Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

            The penultimate episode of the most recent (third) season of Friday Night Lights has a scene that gets to the core of what makes it a real work of art (and a rarity for television).  Tyra, emotional fireball who is trying to write the perfect essay for her University of Texas admissions application, is explaining to Landry – the wisecracking nice guy who has doggedly believed in her for as long as we’ve known them – what was different about her only a few years earlier:

            “Should I write about my trashy family – the fact that my sister is a stripper, or that my mama is a high school dropout who drinks boxes of wine like its water?  Or about the fact that I lost my virginity when I was 13, or the fact that my papa wasn’t around?  How ‘bout that?  Oh!  I know what I should write about:  the fact that until about two years ago, I had enough hate in my heart to start a freakin’ car!”

            Landry understands that the key to life isn’t simply knowing that you used to be different, but rather, figuring out why you used to be different.  And so he asks why she is no longer the person that she just described: 

“Well… what changed?  What changed from two years ago?  Why did you stop having enough hate in your heart to start a freakin’ car?”

            She answers after a brief moment of thought, “Jason Street got paralyzed.”

            Now, Jason Street is the former star quarterback who was paralyzed during a tackle in a game in the very first episode of the very first season of Friday Night Lights.  Though the show has a short “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of each episode, there is no recap of who Street is, no expository dialogue explaining the event or back-story to fill-in the first-time viewer.

            What you realize is that – my goodness gracious! – Tyra actually has a memory.  Things that happened in the first season of the show still matter, because nothing in life ever stops mattering.

 

            I’ve been telling friends to watch this show for a couple of years now.  Early on, my praise was, “It’s not about football, it’s about life.”  Having spent more time with the characters, what I tell people now is this:  “When it’s between seasons, I feel like I’m missing my friends.  I don’t ‘miss watching the show,’ or ‘miss my favorite characters,’ because that implies some level of artifice that is remarkably absent.  So whenever there’s a question of whether or not the show will be renewed (which there always is), it’s like wondering if my dad will take another job and I’ll have to move away from everyone I know, and no longer be able to keep up with what’s going on in their lives.  Because I know their lives will go on.”

            Dramatic, I know – but entirely sincere.  Friday Night Lights is somehow able to achieve an undeniably organic feel, and it tackles real issues with an honesty and acuity that is commendable.  I personally connect to it because the vast majority of the themes it approaches – family and community chief among them – are themes near and dear to my heart.  But above all, it’s the show’s refusal to settle for anything less than portraying the most complete human beings and interactions possible that makes it special.

 

            Despite the brilliant writing, acting, et al., Friday Night Lights is still fighting to stay on TV.  After thinking about it for a while, here is my proposal as to why: 

            Any significant piece of popular culture necessarily has two overriding qualities.  First of all, it has to be something that a large number of people can relate to.  It has to hit the zeitgeist; it has to be cool.  Second of all, it has to be commercially viable.  For anything in pop culture to get big, it has to be backed by serious dollars, because dollars buy widespread visibility.  Bankability buys exposure and growth.

            Two of the newest forms of American pop culture (though they are already relatively old) are Reality TV and online Social Media – particularly social networking sites, like Facebook.  They both fit these criteria to a T.

Consider Reality TV.  Someone asked the question, “What will people relate to more than the celebrities they see on typical TV shows?” and came up with the answer, “normal people.”  That was smart:  after all, the allure of Reality TV is the chance to see a group of “real people” interacting, facing challenges, and reacting.  Cameras are around to capture the action, and there’s usually a “Confessional Booth” for participants to share their thoughts and feelings.  Honest and organic, right… right…?  Wrong – and that was the brilliant part of Reality TV.  Someone understood how effective it would be to cut normal people into Soap Opera-worthy personalities and storylines.  People don’t just want to be able to relate to what they are watching; they want to imagine it could be them.  It’s cool to relate to the people on a Reality TV show; it’s even cooler to imagine you are them when they are as big and glamorous as the celebrities they “replaced.”  On top of that, these personalities (unlike normal people) can be marketed – they are bankable.  And in the end, they also belie the farce of the situation:  that reality TV is edited into something as artificial as typical, celebrity-laden TV – and the viewer knows it.

Now consider social media websites.  The big one now is Facebook, the last big one was MySpace, and the next big one probably doesn’t yet exist.  In all cases, the general idea is to create a page that represents you, via photographs, lists of interests, and pithy quotes.  Once you’ve created this page, you “make friends” with other people – which basically means they can read your lists and pithy quotes, and a thumbnail of their picture shows up in your list of “friends.”  Then, once you’ve established a group of “friends,” you keep up with them by writing on their “wall” and announcing how you are doing with ever-present “status updates.”

To recap, the idea is to posit oneself as a collection of lists and one-liners, and use this self to make friends with other one-liner selves.  Then your selves talk to each other.  This is how the most technically advanced generation thus far has decided to have relationships.   And it attracts astounding numbers of people; lucky for Mark Zucker, in the new economy of the Internet, traffic is worth well more than its weight in gold.

Anyways, while I’m probably beating a dead horse, I can’t move on without mentioning Twitter, my personal favorite of all social media phenomena.  The idea in this case is essentially to be able to offer “status updates” ALL THE TIME. 

Eating a good sandwich?  Tell your friends! 

Having a personal epiphany about why Whole Foods is totally worth it?  Tell your friends!

Watching paint dry?  Tell your friends!

All you have to do is fire off 160-character “tweets” that are received by people who choose to “follow” you.  The advantage of tweets over Facebook status updates is that they fit perfectly into text messages, so that you can tweet and receive your friends’ tweets anywhere, anytime.  Sounds fantastic.

I’m sure I don’t need to spell out the farce here.

 

As satisfying as it may be, I’m not mentioning these things just to make fun of them.  After all, I’ve occasionally watched a reality TV show, and I use Facebook to keep in touch with friends that live back home, in California.  (I don’t use Twitter, though.  And I never will.)

