Looking at love

When I was a kid I liked to wedge a sharp corner in my mouth - you know, the edge of some cardboard or plastic packaging, or else the top of a Bic pen cap - and jab at the point where my palate met my top teeth until it was irritated and bleeding a little. I liked the taste of the blood and the tingling sensation. I never did any real damage. In fact, it never even occurred to me that this was weird, or self-destructive. The pain was besides the point. It was entertaining. I felt something different.

At night now I sometimes look at things on the internet designed to poke me in a similar way, although I take a lot less pleasure in them than I used to in gumming on a repurposed cracker box. One is the blog of St. Paul-based photographer Melissa Oholendt, which I stumbled upon through a friend's blog. Oholendt photographs engaged couples and weddings. On her professional website, she sets forth a mission statement of sorts:

You know the moment where the groom sees his bride for the first time? His look tells a story of love.

My passion is telling your story.

When I say I'm yours, I very literally mean...I'm yours.

So far, so strangely-emotionally-transgressive-and-bizarrely-sad. But hey! Her photos are nice. But (no insult meant to the Oholendt here; I'd hate to be TP'd by marauding fans of the photog), that's not why I look. When I stare blearily at pictures of "courtney & matt" or "beth & jeremy," I'm actively looking to snark (bad news, according to these findings). I want to think something bad. Not because I'm against Oholendt's stated goal of capturing love, but because I'm exhausted by the big question of how people fall in love.

For a good chunk of my life I thought I understood the machinations of emotional attachment, sexual compatibility, and human companionship quite well. Then, when I became single last year for the first time in nine years, I realized I was completely out of my depth. Since then I've experienced the vagaries of the dating world in a fashion that is neither unique nor, all things considered, particularly egregious. The things that have happened to me are the stuff of some particularly mumbly indie romantic comedies. I'll get over it.

But this year I was with a man who took beautiful pictures of me. I framed one, and it's sitting bubblewrapped in a cabinet right now because between the time I packed it into a box in New York and took it out of one here in Los Angeles he made it dramatically clear that my assumptions about our relationship were incorrect. And now on the internet I can look at the pictures he takes of a different woman, one who looks like she would agree with Oholendt's quip:

Um. Is Jennifer Aniston way prettier than Angelina Jolie? That would be a yes.

So I guess this post is a limp, barely interested Team Jolie fistpump.

But anyway. When I was a senior in high school I went through yet another bout of body image issues. I never had an eating disorder or hurt myself, but I sure felt pretty fucking terrible about the way that I looked. At one point I cut a photograph of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis out of one of my mom's copies of Hello!. I coated it in several overlapping strips of Scotch tape, a sort of ghetto lamination job, and stuck it in my wallet.

I'd pull it out when it was time to order at a restaurant. The photo - not the one above - didn't show Depp or Paradis's bodies, just their heads.

"What are you doing?" my sister asked me once.
"It just helps me," I said. "You know, to think about being beautiful."

It would have been more effective if I'd just folded the picture in half, pinched the corner sharp, and opened wide.

Two Movies

Last week, after what I think was exactly a calendar year of not going to the Film Forum for no other reason than sheer laziness (well, also not living in NYC for five months of 2008), I saw two films at the Film Forum. They were Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas, and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman. It was my first time seeing both movies.





The premise of Silent Light (Stellet Licht in Plattdeutsch, the language spoken by Russian Mennonites) - a man falls in love with a woman who is not his wife - interested me less than the details of its production. Silent Light was filmed with a nonprofessional cast of Mennonite actors. Although it takes place in the Mennonite community in north Mexico (a community I did not know existed), the actors also hail from Canada and Germany, and were able to communicate with eachother because they all speak the same small language. Miriam Toews, one of the lead actors, is an acclaimed Canadian author who was raised in a Mennonite community. All of this is the type of trivia that makes me adore movies.

