Sitting between Two Redheaded People

I received some major news a few weeks ago. You know how it feels when everything around you unexpectedly goes in slow motion and you're almost capable of doing a play-by-play analysis of what's getting shown to you? Yeah, kind of, sort of like that.

Afterwards, I go to my car, sit, and put my hands around the steering wheel as if I’m driving somewhere. Only, the key is not in ignition and I have no music or a podcast episode from WTF with Marc Maron coming out of the iPod. Fifteen minutes into it - even though I'm told it's fifteen minutes. It felt more like 15 seconds to me - I hear, “uhm, so, are we going somewhere or should we see if we can get pizza delivered in the parking lot?”

Funny. I know.

For some odd reason, my mind took me to my first semester as a freshman in college. I haven't really thought about that time since going through it. As a general rule, I tend to experience, file, and move on to the next thing. Anyway. I had a brutal schedule then. One that I had hand-picked myself. Naturally. The thing is, I have a knack for picking difficult scenarios and subsequently sticking with them and bringing them to fruition. It's a chronic condition, I guess. Some people spend their lives averting challenges, others welcome them with an unexplained and unrequired bravado. Color me the latter. Whoopty doo!

So, when most students would take between 12 to 15 credits, I would alternate between 18 to 22 credits. Most unnecessarily, by the way. I just wanted to see if I could push myself to a new limit and if I could still hold on to my full-ride scholarship while castigating myself with an impossible schedule. I know. Let it go. It’s my thing.

To illustrate my point, here’s my schedule as a first semester freshman.
English Writing: 8:00AM-8:50AM (apropos, I am categorically not a morning person.)
Basketball: 9:00AM-9:50AM
Religion: 10:00AM-10:50AM
Biology: 11:00AM-11:50AM
And, after a six-hour break:
Math: 6PM.

Chances are, if I would go at it again, I’d most likely pick some hard scenario like this again. And since I didn't do all that shabbily the first time around, I'd dare make it even more challenging. I wish I were joking. At times, I wished I was one of those people who were happy being a 12-credit type of person. I could never pull that off, however. A certain gene pool and predisposition coupled with certain acquired behaviors proves to be incurable more often than not. Bottom line, some people take the easy or easier way out while others like detours or harder trails. It doesn’t mean that one camp is better and/or smarter than the other. It’s just diversity. I used to think, foolishly proudly, that the harder way was somehow more respectable. Turns out that's not true at all. Being happy with ease and a general lack of ambition is something I wish I could do. I bet life would be a total breeze. I doubt I'd lose track of time, holding on to my steering wheel while the ignition key is still on my lap if I were into 'easy.' Alas, I'm not.

But back to the schedule. I know I'll make the point eventually. The hardest thing about it (i.e., the schedule) was going from Basketball to Religion. I played basketball like I was a 6.2’ dude. And I’m a foot shorter than that. I played so hard all I wanted to do afterwards was take a long shower and do the unthinkable: take a nap. Instead, I’d gather my stuff and try to clean up as I ran even harder from the gym to the Humanities building where the Religion course took place. I was always panic-stricken when going to Religion. Ok, the real reason had to do with the seating chart, yes there was a seating chart for that class. The professor thought he could remember our faces better if we sat in the same place every day. Oh, there were close to 100 students in that auditorium, by the way. Insane man, I know.

In Religion, I was sitting in the middle of one of the back rows. That's the seat you get for being one of the last ones to walk in as you pull a Carl Lewis from gym class. I was smack dab in the middle. I tend to remember few details from people and events if I’m not too struck by either aesthetics and/or intelligence. Nothing much struck me in that class other than the fact that there were two redheads in there, a boy and a girl, and for some reason they were sitting respectively to my left and right. Yup, I was sitting between two bona fide redheads, a boy and a girl. I couldn’t get over the fact how enthralling I found their hair and their galaxy of freckles. They could have been related. They weren’t.

What occupied my mind then was the fear that I would continue to perspire as the professor taught about the historical context behind Leviticus. I couldn’t wait to go home and shower. Hard. Few things make me freak out. Not showering twice a day is one of them. I know. It’s my thing. Let it go. In Religion, I somehow felt some version of piety as I “suffered” in my tight but cushy seat while pursuing my education in the private university where people were more polite than those in Pleasantville and perfect strangers would say “hello” and “how are you?” to you. Ad nauseam.

For some odd reason, after my news, I felt exactly how I felt when sitting in Religion as I freaked out at the prospect of more sweat coming out of me as I had played with a kind of vigor I generally reserve for the airport as I'm always running to my gates trying to make my connections. I recognized the feeling immediately. I scratched my head metaphorically and literally. I wondered why I had to scratch my head and made a quick mental note re: changing shampoos. Then, metaphorically, I scratched my head again and wondered why, of all the thoughts my brain would have strung together, it decided to pick one that took me back to my freshman year.

In sum, I often wonder why I have such loyal tolerance for quotidianity and all its menial routines and overall uninterestingness. And every time I wonder about its strong presence, I am reminded of the function it plays. It's a bringer of stability and overall sanity. I like control. Control, for odd reasons, gets a bad rap. However, control is nothing to sneer at. It comes too naturally to some and very challengingly to others. While I have a naturally hyper nature which at times makes concentration difficult, thanks to learned control and discipline, much can get accomplished.

