The Sinclair Project

the world via film, books, poetry and any and all things that intersect.
January 19, 2012

The Pitfalls of Coffee and Conversation.

by Erin Gustafson

On a recent Sunday afternoon drive, she decided to show me the house her dad grew up in and where her grandmother lived after her grandfather died.   We were seeking out ghosts of the past, trying to substantiate memory amidst the melancholy of Sunday. So logically, we stopped to get coffee.

While sitting together at a table by the window, we were addressed by an innocent looking fellow sketching the face of a model.

Why did he talk to us? What did he want from us? Would I (could I) have addressed him? What about our coffee conversation presented itself as permeable? What space was there between us for his questions?

I was full of curiosity and excited at recognizing a fellow traveler. But in being open, in being curious, in wanting to share what we enjoy in the world, exchange stories and share experience, we fell into the trap of polite conversation. Why is it that in being open to conversation with men, my body must always be open too?

“So what do you girls do?”

You girls, you girls, you girls. It’s as if all of a sudden I’m cut off – my identity abruptly separated from everything that isn’t the pleasures rumored to be trapped inside the body of a young college girl. Two comments from past encounters with strangers come to mind:

“Girls from this college are Fun!” and, “We draw people to our state by tellin’ ‘em, ‘In Kansas, there is a pretty girl behind every tree.’”

All of a sudden, in these conversations, I find myself pegged as belonging to someone else (the specific person I’m talking with), as well as holding all of Mankind’s promise of ecstasy. They were looking through us not to find a person or a story, but rather a pleasure.

I guess I perceive in these conversations a reticent, axiomatic belief that women exist for the pleasures of men. What upsets me is not that someone might find my body desirable. Rather, it’s that there is this commonly accepted notion that men think with their dicks, have uncontrollable sex drives, and biologically need to jack-off (often over the nude and prostrate figures of a woman).

In a phallic dictatorship, there is no place or voice for my own desire–except the desire to please. I am frustrated at my inability to challenge the assumptions of my role as a woman without turning a polite conversation into a crude argument. It’s as if my voice emerges from a mask of pleasantry, unaided by my own will: ‘I will be who you want me to be.’ But I’ve come to understand that the desire to please is not the same as self-interested/self-actualizing desires.

Is there a way to avoid the traps of conversation? I feel I get sucked into situations of answering this demand for sweet girls. I keep following the rules of what can be said, what can be hinted at, but I’m continually perturbed by who has the power to speak about sexuality.

When I talk with most people, I feel like part of myself gets lost. All the things I cannot articulate manifest in other forms, like a shadow of who I’d like to be. But I always still play to the situation, the expectations, the possibilities of commonly understood speech, the structure, the symbols, the packaged meanings of easy-bake phrases.

Language can be a trap, the pitfall of conversation: ‘I will be who you want me to be.’ Except that my failures, those silences, the things left unsaid are not just a shadow-they are a place of drowned desires still living. The pleasantry exposed requires the strangulation (death by suffocation) of most of my thoughts. So many stifled things are a workout for my tongue: the muscle is built to keep the silence in and let so many things slide through.

The pitfall of conversation: situations we fall into when just trying to be social, approachable, less of an object and more of a person.

“I’m the same as you with coffee and a dead grandmother, a love of art and an interest in travel.”

But I guess we’re not the same because in the end you look like Larry Flynt, he’s a dirty old man, and to be a good woman, the only question I need be concerned with is, “Hey, do you like me or not?”

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January 15, 2012

Occupying Week End.

There had been this massive shift, something like a zoom. It felt like a big move forward. I’d been waiting for something even close to it for a long time. But suddenly, sitting down in front the screen at the start of the day and the beginning of the week, it felt so overwhelming, intense, like it requires far more work than I can manage. It takes so much to be everywhere.

I discovered something unexpected in the constant chatter of social media, at the heart of Tweets and iPhone Facebook status updates: it’s not really so much about hacking anything, anyone, any product in particular. It’s more about wanting to be out and heard and passed around in a cyber soup. Clicked on. Mentioned. A favorite. Followed. This I find deeply disorienting. It makes me uncomfortable and question my ability to really participate in it fully.

A few days before, I saw Godard’s Week End again at the Castro and it never ceases to startle. It does so many things so well, but it hit perfectly upon the quasi-thesis I’ve been after for the last year: what happens when we leave the road?

I’m not sure if part of my obsession with this topic is due to the fact that I’ve been more or less commuting long distances daily for the last few years, poetically or not stuck on the road for long stretches of time, unable to do anything except sit and survey the concrete landscape or my knees.

There have been moments when the stationary formlessness of it has knocked into my frustration so powerfully that I’ve seen nothing but blood and flames–harkening to the many uncomfortabley drawn out scenes of traffic depicted in Week End.

One of the strengths of that film and those scenes, though, is how long they go on, and that no one in them is phased by the repetition and lack of resolution. The horn honking becomes simply an instinctual response, like pressing the gas or hitting the brake: motions carried out with little thought and little production.

But despite the literal and figurative road-blocks encountered by the couple whose strange, misfortune-filled Odyessey  frames the film, Corrinne and Roland continue on their journey to Oinville with the mission of eliminating Corrine’s father and taking all of his money. Yet, they end up  further and further off the pavement, what’s so interesting being the fact that they need to be pushed off, that otherwise they comply, keep going, are determined to stay on the road regardless of the wreckage and death.

