And I shall be buried in Spain

In the café where I'm sitting there are always little slogans that are supposed to make "you" feel good. Today's is

Счастье - это когда тебя понимают...по-твоему.

["Happiness" is when (everyone) understands you in your own way]

At first I thought: "Sentimental crap." And then I thought: "This really upsets me."

Break it down: "тебя понимают" - there's another voice, the author's "I" - that doesn't figure into this at all. As if that one could teach "you" exactly how to be happy.

"They" - an unquantifiable, general, external, collective. And to put the meaning of the whole adage in just a slightly different cast: "You'll be happy as long as you've conformed to everyone's wishes."

I no longer want the superpower I earlier said I wanted. Now I want to edit and revise my writings to the point where I can say

1. I understand everything that I was trying to say there.
2. I could never say it a better way.

Nevermind whether they understand or not. I will still be happy.

In the Candy Shoppe

I had meant to write this post when I became distracted by Avatar and perceived disconnects. The jump, as it were, was bad writing. I was prepared to compare the script writers for Doctor Who with Anne Rice, who is famous for her disdain of editors and their publishing industry, as discussed here. That site led me to the pseudo-contests mocking individuals Storm and I very much admire and - dare I say - hero worship, such as the 1998 "Bad Writing" award winner and runner up, Judith Butler and Homi Bhaba, and I couldn't resist commenting.

If the drunken revelation I underwent in Avatar regarded the disconnect between various parts of my life, the end of David Tennant's run as the eponymous Doctor, The End of Time,* suffered from the exact opposite - from too many allusions to Tennant's, Davies's, and others' exit too strongly affecting the plot.

When I go book shopping, I go around and around the store, and pick up all the items that catch my attention. When I want to go, I find a quiet spot with the ten to fifteen titles in hand, choose a maximum of three, and put the rest back. I thus know I really want the books I've chosen; I economize; I am happy.

Someone needed to sit Russell T. Davies down and say: "You need to look through the fifteen plots you are doing poorly in this rough draft, choose three, and then edit and revise them."

-Drunk
* 2009, BBC One. Directed by Euros Lyn. Written by Russell T. Davies.

She Blinded me with Economics

There's a financial analysis program that's on the morning news. The anchor-analyst looks at data charts and riffs, entirely impromptu, off of them. The quadruple-Windsor knot around his throat seems to rob his brain of necessary oxygen, and he fails at the formation of complete sentences.

Sometimes he has a female commentator, sort of like a weatherman, who sits in front of a different camera. The analyst prompts her with scripted questions and she reads the answers off a teleprompter. She is so pretty.

The male analyst sounds like an idiot for all of his stuttering, used as we (I) am to the careful polish and script of newscasting. The female, in contrast to him, and with the Russian proclivity to read things as fast fast fast as she can, is a marionette whose strings are clearly visible.

I find myself comparing it to Anchorman*, and sadly realize that even such a movie as Anchorman does more to query the gender binary than this farce of equal-opportunity televidenie.

*2004, Dreamworks. Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Will Ferrell and McKay.

Not-conveyed in carrying-across-language

"...Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, 'What the hell do you mean by that?' And he said, 'He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, "You didn't understand me; you're an idiot." That's the terrorism part.'..."
-John Searle

(full interview here)

Even if we reject solipsism (so there is a world-environment we share, and I can somehow convey my impression of that world-environment to you), how can I make my thought so clear that you will, if not agree, see the forms and functions of my argumentation as I perceive them? How can I “check” that you’ve, in fact, “got it”?

I can’t. But we go on speaking and writing, trusting that the amount lost will be imbalanced by the amount conveyed - hoping, praying. Even though Derrida will say, “You misunderstood me,” even though Joan Scott will differentiate between her physical self and the construct of her that has been extrapolated from her writings, even though Judy Butler will disassociate from the fields that arise out of her works.

There are checks and balances, discussions and reviews, edits and comments. Understandings can become mutual, and our precises can resemble one another.

