Snowballs

Do you ever have those experiences in which you have an idea you attempt to fill out in your head, but then a series of experiences causes the idea to grow into, not one, fleshed out idea, but several related ideas?

In high school, MCS and I would preface many of our latest thoughts and discoveries with a quick rundown of the train of thought that led to the epiphany. Here's mine: first I was fleshing out a post centered around these articles and my personal experiences and reactions to them as a black female, but then I started relating those thoughts to the book I'm currently reading, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. After that, I was talking to KAC about the book as well as what another meaning sellout could be nowadays, especially since sometimes the most visible black people are those making a "bad name" for us and perpetuating terrible stereotypes that even our friends are guilty of believing we are only an exception to, as opposed to members of a heterogeneous race with many different types of people (see: "Kids 'Make it Rain' on Mom"). And then it all came back home with a stressful situation at work that I won't go into. All of this in a matter of about 2 weeks.

I don't even know where to go from here, especially since the work situation continues to stress me out and make me want to cry (as I did yesterday, alone in my office).

I can only conclude this: Race is a very complicated issue that has not yet gone away. I wonder, though, how much will things have changed by the time our generation are the ones running the world? How much of current attitudes (in multiracial communities) reflect the tension between the older generations -- so close to the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath -- and the younger? I am pretty confident that while our generation is not by any means completely "post-racial," the playing field has and will continue to change along those lines. (That is not to say, however, that something bigger, like huge class-related problems, is on the horizon.) The question is, what effect have all of those multiracial TGIF shows and textbooks had on the growing adults of America? How much will be changed once we rule the world?

Say Shhh...

SM and I went back to Minneapolis for my brother's high school graduation last Saturday through Tuesday. After this weekend being so long what with work all day Saturday and everything, it seems like it was already so long ago, but I figure it's not too late to officially attempt to set down in writing a few reasons why I think Minneapolis is the greatest and a few other thoughts I have about the town.

I love the scale of Minneapolis. It's a lot smaller than Chicago, but it's still packed with a lot to do. Sometimes, I feel like a giant among the buildings downtown, but it's a lot more manageable, and its features feel functional and efficient, nothing more or nothing less than is needed. The layout is clean and clear. Also, skyways are amazing.

Public transit has gotten a lot better, and the plans for the newest leg of the Light Rail are in the works. One of the things I truly appreciate is something that evolves organically, and I think that MetroTransit under R.T. Rybak's guidance has done just that for the public transportation of Minneapolis. Instead of sprawling until it's too late to put together a working system, the city has taken the time to figure out what it needs and really promote it from a heartfelt place. The Light Rail is a prime example, as is the fact that downtown they already have the upcoming buses on display at bus stop kiosks, something Chicago has only recently caught on to. Also, speaking of transit, the bike system is amazing. This year it's been officially named the most bike friendly city, but it's been in the top tier in past years as well.

It's a great blend of city and nature. I never went crazy being in the city for long stretches because I could drive for less than 40 minutes and hit farmland or large estates. Even before that, there are just trees everywhere, in all neighborhoods, and the plethora of lakes creates mini oases out of many areas of the city without locking people in to super-defined neighborhoods. This is something I really treasure, because, while Chicago prides itself on its neighborhoods with distinct personalities, unique patches within the larger quilt, I am constantly frustrated with just how true that is. Unless one makes the effort to look at that larger framework, one can easily get caught up with the intricate patterns of one's own square. There are so many native Chicagoans (friends and family included) who don't know anything outside of their own neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are set up to be self-sufficient and can be quite isolating unless one's goal is to delve into a new place for the sake of seeing how it fits into the rest of the city. Unfortunately, that means the people who get the most out of this quilted metropolis are the outsiders who care to look.

One more thing I really love about Minneapolis is that it's free to live outside of the shadow of other cities. While Chicago is too busy going blow for blow with New York, there's enough Minnesota/Minneapolis confidence in creating its own thing. Who cares about New York vs. Chicago style pizza? Both are good, so don't waste time with imitations: just make a good pizza and forget the label. We don't need to stack ourselves up against other places when it comes to the arts either. Sure, we know that New York is a big place with big museums and theaters, but we've got our own theaters and museums and a deeply rooted appreciation of the arts that has garnered national attention without an unnecessary complex.

I could go on and on about the smaller and more personal reasons I love Minneapolis (it would probably be a list of names and places), but that would just be gushing, and it would be beside my point of pointing out Minneapolis's strength as a city. To temper the high opinion you all know I have for my hometown, I must throw in a caveat. I don't know much at all about the nightlife. I've enjoyed it, but I don't know it well enough to put forth my two cents on the subject. Unfortunately, I left Minneapolis just as I was able to take advantage of a very important facet of city life.

