It is impossible to capture the yellow and green of the hallway in a photograph. For one thing, the yellow is so vivid that it makes everything glow. You can get a sense from these shots. It is still a work in progress. I have to do a second coat on a couple of the doors and finish the trim on the doors. 

I woke up this morning and tore out the hideous carpet in the hall. What a freaking undertaking. Getting the carpet out was the easy part. Using a pry bar to remove the nail encrusted boards from the concrete was not so easy. In fact, I'm only half way through the heinous nail board removal project. I did, however, accomplish my goal of getting hideous carpet into the trashcan before the garbage truck came. Goodbye hideous carpet. You would not believe the FILTHY CRUD under that rug. TOTALLY GROSS EWWWW.

Taking off to Art Day In Phoenix now. Then tomorrow back at the hallway and painting the kitchen. I've lost six pounds this week from sweating while cleaning and working on the house. No exaggeration.

Excuse my lack of response today. I have spent the entire day and night painting my hallway. I know. It sounds easy. I mean, how hard can it be to paint a hallway. Well, it's NOT EASY. It was very hard, though rewarding hard because now my hallway looks all brand new and like art. Besides the fact that it has a cathedral ceiling, all kinds of angles and built in shelves and nooks and crannies, it also has SIX paneled doors. I am so exhausted, and yes I am in PAIN, but happy pain. And the fun hasn't stopped yet. Next up the south wall in the kitchen and family room.

Bean's my little helper. She paints for like 40 minutes and then goes and plays. I paint for like 14 hours and don't stop til I drop.

Oh and like some kind of miracle from God-Or-Whoever, monsoon busted through tonight and dumped a bunch of rain and cool temperatures, so I could open the windows and air out all the paint fumes (with the added bonus of being serenaded by the cacophony of millions of frogs making frog noise in the wash next to our house).

Tomorrow - Art Vacation Day in lovely HOT-AS-A-MOTHERFUCKER Phoenix. Then back to Land of Vacuuming, Dusting and Painting.

For the record, I've been taking a Housecleaning Vacation At Home, and it has been awesome.

PS: You can't see the colors in these photos because they were taken at night. I'll take some photos in the morning with the sunshine pouring through the windows making my hallway glow with splendiferousness. Then you'll be able to see how gorgeous my walls are. It's amazing what a positive psychological effect newly painted walls has. I can't wait to paint every single one of my walls, so I can have a complete emotional renovation via color.

Sorry to keep beating a dead horse here, but the ideas of censorship in relation to my Larry Clark post are eating up my brain, so I need your help. Perhaps my ideals don’t exactly match reality. I need you to decide whether I overstepped my boundaries by not posting the Larry Clark photo behind the cut. Someone else (not the anonymous commenter) said it’s because it’s livejournal that I should put it behind the cut as if livejournal has its own special set of rules.

Seriously, in regards to art, internet, children etc, whenever I bring my child to a museum or gallery that has contemporary art, I screen the work first. It’s my responsibility. For example, recently I took my child to the Trouble In Paradise exhibit, and I steered her clear of the Joel Peter-Witkin photo, and in fact whenever we go to Etherton Gallery, I never bring her into the Witkin room because as much as I enjoy Witkin’s work, it certainly isn’t appropriate for my ten year old daughter.

The image that I used in my blog post is available on artnet.com, a mainstream gallery source for art images. You can also find Robert Mapplethorpe’s work on that site. (We all know what a field day censors have with Mapplehthorpe.) I closely supervise and monitor what my child does on the internet. No, she’s not reading my blog or any other blogs. It’s my job as a parent to make sure that my child engages in safe and appropriate choices on the internet.

Those who have been reading me, know the content of my writing. I do not shy away from uncomfortable subjects, yetI have managed as a parent to shelter my child from my artistic voice which definitely leans toward the NC-17 range, and I have managed to shelter her from the adult-themed art and writing that I enjoy in my personal tastes.

Regarding being surprised or taken aback by the content, well I was surprised when I found the Clark image in the book that I was reading. I wasn’t expecting to see the photo, but it was there, so I stopped to look at it and think about it. That’s the nature of contemporary art. It can surprise you with disturbing content. Have you seen Cindy Sherman’s recent work? If I posted one of those should I put it behind the cut? Just pull open a recent Artforum and you will find no shortage of art that depicts much more graphic and violent sexual acts than the one shown in this photograph. Artforum isn’t issuing warnings on the cover of their magazine, nor delivering it in brown paper wrapping. However, I don’t let my child look through Artforums because of the content of some of the art. Again, I have to take an active role in parenting in regards to any kind of cultural consumption. Certainly my posting a Larry Clark photo is low on the list of the “dangers of the internet .”

So what? Does having my blog on livejournal mean that I’m subject to rules of censorship that don’t exist in the actual art world? Was I offensive and overstepping my bounds by not putting the Clark photo behind the cut? One thing about the photo is that you can’t really tell what’s happening until you really look and study it. I think that what makes it so disturbing is that you have to consciously engage with the content to get the content. That’s another reason I didn’t put it behind the cut because the content is not really obvious at first glance.

And regarding the image as being violent toward women, well I don’t think I have to remind most of you that I am no stranger to violence toward women. I can choose to be a victim and hide from it, or I can think about it intelligently and engage with it in its representations in art, film and other cultural forms. I have chosen the second option.

All that said, you let me know. I’d like to hear from you on the matter. If you all think it should be behind the cut, then I will listen to your advice in this post and any future posts with this kind of content. Perhaps I’m just being “too big for my britches.” It wouldn’t be the first time. Ha ha.


Poll #1427008 KDD Behind the Cut Poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should I have put the Larry Clark photo behind the cut?

To those who are offended by the Larry Clark photo, I have chosen not to put it behind the cut (e.g. censor it) for the following reasons that I stated in the comments thread of the post:

I thought about putting it behind the cut, but a) it's an art photo that hangs in museums and galleries and is available in books in public libraries and b) it's easily found via google with moderate search preferences, in other words google doesn't censor it. So since neither museums, galleries, books, libraries or google has chosen to censor this image, I have chosen not to as well. Sorry if that's a problem for you, but this is my blog, and my blog supports freedom of artistic expression and is adamantly opposed to censorship.

And for the record, I discovered the photo in a book I checked out from the university library.

Now . . . anyone who would like to engage in the actual content of the post is welcome to join in. Your thoughts would be most welcome.

Yours truly,

KDD

I really love Larry Clark’s work. Obviously his focus on the inherent violence of teenage sexuality is something that appeals to me. I discovered his autobiographical photo essay Tulsa back in the early 1980s when I was fresh off the streets and had this giant bank of experience clogging up my emotional pipes with nowhere to go, so I was trying to write and paint my way through it. Clark’s focus on drugs, sex, and the icy disjunction between mind, body, and place that haunts so many teenagers was like a mirror into my own understanding of myself and my various art and writing projects. Not that mine and Clark’s experiences were the same. They weren’t, but certainly the sentiment contained within Tulsa struck an intimately personal chord with me.
I was reading a book about Clark a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled upon this photograph. I had never seen this one before, and it caused me to stop dead in my tracks and study it closely. I apologize to those who find this photo disturbing or offensive. It is disturbing. It graphically exposes a part of life that many of us would rather not confront, a kind of alienated, detached, teenage consumption with a hard-on and the blank stare of hallucinogens. All the components come together to present a picture that may leave some a bit queasy. First you have the casual title of the photograph which could just as easily read, “They found a dog in the park and took her home.” So there’s the sense that the boys found a thing (a girl) that they could take home to entertain themselves (e.g. fuck), a kind of casual consumption of body as mindless entertainment. The one boy in the corner holds his erection like a joystick, as if he is waiting his next turn at the video game (the girl). The flat still form of the boy on top of the girl (look at how limp his legs are) wears his hat like he couldn’t be bothered to take it off. The girl is completely disconnected from the experience, her eyes glazed over with the blank stare of drugs, her legs flopped open as if her body is some kind of object she found in her pocket and gives away with no personal connection to it. It’s an uncomfortable photograph to be sure, but it’s probably also one that strikes a chord in quite a few people who look at it.

