Momeaga: Marc's Blog

August 07, 2006

Moving Notice

I've decided to pack up shop here and move my blogging over to my new Myspace page. To you loyal readers, all three of you, the new URL is:

http://blog.myspace.com/momeaga

It's been a slice, Blogger.

posted at 7:06 AM.

August 06, 2006

Over-Resolution

I'm doing a lot of crying these days. Not that I'm depressed or morose or anything. Just that I've been subjecting myself to some particularly affecting material, and that coupled with the Georgia summer heat (always a catalyst for melodramatic turns) has really pumped up the waterworks.

A lot of it has to do with reading. Dickens write some majorly tear-jerking scenes that get me every single time I read them. When Joe Gargery takes care of Pip near the end of Great Expectations. When Barkis, the carriage driver, dies after saying to David Copperfield one last time, "Barkis is willin'." And then there's Charlotte Bronte--rereading Jane Eyre is always an emotional experience. But the granddaddy of them all came when last night I finally got around to watching Brokeback Mountain.

What a movie. I think I bawled even louder than I did for Million Dollar Baby (although I'll still argue that the latter was a better film, this one comes pretty close to being as good). The now famous "I wish I knew how to quit you" scene was so hard to watch, as was the masterful slow devastation of Alma, Ennis' wife (played by Michelle Williams). The scene that got me most, however, was when Ennis found, in Jack's childhood bedroom, his forgotten bloodied shirt from that first Brokeback Mountain summer tucked inside Jack's blue parka (and major kudos to Ang Lee for bookending this perfectly and subtly when, at the very end of the movie, Ennis caresses the two shirts with Jack's now inside of his, Ennis finally and too late being able to accept Jack fully). Perhaps the best thing about the movie, at the end of the day, is that it doesn't descend into cliche and try to proselytize; any message that it attempts to communicate is contained wholly in the silent tension that remains at the end, in the fact that this is a love story where the word "love" is never spoken (dare not speak its name, to borrow the beautiful line from that bastard Bosie Douglas).

Speaking of that tension, I now arrive at the subject of my post. What prompted this spiel was a trip to the cinema on Friday. Jen and I went to see The Devil Wears Prada and enjoyed it thoroughly. Meryl Streep was wonderful as ever (I loved the way she captured the Botox tenor of Anna Wintour's voice). However, I thought this movie ended about ten minutes after it should. The plot is pretty straightforward--free-spirited girl joins fashion industry, resists it, becomes co-opted by it, struggles to rediscover her identity. The ideal moment to end the movie would have been in the bit in Paris when Anne Hathaway decides that she can't be Miranda Priestly (the Streep character) and walks away. Instead, the movie's writers/director decide that we must go back to New York, see the Streep character undermined by showing, somewhat schmaltzily, that she is human (all the humanization necessary for the character had been accomplished when Priestly, sans makeup or glitz, deals with her impending divorce) and helps the Anne Hathaway character to get her dream job. It didn't totally spoil the movie, but it did turn a pretty okay bildungsroman into a pretty okay fairytale.

This trend to over-resolve has been a pet peeve of mine for some time. Not that I don't love fairytales, but there's a reason that we read them when we're kids. It's because we're not able yet to handle the complexity of the world, to countenance that there's not always an easy answer and a neat little package. As you get older, the simple answers become insulting and aggravating because there are no simple answers. In a fairytale, the apple becomes dislodged from Snow White's throat, and she lives happily ever after with Prince Charming; in real life, Snow White has to attend years of psychotherapy to deal with her mother issues, try to figure out if these will affect her relationships with her own children, and take prescription medicines to deal with the trace amounts of poison left in her system and the pain associated therewith, possibly eventually becoming dependent on Vicodin.

Over-resolution was the problem with the Oscar-winning Crash for me. The ending of that movie completely ruined (and I say completely because the subject matter's so serious and important) what the rest of it had tried to achieve. The bullshitty epiphanic moment of the Matt Dillon character made me want to retch. How dare they oversimplify to the point of absurdity like that? Tie a pretty little bow on the issue of racism and parcel it out to the public at large. There was one redeeming point about the end of the movie, however, and that was with the Ryan Phillipe character--that, at least, deserves kudos. In general the acting was great, too, but the end of the movie soured me on it as a whole.

