#72: Le Million

(originally published Jan. 4, 2011)

Sometimes after we’ve left a place, Matthew will pat his pockets and exclaim, “I’ve lost my keys (or wallet, or checkbook)!” For a few minutes, he panics, but he always calms down when he finds the misplaced item, usually in an overlooked pocket. The agitation is probably not good for his heart.

When I realize I’ve lost something, I give it up as gone forever.

Not far from our exit on I-95 (but still too far to turn back if one of us has forgotten something), a billboard displays the current Powerball jackpot in bright yellow letters, like a digital clock. Every Thursday and Sunday, the number goes up or down. I’ve never see the change, but I wonder if it’s like those train station announcement boards which flutter through every number until it reaches the correct one.

We tell ourselves, If the jackpot gets above $100 million, we’ll buy a ticket. We repeat this as the number reaches 115, 132, 150, each time forgetting about the previous promise to buy a ticket.

When the newspaper runs stories about lottery winners, the winners’ material circumstances (truck driver, single mom, elderly widow living in a trailer) are always mentioned. The winner inevitably thanks God. In Le Million, when Michel strikes it rich, he doesn’t thank a higher power. Instead, he dances with his neighbors in a long serpentine around his studio.

The losers are too numerous to warrant their own stories. Some commentators call lotteries a regressive tax. It’s the poor who buy tickets, and those funds funnel their way into government coffers. Less charitable commentators call lotteries a tax on the stupid, but those commentators usually aren’t truck drivers, single moms, or elderly widows living in trailers.

When the Houston lottery reached a pharaonic two hundred thirty-seven million, some of Matthew’s colleagues at the Museum of Fine Arts formed a pool. Everyone who put in a dollar would get part of the split. (This is how we know that Michel is the virtuous one; when it’s unclear whether he or Prosper holds the winning ticket, he offers to split the winnings. Prosper says no way.)

Over 80 people joined the Houston pool. The organizer, an older African-American security guard, made a multi-page photocopy of all the tickets. On the day of the drawing (perky announcer, ping-pong balls guided by the airburst of God), we flipped through the sheets, striking out page after page.

Given astronomical odds, buying 80 tickets is statistically indistinguishable from buying one.

Buying one ticket, however, is a 100% improvement versus buying none. When Powerball recently reached 160 million, I stopped into by the newsstand near the University of Delaware and bought a ticket: my chance to link hands with my creditors, to sing “Le Million!” 160 times.

I didn’t lose the ticket. Matthew placed it in the hands of the bronze Buddha in the living room. In a minor act of sacrilege, I lit a cone of incense and prayed for a winner. That week, on the billboard, the number went up again. No one won.

#71: The Magic Flute

(originally published Jan. 10, 2011)

The Magic Flute starts with a montage of faces, audience members waiting for the curtain to rise. The close-ups encompass all ages, races, and genders, and I expected to hear “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)” instead of Mozart’s overture. Bergman returns the camera to one cherubic, red-headed poppet, but the others whip by like the faces of people waiting on platform as the subway pulls away. Bergman doesn’t shoot the faces directly, but from a slight side-view, as if the camera were in the aisles.

My senior year of high school, I volunteered as an usher for the Denver Center Theatre Company. My duties, once every three weeks, usually a weekend matinee, were to guide ticketholders to their correct seat. I memorized the layout of the two theaters: the Stage, a traditional semi-circle, and the Space, with 360° seating arrangement.

In the tiny usher dressing room, we were to put on red polyester vests over our white shirts (the rest of the uniform: black pants, black shoes). The vests were stored in a wooden box, and the other ushers—housewives, doyennes, other high school students, retirees—and I fought over the few vests sized for human beings.

But here’s the thing: I’m not a fan of live theater. I volunteered to fulfill the community service requirement for National Honor Society. Volunteers also received a season’s subscription, but I never attended a single show. Instead, I gave the tickets to my parents, who watched some and passed the others onto their friends. I saw only glimpses and fragments of the shows, standing by entrance, waiting to lead latecomers into the back row ‘you-should-have-been-on-time’ seats.

Books and films, at least, have the appearance of permanence, but live theater is an inherently fungible art. Its qualities fluctuate, dependent on the so many people: playwright, stagehands, actors, director. I wonder, sometimes, if I derive can pleasure reading the script than seeing the script performed: a perverse form of auteur theory. The printed page will always the same text, the film will replay in the exact way it did before.

I’m not, however, entirely immune to live performances. I recently saw a performance of Madama Butterfly (the most frequently performed opera  in the United States) in Wilmington and, despite being seated behind a support column that obstructed half my view, I held my breath during the climactic note of “Un Bel Di Vedremo.” But, if anything, this emphasizes the ephemeral quality of theater: you can only experience a chord progression, a particular phrasing once. The next day, the timbre shifts, the tone changes ever-so-slightly. There is no final product; each performance is a revision. After its 1904 debut, Puccini reworked Madama Butterfly four more times.

After Fanny & Alexander, Bergman announced his retirement from film; he would henceforth concentrate on the theater.

I wonder how Bergman would have staged Madama Butterfly.  A stage saturated in crimson—costumes, backdrops, lights. Instead of a steamer, a Norwegian icebreaker. Pinkerton as God: Lover, Savior, Disappointer. The auteur who abandons His creations and is too cowardly to revisit them.

#70: The Last Temptation of Christ

(originallly published Jan. 7, 2011)

Hinkley High School didn’t offer AP Chemistry, so every morning, my friends Steve and Dan and I piled into Steve’s black vintage Thunderbird and trekked to Gateway High. The front seats were stuck in ‘recline,’ and since Dan was taller than I, I took the backseat. For the fifteen minute ride, we talked about day-to-day mundanities that seem important at the time, but fade as years accumulate: Did you get this answer on the homework? Who are you taking to prom? Which colleges have you heard from?

But the times all three of us were groggy or belligerently silent, Steve, a Peter Gabriel fan, put on music. So and Shaking the Tree were our soundtracks. Every so often, he’d slip in Passion:  Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, and I imagined that the drive down Chambers Road was a desert journey: police sirens and ululations; car tires thrumming over potholes and African talking drums.

