Last night Sue and Enrique took me to see Evening. I wanted to see Live Free or Die Hard. Sue,girlunraveling, posted a real cool critique of the film last night, which pretty much says what I would have said about it. The screenplay is from a book by Susan Minot, but Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours, co-authored the screenplay and so I think we were expecting something edgy and discomfiting, rather than a feel-good movie. Instead, we got Vanessa Redgrave dying beatifically, with her beautiful long hair feathered over the pillows and her weeping middle-aged daughters saying things like "There's so much I still want to say to you." Like Sue writes "This movie is not about living hard, but about folding softly back into the earth." (We should have gone to see Die Hard!) The movie tries to subjugate our fear of death through the worst kind of high-kitsch sentimentalism. What struck me most about the film was how all the "feelings" were cast against such opulence and financial well-being. The musician boyfriend says at one point his band is "climbing up from dumps to dives..." and that's supposed to be all boho and arty-like. But you're never far away from the idea that after he learns Toni Collette is preggers he can slip back into law school or a job with the family business.
Now that I'm officially pushing 60, I feel like I have the right to brood upon how we die in this culture. My suspicion is that everybody daubing kleenex to their eyes last night, as well as everybody reading this post, is going to die under florescent lighting in a room painted lime green, with paid strangers standing around and every tube in the hospital stuck up their asses. Sue cites Strether from The Ambassadors as a counter example to Meryl Steep's little homily about how, after all, there are no mistakes. I will add another voice to that, Alan Arkin's advice to his grandson in the back of the family van in Little Miss Sunshine (a film also about death that is everything this one is not):
Fuck a lotta women!
NOT ONE WOMAN!
A LOTTA women!
Here, you get a sense of a life closing down around somebody who wishes he had made different choices, or at least that he had caught a different set of breaks. There is a sense of horror, loss, futility -- what Faulkner would call "abnegation and denial" -- and in the face of all this you still you get affirmation, tenderness and love. The beauty of Little Miss Sunshine lies precisely in its hardness and its willingness to hurt its audience.
Mike O'Donahue, one of the guys who took the Harvard Lampoon to the National Lampoon, and one of the founding writers for Saturday Night Live, once put out a spoof called "Let Me Show You How to Write Good!" In it he suggests ending every story with the line "Suddenly, they all got run over by a truck." Evening is a movie where you just wait for the truck.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Fitness Boomers
The current issue of Muscular Development (Yes! One of my great guilty pleasures is reading muscle man magazines!) has an article on how Gold's Gym has sold out its musclehead base in order to extend its market to soccer moms and fitness dads. I think the Gold's near me, off Donald Ross Road in Jupiter, is a good example of what the expanded demo looks like. You see lots of lycra spandex, lots of people humping the treads over-working the cardio deck. You see lots of middle-aged men with fragile egos using bad form to lift weights that are way too heavy for them. There are four leg press machines, but no hack squat; the cambered bars don't fit to the preacher benches, and the free weight area is way too small.
But, really, and with respect to the editors of MD magazine, its also a place where the body builders and the fitness crowd get along pretty well. There is always a problem with bad manners in a big gym. Nervous women carry big straw bags around with them, and try not to look at themselves in the mirrors, young kids pop each other with towels and jump in the way of people lifting dangerously heavy weights. And my favorite! -- dubbed "towel boy" by my workout partner Chula -- the guy who comes in at the busiest time of the day and wants to do a circuit -- (you know, like they do at Planet Fitness and Curves) -- and who drapes towels over three or four machines to hold them while he works around the circuit. This bullshit you get in any gym.
So the whole idea of a betrayal of its original body building demo raises the question of what a gym is for. Personally, I don't mind sharing the space with doughy middle aged men who say things like "Well, I just wanna be fit!" and guys who come in on Friday nights to pump up their club muscles. In fact, I've always felt a little duty-bound to try to make everybody feel comfortable in the gym.
