killing the American Dream?

You know, sometimes I think that even though the loud-mouthed conservative population in America may lead us to believe that our nation is one of people full of faith, we've become quite a faithless nation.

"No survey data can reveal the hurts inflicted by our wasteful, immoral wars foisted upon us by deceitful leaders exploiting our anxieties and gullibility. That only 2 percent may place them among our biggest national worries at the moment is a sign of sublimation rather than their discounting. As for the loss of faith in our institutions -- private and public -- from financial kleptomania and the compromised actions of government, it has become free floating. A constant presence that aggravates every fear and uncertainty." (Brenner)

Maybe we've finally killed the "American Dream." That whole highschool-career-family, white picket fence thing was all well and good for the conservative, high-moral Americans of the 1940s and '50s. I know the dissent of the 1960s was rooted and began in the '50s, but generally speaking, I think Americans had faith in the paradigm of delayed gratification by which they existed: get a job, pay your dues, and reap your consumerist suburbia dream reward later.

But now, in a post-9/11, mid-recession, Wikileak'd "information age," that paradigm is changed. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that today's 18-35 year olds no longer have faith in the promise of delayed gratification -- in the promise of the American Dream. We like fast food, smart phones, and the internet: we like NOW. Boomer parents have given their children everything, including a sense of entitlement. But I'm beginning to think that our desire for instant gratification may not be solely the result of us being spoiled silly.

Maybe we want what we want right now because we don't have faith that the future holds anything for us. Maybe we feel like we deserve everything we can get out of life this minute because we can't trust our flawed institutions and chaotic world, and we can't believe that the best is yet to come. Maybe we've realized that our parents were disillusioned and the American Dream doesn't exist. Maybe we're finally killing it. Or maybe we really are just spoiled, spoon-fed brats.

Regardless, I think we need to accept that the old model is in need of an upgrade. I think the dominant ideology is slowly beginning to gravitate away from the old idea of the American Dream, and I think this is a good thing. Perhaps popular culture has taken to cultivating a sense of nostalgia for the 1950s because it's realizing that the old paradigm no longer applies. Yet, in the same way I think no one really knows what will formally succeed postmodernism, I can't say I really have any idea where post-American Dream social thought will go. But I'm pretty eager to see it happen.

Sometimes I think I scare people by talking about non-normal things.

I wish this was not true but I think it is.

scattered thoughts

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
...That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy..."

- The Merchant of Venice

This is one of my 2 favorite Shakespeare quotes. I was thinking today, though - maybe, sometimes, the most merciful thing one can do is be just.

I don't know. I like fairness. Lack of justice frustrates me and pisses me off, even though sometimes I can accept that realistically, life isn't fair, and often justice isn't served. But if that's true, then I guess we should pray for mercy, right? I'm all about forgiveness, and mercy is forgiveness given freely, whether it's deserved or not.

Maybe, then, that's where love is. Maybe love is mercy - maybe love is a place where forgiveness is given freely with no expectations of reciprocation. Maybe our friends are the people who are merciful to us - the ones who love us and forgive us, whether we deserve it or not. Maybe we just need to trust in their mercy. As hard as that sounds. But then... aren't most forms of Christianity supposed to be about trusting in the mercy of God? I wonder if trusting in the mercy of God makes it easier for one to trust in the mercy of those who love them.

Although, I guess it's hard to know who really loves us. "I love you" is an easy thing to say, but saying it doesn't matter so much as acting it, right? It's nice to hear, and sometimes saying it is an act in itself, but it's meaningless if you don't act it. Whereas I guess that's not so much of a thing with a relationship with God. Or maybe it is. I guess I wouldn't know.

I don't know if I believe in God. I'm not really down with organized religion. I believe in something, but I don't really have a name for it. I guess I believe in timing? Things happen when they're supposed to happen, we meet people when we're supposed to meet them, we make the choices and decisions that we're supposed to make when we're supposed to make them. I tend to doubt when the going gets tough, but it's not faith without doubt, right? I think I really believe it though. Whatever "it" is. Fate? Fortune? I just think it's time. Moments.