We knew of The Last Temptation of Christ because of the controversy, another shot in the endless culture war, whose targets would eventually encompass Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” Kevin Smith’s Dogma, Chris Ofili’s “Black Madonna,” and David Wojnarowicz’s “Fire in My Belly.” But what makes something sacrilegious? When an upscale dessert spot opened in Cherry Creek a few years ago, members of my parent’s temple were offended by a Buddha statue placed in front of the bathrooms. They asked the management to move it. Similarly, in Philadelphia, my sister huffed when we passed Buddhakhan, a yuppie-favored restaurant that features a gilded, oversized Buddha.

“We should,” my sister said, “open a theme restaurant with a big, honking Jesus overlooking everyone.”  Sample menu: holy blood pudding, Disci-pulled pork, Communion wafer cookies. The bar would serve nothing but rusty nails. The name of the restaurant: ‘The Last Supper,’ of course.

In the Last Supper scene of The Last Temptation of Christ, Willem Dafoe, as Christ, is calmly resigned to his fate. This the same man (God? Son of God?) who, earlier in the film, doubted his own divinity. Did his doubt redouble his faith, or does faith exist only in the absence of doubt?

Dan, Steve and I also had English together, and our teacher presented a Bible-as-literature section. In it, a classmate and I performed the first act of Arthur Miller’s The Creation of the World and Other Business. We also gave presentations on other religions: I wore my sister’s Norma Kamali dress and silvery bangles and drew, on the chalkboard behind me, extra arms to represent Shiva, dancing the world into destruction.

Dan, a Mormon, showed a videotape re-enacting the history of Mormonism. Shot PBS-style, with a baritone narration over sepia-tinted images, the film droned on, a pioneer Western stripped of its outlaws, Indian raids, wild shoot-outs. But when the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written were taken back to heaven, we erupted: What? How’d that happen? Did they get shipped Fed Ex?

Dan, eyes flickering with visible agitation, remained silent, his faith unshakable.

#69: The Testament of Orpheus

(originally published Dec. 8, 2010)

Towards the end of The Testament of Orpheus, two children feed autographs of two “intellectuals in love” into the mouths of a three-headed statue. Cégeste, the resurrected poet from Orpheus, explains that the statue is an “instant-celebrity machine” that guarantees “fame for anyone in a minute or two.”

“Beyond that,” he continues, “of course, it becomes more difficult.”

After devouring the autographs, the machine spews forth long strips of paper: “novels, poems, songs and so forth,” Cégeste says. “It stops until it’s fed by new autograph hunters.”

In the room that Matthew and I refer to as the ‘library,’ I have more than 100 signed books stashed in a corner unit that we bought off the street. Back home, in Colorado, I have about 300 more. I’ve been to readings where the bookstore staff handed out tickets for signings that went into the high four-hundreds. I’ve been to readings where I felt the need to act extra-enthusiastic to make up for the vacant seats around me.

I’ve recruited friends to wait with me when the line proctor for Salman Rushdie announced, Only five books per person. I’ve chased Orhan Pamuk down the National Mall after ending up on the wrong end of his cut-short signing line. I’ve stood behind the rare-books dealers wheeling book-laden luggage with them, pulling out ARCs and foreign editions, first-editions with dust jackets lovingly Mylared—Signature only, they say.

Book dealers have a financial incentive to have their books signed. My modest collection, on the other hand, would yield only a meager retirement account. When asked if I want my books personalized, I waffle mentally before answering, Sure—not that I intend ever to sell my books.

Paul Bloom, in How Pleasure Works, suggests that, on a basic, cognitive level, people “assume that things in the world—including other people—have invisible essences that make them what they are.” Works of art, in particular, have an essence that is “rooted in an appreciation of the human history underlying its creation.” A painter signs his work to validate it; the signature embodies this essence of the work.

When I gave Matthew an inscribed copy of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, he was speechless. He, of course, had already read it many times, but the fact that, at some point, Arendt had touched this book, held it, rendered him speechless. Her essence now mingled with his.

There’s an old canard about how certain African tribes ban cameras because they believe that photographs can capture their souls. Is this any different than the baseball memorabilia collector who believes that part of Joe DiMaggio resides in his glove? Does he smell DiMaggio’s sweat in the creases of the leather? If the collector slips his hand into the glove, does he taint DiMaggio’s essence or does DiMaggio’s essence infuse his hand?

I am a lepidopterist, pinning an author’s name into his own work.

#68: Orpheus

(originally published Nov. 28, 2010)

Death, in Orpheus, is an aristocrat. She drives a black Rolls-Royce and cruises outside the Café Poete for young, handsome poets. When she finds one to her liking, she runs him down to invite him to her decrepit villa, where she puts him to work, reciting aphorisms into a shortwave radio. She watches Orpheus in the dark with unblinking, lidless eyes. When he finally embraces her, and she embraces him back. She moves through time and space via mirrors. As her manservant Heurtebise explains, “Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you’ll see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass.”

In Tanith Lee’s “Elle Est Trois (La Mort),” Death takes on three forms: the Thief, the Butcher, and the Seductress. Under these guises, she stalks bohemian artists—friends, patrons of the same café—living in 19th Century Paris. It’s La Bohème with gore. Death sings the aria.

For The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman posits Death as a black-cloaked entity, a chess-player with a deadpan sense of humor. In this form, he doesn’t crack a smile until he appears in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Neil Gaiman, in his Sandman series, pictures Death as a Goth-punk girl, with spiky hair and Egyptian eye make-up. Her skin is pale, keeping with tradition, and she wears a black tank top. A silver ankh hangs around her neck. She has pets: two goldfish. Sometimes, on particularly strenuous cases, she wears leg warmers.

In Aurora, Colorado, Elisabeth was a year behind me in high school. She was an adoptee from Laos, and she had severe eczema on her hands which turned them white and scaly, curled into claws. When she stretched her fingers, raw pink flesh peeked out from between the scales. I don’t recall shaking her hand, but I remember giving her hugs. She wrote me my first year of college, talking about how excited she was to graduate high school and go to college, where life would spread out before her, a hotel hallway with innumerable doors to open. I learned later, through a mutual friend, that death came for her at her birthday party. A guest brought a snack that either contained peanuts or had come into contact with peanuts, and she went into anaphylactic shock. Here, death is — what? A cookie? A slice of cake? Would death in this form be any more or less ridiculous? Would I have had a chance to respond to Elisabeth’s letter?

We give death a form in order to understand her. If, we think, death can be personified, then we can put our arms around her. She won’t appear so fearsome. We can reason with her; we can make her fall in love with us, and she’ll turn back time, a film played in reverse, figures in the background stepping backwards, trying to un-remember the Tartarean landscape through which they pass.

