Never saw this video until today, but when I was a kid someone tried the “helping trap” on me and I blew him off. It was scary as shit, and even though I knew it was a trap, I simultaneously hoped that the guy found his lost dog.
It may be terrible timing, but it is nonetheless time.
I am going to leave my current job. Since this is a small company and I have some personal regard for my boss and thus for the success of his business, my hope is not to storm out of here or state a forceful two weeks’ notice. Instead, I want to sit down and tell him that I’d like to give my two weeks’ notice, but I am also aware the company is in a delicate position and might suffer from abrupt personnel changes right now, so I’d like to negotiate my departure from the company with him.
I’m extremely nervous about doing this, although I have little reason to be. Earlier this year, my boss gave me four hours of notice before going off the grid for thirty days and I was left to run the place entirely on my own. As a private investigator, he values honesty above all else, and I know he would appreciate me telling it like it is instead of trying to sugarcoat things for him.
I’ve been unhappy in this job for a very long time for various reasons, but have stayed since it feels like such a family. I work for a married couple, after all, the Big Sister tendencies in me have built a loyalty, for better or worse, to this place. But unlike those who share my genetics, these are people I can actually leave.
I just want to do it right. Respectfully. Truthfully. With an intact reference, and without throwing things into chaos (which is what the previous office manager did by quitting abruptly a little over a year ago).
Also, I’m totally nervous, and in a weird irony-less patch of possible delusion, I’m looking to a group of people I’ve never even met, on the internet, for reassurance.
And then I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with some rambles about a Motown song or something, regardless.
I think it’s great to engage with art in any possible way (okay, maybe not engagement with a hammer), but it is kind of weird to casually photograph content in order to have evidence of having seen it. Doesn’t that compromise the actual experience of Being There? Or maybe, over time, we’re just developing new definitions of experience.
I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium back in May, and the very delicate and romantic exhibit The Secret Lives of Seahorses (in addition to almost every other exhibit in the place) was downright ruined, exploited, horribly horribly unenjoyable due to how many people were taking photographs all over the place, flashes on, crowding each other, and so forth.
The last time I went to the Legion of Honor, there was a similiar outbreak of photography, but that was significantly more understandable. For people who don’t hit up museums very often, it’s cool that they can take a quick snapshot of a painting or sculpture they like and be able to access it later. However, it certainly ruins one’s Being There artistic contemplation to have flashes going off and electronic sounds echoing in the halls. So who should win? Which type of art audience is allowed to dictate the environment in which the art exists? How does that intersect with the already existent class issues in art, which is itself attempting to incorporate the increasingly everyday existence of certain technologies?
So many questions, Sarah. Thanks a lot, now I will never be able to concentrate on work.
Ever read White Noise by Delillo? “The Most Photographed Barn” - what exactly is it you are photographing, and all that. :)
Last night I watched a movie called Swept Away. Or, Swept Away … By An Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. Or, if you want to get SERIOUS, Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto. Intense already, right?
Well, this movie is hopelessly going to be known as the 1974 Italian film that was remade into something starring Madonna and this other guy whose name escapes me, but who is apparently the son of the guy who played the same role in the original? That seems a little perverted, actually. The existence of the remake is, as with most American remakes of foreign movies, always unavoidable. (I heard someone in a video store say the other day, “Have you seen this? It’s the Spanish Vanilla Sky.” I did not even like Vanilla Sky, nor have I seen Abre Los Ojos, but I still wanted to punch that lady right in the face. Don’t even get me started on when they change the endings and stuff, ala The Vanishing or Insomnia. Anyway.)
I don’t see how this movie would work without the furious Italian dialogue. People can yell very well in many languages, I’m sure, but by the end of the first five minutes I knew that it just could not be the same in another language. Or with another actress. Man, she made me want to hit her, I spent so much of the movie just waiting for when she was going to shut up, and I’m sure a good contingency of the general audience felt the same way, which automatically puts us on the side of Gennarino, at least for awhile.
Although this movie seemed very straightforward at the time I watched it, curled up in bed alone, tucked under the covers, I have spent most of this following day teasing out its possible meanings and layers. It is unavoidably intriguing. I understand that the director and screenwriter, Lina Wertmuller, was a well-known feminist and leftist, and that just makes me think MORE things. I would not want to ruin the plot of this movie, even as its own cover makes it evident.
