Monday, July 13, 2009
How to fall in love for the 500 billionth moment
I watch my best friend lean into the back seat. He wraps his arms around the girl and scoops her gently out. As he comes to standing, her tutu fluffs around his legs like a star. In the back pocket of his swanky Banana Republic jeans, hanging against the firm of a beautifully sculpted body, are a pair of tiny pink ballet shoes.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Tender
I watched Rachel Getting Married tonight. Only two other movies have made me as happy as that one did. The first was Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? which was jubilantly American, and which, now that I think of it, even included the peerless Holly Hunter. The second movie was Black Snake Moan. This was also a fundamentally American movie, and it was the first movie I had seen that was about women like me. I have watched dozens of romantic comedies and in all of them, the woman is nothing like me. She bakes better and her neuroses are cuter and she has good taste in shoes. Her love is as round and plain as a rubber egg. I don't love like that. My love is a human love with stuttering honesty and hopeful kisses in the hairy crease of a groin. When I am unwell it is a pulsing tentacular thing, and when I am healthy it it is the gentle pressure that springs a moment open.
I loved Rachel Getting Married for the same reason. It was a movie about what it's actually like to be human.
When I say that I loved it, I mean that I cried through the entire last half and then for an hour afterward. It left me, in the end of all the crying, with a conclusion I can't fully trace to its origin. No, maybe I can. The origin, I guess, was all the music in that story. Those families were joined and bonded and juiced up with music. I have no vocabulary about music, so this is very difficult for me to talk about, but to me the music was about happiness. Not rubber-egg happiness, but flesh and blood, love in the presence of grief happiness. It was about people feeding themselves on the sound of musky red wine and ripe papayas and leaving their eyes open to the world while the liquid spills down their chins. And that music, the centrality of that music, led me to a conclusion I wasn't expecting.
The conclusion was that I admire my son exactly the way he is. I have struggled against something in him for a very long time, something that I thought might make him unhappy or hurt him or leave him lonely. And so I have had to admire him in pieces instead of as a whole, stepping as I often was around the big piece of him that I had scheduled for gradual excision.
My son is an artist. He watches the world with a fundamental tenderness. I don't know why it has taken me so long to see this. I don't know why it should surprise me. My father is a zen poet who moves through the hills with a listening body. Michael is a musician who renders food, news, science, fashion, and the curves of my skin all more subtle and climactic by passing them through his hands. I, after years of clinging to a pair of cowboy boots which I have never actually owned, have come to accept that I love and choose this kind of living over the clear side of day and let's go raise a barn frontiersmanship I thought I was looking for. It is no wonder at all that I gave birth to a sensitive boy who is wide-eyed for stories and thinking, and who would spend the day drawing me pictures with infinite, mind-bending details if left to his own devices.
I have fought it in Michael. I have fought it in myself. And I have fought it in my son. I have believed we should all be something else. I have believed that we would would be worth more if we could stop thinking with such fascination and instead bang out a brand new deck after slaughtering seven chickens and making yarn from the hair of our weight-lifting goats. I have wanted an old chevy truck to stand in as my pair of substitute balls for what I perceived as an emasculating life.
But art isn't for whiners and pussies, is it? Great art is powerful and compassionate and clever and it makes the world suddenly, irreversibly better. My son will be hard-pressed to touch his potential if I am always trying to pull him in the opposite direction. He will only be undernourished and struggle to satisfy both himself and my expectations, touching bits of himself at a time. There is the strength I have tried to give him by holding him firmly away from his softness, and there is the strength that comes from ushering him through it. We both deserve the second kind.
I loved Rachel Getting Married for the same reason. It was a movie about what it's actually like to be human.
When I say that I loved it, I mean that I cried through the entire last half and then for an hour afterward. It left me, in the end of all the crying, with a conclusion I can't fully trace to its origin. No, maybe I can. The origin, I guess, was all the music in that story. Those families were joined and bonded and juiced up with music. I have no vocabulary about music, so this is very difficult for me to talk about, but to me the music was about happiness. Not rubber-egg happiness, but flesh and blood, love in the presence of grief happiness. It was about people feeding themselves on the sound of musky red wine and ripe papayas and leaving their eyes open to the world while the liquid spills down their chins. And that music, the centrality of that music, led me to a conclusion I wasn't expecting.
