I’m hurting cultchah!
Confidential to Keen in Silicon Valley: dude, I know, he made a lot of money, but you start citing George Lucas as some sort of, Christ, I’m not sure what, a compeer of David Hockney or something, some sort of authority on art, well, you’ve pretty much gone and shot your argument in the face. (via; via)
What do you think of Internet video? Lucas says there are two forms of entertainment: circus and art. Circus is random, he says: “feeding Christians to the lions”—or, he says, as the term in Hollywood goes—”throw a puppy on the highway. … You don’t have to write anything or really do anything. It’s voyeuristic.” In short, he says, it’s YouTube. Art is not random, Lucas says. “It’s storytelling. It’s insightful. It’s amusing.”
All models are wrong. Some are useful.
We’re finally watching Rome. —At some point during the second episode, I say something like, “So it’s Artoo and Threepio.”
And then a little later, the Spouse says, “I’m still trying to deal with the idea of Threepio as a whoremonger and Artoo as a stolid family man.”
I frowned. “No, wait,” I said. “Threepio’s the uptight prig, right? Artoo was the id-guy.” The collapse and reversal shorted something in my brain. I grinned. “So, like, Molly’s Threepio, right?”
—Maybe you had to be there.
Magical white boy.
Oh, hell, let’s chase the red herring for a minute. I’ve got time; I’ve got nothing but time. —So: no. Morpheus is not a magical negro. If nothing else, his touchingly stubborn faith in Neo, which sets him at odds with the magical Oracle, which causes us to doubt him (though we never doubt he’s right: Neo must be the One—look at his name!), and which even causes him to doubt himself—this grants him a degree of agency and protagonism that sets him apart from the mere role of wisely aiding and abetting Neo’s enlightenment. (To say nothing of his captaincy, his popular acclaim in Zion, or the fact that he’s the one who lives to tell the tale—)
So: the One True Neo, a man with almost no past, prone to criminality and laziness, inwardly disabled by his shyly geeky nature, hated as a hacker by the powers that be, granted a terrible power so close to the very nature of things yet tempered by his need to help others, ultimately sacrificed, and all to aid Morpheus in realizing his dream—
Well, yes. That’s why the movies, flawed though they indisputably are, nonetheless have the power they have.
But I wasn’t really thinking about the red herring. I was thinking about Mercutio, and I was thinking about Nick.
—Why was I thinking about Mercutio? Right. Because we’d just finished the second season of Slings and Arrows, with its hilarious production of Romeo and Juliet running under and around the A-plot of Macbeth. Why was I thinking of magical negroes? Because I’d stumbled over MacAllister’s LiveJournal, and the most recent entry over there is a nice-enough trip through the trope. And why was I thinking of Nick?
Well, first, Mercutio; specifically, given the confluence of topics, Harold Perrineau’s, in the deliriously ludic Baz Luhrman production. Ostensibly Romeo’s foil, Perrineau’s Mercutio practically foils the whole damn film, othered to his very gills: the only black character, his gender bent in an otherwise rigidly stratified world, his sexuality—well. Even the lightest brush of those buttons with Mercutio—witty, articulate, prancing Mercutio, always a snappy dresser—leaves little room for doubt. —Forever outside the discourse of both those houses, he pushes and pulls and chides his charge until Romeo sees the light and gets off his goddamn ass, and as far as magic goes, well. Queen Mab, bitches. Those drugs are quick.
But hard as they might push in that direction, and as much power as they might arguably draw from the trope, and despite his Act III Scene 1 sacrifice, there’s no way in hell or out of it that Mercutio could ever be anyone’s magical negro.
(A conscious piss-take? I doubt it; I highly doubt it, if for no other reason than Spike Lee’s eponyming talk came five years later. —But Uncle Remus has been with us for a long, long time. Even in Australia.)