Needless to say, two tanned half-naked Italian people end up washed ashore somewhere and it gets sexy. But it also gets violent and scary, but it also gets tender and insightful? What the hell movie, just give me something I can easily grasp! That last statement being a compliment, of course. There is an unbelievable amount of ambiguity at play for what seemed like a straightforward film at the time. We would have to pick just ONE thing to discuss to start: sex, or love, or politics, or money, or desperation, or even religion. There’s a lot, dammit. And they all blend together, leaving an attentive viewer with a lot to say. I wish I had another viewer to discuss it with instead of online message boards with comments from six years ago that quickly derail into weird yelling.
My general feeling about this movie is that it is not about love, though its characters profess it to be. It seems to be more about two people who are either personally or situationally unable to understand or experience what love really is, as they are both missing some component of deepest honesty with themselves about who they are. I am, at this stage in my life, convinced that being able to experience and express love requires a certain amount of self-knowledge and expression of that knowledge. Simply being stranded and then consistently elated by orgasmic chemicals while in a slavery/prostitution situation in a subsistence lifestyle doesn’t seem to count. Or perhaps, to moralize, I don’t feel like it should count.
Although Gennarino and Raffaella both speak of how things should be, or how they started, or ideas such as being the “original man and woman,” I don’t think that advocacy of this regression is best, regardless of how sexy it is. Whatever passion or understanding these characters reach on their deserted island dissipates quickly, or is rendered irrelevant, when even the possibility of being rescued presents itself. Something about each character appears to be revealed during the course of the film, most obviously that each of these hard-bitten characters has something soft and tender on the inside, some shape of themselves that requires love or attention, but those revelations are not carried back to the mainland, I don’t think, not in any way that matters.
It is in this way that it seems obvious we’re dealing with characters who are no more than puppets that Wertmuller can use to teach us something about, well, everything. The intersections of money, power, sex, and love. I cannot profess to know her intent, but I know that what I saw was a film about two people broken beyond the ability to love OR (if you want to interpret the film as the two of them actually finding love) the inability to believe in its transformative power. With all the attention paid to politics and class division, it is tempting to say that they are divided by their own circumstances, and that the larger power structures are what destroy the possibility of love. However, that seems to let them off a bit too easily, as much of an apologist as I am. Each side of the haves and have-nots is missing something - that would be the broadest and kindest way to interpret them, if we are to see them as human beings and not thematic instruments.
I remember a high school teacher once saying (in jest?), “Poor people cannot love.” He said it simply and truthfully, he challenged us to include the demands of money when we consider what it is we call “love.” It is this phrase I keep coming back to when I think about this movie. But instead of using it to try and determine if the rich, or the poor, characters were experiencing true love, I am searching for the nugget of truth I can insert into the hypothetical non-monied situation. What is “poor” or “rich” when no money is changing hands, and does it still create the same idea of love? The capable man can feel it, but the powerless woman cannot? Is love condescending or sacrificial?
It seems it is neither, or that each person involved (depending on what they already have or don’t have) defines it differently. It’s this gap in understanding, created by differences in gender, class, or politics, that needs to somehow be bridged, and I think Wertmuller may be hinting that sex, although basic, fundamental, primitive, instinctual, and FUN, is not the way to do it. It is only a temporary fix, and doesn’t provide a path to changing the larger structures that create the problem in the first place, not without accompanying dialogue, not without living in truth.
I am reminded also of the bell hooks book I read recently wherein she describes the difficulty early feminists she knew had with espousing feminist principles in the bedroom. Their ideology was all in the right place in their minds, but between the sheets it fell apart and patriarchy stepped back in. It seems that, as human beings, not as apes and not as hyper-mental aliens, we need both sides, the physical and the verbal (since isn’t that what really separates us?) to work in unison if we hope to create some kind of love that is equally pleasurable and fulfilling to both the haves and have-nots. Sex is only one part of it, a strong and intoxicating part, but certainly not the whole picture.
Maybe I like August because it’s an easy way to mark looking back, due to it being near the beginning of school and all. I still remember that it was in August that a boy in high school said he loved me and to never forget that. I have since forgotten the impact of those words, but for some reason remember that it happened in August, probably the 18th. So, in honor of that totally arbitrary thing, and a ton of self-focused spare time at work, let’s look back on the Augusts of the past.