It’s not her finality that they fear; it’s her abstraction.

#67: The Blood of a Poet

(originally published Nov. 24, 2010)

I:  The wounded hand or the scars of the poet

The image of a writer typing until his fingers bleed is, I’m afraid, a fabrication attributable, perhaps, to Bryan Adams.

II:  Do the walls have ears?

Next door lives Jimmy, who has Tourette’s. Sometimes, late at night, he screams, and the screams penetrate our shared wall, and it almost sounds as if the wall is screaming. The walls say, Ahh!  Jimmy!, an unbroken howl, as if they had done something unspeakable. In the mornings, Jimmy nods and say hello, and the walls stay silent about the previous night.

III:  The snowball fight

In Colorado, the snow is wholly unsuitable. It’s crisp and powdery, impossible to pack together. The balls disintegrate in your mittens, and if you manage to get one to cohere, upon contact, it evaporates, a whiff of ice, a halo, a cloud. On the East Coast, however, the snow is wet and slushy, as if it had already partially melted on the way down. It clings to branches and cements itself to the sidewalks and will, overnight, in a feat of treachery, turn to ice. The crystals are and thick and gristly. The snow tastes of salt and metal; in other words, like war.

IV:  The profanation of the host

Jean Cocteau, speaking before a 1932 screening of his film: “One can’t tell the story of film like this. I could give you my own interpretation. I could say: the solitude of the poet is so great, he lives out his own creations, so vividly that the mouth of one of his creations is imprinted on his hand like a wound; that he loves this mouth, that he loves himself, in other words; that he wakes up in the morning with this mouth against him like a chance acquaintance; that he tries to get rid of it, that he gets rid of it, on a dead statue; that this statue comes to life; that it takes its revenge; that I sends him off into terrible adventures. I could tell you that the snowball fight represents the poet’s childhood and that when he plays the card game with his Glory, with his Destiny, he cheats by drawing from his childhood instead of from within himself. I could tell you that afterwards, when he has tried to create a terrestrial glory for himself, he falls into that ‘mortal tedium of immortality’ that one always dreams of when in front of famous tombs. I’d be right to tell you all that, but I’d also be wrong, for it would be a text written after the images.”

This is Orpheus, who, with a glance over his shoulder, sees the image of Eurydice, now fading from view, now disappearing back into darkness.

#66: (The Orphic Trilogy)

(originally published Nov. 19, 2010)

Excerpt from Plato’s Symposium, the Speech of Phaedrus (trans. Nehamas & Woodruff), annotated:

Orpheus[1], the gods sent unsatisfied from Hades, after showing him only an image[2] of the woman he came for. They did not give him the woman herself[3], because they thought he was soft[4] (he was, after all, a kithara-player[5]) and did not dare to die[6] like Alcestis[7] for Love’s sake, but contrived to enter living into Hades.[8] So they punished him for that, [9] and made him die at the hands of women[10].

—

[1] We root for Orpheus, not because of his pursuit of true love, but because he was not a hero. He’s neither a Heracles nor a Theseus, blustering in and thundering out; he’s a young artist, uncertain of what awaits him in Hell.

[2] Immortal Eurydice! In image-form, she remains eternally young, eternally beautiful, as pure and crisp as on the day she and Orpheus were to be wed. On clear nights, Orpheus shines a light through her and projects her image onto the foresail of a ship docked in the mouth of the Hellespont, and her face grows large enough to rival Artemis herself.

[3] Skin riddled with serpent bites, veins filled with venom: the woman herself. This is an act of mercy.

[4] Orpheus guided Jason and his Argonauts past Anthemoessa by drowning out the sirens’ song with his own; he made the Furies, wreathed with snakes, weep; he sang Cerberus to sleep, one head at a time, until each mouth snapped of its own accord, dreaming of closing its own muzzle around warm flesh.

[5] Orpheus fears silence the way a scribe fears a blank page, the way a historian fears forgetting.

[6] Eurydice was not heroic; she would not be sent to the Elysian Fields. Neither was she a wretched sinner, bound for Tartarus. If Orpheus were to die, the best the two of them could hope for, in death, was the Asphodel Meadows, miming their quotidian existence—a continuation, but neither a life nor an afterlife.

[7] After Eurydice’s death, Orpheus, at least, had the good sense to turn his back on women.

[8] Such a thin line separates the Overworld from the Underworld: a bite. A song. An angry mother, a piece of wood. A poisoned robe, a rainfall of arrows. A single, golden apple.

[9] Orpheus’ sin is not that lacked nerve, but that he had seen what lies beyond the physical world. When people ask what he had seen in the Underworld, he replies with the simple truth: When I looked behind me, there was nothing.

[10] The body is such a burden; the sparagmos is a blessing. Bobbing in the Aegean Sea, he watches the Muses carry his lyre into the stars.  oodbye, he sings, but with his vocal cords torn, he makes no sound, and like that, singing wordlessly, he drifts, all the way to Lesbos.

#65: Rushmore

(originally published Nov. 3, 2010)

Water, in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, signifies a freedom from spiritual malaise. For instance, in the scene where Bill Murray dives into a pool at his twin sons’ birthday party, he stays underwater, as if to escape the world outside. All the worldly noises drown out, except for the Kinks’ “Nothing in This World Can Stop Me Worrying ‘Bout That Girl” on the soundtrack. This, of course, mirrors Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman, having grown disillusioned with his affair with Mrs. Robinson, also takes a dive into a swimming pool.

Perhaps, as he’s swimming, Benjamin Braddock blocks out the word plastics. Herman Blume, while submerged, ignores the demands of steel. Underwater, Houston no longer thinks about oil.

Anderson filmed most of Rushmore in Houston: the private school scenes at his alma mater, St. John’s; the public school scenes at Lamar High School. But the movie as a whole is steeped in Houston: Herman Blume’s neighborhood could easily be River Oaks; Miss Cross’ more modest house looks as though it’s in the Heights; and one could imagine Max Fischer living in the Third Ward, where the streets are lined with billboards that announce We Buy Ugly Houses.

No one neighborhood represents Houston. The city emanates outward, in ever-widening concentric circles: the Inner Loop, the Sam Houston Parkway, the Grand Parkway. Houston is a target without a bull’s-eye. Downtown, on the weekends, becomes awash with young urbanites, eager to impress their peers with a free-flowing flood of cash.

