Some people prefer to defile the essence of Christmas through a traditional vomit-spray of lighting, as in the below. Those who tend toward the latest greatest in tiny-bulbed Christmas wattage seem to have cottoned onto a fire sale for blue, green and red peppered lighting strings this year at Home Depot. The blue dominates on the eves, fences and trees of people so compelled to up the ante on their nighttime festive displays: Or, you can choose to embrace the limits of your budget and ladder, and celebrate in a low-key, grass-rootsy kind of way. Here, the owners of this S. Milwaukee Street property have comprehensively captured the contours of the trunks of two fruit trees, and have decried the option to attempt illumination of the branches as not worth their trouble. In the process, I wonder if they haven't subverted our very expectations of Christmas lighting. In lighting the branches, the heights of a tree's reach, are we not subscribing to an elitist selectory that values only the "high" the "lofty"? Below, the reverse is celebrated: a lack of funds, a lack of cord, a lack of time, generally, or will to navigate the disagreeable branches of a mid-sized tree. Instead, we are left with a definitive statement about man's vantage on salvation. "Hurry up and decorate thy trees before Boardwalk Empire comes back on." Seems to be the canticle of the honest residents of Cory-Merrill neighborhood.
Don't call me Jeremy, Mom, I call myself "Jem." I had it on my nametag in the bookstore back when I dished rare ed comics and spun vinyl to the plebs "Anarchist bookstores have opening hours too," is what my boss said.
It's an anarchist bookstore, why'd it matter if I'm late? The goths aren't going nowhere, their kohl pencil can wait sleeping in was just civil disobedience, a disguised rise against but Reiner, slave of "business hours," didn't get what it meant.
Why was I sleeping? You want to ask. Um, have you ever fallen asleep after drinking a cask? The white zin was white magic as we drank in our pile my flannelette shirt rubbed against hers to beguile
It was totally worth skipping my shift our skinny naked bodies set all adrift in all-natural fibres, my spring awakening then getting high again after some more brownie baking
What am I doing now I'm unemployed? Ma, money enchains us all, it's a government ploy I'm living the organic life my mother intended mother nature, that is, sorry if I upended
your predictable commitment to the status quo Mom, I made my own jam, look how far I will go! I'm thinking of starting a business around ginger ginger purses and shoes - say my landlord's a real stinger
could you maybe help me with my artist loft rent? I had some rupees but on ginger they're spent I got fired from my job at the anarchist bookstore ... when a hipster angel stole my heart, she broke anarchist law.
Following, is the "overture," if you will, for the as-yet incomplete collaborative musical set to capture the zeitgeist; today's disillusioned, raggy-haired youth, inspired by the winter 2010 Urban Outfitters catalogue. Penned during Thanksgiving dinner by the ever-talented Patty Ho and myself is the first musical number, which still lacks music. Please enjoy the open-source, non-copyright, non-trademarked "Song of Dahren," tentatively subtitled "I want my tree house back (I don't wanna grow up)." Dahren is pictured lower center.
Dahren's Song
I used to turn tables, now I rock farm to table. My decks used to spin hardcore, now I hand-sand my hardwood floors, and smoke weed on my Huron deck - did I mention my cousin's friend is friends with Blind Pilot?
I went out looking for truffles, but freeganism found me dumpster diving in second-hand Dickies and my mum's paisley blouse, in the middle of a forest, by a tall oak tree, with a cast of other spirits in our flannel Urban tees, in Portland.
[Chorus] The great highs I once sought were just lows of false choices made in a community of myself.
I just layer on foraged clothes, like the fads that I seek, rock my mossy beard, slackline through mid-adulthood I've got a t-shirt with Hemingway on it, and might read him one day I hear he's concise, knows all about sea shells - that's neat, too.
I want my tree house back, I want to build a ladder to tomorrow a tomorrow with neat bands and soy dandelion lattes and an honest humanity to see in me their skinny-jeansed reflection animals of this earth in Her boughs playing Scrabble.
The great highs I once sought were just lows of false choices made in a community of myself. Great highs I sought just lows of false choices a community of myself [to fade]
The semi-annual haircut has taken place, and in spite of having the same hairdresser, the same source material, and the same time-slot (allowing for possible changes in lighting, crowdedness and din of salon), the end result was underwhelming.
