bitterfig

I saw Dark Knight  a couple days ago and was more or less blown away. 

 

I grew up with Batman—watching the 60’s television show, reading the comics.  Characters like Batman, Batgirl, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face, Penguin, the Riddler, and Poison Ivy have been a part of my consciousness for over 30 years.  It’s kind of amazing to me that I can still be so captivated by such a familiar story, that there are still new layers to be reveled.

( cut for spoilers and length )

I had both Thursday and Friday (07/03 and 07/04) off so I ended up getting a bit of a holiday weekend.

 

Thursday I did mostly mundane stuff—laundry, grocery shopping, seeing my therapist—but in the evening my brother-in-law took me to see Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears.  It was playing at my favorite theater, the Music Box, which is one of the few old style, non-multi-plex movie houses left in Chicago.  It’s so beautiful, it’s been around since the 1920’s and has the old fashioned marquee outside, a huge, ornate theater, even a red curtain over the screen that goes up when the show starts.  They operate as an art house and revival theater and show a lot of foreign films and more off-beat movies.  It’s actually been ages since I’ve been there.  Lately I’ve only been getting to the movies about once a month.  Back when I was working for Biff (and making a bit more $$$$) I actually used to go to the movies at least once a week.  I rather miss being able to do that. 

 

Mother of Tears is the third installment in Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy that began with the 1977 classic Suspiria (one of my favorite horror films) and continued Inferno (which I haven’t seen) in 1980.  These movies deal with three sister witches—the Mother of Tears, The Mother of Sighs and the Mother of Darkness—who have houses in Germany (Suspiria), New York (Inferno), and Rome (Mother of Tears) from which they spread chaos and evil. 

 

I’ve always preferred the chilling, atmospheric giallo of Argento’s early days to his latter work which is more baroque and vividly horrific.  Still, Mother of Tears was a pretty enjoyable as a gory horror movie with strikingly bizarre imagery and minimal story.  Many creative things were done with intestines, and some gorgeous Roman architecture was shown as packs of witches resembling Madonna circa 1983 descended on the ancient city. 

 

There was actually a strangely retro vibe to the whole film, as if it had come a few years after the previous chapters of the trilogy rather than nearly three decades later.  All the witches wore new-wave make-up and the scariest witch, a Japanese girl with a silver front tooth reminded me of nothing so much as a particularly menacing Tama Janowitz. 

 

The heroine of the film was played by Dario Argento’s daughter Asia.   She’s been in several of his films but this was the first I’d had the opportunity to see.  I’m fascinated by the idea of a man directing his daughter in horror/exploitation films being terrorized, raped, tortured and occasionally grotesquely murdered.  There’s something so pathological yet telling about it.  It really lends a whole other level of uncomfortableness to something like a routine fan service shower scene when you know that the director is the actresses Dad.

 

My brother-in-law Dean had brought a bottle of citron vodka along and we had spiked cokes but I didn’t drink enough of mine to even get buzzed as vodka sort of turns my stomach.  Even with the citrus flavoring it still tastes thick and chemical and sort of vile to me.  I consider this repulsion a good sign.  My ex-boyfriend, who was a recovering alcoholic, always said that one of the things that separated alcohol abusers from casual drinkers was that the abuser would drink anything available to the point of intoxication whereas the casual drinker tended to have personal preferences and wouldn’t drink if they couldn’t have something they enjoyed. 

 

I’ve been drinking again for a little over a month and it really is an experiment to see if I can drink socially and casually.  So far I feel like I’m doing all right.  I did go out of bounds at the party a couple weeks ago where I embarrassed my sister but I didn’t totally lose it.  In the past I’ve often figured that once I go past a point I might as well relinquish all control and finish off the bottle.  I didn’t do that this time and I think it’s because I’m trying to look at drinking differently, not as a huge cathartic experience I allow myself a couple times a year but as something I can incorporate into my life and do in moderation maybe once a week or so. 

 

As I said, it’s an experiment.  If it doesn’t work I’ll probably go back to not drinking at all because I know how dangerous problem drinking can be. 

A couple of days ago I went to see The Fall, an opulent fantasy/allegory directed by Tarsem Singh.  Tarsem (as he is called) is best known for directing music videos and commercials.  His pervious feature film is The Cell, a 2000 science fiction film starring Jennifer Lopez and Vince Vaughn which received pretty bad reviews and was generally dismissed as being all style and no substance. 

 

I’ve never seen The Cell but I wasn’t expecting much from The Fall.  I went to see it mainly because I’m a fan of Lee Pace.  Pace is best known for his work on the television shows Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies but he’s played a MTF transsexual (The Soldier’s Girl) and In Cold Blood killer Dick Hickcock (Infamous) in Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies)—just the sort of bizarre combination of roles that attracts my attention. 

 

The story of The Fall is fairly straightforward.  It is set at the dawn of the motion picture era it concerns two patients recuperating from falls in a Hollywoodland hospital.  One is a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru was is the cutest little thing I’ve ever seen)  who has been working as a fruit picker and broke her arm when she fell from a tree.  The other is Roy (Lee Pace), a stuntman who is suffering from paralysis that may or may not be permanent as the result of a back injury he incurred when he fell from a horse during the shooting of a cowboy movie.  We later learn that his accident may have been a suicide attempt.

 

Roy and Alexandria befriend each other and he begins to tell her a story about a mismatched band of adventurers including an Italian explosives expert, an Indian prince, a masked bandit and Charles Darwin (who wears an amazing multi-color fur coat), and their efforts to stop the evil Governor Odious. 

 

Making the story up as he goes along, incorporating other patients, hospital workers and every little bit of information he has about Alexandria, Roy soon has his audience of one captivated.  From there he starts manipulating her to do things for him, specifically to get him pills so that he can commit suicide (ah, the days when a very tiny child could toddle into a hospital infirmary and make off with a bottle of morphine).

