Category Archives: girls

On Valentine’s Day

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Perhaps we might invent a holiday that torments single people and makes them feel isolated and alone. Wait, we already did that with Valentine’s Day. I think marriage was invented so that the vast majority of people would not have to worry about getting a date for that day, or not getting flowers, or not going dancing, or not giving away chocolates. The pressure is always on during the days leading up to Valentine’s Day. Single people are tormented by the endless parade of happy people, their flowers, their heart-shaped balloons, their romantic dinners, their Valentine’s Day cards. What if you don’t get any? And romantic music is like a stake in the heart for a vampire. For those lucky folks who find themselves paired up during the Valentine, the holiday in mid-February is a wonderful time to love stuff, but for those folks who have recently broken up with their significant other, every loving couple is only another reminder of their own loneliness and failure. Every Valentine’s Day party, every bouquet of roses, every couple dining in a romantic setting, is a reminder of their own solitary condition. This is supposed to be happy occasion, and for many people it is, but the irony is bitter, difficult to swallow because solitude is the only part of the human condition for which there is no solution, unless it be other people. I don’t know which part of Valentine’s Day I hate most–the stuffed bears, the bunches of balloons, the red, frilly hearts, the roses, the chocolates, or kissing couples. The clichés are not endless, but they are repetitive, and they are boring. People in love just make me sick. In another lifetime I might not have felt this way, but the years have tanned my hide, so to speak, and any romantic bone that I might have ever had has long since petrified, cold and unfeeling. Yet, this strange red and pink-hearted holiday is about an ideal after which most of strive at some moment in our lives. Our crushes, our loves, our obsessions all come home to roost on Valentine’s Day when we remember, perhaps ponder, our emotional attachments, the loves of our lives. What most bothers me about Valentine’s Day is how the multi-national corporations that sell Valentine’s Day have turned a sweet, emotional fun day into an out-of-control consumer nightmare of buying and splurging and spending. One is delinquent if one has not bought a diamond or chocolate or roses or lobster or mink or electronics or whatever. Since when is love about money and spending a whole bunch of it? I am often disappointed in my own culture’s inability to find meaning and value in something without attaching a monetary value to it. Savage consumerism has wrecked this holiday, and there is probably no way to save it from unbridled spending and uncontrolled materialism. Materialism is the dialectic opposite of love, which is a self-less emotional response to another human being. Things, stuff, can only get in the way, and are often the cause of so many break ups. Perhaps love can only survive Valentine’s Day when it is not controlled by a capitalistic market that is marked only by dollars and cents. Diamonds are not the solution to Valentine’s Day, but real emotion might be. Valentine’s Day, the way it is sold in stores, is fake, phony, a waste of time. Valentine’s Day really only exists in the heart, and that is the only place where it will ever be found.

On Valentine’s Day

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Perhaps we might invent a holiday that torments single people and makes them feel isolated and alone. Wait, we already did that with Valentine’s Day. I think marriage was invented so that the vast majority of people would not have to worry about getting a date for that day, or not getting flowers, or not going dancing, or not giving away chocolates. The pressure is always on during the days leading up to Valentine’s Day. Single people are tormented by the endless parade of happy people, their flowers, their heart-shaped balloons, their romantic dinners, their Valentine’s Day cards. What if you don’t get any? And romantic music is like a stake in the heart for a vampire. For those lucky folks who find themselves paired up during the Valentine, the holiday in mid-February is a wonderful time to love stuff, but for those folks who have recently broken up with their significant other, every loving couple is only another reminder of their own loneliness and failure. Every Valentine’s Day party, every bouquet of roses, every couple dining in a romantic setting, is a reminder of their own solitary condition. This is supposed to be happy occasion, and for many people it is, but the irony is bitter, difficult to swallow because solitude is the only part of the human condition for which there is no solution, unless it be other people. I don’t know which part of Valentine’s Day I hate most–the stuffed bears, the bunches of balloons, the red, frilly hearts, the roses, the chocolates, or kissing couples. The clichés are not endless, but they are repetitive, and they are boring. People in love just make me sick. In another lifetime I might not have felt this way, but the years have tanned my hide, so to speak, and any romantic bone that I might have ever had has long since petrified, cold and unfeeling. Yet, this strange red and pink-hearted holiday is about an ideal after which most of strive at some moment in our lives. Our crushes, our loves, our obsessions all come home to roost on Valentine’s Day when we remember, perhaps ponder, our emotional attachments, the loves of our lives. What most bothers me about Valentine’s Day is how the multi-national corporations that sell Valentine’s Day have turned a sweet, emotional fun day into an out-of-control consumer nightmare of buying and splurging and spending. One is delinquent if one has not bought a diamond or chocolate or roses or lobster or mink or electronics or whatever. Since when is love about money and spending a whole bunch of it? I am often disappointed in my own culture’s inability to find meaning and value in something without attaching a monetary value to it. Savage consumerism has wrecked this holiday, and there is probably no way to save it from unbridled spending and uncontrolled materialism. Materialism is the dialectic opposite of love, which is a self-less emotional response to another human being. Things, stuff, can only get in the way, and are often the cause of so many break ups. Perhaps love can only survive Valentine’s Day when it is not controlled by a capitalistic market that is marked only by dollars and cents. Diamonds are not the solution to Valentine’s Day, but real emotion might be. Valentine’s Day, the way it is sold in stores, is fake, phony, a waste of time. Valentine’s Day really only exists in the heart, and that is the only place where it will ever be found.

