Culture, Swoop Down Like a Vulture

I have no idea which old rap song gave birth to the title of this post, all I know is that I have always liked the image it suggests. We tend to think of culture as something high and mighty that holds our (or others’, or even Others’) values and ideals. Yet culture is not only capable of simultaneously embracing both the low and the high, but of devouring the middle ground.

So my husband and I determined that our lovely Winter Solstice vacation should be used for more than holiday stress and the resultant, post-holiday cozy lethargy. The weather was lovely (thanks, Global Warming!), we for once had time on our hands, so we should make a family trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art  for a little good ol’ fashioned dose of culture-slash-Mandatory Fun, right?

“I don’t wanna go the museum, I want to have another sleepover with Elena!”

“I hate museums, you always drag us to them and they’re so BORING!”

“Nooooooooooooo……”

Of course, any parent knows that this only adds fuel to the fire of our determination. We even used some psychological strategizing to outwit the lemming-like impulse of all families residing in/visiting the Tri-State area to do this exact same thing, resulting in a Museum Madhouse that’s no fun for anybody. A couple of friends had tipped us off that they took their progeny bright and early–probably at nine, opening hour, when my kids are still sound asleep on days off–in order to “get the most out of the day,” only to encounter a museum with a line snaking out the door and the shoving, clusterfuckathon that pushes kids over the edge and tests parents’ ability to maintain Chipper, Enthusiastic Mom/Dad Voice (the evil twin of Chipper Mom/Dad Voice being, “You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to cry about!”). We decided instead to go for a late lunch at our town’s new burger place and head into the city afterwards, arriving at about four when the majority of the tourists were departing.

The goal was not to overwhelm the kids, just head into the cool Medieval Armor exhibit and maybe enjoy a few other things on the way. But we knew we’d scored a hit when we not only smugly witnessed a giant flood of people streaming out of the museum on our way in, but The Free Spirit also started happily skipping up the steps, crying, “Cool, this is where they stayed in Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!” (referring to The Mixed Up Files thereof). The hits just kept coming as we passed through the collection of ancient jewelry. Since I was a little girl wandering through the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, exhibits featuring ancient jewelry have always been my favorite because of the intimacy of the objects. Sure, I got my professor on yesterday being able to explain to the girls about the Celts who had made those gorgeous bracelets and rings; the Visigoths who had ranged far and wide leaving those intricately wrought necklaces and daggers; to tell them the basics of the Byzantium empire behind those heartbreakingly beautiful, gold earrings with the cascading precious stones.

But I could hear in their caught breath and see it in their wondering eyes that they got it on a much deeper level: those gorgeous earrings that mommy and all three sisters want right now were owned, actually worn, by a woman in a drastically different place and time, a woman who must have loved them as much as we would. The Byzantine earrings initiated an experience that was part time-travel and part metempsychosis; looking through the glass at such intimate objects from the past while seeing ourselves reflected in their beauty was a powerful lesson in how very little people have changed in the past 2,000 years.

Meanwhile, behind us, my husband tapped his foot impatiently. Reluctantly, the girls and I left the jewelry and we all headed into Medieval Armor, which was awesome and fascinating in its own right…although that was the place where our lofty cultural meditations began their downward swoop.

It started innocently enough, noticing that while most suits of armor seemed to be for men who would be relatively small today–when 6th graders loom over their parents and slam-dunk basketballs–there was one huge one that must have been worn by a six-foot-plus, barrel-chested monster. The girls joked about the Terminator, while Husband and I were certain we were looking at “The Mountain,” Gregor Clegane from A Game of Thrones. But that wasn’t  what did it. It was this dude, much smaller and shinier than The Mountain, and much more, shall we say, arresting:

To show you what I mean, allow me to insert (wink wink, nudge nudge) a closeup of his somewhat unusual, um, codpiece:

Yep, you're seeing what you think you're seeing.

I really wish I had thought to bust out my phone and take a picture at this point (this is from the official website, my zoom/crop job), because the side-view was even more unbelievable. Needless to say, the girls’ jaws dropped while my husband and I tried to rally with theories about symbolic potency, as this was the armor of an Emperor…but I can’t be sure we were coming through over the titters and giggles. Suddenly, the museum wasn’t nearly as boring as they thought!

