Remember, Remember the 17th of September

For some indescribable reason (my reasons for these things often defy description), I was immediately bummed out by the visage, pants, and lankiness of this morning’s substitute yoga instructor. Since Dana, with whom I practiced too briefly, returned to the east coast, I’ve been adrift, looking for the flow yoga instructor who inspires me to get over my uncomfortableness with the idea of even having a practice to speak of and, well, go with the flow. I suspected this guy would not be him.

He spoke with an inscrutable accent that I guessed to be mere affectation or the product of life as a military brat, dragged from post to post, picking up a lilt here and a dropped consonant there. I found it to be a little annoying. When he off-handedly mentioned that, on his first visit to Occupy LA, he had expected to see a bunch of strangers but instead found only familiar faces, I appreciated the connection to something I respect but doubted his motives: is he trying to impress us?

I can be pretty judgmental of individuals–sizing up motives and weaknesses like a lioness deciding whether to mate with a male or sic her pride upon him. So its surprising–even to me–that I have never shared the skepticism many on both the left and right harbor about the Occupy Wall Street movement. While I have identified with it from the beginning, I’ve never felt an overwhelming desire to pitch my yellow North Face tent (a prized possession) on the lawn of Los Angeles’s City Hall. I’ve visited a number of times, wandering through the maze of tents and signs, peering into the library and kitchen tents; one weekend, I even served granola to a line of Occupiers, all sleepy-eyed and grungy and spirited and hungry. I’d call myself vaguely connected to the movement. I follow along on Twitter and think about it daily and occasionally donate a box of granola and carton of soy milk. I’m certainly no expert.

Which I suppose makes me an expert, given the spirit of the movement.

I’ve scrutinized the efforts–both earnest and contemptuous and always quixotic–to define this movement and discuss its shortcomings and attributes. The constant clamoring chorus desiring a single, clear, articulable goal or single leader to emerge from Occupy have missed the point completely. And so my effort here is not to add to that particular chorus, though I’m inevitably doing so simply through the very act of writing about it. I suppose I only wish to add another voice to the rhythmic beat of individual voices, to discover what this movement has meant to me and how I can participate in a chorus of a different kind–one that encourages all ideas to have a voice, one that can drown out the cacophony of talking heads that wish to add more noise to the same old paradigms.

I see the Occupy movement as an effort to bust through binaries, the oversimplifying of nearly every aspect of American life into black/white, either/or. Some of the most idiotic attacks on the Occupiers have gone after those involved in it as hypocrites, claiming that mere consumption of corporate goods somehow undermines any questions one might raise about any corporate behavior, no matter how insidious. These people claim: you can’t have it both ways.

The Occupiers gleefully retort, with chants and drums and signs and the People’s Mike: Why not?

It is the People’s Mike, in fact, that I regard as the fundamental characteristic of this movement. Traditional lefty protest–which this both is and is not–tends to be identifiable by its leaders–those who hold the megaphone, which, by virtue of its being the property of someone lends to a hierarchy of ownership and signifies a sort of bureaucracy that mirrors the bureaucracies these movements so often push against. But early on in the Occupy Wall Street movement, an effort to silence the protest–to strip it of the megaphone–strengthened its core principal: everyone has his or her own voice, and everyone has the right to be heard. This perfectly responds to the confusion about a singular message: there is, through this device, a singular voice, but this voice has an endless number of speakers. There is no ownership of this voice, no ability to turn it off, and no dominant rhetoric nor ideology. It is the voice of the individual and the voice of the group. It is not neither nor both.

This exploding of binaries helps to explain the conundrum of consumption. Another popular image of the Occupy movement has been the Guy Fawkes mask. Of course, the history of Fawkes himself dates back 400+ years; however, the mask’s roots lie in the pages of Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. But the image adopted by hundreds of protesters, who are fed up with the monolithic control forced upon them by a government and corporatocracy that are an intertwined massive symbol of oppression, is most readily tied to the film version of the graphic novel, released in 2006 by mega-super-conglomerate Warner Brothers and written/produced by the duo then known as the Wachowski Brothers–a monicker that is no longer used, as Lana (then Larry) Wachowski is a transgender woman. The layers of this historical/written/drawn/filmed image are so vast and tricky that peeling them back is like counting grains of quicksand while standing in it. So if the People’s Mike provides the character of this movement, this mask is its perfect symbol. It’s not necessary to go into the history of Guy Fawkes or the general symbology of masks as a tool–these things are understood easily enough. It’s the mediated layering of experience that is most compelling.