On smiling

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It seems that it takes, according to experts, lots of muscles to smile, but that babies learn to smile before they can even talk, imitating the faces that their parents make at them. I am no expert, but I think that trying to analyze what a smile is, exactly, takes all the sunshine right out of a smile. Perhaps the most positive sign of affirmation that anyone can receive is a smile: when we do something right, when we meet again after a long absence, when we need reassurance, when we wake up in the morning. We all smile for lots of different reasons: we are glad to see someone, we are feeling happy, we are getting exactly what we want, we want to reaffirm the efforts of someone else, we are euphoric, we are relieved, we are in love, we want to cheer up someone who might not be smiling. When I see others smile, it warms my heart even when I am not involved in the conversation. Seeing that someone else is happy, reaffirmed, right, creates in me a positive light in a dark world. With all the tragedy, chaos, and sadness that troubles our world (and has always troubled our world, let’s face it, we are far from perfect creatures), a smile is like a beam of sunlight on a cold winter’s morning when you know it’s not going above zero that day. A smile reaffirms the idea that this whole business of life is worth pursuing for a bit longer. Smiles are also sexy, and in the right situation, speak about desire, pleasure, love, longing, intimacy, craving. Smiles between a man and a woman are about more than anything that might expressed in words, and perhaps there are no words to express those kinds of feelings. Poets, philosophers, play-writes, mystics, barbers, bartenders, and theologians have tried to express the ideas and emotions behind the smile, but they have been at it for several millennium without getting it exactly right. What the smile communicates is complex, positive, and happy, and it’s happiness that illusive thing that we all pursue? In a world which often seems arbitrary, cold, and uncaring, a smile is often a light for a soul lost in the dark night of life. I would suggest that smiles, even when we are alone and only smiling to ourselves, are a sign of mental health, of an upbeat, positive view of the world. Of course, we have all seen creepy smiles on the faces of sales people, receptionists, and others who are paid to smile regardless of how they feel. I wonder if smiling actually helps them deal with tough situations (customer service, blech) in which those fake smilers must deal with unhappy and demanding and unsmiling folks who are bringing trouble–me, for example, when I have to take back a defective product. Could a smile be a shield against ill-will and anger? Does a smile defuse and angry heart? In the end, a smile, as opposed to a frown, seems almost to carry with it supernatural powers for healing, loving, caring in a world of frowns, of negative energy, of violence and chaos. So we smile at each other–non-verbal communication–and hope that the message gets across, but maybe a smile is not just a one-shot deal, maybe it’s a promise, or an ethos, or pathos, unwritten rhetoric of hope that cannot be truly expressed in words or any other verbal way. Maybe smiles are more about communication and less about words?

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it’s just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn’t seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother’s nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let’s skip that ugly detail. “My, grandmother, what big teeth you have.” ” My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure.” “My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!” Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother’s clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother’s cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy–the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life–sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf’s skins. That is all the wolf has ever been–a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.