And I did enjoy Silent Light deeply, although my prurient interest in the film as a window into the cloistered lives of Mexican Mennonites ended up being inconsequential. The movie is an explosion of sensuality. Watching Silent Light reminded me of an African cinema course I took during my undergraduate career. The instructor told us that we would have to learn to read film in a new way, since African cinema features few of the tropes of mainstream American movies (closeups, quick cuts, flashy camerawork) and often features long still shots on people moving through a landscape. But Reygadas's film is by no means plain. every scene was so full of texture that I felt physically respondent to the film, wet when it was raining, heavy with sorrow during scenes of a funeral - but it subverts the expectations of the modern viewer. The film begins and ends with long dreamlike shots of a sunrise and sunset. The images are strikingly beautiful, and yet the desire to look away, to do something other than focus on what was in front of me, was hard to resist. Most of the people in the theatre did not resist - the rows were lit up with cell-phone screens as people texted and checked their missed calls. But Silent Light is all about the value of experience, even at the cost of personal comfort. A life fully lived, it seems to say, will never run out of surprises.



Jeanne Dielman is completely tonally different from Silent Light, but it too has a deep love for the unmoving camera. For nearly three and a half hours the viewer follows Jeanne through her day. She is a Belgian housewife without a husband, performing the rituals of domesticity seemingly solely for the benefit of her teenage son, who is at school all day. Even with the promise of "something" happening at the end of the movie, Jeanne Dielman is a long haul. Scenes ten and fifteen minutes long show Jeanne meticulously preparing food and then cleaning up after herself with a heartbreaking efficiency. The viewer returns with Jeanne to her chores - folding up the sofa bed her son sleeps on, making her own bed, grinding coffee beans - so many times that one starts to feel the same sense of exhaustion and misery at the routine that Jeanne herself must feel.



One of Jeanne's daily tasks is draping a small towel over her shiny middle-class bedspread, so that the gentleman caller she receives in the middle of each day will not sully her linens. Jeanne Dielman is a genteel prostitute, you see, selling dispassionate rolls in the sack in exchange for her continued stasis. These encounters are barely shown in the movie. Instead, we see Jeanne's ability to cope deteriorate over the course of the three days. On the second day, her hair is still tousled when her son gets home. "Your hair's a mess," he says, scarfing down his food. Jeanne's sister writes to her from Canada: would you like to visit us and maybe meet a nice man? But Jeanne can't even summon the energy to decide whether or not she would like to make the trip.

Where Silent Light was life-affirming for me, Jeanne Dielman felt uncomfortably familiar. I, too, am a woman who spends a lot of time alone in her apartment, although I am not also a discreet prostitute. I know the feeling of preparing a meal for yourself and then carefully cleaning up all evidence that the meal even occurred. The slight satisfaction that I take from small household tasks can become an enormous gloominess over the course of a day spent alone. By nightfall I'm restless, and if there's nothing for me to do and no one to see, the clean kitchen is small comfort.

Chantal Akerman was 25 when she made Jeanne Dielman. In an interview with my friend Dennis Lim, Akerman said:

“Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious. She didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour. [...] I sometimes think I should have made it after many other films, at the end of my career,” she said. “I remember saying to myself, how can I make a better film? But it was also exactly the film I had to make then. It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself.”

She added, “I would have changed nothing about it.”

Things that are not graduate applications

The Britney Spears Rolling Stone cover. How sad is this? I don't know what smacks of more desperation: the magazine turning whatever residual Obama excitement that exists into an endorsement of the most manufactured comeback since Coke the first triumphed over Coke II, or the fact that nobody is even pretending any more that "Britney's back!" means anything other than "Britney's skinny again!" Even the way they rolled her shirt up looks so haphazard but direct, like a madam's hasty attempt to prove that a hooker still has it. In this Jezebel post, the author notes that she saw Spears on television for the first time when she was 16, that Britney replaced Shirley Manson as the arbiter of hot. I was fourteen when I saw a weird infomercial for the first Spears album, and although I was a Garbage fan in the late Nineties I can't remember a time when Shirley Manson - or anyone like her - was considered mainstream hot. The high-porn standard of beauty has been the norm for almost as long as I can remember, and for just as long almost everyone has been complaining about it. The revolt against the Britney idea of beauty and music is as old as unambiguous appreciation of these things. I guess I'm supposed to ironically appreciate a song like "Womanizer," but like this cover it just bores me.