The conclusion was that I admire my son exactly the way he is. I have struggled against something in him for a very long time, something that I thought might make him unhappy or hurt him or leave him lonely. And so I have had to admire him in pieces instead of as a whole, stepping as I often was around the big piece of him that I had scheduled for gradual excision.
My son is an artist. He watches the world with a fundamental tenderness. I don't know why it has taken me so long to see this. I don't know why it should surprise me. My father is a zen poet who moves through the hills with a listening body. Michael is a musician who renders food, news, science, fashion, and the curves of my skin all more subtle and climactic by passing them through his hands. I, after years of clinging to a pair of cowboy boots which I have never actually owned, have come to accept that I love and choose this kind of living over the clear side of day and let's go raise a barn frontiersmanship I thought I was looking for. It is no wonder at all that I gave birth to a sensitive boy who is wide-eyed for stories and thinking, and who would spend the day drawing me pictures with infinite, mind-bending details if left to his own devices.
I have fought it in Michael. I have fought it in myself. And I have fought it in my son. I have believed we should all be something else. I have believed that we would would be worth more if we could stop thinking with such fascination and instead bang out a brand new deck after slaughtering seven chickens and making yarn from the hair of our weight-lifting goats. I have wanted an old chevy truck to stand in as my pair of substitute balls for what I perceived as an emasculating life.
But art isn't for whiners and pussies, is it? Great art is powerful and compassionate and clever and it makes the world suddenly, irreversibly better. My son will be hard-pressed to touch his potential if I am always trying to pull him in the opposite direction. He will only be undernourished and struggle to satisfy both himself and my expectations, touching bits of himself at a time. There is the strength I have tried to give him by holding him firmly away from his softness, and there is the strength that comes from ushering him through it. We both deserve the second kind.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Further tales of the WASP and the Jew
The cracker crumbs are falling from my mouth to the bedspread when I realize I'm out of salami. I go back to the counter for more with the absent-mindedness of summer afternoon, padding through my living room and debating a thorough vaccuum before my sons return from camp.
I lean against the cabinets in low-slung jeans and a tank top. The salami comes out of its wrapping in nearly transparent sheets and I fold it into triangles, draping it over cheddar cheese and strangely addicting $5 gluten-free crackers. This salami comes from the butcher instead of from the grocery store. I stood at the butcher's counter for twenty minutes so I could taste every salami they had, and this one is my favorite. It's dry and peppery and tastes only slightly of ham. Because it is from the butcher, though, and designed for people who are willing to face the realities of meat by walking into the Chopped Up Body Parts store in the first place, this salami is a little disturbing to look at. In place of the carefully distributed, tiny fat globules of store-bought salami are sporadic white circles the diameter of my pinky that promise future heart attacks and prodigious clearing of the throat. This salami is undeniably porky.
I find myself wondering if Michael ever ate like this growing up. He did the weird, freakish sucking of marrow from the bone thing, but I can't really picture his family in my salami scenario. We ate it mostly on camping trips, my mother in her seasoned hiking boots and browned summer skin and us girls swatting mosquitos while chewing salami on crackers and homemade GORP for lunch.
I hear Michael again marveling at the unexpected food habits of my family. Under our hippy veneer is a generations-deep tradition of fat and sugar consumption that cannot be shaken from us. I cringe every time my children eat candy, but come Sunday morning I am pouring ounces of maple syrup over their butter-soaked dutch babies and dreaming of strawberries with cream. Growing up, we ate chicken soaked in half and half, homemade fried egg rolls, and the classic ham and pineapple combo right alongside our zucchini, carrot juice and spinach.
Michael and I were out to dinner with his family last winter when the subject of WASPs came up. "It's really true," he said with glee, "they eat so much fatty food!" There is something pleasing for me about being the center of attention and the odd person out in this kind of situation, probably because it's never very threatening. Culturally speaking, I've lived a very sheltered and privileged life, and this makes it as fun for me as it is for everyone else to examine my tribal quirks. Vanilla protestant bats her eyelashes at the onlooking T family and pronounces bagel wrong.
Michael's sister-in-law D brought up some member of the family who was practically a WASP himself and, when pressed, she explained that he was less successful and poorly educated. This was the absolute gem of the evening for me, and it is still rich fodder for jokes between me and Michael. So far as I understood it, there was no clear delineation for her between the generic category of WASP and its well-known subset, White Trash Honkey. They were, in fact, synonymous.
