Yeah Yeah Yeah

I told myself I was going to talk about my morning at a mega-church, but I’m not ready for that yet. I don’t have enough distance from the traumatic event. Besides, what good am I going to do coming on down on these sad, sad people? They already believe the poorly written lies of a sermoning, bald WASP who makes more money than them. In many ways, so do I. One could say Noam Chomsky is my ‘Pastor Bill.’ Hell, I would look at pictures of Noam Chomsky’s daughter’s wedding the Bahamas while an acoustic version of “How Great Is Our God” is played by a bearded young Christian. I would at least do it without sighing loudly and putting my head in my hands, as I did for the multimedia presentation detailing the happiness of Pastor Bill’s orange gymnast daughters.

My mom leaned over to me and whispered sharply, “Lara.” I guess the face I made caused her to laugh, because as the person whose vagina I came out of, she feels she has the right to laugh at my misery. “That’s gonna be you,” she taunted, shaking with silent giggles. “That will be you someday.”

She was so giggly this visit. I cracked a smile earlier that day when she said “ding-a-ling,” and she erupted all over the lunch table. I hope you really are this giddy, Mom, and not just back on your ‘nerve medicine.’ Avery women have long and rich history with such chemicals. If the Lifetime Channel had cartoons, that would be my mother on I on our respective sedatives. Wacky ladiez. Always crying, always candid–and unfortunately for everyone else, enjoying ourselves immensely.

My mother’s sister had a little taste of the Avery crazy when Mom and I “split” a bottle of wine. She had a glass and a half with dinner, and I the rest. We sat at the counter, watching Barb do the dishes, and suddenly I found myself talking about my future. Whether anyone asked me about my future I do not recall, but I began anyway, pounding on the marble when I spoke of other people my age and their “job searches.”

“It’s poin-less,” I slurred. “You have to be passionate ‘bout what you’re doing.”

“Mmhmm, mmhmm,” my mom replied, her finger drooping at me, “but everything is cheaper in Kansas.”

“Ugh! Mom!” If I wasn’t already sitting, I would have dramatically melted to a sitting position. “You’re not even lisssning!” I welled up.

“Who wants a piece of cake?” Barb said.

“Me,” I said through tears, then, “You’re not even lisssning to me, Mom!”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m just saying, you could save up. Maybe move to Kansas City.”

“I can’t do that!” My mouth was probably stained purple. “I can’t be in that place! I get so depressed Mom. You have no idea.”

Barb put down a piece of cake in front of me. “Let’s go watch Marley and Me.”

“You guys have to support me!” I ate a bite of cake.  ”No matter what! You can’t just keep pressuring me to do what you want!”

Mom looked down. She seemed tired. She said, “Okay. What kind of cake is that?”

Then we watched poor, fat Owen Wilson and his stupid dog, but my mom loved it. She sat in a chair in front of me and laughed and laughed.

I can’t believe her daughter is going to graduate from college. Her daughter is going to be an adult.

Occasionally she turned around and said to me, just floored with mirth, “That’s Puppy! That’s just like Puppy!” Puppy is our dog at home. And yes, the dog that played Marley does resemble Puppy.

What the fuck am I going to do with my life?

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Up In The Air

On the weary sojourn to Original Movie Land,  I figured Up In The Air was going to make me walk along the boring “independent-professional-just-wants-family” path, and then then it would make me eat the smooth-talking fruits of George Clooney’s loin, and then it would make me gather compact little field samples of his poopy redemption.  But there was talk of a better place beyond that path–there was talk of treasure, and of  new beginnings. The wife and I were sitting on the porch, rocking and smoking, taking in the evening, and when the pipes went out there was a smell coming from that trailer. There was unflattering light and blocky letters and the sound of acoustic guitar, and there was that new movie ocean smell.

I never trusted Jason Reitman, not since that tricksy yuppie-blubber of a Michael Cera’s penis Juno, and I don’t trust him now. I sat slumped in the center-left with my boots making wet marks on the back of the seat and scoffed. But at the feature presentation, when simple, bleak shots of Midwestern farmland backed the credits, I got a whiff of something. The shots were muted and abstract, and the opening “getting ready” montage recalled none of Juno’s gilded cleverness. [Maybe the wheezing hipster in that movie was all Diablo Cody's doing. Minor conclusion: I need to re-watch it on mute.]

So, I breathed it in, I let myself go, and I was rewarded. Not since The Science of Sleep have I felt so rewarded by a movie in theaters.

