Eredien's Journal

Mom fox was trying to figure out who the heck I was. Also fox kits remain adorable.

No video from yesterday, except about two uninteresting seconds of the world's fattest groundhog. The weather's been rather rainy here, and then my dad just had to mow the lawn at prime fox-gamboling time, and then by the time I got outside at dusk it was so dark the camera was having a really hard time focusing.

But I did see a little head peep out from around the den.

And I sat in the grass for an hour. I am beginning to think I have the makings of a naturalist.

So back in the early summer of 2010, I posted about an Upstate NY film fest I'd have liked to host, but since I'd just moved and nobody else seemed interested-- and one of the only reasons I personally spend time watching movies, anime, or TV is in order to share and discuss the movie's ideas and art with other people who I think might enjoy, hate, or be disturbed and intrigued by them, to share insights and debate and conversation with friends--I let the idea drop.

But I'm here now, in upstate NY, and it's cold, and library movie rental is cheap. Still no friends to discuss movies with in person, unfortunately, but maybe people have watched or will watch these movies on their own and want to discuss them.

So, a review of Frozen River, from 2008. This movie opens with a shot of snow, and trees, and more snow, and some decrepit buildings and the sky a steely shade of grey. I thought, "it's like looking out my window." A sense of place is really strong in this movie, and what the place--Massina, NY, a real town--says almost more than the people in it is "hope passed through here on the way to a better place." Ray, a woman whose life has treated her hard, works in the dollar store and lives in a trailer park like the one my school bus used to pass through; Lila, a Mohawk whose legal job options in the movie appear to be stuck somewhere between "answering phones in the Tribal offices" or "stamping people's bingo cards" lives in a trailer without heat, and needs more money in order to get her child back from her mother-in-law, who took him after Lila's husband died.

The two women are desperate--for Ray, a promised promotion to full-time employment hasn't come for two years, and her husband has run off with the down-payment for their new trailer, which she was going to get just in time for Christmas. For Lila she's been living with the personal and political--both inter-Tribal and extra-Tribal--implications of her husband's death during that smuggling run ever since; people suspect her of running the border or make it clear they resent her for her husband's death every time she leaves her trailer. She spends a lot of time in there.

In a very real way, this movie is about absence--absence of industry, absence of men (we never see Ray's husband or any memento of Lila's husband in the film, but the absence of both men is a presence throughout, and the grown men in the rest of the movie are all incidental), absence of money.

The two women meet--Lila co-opted Ray's second car, the one Ray's husband drove off in, and Ray follows Lila home, unsure if she's doing it for news of her husband but sure about needing the car back--and abrade; they're both too stubborn and too strong and too hurt. They don't converse for the first few meetings so much as aggress at each other in sentences. Lila knows where Ray can make money, but has no car. Ray has a car.

They start running immigrants across the border. They lose their families, a little--Lila passes up a job someone finds for her, and Ray lies to her eldest son about what she's doing. They start to become friends, even as they're not sure how to do that. It seems neither of them has had a friend for a very long time.

There's a subplot where Ray's eldest son, left alone with popcorn to eat and a kid brother who wants nothing except an unattainable $15 Hot Wheels track for Christmas, wondering where his dad is and when his mom is going to get home (and starting to be suspicious about her lies about the dollar store promotion), scams elderly Tribal members for their credit cards in a mix of altruism for his brother, resentment toward his parents' absence, and racism toward Mohawks (his mother described her first meeting with Lila to him in less-than-glowing terms, and hasn't been home much since, so he has no idea why his mother seems to slowly make a path from resentment to a sort of mute understanding, and his complex mix of emotions reflects very real and unfortunate regional political infighting between upstate NY tribal peoples and politicians whose main constituents are all broke and resentful white people. Charlie McDermott plays the boy. I think he's the finest actor in this movie; you can watch McDermott's character knowing he's crossed a moral line and then justifying it to himself with the desperate need for self-justification of someone who's doing something seriously wrong for the first time, and paper over all of that with the factor that it's fun for him to impersonating somebody else's voice and life over the phone and get away with it, and show the fact that he's still naive enough as a teenager to show that he's having fun transgressing with the impersonation, a pleasure an adult might not allow themselves to acknowledge or take from the moral transgression. There's a scene with a blowtorch and Ray--the second one--which I think is beautiful. I love how the actor wears the clothing his character has--it's ten years out of date of cool, and he knows it, but ten years out of date is only five years out of date where he lives, and he pretends it's cool anyway and almost succeeds in making it so via conviction.