The adoption of undeniably Big Media iconography as the “face” for so many largely anti-establishmentarian protesters provides a glimpse into why one can both be and not be a consumer of corporate content and goods. The perceived dichotomy between corporations and anti-corporate sentiment is one of the many ways in which we can underestimate the complexities of our lives. While the talking heads of news show hosts/guests and politicians consistently strive to stand firmly on black and white talking points, we all know this dichotomy of ideas to be a canard. Nothing is black and white. Nothing is simple. Things are complicated and messy–the gray spaces are where real insight occurs. And so a generation that has been brought up on media imagery cannot simply reject that imagery as a form of protest. This movement co-opts from everything and everywhere: the placards and signs of previous movements, the images of the political protests of imagination–like the one staged in V, the philosophies of those who came before, recycling the ideas (as young people always do) of Marx and Bakunin and Nietzsche and Rawls. But there are new things too–the incessant drumming, the universal leadership (such a brilliant way to avoid scapegoating and martyrdom), the tents.

The tents.

From early October, when tents only sparsely occupied the City Hall lawn.

If Guy Fawkes masks provide the perfect symbol–all layered with the medium and the message and the metaphor and the moment–the tents provide the movement’s central imagery. They are the physical embodiment of Occupation. Tents provide a sense of place–they are stable and constant if not permanent nor impenetrable. They both are and are not a home. With tents, the Occupiers have solidified what is perhaps the single most cohesive message of the Occupation: public space, public access, and public ideas are essential in a democracy.

To dig deeper into these ideas, I think we need to consider geography, space, and some heady French dudes–most notably Lefebvre and Foucault and Baudrillard. I’ll leave the latter two alone in this piece, though within their (often nearly impenetrable) works lie clues to the bones of this movement’s anatomy, if not the sinew and muscle. Lefebvre, however, will get his moment. In a discussion of class hegemony, he writes:

Hegemony implies more than an influence, more even than the permanent use of repressive violence. It is exercised over society as a whole, culture and knowledge included, and generally via human mediation: policies, political leaders, parties, as also a good many intellectuals and experts. It is exercised, therefore, over both institutions and ideas. The ruling class seeks to maintain its hegemony by all available means, and knowledge is one such means. (10)

If we replace “ruling class” with “The 1%,” something begins to take shape. And I don’t think The 1% is merely defined by financial wealth. Many who fall into the quantifiable distinction of the 99% balk at the idea that economic inequality has led to a corporatocracy in which ideas are divided into binaries of To and Not To or Buy or Not Buy, and there are those who are of the economic 1% who understand that these binaries help to limit choice, opportunity, and freedom. But the symbolic 1%–as practiced by a far larger segment of the population than that mere 1/100th–is this hegemony that wishes to control both space and conversation–both “institutions and ideas.” In recent weeks, for example, we’ve seen institutional power exercised through the use of police who attempt to divide Occupiers from the spaces they occupy (cops function as a form of mediation–the medium through which the hegemony, both political and corporate, sends a clear message). The Occupation, on the other hand, succeeds most as a completely new model–a society in which the free exchange of goods and ideas are marked by the ownership of things (iPhones for Twittering and tents for sleeping in) and the not-ownership of anything (a donated library, donated food, the People’s Mike). And the embodiment of these various ideals–as vast and diverse as those who espouse them–is seen in the embodiment of public spaces all over the country and the world. Zuccotti Park, myriad city halls, parks and campuses–these are merely places, no more singularly significant than one person’s voice or ideas. It is not the place that matters–it is the space and the people who occupy it.

And I think this movement has impacted the way many Americans understand space. Edward Soja, jumping off the insights of Lefebvre, identifies a Third Space–the breaking down of binaries to create a space that is both inhabitable and conceptual, “an ‘in between’ position along some all-inclusive continuum” (60). This Third Space produces an open alternative that is “both similar and strikingly different” (61). In the language of the Occupation as I understand it, this is where the tattoos of movements past layer over and under the inking of a new conceptualizing of the meaning of a movement. If there is a dominant hegemony (is this even an “if”?) that wishes to bifurcate all of our experiences into easily digested either/or poles, then the only way to re-imagine our lives in a completely different way is to live inside our paradoxes–we are consumers and revolutionaries and media whores and adbusters. In order to survive the complexities of a world that is constantly–and wrongly–being whittled down into easy-to-market pieces, we have to embrace the confusion and revel in a lack of understanding in order to truly understand. Or, to draw again from Soja, the Third Space occupied by this movement is perhaps “distinguishable from other spaces (physical and mental…) and a transcending composite of all spaces” (62). If some of us–through conversations about tents and parks and public spaces and what they represent–begin to even conceptualize this sort of non-binary understanding of ourselves and our place in the worlds of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, media, and poetry, then this movement has already succeeded in altering the dominant conversation in some fairly profound ways.

