Suicide, fear and loneliness – a night with Hemingway

On October 27, ironically my mother’s birthday, I went to see the Nick Adams Stories with an all-star cast at the SF Symphony’s Davies Hall: Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Casey Affleck, Bruce Willis, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Robin Wright Penn, Rita Wilson (maybe that’s half a star), Joachim Phoenix, Danny Devito, Billy Crystal and Jack Nicholson playing old Papa himself. All were performing in a play written by a friend of Hemingway’s – A.E. Hotchner, for a benefit for Paul Newman’s charity. The money raised went to support the Painted Turtle – the West coast version of the Hole in the Wall Gang in Connecticut; both provide support and a place to find friendship for children living with diseases and life-long disabilities.

In the wake of Paul Newman’s death, the performances seemed to carry an additional weight. The actors read from script books, but occasionally didn’t need them at all. The symphony sometimes drowned out their voices, which was a shame, and generally detracted from the performances instead of adding the emotional depth I think that they were meant to offer. Overall, a good night with some stellar performances and some so-so acting.

I also wasn’t sure that I left with the charitable feelings that the night meant to protract from me. As I sat in the dark, watching the children led onto the stage at the end of the play, listening to Bonnie Raitt singing “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”, I felt manipulated. And I wondered if pity was really the motivator of all charity, when it should be something else. I thought about Leslie Butt’s critique of the “suffering stranger” as a rhetorical device and humanitarianism as culturally constructed. Yet, I still paid my $40 and felt good about it, even if it only pays for one week out of 52 and doesn’t fix any of the structural reasons that these children need help in the first place.

What I did leave the event with, however, were some overall thoughts on Hemingway, writing and death. Basically, I rediscovered what it means to be human. I had forgotten how powerful Hemingway’s simple prose could be. No fancy tricks, no turning books upside down, no footnotes, no clever use of punctuation – just the bare bones human experience to turn around in your fingers like a dollar-coin, pondering what you can do with it.

Hemingway’s character, Nick Adams, is the complete symbol of America. He’s selfish, ego-centric, searching, and alone. He claims near the beginning of the play that he doesn’t love anyone at all. Sometimes, he seems incapable of feeling anything at all. He’s the center spoke in the wheel of activity around him; he records, observes, participates in an off-handed way, but never seems quite fully present. He’s young and brash and naive and foolish and brave all at once.

Nick Adams, for all purposes, is Hemingway – not entirely a fictional character. I’m writing a memoir right now, and I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time wondering how to ’structure’ my own life inot discreet, narrateable tales. The Nick Adams Stories gave me a clue.

The play – and the stories – are all about the same things: fear, loneliness and death.

Hemingway seemed almost obsessed with the truth versus social lies, masculinity in the form of violence or aggression (note all the war and bull-fighting stories), femininity and the ways in which women ruin or poison men’s lives (Hemingway hated his controlling mother, whom he blamed for his father’s suicide), and what it meant to be brave or a coward in the face of life – and by extension, death itself.

Hemingway’s stories reveal a man that desires to ‘be somebody’. That desire drives him out of his home in small-town Illinois and around the world, until he finds himself smack in the middle of WWI as an ambulance driver in Italy. Once he’s on the road, however, he discovers that loneliness and fear follow him wherever he travels. Nick Adams tells us that once loneliness and fear start, they never stop.

In the end, Hemingway discovers that he was always running AWAY from something, but never TOWARD anything. What he was running from was his ambivalent relationship to his father, whom Hemingway thought was a coward for killing himself with a shotgun. Hemingway, throughout his life and his stories, tries to face death head on, to be unafraid in the face of it.

I wonder if, just before he pulled the trigger of the shotgun, Hemingway had his last revelation about suicide and death. It’s not exactly cowardice to pull that trigger, and the false bravado that Hemingway tried to master his entire life was not exactly bravery or courage. In the end, Hemingway ran toward death – like his father before him – and who among us can judge him? 

The last line in the play sums everything up for me:

“You cannot carry the wind, the wind carries you.”

