Aventurina King

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/08/online_novels

I am reading a French book about Marilyn Monroe.  I haven't finished it yet, so I cannot make any all-encompassing statement about the curve of its plot or the measure of its depth.  I like the book.  But up until today, 200 pages in, I couldn't quite pinpoint why I liked the book.  I couldn't even begin to describe it.  Reading it had been a completely passive experience, one in which I relinquished all intellectual control and was breathlessly dragged along the marble road of polished sentences without looking back.

 But a few days ago, in a conversation with my roommate, my reading experience congealed into sentences.  It is a historical novel.  You don't know what's true, what's not.  Although the feeling of Marilyn's presence that coats the open pages is so visceral that I can't help but believe every sentence.  I already feel like I know Marilyn.  I couldn't describe her face, nor what she likes to eat, nor even which jokes make her laugh.  I feel like I know her in a different way.  That knowledge is much like the memory of a delightful film you have seen five years ago.  You know it's good, but you couldn't begin to describe the plot.  The stenciled outline is erased, what remains is the raw, dense sensation of the core.

 How does the book achieve this? The chapters are short.  As in a puntilistic painting, form or rather meaning is achieved in the assembly of disparate events, thoughts, quotes and encounters.  In one chapter, Marilyn spends two weeks in a sanitarium.  In another, she is discussing anal sex with her last analyst, doctor Greenson.  Ignorant of time, yet loyal to its title, each chapter explores an issue discussed in Marilyn's last few years of analysis.  The novel's organization reflects the erratic digging of these sessions.

  Some of my favorite passages (i love the way the author, Michel Schneider, ends her chapters.  Not the incisiveness of the punch line, something more subtle, yet more poignant, like an unexpected caress):

A week and a half ago, I started going to the gym.  Everyday for one hour.  The exercise apparently still hasn't sunken in.  No bulging calf muscles and my running endurance went from an all time low (10 minutes) to a not so low 15 minutes.

But more importantly, straight back from China, the gym crystallized my renewed impressions of America.  Women in tight pants and tops, men in baggy shorts and T-shirts tangle themselves up in monster machines.  A large portion bully themselves on the treadmill, staring fixedly, as though for vital moral support, at the glaring flat screen perched atop their buzzing scaffolding. 

The American gym is a microcosm of America's worst.  Whereas sport brings people together (granted it's around a piece of plastic polymer), gym adherents are alone with the machine (as I am now with my labtop) in their own bubble of self worship.  The machine becomes an extension of their ego, the bigger the better.  The effect is heightened by a strapped ipod, piping music that inexorably flattens thoughts to the level of the body: building muscle, losing fat.

As I sat on this beach-chair-like contraption, pushing a board attached to 40 pounds of weight with my two legs, I wondered whether there would have been another way to design these machines.  At the time I couldn't think of any.  Right now, I have this image of one huge massive treadmill, or conversation of treadmills where people would have to face each other and speak while they are running.  The present positioning of the treadmill makes conversation uncomfortable.  Maybe the machines could be less intimidating.  Instead of black, weights could be rainbow colored.  The iron frame could itself lose weight to encourage vision and conversation.  Maybe the gym would just become one, huge flat gymnasium where people would sweat over exerting their own body weight.  Maybe I'm too optimistic.

Yesterday evening, I attended the Bent Festival.  It was much like going to a party I wasn't invited to, the guests were strangers--they were mostly middle aged men, some with mohawks, some with glasses and studious airs--and the chain of events unrolled with nerve racking abruptness.  It began in the dark, the surrounding horizon of concrete walls silently cast off its yellow glow.  Then the sound of an electric circuit, a concentrate of burning textured sound waves, rang out in the grey darkness.  On stage, the performer, a man with sunglasses, was playing with what appeared to be a microwave.  On top of it, soldier-like rows of metal prongs, and in between a pair of these, a thin, wavering stub of white current.

The concert's content was noise, or at least noise as defined in my high school music classes.  It wasn't easy on the ears, long bands of electrical slashes, at small intervals peppered with decipherable beats and melodies.   Following performances featured a girl in elvin attire and a cowboy who has lost his way in time.  The former threw out sounds of babies crying cut with electrical grumbling.  The cowboy lit a small furnace and the audience watched, curious, as a single wheel of a model locomotive began turning.

I left the cowboy and his locomotive to explore the premises.  To the right of the stage, a flock of cardboard boxes hung silently from the ceiling.  Further away, microphones had fallen into huge jars that smelled like candy.  (see pictures below)

The Chinese film Summer Palace raised quite a cloud of dust at the Cannes film festival.  It competed without the green light of the Chinese censorship bureau and back home, officials were quick to retaliate.  A group of correspondents reporting on the festival was sent back to China.  The director, Lou Ye, was banned from making films in the middle kingdom for five years.

All this news, of course, muffled the film in an aureole of hype.  It was yet another concrete manifestation of Chinese dictatorship and a particularly public one at that.

What was so threatening about the Summer Palace?  In Cannes, all the mediatic brouhaha suggested that the film was a romanced documentary of the 1989 Tian Anmen square massacre.