It is a marvel to me, still, to see from a perspective that is not honed by the dominant culture; by my culture. There before me was a woman who had been raised to see me as a slightly embarrassing peculiarity. Sweet girl, really, and she didn't even have buck teeth.
I talked later with Michael's brother, trying to describe my family's attitude toward work. "No, no, we don't work hard to get things. We work hard to suffer. It's actually better if we don't earn anything from it. That's makes us better people." He smiled a subtle, gap-toothed smile that I think must have beguiled his wife from the very beginning because it fits her needs so well, and he said something gentle but funny.
I spent those evenings with Michael's family feeling welcomed and rare at once, and I think that is a fair description of how I have often felt with him. We come from such different places, and yet we were both born to education, both made for touch and for art. We are both inches shorter than the average of our sex and physically molded to the other. These days of making friends after years of being in love are fresh and awakening like copper on my tongue or the green clang of river water. They are, so far, the happiest yet.
I lean against the cabinets in low-slung jeans and a tank top. The salami comes out of its wrapping in nearly transparent sheets and I fold it into triangles, draping it over cheddar cheese and strangely addicting $5 gluten-free crackers. This salami comes from the butcher instead of from the grocery store. I stood at the butcher's counter for twenty minutes so I could taste every salami they had, and this one is my favorite. It's dry and peppery and tastes only slightly of ham. Because it is from the butcher, though, and designed for people who are willing to face the realities of meat by walking into the Chopped Up Body Parts store in the first place, this salami is a little disturbing to look at. In place of the carefully distributed, tiny fat globules of store-bought salami are sporadic white circles the diameter of my pinky that promise future heart attacks and prodigious clearing of the throat. This salami is undeniably porky.
I find myself wondering if Michael ever ate like this growing up. He did the weird, freakish sucking of marrow from the bone thing, but I can't really picture his family in my salami scenario. We ate it mostly on camping trips, my mother in her seasoned hiking boots and browned summer skin and us girls swatting mosquitos while chewing salami on crackers and homemade GORP for lunch.
I hear Michael again marveling at the unexpected food habits of my family. Under our hippy veneer is a generations-deep tradition of fat and sugar consumption that cannot be shaken from us. I cringe every time my children eat candy, but come Sunday morning I am pouring ounces of maple syrup over their butter-soaked dutch babies and dreaming of strawberries with cream. Growing up, we ate chicken soaked in half and half, homemade fried egg rolls, and the classic ham and pineapple combo right alongside our zucchini, carrot juice and spinach.
Michael and I were out to dinner with his family last winter when the subject of WASPs came up. "It's really true," he said with glee, "they eat so much fatty food!" There is something pleasing for me about being the center of attention and the odd person out in this kind of situation, probably because it's never very threatening. Culturally speaking, I've lived a very sheltered and privileged life, and this makes it as fun for me as it is for everyone else to examine my tribal quirks. Vanilla protestant bats her eyelashes at the onlooking T family and pronounces bagel wrong.
Michael's sister-in-law D brought up some member of the family who was practically a WASP himself and, when pressed, she explained that he was less successful and poorly educated. This was the absolute gem of the evening for me, and it is still rich fodder for jokes between me and Michael. So far as I understood it, there was no clear delineation for her between the generic category of WASP and its well-known subset, White Trash Honkey. They were, in fact, synonymous.
It is a marvel to me, still, to see from a perspective that is not honed by the dominant culture; by my culture. There before me was a woman who had been raised to see me as a slightly embarrassing peculiarity. Sweet girl, really, and she didn't even have buck teeth.
I talked later with Michael's brother, trying to describe my family's attitude toward work. "No, no, we don't work hard to get things. We work hard to suffer. It's actually better if we don't earn anything from it. That's makes us better people." He smiled a subtle, gap-toothed smile that I think must have beguiled his wife from the very beginning because it fits her needs so well, and he said something gentle but funny.
I spent those evenings with Michael's family feeling welcomed and rare at once, and I think that is a fair description of how I have often felt with him. We come from such different places, and yet we were both born to education, both made for touch and for art. We are both inches shorter than the average of our sex and physically molded to the other. These days of making friends after years of being in love are fresh and awakening like copper on my tongue or the green clang of river water. They are, so far, the happiest yet.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Growing up
"Are you getting back together?"
