Friends of the blog have already realized that projects I'm currently working on have taken me away from blogging, but I figured I'd make it official and call it a "hiatus". 

I post regularly on facebook, and invite you to friend me there if you're interested in what I'm reading, watching, and listening to, and (very succinctly) thinking about it all. 

I'll return to blogging at some point down the road as time permits, maybe here, maybe elsewhere. 

I've sure enjoyed it these past 6+ years.

I was in New York last week.  The BF and I were staying in midtown and ambled down to the 9-11 memorial on Tuesday.  It's been several years since I've been to Ground Zero, and I was interested to see how the memorial was coming along. 

(I did my senior thesis at Indiana University, lo, these many years ago now, on monuments and memorials — they combine a number of enduring interests for me: art and architecture, the language of shapes and symbols, poetry (visual and otherwise), finding the universal in the particular and vice versa, official versus vernacular narratives, death, heroism, and the mystery of memory, to name a few.) 

I must say, I was impressed.

When a memorial like this works it works on an elemental level.  It speaks to something universal that has been experienced in a profoundly personal way.   All great art works like this, but memorials and monuments like this one reach deep into us for their power and resonance. They don't seek to bring an artist's vision to us, but — quite the opposite, they allow us to pour our vision into them.

Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial — "the Wall" — has pretty much been the standard by which we've judged all such monuments since.  The stark symbolism of her original drawings is still arresting:


It tells its story — and it is really but a chapter in a much longer story, a universal story — in a language so direct it will be decipherable for millennia.

Maya Lin's War Memorial derives much of its power — and its ability to speak to us as it does — from its context.  The audacity of this memorial is hard to overstate, and it marks, quite literally, a turning point in our history.  The scar is there, exposed still, and will remain for future generations.

The 9-11 Memorial borrows some elements, to be sure, but is, thank goodness, no mere regurgitation of Maya Lin's brilliant work, which countless war memorials around the country have cribbed.  The 9-11 Memorial had a different set of challenges altogether, but the spirit is definitely kindred.

The site itself is the biggest challenge.  It remains to be seen how visitors on a pilgrimage to the site (and it is a pilgrimage site) will be "handled" going forward.  As it is getting from the ticket center to the entrance to the memorial requires a hike, several security checks, and several ticket and ID checks.  All of which is part of the legacy of the events of that day, and is, in some ways, performative — a ritual, blunt as it is, that is meant to convey both the seriousness of the event and the idea of a space of continued extreme surveillance.

This is "attention to memory" in action, you could say.  And while the level of control is pretty clearly pathological, I think it's understandable in the dual context of millennial hysteria (which we are still very much in the thick of and which many of us will likely not live out) and a shared tragedy of the magnitude of 9-11, which utterly re-wired our culture. 

The space has yet to fill in.  While presumably this is what it will look like in a couple months...


...right now it looks like the moon.  A landscape of desolation, brown lawns and dead trees, with visitors wandering like wraiths in a Gustave Doré etching, only not as well-dressed.  Fitting somehow, but not the intended effect, I don't think.

Visitors are easily drawn to the two enormous pools ("Reflecting Absence") which you could say is the memorial proper.  And while people's behavior in such places is always a revelation, the memorial does a lot to mitigate the garden variety idiocy that any public space seems to inspire these days.

The BF was all of 15 on 9-11.  I feel dirty even saying it.  It's hard for me to get my head around it, frankly.  While I had the task of integrating the reality of that event into an already pretty well-rooted worldview, it was a formative experience for him.  Neither of us knew anyone personally who perished in the Twin Towers, but the event and its reverberations struck close to home nonetheless.

His mood was solemn and contemplative, appropriately enough, but there were others who seemed thrilled to be there, posing before the pools flashing sideways "v"s and big cheesy grins. 

Luckily the effect of those 52,000 gallons of water per minute crashing down those 30-foot walls into an abyss an acre wide is precisely as intended.  The thunder of the waterfalls drowns out just about everything else, creating a contemplative space in the middle of bustling lower Manhattan. 

There is something, obviously, very calming about the sound of water falling.  But it's also a curiously direct metaphor in this case.  In the footprints of the fallen Towers.  We all remember watching in horror as people just like us, whose names are inscribed there, fell, many having leaped to their deaths rather than perish in the flames. 

The choice to go with this design was courageous, I'd say.  Because in the silence of the noise of the space we're staring right at the truth of what happened.  It's not only vaguely evocative, it's a performative metaphor.  Water, that element of life, makes it safe for us to contemplate not just death, but the deaths of those whose names are memorialized where they fell.

The memorial does this with such single-minded simplicity — working with very stark elements — it's really a marvel.  It's not only readily graspable, but its "universalism" works as part of its narrative as well.  Its symbolic language is very elemental, "primitive" even, and the marvel of it is that through all the flak we had both the good sense and sophistication to go with simplicity.  A healing clarity results.

The pool runs under the names of those who died in the Towers.  Its symbolic source is there in the narrow, highest tier, the names hovering above it, where the water is placid, hardly a ripple.  It silently flows over the edge, where (through the wonder of modern hydraulics) it becomes a thundering waterfall, crashing the thirty feet into a basin, where it then flows inexorably into the abyss at the center.  No one standing at street level can see to the bottom of this abyss.

That narrative, offered without frills or pretension, coupled with the sheer magnitude of the pools, accounts for the monument's power.  You have only to look at awkward overgroping monuments to shared tragedy like the Oklahoma City National Memorial (which commemorates the 1995 bombing), to see what a muddled narrative can do to a memorial.  The memorial is (helpfully) referred to on the official website as "the outdoor symbolic memorial" and includes so many very particular non-intuitive elements, it can hardly be "read" without copious annotation.


What is obvious to the "initiated" will be cryptic in time, and the use of the elements — water and stone, earth and orchard — are not intuitive enough to have the kind of impact similar elements have at the 9-11 Memorial site.

The Oklahoma City site, I think, may struggle too desperately with the fear of forgetting, which is a latent element in all memorials.  And part of what makes the 9-11 Memorial different is the absence of that particular struggle, the certainty (in other words) that what happened there will never, could never be forgotten.  Of course that's sheer chutzpah, but that's why New York is New York and Oklahoma City isn't.

The 9-11 Memorial seems to recognize that, aside from sheer acreage, less is more.  It is always a question how to honor individuals in a mass tragedy.  The 9-11 memorial handles this intuitively, and the rest flows from there (literally and metaphorically). 

There will no doubt be other monuments to pop up over time on the site memorializing aspects of the tragedy, as at the Vietnam Memorial the more "traditional" representational monuments, the heroic Women's Memorial and  the "Three Soldiers," by a runner-up to Maya Lin's design, which depicts three soldiers glaring in disbelief at The Wall as if to say, "can you believe that shit?" were put in after protests.


But I think the 9-11 Memorial achieves something quite extraordinary on its own.  It gives us a place in the midst of a shared tragedy to contemplate our shared fate.