The point I’m trying to make is this:  these are arguably the two newest, biggest ways that the American people like to see themselves represented, and they are both exercises in doublethink.  And by “doublethink”, I mean “believing that we are consuming real representations of real people, while at the same time knowing that these representations are as artificial as any other act of theatre.”  So in other words, by “doublethink,” I mean “willful ignorance.”

That’s a troubling thought, at least from where I’m sitting.

But then, we all willfully ignore things to make ourselves feel better.  It’s not a troubling idea on the individual level, necessarily.  However, the aforementioned first requirement of popular is that it by definition has to capture the zeitgeist of the moment.  It’s the proverbial canary in the coalmine for doomsday trends (Wouldn’t we have seen the 80’s drug apocalypse coming if we had just stopped for a moment and thought about how horrendous the music was?).  It seems that our moment is saying, “We want to project ourselves onto our media – but we also want to make damn sure that we only project the parts we want.  And then, for our next trick, we want to tell ourselves that we are doing no such thing.”

 

So where does that leave Friday Night Lights?  In the midst of a culture that says, “Show me people that I can put in a box” or, better yet, “Allow me to create myself exactly as I wish,” it’s a show with no real heroes or villains.  It’s a show where the most villain-ish character, the seemingly unscrupulous football booster, actually turns out to be the most loyal of friends to the good-guy Coach.  It’s a show where the same good-guy Coach constantly screws things up for his wife, puts football ahead of education, and jumps to conclusions when it comes to his teenage daughter.  These aren’t plot twists; they are the realities of the situation.

I suppose, however, that the show’s most egregious violation of the status quo is the fact that, really, it’s mundane.  Instead of taking normal people and turning them into celebrities, it takes Hollywood archetypes – hot cheerleader, star quarterback, town slut – and explodes them until the only thing left is real people.  It devotes no air-time to the fancy parties attended by Coach and Mrs. Coach (about the closest thing in the show to a power couple) – because there are none.  On the other hand, it devotes considerable time to their quest to purchase a bigger, nicer house – which, of course, they ultimately realize they can’t afford anyway (sigh… if only life imitated art, who knows what our economy would look like…).

How can you possibly make that bankable?

 

Getting back to where we started:  the anecdote about Tyra and Landry and memory?  Functionally, it’s been the best illustration (among many) of the fact that there is no reductive element to the show.  It truly tries to exhibit a real human experience.  In a world of characters that are so often archetypes, or cause-and-effect machines, or cardboard cutouts, it’s refreshing to watch a show and feel like you are getting the real deal.

That said, it’s not exactly tenable to expect every piece of entertainment that makes it to a screen to have that quality.  Nevertheless, its disheartening to see Friday Night Lights toil on with no audience, saved only by a deal with DirectTV, to be aired on a channel that is not accessible to many viewers.

I suppose we the people of this moment have made our bed, and now we have to lay in it.

 

Just to prove that this isn’t my own personal doomsday scenario, I want to close with a note from a completely different source.  It’s a quote from one of the participants of the Up series of British documentaries that follow a group of children over the course of their lives, catching up with them every 7 years.  The series is certainly among the most real, organic things I’ve ever found presented on a screen.

One of the participants, Neil, is a college dropout who has moved from place to place, and at the time of 28 Up lives in a trailer in a rural part of Scotland.  When asked, “What other things about modern society turn you off?” he answers:

 

The cheap satisfaction in so many things.  The aimlessness.  But I think the total lack of thought is at the bottom of it.  Nobody seems to know where they or anybody else is going, and nobody seems to worry.  You know?  You finish the week, you come home, you plug into the TV set for the weekend, and then you manage to get back to work on Monday.  It seems to me that this is the path to total brainwashing.  And if you have a brainwashed society, you’re heading towards doom.  There’s no question about that.

 

            That was in 1984.

Ironic, yeah?

I guess doomsday hasn’t happened yet – but what if the canary has, indeed, bitten the dust?  What do we do?  What can we do?  Maybe nothing.  Because if the smart part of popular culture is capturing the zeitgeist, the brilliant part is being beyond the influence of any one man.

I’ve never expected anything less than brainwashing from The Media; I just wish it didn’t seem like this was a case of the populace willfully brainwashing itself.

The Long and Short of It

Well kids, it's been a while since I've posted anything.  I've been exploring a lot of different things - new city, the guitar, fiction, etc.  What I have here are two pieces that I wrote recently for different things.  One is very short, and I wrote it on a whim for a AAA contest.  I realized pretty quickly that I was trying to condense a big idea into very few words.  I don't think it'd entirely successful but it's interesting to me as a writer.  The second piece I wrote as something that I intended to finish, polish, and hopefully get considered as a piece of "Real Writing."  One day I'll get something published in Rolling Stone, Spin, or Esquire.  I doubt this is it, but maybe it's a start.  I think it captures my style and sensibilities.  Who knows.

Brotherhood

            I had recently moved to Boston, and my brother had come to visit me for the first time.  We decided to take a day and hike to the summit of the highest peak in Massachuetts.  He was four years younger, a senior in high school, and because my last four years had been in college, we hadn’t seen each other much.  This was a good chance to be brothers for the first time in quite awhile.

            Unfortunately, I hadn’t been the best planner – so we found ourselves freezing cold on top of Mount Greylock in Northwestern Massachusetts, sunlight nearly gone, with only a flashlight to help us hike the four miles back to my Jeep.

            I was worried at first by the cold, but luckily, as we hiked, we got deeper into the woods and the cold abated.  That left only the dark to worry about.  I could tell that my brother was a little afraid  – perhaps of the cold, perhaps of the dark or the unfamiliar landscape of an East Coast forest at night.  But as we descended into thicker forest – not our own personal Heart of Darkness, but reminiscent, to be sure – we managed to slip back into the old roles of Big Brother and Little Brother that I, for some reason, thought we’d left behind. He fended off fear of things that go bump in the night and I fended off fear of having gotten him into a situation I couldn’t get him out of in one piece.  When I fell down, he laughed; when he fell, I dusted him off.  It had been awhile, but I guess it’s true:  “A brother’s love is… a brother’s love.”

