Againstmybetterjudgment's Weblog

Do The Right Thing

againstmybetterjudgment — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:16:37 +0000

I have to admit, I was more than a little confused by Spike Lee’s message here. I understand that none of the characters seem to be “doing the right thing,” with the exception of The Mayor, but he’s playing with all manner of sub-surface racial-tension throughout and he reaches for something a little deeper at the end when (mostly racial but some economic) tensions finally do explode, the sympathetic-but-only-up-to-a-point white businessman loses his business, and we finally get some black people up on those walls. Which solves what, exactly? The impoverished blacks of Bedstuy are still in Bedstuy; there is no intimation that the vacant storefront owned by Sal will become the fixture of the three middle-aged sit-around-all-day blacks’ dream; will become a black-owned and operated business. Mookie is no better at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning (apart from now being “a regular Rockefeller”); same guy, same problems, same economic and personal inabilities to fix or confront his problems. He hasn’t learned a bit from his experiences with Sal’s racist and Sal’s open-minded sons, or from Radio’s death, or from the riot. The entire cast of Do The Right Thing is static apart from the Mayor and Mother-Sister, who change in regards to how they regard one another but not perhaps in how they regard themselves. The crusade of Geeky-Glasses to get pictures of black people on the wall only comes off as absurd to me; I don’t understand, I can’t sympathize, I think he’s making a huge deal out of nothing. I get (grok?) the mob’s justifiable rage at having stood by and watched the cops kill Radio, and I inwardly groaned as Sal said completely the wrong thing in that situation (“You do what you have to do” instead of, say, “I never meant for him to die” which would have gone some way of putting him and the angry blacks on the same side instead of aligning him with the cops), and I pleaded then laughed at the antics of the frantic Korean grocer (“I like you! I black!”). I utterly failed to understand Mookie’s reasoning in chucking the garbage can through Sal’s window. Was he trying to distract the mob from tearing Sal and his sons apart? Was that supposed to be some sort of major pivotal moral moment for him?

Either I missed some things, Lee’s message wasn’t clear enough, or his message was essentially “there is no solution; there is no hope.”

Jazz

againstmybetterjudgment — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 22:20:33 +0000

“‘I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.’” (135)

In a story where even the narrator is a biased, untrustworthy, probably-lying sneak, this rings as the falsest sentiment in the book – and also a perfectly true one. False because any illusion of control over one’s emotions, to love or not to love, is an utter farce, and while one may choose one’s lover as one chooses a loaf of bread, one may not choose whether or not to love. Joe’s actions belie his assertions that he is in control – his obsessive need to follow Dorcas and confront her rather than let her go is a direct contradiction to his ability to choose, his claims to ‘making up his mind’ to hunt her notwithstanding. That is the action of a man who has no control and is losing what little semblance of it he has left. Shooting Dorcas is not the action of a man “making his mind” but of a love-crazed slave to his needs and instincts. Even his unconscious shift from “she” to “you”, unwittingly speaking directly to the object of his obsession, betrays his unstable and unrestrained state of mind.

Quicksand

againstmybetterjudgment — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 21:51:22 +0000

“Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake of the twenty-five dollars, to her self-control, Helga gave her head a little toss and flung out her hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she shrugged. What did it matter? ‘Oh, well, if you really want to know. I assure you, it’s nothing interesting. Or nasty,’ she added maliciously. ‘It’s just plain horrid. For me.’ And she began mockingly to relate her story.” (39)

This paragraph is from Helga’s pilgrimmage to New York with Mrs. Hayes-Rore when Helga is pressed for information on her “people.” Through body-language and verbal assurances Helga attempts to make the story of her origins unimportant both to her and Mrs. Hayes-Rore – the head-toss, the helpless hand-flinging, shrugging. Feigning disinterest – “Oh, well, if you really want to know.” Even without reading the preceding paragraphs, where Mrs. Hayes-Rore is called Helga’s “tormenter” and intuites that the subject bothers Helga, and the following, where Helga’s attempts at poise fall completely apart, we can see Helga’s passion and discomfort here in the way she over-reacts: adding “or nasty” in a malicious tone only seems like an attempt at humor but is really a way of covertly attacking Mrs. Hayes-Rore for having an interest in “nasty” things as a way of getting back for making her tell her hateful story, and the falling-short-of-ironic “It’s just horrid. For me.” Based on these contextual clues it becomes apparent Helga’s mocking handling of her life-story is only a cover for her hurt, resentment, and bewilderment.