A few years ago when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, I did not mourn.  A life-time appointee to the Supreme Court so batty with immunity that he spent his time designing special insignia distinguishing the Chief Justice from his cohorts (a practice thankfully abandoned by his far more cunning successor), I felt that whatever the details of Rehnquist's personal life and emotions, he was better off out of public life entirely, and if death — by natural causes mind you — was the only way to get him out, then, well, whatever works. 

I thought about Rehnquist last week when I read of Andrew Breitbart's death at 43.  While Breitbart was no real long-term threat like a Rehnquist, he did personify everything loathsome about the Tea Party: the pettiness, the intellectual dishonesty, the victimizer-as-victim mentality, the view of politics as pure provocation and provocation as politics.

Nobody outside of the inner circle of someone like that really mourns his passing.  Why would the public mourn the passing of someone so singlemindedly dedicated to exploiting its forum for the purpose of destroying it?  It's like asking the congregation to sing praises to the church arsonist. 

Even his acolytes are more outraged at the lack of reverence being shown him in death — a reverence not his or anyone's due simply for dying — than truly mournful of his passing.  Because to mourn we must love.  And the public — "The People" — can love.  They will line boulevards a hundred-people deep for miles and miles for those they love.  (For those they fear, as well, alas.)

But when one's life is dedicated to spreading rumors and sowing hate, to exploiting petty differences and rubbing salt in wounds, one should not expect to be loved in return for it, even in death (although, inconceivable as it is, people do).  Your Culture Warriors will send you off the Valhalla in a flaming boat, but what you'll get from the rest of us is a glad good riddance to bad rubbish.

The Right isn't really in mourning for Breitbart, though.  They'll always choose fear over love.  Here they are turning the absence of love for one of their own (which is indifference) into hate for those they fear. While they cannot mourn him — not truly— themselves, this is their way (strange as it may seem to the rest of us) of paying him tribute.

And it is fitting.  If you're not that familiar with Breitbart, his last public outburst (one of his best, I thought) should get you up to speed.  It was as succinct a statement of his (and his cohort's) philosophy and methods as you are likely to find:

So, no.  Commentators on the left aren't mourning. 

And if commentators on the right see that as proof that we're animals and think we should behave, they are only assuring us all that Breitbart's legacy is safe with them.

There are some pundits and politicians out there who think that Obama's reelection will hinge on the price of gas at the pump.  It's true enough that the price of petrol impacts not only the pocketbooks of suburban commuters but is felt in all the relatively cheap goods shipped in from God knows where to our supermarkets and big box stores.  But there is something about "pain at the pump" in particular that conjures up for Americans of a certain age failure on the political stage of Carteresque proportions.

Apparently even some Democrats are urging Obama to tap into America's reserve oil supply to avoid petrol topping the "critical" four-dollar-per-gallon mark before the election, even though doing so could not possibly impact gas prices in the long-run.  It would, most analysts agree, be a largely symbolic "I feel your pain" kind of move — utterly cynical, utterly political in nature, in other words — that would send a very American message: that we can keep pushing back the real long-term solutions: a combination of renewable energy and sustainable living that while currently unimaginable could — imagine! — actually make us all a lot healthier and happier at the end of the day.

The White House's stance on "clean energy" looks pretty good — the spirit is obviously willing but the flesh is kinda weak.  Nothing new there.  Even many self-proclaimed progressives balk at a four dollar gallon of gas.  And, hey, it's not their fault a whole culture has been built up around the automobile and that we haven't been able to muster the will to make public transit work.  I know a lot of progressives who refuse to ride the bus.  I am one of them myself.  But then I bicycle commute instead. 

The truth is, Americans should pay more for petrol.  Much, much more in fact.  US consumption is double any other nation on earth's with the next in line being China — which has four times as many people. It's beyond ridiculous — it's redonkulous really — that we're sucking it up for a song. 

But everybody knows truth doesn't win elections.  Hope and change sometimes do.  But apparently there are a lot of Americans out there hoping things never change when it comes to the price of a gallon of gas.

We have our first Applicant Information Session of 2012 in the America's oldest remaining continuously operating Victory Gardens — the Fenway Victory Gardens — tomorrow.  The early bird gets the worm, as they say: anyone who shows up for an information session at this point in the proceedings is almost guaranteed a spot. 

This is the time of year we get a lot of questions from prospective applicants for membership.  a couple I got yesterday are not atypical:

Hi, I would like to apply for a Garden Plot. However, I will be in NY this Saturday for a very important conference. How can I apply for a Garden Plot without being physically present? I'm originally from Colorado and have a natural green thumb.

Can you tend a garden plot without being physically present?  Very important conferences and "natural green thumbs" aside, we do value physical presence in this business.

But this one really drives me bananas:

Hello there, how can I rent a garden in 2012? How about the renting fee and schedule? Thanks!

"How do I rent a plot?" I have to admit, it gets my hackles up every time.  But honestly, sometimes I wish we did rent 'em out. 

I mean, consider:  membership in our organization is thirty bucks a year (plus a few hours of service to the community). $30 is about the average cost of rent in the Fenway neighborhood, per square foot.

Given that our gardens average 30’X15’ – that’s 450 square feet – if we were to charge rent, with seven acres and 500 plots... the mind reels.

But we don’t.

And personally I think we’re much better off as members of a community of gardeners than renters of plots.  Though I'm not sure everyone agrees with me, I'm pretty sure they would if we started charging 'em market.

One of the more, uh, interesting analogies to come out of the neverending shit-show that is the Republican Primary is the one that Rick Santorum is running with at the moment — that Obama, in "crushing faith" in this country is leading the nation to the guillotine.

Regardless of how patently baseless the accusation and how nonsensical the analogy is it's yet another TMI moment for a party so far down the well of paranoid delusion they've definitely got the Mole People vote all sealed up. 

The fact that Santorum's analogy has legs is still a little dismaying.  I mean, is Santorum siding with Absolute Monarchy?  Is he against The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen which has some striking (and not, um, entirely coincidental) similarities to our own Bill of Rights? 

Well, yeah, absolutely. 

But that's not really where Santorum is going with this.  There are two things that the analogy is useful for in Santorum's tortured imagination.
 

 

Down with the guillotine!  Up with the Breaking Wheel!

One, the image of the guillotine (which was made France's official method of execution under Louis XVI, replacing the "breaking wheel", and remained so through 1981 when the death penalty itself was abolished, but is associated in this analogy with angry mobs and Robespierre's Reign of Terror), which while utterly ridiculous in the current context, appeals precisely to the paranoid imagination of the mob Santorum's whipping up, the same mob that embraced the Death Panel fantasies of Sarah Palin. 

And, two: framing the French Revolution as an attack on religious faith (note that Santorum is not as interested in Freedom of Religion, which was an enlightenment value among those expressly enumerated in The Declaration of the Rights of Man), rather than understanding the history and culture of the Estates of the Realm, and the exemptions and abuses of power that the clergy were guilty of perpetuating for centuries at the expense of commoners. 

