spleen

notes on men and action movies

The movie begins with a man of strong character, possibly even a man of good humor, driving a car or preparing to jump out of a plane. If he's a family man, he's at home doing something decidedly manly - chopping wood, or fixing the roof. If he's a rugged professional, he's off at work in the forest or on an oil rig. This man is the hero of our story, and for the first third of the film, we'll come to understand a bit about his haunted past, his loves and losses, and why he's so relentless in the pursuit of his ideal world.

Meanwhile, in a warehouse or underground facility - maybe in space, if it's that kind of movie, or in a government office somewhere - there's a sullen and slightly insane man who's managing his henchmen, or gathering henchmen, or just gathering resources to go it alone. This man either has a master plan, or is comfortably situated in some nefarious enterprise. He is the villain of this story. The movie will go on to reveal, point by point, some elaborate plot or failing criminal scheme, but that's not the story's point - it's the juxtaposition of these two men that drives it forward and keeps us in our seats, eyes darting at every gunshot and explosion, every thrown fist.

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Witness

On foot and absorbing the day, swimming in the fanged heat of just another summer. For every person you pass, say to yourself, we could have been lovers. For every child you see, say, that could be my child. Wander and wander into other lives, not between worlds but in this one, solidly, with shadow and weight.

First, there are blocks of pawn shops, and men young and old lingering on street corners with nothing to do. Some are waiting for buses, but most of them are just waiting. Their heads are full of hip hop, jazz, elevator pop songs, anxious calculations for electric bills, mortgages, foodstamp lines and welfare lines. You think of a city in California, where once you walked two miles from a bread line to your dive apartment with fifty pounds of beans and rice. Remember the ache in your shoulders as you carried your private and shameful world?

Wander on: a neighborhood where everyone is tasteful and owns a duvet, where the terms "artist" and "independently wealthy" often go together, and the furniture of sidewalk cafes is all immaculate wicker and wood. A woman here will say hello to you, and she'll make you think of that woman in Baltimore, who stopped to ask if you were all right because you were sitting alone at the grave of a poet in a bad part of the city. You wonder if there are only so many types of people, repeating and repeating through all cities and all walks of life, but you only need to talk to one to realize that each bears a unique payload of wonders.

The neighborhood of Russian Jews and its amazing odor of fresh bread, like being in Crown Heights again. The neighborhood of dive bars and Asian groceries that makes you think of Portland. Farther and farther into the city's belly, where the ancient markers of the Revolution lay, where the underground railroad kept its many stations. A house with a band practicing, loud and messy, and you can almost feel the years peel away from you, your hair past your shoulders, a beer in your hand, your friends not yet heavy and lovely with children. A man with boots just like the ones you owned, back in the day. A pair of hips, a face that could be her face. They pass you and walk down into history, into relics and archives, commending themselves with each step to historians and librarians who fold them into the dream we call the Republic.

Maybe you'll see them again, somewhere in the footnotes and annotations that might be your legacy. Maybe history is like an airport or a train station, everyone gathered together and waiting to journey into whatever corner of the great record belongs to them. In this place, there is no time; everyone is there, and waiting to shake your hand. Who are you? they'll ask. To each of them, say: remember that news article about the murders, or the great disaster, or the wonderful forgotten thing? I'm the one they quoted. I'm the witness, the anonymous source, the bystander's voice without a name. Dear traveler, dear reader, remember me.

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and now …

Leaving Provincetown soon. For the holidays, that is.

and I'm about to do something that you might hate. I'm working on poems about the Fantastic Four. There's a reason, a motive, a purpose. You must find the poetry in our heroes, and you must understand that the kernel of American heroes is identical to the kernel of American villains. Our greatest obstacle is the fact that what we love is also what we hate.

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the youth of a nation

Whenever I become depressed by our national arrogance, I remember how young and foolish we are. Imagine this:

1) Someone is born in the United States in 1776. They live to be 80, which means they die in 1856. They see the founding of the country, Washington and Jefferson, the Great Compromise, the rise of cities and the like.

2) Meanwhile, in 1850, person #1's great-grandchild is born. This person will also live to be 80 and will die in 1930. They see the Civil War, Reconstruction, the depression of the 1890s, the turn of the century and the Great War.

3) In 1925, person #2's great-grandchild is born. This person will (yes, that's right) live to be 80. That means they will die this year.

It's theoretically possible, however unlikely, that there are people alive right now whose elders told them stories about Thomas Jefferson, and that those elders were in turn told the same stories by people who actually saw Jefferson.

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generation x

And one more thing. "Generation X" is a misnomer. Let's define the term as "anyone who spent their teen years in the 1980s," which seems like a fair definition to me, because a whole hell of a lot changed after 1989 (the end of the Cold War, the weird "Gulf War" armchair view of combat, the introduction of the internet, etc). But when we say "Generation X," we're almost certainly not thinking of people who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, or Spanish-speaking children of migrant workers, or kids who grew up in Compton and became sanitation workers. Those people may have had their teen years in the 80s, but the term doesn't apply to them; it applies to middle class, technologically privileged, mostly white kids growing up primarily in suburbia. These kids had access to cable television (those of us who didn't had almost no exposure to MTV), could afford to purchase music, and watched The Cosby Show and saw parallels (however distant) to their own lives. "Generation X" isn't a generation at all; it's a select group of people who had the privilege to subscribe to a set of cultural ideas.

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