Looking at this photograph reminded me of something a few women have said to me in response to my sex work memoirs. They tell me, “I’m just like you except I did it for free.” When I hear this, I always feel a bit confused by the equation. Studying the Clark photo inspired me to think more closely on the complexities of the “prostitute” (the girl who gets paid for sex) versus the “slut” (the girl who does it for free). For the most part, the women who have told me this are older than me and were teenagers during the late 60s and early 70s, the height of free love and LSD culture. Even though the Clark photo was taken in 1980, when I look at it, I see a snapshot of these women who “did it for free.” They all talk about using a lot of drugs, especially acid, and having sex with lots of men so they could have a place to stay and take more drugs. It was the culture of the time. I was born in 1962 in San Francisco, so this kind of LSD inspired free love was nothing new to me. I knew about it. I witnessed it in the adults and teenagers around me, but I was too young to be part of it.

I have this thing that I like to say about 60s counterculture: a lot of girls were used and their bodies exploited while a lot of men got laid. For some reason, “free love” always disturbed me. Oddly, I think my union working class origins where I was taught that labor (sex or otherwise) should be rewarded in measurable terms (e.g. pay), the idea of “free love” never appealed to me. My labor should be paid for. But mostly, I think because I had to struggle so hard to be in control of myself in my out-of-control childhood environment that I wasn’t willing to relinquish control of my body when I became a teenager and hit the streets. I orchestrated losing my virginity in the summer of 1977 when I used a boy to fuck me and get it over with and then I dumped him. I then had one sexual relationship before I became a prostitute in the spring of 1978. I went from virgin to prostitute in less than a year. If men were going to use my body, they were going to pay for it. My body was more of a tool of survival than something that could be used to express love. When I was a child, I used it to perform chores and earn my allowance. When I was a teenager, I used it to sell sex and survive.

In my mind, selling my body meant that I had control of it. In retrospect, I’m thinking about the fucked up thinking that made me think that somehow selling my body was far better (superior) than “doing it for free.” Somehow, I figured that if my body had a value, if the sex act could be measured by the money it generated, if I was performing work by having sex than the body and the sex it was performing were acceptable. At one point, when I was barely sixteen years old, I had convinced myself that my true professional calling in life was to be a prostitute, and I looked at it as a job that I could perform as well as anyone else performs their jobs. I convinced myself that there was no difference between me and a bus driver or a carpenter or a secretary. My line of work just happened to be sex. So I think when women told me that they were just like me but they did it for free, I would stop and think well why would you do it for free? You don’t do other work for free, do you? I look back now and see the weird kind of indoctrination that I was operating under. I had my blue collar working class background that conditioned me to believe that you have to work your ass off to survive and get anything in life even if that work means selling your ass. I was living in a culture that assigned monetary value to everything in order to validate it. Since my body had monetary value, it was then something with worth. So the women who were doing it “for free” were denying their bodies worth and value. This is some pretty messed up thinking.

But this is the other conundrum that I thought of. While we live in a culture that insists on using monetary value as a form of validation, our culture cannot accept that in relation to a woman’s body. While I thought (and to a large degree still do) that I was maintaining bodily autonomy and control by selling my body instead of engaging in “free love,” it is the position of the prostitute that is most frowned upon. Line me (“the prostitute”) up with all the women who “did it for free” (e.g. “the sluts) and which one will garner the most scrutiny in the public eye? It is taken for granted that it’s okay to take a woman’s body for granted, but if she uses her body to make a living than she becomes a criminal.

This is why this photograph is important and difficult because it shows us the truth of what “doing it for free” means. Does the girl in this photo have control of her body? What did she think the next day? What does she think now? What do the women who told me that they’re just like me except they did it for free think when they look at this photograph? What kind of bodily response does it inspire? But seriously, nothing really is free is it? It's interesting that these women referred to their sexual acts in exchange for drugs and housing as "not getting paid for it" or having sex "for free." Really if they were doing it for drugs or a roof over their heads, then then in reality, their sexual acts were another kind of prostitution. Perhaps it was as unfathomable to them to see themselves as prostituting themselves as it was for me to see myself "doing it for free." Again, which stigma is worse -- the prostitute or the slut?

As a side note I also want to mention that my need for control of my body is also why LSD never appealed to me. I tried it a couple of times but could not stand how it took total control of my body and my senses. I felt claustrophobic by its effects and wanted nothing more than to reclaim my body. I never wanted to look like the girl in this photo or be in that position. The idea of being her (the girl in Bryant Park and now on the mattress in that room with those boys) still horrifies me. I fought tooth and nail to maintain control of my body even while I was selling it. Funny that heroin would end up being my drug of choice, since it is also a drug that takes total control of your body, except in a different way. It makes your body need and want it, so you have to work to get it. Someone once told me that the junkie’s job is the hardest one on the planet. Indeed, heroin addiction is a full time job. You have to work hard to feed it, plot and plan every inch of everyday, so in a way it is a drug that takes total control of your body but also forces you to take control of your body (by feeding the addiction). So many thoughts from one photo!

But the bottom line is this. This photo inspired me to think of cultural representation and social stigmas of the slut and the prostitute and where they differ. It made me realize the connection between money and sex as something that gave me a sense of control. It made me realize the hypocrisy of our culture when monetary value is what legitimizes an object except for when that object is a woman’s body which she is selling. I was also astounded at how viscerally I still react to an image where a girl is being used and in which she is so disassociated from her body. The photo actually makes me a little nauseous.

I have one word for you at the moment: VACUUMING

Yep, I'm still at it. I have vacuumed floors, rugs, walls, closets, furniture, appliances, cat scratchers, ceilings, doll houses, stereo speakers, books, stuffed animals, and my own stomach. I have also washed curtains, sheets, bedspreads, throw rugs. In other words, I took the week off to overhaul my house and enjoy my new toy, and that's exactly what I'm doing.

However, I woke up this morning with Two Things Which I Must Write spinning through my head. So maybe I'll sit in my new lint free, dust free, cat hair free environment and get some freaking writing done.

But first -- must engage the Crevice Tool That Sucks for a little while longer. I'm not ready to stop yet.

My new vacuum sucks. HARD. Woo fucking hoo. I am having so much fun. Oh my holy god, I totally underestimated the euphoria of operating a well sucking crevice tool (a.k.a. the long thin attachment). I am so high on my WINDFUCKINGTUNNEL. It's a Lean Mean Sucking Machine. Yes. Yes. Yes.