Of course, there's just enough of an analogy here to draw a tenuous connection.  France was, after all, facing an economic crisis exacerbated by foreign wars and a regressive tax code that favored the top 2%.  But that's about where the analogy ends.  While some rabble showed up for Occupy Wall Street, the movement didn't manage to produce a Robespierre, alas. 

Not that understanding the appeal of an outrageous analogy is all that enlightening these days.  We already knew that Santorum is medieval in his politics.  Now it's official: the GOP would prefer the Spanish Inquisition to Mitt Romney.   

But really.  Someone should tell these bitches to be careful what they wish for.  In the final analysis, the battle in Santorum's mind seems to be between the guillotine and the breaking wheel.  A Santorum presidency would definitely be torture.

With the Fenway in total lockdown — we're talking no parking and cops and barricades with closed-off access to side streets all along Boylston — it was an eerily quiet night last night.  No cries in the night, no rending of garments, no cars overturned and set ablaze. 

I spoke to a BU cop this morning at Billy's on Berkeley, and he said there were incidents in Amherst, though.  And sure enough, according to the AP, there were several arrests on the UMass campus after the game.

“It was a loud crowd and there were fights breaking out in pockets,” [UMass spokesman Ed] Blaguszewski said.

Marissa Faldasz, a junior whose dorm room looks out over where students gathered, said they were chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” and throwing beer cans and toilet paper rolls.

“As soon as the game ended, a bunch of students came running from all across the campus,” she said.

Video she took from her fourth-floor room showed smoke and flashes and students yelling, then much of the crowd running away as police on horseback approached. Police officers wrestled at least one student to the ground. She said there was a similar incident after Osama bin Laden was killed last year.

Sorry to have missed it.

Boyfriend and I caught the first quarter of the game at Citizen's Pub on Boylston, which was refreshingly deserted on account of the lockdown.  I actually haven't seen it that deserted since, well, Sunday. 

Citizens does what we have dubbed the Disney Brunch on Sundays, where they play only hits from Disney's Aladdin and Momma Mia!, an interesting twist for a Brown Bar with beardy bartenders that specializes in whole suckling pig roasts.  For some reason tossing back bourbon and dining on braised pulled pork, slow poached eggs, pork fat hollandaise and brioche to a bartender sing-along version of "Dancing Queen" just hasn't caught on. Go figure.

As for the game — Citizens only has two TVs, which is another plus.  Even so I could tell from the get-go it did not look good.  First of all, the Pats need to get rid of the shiny leggings.  The Giants, who were not in shiny pants, just looked hotter in theirs.  And when you're dealing with a hostile crowd, why would you egg them on by wearing shiny pants?  Does anyone like a man in shiny pants?  I mean, what is this, Dancing With the Stars?  Why not feather boas and faux fur capes, too?  Seriously, why not just go the full Elton John on their asses?

We left the bar with the Giants at 9 and the Pats at 3, and I could already smell defeat.  The streets were deserted.  The Fenway was like what I'd imagine one of Newt's moon colonies to be like.  It was all very Space: 1999. 

We'd been thinking of a movie to pass the time, and decided if we were going to be dealing with shame we might as well get some full-frontal nudity along with it.  As luck would have it Steve McQueen's Shame with Michael Fassbender was still playing at the Somerville Theater in Davis, so we headed over there.

Shame is a real movie.  It's like a movie movie, with acting and everything.  Not only do you get to see the sultry Michael Fassbender walk around with his ample junk flopping everywhere but you get to see the sultry Michael Fassbender walk around with his ample junk flopping everywhere .  Did I mention you get to see the sultry Michael Fassbender walk around with his ample junk flopping everywhere? 

There's not a whole lot of plot here, actually, but what there is forms an elegant loop that perfectly captures the plight of its amply drawn characters.  Director Steve McQueen has managed to craft a picture that is much greater than the sum of its parts, and its parts are, again, ample.  Especially Fassbender's.  His penis should win an Oscar.

We didn't know the outcome of the game when we left the theater, but the eerie quiet on the streets and the few downcast characters we saw shuffling about told us all we needed to know.  Boston is not subtle when it comes to its sports. 

As we maneuvered our way back home through the police roadblocks that sealed off all of Kenmore-Fenway to the rest of civilization I felt good about our choice of entertainment for the night.  Not to downplay the shame of a Super Bowl loss, but shame is always more satisfying when there's a little sex thrown in for good measure.

Plans for Poe Square proceed apace!  Now the Poe Foundation is inviting the public to comment on the three finalists for a sculpture (or in one case, structure) dedicated to Poe on the corner of Boylston and Charles Street South, near where Poe was born (Poe's birth home was razed in 1959).

Last September the Poe Foundation announced three finalists in the Poe Boston Public Art Project, and now they've set up the Poe Square Public Artwork Public Forum blog to collect folks' thoughts on which design they'd like to see on the spot.

The three designs are very distinct from one another, each a different take on not only the man, but how we might go about monumentalizing him in a city he more or less despised that by most accounts didn't exactly hold him in highest regard either.  But then Boston is not a city one loves, especially if one expects a city to love one back. 

None of the designs is without its flaws, of course.  One bears a shocking and likely unconscious allusion to Abu Ghraib which should probably disqualify it.  Another resembles a giant cube of jellyfish (when the visual rendering of the design is as abstract as the statement of intent you know you're in trouble).  Which leaves the probably too cluttered and rather whimsical third option as the likely crowd favorite. But we mustn't make the perfect the enemy of the good here.

We'll start by making the bad the enemy of the good: the Bonner/Stayner structure, "a small, freestanding triangular glass pavilion... comprised of an almost spectral structure of steel fins above a distorted glass façade."  Described by the artists as a "Wonderkammer" ("curiosity shop" sounded too, er, English, I guess) and "cenotaph meets 'gift shop'" ("gift shop" in quotes, for unknown reasons — I mean, the structure would admittedly be a gift shop), the project presents some opportunities but mostly challenges, and represents a trend in design that will, I predict, soon become dated, if not hated. (MIT's Strata Center, not yet a decade old, is an embarrassment disguised as a curiosity wrapped in a leaky veneer, coated in a lawsuit.  I mean, at this moment distorted facades are all the rage.  But one day, in the not too distant future, Frank Gehry is going to die, bitches.  Just sayin.)

Therefore, to Bonner/Stayner I give a big, fat NEVERMORE!

The other two finalists have very different vibes, one solemn and static, the other whimsical, frenetic. 

I really liked the idea of the Hirsch/Olson design (aside from the plinth)...

Too soon?

... until someone pointed out the unfortunate resemblance of the sculpture's "shrouded figure" to the infamous "hooded figure" of Abu Ghraib. 

And then there's the plinth.

If Boston is looking for a mini-landmark that will be beloved by tourists in passing duck boats (maybe they can even add a raven boat to their fleet), Stephanie Rocknak's bronze is just the thing:

Make Way for Poelings!

The speed-walking sculpture is probably too kinetic for the po-faced Poe, who was not exactly a bustling, bubbly figure.  The intensity in his eyes here is more industrious purpose  and steely determination (flinty hope, even, according to the artist) than the weary madness for which he is so well-known (and loved).  And the bird, which (I'm sorry to have to point this out) is way too big for his briefcase, looks more eagley than raveny, truth told. Oh, and that clutter trail is a lawsuit waiting to happen. 