But, once in a while, the city holds its breath.

When Tropical Storm Allison stalled over Houston in June of 2001, almost 40 inches of rain dropped over six days. In Montrose, where I lived, the water rose to my doorway, threatening to enter. Cars were lifted off their tires and prowled the streets. Amorphous rainbows of oil stretched their fingers. Sewers overflowed.

I heard stories: how balls of fire ants rolled along the surface of the water, how the poisonous snakes from the Bayou shimmied underneath—all the dark and dangerous things of Houston given free rein. In the metropolitan area along, there were 21 deaths. One woman, who had worked overnight at the Bank of America building, was told to retrieve her car from the underground garage. When the building lost power, her elevator car was trapped three levels beneath the surface, where there was no escaping the water.

But as the rain fell, the city seemed to level out. The drops rapped on everyone’s windows, driven by a howling fury. Mansion and hovel alike shared the deluge—the occupants of each hunkering beneath the endless grey expanse of sky.

And, for a instant, underneath all the water, the city escaped its anomie. My downstairs neighbor moved his stereo equipment into our apartment, a moment of connection in an otherwise strained friendship. Outside, someone did the breast-stroke down Driscoll Street. Traffic cameras on the Hazard Street overpass showed a kayaker along the Southwest Freeway, paddling, not to escape the water, but to become part of it.

#64: The Third Man

(originally published Oct. 23, 2010)

Peter Bogdanovich introduces The Third Man by mentioning how Carol Reed’s black-and-white photography makes post-war Vienna look preternaturally wet. The light catches the edge of each cobblestone, treachery multiplies along the length of the street, every step a wrong step.

The climactic chase through the Vienna sewers, as well, makes it look as if Vienna had been hit by a monsoon. The water falls in great cascades and winds its way through pipes, channels, passageways. If the city above ground is a ruin, then then the city underground is a maze, an elegant trap from which there is no escape.

But it’s still a sewer. Outside the Vienna Opera House, gilt and filigreed like a carousel, agencies offer tour groups for any number of tastes: the Mozart Tour, the food tour, the World War II tour. The Third Man tour features sites from the movie, with a special excursion into the old sewer system. This is no different, I suppose, than the Philadelphia ghost tours which highlight the cemetery where a scene from The Sixth Sense was filmed. But I don’t recall, however, spirits rising from the toilet to torment Haley Joel Osment.

The Third Man makes the sewers seem almost sanitary. Only one character mentions the smell, but even then, the high arched tunnels make the sewer look like a submerged cathedral. Policemen rappel down and into waterfalls of effluent. People splash in the rivers of liquid. It’s a sewer removed of its scheisse.

Modern-day Vienna still has an underground, of course. In particular: the bathroom near the Opernring announces itself with a jolly yellow sign: Opera Toilet. Mit Musik! Musical notes dance around the words, as if they’d been flushed down from the opera house above. Does the music come piped in for free? Or is there a jukebox inside the loo, vending concertos the way other restrooms sell condoms?

The other bathroom is the only bathroom worth a mention in Rick Steve’s guidebook. It’s down a flight of stairs along the Der Graben, Vienna’s main commercial drag (with translates roughly to “the trench.”) This trench is lined with high-end stores: Chanel, Hermès, Tiffany’s. People double-fist their shopping bags, store names fanning out like birds during mating season.

This restroom is famous for being designed by Adolf Loos. I wonder if he took it as a challenge: let’s see if I can make something beautiful out of this. And, for the most part, he succeeds: the urinals dividers are sheets of marble; the stall doors are dark, slats of wood with a large milk glass pane, and above each stall, a transom.

But when I went down into the bathroom, there was no mistaking the ultimate function. At one of the far urinals, a man relieved himself. The smell of urine seemed trapped there, underground. Accidental puddles dotted the elaborately-tiled floor. When I took a picture (his, the bathroom’s), he didn’t notice the flash catching the room in light, the way his profile came, momentarily, out of the shadows. Or else, he resolutely ignored it. Austria is, after all, one of history’s great denialists: they convinced the world that Mozart was Austrian and that Hitler was German.

#63: Carnival of Souls

(originally published Oct. 18, 2010)

I bought a copy of Carnival of Souls in high school. The age of VHS—magnetic tape, we called it. Video rental stores were as plentiful as trilobites, and brontosaurus-sized Blockbusters lumbered across the land. I had mastered taping movies right off the TV or making tape-to-tape duplicates. At the time, I thought taping at EP or SLP instead of SP meant that I could fit more movies onto a single tape, thus ‘saving tape,’ but I didn’t learn until later how that degraded the picture quality. Watching the tapes repeatedly, as well, wore out the tape, and, over time, the movies became ghosts of themselves, shaky and speckled, one image bleeding into the next.

I owned very few horror movies on VHS. In the 80s, videotapes of movies were expensive—priced for rental, not ownership, and the film was a staple on PBS; on Halloween night, I could count on either Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead playing (much in the way that I could expect falling snow during trick-or-treating). Nevertheless, I bought my copy from the Aurora Mall Suncoast Video. On the cover, a dazed, muddy Candace Hilligoss clambers out of a river, and the title whirls its way out the home for psychedelic fonts.

Noel Carroll, in his book The Philosophy of Horror, suggests that the emotion of horror is evoked by the processes of fusion and fission. Fusion, he explains, is the conflation of discrete entities: the distinct states of being of ‘living’ and ‘dead,’ for instance, merge into ‘living dead’; the physical distinctions between ‘man’ and ‘beast’ blur into the form of a werewolf (or, if you prefer, a sexed-up humanoid cicada).

Fission, on the other hand, is the separation of a conceived-of whole. Killers with split personalities exhibit fission, as do most slasher films (separation of head from body, viscera from stomach, fingernails from fingers). Carnival of Souls, then, is all about the fission: from her godless organ playing to her sangfroid with a potential suitor, Mary’s soul seems detached from her body.

Watching the movie so long after abandoning my VHS tapes to the dusty ignominy of my parent’s basement, I feel a similar fission. It’s the process of growing up; the theory-addled academic can no longer be the giddy teenager walking out of the mall, though he remembers the smell of ozone from a hot VCR player; the crinkling as he removes the cellophane; the shaking hands as he inserts a new videotape into the player, waiting for phantasmagoric images to flicker into life. He still enjoys the movie on an aesthetic level: the atmospheric shots of the abandoned amusement park, the oblique camera angles. But he wonders when the white-faced ghouls will catch up, dragging him, kicking and screaming, back to the decrepit Saltair pavilion.