Whenever I go back, I get really excited, and then I realize I don't have anything to suggest to my friends when we want to hang out. Places I'd even vaguely heard of have turned out to have d-bag clientele or no longer fit who I am today. I feel powerless in that kind of situation, completely dependent upon the handful of my closer friends in the area who have stuck around to make their adult lives there. I would really like to be able to spend enough time there to make my own social decisions about the place. I'm sure it's always hard to go back to any hometown under those circumstances, when you've built your life in another place and grown into another person while being there, but I think it's especially hard, when one has such a glowing review otherwise, to be in the dark about a sizable facet of what life is for one now. Hopefully one day that will change, though. In the meantime, the places my friends have discovered and shown me have been right on target, and I look forward to the next time I get to visit my hometown, my territory, my state.

Talkin' Film and Droppin' Names

First off, RIP Dennis Hopper. Huge fan. Personal favorites, most to least: Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand Luke, Blue Velvet.

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I had the great opportunity to meet and learn from Haskell Wexler on both Thursday and Friday of this past week. On Thursday he visited The University of Chicago Film Studies Center's screening of his film, Medium Cool. Friday I was invited to a small Master Class where we screened and critiqued student work.

Medium Cool was fantastic. I have to admit I was a bit skeptical at first, and didn't really know how everything was going to fit together, but by the time I got into the rhythm of it, I was definitely enjoying myself. There are so many questions it asks, so many themes it explores. My favorites were the objective and amoral position of the cameraman (you might watch a terrible scene unfold, but do you do anything to help? no); fiction vs. reality (Wexler had written a fiction film that anticipated serious things happening at the 1968 DNC in Chicago, but he hadn't expected anything close to the violence and tragedy that he actually ended up catching on film); and the parallels setup quite subtly at the beginning and end of the film (car crashes, violence, freedom). After the screening, I found the man himself a lot more rambling and deaf than I'd anticipated, but he was still great.

Interestingly, he didn't seem to enjoy talking about the craft itself. He was more like, it is what it is: someone asked him if he has any certain things he does to achieve such stunning photography, and he replied, "no. It's just cinematography." I was telling DP about this after the fact, and it struck me that there are so many tips and rules that are thrown out there by our teachers, but it doesn't seem that anyone wants to listen. Not to simplify the craft, but stuff like good lighting and composition, the Rule of Thirds, zooming in to focus on the subject, leaving the camera running (capturing as much as possible, as opposed to just trying to get the shot you want, especially in documentary filmmaking), sifting through to find the gem of a shot in the editing room, they're all important, and they can make for some beautiful shots. I think his answer was so apt. There's nothing you can really do but do it well, you know?

The Master Class was awesome, and it really made me miss class. I miss sitting in a room with smart people who think critically, trading thoughts and debating consequences. It was really fun. He was very honest with his criticisms and doled out his accolades subtly. Again, though, he was very matter-of-fact about the whole business, and sometimes it was as if was going between questioning why he even needed to be there and just taking part of the discussion like just another quiet student in one of Judy's classes.

It also made me miss Film in general. One reason I was drawn to the subject was because of its superior balance of theory and practice. I could never be one of those boring schmucks who talks about film in a purely theoretical sense, but it also didn't sit right with me to just go to film school and learn the craft without tapping into the rich history and the more abstract and academic potential of the medium. I've rolled my eyes in the presence of both camps. But the academic aspects mesh really well with the nostalgia I feel sometimes when I think about what drew me into cinema and media studies - film. There's so much there on both sides of the emulsion: a careful and historical practice that takes some serious skill on one side, and the consequences of capturing reality and the history of the ontological image (<3 Bazin) on the other. Nowadays, though, none of that really carries over into the cheaper, more convenient, and DIY video medium. I use it, and I know it, but I don't enjoy it nearly as much as I enjoy everything about base, emulsion, halide crystals, mirrors, lights, and everything captured on it.

So what to do when you're just born at the wrong time? Film's expensive and slowly dying. My American Cinematographer magazines splash the latest digital hotness on its pages. I like to think too much about what I'm putting out there to actually go to film school for the craft. Freelance is all about video, where my heart just isn't. Meanwhile film theory is full of ridiculous people who abhor touching cameras. This transitional period in the world of film and video is like coming of age in the town in The Last Picture Show, where the town is dying just as you're old enough to enjoy it, but you can't bring yourself to ever leave.

I didn't sign up to watch Melrose Place [spoiler alerts??]

We started talking about our favorite television shows, and things quickly spiraled into a comparison between Six Feet Under and The Wire. Obviously, both were on the list, but what exactly was it that pushed The Wire to the front in our minds? What was it that made the 4th and 5th seasons of Six Feet Under (with the exception of the series finale) so distasteful, while The Wire was just so wholly delicious and left us wanting more?