As I write my path through my past, I’ll try to keep the wind at my back, instead of bracing myself against it.

Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair Pics vs. Pictures of Underage Models: What’s the diff?

[Is this also a 'sick' or 'sexual' photo? I suppose it's what we make of it. You could see a loving father/daughter or incest. I, personally, see a picture of two beautiful people who happen to be related.]

The backlash against Miley’s pictures in Vanity Fair should have been timed with a stopwatch. The reaction would have been fast, maybe even a world-reactionary record (where the ‘world’ is mostly confined to the United States, natch). The problem? People seem to be outraged that a 15-year-old girl is draped in a sheet, looking all ‘post-coital’.

Um. Yeah.

It is definitely disturbing, but hasn’t anyone been paying attention for the past 30 years or so? Fashion models are often naked, and barely 18. Other models, under 18, are scantily clad ALL THE TIME in fashion ads. But, maybe ‘fashion’ gets a pass. I’ve always been a little suspicious of the barely legal girls, looking dead sexy, trying to sell me a bra, or jeans, or whatever. You rarely see, however, any real backlash against them. Perhaps because they aren’t on the Disney channel, hardly anyone thinks of them as ‘role models’, and none of them are easily recognized except a few big names. And anyway, can you imagine your daughter worshiping Kate Moss as a role model? What would the Kate Moss merchandise look like? A small pile of cocaine, a meth-ed out boyfriend, and a fashionable bag and hat to match?

These photos are beautiful, no matter what you think they mean. Meaning is applied by the viewer. You’d have to ask Leibovitz about the intent. And who knows? Better yet, who cares?

Why is this ad any less disturbing? To some – especially in fashion – it was a direct strike at what the media and marketing/PR companies promote to us as ‘beauty’. This women is naked, but she isn’t half as sexualized as Miley.

How young do you think the girl in the middle of this ad is? Does it matter if she is actually 23, but looks 16? Isn’t it the looking 16 that the advertisers are really after?

Now, I know that most people who have been calling Miley a whore will also think these girls are whores, too. And, because of my own picture above, I’m probably in the same bag. But before we cast stones at Miley, shouldn’t we analyze the culture in which she exists? Shouldn’t we look at what we take to be normal in 2008 and ask some questions? Shouldn’t we ask ourselves some hard truths?

Sex sells. Until it doesn’t, this is just going to be ‘business as usual’. As a feminist, I waffle about my own sexuality, wearing bikinis, and trying to look good all the time. But, then I think, why not? Why can’t a woman be beautiful, celebrate it, and also be savvy or smart about how she uses it? Certainly, women in Rome wouldn’t have blinked at this picture, if they had had pictures back then. And, Greeks and Romans did provide the model for all the freedoms we so passionately support.

Maybe this is just all to do with our Puritan ancestry. We just can’t escape from our own prudery. And the irony is that prudery leads to more underground perversion. The more you make sex into a big deal, the bigger problem you will have. Which is great for the advertisers and anyone selling us anything. It’s a vicious cycle, and I can’t see it disappearing anytime soon.

These are my two cents. But, then again, what do I know? I’m just a cultural anthropologist trying to make sense of how we see China. And that’s a-whole-nother can of worms.

Paris Hilton is boring, and I’m not going to take it anymore. . . .

I used to frequent gossip sites. You know, those nasty, vituperative sites that catalogue absolutely everything that a celebrity, or quasi-celebrity, does, then mocks it? (For those of you who do not frequent, here is a sample.)

Now, I’m no stranger to judgment. It’s my favorite game. Especially when it comes to women.

Except that recently, I’ve realized that being bitter or happy about other people’s successes or failures is probably the stupidest waste of time ever. Basically, it means that I procrastinate – one might say it is a symbol of my larger procrastination problem – and I don’t actually have many successes or failures of my own. Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, and Angelina Jolie are ruining my life.

Or, rather, my obsession with checking out DAILY what is going on with THEIR lives is ruining MY life.

So, no more.