In other birthday present news, I got my new running shoes on Saturday morning. Someone once asked me how I pick out shoes, as if there were a science to it. I said, I buy what’s on sale, fits and is comfortable. In this case, I got a pair of $70 Nikes for thirty bucks which left me $20 of remaining birthday money from my dad. I used that to buy Bean a little outfit (with a small donation from me included).

Anyway, I forgot what it’s like to run with shock absorption. I’ve been running so slow lately. I thought I was just getting old, but apparently just my shoes were old.  I put on my new running shoes and I flew like a KDD BAT OUT OF HELL.

Here’s to shock absorption and crevice tools that suck. I’m pretty easy to please, all things considered.

PS: This post ends the KDD Birthday Vacuum Saga.

Note: I saw this movie twice in less than 24 hours, and I couldn't even come close to saying everything I have to say about it. I'd be writing for a week.

Let me just start by saying this. Michael Mann’s Public Enemies is unequivocally the best Hollywood movie of the year. There will be nothing else coming out of Hollywood that comes remotely close. Then again, that’s because Public Enemies is a Hollywood movie that is not a Hollywood movie. Focused on the mythic bank robbing icon John Dillinger, this is no emotionally deep biopic, no in depth character study, no story of human frailties and flaws, no fateful melodrama. It has none of the character depth of early gangster films like Little Ceasar and Public Enemy, no human depth like the epic Godfather I and II, no sexual complexity like Bonnie and Clyde (though it certainly pays tribute to all those films). Public Enemies does what Michael Mann does best. It shows the complexities of men at work and operating in the matrix of other men, and he delivers them as if he were choreographing a minimalist ballet. Men wearing suits and fedoras and wielding machine guns weave through this film like dancers on a stage in which every slight movement stands in for something much larger or simply exists for the pure beauty and mastery of the movement. The film, with its impeccable photography, economy of dialogue, and precisely mastered editing, presents more like an abstract geometric plane flashing with gunfire and leaking blood than an actual movie about characters and incidents. For the most part, it’s hard to make a good film based on real people and events without falling into the tedium of recording history. Public Enemies is successful because it distills all the tedium out of the Dillinger story. The film’s bare minimalism and extreme economy make every single moment in the film count with no extraneous emotion or human excess to weigh down the brilliance of the film as a mythic object in its own right.

This is not to say that the film is simply an abstract exercise about John Dillinger. After all, the movie is called Public Enemies, as in more than one. The interesting thing is that while Dillinger is the focus of the film, he is not the enemy. He is the hero. The enemies in this movie can be found everywhere -- from the criminal world to law enforcement to federal agencies -- but not in Dillinger. Paying tribute to the notion of good guys and bad guys in cinema, Mann blurs the divide between sides. The characters in his movie could be divided into four categories: 1) the Good Good Guys; 2) the Bad Good Guys; 3) the Good Bad Guys; and 4) the Bad Bad Guys. No, John Dillinger is not the enemy in this film. He is the Good Bad Guy. He is the guy who lives by a code of honor. He is the guy who robs banks, not people. He is a guy just trying to make it in the world. Indeed, a Code Of Honor seems to be the defining factor in Michael Mann’s movies between the Good and the Bad. On the criminal side of this picture you have the impulsive, selfish, excessively violent and greedy Baby Face Nelson representing the Bad Bad Guy. He exhibits no respect for honor for human life, and he will shoot anyone for sheer kicks. He brings everyone down when he casually guns down a bunch of innocent bystanders during the film’s final bank robbery. Dillinger, on the other hand, certainly commits his share of pistol whipping and thuggery, but it is always with clear a purpose and mission (e.g. get the money from the safe). Those he assaults represent systems (banks) and not individuals.

The Good and Bad divide extends beyond criminal lines. Like in Francis Ford Copolla’s gangster opus The Godfather, Mann shows us that the real public enemies reside on the side of the law. Indeed, the biggest enemy in the movie is J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and its fascist pursuit of the “criminal elements” in society. Played with quiet, creepy, psychopathic, megalomaniacal menace by Billy Crudup, J. Edgar Hoover comes off as the face of American fascism that has extended its white gloved hand into the present. In one scene, Hoover literally quotes Mussolini (“It’s time to take off the white gloves.”) right before he awards a row of young white boys lined up in uniform (and looking a hell of a lot like the youth of the Third Reich) with honors for exposing criminals. In Mann’s concise and economic cinematic vocabulary, he uses the Hoover character to expose such pertinent U.S. government practices as illegal surveillance, wire tapping, and torture. As in everything else in this film, these elements are delivered with the lean jolt of rapid fire bullets. In one scene, we see Feds listening in on phone calls and reading the transcriptions of private and intimate conversations. In another, Hoover orders Dillinger’s family to be hunted down, detained, and pressured to informing even though Hoover’s agents explain that Dillinger hasn’t seen his family in years. In a particularly grueling scene, Hoover orders one of his agents to torture one of the apprehended criminals by denying sedation while he has a bullet wedged between his brain and eyeball. To make matters worse, the agent takes sadistic pleasure in pressing on the criminal’s skull and listening to him scream in agony. Certainly these scenes depict historic moments from Hoover’s reign, but they also could be things we’ve read in the newspaper in recent years; they are all uncomfortably familiar. Speaking of the sadistic cop who enjoys watching pain, he would fall into the category of the Bad Good Guys, along with J. Edgar Hoover, and the pig faced cop who gets his jollies beating Dillinger’s girlfriend Billie Frechette.

Then there are the other lawmen in the movie, most notably Dillinger’s pursuer Melvin Purvis, played with perfect stoic confliction by Christian Bale. Purvis is not a Bad Good Guy. He’s just a guy trying to maintain a personal code of honor while performing his job in a system (Hoover’s and America’s increasingly fascistic system) that is far from honorable. In a way, Purvis and Dillinger are two sides of the same coin. They are both men who need to work to make a living but live in a system that could give two shits whether they live or die. Purvis takes the “legitimate” route as a Federal agent, but he is increasingly haunted by the faces of the dead men who he himself has killed and who have been killed by the system he works for. According to Mann’s vision, working for the system is a murderous blood-soaked operation, not unlike the criminal world. This obviously torments Purvis as Michael Mann plays on Purvis’s obsession with (and fear of) the look of dead men. Every time a significant character dies in the film, Mann moves in for the close-up and details the slow passing of life and the sheet of death coming down on the face and the eyes. He asks us to watch this through the eyes of characters in the film. We see Purvis’s agents and the criminals he pursues die through Purvis’s eyes, and when Dillinger looks into Purvis’s eyes, he sees the toll of Purvis’s job. “Maybe it’s time to find a new line of work,” Dillinger advises Purvis, and the words hit the lawman as effectively as if Dillinger let him have it with his machine gun. It’s hard to find a job that doesn’t eat your soul when you work for the system.