You could call the sculpture "The Revenge of the Frogpondians".  Even though he is speed-walking away from the Frog Pond here, this imagining of Poe definitely sprang out of it.   

But, again, of the three finalists, this is the "Make Way for Poelings" of the lot.  And even echoes the famous and much-loved "Ducklings" a block away in its linearity.  And it's kid-friendly, too:

Although the Raven is designed to look rather foreboding, all of its sharp looking elements are people-friendly. The claws are turned inward and the feathers are left blunt and are curved back.  Meanwhile, the beak is also blunt and is turned down.

Like Poe, sort of.  I mean, face-down.  In a gutter.  Ah, happy endings!

People-friendly Poe.  

Evermore, baby.  Evermore. 

I've been watching Downton Abbey with the bf (I've been cheating on him with The Way We Live Now, though, an adaptation of Anthony Trollope from a few years back which I like better).  From the beginning I found the PBS sensation to be a little, well, camp.  It's basically Knots Landing in fancy knickers, and about as true to life. 

Which must be why it's popular with the gays*, right?  It can't be for the positive, complex and incisive depiction of gays in Downton Abbey that the gays are drawn to, since, well, there isn't any positive, complex and incisive depiction of gays in Downton Abbey. 

Oh, there is a gay character in the series — one we would recognize as gay who seems also to self-identify as gay — Thomas the footman.  Whom the website describes as "scheming", "vicious", "cunning" and "nasty".  He is a liar, a thief, and a coward.  His only remotely sympathetic emotion is self-pity.

The only "gay scene" so far pairs Thomas up with a Duke he's carried on with whom he's now trying to blackmail.  The Duke proves more than his equal in villainy.  That's all we'll say about that.

The show's creator, Julian Fellowe has said of Thomas,

It’s hard to be gay in 1912.  It’s illegal. If anyone finds out, you go to prison. So for me, him being gay means you slightly stay your hand. He’s not just horrible. To get any kind of emotional life going, he’s got to take his life in his hands every time. That seems to me to be a sympathetic thing.

It's really rather, um, not.  Actually.  But if I'm reading Fellowes right, The evil gay footman is a product of his society, and can therefore be forgiven.  Carry on. 

It may be that the gay community is all grown up in a big wide post-gay world and doesn't mind blatant negative stereotyping of the sort Thomas represents. The character of Thomas takes it so far, in fact, is so utterly lacking in redeeming qualities and so jam-packed with despicable qualities historically attributed to homosexuals by the 'phobes, that as serious as the show seems to take itself we may detect some archness in the audacity of presenting such a sadly retrograde character in this day and age, and on PBS to boot.

Of course, gender and sexuality have always been coded in theater and cinema, and remain so even today in our ostensibly “liberal-permissive” culture (as Zizek would call it), which is much more expulsive than repressive.  Theater and cinema thrive on layers of meaning, and it's not unusual for characters — I'm thinking of the girls in Sex In the City — to be read as essentially gay men in drag. 

There's obviously a long history of cross-dressing in theater which took on fascinating new dimensions with the advent of cinema, where male writers can "have their way" with women, and gay male writers don't have to don drag themselves to "play" women.

When you look at it like this, the gayest character, by far, in Downton Abbey is not Thomas the footman, it's the saucy Dowager Countess of Grantham, whose Wildean quips — "what is a weekend?" "Don't be defeatist, dear, it's very middle class." "I do hope I'm interrupting something." — provide the "oh snap!" moment (such as it is) of many a scene.

But it would be a tad too postmodern to suggest that there is really the subtlety of subtext in this series, which is, in so many of its details and the gravity with which it so obviously grapples, something rather short of a masterpiece, I'm afraid, that would qualify its characterizations as duly ironic. 

But it may still qualify as camp.

Camp has many faces, of course, and has been notoriously hard to nail down as a concept, but when I think of what constitutes camp at its most wickedly glorious, it is its identification with cultural kitsch.  "Pure Camp," as Susan Sontag famously put it, "is always naïve".  What makes something poorly constructed that aspires to high seriousness camp is our reaction to it, our reading of it. 

Again, to echo Sontag:

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

Which is why the Dowager Countess is the gayest character of the lot.  Her elitism and attitude of umbrage are in every way more representative of High Gay sensibility than the cliche of the conniving, evil, blackmailing gay (a cliche that conniving, evil, blackmailing pols like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich would certainly approve of) that Thomas the footman represents. 

Can we still enjoy the grotesque and outdated depiction of gays Thomas the Footman represents?  Of course we can.  But I don't think we should try to understand the character as a serious statement about the evil effects of criminalizing homosexuality, or any such nonsense, as his creator half-heartedly suggests.  No.  That's taking it all entirely too seriously.

The only way to understand it properly is as camp.  Pure camp.

___________________________________
*No, I don't mean my high school New Wave band The Gays.  I mean the "gay community" in general.

The big headline at Huffington Post this morning:

The Boston Globe, while a little less triumphalist (the front page headline: "Patriots showing they may be best in NFL") riffed on Bronco QB Tim Tebow's religious pretensions below the fold, calling last night's drubbing a "beating of — shall we say — Biblical proportions." 

Meanwhile, over at timtebow.com, the smited Broncos QB had yet to offer exegesis on his pre-game Bible verse: Romans 8:37-39.

³⁷Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

 ³⁸For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

 ³⁹Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This is clearly meant to be consolation to his loyal fans for losing against the Pats.  Tebow obviously knew he was going down. Or should have.  Like my friend Ellen said today, "Jesus is a Jew.  He doesn't work on Saturdays."  (In fact Jewish Law explicitly forbids scoring on Shabbat.)

So while it may seem everyone's picking on Tebow, and it may seem as though the Broncos lost last night, it's all part of God's plan.

The one thing Christianists love better than gloating on their own super-star humility when victorious is persevering in their faith in the face of defeat. 

Because everybody knows when True Believers win it's undeniable proof of the truth of what they believe.  And when they lose it's still undeniable proof of the truth of what they believe.  It's just that God is testing them.  He's daring them not to believe the undeniable proof of the truth of what they believe because he knows that they never will. 

Because never does doubt, the smart man's faith, come into play. 

Doubt is the ultimate heresy for the True Believer. 

So you can be certain Tebow believes he's being tested.  And if there is something truly enviable about people of faith, as they are sometimes called (and sports fanatics, as they are other times known), it is that their ultimately petty successes and failures gain epic proportion in the arena of play.

There's a lesson here for all of us. Why is it only True Believers can turn an epic ass-whooping into an ultimate victory for faith? I mean, the Huffington Post is wrong. There is a miracle here.

It's the miracle of faith.

Clumsy, playful, clever, hungry (or all of the above)?

It may be that in a thousand years when they look back on youtube what they will be most impressed with is not the preponderance of evidence of the overwhelming stupidity of humans but proof of our interest in the cognitive, emotional and moral lives of other animals. 