Moving on into the Italian Renaissance room, we were halted dead in our tracks by this statue called The Siren, so amazing that she merits both a front and a back view:

Note the pose and expression on the face of the woman viewing the statue in the right-hand picture.

Yeah.

Of course I had to explain the mythology of the siren, how she lured sailors to their deaths with her sweet…um…song.

“Why?!” demanded The Diva, eyes fixed on the mermaid. “Why would she do that?”

At a loss for an explanation, I had to just admit there really was only one reason. “Because she can.”

Emperor Ferdinand’s “potent-potentate” armor, coupled with The Siren’s obvious charms, led to some interesting discussion on bodies and gender ideals as we wandered through the ancient Greek and Roman rooms full of statues of naked people.

“She’s kinda fat,” The Lawyer noted as we paused in front of a love-goddess statue. “Actually, they’re all a little….chunky. That guy,” gesturing to a male statue identified as a famous warrior, “Doesn’t even have any abs!” So we walked on, talking about the reasons why different cultures idealized different body forms, comparing and contrasting these ancient Greek and Roman marble bodies to today’s celebrities and models. By the time we realized that the bigger-deal mythological heroes definitely seemed to have proportionally bigger booties than their less heroic counterparts the girls were having the time of their lives, skipping through the exhibition singing “Baby Got Back” (to which they, unfortunately, know all the words). Case in point is this statue depicting Hercules,

who has so much junk in his trunk he needs an extra marble plinth to hold it all up.

As it was getting late and energy was finally beginning to wane, at least in the younger two girls, we decided to swing through the African/Oceanic roomand then call it a night. Of course, by that point, eldest daughter was really into the cultural comparison thing and was delivering some pretty in-depth analyses of the warrior gear from the deep Pacific island cultures and the insanely heavy, elaborately wrought armor from Europe. For instance, she and I were captivated by this mask-helmet from Papa New Guinea:

Again, the frontal view doesn’t quite convey that the top figure is not only riding astride the bottom one, (which comprises the helmet part), but his weirdly long penis is resting atop the bottom figure’s head (which reminds me of a Ricky Gervais routine about dolphins, possibly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen). We both agreed that it would be far more horrifying to face someone wearing this into battle than face someone wearing a full suit fifty pounds of armor.

Finally, as if to illustrate Buckaroo Bonzai’s insight that “Wherever you go, there you are,” we found ourselves facing this amazing sculpture, also from the area around Papa New Guinea:

Look familiar? No? Scroll back up to the frontal view of the Italian Renaissance Siren above. Yep. Separated by a globe and several centuries, two artists managed to come up with almost exactly the same concept (I’m pretty certain that the Italian Siren is not famous enough to have inspired the [then] largely illiterate Papa New Guineans). I guess you could consider that another feather in the Cultural Vulture’s wing: no matter how drastic the temporal or spatial differences between cultures, we’re not so different (or is it original?) as we like to think.

Cassandra, Part 2: The Bitch

I. Bitch.

I always crack up when I see young men with big, macho-looking male dogs. Clearly, the massive size of the dog’s head, its sometimes cropped, sometimes not ears; the dookie-chain around its neck, and especially the uncut testes are supposed to be a reflection on the masculinity of its owner. A dog like that is supposed to say, I could kill you if I wanted to and You don’t want to fuck with me, man. The men who possess them, who wish the dog to be perceived as an avatar of their egos, make the mistake of equating size with toughness.

But dog-lovers know that if you want really want a tough dog, you get a female.

You get a bitch.

I’d never really thought about the etymology behind calling an aggressive woman a “bitch” until I got one, the late Maria Inez (Nezzie). I assumed it was merely a misogynist way of denigrating a woman by implying she was an animal. Then, when Nezzie was about two, i.e., in the dog-world, came into her own as an adult, I learned differently. One day, we were at the dog park when I sat down to nurse my fairly-recently arrived first daughter. Nezzie sat at my feet under the bench. A male dog who was somewhat infamous for his belligerence approached and tried to sniff the baby, so I nudged him away with my foot. He growled at me….then yelped in pain as he was bowled backwards down the sloping path. A torpedo of righteous, fanged vengeance had exploded out from under the bench when the dog growled at “our” baby, and she wasn’t playing: she went right for his throat. It was an ugly fight–a real fight, not the usual dog-park sound and fury–that took multiple people to break up. Probably only the fact that the other dog was a Chow (with a nasty disposition and impenetrable layers of fur around his neck) prevented him from sustaining serious damage.