Although I presented the below hair-spiration: I wound up with this:
And while such a go-get-em, power to ovaries haircut might suit someone as high-flying and fond of reinvention as Gwyneth, it does not suit my retiring, non-ground-breaking personality. Gywneth's "Sliding Doors" haircut is a fashion-leap made only by women at the peak of confidence; usually post-nuptials, or post-breakup, and fanned by hyperbolic girlfriends. It also reminds me of the insta-glam "Us Weekly"/"New Idea" look Olympic swimmers often wind up with after they win a medal and become famous. It's a look I patriotically term the angry echidna.
Much like Liesel Jones, I just go out there every day to do the best I can, and make my mum proud. And really, my life is quite normal.
But it did get me thinking about the futility of cutting hair, as alluded to by Tom Stoppard in his incomparable "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead." The haircut, anticipated months in advance, is the venerate "Godot" we are all waiting for; the haircut that will right wrong relationships, communicate a more positive you to the world, and absolve genetic/spot problems with the chin and jaw area (i.e. definition, lack thereof). The haircut allows an individual the chance to transcend their normal Olympic lives, and posit briefly the idea of "denying death" through the immortality a great cut bestows upon its wearer (see Ernest Becker, Jennifer Aniston).
However, things go awry quickly, having reached the salon. First, one is forced to confront their material self in a full-length mirror, while seated thighs first toward it, much like Atreyu must confront his true self in the Magic Mirror Gate on the way to the Southern Oracle.
Having faced and conquered small foreheads and pink complexions, you may then continue on to the "color" portion of the appointment. This is a crap shoot, as your head is covered in foil for the duration, and then you are whisked away from the Mirror to a hot rocket hat while the dye "develops." Then comes the creepy head massage. Then the haircut. At this point, even if you are aware that a hairdresser is taking liberties with the chopping of hair, there is nothing that you can do, no sound you can utter to undo a cut too short. Once it is happening, you have boarded the flight to Heathrow, and there is no letting you off until you hit the faux-Pommy accent and start dating John Hannah.
At this point, all that is left for you to do is acquiesce the ghastly charge for this service, and carry your Kate Gosselin Halloween wig do out into the world with the confidence of a newly married pair of ovaries.
Well, the deed is done! I have severed the corporate umbilical cord that has bridged my immature career-self with the nutrients of COBRA, Blue Cross, a payslip and Post-it supply these past two years. In fact, it turns out I had the poor taste to actually quit on the second anniversary of my joining the firm, as a colleague pointed out (we have not yet figured out why this monument to my longevity was in her Outlook calendar). So, like a tedious and poorly cast Broadway show, I am moving into the final month, toward the final mash of sundry "reprise"-es, and a celebration of the composite memories of my historic time in this cubicle by the other cube-mates pissed that I will likely leave them with more work. I am buoyed my decision to remain frank and honest in my resignation letter, an epistle that began thus:
I regret that December 17 will be my last day at FMI. I have recently made the decision with my husband to take a great, unbidden leap into the unknown; to move to New York City and pursue work in the world of the creative, unorthodox and eccentric, or to answer phones and bus tables - whichever opportunity comes knocking first.
I am tremendously fond of the phrase "gone to seed," used in the context of Joaquin Phoenix-style degeneration (not sure who used the phrase first on Joaquin, but it pops up in half the reviews of I'm Still Here). It is a remarkably apt phrase for any number of conditions: I'm still in pajamas, I've gone to seed; where did that beard come from? He's gone to seed; What a great camping trip that was, we've all gone to seed; Did Aunty Poppy just mistake me for the late Peter Sellers? She's gone to seed. The photo above was taken in our backyard, out by the "lettuce patch" that had provided us, for a time, with boutique heads of butter lettuce. Today, as you can see, the lettuce has gone rogue, spiraling up into a mutant cone of dis-cultivation and frilling its seedy ends in the breeze, like a drug-sodden Hollywood star.
Denverites prize their mountainouse backdrop just as the serious Urban Outfitter shopper prizes a vinyl-coated wall mural. An epic wall piece will spruce up the most forlorn piles of scatty mail, old banana skins and discarded underwear; similarly, Denver's Front Range provides a welcome distraction from the unceasing mattress warehouses, evangelical churches and DMVs that huddle across Denver's landscape.