 

The fantasy sequences in The Fall are lavish and ornate, full of vivid colors with an emphasis on the exotic-- Indian, African, Asian and Middle Eastern motifs.  I actually found the exoticism to be a bit much.  To me scenes of frenzied “primitive” drumming and dancing seem a little too close to racial stereotyping.  Or maybe they just reveal a little too much of Tarsem’s roots in music video…  Still, there were some truly gorgeous images, some with sadomasochistic undertones that I responded very strongly to. There’s a scene where Lee Pace is half-conscious and tethered to a post in a vast desert under the beating sun where the camera lingers over scraped cheek and peeling lips that I found  particularly memorable... 

 

While spectacle is the main thrust of The Fall I actually found its content rather affecting to the point where I wish it had been more carefully developed.  The Fall touches on some potentially interesting ideas about the way that stories can be used to both control and to heal.  Early on Roy is very deliberate in creating his story to please Alexandria but as his emotional state deteriorates he seems to lose control of the fantasy.  She is hurt and frightened as he kills off his characters but he can’t seem to stop it any more than he can stop his own pain.  I would have loved to have seen more exploration of this concept of deliberate versus unconscious story telling; however that wasn’t really the film’s focus.  It was, like Across the Universe, more of a dance than a novel, more about motion, space and color than about character, story and ideas.  Still, it almost seemed like there were enough half formed characters, story and ideas that I was sort of disappointed not to see more done with them.

Saturday night, I went to the movies.  Given my obsession with Tim Roth and my love of comic books (not to mention a long time interest in Ed Norton’s work) it probably seems like I’d want to see The Incredible Hulk but I honestly don’t have any desire to see it.  On the other hand I was very excited to see Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace.  Kalin directed Swoon, one of my favorite movies, in 1992 but hasn’t done a full length film since then so in my world the opening of Savage Grace was a big deal. 

 

Like Swoon, which dealt with the Leopold and Loeb murder, Savage Grace is based on an actual case—the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland by her son Tony.  Barbara (Julianne Moore) is married to Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) whose family earned a fortune from the invention of bakelite plastics.  Their marriage is deeply troubled.  Brooks is discontented with the sort of pretentious, upper-crust social circles that Barbara obsessively courts.  From the beginning, Barbara seems dangerously unstable or even mentally ill.  She puts a great deal of work into being accepted by high society then sabotages her own efforts with inappropriate outbursts—in one scene she begins as a doting hostess and ends up denouncing her guests. 

 

Barbara’s behavior alarms and exasperates her husband but Barbara creates an unwavering and worshipful ally in her son Tony (played by Eddie Redmayne as an adult).  Which works very well when Tony is a precocious child but gets much more complicated when Tony becomes a sexually confused adult and Barbara and Brooks’ marriage dissolves. 

 

It’s quite an amazing little film, darkly comic and profoundly disturbing.  Anyone who’s read my fiction knows I have a sort of twisted fascination with the idea of incest as a trope for the way family members use and misuse each other.  Savage Grace brought these ideas chillingly to life.  Barbara refuses to allow the appropriate boundaries between herself and her son and a horrible interdependence grows between them that leads first to the scariest threesome on film (suddenly the brother and sister in The Dreamers seem vaguely wholesome) to an outright sexual act between mother and son that was frankly, shocking (people in the theater, including me, we literally gasping).  I knew there was incest in the film but by the time Barbara mounts her son he seems so emotionally damaged that it seems like an act of deliberately, selfish and nearly violent cruelty on her part. 

 

Really chilling, and yet despite all the implicit emotional violence part of me thought it was a really cool scene in the sense that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a woman being that aggressive or that much in charge during a sex scene before, at least not in an American film.  It’s sort of a shame (but not really a surprise) that the rare sexually dominate woman (or femme seme as I like to say) is a bit of a monster.

There was lot’s of excitement at work yesterday because there’s a major movie being shot a couple blocks away at the Biograph Theater where the Jazz Age gangsta John Dillinger was famously shot (and not with a movie camera)  The film—Public Enemies—is being directed my Michael Mann and stars Christian Bale and Johnny Depp. 

 

Apparently Bale’s just arrive in town and in the break room a couple of kids were talking about going down after work to try and see him. 

 

They’ve actually been shooting for a while.  At my brother-in-law’s concert two weeks ago his sister, Bebe was telling me about it.  She’s an extra and she was telling me about how they’d cut her hair in 1920’s style which means they’re really going for detail.  She’s worked on other period films where they just styled the extra’s hair but never one where she’d had to have it cut. 

 

A guy came through my line who was working on the film as a hairstylist and I mentioned this to him.  I felt like such a Hollywood insider though I’m rather glad I’m not.  Bebe had mentioned that the days were really long and the hairstylist said he’d worked 18 hours yesterday.  That’s unimaginable to me; I can scarcely make it through an 8 hour shift. 

 

Still, I’ll make a point to see Public Enemies when it comes out.  I’ve never really liked Michael Mann as a director but both Bale and Depp tend to gravitate towards interesting projects so their involvement bodes well. 

I’ve developed something of a passion for the manga of Ai Yazawa, mostly Nana (I’ve devoured the first eight volumes) and also Paradise Kiss (which I’ve read the first volume of). 

 

Her series Nana was recommended to me based on a bit of Princess Tutu yuri I’d written and right before I lost my second job at Biff’s office I decided to take a chance and secured copies of the first eight volumes of the series from e-bay.  A rather significant risk, I might have hated the series, but as luck would have it Nana turns out to be one of the better manga series I’ve ever read. 

 

Basically it’s about two very different 20-year-old women, both named Nana who come to Tokyo, meet and whose lives become increasingly intertwined.   No science-fiction or supernatural elements, just a pair of girls trying to build their lives and become themselves. 

 

Nana Komatsu is an exuberant but essentially aimless young woman.  Good hearted but clueless she allows herself to drift through life in the wake of whoever she happens to be in love with.  When her friends, including her boyfriend, move to Tokyo to attend art school, she follows them.  On the train to the city she meets the other Nana, Nana Osaki.