We know that other animals play, problem-solve and engage in selfless — that is, heroic — behavior, partly because we see them do it all the time on youtube.  But the fact that we love watching them do it as much as we do is interesting.

Of course, animals have long been used by humans as examplars of moral activity, notably in fairy tales and fables, and usually based on anthropomorphized attributes, but never before have so many animals themselves been so widely observed going about the business of their own inner lives.

Although no videos featuring cute and cuddly animals have cracked the top ten most-viewed ever (unless you count Justin Bieber, who's got two in the top ten), animal videos do go viral on a fairly regular basis (remember "surprised kitty"?  "Playing with an otter"? "Baby elephant sneezes and scares himself"?), with domesticated animals most likely to become viral video stars (Maru the Cat has his own wikipedia entry — see "Maru (cat)").

The truth is Top Ten be damned (I mean almost a billion views for Bieber? Really?), intelligent humans tune in to youtube for two reasons:  to see videos of children, usually at their parents' prodding, saying and doing the darnedest things (which is infinitely more interesting than when, say, adult politicians do), and to see cute or clever animals doing likewise. 

Research suggests we're hard-wired to respond to animals.  In fact, researchers from Caltech and UCLA report that "neurons throughout the amygdala—a center in the brain known for processing emotional reactions—respond preferentially to images of animals."

"This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala."

...[T]his striking hemispheric asymmetry helps strengthen previous findings supporting the idea that, early on in vertebrate evolution, the right hemisphere became specialized in dealing with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli, or with changes in the environment. "In terms of brain evolution, the amygdala is a very old structure, and throughout our biological history, animals—which could represent either predators or prey—were a highly relevant class of stimuli."

Had Charles Darwin or Konrad Lorenz, that giant of Comparative Ethology (animal behaviorism, essentially) been around at the dawn of the youtube age, I can imagine their satisfaction. 

Both Darwin and Lorenz were fascinated not just by animal behavior but by how it relates to human behavior.  Darwin, in Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, observed how like other animals we are when it comes to expressing many of our emotions.

We snarl and raise our upper lip in fierce anger—to expose our nonexistent fighting canine tooth. Our gesture of disgust repeats the facial actions associated with the highly adaptive act of vomiting in necessary circumstances.

Evolutionary Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has a fascinating short essay — "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse" — that brilliantly explores the theme behind so many of today's internet memes.  Riffing on Lorenz's observations in Ganzheit und Teil in der tierischen und menschlichen Gemeinschaft, that features of juvenility trigger "innate releasing mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans, Gould shows how Mickey's morphological evolution over time, a "reverse ontogenetic pathway" from "the ratty character of Steamboat Willie" to "the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom", reflects precisely the unconscious human predispositions toward animals Lorenz posited. 

For Lorenz, our affection for animals that share, "for reasons having nothing to do with the inspiration of affection in humans, ... some features also shared by human babies but not by human adults," may be a "biologically inappropriate response to other animals".  But it seems it's one we can hardly help having.

Of course we humans have a habit of taking things too far, even evolution.  And as often as not rather than shining a light on the moral life of animals, from which we might learn a great deal, our treatment of them instead sheds a light on the animal in us. 

8 'Adorable' Viral Videos That Qualify as Animal Cruelty — powered by Cracked.com

I would hope that most humans would choose the biologically inappropriate to the morally inappropriate response.  And hopefully in a thousand years we'll have more than just youtube videos to prove that occasionally we did.

Have you noticed: there's a whole slew of agony aunts out there doling out all kinds of crazy advice to anyone who'll write in. No longer the sacred province of Miss Manners and Ann Landers', everyone seems to be giving advice to the lovelorn these days.  So much so, it's hard to know who to trust sometimes! 

__________________________________

...No one wants to follow it.
__________________________________

I'm always on the look-out for good advice, so when aimlessly perusing the Globe's "G" (pronounced "guh") section today at lunch, I discovered  "Ask Margo," by Margo Howard, Ann Landers' very own daughter, I dropped my turkey cobb sandwich, suddenly hungrier for wisdom.

Does good advice run in the family?  I figured I'd give Margo a read and find out. 

Today Margo responded to two letters. I read the short one first, even though it came last, so as not to waste too much time should the whole affair feel a little too much like eavesdropping on a conversation on the subway or the supermarket checkout. (I prefer eavesdropping — in this order — in public restrooms, cinemas just before the movie starts, and for some reason, fast food joints, but only if it's via cellphone.)

Anyway.  The first (or last, actually) letter went like this:

Dear Margo: My younger sister died after a long illness. Her husband was a total menacing control freak before, during and after the illness. There is a bit of a family dispute going on about what to do about him. Is there anything wrong with cutting him out of the family completely at this point? — Hesitantly

Nice.  It's a good sign when those seeking advice from you get straight to the douchebaggery, no beating around the bush. 

Would Margo slyly suggest a little soul-searching empathy on the part of the Letter Writer, who, for all we know, is a control freak herself — takes one to know one, right?  The Emily Post approach ("Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others," &c.)? Maybe something high-minded and moral, referring to herself in the third person, Miss Manners-style?  Would she throw in a little dtmfa like Savage?  Maybe toss out a tidbit from beyond the grave like Ask Grace?  What, I wondered, would be her schtick?

Dear Hes: No. If the guy was an irritant while your sister was alive, I assume you all put up with him for her sake. Now there is no reason to do that. I would just ease on down the road and reject any overtures — which may, in fact, not be forthcoming. — Margo, sensibly

Sensibly, indeed.  And succinctly.  Breezily oblivious to the complexities of human emotions and relations.  Always useful when giving advice about grieving in-laws on the fly.  As unquestioningly dismissive of inconvenient truths like there's two sides to every story as a toadying subordinate in search of a promotion. 

She could be The One.

Read on, gentle reader.  Read on.

Dear Margo: How can you tell whether someone is bipolar or just plain angry?

Ooh, this oughta be good.

I’ve been with my husband for nine years, married for five. I currently work full time, go to school part time and am away from home 13 to 15 hours a day Monday through Thursday. On weekends, I spend time with our kids, do homework and light housework. The issue is my husband.

During the week, he is the housecleaner, which he claims not to mind because I am the main moneymaker. Because I only have a year left in school, I shouldn’t have this schedule much longer. He, too, is in school and works part time.

One of our issues: When friends invite us out during the week to celebrate a birthday or a new job and I’m able to get a sitter, he gets upset and lectures me about not doing housework, not working harder at our relationship and just wanting to party with friends. Another issue is that he thinks I don’t find him attractive anymore because we don’t have sex like we did when we met. (I was 19, without a care in the world, and we’d get physical about five times a day.) Over the years, it’s dwindled to once or twice a week.

Without going to a counselor — which he doesn’t believe in — I am wondering whether this is a mental issue or an abusive one that can be dealt with on a rational level. Am I naive for staying and thinking that once our money and schedule stresses go away he will be better about not saying hurtful things? — Dealing with Who Knows What?