My best answer is that The Wire's writers and production team made a conscious effort to subvert the characters' personal lives in favor of the broader narrative, while Six Feet Under did not. The choice to push the broader narrative of the city and its drug lords, police, docks, schools, and newspapers to the forefront was not made from the beginning, however. The first two and a half seasons are littered with the HBO-standard gratuitous sex scenes and a lot more about each character's personal lives. But as the show progressed, it seems the writers and producers honed their thesis and focused instead on the various systemic ailments that both plague Baltimore's citizens and inadvertently recreate countless versions of the characters we grew to know and love.

This thesis is restated and underscored during the montage in each season finale, and is brought to a depressing yet realistic head in the series finale's montage. In the first season finale, all that the detail worked for is undercut by a montage of drug dealers in various parts of the city and even in New York City (where we leave Omar), nameless yos in every color and ethnic background, untouched by the detail's work. One feels a sense of helplessness, that the problems are just bigger than all of us. Each season finale's montage seems to stress that as much work as each beloved character puts in, there is always going to be more work to do.

The series finale takes that hopelessness one step further. Not only is there always going to be more work to do, but even the characters we'd spent so much time getting attached to are just placeholders; no matter what happens to any of them, there will always be someone else directly behind them, ready to assume their very attitude, conviction, motives, and actions. McNulty's not the only one who cares; Omar is not the only rogue; Carcetti is not going to be the last mayor. The truth is hard to swallow, but that's what makes it all so great. It really feels like truth. Life goes on with or without our characters, with or without us, and what remains is the city and the people who make it go and the motivations that get them there, regardless of their names.

Six Feet Under works backwards from this model. The main ideas and goals are somewhat understood in the beginning: How do people deal with death? What are the ways we prepare/fail to prepare for the inevitable? Does dealing with death on a regular basis affect those questions in any way? And the context in which the characters are placed does a lot to set up our study of these questions: A family who owns a funeral parlor in Los Angeles, California; three children and a widow with their own distinct personalities; first term G.W. Bush; carefully placed generational gaps.

Of course things are going to be closer to home during the first season as the Nathaniel's death is our first case study. However I think as the family heals and moves on the writers continue to do a good job of looking at the main questions through different lenses. They have a good setup: there are plenty of ridiculous and eclectic people in LA whose backgrounds lend themselves both to crazy deaths and to different ways their families deal with them. From bikers to Born Again Christians to Nate's own untrained handling of clients, there's a lot of good material.

And of course if we're looking through the lens of one family, we're going to get close to them. I concede that the scope of The Wire is a lot bigger. Not only were there a lot of main characters, but the focus was on multiple sectors of a city's population. Six Feet Under had a main cast of fewer than 10, and they had mostly interesting lives. There's a young character, an old character, two gay characters, and the entry characters who are most likely the age/generation of most viewers. I truly enjoyed (the beginning of) Brenda and Nate's relationship. I also enjoyed Nate and Claire's relationship. I loved Ruth. I liked David, loved Keith.

But I think the show started to go downhill fast when the focus was more on the personal lives of the characters and less on the funeral parlor and death. What was with David's attacker? Why should I care about Brenda's supposed sex addiction? WTF was up with Rico's affair? And why the hell did Maggie even exist?? The fact of the matter is, I don't care. I didn't sign up to watch Melrose Place, I committed to watching a family deal with death.

What's worse for me is that they lost all that they had set out to do. It wasn't just that they decided to delve into the characters' personal lives, it was that they did so and lost all context that once existed. I used to watch General Hospital with my mom when I was little, and I can pretty much guarantee that if I were to turn it on today, I would be up to speed within 10 minutes. Those names are really all that matter: the Quartermaines, Luke and Laura, Lucky, Mac and Felicia. Even the actors themselves change up every few years, but the characters and even the storylines remain the same. Port Charles? Who cares where it is. It doesn't even matter that there's a port. And the Hospital? I can probably count on 2 hands in all my watching the times when the Doctorness of a character or the setting of the hospital even mattered. But that's a soap opera, and the flaws I've pointed out are its veritable strengths: they put the personal stories at the fore because that's the part people tune in to watch, and it's the part that never changes in spite of all of the tumult of our own real lives.

For Six Feet Under, it soon became irrelevant that they were in LA or that they were of certain ages or that they were a pretty liberal family living during the Bush administration. And for a family so contextualized in the beginning, their actions began to lose all credibility. Take Lisa, for example. Lisa comes into the story as Nate's friend, and as we find out, the mother of his child (a dubious entry, IMO, but I never really warmed up to her). However, her eventual death should have been the perfect opportunity to come back to the heart of the show. Instead, the mystery behind her death is focused on as a source of drama, and the way Nate deals with her death is overtaken by what actually happened to her, an unsolved mystery that points to an affair with her sister's husband, Hoyt. Under suspicion, Hoyt kills himself, and they never really return to the family to see how they cope. I think this a great example of an opportunity that probably never should have existed but was missed anyway.