I've been asked this question a thousand times over the last three years, by a group of protective and well-meaning friends whose job it has been to scrape me off the floor after Michael and I fall apart. They bear down when they ask the question and their voices grow dull with frustration. They sound like they want to pluck someone's eyeballs out, and while it would be natural to guess that that someone is Michael, I think it is usually me.
I always say no to this question, this is finally it, but so far the answer has always turned to out to be yes. And I am getting less and less embarrassed about it.
I know what I am supposed to do. I am a single mother with two children and Everything Else in Place, and there are rules about my behavior. I need to choose someone wholesome and committed. I need to always put my sons first. I need to be staid and stable, having only the sort of fun that will blossom my children and make them happy. I need to be their Madonna.
I'm not. And I'm not a whore either.
I am a woman. With regard to my friends, I am developing the strength that gives me a right to my own decisions: I am willing to pick myself up off the ground, or even prevent my landing there in the first place, without prodigious complaint. I think they had a place in slapping me silly with indignation when I was calling and sobbing hysterically every seven hours. I take care of myself now, though, much more so than I ever did before. Yes, I ask for support. And advice, and empathy. But I don't ask for approval, and I don't ask anyone at all to save me. I have a handle on that.
There is this other element, though, and it's much more abstract than the one above. I am more complicated than any of the rules allow for. I have 70-odd years left of myself at the most, and only 20 in which my body will be as sexually beautiful as I would like it to be. Maybe 30, if my mother's genes have anything to say in the matter. I have only so long to love as hormonally and passionately as I do now. And that matters to me.
I love this man. I love him with his fits and starts, his arduous search for truth, the habits he embraces that make me wonder if we will tip off the end of things for lack of center. I love the way he looks in silhouette at 4:30 in the morning in a JC Penny sweater, the feel of his hand around my waist, the terror of his love for a daughter who lives too far away. He is dark sometimes, and delves often into dense waters, and he is also the man who throws my boys through the air and strengthens them with this thoughtfulness and respect. He bakes the best tofu, plays the best guitar, and is more loving to animals than I will ever be.
I am the woman who loves like this. I am not the mild and clear-hearted girl who stumbled into a relationship she cannot see her way out of. There is no cure for this complexity. It is who I am. And I am tired of asking if I should be this way, if it is good enough for my children. I have birthed them at home, nursed them for four years in total, fed them on celery juice and nettles tea and yoga. They take judo, attend good schools, do chores every day and can be read to for hours at a time. They are kind and clever and playful and loved by all who know them.
I have done an amazing job, except in this one way: I have tried to control everything for them. I have failed, of course, but I have also saved them from a great deal of exposure by the constant putting down of my foot and the explaining, explaining, explaining so that they go out always with an armor of knowledge. The control is a tired theme, though. I need to find something more complete.
I see, and also see past, a fundamental tension between the stability and simplicity I so desperately want to give my sons, on the one hand, and the acceptance and richness I want to give myself, one the other. And here is how I see past it. Maybe it is better to raise my sons for the world that actually exists instead of for the one that I think we are meant to live up to. I know that children need stability. I provide them with that as much as I can. But they also need humanity. They need to know that what they are--unclear sometimes, both dangerous and sweet, intricately mixed into something exquisite--is all there is to be.
There is no Stepford life. There is only us. We are the devoted former alcoholic who loves his kids in hilarious words, the brilliant blogger with HIV and a case of the bitches, the consummate and generous mother who at first could not love her surprise daughter, and the woman who carries her career through the roof while she loves and furies over men who want to rest. I want to look my sons in the eye and hold them in my arms and believe that I deserve them exactly as I am. Fuck the therapists awaiting their business later. Fuck the holding tight in order to belong. This isn't a messy version of life I am living. It is the only thing there is.
I will do the very best I can for them, and I will always want to protect them. I need to start here, though. I need to begin with the truth.
I've been asked this question a thousand times over the last three years, by a group of protective and well-meaning friends whose job it has been to scrape me off the floor after Michael and I fall apart. They bear down when they ask the question and their voices grow dull with frustration. They sound like they want to pluck someone's eyeballs out, and while it would be natural to guess that that someone is Michael, I think it is usually me.
I always say no to this question, this is finally it, but so far the answer has always turned to out to be yes. And I am getting less and less embarrassed about it.