Maybe certain people come into our lives when we need them most; maybe we make certain friends at certain times because at that time, we need them. Maybe we happen across certain songs or movies or writings to comfort and awaken and inform when we most need them. I can't count the number of times I've gone to a class, only to leave thinking that the perspective or truth of the movie we watched or the article we read was something I really needed in order to move forward in one way or another. And then I marvel at how it seemed to fall into my lap when I needed it.

Maybe everything, everyone we need, is waiting right under our noses, and we just need the grace to see it.

Sometimes I read the Bible. It's a pretty swell book with some great stories. And sometimes it makes me feel better. This is my favorite verse: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32.

If grace is a touch of truth... and truth is in the reaction... and the reaction comes from intuition in a moment of crisis... and sometimes you have to have the strength to force a moment to the crisis... then I suppose times of crisis are freeing. Cathartic.

The melding of pity and fear. Pity. Fear. Pity. Fear. Cleansing. Purge. Release. Making the truth known. Knowing the truth. Maybe letting the truth be recognized is justice. Or maybe it's mercy.

Maybe it is both.

I wonder if I will ever be able to write truthfully, with total honesty. Sincerity. Vulnerability.

I feel like I have been here before...

can't fall back asleep.

THINGS I AM GOOD AT:

-- Wanting things I can't have.

-- Making excuses.

-- Procrastinating.

-- Whining about ~1st world problems.

-- Being paranoid and overly self-aware.

-- Being paranoid that I am not self-aware enough.

-- Being overly sensitive and thin-skinned.

---- Being super insecure and pretending I'm not.

-- Being awkward.

-- Indulging.

-- Overanalyzing.

-- Thinking about things I shouldn't.

-- Having stubborn pride.

-- Being narcissistic.

-- Making lists as a feeble attempt to organize and control my messy, unstable life.

---- Realizing that these lists don't really make me feel any better but making them anyway.

Today, I am thankful for:

-- There not being an actual fire in my building when the fire alarm went off an hour ago.

-- Not getting hit by that bus that almost hit me outside of Waterloo Station.

-- Sallie Mae for reminding me today that my loan payments go up next month.

-- Wonderful friends who send me mail!

-- Wonderful family who send me mail!

-- Titus Andronicus for giving me a dose of Jersey tonight.

-- Amazon for putting Mad Men seasons 1-3 on sale.

-- This chicken and stuffing sandwich.

-- Clothes and food and a roof and all that.

favorite body parts

hands

wrists

ankles

neck

I guess I like for things to connect.

chit chat small talk bullshit etc.

I've been talking too much lately. It's kind of a problem. I really, really hate when I do it. I feel like talking so much makes me inaccessible and makes it harder for other people to talk to me, which is the last thing in the world that I want. I would, 9 times out of 10, prefer to just listen. But I feel like these days I don't shut up, ever.

And I mean, I'm not stupid...I know that I need to talk to get other people to talk to me. Trust begets trust. I just feel like I've been doing too much talking and not enough listening. And it's not even good, interesting talk. It's fruitless and empty talk.

Rambling, nervous talk.

Rambling, nervous writing.

Meh.

liberation

It is possible to exist between fixed identities.

Not only is it possible, but it's exactly what we do, mostly.

We attach ourselves, at times, to concrete archetypal identities, but we move around within and without them.

This is such a simple idea, but it's one I tend to forget, in trying to organize and control everything all the time.

We don't have to identify as black or white or even gray. We can, and do, exist with fluidity in the spaces between. We can let go.

Inhale. Exhale. Mmmmmm.

I want to reread The Tao of Pooh.

nostalgia.

Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged beyond flash - if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job - I was in house at a fur company - with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new." Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate, but potent.

Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain of an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. [Kodak's projection wheel] isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. Goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called "the wheel." It's called "the carousel." It lets us travel the way a child travels: around and around, back home again to a place where we know we are loved.