The “getting ready” montage was slower and quieter than usual–no rhythmic plops of folded clothing, the sounds of the zips were fully realized–but also straightforward and shot like a catalog. It was efficient, un-flashy, and repeated several times throughout the film. Formal repetitions with no huge service to moving the story forward: I am a huge fan. They are like picture commas in a cinema sentence.

Clooney’s character’s profession was to fire people, and similar to an audition montage, a series of performances followed his “you’re fired” speech. No frills, no spectacle, no exaggerations, just an authorial movement by the film to make itself more deliberate than a documentary, but with good actors that were shot and spoke with a biting realness. I assume Reitman was also aware that this ‘realness’ was not just a product of his style, as getting laid off is a reality Americans now have to deal with every day. The actors were given individual sentence-long narratives that had to do with their kids and all their hard work for the company gone to waste, but the sometimes spoken, sometimes silent theme of all of them was, “What am I going to do now?”

As most of the film was shot in Clooney’s POV, their questions were posed directly to the audience. Like Clooney and his partner played by Natalie Keener, we didn’t have a straight answer, and we had no choice but to follow them to the next city, the burden of ruined lives half-heartedly ignored in the now memorized, clean-cut montage, but peeking through in fleeting close-ups of the protagonists’ sagging faces. There is a particularly brutal sequence of Clooney’s search for Keener in an almost post-nuclear officescape, with desks scattered in isolation randomly throughout an entire floor, useless bits of paper fluttering in the air conditioning. He finds her sitting in a corner room, populated with nothing but empty rolling chairs.

Of course, in such stark times, beauty and warmth have to do very little to stand out. Contrary to the routine of endless firings, the pleasantries and fulfillment of this story come in waves of small triumph. The protagonists jogging drunkenly out of the sea at sunrise with a gaggle of IT professionals whose conference they crashed, Clooney walking around his high school in Milwaukee, a simple wedding in City Hall.

Oh yeah, an actual summary of the narrative…well, I guess you can just read IMDB for that. I linked it at the top of the page. See this movie. And then have some sex. It will be a good night for you.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons (cont’d)

At the crack of 2 pm, when everyone had sharpened themselves with Axe and butter, there is a council of the Seven: Vinny and Ronnie, from the legions of Men; JWoww, an elf from the Forest of Twotone Mountains; Sammi, child of the hobbitses Merry and Pippin; Pauly D, a thing with all the temper and stature of a dwarf but with none of the witty asides; and of course the creature Mike, who some call the Situation, because he talks only to himself and coughs up semen with a “coodle! coodle!” sound.

Suddenly a Figure walks to the center, the brim of her neon orange hat cocked over her eyes, and the din slows to a trickle.

“Fambly meeting!” she calls, and everyone feels the presence of a strange and powerful magic, like artificial wind in one of those giant inflatable snow globes that people put in front of their houses at Christmas. The council was not expecting the presence of the Orange Wizard so soon after her fall into shadow, where an ancient demon had punched her in the face. Nor had anyone recently been in her quarters–a wizard prefers solitude, and as the rest of the fellowship knows, solitude prefers a wizard.

Like any vigilant sorcerer of auld, The Wizard Snooks sleeps with her eyes open, her bedsheets barely exposing the curve of a shining, black hump. Any stranger who wandered into the room, perhaps a drunken pool-doll in search of raw fish for the creature Mike, backs out of the doorway at this, her unresting stare, which seems to see between walls into the kitchen, outside to the grill, to the dead-grass tips of Pauly’s halo, glowing blue at the sense of coming evil.

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Ol’ Is The Most Useful Colloquialism, For Me, At Least

When I was freshman in college, if I couldn’t find anyone to make out with, I often rode my bike to the river, drunk. Anytime from midnight to 2am, depending on the ratio of vodka and orange juice in my belly to alienation, I said ’see ya’ to whatever smoking lost-cause I was talking to and hopped the ol’ Takara.

I wish I could say that when my friends asked me why? I responded, ‘Might as well ride something,’ but really I just wiped away the snot accumulated under my nose and said slurringly, ‘I’on know. I get lonely thassal. Is fun.’ It was fun. It feels good to pretend to be in control of something when you’re drunk. When the road weaves beneath you, you think whatever, you have nothing to do with that, as if the bike itself is doing it on its own, trying to tell you something. I often wonder what I might have looked like to a passing car, shakily zooming through the bike lane, tears and hair flying, muttering ‘What?’ and ‘Okay’ as I try to keep my balance. A lawsuit, I’ll warrant.

