TV from 1996: NYPD Blue

January 2, 2023January 4, 2023 / spandrella / Leave a comment

I recently re-discovered NYPD Blue, the show that got me started on my unhealthy interest in crime procedurals, thanks to finding it on Hulu (and also, according to the internet, Amazon Prime). I haven’t actually seen that much of the show in its totality, considering how long it ran for—the first episode I ever saw was the season 3 premiere, and I dropped out sometime in the sixth season after the character Bobby Simone died and I didn’t like the detective who replaced him (Danny Sorenson, played by Rick Schraeder). But when I did watch it, I would record episodes off TV on a VHS tape and watch them over and over, and as I’ve come back to these episodes over the past month, it turns out that a lot of this show’s dialogue that still lives in my brain. And I’m re-discovering a lot of cool characters that I’d basically forgotten, like Donna Abandando and John the PA. If anything, the show is better than I remember, or than I was able to appreciate when I was 13.

To be clear, there is a lot of NYPD Blue—which debuted in 1993 and ran for 12 seasons—that is dated. For instance, LGBTQ stuff: there are good moments, but there’s also a lot that is objectifying and not flattering. Even the tolerant detectives seem painfully aware that they’re interviewing one of “those people” whenever they deal with a crime that requires them to talk to queer folks. There’s tolerance, but precious little genuine acceptance, and less celebration. I wouldn’t recommend this show to another queer person without that disclaimer, even though (for me) there’s enough other awesome stuff that I focus on instead. And even though I think the show does a pretty good job with non-white characters (at least within the boundaries of its genre as a crime show, and the fact that everyone the detectives come in contact with is intersecting with the criminal justice system), it’s definitely a show written by a white guy who was writing (perhaps unconsciously) with a white audience in mind. Detective Sipowicz is racist, he’s surrounded by other cops who are racists, and even the presence of the (phenomenal) black Lieutenant Arthur Fancy or the always solid Detective Martinez, does not make up for the snide remarks and sighs and grunts that pepper the show whenever a white cop has to deal with a character with a background different than his.

I started writing this to discuss the season 3 episode “Backboard Jungle,” which directly addresses Sipowicz’s racism and its effects on those around him (and how they navigate it), because I think handles racism in a way that’s nuanced and complicated and still speaks to America today, in 2022 (though by the time I post this, it might be 2023) (update: yep, it’s 2023, happy new year). The way it slowly hems in Sipowicz, traps him in a cage of his own making, is masterful. And I was all set to laud David Milch (who I think is one of the finest writers to ever work in television) for it, and then I learned: he didn’t write it. A black man did, David Mills, who’s also written for Treme, The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street, ER, and others. Intellectually, I know that network television shows employ many writers (they have a whole room!), and that producers, showrunners, or head writers rarely if ever write an entire season’s worth of episodes, even if they’re credited in every episode. But also, duh. I really should have intuited that this episode is more nuanced than most white writers could manage. But memories are imperfect and credits are easy to misunderstand.

“Backboard Jungle” reminded me of a small-scale Do the Right Thing. Not in plot or in stance, necessarily, but because both pieces have the courage to raise questions about racism in America and then not answer them. At the end of Do The Right Thing, characters circle and snipe and attack each other, and it feels simultaneously futile and inevitable, because the real evil in that movie is something that none of the characters can ever directly address, much less defeat. The racism at evidence in that movie destroys so much, by the end. It also still exists. It hasn’t gone away, even though every character (I think) wishes that it had.

“Backboard Jungle” does a variation of the same thing: It wrestles with these problems, but does not solve them. At the end of the episode, Sipowicz is still a racist. He’s still a cop. Fancy still has to work with him, the people of color who live in his precinct still have to encounter him and tolerate his presence and power in their neighborhood. He has opened wounds with his coworker Bobby Simone and his wife Sylvia that do not close. A murderer is off the street, but the drug dealers who contributed to the initial violence in the story are all still out there. There are no winners.

How do we deal with racists in our immediate vicinity? How do we challenge them, how do we change their views, how do we move forward in spite of them? This episode poses some options, but it doesn’t present any of them as fun, or magical, or even all that helpful at all.

As the episode opens, a local black community organization has organized a basketball game to honor the memory of a young black man who died in police custody (we never know much about this man, but it’s stated several times that the cause of his death is ambiguous: the medical examiner and the police department said he had a seizure; members of the black community suspect he was murdered by police). The community organization—represented by the character Kwasi Olushola, played by Tom Wright—has convinced the police to stay away from the game. Sensing opportunity, drug dealers in the area take it over, forming their own teams. With a high gang presence and no cops, violence breaks out, at least two people are killed, and numerous other innocent bystanders injured.

Sipowicz starts out bad, frustrated at “the brass” for going along with the community org’s request for no police, and with no respect for the people who organized the basketball game, and particularly none for Kwasi, who he sees as little more than a drug dealer. He resents that the black community doesn’t just believe the police when they say that the boy in their custody died of a seizure (gee, Sipowicz, wonder why they don’t believe you or your bosses). Sipowicz is both terrible at expressing himself and terrible at hiding how he feels, so the initial interview with Kwasi, well, it devolves.