It's hard to get stuff done well when you are pulled in so many directions all of which beg for your attention. So, amid the frustration of nature, desire for focus needs to kick in. And it does. It says, I want to do a task at a time and I want to do them well. So, controlling one's nature is indispensable when it comes to accomplishment and productivity.
It turns out, it's also indispensable when it comes to dealing with a kind of novelty that puts well-tested quotidianity on its head and tells it to go spin.

And there you are, metaphorically sitting between two redheaded people, hoping your sweat won't get noticed.

Hmm. You Want a PhD in the Humanities?

My good friend just sent this to me. Alas, much of it is true. It's especially interesting if one has a graduate degree, is a college professor, and has had countless conversations with students who come for advice whether or not to go to graduate school.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

How to Control Impulse Reading

The following post is really interesting. I also have difficulty reading everything I want to read on most days as there are simply too many things to read out there. Between Google reader, my Twitter feed, my blog roll (and the list is rather generous), the daily newspapers and a cornucopia of domestic and international magazines/journals, at times it feels a tad overwhelming to get to all of the things that seem interesting. Hence, reading the following was helpful:


Today I thought of a nifty hack to control my “impulse reading” — things that I read on a whim during a bout of web surfing. It adapts a popular trick from personal finance to control impulse spending, which is to wait 30 days before making a purchase.

When I encounter an article I’d like to read, I open it in a new tab in Firefox and leave it there. Right now I have about a dozen tabs open. Some of them have been there for days. Invariably, when I make my way back through them, I read maybe 1/3 of them. Most of them just don’t seem as interesting anymore.

You can read more of S. Golder's post here.

Hat tip to MR for the pointer.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph via google images

A Note about Education and Entertainment

I was asked again today about what mostly informs my basic likes and dislikes the most. I usually mention education and music when I am asked similar questions. I consider my formal education to be one of the biggest gifts of my adult life and one that daily informs how I experience quatidianity. Possessing a doctorate degree means different things to different people, to me, among other other things, it means having an increased appreciation of the kinds of arts I tend to like naturally. As an adolescent I knew I liked Verdi but I couldn't quite say why.

While a Verdi opera meant one thing to me then, it means much more in my formally informed adulthood. Education allows one to not only have standards of art appreciation but, most importantly, to have the strength to stand by them. And art appreciation rarely does not apply to life. Cognitive knowledge informs experiential knowledge very well. And if a person could invest in one thing of lasting worth it would be formal education. I illustrate, when I would go to rock shows when I was still in school I would experience them differently. I remember noting in one of my grad school courses the following: "well, literary theory is ruining the enjoyment factor of a fundamentally simple art experience. I keep having all of these questions all of a sudden."

Being a more informed audience member, however, is something I appreciate more as it is better for me in the long run. Arts don't exist to simply give us access to escapism. They exist, I tend to think, so that we can think more, deeper, and better about ourselves. Entertainment has longer lasting effects this way. And such effects, I would add, are worth not only keeping but, most importantly, preserving. Much can get in the way of one's pursuit, education, however, is there to comfort you when much else might not. Education, true education, promotes self-sufficiency and independence and I cannot think of many other things in life that can quite do the same. So, today, my special tip of the hat goes to higher education and the beautiful things it affords us. It is hard work and, at times, infernal but oh-so-worth it as in the process of getting to know more about the world we get to know more about ourselves. What is that psychological Socratic phrase one hears all the time, i.e., 'an unexamined life is not worth living?'

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Well-being and Committed Relationships

David Brooks of the New York Times has a new Op-Ed piece called the The Sandra Bullock Trade where he asks the following philosophic question: "Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?"

As I was reading Brooks' piece I kept thinking that life scenarios aren't always so black and white, or better, what's entirely tragic to one might be a bit of a stumbling block to others. The thing is, people tend to have different views and expectations of commitment and monogamous relationships. However, certain life choices and lifestyles are more conducive to certain levels of commitment in a congealed union.

For example, if one of the partners has to be on the road a lot for work reasons, it would be quite difficult to keep the union strong and organically healthy. Spending quality time with the other party is, after all, what makes a relationship a relationship. However, if one needs to travel a lot and/or needs a lot of alone time to cogitate and do one's work, the best scenario for a person in such a situation would be to be paired up with an equally independent person who doesn't define the intimacy in the relationship by how much time is spent together but rather by how qualitative common time is.

This, I would say, is the mark of a strong union. In our day and age where careers are demanding and much time, focus, and dedication goes to good work ethics one thing will undoubtedly suffer, at least to some degree, and that is the committed relationship, marriage and/or domestic unions as there is only a certain amount of attention to go around, after all.

David Brooks notes:

"Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled."

Again, I would agree with the general sentiment here but not with the extreme degree to which Brooks takes the argument. Marital and/or committed happiness is more important than most things. It, after all, can inform for the better (and, alas, at times for the worse) a person's quotidianity i.e., how the world perceives one's presence when out there. A functioning union is one that facilitates the other things of substance in which the couple is engaged. And is it not all about creating the better version of one's self after all?

Commitments don't always get a lot of praise and they should as in many cases, if not all of them, they do play a pivotal role and are mostly responsible for professional success. I absolutely agree with Brooks when he notes that "worldly success has shallow roots while interpersonal bonds permeate through and through." I would also add that one way to secure some measure of good success in both areas is by daily negotiating the allocation of personal attention and what aliquot of attention goes where.