We drove for hours several weeks ago. We dove for an entire day. We kept drinking coffee and then having to stop and find places to pee. Caffeine was easier to find than bathrooms.

When he first emailed me and wrote that he thought we should meet again, he was about to drive down, the opposite way I headed last week. We corresponded over the course of that weekend, and when he made his way back up, he wrote that while driving on that particular highway, he’d always stop and find a small pool, a lake, a little place of water where he could lay for a time. I thought of that as we drove the same route last week, and wanted to suggest doing something similar. Somehow, it didn’t feel quite right.

In Week End, when Corrinne and Roland are pulled into the fields, into what’s off to the side, it’s not idyllic. It’s violent and strange, a misshapen meld of what didn’t get paved. Nothing is really happening there either, except a consumption of whatever comes close enough to catch, of whatever gets lost and can’t get back to the road. What is it they’re making out there? Cooking pieces of meat, both human and otherwise, forming grotesque partnerships and meals, composed of things and people that should never have gone together, and once they are, aren’t attached in ways that produce results.

Being yanked into the swirl of the internet and social media feels like that sometimes. I forget the task I was attempting to complete when I first pull over the screen. I had a mission, initially: there was something I was going to do, find, write. But then I’m diverted, and before long, have landed somewhere without really knowing how or why, am witnessing interactions between people I barely or don’t know, unsure of how my interest and engagement fits into it all.

We have roads built everywhere now. Below our feet as well as in front of our eyes, there is no escape from pre-made pathways. No one really knows where they’re going to take us, even those who built them.

Yet, I don’t actually think all the driving back and forth over the last few years has been for naught. It became a new challenge to determine what to do with that time, of what to put in the space. German, podcasts with interesting journalistic uncoverings, phone calls to those whom I rarely speak, recordings of obscure vocabulary words to memorize. Something new did get built in that car, on those drives.

So maybe this is precisely why Occupy was the movement birthed of this time: to be in a preconstituted space but fill it out differently. À la Week End, the notion of going out off the beaten path perhaps isn’t what will illicit change. To be, to stay, to show rather that your presence it still something that matters in the concrete jungles, that even in its solidity, uprooting and re-building is still possible.

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January 6, 2012

Melancholia, Women and The Light of the Stars.

As appeared on RADAR Productions blog.

This morning, I saw this article on the New York Times and instantly read it:

“Don’t get too close. Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of violent quasars, the almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies that dominated the early years of the  universe. One of these newly surveyed monsters, which weighs as much as 21 billion Suns, is in an egg-shaped swirl of stars known as NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in a sprawling cloud of thousands of galaxies about 336 million light-years away in the Coma constellation.”

Conceiving of such abstract and massive forces has always left me both confused and intrigued. With social media, with globalization, the world feels smaller and more incestuously connected than ever. Thoughts of quantum theory and black holes feel for me an odd but genuine mental relief–they’re free from the current woes of this planet anyway.

It harkens to Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s latest film. I saw it following a strong recommendation by a friend, who also warned, “Don’t plan to do anything for a good few hours afterward.”

It was true–I could not do anything for the next day except think about it. Many of von Trier’s films have this effect; he lingers until you feel this massive heaviness, even in the simplest of scenes and moments. (Melancholia is also, like many of his other movies, visually stunning and beautifully shot).

But this movie was different: there is, especially in the first part, more action and movement, and the heaviness builds over the course of the film, rather than being located in any one specific scene. The story follows two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), opening with the evening of Justine’s wedding party, held at the expansive manor of Claire and her wealthy scientist husband. Justine is young and pretty in a very all-American way, her new husband the same. But it quickly becomes clear Justine is not so sure about her marriage, and finds it increasingly difficult to remain at the party, ducking out for longer and longer periods of time. Her ambivalence seems to strengthen after the sisters’ mother (played by a perfectly cold Charlotte Rampling) an evident person of challenge in the family, openly denounces marriage during her “toast.”

Claire, the older and more nervous of the two, pleads with Justine to get it together, begs of her to just be happy and to not embarrass the family.  Justine is given constant reminders of how much money was spent on the wedding, of how so much is going into “making her” happy. Yet despite some effort on Justine’s part, the possibility of the marriage dissolves with the night. By dawn, Justine’s husband leaves with the rest of the wedding guests.

The film then transitions some time ahead, taking Claire’s perspective. Still located in the dark and unwelcoming manor in which the failed wedding was held, Claire, her husband John (Keifer Sutherland), and their son Leo, welcome an incredibly forlorn and depressed Justine to stay with them indefinitely. Sliding alongside the interpersonal plot of the two sisters, is the question of a planet, named Melancholia, which is to be imminently passing by the Earth.

Claire’s husband is deeply involved in its study, monitoring its movement, watching it from his high-powered telescope. Claire has been doing research of her own about the planet (much to her husband’s chagrin) and is petrified that it will not simply slide past, but rather make contact with the Earth, obliterating them. John eschews Claire’s fear, accuses of her being a very nervous and unreasonable person, begs her to “trust him” and science: they’ll be safe.  Yet as the planet gets closer and more visible in the sky, Claire’s anxiety increasing to the point she purchases what seems to be cyanide or something of the like, Justine’s depression alleviates. In one of the most moving scenes of the film, Claire finds Justine lying alongside a riverbank bathing naked under its light.