As it always is, today’s yoga class was a journey, one I’m always happy to be on, in spite of legs that shake in the warrior poses and spaghetti arms that battle through each chaturanga. But I have my strengths, too–the ability to lay my belly on the ground when my legs are splayed wide to the sides or to fold into an odd pretzel, arms clasped behind my back, legs creating a helix in front of my head, which is firmly implanted near my crotch. Like all yogis this new guy encouraged us to venture as far into the poses as we could, or desired to, listening to our bodies and adjusting for the particularities of the day. There’s a clear line from this sort of yogic thinking to the Occupy movement–there is no one size fits all, and the search for enlightenment is individualized and shared, singular and universal. And, despite my own penchant for applying theories and philosophies in order to comprehend ideas in a measurable way, perhaps it’s often best that some ideas defy the ability to reason with them, forcing the thinker to dig deeper and deeper (…breathe into the pose to take you deeper…), revealing and refuting and re-imagining and renewing. Some things are best left inscrutable because scrutiny leads to being “pinned and wriggling on the wall” like the existentially doomed Prufrock, measuring life with coffee spoons. Or with price tags. Not everything should be so easily quantified.

By the end of my yoga class, I had somewhat warmed up to my new instructor. Despite his unplaceable accent (I knew Dana was from Maine the first time I met him, having gone to graduate school with a man who had the same strange accent, marked by a sort of geographically-specific speech impediment) and impossibly pointy elbows, shoulders, and knees, he kicked my ass a little bit, and I respect that. After class, a fellow practitioner, clearly as curious as I, asked the yogi where he comes from. He chuckled, obviously having been asked before, and responded, “I’m from Cleveland.” Now that was not the answer I expected.

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Be True to Your Soap–It’s Better Than That Other Crap

So I gather today is the day that ABC tosses aside decades of soap history and replaces it with a rag-tag crew of people talking about things that 20 other shows are already talking about. Of course, it’s about the money, not the conversation, and ABC will save tons of it even if this foray into boredom is a relative failure. Goodbye Erica Kane and All My Children, hello chat show creatively named The Chew (get it? They talk while they eat food–The Chew!).

But I hope it’s a complete failure–the kind that makes the suits (mostly male) reevaluate their choice to dismiss and disenfranchise generations of (mostly female) viewers, albeit in dwindling numbers.

Soaps ain’t Shakespeare. We all are well aware. Even at their best, they’re not the best thing on TV (General Hospital will never be Mad Men). But their narratives allow viewers and creators alike a unique opportunity to participate in lived stories over time. Even The Simpsons can’t compete with the longevity of a single soap. Perhaps most significantly, soap opera is a genre aimed specifically at women. There’s been a load of discussion about whether this is a good or bad thing throughout the years; however, it is nonetheless the case. In a media landscape where women are treated as a second-class audience, soaps add a for-better-or-worse alternative to perpetually pandering to men.

Now, of course, we can go back and forth regarding whether soaps are simply a ghetto for “women’s stories” filtered through the male gaze–and I think that’s a pretty valid argument. But we cannot dismiss that they, with their interwoven narratives and elephantesque memories, play a significant role in the history of ecriture feminine…whatever that means. Furthermore, we cannot deny the impact of the stories and families and valid discussions of topics like HIV/AIDS, sexuality, and rape (sometimes bungled horribly, see re: Luke and Laura; and sometimes handled deftly with the benefit of long-term impact that we could never get out of a mere season of TV). What’s more, these stories create a framework over time–a way to consider how these discussions change. While a ripped-from-the-headlines episode of a show like Law and Order seems ridiculously outdated within six months of its original airdate, soap stories build over decades, revisiting and re-imagining their own histories in order to change with the times. Characters and narratives evolve. Of course, an argument can be made that, where women’s issues are concerned, soaps can be downright reactionary, but the discussion is happening in more or less real time. We can reject the soap approach to women–that aforementioned male gaze–but we cannot negate the movement of this discussion through time and space. Soaps provide a benchmark with which to measure progress, even if they often lag behind in progressing.