Dillinger, on the other hand, has refused to be a part of the system, other than the small fraternal group of outcasts with whom he works. He’s just trying to make it the best way he can – by robbing the system (economic power and control as represented by banks) that would just assume rob him. Dillinger was a hero for the Great Depression as much as he is a hero for our times (and our own Depression). He is the man who has liberated himself from the fetters of the system by robbing the system that robs the struggling working people. When he meets Billie Frechette and she asks him what he does, he says, “Just catching up.” Indeed, rather than being another disposable cog on the wheel, Dillinger chooses to take control of his own destiny and rob the system that is fucking over the public and “catch-up” the best he can. In a short and effective snapshot moment, Mann shows Dillinger telling a regular working guy to keep his money during one of the bank robberies, and in another scene he shows a crowd of people waving to Dillinger like a hero in a parade as he is escorted to jail in a police car. Indeed, Dillinger as we see him in this movie and as he has been remembered as a mythic icon, is not a Public Enemy but a Public Hero, an icon for revenge against the system, but according to Mann’s definition of heroic, Dillinger is a hero because he lives by his code of honor. He is true to his fraternity of brothers in crime, and he does not sacrifice the safety and stability of the fraternal unit by his own impulsive needs.

In Public Enemies as in his earlier film Heat, Mann shows us that it’s not necessarily the rogue free agent who is a hero, but the free agent who works within a system of free agents who want to liberate themselves from the system of economic power and disparity by robbing it. The heroic act is the ability to honor each other and the mutual goal at hand (a jewelry heist or a bank robbery) and not let impulsive self-interest put the group in danger. It is actually the rogue agents (the Bad Bad Guys) that threaten the subversive system of the criminals who are really just working guys trying to beat the system by robbing it together as a job. Mann’s impeccable photography continually frames these men, Dillinger and his gang, within the matrixes of urban and institutionalized spaces. Apartment buildings, hotels, streets, jails, and bank vaults are composed of intersecting grids of windows, doors, and hallways, showing the characters operating within a matrix that is mimicked in the vast network of phone lines within the telephone surveillance headquarters. The grids that intersect the frames of the film are the grids that Dillinger and his gang have to navigate their way through without being caught. They can only successfully navigate their way by working together as a unit operating on a code of honor and trust. No scene in the movie illustrates this more effectively than the Indiana jail breakout scene which is delivered like a perfectly executed ballet. Working together, Dillinger and his cadre of jail mates, literally break through the grid that traps them as they work together to break through layer upon layer, door upon door, of the jail. They break through one door which leads to another and another. In their movement through the grid, they pass bodies between each other like dancers. They grab guards and guns in beautifully smooth balletic movements, until finally they break free of the multitude of locked doors and cells that have kept them imprisoned. The scene is done with economic efficiency yet moves with a fluid beauty that is mesmerizing to watch.


Indeed, the entire film with its paired down minimalism and perfectly orchestrated choreography works more like an abstract ballet than a Hollywood movie. With all the characters reduced to minimal icons not unlike ballet characters, the individual scenes flow like movements in a dance, each one orchestrated by the sublimely beautiful cacophony of machine gun fire. Never have machine guns looked and sounded so stunning. Simultaneously gorgeously excessive and formalistically avant-garde, the movie contains multiple extended scenes that consist only of gunfire – the flash of the machine guns, bullets riddling walls, bodies falling and dying, cars punctured in an ferocious fury of ammunition. In a way, the machine gun is the true star of this movie. Men on both sides are armed with them, and men on both sides die by them. This is a violent world, a world where men bear guns and use guns. The men who work for the law and the men who work outside the law are joined together by this singular weapon – the machine gun, while the banks stand in the middle and the federal agencies stand by the side and watch the men kill each other. The scene at Little Bohemia Lodge in which Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and their crews shoot it out with Purvis and his crew is an absolutely avant-garde explosion of violently beautiful machine gun fire. Every single fraction of the space of the film is riddled with gunshot. While walls disintegrate and windows and bodies explode with bullets, the men hold onto their guns and keep firing as the literal physicality of their world crumbles around them with an excess of bullets. If Jackson Pollack were to paint with machine guns, it would look like this, every inch of the canvas sprayed with gunfire.
Mann engages his economy of style with flawless discipline throughout the film. Much of the film is awash in the abstract geometry of suits and fedoras. All the men are wearing them on both sides of the law. They hang on racks. They are held up as evidence. This is the world of men. When they move out of the urban environment and enter the rural landscape, the shots are as austere and weighted with meaning as the internal grids of the city. In shoot-out scenes in the forest, the characters are reduced to iconic images of hunter and prey, showing the kind of primal violence that is part of the same system in the “civilized” city. In the scene when Purvis shoots Pretty Boy Floyd, it’s like he shoots a stag, the wild beauty of nature represented by Floyd’s bright blue suit running through the woods. In the scene when Dillinger and John flee the lodge, they leap through the forest like deer on the run.

Mann’s minimalism is also extended to dialogue. The lines that the characters deliver were chosen with utter precision. No words are wasted, and each line carries the weight of a hundred words in delivering Mann’s point. For example, the dialogue is carefully chosen to depict the financial economic framework in which Dillinger operates, a framework in which the consolidation of power and economic forces reigns. In one US senate scene, J. Edgar Hoover is called into question for “spending more tax payers’ money on his bureau than the robbers are actually stealing.” In another scene, Dillinger explains how he was sentenced to ten years for stealing 50 dollars, and that’ show he met his brothers in crime. In another scene, one of the members of the Syndicate stands in a call center where they are taking bets on horse races, and he explains that everyday they make as much money as Dillinger makes robbing a bank because they are “connected coast to coast,” showing the stretch of economic control. All these short lines and scenes are delivered like terms in a larger equation, the sum total of which is that government and the criminal syndicate are one and the same and are in collusion for one thing – the consolidation of economic power. Ultimately, Dillinger is a danger to that economic power, so the government and the Syndicate work together to bring him down.

The final scenes in the film are some of the most complex and beautifully done. The last part of the film is layered and loaded with self-reflexivity. It doesn’t just detail the eventual shooting and killing of Dillinger, but it also explores Dillinger’s status of mythic icon. Using cinema itself and representations of Dillinger and gangsters in film and media, Mann shows Dillinger reflecting on his own status as a mythic icon while also asking us to reflect on our relationship to him and how he functions in Mann’s movie itself. In one scene, Dillinger sits in a movie theater while J. Edgar Hoover talks on the screen about his mission to capture “Public Enemy Number One.” The lights in the theater come on, and the audience is asked to look around for Dillinger. As the audience looks side to side, Dillinger looks out of the screen at us, the audience sitting in the theater in 2009 watching this Dillinger movie. In other words, we are asked to question on our own implication in government witch hunts propagated by media but also at our own romanticization of the Dillinger myth because no one in the audience wants Dillinger to be caught. He is the hero. In another witty and clever scene, Dillinger actually enters the Dillinger Squad Room at the police station and studies all the documents on the walls, the photos of him and his gang and looks at himself from the outside, a brilliant moment of exploring his identity as an object removed from himself but also inextricably wedded to himself.