Nick, of course, Chris Eigeman’s Nick, is the Mercutio of Metropolitan, othered by his cheerfully chilly snark, his abiding concern for times and fashions past, his detached perspicacity—though perched in the very catbird seat of privilege, he is nonetheless, within his own context, his insular circle, despised; though his power is mighty (he creates a person from whole cloth, like New York magazine) and his scorn withering (ask a bard what terrible magic satire can wreak), he does little beyond push and pull and chide his Romeo, Tom Townsend, over the barest threshold of the story. (He does also insult a Baron, and start a cha-cha.) —And though he isn’t sacrificed, per se, he does abruptly leave the story toward the end of the second act (of three, of course, not five), marching stoically off to his comically supposéd doom.
But much as it might tickle me to push this WASP in that direction, there’s no way in hell or out of it that Nick could ever be a magical negro.
And not because he’s so very, very white. Well, yes, of course, but—
Nick’s a foil, like Mercutio: slipped under the gem of the protagonist to catch the light and throw it back, up and through the protagonist’s facets, the better to shine for our delectation; necessarily subordinate to the protagonist because it’s all about the protagonist. Isn’t it? —They are othered because the protagonist is by definition normal, and they must stand in contrast. They leave so suddenly because the protagonist, having been pushed, must in the end do it all alone. It is, after all, the protagonist’s story.
Yet ask an actor who they’d rather play.
There are foils that disappear behind their gems, that bow and scrape their way across the stage, that take so literally the story-mechanics of their function—to assist the protagonist, buff and polish them till they shine—that they reify those rude mechanics within the story itself, black-garbed kabuki janitors shoving the machina in place for the fifth-act emergence of a pure white deus, and they perform these tasks with little more than a wide wise smile to hint at a there in there, somewhere. And there are settings so rich and strange and wondrous that the very question of who is a protagonist and who isn’t becomes a trick of where your eye happens to light first, and what you make of it. —Nick and Mercutio fall within that spectrum (there is no doubt as to the protagonists of their stories: not them), yet much closer to the one end than the other: no mere enablers, but so very much themselves, so selfish that they’d never be mistaken for the help.
(And because they stand so flashily in contrast to protagonists who must, as noted, be so damned normal [though admittedly not too normal, in either case], a little of the life of the proceedings can’t help but leak out when they leave. There’s a lesson there, too: like all good blades, this stuff cuts both ways.)
—One final digressive note, which draws a little on the related though much less prevalent trope of the magical faggot (think for a moment of the queer eyes buffing and polishing their protagonist; now let’s move on), and specifically the o’erwhelming need for queer foils to die in order to balance out on some inhuman scale the racy transgressions they commit to foil whatever they’re foiling; more specifically, the storied death of Tara, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which Mac (most specifically) brought up in passing at the end of the post that’s one of the wellsprings for this one: well. It’s at once rather a bit less complicated than that, and rather a bit more.
The one true only.
And so we return and begin again.
You know, human batteries aside, I enjoyed The Matrix well enough right up to the very end, you know, the Nebuchadnezzar’s blowing up all around them, those electric jellyfish beating their way in, Neo lying flatlined in the cradle, Hugo Weaving with his gray-flannel smirk, and Trinity leans over Neo and says something like, “Neo—I’m not afraid anymore! The Oracle told me—”
Yes?
“—I would fall in love, and that man, the man I loved, would be the One. So you see, you can’t be dead, you can’t be—because—”
Oh, no no no no no. That’s not what the Oracle told her, dammit. Should have told her. Could have. Would have. What the Oracle should have told her is what the Oracle should have been telling every-damn-body:
You’re not the One. Not yet. Sorry, kid. Looks like you’re waiting for something. Your next life, maybe. Better luck next time.
Still bugs me, thinking about that.
Well, the human batteries, and that shoot-out in the lobby. Gratuitously nasty round of best-man-fall. That little gesture to fix the sunglasses, trying to remind us it’s only a game. —Doesn’t work, somehow.
I am interested in your product or service, and I’d like to hear more.
A quote from Trilling; head over to Kugelmass for context:
As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multiplication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and in humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer… And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace—we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it.
Bruises and roundhouses.