So much of this movie takes place inside the interior of a car that it becomes a stand-in for the personal interiors that are this movie's true driving force; you can feel the cold leaching through the windows and battling the heating system in the car and it becomes metaphor. When Ray gets out and runs, when the ice sags way--everything in this movie is too tired to crack--under that first wheel, it's almost like freedom.

This is not, despite everything, an ultimately depressing film, rather the reverse. Recommended.

Edit: I've just reserved the next 2 films I wanted to watch in this series, Canadian Bacon and October Country, on hold at the library, so if people want to pick them up and then watch and chat, you can.

My dad and I got into a fight today because he didn't respect my opinion about something and then later tried to shush me loudly and rudely when I tried talking to him about why I was upset, and my mother has a totally racist 'funny' work forward printed out and sitting on our kitchen table that I am trying to figure out how to confront her about, but those are not the only things that have me thinking, "something's badly wrong here, in this place."

My mom and I just came back from the Muppet movie--I'd been wanting to go, so she took me. It was pretty fun (I am really looking forward to the Studio Ghibli adaptation of the Borrowers, which was like my favorite book in 3rd grade!) until we got to the parking lot after the movie, at which point a panhandler walked up to our car. My mom rolled down the window a crack, and the woman asked, "look, are you nice people?" My mom repeated the question sarcastically--"are we nice people?"--rolled the window up, said, "I guess not," and drove away.

I sat in absolute stunned silence all the way home while my mom made the following comments:
- "See, those other people next to us didn't help her either."
- "There was this guy in front of my office who used the 'I need help' spiel on me and my coworkers without realizing he'd said it before, and when he'd used it before we'd given him help and places to go and he went there for a while and then was back in the same spot using the same old story a month later."

We paused in the parking lot of my parents' home:
- "I want you to know, [Eredien], that if she had really needed help I would have helped her."

I interjected at that point, saying, "how do you know what she needed? You didn't even listen to her."

My mother: "If you really need help you don't go up to people and ask if they're 'nice people.' You go up to people and say, 'I need help.'"

I don't always give to panhandlers. I didn't tonight because I didn't have my wallet on me, and I haven't been giving lately because I'm deep in debt and need to save my money to get out of the spot I'm in. But there's a difference, a big one, between listening for a few moments and going, "sorry, I can't help you today," and meaning it, and saying, "well, I'm not a nice person!" But I wish I had my wallet tonight.

I am baffled, and hurt, and angry, and shocked, and deeply saddened. I am also angry that I'm angry, and baffled that I'm baffled--what the hell else did I expect? Must I truly grow a tougher skin again and pretend like everything that offends or upsets me doesn't matter just so I can live in this place without daily screaming fights?

I am definitely moving back in with my family. Over the weekend of Nov. 18th and 19th, I will be moving from my current place in MA back to NY.

I've personally been struggling, since spring 2010, to banish as paranoia (as I and others characterized it) the feeling that my loved ones and roommates can't really decide if they want to have my physical presence, much less welcome my physical presence, in the spaces they've said they want to share with me--only to have it turn out that my presence was decidedly unwelcome after all, no matter how regrettable that was, and I needed to be the one to fix the awkward situation by leaving.

This is mostly because, as I realized in the summer of 2010 when my parents weren't there for me in the hospital, that my parents' attitude toward living with me (whether as an adult or as a child), that they want me in their presence when they want me, as a kind of command performance, and want me and the reminders of me out of their presence the rest of the time, that makes me so aware and so hurt when others express ambivalence about having me in their lives, physically, sharing space with them.