OK, so lets recap: 

By her own admission, her husband, who works and attends school, as does she, does not mind keeping house, and there doesn't seem to be any conflict on that count. 

She's home less than he is and when she wants to go out during what little time she has for family, he "gets upset" and "lectures" her "about not doing housework, not working harder at our relationship and just wanting to party with friends" — all of which seem like standard gripes in a situation like this.  None of which she denies. 

He also voices concern about their sex-life, which after nine years together is surely long overdue.  But he doesn't call her fat and complain that she has become unattractive to him.  On the contrary, by her admission he worries that he has become unattractive to her, which obviously he has.  It's what the whole frakin letter's about. 

Because he really hasn't done anything out of the ordinary or unjustified given the circumstances (I mean aside from saying super mean shit like "I'm worried you don't find me attractive anymore") and she knows she's not justified in telling him go screw, she obviously wants Margo's blessing to have him committed.

She's not asking for advice.  She's asking for an accomplice. 

And Margo does not disappoint.

Dear Deal: I am no diagnostician, but this does not sound like bipolarity to me. It sounds like anger mixed with insecurity, resentment and immaturity. In addition, your being the major breadwinner is probably interfering with his machismo. Show me one woman with kids, a full-time job and part-time school attendance who is getting it on five times a day, and I’ll give you a nickel.

Your reluctant househusband needs to shape up and grow up. I suspect you are assigning magical properties to having more money and easier schedules. Those things don’t make people nicer; they just provide more money and easier schedules. I would have it out with him and tell him that his treatment of you is causing second thoughts about the future. If there’s an improvement, fine. If not, decide whether this is how you want to live. — Margo, decisively

Now, that's advice you can use. 

Which is how you know it's bad advice.

As I was about to mull it all over, something on the page just below the advice column caught my eye.  The "Reflection of the Day", which today was a quote from Charles Darwin:

A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered  the value of life.

Now that's advice.

I threw down the paper straight away and took up my sandwich again. 

I confess that while nothing about the GOP freak show really interests me (galls and frightens me, yes), the prosaic process by which we magically confer relevance, importance even, on crazy people does somehow.

____________________________________________

And so it is that every
election cycle we end up back here.
____________________________________________

This painfully drawn-out primary season is more evidence that Andrew Sullivan is right about one thing:  the GOP "is an entertainment company based around a religious identity politics and masquerading as a political party." The Republican primary is just an extended interview for a stint bloviating on Fox during the general.

People still find the comparison to American Idol and America's Got Talent novel, but that's really what we've been witnessing — without a hint of irony — A version of The Biggest Loser, where instead of pounds, the contestants shed their sense of shame, decency and conviction.  (How could Romney not win this?  It's totally rigged.)

So after having to actually contemplate a world in which a Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann presidential bid is a reality — a fact no one really knows what to do with — we're now down to Rick Santorum, whose hackneyed "God, Gays and Guns" approach to campaigning is — surprise! — resonating with the right.  You don't get points for originality, people. 

We shouldn't have to care what Santorum thinks.  Just like we never should've had to care what a two-bit huckster like Herman Cain or a bat-shit crazy gay-married Michelle Bachmann thinks about anything — anything!  But for weeks we did.  Participating, sometimes passionately, in our own degradation. 

So now the man who likened gay marriage to "man-on-dog" sex is the GOP's frothy fecal flavor of the week.  Great.  Another round of warmed-over Kulturkampf. A culture chasing its tail, occasionally catching up to lick its own ass. Talk about man-on-dog.

It's probably an improvement on repeat-philanderer Newt Gingrich's thoughts on marriage equality, though the serial dehumanization of gay people that is de rigueur for Republicans should give all people pause.  As far as we seem to have come, the same people who are exporting the idea of the death penalty for gays and their allies in Uganda are registered Republicans here.

We have to remember, always remember, that there is no such thing as progress for the right.  There is only infinite vicious regress.  And so it is that every election cycle we end up back here. 

Of course I couldn't care less what Santorum thinks of gay sex.  The truth is: the existence of gay sex in the world obviously has not stopped Santorum-on-Santorum sex. 

He should bear in mind, however, that scientists have found a correlation between fraternal birth order and male sexual orientation.  According to several studies, each older brother increases a man's odds of having a homosexual orientation by 28–48%. Which means that the odds are pretty good Santorum has a gay kid or two himself.

Now that would be progress.

Some old Friends of the Blog may remember I began this whole blog business six or seven years ago with a wildly popular blog called T-Rage! where I related shocking true stories of my daily commute in posts like "Child Seen Licking Seatback and Sibling While Father Looks on Unfazed" and "Man’s Hopes Dashed on Commute Home (Again)", still classics of the subway vérité genre.

Especially for a writer (and for readers as well), public transit is much better than driving.  Even for non-writers and audiobook types I think it's an awesome idea that is seldom executed in America with the level of commitment and competence you see in some other places. 

Before coming to Boston I had, of course, spent nearly a decade abroad, Europeanizing myself.  And I have to say, for the most part, at least in the places I lived and visited, they had the will and the wherewithal to make public transit work. 

Either that, or everyone over there at that time was a writer. 

(And it's true that continental writers — Bulgakov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola — have traditionally loved public transit, particularly trains.  Bulgakov could not have started The Master and Margarita without a streetcar, and Tolstoy could not have ended Anna Karenina if his heroine been driving a Volvo station wagon.)

Whatever the case, Europeans knew it was worth it.  I mean, public transit is just great people-watching, and occasionally you get a shag out of it. 

I remember living in Budapest, one dashing lad on a late-night train from Deák tér, where I used to work to Moszkva tér, where I lived, who, after several stops playing eye-tag stood shoulder to shoulder with me on the endless escalator ride up to the exit, pressing himself to me as I pressed my shoulder to his, both of us looking straight ahead, neither saying a word.

We got to the top of the escalator and out into the night, and I think all I had to say was, "Gyere." Come.  And, boy, did he.

It's true, my life in Budapest was basically one big porno.

Boston, not so much.  But I don't blame the T for that.  I could, but I don't.

But I have more than a prurient interest in public transit.  Totally aside from the sex, public transit just makes good sense, especially in a city like Boston.  And that good is a common good, and it deserves to be publicly funded. 

And that's coming from someone who, after fighting the good fight back in '06, grew totally disgusted with the T, threw up my hands and became a bicycle commuter. 

Yeah.  One of those.

And that's what all you motherfuckers who don't want to fund public transit because you don't use it have to think about:  do you really want more bicycle commuters out there on the road?  DO YOU?  Because that's EXACTLY what you're gonna get if the T keeps hiking up fares and cutting services.  And with climate change progressing apace we'll be crowding the thoroughfares ten months out of the year.  Pretty soon Copley Square's gonna look like downtown Shanghai at rush hour: 

And you know what else?  The more bicycle riders you get out there, the more naked bike rides there're gonna be. It's inevitable.