Bottom line, to make anything work in life one would first need to want to do it. Success comes with a lot of sacrifice and a lot of pain. In order to finance all of the pain and suffering, one needs to have genuine commitment and love for the subject at hand.

But, most importantly, success, be is professional or personal, depends on a lot of factors, two of the most important ones being endurance and work, a heck of a lot of work.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per blog.not2wo.com

Professors and Liberalism?

I received my Doctor of Philosophy title at 29. My field was in the realm of literary scholarship and the Humanities. Hence, when I read the following title of the recent NY Times article, my curiosity was peaked. It says, "Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left." Now, as someone who works with gender and literary scholarship, I tend to be averse to congealed labels. But, be that as it may, at times labels come in handy.

According to the article, a couple of sociologists contend that the stereotype that most professors tend to be liberal might just be a valid one. "Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up."

As a professor in the Humanities, I don't quite agree with the premise of this piece. I did not receive my PhD in the Humanities because of my tweed-wearing professors in college. If anything, I always found tweed to be quite unfortunate as a sartorial choice. I was one of those who picked the Humanities for one simple reason: it picked me. The subject matter spoke to me more than those transmitting it to me. Still, this is an interesting article to consider. Another paragraph of note says:

"Typecasting, of course, is not the only cause for the liberal tilt. The characteristics that define one’s political orientation are also at the fore of certain jobs, the sociologists reported. Nearly half of the political lopsidedness in academia can be traced to four characteristics that liberals in general, and professors in particular, share: advanced degrees; a nonconservative religious theology (which includes liberal Protestants and Jews, and the nonreligious); an expressed tolerance for controversial ideas; and a disparity between education and income."

More here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

New Article Available on Journal

My literary theory-informed article on a relatively little known German medieval text called der borte is now published and available on the journal Neophilologus. The title of the article is Economics of Virtue in Dietrich von der Glezze’s der borte: A Wife Errant and a Husband Caught.

You may access the abstract and more information on the article here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Assorted Links: Biology of Music and Black Metal University Course

1) The Biology of Music: Why do we like what we like?
"Rock is especially popular because it emphasizes the musical intervals whose frequency relationships are those we hear in the human speech."
More here.

2) This was a most interesting article to me. A Germanist at Emory teaches a course on black metal. A bit says: "Mr. Butler, an assistant professor of German studies at Emory University, talked about black-metal music — in its second-wave, largely Norwegian form — as a cryptic expression of Roman Catholicism. He started with the 16th-century Council of Trent and the early modern church. He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some of rock’s orthodoxies, as opposed to the heresies of disco and punk; and he spoke of black metal’s preoccupation with “the abiding and transcendent: stone, mountain, moon.”

And here:

"“The black metal event is a confession without need of absolution, without need of redemption,” he said. It is, he added, “a cleaning up of the mess of others.” He invoked the old English tradition of sin eating by means of burial cakes, in which a loaf of bread was put on a funeral bier or a corpse, and a paid member of the community would eat the bread, representing sin, to absolve and comfort the deceased.

“Black metal has become the sin eater,” he intoned. “It is engaged in transgressive behavior to be rid of it.” "

I highly recommend you read this in its entirety. Read more here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

iPod Piece to Appear in Print

The iPod piece which I originally wrote and had remixed for public radio a while back will now be published by an academic journal shortly. Since in the original I had included various commercial music snippets, I decided to record an edited version of my original piece again as it would have taken too long and/or it would have been too tedious a process to get music clearance for it. After discussing it with friends of mine trained in (and about to get trained in IP) Law, it made good sense to create yet another version of a remix.

Much thought went to this new remix and, one sunny day as I was enjoying the weather riding my Ventura, the answer came to me. I decided to remix my original piece with a different kind of commercial music. The kind that is created by my own friends whose work I love and support.

The Literary Theory-informed piece on the 'text' of the iPod would have never happened without, to quote myself, "music being in the background" so it was only apropos that I include a kind of music that reflects the very creative process I was engaged in while working on it: one of direct collaboration. I was very happy to get clearance from my dear friends and am happy to post the recent version of this remix here. (see below)

The music used to remix this piece comes from the very talented Camille Nelson and her newly released album First Words as well as the West-based band Calico whom I greatly appreciate.

You may hear this new remix here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

The Best Writers Don't Always Speak

An active interest of mine is the behind-the-scenes of writers and composers. I like learning about their quotidian mannerisms and experiences. Hence, what I read today on the Times did indeed tickle my fancy.
Excellent article by Arthur Krystal!
"...when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic, he was invited to the doctor’s home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn’t go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. “I like your lunatic,” he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The host frowned. “But it’s the other one who’s the lunatic. The man you’re pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac.”

Read it all here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?

Michael Bérubé's article on The Chronicle asks some good questions about Cultural Studies, the scholars trained in it, and the state of the overall discipline.