 

Nana Osaki is a punk rock singer with very definite goals.  Her previous band, Blast, was a local success in the small city she is from but that ended when their bassist Ren left to join the major label band Trapnest.  Ren was also Nana’s lover and he asked her to come with him but she declined as it would have meant being relegated to “rock star’s girlfriend.”  Their affair was put on hold and in Tokyo, Nana O is determined to become a success at least equal to Ren, with her new band.    

 

Nano O is guarded as Nana K is open, sharing little about her painful childhood or her personal life.  Yet her music has the ability to move people deeply.  Through her music, she seems to speak for them. 

 

While there’s some cutesy stuff, overall Nana is much more adult- as in grown-up, than most manga I’ve read.  Also it’s more novelistic, things seem to develop, grow and deepen with each installment. 

 

Also it has a sensibility I love. 

 

While so much manga seems to focus on students in school uniforms who aspire to the student council, Yazawa’s characters are hip bohemians, artist and musicians in Nana, an enclave of edgy fashion designers in Paradise Kiss.   They shop at thrift stores and vintage shops and garner inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Velvet Goldmine- definitely my kind of scene.  In a way Nana reminds me somewhat painfully of my college years, especially Nana K’s desire to be included in Nana O’s circle of punk musicians.  

 

Though I’m quite late to the party, I’ve started watching the BBC series Torchwood.  I polished off the first season on DVD and am two episodes into season 2 via downloads.  Overall I like it quite a bit.  Season One was fairly uneven.  There were some good episodes but some truly baffling suspensions of logic were required (I’m sorry, but any solution that involves reading the complete works of Emily Dickinson aloud is not acceptable).   Still, it’s amazing what you can forgive of a show that makes just about everybody in its entire cast more or less bisexual.    

 

And when I say everyone I mean everyone.  The leader of Torchwood (an alien hunting organization that’s sort of the UK equivalent to Men In Black) Captain Jack Harkness  openly admits to lovers of both sexes, is sexually involved with a member of his team but still manages to have a kind of “unresolved sexual tension” thing going with Gwen.  In addition to holding up her part of the UST with Jack, Gwen has a boyfriend and has an affair with the team’s medic Owen.  This doesn’t stop her from kissing a woman processed by an alien in the second episode of the show.  Computer expert Toshiko, who seems to have a crush on Owen has an affair with an alien who is female in human form.    An episode is devoted to another team member, Ianto’s efforts to resurrect his girlfriend but it’s gradually revealed in future episodes that he’s become involved with Jack.  Even Owen, a compulsive womanizer and seemingly the straightest member of Torchwood makes out with a guy in the series premiere and during an apocalyptic moment suggests that both Ianto and Toshiko have end of the world sex with him. 

 

I sort of love this kind of stuff. 

 

Season One had a lot of promise which I hope Season Two will deliver on.  It definitely seemed to be off to a good start in the first episode (appropriately titled “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” when Spike (yes, that Spike—Buffy Spike) shows up looking for Jack to be his Drusilla.  Okay, it’s not Spike.  His name is Captain John Hart.  He’s brunette and American.  And he’s not a vampire, he’s some sort of time agent thing that I’d know about if I’d actually watched Dr. Who before watching the spin-off but basically it’s Spike engaging in violent making out with a really cute (if full of himself) guy and in my book, that is pretty stunning. 

 

On the literary front I just finished reading Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith.  It’s the third novel I’ve read by Waters (I admit it, I have a thing for Victorian lesbians).  The others were Tipping the Velvet (my favorite) and Affinity.   

 

I’d seen a BBC adaptation of Fingersmith a couple of years ago so I knew the basic outlines of the plot, which is probably a good thing.  I’m less concerned with being surprised than I am with knowing what’s going on and Fingersmith is full of the sort of twists and turns and reversals that often times confuse the hell out of me.  Knowing where the story was going freed me up to focus on the characters, the wonderful period dialogue and the rich atmosphere that Water’s evokes.  This atmosphere is by turns sensual and sickening.  Water has a way of making you smell the 19^th century and what with chamberpots and close rooms on rainy nights reeking of dog and unwashed bodies it doesn’t always smell good. 

 

In Fingersmith, Waters seems to deliberately set out to write a sort of post-modern  Dickensonian novel brimming over with melodramatic contrivances such as switched babies, ghastly uncles, and dastardly plots as well as expanding Dickens social themes to include issues of gender and sexuality as well as wealth and class. 

 

Another bit of post-modern pseudo-Victoriana I’ve indulged in lately is Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, about a pair of rival illusionists.  This was my second viewing of The Prestige.  I have to admit my first left me rather baffled.  As I said, I’m not so good a following plots and The Prestige is extremely complicated, a puzzle of a movie in much the same way Nolan’s Memento was.

 

The film’s complexity is encapsulated by its framing device—much of the movie concerns a man reading another man’s diary about reading his own diary.  Follow?  Of course both diaries were intended to be read and are full of deliberate misinformation.  Appropriate for a film that’s central themes are doubles, the creation of illusion and how things are not what they seem to be.  I definitely got much more out of the Prestige by seeing it a second time and I’d like to watch it again just to clear up some details I didn’t really follow.  Also having watched it, I’d rather like to see Nolan’s contribution to the Batman mythology.  I’ve been intensely interested in Batman as a sort of masculine   archetype since I was a teenager but somehow I never got around to seeing Batman Begins. 

On Tuesday I went to see the movie Stop-Loss, a drama about Iraq war vets who return home believing their service has ended only to learn that under the militaries stop-loss policy they’re going to be sent back.  Stop-Loss is the first film that openly lesbian director Kimberly Peirce has made since Boys Don’t Cry back in 1999.  One of the reasons I really wanted to see this movie is because a couple of years ago I had the opportunity to see Peirce speak (she has Chicago roots, she’s a University of Chicago alumni) and she was talking about the struggle she was in with the studios to make the film she wanted—a movie about war and returning veterans drawing from her younger brothers experiences in Iraq and 70’s films on similar themes like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. 