I saw the film last night at the Lincoln Center.  It is far from a feature on Tian Anmen.  Tian Anmen lasts ten minutes in the film, and those ten minutes are so confusing that both heads and tails of the event are buried in a marathon of fire, screams and impromptu gun shots.

I guess the montage accurately depicts the 1989 event from a Beida student's point of view: the exhilaration and then the panic of the unknown.  Summer Palace adeptly paints emotions and atmosphere--timid dance steps in a crowded club, cold evening rays caught on pirouetting feathers--but it doesn't do much more than that.  Throughout the whole movie, the camera is scotch-taped to a depressed (albeit gorgeous) college student.  We watch her run, cry and smoke imported cigarettes; most of the time we watch her make breathless love to the school's pretty boy.  They part ways.  He goes to Germany, she becomes more depressed.  He comes back, they meet, they don't like what little they see of each other and in the last shot, he is driving and purposefully ignores her slight figure on the side of the road. 

The skeletal story happens in the interstices of the film's self-indulgent visual orchestrations and the characters remain distant and incomprehensible throughout.

I recently made it through two chapters of Edward Said's "Orientalism."   

It was far from an enjoyable read (imagine treading through a swamp of five syllable words and one paragraph long sentences), but it still got the wheels turning so much so that I brought up Orientalism at conversations during two recent social events (one engagement party, one birthday brunch).
Simply put, the book mercilessly critiques 19th century Western writings on "the oriental."

Example: "The Arabian traveler is quite different from ourselves.  The labor of moving from place to place is a mere nuisance to him, he has no enjoyment in effort [as "we" do], and grumbles at hunger fatigue with all his might [as "we" do not].  You will never persuade the Oriental that, when you get off your camel, you can have any other wish than immediately to squat on a rug and take your rest, smoking and drinking.  Moreover the Arab is little impressed by scenery [but "we" are]." (Smith)

This racism can't come as much of a surprise given the colonial agenda of the author's nation.  What did surprise me though was the relevance of Orientalism to the present.  It seems that most of today's journalism covering "the east" hasn't evolved much from its 19th century counterpart.

Example, a recent NPR news story:

Aerobic, Not Erotic: China's Latest Fitness Fad
In a downtown Beijing apartment, a half-dozen, mostly young women are gyrating and undulating in a room full of floor-to-ceiling metal poles and mirrors.
The women, who work white-collar jobs, are dressed in high boots, hot pants and tight tops. They swing, swoop, shimmy on up - and slide on down.
In China, newly affluent citizens are spending more time and money in search of a higher quality of life. They are quick to catch on to the latest foreign fitness fads, from yoga to bungee jumping and ballroom dancing to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And the women at this school are all practitioners of the latest fitness fad to sweep China: pole dancing. Here, the activity seems to have escaped connotations of strippers and girlie bars, and is seen as just another way to keep fit - exotic, perhaps, but not erotic.

(rest at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7119220)

Aside from some serious fact checking issues (6 women in a small apartment = latest fitness fad to sweep China = all the women in China) the article is pretty blatantly ridiculing it's subject matter.  Wow, the entire population of Chinese women (not just the 6 students) actually think that pole-dancing is just an exercise, haven't they got a lot to learn from us.  No superpower is happy to witness the birth of another and a lot of today's "China coverage" is a US defense mechanism against a constantly bruised ego (first Iraq, then China). 

I know it's easy for me to point a finger.  The identification of a problem doesn't become an obsession, it's solving it that takes brain power.  How do you guard against writing biased articles on another country?  That's one I'm still trying to figure out.  All help welcomed.

As an adolescent, I spent time yearning for the day I could shed off my childhood and emerge from that embarrassing shell, a confident adult.  Now, in frequent daydreams I grope back in time trying to find a nugget of my former self within my thoughts.  Why was I so fascinated by the feeling of sand slithering through my toes on days at the beach?  How is it I could squeeze a day's play out of a metal rod I found lying in some corner of a library?

Pan's Labyrinth is not a film for children.  It is rife with graphic violence--slit cheeks, gun-holed bodies.  But we experience this violence through the imaginative lens of a young girl, Ophelia, and learn to think the way she thinks, reinterpreting death as coronation and populating sadness with frightening and mesmerizing creatures.

1944's century Spain is in the throws of civil war.  Ophelia's mother overcome by necessity, and impregnated with Ophelia's brother, has followed her tyrannical husband to his army encampment.  Ophelia runs after the flight of a praying mantis through the earthy greens of the surrounding forest.  It leads her to an ancient labyrinth, and in the stone-reflected moonlight, a bark-featured faun bows before her.  She is the lost princess of the kingdom below, and to return to her father, the King, she has to prove her valiance through three tasks.

In the daylight of the adult world, the explosions of rebel gun-shots and grenades near the encampment as the husband kills and tortures with increasing viciousness.  At night, Ophelia is spurred onto her tasks by visits of the Faun.  She imagines ever more fantastical stories to make sense of the escalating violence.  Whether imagination can triumph of fate is a question that the movie leaves unanswered.