Even then...Three people read a treatise. Two agree with the general thesis: even if there is inherently an ‘objective’ world, as soon as humans begin to represent it {in stories, news, art photographs, histories…} the world-signs become signifieds. They assimilate connotations and compile constructs like poison quicksilver moving up a food chain.

But then the third opens his mouth. And he says, “As we see in this treatise on mythology, there can be an objective representation of the world.”

And I want to deride him for saying this; I want to storm and rage; but at a certain point I can’t break past the solipsism that is an individual’s interpretation of the text. Besides. Maybe I'm the one who's wrong.

A fortune; an interpretation

Creatures of the air
creatures somehow at odds with the world
[humans ought not to fly
the atomic bomb splits what should be whole
the vampire as a stereotyped Jew
the face that launched a thousand ships]

Creatures that have an outer shell
easily guess and qualified
a slight hesitation, only, that the sign
might be misinterpreted

Layers of interpretation
direct, synchronous testimony bears no might
nor does the long and weighty night
of retrospective, earnest contemplation
sometimes we don't have enough information

To solve the puzzle.

Through the Looking-Glass

Heath Ledger's swan song, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,* explores a possible union of a shadowy Eastern philosophy (closer to Buddhism than anything else) with the Western Devil-as-Great-Tempter. The titular imaginarium is a gateway Parnassus creates, through which audience members can travel into their own imaginations.

Within their world-construct, the e'er-smoking and smooth-talking Devil offers the temptation of the audience member's most-desired material possession {alcohol, sex, normalcy} while Parnassus offers a transcendental Nirvana. The path to Parnassus's option is often hard {in the distance, up a ziggurat, in the clouds} but the Devil's choice immediately implodes, taking the soul with it.

Heath Ledger smooth talks the souls into taking Parnassus's option, which results in their renunciation of material possessions - which they then give to the troupe. The Order of the Imaginarium thus show the paradox of their position: while attempting to save people from the illusion of samsara, they are themselves trapped on the outskirts of society by their rickety show, by their appearance as stereotypical carnies/gypies, by their carnal desires.

What's more, the film emphasizes the modern vanity - the supreme importance of a singular choice that will forever trap the soul in samsara, or release it to nirvana, when human experience is never so clean, never so easy to encapsulate in the run-time of 120 minutes. Even if the soul chooses the "arduous" journey, it receives instant gratification, and we are meant not to ask just what happens to the individuals who have given up all of their credit cards and furs and riches. They presumably have wrought themselves into a state of poverty and suffering, but we should rejoice because they have reached, in the "A-B-C-s" of enlightenment, "z"?

* 2009, Sony Pictures (et al). Written and directed by Terry Gilliam.

The Places that Scare Us

Once upon a time, for about a week (that is, a very long time), we empathized with all our red and beating hearts as Tyra Banks mourned the thirty minutes that she walked around as an obese individual (and the four hours it took to get in and out of the latex suit).

In the red corner, a so-called "mobocracy" with Palin, et al., at the helm rants against big government, Obama, national debt, and other "taxation-without-representation" issues. In related news, tickets to their convention, plus keynote speech, are over $500 a pop.

And in the former capital of the Reds, a lone white American middle-class straight male kvetches that he might experience some slight discomfiture, as if he were suddenly a member of some subaltern community, as if, in one crystallizing moment, he understood what it meant to be on the business end of repression.

It was for this I wanted to prepare in my previous post. The rhetoric needs to change from one of instant gratification and momentary, shock-therapy-driven revelations. Instead of making wild promises or throwing tantrums that one political group has been capsized by another, instead of "suddenly understanding" the sum totality of a human's problems (the so-called "another's doorstep" syndrome from To Kill a Mockingbird), instead of infusing our world with a wasted rhetoric of revolution...

An Intimate Gathering - My 1500 Closest Friends

Consider this article.

In short, it explains the statistical phenomenon that for any human (x) with set number of friends (y), at least one friend (z) will have a set number of friends (y') that is significantly higher than x's y. Why? Because x is part of z's social circle, and it's much easier to be 1:100 than it is to be 1:5.