 

I’m glad she was finally able to make her movie and I think Kimberly Peirce is the ideal choice to make a movie of this kind, maybe because she isn’t a Hollywood insider.   She has a lot of respect for her soldier characters; she doesn’t denigrate them for their lack of education and their very traditional aspirations and that makes their love of their Texas home town seem real even to someone like me who’s very alienated from small town values.  Peirce doesn’t glamorize or sentimentalize this world, she just let’s us see it through her characters eyes. 

 

She did this very effectively in Boys Don’t Cry as well.  When I first read about the life and death of female to male trans-person Brandon Teena in the Village Voice I remember thinking “He should have gotten the fuck out of Nebraska, gone to San Fran or NYC.”  Watching Boys Don’t Cry, this didn’t really seem like an option.  Brandon didn’t want to escape Nebraska, he wanted to belong there.  It was sometimes exciting, sometimes beautiful, it was home.  It was where he died but it was also where he found a girl who accepted him and loved him.  Peirce never vilified Brandon’s world, didn’t turn it into a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vision of homophobic hell.  There were good people in it and bad.  

 

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit about the cultural divide in America lately because of all the controversy surrounding the statement Barack Obama made regarding Pennsylvania primary voters about bitter people clinging to God and guns.  I have to admit when I heard it I didn’t think it was at all offensive or questionable, I thought it was true.  Yet watching Stop-Loss I was able to suspend judgment, to watch and feel for characters that don’t see the war in Iraq the way I do, who believe in Tody Keith songs and guns and the military.  I think this is quite an accomplishment on Kimberly Peirce’s part that she can make someone with a lousy elitist attitude like mine inhabit the world of these characters.  In times like these its’ critically important to have artists who can serve as a bridge between liberal and conservative, red and blue, urban and suburban (does rural America even exist any more?  I think of the area around my hometown, how acres and acres of farmland turned to acres and acres of used car lots, gas stations and fast food restaurants as I grew up).   

 

Though its characters honestly believe in “killing terrorists over there so we don’t have to kill them here” Stop-Loss is very much an anti-war film and it pulls no punches in showing the damage war does to the men who fight it and the ways in which the very people who support the action in Iraq are being screwed over by it.  The scenes of fighting set in Iraq are pretty harrowing and really give a sense of just what urban guerilla warfare involves—it involves driving (and sometimes shooting) on city streets with pedestrians, bicyclists and local traffic as well as people on sidewalks.  It involves combatants running into civilian apartment building.  It’s not just a matter of taking out the enemy but of trying not to take out the neighborhood and of course not to get killed in the process.  Both the psychological and physical toll the war takes on soldiers is also unflinchingly portrayed.  We see a solider named Rodriguez wounded early on and references are made to him thought out the film but it’s very shocking when we finally see him, blinded, scarred by shrapnel, minus an arm and a leg, during a sequence set at a VA hospital.   On the emotional side, both of the films main characters, Brandon (Ryan Philleppe) and Steve (Channing Tatum) as well as their friend Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have been seriously impacted by their experiences in Iraq.  All of them display volatile behavior and abuse, both Brandon and Steve have flashbacks to combat, and neither Steve nor Tommy can sustain a relationship with their partners.    It’s no wonder that the stop-loss policy, which threatens to send Brandon back after everything he’s been through, seems so consummately unfair. 

 

Unfortunately, while Stop-Loss has moments that are powerful and thought provoking overall it just didn’t seem to come together for me.  It sort of meandered towards the middle and I really felt there was something missing in the character trajectory of Tommy.  He really felt more like a plot contrivance than an organic part of the story.  Still, I’m glad Peirce was finally able to make the film though I can’t help wondering if innovative directors would fare better outside the studio system entirely.  I guess it’s the cultural question all over again.  Because Stop-Loss was made through a studio it has wider distribution, it’ll show at multiplexes instead of art house theaters.  It might actually show outside of major cities.  Whether or not anyone in these markets will opt to see an anti-war film directed by a gay woman is up for grabs but it’s good that they’re given the option.  Given the amount of time I spent in living in rural upstate New York I can appreciate that Peirce wants to reach beyond what would be considered the target audience of educated, urban liberals and actually have this picture seen by the people it’s most relevant to.

One of the advantages of living in a major city—I get to see every obscure ass film Tim Roth appears in the theaters as soon as it’s released. 

 

Yesterday I went to see Funny Games.  It’s directed by Austrian Michael Haneke, best know for controversial films such as The Piano Teacher (2001) and Cache (2005).  Funny Games is rather peculiar in that it is a shot-by-shot English language remake of a film of the same title that Haneke made in 1997.

( cut for spoilers and discussion of violence. )

Last night I watched (for the second time) Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Peeping Tom tells the story of Mark (Carl Boehm), a shy filmmaker who commits a series of gristly murders, filming his victims as they die. Made in 1960, the film pre-dates Hitchcock’s Psycho and (for better or for worse) can be seen as one of the first slasher/serial killer movies. While very controversial in its day, Peeping Tom would probably get a PG rating today-- it’s more psychological than gore-iffic—and in my mind more effective than many of the more graphic films that followed it. One of the things I found most interesting about Peeping Tom is the way it captures the very fine line between art and pathology.

The killer, Mark, has a complex relationship the camera. As a child, his psychologist father filmed him constantly and subjected him to “scientific experiments”, essentially abuse, to provide him with data on his studies of fear on the nervous system. I found myself fascinated by a scene where Mark shows his downstairs neighbor, Helen, the films his father made of him as a child. Watching the footage of the little boy being tormented by bright lights and a lizard thrown in his bed, Helen becomes increasingly confused and anxious. At which point Mark begins to film her. It’s an odd mirror within a mirror moment where he’s using her reaction to his trauma to fuel his compulsive “art”.