I love the brief view I have of Mt. Evans on my morning commute (long ed.) while crossing I-25. It is pleasing to find myself out in the wind, puffing life into my pillow-imprinted face, while the poor souls below fiddle inside their SUVs with disagreeable coffee (espresso so disagreeable they invented the Americana - who waters down good coffee?) and the haranguing of drive-time radio and traffic.
To my earlier point, though, about Denver's no-frills infrastructure, the serene bike loop I pedal on early mornings needles its way through a tight corridor of greenery along the Platte, skirting the back-end of industrial factories, warehouses and construction sites. Above, the raw beauty of the Platte is offset by high retaining walls and thick traffic on the arterial routes. To me, it is richly evocative of the scungy Venice Beach canals, and it is difficult, blinded by sunrise, to tell if the river is concealing bodies, plague, dead fish, or merely a spot of trash or vandalism. I do get a nice view of the Denver skyline on a little ways though (close in, the Capitol can be seen), replete with the spires of numerous abandoned power lines and old billboards.
Above, a mysterious purveyor of gases trades nearby the perennially on-sale Cal Spas hot tub outlet ("New! Salt water hot tubs"). The gas shop has a flashing display that alternates between the current temperature, time and "We sell nitrogen." Presumably the flashing call-sign was designed to pull cars off I-25 in pursuit of bargain liquid nitrogen at wholesale prices. To date, though, I have never seen more than a single truck parked outside the establishment, and have reached the conclusion that, like an old missile silo, the bottles of pressurized gas have been left to integrate with the landscape.
I like the idea that factories have been assembled purely on a whim by any spare bits and pieces nearby at the time. I imagine that were you ever to take one apart, no one would ever figure out how the pieces all go together again. This example, located in close quarters of Mile High Stadium, appears to have been constructed from old takeaway chopsticks, broken-down tractors and IKEA filing cabinet kits.
And my favorite, a view I title: "Six Flags Refinery at Dawn."
I have invented a new punctuation mark, and I am writing to ask you to consider introducing its usage into the American Punctuation Lexicon.
I would also like to check up on the status of the interrobang (also known as the "quesclamation mark"). You may not remember it, but it was the combination exclamation point/question mark invented by ad executive Martin Spekter to help us with such sentences as "WHAT did you just say to me?!" and "Lindsay Lohan's suing WHO?! Over WHAT?!"
I have thusly been forced to meet my creativity of ills head-on, and to examine the paltry, derivative fluff that pads out this blog, like adobe mud layered on adobe mud year after year. A promise to the non-existent readership: Things of which I shall not write again:
1. new punctuation 2. Scott Baio
Each of these has been effectively covered by my peers in Internettia.
Once again the wagon headed west, bound for frontiers unfathomable.
Actually, I have fathomed La Plata Peak, Colorado's fifth highest at 14,336 feet, many times this summer, plotting my triumphant straddling of the kitter litter streusel atop the Sawatch Range. This weekend the window opened up, framed by aspens crisping to tater tot gold beneath a lacquered blue sky.
An agreeable dusting of snow from earlier in the week informed out quest as far more rugged and extreme than was the reality. Much like blonde highlights, a few streaks of white laid into high ravines and crags will do an excellent job of highlighting the "dimensionality" (in Loreal parlance) of Colorado's majestic mounds. Our campsite, above, was at a secret locale known only to ourselves and four or five other RVs, four other dogs, and a broad selection of granola tent-dwellers - in other words, a few thousand people, tops. It looked over the Twin Lakes southwest of Leadville, and was nestled into the navel hair of Mt. Elbert's lowest approach.
The hike into La Plata Peak does a good job of building to a crescendo of thigh-crushing switchbacks over increasingly unstable rock. Above, we scaled a track that beat its way up to the northwest ridge of La Plata, glancing all the way at the impressive outline of Grizzly Peak (an almost fourteener at 13,988 ft). We passed no one until late in the hike, but could see hikers silhouetted high above the rising sun. Much like Shoeless Joe, they bid us into the upper realms where vegetation and sediment seem to explode open against themselves, looking either to take off or plummet to the bottom of La Plata's central gully.
We were accompanied by three load-free dogs, each of whom possessed an endless thirst that quickly dwindled our royal supplies of water. Note that they were all kept on leash, per forest requirements, and all eagerly yanked the leash forward, bringing their steward into awkward ankle-crunches over the mish-mash of steps, gravel, dirt and boulders.