            Eventually, the trees thinned out and we walked out onto the farm where my Jeep was parked.  It was warm.

_____________________________________

Caffeine and Conversation:

The Grand View from a Small Town in Northern New England

 

“You don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.”

-Tom Waits, “Hold On”

 

I

 

There’s a lot of anxiety being passed around these days.  Uneasiness, dissatisfaction, fear – people don’t trust the government, they don’t trust the banks, they don’t trust their employers, and it often feels like they don’t trust each other.  As the effects of the failing economy express themselves in new and surprising ways, it becomes more and more clear that no one is immune to the country’s present ills.  Its as if the rug of 21^st century manifest destiny has been yanked right out from underneath our feet.  Old people say it’s the death of values.  Middle-aged people say it’s the death of American economic values.  Young people say it’s the death of America.

            I don’t know how to adequately describe what I feel, but I know how to describe what I see:  I went to the bank a few weeks back.  I was seated with my back to the waiting area, talking to a banker, when I heard a commotion behind me.  There was a woman talking to the bank manager.  Pleading, actually – not talking.  She was trying to convince the manager to give her a loan, and he wasn’t having it.  She pulled out an envelope and rifled through it, holding up receipts with abandon, saying, “See?  See?  I can pay!  I’ve paid for these things!  You can give me a loan and I’ll pay it!”  The manager’s back was to me, but he was shaking his head… The woman picked up her baby out of the stroller next to her, pressed him against her chest, and said, “I can’t leave here.  I can’t go back out there.”

 

* * *

 

            I’ve only been living in Boston for about a month.  It’s a pretty solitary existence.  I work from my apartment and I live in my apartment, so I have to motivate myself to leave everyday.  Sometimes I don’t.  I moved out here knowing no one, and the people I’ve met are scattered around the city, so mostly we just meet up at bars or restaurants and chat nights to bed.

It’s put me in a position where I find myself spending a lot of time wondering what loneliness is all about.  I thought I understood, given my circumstances, (though to be clear, I welcomed it – I had move somewhere with no social connections for a reason) but it didn’t take long – didn’t take much misguided economics, many bank encounters – to make any loneliness or isolation I felt seem petty and inconsequential. 

See, I know what I’m not really alone or really isolated – hell, I know that I’m in better shape than probably 75% of the country.  But my only basis for comparison lies in situations that I know.  I know the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento.  I know family and friends and how the economy has hit them.  I don’t know Boston, or New England; small towns or blue-collar jobs.  I like to believe that I can understand their plight, at least intellectually – but at the same time, I know that that’s something that I want to believe.

And sometimes I come across things that I have to fully acknowledge that I don’t understand.

The Grand View Topless Coffee Shop is a coffee shop that recently opened up in Vassalboro, Maine.  Vassalboro is a small town.  I read about it online, and was instantly intrigued.

What is a topless coffee shop doing in a small town like Vassalboro?  Do women even take their tops off in small towns?  I hadn’t thought so when I was younger, that was for sure.  But then, I guess a bad economy will make people do crazy things.  I mentioned the shop to several friends, out of curiosity and humor.  One well-endowed female friend quickly explained to me that any girl who gets her ya-ya’s out in public has low self esteem.  This made me wonder if the shop was inspired by the same loneliness and isolation that everyone else seemed to be feeling, albeit perhaps in a different guise.  Why else would a young lady take her shirt off in a small town, where everyone would know about it?

It just so happened that I would soon be picking up a 2005 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (a trade in for my snow-unready Honda Civic), and I had long planned for the inaugural trip to be to Maine.  I realized that I needed to go see this titty café for myself.  I didn’t know if I’d find any answers, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t a downside to a trip to a topless coffee shop in a state known for its natural beauty.

 

II

 

            I picked up my Jeep at 6 pm on a Friday.  I got up to Vassalboro – after a variety of pit stops and misadventures – at 4 am.  My usual MO in this situation was to find a quiet street in a safe-looking neighborhood to park my car and fall asleep.

Vassalboro has quiet streets but no neighborhoods. 

I was either parking on the minimal embankment of State Route 3 or I was parking in the driveway of a respectable Vassalboro citizen.  I chose option C, which was to find a small, unpaved road along the shore of a frozen lake.  It was quite a sight to see at sunrise… until I noticed the private property signs everywhere.  I headed back into town to try and find the Grand View.  It was harder to find then you’d think, considering that there are only a handful of commercial buildings in Vassalboro.

            I noticed two things as I drove through “town:”

1.     My concept of a small town was being challenged – Vassalboro was a stretch of Route 3 with houses a half-mile apart and a gas station or general store thrown in here and there for good measure.  The Grand View used to be a hotel.  I have no idea who came to stay.

2.     The citizens of Vassalboro love antiques.  Either that, or the booming tourism industry in Vassalboro is based around antique shops.  Maybe people used to come, stay in the Grand View, and cruise the antique shops.  I really can’t say.

 

Anyways, I eventually found the place.  I was tired and disheveled and actually needed a cup of coffee.  It had a curious façade – the windows were all blacked out, so that you couldn’t see the “merch” inside – but they were blacked out with posters advertising the New England Coffee poured on site.  Not the typical window dressing for a nudie bar.  Continuing the absurdist theme was the sign by the door:  “18 and over only.  No touching.”  This was a coffee shop?

Even though it was 8:30 AM, I had the mindset that I was going into a strip club… and sure enough, there was a bouncer checking ID’s just inside the door.   He didn’t check mine.  I don’t know if it was the beard or the fact that I looked like I’d slept 3 hours in the back of a Jeep.  Which I had.