Kwasi: You people wanted this to happen. The cops resented this game from the outset because it was in memory of a young black man murdered by police.
Simone: All right, Kwasi, calm down.
Sipowicz: That kid died from some kind of seizure.
Kwasi: He was murdered, and the racist NYPD covered it up.
Simone (reaching out to take Kwasi’s arm): Let’s tell it at the station house.
Kwasi (pulling away): Am I charged with a crime?
Sipowicz: Hey. Don’t be flailing your arms.
Kwasi: I don’t have to go anywhere with you. You dealing with that one [n-word redacted] in a thousand who knows what you can and cannot do.
Sipowicz: I’m dealing with a [n-word] whose big mouth is responsible for this massacre.
Simone: Shut up, Andy.
Kwasi: (pushing) Back off!

The conversation ends with both men losing their tempers, Simone needing to separate them, and Kwasi getting arrested for “putting his hands on an officer.” The whole interaction is witnessed by a local reporter and couldn’t be swept away or denied even if Sipowicz wanted it to (spoiler alert: he doesn’t).

Note that this interaction is precisely framed for Sipowicz to give himself an out. It’s not his fault, he didn’t say the n-word first, he only said it after the other guy did. The old “It’s not a slur if I’m just quoting someone else saying it” line.

“I did not call him that. He called himself that, and I threw it back at him,” he says to his boss when recounting the incident later. “You don’t get to ‘throw that back,'” Fancy retorts. Sipowicz knows that he won’t find any sympathy from Fancy, but he doesn’t want or need that; if anything, Fancy’s reaction cements Sipowicz’s feelings that nobody is assessing the situation—or his role in it—fairly or objectively.

Bobby Simone walks a fine line in this episode, having his partner’s back in front of Kwasi and the Lieutenant, while also making clear to Sipowicz that he doesn’t support how Sipowicz is behaving. Simone has the conversation with Sipowicz that we all hope non-racist cops are having with their racist coworkers: “Partner. I was not comfortable with those words. I am not comfortable with the feelings behind them.” They don’t have time to talk about it very in-depth because Simone has to solve the case without help from his partner. The conversation doesn’t do anything to change how Sipowicz is thinking, but it does let him know that the receptive audience for his feelings on this issue is shrinking, has shrunk.

Fancy benches Sipowicz and lets him stew at his desk for most of the day. It is not until they both have their coats on to go home, and the day is done, that they have it out and Sipowicz’s cracks begin to show, that his self-justification begins to wilt. He’s always argued that even if he is racist, he has never let that get in the way of doing his job. He thinks that Fancy is keeping him back because he’s acting as a black man, and not as a lieutenant in a police force who wants to solve crime (“acting his color,” I suppose, another thing that Sipowicz said to Kwasi). Fancy points out that racism did keep Sipowicz from getting his job done, today. That even before Fancy took him off the case—even before he got into it with Kwasi—Sipowicz had not been able to conceal his contempt for the people he was interviewing, or his impatience with the whole situation. (And just, man, look at all the emotional labor Fancy has to do here, putting aside his own feelings about the n-word or the whole situation, and finding a way to approach it that Sipowicz will actually see and accept.)

Sipowicz: I’ve said that word. I’ve thought it plenty. But I never used it on the job till your hump pal put us on that road.
Fancy: This isn’t about a word, Andy. Or your impure thoughts. It’s about you making this case harder to work.
Sipowicz: Not about you being black? Not about giving some back to me?
Fancy: It’s about what I say it’s about.
Sipowicz: Then say it. Part of what it’s about is watching me sweat.
Fancy: Well, a hell of a lot went down today, so I’d have to check my notes, but I thought I spent some of that time trying to save your sorry ass.
Sipowicz: Give me a break.
Fancy: I’m not gonna take you out, Andy. I move you out, my white bosses—they send me a little message. They send me another [racist detective] just like you, but maybe that one can’t do the job like you can.
Sipowicz: Gee, thanks a lot, boss.
Fancy: …I’ve been dealing with white cops like you since the academy. I can manage you with my eyes closed. Now, maybe you can’t handle a black man being your boss.

So we’ve got two strategies going: Simone appealing to his feelings, Fancy appealing to his pragmatic side. In the final scene, Sipowicz goes home and tells his wife about his day. He repeats the same justifications to Sylvia (who is pregnant)—that it wasn’t his fault because he didn’t say the word first, that he’s never used that word on the job before, and surely all that previous good behavior counts for something. The problem is the word, surely, not the attitudes and beliefs and subsequent actions of white people using the word.

Sylvia: I haven’t heard you use the word, but I have seen you do this. (She gestures with her hand so it crosses her face, like she’s casting a shadow over it.)
Sipowicz: That’s not the same thing. That’s something cops do so you don’t have to mention race. ‘Hey, did you hear about the shooting at this barber shop?’ (gesture) ‘Yeah.’ So it doesn’t have to be said and nobody gets offended.
Sylvia: Andy, it’s code for the word.
Sipowicz: It’s code so you don’t have to say it.
Sylvia (after a pause): Don’t ever show that to our child.
Sipowicz: Yeah. All right.
Sylvia: Don’t teach him that. Don’t teach him to think that way.
Sipowicz: Yeah.

And Sipowicz has no response to that. And because he loves his wife, because she is one of the only people on this earth that he wants to create happiness for, he says, “Yeah, okay.”