The terrain got sketchy enough that after 2 1/2 hours of climbing, and enough progress over sketchy scree-fields while thinking "how will we get down?" with the dogs, we reached this friendly balcony and paused for a photo-op. Bringing the dogs up the last few hundred feet of gain was unquestionably a recipe for disaster (Gaston later admitted he had walked through the mental possibility of having to bury one of his dogs on the mountain after a calamitous misstep), so we debated leaving one person behind to mind the three dogs while the other two of us bagged our summit. Leaving one person on a boutique-sized plateau at 13,800 with three dogs for an hour seemed a poor decision, though the pull of summit-bagging was strong as ever. Rather than become "those dickheads" who were suckered into a summit campaign only to become shredded to pieces in an avalanche chute and mentioned briefly in the Denver Post the following Monday (Denver man falls off mountain), we made the prudent decision to invest instead in a couple of great iPhone pics. As the photo above proves, a non-summit bag will often make for a far more impressive souvenir pic than will actually standing on the summit. If you peruse the halls of internet summit-bag photo-ops, you will notice that they all look the same: two people, cold, against a blue screen, with some pebbles under foot. On the other hand, a gnarly summit will advocate the hiker in foreground with low growl of topographic contrast: "Ten contour intervals to go, biatches!"
Here, you will notice my dog taking the wussy dry-foot option for the river-crossing, faithfully following his master. Neither dog nor human is too disappointed at chalking up a summit attempt. Indeed, in the trailhead log, I note "Karen and Irene" of Denver whose destination was "until we get tired :-) " Likewise, my response to such a question is always "Up! Then down." To the mountains!
I'm bypassing the cute anecdote. You want to know what I cooked today? Fucking Anzac biscuits. I only cooked them about 20 minutes too long in a scorching hot oven. Their flavor is nuanced with a delicate dash of ginger and cinnamon, and they have a potent and defiant soot aftertaste.
Unveiled today by PirileePirilee amid much hype, the newest member of the punctuation family is designed to underscore moments warranting both exclamation and a call for clarification - excitement and confusion, absurdity, vexed wonderment. The "quexclamation mark" has been mulled over in the Pirilee studios for a month now; the germ for the production of a more flexible punctuation symbol was an increasing distaste for the visual stamp of a question mark and exclamation point used together (!?) in emails.
While the creator, the illusive J. Self, was perfecting the lines of concurrent enthusiasm and query, Self came across the failed "interrobang" symbol, designed by Martin K. Speckter in 1962 to advance the cause of rhetorical questions in copy.
According to Wikipedia, "The interrobang failed to amount to much more than a fad ... It has not become a standard punctuation mark." What did Speckter lack? In the opinion of this author, a willingness to step outside the bounds of traditional architecture was lacking in Speckter's lopsided attempt to revolutionize punctuation. Speckter may also have brought a new punctuation symbol into a hostile world simply unready for such radical typographical advances. Indeed, little occurred on the typographic timescale between 1962 (was the interrobang doomed by the backlash from the First Annual Swiss & Wielder Hoop and Stick Tournament of the same year?) and the dreaded emoticon plague of the 1990s - an indication that change in the field of punctuation is fought slow and hard won.
Is the quexclamation mark superior to the interrobang? It has several benefits: 1. Symmetrical design. 2. Lends itself to running writing and serifs. 3. Its physical character indicates the tension and excitement of two emotions competing to pull the reader in one or the other direction. Assuredly, the quexclamation mark is highly compatible with any number of fonts. The interrobang, in contrast, remains only in a few, including Microsoft WingDings; a sure sign of its obsolesence.
If you found the cry of the subaltern somewhat underwhelming here , you are not alone. The above graffiti has, however, inspired in me the desire to do an "installment" on a local warehouse wall, wherein I will inscribe placeholder text across the length of the facade: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. And so on. The defiant sprays of pidgin Latin will at once underscore man's inability to adequately communicate, forced as he is to use the imperfect written signifiers of the Roman alphabet as a medium, as well as the shallowness which with his words - now assembled into hopeful phrases - do wash over and by his fellow man, who wonders if "i'm" [sic] should have been capitalized, or if the lack of capitalization was a deliberate and cunning refusal to accommodate "the rules."