In a way it reminded me of what I do as a writer. I feel like my stories and even my journaling involves dredging up my worst and most painful experiences (in my fiction, these are often metaphorical rather than literal, exaggerated and disguised versions of my experiences) and seeing how people respond to them.

I am, in my personal life very shy but I’ve always felt that my writing is to an extent fueled by exhibitionistic tendencies. I often quote Anne Sexton’s poem Mercy for the Greedy where she writes “My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.” Because I was raised to believe that there is something wrong with seeking attention, I feel a little ashamed about writing. It always felt like a transgressive act to me. I started writing at 14 but I was a college student before I really dared to show my writing to others. Even today, at 36, I have very mixed feelings about my art. I’ve worked very hard to be able to write freely about things that I would rather keep to myself, including aspects of my sexuality and painful experiences. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, like Mark, by engaging these dangerous parts of myself I’m feeding them, giving them power. 

Back to work today.  It wasn’t too bad.  I didn’t pass out or anything.  After work I had to do an hour long training on customer service.  I was very well behaved and refrained from making a great many snarky comments.   We’re going to start doing “team huddles” every day.  How I look forward to that. 

Because I was better on Wednesday but still not working and I needed to get out of the apartment and away from the kitty I went to the movies.  There were three films I wanted to see at Landmark Century Cinema—No Country for Old Men, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Juno.  For mental health reasons I decided I’d better keep it light and went to see Juno.  I actually liked it quite a bit even though it’s so beloved I was prepared to despise it.  The entire cast was from television shows which I found momentarily disconcerting.  I know its acting but it still takes me a minute to get myself into the proper frame of mind to accept Sydney Bristow as a young wife desperate for a baby and Vern Schillinger as a dotting dad.  Faces bring with them certain associations.

I’m fairly sure Juno bears about zero resemblance to the actual life of the average pregnant sixteen-year-old since the world its set in a sort of a Wes Anderson terrarium where everything is cute and kitschy and everyone is quirky and clever.   I’m also pretty sure Juno was a lot more fun to watch than the life of the average pregnant sixteen-year-old (which to my thinking would probably be a high anxiety nightmare— I was shall we say volatile at that age, not unlike napalm).  There really wasn’t even any conflict, you sort of knew everything was going to work out and be okay so it was actually a really good film for me to be watching given my stress level lately. 

Still, amidst the sarcasm and whimsy where were some moments of hard insight.  Unlike a lot of films it actually acknowledged that there are different social classes and that they sort of live on different planets.  Mark and Vanessa, the couple that is planning to adopt Juno’s baby, live in a posh but generic suburban McMansion that’s worlds away from the more working class existence of Juno and her parents.  In this dream house, Mark has a single room which he devotes to his abandoned dreams of being in a rock band.  He’s still enough of a kid that he seems more interested in convincing Juno that he’s cool than in being a father.  And in some ways I can’t blame him.  Vanessa seems so uptight and controlling, the way they live so of personality I couldn’t help sympathizing with Mark’s dissatisfaction with his way of life even though it was meant to be seen as immaturity.  I actually thought Vanessa’s character was one of the greatest weaknesses of the film.  She seems like a brittle perfectionist who doesn’t really have any wit or imagination.  It’s stressed again and again that she desperately wants a baby but given the very superficial view we get of her it seems like she could only want a baby because that’s what successful people have, offspring as a sort of accessory.  We see a brief glimpse of her playing with a friend’s child at a mall but a brief glimpse doesn’t make a rounded character.  Mark, even with his considerable flaws felt much more fully realized. 

Book-wise I’ve started reading Anne Bishop’s Daughter of the Blood which is the first volume in The Black Jewels Trilogy.  It’s a dark fantasy series and since I’ve only just started it I’m struggling to figure out the world its set in which is matriarchal and has a complicated hierarchical system based on family and the shades of mystic jewels and also how magic works in this world. 

I managed to drag myself out this morning to get some groceries, including some gel-caps that seem to work better than the generic brand Sudafed I’d been taking. I’m not feeling dizzy or in pain anymore but my nose is still running like water. I don’t know what I’m going to day about work tomorrow. I’m scheduled for a long mid-shift, not sure if I’m going to be up to it.

Yesterday I called Fabrizio, who coordinates paid time off and insurance at the Market. He says that if I get a note from my doctor saying that my absences have to do with my medical condition he might be able to take off some of the points I’ve built up. I talked to my doctor today and she’s going to mail a letter. I feel kind of guilty about doing this, like I’m getting away with something but I really think that my chronic depression and eating disorder have really contributed to my recent health problems. Also I’m not getting anything out of it. I still won’t be paid for the time I’ve missed I just won’t be penalized for it which will be done less thing for me to worry about.

I watched Sleepy Hollow last night. Christopher Walken as the Hessian is so terrifying yet sexy… those filed teeth… though the image that struck me the most was the two white blonde little girls he comes upon in the forest one of whom grows up to become a shabby woodland witch, the other Miranda Richardson’s ornate and murderous lady of the manor. They rather reminded me of the dark haired sisters, DJ and Azkadellia in the Wizard of Oz revision Tin Man I watched last month. Two sisters who stumble upon something evil and because of it go in opposite ways. I sometimes feel as if my sister and I are something like that. She managed to fight her way out of whatever darkness possessed us but I’m still living in it.

I continue to be sick.  Again.  Last time was the flu, this time it’s a pretty bad cold including a hacking cough that makes it sound like I’m about to throw up.  Truly lovely.  Even though I’m sick I’ve still managed to pick up a couple hours work at Biff’s office today and yesterday.  The other woman who works there part time has pneumonia so I’m comparatively healthy. 