This may just be a pattern in search of a theory that is itself in search of a problem, but it struck me in the shower and hasn’t gone away, and so I give it a wipe and a polish and set it down before you. “It” being: the notion that there might be if not an essential difference between the pulp heroics of prose and the pulp heroics of comics (because, let’s face it, everything is essentially the same dam’ thing) then perhaps a perceptible difference: what is heroic in a prose pulp hero will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-to, the withstood, the survived, the masochistic; what is heroic in comics pulp will tend or drift or gesture toward the done-by, the delivered, the unleashed, the sadistic.
Not to freight our gestures or drifts or looks too heavily or anything. Pattern, theory, problem. —But think of James Bond (in the books), think of Travis McGee: the scars they display; the pain suffered so exquisitely during and after every fight. Think of Spider-Man, think of the Batman, think of the balletic spins and kicks, the terrible punches, the bodies in motion.
There’s nothing sinister about this, no more than there’s anything original: it’s merely the difference in artistic technologies employed. One’s hand fitting itself to one’s tools. With prose, all you have are words, and the reader’s sensorium, and the changes and echoes you can ring by banging the one against the other: and so for effect you’re going to focus on making the reader feel (and see, yes, and hear and smell and taste, too) what’s happening. You’re going to do to them, and if you’ve got a protagonist in the way, you’re going to do it through them. —Whereas with comics you’re handing the reader what they’re seeing (with certain shorthands and gestures and signs and symbols to be interpreted according to various rules, yes, we’re still reading, after all); it’s pretty much the preoccupation with what it is you’re doing, and doing just looks ever so much cooler than being done to. And so.
And of course there’s all sorts of spoiling overlaps, and yes Wolverine is the best there is at soaking up yadda yadda, and Bond is himself a sadistic bastard, but then he’s also in the movies a lot. —This is hardly a hard and fast genre rule unwritten or otherwise; it’s hardly an idiomatic necessity. It’s a reflexive tendancy. It’s a pattern, in search of a theory, wondering whether there’s a problem with reflexively, unthinkingly, turning to doing, or being done to, in order to drag the reader from the phenomenal to the sublime. Probably not. (One so dislikes being judgmental.) But like I say, it hasn’t gone away. Give it a poke. See if something happens.
Happy Delany Day.
With a poem, Ray Davis reminds us of the other reason for the season. (“ATTN Will Smith’s agent: The Motion of Light in Water is the EPIC SAGA of a GENERATION shown via the TRUE STORY of a GENIUS who TRIUMPHANTLY OVERCOMES a NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!”)
Hitchcock, dropping Jupiter.
I never did come close to figuring out what I was talking about last year, did I. (1; 2; some context; 3; elsewhere; some further context; 4; intermission.) —Maybe if I’d seen Rear Window recently, I’d have put it better. Maybe not.
This is Sparta.
I’ve only got the one recording of the Mountain Goats’ “Black Molly.” It’s from Bitter Melon Farm. He’s singing in some dive bar somewhere, you realize, hearing crowd noise bubbling under the tape hiss. The sound of the guitar chords is degraded enough that they slash and ring like bells, and he’s belting out the lyrics in that adenoidal whine he saves for the angry songs, the one that’s either powerful, or the reason you don’t listen much to the Mountain Goats—
black mollies in the aquarium,
darting back and forth as though an earthquake were certain
and I turned up the heater
and I ripped off my shirt
and I grabbed hold of my stereo
and I threw it out the window
you were in town
again
—and this is the chorus; he’s stretching that word “town” out past any normal limit—
you’d come around
again
—and again, with “around,” and you can hear what he’s doing to his voice, punishing it with this song, and I know why half the time when I’ve seen him live, and why on most of the bootlegs I’ve got lying around on my harddrive he usually stops somewhere in the set and says if he goes on, if he sings “Going to Georgia” or “No Children” the way the crowd wants, he’s not going to have any voice left for tomorrow, in Eugene or Olympia or San Francisco.