The episode closes with Andy sitting in a chair, looking as small as it’s possible for a burly man to look. Looking angry, and trapped, and like he suspects he’s in the wrong but doesn’t know how. This has gotten through to him. Do not teach our child to think that way. (The question of whether that’s possible, of whether Sylvia is asking for something that Andy is capable of doing, is a whole other question.)

It is rare, even today, that we see racism portrayed with complexity on network television (or anywhere else in mainstream arts/entertainment). Andy Sipowicz is the protagonist, he’s the center of the show’s narrative, we’re definitely supposed to see him as a good guy, and yet he is incredibly flawed. The conversations in this episode carry forward into at least two other episodes in later on in the show—once when Kwasi’s character recurs, and once when Sipowicz is up for promotion. It feels weird to say that I wish there was more of this? (More racist characters, yay! –No wait.) If we’re going to deal with racism in our art and culture, it needs to be dealt with in a way that’s thorny, and hard, and unresolved—the same way that racism itself is thorny and hard and unresolved. I want television to reflect the society that created it. I want it acknowledged that white people are not just racist by accident or innocent participants in a larger, racist system. I want a world in which racists are not only evil, even while racism itself is acknowledged to be evil. Sometimes white people are racists, and they’re also good dads and good husbands. And usually they don’t suffer consequences for being racist in the way that we want them to.

Am I making too many excuses and justifications for a show that I like? Probably! And there’s a lot here that’s not perfect, and dynamics that (as far as I know) go unexplored in the series—Fancy and Sipowicz talk about race, true, and their relationship is explicitly colored along a racial axis. But other characters—like Detective James Martinez, and the PAA Gina Colón, both portrayed by actors of color—don’t ever talk about Sipowicz’s racism at all. The PAA present in this episode, Donna Abandando (who’s a white woman), hears basically everything that happens in the office (especially between Simone and Sipowicz, because her desk is right next to theirs), but we don’t hear what she thinks about any of it. The dynamic between Sipowicz and Fancy is defined by their power dynamic of subordinate/boss, and Fancy’s character has more power and agency to deal with Sipowicz than his coworker or the office receptionist. Do Gina and James like working with him? Is Gina afraid that if she makes a complaint about him, that she’ll be the one to lose her job, not him? The effect of the characters’ silence is to imply that since they’re not direct targets of Sipowicz’s racism, its existence doesn’t bother them; I think most POC would probably say that this is not an accurate reflection of how racism affects them in the workplace. But the show is silent about this, at least from what I can remember.

And yes. There is an argument to be made that the sympathy that we as an audience are expected to feel toward Sipowicz would be better spent at the altar of, say, Lieutenant Fancy. And that we need shows that show black joy and jobs for black actors that aren’t just as murder suspects (I think we do have more of those now, in 2023, but in 1996 when this aired, the pickings were comparatively slim). Agreed! All agreed. We need all those things in our culture too. We also need more shows about white people honestly, actively, *consciously* wrestling with their own racism. Sipowicz “wins” in this episode. He caught the murderer, Kwasi’s not going to sue him, he gets to keep his job. But the last shot of the episode shows just how much he does not feel like a winner.

It is important that this episode was written by a black man, David Mills. I think it took a white man to write Sipowicz’s racism (Milch has said that he used his own experiences when delving into this side of the character), but it takes a person of color to truly play out the consequences and especially the effects of that racism. I also think it’s important that Mills was sixteen years younger than Milch. I truly don’t remember how much Sipowicz examines and re-assesses his own racism over the course of the show and changes thanks to self-examination and personal hard work. I do think it’s crucial that in this episode, we don’t see Sipowicz changing, but we see signs that the world is changing around him. His boss is black, his partner vehemently disagrees with him, his wife will not tolerate it in their household or around their child. He can’t count on the reporter who hears the exchange with Kwasi to be pro-cop and sweep the story under the rug. Kwasi himself has access to resources and a megaphone that he can deploy against this cop if he wants to. Sipowicz hasn’t changed, but he’s realizing that the world around him has, and he can learn to navigate that world, or he can choose not to. And sometimes that’s the best you can expect.

Sources:

“The Backboard Jungle.” NYPD Blue. Written by David Mills and William L. Morris. Directed by Mark Tinker. 20th Century Fox Television, 1996.

Britt, Donna. “Giving Voice on TV to Things Unsaid.” The Washington Post, 6 September, 1996. Retrieved from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed 22 April 2022.

Elber, Lynn. “Irked Black Writer Breaks ‘Blue’ Line.” Sun Sentinel, 16 January 1996. Retrieved from ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed 22 April 2022.

Millman, Joyce. “Racist — or realistic?” Salon, 27 September 1997. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20070703061913/http://www.salon.com/sept97/media/media970922.html. Accessed 6 October 2022.

After the Music is Over

March 26, 2022March 26, 2022 / spandrella / 2 Comments

It starts in Kenmore Square, which the song says is deserted, but you’ve never been here when the college kids are here, so you don’t really know what that’s like (or not like). When you get off the T and exit the station, you always have stop and do a full 360 spin and make sure you’re pointed the right direction, because Boston has a way of spinning your inner compass.