Lunch Poems

againstmybetterjudgment — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 01:46:41 +0000

If you’re a big fan of New York, or mid-sixties pop culture, the O’Hara poems collected in Lunch Poems are indispensable. If not, there is less reason to jump on a copy. Most of Lunch Poems are meandering and groundless almost to the point of being schizophrenic. I do not have to make perfect sense out of a poem to enjoy it, but it helps if it is not strings of obtuse referances and bizarre corollaries. Every so often O’Hara figures out what he’s doing and delivers a real genuine weighty thought:

“I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so” (from Personal Poem)

“do I really want a son

to carry on my idiocy past the Horned Gates

poor kid a staggering load” (from Cornkind)

These are jewels lost in the flood, however, and there are far far too few of these and far too many instances of what O’Hara was thinking this morning when he ordered a ham-on-rye, which rarely get more interesting than the latest news item or his plans for the day.

againstmybetterjudgment — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:40:27 +0000

Blarghablarghablarghablarghablarghablarghasick again.

Hope to be back on my feet by Thursday.

Midnight Cowboy

againstmybetterjudgment — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:59:49 +0000

There’s something to be said for watching a movie in the comfort of your own dorm room, by yourself. You can make all the inappropriate comments you like, laugh at all the wrong moments, offer running commentary and advice, even, when the DVD started skipping, yell at the projector booth and throw empty White Castle boxes.

Within the first few seconds of film, Joe drops a bar of soap. I’m a little surprised no one else picked up on that, but then again, I already knew the tenor of the rest of the movie. I also thought it was a hilarious visual pun. It might just have been an excuse for a full nude exposure from the feet up so we could see how built he was.

A lot of ground was already covered in the class discussion, so I’ll try not to retread ground already well-worn, other than to say that yes, it was depressing, yes, it was about the characters, and yes, I kept thinking they had a shot at making it, but would screw up some way or another. It was mostly about loneliness and how we deal with that and how we try to survive and make our way than about depression and always failing, I thought. Leaving for Florida and killing the elderly man seemed less about being thwarted in our aims and desperation and meant to be statements on the lengths Joe was willing to go to for his friend, and the value he put on that friendship. “Kin” was what he called Ratso (I call him “Rizzo.” “Ritzy ditzy razzy ol’ Rizzo”) in the old man’s apartment. When you think about it, Ratso was the only one he had in the world.

Joe’s relationship to his grandmother was – very charged and highly erotic. I don’t think anyone has reached around and pulled my face down for a kiss the way she did while he was massaging her, when they didn’t also want to sleep with me. The scenes in the bed were weird in the same way – well, the naked man with the whiskey bottle was just weird, but the scene a little later in the montage where she pulls him close and kisses his face was – weird in a very different, suspicious way.

Montage! Montage! Montage! Everything’s a montage! Emotions are montages! Memories are montages! Drug-induced euphorias are montages! Montages! Montages! Montages!

I really do think Joe Buck could have made it as a hustler – if he had only stuck with it, gotten a manager (I yelled this and related advice at the screen with disturbing regularity), been persistent, instead of walking around in a fugue all those days after the ‘manager’ incident. Tried the same trick again with the escort service, now that Joe was a little wiser to the ways their (higher breed of) clientele preferred to be treated (in public, anyway). Or hell, he could have applied for a job with the escort service. Boy needs to get his act together.

The ‘manager’ scene was pretty damned screwy altogether. Getting down on their knees and praising Jesus for – a fruitful hustling? – was just downright bizarre and almost nonsensical, and Joe’s reaction was also – well, it was fairly well explained through the montage, but it still seemed a little strong. What I was expecting - waiting for – maybe I mean ‘goading for’ – was for the manager to ask Buck to go down on him, probably fellate him. Maybe that expectation was what the director/writer wanted to play on.