I know what I am supposed to do. I am a single mother with two children and Everything Else in Place, and there are rules about my behavior. I need to choose someone wholesome and committed. I need to always put my sons first. I need to be staid and stable, having only the sort of fun that will blossom my children and make them happy. I need to be their Madonna.
I'm not. And I'm not a whore either.
I am a woman. With regard to my friends, I am developing the strength that gives me a right to my own decisions: I am willing to pick myself up off the ground, or even prevent my landing there in the first place, without prodigious complaint. I think they had a place in slapping me silly with indignation when I was calling and sobbing hysterically every seven hours. I take care of myself now, though, much more so than I ever did before. Yes, I ask for support. And advice, and empathy. But I don't ask for approval, and I don't ask anyone at all to save me. I have a handle on that.
There is this other element, though, and it's much more abstract than the one above. I am more complicated than any of the rules allow for. I have 70-odd years left of myself at the most, and only 20 in which my body will be as sexually beautiful as I would like it to be. Maybe 30, if my mother's genes have anything to say in the matter. I have only so long to love as hormonally and passionately as I do now. And that matters to me.
I love this man. I love him with his fits and starts, his arduous search for truth, the habits he embraces that make me wonder if we will tip off the end of things for lack of center. I love the way he looks in silhouette at 4:30 in the morning in a JC Penny sweater, the feel of his hand around my waist, the terror of his love for a daughter who lives too far away. He is dark sometimes, and delves often into dense waters, and he is also the man who throws my boys through the air and strengthens them with this thoughtfulness and respect. He bakes the best tofu, plays the best guitar, and is more loving to animals than I will ever be.
I am the woman who loves like this. I am not the mild and clear-hearted girl who stumbled into a relationship she cannot see her way out of. There is no cure for this complexity. It is who I am. And I am tired of asking if I should be this way, if it is good enough for my children. I have birthed them at home, nursed them for four years in total, fed them on celery juice and nettles tea and yoga. They take judo, attend good schools, do chores every day and can be read to for hours at a time. They are kind and clever and playful and loved by all who know them.
I have done an amazing job, except in this one way: I have tried to control everything for them. I have failed, of course, but I have also saved them from a great deal of exposure by the constant putting down of my foot and the explaining, explaining, explaining so that they go out always with an armor of knowledge. The control is a tired theme, though. I need to find something more complete.
I see, and also see past, a fundamental tension between the stability and simplicity I so desperately want to give my sons, on the one hand, and the acceptance and richness I want to give myself, one the other. And here is how I see past it. Maybe it is better to raise my sons for the world that actually exists instead of for the one that I think we are meant to live up to. I know that children need stability. I provide them with that as much as I can. But they also need humanity. They need to know that what they are--unclear sometimes, both dangerous and sweet, intricately mixed into something exquisite--is all there is to be.
There is no Stepford life. There is only us. We are the devoted former alcoholic who loves his kids in hilarious words, the brilliant blogger with HIV and a case of the bitches, the consummate and generous mother who at first could not love her surprise daughter, and the woman who carries her career through the roof while she loves and furies over men who want to rest. I want to look my sons in the eye and hold them in my arms and believe that I deserve them exactly as I am. Fuck the therapists awaiting their business later. Fuck the holding tight in order to belong. This isn't a messy version of life I am living. It is the only thing there is.
I will do the very best I can for them, and I will always want to protect them. I need to start here, though. I need to begin with the truth.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Cold
My father, a consultant in the 90's when such things were fruitful, was once asked to work with the heads of several oil companies.
No, rewind a moment. We were raised on brown rice, orange juice and Thomas's English Muffins. We had a volvo and my sister was given a five-word middle name, and my father's hair was longer than my mothers by a foot. We were hippies of the most obvious sort. And so when he became a consultant, my father did so with a backlog of zen koans and a mythology about the sword as an agent of the soul. His dream, kindled perhaps in the time during which he counseled the guards of San Quentin while political prisoners lived under the weight of their batons, was to work with leaders and to teach them that mastery of business and mastery of self are one kind of work. He wanted, I think, and wants today, to softly transform the world.
The oil company work was the opportunity of which he had dreamed: a room full of crucial executives, responsible for policies that could change the global stage for evil or for good, asking for guideance from people like my father.
He froze up entirely. The story as I remember it progresses from fear of success to out and out agony, at which point my father collapses in sobs and is rocked back and forth by corporate tycoons on the floor of his fallen hopes.
I feel a bit like him today.