The final Dillinger scene in real life as well as in this movie takes place in the movie theater. This scene brilliantly recognizes Mann’s role in orchestrating the story of Dillinger through his cinematic vision while also using the cinematic apparatus, a film within a film, to show once again that heroism is defined by codes of honor not by what side of the law you reside on. Dillinger is watching Manhattan Melodrama, and Clark Gable is a gangster who has been issued the death sentence. William Powell tries to save his life, but Clark Gable says that would be hell, that he would much rather “die on the inside like he lived on the outside.” That sets the table for Dillinger’s death. It was only in my second viewing that I realized that when lawman Charles Winstead cleanly shoots Dillinger in the back of the head that he is performing an Act Of Honor from one brother to another. By executing him cleanly, Winstead allows Dillinger go out the way Clark Gable wants to go out in Manhattan Melodrama. Mann has a hero kill a hero, and the Good Good Guy kills the Good Bad Guy in the final heroic act. Dillinger is not shot down by the sadistic pig faced cop. He is not captured by the Feds and hauled back into the system. He dies by the Code of Honor on the street in front of the movie theater. He dies in his full mythic status in front of the movie theater on the screen as we watch him from our seats in our own neighborhood movie theaters. Now I undertand why there have been so many books (including a book-length poem) written about “the man who shot Dillinger.” He is the quiet hero in Dillinger’s death, at least that is how Mann portrays him in the film as we watch the final scene in the movie when Winstead delivers Dillinger’s dying message to his girl Billie Frechette: “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

As the final credits role, there is no doubt in our mind that Dillinger was not a Bad Guy. He is not the Public Enemy in this movie picture or the the picture we are living in today. But what makes this movie so successful is that Mann doesn’t exploit Dillinger as good either. Mann doesn’t give us easy access to Dillinger’s character, his humanity, or his depth. What he gives us is a portrait of an icon, and Mann maintains Dillinger’s status as icon by delivering him with precision and economy as a work of art. The closest we come to understanding Dillinger as a human is when we see him in relation to his own iconic status (e.g. in the squad room and the movie theater). Mann distills the Dillinger legend and the characters and stories that surrounded it into a cleanly executed document that resists emotional investment or standard biopic character exploits. To me, it is precisely this economy and lack of depth that makes it so watchable. Like a poem or a ballet, every word and every movement stands on its own for a thing of beauty and meaning. It needs to be appreciated in each singular act and frame and how they connect and interconnect without relying on easy access. I saw the movie twice in less than twenty-four hours and wasn’t bored in the slightest. In fact, I was even more enthralled during the second viewing because I could savor each piece of the film as if I were dissecting an intricate machine. If the movie was cluttered with excessive emotion, character and story, I could not appreciate how so much is delivered through the balletic poetry of image, line, and form.

Nevertheless, as abstract and experimental as the movie is, it is still a movie of our times, a time when it seems like we need to be reminded of that legendary hero who beat the system by robbing the banks that represent it and that rob us. A time when we need to be reminded that the government, the bureaus it creates, and the economic forces that support their power are their own kind of criminals. They are the Public Enemies. But it is also a time when things should not come easy, when we should be asked to think rather than blindly consume. Though I must admit, it is also a time when shooting machine guns sure looks good.

1. I'm going to save about 90 bucks which is no small amount of bucks to ignore.
2. The most important thing: I CAN SUPPORT GOOD LABOR PRACTICES since Costco is one of of the best, if not the best, retail employer in the United States. So I can feel good about where my $139 is going. It's going to a business that pays its employees well and provides them with some of the best benefits availble to the American workforce.

So no vacuuming for me today.

End KDD Birthday Vacuum Saga. I'm sure I'll report from the frontlines of Crud Sucking on Monday.

Today, my last day of my 46th year on the planet, I took it easy. Well, insofar as taking it easy works for me. I got up early and got my kidlet ready for theater camp and for her big performance as Dorothy in Wizard of Oz. I dealt with all the last minute crises like finding a needle and orange thread and a pair of white socks. I went to the gym and busted my ass running on the treadmill, doing the Stairs of Terror, pedaling on the exercycle, and doing a buttload of free weights while standing on a yoga ball. I then rushed home and scrubbed my kitchen for two hours before giving up housecleaning to go see Public Enemies for the second time in less than 24 hours. Didn’t regret my decision because it was just as good if not better and most definitely is and will be the absolute best Hollywood film of the year. Period.

I came home, made myself some lunch, then met my dad to go see our Superstar play Dorothy. My dad was so happy to see his granddaughter (and even happier still that a certain other party did not join us). Bean was amazing. All the kids were amazing. Nothing can put smiles on your face like watching a group of kids sing, dance and act with all their heart. We were surprised when our good friend E drove down from Phoenix speeding at 90 mph all the way to make it to Bean’s performance. That’s the kind of thing that a Good Friend does, and it’s nice to have a good friend right now.

We came home and I cooked a fantastically delicious meal. We then had to “bite the bullet” and go see my parental units because my dad got me a surprise birthday cake, and since I spend my birthday in the quiet peace of my own home, we did that tonight. It went pretty well, all things considered. I won’t go into the details of the “all things” right now. My dad gave me fifty bucks. I’ll use it to buy new running shoes. I always do. Can’t wait to run with shock absorption again.

Came home and I worked on a “July Collage” while E and Bean watched Wizard of Oz. Now the sky just busted open with big ass thunder that is shaking the house at its roots. Nice way to ring in the last few minutes of this day.

Bean has just informed me that she is exhausted, and as a matter of fact I am too. Time for bed.

End last blog entry of my 46th year. I’m posting it for the record.

Good night.

In which I attempt to say something about James Toback’s Tyson documentary.

I saw James Toback’s documentary Tyson yesterday, and the first thing I noted is that Mike Tyson is one of the producers of the film. When I saw his name listed as a producer, I questioned the intent of the film. There are plenty of documentaries about celebrities which don’t have the actual celebrity as a producer, but when the celebrity is involved, then the documentary becomes something else much more subjective. Certainly all documentaries have subjective intent since the genre’s main goal is to document some kind of "real" event, person, corporation, etc from a particular perspective. When the person being documented is part of the process, then the documentary becomes much more autobiographically informed, and the image being presented is being manipulated and controlled by the image being represented.

Though James Toback made the Tyson documentary, I would say that the film is Tyson’s attempt at autobiography. It's primarily Mike Tyson telling his story from the Mike Tyson perspective and that makes for pretty compelling viewing. However, the most interesting thing about the film is that there is no sense that Mike Tyson is manipulating his image.  It seems to be more of a project about him trying to understand himself from his personal and, at times, uncomfortably honest  perspective than it is about projecting a certain image onto the audience. The trailer opens with Mike Tyson saying: “The first question you ask is who am I?” And that seems to be the question he himself is struggling with throughout the film.

What's most interesting and compelling about this movie is watching 88 minutes of this public figure struggling with his identity while he does not seem fully conscious that he is struggling with his identity. Certainly Tyson is as intense as you would expect him to be, but he is also really conflicted though not necessarily consciously conflicted. He tells his story in a linear fashion, starting with his rough childhood where he was picked on and beat up then turned into a thieving hoodlum. Then he talks about taking up boxing while he was away at a boy's detention center, and then he relays all the various ups and downs of his boxing career. Tyson states the facts of his life and jumps in and out of emotional intensity, fluctuating between turbulent rage, cool reflexivity, and boiling emotion, without too much self-analysis other than trying to think about how and why he fucked up when he fucked up or how and why he was fucked over when he was fucked over. In between his tales, Tyson pulses with self-reflexivity, intense emotion, enormous anger, and uncensored lust. He recounts the incidents of his life and his emotional responses with intimate honesty that leaves us reeling in the tornado of how this man relates to the world. It makes sense that Toback chose to deliver many of the scenes with multiple split screens and multiple tracks of Tyson’s voice because Tyson swings back and forth so quickly between emotions and perspectives.