Luke and Laura's Wedding in 1981 drew 30 million viewers

Lastly, we rarely give soaps their due when it comes to the way they’ve influenced prime time TV. Some viewers simply balk at the melodrama of the woman-who-was-shot-by-her-husband-with-a-bullet-that-was-meant-for-her-lover-while-giving-birth-to-their-child (yeah, this happened), but they forget to look at the tapestry–the design behind the drama. The mega-popularity of Luke and Laura on General Hospital in the early 80′s infiltrated TV at all levels, and, by the end of the decade, TV had transformed from A/B story one-offs (picture the A-Team and the freeze frame ending) to complex worlds in which viewers are trusted to follow a dozen characters over multiple seasons (ergo Mad Men). The pedigree that brings us The Chew is far less prestigious.

In fact, The Chew and its ilk, overtly striving for a female audience, take a step backward from soaps. They make no effort to legitimize women as intelligent viewers; rather, they asks far less of them in the way of participation, memory, and interaction. There is no narrative–topics are fleeting. Of course, I haven’t watched The Chew, but I’ve watched The View, which is insipid to the point of being offensive, and, since ABC is positioning this new show as more fun and less hard work for the audience, I’m guessing it’s an intellectual coma zone.

In light of all this daytime navel-gazing, I for one want to see the remaining soaps pull through this low period. As troubling as soap operas can be, I do not necessarily wish to live in a TV world without them. Sadly, however, this seems more and more inevitable. If and when the end does come, I think–on the balance–the media landscape for women viewers will be a less interesting place. Perhaps soap operas do add to a sort of media ghetto into which “women’s stories” are deprioritized by a male hegemony, but their absence will not create space for new, dynamic stories aimed at women. Their loss will just leave a void.

Luke with Luke and Laura's offspring, aptly named Lucky and Lulu

A Not Completely Ungrateful Letter to the Members of the Academy

Dear Emmy Voters,

I’d be a total moron to look a gift horse in the mouth. You honored Margo Martindale, who, more than any other performer this year, earned the statue you gave her. You didn’t allow affection for Steve Carrell (I mean who doesn’t love Steve Carrell? He’s delightful!) to overshadow the strength of Jim Parsons’s work on Big Bang Theory even though he won last year (really, all this shows is that, even in a crowded field of talented guys, his work rises above).

Lastly, you–gasp!–honored television’s most human show with two significant awards: one for writing, and one for acting.

So here goes: gift horse, mouth.

Maybe last year would have been a better time to give Friday Night Lights its due, providing an Emmy-fueled boost into its fifth season, perhaps driving it forward to a sixth. Again, I’m not complaining. Not too much. I’m just sayin’.

Because the truth is, the world is a better place when Coach, Mrs. Coach, and the Dillon Lions/Panthers are in it.

Your friend,

Mr. F.

Torchwood Is Totally Queer

Over the course of the past month, Chereth and I have watched every episode of Torchwood. It started innocently enough with a geeky summer Dr. Who fling. But once we met Cpt. Jack Harkness, a handsome, polyamorous immortal friend of the Doctor’s, we wanted more more more. This led us to the darker, dirtier, deeper spin-off.

On the show, Torchwood is the name of a secret British alien-hunting agency, and the branch in Cardiff, Wales, monitors a time rift through which all sorts of gnarly beings slip. Pause: yes, I said Cardiff, where both Dr. Who and Torchwood are/were filmed. But the rift and the aliens and all the sci-fi hullabaloo are what make the show genre, not what make it queer.

And the fact that Torchwood is unapologetically queer–decidedly and uniquely so–is what makes it stand out from most, perhaps all, other shows on television.

There have been plenty of gay shows. Cue The L-Word. And there are shows with gay characters on them, but Torchwood is queer, not gay, and it’s queer at its core, not as a side concern or as a backdrop for humor.

The queerness of Torchwood comes right back to Cpt. Jack, who defies labels. He’s already immortal, and therefore less concerned with what people may think of him than a mere mortal might be. His affections are neither traditional nor particular: he’s been around long enough that love and loss are tied up in one big (sometimes depressing) shag fest. In one notable arc, Buffy‘s James Marsters, with his usual swagger, shows up as one of Jack’s exes, adding a certain amount of star power to Jack’s myriad escapades. Jack’s a downright slutty guy who’s lived thousands of years, so a lover must have to be pretty stand out if he doesn’t want to be forgotten.

Certainly, as Torchwood moves through its four seasons, Jack notably has more men in his bed than women, though the show never worries about defining his sexuality. He speaks of boyfriends past, and we know he was married to at least one woman, but these are accepted as tales of a life well-lived. No one dwells on what it means to be bi-sexual or gay or any other thing: Jack is just queer, and this is celebrated nonchalantly.