A bit says:

"Cultural studies has taught us—or has tried to teach us—that you don't know the meaning of a mass-cultural artifact until you find out what those masses of people actually do with it. The Internet may be dominated by commercial interests, but the liberal/left blogosphere appeared out of nowhere, largely as the result of the "netroots" work of ordinary men and women with nothing more than laptops, modems, and a desire to offer an alternative to cable news. After my talk, someone asked me, "But isn't that really more a question for sociology?" To which I replied, "Well, the questions of sociology shouldn't be considered alien territory for cultural studies." The situation is even bleaker if you ask about cultural studies' impact on psychology, economics, political science, or international relations, because you might as well be asking about the carbon footprint of unicorns."


Read more here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Google Scans 2 Million Out-of-Copyright Books

Amazing!

"Two million out-of-copyright books that have been scanned by Google could come back into limited printed form after the search giant signed a deal with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine - a custom book printer able to produce a bound one-off 300-page paperback, with a full-colour cover, in about five minutes."
More here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Tip of the hat ti MR for the pointer.

Statistics: It's Where It's At

Interesting article on the job market and careers in statistics.
Read it here.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Belle/Sebastian, Sid/Nancy, The Smiths, Tom/Summer: (500) Days of Summer: A Review

Note: This is the very first draft of an article I have been developing about the new film (500) Days of Summer. After having viewed the film in two different countries and various cities, I feel the writing experience has been most unique.




The terms indie, emo, and punk are as ubiquitous these days as Starbucks custom drinks and Steve Jobs-conceived gadgets. After spending a good amount of time hovering between sort-of-anonymity and the cool margins of the London and Seattle undergrounds, they are now finding themselves residing in the mainstream. What kind of cultural shift allowed for such unequivocal embracing?

Popular culture journalist Andy Greewald observed the following on this very question, "In a world where cars are advertised as punk, Green Day members are platinum rock stars, and getting pierced and tatted up is as natural as a sweet-sixteen party, everyone is free to come up with their own definition of punk—and everyone is ready to embrace it.”

While I disagree with Greenwald that punk is something that anyone can define at a whim, he seems to have tapped into some truth here. The new face of punk is of a somewhat reified or perhaps commoditized nature. It seems to seems to be as readily worn as a 300-dollar pair of torn Hugo Boss jeans with a rebel mark on the label.
Punk culture is not occupying the margin anymore. The norm or rather the center has now 'discovered' the margin much like Columbus discovered the Americas and it has acquired all the real estate its liquidity can manage.

Punk has entered the mainstream with as much gusto and confidence as Disney's next less-than-average loud stars (and future unemployed actors). If punk meant to refer to marginal and marginalized groups and subcultures, that stood for what was alternative to normativity, it now stands as another synonym of what it means to be cool, “in” and with-it, socially relevant, something you want to follow on Twitter and friend on Facebook.

I submit that Punk has not arrived anywhere. Instead, it has been co-opted. The center has co-opted it as only it knows how. Punk has been colonized by SUV-driving parents who will soon have to swap their big American-made and bankruptcy-swallowed GM for the Japanese-made Prius.

Could it be that the integration into the mainstream and espousal of once marginalized terms is yet another sign of our current systematic re-imagining of what it means to be us and how relevant we can still manage to be even though the cash flow is not what it once was and the current parachutes are not made of gold because it [gold] ran out?

This piece will explore how Marc Webb's first film (500) Days of Summer manages to feature in the center once marginalized culture terms and expectations. This film offers a new and gripping representation of life in the contemporaneity of post-2008. Webb, who comes mostly from the music video industry, provides a chronology-ignoring, fragmented love story which is so much more than what it explicitly purports to be. It is in this regard that the film delivers.

I have had the opportunity to view this film in two different countries now as well as in different cities. Regardless of the setting, the audiences seem to share a common approval of the film. Most of the online and newspaper reviews of this film, domestic and international, focus on it being a love story gone wrong. The story does indeed revolve around two people who enter a love relationship, one more readily than the other, but it is not all it is. I suggest that this is fundamentally a story of life in a modern reality in which shifts in cultural expectations have taken place and a new imagination has been engendered.

Plot Summary

In this film, screenwriters Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter tell the story of love of two modern young people who, at first sight, seem to be compatible. They look like cut-outs of the 1960's London pop scene. The protagonist, Tom Hanson, is a soft-spoken, 'poster child' for emo culture a-la-1980's England. He is lanky, drenched in melancholy, interested in independent (indie) rock music and is especially keen on The Smiths, old architecture, urban planning, and minimalistic decor. Tom's appearance is almost a carbon copy of a young Smiths' Morrissey. Tom is a believer in love and destiny. The storyteller tells us that his beliefs as an adult are shaped by an early exposure to and love of melancholy British rock as well as such films as Mike Nichols' The Graduate.

Summer Finn, on the other hand, is a beautiful, carefree girl from Michigan whose parents divorced when she was young and who does not share Tom's beliefs in destiny, love, and daily life events of cosmic significance. Summer seems to be a person who lives in the moment not attaching much meaning to her and others' quotidianity. As she maintains, she is young and she'd rather have fun while living in Los Angeles and "worry about the serious stuff later." Summer procrastinates love, one might at first assume, and by so doing she manages to procrastinate responsibility-laced life.

However, what Summer might be procrastinating is the embracing of a shifting culture.
The first piece of information we get about Summer is that she quoted from Belle & Sebastian's track “The Boy With the Arab Strap” on her yearbook. The snippet she chose to quote says: “Colour my life with the chaos of trouble.” She seems to enjoy doing, as Tom observes to her during one of their almost-passive aggressive fights, “what she wants to do” thus exhibiting total disregard for what the others might think of her or how they might interpret her behavior. She seems to have disregard for established structures of any kind.