I’m a little confused as to why people were a little confused as to whether or not Joe killed the elderly gentleman in the hotel room. The man was clearly a closet queer that believed his “unhealthy” preferance in past-times was an affront to God – hence the repeating that things were ‘wrong’ and telling Joe that he ‘deserved this’ when Joe started hitting him and wanting to give him things to try and make it ‘right’ and so on (I don’t remember if this aspect of the scene was discussed in class or not so I’m doing it here to be safe). Joe clearly used the telephone mouthpiece (or receiver) to smother the old man, and killed him. The train passing as he did it would confirm this – killers had a reputation of waiting for a train to go by before striking, so that the noise would cover up there victim’s struggle. Joe obviously didn’t have the luxury of waiting for one to pass before killing the man, but audiences – particularly audiences from the late 60′s, which I’ll get back to in a minute – are so accustomed to seeing scenes of murder while a radio blares or a train rolls overhead that it becomes iconic – sort of shorthand for “murder being done here.” In 1969 there would still be plenty of people who remembered old-time radio programs where the tactic of killing as a train went by was all the rage because it aided an audio element to the otherwise tired “screams.” For a classic example hear “Sorry, Wrong Number” (http://www.geocities.com/emruf2/otr/suspense2.html) (or rather read, I can’t get an audio version online without paying – sorry).

Why didn’t I hear a single person refer to Rizzo as a grifter? It’s what he is, folks. Look the term up.

Speaking of Rizzo and his grifting, thieving ways, I thought one of the most poignant, inciteful moments of the film was when they visit his dad’s grave. Rizzo can’t even mention the guy during the movie without down-talking him. When they get there, Rizzo even swipes a bunch of flowers from a nearby grave. At first you think, “Jeeze. How callous – towards the person whose grave he swiped that from and to his father who he gives it to. Almost like an anti-gift – I think so little of you not only do I not buy you flowers, I give you stolen flowers instead.” But then you realize that stealing is all Rizzo has to give. He doesn’t have a single thing he hasn’t swiped or cheated out of somebody, except maybe his dreams of Florida. Stealing to give to his dad, or give to Buck, is the most sincere thing Rizzo has to give.

To end on a lighter note, thank god Joe ditched the cowboy suit. You’d look handsome in anything, sweetie, no need to look like a clown while you’re at it. In his new gear he reminds me of a blonde Tommy Vercetti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Vercetti) but 17 years earlier and with a more tragic choice in shirt color. Maybe it’s just because they both fled New York for Miami. Maybe I just want to play GTA: Vice City again. Who knows.

Best moment? When Joe Buck learns some sense and announces out loud “I think I’m going to get some kind of job or something. Hustlin’, that ain’t no kind of life for a man” (or something to that effect). Pan back. “What do you think about that?”

Me: “I think I’m dead. Quick, check my pulse. Look, I’m real sorry, but I just browned your new pair of pants.”

I’ll be a real riot in hell.

againstmybetterjudgment — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:17:15 +0000

Why can’t we live without ribs?

Me and my monkey

not enough dead zombies

across a campus shooting

stench of death

Beside Ben

this is drivel

Greco-Roman

Jupiter cardinals

singing frogs of

Alabama’s fury insanity.

Soul-kitchen.

I can cook too, in Spanish pictures.

Bugs Bunny-blender.

Sunny-Spanish-scalpel-souls.

Whiskey-bullets

in the kumquat ivory.

Fornicates, dies.

Like silken jazz.

rough blue shit explosions.

Now.

Here.

Penis.

Dis. I see sex.

Keeanu Reeves.

Pointless controversy.