Law and Order alternate universe approximations. Unfortunately I don't have screenshots for any of this, but I sure love the almost-real stuff L&O comes up with for their ripped-from-the-headlines stories. Especially "b-friendz.com," a stand-in for both MySpace and Facebook that is somehow also a real website. Somehow every attempt they make at approximating an element of the real world comes off as both a parody and a clueless imitation. I especially like it when the detectives rough up the nerdy head of b-friendz.com. He's no Nate Silver, that's for sure.

Eavesdropping for fun and profit

Right before the band came on at the My Bloody Valentine show last night, after the second terrible opening I've seen the Lilys perform (saw them open for the Brian Jonestown Massacre in 2005 and it was just as terrible), this trio of people did that annoying thing where they push through the crowd pretending to look for someone and then it turns out they just wanted to be closer to the stage. They decided to plant themselves right next to me. In doing so they separated a woman with an amazing 80s goth haircut (sort of a monklike fringe, shaved in the back) and her man.

"Excuse me, I need to stand next to my wife," the man said with utmost restraint.
"OH WATCH OUT YOU'RE SEPARATIN' FAMILIES!" One of the trio chortled to another, moving closer to me. They were two women and a man, maybe in their mid-to-late-thirties. One of the women was either drunk or medicated, because she proceeded to speak loudly about things that most people, even me with my penchant for public uncomfortableness, do not.

It seemed that she and the guy were a couple who had dated in the past, but he had "cut her off" sometime in August, and she was pissed. At first I thought she was complaining about him cutting her off in her babbling conversation, but then it was clear she was demanding an explanation for his behavior in August. But our girl - who was, say, 5'2", with a perfect helmet-blowdried red bob (she probably brings in a picture of Louise Brooks) and dressed in that near-goth inexplicably slutty way lots of women her age do for concerts - was not the type to take a straight train of thought from A to B.

"Why did you cut me off in August?" She demanded of the guy (who I will note here was not the type of guy anybody should be hurting over; sorry, it's not okay to wear aviator sunglasses inside in a dark room even if you're a blazing hot British vampire, and this guy was more like a slightly-better-looking Kevin James, which oh god makes me WISH I had started Personal Ad Hell on this website before I found this amazing Casual Encounters ad where the guy said he looked like Kevin James). "I went three and half weeks without sex. I cut myself off. I cut MEN off."

"Three whole weeks, huh?" The guy said, mildly concerned.

"Yeah, and then when I was on the phone with that guy, I told him, I told him all kinds of fucked up shit. ALL KINDS."

"Like what?"

"I told him I got herpes from my lover who was bisexual, oh yeah..." The couple dissolved into giggles and then a prolonged openmouthed kiss. "Yeah, all sorts of fucked up shit. And you know what? You know what I am SORRY I don't have the big ass you want. I know you want a big fucking ass. I know you do. But I like being a waif. I like being a little girl. I can't put Botox in my ass to make it big so you can fuck it..." The guy grabbed her and made out with her again, presumably because he was crazy turned on, or maybe because he was slightly more conscious that they were sharing space with a couple thousand other people waiting to float away on a tide of shoegaze.

At this point I was kind of blushing for them, but not really because what they were saying was inappropriate, more because it was so inaccurate. Botox doesn't, uh, inflate anything; maybe she was thinking of lip fillers like Restalyne or collagen? But you couldn't put those in your glutes, either. There are implant procedures, but they're pretty costly and stupid. More bothersome was the fact that even this crazy drunk-or-just-loud lady was slipping back into this thing I watch women do all the time, which is tout their own thinness against the broad tide of society's demand that they bulk up. Cram it! No one is ever going to give you a hard time for being tiny!

At this point the third member of the trio, the other woman, who had not been a participant in this conversation, turned around and apologized to me. "They must be really annoying," she said. "So much drama."

"No, it's fine," I told her. "Kind of amusing." I immediately thought, ah ha, here is the much-abused nice friend. But all of my sympathy evaporated when the redhead detached herself from the guy who wanted to fuck a big ass and started kissing her friend. This is also behavior I abhor! Admittedly, it wasn't exactly Girls Gone Wild gonzo-style performalesbianism, but just all the weird homosocial cuddling that goes on in public. Once when I was home visiting some friends I hadn't seen in a while, I met one of their friends from the local college, and watched with a little bit of vomit in my mouth as she proceeded to interrupt conversation all night by making eye contact with one of them, saying "Kiss," and pecking them on the mouth.