This week is remarkable for little other than repeated formatting issues in MS Word, and misbehaving printer settings in Excel. I did, however, attend a Rockies night game down at the old ballpark, like a good, Tornadough-eating, light-beer swilling Yankee.
Of course we did not actually consume any of the $10 food items for sale on premises, despite the agreeable vendorship of rainbow snow-cones and "cheese cups." Instead, we chipped away at the five-pound bag of peanuts our friend had brought (at games' end, his feet were partially buried under the shells, the detritus clambering up his ankles like two anthills).
Balls were hit and caught, missed sometimes, and players went for brief runs between the bases to the delight and admonition of the crowd. The outing provided an opportunity for me to shuffle my thoughts on the sport; one I have long considered as bringing out the most endearing qualities of Americans. Following are the aspects of the sport I find most curious:
1. "The wave." Known in the U.S. simply as "the wave," the wave is referenced internationally as "the Mexican wave," and enjoys high popularity within both the National and American Leagues. For a full-stadium wave to occur, there must exist one seating section intent on little more than standing up, arms raised, multiple times while "woo"ing enthusiastically; much like an old lawn mower, this seating section must crank the starter through the "wave and woo" maneuver many times before it "takes" to the rest of the crowd, and must sacrifice their attention to, and enjoyment of, the game in its pursuit. Their collective hopes then ride the crest around the stadium, invariably heartbroken when it disintegrates around the expensive seating sections with good views of home plate. Members of the greater crowd will acquiesce the approaching wave with a half stand or throw up of the arms almost without thought, they way they might pass ketchup from table to table at a crowded sports bar. Oddly enough, when asked to recap a game they have attended, Americans seldom mention a memorable wave in which they partook.
2. The multimedia distractions peppered throughout the innings. Each stadium has its roll of "boredom alleviating devices" which they will insert between innings to assure the public that progress is being made - no surprise when you consider that 18 half-innings stand between Joe Citizen and his comfy chair at home. Downhearted and distracted, the most apathetic fan has been known to perk up at the sight of the "watch the ball" hat-switch game or the third inning "tractor race." In fact, fans that were catatonic just moments earlier will reanimate in the interval between innings to crow for the purple tractor, or to register their "song choice" (Bon Jovi always wins) via hollering indiscriminately into the ear of the person in front of them. By the time the first ball of the new innings is in, their behind will be firmly rooted in the bucket seat, and roused by little less than a tie-breaking homer.
3. Jumbo-tron moments. Late in the 8th or 9th innings, when all pitchers have failed, and an emergency pitcher is being prepped to "close," fans get most ancy. Before the advent of the jumbo-tron, fans were left to throw pizza at one another, and make period insults: "Your behind is wetter than a liquid lunch." Today, however, win-challenged teams like the Kansas City Royals have succeeded in almost completely distracting fans from the presence of a ball game via an oversized digi-screen of stats, pictures, replays and useless information designed to obscure the location of the score. During the latter stages of a ball game, fans are encouraged to shake their booties or kiss one another or flex their muscles in return for a semi-second of jumbo-tron fame. The palpable excitement seen on their faces as they realize they are on the big screen, part-way into their feature, is priceless: like a good "funniest home video" of a child totaling their tricycle, it can be guaranteed to solicit laughs from the crowd; similarly, the moment is snatched away from the micro-celebrity as quickly as it has been granted. Side note: Coors Stadium utilizes Bob the Builder's (DJ Otzi?) seminal dance hit "Hey baby (I wanna know if you'll be my girl)" - otherwise known as "the song that makes everybody dance like a moron." Other stadiums have also kept their fare to outdated dance or country numbers: "Cotton Eye Joe" gets a good turn at Coors, while Garth Brooks provides the seventh inning stretch distraction at Royals Field.
4. The seventh inning stretch. Not only do fast food vendors walk through the stadium to deliver fatty, synthetic treats to the fan too lazy to walk to the nearest kiosk, but the short duration of each innings encourages even the frugal fan to purchase beer at repeated intervals - many are well neigh sodden by the time the stadium goes "dry." Come the middle of the seventh inning, game organizers cunningly invented the "seventh inning stretch" to combat the extreme resulting atrophy, and ensure the safe departure and vitality of all patrons at games' end. At the behest of the announcer, the entire stadium will lumber forward onto its peanut-shell-littered feet, and bellow out "Take me out to the ball game" - a song only steps above the "Diarrhea" song in terms of sophistication. But the Yanks love it! Almost as much as they love Cracker Jacks. If only all public health policy was as easy as "Stand up! Just this one time! Okay you can sit."
