rebeccakuder

Wes Anderson & the Buckaroo Banzai Principle

I wrote a post here nearly two years ago (at my yearly movie outing, so sad!) about Wes Anderson.  Today, I watched “The Life Aquatic” again on DVD and though I adore it, it was as if I had never seen it before.  Turns out I barely remembered the movie, though it’s my favorite of Anderson’s.  I noticed things this time I either saw and forgot or never saw.  I watched the background this time, allowed myself to look away from the principal humans and around the room, as it were, and linger in my tour of the Belafonte.

The film’s similarities to “Buckaroo Banzai” (another favorite film) were more beautifully apparent this time.  One Banzai moment with Team Zissou was the curtain call, which some loving film geek posted here in mashup.  (There’s also the Jeff Goldblum connection linking the two films.  And as my husband said, TZ would have mirrored BB and the Honk Kong Cavaliers more fully had they brought back Ned for the curtain call, as  W. D. Richter did with Rawhide.  But not bringing Ned back does a more authentic job of continuing and closing the film’s narrative rather than opening it up, so maybe in the lineage of collective filmmaker evolution, this omission makes some sense.)

But in addition to the visual homages that Anderson paid Banzai et al, much more fundamentally, he followed the Buckaroo Banzai Principle as outlined here.  It’s, briefly:

When a work of fiction is so confident in itself that the reader just enters the world and goes with it.

Applies equally to a written or cinematic world, but as I thought about it today, I realized how I’m not quite doing that with my new novel, and thought of one little way that I can follow the BBP more closely.  For which I owe Mr. Anderson a card of thanks.  If only I had some Kinglsey (Ned) Zissou corrsepondance stock.

(Dear Mr. Anderson, if you are reading this:  Thank you.  Thank you for caring enough about your audience to make something so fully realized.  Thank you for following your own obsessions and idiosyncrasies with such commitment and grace.  Thank you for Seu Gorge reinterpreting Bowie.  Thank you for your hard work, which looks effortless as breathing in and breathing out.)

rebeccakuder

Cinderella, what big, sharp teeth you have!

Because of my recent rants about princess stuff, a friend recommended Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein.  I finally read it.  It was great.

It was great even through the lens of Orenstein’s preaching to the cliched choir (me).  It was great despite how depressing it was to read what inspired the Disney Princess phenomenon–in 2000, a new executive at Disney went to see Disney on Ice, and noticed, to his horror, that the girls wore HOMEMADE princess dresses.  In the small gowns, rather than creativity at the hearth, he saw a missed merchandising opportunity.  Thus the Disney Princess brand was born.  (And now we have girls clad in shiny, generic, made-in-China garb, rather than homespun results of someone’s invention.)

I live in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a bubble like Orenstein’s city of Berkeley, both places relatively more immune to over-the-top materialistic madness than much of the U.S.  This book was great because it was reassuring to read someone thinking about how to revolt against the default definition of femininity as only and always about what girls look like rather than what they do.  And not only is Orenstein thinking about how to revolt, she’s done her research.  She backs up her arguments.  As a journalist, she seems responsible in her work.  Her credibility as a person in the narrative is crucial to how therapeutic this book was to read.  Throughout, she’s grappling in plain view with the same questions other parents are.

It’s overwhelming to consider how to fight the subtle and unsubtle corporate power of entities like Disney.  My four-year-old daughter saw the Disney Princess undies at Target, and it’s all she wanted.  She could not be easily dissuaded.  (I bought them.)  The other day at Goodwill, I steered her away from the shelf of half-clad Barbies in the toy section.  I lured her to the books, figuring that was safe and we could get out without her wanting to buy yet another “baby.”  (She has always loved her “babies” and it’s often a struggle to convince her she has plenty of plastic mouths to feed.)  In the book section, she found a shiny pink Barbie book called Little Sisters Keep Out.  She does not know what Barbie is, though she’d seen them on the shelf.  She saw the book’s cover and said, “It’s a princess book!”  Ironically, I had just finished reading Orenstein’s book the night before.   I stood there, holding my own literary find–a gorgeous illustrated Aesop’s Fables–and reminded myself I had grown up with Barbies, and I turned out okay.  (Yet, like Orenstein, my self esteem was not helped by Barbie, nor by Seventeen Magazine, nor that iconic, tarted-up teen, Brooke Shields.)  Like the “I grew up watching too much TV and I turned out okay” argument, my Barbie excuse thins when I think too hard about it.  I bought both books, though I refused to read the Barbie book to her.  I told her that I didn’t like the kind of story inside it.  She said, “I love it.”  I told her those kinds of stories say girls can only do certain things, like brush their hair, not run and jump and climb and do fun things like that.  “But they go to the playground,” she said.  (One picture shows the dolls sitting on swings.  She decided she would read the book to her babies.  She makes up stories about the plastic dolls in the photos, and we have a compromise.)

