Pooped from museum training again; I just wanted to pop in to share with you some of the metaphors and analogies that Brian Greene has used recently in the book on physics that I’ve been listening to. I think the following list reflects quite well how strange some of our modern ideas about the ways of the universe are (when compared to our everyday experience), how bizarre it is to learn about them, and also how extraordinarily difficult it must be for scientists, particularly theoretical physicists, to convey a true sense of their work to people outside the field. But boy do they try hard. Really hard.

1) The entirety of spacetime is like a gigantic loaf of bread; a single slice of bread represents the events taking place in all of space at a given moment in time. People who are traveling through space relative to each other slice the loaf at different angles. (He talks about this one a lot. I think I almost understand it now.)

Told you physicists were loopy. But it’s kind of cute how they try to make things easier for us mere mortals by bringing things down to the level of food products, animals, and pop culture. Sometimes it even sort of works.

(Except the frog analogy — which is actually, I suspect, even more confusing than the technical explanation. I mean, I hope it is.)

Some time ago Ross decided that the word “criticism” wasn’t quite cutting it, so he made up the term “critique-icism,” added a funny nasal professorial voice, and presto! He had a patented new school of literary and artistic interpretation. The major characteristics of critiqueicism include

a) having an opinion, and
b) telling other folks about it, preferably in a Southern accent.

Since we were just speaking of the dearly departed Kurt Cobain (see previous entry), tonight I decided I would critique-icize the movie I saw last night — Gus Van Sant’s film inspired by his last days. I’m not going to bother with the accent, but you can try putting this entry through the Dialectizer if you want.

I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to feel about Last Days. I tried to imagine what a film would be like that would attempt to capture the experience of a person during the final hours and days before they committed suicide, and I couldn’t envision it without expecting it to be something like the brilliant, but also truly horrible, Requiem for a Dream. Then I tried to imagine what a film would be like that would attempt to capture the experience of a fucked up famous person during the hours and days before he shot himself in the head, plunging millions of teenage girls around the world into deep depression and forcing his insane wife to read large parts of his suicide note out loud to the world, and I began to feel rather ill.

But the movie, while flawed (mainly in its pacing; it did feel a bit tedious at times), kind of took my breath away. For an hour and a half you watch Blake (the Cobain character), this sort of crumpled rockstar, concentrating very hard on performing tasks like pouring cereal he will never eat, making undercooked macaroni and cheese, digging a hole in the ground for no reason, and doing his best not to topple over more. Everything takes twice as long as it should and looks as if it requires all the intent in the world, even if you can’t for the life of you figure out what he’s doing or why. His body is shriveled and creaky, it moves in slow motion while a cigarette grows a long ash in one hand. In one exquisitely beautiful scene, he tries — like a brittle ballerina, like a hundred year old puppet — to sit down on a chair from a standing position, but ends up slowly falling onto all fours and crawling to the door while a bizarrely appropriate Boyz II Men video plays on the television.

Time loses all meaning. Blake takes a swim in a river, he dries his socks by a crackling fire. He puts tattered clothes on and takes them off again, he mutters fragments of conversation under his breath. What he says you can’t hear unless you put the subtitles on, and then the words are things like,
“The only reason we…
even… that it was even…
that she… that it was even mentioned
in the… in the first place is really… it wasn’t for us,
you know, like that she…
big fucking favor.
This fucking…
swamp.
‘Cause I’m afraid…
You can’t do anything.
You can’t do anything.
I can’t.”

He’s broken, you can see that, but the film doesn’t ever try to explain why, and it doesn’t matter. His friends, who are living with him in what is a truly gorgeous, completely ruined mansion of a house with peeling walls and stained antique furniture, are broke and drugged out themselves. They ignore him except to ask him for money or musical advice. Blake takes a visit from a hideously unaware Yellow Pages salesman who studiously ignores the fact that he is wearing a dirty black dress and hiking boots, and that his face is falling into his knees. Yet there are moments when the passion and pain that have obviously brought him to this place break through the haze; the camera pans away, almost imperceptibly slowly, from a window through which you can see Blake thrashing at a drum set; he picks up a twangy guitar and tears out a mournful, yowling song.

At some point he takes his life; you don’t see it, although you do see a ghostly image rising from his body, naked and climbing — but still slow, broken, bent. Opera plays as the credits appear on the screen, and no music could carry you further away from seeing this as the pathetic, dramatic death of a rock and roll star.

I think what makes Last Days such a powerful film is the fact that it absolutely fails to romanticize either fame, rock and roll, or depression. The movie knows that it’s explicating a cliche; one of the characters even says so at one point. What it does do is allow us to see what ends up being an extraordinary kind of beauty; it’s a strange and rare beauty, which somehow emerges from this quiet, honest, almost poetic impression of the slow, exhausting decline of a human soul that has decided to give up the attempt to survive a lifetime.

*******
This morning I drove to Brandeis to see a couple of exhibits at the Rose Art Museum, both of which turned out to be wonderful. The Rose is a really beautiful museum; it’s very small (one main exhibit hall, one smaller room and a few other walls) but it feels incredibly open and spacious. It even somehow manages to have a lovely shallow reflecting pool in its basement, which I think is quite an achievement.