To leave the synopsis there, yes, Melancholia is a very heavy film, although for reasons unexpected.  There are many (and many excellent) films on the problem of depression, and Melancholia is certainly making a case for the fact that such depression is due to a kind of inherent faultiness in the world. But that’s what makes this movie different: the faultiness goes beyond structure or society–it’s embedded in our very galaxy. What the film proposes, the necessity of a new planet, new light, I thought stunning, à la my passive interest in quantum physics.

It reminded me very much of one of my favorite scenes in part 5 of Roberto Bolaño’s apocalyptic tome, 2666, when two of the characters reach the top of a hill:

“Look at the stars,” said Ingeborg.

He lifted his gaze: it was true, there were many stars, then he turned to look at Ingeborg and shrugged.

“All this light is dead,” said Ingeborg. “All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It’s the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn’t exist, life on Earth didn’t exist, even Earth didn’t exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It’s the past, we’re surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can’t do anything to stop it.” 

Reading that passage in 2666 for the first time, I felt a similar message to the one I got from watching Melancholia: we are surrounded by, and locked into a past we are literally unable to see our way out of. Even the light of the stars project a history which dooms us.

Returning to Earth, the fact that women are the way in to this idea, more connected to a level of intensity, is undeniable (this is even true in the above scene from 2666). In every sense, Justine and Claire are completely ungrounded in comparison to their male counterparts: Claire’s husband John is focused entirely on science, Justine’s betrothed is unaware of her misery, easily loving her because it makes sense socially, the sisters’ father is portrayed as a sweet but immature skirt chaser.

This prompted me to open back up a book of essays by Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality, that I’ve been making my through on and off for the last few months. In it,  Zizek writes a lot about female depression and the way it’s perceived socially, but I found some interesting connections to my thoughts on Melancholia in the essay titled “Otto Weninger or Woman Doesn’t Exist.” It takes from the philosopher, Weninger, who Sizek describes as the “author who brought anti-feminism to its unsurpassed acme.” Weninger’s one and only book, Sex and Character,  posits that women are entirely sexual beings who exist only via their relation to men. In his essay, Sizek takes Weninger’s pithy thesis and Hegelian-izes it: a void is still a space, and so women exist precisely in that they are the void:

“Weninger fails to accomplish…recognizing in this ‘nothing’ the very negativity that defines the notion of the subject…He [also] fails to recognize the very striving of the subject for substantial support…Wenginger’s aversion to woman bears witness to the fear of the most radical dimension of subjectivity itself: of the Void which is the ‘subject.’..as Hegel puts it, this inwardness of the pure self must enter into existence itself, also become an object, oppose itself to this innerness to be external, return to being.”

Part of being woman is being part of a perpetual search, Sizek suggests, for a structure within which to adequately gain definition. The fact that men fall more easily into structure, are more defined, perhaps at times stifles them from seeing or noticing what is outside of it.  This idea of seeking form connected to Melancholia: the planet being both more defined but also unknown, an encounter, for the women, with a total force so much like themselves. Perhaps this is why Claire’s scientist husband John has such difficulty with the planet once it escapes the bounds of his control and cannot bear to come in contact with it, outside of it being a distant orb he can gaze at from afar.

“Feminine is this structure of the limit as such, Sizek writes, a limit that precedes what may or may not lie in its Beyond: all that we perceive in this Beyond are our own fantasy projections.” 

Ultimately, what I thought was so striking in Melancholia was the suggestion that perhaps the only “solution” to all of this is a new planet, a new star, new light that must come from a “galaxy” outside of ours. Something that might need to come from farther than we can even conceive. Whereas many movies that poke at depression and the inability (of specifically women) to be satisfied with what’s given provide few alternatives outside of falling directly back into the structure they’ve been struggling against (Lost in Translation, The Good Girl), or depict death as a direct result of a failure or difficulty to join the given structure (Varda‘s La Bonheur and Vagabond come to mind), there was something so big and beautiful about a movie that stretched itself quite far outside, that leaves given structure altogether.

In another strange, synchronistic turn, just the other evening I was with an older woman, a friend’s mother, and we were discussing fears. My friend shared that his greatest fear was a home invasion–specifically him coming home and finding someone already there, rifling through his things, ready to attack him when he opened the door. My friend’s mother interjected quickly–before he was done describing–and said that her greatest fear was a meteor, or a star, or some planet crashing into the Earth and obliterating us all (she had not seen or heard of Melancholia).

My friend scoffed a bit and remarked, “But that’s so unlikely! The chances of that happening are so small.”

But she shook her head: “I wake up at night sometimes and think about it. I can’t imagine anything scarier.”

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January 3, 2012

Philip Glass, Sherlock Holmes and Marie Calloway.

I’d only been here once before, some months ago, and it had been strange. It was not at all the place I expected to find him living–the palm trees and the piercing blue skies, the golf courses and the Mexican food.

These were things I thought he hated, the anti-thesis of his being. He turned around and waved at me in the airport, long black coat, hair and beard: everything long and dark.

His house was no different. A bright, white place, high-ceilinged with marble and a big bath tub with jets. His dark wood objects and stacks of old, important looking books sat on the very white, thick carpet. I wonder how they feel about residing there.