But the tone of this article is not "so stop comparing and appreciate the people you DO have, those people who will tolerate your drunken revelations or ponder your queer thoughts." No!

This is also why people think of certain beaches or museums or airports as usually ­busier than they actually are: by ­definition, most people aren't there when they're less crowded.

The article takes what could be an opportunity to expose the irrational, consumerist underbelly of demand-based economy, and chooses instead to make it into a reductive account of the observation bias.

Modern vanities.

As print newspapers struggle and web-based newspapers grow in supremacy, I vacillate between my excitement and my fear.

Because web-based news is in real-time, there's no longer a canon of headlines and "major issues" - no history of Great White Men and their Great Wars that will dominate, forever and ever, amen, the homepages of newspapers. What runs as the major headline of the New York Times homepage will not be the major headline for even a day, even twelve hours, even, perhaps long enough for me to read the headline before it changes.

Because web-based news is in real-time, any ridiculous issue on which a journalist's written for the sole purpose of keeping the job will get more-or-less identical treatment to the outbreak of a Great White Man's war, and both will seem to have equal importance, and we will choke on the bile of our own hysteria.

Am I arguing "guns don't kill people?"

Give a public speaker a bad microphone. She might have the vocal power to fill the hall on her own; if she had seen just one more "Stomp the Yard" movie as a teenager, she might have become the 32-year-old star playing a teenie-bopper in a Disney made-for-TV movie; she had chops.

As soon as that mic is in her hands, she can't let go. Even as it loses battery power and ultimately dies, she clutches the useless metal and plastic. She raps it over and over and over. She presses it to her mouth and prays it will eventually fix itself.

There are all those stories of people "feeling depressed after watching Avatar," or of going insane while Blackberry™ had a temporary outage and they couldn't compulsively check their emails and facebook pages.

In short, I planned this to be a drunken revelation that amounted to technophobia. But then. Oh, then -- then I was in the metro, and I saw a teenage boy playing on his cell phone, and the only seat open was right next to him. And from that seat I could see that the kid wasn't playing on his cell phone - he was drafting poetry.

Technology is technology is technology. "Good" and "bad" are terms we can only add after the warranty's worn off.

The Streets are Paved in Gold

One of the dramatic readings at a recent festival, Кино без плёнки [Films without any film], was a "whodunnit" melodrama staged at the 1957 World Festival of Youth in Moscow. The scenario was pretty horrible, but the discussion on how to "improve" it afterwards was fascinating.

I'm still struck by one of the phrases that came out of the anti-hero, Zina's, mouth:

What's there to love about the Urals? It's all dirt, drinking, degeneration... But here - in one word - is the capital!

This is interesting on a couple of levels, not least of which that it is an Armenian man in St. Petersburg writing about the glory of the capital, at such a time when Piter has been relegated almost to the provinces.

To Russian provinces, that is, as opposed to American: I recently gave a presentation on American suburbia, which I loosely translated, for the fulfillment of my purposes (but with full disclosure that my definition wasn't definitive) as an ideologico-geographical space somewhere on the periphery of a metropolitan area, where families live in nuclear houses. You notice - this includes small towns and bedroom communities, but does not include apartment slums.

After the presentation a few people made a point of verbally and, to an extent, vehemently disagreeing with those two specific points (no slums, small towns included). "I grew up in the suburbs," one said, "and the defining feature of the ideology, for me, was that we spent all of our free time out of the suburbs and in the city."

It highlights an American centrism we don't prefer to accept. We don't have the same relationship to our capital, the hotbed of Senatorial prostitution, muggings, and heightened crime rates that it is; but for all of our multiplicity of metropolitan areas, there still is the sense of being IN or being OUT.

-An urbanite: "I might not be from New York, but at least I'm from Philadelphia."

-A suburbanite: "I might not be from the city, but at least I'm not from a small town."

-A small towner: "I might not be from the suburbs, but at least I'm not from a farm in the countryside."