In one acutely-angled corner, where Comm Ave, Brookline, Beacon, and Deerfield all come together, there is a two-toned, roughly triangular building. This is your hotel. The floors in the lobby are stone, murderously slippery when wet. There’s a restaurant/sushi bar/karaoke bar just off the lobby. The elevators are small, and old, and take forever. The stairwells (one on each side of the building) wrap around the elevator shafts, and it’s often faster to use them—but they’re also slippery, also murderous when wet.

The hotel was built in 1897, and god knows when it was last renovated. The windows don’t have screens, so if you open one to get some extra air, you have to mind how close you sit to the edge. From one side of the hotel, you can see the Citgo sign. From the other, you can see the backside of Fenway Park. If you can’t see either of these, well, there’s always the roof, which a careless employee has left unlocked. Just climb the rickety-ass iron steps and push on the door that says AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. There’s never any stars to speak of—it’s Boston, it’s December, it’s generally overcast; even if it’s not overcast the city lights drown out the sky—but you can see all of Kenmore Square from up there, watch people crossing the street below you to get to 7-11 or Dunkins.

The carpet is maroon with little pale spots on it, and it’s the same carpet regardless of what floor you’re on, or whether you’re in a room or a hallway. In spite of the hotel’s general triangular shape, the inside is a warren, with dead ends and side hallways. No matter which direction you turn when you come out of the elevator, it is the wrong direction. Some of the rooms are freezing, some roasting.

It was one of the first hotels built in Boston, and when it was built, it was one of the largest buildings in the city. One has to think that there was splendor here, once. The lobby tries to call back to it, with its fancy ceiling and the aforementioned stone floors. The wooden staircase railings that swoop down black and gold metal balusters (are they supposed to be wrought iron? Cast iron? Colonial something-or-other?). But that was awhile ago, and Kenmore Square is no longer upper class (if it ever was), no longer the “it place” in town. It has shops and offices and restaurants, it’s like 3 blocks away from Fenway Park, and it has the Citgo sign. That’s it.

According to Wikipedia, the hotel was used to house Italian prisoners of war in World War II. It’s where the fixers of the 1919 World Series met to iron out their conspiracy. There used to be a radio station in the basement (man, now I wish I’d found my way to the basement, I bet there’s still equipment down there). There used to be a nightclub in the space that later became a pizza restaurant, with performers like Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong.

So that’s the actual history. The history that matters to the rest of the world.

The important thing is, there’s no cops at this hotel, no noise complaints, and the rooms are big enough to cram in a truly criminal number of people. She is old and shabby (like me, like so many of us), but so many things happened here, the kind of history that only matters to a few people, here and there, who passed through her hallways.

Here’s the punx room, stinking of beer and sweat and sweaty beer after three days, floor covered in sleeping bags and duffels and lanky, hungry humans who either didn’t want to or couldn’t pay for their own hotel room.

Here’s where we—grown-ass adults with steady jobs and retirement savings accounts—almost got in a fight with teenage girls who wanted to party for a weekend and mouth off.

Here’s where that guy kissed you, that one time.

Here’s the room where somebody—not saying who—hid action figures in the ceiling, to see if they’d stay up there until the next year, or if someone would find them and take them.

Here’s people making sure everyone they know has tickets to the show, has food, has beer. You know, all the important stuff.

Here’s where W built a whole-ass bar out of plywood and ingenuity, and that one actually did cause a noise complaint, because he was using power tools, but when the security guy came to see what the fuck was happening, W was so charming and competent that the guy just made him promise to take it down at the end of the week (he did).

Here’s Bill, outside smoking, Bill who got you drunk when you were 17 and has never asked you to be anyone other than your own sweet self. Bill, who’s seen enough fucked up shit in his life, that when he tells you, “That was fucked up, what happened to you,” you know to believe him.

Here’s someone in a tiger suit, opening beer bottles with her teeth.

Here’s Skippy, carrying a shrub through the lobby. As you do.

Here’s a guy bringing a dozen people out into the city on a Pizza Tour of Boston.

Here’s another, showing everyone the route over the bridge, past the college campus, down to the Harvard Square post office.

Here’s half a dozen people sitting on the floor in the hallway, beers next to their ankles, wrists hooked over their knees. There’s like 40 people in the hotel room and no room for more.

Here we are, every December. Slightly different cast, maybe, but same general, hospitable, welcoming insanity.

The hotel is closed now, killed by the pandemic (and maybe other factors? I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been unprofitable for awhile). The lobby is dark, the elevators still. Did the owners sell the hotel furniture, try to even out their losses? Are the tourist pamphlets about the duck boats and Freedom Trail still in the empty lobby? Did a homeless guy jimmy his way into the basement? Did they remember to lock the door to the roof before they left, or is it swinging open?

I’ve been listening to the Mighty Mighty Bosstones since I was 14 years old. I went to my first Throwdown (and met Bill) when I was 18. That whole time, I felt lucky: To like this band, who didn’t force me to wrestle with the idea of problematic faves. To find these friends. To explore this city. To find new bands that I loved because the Bosstones took them on tour or talked them up in interviews. To love a band that played this many shows for this many years.

The Bosstones broke up in January, and my streak of having non-problematic faves is officially broken (thanks, Dicky, and fuck you). As I wrestle with my anger, I realize that this is what I will miss: all these people, all these friends. I hope I see you all again. I hope you’re all doing okay, keeping safe, all that.