Now that we grownups realize what TV does to a young person, or what all-pink-all-the-time (not to mention the focus on how a girl-to-woman looks rather than how she feels) does to the feminine psyche, we have the power (the responsibility!) to make better choices.

Let’s!  Let’s.

For me, all roads lead back to Buffy.  A slayer, a killer of demons.  Always fashionable, sometimes wearing implausible slaying footwear (but hey, she’s the slayer!) she takes care of herself and by “takes care of herself” I do not mean a pedicure.  In a dark alley, Buffy is the one kicking ass.  The final paradigm shift of the end of the TV series still makes me cry, every time I think of it:

“From now on, every girl in the world who might be a Slayer, will be a Slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Who can stand up, will stand up. Every one of you, and girls we’ve never known, and generations to come…they will have strength they never dreamed of, and more than that, they will have each other. Slayers.  Every one of us. Make your choice.  Are you ready to be strong?”

Buffy wasn’t taken seriously at first.  She grew from a blonde teen cheerleader to a strong woman who changed the (fictional) world.  She spawned a small academic field called Buffy studies.  (And yet I found a Buffy dress-up game, where you can change Buffy’s clothing as if she were a paperdoll on the screen.  Sigh.)  The size of the problem of raising a strong, confident female person amidst well-funded and deeply entrenched corporate sinisterness makes me tired.  I have no answers.  But Orenstein’s book gave me hope.  Maybe parents will read it and meet together, talk about alternatives to the madness.  Maybe this kid’s parents read the book.  Maybe this kid can help start the revolution.

Maybe we will start making our own costumes again.

rebeccakuder

The Rules

THE RULES:

1) NEVER UNDERESTIMATE EACH OTHER.

2) KEEP YOUR HANDS STRONG.

3) DON’T KEEP WHAT YOU CAN’T CARRY.

4) CLOSE YOUR EYES ONLY WHEN NECESSARY.

5) NO SPITTING.

6) NO PUGILISM.

7) A THING ISN’T YOURS UNTIL SOMEONE GIVES IT YOU.

8) MACHINES SHALL REMAIN PRISTINE.

9) DON’T BE TOO SUPERSTIOUS.

10) BE A LITTLE SUPERSTITIOUS.

11) TRUST US.

(From The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival.  Please abide by these rules if you ever have a chance to visit.)

rebeccakuder

The kid-think of Room (novel by Emma Donaghue)

Many Moons Passed with the Wolf at My Door, by Angela Treat Lyon

The first book I read after fall quarter had dusted down was Emma Donaghue’s novel, Room.  I can’t avoid “reading as a writer,” and thinking about how the writer does and makes her thing, but wanted to immerse myself, so I refused the urge to take notes.

The narrative procedures used in this book are inseparable from the sensational story, which is, to quote the Wikipedia entry, “told from the perspective of a five-year-boy, Jack, who is being held captive in a small room along with his mother.”  The book is a page-turner, sure, but what kept me riveted was the grace with which Donaghue sustained the narrative told, first-person, in a young child’s words.  It’s of particular interest to me because I know it’s so damn hard to do.  (My novel, The Watery Girl, is told from the point of view of a seven-year-old, but I didn’t want to limit myself to her language.  So I used a close third person, still intimate, often imbued with thoughts and words directly mined from the protagonist Claire, but third person allows space to wiggle language.  First person really locks you in.  All writing is artifice, but if you want to convince a reader like this one, you better stick close to what a child would actually say.  And more than that, Donaghue’s Jack breathes the breath of childhood, lives out its logic.  I’m convinced her sentences are true kid-think.)

