"Jackassishness"

Lo and behold, I found myself enjoying the latest iteration of what passed as entertainment for a high school and college-aged Derek: Jackass 3D.

The prevailing discourse regarding maturity would have me be ashamed of this indulgence at the age of twenty-eight. It would have me immediately point up my nose at such nonsense and pull out Faulkner in order to get my responsible intellectual vitamins. But something has been yearning in me recently to experience youthful, mindless glory, an unashamed revelry in pain for no reason juxtaposed with the juvenile exploitation of bodily functions.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but there’s something symbolically wonderful about Jackass and their stunts. Something boldly anarchic and charged with contemporary frustration. Most would brand me a postmodernist babbler who would also likely deem a piece of contorted metal on stand “art” if I dared to allow Jackass in this category …but I think there are some unrecognized merits in their stunts. Call me crazy.

Although it feels slightly hyper-masculine, in the sense that it’s really just a bunch of skateboarders reenacting the same premise as Fight Club in a more overt and less narratively cohesive sense, I also feel the stunts can be stripped of such gendered interpretations by looking at the motivations behind them. Sure, Jackass 3D does not contain the same rebellious twenty-somethings trying to eliminate boredom, but it does harken back to those initial intentions. Boredom is powerful stuff. It makes one uncomfortably aware of their goals, life intentions, or inherent motivations. And when one doesn’t have a responsible or coherent answer, we’re left with a gripping nausea.

A nausea which makes us want to ride grocery carts over ramps and into nearby pools. A sickness which makes us want to take someone’s fast food bag out of their hand in the drive-thru and spike it on the ground in front of them while wearing a football helmet. The ideological undercurrents informing these kinds of stunts—commercialism/materialism generates absurdity or ubiquitous mendacity—may not be articulated by these guys, but I have a feeling it’s there in essence.

Qualifier: On occasion.

Now…this is not Sartrean existentialism. I’m not saying it has high artistic merits or credibility But it is, on occasion (and when they aren’t over-compensating by attempting to display how manly they are through pain-endurance) symbolically powerful stuff.

Call it the logic, or illogic, of “Jackassishness.” It’s the new way of saying something “just ain’t right, so I’m gonna go hurt myself to pass the time. Cause at least then I’ll feel something.”

Musings

I haven’t blogged in a while due to grad school preoccupations. But I figured I would productively procrastinate once again and write, public journal style to broadcast my thoughts, for others and for myself, about interests and happenings.

Of course, most “happenings” happen in my mind nowadays. That’s a euphemistic way of saying I’m too busy to have a social life.

A preoccupation of mine recently has been the psychological root of ideological formations. I mean ideology in the post-Marxist sense, the wide social, conceptual patterns of thought that make up what Foucault calls a discursive formation. The drive to knowledge at the heart of various contemporary institutions and articulated in individual values, apparent everywhere from journals to the voiced preoccupations of undergrads in my own composition classroom, feeling compelled to major in something that will win them money (tacitly: happiness). Values pronounced in the green ink of dollar bills, hovering silently over transactions and affirmations of company loyalty.

The root is psychological, I think, because, if happiness is satisfaction or contentment, then the compulsion to strive for knowledge is behavioral. I guess what I’m talking about is a kind of psychology unmoored from the purely empirical domain—a philosophical psychology—which accounts for visible, manifested patterns or tendencies of a given populace, regurgitating the values of a contemporary episteme, without reliance on the purely testable, measurable. The way through which it is thought, in a certain sense, that the normative “we” can attain meaning or assuage feelings of hopelessness, despair, futility. Religiosity once fulfilled this function, but now accounts for little. Empirical questing is the new religion.

At the root of this is the compelling fear of the human animal, perhaps present in boredom. Erich Fromm and Heidegger have the same kind of emphasis here that I do, in that they understand boredom as an intolerable cessation of temporal progress and thus opens the space for aporia in contemplation—a kind of contemplative realization of one’s own striving and the teleological assumptions society articulates through it, alleviated, in some regard by distraction from these kinds of uncomfortable thought-swamps.

Perhaps this is why I have turned to ontology and am considering gender constructs. It seems to me that the heroic quest to self-fulfillment is inculcated through our physiological assumptions about gender roles. What, though? How to answer this question? What is the at the root of the strive for power which eliminates the need to contemplate boredom and open the dialogue of nihilism? And how does this reveal itself in the late 19^th/20^th C. cultural imaginary?