August 2002: About to head off to Berkeley, decided it was perfect timing to tell long-time platonic friend that I had a crush on him. I think Patty had urged me to do it before leaving for college, and though she was probably right about the timing, it would have been better had I not decided to do it over AIM. Ah, high school. What stupid stupid times. I remember that whole summer, though, with this weird anticipatory dread mixed with apathy mixed with a shit-ton of hormones and this sense that everyone in college would laugh at me for getting through high school while remaining a virgin.
August 2003: Got through the first year of college in one piece, and was just wrapping up the Greatest Summer of All Time, which it has steadfastly remained through many summers. In the first week of August, I was able to drive a golf cart for the first time, at the country club across the street from Seth’s house, with Sarah hanging onto the back of it desperately. We were “kindly asked” to leave the premises after I veered off the paved path due to alcohol-induced bravado. It was an excellent time! That was the summer I worked for Cutco, and Clear Star Pictures, and Campaign California! or whatever. I still use the pocket knife I got from Cutco, I still put Clear Star Pictures on my resume, and I recently received a check because I was automatically part of a lawsuit against Campaign California, as they broke some labor laws. That was the summer I met some weirdo with a Caesar haircut at a dive bar in Los Angeles who insisted I listen to his band’s demo tape and called me incessantly for a month or so afterward. Spent a lot of time with some dubious characters in general. Spent a lot of time on the phone. Went dancing a lot. Good times.
August 2004: Post-stroke. Was spending my time back in Berkeley renting documentaries and smoking a lot of pot. I got a job at Ned’s Bookstore, and would go to it while high. Also had a job at a head shop, strangely never went to that job while high. I reread American Psycho this month, maybe the last time I read it in full. My boyfriend at the time was always working during the day, so I spent a lot of time listening to classical music and staring at myself in the mirror. I watched whatever came on public access television, including some fantastic programs like Classic Arts Showcase and Squirrel Wars! Despite it all, I was deeply depressed, still trying to come to terms with invisible disability and shit like that. The constant classical music and crossword puzzles were nice, but to the rest of the population I was merely a hermit.
August 2005: Still primarily focused on pot, reading, and being a hermit. Became entranced by the way trees looked when strong wind was blowing through them. Attacked fantastic criminal literature for the first time, and also went ahead and read Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, it was a good one. I was reading all of the books for classes I hadn’t started taking yet, and thus the classes were horribly boring and I thought my classmates were idiots. This is not different from any other year of schooling. I discovered a box of old photographs and realized I had more photos of my pets than of my friends, but that’s okay. This was the month I realized my boyfriend did not like musical theatre whatsoever, and it was heartbreaking. I freaked the fuck out a lot during this month, but it was still good. I lived in my first San Francisco apartment and watched a lot of Gilmore Girls reruns. I had a pet rat named Dipstick who was very wily.
August 2006: Had suffered a nervous breakdown, reneged on a new lease with the boyfriend. Went on a road trip, dumped old boyfriend, came back to town and had new boyfriend within 24 hours. I was living in Berkeley again, stuck in the dorms for awhile before finding an adorably overpriced converted garage studio tucked into this woman’s back garden. Was already upset with the new boyfriend, but was thrilled about embarking into the World of Swinging. Had started meeting creepy and not-so creepy types over the internet, and at the same time I was so interested in my new sexual ideology, I had neglected to heal from previous relationship and was wandering into dangerous waters with the new one. I discovered a lot of new music at this time. I didn’t smoke pot anymore. I was a senior at school and ready to be done. Raccoons crawled over my skylights in the middle of the night.
August 2007: Had strep throat, but also went to Colombia! First trip out of the country to see the wedding of my boyfriend’s wife’s brother, because my life was one big interesting story at this time. I mysteriously bled out of my mouth a lot, but I was in a gorgeous country and had a gorgeous time. I was living in downtown San Francisco, in some kind of barely-legal apartment with no windows and communal bathrooms. The space was huge and I watched a ton of fantastic films projected onto a bare wall. I rarely saw the sun. I was okay with that. I still traveled to my job in Berkeley, which I really enjoyed and still miss. I had a good time, most of the time, everyone thought I was very interesting and exciting. The first week of this month, though, was aaaall Colombia. I could have had a better time if I’d gone with someone else, but it’s too late to change that now. I no longer speak to the now ex-boyfriend, but I do speak to his wife, who is designing a dress for me.