Shoot’em up, meteor storm far away, so why not now?

againstmybetterjudgment — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 20:37:55 +0000

Had a problem with an incident from this morning clinging to me like a limpet until the obsession half drove me mad. Impossible to concentrate on my work. It submerged as soon as it occurred and lurked there all through the day until I was finally alone and setting down to work. I lost a good forty-five minutes going over and over it and banging my wrist against the keyboard; none of the messengers have been working this week and I just needed some good old-fashioned amateur psychotherapy/venting. Finally picked up the phone and called my oooold friend J.I. J.I. is a deeply devout nondenominational Christian, staunch Conservative, and (this has no relation to anything else) Filipino. We are so diametrically opposed in our personal lives and beliefs it’s a wonder we don’t explode like matter/anti-matter when we touch. Probably why we get along so well. Jawed his ear off as he was walking home with a whole lot of junk he probably didn’t want to hear but, tough. That’s friendship. If he ever falls far enough off the straight and narrow to need guidance or an ear to rant in, I’ll be returning the favor. Feeling fairly better; expect to get work done now.

againstmybetterjudgment — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:59:14 +0000

The G. There’s a lot of us, boisterous, uncontained. Loud voices discussing things sure to frighten other passengers. Ejected by steam into the vomit-coated street. Turning in place. Standing in the chill and talking; the little one shivers like a wind-up penguin and tells us she can kill a man with her bare thumbs. We shove wadded-up bills at the ticket-seller en masse and wind down and down and down to seats. We laugh. We cringe. We laugh some more. The doors open up and we spill back onto the street. Too early to go home. He has a psychic McDonald’s sense, always points to the nearest McD’s. We buy shakes for the thirsty ladies and a happy meal. He doesn’t get the wrestler. The dog’s bone is tiny, frail plastic and sure to be lost by the end of the night. Where to? Where to? The national debt clock whirls. Forsaken we file back down into mahogany dusk. Lovers rest head-to-shoulder. We offend and are loud, then the brakes scream and we are home.

The original National Debt Clock was erected in Times Square, in 1989, when U.S. debt stood at 2.7 trillion dollars. Seymour Durst, real estate developer, created it to show Americans how their government was doing, debt-wise. In the mid-90′s, debt rose so fast at one point the computer behind the clock crashed. In August of ’99, however, a frugal Democratic Congress began paying back the debt and the clock began counting in reverse. This was so emotionally jarring for many New Yorkers that Durst’s son disconnected the clock September of the following year (fun fact: then vice-president Al Gore outlined a plan to eliminate the national debt by 2012; his running opponent Bush also promised to eradicate the debt but failed to set a specific deadline).

The clock was switched back on two years later as debt rose and in 2004 it was replaced by a digital version in the Financial District, which we passed on our outing. At the time of this writing, the national debt stands at $9,246,939,934,027.54.

Sources: a CNN article from 9/7/2000 which can be found at http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/09/07/debt.clock/

and a Russian paper article translated into English called Pravda dated 3/30/2006. It can be viewed at http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/30-03-2006/78085-nationaldebt-0

againstmybetterjudgment — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:21:57 +0000

Jacob Riis was a Danish-American journalist with a reformist bent from the turn of the century. For those not a personal fan of Riis, the term is “muckraker.” He was the son of a hard-working Danish newspaper-editor who had fourteen other children to worry about. At 12 he donated all of his Christmas money to a poorer family and at 21 he steamed to America alone to work as a carpenter. His only friend was a stray dog which was subsequently beat to death before his eyes by a police officer. He struggled to get by in police-run poor-houses for four years until he landed a job as a police reporter. He left his first newspaper for another and finally was successful enough to begin “paying back” by exposing the degradation and horrors of poor immigrant America and improving their lot. His work culminated in a series of essays both written and photographic, culminating in How The Other Half Lives. Riis was among the first photographers to use “flash powder” to enable photography even in dark poorly-lit environs, making him something of a pioneer of the trade. His reforming crusade won him the friendship of Roosevelt and closed down the horrendous police-run poor-houses that had made his life so miserable when he first arrived. His work can found at any of the following links:

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/photos/images/riis4.gif

http://www.atschool.org/materials/primary/images/riis1.jpg

http://faculty.tamu-commerce.edu/kroggenkamp/riis3.jpg

http://www.sat.lib.tx.us/JETA/images/riis.jpg

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vox-pop/images/gny3.jpg

How The Other Half Lives can be found online at http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html