I was the only customer.  I sat down, and realized that I had no idea what I wanted.  I wasn’t handed a menu, and this wasn’t a coffee house where you walked up to the counter and ordered from the menu posted on the wall.  I had to squint at a menu on another table to see what they offered, and I think the bouncer thought I was ashamed to look my topless waitress in the eye because he told me, “Tell the lady what you want!”

I managed to fumble out some words about a regular coffee with cream and sugar, and then promptly checked my wallet to discover that I had no cash.  The joint was cash only.  I got up and told the bouncer and my waitress that I’d be right back.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t know if ATM’s existed in Vassalboro.

The bouncer let me know that there was, in fact, a local ATM, as well as where it was (in a general store two miles down the road).  He told me to come back when I had cash, but clearly didn’t expect me to return. 

I got in my Jeep and drove down the road.  I wasn’t sure if I had driven two miles, but I was pretty sure that ANY store would be THE store, so I pulled over at the first place I saw.  It was a gas station/general store.  The ATM was down, but I could get cash back with my debit card – I just had to wait for the cashier to lend a hand to the local (ice?) fishermen, who were buying worms.  God this was a small town.

Arriving back at the Grand View, I followed a family of eight adults through the door, and the bouncer told my waitress – with a mix of surprise and respect – “He came back!”  I sat down to wait for my coffee and the cinnamon bun that I had been convinced to order, and finally got to observe the small town anomaly that I had come to see.

 

I’m still not really sure what I expected to find – but I’ll try to articulate what was on my mind.  I grew up in a town of 25,000 people next door to a town of 125,000 people in the backyard of San Francisco.  My dad has a lot of family in Oregon and Alaska and despite the fact that he grew up in Sacramento, his parents farmed their backyard and his whole family personified down-home small-town values.  I was trained to hate the San Francisco Bay Area; I was trained to hate large groups of people, period.  And what this meant, in practice, was that the “City” and the “Small Town” were more than dissimilar locales:  in my mind, they were two very different ideas.  The City was a place of possibility but of uncertainty, a place of promise at the cost of moral decay.  The Small Town, on the other hand, was the embodiment of Puritan consistency, with a firm ceiling compensated for by the virtual guarantee of “living the good life.”

All this to say that a topless coffee shop in a small town was a damn curious thing.  Unnatural.  And so my hypothesis was this:  in a time of such economic unrest and cultural anxiety, the city was exporting its undesirable qualities to the small town, because for once, life in the small town was as threatened and uncertain as life in the city. 

It’s probably relevant to divulge that I cooked this theory up sitting in my lonely Cambridge apartment.

There was an idea in my mind about isolation and loneliness, and I thought that perhaps the physical isolation of the small town – which had always begat surfeit moral isolation – was for once being overpowered by the cultural loneliness that all of America was bearing together.  I heard a woman in a bank saying, “I can’t leave here.  I can’t go back out there,” and I heard it echoed by another woman saying “taking my top off in a coffee shop is a job, if nothing else.”  In both statements lived the idea that, for maybe the first time as a superpower, we – as Americans, as individuals, as citizen patriots or citizen apathetics – were feeling incredibly alone.  It was an idea predicated on the implicit notion that when the chips are down, you do what you gotta do – though maybe this time with a different oeuvre.  Because, perhaps for the first time, it seemed like isolationism couldn’t be the answer.

My late-night California-via-Cambridge mind thought this was all wrapped up in a wooden building in the middle of nowhere on Maine State Route 3.

What I found was something entirely different.

 

* * *

 

By the time my coffee arrived, the Grand View was far more populated than when I had left to find the town ATM.  The aforementioned family of eight was sitting at four tables in the center of the room.  Their ages had to range from 25-65… it was some kind of bizarro Sunday Brunch.  And that wasn’t it – the Grand View was full of  small town clichés.  There was the 20-something with wraparound sunglasses on his head.  He was in the booth next to me.  He actually knew one of the waitresses and I overheard them talking about a party later that night.  They probably went to high school together.  I think he had Twisted Sister in the CD player of his lifted truck (Ok, so I made that up, but I’ve probably got a 91% chance of being right).  Then there was a booth with two middle-aged men, probably getting their morning Cup of Joe before fishing with the worm buyers.  Another booth held an older man reading the day’s paper.  It was everything I would have expected from a diner in a quiet little town – and I’ve been to a lot of those – except that the waitresses were topless.

There were three of them now.  Mine was tall and lanky with small breasts and two pierced nipples.  I thought she seemed a little hangdog until we started chatting and she turned out to be a lot of fun.  Then there was a shorter brunette, with larger breasts, and one pierced nipple.  She was the one that Twisted Sister knew.  She looked like she probably knew how to find the hottest Vassalboro parties.  The third waitress was the tallest and most well-endowed, but also the chubbiest.  Neither of her nipples were pierced.  It made me wonder if they scheduled the waitresses that way on purpose, to cater to all crowds.

They all seemed comfortable.  I started a conversation with mine to prove that I wasn’t uncomfortable, and we ended up talking for a while.  I told her how I was from Boston and came up to Maine to get away… and she told me how she and her friends went to down to Boston to get away.  Fair enough.

When she went to help other customers, I took a look at the décor of the place.  They had done a real bang-up job.  Like I mentioned, the Grand View had previously been a hotel.  From the looks of things, they had simply taken the lobby of the hotel and put in ugly, uncomfortable booth seating.  There was a counter with coffee machines and a register, and a standard break-room refrigerator holding the day’s pastries.  In the entry way of the place – behind the bouncer’s barstool – was a pen and ink drawing of Dave Letterman.  Letterman!  I couldn’t help but wonder if he had given consent to have his picture used to promote this endeavor.  Near my booth was a pen and ink of a B-rock star, if I remember correctly, Jon Bon Jovi, and on another wall was, no joke, a pen and ink of the Three Stooges.  All things considered, I had no idea what they were going for.  I think the point was that they were really just selling one thing.  Two, I guess.