In the early eighties I worked out with my wife Deborah, who had been an acrobat with me in the circus. We were in very good shape from the circus, and became running boomers worked out together until injuries took D out of the game. In those days, the gyms were beginning to cater to the "jazzercise" crowd. Richard Simmons was just getting started, along with Jane Fonda's Workout, and Olivia Newton John's "Physical." I remember stretching out once with a bunch of hard-on marathoners, while this young kid was "warming up" to some disco beat only he heard. As the rest of us pushed our heads down to our knees and looked at one another with the dignity of serious runners who were going to knock out a five or ten-mile run, this kid was popping his fingers and saying "Yeah!" to himself, and shaking his ass on his little rubber mat.
I thought that kid was stupid. But I was wrong. And in fact the whole "jazzercise" thing got people into the gym who never would have gone there without it. In that regard, the contempt that muscleheads feel for the "sweating to the oldies" -- "aerobic striptease" -- and my favorite "Tae-Bo" is misplaced. The overweight soccer moms and pudgy dads, the dumb fuck kids and the needy idiot with the comb-over cheating up way too much on the dumbell curls are all on the right side of the gym door and deserve respect for getting there. I think even the editors of MD would have to admit that the rise in body building, along with all the panic about steroid use among the citizenery, is due to a kind of success that the old Pumping Iron culture could never have produced without its Richard Simmonses.
That said, since they're making so much money with their expanded demo, the people running the Gold's franchise might consider producing a 30-minute tape for all new members to view on gym etiquette and safe techniques. If you're going to bring initiates through the door, you might consider you have a responsibility to socialize them and to help them get the most out of the experience for which they've paid in advance.
But, really, and with respect to the editors of MD magazine, its also a place where the body builders and the fitness crowd get along pretty well. There is always a problem with bad manners in a big gym. Nervous women carry big straw bags around with them, and try not to look at themselves in the mirrors, young kids pop each other with towels and jump in the way of people lifting dangerously heavy weights. And my favorite! -- dubbed "towel boy" by my workout partner Chula -- the guy who comes in at the busiest time of the day and wants to do a circuit -- (you know, like they do at Planet Fitness and Curves) -- and who drapes towels over three or four machines to hold them while he works around the circuit. This bullshit you get in any gym.
So the whole idea of a betrayal of its original body building demo raises the question of what a gym is for. Personally, I don't mind sharing the space with doughy middle aged men who say things like "Well, I just wanna be fit!" and guys who come in on Friday nights to pump up their club muscles. In fact, I've always felt a little duty-bound to try to make everybody feel comfortable in the gym.
In the early eighties I worked out with my wife Deborah, who had been an acrobat with me in the circus. We were in very good shape from the circus, and became running boomers worked out together until injuries took D out of the game. In those days, the gyms were beginning to cater to the "jazzercise" crowd. Richard Simmons was just getting started, along with Jane Fonda's Workout, and Olivia Newton John's "Physical." I remember stretching out once with a bunch of hard-on marathoners, while this young kid was "warming up" to some disco beat only he heard. As the rest of us pushed our heads down to our knees and looked at one another with the dignity of serious runners who were going to knock out a five or ten-mile run, this kid was popping his fingers and saying "Yeah!" to himself, and shaking his ass on his little rubber mat.
I thought that kid was stupid. But I was wrong. And in fact the whole "jazzercise" thing got people into the gym who never would have gone there without it. In that regard, the contempt that muscleheads feel for the "sweating to the oldies" -- "aerobic striptease" -- and my favorite "Tae-Bo" is misplaced. The overweight soccer moms and pudgy dads, the dumb fuck kids and the needy idiot with the comb-over cheating up way too much on the dumbell curls are all on the right side of the gym door and deserve respect for getting there. I think even the editors of MD would have to admit that the rise in body building, along with all the panic about steroid use among the citizenery, is due to a kind of success that the old Pumping Iron culture could never have produced without its Richard Simmonses.