Well, bugger me if life hasn't painted itself again, courtesy of the iPhone and Photoshop. It hardly bears mentioning that the fecund soil of our rental property has given us a bounty of fruit, life's own gift to itself, so vast the tree must almost orgiastically heave and discard its expired pears into the post-coital winds of early fall as part of its daily ritual now. Yes, there is no need for rumination on the famine and feast of our very souls, in "these conflicted times." Sigh, the artist is not needed here.
The Fall catalogue for TopShop has "dropped" at last, and was it worth the wait. Deriving from both the urban tramp aesthetic of recent seasons, and the trend toward looking like a crazy old bag lady, TopShop's Fall line is heavily redolent of game hunting, or olde timey homelessness, when well-dressed gents would sleep under bridges with the quaint charm only disenfranchised businessmen seem to be able to effect.
On second look, the provocative line began to stir my memory. It recalled the sentimental lawns of Kenneth Graham's "Wind in the Willows," over which strode the strappingly dressed Mr. Toad and his lesser friends during my formative years.
The bushy eyebrows in particular sparked a nostalgic longing for walking canes and monocles. Here, I thought, is a theme I can get on board with: the thick, coarse, weather-repellent hair of a polar bear, and a contrasting vest - both quite appropriate for Fall weather.
Above, Ratty and Mole take in the sights of a local pond, discussing literature, politics and the state of the human condition. Squint, and you could be looking at any two hipster pals practicing an ironic renaissance in Central Park on the rent-a-boats.
The above BBC production of "Wind in the Willows" features Matt Lucas and Bob Hoskins in a "handsome" revival. Note the overlap in fine tailoring, layering and highly textured knits between the BBC production and Britain's TopShop.
In fact, TopShop were not the first souls to identify the saliency of "Wind and the Willows" for an impressionable young audience. The girl pictured above right pulls off a winning combination of nautical style and animal or "furry" subversity - a cry to the "never grow up" crowd, and highly insightful from an anthropological standpoint.
I came across the delightfulness of Tennis yesterday via another blog. Tennis, I have learned, are a husband and wife team of musos who wrote their first album while sailing south down the east coast of the U.S. They sport that rendered crackliness of '50s records that is in fashion right now, and I guiltily lap up the faux retroness. Apparently these charmers will be playing in Denver tonight at the Larimer Lounge, and I'm going to make a bold prediction, so as to make it first ... Tennis could very well be the next Captain and Tennille.
Meanwhile, yesterday's "day-ender" was what Yanks term a "trail-run" (but which every understated Australian knows simply to be a jog) out in Denver's foothills. The view up to Red Rocks was not too shabby.
And the tall roofs of Denver's downtown district, and ruckus of the Rio Grande, were about as close as I like them, visible here in extreme miniature.
Along the Castle Trail, I was accosted every 200 yards by a mountain-biking 50-year-old man. Evidently they were each on a reconnaissance mission for their own vitality and youth - mountain bikes are an excellent vehicle for recovering your virility, I hear, being as they are so burly. An excellent vehicle for recovering your youth? A race car bed.
In Oliver Stone’s 1987 “Wall Street,” a binary examination of good and evil in Manhattan’s canopy ginned up the excesses of eighties capitalism so well that the moral hammer missed many movie-goers. Instead, aspiring brokers and bankers took GordonGekko as a deity of sorts. Ruthless, suave, hair combed back, MichaelDouglas’s Gekko exemplified full-scale investment in the false idols and Dionysian pleasures born of wealth, fully aware they came at the expense of others. “That’s the one thing you have to remember about WASPs,” says Gekko. “They love animals and hate people.”
American cinema has long gazed inward upon itself, co-opting foreign narratological conventions and romanticizing the raw culture of a young country even as it built an ideology atop the it empire left behind. The western was built upon the Arthurian notion of heroism and conquest. The musical was a populist response to the classical music canon in Europe. Hollywood was created as a fantasy for the masses to aspire to; its stars and studios teasingly accessible in cinemas to the lower and middle classes, who bought wholesale into the meritocratic American Dream. Likewise, on Wall Street, every man is just one big trade away from fortune.