you were dragging me down again with you
“Fuck Eugene!” somebody usually says. And sometimes he sings what the crowd wants. Sometimes he doesn’t. The crowds have been getting pushier, lately. And larger. But this time nobody’s calling for anything, because he’s still singing “Black Molly”—
siamese fish flashing like sparklers
it started to rain
and the telephone rang a couple of times
I put a bullet through its cold dead brain
and I got out my photographs of you
and I put bullets though all of them too
you were
—and here, in this recording, the crowd noise boils over in cheers and whoops, applause even, as he lifts and pulls his voice to some triumphantly broken point—
in town
again
you’d come around
again
you were dragging me down again with you
yeah
And maybe it’s the release in his voice they’re cheering? That sudden savage joy that fills you when you finally give up and stop worrying and fall into the fact that you’re going down? That you know, you finally know there’s nothing you can do?
I’d like to think so. But somebody starts the cheer with the bullets, the ones that go through every photograph of her he’s got.
Heidi posted a mashup poster for The 40-Year-Old Spartan, and I chuckled and followed the link and there were enough other goofy mashups there that I emailed it on to a couple of friends who’re the sort to chuckle at that sort of thing. LOLSpartans. You know. And I didn’t think anything more of it until one of them emailed me back. “Those images are really great,” she said, “but those message board quotes, though probably hyperbolic, give me the serious wiggins.”
Message board quotes?
Sure, there was text, but I hadn’t read it. I’d assumed it was just there to frame the funny pictures. Who has time for that? —So I went back to the site. “To say that you’d have to be living under a rock to not know about all the hype surrounding 300 would be an enormous understatement,” it begins.
The movie’s hype has taken on absolutely absurd proportions, to the extent that it just had to be documented on WTFsrsly…
On forums you find posts about crazy 300-related stories such as this one by SmithX on the IGN boards:
And it ends like this—
The hype has turned into madness! (I’m refraining from making a “madness” joke here) The past month there have been many threads (some that had nothing to do with the movie) that randomly derailed into posts screaming “THIS IS SPAARTHAAA!”. Meanwhile, people are hard at work doing these hilarious 300 photo manips:
And then the mashups. But the message board quotes? The crazy 300-related stories posted to demonstrate that the hype’s absolutely absurd?
Here’s the first one:
Well i found out someone i know is in alot of trouble today, he was drunk in a club and there was a girl dancing by some stairs so he went up to her…..................... Kicked her down the stairs shouting this is SPARTA
Here’s the second:
We had all lined up in front of the theater for about 30 minutes, and then they brought us in. I had to stand right beside these two fat, horse-faced lesbians eating each other tongues like they were making a political statement or something. So, like 30 minutes later, we end up shuffling in the theater and these bitches start bitching about having to wait when the movie is about to start and it turns out they were going to see that Jim Carrey movie 23 and they were missing it. So, the ugliest of the two just exclaims like there’s nobody there “This is the wrong fucking movie!”. I just had to do what I did next. I shouted at the top of my lungs “This is SPARTA” and kicked her in the chest, causing her to fall down about 8 steps to the floor. Most were shocked but about 80% of the theater started to cheer as I was forcibly thrown out by 2 officers. Charges are going to be pressed against me apparently, but it was worth it.
And that’s it; those are your examples of crazy 300-related stories that demonstrate the hype has taken on absolutely absurd proportions. —Are they true?
Does it matter?
I don’t know if John Darnielle sings “Black Molly” live all that often. Is it an old favorite now mostly retired from the setlist? (He’s sick to death of “Going to Georgia,” and you can’t really blame him.) An old obscurity, dredged up now and again for the fans who’ve been with him since the cassette days? I don’t know. I’ve seen the Mountain Goats a number of times, and he only ever did “Black Molly” once. Was it the last time we saw him at the Doug Fir? Or the time before that? I’m not sure. Did somebody specifically ask for “Black Molly”? I don’t remember. But I do remember how he sang it. —The other thing I remember from that show, that sticks clearly in my head, is how he sang “Game Shows Touch Our Lives,” his voice lifting a little from the hushed falsetto he saves for the reflective songs, “People say friends don’t destroy one another,” and then Peter joined him and they punched the next line, “What do they know about friends?” the way he punches “Hand in unlovable hand” when he sings “No Children” or “Take your foot off of the brake, for Christ’s sake” when he sings “Dilaudid,” except really that’s more of a strangled yelp, isn’t it. —Damaged people damaging each other. The savage joy that fills you when you let go. Apocalyptic. “Black Molly” begins like that.
