what a happy day. kissing k in the sunshine was so bright and her eyes were so big. 2-2:30 was a beautiful moment.
i think i learned a secret about cooking making chili with k the other night. my job was to stir the onions and garlic exhaustively. and that stirring, something i had always associated with cooking, but only abstractly, i now realize is something i have always neglected. i have never stirred things, i have let them sit and poked at them occasionally and aggressively like a boyscout frustrated with his fire. but stirring is the key! stirring! i doggedly stirred leeks and garlic for my dinner, adding mushrooms and tomatoes in lightning interruptions, chopping like a maniac, to not not stir for too long. and that made everything terrific! i mean, it was all gray and saucy and didn't look very nice when i dumped it all on top of a steak i had topped with the tea kettle, but it tasted like the things i had been cooking, which is not what normally happens.
i also went to the vagina monologues. i wish i had seen it long ago. it's horrible the way i, men generally, probably, relate to women's pleasure, to their vaginas. i have a really horrible memory that sometimes dogs me from midway through my senior year of high school when i was dating a girl named amy. i wasn't technically a virgin at that point, but i was by any practical measure. and i had never really "done" anything with amy, we made out and touched each other desperately, as if touching each other represented the end of sexuality. and i felt like i wasn't living up to how sexual i thought i should be at my age. i wanted to have sex with her but that seemed like a lot. and so, in moments of passion, i wanted her to go down on me. i think i felt that that would have been sufficient to make me feel like a big, sexual man. what's striking about this is that it never ever occurred to me to go down on her, this pleasure, this next level of sex was entirely my prerogative and my pleasure. and i, clumsy, embarrassed and inarticulate as i was, remember once trying to push her head, be suggestive in that barbaric way, towards my sex while we were in the midst of one of our gaspingly intense making out and touching moments. and i she knew what i was doing, what i was trying to "suggest," and she didn't. my real shame here was in trying to do that that way, but there's also my shame at it never having occurred to me that i might have tried to give amy that pleasure.
and part of why i'm sure it never occurred to me is that vaginas were gross to me. they have, until extremely recently, been very gross to me. and that has meant neglecting, denying women's pleasure in a big way. if its incidental to love making, that is obviously what makes love making great, but going down on a woman, that ultimate consideration, that full bodied dedication to making a woman feel good that, as far as my sex is concerned, does not involve my pleasure, was not something i was willing to undertake. and that's ridiculously wrong. i mean, it would even be wrong if it never occurred to me that a woman might go down on me and all sex was was having sex, but with my mindset, feeling that blow jobs were a rightful part of my juvenile manhood, it was a clearly a deeply sexist and troubling thing. and the vagina monologues is great because that woman's pleasure is made so central and fundamental to the world. it MUST happen. and i wish i had felt that before, had that occur to me. because it must. didn't i ever think of how horrid looking my sex was? of that hair? i like to think i've grown up. though the vagina monologues presented me with the next frontier of this progressive view of the vagina: birth. i'm still definitely mortified by that, but maybe i'll even get over that some day. no promises.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
on the crippling weight of the expectation of happiness
i cannot get anything done right now. i have not been able to get anything done for days. I think it is K's fault. Because of thinking of her and time I would like to be spending with her, all other time has become extremely dreary. I don't know what to do with it, I only see it as time not spent with her and so I don't respect it or look forward to it enough to make any damned use of it. It's just time to pass. Loving someone's company, really living for it, divides life into the happy times and the unbearably useless ones. Having something to look forward to doesn't enliven you, it just makes you hate the vast, tumbleweeded expanse between you and the golden horizon. I don't farm that expanse and so it lies hard and fallow; I play a lot of online chess and mope.
At least the dinner I cooked was a triumph -- I must remember in the future to really let onions cook, cook to the point of negligent cruelty, because I always figure they must be done and they never are. They cling to their crunch desperately and one has to be merciless. Also, ricotta was a pretty good idea. I really have to drag these words out of me, my palms rest so heavily on this computer.
I should read something.
At least the dinner I cooked was a triumph -- I must remember in the future to really let onions cook, cook to the point of negligent cruelty, because I always figure they must be done and they never are. They cling to their crunch desperately and one has to be merciless. Also, ricotta was a pretty good idea. I really have to drag these words out of me, my palms rest so heavily on this computer.
I should read something.
Friday, February 4, 2011
incendiiiiiiiiiiiies
Most movies consist of taking an idea, like a romance, and putting it in a box. That is to say ideas are given a narrative and an assortment of coincidences to usher things along. In When Harry Met Sally Harry and Sally’s love (idea) is fuelled by happenstance shenanigans (narrative) and their unrivalled habit of running into each other (coincidences). Peoples’ lives in those movie boxes are a purposeful march towards some kind of closure or at least a new frontier, like Harry and Sally’s marriage. Things only ever happen to advance or complicate the idea of their love, and the world is only relevant as a cute, sexy or dramatic background for their shenanigans. Weddings, bookstores and new years parties are not weddings, bookstores and new years parties, they are props for the idea of Harry and Sally’s love. Everything fits together in Harry and Sally’s love box, everything happens for a reason.