#62: The Passion of Joan of Arc

(originally published Oct. 8, 2010)

This semester, I taught a section of the First Year Experience, a one-credit, pass/fail class that’s essentially a banner announcing, ‘Welcome to college.’ My students, for the most part, are good kids: sometimes rowdy, sometimes apathetic, sometimes distracted and beyond my reach.

But, as I said, basically good kids.

Prompted by the recent spate of high-profile gay suicides, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to talk to my freshmen about anti-gay bullying and harassment. In particular, the death of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who jumped off a bridge after an intimate encounter with another student was broadcast without his knowledge by his roommate, raised issues that went beyond the bullying—negotiating privacy, living with other people, controlling your on-line image.

The discussion went well, I thought. When I told Clementi’s story (amazingly, some hadn’t heard about it, which I expected from the international students, but not the English-speaking ones), one of the guys in class (who looks familiar with the Jersey Shore) commented, “That’s fucking demented.” Towards the end of the conversation, he glanced up at the clock repeatedly, but he got it, I thought. He understood.

That night, when I watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, the first thing that popped into my head was: Joan of Arc, gender warrior! Of course, she was persecuted for heresy, but when the warty, jowly judges press her about her preference for men’s clothing, it brings to mind Daphne Scholinski’s The Last Time I Wore a Dress. When Joan is first asked, Renee Falconetti, wide-eyed, nervously fingers her collar, as if the clothes are tightening around her neck. When another judge presses—“So God orders you to dress as a man?”—her eyes are half-closed, as if in resignation. Her answer doesn’t receive an intertitle, but her whisper is unmistakable: Oui.

Yesterday, I took my class to the student center on campus for a lecture. On the front of a building were posters announcing an upcoming drag show. The featured drag queen, Sahara Davenport, was plastered on every window, in every conceivable color Hammermill provides: fuchsia, goldenrod, lime, taupe—a Warholian whirl of fabulousness. As we entered, the Jersey Shorean student muttered, “Seven bucks for a fucking tranny?”

Fucking tranny.

What upsets me is not that he said what he said—but that I didn’t stop right there and say something. I kept walking. Students sat at tables, eating their lunches. The smell of fried Chik-Fil-A sizzled in the air. His words hung there, unconfronted, unaddressed.

I’m no Joan of Arc. At best, I’m Jean Massieu, the monk (played by Antonin Artaud) who knows better but is cowed into silence. He supports Joan in spirit, but when things get hot, he bows his head, and lets his tonsure reflect his shame. We share cowardly silence. As punishment for our sins, how many more martyrings will we be forced to witness?

#61: Life of Brian

(originally published Oct. 2, 2010)

In the early 1990s, my sister dated Kevin, whom my parents hated. They’d gotten over their Oh my goodness, he’s white phase and moved onto their Oh my goodness, he’s a loser phase. Maybe this is true of over-protective parents everywhere: no one is good enough. For Vietnamese parents particularly, the ideal mate is an asymptote; though people can approach good enough, they never quite make it.

That’s not to say that Kevin was good enough. He was tall, thin, and blond, with the air of someone who’d just finished second in a regatta. He worked waiting tables at the then-recently opened Spinnakers in the Cherry Creek Mall. My sister had met him at the nightclub she frequented, the 23rd Parish; Kevin was best friends with the DJ there, a gay black man named Tracy Jones.

Kevin also fancied himself a DJ but had appalling taste in music. Granted, electronic music was still in its infancy, but Kevin preferred songs that sounded like that had come off a Commodore Amiga (long before chiptunes were hip, obviously). He gave my sister mix tapes, and she passed them on to me, and I listened with an equal mixture of befuddlement and antipathy.

At the end of one of his tapes, he put the “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” But stripped of its context, the song seemed odd to me. Kevin explained:  t’s funny because it’s sung by a group of men on crucifixes. Okay then. He pressed: Haven’t you ever seen Monty Python’s Life of Brian?

(Growing up, I was only ever a moderate Monty Python fan. It came on late night weekends on PBS, after The Benny Hill Show. I remember segments like the ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year’ but much of its free-associative surrealism escaped me. Even as a youngster, I demanded narrative cohesion.)

Under the guise of being a good little brother, I lent Kevin music that I thought was great. The Orb’s first album, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraverse. The 4-disc This Mortal Coil boxset. The Future Sound of London’s Accelerator. But our tastes never converged. And anyway, Kevin soon joined the Navy and shipped off for training, and my sister found that an opportune time to break up with him. Alas, I never got my CDs back.

I ran into Kevin again, years later, after I had finished grad school and was working in a movie theater. He came in with a redhead sporting the librarian-by-day/roller-derby-by-night look. I recognized him immediately (confirmed I saw his credit card), but he didn’t recognize me. I wanted to say, “Hey, give me back my This Mortal Coil boxset”—but didn’t. Part of it was pride: since we met last, I had accomplished what exactly besides making lattes and slinging popcorn? The other part of it was: why bother? What would I say? ‘Hey, thanks for ruining the ending of The Life of Brian for me’?

Instead, I poured him a glass of wine and let him see his movie in peace. It goes without saying what song I hummed all night long.

#60: Autumn Sonata

(originally published Sept. 24, 2010)

Tonight was the harvest moon—what the Vietnamese celebrate as Tết Trung Tu. When I was young, the signs of Tết Trung Tu were unmistakable: the invasion of mooncake containers at Asian supermarkets, gold foil banners hung across doorways, increased visits to the Vietnamese Buddhist temple. When my family had our post-temple bowl of phở, out past the lot crammed with awkward Vietnamese parking jobs, the lion dancers (mostly students from a nearby tae kwon do academy) did their thing, undulating, thrusting, flicking the switch to make the lion’s Tammy Faye Baker-like eyes blink.

My sister told me about celebrating Tết Trung Tu back in Vietnam: she and my brother made their own paper lanterns. There were none of these pre-made ones, she said. After dark, they paraded with the other children, lanterns tied to the end of a stick, a little piece of captured fire.

Last year, Matthew and I bought our lanterns (not home-made, alas) from two eager young girls fundraising for some Asian community center in Philadelphia’s Chinatown—I’m not sure which, since I’m a bad Asian. The lanterns were mounted to chopsticks, and each had a tealight taped to its interior. They were cheap, of course, but as they dangled off the edge of our porch, they insisted on their own beauty.