- Mad Men, 1.13 - "The Wheel"

Andre Jordan.

I like him.

love this blog.

think think think

I've been thinking a lot again, over the past few days, about the day in Venice when my professor Kathy - who at the time was 67 with bad knees in a city with no cars and lots of steps - sat with me and my friend Jess at lunch and talked frankly with us about how she had been struggling with feelings of what she termed "intellectual alienation" for most of her life.

Some background: When she was 18 or so, Kathy left home and moved to India for three years, and only came home after giving birth to her first child. Before she was 30, she was living back in the US with an MA and PhD in Literature from Harvard, writing and publishing youth travel guides with her husband, and she had another kid. Eventually she got divorced, and since then she's taught everywhere from Italy to Russia to Turkey to Thailand. She worked at Ramapo for years, directing the telecommunications center (that a lot of people don't know exist) and teaching. A lot of people who had her as a professor said she was awful, but as a person, she's unbelievable. She's mainly retired but she still runs the Venice trip every May, and she still knows the city well. She lives in a gorgeous little house in the Bronx right on the Hudson River with a view of the cliffs and the GW Bridge that'd knock you silly. She has a dog named Pablo and a cat named Ringo, and her house is decorated with things she's collected over the years from all the places she's been: masks from Venice, ganeshes from India, street paintings from Africa, hand-carved wooden benches from Bali. This is her backyard. I want it.

But anyway. Kathy is as liberal and sharp-tongued as most Ramapo comm professors, and she would always talk to me in Venice about how she gets slack for being intellectually curious and holding a mix of knowledge and experience in higher regard than straight academia and bureaucratic bullshit. She said she's always felt a bit on the outside for thinking differently from most people, and she realized a long time ago that that struggle never ends. The first time she told me this, I groaned and told her that's depressing. She fixed me with an earnest stare and said, "Well, it's true. I don't want to lie to you. It doesn't go away."

It was reading week, this week, and I didn't have class. I didn't catch up on reading or get a head start on my papers, like I should, but let my brain rest for a week. I love my classes, I really do. But at the same time, even though I only have 6 hours of seminar a week, they exhaust me. I find myself questioning everything, all the time; in a sense, turning everything into a struggle of ideology and social issue and so on and so forth. I look at something and I can't just appreciate the basic aesthetic value; I immediately start deconstructing it. I find myself placing even the most mundane things in academic or critical frameworks, and it's tiring. I really appreciate having the opportunity to be here and learn and be made to feel totally lost and clueless on a regular basis. Seriously. It's a great experience, so far. But having this time off this week also made me realize that I am a much, much happier person when I don't think so much about things.

And then that makes me wonder: which is the better way to live? Blindly accepting of the problems in the world, of the various "meanings" of works of art, unaware that they exist, and relatively happy? Or trying to learn and grow intellectually and constantly questioning everything, but struggling all the time? Where is the joy and wonder and excitement and passion in "intellectual alienation"?

I think I'm gonna go to church next Sunday.

hahahahahahahahahahaha

This isn't really funny. Except it kind of is. From: TOP TEN FACTS ABOUT LOW SELF ESTEEM

3) Characteristics of Genuinely Low Self Esteem

1. Social withdrawal
2. Anxiety and emotional turmoil
3. Lack of social skills and self confidence. Depression and/or bouts of sadness
4. Less social conformity
5. Eating disorders
6. Inability to accept compliments
7. An Inability to see yourself 'squarely' - to be fair to yourself
8. Accentuating the negative
9. Exaggerated concern over what you imagine other people think
10. Self neglect
11. Treating yourself badly but NOT other people
12. Worrying whether you have treated others badly
13. Reluctance to take on challenges
14. Reluctance to put yourself first or anywhere.
15. Reluctance to trust your own opinion
16. Expecting little out of life for yourself

...

7) Build on Solid Foundations

For anyone to be psychologically and physically healthy then core needs have to be fulfilled. Being clear about what you need and making efforts to meet those needs constructively means you’ll naturally have better self esteem as a by-product of living well.