In comparison, American television, even the best of it, tends to define its characters’ sexuality, noting who is gay or lesbian (the most typical), bi-sexual (only occasionally), or transgender (quite rare); on this side of the pond, we love to draw attention to our own open-mindedness, betraying, of course, a sense of othering. What is so truly queer about Torchwood is its ability to exist comfortably in a queer space. Jack’s snog sessions with Torchwood’s dapper guy Friday, Ianto Jones, are not differently defined from those between Gwen (the show’s other main character) and her boyfriend/fiance/husband, Rhys. What’s more, it’s not just Jack who leaps across the traditional barriers of sexuality: all but one of the show’s central characters has at least one same-sex snog. And that’s just season one.

Quick side note: if you Google “Captain Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones” and click on the image gallery, what you will find, in addition to various photos of the two locked in sweet embrace, is a smattering of photos in which bois and girls photograph themselves dressed as Jack and Ianto, recreating iconic moments from the show. In terms of Torchwood‘s queer reach, this is thoroughly compelling. Clearly, these two are not merely identified as a gay couple (Ianto, in fact, clarifies to his sister that he’s not necessarily gay–he’s just all about Jack) but as exemplars of queerness–categorically impossible to categorize, emulated for their ability to pass through binaries rather than be defined by them.

Now back to the show.

In season four, the U.S. happens, and things get a bit gayer.

In the show’s fourth season, which just wrapped a dual run on Starz and the BBC, Jack and Gwen go stateside when everyone on earth suddenly becomes immortal–and Jack Harkness is suddenly just a man. The American influence is keenly felt when Rex, a new addition to the team played by Mekhi Phifer, drops various comments about how Jack is gay. Suddenly, Jack has to defend his sexuality through jokes–for example telling a paramedic to take good care of his “boyfriend,” Rex. While it is understandable that some vestiges of homophobia are realistic in macho American society, situations like these whittle away at the accepted universe of Torchwood in which there are aliens and rifts in time and boys who like girls who like boys who like boys who like girls. In Torchwood of old, the aliens were the Big Surprise; the queer folk were just your every day human beings. In Torchwood: Miracle Day, aliens are only a passing part of the conversation, but Jack’s gayness, as he is now portrayed as almost solely interested in men, is part of what reminds us of his difference–the last mortal, a man out of time, and gay. What once made him human–proof that he was flesh and blood though, perhaps, a bit more “innovative” (according to Ianto) than others–now is a mark of his difference. And, while Miracle Day is an interesting story, I found myself missing my Jack Harkness–one not so set apart, not so easily defined by external perceptions.

The most standout episode of Miracle Day was penned by Jane Espenson, perhaps television’s greatest ringer writer. You need love and angst and sex and blood? Bring in Buffy and Battlestar Galactica alum Espenson. She’ll up the stakes, bring the funny, and deepen the emotion. There’s really no one better, and the episode detailing the sad and chilling tale of Jack’s 1927 affair with a newly immigrated Italian man, Angelo, who struggles with his sexuality and Catholicism, really delves into the complexity of Jack’s circumstance. Ultimately, though Angelo has to confront his own upbringing and feelings of difference, it is Jack’s immortality that he cannot accept. Honestly, I was missing Jack through most of Miracle Day. His presence had diminished, his flirtatiousness muted, his queerness tokenized. This episode, the season’s 7th of 10, is the first real, complex, and messy reminder of what makes Cpt. Jack Harkness so extraordinary–and so damn human. Hint: it’s not because he shags guys.

Which all leads to this: It’s not yet clear whether Torchwood will be back for another season. I hope it is. And if it does return, I hope it gets back to Torchwood Cardiff, where being queer does not make a person any more different than being Welsh does. But, if it does not return, I hope that Torchwood takes its rightful place in TV history for changing the conversation from one of binaries–in which all people are coded as gay/not gay, minority/not minority, attractive/funny looking–to one that celebrates the great primordial stew that is humanity.

Coming Out Party

Every few years, let’s say 8 or so, there’s a spate of movies starring the We’re-Gonna-Be-Fucking-Big newcomers. Many of them have been building their oeuvre for quite some time, but, in a moment that resembles a flock of South Pasadena parrots taking flight in a flash of green, these actors march into the season and shove aside the previous class, declaring their “itness.”

This is one of those summers, and it’s a pretty exciting crop, actually. Every movie I’ve seen this summer provides a shining example of tomorrow’s people. The actors who are destined to be the Big Comedy Star, the Big Action Star, the Oscar Regular.