And admitting any happiness at being from a more provincial region, or by identifying ideologies that might clump an individual with a "lower" podunk village - that is vulgar and conservative and repulsive.

"To Moscow, I beg you!"

Image: Mikhail Trakhman, "String Orchestra in a Car," 1957 Moscow Youth Festival

Stop, Thief!

This is in response to the case of an allegedly "stolen" Van Gogh currently in Yale University holdings.

The argument comes down to the legal apparatus by which this private property was nationalized and then sold. Was that government ultimately, "objectively," truly legal?

Unlike the terms of war reparations that return artwork stolen from a targeted, localized community of Jewish individuals in Nazi-controlled territories,

1. There is no language demanding that the ex-Soviet Union make reparations to any one.
2. The "theft" or nationalization was of all things, of all possessions. (At least at face-value.)

I don't want to be a Soviet apologist, but I don't think it's right for this "purported" great-grandson of Morozov's to privatize this painting and hang it on his living room wall, where no one can see it, where, likely, the conditions of care will not be correct and the painting will fade and die.

Or for him to privatize the painting so he can turn it around and sell it to a private collector for the appraised $120-$150 million. There would be no law suit if this was a no-name painting that didn't figure into myths of art history and "beauty."

What claim does this great-grandson have to the piece? Did Morozov himself promise it to this Konowaloff before his death, before the nationalization? How else could he fight off all of the other great-grandchildren's claims to the piece?

If we are going to give back anything nationalized at the start of the Soviet Union, I will want to see everything nationalized to be given back. All things. All heritages. Which means the Yusopovs get their mansion back; which means the Romanovs get their throne back.

And if we're going to play that great-grandchildren automatically inherit from their ancestors, I will demand legal action for all those who carry the blood guilt of their ancestors' past atrocities.

Image: Isabella Gardner Museum, Boston, MA. "The Most Famous Art Theft in History"

Rhymes with Philanthropy

Let's, for a moment, pretend that the capitalist oppressors and thinkers are correct, and capitalist-model democracy is the be-all, end-all of human institutions. And yet even in this "ultimate state" of human endeavors we see laziness, greed, black desires (cheating, stealing, etc., etc.) So if there is a teleological bend to some Great Story we haven't yet guessed, hopefully this isn't it. But we're operating under the hypothesis that it is.

Scarily, it would make sense with what we know of the physical world. Life is the #1 cause of death. The second law of thermodynamics: a percentage of all reactions is transformed into entropy, or unusable energy.

Perhaps capitalism is the be-all, end-all. Perhaps it's entropy.

<3

Drunk

Image: The Communist Party, available at threadless.com.

(You get the irony, right? I'm...pimping...an internet seller...aw, forget it.)

Heritage

I asked Storm: "Why is it that, some three thousand years after its construction, the Parthenon is still the paradigm of Classical beauty? What would it take to reestablish our standards?"

We laud the Parthenon for its purity, its geometric excellence, the systematization of its orders. This is all because of our modern vanities. We believe the Parthenon to have always looked the way we now see it.

How would our perception change if we saw, not a bare and abstract form, not the "culmination of the Doric order," but a temple with Elgin marble intact, statuary and religious rites complete, the hustling crowds of worshiping masses, the colors and the vibrancy?

It would be busy. We would speak more to the tiny diagrams of processing parades that no one can see, the poor engineering of the meandering approach, and wonder if the reason the interior/exterior colonnades are different styles isn't because of a systematic hierarchy, but because the Parthenon was actually a Hellenic-Mannerist piece that fused multiple styles.

Oh, how I'd love if everything we ever thought about classical orders was based on incorrect interpretations of Greek architecture by Vitruvius et al.

<3

Drunk

Forever and Ever, Amen

Atlantis. Camelot. Lemuria. El Dorado. Kitezh.

What is the appeal of a lost city? There must be an appeal, the amount of thought and dreaming we've put into the Atlantises, Alexandrias, Babylons... Yes, they all have become mythic heavens-on-earth. Yes, each has an aspect of Star Wars-ian "Long-ago-but-somehow-in-the-future" trope.