But I’m always reminded of how sharp and interesting his interpretations of things are, regardless of the fact that he is so removed from intellectual life on all sides. He doesn’t even read as much as I think he once did. But he picks up on threads and makes connections I rarely see. Lately, I’ve been wanting to pull him outside with me, I want to take him somewhere where the whole world can see what he is.

We drove along the wide streets, through the canyons and alongside nice cars to a theater that was sort of underground. The elevator was broken and we had to walk down several flights of steps. We stood in line to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. It’s become rare that I go to “the movies”, especially mainstream films. We got a free bucket of popcorn and it was so salty there was absolutely no taste aside from the salt.

We ate it anyway and then the movie started. Everything moved so quickly, in a kind of hypnotic dazzle with loud, clanking sound effects jumping in and out,moving with the same kind of stunted, frenetic pattern. I felt like no one trusted I could just watch the movie. I felt edged, induced in every scene: this is a very dramatic moment, this is a very intense moment, this is a very frightening moment. 

We kept grabbing handfuls of popcorn, dropping them into our mouths and that sort of encapsulated the whole experience: being so inundated by flavor, sound, or movement that no thought is required. It occurred to me that seeing most contemporary movies is motivated by the same desire to ride roller coasters at a theme park. Just do something that overwhelms from the outside, so much so that you don’t feel anymore.

I woke up early the morning we were supposed to leave. I always wake up early now, and I made myself a pot of coffee and sat in front of the computer with it. And then I found the link for it, a story by a writer named Marie Calloway.

It’s called “Adrien Brody”, an account of her experience sleeping with a Marxist-bent intellectual and writer. I started reading it, completely unsure of what to expect. After several paragraphs I felt this swoosh, the one that I get when I read something that really moves me. I was completely taken.

The rest of the house slowly awakened and came into the kitchen, making fresh pots of coffee and toast, but I couldn’t stop reading.  I’d never read something that so accurately described many experiences I’d had with men just like the one in the story. One notable differences between some of the encounters I’ve had vs hers is that she solicited the writer “Adrien Brody” for sex directly. It occurred to me that doing that was perhaps more honest in way, yet the outcome was the same.

She writes her own voice so well. She’s able to hear herself speak as different than her thoughts, the kind of disconnection that occurs I think specifically when one is a young, pretty girl with a man. “Adrien”‘s comments are all very clear and stoic, hers are dotted with “likes” and a sort of capricious desire, even though her stream of thought is generally more fleshed out than what she says. That’s the root of the disconnection: there’s something that keeps catching–her body, her age, the power dynamic of her relation to him which makes the transference of thoughts struggle. Certain things can’t really get out so long as she’s with him. She’s pushed into a space, one that is allowing her to be with this person, allowing her access to him and his space in ways she wouldn’t were it not that she’s cute/21 etc. and moreover, knows that there is the possibility of sex glaring into the corners of their eyes. But I don’t know that she wants to stay there, there’s more she wants to accomplish in their interaction but it’s confused. It’s tied in with the sexual desire. What’s different about Marie’s story, though, is that I think she somewhat does attain something, her retelling of it in itself the greatest proof.

There’s been a few but I’m mostly thinking of him when I read Marie’s story. Once you meet someone you’ve known from afar, it breaks things down in a strange way, inevitably. They no longer belong to you the way they have before: an outline whose inside you’d filled in. You become part of the story you’d read.

What he wanted from me was my prettiness, a freshness, enjoyment of a beautiful body.

To me, he was a beautiful example of being in the world: I wanted to be him.

At the time we were involved, I was reading Irigaray’s  The Way of Love, which is all about dialogue. A dialogue must be an exchange to be effective, to communicate. But the currency used in that exchange can be different. And that difference can still allow for dialogue, for connection, so long as that is understood and acknowledged.

I was something for him to behold, to touch, to grab, to push into, to enter. I was a validation, showing him what he’s capable of being inside of. I was something for him to move towards in taking time away from many lines of text and rhetoric. I was a space that allowed different pleasure, a release.

For me, he was something to take in. I felt empty and he filled me. He presented a possibility, a way, a path toward something I desired. My observations of him taught me how to move and where to go. His enjoyment of my body validated a success in representing physical beauty and that brought me pleasure.

In this way, we held a dialogue. And since him, I’ve worked harder than ever before– not to gain his affection, but to become more of the person he was, someone I respected  for his work ethic and passion as a writer and thinker perhaps more than anyone else I’ve ever known. As a person, as a lover, he was less so.

Yet even as I write and think this, even as I believe it to the uttermost, the greatest saddening, melancholy, sharpest pain I felt during our time, was that I would and will never feel the same depth of comfort he did and does. How nice, I would think, to be him– to be able to write and play basketball, and enter a room with young women looking up at you, with older men nodding at you with respect and approval.

This will never be true for me, even if were to command a room or meet a younger man.

But perhaps this is never the right line of thinking to stay upon: he lamented being in the “wrong time,” hating social media and Priuses, Tumblr and the necessity of maintaining a minimal aesthetic coolness to be part of the  current literary world. If only he could’ve existed at the end of the 18th century, working in a wooden room, writing with ink by candlelight.

He forged ahead regardless, though. He carved a space. How many of us are ever born in the ‘right’ time, body, to the ‘right’ parents, with the ‘right’ hair, eye color, skin color.