I had plenty of time with the Bosstones. With their songs, with their shows, with them as people. I didn’t have enough time with my friends.

After the music is over
When what needs to be’s been said
After the tears have all been shed
When it’s over, what is after that?

….After the music’s over, we will hear the music again.

Work in 2020

May 27, 2021 / spandrella / Leave a comment

The library stopped being a library.

They let me back in to work in the building, three days a week. I emptied the book drops. I checked in material.

I watered my coworker’s plant, still hanging on after two months with no water.

I edited all the process documentation. I edited it again.

I took everything off the hold shelf, that had been sitting there for three months, unable to be picked up. Empty shelves. No patrons. No services.

I took all the forms that we have patrons fill out and filed them in a filing cabinet. I organized folders by month. I labeled the drawers.

I threw away old documentation. Out of date forms. Empty three-ring binders. I found circulation policies from 2007 and thought about sending them to the archives collection.

I ran documents through the shredder.

I noticed that my coworker, who quit two months before we went into lockdown, had left behind a really cool supply organizer on her desk. I stole it and put it on mine.

I reorganized our network drive, and the hard drive.

We were a one-way library. Books come in….they don’t go back out.

Outside the library, our campus had become something of a park, a picnic ground for neighbors in the area. They couldn’t go to the actual parks–the city had closed them. They couldn’t stay in their houses forever. So, they came to the college I work at, sat under a cottonwood for awhile, let their kids toddle in the grass.

I piled up boxes of mail, waiting for our ILL staff to come back to work, along the wall. I organized them by date, in crates. It took about two weeks to fill up a crate. I ended up filling 6 of them, before my coworker started coming to the office, started unpacking and processing everything.

I took our larger-than-lifesized cardboard figure of Legolas the Wood Elf and made a mask for him out of paper towels. I moved him to different places around the office so he could surprise the cleaning crew.

One of the staff computers near me had its monitor on, and it was being used by someone working remotely. I could see them highlighting and annotating old digital versions of the school newspaper to make them accessible to screen readers.

I was often the only one in the building. Most of the lights were off. I listened to podcasts. Wiped my desk down with disinfectant even though nobody else was going to touch it.

I stayed away from windows. Every now and then, someone would walk by, cup their hands to their face and peer through the glass, trying to figure out if we were open.

My coworker who organizes building stuff showed up eventually. He started taking away furniture, piling it in study rooms, blocking off the entire lower level. Stickers appeared on the floor, directing people to this side of an aisle or that one. We threw dropcloths over bookcases to keep people from browsing. Plastic wrapping appeared over the drinking fountains. I put a sign on the dishwasher letting people know they had to hand wash their dishes or bring their own dishes in with them. We ran out of coffee but there was nobody to order any more, and anyway, we weren’t accepting deliveries. At the request of the custodial staff, we placed our trash cans outside of offices, to reduce the number of areas they’d have to walk through.

We put up a curtain around the front desk. No lending books, not right now. Not even when we let people back into the building. The library is closed.

I signed into staff meetings on my phone so that I could walk around and show everyone else, who hadn’t been in the library in over six months, what the building looked like now.

Quiet, quiet, quiet. I had no patrons. I had no requests to fill. No printers to fill with paper. No questions about restrooms or room assignments.

I was getting caught up on so much that I’d been planning to do for years. It was terrible.

I took inventory of all of the chargers and headphones and projectors and everything else we check out to patrons. I wondered if we’d ever check them out again.

Eventually, I started meeting patrons by appointment. They could put items on hold and set up a time and I would bring the items out to their car. Since no one else was working in circulation, I could organize the hold shelf however I wanted. I gave patrons weeks and weeks to pick up their items before cycling them back to the shelf.

When does a library become a library again? We’re lending books now. Students are in and out of the building. We’re even having classes in the building. Holds get picked up. But there’s still no research center, no computer lab, no writing center. No questions about restrooms or school assignments. No group study rooms. It doesn’t feel like a library. I’m still behind a curtain. Still behind glass.

I’ve started to picture the library as a great, slumbering beast. Unlike most beasts, though, it was a lot easier to send it to sleep than it is to wake it up. One of the podcasts that I listen to adapted its sign off by saying, “We are produced on Radio Row, which is currently scattered across the North American continent but will always be centered in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.” The library is currently scattered across the North American continent (or at least…the greater metro area), and what lives here is a skeleton that puts books in the mail and electronic files in email boxes. It lives on Zoom and in the chat room.

And it slumbers, which it can do because campus is quiet and empty, waiting for thousands of students to be safe enough to come poke it with a stick until it wakes up entirely.

Michael and Scarlett

May 25, 2021 / spandrella / Leave a comment

I’m sure there were things I planned to do this weekend, like go to the grocery or buy gas or just go outside and look at the sun or something. Instead, I watched three epic (and epically long) classic movies between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening: Gone With the Wind and The Godfather (Parts I & II).

One so loud, the other relatively quiet. One with a protagonist so all over the place, so outward and emotional; the other so restrained, hiding everything behind his eyes because revealing too much of yourself is a death sentence. Both movies about inheritance, really. In Gone With the Wind it’s about land, in the Godfather it’s about family. Both are about kids trying to live up to their dad’s legacy.