I’m on the verge of some kind of theoretical articulation for this project, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to sound like Ernest Becker in his Denial of Death….but, then again, maybe I do? In a gendered sense?

My Furry Prisoner (aka Animal Companion)

I have a cat named Blaze. I never thought I would own a cat—call me a sucker for the obdurate loyalty of the canine, which trumps almost any ephemeral human connection—yet here I am, and I love the little guy.

He’s a zestful fellow who, in his short year-length span on earth, has managed to see half of North America, albeit flashing by through the window of a car. An ex-girlfriend, who was driving with me from Alaska at the time, owned him. When that didn’t work out, he ended up mine. And he’s a great companion for the secluded scholarly sort, the kind of creature that adores privacy and a good nap. If dogs are perpetually extroverted, the cat is introverted, and scrupulous and practical regarding his selection of companions.  The gateway to a kitty’s heart isn’t a free-for-all. One has to earn it.

Anyway, I’m in a quandary. Blaze used to be an outdoor cat. Due to a pretty bad injury resulting in several teeth marks and a large open wound on his leg from an angry neighborhood dog, I decided to wean him off the great outdoors and keep him inside from here on out. Indoor cats live longer and are less expensive to keep around than an adventurous Zorro-cat seeking nightly duels with other local felines.  Budgets matter when you make 12k a year as a graduate teaching assistant.

However, I’ve since noticed a tad bit of melancholy creeping in. While before he was a blur of furry excitement, he’s become a tad mellower, collapsing lazily on the carpet, watching to see when I’ll go to the kitchen and thus be near enough to his food to beg in the form of inquisitive meows. I’ve bought him several electronic and non-elextronic toys that spin and bounce and squeek and even mimic the movements of actual prey, but he gets bored of them quicker than it took for me to spend my hard-earned money on them. I’ve found him clawing at the posters on my wall, possibly thinking they are avenues for escape.

I catch him gazing longingly to the outdoor awesomefest he once had a daily dose of. A squirrel occasionally comes onto my porch in search of bird seed, and Blaze makes his typical predatory sounds and lion-like movements, but quickly gets discouraged when he realizes his efforts will always be deterred by a thick pane of glass.

It would be different if he had never experienced the outside world. One doesn’t miss what one doesn’t know. But he has, and I cannot avoid the icky feeling that I get when he pines for his outdoor prey-fest…the feeling like I’m a prison guard, keeping my furry inmate from living the life he was meant to.

On the other hand, I also get more icky feelings at the thought of letting him out to kill helpless birds and rodents and whatnot. This is what a cat’s meant to do, yes, but I feel like somehow harnessing the beast within is the most humane approach. Let’s face it: they’re adorable little Ted Bundys, people. I saw a documentary once where some documentarians filmed neighborhood cats National Geographic style. Despite the fact that most of them had full stomachs, they still proceeded to rip the heads off of a few dozen baby chicks the crew had placed in certain locations.

I don’t know what to do. I want him to be happy, and I guess he’d be happier if he weren’t dead and had a nice meal and a warm bed, right?  

Hyperreality

Recently I witnessed an apartment complex burn down across the street from my own. The first thing I remember thinking was that it looked like the set from a movie. If you’re so cocooned in cinematic tragedy, to the point where you forget what real blood or real auto accidents or real flames look, feel and smell like, the real thing is likely to shock you—not for the sheer sensory immediacy of the experience, but the fact that this “real” event cannot potentially be divorced from the visual panopoly of “fictional” experience streaming out of our glass screens every second.  

Hello, Baudrillard.

I don’t have to tell most people reading this blog that the news is probably just as much entertainment as reality. News itself is gathered and read off Teleprompters by handsome or pretty talking heads, and clips of the event are possibly intercut with them, albeit sanitized for general audiences.

The “news” itself is fiction—you need to look elsewhere to find the actual images of the brutal consequences. If you hear about an accidental stealth bombing of a noncombatant’s building in Afghanistan and hear the reporter rattle off numbers—4 children, 5 adults killed—you’re left to imagine the scenario (perhaps a dim flash of nine whole bodies lying in circular fashion in the midst of a crumbled building, charred and battered but still somewhat photogeneic) deem the military’s actions as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of war, and move happily on with your day. But if you go to an a obscure site that publishes all the stuff CNN won’t display on its screens and see the mutilated body parts and the horrible screaming of the gathered relatives, maybe you’re not so ready to let Uncle Sam off the hook.