August 2008: Had split with that boyfriend a few months earlier, life was instantaneously better because of that. Was using more social networking sites than ever, having joined OkCupid, Twitter, and Tumblr. Blogged more. Tried to be friends with ex boyfriend, but he disagreed with too much of what I was doing with life. I flirted a lot. I slutted it up. I was able to say, “I’m with the band” for the first time, regarding a band that was actually good, and with the implied meaning of “I’m fucking the drummer” actually being true. The drummer was great in bed. I got a promotion at work. I had a room of my own. I met more people over the internet during this month than I have between that month and today. I met my current boyfriend, but made sure to sleep with the drummer again before things got official. I spent a lot of money, started regularly having wine with dinner, and everything was gravy.
So far, August 2009 is also fantastic, with only minor ups and downs. If all goes according to plan, I’ll lose my job and have a good reason to kickstart life again. Also, this job is kind of stupid, even if I do get a bottle of whiskey in the mail every so often.
I have been wanting to watch Breaking the Waves again, but don’t have anyone I trust to lock up all the sharp things in my house until I’ve calmed down and stopped crying after the ending.
Yesterday, my boyfriend was on a crowded bus in San Francisco. His foot bumped up against that of a teenager, who was riding with his sister. The teenager took this as an excuse to start yelling at my boyfriend (let’s call him Steve, as that’s his name). Steve, a former professional boxer, does not take kindly to being yelled at, but did not take any physical action against this teenager. At one point, the teen started yelling, calling Steve “a motherfucking nigger” repeatedly. Steve’s immediate reaction was a bit of shock, as he was extremely offended by the use of such a strong word in a crowded and cramped public “area.” Steve, who is white, glanced around the bus and saw people of various ages and races not responding to this slur, which was repeatedly being yelled at top volume. Steve’s only response was to tell the teenager that it was “classless to use that language in front of all these people,” to which the teen responded, “If I want to call you a motherfuckin’ nigger, I’m gonna call you a motherfuckin’ nigger - I’m Puerto Rican, bitch!” Etc.
This yell fest hit some kind of a fever pitch and the only way that I was involved was that this incident is all Steve could talk about all night and the following (this) morning. He was very upset about how no one said anything about the offensive language, and it made me think about if I would have said anything. Maybe. But I wouldn’t have been the first. I would only echo a statement of disapproval from someone else. I have been riding buses in San Francisco for a long time, and god knows that kind of shit that happens on the bus. It’s a mess, it’s confusing, and it’s violent surprisingly often. I assume most people are like me - you board the bus, find a place to stare, and just lock into that little space like it’s the only thing in the world, hoping you can get to work/school/play before you succumb to overwhelming misanthropy, paranoia, or claustrophobia.
Steve has started a dialogue in his own corner of the internet, asking why this happened, and has not been able to drop the topic for even a moment. The overwhelming feeling I’m left with is one of deficiency. And I wasn’t even on the bus! Who knows what I would or would not have done, had I been with friends or with a boyfriend, or what. I’m not sure.
This train of thought spiralled into a place that has made me see that my priorities are heavily “selfish,” which is to say I truly believe that all worthwhile change comes from within. Rather than use that belief as a weapon to divide people into an “us” and “them” of “rotten inside” and “willing to change on the inside,” I instead spend a lot of time meditating on my own emotions, their roots, and possible ways to harness their power without their negativity. Yes, there is a nice cushion of class and race that allows me to do this with my time instead of being consistently confronted with prejudice. But I have my issues and they’re legit - finding ways to honestly and fairly deal with them is how I believe I will become a better person, both on my own and in social situations.
I am just left wondering a couple of things. One, if you were on that bus, what would you have done? Or, have you already been in such a situation and done something, or not done something? And, this is where the concept of balance comes in: when you encounter an injustice, which you recognize as an injustice, that falls outside your realm of priorities (that is, it’s far from an issue that consumes the majority if not entirety of your energy), do you encounter some kind of inner conflict? Do you waver, question yourself, change? Or what?
And finally, do I sound a bit insane in this post, or just insecure? (Hooray for the internet!) ?