“Black Molly” began like that, yeah, there in the dark crammed basement of the Doug Fir, but it started at a yelp and climbed from there, and the crowd all around was starting to grin when he threw the stereo out the window, and there was a whoop when he stretched that first “town” out on a rack, but it was only one whoop. And then the phone rang a couple of times, and he shot it, and then he pulled out the photographs, and there were more whoops, and he put bullets through all of them too, and the crowd started cheering and applauding, just like it does on the Bitter Melon version I’ve got, well before the song is over, yeah!
Why?
I’d like to say it’s the savage joy. It’s the release. You’re coming around again, to drag me down again, and there’s a certain exhilaration in giving up to that, the top of the emotional rollercoaster thrill. —But I could just make out their faces in the dark and even if I couldn’t I could hear it in their voices. The crowd was cheering the rage, however impotently expressed. The crowd wanted the bullets, and the bullet holes in the photographs, and. The crowd smelled blood. —And I know why he’s angry, but it’s not why they’re cheering, and I was left standing there, outside the concert, outside the song, my stomach cold, thinking of screwflies.
And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.
“Tragic futility, though, has a hard time lodging in the imagination of boys in short trousers.” —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
SWM ISO DFK, GFE.
I realize it’s terribly judgmental and tools-and-house of me, but I can’t help pointing to this lithe little anecdote as a neat summation of why it is at the end of the day I shake my head at the very idea of “difference feminism.” (—“Deep French kissing,” by the way.)
Count Bérubé’s passage over Piedmont.
You’ve read it elsewhere, but the sinistral contract obligates I mention it, and so: Michael Bérubé renounces blogging exile, joins the gang at Crooked Timber. Hot holy damn.
Liverwurst, Battenburg, Emmenthal, Syllabub, Muscadet—
Throw it away! We need more height! Toss it all over the side!
O Newton, release this apple from its earthly shackles!
Throw it all away, and live to fight another day—
Empathy and usefulness,
or, Innovative design solutions.
“Traditional tools such as pencils or markers may be used to develop graphic design ideas, even when computers are used for finalization.” —And y’all thought Conservapedia was funny.
Put down the poker and nobody gets hurt.
I confess that, in these days of blogroll amnesty, I worry how much longer I’ll be able to claim a spot on the rolls of both the Valve and the Weblog. (Have neither of them noticed how far behind I’ve fallen in the reading? Even the title’s secondhand!) —Ah, well. I can just go cue up “Sailing Day” again, and if that doesn’t do the trick, there’s always another fight elsewhere.
Tipping their hand.
Red is the boldest of all colors. It stands for charity and martyrdom, hell, love, youth, fervor, boasting, sin, and atonement. It is the most popular color, particularly with women. It is the first color of the newly born and the last seen on the deathbed. It is the color for sulfur in alchemy, strength in the Kabbalah, and the Hebrew color of God. Mohammed swore oaths by the “redness of the sky at sunset.” It symbolizes day to the American Indian, East to the Chippewa, the direction West in Tibet, and Mars ruling Aries and Scorpio in the early zodiac. It is the color of Christmas, blood, Irish setters, meat, exit signs, Saint John, Tabasco sauce, rubies, old theater seats and carpets, road flares, zeal, London buses, hot anvils (red in metals is represented by iron, the metal of war), strawberry blondes, fezes, the apocalyptic dragon, cheap whiskey, Virginia creepers, valentines, boxing gloves, the horses of Zechariah, a glowing fire, spots on the planet Jupiter, paprika, bridal torches, a child’s rubber ball, chorizo, birthmarks, and the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. It is, nevertheless, for all its vividness, a color of great ambivalence.
