The Quixotic and the Autoblown

Last week I taught reflexivity to my Intro to Drama class, as part of our final lecture on the Spanish Golden Age.  Reflexivity, you see, is self-consciousness and self-reflection.  In this context, it is art that is aware of itself as art, and that draws our attention to itself as artifice.  It is art that represents itself and its processes, like Don Quixote or Las Meninas.

The best way to explain this, I sometimes find, is the simplest: the grammatical route.

"What," I asked my students, "is a reflexive verb?" [Pause. Sporadic answers, some dead-on. Widespread perplexity.] "Look, who's seen ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT?"

And that's how I came to teach Velasquez and Calderon under the aegis of the immortal Tobias Funke.

The Banal Omnipresence of Pants

Today, D rolled out of bed, walked sleepily into the living room, and said, "I'm going to jail."

"I know, honey," I replied, a tremor in my voice. "I'll wait for you. No matter how long it takes.  As long as it's today."

I'm in Honolulu now, where D is in his last couple of weeks working on the show that has kept him here for two-and-a-half years.  It's bittersweet, really.  But they've decided to ease his leave-taking by spending much of the penultimate week filming in one of the state's rare prisons. 

In terms of the surrealism that television production has wrought in our lives, is this up there with the time he came home to discover he was inadvertently covered in the fake gore of Criminal Minds, and spent hours channeling Lady Macbeth, all scrubbing and muttering? Who's to say?

From Halawa Prison. Strangely, this is also the mood D's in when he gets home.

I did feel an echoing twinge of dismay, edging into full-blown guilt, that while I planned to go off snorkeling with a visiting friend, D was in jail.

"The worst part about jail," D said to me, while breaking down why it is that we couldn't visit him on the highly secure location shoot, "is that they make us wear pants."

"Yes, that's the penal system and its endless oppressions," I said supportively.

"I really hate pants," he sighed. 

"I have bad news for you: in the frozen north, you are going to have to wear pants *every* day. Unless you take up my suggested kilt regimen, which my mother and I agree is a look you could totally rock."

"I do have good legs." He settled back into resigned anticipation: "Ugh: prison." Cry of despair: "PANTS."

"It's true what Baudrillard said, I guess: the prison only exists to obscure the fact that it is pants themselves, in their banal omnipresence, that are carceral."


Waikiki
December 8, 2012

Infernal Contortions, Nether Contemplations

See how he's made a chest out of his shoulders;

And since he wanted so to see ahead,

He looks behind and walks a backward path.

-Dante on the sorcerers and false prophets

The Inferno, Canto XX

 "It used to be," says my mother over breakfast yesterday, "that when you went out with your kid, your kid was like an actual person."

"Um. What?" I'm a little surprised to find my personhood in question so early this Thanksgiving morn.

"An actual person. Someone you would talk to. People used to come up to me on the bus and say, 'I can't believe how you talk to your daughter!'. Now your kid is just someone to be kept quiet with technology so you can concentrate on your own screen."

(You may remember that my mother told me, upon receiving news that I'd acquired a smartphone, that I was "up to my eyeballs in assholedom."* She feels strongly about hypermediation.)

"We first noticed this in London," interjects my father, "All of these parents, pushing around their kids in strollers and hushing them while they tapped away at their phones. Contemplating their own assholedom."

"Is that the new navel-gazing?" I ask.

"Yes," says my mother. "But it requires a twist."

"My tablet!" I cry, rushing out of the room for my computer, "Meet it is I set it down!"**

Washington, DC

November 23, 2012

*My mother: "So what's new with you and D?" 

I: "Not much. We found an apartment and moved into it. He's working. 

We're continuing our transition to being assholes with smartphones." 

My mother: "Mmm."

I: "For instance, today he realized he'd forgotten some paperwork

 he needed for work, so I offered to photograph them using an 

app he'd downloaded that turns iPhone photos into PDFs, 

and then email them to him so that..."  

My mother: "OH MY GOD: you are up to your eyeballs in assholedom."
 

** This joke would be better if I actually owned a tablet. 

 But what can you do: sometimes Shakespeare won't be held back by the mere mundanities of fact.