After coming home from Sherlock Holmes, I wanted to play another movie for him, so that he could  see something completely different: Pasolini’s Teorema. It’s very slow and has almost no dialogue. There’s so much space in movies like that, so many wide paths and possibilities hanging from the corners. You have to be patient.

The end of that movie is probably one of the most powerful I’ve ever seen. A man, the father of the family the film focuses on, takes off all of his clothes in a busy train station and then the scene shifts to him wandering along a windy desert. He screams.

The next day and the one after, I listen to Philip Glass again and he makes me feel the same as watching Teorema. His music is long, and moves to many different paces. I feel lifted when I’m listening to it–my thoughts have room to move along with the wide curves of the songs. I come to realizations.

People have been enraged by Marie Calloway’s story–offended, disgusted perhaps. But I don’t know what they’d rather read? Her story is presenting something different, and there’s very little judgement imposed. I don’t get the impression she left the encounter feeling negatively. It just was. The story showcases the difficulty in getting involved, sexually and otherwise, with anyone. What’s interesting is they try to anyway.

The reason I like Marie’s story is why I like Pasolini films and why I like Philip Glass. There’s no one jumping in with loud sound effects, or deciding when the scene should be cut. There’s room to breathe very slowly and very deeply. I can actually exhale.

And it’s why, even though I’m not sure why his hair is so long now, or why he moved to the desert, I understand that it’s because he’s finally found the wide space he needed, that there he feels his chest can expand.

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December 26, 2011

In the Company of Women.

“You qualify for a free scalp and hand massage at your appointment today,” the receptionist at the hair salon told me. “Lisa will get you started. Follow me right this way.”
She motioned her long fingers, and I followed the swoosh of her dress to a room in the back where I was laid in a reclining chair. Lisa was already there waiting for me.
“So, what type of scented oil would you like for the massage? We have vanilla, grapefruit, jasmine, sandalwood or lemon grass.”
“Vanilla.”
Lisa put herself to work right away, lifting my hair into the bowl behind me, running her oiled hands through the strands, then moving her fingers back and forth along my scalp.
I could see the crux of her armpit as her hands moved over my head and I could smell the light scent of her perfume. I watched the line by her ear where her concealer ended, leaving slightly lighter skin. She was wearing a dress with a flowered skirt and a gold belt. She didn’t speak to me, remaining completely focused on her task.


Once she had finished with my hair, she lifted the chair forward and asked me to hold out one of my arms.
“Vanilla still?” she asked.
“Sure.”
Once I was upright, I started to look at the other women in the salon. Two women were seated to my right, also receiving their complimentary massage treatments. The expressions on their faces were pleasant and relaxed, lots of half smiles.  The women working on their arms and heads were like Lisa, brisk and business-like but all well dressed and coiffed.
“I had the Brazilian blowout treatment at this one salon,” I heard a woman across the room, who was having her hair trimmed, say to the stylist working on her. “It was a nightmare.”
“Really? Where? Can you tell me the name of this salon?”
The place smelled of slightly burnt hair and the intermingling of different perfumes and shampoos. It struck me fully at that moment that I was seated in a room full of all women, women bent over one another, women all working in one way or another for beauty and maintenance and validation.
For a moment, I smiled at this thought, placing it in the context of positive communal experience and embracing the pleasure of having warm, soft hands rubbing mine, of being made beautiful, of being in the presence of beautiful women.


But I felt and always feel a sharp twinge of resistance to this somehow. An edge seems to exist in all these places. Every compliment—“What a great pair of boots—where did you get those? But I could never wear them anyway, I’m too old now….”—“You have such beautiful hair– and the color! What do you use? You don’t color it? It’s natural? I hate you. I would kill to have a natural color like that”—contains a bit of violence and self loathing. I have never been in a salon, or women’s clothing store, or make up counter, and not heard self-deprecating comments from women of all ages, shapes and sizes.
I went to a swanky, women-only “Clothing Swap” the other day.
There was a bar at the event and they served sweet sugary drinks in childlike pink and peach colors. The bartenders were all women in corsets with bright pink lip gloss and bleached blonde hair that had been curled into sticky looking ringlets. They asked: “What would you like, honey?”


There was a huge tapestry draped over the top of the bar featuring a rendering of a beautiful, leggy woman in a black leotard with slits cut out along the sides of her ribs. She was wearing strappy black stilettos and was lying on a bear skin rug with her back arched. Her long black hair was draped alongside of her, bangs covering part of her eye and face. She was holding a martini glass and had one long, milky white leg bent upward, the other stretched out along the white fur of the rug.


“That’s what I look like every night when my husband comes home,” my friend joked, gesturing her peach filled glass towards the tapestry. “More like I’m wearing sweats and my hair is a disaster.”
I stood with my drink in hand, listening to the sound of all the high heels sliding across the marble floors, watching heavily manicured hands delve into piles of dresses, seeing slick, dyed heads of hair snap back and forth.
Many men have said to me: “Don’t you get it? Women have all the power.”
But it’s not women themselves—it’s beauty and particular kinds that have power–and beauty is made out of impossibility. It’s ephemeral, never completely attainable, barely graspable, always fleeting.
And we are not the gatekeepers. It is only deference to this larger force, pulled from time and place, from fabric and pixels, that we could qualify.