On Little Red Riding Hood

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The story seems so simple, yet, of course, it is so complex. We read it to children, this horrifying story of violence and death. A wolf is loose, a wolf who can talk, and he is interested in eating Little Red. An odd name, that one, Little Red Riding Hood. Today, it’s just a red hoodie. The young girl does not have a name, not a real name anyway, and she lives in a rural area of farms and trees and isolated country cottages. She is carrying a basket of goodies to her grandmother, but of course her grandmother lives in a cottage in the woods, and by this we understand such things as fear, loneliness, and danger. After all, it is off the beaten path in the woods, and who knows what you might run into out there. Little Red is, of course, just a metaphoric player in this family drama about coming of age, sex, and awakenings. There is no talking wolf, but the wolf does eat grandmother, a tradition that doesn’t seem to alarm listeners, but it does scare me, being at times rather wolf-like myself. The most frightening part of the story is the conversation between Little Red and the wolf who has now put on the grandmother’s nightdress and hopped into bed. I imagine there are still little drops of blood on his whiskers, but let’s skip that ugly detail. “My, grandmother, what big teeth you have.” ” My grandmother what hairy hands you have, and you also need a manicure.” “My, grandmother, what big ears you have and they are pointy and hairy as well!” Why Little Red cannot see the wolf in grandmother’s clothing is a little beyond me unless Little Red is a little simple in her ways. The wolf attacks her, of course, and she runs, seeking the help of another wolf, the axe man/lumberjack who happens to be near grandmother’s cottage. Using his ever present phallic ax he proceeds to disembowel the wolf, saving Little Red and the grandmother from certain death. The goodies probably go to the trusty young handsome woodsman, and everybody is happy–the wolf has been defeated. Life seems to be all about defeating the wolf, who represents all sorts of unmentionable things that we really want to ignore in life–sex, violence, adulthood, coming-of-age. We would all like Little Red to remain a child forever, caught in a strange vortex or stasis where she is forever ten years old, innocent, unknowing, pristine, unmarked, virginal. The father of Little Red is strangely absent from the story, leaving things unsettled and the entire story is disquieting and problematic. The wolf, who is not a wolf, is only a person dressed in wolf’s skins. That is all the wolf has ever been–a person. How else could it talk? There are unanswered questions about the violence that Little Red witnesses, the fear she experiences at the hands of the wolf, and that strange red cloak that defines her very identity. Yet she is condemned to stay ten forever, never arriving at womanhood, forever trudging through the woods to her grandmother’s cottage. I hope there is snow in the version you have read because that will make her red cloak that much redder. She epitomizes womanhood and femaleness as a paradigm of innocence pursued by evil, a relentless evil that takes the form of a wolf, a violent carnivorous animal bent on destroying her. I have never completely understood the story, and perhaps I never will.

On the thing that came from another world

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This strange little film came out at a time when the world was wondering if it would have to duck and cover, and the world’s leaders were all caught up in dreams nuclear war, atom bombs, and anti-communist rhetoric. The whole world was Cold War obsessed, and the crazy senator from Wisconsin was carrying around lists of all the communists that worked in the State Department. Unsure of either the science or the ethics surrounding the nuclear age, people lived in fear that today might be their last day on earth if someone got crazy and punched the wrong button, sending nuclear weapons flying, helter-skelter, across the world and obliterating every living thing. So this archetypal ghost story comes with an interesting twist: one of our Cold War outposts in Alaska find a flying saucer in the ice near the North Pole, and they bring back, frozen in ice as if he were some wooly mammoth or something, an alien. This alien, played by Gun Smoke’s James Arness, is a rather blood-thirsty and violent creature who wants to wipe out the men and woman who are temporarily stranded in the Arctic wasteland. In the true spirit of American bootstrap initiatives, they fight back and (spoiler alert!) and defeat said creature. When I first saw this film back in the sixties, I was just a kid and it scared the heebie-jeebies out of me. Now I can listen to characters talk, understand their fear of the unknown, and experience their total blind panic in a very direct fashion. This film gives a strange vicarious thrill, but it is not cathartic, and the ending leaves one feeling both incomplete and nervous. This movie predates Alien by almost thirty years, but the story is there. There is a direct threat to the security and well-being of the people at the outpost, and those in command must do something to resolve the situation. What I found incredibly creepy about this film is this: the difference between life and death is very fine, and it doesn’t take much to move from one to the other. The intensity of the film, the nervous tension among the characters, the fear, and the violent nature of the human response drain the viewer of energy because the emotional response to this film is extreme. The fear of the unknown is strong, overwhelming, intimidating, reckless, chaotic, unpredictable, and powerful. People do crazy things when they must confront their fears, and unsurprisingly, most of the time they turn tale and run. This movie is a Cold War product because it reflected both the Cold War fears of the unknown and American bravery and ingenuity for dealing with an unknown and dangerous power. The movie shows these good intentioned, but violent, soldiers working for their country. They and their reaction to the situation is heroic and exemplary, even in the face of certain death in an isolated and inhospitable location thousands of miles from civilization. There’s even an embedded newspaper man with the troops to shout about the first amendment, free speech, and freedom of the press. Though the film is shot in glorious black and white, it’s really rather red, white, and blue.