 

I’m trying to work at Biff’s as much as I can because I’m completely out of paid time off at the market which means that I’m not earning any income for the days I miss work (Tuesday, and tomorrow at least.)  I’ll probably have to dip into my savings which I always hate to do.  Of course it doesn’t help that recently in a fit of self-indulgence I bought myself a bunch of DVDs—Eastern Promises (gratuitous violence! homoerotic subtext!), Stardust (Mark Strong!), Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (more Mark Strong!  Philosophical inquiry into the meaning of existence!  Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones!), and the anime collections for Magic Knight Rayearth I (Clamp cuteness!) and Simoun (cuteness and genderfuck!  It’s set on a planet where everyone is female till they turn 17 when they choose their sex). 

 

I will say in my defense that I got all of these used on e-bay so even though I spent too much I could have spent a whole lot more.  I tend to think this way far too often.  For instance when grocery shopping I recently shelled out $11 on a big, big bag of Pacific Rose Apples (which are the yummiest) and justified it by thinking that  compared to the people I see at the market who spend $112 on a cut of meat it really wasn’t that  extravagant. 

 

This afternoon I watched Lost in Translation.  I saw it in the theater when it first came out but I’ve wanted to watch it again based on a conversation I had with this guy I went out with a couple times over the summer (known as the Guy in the Ethyl Meatplow t-shirt).   We were talking about movies at one point and I mentioned that I liked Sophia Coppola’s films.  He was said that as an Asian (he was Filipino, born in the Philippines but raised in America) he’d found Lost in Translation really offensive and stereotypical.  I didn’t remember any of this, but it had been about four years since I’d actually seen the film so I thought if I ever watched it again I’d keep an eye out. 

 

Watching it again I still really didn’t see anything that I would consider offensive.  I can almost see how scenes like the one with the “tear my stockings” woman border on derogatory stereotypes but to me the humor saves it.  Bill Murphy’s character is sort of rude sometimes but it seems to ring true for the character and you get the feeling he’d be just as snide in any setting. 

 

Yet as I write this I realize I’m using the same excuses that people give me when I’m offended by sexism in a book or a film.  It’s just part of the story, it’s the character, it’s meant to be funny.  This sort of bothers me.  Is there something there that I’m unable to see from my vantage point of white privilege?    Does everyone wear their own pair of blinders that shuts out what doesn’t apply to them? 

I was home sick again today.  This absence brings me 4 and a half points out of a possible 6 (you get fired at 6 points) but I just felt really bad.  It’s a combination of things.  I started the pill last month and because of some hormonal quirk I’ve had my period for the last 10 days, plus the beginnings of a cold, plus the 5+ pounds I managed to lose since November and working long mid-shifts all weekend.  Everything just added up and yesterday I could barely drag myself through the day.

Today I didn’t do anything—I didn’t vote which I feel awful about, I didn’t work out, I pretty much just lay in bed and re-read Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis graphic novels.  I’d gone to see the film adaptation (which is wonderful--truly beautiful animation) last week and really wanted to read the books again. 

Marjane Satrapi is three years older than me, my sister’s age, born in 1969, and I’m amazed by the way our lives have been similar despite the vast differences.  She speaks of being an Iranian in Europe and a Westerner in Iran and that’s very similar to how I’ve always felt, carrying the baggage of my repressive upbringing with me even when I’m in an environment with very different standards while also feeling out of place amidst my family and in the place that’s supposed to be my home.  The way I live now sort of reminds me of the periods of self-imposed isolation Satrapi goes through when she’s living in Austria as a teenager and the depression she suffers when returning to Iran. 

I’ve always thought that there were, simultaneously, two Americas.  One is the dream of high ideals, liberty, justice, freedom and compassion.  The other is the monster that consumes its share and everyone else’s and butchers anyone who stands in its way.  I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood on Monday and it does an amazing job of capturing the cruelty and compulsions that went into creating America’s monster side. 

 

There Will Be Blood begins just before the turn of the century and follows the career of oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) but to the late 1920’s.  With his young son H.W. beside him Daniel lauds family and plain-speaking while swindling communities of their land and oil rights.

( cut for spoilers (though I don't reveal everything) )

Yesterday was to be my big job hunting day.  I applied for a few positions but overall I didn’t do nearly as much as I should have.  Part of it was that it was my first day off in forever and I had some other things I had to take care of, mainly renewing my driver’s license which was set to expire on my Birthday next week.  I couldn’t renew on-line so I had to haul my sorry ass over to the Chicago North DMV building which is way, way out on Elston Avenue and go through the whole process of standing in various lines, taking a number etc.  At least that’s taken care of for another four years.

 

My other distractions were purely frivolous-- going to the library (as if I won’t be reading Vanity Fair for the next month), writing, and updating my journal.  Things I enjoy doing and want to do on my day off but still I really have to make job hunting a priority.  I’m particularly aware of that this morning because I don’t feel very well.  I’m dizzy and have stomach cramps but I’ve got to be at work at 2:45 p.m. because if I take a sick day I’ll be half a point away from termination.  

 

I know I procrastinate and put off my job search because I’m afraid of being turned down and also of change but I’m also afraid of failing and having to return to my parents.  I had a nightmare about it last night.  I was packing up my apartment (which was also my dorm room from college) to go back to my parents house in Upstate New York.  I think it was partially influenced by a movie I recently watched, Everything is Illuminated which is about a Jewish American who goes to the Ukraine to search for his families roots.  There are many, many shots of driving through the remote Ukrainian countryside that reminded me of the rural landscape where I grew up-- beautiful in so many ways but also empty and desolate. 