There is Someone reading my blog, or maybe they already came and went, but suddenly my writing matters differently. It's being Seen. This is my moment to turn out some absolute riot of feeling, or reorganize my site to list all the wonders that have spilled from me since the last time I messed with my 'favorites' links. I'm reading David Sedaris right now, and I am embarrassed by how unsubtle I am by comparison and how unlikely I am to piss golden lemonade and spit orange juice just as this Someone enters stage right.
The good stories are all so private, and the safe stories are just above mediocre where they hover on my taste buds. Combing through them both for what is most worth saying is some of my favorite work. Today, though, I wake up late to a passing parade.
No, rewind a moment. We were raised on brown rice, orange juice and Thomas's English Muffins. We had a volvo and my sister was given a five-word middle name, and my father's hair was longer than my mothers by a foot. We were hippies of the most obvious sort. And so when he became a consultant, my father did so with a backlog of zen koans and a mythology about the sword as an agent of the soul. His dream, kindled perhaps in the time during which he counseled the guards of San Quentin while political prisoners lived under the weight of their batons, was to work with leaders and to teach them that mastery of business and mastery of self are one kind of work. He wanted, I think, and wants today, to softly transform the world.
The oil company work was the opportunity of which he had dreamed: a room full of crucial executives, responsible for policies that could change the global stage for evil or for good, asking for guideance from people like my father.
He froze up entirely. The story as I remember it progresses from fear of success to out and out agony, at which point my father collapses in sobs and is rocked back and forth by corporate tycoons on the floor of his fallen hopes.
I feel a bit like him today.
There is Someone reading my blog, or maybe they already came and went, but suddenly my writing matters differently. It's being Seen. This is my moment to turn out some absolute riot of feeling, or reorganize my site to list all the wonders that have spilled from me since the last time I messed with my 'favorites' links. I'm reading David Sedaris right now, and I am embarrassed by how unsubtle I am by comparison and how unlikely I am to piss golden lemonade and spit orange juice just as this Someone enters stage right.
The good stories are all so private, and the safe stories are just above mediocre where they hover on my taste buds. Combing through them both for what is most worth saying is some of my favorite work. Today, though, I wake up late to a passing parade.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Taken in
I went to see Taken yesterday for $1.50. It's a story about a secret ops government guy who has finally quit his job to be close to his daughter, but the daughter is then kidnapped by Albanians for a short life of sex slavery in Paris. Government guy redeems his relationship with his daughter by slaughtering all of them and bringing her home. I like it when guys blow things up for the women they love, you know with the angsty face and the death fury? In my current stage of life, that is a better hormone hit than romantic comedy. Also, I like Liam Neeson. He has a determined looking nose and The Voice. So I went to see Taken, and I fully expected to like it.
My politics got in the way. The first thing that bothered me was the torture scene. He's through maybe 25 dead guys at this point and he needs some more information. So what does he do? He hooks a brownish guy up to an electrical current and shakes the shit out of him after stuffing a wad of spitty rag in his mouth.
Shock 1: Brownish guy maintains bravado
Shock 2: Brownish guy caves and tell him what he needs to know
I wanted to point and yell, like I was at a party and someone was dropping a roofie right in front of my eyes. "Wait, shit, FOUL! Right there, FOUL!" I don't think we're supposed to glamorize torture anymore, right? Because torture is some fucked up shit, and the fucked up shit doesn't even work. It was the ticking bomb Dick Cheney scenario all over again and I was embarrassed for us all.
Oh, and before that Liam finds the daughter's best friend who was kidnapped at the same time. Only this girl: already deflowered. Ho. bag. So what happens to her? She gets drugged while chained to a bed, vomits all over herself, and dies.
Only the virgin gets saved.
The virgin is being auctioned off for very good money in some chintzy gold chain getup. And which bidder should Liam threaten with a gun and force to buy her so that he can finally save her and take her away? An even browner guy! And he's not just a browner Albanian! No! This guy is an Arab wearing eyeliner. Who purchases Liam's daughter's hymen for $500K.
Now we enter a private yacht, onto which not one but three! virgins in hooded white lace have been herded for someone's pleasure. Liam has to drive a small European car really really well to get on the yacht and then he has to shoot a shitload of men. Among them is the escaped bidder, who is of course only a henchman. Once he's dead, Liam arrives in the chamber of pleasure.