Of course I want it—perhaps even have some of it–but it scares me. I’m petrified of the extent of its power, its control, but its pleasure perhaps most of all. I work towards it, just like all those women at the salon, at the clothing swap. I invest time and I invest money in creating and maintaining it. There’s even investment made in looking as if there has been no investment at all.
I won’t deny I often smile when examining my own image, taking pride in the success of my construction. Of course compliments pertaining to my looks are sources of flattery. But there’s also the memories of sobs of defeat in dressing rooms over ill fitting items, moments of panic when catching sight of myself in an unflattering photo or store window. It leads to the jagged fear that I’m too ugly to deserve the body of a woman, that I’m too ugly to be loved.


“I think one of my greatest fears is ending up alone,” I once told an older man I was sort of seeing.
“You’ll be married in a couple of years,” he dismissed me. “Young, attractive women don’t end up alone–trust me.”
I didn’t really know what to say in response. He’s older, I suppose he should know what he’s talking about, I suppose he’s pretty confident he knows what he’s talking about.
But I’m confident that he’s wrong. I’ve seen and know too many contradictions to his assertion, and more, the fear I articulated to him isn’t desiring to be soothed via marriage. It’s something deeper, it’s more about recognition, about wanting to build something people will come to.
And the trouble is, so much of what’s available to me dictates I have to start with my body, that the splash of my face and the turn of my waist are where both I and home belong.

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December 14, 2011
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November 10, 2011

The Return.

We began by congregating in the kitchen and ended up staying there the whole evening. Because of fall, it had turned dark early and candles had been lit, making the space orange and dim. While food was being prepared, the room sort of moved–nothing was still.

But when seats were taken at the table and the food was served, everything stopped. The shift was almost immediate. We looked at each other, a kitchen full of only women, and we started pulling on the chain of our history together. It was glistening.

All the men have fallen away. They started to six years ago and they didn’t stopped until they were all gone. Now, there’s just this patchwork group of women, initially connected to each other by whom they’d loved and married, but now more tied by the fact that they’d all been left. They’re all moving ahead with their lives, although sometimes without really knowing why.

Quickly, the conversation turned to sex. They all have a fear of sex. They don’t fully avoid it–they sometimes think about it, talk about it, but won’t get anywhere near it. They lament time, how it’s changed their bodies and they way they knew them. Did they even deserve it anymore? Then there was a heave: all of the expectations and tension threw themselves onto my sister and I, questions and comments about boyfriends, their physique, male prowess.

The room felt ready to burst. Suffocating and so sad–this big, cold unpolished stone we all had to sit on–one we couldn’t warm or smooth out. In their eyes, I could see the acknowledgement of a history and trajectory they would never have chosen and the lack of understanding of how it chose them.

I’ve been drawn to watching Almódovar films lately. He positions all these working class women, beautiful and exhausted, in relationships with deadbeat men and precocious children.

Volver is perhaps one of his most linear films: it lacks the elements of absurdity and kitsch Carne Trémula or Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto! hug. But Volver is almost entirely about women: in fact, male characters literally fade out of the film, like in my family. Raimunda, the protagonist, played by Penelope Cruz, finds her husband killed, her male neighbor goes to Barcelona and leaves his restaurant in her care, the flirtation she shared with her first patron at the restaurant is never realized. Soledad, Raimnunda’s younger sister, had a husband who apparently left years ago and has never returned.

But then there’s the scene in which Soledad goes back to the family’s small Spanish village for their aunt’s funeral: it showcases the impossibility of the men and women to be merged. Fearful she’s seen the ghost of her mother,  Sole rushes across the street to her cousin’s home, pulls open the doors to her patio, and comes upon a group of male mourners–all wearing crisp white shirts. Sole’s face is one of confusion, but more, it expresses a lack of understanding. The men on the patio stop her dead in her tracks–she’s paralyzed in the doorway, there is no possibility of entering that space.

Sole is met with the same reaction from the men: no one calls out to her, they fall silent and simply stare.

Sole then turns to find her cousin, Augustina, who brings her into a room full of the women mourners. They are all dressed in black, and Sole, like my sister and I, is passed back and forth between the older generation, who wrap her tightly again and again in their history, while asking why she hasn’t yet escaped it.

History is opaque in the film. Time and truth: it’s never full clear what is real, what really happened, what’s imagined and what’s perception. Again, people fade: death seems just movement, not termination. Those who are supposed to be dead return, those who are supposed to be alive can’t be found. The supposed ghost of Sole’s mother really is her mother, for example, who never actually died but instead murdered her husband and his lover. Or is she a ghost? She continues to live like one, and her relationships remain limited to only her daughters and granddaughter.

And, the body of Paco, Raimunda’s murdered husband, keeps getting moved. His death is never talked about, discovered nor known about by anyone besides Raimunda and her daughter. When she tells people he just left, they believe it.

Raimunda’s daughter, Paula, is who I found most interesting. She indicates that the history and pattern of the family will only continue. She, it’s revealed, is the product of incest: Raimunda was raped by her father, producing Paula. She kills Raimunda’s husband, the man who acted as her father, when he tried to rape her. Then there’s her name itself, Paula: she was named after the aunt who dies early in the story.

As the film closes, I want to know: is this history something inside of her, in all of them, or does it continue to be imparted? And if so, how do you move out of it?