I realized this, last summer, and realized that the fix was trying to express that I needed the people who lived with me to express non-ambivalence and actively embrace my presence in their space and in their lives, but my partner at the time was unable to do that, even though I believe she may have wanted to, so the uncertainties built up in my mind.

Of course, that contributed to the problem until my worst fears, the ones I was encouraged by others to think of as impossibly paranoid--and, more importantly, had taught myself to believe in (correctly, still, I think), as impossibly paranoid, because after all I believed I was someone worth living a life together with, or else I would not have taken the leap of faith to move and trust even when things looked hard, and change careers and start admitting my deep desire to further my own self through my own creative work as a job--came true. No wonder I was a wreck. No wonder parts of me still are.

I don't think this will be good for me as a whole experience, but it may lead me to confront the issue at the source, which I think will be good for me. I can only hope. And I will hopefully emerge stronger, able to afford things like the carpentry program I want to persue, able to afford my own damn apartment without being screwed over by a succession of passive-aggressive roommates, able to take love and care from people and give it back without being so needy as to rely on their love and care in a way that terrifies them or makes them resentful of my otherwise awesome, even nee4ded, presence in their life.

According to bookelfe, Sleep No More just opened in NYC. If you are in or around NYC, or able to get there to go see it and wish to go see it, you should.

Thank you to sovay for finding my review of the Boston production from December.

I was reading rm's journal earlier today, and started thinking about something she wrote in this post. I was going to post the following as a comment in her journal, but it wouldn't fit in a comment no matter how I edited it, and I realized it would make a good standalone post. So, I thought I would post it here and also leave a link to this in her journal comments.

I am leaving comments open, but be nice to each other. I left comments open because I am hoping that people will have interesting things to say about geology and critical literary theory in relation to metaphors and language phrases as they are used in modern politics. I have no emotional energy to moderate a debate right now, and even if I had the emotional energy, I have other things to do. If you are nasty, you are going to get banned. Thank you.
--

rm wrote:
"Ground Zero" has been, since the beginning, a useful term to frame, not just what happened at the WTC as an act or war, but to frame this idea of ourselves ("The West") being at war with Islam (which we shouldn't be, and is what the terrorists are trying, successfully apparently, to trick us into), and that's not a type of useful I can support.

That made me realize something new about how language is used to empower those already in power. The idea of "Ground Zero" implies some kind of origin point--a ground--and some kind of spreading out from that origin point--if there's a zero, that implies a one, two, and three, and on. But there's no Ground 1 or 2; there's just this empty origin. Ground Zeroes happen all over the world, every day--but how many of those get named? And of those, how many get named as the central point from which everything came, but in which there is emptiness?

Just one, and it's in one of the largest, richest, most important cities in the Global North (I'm trying to ditch the concept of "The West" in order to use the different concept of "The Global North," after having read Stuffed and Starved). An incredibly privileged act: name our wounds, and name them as first--to name them as the origin of pain.

So now there's this literally empty signifier of zero, as blasted origin. Origin implies that something is supposed to be spreading out; but no one knows what is "spreading" or where it is going. But people always pour things into empty spaces; human beings are always compelled to construct meanings out of trauma.

Something foreign, unknown, terrifying, is spreading from a single point, a wound, in the Global North, and no one knows what it is...
Mosques are foreign, unknown, terrifying, and "they" want to build one on the point, the wound.
Oh my God! The terrifying spreading thing must be Islam! It must be Plan51 Park 51!
It must be...the Ground Zero Mosque! (With that one added word, appended, the empty lingustic place gets literally filled with the idea of a literal building, and one which encompasses all of the Global North's fear of The Other at that. See it?)