 

The film version of Everything is Illuminated was, like the book on which it is based, deeply flawed but still vital and interesting.  Watching it I found that I identified not with the American, Jonathan, a compulsive collector who comes seeking his roots, but with Alex, the native Ukrainian, who wants nothing to do with history and embraces cheap contemporary pop culture.  I feel like that’s what I want to do and maybe that guarantees that sooner or later I’ll have to deal with where I come from.   My case is of course a bit  unique.  I know many people feel cut off from their heritage but both my parents want to live in 1800’s so I’ve had a version idealized of the past forced on me for as long as I can remember.  Spend enough of your childhood paying homage at he graves of various ancestors and you’re bound to resent them.  My mother in particular is very uncomfortable with sexuality and has created a safe haven in a chaste and pious past.  Among her prize processions are the journals of a relative who would faithfully report the weather and the chores performed each and everyday while never mentioning her pregnancies except to note that she had had a child and certainly never making mention of said child’s conception. 

I had hoped that with Christmas behind me and my car finally working I’d have some relief from tooth-clenching, stomach churning anxiety however on Thursday (12/27) I got a letter from Illinois Unemployment saying that I was working for Biff’s property management company during the time I collected unemployment—08/26/06 to 09/23/06—so they want their money back. 

 

This is totally inaccurate—there are certain things I don’t forget and I was terminated from my job at the property management company on Sunday, 08/14/06 and the last day I worked was Friday 08/12/06.  I did go back to work part time (off the books and under the table) but that wasn’t until early November-- I remember this because when I went in that first day all the half empty cups and kegs were laying around the yard from Biff’s Halloween party the night before. 

 

I sent a semi-hysterical e-mail to Biff (who’s trying to enjoy what may be his last vacation sans child).  He’s assured me it will be taken care of so I’m trying not to dwell on it obsessively and overall things seem to be looking up.  Work has been quite manageable, even pleasant for the past few days.  The boy I sort of like leant me his copy of Rushmore, which I’d never seen before through I like a couple of Wes Anderson’s other films.  I wonder if he leant me this particular movie to send a coded message that he’s receptive to a relationship with an older woman (actually that’s the sort of obscure connection between reality and fiction that only I would make).    

 

I’m obviously a little annoyed with my mother for all the pressure she put on me to be in New York over Christmas and she sent me an e-mail yesterday that I found particularly irksome.  Eileen, the woman who was our pastor (as well as a close friend) when I was living with my parents was getting married.  Mum’s immediate response-- “This’ll be the third time she’s gotten married.  Why bother?”  Mum later recanted somewhat and said that it was probably good that Eileen was still willing to try, but the initial reaction is so typical of my mother’s worldview—no tolerance for mistakes, judgmental of and superior to anyone who doesn’t abide by her standards which are the result of a very sheltered life dominated by fear the unknown and the need to control. 

 

I’d like to say that I haven’t let Mum’s views on relationships color my own but in all honesty they have.  I really feel like the fact that my last relationship didn’t work out means that I’m fundamentally unsuited to have any kind of a partner, like it wasn’t meant to be.  Even though I’ve had my crushes over the past five years I really can’t imagine anything coming of them.  They’re reasons for me to get up in the morning and put on my make-up but I do feel rather like I’m failed in that area, that I wasn’t good enough, that I made the wrong choices and missed my chance. 

 

Which isn’t right or real or true. 

 

Mum’s always believed in her own set of inflexible rules--  Anything too difficult was not meant to be and should be abandoned.  If you’re not happy with a situation you shouldn’t try to change it because there’s a good chance you’re the problem and you’ll be unhappy whatever situation you’re in.  If you’re in a bad situation it’s because there’s something wrong with you.  If you’re good and smart and moral you’ll find a man who’s taller than you, get married by the time you’re 25 and stay married for the rest of your life.  If not, you’re just pathetic. 

 

I think that in reality, these rules don’t exist.  The third time might be the charm for Eileen.  Or maybe the fourth will work out, or the fifth time or maybe she’ll just takes something valuable from each marriage.   Maybe someday I’ll have a boyfriend again or even a girlfriend.  It’s possible, it really is.  I just wish I could believe it. 

Amazing as it seems I've made it to and through Christmas without completely losing it. 

I was really dreading Christmas Eve, especially as I'd felt quite ill on the 23rd but didn't even have to work my full shift at the market.  I got sent home early and took advantage to go to a matinee of Youth Without Youth, the Francis Ford Coppala film starring Tim Roth.  It was very ambitious film.  Somehow it reminded me of something that might happen in Henry James, an American filmmaker aspiring to emulate the European masters but not quite knowing where they were coming from.  There’s some interesting stuff going on but it doesn’t quite come together, the scope is too broad and it ends up seeming haphazard and bizarre.  I was a bit disappointed; I’d really been hoping it would be a success.  Roth seems to make a point of working with interesting, prestigious directors (among them Coppala, Tim Burton, Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog) but for some reason the films they make with him are rarely among their best.

 

My father wanted me to go to a Christmas Eve church service and I wanted to be lazy and stay home where it was warm so I ended up handling the situation in a passive aggressive sort of way and not finding out when local services would be then looking on the computer and not being able to find any and even going out and driving around and not being able to find any. 

 

Today I just kind of loafed around and read and worked on the bread dough ornaments I’m trying to make for gifts.  In the afternoon I went to see Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd  which is basically about what Leonard Cohen called “the homicidal bitchin’ that goes on in every kitchen to determine who will eat and who will serve.”  I liked a great deal, the design of the whole thing (Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp’s ghoulish make-up alone would have been quite enough to keep me captivated) and the songs.  Stephen Sondheim is such a wonderfully witty lyricist, so dark and funny and horrible.    The barber singing to his razors is as chilling as John Hinkley Jr.’s love song to Jodie Foster in Assassins.  I was also rather amused to note that Sweeney Todd starred half the cast of the Harry Potter films—Alan Rickman (Snape), Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange) and Timothy Spall (Peter Pettigrew).  Of course I loved the fact that Rickman played a nasty judge pursuing a much younger woman because it made the whole thing seem like a deliciously warped version of Sense and Sensiblity.

 

Presents.  Can’t forget presents. 