Maybe it was inevitable that war would be stuffed into that tidy box, that guns and burned out orphanages and rape would be marshalled as chance props for a fabulous, ultimate metaphor for wartime suffering, but it’s still extremely unfortunate that Incendies had to do it. Nawal Marwan does the suffering as the supreme innocent; she transcends religious divides and has forbidden love affairs with refugees and really, really loves her son. Her war takes place in a made-up Arab country in 1970, which I found kind of sickening – there’s something callous about generalizing to invent a universal war for the universal victim, about using charred buses and dead children to create a formula of war and suffering, as if to say the unique horror of every tragedy is replicable, that the filmmaker could give you an average atrocity.
What’s worse is that Incendies uses those atrocities the way When Harry Met Sally does seating arrangements on a plane, it makes coincidences into narrative fate. Which is despicable because it means justifying them on some level, because when you narrativize dead children you argue that they are dead for a reason, dead so Incendies can conclude declaring that “the circle of hate is broke,” or some other fabulously self-congratulatory Disney shit. Marshalling the battered bodies of war victims into a parade of scripted progress towards a flashy denouement is schmaltzy and manipulative and fucked up because the death of a child, for example, is completely and exclusively a random and purposeless death. There is no reason for that death.
But Incendies makes its victims march in life and death alike. It begins its contemptibly rigorous story in a notary’s office. Nawal Marwan’s twin children, Jeanne and Simon, have been summoned there because their recently deceased mother has left them a sort of treasure hunt. They are each given a letter and a picture of her and are told that the father they thought was dead is alive and that they have a brother they never knew existed. Finally, they are told that there are two more envelopes for them to deliver to their father and their brother once they find them. It’s a nifty setup with an almost mathematical air. And that’s the problem, of course, because their mother’s past is a war, and fine parchment and neat French prose are not the ways to address it. It’s diabolically tidy, but tidy nonetheless.
And that’s disgusting and wrong because it approaches war with an equation in hand, as if fate strategically strews the bodies in a mass grave. But that is how Incendies sees war – it crowns a particular cell in a prison of hell an article of destiny, for example. Later in the movie when Simon is trying to make sense of the preposterous narrative of his mother’s life he mumbles to himself in bewildered horror about how 1 plus 1 could equal 1. This return to equations, this idea that any life, let alone one in a war zone, can be summed up in some dashingly nonsensical math problem, is the essence of why Incendies is so grotesque. It’s unworthy of depicting human suffering; it uses its characters like the variables in a formula. Everything adds up, and you can leave the theatre with your exquisite misery in a fine little box.
Maybe it was inevitable that war would be stuffed into that tidy box, that guns and burned out orphanages and rape would be marshalled as chance props for a fabulous, ultimate metaphor for wartime suffering, but it’s still extremely unfortunate that Incendies had to do it. Nawal Marwan does the suffering as the supreme innocent; she transcends religious divides and has forbidden love affairs with refugees and really, really loves her son. Her war takes place in a made-up Arab country in 1970, which I found kind of sickening – there’s something callous about generalizing to invent a universal war for the universal victim, about using charred buses and dead children to create a formula of war and suffering, as if to say the unique horror of every tragedy is replicable, that the filmmaker could give you an average atrocity.
What’s worse is that Incendies uses those atrocities the way When Harry Met Sally does seating arrangements on a plane, it makes coincidences into narrative fate. Which is despicable because it means justifying them on some level, because when you narrativize dead children you argue that they are dead for a reason, dead so Incendies can conclude declaring that “the circle of hate is broke,” or some other fabulously self-congratulatory Disney shit. Marshalling the battered bodies of war victims into a parade of scripted progress towards a flashy denouement is schmaltzy and manipulative and fucked up because the death of a child, for example, is completely and exclusively a random and purposeless death. There is no reason for that death.
But Incendies makes its victims march in life and death alike. It begins its contemptibly rigorous story in a notary’s office. Nawal Marwan’s twin children, Jeanne and Simon, have been summoned there because their recently deceased mother has left them a sort of treasure hunt. They are each given a letter and a picture of her and are told that the father they thought was dead is alive and that they have a brother they never knew existed. Finally, they are told that there are two more envelopes for them to deliver to their father and their brother once they find them. It’s a nifty setup with an almost mathematical air. And that’s the problem, of course, because their mother’s past is a war, and fine parchment and neat French prose are not the ways to address it. It’s diabolically tidy, but tidy nonetheless.
And that’s disgusting and wrong because it approaches war with an equation in hand, as if fate strategically strews the bodies in a mass grave. But that is how Incendies sees war – it crowns a particular cell in a prison of hell an article of destiny, for example. Later in the movie when Simon is trying to make sense of the preposterous narrative of his mother’s life he mumbles to himself in bewildered horror about how 1 plus 1 could equal 1. This return to equations, this idea that any life, let alone one in a war zone, can be summed up in some dashingly nonsensical math problem, is the essence of why Incendies is so grotesque. It’s unworthy of depicting human suffering; it uses its characters like the variables in a formula. Everything adds up, and you can leave the theatre with your exquisite misery in a fine little box.
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