First, there was Thor–a somewhat slight film that is surprisingly better than it should be an yet not as good as it could be–starring that Chris Hemsworth, who is destined to grace screens in the coming years as that Ridiculously Charming and Handsome Guy who’s ridiculously, unbelievably, unspeakably tall and buff, and whose eyes are unnaturally blue.

Then there was Bridesmaids, the season’s entry in the “Duh, we’ve been here all along” category. This is Kristen Wiig’s moment. Those who called her too odd or skinny or goofy or old to be a Big Comedy Star (rather than a small-screener) just ate their words. And she brings with her a number of women who have also done their time on the tube, particularly Melissa McCarthy. They now get to chant: “We’re here, we’re funny, now get used to paying $14.50 for it!”

Next came X-Men, First Class, which is an embarrassment of tomorrow’s riches. Forget that a few stars in this treasure trove have already racked up a “starter” Oscar nod–it’s the future nods we’re all waiting for: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence (Hunger Games!) are all poised to dominate the red carpets in the next few years. This bunch (add in Nicolas Hoult, who will star in the new Bryan Singer/Christopher McQuarry re-teaming) was clearly cast in an effort to gather a gaggle of talented unknownish actors with bright futures, a choice that earns the award for This Summer’s Brilliant Move.

Lastly, we have Super 8, which is less notable for all those new kids (this is less a coming out for this group, aside from Elle Fanning, than it is an amuse bouche) than for the appearance of the small screen’s Kyle Chandler, proving once and for all that doing time on a brilliant-but-not-watched TV show can yield a big screen payoff. Sure, he garnered an Emmy nomination last year for his fantastic work on Friday Night Lights (shame on you if you have not watched it), but his appearance on the big screen solidifies his post in the pantheon of go-to actors who play sympathetic dads. And Elle Fanning, with her giant, knowing eyes, will cause you to cry out: “Dakota who? That chick’s a has-been.”

So keep your eyes on the big screen this summer. It’s clearly a time for the type of discovery that leads to meteoric rise and ends in inevitable under-whelmingness. Enjoy the ride.

Where’d Club Sauce Go?

Took a little hiatus. I’m somewhat sure this blog is considered dead, buried, and forgotten.

And yet I’m sort of in the mood for a good resurrection. Who’s in?

Rubican’t

I get that even a cable netlet that shepherds excellent-but-ratings-challenged shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad can’t be expected to stand behind the severely under-watched Rubicon, which averaged something like a dismal .4 share in its first season. Still, this smart, subtle program will be dearly missed.

As much as anything else, this was a show about architecture–the building up and breaking down of postmodern angles; the intertwining of people with space and the way that insularity can cause even a brilliant character like Will (James Badge Dale) to wear blinders; the machinations of design built by the scheming-and-evil-yet-strangely-likeable Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer); the sparsely populated, antiseptic and cubist world of Kal Ingram (Arliss Howard). Rubicon was as sharp as its angles, as circuitous as the halls, stairs, bridges, and roofs that inhabited each episode. Some viewers found its pace sluggish, its lack of revelatory materials to be frustrating. I’d say they missed the incredible ability this show had to pull back and reveal complex personalities rather than simple twists and turns. It, and its admonishing of the corporate/government web that drives American political realities, will be sorely missed.

You’ve Got the Look

I think it’s time for a refresher up in this bitch. I’ve been absent. This is a somewhat general state of being–busy with things that I love but are of the world outside, not of the world inside. I wanna jump start my heart, you know? So maybe a new theme will offer inspiration. It’s not quite as sunny as the last, but more stark and assured. I also might occasionally move away from the themes of media and pop-culture just a bit. Not that those aren’t exceptionally important to me. Just that there are other things, too; I should stretch out a bit, dabble.

I’m writing this from a coffee shop in Portland. I’ve had so much coffee today that my heart is racing a bit too fast, and my head is a bit too light. It’s an odd but familiar sensation. It’s about 100 degrees outside–hotter than it’s been all summer back home in Los Angeles. I’ve always had mixed feelings about this city–even when I lived here 14 years ago. It’s so…livable. Coffee shops and bars on every corner. Everyone has a bike and a dog. All the food is organic. It would be so easy to be lulled into a friendly state of ‘alright’ here. But there’s so much whiteness and the rain leaves the city scrubbed clean and this unreal quality makes me uneasy. Like in a David Lynch film, there are unseemly things hiding under the roses. There must be, right? I’m incapable of believing in a Caucasian Valhalla such as this.