We don’t see as much of Gerald O’Hara as we do of Vito Corleone–and most of what we see is past his prime, the decline of his life. In Part 1 of The Godfather, Vito is on the far side of his life, but still at the peak of his power. We know that Gerald is an immigrant from Ireland. This isn’t in the movie, I don’t think, but I asked my parents (who’ve read the book) and they said that he won the land that became Tara gambling. He built up this whole estate. He takes risks, loves horses, is kinda carefree. Gerald has basically won the American Dream. He has a big estate. He enslaves people. He’s respected by his neighbors (well, other than the ones he enslaved) and has beautiful daughters all ready for marrying off. He’s been accepted by other men of his age and station. But he loses it all because the core of the American Dream is rotten. It relies on the exploitation and abuse of people. And he doesn’t prepare Scarlett to live in a world that’s different than the one he created for them.

Vito Corleone is more reserved and calculating than Gerald O’Hara. He builds his empire slowly, step by step–not all at once in a fantastic, and fantastically risky, game of cards. In Part II, his story exudes warmth, with lots of camera shots of sunsets and growing babies. It takes place in a tenement neighborhood in 1920s New York City, but there’s nothing filthy or smelly about his story. Vito has also won the American Dream, sort of, but it’s hollow. Not because the American Dream (in the world of The Godfather) is hollow, but because Vito’s methods, the power behind his business, is bloody. The violence at the core of his life means he can never make the transition to being a straight businessman. That, and the fact that America isn’t ready to accept Italian Americans as “Americans” in the same way that Gerald’s neighbors were apparently ready to accept him. After a time, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the Corleones run into anti-Italian racism, sure, but there’s also plenty of people who know exactly what their business entails and are repelled. If Vito’s timeline is about winning the American dream, about creating and protecting his family, Michael’s timeline–with Tahoe in the winter, with 3-piece suits, with Cuban revolutions and gunshots and proper offices and hard edges and hotels– is about losing all of that.

Neither Michael nor Scarlett can truly live up to their parents’ legacy, can carry their parents’ dreams into the future, even though they are their parents’ best heirs. (Interestingly, both of these movies were made at a time when middle class parents could reasonably expect that their children would live better lives than they did. Perhaps part of the reason why I relate to both Scarlett and Michael is because I’m one of the first generation of Americans in 100 years that can expect to live more insecure, less prosperous lives than our parents did, and so I relate to the futility of their situation.) Scarlett’s first downfall is external, because her whole world catches on fire around her, and her own individual power can’t withstand that. Later on, she’s the manufacturer of her own doom and misery in a much more direct (and inevitable, and sad) way. The seeds of Michael’s failure can be found inside him, in his core where there’s something rotten. If his father hadn’t been shot, if he’d gone on to marry Kate and graduate Dartmouth and go into politics or become a college professor, maybe that core would have remained hidden for longer. But his family was threatened, and once Michael decided to keep it safe, he could never come off the battlements.

Both movies are about the transitions of those characters, the derailing of their lives into something else, and how they both surrender it (to a certain extent) and own it (in another sense). The transition moment in The Godfather is fast. I used to think it was when Michael was eating dinner with Sollazzo and McCluskey–that moment before he shoots them, when the camera does a slow push in on his face, and he’s not blinking and you can see everything coming forward for him, out of his eyes. And Sonny thinks it’s because McCluskey broke Mike’s jaw. But re-watching this weekend, I realized it was earlier than that. After the Don was shot, Michael spends one evening back at the family house, watching Sonny declare war and rage against the other four Families, watching Tom Hagen try to talk him down, watching nobody know what to do. Then he goes to the hospital to visit the Don and realizes that his dad’s about to be killed. Assassinated in the hospital. And he bends over his father and whispers (I think, I should have written it down), “It’s me, it’s Michael. I’m with you now.” He doesn’t say. “I’m here.” He says I’m with you. That’s the moment when Michael changes his entire life, steps in to save his family. The Don’s in danger. Fredo’s not up to it. Sonny’s not up to it. It’s up to him.

Scarlett’s journey is longer, which is something I really respected about the character’s portrayal in Gone With the Wind. She changes over the course of the movie, but also keeps the core of who she is. She doesn’t change enough to save herself by the end. At the beginning, she’s manipulative, doing things for approval, or because it’ll attract a man, and not out of loyalty or duty or friendship. She’s sort of kind of always…empty? When she gets back to Tara, after Atlanta burns, she becomes determined to save it, because it’s her home, it’s Tara. I don’t know if she truly felt bound to Tara before the war, maybe because (as a woman), she would have been expecting to leave her childhood home and join her husband’s plantation–not inherit her father’s. Tara is where she finds her core, and she realizes that it’s the most important thing in her world. She discovers that she’ll kill for it. That she’ll make other people hate and resent her and that’s fine as long as she gets to keep it. Where she starts telling people to do things because they need to be done, not because having power pleases her. Where she starts working herself as hard as she works everyone else. She and Michael both find out what they’re capable of, when their family legacies are threatened.