On the thing that came from another world

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This strange little film came out at a time when the world was wondering if it would have to duck and cover, and the world’s leaders were all caught up in dreams nuclear war, atom bombs, and anti-communist rhetoric. The whole world was Cold War obsessed, and the crazy senator from Wisconsin was carrying around lists of all the communists that worked in the State Department. Unsure of either the science or the ethics surrounding the nuclear age, people lived in fear that today might be their last day on earth if someone got crazy and punched the wrong button, sending nuclear weapons flying, helter-skelter, across the world and obliterating every living thing. So this archetypal ghost story comes with an interesting twist: one of our Cold War outposts in Alaska find a flying saucer in the ice near the North Pole, and they bring back, frozen in ice as if he were some wooly mammoth or something, an alien. This alien, played by Gun Smoke’s James Arness, is a rather blood-thirsty and violent creature who wants to wipe out the men and woman who are temporarily stranded in the Arctic wasteland. In the true spirit of American bootstrap initiatives, they fight back and (spoiler alert!) and defeat said creature. When I first saw this film back in the sixties, I was just a kid and it scared the heebie-jeebies out of me. Now I can listen to characters talk, understand their fear of the unknown, and experience their total blind panic in a very direct fashion. This film gives a strange vicarious thrill, but it is not cathartic, and the ending leaves one feeling both incomplete and nervous. This movie predates Alien by almost thirty years, but the story is there. There is a direct threat to the security and well-being of the people at the outpost, and those in command must do something to resolve the situation. What I found incredibly creepy about this film is this: the difference between life and death is very fine, and it doesn’t take much to move from one to the other. The intensity of the film, the nervous tension among the characters, the fear, and the violent nature of the human response drain the viewer of energy because the emotional response to this film is extreme. The fear of the unknown is strong, overwhelming, intimidating, reckless, chaotic, unpredictable, and powerful. People do crazy things when they must confront their fears, and unsurprisingly, most of the time they turn tale and run. This movie is a Cold War product because it reflected both the Cold War fears of the unknown and American bravery and ingenuity for dealing with an unknown and dangerous power. The movie shows these good intentioned, but violent, soldiers working for their country. They and their reaction to the situation is heroic and exemplary, even in the face of certain death in an isolated and inhospitable location thousands of miles from civilization. There’s even an embedded newspaper man with the troops to shout about the first amendment, free speech, and freedom of the press. Though the film is shot in glorious black and white, it’s really rather red, white, and blue.

On daydreaming

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Can it really be that bad? I mean, it´s only a few minutes, to let your focus go, to let the mind drift, your eyes close a bit, and at least for a short while, you really don’t care about your surroundings. You slowly relax, your muscles go slack, your blood pressure drops, but you aren’t quite asleep either. You are dreaming wide awake. Background sounds do not disturb you, and other people and places invade your waking dream–a street in another town, a sunlit terrace in another country, a foggy mountain meadow, a neon-darkened subway, a busy county fair, a smoke-filled bar in an eastern port, an air-conditioned kitchen with an apple pie cooling on the counter, a rainy Sunday afternoon in May, a dark alley in a small Midwestern town. You tumble through time and come out in another life, a dingy office that smells of stale smoke and sweat. You don’t know the raven-haired beauty that just walked into your office, but she spells trouble. You can smell her perfume, lilacs and roses, and you don’t like it. That skirt couldn’t be tighter or shorter and still be a skirt. She wants to smoke a cigarette, and she fidgets with a lighter, but you have no ashtray. Her voice is husky and rough and you have no idea what she is talking about, but she reminds you of a case you solved in Chinatown, and you’re already thinking you want no part of this fiasco. A stiff drink would go down pretty well about now. The siren of an ambulance haunts your conversation. Something about her little sister, something about an older man, but none of it makes much sense. A sad song that plays too well on the mean streets of this city of angels. I recognize the surname and wonder what she’s doing slumming here in my office. Dirty work is only done by a dirty detective. She’s the daughter of a retired oil tycoon, she needs help, but this can only end badly…and the phone rings. “Hello, no, this is not the ticket office, no, I don’t know the right number. Yeah, bye.” And it’s over.