By 7:30, the moon’s glow had spread behind the houses across the street, a soft phosphorescence, like a jellyfish’s. We sat on the brick stoop. I made tea. Matthew reviewed notes for tomorrow’s class. Neighbors returned home and parallel parked. We waved to them, and Matthew called to them by name, but if they saw our lanterns, they said nothing; maybe from where they were, the lanterns’ colorful aureoles couldn’t compete with the devouring streetlamp in front of our house.

As we sat, we shared a mooncake. Buying them was almost a Pavlovian response: Oh, look, September.  Mooncake time. We bought two boxes: one was a tin with the picture of what looked like a fancy hotel lobby; the other was a box lined with cloth, each mooncake in its own tin adorned with a kitschy portrait of a Chinese courtesan. We skipped the green tea flavor, the mixed nuts, the pumpkin paste, and the red bean in favor of pure lotus paste. (No salted egg yolks, however; Matthew finds them gross.)

And then we saw the moon. We may have missed its low-to-the-horizon ruddiness, but when it appeared, full and bright, it seemed to have sprung from nothingness. We blew out the lanterns and carried in our teacups. I went upstairs to watch Autumn Sonata.

It’s said that Tết Trung Tu is a celebration for children. Parents who have been too busy harvesting crops to play with their children use the festivities as proof of their affection. Maybe Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman could have used some mooncake time: tea; glowing lights; a warm, silent evening; a stray gray cat, strutting along the porch, demanding nothing more than a little attention.

#59: The Night Porter

(originally published Sept. 23, 2010)

Actual question from the 2008 All Souls College (Oxford) entrance exam: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”

I reply: Yes, it does. (Though, really, why are they wearing anything at all if it’s an orgy?)

Simply because a person is libertine in his sexuality does not mean that he exhibits moral turpitude in other aspects of his life. This includes the ability to be offended by Nazi uniforms. Let’s rephrase the question this way: does the moral character of a “native and colonial” costume party change when Prince Harry shows up with a swastika armband?

Speaking strictly of the orgy, Nazi uniforms introduce an unsettling power structure. The ‘conceit’ behind an orgy, if you will, is that everyone gets some. Since the question overlooks the specifics of the orgy (round robin? Roman free-for-all? bukkake? Wheel of Fortune?), one must assume that everyone approaches the orgy on equal footing. Nazi uniforms introduce a master/submissive dynamic, which necessarily upsets this balance.

(One could argue, of course, that Nazi uniforms are role-playing, akin to ‘stern professor/naughty student’ or ‘football coach/star quarterback’ scenarios. But Nazism is acknowledged to be beyond the pale. Case in point: many years ago, I rented a— h, how shall I put this?—a ‘romantic comedy’ called Honorable Discharge. In one scene, two men cycled through various military uniforms.  “Sailors suck,” the costume aficionado says to the other. “Soldiers fuck.” After their encounter, the costumier asks the jejune Lejeune [played by Chuck Barron], “Which would you like to be next? The Nazi or the Jew?” Barron, the viewer’s stand-in, gapes in disbelief.)

Which brings us to The Night Porter. (Corollary question: does watching the Night Porter the day after Yom Kippur make one a bad Jew? Answer: Don’t ask me. I’m not Jewish.) While I can’t say that I enjoyed the film—the way one does not ‘enjoy’ Salò; or the 120 Days of Sodom—I will say that it’s provocative in examining not only the psychology of Nazi perpetrators, but of its victims too. I do wonder the film errs in placing too much emphasis on Dirk Bogarde’s suave, murderous SS officer Max and not enough on Charlotte Rampling’s suffering Lucia. Her psychosexual journey—concentration camp victim to survivor, respected citizen to masochistic prisoner—is the moral heart of the film.

(Here, I’d like to point out my fondness for ‘Naziploitation’ films [Love Camp 7, the Ilsa series], though I haven’t yet had a chance to read any Israeli Stalags.)

Does the moral character of The Night Porter change when Lucia takes charge of her sexuality while performing topless, in Nazi regalia, for a group of SS officers? Or when she reclaims that sexuality when voluntarily chained in Max’s apartment? Director Liliana Cavani doesn’t offer answers. In this way, she’s like the Oxford test-givers, showing how there’s no easy entrance into this world.

#58: Peeping Tom

(originally published Sept. 16, 2010)

My knowledge of Peeping Tom will forever be incomplete. For some reason, my disc freezes and refuses to play from about the 75-minute mark to the 85-minute mark. (From what I understand, I miss two crucial scenes: Mrs. Stevens’ confrontation with Mark and the psychologist’s explanation of scopophilia.) And now that Criterion’s version is out-of-print, I can’t easily go out and buy a new one. I looked to see if the disc was scratched, but no: all I could see was my horrified reflection staring back at me, screaming No, no!

Even with the commentary track switched on, no go. Shortly after Laura Mulvey says, “It was Andre Bazin who first pointed out the relationship between photography and death,” she cuts out entirely. Even stranger: when I went to check out Visual and Other Pleasures from the University of Delaware library today, it was listed as ‘missing.’

The world conspires to keep me ignorant.

I know just enough film theory to pontificate convincingly, but not enough to do it with conviction. My lack of conviction, however, wasn’t enough to keep me from presenting a paper at the 8th Annual Lambda Rising Queer Studies Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder. (I don’t believe that a 9th Annual Conference ever took place.) This was in the spring of 2000, after I’d already decided to attend the University of Houston for my MFA in fiction writing. I don’t recall ever taking a formalized class in film as an undergraduate; most of what I knew was self-taught. I was a dilettante. Still, I thought, it would be fun.

So the Saturday morning of the conference, Matthew and I made our way up to Boulder. I’d practiced my presentation—a running commentary on the film Sleepaway Camp—with the ease of a man trying to pass off a cubic zirconia as a diamond. And I wonder if my nervousness that day was akin to the nervousness I feel the first day of classes every semester: all those faces, waiting for you to feed them knowledge.