At least, that’s how it felt.

However, as I looked from the décor to the “It’s a Wonderful Life” clichés sitting in the booths around me, I realized that my conception of what the Grand View was “selling” was flawed, thanks to my life as a City Kid.  In a City, the place I sat in would only be selling breasts.  We’ve all been to the strip club that wouldn’t pass as an acceptable bar if it didn’t have boobs on display. 

This was the same thing, except that it wasn’t.

Despite all appearances, this was a coffee shop that was selling what all coffee shops sell:  caffeine and conversation.  And unlike most Big City coffee shops, there wasn’t a laptop in sight.  If there was anything in front of a patron’s face besides a cup of coffee, a donut, or another person, it was a newspaper.  The conversation was genuine.  There was a family of eight sitting together.  In a completely unexpected turn, it was comforting and familiar in the way that lunch at a normal Small Town diner would be.

 

I had finished my cinnamon bun (good) and was working on the coffee, trying to take everything in.  I had no answers – but that wasn’t for lack of information.  It was the most understated sensory overload I’d ever experienced.  My problem was that I had driven up North with a preconceived idea of the answer I wanted to give, before I even had a proper question formulated.  So now, I sat in the shop, staring at Larry, Moe, and Curly hanging on the wall, stealing glances at Party Girl’s rack, and thinking about how much I wasn’t a drip coffee guy… all the while wondering if, maybe, there wasn’t anything interesting to write about after all.  I was wondering if perhaps what I had wasn’t a story about Big City disillusion in a Small Town, but rather about how the Big City and the Small Town remain as different as ever.  Or at least about the ignorance of Big City people, like myself, towards Small Towns.

I was interrupted by my waitress:  “So, are you an artsy person?”

I looked up at her, laughed in spite of myself, and then replied, “What makes you ask that?”

She really only had appearances to go on.  I was wearing beat-up Nike shoes that had been – if ever hip at all – preppy-hip when clean and new.  I had on a tight pair of designer Levi’s jeans and a flannel hooded sweater with expensive aviator sunglasses hanging on the collar.  My San Francisco-made Chrome bike messenger bag was on the seat next to me.  Of that motley collection of articles, I really expected a comment about my jeans being way too tight, or my flannel sweater, or the fact that the clasp on my bag was a seat belt buckle.  These were the kinds of comments I normally got in the Northeast.

What she said was, “The shoes.  Only artsy people wear shoes like that.  And maybe the aviators… you just can’t pull those off…”

Maybe that is artsy, or hipster-ish, in Maine; maybe even in New England – but in Berkeley, my shoes and aviators would have been a dead giveaway that I wasn’t artsy.  After all, they weren’t Chucks and rainbow colored Ray-Bans.  

She went on about the glasses.  “The other thing about aviators is that they get scratched within five days of you buying them.  Last time I was in Boston with my girlfriends, I bought a good pair for $15 or so, and I dropped them the next day and they scratched.  That’s how it always goes.”

I was fumbling with my own pair, and dropped them.  They didn’t scratch, and that may or may not have had something to do with the fact that they were $200 aviators, as opposed to $15 aviators.  I suppose that admitting the price would have been the most revealing and honest thing for me to say, but I kept it to myself, because her next move was to venture a guess that I was a musician.

I should have lied.

Instead, I told her that I was an aspiring writer; that I thought that maybe there was a story in a place like the Grand View.  I asked her how she liked working there, and she said she loved it.  I asked if they ever got trouble from locals who weren’t appreciative of the nature of the business venture, and she said a little, but that it wasn’t too bad.  That was the extent of my investigative journalism.

 

It was quickly time for me to leave.  I had read online that some of the waitresses allowed hugs as one exception to the “no touching” rule.  When I read it, I assumed it was about customers who wanted to get cute, and the girls letting them indulge a little – I realized, however, that it was probably more about the fact that everyone in the damn place knew each other!  In any case, I think I could have gotten a hug from my waitress, but decided just to pack up my things and leave.  The other move on my way out would have been to give the bouncer a wink – I’d proved him wrong, after all – but considering that I looked artsy, was wearing tight jeans, and had originally seemed nervous about the topless woman serving me, I figured it was probably best to just climb in my Jeep and head off.

 

III

 

            I got back into Boston in time to meet up with friends for St. Patty’s weekend festivities.  They were waiting for me at an Irish pub, with a live, three-piece Irish band.  I ordered Bangers and Mash, had a lot of Guinness, a car bomb, a Tom Collins (sounds Irish…?) – it was a good time.  Everyone was drunk but there were no fights.  I’d thought it was impossible to have that many drunk people in that little space without fights.  Suffice to say, I was thankful to be in Boston for that particular weekend.  And I’ll be honest, the Grand View wasn’t anywhere near the front of my mind.

            Nevertheless, as the weekend came down and the Guinness wore off and I put my green shirt back in the back of my closet, I started thinking about the café again.  I wondered if my waitress had come to Boston to get away for the weekend, to experience St. Patty’s in a Big City.  I wondered what I would have done if I had bumped into her in the pub I was at, with her shirt on.  It would have been strange, that’s for sure.  I probably would have bought her a drink but I’m not sure that I would have had words for her, and I sure as hell wouldn’t have had words to explain to my good Christian friends where I knew her from.

            That’s what dawned on me, though:  what I had been experiencing throughout the trip was that most basic of human fascinations, the unkown.  My waitress at the Grand View goes to Boston for the same reason that my California friends called me after March 17^th to get the lowdown on St. Patty’s in Beantown, and for the same reason that I wanted to drive up to Maine even before I heard you could buy coffee and donuts and stare at tits in one convenient location.  It was the same reason, even, that I moved to Boston in the first place.  It’s hard to be fascinated with something you know intimately.  And life without fascination is painfully regular.