Tom and Summer meet at the workplace where Tom is a greeting card writer and Summer is the new assistant to the business owner, Mr. Vans. Tom's trained as an architect but he did not manage to get placed in his profession and consequently ended up working in a niche far from his immediate professional training. Tom's career choice in not really a mystery as he seems to reflect the economic fate of the times. This is another subtlety Webb manages to include in his film.

Tom is interesting, aesthetically pleasing, and intrigued by substantial music with a message. In fact, he is always seen in the company of the iPod which, as it is the case with many young professionals like Tom, serves as a quotidian guide. Tom is smitten by Summer. Summer insists on her liking of Tom inferring that such liking will not amount to much else. Tom wants consistency as he puts it, a structure, a routine. In other words, he wants that which Summer has been historically rejecting. Tom wants to hold on to a sense of stability and continuity which Summer explicitly says she, nor anyone else for that matter, can provide. By her own admission, she is not looking for anything serious. She is simply filling her days with some fun and adventure. She is not one to be anybody's titled girlfriend. She is keen, however, on offering friendship.

While Tom wants to nest, Summer is keen on flying away. One day, Summer breaks up with Tom just as easily as the two came together. She breaks her relationship with Tom while they are having pancakes. With an almost chilling nonchalance which is brilliantly captured by Zooey Deschanel, she conveys to Tom that they should remain friends. She continues to masticate her delicious pancakes while she dishes out to Tom a heartache which will consume him the rest of the year.

The reason she provides for the break-up is that the relationship had become too serious and that they were fighting too much almost turning into a “Sid and Nancy.” Tom is crushed by such admission and is quick to note that he hardly thinks he's 'Sid.' Summer quickly corrects him that it is she who is Sid and that Tom is, indeed, Nancy. Tom's emasculation by his dream girl takes full effect at this point in the story. Summer has not just claimed the one punk rock story from the 80's that defined an era. She's redefined it to fit her own view of love and relationships. She is the one in control, she is Sid and Tom is her “Nancy,” her eventual victim.

Soon after the breakup, Tom is inconsolable. He is an utter mess. Weeks after the couple happen to meet again. Tom is again full of hope that the previous love would somehow see the light of day again. Summer is flirtatious post-breakup and she sings and dances with Tom at a colleague's wedding. At the conclusion of a beautifully spent day, Summer invited Tom to a get-together she is having at her house. Tom is invigorated by such gesture and is almost levitating of joy. He interprets her seemingly interested dancing as a sign of renewed interest.

The director provides an enlightening split screen at this point which details Tom's expectations on the left and reality on the right. Eventually, reality takes over and it ends up devouring the left screen. At the party, in Summer's home, Tom is faced with the sad truth that Summer, his anti-commitment almost-girlfriend who crushed his world months prior to the party, was about to crush his world and sum of hopes anew.

Summer had not just found another love. She had said 'yes' to an offer of matrimony as evidenced by the diamond ring she was wearing on her left finger. Summer, the girl who had always resisted convention, ends up portraying the epitome of a conventional girl wearing a lovely blue dress, long, shiny pony tail, and diamond ring on the conventional left finger. She managed to co-opt Tom’s notions of romance. Heartbroken and alcohol-medicated, Tom becomes convinced that there is no such thing as destiny and fate when it comes to how people fall in love and that the universe is nothing but a series of random events.

He meets Summer again at the place he had once shown her as his favorite one in the city: Angela's Plaza. The plaza is a space where a man of his architectural sensibilities could feel at peace and be surrounded by beautifully old buildings. Summer tells him that he had been wrong about her and that after she left their relationship she became a believer in ideas of fate, destiny, and love.

Tom, determined to pursue his architecture dreams, leaves the business of card-writing and his steady/safe employment and starts interviewing for an architecture position for which another beautiful woman is applying as well. The woman seems to share much more with Tom than his love of architecture. She loves Angela's Plaza as well and her name, well, her name is Autumn as it makes so much subsequent sense that it would be.

Analysis

In his new book In Pursuit of Elegance, Matthew E. May observes the following: “Experiencing elegance is nearly always profound: it gives us pause, often evoking an ‘of course!’ – usually accompanied by a mild slap to the forehead. It can change our view of things, often forever.” This is the kind of reaction the protagonist Tom Hanson has when he sees Summer Finn. There's something about the aesthetic sensibilities of Summer that he finds immediately congruent with his own. Such congruity begs for tenacious attention which he feels he cannot help but give.

Tom's realization that his likings line up most adequately with Summer's is what catalyzes the birth of his deep interest in her. He sees himself reflected in Summer's idiosyncratic nature and it is precisely this reflection that legitimizes his pursuit. He doesn't simply love Summer because of some capricious whim, he likes her because their natures and inclinations are so close. The more he sees himself reflected in her the more attached he becomes.