My presentation, admittedly, was an unholy mish-mash of Laura Mulvey, Carol Clover and Harry Benshoff—not to mention that Sleepaway Camp hardly merits critical attention. But as I lectured, I could almost believe my own theories: the camera as not just a male gaze, but a homosexual male gaze; watch how it travels beneath the partition of the bathroom to peek at the occupant, how it lingers on the bodies of the male skinny-dippers.  Oh, Camille Paglia would have my head on a platter, but theory is nothing if it isn’t a way to look at the world, and while I spoke, I understood the world of Camp Arawak, and the foothills sunshine of the city outside me, and the audience that sat before me, who gasped as that curling iron really went you-know-where.

#57: Charade

(originally published Sept. 7, 2010)

A.O. Scott, in the New York Times, describes Charade as “a light-hearted, frivolous bauble…. It’s a work of great craft and artistry, not a great work of art, but a marvelously fun movie.”

Ignoring the fight I’m itching to have as to what constitutes a “work of art,” I admit that Charade has a special place in my heart. My sister introduced me to it when I was nine or ten—in fact, she insisted that I watch it with her. So I did, and after that first viewing, I was traumatized by one image: a man, suffocated to death with a plastic bag, his feet bound to a radiator, his hands tied to a heavy piece of furniture.

Charade continued to be broadcast once every three years or so, a network stand-by to fill those long programming dead zones on Saturday afternoons, and watching it became a ritual: at the appointed time, we convened in our mother’s bedroom (where the television was), on her waterbed, and waited for Charles Lampert to get tossed from the train.

I understand why Charade is one of her favorites: it stars Cary Grant (one of her favorite actors) and Audrey Hepburn (one of her favorite actresses), wearing couture by Givenchy (one of her favorite designers) and being pursued by James Coburn (not one of her favorite anythings but totally freaky as the tall, sadistic Tex).

I sometimes wonder, though, if there’s something more in her affection for it. For instance, it may be something she first saw in Vietnam before we came to the States. (My mother, conceivably, could have introduced it to her; she loves Audrey Hepburn too, particularly in Roman Holiday.) But, really, I suspect that it has to do with the clothes.

My sister has always been a clotheshorse, she has an unerring eye for style. She knew an arcane language of designer names long before they had penetrated the popular consciousness: Kamali, Versace, Gaultier. In her room, she had an array of cosmetics in colors harvested from prehistoric insects, and she was meticulous in their application. (Today, whenever I see a woman apply lipstick directly from the tube to her lips, I want to pull her aside and say, Meet your best new friend, the lip brush!)

She taught me the ways of fashion: she steered me away from Z. Cavaricci when it was all the craze in high school (“Their zippers are made of tin! They’ll rust shut.”). She introduced me the invisible line that aligns the shirt buttons and the pants zipper. She told me to always wear a belt if I was tucking in my shirt, unless I was wearing suspenders, and never a belt and suspenders.

Her clothes, hermetically sealed in dry-cleaning bags, still crowd the closets (including a good chunk of my closet) back in Colorado. Many haven’t been worn in decades. On my last visit, I thought about donating the more obviously out-of-date duds to Goodwill, but realized that it would have given her a nightmare similar to what Audrey Hepburn endures early in the film: rushing through the house, opening the closet doors, only to find the drawers empty, the hangers swinging forlornly in the breeze. All those beautiful clothes: gone, gone, gone.

#56: The 39 Steps

(originally published Sept. 2, 2010)

Towards the end of The 39 Steps, our dashing hero (with his equally dashing moustache) demands to know, “What are the 39 steps‽” But before the respondent can complete his answer, he’s shot. Not that the answer has much meaning anyway: the 39 steps are nothing more than a Hitchcockian MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin, as Hitchcock explains, is “the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” It’s the code for which people will kill. It’s the computer disk that a hero must retrieve or protect.

Though the primary purpose of the MacGuffin is to drive the plot forward, I think it also serves a second, more existential role. The MacGuffin is necessary to stave off despair.  A hero’s travails must have some external meaning (to preserve the secret British airpower, to expose the bad guys, to fall in love with the hot blond) to be consequential. As much as MacGuffins give narratives their shape, it also gives on-screen lives their significance.

If only real life provided MacGuffins as easily.

Over this last weekend in Wilmington, there were two shootings, both unrelated, both about 10 blocks from our house. The quality of the neighborhoods in Wilmington, like most urban cities, varies drastically from street to street. When Matthew and I go on recycling strolls (picking up stray cans as a form of exercise), we see the differences immediately. To our north is Baynard Boulevard, with its grand houses and manicured lawns. Very few cans there. But if we go south past Jefferson, the streets grow increasingly dingy. I oftentimes see an object and think, Should I touch that without a Hazmat suit? The cans here are long 40 ouncers, with some variations of the word ‘Cobra’ or ‘Ice’ emblazoned on it (sadly, completely unrelated to the Southeast Asian aperitif of iced cobra liquor).

Our street (21st) is relatively quiet, a mix of families and younger professionals, with very few problems. Occasionally a rumble comes down our street—a mass of youths hooting and hollering and aching for a fight, but our across-the-street neighbor, Sharon, quickly puts the kibosh on that. Her rolling out with her wagging finger is enough to dissipate any trouble.

But these fights have their own MacGuffins (a stolen boyfriend, an insult), but the shootings don’t have a readily-available narrative. A woman shot in the back. An 18-year old. A robbery, a random event; nothing is there to help make sense of the crimes.

This evening, after the sun had set and as the sky approached near dark, I took 39 steps from my street towards 31st Street, where both the shootings took place. I only made it halfway down the block—not far enough to put myself into harm’s way, and yet not far enough to distance myself from the fear that people are killed for no reason whatsoever.

#55: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

(originally published Aug. 25, 2010)

In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino ruminates on five “qualities or peculiarities of literature” that he holds dear (he died before he finishing the sixth memo). The first quality, ‘lightness’ (leggerezza), describes not frivolity, but a nimbleness—with story, with language—that makes the gravity of the world easier to bear. “Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness,” Calvino writes, “I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to… look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.” For Calvino, lightness and weight are two indivisible sides of the same coin; the presence of one does not necessarily indicate the absence of the other.

As an example of this, Calvino cites Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel, he writes, is “a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of [Kundera’s] hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be.” According to Calvino, Kundera “shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight.”

The film maintains this delicate balance, veering from erotic comedy to serious relationship drama; from a gritty political realism to a satire of Soviet totalitarianism. What’s the best way to equilibrate Juliette Binoche’s debilitating paranoia? Stellan Skarsgård’s ass, of course! I’m not sure what about the Czech Republic invites this mixture of light and weight (Calvino also mentions Kafka in his memo), but the film captures this mood visually: early on, Prague appears vibrant and thriving; later, dilapidated and confining.