            When I was driving home through Maine and New Hampshire, I thought that I would be writing a piece about how Small Towns and Big Cities are as different as ever, or perhaps the same as always; about how a “topless coffee shop” in a Small Town was really just a “coffee shop with topless waitresses” – though in a Big City it would almost certainly be a “topless coffee shop.”  The purpose of this piece, if I followed my original intentions, would be to use that conclusion to say that, in this time of great uncertainty, the two ideals were still no closer together than when they had been moving forward through time uninhibited.  Crisis averted, at least for the easy distinctions I had made for so long.

            In truth, if I had set out with a good question to answer, I had gone about answering it all wrong.  And if I had set out with an answer and a desire to confirm that the question was valid, I only succeeded at confounding my own biased notions.  Perhaps Vassalboro was suffering gravely from the economic downturn.  Perhaps antique sales were way down and their one ATM would soon be shut down for lack of use.  I really don’t know.  But toplessness is not a proxy for economic desperation.  I’m not sure if that’s what I thought going in, but I certainly would have entertained the idea.  I know now that it’s not the case at the Grand View Topless Coffee shop, as clearly as I knew within five minutes of sitting down for coffee that I wasn’t going to be answering my original question.

            So did I end up with either a question or an answer?  That’s neither here nor there.  On a personal level, the Small Town and the Big City remain exactly the same for me.  If anything, the experience strengthened my preconceived notions of what Small Towns are – I was genuinely impressed with the candor of the patrons and the help at the Grand View.  Well, except maybe for the bouncer.

            But I think the final conclusion was this, neither question nor answer:  People cannot separate themselves from their expectations, and these expectations are intrinsically tied to the circumstances that inform our view of the world – tied to what we know.  In this sense, Small Town and Big City are certainly meaningful groupings of peoples or lifestyles.  Nevertheless, the expectations I had for the Grand View based on its lack of clothing were in essence the same as the expectations my waitress had for me based on my clothing.  This is precisely how the people of Small Towns and Big Cities are the same – in the way they construct their notions of the world outside the scope of their own understanding.  But it’s not a matter of the Big City leaking into the Small Town, or vice-versa.  It’s human nature.  It’s an immutable consequence of our construction, whether we chose to cover it up or let it all hang out.

 

* * *

 

            If you’re wondering why I chose to mention the scene at the bank, I can only hope that the image sticks with you as evidence that there is something that’s changing right now about the American condition – because there is still a connection between that condition and what I’ve been writing about.  See, I’ve been back to my local bank several times, and I’ve wondered each and every time whether or not the desperate mother ever got her loan.  I’ve wondered if she even left the bank.  And if I expected my trip up to Maine to somehow assuage the concern and disconcert I felt at my encounter with a real manifestation of the economic unrest that’s taking hold of everyone, well, I was sadly disappointed.

            In a different sense, however, I found something that should probably be as, if not more, demonstrative than what I had hoped to find.  What I discovered is that people are still just people.  Half-empty pessimism about unflattering Big City qualities leaking out to Small Towns has been replaced with half-full optimism rooted in the fact that this is still the same America.  And as far as America is concerned – let’s just be honest and say that we’ve faced troubles before.  We’ve faced depression and unrest and isolation and human ingenuity has pulled us through each and every time. 

So it is that the certain link between the subject of my trip and economic unrest is that America is facing a new problem that will color the Big City, the Small Town, and the interplay between the two a different shade than ever before.  They are categories that are truly defined by cultural context.  That context right now is grave and challenging, but we are ingrained with a receipt-waving sense of resolve to find a solution, Small Town and Big City alike.  It’s what people do.  There are desperate women in banks everywhere.  Worm buyers and artsy types may find solutions in different ways, but you can be damn sure they’ll both be working on it – and the solutions they arrive at will not be symptoms of population or loneliness or poverty, but rather will be indicative of the different ways of life that coexist in America.  The economy is not contributing to a breakdown of the walls between the Big City and the Small Town; the economy is a catalyst for understanding why they are both distinct and valuable.

I’m not sure why it took breasts to make that clear, but I can’t complain.

Indulgence

A long time ago, I set out to put down on paper a long discourse on what, to me, defined reproducible, mass-consumed art (i.e. print, film, and music).  I called it “published art,” and when I sat down to write, I had determined that the essential attraction between man and art is based in the struggle out of which this art is borne.  While I never finished this treatise, here’s something I wrote in the introductory paragraphs:

"The point that I hope to approach, ultimately, is that published art connects strongly with people for one particular reason:  because the personal genesis of this type of art, and the struggle of its creator to find its place in the canon of work that already exists, is the same as our struggle, as individuals, to find a personal definition as a person, and to retain our individuality while at the same time trying to be socially accepted into the larger societal framework."

I can’t help but cringe at the phrase “personal definition as a person,” so let’s just pretend I swapped “unique” for “personal.”  Let’s also cut the word “socially.”  Those things aside, I still think it’s a pretty valid statement – though I think if I sat down right now to work on the same kind of essay, I’d focus on a different sort of struggle.  I’m really fascinated by the tension between composing a work for oneself, and composing a work that will be experienced by uncountable strangers.  The reason I’ve included the quote above is that I’m not entirely sure that the two ideas are really very different.  Nevertheless, at the moment, I’m more engaged with the latter idea.  It’s an old platitude that “what we write for ourselves is always more satisfying than what we write for others.”  But I also find myself wondering, for example, how musical artists with intensely personal lyrics can possibly convey those lyrics to their band mates for the sake of performance, let alone to individuals in their audience.  Similarly, I’ve heard of auteur film classes that pose the question, “what was the film that Director X spent his career trying to make?” and found myself asking, “if his career was about making one particular film, are we – the audience – even relevant?”