Then there’s the river. People ride their bikes drunk, yes, that’s permissible. Dangerous but entirely plausible. But do they leave the bikes laying on a cliff and then trip down the sides of a sloping bank into a major water source in their bare feet? If they do, I don’t want to meet them. They sound stupid. I once cut my foot on a piece of glass near the water but never told anyone. I just let it fester and eventually heal. But seriously, that and losing a few dozen items of clothing was the worst that happened. Any creepy killer that saw me must have witnessed a figure weeping, singing Neil Young to herself and trying to skip rocks, then said, ‘Meh. That just looks complicated,’ and kept on his way.

I was recently reminded of these times on Saturday, at a bar, where for no discernible reason I was overwhelmed with sadness and began to well up. This band was playing. They all had greaser hairstyles and suits, with a stand-up base, a piano, and a snare drum and cymbal. People were dancing, enjoying themselves, perhaps nostalgic for a time when this kind of music was commonplace.

Then I thought, this is dying. This kind of fun is dying. I kept repeating that to myself, and the combination of sincerity around me with the fact that it would be no more was all too much. My dance moves became weak and forced. I noodled myself around the audience and took deep breaths outside.

I wanted my bike immediately. Then I remembered it was in Bob’s cellar. Then I realized I was outside without a coat. Then I went back inside to the bar and ordered the ol’ sweater on the inside. Then I told the guy next to me he looked like a character from a Dostoevsky novel. Then I felt better.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons

Episode 1, in which Whitney Port sits atop her fully-made bed, floating her fingers over her eyes so as not to smear the makeup she put on while asleep. There is a tinkling sound–it is the sound of night, scurrying to the corners of the room, little black figures with microphones and cameras. Whitney shakes her head; fairies fall to their death. A cough rattles from the futon. Roxy is also awake, and from the smell of it, making her morning cocktail.

Whitney pads from one room to the other in her panty set, and the world flashes in a flood of artificial gold. She pauses as the gold hits on her face, and again the night scurries. Where are they going? she thinks. Outside? To get to the outside of Whitney’s condo, there is a revolving door, and outside of that revolving door is…well, the universe, she supposes. A giant B-roll montage. A place where the Yeah Yeah Yeahs appear to everyone on earth, to touch them, to give them what they want, and babies stop crying and move their hungry cheeks to nipple, and weavers look up from their looms, and the gulls flock and fly, flock and fly. Whitney’s face sags. She is tired from the double-task of thinking and being lit, and she collapses on the couch. I am done thinking, she thinks. As the indie noise of the outside fades, she tucks her continent-long legs beneath her, folds the weathered curtain of her hair behind her ear, and says to Roxy,”I can’t believe what happened last night.”

Roxy leans forward into the night-gold-drips and smacks her lacquered lips, so as to warm them up for talking. “Whit,” she says. She swallows. Her eyelids leap and fall with the night’s army behind Whitney, jogging and shoving and shuffling. Roxy has forgot the purpose of night, as she does every day, but its movements unsettle her. She must warn her friend. Her voice rises again, like a pheonix from the ashes of a crack-pipe, “Whiii-iiiit…”

Suddenly, the night has a message for Roxy. It is suspended in the sea of black on a crisp, cream-colored placard: “FASHION IS HARD,” she reads.

Whitney moans like a coming dove. “But,” she replies. She takes a strand of honey hair in her mouth, to taste it. She remembers a time when it was salty, and she liked to have it as a snack while she watched her mother drain excess silicon into the bathtub.

“Butt?” asks Roxy.

Whitney spits out the hair with a pth! Now the hair tastes like Pantene. Pantene and poop. ”Roxy, you can’t get so drunk…IN THE FASHION WORLD,” Whitney snaps her head to finish, as the night whisks another placard across their vision.

“Yeah,” Roxy says, in order to answer the question she had just silently asked herself while Whitney was talking. The question was, Hey, so Roxy, my friend Roxy needs to score. Do you have any coke? “Yeah,” she repeats, then she shouts, “FASHION LIFE GOALS,” to appease the shivering, whispering night.

Roxy’s yell rattles the crystal in Whitney’s miniature chandeliers. Whitney sways with them, balancing on the bottom of her spine, side to side, waiting for the night to rush upon her once again and stop her empty back-and-forth, like the ceasing click of a metronome.

Someone, somewhere–a doorman–hears Roxy’s hacking cough through the open balcony and thinks to himself, something  is dying. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it has.

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