We think of Scarlett’s transition as the moment when she pulls the carrot or turnip or whatever out of the ground. “I will never be hungry again!” And that’s the turning point, the moment, maybe. But after that–when she sticks to it, when she starts working, when she finds the steel in her spine–that’s a whole process. And she owns it. The war changes her involuntarily, but this is the moment when she chooses to change herself. She could have stayed the same, and in the process, lost everything. Instead she chose to change, in that moment, and while it didn’t fix everything for her–far from it–it gave her enough to get through that particular time.

These movies are obviously about a lot of other things. I haven’t talked about Michael’s abuse of his wife, or the racism and historical revisionism in Gone With the Wind. We haven’t talked about iconic movie lines or Rhett Butler. I haven’t really talked about the books at all, or how both of these movies are better than they have any right to be. Gone With the Wind was made by a director who had never been to the South (and didn’t go to the South until after the movie was completed and he attended the premiere in Atlanta). The Godfather is a story of an immigrant family made by a guy from Michigan. And yet both movies manage to capture something both universally human, and something particular to the times and people whose stories they tell. They’re both movies about bad people that the audience ends up loving and rooting for. But now I’m sitting here thinking about Scarlett O’Hara and Michael Corleone crossing space and time and fictional realities to sit down and have dinner together, and wondering what they would say to each other–if they would know how alike they are.

Happy New Year

January 9, 2021 / spandrella / Leave a comment

(Okay, but seriously, me making a timely post within two weeks of the actual time? I am fucking on it, you guys.)

Thank you, to all the vigilant/anxious/conscientious people in 2020 who worked really hard to make wearing a mask and not leaving home the norm in 2020. It helped. I’m a person who wants to be vigilant and do the right thing, but ultimately I’m also lazy, and keeping my attention on something in a consistent way for weeks and weeks and weeks and months is impossible for me to do if I’m not around other people who are also doing it. (I don’t know if this is typical? If people in low-compliance areas would wear masks if it was more the norm? In some ways I notice myself being really susceptible to just rolling along with what everyone else is doing; in some ways I’m super ornery.) Surrounded by different people (or surrounded by no people), I know I would have continued to wear a mask, but I’m not sure if I would have stayed out of restaurants. I maybe would have forgotten about staying away from people at the grocery. I might have given up on social distancing at work. I would have just made doctors’ appointments and dental appointments and kept going to starbucks. I admit I did keep going to get my hair cut, partly because I couldn’t stand it and partly because my stylist owns her own business, but that was one of the only “That’s a really stupid thing you’re doing” things I did all year, and on balance…well, at least I didn’t have to pay a price for it.

Throughout this whole thing, I’ve underestimated the danger and the longevity of it. I started getting anxious about my work needing to shut down only a day or two before it actually did. I didn’t really think, in April and May, that we’d be settling in for doing the whole year like this, even though people said we would. I am still only half-believing the people who are saying that we need to be prepared for this to be our life for another six months. By this time I know to trust other people and not my instincts, and that my disbelief/disunderstanding is probably more self-preservation than anything else.

Thanks to the people who tweeted about non-instacart grocery ordering apps. Thanks to the people who tweeted about mental health and the agony of combining grief with waiting. Thanks to the people who normalized Saying No To Everything. Thanks to the people who gave me words with which to say, “No, I’m not doing that right now/this year/etc.” Thanks to the people who figured out how to have writer’s conferences online. And movie parties online. Thanks to the people who made me feel guilty for even considering doing a thing, which then steered me away from doing that thing. Thank you to the people who know that human life matters, and that all the lives we lost this year mattered, and that they all left holes behind. Thank you for making pushing back against boomer parents who still want to go to restaurants and to church a thing that we can do with love and humor and compassion.

Thank you to the pets, the dogs and the cats and bunnies and bearded dragons and iguanas and chickens and whatever, who made staying home a tolerable project. Thank you to the lady who let me keep coming over to watch her dog and hang out with him even though she probably didn’t need to. Thanks to the dogs for giving me a reason to leave the house, walk around, and look at the sky. Thanks for keeping me company on zoom meetings. And for interrupting zoom meetings. Thank you for the snuggles, for collapsing across my lap so thoroughly and heavily that my legs fell asleep.

If you still exist in the world and are reading this, thank you. I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’ve survived this long. Thank you for helping all the people that you helped. I’m glad you kept on as best you could. I hope you have something good to look forward to in 2021.

Thank you to all the activists who took to the streets in 2020, risking literal life and limb to do so. Thank you for telling your stories. Thank you for telling me what were the good orgs to donate money to. I hope in 2021 we can make progress on defunding police and treasuring black life, and not have to take to the streets and protest every time the police kill a black person.

And to thousands of firefighters, across a dozen states, who left their families (in the middle of a pandemic) to fight the worst wildfires ever (during a pandemic). Thank you for working to keep the homes of total strangers safe. I’m really sorry that the season was so long, and hard, and relentless. I hope you’ve had a few good nights’ sleep since October.

Thank you to the people who gave me stories to read, listen to, play, or watch in 2020. Thank you to everyone who figured out how to find the bandwidth to do creative things in 2020. Thank you especially to the people who made things lighthearted and compassionate, things that seemed as far away from 2020 as possible.