This is useful list of basic human needs:

1. The need to give and receive attention
2. The need to look after your body.
3. The need for meaning, purpose and goals.
4. The need for a connection to something greater than ourselves
5. The need for creativity and stimulation
6. The need for intimacy and connection to others.
7. The need for a sense of control
8. The need for a sense of status and recognition from others.
9. The need for a sense of safety and security

Of course, it is likely that at any one time, one or more of these may be slightly lacking in your life, without dire consequences. However, in the long-term, they must all be catered for one way or another.

Something else the “low self esteemer” needs is the capacity to focus off their own emotionality and merge with experience so they gain more enjoyment from life.

2, 7, and 9...never gonna happen, hahahahaha.

reductive

It's easy to get lost behind a camera, where people cease to be persons with any kind of meaning as such, where the main focus is on the surface. It's easy to see you through the lens, construct you within the frame, as a figure of lines and curves, as an object that moves and acts and is acted upon, that is seen but does not see. It's an easy way of life but I guess it's not much of a way to live, is it?

posting this everywhere I possibly can so maybe I'll remember that it's true

Letting go of our prerequisites for worthiness means making the long walk from "What will people think?" to "I am enough." But, like all great journeys, this walk starts with one step, and the first step in the Wholehearted journey is practicing courage.

The root of the word courage is cor -- the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.

Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we've lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we're feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage.

Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. If we want to live and love with our whole hearts and engage in the world from a place of worthiness, our first step is practicing the courage it takes to own our stories and tell the truth about who we are. It doesn't get braver than that.

- "Want to be happy? Stop trying to be perfect" by Bréne Brown

Fictional Relationships That I Would Love To Be In

-- Before Sunset / Before Sunrise's Celine to Jesse.

-- Mad Men's Peggy Olsen to Don Draper. (Weird, right.)

-- The Philadelphia Story's Tracy Lord to Macaulay Connor. Or CK Dexter Haven.

-- Holiday's Linda to Johnny.

-- Gosford Park's Mary to Robert Parks. (Really weird, right.)

-- Eternal Sunshine's Clem to Joel.

-- Little Women's Jo to Laurie.

-- Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy. (lol duh.)

-- Gilmore Girls's Rory to Jess.

-- A Wrinkle in Time's Meg Murry to Calvin O'Keefe.

-- The Anne books' Anne to Gilbert.

-- The View From Saturday's Nadia to Ethan. (Really, REALLY weird, right.)

-- Atonement's Cecilia to Robbie.

Most of these relationships are either extremely weird or dysfunctional, or they're total failures. Or they're totally romanticized and completely unrealistic. This probably says something about me.

"We say that we read to escape into fictional lives, but before we know it, we’re finding our own lives in the fiction we love. That’s why we love it"

What was this compulsive need to be lovable? They both had it, were driven by it, bound by it. They would even sacrifice each other for the sake of it.

But she sensed they were afflicted differently. He wanted to preserve his worthiness in the eyes of other people. It was because of losing his parents; it had to be. Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

And what about her? Whose love did she so compulsively doubt?

She knew without thinking. From her earliest memory she had perceived the chasm between how she looked and how she felt. She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends'. It was her own.

forever in blue - ann brashares

more lengthy academic notes; disregard

Oh, also.

KH: I was just showing my work as part of a panel at UCLA. I attended another panel of women artists where the first audience question was, "Do you find working with your autobiography self-indulgent?" I was struck by that question. Why is it that the first question about this work is whether or not it's self-indulgent? Will women be making work about their experience always be accused of being self-indulgent and narcissistic? So it is interesting for me to now hear you say that people made the same comments to you in the early sixties. Could you speak to this? Do you think that this relates to your teacher's comment, "Don't put your heart into art [because you're 'just a girl']"?

