Day of the Consumption

AH, BLACK FRIDAY, the holiday of American consumerism, when demon-eyed shoppers fight for discount flat-screens across this great nation. It's not the sort of holiday you can wish somebody a happy one of. It's more like gloomy Yom Kippur, when you wish people 'an easy fast.'

I am not strictly opposed to consumerism; surely we can all enjoy a bit of exuberant retail now and then without harm. But the consumerism of Black Friday has a maniacal, desperate tone. It is not billed as a fun day out shopping, but as a sort of mall armageddon. Getting gifts becomes, in this model, a massive, panic-stricken mission rather than a cool opportunity to think up a few things loved ones might enjoy.  Talk of 'door-busters' and 4am store openings, frantic ads during Thanksgiving football, whip buyers into a retail feeding frenzy.

Walmart challenges you to win it.

Black Friday ads are designed to create a perception of urgent need and brief abundance, to be followed by dire scarcity. These deals won't last, they grimly warn. Get yours NOW, before they're ALL GONE. Women in commercials compare their bag takes, implicitly competing for some 21st century homemaking prize. The shoppers at big box stores look like looters, grabbing what they can while the getting is good. Walmart challenges customers to 'win the day.'

The very name has the ring of doomsday. Black Tuesday was when the 1929 stock market crashed, for godsakes, ushering in the Great Depression. This is how we kick off the Most Wonderful Time of the Year©?

The purpose of the madness is for everybody to get what they want on Christmas, without it costing a fortune. That sounds like an okay idea. It is amazing how many shiny gadgets, lovely clothes and complicated toys can be had today on a reasonable budget, and, hey, I'm all for bargain shopping and not immune to shiny gadgetry. And yet it sounds awfully nice for retailers not to manipulate us so crassly, for kids not to expect Playstations, and for moms not to feel obliged to camp out at Walmart to buy them.

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Dawn of the Booty Supremacists

ONCE UPON a time, women longed to have flat butts. 'Big tits, tiny ass' is how my mother described the body ideal of her youth. How times have changed. I have a forty-two inch posterior and no complaints.

Well, one complaint. Now that we the callipygian have risen to power, I don't want us lording it over the assless. In the pop culture vanguard, the lording has already begun.

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Food Religion

WHICH IS healthier? Soy or beef? Your answer will depend upon the food religion to which you subscribe.

I know, I know. It's obnoxious of me to refer to it thusly. I've annoyed everyone I've talked to about this subject, probably because no one wants to think of herself as believing in a 'food religion.' People say, Religion is based on belief. My nutritional choices are based on facts.

Wholesome plant nutrition or GMO phytoestrogen?

Ah, but. Most people make at least some effort to eat healthfully, and we all think our healthy eating choices are based on nutritional fact. And yet each of us chooses, often quite adamantly, to eat different things. One person says beef is artery-clogging, hormone-riddled and murderous, while soy is packed with wholesome plant protein. The other says soy is naught but an allergenic, GMO phytoestrogen, while land meat is the hearty fuel of our ancestors. Old reliable Science does not unequivocally discredit either point of view.

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Lana Del Rey and the Forbidden Feminine

LANA DEL REY evokes a world of red lips, intoxicants, deceptively innocent dresses, punky badboys and slick-haired sugar daddies who take you on fast drives down the coast at night. Her songs sound so lushly beautiful that you almost wish to be in them--until you remember how miserable that would be, since they are made of gilded angst, as dark-skied as pop can be. Lana has a Mad Men-esque knack for slathering glamor on turmoil until it's gorgeous. Her new album Ultraviolence is darker even than previous releases and edges into a hazily adulterous, abusive space. Even when she's cooing Ooh baby ooh baby/I'm in love it sounds like a scary place to be.

Her fascinations with quicksand sexuality, meekness and a badgirl variety of transactional romance are irksome and anti-feminist to some. "If we as a society accept the disempowered form of femininity that Del Rey embodies, young women are truly in trouble," read a recent denunciation in Ms.

I think such irking is important. Feminist thought tends to wish away some common, deep-rooted habits of the female mind, like yearning for male attention, fearing aloneness, being enticed by wealth, and that ancient craving for the protection of muscles. (He holds me in his big arms/Drunk and I am seeing stars/This is all I think of, Lana disempoweredly sang on "Video Games.") Even if we choose to sensibly repress such brain habits, lifting the rules to see what may lie beneath serves a real-keeping purpose.

Lana keeps it thusly real. Her sisterly defenders point to every woman's (feminist!) right to be screwed up, and I do not disagree. Lana's music contains disturbing scenarios, which should be heard as earnest art, dark subject matter handled with nuance and skill, rather than judged as bad role modeling. But her words are rarely as shocking as He hit me and it felt like a kiss; she is mostly criticized for the submissive fragility and phallocentric romanticism of her lyrics. The singer Lorde said of Del Rey, "It's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: 'I’m nothing without you.' This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff."

But surely many a woman has had not-proud moments of "don't leave me" shirt-tugging, if only in her own head. Weakness, fear, neediness--and the use of seduction to paper them over--are authentic parts of female experience, and it is valuable to hear a voice that admits to loving foolishly. Lana, singing Need you, baby, like I breathe you, baby, takes us to vulnerable corners of the female psyche that feel forbidden. Her unfeminist vices let us question the unflappable power pose of contemporary womanhood.