It's not that I have become some snobby academic who thinks sentimentality and happy endings can never equal great art (I still need my intellectual comfort food on a regular basis--I read Maeve Binchy's novels, I adore Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and I watch no end of schmaltzy tv). I'm sure they can, but the instances of them doing so are few and far between specifically because they are stagnant things. Think of the peremptoriness of those words, happily ever after. Why do they stand like a wall, forbidding us from peering into the futures of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty? Because they know that constant and eternal happiness (let's keep the argument earth-bound and not stir up theological questions) are impossibilities. Eutopia is Utopia.

Great works of art, for me at least, MUST retain tension because the great work of art, to some degree, is a mirror for the human condition. Michael closing the door on Kay at the end of The Godfather, the lost love and lost hope of Janis Joplin's "Bobby Mcgee" and Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," the contemplative and forlorn face of the French lady in Degas's "L'Absinthe"--these all respect that maxim. To expound on my rough aesthetic theory, then, the great work of art that depicts the happy ending must make some gesture to the finiteness of that happiness, must concede that there is no absolute resolution. For the life of me, I can't think of such a work in any format or medium right now. Any thoughts?

posted at 7:55 AM.

July 27, 2006

Meme from Colin: A to Z

When you get to the letter I, you'll understand my inspiration for doing this.

Accent: flattened out Trini accent. I've had to make my speech somewhat vanilla for ease of understanding, but there are certain words I just can't pronounce like an American, if I were to try. Primary among these is "calves."

Booze: Daiquiris, Margaritas, and Pinot Grigiot. As far as wine goes, I'm still a philistine, but Jen and I have been doing Project Runway cooking nights, and she's been teaching me about the differences between the various wines (she's taken sommelier classes).

Chore I hate: Cleaning the litterbox.

Dogs/Cats: given the fact that I have a litterbox, it would be kinda creepy if I didn't have a cat to go along with it.

Essential Electronics: my laptop.

Favorite Cologne/Perfume: Old Spice. Really.

Gold/Silver: I own one piece of each: a gold ring from my grandmother, and a silver bracelet from my mother. I don't want or need anymore (wooden jewelry's more my taste).

Hometown: Chaguanas, Trinidad

Insomnia: Help me...

Job Title(s): Graduate Student, Instructor of English, Writing Consultant

Kids: Not until I've got a tenure-track job and own a home. And preferably, but not necessarily, am in a stable relationship.

Living Arrangements: renting a carriage house three blocks from campus.

Most Admired Trait: my organizational skills

Number of Sexual Partners: I'll stick with Colin's answer: mind your beeswax.

Overnight Hospital Stays: nope.

Phobias: I've unfortunately inherited some of my father's hyperchondriacal tendencies. Oh, and bats freak me out.

Quote: "A little bit of sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it can be absolutely fatal"--Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist."

Religion: Not anymore. Agnostic. Humanist.

Siblings: Sister (22), brother (16)

Time I Usually Wake Up: I wish there were a "usually."

Unusual Talent: Understanding the covert and underground operations of squirrels.

Vegetable I refuse to eat: I really do love vegetables, even the ones I hated as a kid, like spinach and cabbage and eggplant (the first is now one of my favourite foods). I suppose I'll say Brussels Sprouts, but only because I've never had them and am going on their bad reputation.

Worst Habit: overthinking things.

X-rays: Chest, once in college when the doctor wanted to rule out pneumonia, and teeth.

Yummy Foods I make: the latest thing I've added to my repertoire is Thai green curry. Nummy.

Zodiac Sign: Aries. I'm a stubborn sunuvagun. Funny to note, as for as astrology goes, that with my friend Kath and my sister, both of whose birthdays are the day before mine and both of whom are also consequently Aries, we frequently say the same things at the same time. It's terribly freaky.

posted at 6:20 AM.

July 15, 2006

19th-Century Cribs

This one ranks with realising that naughty words like "shit" and "crap" and "fart" and a certain c-word referring to female genitalia existed, in one form or another, as far back as Chaucer's time.

In reading Dickens' Great Expectations, I came across the following line:

He... advised me to look out at once for a 'fashionable crib' near Hyde Park.

Who knew? Move over Beyonce, Mariah, and Diddy: tell MTV that Phillip Pirrip's got a crib too!

posted at 8:56 PM.