But perhaps this reflects Prague itself. When Matthew and I traveled there in 2008, the film’s landscape ran in reverse. On the bus ride from Ruzyne International Airport, Matthew noted, with a look like he’d just bitten into a licorice jellybean, the Soviet-style block housing zooming by. But once we arrived in the Old City, Prague had become fantastic (in the classic definition of the word). As one of Matthew’s colleagues described it, “Disneyland done right.”

Nothing, though, encapsulated the heady interplay of weight and lightness better than the changing of the guard at Prague Castle. As with any quasi-military ceremony, it was performed with the formalized dignity of a Viennese waltz (except with bayonets and sabers). The guards wore powder-blue uniforms, a tri-color herringbone cord looping around their shoulders and disappearing between the buttons of their jackets. They marched gravely and lined up in formation, each soldier stretching out his left arm to ensure the proper distance between him and the next. One held a flag embroidered with the words Pravda Vítĕzí, while, from windows overhead, a military band played—trombones, tuba, snare drum.

The solemnity was leavened, however, with the knowledge that those uniforms were not of strict military origin; instead, they were designed by Theodor Pistek, who won an Oscar for his costume work on Amadeus. And though the soldiers paraded themselves with the utmost solemnity, I sensed that the soldiers knew that what they were really did was less a military necessity and more a show for the throngs of tourists crowding outside the gate, snapping pictures and reveling in the ceremony, and I sensed that beneath their po-faces, they put some extra lightness in their steps for our benefit.

#54: For All Mankind

(originally published Aug. 9, 2010)

Americans who watched the moon landing talk about it as a moment they’ll never forget. They remember every detail: how old they were, the television on which they watched it, the room in the house where it was playing, what their mothers had made for dinner that evening. Very few moments in American history achieve this mythic status, and most that do revolve around tragedy: Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s assassination, 9/11.

But the moon landing heralded something different: the world had woken from a dream and discovered that it was true. For All Mankind, with its images of the Earth from space, of astronauts at play, conveys the kind of marvel the idea of space travel must have in the late 60s.

Alas, being born until 1974, I came late to all that. Much of the awe had been lost to history and progress. Everyone remembers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, but who remembers the second team to summit Everest? Besides, once you’ve watched one countdown, you’ve seen them all.

My sixth-grade teacher tried to re-excite us about space travel. Halley’s Comet, after all, was returning.  She assigned the whole class to write reports on the comet. I researched how the comet has been seen, throughout history, as an omen: Mark Twain, for example, was born on the day it appeared in 1835 and died on the day it next appeared. On black construction paper, I drew diagrams of ‘Why solar winds matter!’ and renderings of what the comet would look like head-on.

When my academic rival, John, used appliqué letters to make his report look like a newspaper, she held up his report and exhorted us all to do the same. Further proof: once something has been done, the second time just isn’t as special.

But in the grand scheme, Halley’s passing seemed inconsequential. I stared into the night sky, searching for where it should have been. But the ambient lights in Aurora were too much for such a distant light. If I saw streaks in the night, they were more likely to be planes flying into nearby Stapleton airport than a comet that I wouldn’t see again until I was 86 (if I was lucky).

In any case, Halley’s Comet paled in comparison to just a month earlier—I was sitting in class, doing busy work designed to keep students quiet for minutes at a time. Our principal came over the Intercom. Solemn and gravelly, he announced that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. The silence in the classroom extended outward over the whole school. No one knew what to say. We looked each other, and then at our teacher, who was never in the running to be the first teacher in space, but we could imagine her, in that moment, as Christa McAuliffe.

Later in the week, I asked my father, who was teaching for Denver Public Schools at that time, if he would have gone on the Challenger, even knowing that it was going to explode; space travel would never again seem safe, filled with wonder. But without hesitating, my father answered, Yes. In a heartbeat.

#53: Sanjuro

(originally published Aug. 7, 2010)

Chris, my college boyfriend, once paraphrased Winston Churchill to me: “If you’re not a liberal by 20, then you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by 40, then you have no brain.” He was mocking my political passion, the type that comes when you’re in a safe environment away from home.

I don’t recall what the exact issue was: most likely something minor, such as my refusing to eat a ‘fun-sized’ Crunch bar because I was boycotting Nestle for its baby-starving practices (never mind that their chocolate tastes like candied wax). But Nestle-denial was only one of many causes that I had taken up as an undergraduate: gay rights, reproductive rights, racial equality, preservation of the environment, workers’ rights—I knew I had to do something, but not exactly what that thing should be.

In that way, I was like the one of the young samurai in Sanjuro: idealistic, class-bound, and rather bone-headed. The meetings with my fellow liberals could have been a scene right out of the film: the group of us, deep in thought, each person pacing in his or her own direction. We didn’t have an older, wiser mentor (like the titular hero himself) to guide us, but we did get the occasional old Baltimore hippie popping into a meeting to see what was up.

When you’re young, everything seems like a cause for a march, a protest, a rally—idealism is the province of the young. I became an expert at making banners with large brush markers, spacing letters out legibly and evenly so that the last few words weren’t crammed together. But being a 1990s radical was very different from being a 1960s radical. There wasn’t the Vietnam War to unify the disparate groups; we’d had 30 years of progress; Clinton was in office and he was doing a pretty good job overall. Sure, racism and sexism and homophobia still reared their ugly heads, but no amount of chanting was going to eliminate them, no matter how well-lettered my signs were.

I wasn’t losing my fervor—but it was changing.  In the fictional years between Yojimbo to Sanjuro, Mifune’s ronin transforms, as well. Sanjuro no longer hacks up the bad guys with glee; in the latter film, he’s more circumspect about violence, as if he’s realized that there’s more corruption in the world than his sword can excise. But, nonetheless, he fights on.

Now, four years shy of 40, there’s still nary a conservative bone in my body, and from what I’ve heard, Chris_ himself hasn’t become conservative. (And if anyone was destined for Log Cabin-style craziness, it’d be him; consider: he’s a commodities broker living in New York City, he’s half a month older than I am, he’s an asshole.) Injustice still rankles me, and if it appears that my liberal zeal has abated: don’t be fooled. I know what my nineteen year-old self didn’t know: how to pick my battles.

Also, I still don’t eat Nestle chocolates.