You think no-pants day on public transit is bad?  You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Discovered last night that Weekend, Andrew Haigh's tale of a weekend tryst, which the New York Times' A.O. Scott hails as "one of the most satisfying love stories you are likely to see on screen this year" is already streamable on Netflix!  Say what you will, this is why I still subscribe.

Weekend is so true to its premise — an extended hook-up of the sort that seems to happen outside ordinary time — that you can't shake the sense afterward that you've actually spent the weekend with Russell and Glen, too. 

Tom Cullen's Russell is eminently crushable, the sweet, earnest relationship-type we all pretend to want, who somehow manages to remain sullenly single.  Chris New's Glen represents the other end of the spectrum: the cynical bed-hopping art-fag, who whips out a tape-recorder the morning after for some po-mo art project on one-night stands he's doing.

While that last conceit feels a little forced, it provides a loose motif for the movie, which is, after all, a movie.  It also gives a sense of an ending when it comes to it, suggesting that the cynic has given up the critical distance that keeps the truth at arm's length, that artlessness has prevailed over art, sincerity won out over irony — and isn't that what love — true love — is? 

The sex is frank without being pornographic — or even, really, particularly erotic (bobbing heads and very earnest slurping sounds is as close as things get to getting steamy).  But in truth the movie is not about sex (despite its sexual frankness). 

Sex, when you take the taboo (and fear of contamination) out of it, is simply one of any number of ways we get into one another (yes, pun and all).  When affection is involved (and obviously it isn't always), sex is empathy in its most literal, immediate and rewarding form.  The intensity of that sense of identification with an other can change us in profound ways.

What's wonderful about Weekend is how it sees and shows sex as one of a vast repertoire of ways we question, cajole, and communicate with one another, a legitimate and frankly wonderful way we make meaning of certain mysteries of identity and existence we can't confront alone. 

And it poignantly explores the ways in which a profound physical connection can sometimes give us a sense of intimate knowledge — of knowing the other — that we might presume supersedes the pesky details of their personal history. We are not necessary mistaken in this presumption, but the application of this knowledge often proves, um, problematic.

It's this seemingly backward approach to intimacy that accounts for many of the film's best, most authentic and awkward moments.  It is, ultimately, a story about understanding, but misunderstanding what it is you're understanding. 

That's something we've all been through — gay, straight, whatever — which is why A.O. Scott was right to call it "one of the most satisfying love stories you are likely to see on screen this year" and not "one of the most satisfying gay love stories you are likely to see on screen this year". 

And satisfying is a good word for it.  Weekend is satisfying in its unassuming humanity.  In its ability to tell this simple story of a very complicated human emotion.

I have to admit, I am deeply curious about my upstairs neighbor.  And I mean that in a Polanskiesque way.

He or she — B. and I have been trying to decode the gender by listening to his or her comings and goings (yes, I could check the postbox in the lobby, but I'm not a stalker) — takes an inordinately long shower every morning just before 5 a.m.  The hissing of the pipes is the first thing I hear most mornings.

___________________________________

Someone is serious
about a clean start in 2012.
___________________________________

Lately I have detected a barely audible high-speed thwacking that immediately precedes the long shower. I can't imagine what this could be.  I mean this is some serious high-speed thwacking — thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack and it's over.

(Maybe the ladies can help me — as a man I can only think of one thing that thwacks like that — though not usually at that speed — but there might be some implement of beauty or hygiene that is in common use among the lasses that we lads know nothing about.)

I don't know how long #11 has lived there but there's definitely some karma here.  Above my bed are several tiny craters in the ceiling that may very well have been made with the handle-end of a broomstick. 

This morning my neighbor was up at 5 again, running up and down the back stairs on the other side of my bedroom wall to the laundry room in the building's basement. 

Someone is serious about a clean start in 2012.

Why should any of this interest me?  I don't know.   Frankly some of the things that interest me baffle me.  But maybe it's the fact that my upstairs neighbor seems to live alone, and yet I'm somehow privy, while not to his or her gender, to some intimate details of his or her life.  Or that eavesdropping — even forced eavesdropping — is just inherently interesting.  And then there's this: while all kinds of people like masturbation, it's a certain kind of person that likes long showers afterward. 

I'm not judging. 

I know you won't believe this, but I don't judge.  I distinguish between and among things, of course.  I categorize and even hierarchize — but that taxonomical mania is our species' genetic predisposition.  Judging is different.  Right and wrong is, after all, a simple matter.  Even Christ boiled it all down to one commandment — do unto others, bitches.  Right and wrong is never as interesting as its outcome, which is bound to be either comic or tragic.  That's the part that interests me.

So, in other words, if #11 spent his or her New Year's Eve dreaming of all the laundry he or she would get done at five in the morning on New Year's Day, what's it to me? 

I spent New Year's Eve with the delightful David Mitchell and Robert Webb (B. was away at a college reunion of sorts) and passed out on the sofa by eleven.  I woke up briefly just after midnight to a tweet from B. and again around two, wishing I had a slingshot, as drunken revelers made their way down the echo chamber of Queensberry Street.

Friends of the Blog know I'm not a big fan of crowds.  These days you never know whether you're walking into an Occupy-something or when an otherwise innocuous mass of people is going to break out into some awful choreographed flashdance routine. 

But to be clear: I'm not really an agoraphobe. I don't mind crowds — on a bustling city street, an airport, a mall, where everyone is hustling off in different directions for their own little purposes, this one rushing off to his daughter's birthday party, that one coming back from the best shag of his life.  Even if some of them have criminal intentions, what's it to me?

No, it's when the purpose of the crowd is singular that I start to get a little scared.  And I don't care if it's a cheesy flash mob or an angry lynch mob, I don't want to get swept up in it.  I mean, bitches whipped into a frenzy'll mace you for a two-dollar waffle iron.  No thank you.  I'll be occupying my toasty little flat tonight.  Alone.  With the deadbolt securely locked.

And that goes double (and yes I have a double deadbolt) for New Year's Eve.  We suspend certain conventions for a few hours in what is really as much a collective nod to death —  what else is the passing of time ultimately good for? — as Christmas is an orgy of futile acquisition in the face of imminent annihilation — er, I mean a celebration of birth and life.

That's why we're encouraged to drink ourselves into a stupor on New Year's Eve.  Because WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE. 

Just consider Auld Lang Syne, that old New Year's standard:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie's a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

That's some sad shit.  Some old man, down the pub, blubbering in your ale, sad, sad shit right there.  And that's life.

So anyway, around five I awoke again, to my neighbor's manic New Year's Morning laundering spree, and decided, fuck it, to get my 2012 up and running.  Time waits for no man.

And yet those first hushed hours of the first day of the year give us pause.  There's something about that hangover hush, something about a whole world sleeping off an epic bender, that gives those of us up at the crack of dawn a moment alone with Time, that old friend and nemesis.  And for that brief moment we can — or so it seems — meet as equals. 

And then it's off to do the laundry.

I'd like to say 2011 was an interesting year, but that would not be in even the top 10 adjectives I'd use to describe it.