What I think I’m trying to say is that it seems like either we – the audience – must cheapen the art, or vice-versa.  If the creation of art is a personal process, than our own unique interpretations seem far removed from whatever end result is created – maybe even implying that our interpretation of a piece of art is itself an act of artistic creation, but certainly of something completely different.  It still leaves us de-valued in some way.  On the other hand, giving up, say, a song about a cherished memory to be consumed by strangers seems to sell the song short as well, no matter how loved.  So where does the truth lie?  I’m not sure.  I called it a tension, that’s all.  But it seems like maybe that tension is the struggle that really gives “published art” a lot of its value.

Anyways, a lot of these questions were raised for me recently after I watched Gus Van Sant’s film “Paranoid Park.”  I thoroughly enjoyed the film – the sentiments it expressed were pure and unadulterated by commercialism or even professionalism.  Nevertheless, the movie immediately associated itself in my mind with two other films – Tarsem’s “The Fall” and Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” – that I enjoyed considerably less.  The association comes from the fact that all three seem to be inescapably the work of their particular directors.

I think a brief summary of each is in order:

“The Fall” is about a movie stuntman who, while in the hospital after a stunt gone awry, befriends a young girl who is also a resident of the hospital.  Despondent due to the circumstances of a failing romantic relationship, the stuntman tells the girl a fantastical story to gain her trust, and manipulate her into helping him commit suicide.

“Synecdoche, New York” is about a playwright who wins a MacArthur Genius Grant and, in the wake of a rift with his wife and failing health, uses it to create a play that mimics life within a giant miniature of the city of New York.  There would be more to say in summary if this wasn’t a Charlie Kaufman film. 

“Paranoid Park” follows a high school skateboarder who accidentally commits a serious crime while out with an older friend.  The film follows the psychological consequences of his secret, primarily by studying his relationships with his family, best friend, and girlfriend.

Probably more important to me than the plot summaries, however, are “directorial summaries” addressing the sensibilities that mark each director’s work.  I’ve decided to give brief plot summaries because I think it’s important to note that each film has a premise with room for satisfying plot and character development.  It is each director’s particular aesthetic style (as well as co-writing credits) that makes the biggest difference to me.

Tarsem is known for his unique visual flair, and “The Fall” is a beautiful film to watch.  There are numerous shots that create an incredible sense of composition, color, and movement… but I never managed to find the soul underneath the beauty.  As the stuntman’s story becomes wilder and wilder, each new twist seems designed only to set up a new shot – connecting the audience with the stuntman’s emotional state is, at best, an afterthought.

Similarly, “Synecdoche, New York” is another Charlie Kaufman mind-bender (we’ll go with the family friendly term here, though it’s a little less accurate), though it is his first directorial effort.  The acting is solid, the film itself is very imaginatively constructed… but when the credits roll, the first words running through my mind were “self-indulgent.”  I knew there was a point lurking underneath everything that happened, and I even felt like I glimpsed it from time to time – but I never felt like Kaufman was particularly interested in letting us in on it.  I didn’t feel like it went over my head; I felt like Charlie Kaufman didn’t make a film where communicating to the audience was a very high priority.  It’s one thing to sacrifice artistic intent at the alter of being “crowd-pleasing” but it’s another thing entirely to forsake the crowd.  Kaufman’s films are never easy on the audience but they usually contain truths that make them worth the effort.

Finally, Van Sant’s film continues to ply themes that he’s worked with for some time:  young men, father-figures, secret uniqueness, etc.  The method with which these themes are explored, however, is notable.  For one, the visual style of “Paranoid Park” is remarkably “lazy,” for lack of a better word.  The quality and type of film used varies throughout, but perhaps more interesting is the fact that the point of focus for shots is often not the point where the action lies.  The development of the plot is similarly unconventional, as it unfolds in a non-linear, almost circular fashion; various scenes are replayed and extended or truncated to reveal more of what the protagonist is dealing with.  Van Sant is conducting an experiment with his own well-known interests.

The point I’m trying to convey is that in watching each film, it feels as if we are dealing with the director himself in a way that is more transparent than is typical.  And this fact, if we accept it, raises a lot of interesting questions about the value of each film.  I left “The Fall” feeling as if Tarsem made beautiful images but forgot to make a beautiful film; I left “Synecdoche, New York” feeling like there were some very noble ideas lurking under the surface, but I never got let in on the joke; I left “Paranoid Park” feeling as if Gus Van Sant had married his developing aesthetic and thematic interests with an interesting plot in such a way as to help me really understand what the main character of the film was feeling.

Then I really started thinking.

What I came to realize was that I felt that each film stumbled and/or succeeded for the exact same reason: all the directors chose to let a lot of themselves into their work.  Too much, even.  And then I started to wonder how that could even be a criticism – not because it seemed unfair (I tend to think that if a film is unsatisfying, its unsatisfying, and that’s a valid criticism regardless of the reason… at least on a personal level), but rather because of the implications of what it meant to be a director, what it means about creating films.  How could I, in good conscience, ask any artist to distance himself from his creation?

Then again, if said artist is going to commoditize his work, how could I not ask him to make it accessible?

So if the struggle of the artist is to step back from his work enough to allow it to speak to others, and the struggle of the audience is to live on faith enough to allow to artist to give himself to his work, maybe the idea of struggle I first raised really is the primary component of art’s appeal.  Maybe we can come full circle.  Maybe we can say that the beauty of art comes from the personal worth it engenders through its experience, as well as from the difficulty in fitting it into that place where it can be a medium for shared experience of the artist and the audience.

In relation to the three films I’ve discussed, then, I suppose that the implication is that Tarsem played things a bit too close to the vest, by making his pretty pictures and a story that mattered to him, but neglecting to determine if this story was sufficiently significant for the audience; Kaufman threw himself into directing his first film but got too caught up in his own labyrinthine persona to leave enough space for audience interpretation; and Van Sant managed, via a simple story and straightforward dialogue, to allow his experimental storytelling techniques to enhance, rather than blur, the clarity of his ideas.