It was interesting to see the movie the week that Michael Jackson died because Tyson is another case of a black kid who was created to be a superstar (world champion boxer) except Tyson was created by a white/Italian American (Cus D’Amato). Like with Jackson, you get a sense watching Tyson that he's still a kid, that by being propelled into boxing so young he never made the transition from child to adult and he has lived his life like an impulsive child. For Tyson, however, much of his impulsive behavior was in relation to women and sex. Through the tale of his boxing career he weaves his stories of women.

One of the most interesting and disturbing components of the film is watching how Tyson struggles with his feelings toward women. He states that he reveres and admires women, that he sees them as goddesses, but he also keeps coming around to the fact that he likes to dominate and control them. In one moment, he talks of women as divine angels, and in the next he talks about them as filthy swine. At one moment he says how much he loves them and admires them and is awed by them, and in another he says how all he wants to do is dominate them sexually. In fact, Tyson sees dominating women as his way of showing his love. He states this. In one scene he talks about how much he loves powerful women, like the type who could be "CEOs,” but then he states that he loves powerful women because he loves dominating them and breaking them. Whenever he talks about sex and women, you can see something inside him click, like how women do have this incredible hold over him, like a drug.

In one insightful moment, Tyson talks about performing "fellatio" on a woman in a bathroom. It’s revealing that he chooses the term fellatio in trying to elevate the act into something reverent and greater than, say, cheap bathroom sex. Of course fellatio is the term for giving a man oral sex, not a woman. Later in the film, Tyson recounts his time in prison as being truly horrific. He talks of men being brutalized and raped and reflects on his experience with obvious horror and pain. But then later in footage from a press interview, Tyson verbally attacks a white man by basically threatening to rape him. He’s obviously sexually confused. In another scene, he talks about how he forfeited his commitment to abstain before fights and fucked a woman who "must have been a prostitute or some kind of low life because she gave me gonorrhea ." In one of the more humorous moment he talks about how "it was burning like a motherfucker" during the fight (meaning his dick). This is not to say that Tyson saw any humor in this situation. He tells his entire story with honest sincerity. This is also true in his discussion of the rape charge that sent him to prison. He unleashes a torrent of hate and anger towards the woman who accused him. He calls her "vile swine of a woman" and says, "I may have dominated a lot of women in my life, but she was not one of them." When he tells his story, you can’t help but believe him because everything he says seems to come straight from his gut without self-censorship. He certainly reveals no shortage of details that make him complicit in aggression towards women. So in this moment, like in so many others in the film, we find ourselves in the middle of intensely conflicting emotions: 1) being confronted with this turbulent male aggression and 2) witnessing the pain of feeling like a trapped animal (being falsely accused and imprisoned). Tyson is both innocent and guilty, guilty and innocent.

There are also some interesting moments in how Tyson relates to boxing and money and work. Sure, in Tyson we have the classic story of the tough inner-city black boy who rose quickly to fame and (mis)fortune, the story of the guy who came from nothing and suddenly found himself rolling in millions, but you can see Tyson struggling between his identities – this man who has traveled the globe, shook hands with world leaders, and made millions and millions of dollars, and the man who came from the streets and still thinks he has to punch it out in the ring to stay economically solid. There is a mind-boggling scene when Tyson talks about being ripped off by Don King. In one moment he talks about beating King to a pulp in front of a Beverly Hills hotel, and in another he gets angry that he was only awarded “a small amount of money like $20 or 30 million” in his lawsuit against King. So here’s this tough guy from the streets who had nothing but who also thinks that $20 is a small amount of money! During his last fight, Tyson enters the ring knowing he’s not prepared physically or mentally to fight. He gets the living shit beat out of him, and he tell us, "I did it for the paycheck." So in the end, the boxing comes back to being the brutal literalization of labor and exploitation. The pay just happens to be a hell of a lot higher than it is in the coal mine.

Tyson tells us his story. He cries, rages, and reflects, and we can’t help but be mesmerized by his presence mostly because it is so bare, exposing and honest. It doesn’t seem that he has ever mastered any other way of being. His rage is honest. His tears are honest. His reflection is honest. It seems that the part of himself that so ferociously goes in for the kill in the boxing ring is as brutally honest as the person who is telling us how he shows women he loves them by dominating them. No matter what Tyson is telling us, it all seems very sincere and truthful even if it is laced with incredible rage and turbulence. Mostly, I think the best part of Tyson is witnessing this man dig deep inside himself to try to understand his identity and his life in the public format of film. Certainly it has a voyeuristic appeal watching him emit such ferocity while also exposing such vulnerability. Tyson is an iconic figure who ends up being neither tragic nor heroic, but just painfully and conflictingly human.

Started my morning with an hour run on the Rillito because it was only 85 degrees out and overcast. Lovely run. Gray skies, air thick with the smell of last night’s lightning. Lots of great tunes popping up on shuffle mode (all accompanied by the thrumming cicada rhythm section so loud it cuts through the headphones and inserts itself into any song that’s playing). All my favorites this morning were long songs (6 – 12 minutes). I like a long song that pushes me to push the envelope running. Actually, I just like to push the envelope.

Four MP3s from this morning’s run, just because music makes life worth living:

Delerium Ft. Sarah McLachlan -- Silence (Ti¸stos In Search Of Sunrise Remix)
Sarah McLachlan like you haven’t heard her before. This remix is astounding. It’s impossible to sit still listening to this groovy pulsing remix.

Orphans & Vandals – Mysterious Skin
It’s like poetry or a mini-novel except it’s a song about queer identity.

Simian Mobile Disco – Hands Off My Gold (SMD Remix)
Nothing like some Simian Mobile Disco to get your buttocks grooving.

Foundry Field Recordings – Transistor Kids (EP)
Foundry Field Recordings are just so darn poetic and atmospheric and contemplative and totally like floating inside a cloud that’s tumbling with words.

It’s been tough times, but in between all the tough times, there has been no shortage of happy happy joy joy. Time to lift the burden of the uck and list some Joy Nuggets that have made me happy lately.

Wizard of Oz


Watched Wizard of Oz with Bean last night for the umpteenth time. She is in theater camp this week, and she’s playing Dorothy. And talk about things that make me happy? How about listening to my kidlet sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow?

I have seen this movie dozens of times in my life, from my childhood to my adult life, and I never ever get bored watching it. It always stuns me that it was made in 1939 because it is so technically advanced. Also, the screenplay is so darn witty that I never ever lose my ability to chuckle at its wit. Not to mention, that theoretically and thematically the film is as rich in complexity as the Land Of Oz. It can be read so many ways, but mostly I like to watch it as a celebration of Freaks and Otherness. Hands down my favorite character continues to be the Cowardly Lion. I know every single one of his lines by heart (and do a great impression), and I never cease to laugh out loud and smile until my face hurts watching him. Hell, just watching the end of his tail wiggle causes me to rip my sides out with laughing convulsions. I started reading Salman Rushdie’s essay on Wizard Of Oz then stupidly accidentally returned the book to the library. I’m picking it up again today. Duh.

And by the way, I could really use a pair of Ruby Slippers about now.