As I read Room, I kept holding my breath (not only because of the story) to see if Donaghue could sustain that thing with the kid.  She did.  There was not one moment when I disbelieved I was reading Jack’s true five-year-old thoughts.  Yes, Jack is precocious and smart, but the writer explained his particular intelligence so effortlessly when needed, and made clear that Jack’s mother worked hard to engage her son in his (albeit tiny) world.  Reading about their life in Room, I was enrapt and also exhausted, imagining how hard it would be to live in a single room with a child, non-stop, for five years.  (Putting aside the whole ordeal–the sheer exertion of the character’s work as a parent was amazing.  And yet believable.  I bought, without question, that Jack was her redemption.)

When I opened the book, I didn’t know the plot, just the premise.  As I read, I wondered how Donaghue would sustain the claustrophobia of one room for an entire novel.  When I realized their situation was about to change, the novel became “about” something very different from what I expected.  I was glad.  Thinking, as I have been this year, about brain plasticity and pinning many hopes to that idea, it fascinated me to read and consider about how Jack might (or might not) adapt to life outside Room.  And like many who have read the book probably have done, I wondered whether we each have a Room of some sort of other that’s shaped what we expect and want from the world.

I want to read more of Donaghue’s writing, soon, because anyone who can do what she did in Room is worth the time.

rebeccakuder

Foody alert: easy faux fondue toast

Don't have a fondue pot? No worries.A year after I graduated from college, I backpacked by train through Europe with a girlfriend.  It was a five-week whirlwind: we visited Frankfurt, Florence, Venice, Corfu, Athens, Salzburg, Amsterdam, Interlaken, Switzerland, and a charming town in France whose name I’m forgetting, staying mainly in youth hostels.  I turned 23 at the Pink Palace on Corfu: no togas that I recall, but many shots of ouzo, and many subsequent plates smashed over my head.  At the time, I was a developing (vs. full-on) foody, but tonight I was yanked back decades and miles by an accidental flavor.

My friend K. and I stayed at a cozy, relaxing hostel in Interlaken with a modest dining room.  Interlaken, after the previous slew of cities, was like a mental rest, and we decided to stay most of a week.  Now, aside from the exhalation and the beautiful hikes and views, I remember most fondly the fondue.  It was such a casual thing there, not a production, simply part of the daily eating process, available downstairs in our momentary home.  I’ve tried to make fondue a few times since, and it’s been okay, but tonight I stumbled upon a great and easy way to fake it. Let’s call it an homage to fondue.

Here’s what to do:

1.  Get some cave-aged gruyere.  I don’t know why being aged in a cave is important, but you don’t have to go to a cave to get it–it’s everywhere these days, and it worked in this case.  (I used Trader Joe’s gruyere, but I’m sure any decent gruyere will do.)

2. Peel a clove of garlic.  (You might need more than one clove, depending on how much toast you are making.)

3.  Toast some slices of bread.  I used a good multigrain, bought from Emporium in Yellow Springs.  (Note: I often slice and freeze bread, then toast it unwrapped, or heat it, wrapped in foil, to good effect.  But for this project, you need to toast the bread fairly crispy.)  It might be good with white bread, but make sure it’s something with body.  Wimpy or mediocre bread would wilt under the next steps.

4. Rub the garlic clove on the bread, effectively worrying the garlic down to a nub–sort of a way of grating and distributing the garlic on the bread.  The garlic clove should disappear onto the bread.  (You’ll find if the bread is not toasty enough, it won’t have a rough enough surface to do the magic of grating the garlic onto the surface.  Experiment.)

5. Shred a generous amount of gruyere onto each piece of garlicked toast, and broil it–in oven or toaster-oven–until it’s melty and bubbly but not overly browned.

6. Eat it.  I bet it’s even more reminiscent of fondue if accompanied by a glass of wine, but it works fine on its own with a bowl of soup.

(For another wonderful (vegan) treat, you could stop after rubbing the garlic on toast, drizzle olive oil, salt and pepper to taste.)

Mmm, cheese…

rebeccakuder

Why I love words, and serendipity: “decimate”

I used the word “decimated” in an essay today, and decided to make sure it was the right word, so looked it up, lazily, on the web.  I’m using it somewhat hyperbolically in my essay, but this is among what I found:

1 : to select by lot and kill every tenth man of
2 : to exact a tax of 10 percent from <poor as a decimatedCavalier — John Dryden>
3 a : to reduce drastically especially in number <choleradecimated the population>
Just right.  When the word came to me, I hadn’t consciously remembered  the ten in “dec” but it is perfect.  So “decimate” is like the anti-tithe, kinda.