I can go with that, albeit with the major caveat that it’s one hell of a subjective explanation.

Actually, it’s a subjective example.  I really do feel ok about it.  Because I think the fact is, after our subjective interpretations take hold, we either sympathize, or do not sympathize with the director and his ideas.  Apparently, I just don’t do odes to stuntmen very well.

Teenage homicide I can do.

In other news, I saw “The Reader” recently, with a good friend, with whom I had been making a joint venture to see the Best Picture nominees.  I came out of the film feeling that it was well acted and directed, but without much of a point.  I didn’t connect emotionally to the core of the film.  My friend thought it was very good.  This is what I said to him:

“I understand the technical value of the film.  I admire the acting, direction, etc.  But I don’t feel changed by it at all.  It was painful to watch the characters go through what they went through, but it didn’t do anything beyond that.  And that means that it was just emotional masochism.”

My friend said “Is that bad?”

I said “yes.”

I’ll stand by that statement as non-subjective.  The value in art comes from its transforming power.  And I can’t think of a transformation that occurs without struggle or pain – but the transformation makes it all worthwhile.  Without the change, though, it’s just more pain.  Perhaps the pain of sitting through a movie with no soul, or the pain of not being privy to the joke… but pain nonetheless.  One-sided pain.  The kind that lacks tension.

And that’s when art is useless - because without tension, or struggle, it is unrelatable.  

And Finally, an Update from Beantown

Well, it's been quite some time since I last wrote.  A lot has happened.  I'm in a whole new city with all-new bills, all-new streets, and all-new weather.  But I'm still the same guy, and I've still got the same job.  Maybe I'll have an all-new work ethic when it comes to this blog.  Only time will tell I guess.

Anyways, there have been a lot of things on my mind in the time since I last wrote almost three months ago, and I'm going to try to recap some of them on here over the next week or so.  I'll do my best.  And I do actually have something new to post, too - I'm not just writing to make myself feel better about my "Last Post" date.  Here it is...

“I read in the paper, today… it’s been a record year for rainfall.”

I’ve been listening to this song a lot lately.  I like the lyrics but I know that I like the song because of the mood the guitar and banjo create.  That kind of thing will get me every time.  Maybe I just like to feel melancholy, or maybe I just like melancholy music – but Colin Meloy could probably sing about rainbows and dandelions and bunny rabbits and I’d like this song just as much.  Or nearly as much.

The beauty of owning music, though, is being able to eventually get over the sounds and take a listen to what the song is really about.  This song is, in my mind, about a relationship fading out, and one’s ability to only see the gray mist that comes with the rain, as opposed to the blue sky that came before or the green grass that comes after.

That being said, the opening line is evocative enough to be the only one.

Can you imagine reading that you were living through the year of the most rainfall in history?  It’d have to seem fortuitous.  It’d have to seem unfortunate but unavoidable.  It’d have to seem… like a raincloud was following you around?  Ridiculous.

Because that’s the thing… the weather has an undeniable power over our perception of our everyday lives.  It has an inexplicable power to change our moods and determine our actions.  But it’s still just chance.  We can’t predict it and we can’t really change it.  The idea of a “record year for rainfall” being significant is about as ludicrous as the idea of having your own personal rain cloud.  But it has traction, to be sure.

I think it’s a bit ironic, though, to think about the possibility of a record year for rainfall in times like this.  If there has been ever been a year when rainfall should be entirely inconsequential, hasn’t it been this one?  People losing jobs at a ridiculous rate, epic bailouts, talk of IOU’s instead of tax returns and mail only five days a week? 

I read in the paper, today… it’s been a record year for economic downturn.

Nevertheless, I’d wager that no popular music artist has ever started a song with that line.  Why is that?  Well, probably because it’s too real. 

That’s the beauty of the weather, right?  It can be another day of rain – or the harbinger of the end of an empire (or relationship).  For some reason, people love to let the things that that can’t be controlled act as their barometers.  Maybe it’s a way to defer the reality of the situation that sits in front of us.  Or, beyond that, maybe it’s just comforting to assign the realest things in life to forces beyond human control.

Whatever the case, I find it fascinating to observe the ways that this happens in art.  I know that I, for one, connect more to “A Record Year for Rainfall” than I would to “A Record Year for Downturn” – even though I read the same exact meaning into both of them.  That’s probably why I like the Decemberists so much.  I love their story songs, precisely because what they manage to capture so beautifully with their tales of lost love, time at sea, failing on the playing field, and even a crane wife are the exact same emotions that I experience in my mundane, everyday life.

I think I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in a recent resurgence of X-Files obsession.  I love The X-Files.  Love it.  And as I’ve been watching it again lately, and reading about it online, I’ve come across – repeatedly – references to how the show “captured 90’s paranoia about the government, black vans, and mysterious helicopters.”

See, people don’t want their governments to be incomprehensible because they are overblown, greedy, and prone to stupid decisions in their quests to satisfy everyone; they want their governments to be incomprehensible because they are constantly trying to keep the public in the dark… about aliens, or human experiments, or unthinkable technology.

People don’t want the sign of dismal times to be the unemployment rate; they want it to be an immutable act of God.

I think this happens because of an unconscious understanding that if we buy into the magical worlds that artists are able to create, and see even a small part of ourselves there, then we elevate ourselves to the level of “magical.”  Is that a productive behavior?  Is it a fear response, a coping mechanism?  Or a source of motivation, or self-worth?  I don’t know the answers to those questions.  I don’t think I’m qualified to answer them.  But I do think I’m on solid footing when I say that most people are just looking for some kind of meaning.

So is that real meaning?  The kind that comes from words on a page, notes in the ear, or images on a screen?  I don’t know.  Maybe it unlocks real meaning – or maybe its only fleeting.

But the people will always need something to believe in.