I think we're more excited because for once, in these lost cities, we escape the process of urban renewal. There can be no porosity - no unfinished projects, no abandoned dreams, no future hopes, no lost monuments, no decaying ruins, no bad paint jobs or plasterwork. There is just holy stagnation, frozen perfection.

There is a utopia. By which I mean a total and absolute war on time itself.

<3

Drunk

Image: N. Roerich, "The Fall of Atlantis" 1929

And Those We Leave Behind

The head curator at one of my host museums passed away, unexpectedly, on Orthodox Christmas.

The spectacle of death has such permutations of stage directions, as I briefly mentioned in my last revelation. A death in the US will warrant a wake, a funeral, a buffet spread, and then only the closest family members will visit the gravesite forever and ever, amen. The most "communal" thing might be a general epithet on mortality:

Remember me as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I
As I am now, so must you be
Prepare for death and follow me.

The socially accepted performances here are different. Flowers propagate whenever anyone thinks kindly upon a soul. The gravestones are beautiful, polished granite and marble, engraved by photographic likenesses of the dearly departed in place of Anglo-American cherubs and urns. The performance doesn't depend on personal knowledge of the deceased, but on the amount of respect an individual bears towards that person. Fresh flowers adorn Esenin's (after 85 years), Pushkin's (after 137) feet. I was urged to make a trip to Fayetteville, to J. William's tomb, to make a public display of my appreciation and gratitude for my opportunity to study.

Take this as a living will. When I die, at whatever ritual ceremony takes place, I want a series of eight full-length mirrors to inscribe a semi-circle around my casket, and I want a candle to burn on a low table in front of each (for inspiration, cf. the apparatus used towards the end of the Dr. Who episode "Turn Left"*), and my body, and everyone who sees it, will be reflected. We shall flaunt the tradition! Everyone will see their soul! Everyone will know that they, too, must live and die! Exclamation point!

I think it could be a powerful moment.

<3

Drunk

* 2008, BBC One. Directed by Graeme Harper. Written by Russell T. Davies.

I Confront My Own Mortality

How do historians relate to death and dying? Our profession, after all, is almost entirely (with a very small percentage of exceptions) about those who have already passed beyond the maya curtain - escaped the cave - fled their mortal coil - etc. etc.

Am I supposed to be encouraged by those who pass in bravery, or at peace, or as paradigms of wisdom? Am I supposed to learn my lesson from those whose utopian visions included immortality for themselves or others? Am I supposed to harden myself, scold myself over the visceral reaction I feel when I see photographs of my architects' gravesites and remember that these people, whose hopes and dreams fill the vast majority of my reading, are now gone?

Is the historian the lonely child who comes up with imaginary friends for himself, at the cost of ostracizing himself from the living? Or is he a sensitive, an individual in touch with his Zeitgeist, but with sympathy to Those Who Have Peaced™, and can approach (if never reach) a reconciliation between the two?

I think the empathic connections I pretend to make with dead people are probably on the unprofessional side of things. But seriously - the phenomenon of death is weirdly different in this country. In any given cemetery there are huge pictures, not just of famous people, but of anyone who has passed! (Look at the background graves in this image).

<3

Drunk

Oh ord-Lay ive-us-Gay our essings-Blay

(Why do I keep writing about films? The world will never know.)

The movie Avatar* takes us on an intergalactic colonial quest to the forest moon, Pandora, of a distant planet (which, although it resembles Uranus or a blue-tinged Yavin IV [of Star Wars fame], is in fact named "Polyphemus." This goes unmentioned in the film). The audience-surrogate and main character, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic who infiltrates the alien society in the form of one of the titular Avatars - an alien-human hybrid without a consciousness or soul of its own, which he controls via a mental bridging device.

In one of Jake's first interactions with a native (Neytiri, Zoe Saldana), he watches as she stabs a knife through the chest of a wounded jackal-analogue and says words over the corpse. He - and we, through his eyes - assume that Neytiri has said a prayer for the animal's soul (which we later discover to be for good cause; all of Pandora is, literally, wired together - and the natives' god is a manifestation of the sum totality of the planet's electromagnetic and metaphysical energy).