I am throwing out my trashy magazines (you know who you are), and I am not going to be clicking on any gossip sites from now on. Because what do I really care if Angelina is pregnant or no? Is my own life so boring that these people seem more interesting?

Hell, I have friends more messed up and interesting than these people. Maybe we should start blogging about real people, since their lives are completely more complicated, intense and fascinating than “fake” lives being lived out in NYC or LA.

Plus, it might make us all feel better about ourselves. We’ve lost all touch with what ‘reality’ is, with all of these psuedo ‘reality’ shows. I, for one, live in reality and there are no TV camera crews here.

Now, I’m not going to stop watching Rock of Love II, because that’s just good TV. But everything else? Going.

I’ll have to find another way to procrastinate not living my own life or doing my own work. And I’ll have to stop fantasizing that if I were (pick one or any that apply for yourself), rich, skinny, beautiful, had a hot boyfriend, traveled to Bali or Hawaii whenever I wanted – that i would be happier.

Um, have you seen how “happy” these people are?

Why Women Love to Drool Over Famous Men

Let’s face it – women love, love, love famous men. Primarily rock stars and movie actors, but no one famous is entirely off the hormonal radar. Sports stars, obviously, but also the occasional news anchor, sexy author (think Hemingway, not Dan Brown), painter, politician, or prince.

Why?

This is an easy one – because first of all, most of them are also hot, hot, hot – but secondly, we don’t know them and we probably never will. They are, in the end, safe repositories of all our hopes and dreams about men. The men we meet are invariably not rock-star good-looking or worldly. They leave their towels on the bathroom floor and check out other women at dinner. We know that 75% of them will probably cheat on us at least once in our lifetimes, and with modern society coupled with internet access, that number probably goes up in both directions.

The real trouble is that we modern, relatively youngish, women were all raised in a cyclone of media hype. There were the Brat Pack – I still drool over Rob Lowe, admittedly, skanky video tape aside, a myriad of teen stars – my friend still has fantasies about Michael J. Fox a mere 20 years later, a plethora of hot pop/rock stars to choose from – my preference was, of course, for John Taylor of Duran Duran. (I still maintain that he was one of the hottest men to walk the planet, again, 20 years on.)

The point is, however, that no one was immune to this kind of media influx. It inevitably colored how we saw the world, including ourselves. Along with our obsession about the perfect man we’ll never know is our own, long history with body image problems. I don’t know a single women who doesn’t hate a part of her own damn body. For me, it’s my colossally sized ass, but for other women it’s the thighs, the tummy, the floppy arms, the weird-looking feet. And let’s not get started on how we feel about our faces, compared to other faces. I grew up thinking I simply had to look as good as people like Cindy Crawford and Christie Brinkley. If that’s not an impossibility, then I don’t know what is. Still, I buy the makeup and the new shirt, that I just KNOW will make me look cute. Just in case I run into Orlando Bloom on the street, I need to look my best.

I also have never met a woman that didn’t secretly wish her husband was someone else. Brad Pitt, Clive Owen, said John Taylor, Johnny Depp, Sean Connery (the younger version), etc., etc., etc. This, coupled with the stupid “happily ever after” tales, have infected our consciousness and mixed into an indefinable and relentless sense of slight dissatisfaction with real life.

Which is why famous men are so great. You don’t know them so you don’t have to deal with their problems. For instance, John Taylor, for many of the years I obsessed over him, was a cocaine addict and completely out of control. Now, would I have really felt he was not only beautiful and intelligent, funny and witty, great in bed and a perfect mate if I had really ever been with him? Probably not. I would have quickly discovered that this man, like all other human beings, had issues that made it prickly to impossible to be with him in a long-term romantic relationship. But I still like waxing on about the dream of him from time to time.

So let us drool over our respective idols, men, and try to understand that it doesn’t mean we love you any less. It just means that we, too, like to get our hearts and nether regions racing about other partners from time to time. And unlike you, we choose people that it’s practically impossible to find ourselves in bed with, so go figure.