“Wall Street” fits into the fantasy genre quite neatly. CharlieSheen stars as the ambitious ingénue, broker BudFox, intent on money, glamour, good-looking women, and an easier life than that of his father, Carl (MartinSheen). The era: bear market America. BudFox’s moral arc is somewhat derivative, and consequently feels a little cobbled: he descends into the pits of moral depravity (insider trading!) assailed by the lion (Douglas as GordonGekko), leopard and she-wolf (DarrylHannah), before emerging, soul intact, to summit Mount Purgatory and reach Paradiso. (Fourteenth century Italy has nothing on 1980s America.)
The great contradiction in the film, however, was the notion that audiences had to first buy into the construct of capitalism to follow Fox down the rabbit hole. And at the end of the film, many remain plied with the images of penthouses, gilded skyscrapers, expensive suits and that oh-so-slick ‘80s technology. (At one point Gekko shows Fox the portable television he bought for his son. “That screen is like two inches!” Fox exclaims.) The great star of the film is Manhattan,* whose social geography places characters into cubicles and offices, down on the street, or atop the urban canopy looking down, according to their status. The buildings not only serve as a means of classification, but symbolize the sheer depth of the illusion bracketing an entire society together. “It’s a zero sum game,” Gekko smirks, “somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred
from one perception to another.”
*The other great star of the film is, of course, Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone.
The film is a fantasy because Fox’s revelation (greed is bad!) doesn’t alter the future landscape of America: twenty years later, the bottom fell out of the financial markets again, only this time it wasn’t the savings and loan scandal did us in, rather, simple folk pursuing the American Dream – the “dog shit stocks” Gekko trashes – beyond their own means. In reality, Gekko always gets away with it.
Which brings us to the impending release of the sequel “Wall Street: Money never sleeps” on September 24. According to IMDB, the plot concerns a young Wall Street trader who teams up with paroled Gekko to save the financial markets from global economic doom. The few things I know about this film leave me with a series of questions:
1.In the original film, Gekko had sired a fat son, seen only in a gratuitous nanny cameo, and quickly retired for a nap. Where does CareyMulligan fit in to this family picture?
2.Gekko is the preeminent antihero of modern-day America. After an entire film of quips like: “You take it right in the ass you cocksucker,” and “Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit,” are we really supposed to buy Gekko as reformed? People with egg-shaped mansions and ridiculous art installations don’t regain perspective.
3.How will Stone portray the highs of Wall Street trading now we’re living in the virtual era? No pink slips to wave, no shoehorn telephones to dial, sensible hair … it’s not quite so sexy, is it?
4.It is interesting to note that bicycle messengers essentially have not changed since 1987; according to the original “Wall Street” they were satchel-toting douches then as they are now. No, that’s not technically a question.
5.What influence will globalism exert upon our fragile 21st century financial instruments? The original featured SirLarryWildman, a British villain of the Bond variety, as well as nigiri sushi machines and such haute cuisine as egg yolk on meatloaf (French?). Now that the world is officially “flat,” we’re close to exhausting the exotic – Korean street tacos and jokes about Greek insolvency is about as edgy as it gets.
6.In a similar vein, how will movie sex have evolved from the MarthaGraham impressionistic, blue-silk silhouette sex seen in the original? Perhaps focus is less on pointed toes and “the wheelbarrow” position, and more about yoga triceps and off-axis maneuvers today.
7.Without Sean and Madonna, what does the Upper West Side real estate market have going for it in 2010?
8.Anyone care to venture some speculations as to the stock in question? BABs, perhaps, or shoddy pension funds?
9.What is the penultimate symbol of upper class recreation? What is today’s equivalent of a) the backless dress, b) martinis, c) evil Brits, d) town cars, e) MS-DOS, f) WASPs? And tell me we can do better than Oslen-twin chic and Dubai.
10.Shia LeBouf. I just don’t get it.
“Wall Street” verdict: Before it was distasteful to flaunt wealth, we had this gem celebrating the clunkiest conspicuous spending (a handheld facsimile machine!) in the most entertaining town.
Potential “Wall Street: Money never sleeps” verdict: Provided we don’t have to hear about BenBernanke or the stimulus bill, this could still be fun. Though I suspect we aren’t as much fun these days. Worth it to make fun of the wealthy once more, and to see what old GordonGekko still has up his sleeve, “pal.”
.JPG)
.jpg)