CS: If a man crosses a threshold to depict or engage a lived reality, he becomes a hero. To deal with actual lived experience--that's a heroic position for a male and a trivial exposure for a woman. A woman exploring lived experience occupies an area that men want to denigrate as domestic, to encapsulate as erotic, arousing, or supporting their own position.

Culturally it has to do with the whole diminution of the feminine, what is female. Being so saturated with our own contradictory traditions and the degree of freedom that we have within these shifting traditions, it is hard for us to see where the deep hatred of the feminine still maintains its squirmy hostile boundaries.

This reminded me of two criticisms I read lately of Jane Austen. One is from Martin Amis (1996): "Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors--all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself." This is one of the great things to me, about Austen: in a weirdly pre-feminist way, she depicts the "feminine" side of English country life - society and relationships and the mercenary institution of marriage - and in sense, she does so with very little romance. She was high minded morally, and though her stories are often given stronger romantic overtones in contemporary adaptations, her work is deeply ironic. In the context of Schneemann's comments on the continuing denigration of all things feminine as trivial, Austen's triumph feels even greater to me.

The second criticism is, more broadly, an argument that the depiction of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice is a post-feminist Elizabeth, a postmodern one even. She isn't a middle-class English country girl fighting for her liberty and right to marry who she chooses - she's won that battle already, and she assumes her freedom carelessly. This is something that I suppose might be a negative criticism, but it's something that I really, really appreciate about this particular adaptation. Austen adaptations ride waves of popularity over the years, with filmmakers repurposing her stories and introducing them to new generations. I love that this latest incarnation of Elizabeth Bennet can be viewed as post-feminist. Though I know we aren't really in a place where the feminist fight is no longer relevant, we're still in a place where depicting a woman as possessed of her independence and liberty is a positive thing. It's subtle, in this adaptation, but it's still there. Lizzy roams the countryside at her leisure, oversees her own formal education, and forms her own opinions (or judgements) of people's characters regardless of their class. At the same time, she partakes in feminine pleasures with her sisters. She goes to town to shop for ribbons, she enjoys dancing, she takes pride in preparing and dressing for the ball, and she girl-talks with her sister under the covers at night. She's both strong-minded and independent, and feminine and girly. And don't contemporary women have the right to be both?

I would also just like to observe that it is 10:30 on a rainy Friday night and I am in pajamas in bed eating a bit of a baguette and drinking white zinfandel while watching Atonement and reading scholarly articles on feminist experimental filmmakers for fun. I can't decide if I am completely satisfied or if I think I need a life.

but you are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it tooooooooo

It's funny, every time I have a critical reading that interviews the filmmaker or discusses their intent or point of view or whatever, I always find myself reading in sympathy with them, as opposed to in sympathy of whatever view the author of the article is taking. Things like this sort of make me wish I'd taken some production courses and applied for MFA programs instead, but I've never been that kind of learner; I've always learned by exploring the abstract and then applying it in life, wherever it seems fitting. This is how I used to end up using my 20th Century American Foreign Policy notes to write papers for Literature and Film. Things like that. Besides, I like to think of theory and study kind of like the way I think of rules: you can follow the rules or break them, but you gotta know what they are, first.

Anyway, today I read an interview with this formalist avant garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, who made this film called Fuses between 1964 and 1967. It's now considered to be an "important" experimental film, but at the time, it was disregarded, to an extent, because it was an experimental film made by a female filmmaker and it dealt with sex on screen. She made it in a response to Stan Brakhage's brilliant Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which is an experimental film depicting the home birth of his first child. It's a fairly ungendered depiction of the birth, but as Brakhage did most of the filming, it still has that inescapable male lens. Schneemann was interested in showing a more equal partnership in sexual terms - "I really wanted to see what 'the fuck' is and locate that in terms of a lived sense of equity...we have to remind ourselves that throughout the sixties, only men maintained creative authority: women were muses, partners."