—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors
Red state, blue state: it’s divisive bullshit, an accident of history barely six years old, it’s a goddamn eyeworm, an honest-to-god meme that won’t get out of the way, a map that warps the thing it maps. It’s magic, is what it is. All this business, George Lakoff and his frames, George Bush and his backdrops, David Brooks capitalizing random nouns in a desperate attempt to bottle that Bobo lighting once more, the hoarse, fierce shadowboxing around “surge” or “escalation” that would be grotesque if it weren’t already so weirdly disconnected—it’s all magic, groping for the emblem or rite, the utterance or name that will when written or shown or repeated often enough bring about that change in accordance with will. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t; as usual, it’s the stuff nobody’s trying to make work that works the best. Psycohistory’s still an art, not a science. (Hence: magic.)
—Digby points us to the latest effort of some apprentices to the art: Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community. Written by a former Clinton strategist, a former Bush strategist, and a former national political writer with the AP, it purports to tell us:
Political commentators insist that the nation is a collection of “red states” (Republican) and “blue states” (Democrat). The reality is that America is a collection of tribes—communities of people who run in similar lifestyle circles irrespective of state, county, and precinct lines.
And there’s some stuff about Navigators (“otherwise average Americans help their family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers negotiate the swift currents of change in twenty-first-century America”) and how fundamental political decisions are made with the gut and not the head and how the authors have cracked the twenty-first century code with their “LifeTargeting” [sic] strategies, etc. etc. —But at least they’ve abandoned red-state blue-state, right? Faceted their analysis into tribes? Brought some nuance into the picture, beyond those two drastically simplified tribes, red and blue?
Yup. There’s three.
Red. Blue. And Tippers.
No. Not otherwise entertaining Second Ladies with an inexplicable mad-on against explicit pop music. People who, like, tip, from red to blue. And back. Get it? Tippers?
—If you’re curious as to how you’d rate in this 2004-level political analysis, there’s a quiz. I scored as a member of the Red tribe. (Apparently, Dr. Pepper, Audis, TV Guide, and bourbon are all more Red than Sprite, Saabs, US News & World Report, and gin.) —I’m thinking their “LifeTargeting” maybe needs to go back to the drawing board for a bit.
Now, I’m not knocking dualism. Dualism isn’t always bad; like any tool, sometimes it’s useful, sometimes it isn’t. With a book like Applebee’s America, there are, indeed, two tribes: those the authors (and the publisher) are trying to reach, and those they couldn’t care less about. A quick scan of the website makes it clear who’s us and who’s them in this particular case:
Their book takes you inside the reelection campaigns of Bush and Clinton, behind the scenes of hyper-successful megachurches, and into the boardrooms of corporations such as Applebee’s International, the world’s largest casual dining restaurant chain. You’ll also see America through the anxious eyes of ordinary people, buffeted by change and struggling to maintain control of their lives.
This isn’t political or sociological analysis. It isn’t even pop sociology. It’s an I’ve Got Some Cheese book. “Applebee’s America cracks the twenty-first century code for political, business, and religious leaders struggling to keep pace with the times,” says so right on the website. —And if you see yourself as a political, business, or religious leader in this twenty-first century, looking out on the ordinary people from behind the scenes in the boardrooms, well, they’ll gladly hand you a neatly bound stack of printed paper in exchange for your money.
—Nor am I knocking the idea of tribes, or guts. Psychology Today has a mildly interesting follow-up to the “Crazy Conservative” study of mumblety-mumble spin-cycles ago, and really, the basic idea that conservatism stems from fear and uncertainty, that liberalism and tolerance are best nurtured by stability and confidence, these are hardly controversial ideas, when you stop and think about it. (In the terms I’ve chosen, yes. Hush.) —For those who want something boiled a wee bit harder, there’s the work of Mark Landau and Sheldon Solomon, on page 3, which gets interesting about here:
As a follow-up, Solomon primed one group of subjects to think about death, a state of mind called “mortality salience.” A second group was primed to think about 9/11. And a third was induced to think about pain—something unpleasant but non-deadly. When people were in a benign state of mind, they tended to oppose Bush and his policies in Iraq. But after thinking about either death or 9/11, they tended to favor him. Such findings were further corroborated by Cornell sociologist Robert Willer, who found that whenever the color-coded terror alert level was raised, support for Bush increased significantly, not only on domestic security but also in unrelated domains, such as the economy.