Don't get me wrong - same sex affection is fine by me, in fact it's sexy by me. But this stuff just combines the queasiness of PDA with the pointlessness of weird showy public cuddling. Anyway, then there was some ass-stroking between the women (apparently they were free from the derriere neuroses that led to the redhead being cut off) and then the music started, and I figured the whole thing was over.

Until they started taking cutesy pictures of each other throughout the entire concert. Who knew that cell phone cameras have flashes now?

F.H.W.

A couple of months ago I had what I immediately termed a "middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout." I'm not sure why I started thinking about her. A friend of mine had mentioned seeing her at a party. He wanted to hit on her, but I guess she was there with her boyfriend.

Anyway, it was around two in the morning. I had brought my laptop into my bedroom, something I generally try to avoid doing, and found myself rereading Chris Heath's hilariously overwritten 1998 Rolling Stone cover story on Apple, "The Caged Bird Sings."



Here's a choice quote:

But in the busy, greedy, impatient '90s, we become whatever may be written about us in one or two perky paragraphs, and hers might lead one to believe that Fiona Apple is either a precocious, calculating prodigy or an unbalanced, ungrateful freak. That is the great sucker punch of modern celebrity: It draws in the Fiona Apples of this world with that most wonderful of all promises -- to be understood -- and yet humans are still to invent a quicker, more-efficient method of being misunderstood by the greatest possible number of people than Becoming Famous in America. Fiona Apple has been discovering this for herself.

I first saw Fiona Apple on Saturday Night Live in late 1996. I used to glean a lot of important pop culture information from SNL; it was where I learned about another band I loved in middle school, Veruca Salt, and trying to follow the political jokes taught me as much about current affairs as, well, A Current Affair. Apple performed the song "Shadowboxer". I liked it so much that I asked for her album Tidal for my twelfth birthday a few days later.

In my memory that album will always be inextricably linked with a happy winter spent playing Mario 64, the only game I owned and part of my other birthday present, a Nintendo 64. For whatever reason the image of Mario diving into the aquatic worlds is especially linked to the opening song "Sleep to Dream." I listened to the album all the time, and I loved Fiona's controversial video, "Criminal."



It looks outdated now. Mark Romanek's slick surfaces and surveillance-camera feel are so common they're basically passe, and we're all familiar with Fiona's sad-hungry stare, the way her eyes sometimes turn red in the glare. But the whole thing transfixed me when I was twelve, even though I had to admit my mom had a point when she snorted derisively at the shot of Fiona squirting that, uh, dish soap out of the bottle at 4:03. Also, heroin chic (and maybe kiddie porn chic) aside, the video was and is sexy.

In 1996, the controversy over the video baffled me. Even though she was writhing on some faceless dude's knee, I reasoned, Fiona seemed to be in control of the situation; it's her song, after all, and the camera's on her. And while I don't really agree with my past reasoning now, I'm glad that I read the video that way. It didn't make me want to look tiny and sad in a closet. It was just a glimpse of a world that I could someday hope to enter and manipulate.

During my middle-of-the-night Fiona Apple freakout I relearned a few facts about her that I missed as a sixth grader. Most importantly, I discovered that Apple dated David Blaine. For a long time.



...And in fact, according to the RS article, Blaine and Apple have matching tattoos that say "kin." And! According to this David Blaine messageboard, Blaine is the faceless man Apple oozes all over in "Criminal," which successfully oblitherates any lingering feelings about the video being sexy I still harbored. Of course, the Heath article also mentions that Apple had been up all night "drinking Surfers on Acid (some malignant combination of Malibu, Jaegermeister and pineapple juice) with Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson," so maybe there was already trouble in paradise in 1998.

I didn't think a lot about it at the time, but I was pretty lucky with the women who were famous when I was what they now call a "tween:" Madonna, Alanis Morrisette, Apple, even the Spice Girls were all better than the cocktail of titilation and stupidity now on offer to young girls. I went to Lilith Fair and saw Jewel and Sarah McLachlan.There were about eighteen months in the late nineties when the whole "women in rock" package got accidentally recycled into a celebration of real voices, and I was lucky to be twelve and thirteen years old.