Nezzie (who stopped attending dog parks shortly after that) went to her eternal rest a few years ago. We now have two new dogs, a male and a female:

Pepper, Angus, and Moxie

Angus is the giant-headed Pit bull/Mastiff mix on the right, clocking in at about 85 lbs. Basically, dog heads don’t come much bigger than his. In contrast, Pepper, on the left, is a feral dog: we call her the ur-dog, as the fact that she resembles every other feral dog in the world seems to confirm that this is what dogs look like when people stop breeding them. She weighs about 40 lbs. soaking wet; a nice, medium-sized dog with deceptively doe-like eyes and a slender build that appears utterly elegant at first glance. Upon closer inspection, you can see the rippling muscles of a Spartan warrior beneath the all-terrain camouflage fur. Front and center is their friend Moxie, who was staying with us while her folks were away when I snapped this picture. A ludicrously cute terrier mix weighing all of 15 lbs., Moxie doesn’t take any shit from alpha-dog Pepper…unlike the macho-looking Angus. When our regular 2-dog team is playing together in an open space Pepper runs roughshod all over the poor guy, flying across the field at mach-force speed to take him down over and over again as if their sizes were reversed.

Now that the kids are older and I can leave them in the house by themselves, I never spend a minute worrying about security. And it’s not because of the giant Pit. If Angus could speak he would sound just like Doug, the canine protagonist of Up: “Hi there, I’m Angus! I just met you but I LOVE you!” Pepper, on the other hand, would roar “FEEEEAAAAR me!!!!” like some monstrous cartoon villain. Pepper doesn’t fuck around when it comes to protecting her family and her territory: neighbors across the street and four houses down getting out of their cars in their own driveways are barked at, just in case. Hell, if she can see you, hear you, or smell you, you’re on HER turf and if she doesn’t know you, you are going to have a problem. More specifically, if you do not belong in the house (burglar, child-molester, evangelical christian time-waster) you are not coming in. Period.

Angus may have brawn and a vast expanse of head with benign, fluffy thoughts wafting around inside of it; Pepper will out-run you, out-gun you, and out-man you every time. While the appearance of the large, male dog is meant to convey I could kill you if I wanted to, chances are he doesn’t want to and never will. The bitch, on the other hand, probably does: don’t even think about crossing her.

Always look out for the bitch.

II. Faith

Even from amongst the outstanding original TV series HBO has produced, Boardwalk Empire stands out. The masterfully paced and developed story-lines weaving in and out of mythological, archetypal, and culturally specific themes; the awesome reproduction of a fascinating period in American history, the superb casting and acting, and above all, the viscerally appealing characterization are what make this show so compelling. But if you start parsing the main characters, you begin to realize that the most complex ones–the Oedipally brooding Jimmy Darmudy, the electric eel Nucky Thompson, the brutally dignified Chalky White–are male. The lesser female characters, such as the ones played by one-note-wonders Paz de la Huerta and Gretchen Mol, are 1.5-dimensional stereotypes whose flashy flatness begs to be compared to the nuanced layers of their male counterparts. The notable exceptions are (were!) Jimmy’s closeted-lesbian wife, Angela, and Irish immigrant Margaret Schroeder, pictured below:

Now, I was excited to see Margaret literally wielding a gun in this scene where she breaks up a fight between Nucky and his equally untrustworthy but more hapless brother, Eli. We already suspected she had this kind of steel inside her: as a pregnant teen, she stole money from her family to emigrate to America; she was unsentimental and practical enough turn Nucky’s soft spot for her into a ticket out of poverty for herself and her children; when the Feds came for her boyfriend she surprised him by rescuing both his hidden money and his incriminating documents. For a while, though, it seemed like the writers weren’t sure what to do with a potentially empowered Margaret: wait, how does she really feel about Nucky? The sexy IRA hitman Owen Slater? Her self-righteous older brother’s repudiation? It was hard to tell, and definitely took a backseat to such eye-popping plot developments as–oh, say, Jimmy fucking his mom. The only thing we know for sure about Margaret is that she’s a mother and loves her children. Hmmmm…..