Old hat, yes, to anyone who’s been paying any attention at all, but how many of us really do? —You have to turn to page 5 for the punchline.
If we are so suggestible that thoughts of death make us uncomfortable defaming the American flag and cause us to sit farther away from foreigners, is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?
To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death. Preliminary research shows that reminding people that as human beings, the things we have in common eclipse our differences—what psychologists call a “common humanity prime”—has the same effect.
Ask us to consider carefully. Remind us of the things we have in common. It’s apparently that simple. Which doesn’t mean it’s easy. And any book that was actually about how to lead and build and make the most would talk about how to do that, and how to keep on doing that.
Anything else is magic, and as any real magician will tell you, magic’s a great way to make some money—but it’s a lousy way to chop wood and carry water.
Blue is a mysterious color, hue of illness and nobility, the rarest color in nature. It is the color of ambiguous depth, of the heavens and of the abyss at once; blue is the color of the shadow side, the tint of the marvelous and the inexplicable, of desire, of knowledge, of the blue movie, of blue talk, of raw meat and rare steak, of melancholy and the unexpected (once in a blue moon, out of the blue). It is the color of anode plates, royalty at Rome, smoke, distant hills, postmarks, Georgian silver, thin milk, and hardened steel; of veins seen through skin and notices of dismissal in the American railroad business. Brimstone burns blue, and a blue candle flame is said to indicate the presence of ghosts. The blue-black sky of Vincent van Gogh’s 1890 Crows Flying over a Cornfield seems to express the painter’s doom. But, according to Grace Mirabella, editor of Mirabella, a blue cover used on a magazine always guarantees increased sales at the newsstand. “It is America’s favorite color,” she says.
—Alexander Theroux, The Primary Colors
After the late, great unpleasantness.
I am a Southerner, for all that I’m expatriate—born in Alabama, raised in Virginia and the Carolinas and Kentucky, I graduated high school in John Hughes land and attended a famously liberal arts college on the North Coast of Ohio. Since then, I’ve lived my life in New York and Boston and the Pioneer Valley and Portland, Oregon, and I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a stretch south of the Mason Dixon. (And those stretches are sometimes awfully few and far between.) —But I cook up hoppin’ john for New Year’s, every year (though, apostasic, I make it without the fatback). I taught my Jersey girl how to eat grits and I make my biscuits from scratch. (Food? Don’t laugh. Look to the roots of your own tongue.) —I’m haunted by the smell of magnolia blossoms, plucked and left in a drinking glass on the mantelpiece. (They smell lemony, the same way apples do.) Long pine needles crushed underfoot, dry, not wet and silvery grey; evergreens burnt brown by the sun. I always forget until I see it from the window of the plane, how red the dirt is, scraped up, laid shockingly bare in circles of development scars that will always ring Charlotte: how wrong it looks, how raw. It’s not the color the earth is supposed to be. It’s alien; I’m home.
For a couple of weeks, at most. And then.
(“You will find no other place, no other shores,” says C.P. Cavafy. “This city will possess you, and you’ll wander the same streets. In these same neighborhoods you’ll grow old; in these same houses you’ll turn grey.”)
—If you aren’t Southern, I don’t know that I can explain the little thrill I felt when I saw the motto for the Levine Museum of the New South: “Telling the story—1865 to tomorrow.” Shock is hardly the word. Frisson even seems too strong. It’s a stifled giggle; a flash of a grin, at something you’d’ve done yourself, but never would have thought to do. It hardly seems worth mentioning, but—well, maybe the About Us page will bring it into focus for the Yankees among us?
What is the New South?
The New South means people, places and a period of time — from 1865 to today. Levine Museum of the New South is an interactive history museum that provides the nation with the most comprehensive interpretation of post-Civil War southern society featuring men, women and children, black and white, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers who have shaped the South since the Civil War.