Tom is also the key narrator in this story whereas Summer remains, for the most part, the recipient of his narration. This is a story of Tom about Summer not a story of Tom and Summer. In this case, it is Tom who co-opts his view of Summer as the only view about Summer. There is a clear giver/receiver dynamic in this scenario. Tom is higher up professionally albeit he finds himself stifled and unmotivated in a career he never intended to pursue seriously. Summer is only a secretary. We do not know what she studied in college or if she pursues anything else with a passion in life other than obscure papier-mâché art and a bizarre love for Ringo Starr whom she professes to love simply because he is the underdog of Beetle-mania and nobody's favorite. However, even though Summer is the receiver of Tom's attention, she has the power and clear ability to subvert the power hierarchy in the relationship by submitting Tom to her choices and decisions.

Summer's clothing signals a creature of classic style predilections who enjoys with a curbed passion the things very few have the desire and courage to pursue openly. She quotes the (to many) a tad obscure music of the British indie rock band Belle & Sebastian and she loves the music of The Smiths.

At first sight, Tom has found what years of cultural conditioning had told him he would find: his heteronormative holy grail. Tom's beliefs are reminiscent of an era of 20th century Americana which says that after a certain amount of good effort has been made, good things are bound to fall into place. Tom went to college, got a degree in a respectable field, by being as he says, “perfectly adequate,” and upon graduation he failed, as many do, when it comes to finding employment in his area of expertise. Instead, he accepts employment from a greeting card company.

Tom's life is not unlike that of many other young professionals who, after years of college instruction and unsubstantiated and unconcretized hope, find themselves proving the old, conventional adages wrong. Hard work and conscientious discipline are not all one needs to succeed. In an ailing economy which, at best, is characterized by caprice and unbridled greed, people like Tom find themselves having to compromise and accept what little the brittle economy has to offer: a seemingly inconsequential job with benefits, a steady monthly salary, and a retirement plan. This is, after all, an old family business which values its workers. Granted, the card-writing business in which he worked is, what he terms, “lies”, but that is irrelevant in the presence of overall economic uncertainty. Hence, it makes good sense that Tom, having been unsuccessful in the realm of his professional life would at least dare to dream and hold on to the conventional practices of love and romance that his culture had taught him since prepubescence.

One of the cultural references Tom reacted to the most was the Benjamin story in Mike Nichols' 60's hit, The Graduate. In that story, the character of Benjamin gets the right girl at the end and Mrs. Robinson, the right girl's mother is put in her place for daring to pursue, no, allure and seduce a much younger man, a new college graduate full of future corporate promise who can only deserve to be with someone like Mrs. Robinson's daughter, whose loins are ripe for the picking and whose wifely presence is all young Benjamin needs to find the right extrinsic motivation to enter the business world of adult men and succeed.

Screenwriters Weber and Neustadter have tapped into some relevant and yet rather new anxieties with the Tom/Summer story. They, the storytellers, and we, the consumers of their product, have only one thing to thank for their art: an ailing, fragmented economy which is struggling to hold on to its not-so-past exuberance and hope.

Images seem to do the work more effectively than language in this film. Webb's camera choices tell the story of love between a couple about to encounter dysfunction in a Mulholand Drive-esque style reminiscent of the kind of Los Angeles David Lynch is usually capable of grasping and portraying. The Los Angeles that Webb so grippingly captures is not the kind we so often get offered from more mainstream Hollywood machines. Webb's city is the city of old buildings with charm and character, the city of minimalism, where people prefer small things, they like owning a little and they believe in exhibiting the kind of minimalism they are fed by the art of their choice. This is a city where people are seen on the streets, they frequent little, adorable Mom & Pop's establishments and then stop at old-school record stores, which are miraculously still in business even after a post-2008 Wall Street debacle. The city of Los Angeles presents an alternative world, a world alternative to what we know. A world which is grappling with the newly found borders and boundaries, a world in which recycling and minimalism dictate the actions and modus vivendi of most.

Both Tom and Summer share an interest in The Smiths and Tom almost looks like a young, vegetarian, lanky Morrissey. If I did not know any differently, I would have thought the story took place in London, the London of the 60's which is a references we get from Tom himself who annoyingly observes that he wishes the girls of modernity dressed more like the girls of the early 60's, the time of BritPop and Mike Nichols' The Graduate as opposed to the big glasses, huge purses with little dogs in them and ridiculous outfits.

While the big sun glasses and big dog-holding bags would have been sustainable in a pre-Obama age, the current modus operandi is different. It is of a Summer kind, the kind which is seemingly car-less, small apartment-living, vintage dress-wearing, and indie thing-supporting. It is conscious of resources and large stuff. It is minimalistic.

Webb's references in this film are specific yet easily decodable. The visible story line is a story told too often and quite well already. It is the kind of story that our collective pool of narratives can support most appropriately and of which it contains many references. This is the story of two people who find out they are interested in each other by virtue of their mutual narcissism. They see each other in the other, ergo, they fall in love. However, as the omniscient narrator tells us this is not a love story, this is a story about love.

One of the specific punk rock references made in this film is that of Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious. The story of Sid and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen is portrayed as a kind of analogy to the Tom/Summer relationship. By way of some background, the Sid and Nancy story is captured in the 1986 Alex Cox film titled Sid and Nancy: Love Kills. Sid Vicious, a heavy heroin user and boyfriend of Nancy Spungen wakes up one day to find out that, while high on heroin, had stabbed Nancy to death. This is a topically unique reference as it does presuppose an understanding of not only the music world, i.e., who the Sex Pistols were and what kinds of concrete contributions they made to rock music as well as the equally fecund rock 'n roll social scene with its sea of heavy partying and self-mythologizing characters.