That said, since they're making so much money with their expanded demo, the people running the Gold's franchise might consider producing a 30-minute tape for all new members to view on gym etiquette and safe techniques. If you're going to bring initiates through the door, you might consider you have a responsibility to socialize them and to help them get the most out of the experience for which they've paid in advance.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Better off dead poets
For a while now I've been reading with interest the posts from my colleagues in the teaching profession at a new blog called rateyourstudents.blogspot.com. This site was generated in response to some of the rate your professor sites out there, and has become the teachers' equivalent to www.bitterwaitress.com. Its a place where the teaching professionals can dish out some of what they've been eating all year, and where we can bitch about our students and our lot in life.
What has surprised me about the blogs there is the level of vitriol and impotent rage they express. Teachers call their students "little darlings," "petulant punks," "little snots," and this surprises me. Somebody wrote in that the counter job at Starbuck's was beginning to look good in comparison to her teaching job. I thought, "You've never had to work at Starbuck's, have you, dear?" Trust me on this. Coffee shop service, food and beverage service, is harder than what we do. A lot harder.
I think a lot of the bitterness on this site comes not because the students we teach are little shits (although many of them are: but so what, they're the students, they get to be shits); rather I think it is because of the way our profession fits into all the self-contradictions and myths we deploy just in daily life. On the one hand, we think teaching is the highest of all professions; on the other, we think that those who can't do, teach.
This all makes me want to start a study of how teachers, teaching, and especially English teachers, get represented in the movies and on television. Sally Kellerman comes out in Back to School and reads Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, moaning like she's coming until Rodney Dangerfield jumps out of his chair and joins her with a "YES!" Who can follow a number like that? In the cold war cinema, professors, even English professors, wore their academic robes all the time, fussed with monocles, and often spoke with German accents. (Check out My Son John). After the sixties, English teachers are played by handsome sexy guys like Eric Roberts or Michael Nouri, with thick shocks of hair they constantly would run a hand through as they say, "Tina, your essay is lying! You'll never become a writer as long as you fear sex!" The remake of a classic film noir, Dead on Arrival, is set on a college campus where all the English faculty are novelists. "Your last novel had no fire in it! You're living off the first four books! You extinct volcano!" Even John Singleton has to give Laurence Fishburn a pipe and tweed coat to play the "black professor" in Higher Learning. In a recent episode of Law and Order the cops come into a classroom to arrest the English teacher for selling dope and fucking his students (It is ALWAYS the English teacher!), and as the door opens we hear a bit of in-class teaching. "Hamlet was a eunuch!" the teacher says.
The much venerated, over-worshipped Dead Poets' Society, with Robin Williams in a post-cocaine, back-on-his-meds mode presents possibly the worst model of what teachers actually do. High-charisma, always drawing the students' attention away from the text to himself; standing on desks, kicking soccer balls, and -- my personal favorite! -- standing behind a knot of awestruck school boys and hissing out the words "Carpe Diem" in a "redrum redrum" psycho-killer voice. People get so enthused by all this they hardly notice there is on real teaching anywhere in the movie, or, worse, that the cathartic moment of resistance and defiance to grumpy old Norman Llyod doesn't come until the students have already sold out not only their favorite teacher, but every principle he has been trying to teach them.
A couple of seasons ago an episode of a show called Boston Public wound up all pious and righteous by firing a high-school teacher who got busted by students in a sex chat room. "Look at me!" he told the principle who was bringing down the hammer. The teacher was a short guy with a comb-over and a pocket pencil protector. "I don't make any money and men who look like me don't get women. My only social life is on the internet!" "Yes," the principle told him, "But you're different. You're a teacher. You live by a higher standard."