Perhaps this explains the dumbfounded look of some of the gathered pedestrians who watched with me as the building burned down. Some tweeted on their smartphones, some took pictures, others just stared and gaped. A few uncomfortably chuckled and, believe it or not, asked others “if there were any dead bodies.” Gawkers clogged the streets with their fat-ass SUVs, impeding the ability of the ambulances and firefighters to maneuver around them. I jokingly told a few friends afterward that this kind of behavior makes me actually wish the world would end in 2012. Hope you were right, Mayans…or, rather, contemporary non-Mayans interpreting a cyclical event as an ending date rather than a temporal rebirth.

Anyhoo, there were a few of my ilk amongst the crowd, trying to convey their sense of shock to people on the other ends of cell phones. I imagined the people receiving the information on the other end in the same fashion they hear the news delivered every night: “Wow. You’re seeing a building burn down right now, huh?....(pregnant pause) What else is new?” And the almost palpable nervousness in the voice straining with exigency would be lost due to the fact that their friend is lost in a sea of dim images, "Backdraft" –esque Hollywood sets alight with controlled, pre-programmed bursts.

My point, if there is one, is that it is occasionally refreshing to realize that one is mortal, after all. Hyperreality often masks the disturbing, raw “real” so that it becomes a dim figment of our imagination, something beyond the pale. Every once in a while, you have to be reminded how fragile and exposed we really are. This is uncomfortable, yes, but it gives you the ability to appreciate every living second.

The Sensitive-Person Brain Disease

Recent events have caused me to think a lot about the nature of depression lately and the people I’ve encountered who have had their lives altered in some way by it.

Every once in a while, I too go through what I call a “Cobain phase” where I withdraw from social contact and simply reflect in a very unorganized and nihilistic fashion, alternating currents of anger and apathy, usually manifested in the kind of music I have playing at the moment. I’ve been on antidepressants since I was a teenager and I’ve since convinced myself that I need them in order to function. Name a brand; I’ve been on them all.

Yeah I know, boo hoo. Woe is me.

When I started this blog, I promised myself it wouldn’t be a self-indulgent public journal in which I gripe and moan on and on about past pains or whatever or whathaveyou. It’s not like I’ve had it particularly bad in my life—I’ve actually had it relatively good. Depression isn’t necessarily about feeling “sorry” for oneself, as many who have never experienced it tend to think. It’s evoked subtly over prolonged periods of slowly accumulating anxiety about the state of the world, leading to the possibly quite “sane” view that humanity is…well…screwed up. Like our overevolved frontal lobes are a thin biological barrier barely harnessing some simian brutishness. Like if an apocalypse were to occur, and food, sex, warmth and whatever else fuels the man-beast were scarce, an inner Dahmer might be unleashed on our loved ones for that last bit of squirrel meat. And I absolutely hate it and hate humanity for a while and hate myself for being a part of it.

Then, I get over it. The soundtrack of my mind turns from grungy screams to anthemy hope fests. The world is hunky dory again and I hear birds chirping and, though my mind may choose to gravitate in that direction, I choose not to hear the predatory, dinosaurish screech of their ancestors in their sounds. I filter out the negative, concentrate on the positive. I feel somehow dishonest in doing so, but I have to do what I have to do in order to function.

It’s like my brain is a thought battery, programmed to go through this purge every once in a while in order to recharge in a ritualistic fashion.

It seems like I’ve known quite a bit of people in my relatively short life that have committed suicide. One was a college friend. I wasn’t in the same state, or even in the same time zone, when it happened and hadn’t talked to him in months before it occurred; yet I do feel partially responsible—like I could’ve done something. Anything. Like I could have reminded him to appreciate simplicity, to drag him to the mountains and smell the foliage on the breeze or pet an animal or simply listen to what he had to say about his pain, which I love to do for others.

Recently I’ve been in one of those rare states where you suddenly have an epiphany and realize, in full raging, empathetic glory, that someone close to you may have experienced what you’re feeling and that you should learn from how they handled it. I’m no stranger to loneliness—one might even call it the academic’s affliction. Loneliness is simultaneously the burden an academic has to bear in order to thrive in this career, as well as one of its greatest joys. It’s bittersweet. Being alone with a book can be one of the greatest joys one can experience. The problem comes when you let ideas replace actual flesh-and-blood people to the point where they become your best friends.