When Summer informs Tom that they had been fighting too much and that it was time for them to end their sort-of relationship, she suggests that they were turning into a Sid and Nancy. Quiet and usually melancholy Tom takes issue with such a diagnosis and resists it by saying he is hardly a Sid character. Summer intervenes by way of clarifying her initial statement adding that she is the one who is Sid thus turning quiet, melancholy Tom into a Nancy.

However, the storytellers are not simply recounting a story about love gone wrong. In a beautifully elegant array of implicit and explicit references they attempt to tell us just why the relationship between Tom Hanson and Summer Finn could not work in their immediate setting. Just like the economy needs to find new ways to re-imagine and re-define its current boundaries and look, love stories and stories of human commitment need to do the same.

Tom's artistic sensibilities are specifically in tune with the new Zeitgeist. He seems to be aware of a continuously shrinking economy. He understands that while he has formally been trained in architecture he will not necessarily find employment in the field as the economy cannot sustain the talent the universities have been supporting and producing for decades. So, for the sake of surviving, Tom does what many like Tom have done before: he accepts employment in a different field so that he can continue to live.

Yet, none of the banality of quotidianity is clearly visible in this story. Tom is a minimalist at best. He wears much of the same, as a matter of fact he is seen wearing the same pain or Puma shoes during the five-hundred-day 'Summer' span which is well over a year and 4 months. The same Ben Sherman dress shirt is something he sports with both suits and khakis. He portrays a kind of minimalism that's aesthetically pleasing yet somehow simultaneously content-rich. His look seems to suggest that a person does not need too much variety and a vast amount of stuff to look good. Who knew that minimalism could be satisfying?

Tom's apartment has an old-school charm to it. It looks like it was transplanted into the LA scene straight out of a London flat building circa 1960. Tom is seen riding the bus in the city where one tends to drive and a street bicycle serves as a furniture item almost as much as the couch right next to it. Tom walks on the street of Los Angeles as well and the last time we saw so much street-walking in LA was during a Steve Martin-produced Shopgirl (2005). The Los Angeles we as viewers experience is not the kind we are fed on a regular basis by typical Hollywood. Los Angeles is portrayed as a city of dreamers, a city which has the kind of structure and net to withhold and support the dreams of dreamers. It is the city of old building, early 20th century architecture and small businesses.

The world director Marc Webb and screenwriters Weber and Neustadter depict is the new global world, a world in which many cultures are seen as peacefully co-exiting while they shop together for urban furniture at Sweden's own Ikea in downtown Los Angeles. Incidentally, the extras Webb picks, such as the Chinese family featured in the Ikea bathroom scene is a rather West-informed Chinese family, a blend or rather a depiction of the cultural state of affairs in the new world. This is a world of differences, a world in which Tom can listen to The Smiths while he rides the elusive bus (yes, they do exist in LA) to work.

The omniscient voice of the storytellers interjects pieces of wisdom quite often in this story. He tells us explicitly that this is not just a story about love. We understand that this is a story about life in a fragmented world where the largeness and greatness of things past is already gone and all that is left is a trace of previous glories. What is glorified is not the LA of the 2000's but rather the LA of beautiful buildings echoing from the 1920's and a time untouched by rapid economic development. It is the LA of pre-modernism, the LA of possibilities, the LA of smaller spaces where intimacy can be conceived and sustained. This is the kind of city that has given up its previously complex ways of living. This is a city that is very much interested in simplicity and quieter ways of being. This seems to be the city that's accepted simpler ways of living because as Matthew E. May observes in his recent In Pursuit of Elegance: “... we need ... to consistently replace value-destroying complexity with value-creating simplicity. Because we need to know how to make room for more of what matters by eliminating what doesn’t.”

I wonder why it is so difficult for so many directors to capture the unique architecture of Los Angeles on the big screen. Usually, Los Angeles is portrayed as a silicon center of beautiful, primarily form-conscious people who clutch their over-priced Birkins and Pradas while their shiny blonde hair soaks up the special California sun.

One of the fundamental reasons why (500) Days of Summer seems to strike a chord with different audiences across the cultural spectrum is because it has captured the oldest story of all in a kind of new setting and world that most of us, regardless of background and experience, can ‘get’ and decode. The story works because it is imaginable. It works because it resides in a setting that most of us find believable and relatable. The film manages to tell the oldest story of our mythology in a new, minimalism-informed, and relatable way. And therein lies its gold.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per google images

Great Piece on Ben Franklin and Creativity

I was just informed of this. A most delightful piece to read.
Ben Franklin, one of my heroes.

View/read it here.

And I love his "to-do" list.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Assorted Links

From today's reading:

1) What Generation Z will be like at work. Penelope Trunks explains. "...if you think Gen Y is obnoxious about being better at processing information than the older people, think how Gen Y will feel when the next generation tells them their IQ is much higher. And they’re right. Gen Y will be getting on the Adderall bandwagon to stay competitive the way Baby Boomers today get on Facebook."

2) God and university majors. "Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity -- measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences."

3) Pastrami meets patty in Salt Lake City.

4) David Brooks on posterity. Brooks starts the piece by referring to one of my favorite bloggers, economist Tyler Cowan. A bit says: "But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives."
Read more here.