She continues, saying how as she was making it, no one stood by her except for her sexual/creative/intellectual partner Jim Tenney, who is in Fuses, and afterwards, virtually all feminist critics ignored it because it was a woman's film that showed a woman having sex. Primarily a performance artist and a painter, Schneemann was trying to liberate the female figure from the traditional, immobilizing framework of "the nude" in art. She had dealt in previous works with the questions, "Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials? Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?" and she was tired of her work being qualified by her gender - "You're really good for a girl, but..." So she made a movie showing the equality and intimacy of her partnership with herself as image.

The interviewer, Kate Haug, a more contemporary experimental filmmaker and critic, asked Schneemann about her identity as an artist.

KH: On one hand, you have this desire to be an artist. On the other hand, you are producing work which you know is highly controversial. It seems you would feel like you are taking an incredible risk; you know you are in a very combative situation.

CS: It's not that I had a desire to be an artist. I'm in a very combative situation because I am an artist. Whatever an artist is or was, I was it. This wasn't a choice, and that's different. It means you have a certain character structure.

KH: How would you describe that character structure?

CS: You have to make images or you're going to die, basically. That is the most interesting, satisfying, compelling, necessary function--like love and sex and breathing. one hears people say "I don't know what great art is, but I know it when I see it." Somebody somewhere recently wrote a variation on this: "I can't tell what produces a great artist, but I know a real artist when I meet someone who has to create images or she'll expire."

By this definition, I think that someday, I would like to feel like I am an artist.

we're not real, anyway, right?

Jesse: What do you think were the chances of us ever meeting again?
Celine: After that December, I'd say almost zero. But we're not real, anyway, right? We're just, uh, characters in that old lady's dream. She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth. So, of course we had to meet again.

before sunset

I hate that

when I'm talking to people ~online, whether it's in real time or in a message or email, it's really hard to convey sympathy or interest. I hate that when someone's telling me about something, I can't nod encouragingly and say "Mmm" and make eye contact to show that I'm interested in what they have to say. I have to spell it out, and it always rings false in my head, even though I mean it sincerely. And I hate that when someone's telling me something and I want to show them that I can relate to what they're saying, I can't nod emphatically and gesture and look at the person. I have to say "I get it" or "I feel that" or something equally as weak. And sometimes I feel like I have to give an example of a similar experience of my own to back that up. And I hate doing that, to me it always sounds like I'm trying to make whatever the person's talking about, about me, but I'm not! I just don't want them to think I'm just going along, or saying that I understand with no qualification for it, and ughhhh. It's really fucking hard to be a good listener online without seeming self-interested and I feel like I fail at it all the time and it makes me paranoid and self-conscious. I hate the internet sometimes. I like words and all but I hate having to rely on them so heavily for communication, because there's so much more to it than that, and I frequently feel like something important gets lost and I hate that. Hate hate hate.

/rant

~lifegoals

-- Write movie reviews for a newspaper or magazine.

-- Write film crit for a legitimate periodical or other publication.

(I think this needs to happen in this order.)

-- Write a full length feature screenplay that I don't hate.

-- Write a play that isn't terrible.

(This also needs to happen in this order, I think. I don't think I could write a play before finishing a screenplay.)

-- Bring back screwball comedy, goddamnit. IT CAN STILL BE RELEVANT.

-- Teach. Preferably university students.

-- Write a media literacy curriculum for elementary/secondary school students to teach them how to sort through and critically digest images/moving pictures/the stuff on the internet with actual content instead of just fucking consuming it mindlessly.

---- Make friends who will get this curriculum implemented for real in public schools.

------ Make other friends who will save public education.

------ Make other friends who will save liberal arts higher education.

------ Make other friends who will effectively reform the university admissions process.

-------- Find the patience and means to do all this myself should the friend-making fail, which it probably will.

In the mean time:

-- Write more letters.

-- Write more in general.

---- Write less about me and more about everything else.

---- Finish that goddamn screenplay adaptation.

-- Read more.

---- Books, I mean.

-- Consume less. Sort through the shit and critically read/view more.

-- Finish my masters without being a total failure.

-- Keep going. Lather, rinse, repeat.