It’s nice to be away from Los Angeles, where it never rains so the dust and car exhaust just build up, a gray film that covers anything not dripping with the kind of resources that allow for excessive scrubbing. The smog is sometimes so thick that the mountains retreat behind a yellow curtain like something out of Tennessee Williams. Poverty chokes families because they lack jobs, services, and affordable housing. The diversity is downright Benetton, but the racism is systemic–it’s in our schools, our health care, our food options.

But over the last ten years I’ve learned to love my city. The possibilities are endless, and it’s always changing–sometimes even for the better. My city will never grow complacent. It will never settle in and say: “This is good. I like it as it is.” This evolution–which sometimes goes wildly awry–is fundamental to being an Angeleno, and, though I’ll always be a Detroiter, I’ll always be an Angeleno, too. As I get older and more set in my ways, I can hardly bear to imagine myself settling anywhere else because other places allow for settling; Los Angeles eschews going gently into that good night and attacks its many mistakes and occasional victories with the vigor declared by one of its great sages, Warren Zevon: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

Yes, I’m One of THOSE People

I’m not going to see Avatar. I have myriad reasons for this choice, not the least of which is that I think James Cameron makes hollow movies that are overly long, stunning to look at, and dangerous to the concept that substance is as significant as spectacle.

But that’s not really it. “It” is that, when it comes to this movie, I’m one of those people who presumes she knows what the film’s problems are without having seen it–I’m one of those who I typically hate, those of knee-jerk assumptions.

So I’ll be clear. I’ve seen the blue figures gracing the cover of my Entertainment Weekly; I’ve read the reviews; I’ve heard tell of the pathetic writing and over-simplified content, and I’m a little worried. The Navi (is that right?) are clearly a mix tape of indigenous peoples with the braids, the necklaces, the outfits. Their portrayal–even in the context of advertising–smacks of romanticizing what was, those people who were better because they were purer, simpler, less, you know, white.

And this scares me. Prejudice is a slippery beast–hatred develops from ignorance, a lack of understanding that over-simplifies the complexity of human behavior. Perhaps more dangerous, however, than overt hatred is misguided reverence. When people are romanticized as knowing the secret to more utopic life, there’s nowhere to go but down–the reality will obviously be a disappointment.

So I keep hearing–over and over and over–that Avatar is a blue Dances with Wolves, and, because I find the myth-making of the American Indian in the latter movie to be so troubling, I cannot bring myself to see the former. Yes, these blue folk are the product of one man’s imagination and not an historic reality, but they are symbolic of a huge problem–the romanticizing of native peoples. Most of all, this habit, which is so linked to white guilt and a subsequent seek for redemption, feels like a has-been. It is a trope developed by the baby boomers, an important step on the way to more complex critical understanding of the interplay between native and interloper. Truth is, I’m unlikely to see Avatar because I feel like I’d be stepping into a time-machine, giving my 2010 dollars to a film that is easily 30 years past its relevance regardless of its futuristic visuals.

Demented and Sad but Social

For the four years that spanned the early mid- to late mid-eighties, John Hughes defined me. I was always a little younger than his characters—when Samantha Baker turned 16 in the spring of ’84, I was 11. By the time Keith and Watts graduated in ’87, I was just about to begin my own high school years. For those of us who waited in line outside the local theater to see the R-rated Breakfast Club at 12-years old with our moms or squatted on the floor in front of the front row to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—twice, I give you this gushy revisiting of the movies that defined a genre as well as a generation.

Sixteen Candles (1984)

The first of JH’s teen films also defines his affect on the zeitgeist—a direct response to the silly plotless comedies (think Porky’s) that characterized teens as punchlines, but not quite as brutal as Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Samantha Baker was Every Girl—a sophomore enamored with the hottest senior in school, a dorky, braced freshman puppy-dogging her every move—she was the insider/outsider that we all could identify with. While other films gave us distinct types (the brain, the athelete, the criminal), Sixteen Candles gave us pedestrian. Sam was, like most 16-year olds: completely regular. And her conquest of Jake Ryan (even despite the unfortunate panties incident) gave the rest of us regular girls a little hope that we could be noticed, too. We just had to live with being a little less funny than the teens in Sam’s world.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Definitely the most serious of Hughes’s teen films, The Breakfast Club is in some ways his most indelible. While Samantha Baker was perfectly normal, the five teens in this movie were the ultimate outsiders—spending the Saturday at detention with a bitter principle who had lost all ability to identify with the students who were his charges. Even the insiders—the jock and the princess—were outsiders, cultivating a simulated identity in order to appeal to their peers and parents. The five teens in The Breakfast Club were types that became individuals over the course of a day trapped at school, and, for those of us who saw types in our own schools (even if those types were slightly different or blurred), we began to understand how similar we all were to each other.