One exhibit consisted of large, rather crude-looking oil paintings that combined lots of lush primordial vegetation with images of crumbling civilizations, people eating themselves and each other, and people rebuilding themselves and each other. It was like looking at the beginning of time and the end of time at the same time. Prelapsarian and postapocalyptic in one. I was enchanted. The other exhibit involved life-size foam sculptures covered in collage-mosaic pieces cut from thousands of photographs of the subject of the sculpture. Those were neat, but they didn’t grab me until I watched a video of their utterly charming creator talking about his artistic process, and the moment I saw him working on matching a small shard of photographic skin with a triangle of warm brown back belonging to a beautiful (and longsuffering) model, I was filled with a huge sense of faith and inspiration.

So then I walked around outside and took this photograph, which isn’t very good but helps me remember the way I remember Brandeis, and also the way I want to remember today.

I’ve been feeling kind of overwhelmed lately. Museum training is awesome (I fell hard for the little puffball of an Eastern Screech Owl we met last Thursday, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never found botany so interesting), but it’s really exhausting. I’ve taken on some extra work so I can finance my addiction to new books and eyeliner. I have a couple of other volunteer commitments that I’ve been neglecting, but that I need to get back in gear on. There are at least two major creative projects I’m working on that I never have enough time for, I owe six people letters, Peter’s been trying to get hold of me for two weeks, and I haven’t cut my toenails in way too long.

Oh, and also, I’m turning 27 in a few days.

When I was 15 — many of you know this story — I used to doodle this little stick figure on rollerblades a lot. She had a bandanna tied around her little head, and she wore sunglasses. Usually I drew her skating cheerily towards the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the sea, because I had this idea that when I turned 27 I would end my life (by skating cheerily off the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the sea).

Okay, in point of fact it wasn’t so much an idea as a thing I said to people every now and then, implying that by the time I got that frickin’ old I would surely have done all the wild and beautiful and fantastic things I could ever want to do, and would thus be able to die happily, and in a satisfyingly stylish manner. As a pronouncement, it had the advantage of being both dramatic and sarcastic, so that it had a good effect whether or not the person I was talking to believed that I meant it. If someone looked at me blankly when I told them my plan, it is possible that I may have gazed wryly up at them through my side-parted fringe and said, pokerfaced, “I work best when I have a deadline.”

Why 27? It was a pleasingly assymetric figure, it contained my favorite number (7), and — most embarrassingly — it happened to be the age at which Kurt Cobain killed himself.

Do you see, how much I love and trust you? That I should make these confessions to you? Count yourself lucky you did not know the pretentious black t-shirted witch I was at age 15. Unless you are a member of my family — in which case I say to you, thanks for keeping the faith.

Anyway, the point of the story is not that I am feeling introspective about turning 27 and meeting my mythical younger self in a dream all wailing “I thought I’d be someone by now!” The point of the story is mostly that 27 came along one heck of a lot quicker than I thought it would, since it seems like only 5 minutes ago that my sister turned 27 (she gets to be 30 this year, which I think is totally rockin’). The point of the story is that life is progressing pretty zippily indeed. This morning one of my friends at work told me that she’d just gotten a call to invite her to her 20th high school reunion. It’s been two whole decades since she graduated from high school! How do you wrap your mind around a thing like that?

I think about how I felt when I was 18, and how well I thought I knew myself. I think about how adult I seemed to be, and I wonder how many times in my life I’m going to have to redefine being grown up. When I was 18 it seemed to mean being free to spend my time any way I liked, and being able to choose the person I wanted to be. Now part of me thinks it means being responsible for spending my time any way I like, and being committed to accepting the person I am turning out to be. And I’m sure it will mean something different the next time I think about that silly little stick figure.

(Or maybe as soon as tomorrow, when I plan to sleep in like a luxurious cat.)

Thanks to Len for the sweetest card, and also to my family for their happy red missive. Is anyone turning 24 this year? or 36? or 48? Anybody reading me turning 60? Rock on! Happy year of the Dog to you!

P.S. Ross and I were just saying last night what a pity it is we won’t be traveling to Singapore until after the New Year celebrations are over — but actually, we’re lucky (dawgs). If we were there, we’d have to be on the side passing out the ang pow. Being old married farts and all.

The three moods of a rusty Chrysler:

hot,

icy,

fierce.

I love old American cars.

Went to see the American Repertory Theatre’s performance of No Exit on Sunday night and had a rather grand time. The play concerns three people who, having lived lives in which they were wicked on a fairly ordinary scale, find themselves after their deaths thrust together as roommates in hell’s boarding house. The point of the piece is simple: the powers that be have dispensed with the need for torturers down there, because any group of human beings will inevitably begin to act as each others’ tormentors if confined together for a sufficiently long time. Hence Sartre’s famous line which gives us today’s entry title.

It’s a clever play, but this particular production, though inspired in its staging (the actors performed on a square platform that was securely anchored to the floor only in the middle, thus see-sawing dangerously and giving everyone sea-sickness whenever any given player chose to stalk across it to one end or another), suffered from a tendency to draw the audience into the experience the characters were having. They were bored and irritated, and at times we were bored and irritated too. There were moments of pure hilarity, but in general I would have preferred to have been a little more outside of their hell — a little more detached and amused. Still, a lovely night out.

*******
Ross is making noises that indicate he is bored and would appreciate company, so more in a bit. ;-)

P.S. Apologies for the tortured — hee — syntax of my sentences in this post. Wine with dinner.

I just thought I’d tell you that today I am wearing a scent called “Embalming Fluid.”

And I keep raising a wrist to sniff at it, because it’s so light and lovely it makes me want to inhale myself.

I got it here.