WITH HER bombshell image and helpless romanticism, Lana sings sex and love in unusual ways. She doesn't care about uprightness, suitability. She sings desire, desperation, unseemly devotion. She sings the kind of sex that makes you feel unpowerful in a good way (In the land of gods and monsters I was an angel/Looking to get fucked hard) and the kind that makes you feel powerful in a wrong way (Fucked my way up to the top/This is my show.)

She has sufficiently intact romantic sensibilities to remake the deliciously treacly Disney classic "Once Upon A Dream," darkening it almost beyond recognition but still honoring the love dream of the original. The punky badboys and sugar daddies are her antagonists, but also her romantic heroes. This is an artist captivated by love, in all its soaring and crashing. The Lana of her songs is exquisitely, sometimes tragically, vulnerable in love, but savvy enough to know that vulnerability carries its own form of honest power.

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Farm Dreams (Are Made of Bees)

MY YARD is full of dreams come true. The yard itself, sunny and alive, I dreamed up during a cold, hard Brooklyn winter. I saw the Craiglist ad for a cottage in Oakland with fruit trees and I cried; it looked so much like my dream, and I figured that meant I couldn't have it. (But I got it. That still amazes me.) I dreamed up the foot-high cedar raised beds with tidy rows of carrots and leeks. I dreamed the flock of hens chilling in the shade of the fig tree, and, later, I dreamed the banty subflock, roosting in a barn-red mini coop perched preciously on stilts.

Cat & corn

Dreams are messy, of course, in the coming true. I've lived in '1 BR Cottage with Fruit Trees'  for ten years now. I had to cut down the loquat and the old lemon. The decrepit peach succumbed to disease, and the figs, which aren't very tasty, besmirch the patio. I've had hens murdered by predators and my vegetable beds infected with equally deadly Verticillium wilt.

But none of those disappointments ruin the dream. Such woes are the price of realness; they cannot outweigh the satisfaction of imagining something wonderful and bringing it to fruition. The lemon and orange I planted the year I moved in are big, productive trees now. I open a high window and grab some bout-to-be-juice.

Problems also shape the course of new dreams. The dread Verticillium has made tomatoes and squashes (and hella other things) hard to grow, which depresses me. Last year, as I watched my cucumbers wither and my strawberry leaves turn crisp brown, I started thinking of ways to produce food from my yard that would not involve soil. I began to dream about bees.

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Happy

I THINK I might be happy. Feels strange. 

There have been long, cold times in my recent life. Sustained happiness is a feeling I had kinda forgotten--perhaps even wished to forget, so as not to suffer unpleasant comparisons. I have been (mostly) glad for good happenings in the lives of other people, but tried to keep such concepts at a safe remove from myself. Better not to dwell upon that which is not quite an option.

But I'm pretty sure I recognize this warmth on me, feeling like For lo the winter is past. Looks like happiness.

I DON'T know about this happiness business. Really though. It's disturbing. Unhappiness has a cool certainty and deflated expectations. Happiness is such a wild risk. It's bound to crumble at some point. What if I get accustomed and can't bear the crumbling?

And if this whole happy thing keeps up...will I become obnoxious? Will I become the sort of person with an endless parade of charmed-life Facebook status updates, tormenting those less fortunate? What if I start expecting my life to be good, rather than being grateful for goodness? Will I turn into a total brat when little shit goes wrong? Will I avoid the sorrows of others, lest they tarnish the sheen of my bliss? I suppose I make the depressing, psuedo-Buddhist assumption that misery makes you empathic and happiness makes you arrogant. But I know some humble, happy people. Wonder how they do it.

Perhaps the best way to avoid these troubling questions is by dampening my emergent happiness with worries about the nature of happiness itself. Phew. I feel better already.

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Why Negative Rap Is So Damn Good

WHENEVER I listen to the Talib Kweli classic "Get By,"  I am transported to a land of rainbows and sunshine. In such a state of bliss, it is easy to think, 'Man, why can't rap always be about love and uplift and the beautiful struggle?' Indeed, many an earnest hip hop fan has, at one time or another, wished rap could quit being so wrong so much of the time, and just be more positive. Such laments are often accompanied by forlorn remembrances of the good old days, when rap was pure.

But such thinking is based on illusion. Rap has never been pure, and never should be.

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On Pain

II. On Ice

I WAS FROZEN for a couple years. On the upside I don't seem older than I did pre-freeze: my face hasn't seen much sun and life hasn't had much chance to wear me out. On the downside years have gone by and things have happened and I had no role in them. I couldn't. I was on ice.

I was frozen in my house, supine on an ice pack, for six months or so, then occasionally upright for the next year, thawing ever so slowly. Then refreezing, then thawing, again and again, up to the present pleasant thaw, three years later.

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On Pain

I. The Weird World of Variable Disability

I DON'T SPEND my days lying on the floor now. I do things, which is lovely. It is a great pleasure to blast the radio on the way to the grocery store, or walk from a parking spot near the lake to the gym, where I yoga and sauna.

It is difficult, then, to explain how Pain infects my life. So many of my dreams and ambitions feel stunted by Pain. One might suppose the operation of Pain on my life would be logical, a static set of limits, within which I function freely. The truth is more chaotic. Pain can overwhelm, even when it's not at its worst. Everything becomes hard. Thinking becomes hard. At some point Pain becomes a sickness. It's not just discomfort felt in one place; the whole body becomes incapable, lethargic, like when you can't run or speak in a dream.

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