July 10, 2006

You Can't (always) Go Home Again

I just got another sobering reminder of this fact. When Cartoon Network announced a couple months ago that they'd acquired the right to Peewee's Playhouse, I was terribly excited. As a child during the years I lived in St. Lucia (which were coincident with the show's original run), I would watch the Peewee's antics every Saturday morning, rarely missing a show and resenting it when Gulf War coverage caused it to be preempted. Tonight, the first episode aired.

Disappointment.

As has happened numerous times before, things I loved as a kid just don't have any allure for me anymore. It happened before with Muppet Babies, which I can't stand now for the life of me (the notable exception is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe; that's just as good now as it was in the 80s, even though the animation is 90% recycled). I like to think that I wasn't a dumb child. What, then, made me watch this show, week after week? It's so inane. It's not even good stupid. It's like that horrible Beavis and Butthead brand of stupid, but without the more sophisticated story arcs. Argh.

posted at 10:31 PM.

July 08, 2006

Fourth and Final

So after the parade ended (Jen and I both had an hour's nap to kill time at our respective houses), Jen came to get me, and we drove back to her place. There, I made chicken salad for lunch and we passed an enjoyable afternoon watching Rent and getting teary-eyed. Later on, Melissa (another friend, from the Comp Lit department), gave us a ring and invited us out to watch fireworks. We all (the three of us, and two other Comp-litters) packed food and wine and drove to the top of one of Emory's parking decks. Then proceeded the biggest thunderstorm of the year thus far, with some magnificent lightning, which far outshone any fireworks launched from Earth. Truly Mother Nature was in all her glo... okay, enough schmaltz. In summary, it was beautiful, and it was great sitting under the covered part of the deck as the rain poured and the thunder thundered, drinking wine and eating strawberries. We didn't even mind that when, finally, the fireworks made their appearance, they were sparse and pitiful. We'd had our show, and we vowed to make the parking deck a July 4th tradition.

After that, we went back to Melissa's house and talked the evening away, enjoying Melissa's new invention: melon balls liberally sprinkled with brandy, on which she bestowed the name "B & B balls." Try them sometime, but remember to send Melissa the royalty cheques.

Ok, so that's the fourth part of my post title. As for the final, that refers to Sunday's World Cup Final match between Italy and France. I decided to make something of an occasion of it, so seven or eight friends are coming over, we're firing up the barbecue, and watching what will hopefully be a good match. I even bought some cake mix, white frosting, and a tube of black icing to do my best at effecting the facsimile of a soccer ball en gateau. Go France!

Much needed frivolity in a week that was primarily given to reading hours and to unpleasant and unfortunate necessity. Oh yes--and to a shocking development in the ongoing squirrel conspiracy.

posted at 12:01 AM.

July 04, 2006

When Good Parades Go Bad

It's the morning of the fourth, and Jen and I have plans to spend the holiday together, idling and not getting work done. In an effort to be festive in an understated manner, I'm wearing a blue polo shirt, white undershirt, and red necklace.

I just got a call from Jen, however: turns out that her house is on a parade route, and they're not letting any cars get out. As such, our own fourth plans have to be put on hold for an hour or so, until the parade is over. I do wonder, however, what would happen in a medical emergency when the entrance to an apartment complex is blocked for something like a parade--doesn't seem particularly responsible to me. The Avondale Estates city council peoplemajigs should give this some more thought (or maybe they have and I'm just not up on how they handle these matters).

Early this morning, just because a few of my friends are taking part in it, I watched the Peachtree Road Race (which, I believe, is the largest subscribed 10k race in the world, but I may be mistaken on that) on TV. Of course, I didn't see my friends among the thousands of faces, but the futile attempt at spotting them was fun nonetheless. Running. Now anyone who knows me knows that I don't run. Large people aren't made to run, for some reason--it's not, in my case at least, a matter of getting tired overly fast. I can walk faster than a slow jog and sustain a brisk pace for an hour on the treadmill and be fine, but if I were to try doing that slow jog, somehow the balance would be thrown all out of whack. I feel uneven, unstable running. There's only one time I like to run, and that's in a very particular circumstance, for a very short distance: crossing the main road to get to my street, which is on a sharp decline--running across it and then down the slope's always an exhilirating feeling. However, you can do that only when you've got to hurry across the street. With no traffic, you'd look awful silly running like Pooh toHunny for no reason.

But I would like to participate in a race sometime. Maybe not a 10K with as many uphill bits as the Peachtree, but if I could learn to run, I'd like to maybe do a 5k sometime. Who knows--maybe I will.

posted at 9:23 AM.