There beside the bed is (oh!) a fat wealthy Arab wearing only slightly less eyeliner, with a curved knife at the throat of Liam's lovely virgin daughter.
Is anyone getting a purity ball vibe, here? Mixed with some ripe Muslim hating into a very dirty cocktail? I feel like they could have made that movie a lot easier on me. I'm thinking intelligent daughter who doesn't come home smiling and happy in spite of having left her friend dead somewhere in Paris, maybe an unsuccessful torture scene in which he gets bad information? How about less eyeliner?
Am I being all PC? Maybe, I guess. Really, though, I'm not so concerned that Taken is going to convince anyone to shoot brown people on behalf of their virgins. I just would really prefer less distraction in my shoot-em-up. And that shit was distracting.
My politics got in the way. The first thing that bothered me was the torture scene. He's through maybe 25 dead guys at this point and he needs some more information. So what does he do? He hooks a brownish guy up to an electrical current and shakes the shit out of him after stuffing a wad of spitty rag in his mouth.
Shock 1: Brownish guy maintains bravado
Shock 2: Brownish guy caves and tell him what he needs to know
I wanted to point and yell, like I was at a party and someone was dropping a roofie right in front of my eyes. "Wait, shit, FOUL! Right there, FOUL!" I don't think we're supposed to glamorize torture anymore, right? Because torture is some fucked up shit, and the fucked up shit doesn't even work. It was the ticking bomb Dick Cheney scenario all over again and I was embarrassed for us all.
Oh, and before that Liam finds the daughter's best friend who was kidnapped at the same time. Only this girl: already deflowered. Ho. bag. So what happens to her? She gets drugged while chained to a bed, vomits all over herself, and dies.
Only the virgin gets saved.
The virgin is being auctioned off for very good money in some chintzy gold chain getup. And which bidder should Liam threaten with a gun and force to buy her so that he can finally save her and take her away? An even browner guy! And he's not just a browner Albanian! No! This guy is an Arab wearing eyeliner. Who purchases Liam's daughter's hymen for $500K.
Now we enter a private yacht, onto which not one but three! virgins in hooded white lace have been herded for someone's pleasure. Liam has to drive a small European car really really well to get on the yacht and then he has to shoot a shitload of men. Among them is the escaped bidder, who is of course only a henchman. Once he's dead, Liam arrives in the chamber of pleasure.
There beside the bed is (oh!) a fat wealthy Arab wearing only slightly less eyeliner, with a curved knife at the throat of Liam's lovely virgin daughter.
Is anyone getting a purity ball vibe, here? Mixed with some ripe Muslim hating into a very dirty cocktail? I feel like they could have made that movie a lot easier on me. I'm thinking intelligent daughter who doesn't come home smiling and happy in spite of having left her friend dead somewhere in Paris, maybe an unsuccessful torture scene in which he gets bad information? How about less eyeliner?
Am I being all PC? Maybe, I guess. Really, though, I'm not so concerned that Taken is going to convince anyone to shoot brown people on behalf of their virgins. I just would really prefer less distraction in my shoot-em-up. And that shit was distracting.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Watching Iran in my underwear
My friend is in Tehran.
I have watched the pictures and videos come loose with violence and I have fallen in love with his country. On the first day after the coup there was a picture of a man in a green Gap t-shirt. His biceps were orange-brown and he stood on the street for Mousavi, looking fully urban and international. Iran became suddenly real to me and I thought this unsacred thought.
Who knew Iranian men were so hot?
I'm ashamed to say it while boys die in the street but I am not ashamed to have thought it. The beauty of courageous men is uneclipsable to me. There were more men after that, a man with Calvin Klein boxers stretching from his well-slung jeans and green cloth wrapped around the victory sign of his fingers, and one who leapt through the air with roses in his hands, as though he would rather fall or be shot than fail to hope for his country. These men brought to life in my mind a country that has, for me, lived only in myth through my friend and his immigrant father.
Then came this picture.
I saw it and felt that I knew my friend better than I had before. I wanted to cup those men in my hands and watch them love each other. The one is a riot policeman, the other a protester for Mousavi, and the one is held by the other with such tenderness that I am all breath before it. I see this picture and I wonder at the marriage of homophobia and intimacy.
I have been preoccupied. For two days I hovered over facebook for updates from my friend. Each one, regardless of its contents, said one thing to me. I am not dead.