Here I come at odds with myself. Everything I've learned and know about studying history, cultures, humans (or fictional aliens) is screaming that I-Jake-we can't take Neytiri's physical actions (stabbing with a knife, saying words) as immediate evidence that she is praying for the animal's soul. We don't know that! And we can't seek better understanding of one another unless we accept that cultural subjectivity (this is Sociology 101, and basic, I know - but the point stands).

As a movie-goer, however, I accept the action as such, and am later rewarded for doing so (because that assumption, in Cameron's universe, is correct). This is little different from the basic adage for writers: "show, don't tell." (And all of its variations: Twain's "...bring on the fat lady and make her sing," Woolf's "It is plain enough to those who have done a reader's part..." Lukeman's "A guy shouldn't have to say, 'Ow, I'm bleeding,'" etc. etc.)

I think this internal conflict is the same as that which we can chart between "academia" and "the real world." For example:

-An attack on the "useless" jargon and opaque prose of academics, which later becomes
-A mocking contest on "Bad Writing", meriting
-A belated response from one of the upper windows among the parapets of the cliched Ivory Tower.

At my entry level position, in the guest lodgings among the servants' quarters in the basement of the Tower, I can see that we must bridge this disconnect. I'm just not sure how yet.

-Drunk

*2009, 20th Century Fox. Directed and written by James Cameron.

500 Days of Summer

I watched the movie 500 Days of Summer* on a recent plane ride. Despite the treatment it received in the Moscow-based entertainment magazine, Afisha, as an art film, 500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy or, in common parlance, a "chick flick." The tag line for the movie is: "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't."

In this non-linear production, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a drone making greeting cards, dreaming of someday returning to his true ambition, architecture, and of finding L'Amour Parfait™. He is infatuated with the very idea of being in love with a temp at the greeting card company, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who doesn't understand why men become puppies in her presence, and who doesn't believe in Les Amours Parfaits™ that Tom espouses. Throughout the film, we see Tom as a manic-depressive, perhaps clinically neurotic individual whose stress-management skills include mechanically throwing dishes onto the ground and writing huge to-do lists in chalk on a wall of his apartment. Summer, conversely, is dead-pan and more-or-less serene even in the most emotional moments of their break-up.

The process at work here seems to be the following. The filmmakers have acknowledged gender stereotypes in a romantic comedy - they should make the man tall, dark, and handsome (or, to put it in the words of a British television actress: "Gorgeous, and he doesn't speak a word! My kind of man.") and ought to imbue the woman with emotional and stereotypic obsessions. They then attempt to reject the stereotypes by crafting characters who are the polar opposites.

But this thought process still hinges upon

1) the concept of a binary of gender
2) the definitional stereotypes of each gender in that binary.

Rather than refuting anything, the filmmakers have solidified the pre-existing stereotypes. A creative individual cannot play with forms if the initial shape of those forms changes. Without the stereotypes, their creation of polar-opposites makes no sense. The polar opposite of a Thing, then, eventually returns back to the very Thing itself.

-Drunk

*2009, Fox Searchlight Pictures. Directed by Mark Webb. Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber.

In lieu of Personal Introductions

The German literary movement of Sturm und Drang was relatively short-lived, lasting just around twenty years, and it was ultimately undermined by its own proponents (e.g. Goethe), who dismissed it as youthful folly and turned to other styles. But for that brevity of its movement-form, Sturm und Drang as a concept is omnipresent. We love storms! Rage! Fire! Exclamation points! It was a dark and stormy night...

And so, to christen this blog, and to explain the title image, I quote two authors who have nothing to do with the German movement of Sturm und Drang but everything to do with the concepts of Storm und Drunk.

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the strait way was lost.

-Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. by Robert and Jean Hollander

Receive thy new possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, available online via Dartmouth's Milton Reading Room.

<3
-Drunk