On Oscar

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What did Billy Crystal say last night? “Tonight we are going to watch a bunch of millionaires give each other little golden statues.” I have watched the Oscars for a couple of decades, and they really are no more transcendent now than they were in 1929 when the Screen Actors Guild started handing out the faceless statuettes. They just add another level of mysticism, elitism and glamor to an already very selective and exclusive club to which no mortal has access. Like a bunch of crazed voyeurs, we tune in each year to stare at the beautiful people come together to out-stage even each other. Their pathetic attempts at saying “thank you” border on the banal and boring. Basically, the Oscars are here to tell us all that we are just normal human beings and have no chance of ever attaining the fame and stature of the stars who will possibly win a little golden statuette. Oscar is a talisman of exclusivity. The people who receive the award have worked hard, but they also have had their share of good luck. And how many, exactly, have sold their souls to the Devil to get that little golden guy? Far from jealous, I would say that having a normal life is a pretty special thing. I can walk into any Starbucks in any airport in the world and not have to worry about being recognized, about having to be nice to fans, about having every inch of my life under a microscope. While I am out in public, my stress levels are very low. I can go to the grocery store, get my junk and get out. I’m not so sure that giving out autographs, getting lots of photos taken, and having my life scrutinized at every turn would be that interesting. In a sense, any of those famous people is just a regular person as well. Notting Hill (1999) is an unglorified look into the public/private pain of an actress (Julia Roberts) who is looking for love, but her all too public face makes that impossible. The stress of living a public life cannot be at all very fun. Having a face that half the planet will recognize has to be a pain in the neck. Oh, I wouldn’t mind the money, at least at first, and I’m sure the fame is great for the ego, at least at first, but in the long run, the press, the paparazzi, the news channels must be both tedious and boring. You cannot gain a pound or grow old, you cannot have a movie that goes bad, you cannot play characters that your fans might hate, you cannot fail to live up to their expectations. So let them pass out their little statues. The movies may or may not be good. Some of my favorite films were never nominated for anything, and, as far as I’m concerned, many of the big names might never have been made at all.

On physiognomy (the Libro de buen amor and don Amor)

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When I started researching female beauty in Spain’s 14th century, I had no idea I would be stepping in the pseudo-science cow pie that is physiognomy. If you don’t know, physiognomy is the “science” (quotation marks mean that the word science is being both ironically and loosely to include this area of inquiry) of external shapes, marks and other physical characteristics which shape how a thing, or a plant, or an animal, or a person, looks or gives it an outward appearance and how that appearance, in turn, shapes the internal characteristics of said object, plant, animal, or person. This particular science has it roots deep in Greek philosophy in a half dozen famous writers. This particular branch of science has been extremely popular well into the modern era, and there are hundreds of books and articles that date from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and even the twentieth century. It was finally thrown on the ashheap of pseudo-science when the Nazis used it to justify their particularly odd (and wrong) ideas about how the way people looked and what this said about their character. Today, physiognomy is practiced by the same people who read tarot cards, make astrological charts, study cabala and practice necromancy. They probably also search for Big Foot in their spare time when they are not searching the pyramids for signs of ancient astronauts. No rational empiricists allowed. Physiognomy was extremely popular, especially in the nineteenth century when random positivists thought that if you could measure it and set up a data table then it must mean something. Well, they were wrong, but real science took its sweet time in proving that. In Spain’s 14th century, the tenants of physiognomy were a part of what passed for both science and philosophy, so as my poet’s fictive creation, Mr. Love, describes the ideal woman (ideal for love, that is) he goes through a very standard list of facial characteristics that is quite commonplace in the medieval poetry of Europe–small head, blond hair, nice eyebrows, high cheekbones, big eyes, shining and bright, long eye lashes, long thin neck, thin nose, small even teeth, red gums, red full lips, small mouthy, white face, no facial hair (LBA, stanzas 432-5 if you care to read it for yourself). Mr. Love is sure that this is the kind of woman that a man should pursue because, given her physical characteristics, she will be more receptive to male advances. This rhetorical practice, a descriptio, is also common in medieval scholasticism and would be reliable if the source were reliable. What subverts the description, or perhaps what validates it, is the speaker, Mr. Love, who has just been berated by the poem’s (LBA) main character, the Archpriest of Hita, Juan Ruiz, for ruining everyone’s life. Mr. Love has an agenda, albeit an unreliable one, and is not a trustworthy source or narrator. In fact, he is the opposite of anything that might resemble truth, ethics, or morality. The question for me, then, is this: is the author playing it straight, (i.e., this is what he truly believes) with his readers with this description or is he undermining and subverting the medieval practice and belief in physiognomy by putting it in the mouth of an unreliable narrator?