Suddenly, everyone I know is getting married or having children. It just began one day and now not a month goes by without an email, phone call, text, invitation announcing one or the other.

These are two things I don’t want as they are, but I feel outside. It’s as if the people who are marrying, buildings families, have jumped on this thing moving very fast, and I’m standing away from it. I get asked why I don’t want it, too, but I can’t really explain. What they’ve grabbed onto has always moved too fast for me to comprehend, and I’ve felt my energy was better spent trying to understand other things. For them, though, it’s not about understanding it. It’s about just getting on and seeing where it goes. I recognize that, but it feels too unsafe, too dangerous.

This morning, I woke up early. I stayed in bed but stared out the window, and something new occurred to me: it’s about more than getting on something moving fast. It’s also about making a declaration of how they’re choosing to live their life.

That clarity is also what tugs at me when the people I know make these decisions. And it’s what my aunts and family are waiting to hear: will you get on? If you don’t get on there, where will you? Who are you?

Part of this is out of concern and care, but as in Volver, my declarations will change or solidify their stories, it could move the dial of our history. It could also bring it right back to where it stands, just as the title of Volver indicates: a perpetual returning.

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October 31, 2011

All Hallow’s.

It is most certainly fall: things hanging by loose threads have finally hit the ground and are demanding the beginning of something new.

In the spirit of that and of Halloween, let’s grab hold of the impulse to don whatever makes us feel most powerful and step out into the dark streets.

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October 26, 2011

Gramsci and Occupying.

Last week, I went to one of my favorite bookstores, and one of the last of its kind. I was looking for a specific book, but instead, my eyes landed on a copy of Gramsci’s The Modern Prince.

I picked it up and when the white haired woman behind the counter saw it, she took my hand and said:

“We need Gramsci’s right now. A lot of people could use his words.”

And so, in regard to Occupying,  and most specifically the occurrences yesterday in Oakland, here are some:

“The city developed around the central pattern which it still retains, organized naturally around the industry which ‘governs’ the whole urban growth of the city and regulates its outlets…

As in a factory, where workers assume a pattern governed by the production of a given object which unites and organizes metalworkers and woodworkers, constructional workers, electricians, etc., so in a city, the proletariat adopts patterns determined by the prevalent industry which dominates the whole urban life. So, on a national scale, a people adopts a pattern laid down by its exports, by the real contribution the nation makes to the economic life of the world.”

“When, in 1919 we decided…to form this group…not one of us (perhaps just one!) thought in terms of changing the world, of renewing the hearts and minds of masses of human beings, or dreamed of a new era in history. “

Let’s think of it now–the new era has begun.

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September 30, 2011

The Window.

I’ve been staying in a place that’s full of windows. It’s high up, and there’s a view of everything that’s below: the Hudson, boats, runners, and distant skyscrapers.

The passing of the day is different when you’re living somewhere with lots of windows. You start to notice the more subtle rising and dimming of light: a poignant brightness in the morning, a duller buzz in early afternoon, and at around 5:30 in the evening, the windows present a wild spectrum of quickly changing pinks. Come 7:30, the light is that reflected from streetlamps and other windows.

The room I’m sleeping in has two big windows. Every time I return, I stand in front of them, almost unconsciously, and look out. I don’t focus so much on what’s outside, but more in just staring.

I’ve had more time to read since I’ve been here, and I have voraciously. I began Eileen Myles Inferno, which is really a poem-novel. It’s beautiful.

She writes a lot about desire in the book, desire for others, for the poem, for herself:

“Then I saw the other woman again and I knew that whatever the outcome, I would make my desire for her abundantly clear and I would unleash every excess of power in body and soul and mind to convince her that my aim was true and I would have her. Not forever, just for now. It was the desire at the center of the universe, this was the beginning of the love for which I had not died. I was climbing over the rampart of my own death. It was the life. If passion was a substance I would say it is dark brown and then blood red. It’s like wet grass, tons of it soaked in mud. It’s warm and it stinks and it’s unaccountably and endlessly good. It’s thick and it goes on for miles and it isn’t so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown. And then it goes. It’s gone.”

I’m sitting in a bar drinking my third beer when I come to that section. It, mixed with hops, stirs me so intensely I look around. I feel the need to pull someone over and say, “Hey! Read this with me.”

But the heads are all bent downward, staring at the screens of phones or one of the many televisions bolted to the wall. I can’t find a pair of eyes.

When I get home, buzzed from beers and passages, a strong urge to watch Rear Window pushes in. I haven’t seen it in years. The sticky hot of NYC and living surrounded by massive glass panels probably helped prompt it.

But I didn’t expect to read that movie as all about desire. Jimmy Stewart’s character, the protagonist Jeff, can’t summon desire where he’s supposed to. It’s most evidenced in the emptiness his attempts to gaze at the ideal woman/life bring forth, in his lack of motivation to “heal”, regain movement.  He’s searching for something out the window–is it just him, I think he wants to know, or is there nothing to really want.

Jeff’s resistance to his life supposedly lies in confusion about whether or not to marry the wealthy Lisa Fremont, the ease at which she lives her life a conflict. She’s high maintenance, she wouldn’t want to or be able to travel, interfering with his career as a photo journalist. But none of that actually unfolds beyond their hollow fights–it’s Jeff who doesn’t want to travel, leave. He actually doesn’t want his lens pointed at far away locales, but at the one closest to him.