I have watched my heart as well. Iran is not a place for me, even after the visceral awakening of those pictures. Until he comes home, Iran will remain the holder of my friend. He is there, right now, as everything our country needs. He is a dual citizen, he is educated and curious, he is fluent in Farsi, and he is a journalist. He is reporting from riots and writing every day while the government calls for the silence and removal of reporters. And so I have watched myself, and instead of caring for the world stage or the ultimate political outcome, I have cared whether guns have found him or he has ducked down an alley in time. And I have cared about how I care.
People are dying, and I have watched to prove my fidelity to the person who holds my heart. Do you see? I rehearse it in my mind. You cannot test a heart more thoroughly than this. He is on the streets of Tehran where women are being beaten and students are disappearing. He is a journalist in the revolution and I watch only as a friend. He could be my cousin. You know who I would be today if it were you out on those streets. I would rip the life from my face in terror. See me now. I am worried but calm. My heart belongs to you.
We have both faced jealousy, loving each other as we do and trying to let one another go. I have thought, over and over, about my ability to love in multiples and to love differently each of the people who matter to me. I have wanted to believe that I can treat you as you want to be treated and still admire and remember the hearts that have passed through my hands. I have wanted you to believe it. My proof, now, is in the blood that spills from a gun-shot leg to the hood of a yellow taxi. I love them all. I love all of the men I have fondly held to my body. And there is only you.
I am ordinary and female in the face of extraordinary days. The whole world could change tonight. History is exploding in the color of fresh grass and our country is suddenly wide open to the faces of Iran. I lay in the sun in my underwear and I think of the way I love.
I have watched the pictures and videos come loose with violence and I have fallen in love with his country. On the first day after the coup there was a picture of a man in a green Gap t-shirt. His biceps were orange-brown and he stood on the street for Mousavi, looking fully urban and international. Iran became suddenly real to me and I thought this unsacred thought.
Who knew Iranian men were so hot?
I'm ashamed to say it while boys die in the street but I am not ashamed to have thought it. The beauty of courageous men is uneclipsable to me. There were more men after that, a man with Calvin Klein boxers stretching from his well-slung jeans and green cloth wrapped around the victory sign of his fingers, and one who leapt through the air with roses in his hands, as though he would rather fall or be shot than fail to hope for his country. These men brought to life in my mind a country that has, for me, lived only in myth through my friend and his immigrant father.
Then came this picture.
I saw it and felt that I knew my friend better than I had before. I wanted to cup those men in my hands and watch them love each other. The one is a riot policeman, the other a protester for Mousavi, and the one is held by the other with such tenderness that I am all breath before it. I see this picture and I wonder at the marriage of homophobia and intimacy.
I have been preoccupied. For two days I hovered over facebook for updates from my friend. Each one, regardless of its contents, said one thing to me. I am not dead.
I have watched my heart as well. Iran is not a place for me, even after the visceral awakening of those pictures. Until he comes home, Iran will remain the holder of my friend. He is there, right now, as everything our country needs. He is a dual citizen, he is educated and curious, he is fluent in Farsi, and he is a journalist. He is reporting from riots and writing every day while the government calls for the silence and removal of reporters. And so I have watched myself, and instead of caring for the world stage or the ultimate political outcome, I have cared whether guns have found him or he has ducked down an alley in time. And I have cared about how I care.
People are dying, and I have watched to prove my fidelity to the person who holds my heart. Do you see? I rehearse it in my mind. You cannot test a heart more thoroughly than this. He is on the streets of Tehran where women are being beaten and students are disappearing. He is a journalist in the revolution and I watch only as a friend. He could be my cousin. You know who I would be today if it were you out on those streets. I would rip the life from my face in terror. See me now. I am worried but calm. My heart belongs to you.
We have both faced jealousy, loving each other as we do and trying to let one another go. I have thought, over and over, about my ability to love in multiples and to love differently each of the people who matter to me. I have wanted to believe that I can treat you as you want to be treated and still admire and remember the hearts that have passed through my hands. I have wanted you to believe it. My proof, now, is in the blood that spills from a gun-shot leg to the hood of a yellow taxi. I love them all. I love all of the men I have fondly held to my body. And there is only you.
I am ordinary and female in the face of extraordinary days. The whole world could change tonight. History is exploding in the color of fresh grass and our country is suddenly wide open to the faces of Iran. I lay in the sun in my underwear and I think of the way I love.
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