 

My parents and grandmother actually got their presents yesterday even though I didn’t mail them until Saturday.  I was very happy about that.  I was also very happy that I got a digital camera.  I’ve been wanting one for about a decade.  I am still in the process of figuring out how it works, but I managed to take some photos of myself looking ugly, both without make up and in my amateur attempt to duplicate the Sweeney Todd make-up….

( Trying out my new camera )

 

A further note on Cate Blanchett as the young Bobby Dylan. 

 

I sort of wish there was something in America like the Takarazuka Revue in Japan where all female casts perform version of classics like The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, Guys and Dolls and West Side Story and even the manga/anime Rose of Versailles with women in drag playing the male roles.

 

I just really love the note of erotic tension and ambiguity having a woman playing a man brought to what was really a familiar storyline.  Of course in I’m Not There Hayne’s script and direction as well as Blanchett’s skill as a performer probably created something much more powerful and nuanced than you’d probably see if you dressed a random actress in drag and had her play the leading man in a poorly written and directed production.  Still, I found the whole dynamic really intriguing.   

Yesterday was sort of a disaster. 

 

In the morning I managed to lock myself out of my apartment.  I don’t have a cell phone but luckily my downstairs neighbor was home so he let me use his to call the landlord.  Unfortunately the landlord wasn’t home so I left a message and then because I didn’t want my poor neighbor to have to deal with an uninvited guest hanging around in his apartment for however long I went outside to wait in the unheated stairwell.

 

It turned out our landlord was downtown so it was almost two hours before he was able to come and let me back into my apartment so during that time I just sort of sat in the cold and was very, very anxious about whether he would get the message and come and how I would get back into my apartment if he didn’t come and how long I should wait and why I was so stupid I’d locked myself out of my apartment in the first place. 

 

By the time I did get back into my apartment I was completely drained, just totally exhausted.  I went to work at 3:00 p.m. but I was really having a hard time.  I was dizzy and having chills and my whole body ached.  I don’t know if it was stress or from sitting in the cold for two hours.  I ended up going home at 4:30 p.m. which is not good.  I just called in the Monday after Thanksgiving because I had to get my car repaired and they’re going to be counting absences against you for 6 months instead of 3 months meaning that I’m probably going to get written up for this absence and if I have two more within the next 6 months I’ll be terminated.

 

Which frankly doesn’t sound all that bad at this point.

 

Why is it so hard for me to be a cashier at a grocery store?  It just seems to difficult and tiring.  I was off today and I went to see I’m Not There the Todd Haynes film about Bob Dylan.  There’s a scene where an obviously exhausted, strung-out Dylan (played by Cate Blanchett and if I may say so Cate Blanchett as a young Bobby Dylan is about 200 times sexier than the actual young Bobby Dylan ever hoped to be) is going over a contract and finds out he has to do 86 more shows and he wails “I can’t do 86 more shows” and preposterous as it is I identified completely because I really feel like I can’t go into work five days for the next 6 months.

 

My options are—

 

Give notice at the market and start looking for an office job, live off my savings and any money I can leech from the parents.  If I haven’t gotten another job by February (when my lease runs out) go back to Upstate New York in defeat and humiliation to the great joy of my mother.

 

Don’t give notice at the market.  Keep going in hoping I’ll feel better tomorrow, next week, next month.  Hope that nothing happens (car problems, getting locked out of my apartment) because I don’t seem to be able to deal with things happening.  Apply for jobs hoping someone will actually give me an interview or hire me even though I’m ugly, stupid, lazy, and have no personality.

 

Just thinking about it is making me really, really want to go to bed and it’s only 9:12 p.m.

On Sunday I was working in the office but I took an hour off and met my sister and her family at the Renegade Craft Fair being held at the Pulaski Park field house.  I found a gift for my mother.  There was a vendor who made journal/sketchbooks out of old hardcover books.  One of them was made out of a 1951 Whitman Publishing company copy of Margaret Sidney’s The Five Little Peppers which was the exact same edition mum used to read us a chapter of every night for a bedtime story (she also read us Little Women and the Little House books this way.  I have my issues with mum but I do appreciate some of the things she did.)  She’ll either love it or think it’s horrible to cut up a book and make it into a journal. 

 

Last year I didn’t really give gifts as I was scarcely making my living expenses but I’m doing somewhat better now and am trying to get everyone something though I do wish I had more time and energy to make things.  In addition to the journal I also got my mother a pair of Bratz Lil’ Angelz holiday ornaments that she admired in Target when she was visiting.  They’re really cute with big heads and huge eyes.  I like dolls that are very exaggerated and cartoony and aren’t intend to look real.

 

I got my father a copy of the film To End All Wars, a film set in a prisoner of war camp during WWII.  I’d watched it a couple of months ago because I’m semi-obsessed with one of the actors who appears in it (Mark Strong) but I think he’ll find it interesting both for the historical element and it’s exploration of morality and spiritual issues.  It’s really an extremely powerful film, particularly in today’s climate where we’re being told that torture is acceptable and really being encouraged to view “the enemy” as less than human.  To End All Wars contains scenes involving a sort of primitive water-boarding and you realize it’s a horrible act of violence, not an “intensive interrogation” method.  Also, though the film is told from the perspective of Allied POW’s there’s a Japanese character, a translator, who is shown to be a kindred spirit to the narrator.  At its heart it really shows how honor codes trap men, Japanese and Western a like and how following the teachings of Christ is very much contrary to the ideas of good vs evil and us vs them that fuel wars. 

 

I’m also hoping to make some Christmas gifts.  A few days ago I bought some flour and salt (since I don’t actually have flour or salt in my apartment, the closest I get is textured vegetable protein and soy sauce) and am going to try and make bread dough ornaments.  I’ve haven’t gotten to it yet because 1) I had to work on stories that were due of 12/12 and 12/15 for 

fem_exchangeand yuri_challengeand 2) Winter weather makes my skin very dry and I get fissures in my fingers and I imagine kneading a dough made with a cup of salt would get very painful.  However I 've finished the stories and my hands seem to be healed so maybe tomorrow night....