The bright glint of the movie was not whether the neighbor murdered his wife, but where the stake lied in its significance. That wasn’t why I was watching. Ultimately the facts of the missing woman are irrelevant. Jeff’s decision about marriage to his wealthy girlfriend and her ability to “change” were left unaddressed. By the close of the film, the inter-personal conflict is not really resolved. Rather, the inertia is even greater: Jeff ends up with two broken legs, Lisa’s paint suit a sham: she picks up Vogue again.

In watching the film, I’m agreeing to live in Jeff’s apartment and I never leave. It becomes uncomfortable, a strange place of non-action that’s struggling, but yet won’t go out through that big window. Rather, it chooses to look cautiously, and I do so with it.

To not want what you’ve been told you’re supposed to pushes up a kind of terror–more so than freedom. What’s there instead, and maybe they were right all along?

But then there are  the moments it is there, and it feels just as Eileen Myles wrote: it’s thick and it goes on for miles and it isn’t so much deep as bottomless and it holds you in its grip, you never drown.

15 was when I first experienced desire–I wanted someone to claim me. The experience was a shovel that turned the earth over. It was new to want something so much it felt like I’d break apart if I didn’t get it. But the possibility of it coming true felt like living, like what life was supposed to be for. It felt like it was making me come alive.

But now I’m in the latter part of Eileen’s passage, “and then it goes. It’s gone.” Yet instead of someone else, I want me, I only want to desire myself. It’s a very different kind of desire. It feels like being in that big room in Rear Window, my leg in a cast. It’s lonely and I’m not sure how to move or where. I watch because I don’t want any of what I used to but am awed by how many people do. 

There was someone I was friends with for a long time and our friendship was mostly about the desire we felt for each other that we’d never pursue. It was like rubber that kept getting stretched, longer and longer, but never snapped. There were lots of logistics, legitimate reasons for the lack of snap. But more, I think we preferred it stretched. He was so desired, and he gave in so often, I think it was nice for him not to.

Once we stood in a record store, laughing in front of a stack of old VHS tapes, and then he looked at me very seriously. He didn’t say anything yet, but just touched his chest and the side of my arm. He finally asked, “Why didn’t we?” It was the only time he ever addressed it.

“But we did,” I said. I think he understood and even agreed.

I saw pictures the other day relating to another life, long after him. They were of the stone church, a fence along a dirt road, his hand around her waist, her head bent backward. For the second time, I had wanted that more than I’d wanted myself. I hovered, completely ready to jump in at a word. He resisted though, kept me behind the line. But for quite awhile and now, there’s been nothing. I have no desire for it anymore.  I didn’t feel glad but confused.

The summer he came, she sent me a letter. A few weeks before, I’d gone to visit her and we’d gone out drinking and I told her I wasn’t so sure about him coming. I was scared. “He fucked me up,” were my exact words. They were violent ones for a love that had been so gentle.

But all the desire, the wanting with no resolution, had begun to kill me, to fuck me quite rightfully up. With it, I was locked in that big room in a wheelchair, not knowing where to go with my desire but also not wanting to leave, waiting.

Before he arrived, her letter. She reminded me about what I’d said to her that night –specifically the words I’d used–the being “fucked up.” She included a quote from Jean Luc-Nancy she’d dug through the notebooks in her garage to find:

Love represnts the ‘I’ to itself as broken…To the “I” it presents this: that the subject has been touched, breached, in its subjectivity, and from now on it is for the time of love broken or cracked, however slightly. The break or wound is neither an accident nor a property that the subject could make its own…for as long as it lasts, love does not cease to come from without and to remain not outside but outside itself, each time singular, a blade plunged into me that I cannot disjoin because it rejoins me.

I felt not whole, as the quote addresses, the feelings I had for this person separate from me but simultaneously necessary for my existence. I was fucked, divided, cracked, and had no ability to bring any of it together. But I felt alive. I didn’t understand where I fit in the midst of a love and desire unrealized yet didn’t know who I’d be were it to go. There’s a possibility I think Nancy proposes: perhaps the split is necessary. Perhaps it’s part of desire and love: it helps divide you into new pieces of yourself, positions something new in between.

But desire and love are not the same. At that time, I thought they were. I felt love too, and I still feel love for him. But not desire, and not desire to move the love anywhere. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy writes:

Desire is unhappiness without end…it is infelicitous love and the exasperation of the desire happiness. But in the broken heart, desire itself is broken. This heart is no more unhappy than it is happy. It is offered…

It calls up Rear Window again, that space where nothing can happen, but everything is. The place of intense feeling with the inability to move towards and the hesitation to do so. With the man in the photo and before with the one in the record store: I offered and waited, or offered and chose to stay on the side of the offering, well-secured by my desire.

And I saw things, like Jeff does in Rear Window, that were valuable. Eventually, for reasons that are not easily tangible, I stood up and left the room. But how do we mediate the amount of time staying in and looking out? And towards what do I go, when there isn’t someone, something outside to offer to?

I’ve been concerned I’ve lost desire because I haven’t found something and where to present myself.

But perhaps this is desire, too: the motivation to understand an urge, even a lack thereof, to claim something you believe could be yours, even if it’s the understanding. This is why Jeff is still in his chair, looking out the window with bated breath at the end of Rear Window. That desire has become the only air that can fill my lungs.

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