Characters from New Orleans

Heather and I took our honeymoon in New Orleans. We met some people.

Keel: Named for the central beam of a ship's construction, Keel was as centered as his name suggests. He was our tattoo artist, and demonstrated extraordinary levels of calm as we texted back and forth over a few days of our trip, sending artwork and suggestions back and forth, and as I fainted (keeled over, even) in the midst of the process. "He's cool," is what he said to Heather, "He'll be back in a minute or two." Then, when his co-worker turned Keel's music back on (doom/sludge/stoner rock, as he described it) he said, "Yo, this man passed out because there was no music. Thankfully, I was sticking him with a needle, so he came around."

The drag queen at The Country Club in Bywater: This story makes more sense if you realize that The Country Club is not a country club set on acres of green golf course, but an old New Orleans mansion in the Bywater neighborhood with a restaurant/bar inside and a pool out back, free to club members, available to others for a small fee. Heather and I swam there, had lunch there, and, ultimately, were accosted by this flamboyant woman, who said "Are you Amish?" This allowed me to discuss Anabaptist history, a discourse with which I am very comfortable. "You're so exotic," she said, "Can I see your chest?" "I'll have to ask my wife," I said.

The bartender at The Country Club in Bywater: He looked on with bemused exasperation during this whole episode, and I realized that the drag queen must be a regular there, like many of my regulars at the bookstore. I wanted to talk to the bartender, but was too busy asking Heather if I could show my chest to a drag queen. "I'm from another world," she said as Heather and I headed back to the pool, "really. I am."

The mystery couple: We actually learned their names at breakfast on day one, but quickly forgot. They had the vibe of those wanting to be forgotten; not the reserved, painfully shy kind of forgotten; they made conversation, and seemed interesting, but seemed to be hiding something behind their small talk. "They're having an affair, " said Heather. "Maybe they're here hunting for treasure in the B&B and they don't want anyone to know," I suggested.

The mystery couple's strange acquaintance: A young guy, younger than Heather and myself, joined the late-middle-aged mystery couple one night at Maison. We were further back in the shadows, eating po'boys and watching a young funk band when we saw them enter. We didn't want to see them, and they didn't want to see us, and before the show was over, the strange acquaintance had left them to their own devices.

P.S. See a selection of photos from our trip here. None of the folks above are pictured.

Earthquake

I roasted my first batch of coffee today. I used a popcorn popper and some green coffee beans given to me for my recent wedding. Pleased with the practice and with the smell, though concerned that coffee may be taking over my life, I brewed a cup at work. Too tangy, not enough body, I thought, so I tried it iced. Delicious. Then we had an earthquake.

It had a disappointingly small impact on my life. I do not wish for collapsing buildings and widespread disaster, but I was at least hoping to be enlightened about the transitory nature of the earth we live on; the instability of all that we find most firm; etc. All of those things that the California folks (Ben Seretan, I'm thinking of conversations with you) tell me happen to their awareness of the world, living in a place where it so often shifts itself.

Instead, some tourists visiting the bookstore hollered down from the second floor "Hey, does the floor usually move up here?" Dumbfounded at the idiocy of this question, I could not respond. The news, trickling in via customers' smartphones and friends' arrivals, changed my assessment of the tourists' intelligence.

The espresso machine pulled a few shots too short, then. The liquid dripping from the machine shifted from a dark orange brown to a blond stream within 20 seconds, and the espresso tasted sour. Having just set the grinder to pull good shots at the beginning of my shift, I was perplexed. Then I realized that there had just been an earthquake. Thus, the only effect that the earthquake had on me only reconfirmed my fears that coffee is taking over my life: Because of the East Coast earthquake of 2011, I had to recalibrate the espresso machine.

Brief Updates

I) I'm married. Hopefully this is not news to most of you.

II) On our honeymoon, Heather and I both got tattoos. Hopefully this is news to most of you.  Mine: A Kestrel on my arm. Heather's: An Acacia tree on her back.

III) Harrisburg got a mention in the Huffington Post. The market profiled is directly across the street from the bookstore where I work, and is a favorite lunch stop.

IV) Lastly, a brief meditation on notes.
          We use a lot of post-it notes at the bookstore, communicating things like "Out of Izze sodas. Add to shopping list." or "These books are for a customer who is still browsing." Sometimes, though, the notes themselves are meaningless when removed from their context. This has lead my co-workers and I to create a category of "notes that are funny when stuck on ANYTHING." Perhaps this is only funny in context, or when needing to relieve a bit of tedium behind the counter, but imagine any of the following, on a post-it note, stuck on, well, anything:

           Science
           What is this?
           Please do not touch the artwork

Tree of Life

A harder movie to make a statement about, there hasn't been in a long time.

There are many ways to view "Tree of Life" (Malick, 2011): via trauma theory, via feminist theory, or, as I would like to view it here, as an entry in the current cultural dialogue of (post) postmodernity.

Though it has many hallmarks of postmodernity, including but not limited to, temporal disjunction, referentiality (the father displaying  a Brahms LP), and a narrator of questionable reliability, I posit this movie as a statement not of the irony so integral to postmodernity, but as a statement of sincerity; to use a stronger word: a statement of purity.

I have made a similar argument about another, very different movie: "Scott Pilgrim Versus The World." The sincerity of "Scott Pilgrim" is very different from the sincerity of this movie, but I wanted to acknowledge that the above statement about "Tree of Life" follows roughly the same lines as my argument about "Scott Pilgrim."

The sincerity of "Tree of Life" is so overwhelming as to be almost off-putting. For example: at times, the narrator says explicitly what the movie is about. In just about any other movie (Gran Torino, for instance) I find this to be an abuse of film dialogue; film is about showing not telling, and it is the showing that gets Malick off the hook. As the narrator says things like "there is a way of grace and a way of nature," the images are of things that could be both or either: the mother twirling underneath a tree, holding a child. The cryptic sequences of cosmological imagery, of fish, of dinosaurs (no kidding!) all serve a function with regard to the words of the narrator that is (ironically) ironic.

Not ironic in the sense in which I have been using it up to this point; ironic in the formal sense of contrast between image and word; this kind of irony is the kind you learn about in ninth grade English; the formal device that makes sitcoms funny; etc. It is only appropriate that Malick deploys this visual/aural irony in service of what, from my seat, looks to be a very sincere statement about some of my favorite things: the wonder of the world (the "glory," as his characters call it), the meaningfulness of small things and small lives, the power of love between people.

Unless I am grossly misreading this film, Malick seems to be sincerely endorsing these things as (borderline spiritual) values, and his film does a great job of carrying this message across. As I walked out of the theater, the sky over the semi-industrialized lot near the Midtown Cinema had never seemed more meaningful, more beautiful, more indicative of the imperfect miracle of humanity.

It is encouraging to feel these things upon leaving a movie, and it is encouraging to see someone so well-situated in culture (popular, artistically accomplished, critically acclaimed) endorsing something -- anything -- with such bald-faced sincerity. Props, Malick.

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I realize, reading over the above, that it gives you a lot to think about if you've seen the movie, but doesn't really assess whether you should or should not see it (though I'm sure you know which one I would tell you to do). Nonetheless, if you're still not sure about laying out $11 or whatever a movie ticket costs these days (mine was $6, a perk of having a local art house with matinee screenings), let me point you to a review by a film critic whose opinions I usually agree with (and in this case, do, almost point for point).