Interesting side note: at my high school, there had been a crew of asshole jock guys called the Rat Pack. They actually did things like tape nerds’ buns together. The group was in its death throes my freshman year, and, by 1988, they were pretty much gone, leaving our high school with less-defined group demarcations (there were still cliques and still assholes—they were just less organized, more rogue groups). I contend that The Breakfast Club had something to do with this permanent shift at many schools.

Weird Science (1985)

Hughes loved nerds. He was one, after all. The bra-headed adventures of Gary and Wyatt gave us Hughes’s most gonzo and light teen movie, a welcome break from all the angst we had to face in his previous outing. In his third film with Anthony Michael Hall, he clearly trusted his young protégé with broader comedy, and he rewarded the nerd with the girl. However, the movie’s most memorable character is Bill Paxton’s Chet, Wyatt’s military dillhole of a brother. Torture from an older sibling (this is Hughes’s only film that goes this route—most of his characters have younger sibs) is most definitely an unforgettable teen trope, and the broad ridiculousness of Weird Science allows for Chet to get his comeuppance in the form of transition into an alien blob—now if that’s not an obvious metaphor, I don’t know what is.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

The last teen film directed by Hughes is also in some ways his most successful. Equal parts teen disillusionment and high-concept comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off does not dwell on external teen politics; its focus is existentialism. Adults, some sympathetic and some not, have no clue how complex and intelligent the teens that surround them really are. But, despite the grandeur of its intentions, the movie never gets mired down in the philosophy it espouses. Instead, it has fun. And as viewers we enjoy the ride—particularly the parts in which obsessed principal Ed Rooney is tortured for his juvenile behavior while our teens behave as semi-thoughtful adults.

Pretty in Pink (1986)

Hughes handed over the directing reigns to Howard Deutch with this outing, and the effect is obvious. While Pretty in Pink explores all the traditional teen themes, it is more a collection of fantastic moments and songs than it is a successful film. However, Duckie serves as the first crush-worthy nerd (so much so that Hughes had to write another film where the loser wins romance to rectify the mistake of giving Blane—Blane!—the girl), and there are, as always, a slew of quotables. It’s amazing to watch this film now and think that we all wanted to dress like Ringwald’s Andie, who resembles a grandparent’s couch cover. But Pretty in Pink is like that—it is a collage of indelible memories set to, let’s face it, the most awesome soundtrack ever. If The Breakfast Club inflenced high school politics around the country, this movie changed the music we identified with, giving the loser punk types the leverage we would use to take over (and quickly help corporatize and ruin) radio in the early 90’s.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

Also directed by Deutch, this movie is a total mess—bad editing, bizarre story gaffes and other rookie stuff. It feels like it was rushed through the pipeline and slapped together with duct tape. It is also the Hughes film I have watched the most, warping two VHS copies before DVD ever existed. This is Hughes’s most punk rock script—where the typical high school assholes are footnotes in celebration of outsiders. Even the object of Keith’s affection (there’s no limit to the love I felt for Eric Stoltz as a teen), Amanda Jones, is an outsider, posing with the rich kids in a vain attempt to make it through high school with as few bruises as possible, getting seriously bruised in the process. While Hardy Jenns, Amanda’s popular boyfriend, remains unchanged throughout the movie, his counterpart, the punk Duncan, gets to grow and change, proving that he’s a standup guy under his tough exterior. However, there was nothing more dear to a young punk girl-in-training than Mary Stuart Masterson’s Watts, the tomboy drummer that, after all the heartbreak and pain, gets her man. This movie, for all its demonstrable faults, proves that a strong friendship between freaks is a much better foundation for true love than raw attraction to a great pair of legs.

Though such awesome Hughesian films as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Christmas Vacation, and Uncle Buck deserve attention all to themselves (particularly Uncle Buck, which is as good as Hughes’s best teen films), it is the above six movies that became a coming of age mantra for Generation X as it birthed its way from adolescence to adulthood. When we were, in our heyday, described as alternative, slacker losers who would never do as well as our parents (raised in the 50’s on poodle skirts and perfection) had, we could look at these movies and grin, knowing we—whether The Criminal, The Princess, The Brain, The Athlete or The Basket Case—did the best we could with what we were given.