Six Feet Under is not the only show with a great premise to turn into a soap, regardless of genre. The last two seasons of The West Wing were bogged down by the President Bartlett's illness and desire for a legacy. The Office is a classic example, ruined by Jim and Pam's love and other wedding stories. Even lesser comedies are guilty (see: That 70's Show, which ended up having nothing to do with the '70s after the first season and was just a teen comedy with actors in increasingly less-bell-bottomy bell-bottoms).

I guess this post could go on forever, and it's already much longer than it intended to be, but I guess I'm trying to say that context makes a good show great, it brings in that realistic aspect that so many other shows are missing. But when you lose that context and bog the fictional world down with personal drama, the show's soul and originality is lost.

Foundations

This was something I originally wrote/posted April 5, 2008. DP says he really likes it, and so I thought I should use it to set more of a mature tone for this blog. Perhaps I'll have to give a status update on what our fridge looks like after SM and I move into the first place we'll have to ourselves in July.

9:58 am - My fridge
When I was younger, living at home with a full house including both of my parents and my five siblings, I used to dream about what I would have in my own refrigerator. In our house nothing lasted very long. All the finer things in life would especially disappear within hours of my mother's purchase. I longed to have applesauce that would still be in the fridge when I got back from play practice. I ached for one more pickle. I craved grapes at all hours, but I felt buying them myself was futile: they'd be gone before I went back for a second bunch. I swore to myself that when I grew up and had my own fridge I would stock it with all of the delicacies I desired. I would have jars and jars of applesauce. I would have a steady supply of fruits and certain vegetables. My fridge would be overloaded with yogurt and cheese. No milk, but in later fantasies soy milk was a must.

When I came to college I was shocked at the fact that I could finish the foods I had started. It was amazing! I bought yogurt, and the whole thing was just waiting for me when I got back. Sometimes I even had trouble finishing things before they went rotten. It was such a change for me that I sometimes forgot how long I'd been waiting for moments like those. Sometimes, though, I longed for even more freedom to stock my refrigerator and pantry. I lived with a number of different roommates, each with different opinions on sharing food, buying food together, etc. Instead of becoming completely autonomous with my fridge choices, I had to learn how to share in a different way from living with my family. Do I share food with my roommates? Do we buy groceries together? Or is it a completely separate arrangement in which I can't even touch their food? I decided I don't like having things that are off limits in my own refrigerator. That just won't do. It completely foils all the plans I have in mind for it. The dream still lives. In some cases we arrange certain foods that are for everyone, like eggs, so we always have a supply of them. The rest of the food pretty much belongs to the person who bought it, unless you ask of course. This arrangement is a good one, besides the fact that sometimes I just don't have the money.

And that's another aspect that has kept my dreams from being realized. Mom isn't buying all the food anymore; I buy my own food with my own money, and sometimes there just isn't enough of it. All those items in my dream fridge add up to a hefty bill sometimes, especially because in my dreams I'm always using the food in my fridge to Live Well. It's become an accessory in my Well-lived life. So the dream has evolved and grown into a fridge that is not only free from invasion, as I wished when I was living at home, to a wellspring of Good Things and a sign of prosperity, humility, and frugal living. Perhaps all of this is just a little too Utopian and way too invested in such a small thing. But for me dreams of my own refrigerator have permeated my life and represented other dreams all amalgamated into what I want my life to be. I've dreamed of getting out of the house, of living on my own, of how I want to conduct human relations, of financial freedom, of quality of life, all through my refrigerator.

The next development in mind is tied to my love of grocery shopping. I love going grocery shopping with people, and I look forward to a time when I will fill my fridge with foods that someone I love and I have picked together. (Does that make sense? I was trying not to say that I wanted to fill my fridge with someone...I keep getting images of someone stuck in a fridge...) It's a step from buying my own food but sharing some with my roommates to buying food with my boyfriend to fill up our fridge; of course there is room in between. For example, I might live with my brother in an apartment on the northside of Chicago next year, and I'm looking forward to going grocery shopping with him to fill up the fridge we will share. It's a feeling of family and community that combines the good points of my old life--living with my mom's fridge--with the good points of my new one--buying my own groceries for my own fridge. But taking that a step further, I think sharing a fridge with my boyfriend is something I really want to do. It's a further developed and totally new feeling of family and community I don't think I am ready for yet. But I think it will feel really good.