Adoration


I saw the very last screening of Atom Egoyan’s Adoration at The Loft last Thursday, and I am so glad I didn’t miss it. As can be expected from an Egoyan film, Adoration is sublimely beautiful filmmaking from a director like no other. Egoyan’s films contain his signature feel, look, process, and nothing else comes close. They are simultaneously intellectually and technically complex while also somehow managing to be incredibly personally intimate and human. Adoration is no exception. In fact, I was so stunned by film’s intensity of human emotions human emotions and its content about loss and recovery and how these things are delivered through such a complex matrix of characters, situations, medium, and ideas that I decided that I can’t even write about the film because I just wanted to let its power move me and leave my experience of the film inside my head. I’ll write about it when it comes out on DVD and I can see it again.

Baking


All other madness aside, I’ve been having a really quiet summer and enjoying a heck of a lot of time with my kid. One of the things we’ve been doing is trying new baking recipes – muffins, pancakes, cookies, cakes, waffles of all variety. We love destroying the kitchen and making everything from scratch. Yumm.

Whacking Balls


I love to hit a ball with a hard stick or other device. So does my kid, so we’ve been spending a lot of quality time whacking balls.  Whacking a ball and sending it into oblivion is a profoundly therapeutic activity. There are few things more satisfying than that feeling of the bat connecting with the ball. Sometimes we go over to the park and hit softballs with baseball bats.Other times we go to the gym and play Bean Ball. This is a game we invented. We use one of those huge plastic garish inflatable balls and whack it around on a racquetball court using tennis racquets. It is way fun and also we don’t have to worry about cars or the ball being popped by a cactus like we do when we play on the street by our house. I cannot begin to count the balls that have been killed by cactus. The other good thing about Bean Ball there are no rules and no points. You just play for the fun of whacking the fuck out of a ball. Yay.

Bowling


Speaking of balls, we’ve also taken to going bowling compulsively. It turns out that they have this deal at one of the local bowling alleys where kids can bowl two games for free every single day during summer! I freaking love bowling. I love the smells and sounds of the bowling alley. I love the satisfaction of heaving my ball down the lane and watching it slam into the pins and knock them down. Also, I like the comfort of the Bowling Class. It tends to be a pretty solidly working class demographic that occupies the bowling alley, and it’s very refreshing to be in an environment where everyone is leaving the stress of life behind for a while and getting their jollies heaving bowling balls. Oh, and did I mention how satisfying the sound of a strike is? Fucking A. Yes, I can knock down some bowling pins. And so can my kiddo. Dammit.

Spencer Tunick and Looking At Art With My Kid


Another thing I love doing is sharing things I’m reading about with my kiddo. Stephane recently sent me a really great video of artist Spencer Tunick in action making one of his monumental photos using vast numbers of nude bodies as his medium. The video was a blast to watch, and I knew that Bean would love the work that Tunick did by an old castle in Ireland, so I showed her that part of the video and the photographs that resulted from the project. I love how my kid grasped the awesomeness of the project. She said, “The bodies are like a landscape, like they have become part of nature.” Indeed, that is what Tunick does – use human bodies as an artistic medium to create unique landscapes. I would like to get prints of these two photos to hang in the house.
Monsoon Clouds


Monsoon has officially arrived. We haven’t gotten the torrential rain and thunder and lightning yet, but we have gotten the big old billowing gorgeous monsoon clouds. The sound of cicadas and the big blustering dirt filled winds have also arrived. Now let’s just get some freaking rain. I love monsoon. It’s the best.

Imitation of Life


I freaking love Douglas Sirk, and I think that Imitation of Life is my favorite Sirk film running close with Written on the Wind. I just watched it again the other night, in fact the night that Michael Jackson died. I hadn’t even thought of the connection, but wow watching Imitation of Life and it’s relationship to whiteness and blackness and thinking about Michael Jackson . . . pretty mind-blowing stuff. No matter how many times I see a Sirk film, I never fail to be overwhelmed by how incredibly awesome they are – how they look, what they are doing, the meaning of every single fractional thing. I think Sirk films are like poetry because every little fraction reflects on itself, the pieces before it and the pieces to follow. You can break apart any scene into components and parts and look at them in relation to each other and dig out even further meaning. This reminds me that I have something to write about poetry and film, so add that to my happy list – I just got inspired to write something.

Mike Tyson


I’m having lunch with him via the big screen at The Loft. I better hurry so I don’t miss my date.

Okay, so all is not doom and gloom. Here’s to some Joy Nuggets along with the drudgery.

My birthday is Saturday, and all I want is one thing and one thing only. A vacuum cleaner that actually works. For years, I’ve been negotiating the ten tons of dirt and cat hair that carpet our house with a piece-of-shit vacuum that blows all the crud around instead of sucking it up. I want a vacuum that sucks, dammit.

Bean is devastated. How could I want a vacuum cleaner for my birthday? A big loud household appliance for fucksakes? Well, I do. I always consider vacuuming as therapy. I just love the feeling of pushing the machine through the house and watching dirt vanish into the maw of the vacuum. It makes me feel like I’m taking control of all the psychic dirt in my life. Unfortunately the maw on the vacuum in my house hasn’t been sucking up dirt for years. So it's been a long long time since I experienced the Psychic Euphoria of Vacuum Therapy. Ever try vacuuming a four bedroom house on your knees with a Shop-Vac®? NOT FUN. Talk about rug burns.

As a consolation for wanting a vacuum for my birthday, I told Bean that I also want lots of sewing and craft supplies and that I want her to go pick things out that we can do together. And then we can use the new vacuum to clean up the mess!

Yesterday, I decided to go to Sears to investigate my Vacuum Options. Being a good working class girl, I know that Sears is where you go for household appliances. So I treated myself to an exciting and existential trip to the Sears Household Appliance department. You want a taste of reality, peoples? Go to the Sears Household Appliance Department. Swarms of desperate salesmen circle the washing machines, refrigerators and VACUUMS waiting to make a sale and reminding you that you too could live in a world where you are a Sears Household Appliance Salesman so you better watch your Ps and Qs. There is a reason that Arthur Miller created Willy Loman . . . because he is alive and well at the Series Household Appliance Department.

My salesman’s name was Chris. I explained my situation to Chris. My situation went like this.

Back in California I bought a $60 vacuum cleaner at Target, and it was a mean clean vacuuming machine. I vacuumed the hell out of shit with that vacuum. It lasted me like ten years or something, but moving into the Land of Tucson Dust and Crud killed it. Since then I’ve been using the crappiest vacuum on the planet, and I’m sick of using the crappiest vacuum on the planet. Chris explained to me that I was lucky that I got a $60 vacuum that worked so well because to get a good vacuum, I have to look in the $400 range.

Pause.

I responded to Chris with this: “WHAT? FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS?!?! I’m sorry but $400 dollar vacuum cleaners are not part of my personal ideology.”

Period.

On that note I said I wanted to see all the vacuums that cost $150 or less. It was rather overwhelming. I mean, please, why must there be so many vacuums in the world? I just want one that’s a good sucker.

I left with a vague idea of what I wanted, but now I’m leaving my decision to the Vacuum Powers That Be and hope they help me pick the Perfect Vacuum Cleaner For Me.

In the meanwhile, someone suggested that I check Craig’s List for a used vacuum.

Pause.