In a personal way it started out promisingly enough, although those of you with a little more organizational experience than I had going into it could probably have guessed that "interesting", while on the list in the ironic "Chinese curse" sense of the word, would not make it without the air quotes.

___________________________________

"Interesting" is a singularly
boring adjective.
___________________________________

Likewise, many of the "interesting" characters I met along the way.  I am a curious sort, and love a good story, and everyone has one.  Unfortunately only a very select few seem to be able to tell it in an interesting way.  We all have complicated stories — It would be crude, condescending, and needlessly cruel to argue otherwise — but most tend to tell them (if indeed they can tell them at all) as if telling a cabbie directions home from the airport.  And directions, while useful, are not interesting. 

Meanwhile, my day job, inarguably in the service of a great cause — educating an underserved population, and blah blah blah — is not in itself interesting, either.  If I had my druthers higher education would be free to all those who qualify, and learning a trade would be mandatory for everyone, even — especially — academics.  (I know, I know.  It's like having to do phys. ed. in grade school, but trust me, learning to do something useful, as my dad used to say, can be useful.)

As it is, my job is to shake 'em down for all they've got, and I can do that because I understand that the world is a prison and we're all somebody's bitch, and that getting fucked is still better than getting shivved in the neck and bleeding out on the shower floor to the heedless jeers of your heartless attackers.  That's what I tell my kids anyway.  And while I occasionally hear stories from them that would draw blood from a heart of stone, you'd burn through a good ten or twenty-five other adjectives there before getting to interesting.

My pet projects of 2011, likewise.  You know, people like to think that if it's challenging it's interesting, but I'd say it all depends on the times.  And I think we live in times when, in fact, a lot of things are challenging that aren't all that interesting. 

I mean, a lot of things are challenging that we maybe used to take for granted.  Like getting by.  Getting by is not interesting.  Maslow's Hierarchy doesn't start to get interesting until Level 5, really, and the longer you're scratching around down at the base of the pyramid the more of a bore you're going to end up being. 

And then you become one of those people the rest of us have to step on on our way up.  And you're going to bitch and moan at us for doing it, and we're going to have to stop and, you know, make nice.  Strap you on our backs and try to hoist you up to level 4, kicking and screaming most likely.

I'm not saying I didn't get a hand up every now and again myself.  But lemme tell you from experience: egos weigh a ton, and you'll never make it to the top with yours in tow.  I don't want to sound like some cut-rate douchebag guru here, but trust me on this.* 

In July I met the guy I've been dating ever since.  It'll sound like a big cliche, but he's hands-down the best thing to happen all year, period.  I'm sorry he couldn't have happened to everyone, but you know how it is. 

But this thing we've got going, which is a gift as all good things are, is — mercifully — not interesting, either. In fact, he was telling me just this morning that he thought "interesting" was a singularly boring adjective.

But I dwell on that word — interesting — because it has so long been the one I have associated with my aspirations for a life.  I mean, I used to want to live an interesting life, Chinese curse and all.  And I guess I kinda did for a while. 

But, man, did it get boring.

For the record, here are my top ten adjectives for 2011:

10. aleatory
9. untethered
8. brackish
7. mealy
6. thick
5. raw
4. uncut
3. rowdy
2. heroic
1. futile
___________________________________________
*There were at least seven people in my 2011 who could use that little piece of advice.  You know who you are.  Not.  I mean, of course not.

Adam Wheeler is back in the news. 

You'll recall Wheeler is the character actor whose greatest role was as a kinda hunky Harvard student who gained entree to the Ivy League by falsely claiming he'd attended a bunch of other elite schools, and kept up the act by aping Ivy League cliches.  Just a semester short of graduating, he was caught back in '09 submitting this brilliant parody of an Ivy League resume, convicted of fraud and larceny, and given a suspended sentence.

Well, now he's going to prison for violating his probation — by putting Harvard on his resume again. 

The judge in this case was so certain that Wheeler's actions were the result of mental illness — why on earth else would an otherwise seemingly intelligent person (I mean, he did attend Harvard) repeat the very behavior that had resulted in his conviction barely a year into his probation? — she sent him to Bridgewater for a forty-day psych evaluation.  When he came back with a clean bill of mental health, the court really had no recourse but to enforce his sentence.

Although I'm inclined to side with the judge, compulsive or pathological lying is not identified itself as a mental disorder in the DSM-IV although it is a component of a variety of personality disorders — Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, to name a couple that probably apply here.

It may be that Wheeler's problem is more a "character flaw", as the judge was forced to call it, than a personality disorder, but there is something in Wheeler's complete physical transformation over the course of his travails that seems to argue for an evolutionary explanation as well.

I was just reading a review of Evolutionary Biologist Robert Trivers' new book, Folly of Fools, which outlines his theory of deceit, where he puts it in a much broader context. From the New York Times review:

Trivers calls deceit a ‘deep feature’ of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling ‘bait’ in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

And isn't that what we saw happening here?  The humor in this whole cautionary tale (which is what it should be for institutions like Harvard) comes from the fact that Wheeler's lies were ridiculous to begin with and only got more monumentally ridiculous with time, and Harvard (and later Stanford) still bought them wholesale — hook, line and sinker.  The kid was this close to getting away with it! 

The fact that Wheeler exposes both the sociopathic tendencies of social climbers and the pretensions of the class to which he still obviously aspires is what makes him such a compelling (if ultimately unsympathetic) character.  The Trickster, who (in this case seemingly unwittingly) shows us how our social order is in some sectors as flimsy as a house of cards.

Wheeler, with a tweak here and there, is the sort of character we root for in movies like Catch Me if You Can and I Love You Phillip Morris (and with less tweaking the sort we don't, like the much creepier Talented Mr. Ripley).  The characters these movies were based on were not merely deceivers, or even master deceivers, but shape-shifters, like species we find in nature, whose survival is based on their ability to effectively deceive.

Of course most folks notice by a certain age that deceit is as common an ingredient in all social transactions as, say, high fructose corn syrup is in canned goods, but most of us don't just chug the corn syrup straight up. 

Trivers' insight is that self-deception is a tool we have evolved the better to deceive others.  So the question is — well, there are a couple: to what degree do the Adam Wheelers of the world come to believe their own elaborate deceptions, and are they different in kind or just in magnitude from those we all construct to get through life?  That's one.  The other: why are we so willing to believe them?

Oh wait, I can answer that last one.  We do love a good lie.  And if it reinforces our outlook — confirmation bias anyone? — so much the better.

What is poignant about Adam Wheeler is that — take another look at the deflated and defeated creature on the right above— he'll never be happy being Adam Wheeler, because there seems to be no Adam Wheeler qua Adam Wheeler.  

Trivers uses the example of a moth against the bark of a tree.  In nature "the deceiver is using morphology, not behavior."

What was striking to me as I followed Wheeler's story was the degree to which he physically changed in subtle but very significant ways — and not merely his mien and mood but his morphology.  That the person on the left is the same as the one on the right is not a question, and yet.

Wheeler's nature is to deceive – it’s his survival that’s at stake.  Perhaps he's not so different from the rest of us in this, just a little less talented.