In both last night’s Season 2 finale and the previous episodes, Margaret’s confrontation with the boyfriend who supports her and her family seem a complex negotiation between the powerful range of this actress and the limitations of the role scripted by a predominantly male cast of writers, in a show produced exclusively by powerful and successful men. The way that Steve Buscemi pumps his Nucky Thompson full of weasely intensity and hams it up in their scenes together, while Kelley MacDonald plays Margaret’s cards so heartbreakingly close to her chest, reminds me of how Pepper sleeps defensively curled into an impenetrable furball while Angus stretches out on his back with his legs in the air and his wares on display. So subtle is MacDonald’s performance, in fact, that when Margaret’s daughter Emily is struck by polio and she seems to be suffer an incongruous Catholic relapse, I bought it. It took me until the very last episode of the season to fully appreciate what she had done with the uncomfortably small box in which the show’s writers seemed to want to stick Margaret:

Nucky proposes to marry her. She calls bullshit on this transparent ploy to prevent her from testifying against him in the federal corruption/racketeering trial, then marries him anyway. Just as we think she’s bounced back from the not-satisfactorily-explained “buy god’s forgiveness if your daughter has polio” subplot, we watch Margaret awake to the sounds of Nucky playing outside, apparently lovingly, with her newly-handicapped daughter and her tow-headed sociopath son (okay, THIS is the only area in which HBO falls short: have Nickelodeon and Disney locked down all the good child actors?) She looks out the window and we watch her heart melt right through her tightly surpressed, emotions-on-lockdown mask. Uh-oh: she’s no match for Nucky because her children are her Achilles heel! Her maternity makes her weak! And then…the morning after her new husband murders his former foster-son Jimmy Darmudy (*sob!*):

“Where were you last night?” Margaret inquires (disclaimer: since this is a blog post, I didn’t trouble myself to check the script for the exact wording, but trust me, this is the jist of it). Her face shows the same implacable Margaret, but MacDonald does something barely perceptible with her eyes (an ever so slight widening, since narrowing almond-shaped eyes would be less effective) that imbues her innocuous question with a dangerous edge.

“Well, I ran into Jimmy Darmudy and we talked for a while.” An almost daemonic fire illuminates his eyes so that she cannot help but grasp the true story behind his casual lies. “Turns out he’s re-enlisting in the army, heading back to France.” The camera pans over to Margaret, who becomes the darkest point in the frame illuminated by the morning light shining through the big picture window behind her. Within the space of twenty seconds, her expression barely changes, but manages to a) register that he’s lying to her, b) realize what he’s really saying, and c) take stock of what she’s really dealing with. We don’t know what she’s going to do; we’re not sure we know her the way we know the more consistently develped male characters.

After Nucky leaves, Margaret goes slowly over to his desk, picking up a pen to sign the deed to the NJ land that Nucky “temporarily” transferred into her name when he was under indictment; land he asked her to sign back over to him and which, we are now seeing in the parallel plot-line, is going to be worth a fortune due to the new highway bill clearing. She screws up her own signature, almost writing “Schroeder” instead of “Thompson” for her last name. But then again, those are merely husbands’ names anyway: they are not sufficient to describe who she is. Carefully and deliberately, in the blank space designating the recipient of this now invaluable land-deed, she writes the name of the church that we have come to understand in this episode she no longer needs.

It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for Nucky. I know Angus would. He would lay his giant, bony head on Nucky’s perfidious, skinny shoulder and sigh sympathetically, “Oh I know, buddy. Slender, elegant, gentle brown eyes, loves kids…you bought that too, huh? Yeah buddy, you and me, we know better now, huh?” Pause. Roll over on back.

“Always look out for the bitch.”