New South Quick Facts
- A Time—The New South is the period of time from 1865, following the Civil War, to the present.
- A Place—The New South includes areas of the Southeast U.S. that began to grow and flourish after 1865.
- An Idea—The New South represents new ways of thinking about economic, political and cultural life in the South.
- Reinvention—The New South encompasses the spirit of re-invention. The end of slavery forced the South to reinvent its economy and society.
- People—The New South continuously reinvents itself as newcomers, natives, immigrants, visitors and residents change the composition and direction of the region.
To say that you are about the South, but dismiss the antebellum—not to forget, because who can forget, not even to repudiate it, but to wave it off as no longer important to the South you want to look at, here and now— Don’t throw out the cotton and the rice, the pastel dresses and grey uniforms, the stars and bars and whips and chains. Those things are all still very much alive and kicking. But cut out the thing that props them up, the hollow rites, the archly wounded pride; blithely (if a little self-consciously) announce you’re leaving the Civil War well enough alone, to all the many other hands that want it; you will turn your attention to everything else, and watch it all fall into some saner perspective—1865 to tomorrow—
(“How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?” says C.P. Cavafy. “Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”)
The Levine Museum of the New South is currently hosting an exhibit called “Families of Abraham.” Eight photographers spent over a year with 11 families in the Charlotte area—Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families—recording their holidays and everydays, putting the photos together to demonstrate that when you set aside the different words we’ve each plucked from the same shambolic Book and just look at the people, going about their lives, well, under the chadors and yarmulkes and double-knit blazers we’re all, y’know, the same. Basically.
Which is why, given the way things currently are, what with the Pragers and the Goodes and the Qutbs, this show is important. —But it’s not why it’s important to me.
That’s a photo (by my mother, which is why the show is important to me, yes, but), a photo of Basheer Khatoon with her great-grandson, Raahil, taken in the home she shares with her son, a Charlotte cardiologist.
My South—the South in my head, the South I came from—doesn’t have a Basheer Khatoon. But there she indisputably is. Alien—and yet, from all the years I’ve spent since and elsewhere, heimlich. The world has come to the South; the South—my South—is becoming part of the world.
No matter where we go, there we are; we find no other place, no other shore. We wander the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods. —But those streets change.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” saith the Lord.
In some otherwise excellent comments on the clusterfucked execution of Saddam Hussein, Josh Marshall said something that gave me pause:
Vengeance isn’t justice. Vengeance is part of justice. But only a part.
I agree that when you’ve been wronged, it can be very, very hard to separate your need for justice from your need for vengeance. This is why judges should always and forever bend toward the asymptote of impartiality, and why “victims’ rights” drives are rarely a good idea.
Vengeance has no place in justice. Vengeance is temporary, short-sighted; the destructive flailing of the hurt who can’t see what they’re hitting. Justice is what you eventually build if you’re lucky enough to survive the ravages of vengeance. —You may feel I’m splitting a miniscule mote plucked from his eye, but this is important: a system of justice that gives any consideration to vengeance is a shameful system, one that mistakes means for ends, that sacrifices peace, justice, for the visceral satisfaction of righteous outrage. Righteous, perhaps; but outrageous nonetheless.
I mean, I know in my bones that impeachment isn’t enough for the various members of the Bush administration. Imprisonment will not bring back the hundreds of thousands of lives we’ve sacrificed for his petty vanity. —When he is turned out of office, I’d want him to tour the country, town by town, set up each morning in the square before the courthouse and allow passersby to sock him in the nose. Not quite inviting passersby to saw at the most famous neck in the realm—Secret Service agents could keep things from getting out of hand—but it would, perhaps, eventually add up in small dollops of vengeance to something you could measure on the awful balance sheet.
But the hundreds of thousands would still be dead, and our nation no closer to something we could claim was health, and the lines would become too long and unwieldy (even if we allowed consolation shots at the noses of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Snow, McCain, Lieberman, et bloody al). —So I agitate instead for hearings, and impeachment; justice, not vengeance.
They really are quite different.