And that, I believe, is where the anger comes from on the professors' blog site. By the time we meet our students our relationship to them and to our job is already overcharged with meaning that attaches to us from without. Teachers, to my mind, are most unforgivable and obnoxious when they mouth off about "standards." We share the world with Scooter Libby, but when it comes to flunking somebody out of college, we suddenly invoke some idiot and unreflected notion of "standards" that we think we represent. (There is a rather touching exchange about this on the blog site.) In fact, the whole idea of what stands, what is standard, comes around and bites us in the ass. I think that we all feel we live in a world that holds us both to a higher and a lower standard.
What has surprised me about the blogs there is the level of vitriol and impotent rage they express. Teachers call their students "little darlings," "petulant punks," "little snots," and this surprises me. Somebody wrote in that the counter job at Starbuck's was beginning to look good in comparison to her teaching job. I thought, "You've never had to work at Starbuck's, have you, dear?" Trust me on this. Coffee shop service, food and beverage service, is harder than what we do. A lot harder.
I think a lot of the bitterness on this site comes not because the students we teach are little shits (although many of them are: but so what, they're the students, they get to be shits); rather I think it is because of the way our profession fits into all the self-contradictions and myths we deploy just in daily life. On the one hand, we think teaching is the highest of all professions; on the other, we think that those who can't do, teach.
This all makes me want to start a study of how teachers, teaching, and especially English teachers, get represented in the movies and on television. Sally Kellerman comes out in Back to School and reads Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, moaning like she's coming until Rodney Dangerfield jumps out of his chair and joins her with a "YES!" Who can follow a number like that? In the cold war cinema, professors, even English professors, wore their academic robes all the time, fussed with monocles, and often spoke with German accents. (Check out My Son John). After the sixties, English teachers are played by handsome sexy guys like Eric Roberts or Michael Nouri, with thick shocks of hair they constantly would run a hand through as they say, "Tina, your essay is lying! You'll never become a writer as long as you fear sex!" The remake of a classic film noir, Dead on Arrival, is set on a college campus where all the English faculty are novelists. "Your last novel had no fire in it! You're living off the first four books! You extinct volcano!" Even John Singleton has to give Laurence Fishburn a pipe and tweed coat to play the "black professor" in Higher Learning. In a recent episode of Law and Order the cops come into a classroom to arrest the English teacher for selling dope and fucking his students (It is ALWAYS the English teacher!), and as the door opens we hear a bit of in-class teaching. "Hamlet was a eunuch!" the teacher says.
The much venerated, over-worshipped Dead Poets' Society, with Robin Williams in a post-cocaine, back-on-his-meds mode presents possibly the worst model of what teachers actually do. High-charisma, always drawing the students' attention away from the text to himself; standing on desks, kicking soccer balls, and -- my personal favorite! -- standing behind a knot of awestruck school boys and hissing out the words "Carpe Diem" in a "redrum redrum" psycho-killer voice. People get so enthused by all this they hardly notice there is on real teaching anywhere in the movie, or, worse, that the cathartic moment of resistance and defiance to grumpy old Norman Llyod doesn't come until the students have already sold out not only their favorite teacher, but every principle he has been trying to teach them.
A couple of seasons ago an episode of a show called Boston Public wound up all pious and righteous by firing a high-school teacher who got busted by students in a sex chat room. "Look at me!" he told the principle who was bringing down the hammer. The teacher was a short guy with a comb-over and a pocket pencil protector. "I don't make any money and men who look like me don't get women. My only social life is on the internet!" "Yes," the principle told him, "But you're different. You're a teacher. You live by a higher standard."
And that, I believe, is where the anger comes from on the professors' blog site. By the time we meet our students our relationship to them and to our job is already overcharged with meaning that attaches to us from without. Teachers, to my mind, are most unforgivable and obnoxious when they mouth off about "standards." We share the world with Scooter Libby, but when it comes to flunking somebody out of college, we suddenly invoke some idiot and unreflected notion of "standards" that we think we represent. (There is a rather touching exchange about this on the blog site.) In fact, the whole idea of what stands, what is standard, comes around and bites us in the ass. I think that we all feel we live in a world that holds us both to a higher and a lower standard.
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