If you look at the op-eds, the articles, the texts of the debate, it's clear many people assume something "spread" out from a defined, empty "ground" "zero" into other grounds nearby. Those areas were never defined, named, (as the "zero" point was, had to be), so there is no structure for people to talk about anything except the "zero" point as being sacred ground. All the "correct radius in blocks" talk is actually a barely-understood struggle to retroactively name and define a "ground 1" or "2." We are having this debate--"should we define those areas? Why wouldn't we? What spread out? How far did it go?"--without recognizing that we are claiming sacred ground, and without understanding why: all because the word zero, which we have heard so much, implies that there must be a one and a two. The lack of same makes people subconsciously uneasy: zeroes need to be followed by ones; order makes sense of things that make no sense. We are trying to build order, but we appear to be unaware, or unconcerned, that we ourselves are laying foundations in the dark.

After earthquakes, geologists talk about the epicenter--the stress point, the origin--of the quake. But they also talk about aftershock areas, and zones of destruction, and seismic shadowing, wherein the ripples from one earthquake reverberate through the earth's core and are felt in the place opposite from the epicenter, on the other side of the planet. After a quake, you hear about seismic shadowing, and you suddenly understand why you have been hearing so much about tsunamis in Japan.
But saying the words "Ground Zero" invokes the idea of epicenter without mentioning the quake. As our house falls to pieces around us, we cannot know why unless we talk about the earthquake. As we count the dead that are our seismic shadow, we cannot have any understanding of why people fight halfway around the world unless we talk about the earthquake.

And we keep invoking the epicenter as the reason for the quake.
I wish they would get a geologist to advise the White House.

A serious question: would the Plan51 Park 51 project would have generated as much opposition if it did not have a number in its name? (Yes, the proposed center is/was also called the Cordoba Mosque Project, but that name people had to research, and people are presenting the meaning(s) of it in articles, and other people are debating those meanings. No one is debating "Plan51," "Park 51" which to my ear sounds almost generic--no, rather, it sounds like it was designed to sound almost generic, like the name of an upscale bar/bistro. "Ground Zero" also sounds almost generic, too.

There's some kind of seismic shadowing in people's minds, in the language; there must be.

For years I have talked about having a film fest that might only make sense to the people who are intimately familiar with the Upstate New York area. Maybe you grew up there. Maybe you left there. Maybe you're from Southeastern Canada. But any way, you get it.

The kind of movie where the people we are talking about are from that area. They have probably been to Niagara Falls more often than New York City, because both are the same distance away, but one is cheaper. They have probably complained about the cold, or the inconvenient train service, or the lack of jobs. They have probably thought that the deer in the fall were beautiful, and probably know where they can get venison. They eat cheese curds and sausage rolls and perogis and half-moons (never, ever 'black & whites.')

So I am trying to make a list of movies that I want to see, with optional TV series that I think illuminate something important about the region.

If you have suggestions for films, or think you have suggestions on how to actually make this happen sometime in the next year or so, leave a comment. I am basically using this post to keep a running tally of films as well as a tally of the good ideas others have.

Films:
Canadian Bacon - There is a secret reason why this movie is funny to upstate New Yorkers, and possibly Canadians living in S. Ontario, which has nothing to do with the humorous dialog and everything to do with trying to live in place where the economy finds new ways to close itself down every six months or so. I do not think that it is funny to anyone else, and that is why it died at the box office. That, and because upstate New Yorkers can't always afford to go see movies, and most Canadians would rather read, right, postrodent?
October Country - I have no idea how I am actually going to see this, as it appears to be an independent art-house film and will probably not make it to Bloomington. It is based on this series of photographs of the same name, which in and of themselves say a lot about where I come from. This is the one that finally made me make this list.
Frozen River - This is the one that made me start thinking of making this list. About the complex and fraught relations between the First Nations people and the broke white people, who can't afford to move to somewhere with jobs. Also apparently about the awesome, somber beauty of an upstate winter. The snow covering everything; the fog laying between the hills lit by the sun.

TV Shows -- to watch if there's time, and discuss:
Wonderfalls - Magic Realism and Buffalo, NY go on a blind date. They've never met before, but the Fox Network was a mutual friend, so they try to make a go of it for the season.