5) Fellow Graduates, Before We Greet The Future, a Word From My Sponsor.

6) For those of you going to Lollapalooza in August here is the schedule.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

School Rankings and Pay Scale

An interesting study on top salary potential by type of school.
Interesting for me to see that the place from which I received my Master's degree ranks higher than my PhD alma mater.

To see the full list, go here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Sarah Barracuda Leaves Alaska for the Big Time

When John McCain announced last August in Ohio that Sarah Palin would be his running mate for '08, I remember thinking, 'Wow. The cameras love her.'
I still maintain that the reason why Palin gets so much media attention is largely due to her aesthetics and how it is captured and translated via the lens. And yet she keeps bashing the media for being unfair to her not seemingly realizing that her refusal to engage them (the media) in a substantial way might perhaps be the main reason for the occasional, ok, not-so-occasional ridicule.

While Palin is seriously uninformed about a lot of issues, she oozes a kind of stamina and tenacity that is rare to see. Now that she's announced that she is resigning as Alaska's governor, she's signaled her actual interest in entering national politics. Vanity Fair has a gripping peace on her. A paragraph of note says:

"In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”

Read it all here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

"Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive" David Brooks

I'm not sure I agree with David Brook's recent NY Times piece, but the following words did ring some measure of truth to me.


However, I'm not so sure why it is that the CEO's claim such epithets as unidimensional and so forth.
Being humble, diffident, etc., doesn't necessarily preclude excitement now, does it?

"The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around.

For this reason, people in the literary, academic and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success. That’s because the virtues that writers tend to admire — those involving self-expression and self-exploration — are not the ones that lead to corporate excellence."

Read more here.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

Embrace the Inner "Music Freak"

Yesterday I was listening to Bob Dylan's track "I Want You" [see video below] from the album Blonde on Blonde, and I found myself struggling over the kinds of contradictory thoughts I was having. "I Want You" has strong, serious lyrics. The melody is inspired.
However, Bob Dylan sings it.
Or at least, he's trying to.
And I know that therein lies his idiosyncratic style. He's no Pavarotti, he never pretended to sing conventionally, and I'm grateful for that.
Here are some of the thoughts I had with nigh perturbing synchronicity. 'Ha. He sounds bad but it's the kind of bad I dig.'
I suppose, I do say 'dig' for 'like' when I'm thinking. My vernacular is truly authentic in my mind, apparently. I suppose it's because I keep it on a leash quite often.

The thoughts continue.
'Hmm, I like the guitar here.' 'Strong lyrics.' 'Ha, ouch, this is bad.' When Dylan says: "The cracked bells and washed-out horns/Blow into my face with scorn,/But its not that way,/I wasn't born to lose you./I want you, I want you," you're bound to pay attention. This, in my mind, is solid poetry. But then he sings it, you know, in that sort-of-talking-sort-of-reciting sort of way, which, I know, is his shtick.
And what a shtick.
It's what makes him Dylan, after all.
So, the mixed reactions contain much seriousness, respect for the art form you're experiencing, and, well, humor, too.

I mention this to make a point about music and how I view it. To me, music is a kind of umbrella that has room for an array of reactions that reside in the cognitive and the emotional at the same time.
And it's in its comprehensive policy wherein its significance lies.
Music is so big that it consumes the totality of my attention.
In that regard, it eclipses everything and everybody else. Bar none. I've come to accept this as a character trait, actually. I know what my limits are and I most surely know how to frame everything else around it.

Granted, many people like music. Humans, for the most part, respond to it instinctually. Some, however, love it with another degree of intensity.
Music-loving is not for the faint of heart.

I was scolded (I'm told in retrospect) a number of times a while back for giving all of my attention to music when engaged in some form of conversation with the other one. The thing is, I've never been able to ignore music. If I was contractually bound to music, I'd never succumb to any other visual temptations, if you catch my drift.
I always go back to this awfully long car ride I once experienced and the other person telling me that every time music is in the background, I leave the premisses. I'm in a different realm. 'You're elsewhere whenever there's music around.' said the other party with a good dose of disappointment. I couldn't understand why my unequivocal dedication to music was taken so personally.
I've loved music since birth and if I'll be asked to make a choice, well, I've loved music since birth.
At the end of the track I said, 'I'm sorry, what was that?'

Music, in other words, is never inconsequential to me.
It's not inconsequential in my personal life and it, most certainly, isn't inconsequential in my professional life. Music accompanies all I do and it's, as I often say to many, my mode of journaling my quotidian experience.

In terms of philosophy, I always reference Nietzsche's discussion of the superiority of the 'language' of music in his Birth of Tragedy. The moral of that story is that the blind, dying music-loving Socrates does, after all, privilege music above all.
And I concur.

I read a good bit on the Rolling Stone magazine yesterday. When asked about his new Web-only show about music, Brian Williams, the news anchor of NBC's Nightly News, had this to say:

"I'm just like everybody else. I love music. If you ask my wife and kids, they don't necessarily know the guy they see for a half-hour on the nightly news. They know me as a music freak."

Openly embracing one's music-freak is key to acceptance, I find.
Yes, I am a practicing music freak.

 Subscribe to HetPer

 Subscribe to Gendering the Media Podcast

graph per www.britishcouncil.org