I think this was my friend’s problem. And I’ve learned that the best way to cope is to seek out others and connect, and now I don’t have as much of these “Cobain phases” anymore. I realize that everyone on this earth has had periods of despondency and that the best way to overcome your own inner pains is to reach out. Cut out the bullshit small talk and really connect. Live bravely with your emotions. Stop waiting on the hinge of another person’s words in order to outdo their narrative and make yourself look “better.” Stop the conversational competition and just fucking listen.  And understand. And empathize.

The key, I guess is, to realize that the meaning of life is to help each other get through…well… life. And it’s awesome. Staggeringly awesome that we get to borrow elements of nature and experience consciousness and thoughts and feelings instead of being dead matter. And I don’t take it for granted. I think that’s what gets me through those rough spots.  

Lutes Avec le Francais

 "Uhhuhhuh! Mon écharpe ressemble à un morceau d'une table à manger! 

C'est magnifique!"

As is my usual fashion, my procrastination tendencies have brought me here. But I think I started this blog as a way to “productively procrastinate” because if I’m writing about my struggles, at least I’m thinking about a way to overcome them, right? Right?

Right. Glad you agree.

So, for my doctoral program I have to learn how to read two languages, ostensibly so I can translate valuable alien words I run into during my research into the mother tongue. This summer I’ve been (re)learning French. The “re” is in parentheses because I don’t know if my two semesters of French in high school really count, as most of the time we were learning cool ways to insult people. “Tu as un vache grasse” (you are a fat cow), for instance, still sticks clearly in my mind.

Anyway, if I hadn’t been so immature, maybe I would have learned the language by now and wouldn’t have to worry about such matters now. Of course, my juvenile mind would have never predicted that I would become a scholar of anything, except maybe heavy metal and comic books. This, of course, would have occurred naturally.

Alas, I did mature (I think). And now I’m faced with dividing the world in twain in verbal fashion, because of the damned confusing fact that French is a gendered language, and every person, place and thing in the world all of a sudden had fictional genitalia of some sort. This daunting task is also exacerbated by the fact that I have an overactive and possibly hypersexual imagination, and I keep having visions of a French grape (de raisin--male) doing the nasty to a banana (la banane—female). Which, on a symbolic level, doesn’t even make any damned sense. You have the most obvious phallic symbol mother nature ever devised, compounded by the fact that most men still associate a woman eating a banana with…you know, as the female and the grape—squishy, round, filled with, uh, juice--as the male? Lacan is rolling around in his grave. Just so ya know.

Anyway, my translating endeavors are going better than expected, but still slowly and painfully. I remember, enviously, that at one point in high school I had an entire Shakespeare play memorized, yet now I can’t remember 20 new French words in a day. Maybe if they made their language more intuitive, like having obvious genitalia-like fruit become masculine, I wouldn’t have such a hard time.

I guess I shouldn’t complain though—learning to read a language in a couple months is still pretty darned good (If I can do it, and I think I can). And I’m sure others are struggling much more with it than I am.

Valhalla Rising

I very rarely have a cinematic experience worth raving about to everyone, but I have seen one that everyone who appreciates gritty realism with dabs of the mystical should experience. It’s a Danish film called “Valhalla Rising” and it’s probably the most curious case of mismarketing I’ve come across.

The trailer, given below, would probably have you believe that it’s a blockbuster action film, filled with blood n’ guts n’ glory. Now it is that…but these furious snippets come in so short (albeit intense) bursts that it really can only be appreciated by those with greater attention spans and possibly under the (ahem) “influence” of certain herbs. Hey, it’s not called an acid film for nothing.

Since this is an art house film that was billed as an action blockbuster, it suffered some pretty unfair criticisms as a result. An audience expecting a Viking “300” but instead getting a brooding, unflinchingly realistic piece of stunning visual poetry (think David Fincher meets Stanley Kubrick meets Terrence Malick and you’ll get the idea) might be pretty disappointed.

It takes place primarily in an unnamed area of Denmark in 1000 A.D. The movie is slow in terms of action and plot, but fast in intellect and in craftsmanship. It meditates on foggy mountaintops bereft of signs of humanity and painstakingly detailed shots crammed with symbolism. The realism comes from everything to its authentic scenery to its grunting, sparse dialogue. Whereas most films would light every single perfect-looking expensive actor on its payroll, this works with natural lighting and with grimy, mud-caked actors in a way folks would’ve looked before hygiene and dental care.  Of course, insects buzz around the camera to give it a nice touch, and it gave me an impression of the level of care that went into making it. As one reviewer said, most medieval era films merely approximate the feeling of “being there,” but this film rips “you out of time and drops you there.”

Anyway, just go watch.