You know that thing about $400 vacuums not being part of my personal ideology? Well neither are USED vacuums. There are three things that I refuse to buy used: 1) underwear, 2) mattresses, and 3) vacuum cleaners. My psychically sensitive constitution cannot endure absorbing the psychic residue of other people’s butt juice, sex stains, or GENERAL HOUSEHOLD DIRT. So sorry. Call me a snob.

In the meanwhile squared, I guess I better get to work to earn the money to pay for aforementioned Birthday Vacuum. Dang, trying to suck up your dirt is a complicated venture.

Needless to say, I have found myself in more than one conversation about Michael Jackson these past few days. What I have discovered is that I really don’t know shit about Michael Jackson. I know his music because it was part of my life during certain moments, but other than that I’m really out of the loop. I’m embarrassed by the thing that I wrote, but basically I just wanted to take a minute to note that I was astonished to realize how much Michael Jackson’s music influenced my life and also to note how ridiculing Michael Jackson for his personal choices in relation to his body is just another form of censorship and legislating control over someone’s private body.

This is the thing that I want to say in this post. Despite Michael Jackson’s presence as a pop icon and object of consumer consumption, underneath all of that exterior is a human being, a human being who should be treated with the same respect as other humans. On the day he died, a woman asked me, “Did you hear Michael Jackson died? How horrible for his children!” I pulled out my usual response to celebrity death and said, “If you’re going to grieve for Michael Jackson and his children, then you need to grieve for every child who lost a parent today. What about the people dying in war, famine, poverty and disease all over the world?” The woman nodded her head and said, “Yeah, you’re right.” What I realized later is that the opposite is true as well. If I’m going to grieve for all the people who die in poverty and famine, then I need to reserve some of my heart for Michael Jackson because ultimately he is human, regardless if we like to pretend he’s some kind of freak cyborg construction.

I am not going to pretend to be some kind of expert on pop music and consumer culture, but I am an expert at one thing that is pertinent to Michael Jackson. I am an expert at living through and recovering from childhood abuse. I know about this not just from my own life, but from my professional life where I worked with teens and adults in rehab for many years after I graduated from college. One of my favorite groups to work with was ex-cons who were paroled and trying to reintegrate into the community. These were big old hardcore tattooed guys who committed serious crimes and did hard time. I never once felt uncomfortable around them. My job was a good one. I got to provide cultural access to these guys, whether it was a trip to the museum, the symphony or the circus. There is one thing that I always said about the tough guy ex-cons. Their exterior may seem hardcore, but inside they are little children who never got to be children, so doing anything that let them free their child spirit for a couple of hours had tremendous therapeutic value.

When I see Michael Jackson and his Neverland world of children and amusement park rides and zoo animals, I see a grown man who never got to be a child and who spent his life desperately trying to be the child he never was. Michael Jackson never got to be a child because his abusive and domineering father forced him into a life of show business, but also he never got to be a child because he was a consumer object from the time he was a very young boy. Michael Jackson never knew privacy. He never knew what it was like to enjoy some of the simple pleasures of childhood. Having his childhood robbed from him was what haunted him. He spent his entire adult life trying to take ownership of the body that was never his and find the child he never got to be. That seems pretty clear to me. Because he was a mega million dollar pop icon, he just happened to have exorbitant resources available to him to go through his version of this common process in his “bizarre” Michael Jackson manifestation.

I know about this process myself because it is one I am intimately familiar with on a personal level. No, I am not Michael Jackson, but I have spent my life trying to reclaim the childhood that was stolen from me. I was not a childhood pop star, but I was sexualized from the time I was very young. I grew up in an abusive home where I was forced to take on adult responsibilities from a young age and where my sexuality was exploited by the people who supposedly loved me. I spent my teen years on the streets selling my body as a prostitute and being an object of consumption. I never understood what a “healthy” childhood was. I spent my adult life trying to take control of my body by abusing it. Back when I used to get shitfaced drunk, someone told me that I did it because it was the only way I could access the parts of myself that I kept locked up all my life. Great, so I got to be a child by getting sloppy drunk and putting all my emotions on the exterior.

I certainly haven’t come remotely close to having the economic resources that Jackson had to try to resurrect the child he never got to be, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to survive because I have had to spend so much of my time just trying to keep my head above water. But I also have something very precious that has helped me reconcile my adult life with the child who got shoved in a box so many years ago. I have my daughter, and I have finally been able to reclaim my childhood by being the best mother I can be for her. Every single day I do things with my daughter, share things with her, teach her things, and nurture her, I am doing the same things for myself. Yesterday we were at the pool, and I was playing volleyball with Bean and some other girls at the pool. We were having a blast. I enjoyed myself so much. I helped the kids. I made funny faces and acted ridiculously silly. We made up the rules (the main one being that there were no rules), shared, laughed and splashed. One of the girls’ mothers said to me, “You’re so great with the kids and so patient.” I told her that’s because I’m having fun too. But really, every time I am generous and patient with children, I am generous and patient with myself. Every positive thing I do to help my child or other children helps undo the negative that was done to me. I really think that Michael Jackson was attempting this in his own seemingly bizarre ways.

I am so out of tune with mass media pop culture that I didn’t even know that Michael Jackson was accused of a second round of molestation charges a couple of years ago. I learned this while watching a CNN special on him at the gym yesterday (the only place where I consume TV). Whether Michael Jackson molested children or not, we’ll never know. I’m not here to tell you he did or he didn’t. Only his conscience knows that. But I can say that he was an easy target, and in fact all survivors of abuse are easy targets because they all tend to manifest “outside of the norm” to some degree. I remember wearing my “otherness” as a child living in an abusive home like a big huge sign on my back: “She’s the fucked up kid from the fucked up home!” To a large degree, that never goes away. It’s in recovery that we can take that otherness and turn it into a creative positive force (or at least try to), but the otherness will still be there. I have learned to embrace it and make it my strength rather than a weakness.

Someone asked me to watch the interview with Michael Jackson’s dad from CNN yesterday because he said it reminded him of my mother. I watched it. Indeed, I am familiar with that affect – the one where the parent is so caught up in his/her fictional recreation of history that there is no connective tissue left between the parent and the child. I spent all day Saturday dealing with that issue as I sorted out my mother’s pills, some of which included Demerol, Dilaudid, Ocycontin, Ocycodone, Valium, Xanax, and Darvocet. In fact, if I could allow myself to step out of my skin for a minute and look at my mother as an individual rather than the woman who bore me, I would see a lot of Michael Jackson in her. She has spent her entire adult life denying her abusive childhood and trying to be the perfect picture of White Middle Class Happiness. All that she’s accomplished is turning herself into a freak and pushing her children away. In fact, when rumor came out that Michael Jackson may have died from an overdose of Demerol, my mother actually said, “I better be careful or that could be me.”

So yeah, maybe I’m sympathetic to Michael Jackson as a human being because I have seen him in so many guises in my life – working with kids and adults in rehab, living through my own fucked up childhood, selling my body as a commodity, watching the disastrous freak show that is my mother, and trying to reclaim the part of myself that never got to be a child. Maybe we all know a Michael Jackson or two. Sure, no one else can be the Massively Wealthy Pop Icon and Consumer Object that he was, but underneath that exterior there lived a person who maybe wasn’t too far removed from ourselves and people we’ve known in our lives. That’s all I’m saying.

The mystery of the Floating Heads movie poster revealed:

I had no idea. I'll never look at movie posters the same again.