Thanks to the kids, the little ones. I know that in a lot of ways you don’t even know how fucking weird this year was. Thank you for being adaptable, for being bouncy and bubbly and bringing us all up with you. I know that I spent a lot of the year wishing that everything would be less noisy, but the truth is, if you were less noisy, I would be a whole lot sadder. Thank you for continuing to find fun and excitement even within all of this nonsense of a year. I hope I was able to support you in a way that was helpful.

Here’s to 2021 being better in any number of ways than 2020.

A Semi-Monthly Blog Post

December 1, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

(Maybe if I just tell myself that updating my blog every other month is a fine goal to have, I’ll stop feeling like a blogging failure?

Anyway, I managed to write a thing that felt like a blog entry, on running and crutches. This whole post is one long subtweet, yes it is.)

In a lot of sports and sports-like activities, particularly ones where adults get involved to “challenge themselves” and “reach their potential,” (anything that involves SCIENCE and GEAR and THE SCIENCE OF GEAR, plus a certain percentage of participants with a certain amount of disposable income), there are plenty conversations in forums and stuff about what’s the Best Way to do the thing. Which shoes? Which heart rate monitor? Which bicycle? Which weight lifting routine? And most of these conversations are fine and fun to have (and essential for newbies and the empowerment of newbies). But sometimes they tip into this weird space where people start buying into some objective “best” way to do the thing, rather than understanding that “best” is whatever way works for you, individual person who is doing the thing. They talk about things like “finding the limits of the human body” and “being my best self” and avoiding “crutches,” like there is this space where the human body can operate outside the constraints of space, culture, and learned human experience. They talk about things being Optimal.

When I first started running, I didn’t have a smart watch or a smart phone, and was without a reliable way to measure my speed or distance. I downloaded a Couch to 5K app to my iPod, so I had audible cues (in the form of a very nice British lady) that told me how long the next run would be, when to start, when to stop, all that. But since I was using an iPod, which has no data plan and thus no GPS, I had no way to track the distance I covered on my runs. I just stepped out my door, started running when the lady told me to run, turned back toward home when she said we were halfway through, and stopped when she told me to stop. I made a very specific playlist that was arranged in a certain way to supplement the app’s audio cues. Eventually I transitioned away from running with the C25k app, but by that time I’d imprinted on the playlist, and continued using it for years.

The first song was “The Foggy Dew” by the Chieftains, with Sinead O’Connor. There’s tension in the song, but it’s slow, and it’s almost five minutes long. It was my walking warmup song. This was immediately followed by “Swagger” by Flogging Molly (the studio version off of Drunken Lullabies). “Swagger” is when you pickup your feet and start running. (The song is mostly an instrumental, with the only words being in the chorus: “Tell me where are you going? I don’t know where I’m going,” which seemed apt.) Somewhere in the middle of the playlist there’s always a song either by Koko Taylor or the Blind Boys of Alabama–upbeat enough for me to keep running if I wanted to, but if I was really struggling, it was a song where I could stop and walk for a few minutes. Immediately after the “take a break” song, though, is “I Am The Doctor,” the Eleventh Doctor’s “action theme” from Doctor Who. You do not walk during the Doctor’s song. Not ever. Pick up your feet and go.

Second to last is “Graffiti Worth Reading,” by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which starts with the trombone player yelling, “The end is near!” Last song was “Walking Is Still Honest” by Against Me!–another song that I could run to if I wished, but if I was wiped out, I could walk to it too. Walking is still honest, as Laura Jane Grace says.

I added songs in the middle, as I got better and better at running and was setting out for longer/farther runs, but the bones of it–beginning/middle/end–stayed the same for years. I have a pavlovian response to certain bits of it now. “Swagger” is always a song that makes me want to pick up and run, for example. Same with a lot of Doctor Who music. If I listen to one of the songs, my brain will automatically cue up the next one on the list.

At some point, I started getting a better sense of my pace, and also the circumference of a lot of the parks in my city, so I no longer have to approximate distance based on the length of my playlist. Now when I leave my house, I plan on doing a certain number of laps of the park, not a certain number of songs. I’ve even branched out musically! I’ll listen to the Hamilton soundtrack and just imagine it in my head as I run. Act I, at least, is great for running. (Not so much Act II where there’s multiple songs that make me cry, but I’m a really slow runner so I can go for five or six miles before Act I ends.) I’ve been trying to get back to my running playlist so I don’t overplay Hamilton (can you overplay Hamilton? Unsure). I don’t have unlimited data so I still don’t run with playlists from Spotify or whatever. I make them in my music app.

I like running to music, clearly. Making playlists and such is a way for me to interact with running outside of the actual part where I have to leave my house and put my feet to the pavement. And it’s also–especially as my listening time gets more and more dominated by podcasts–often where I end up listening to music, these days, instead of to podcasts.

There’s some that say that they don’t want to run with music because it’s a “crutch,” like a run that you do with headphones is somehow less legitimate, or not as big of an accomplishment, as one done without music. I would posit that Crutches Are Good Actually? Literal crutches are a tool that gives increased mobility and stamina to people who don’t get enough of either of those things from their bodies. If it gets you out and running (or walking) that’s good. Using aids is good. If you’re new to running, you should definitely experiment and see which works better for you (some folks run better without music), but with music or without, neither is inherently better than the other. (Unless your music is so loud that you aren’t aware of your surroundings and you get run over by a park attendant in a golf cart. That’s bad.) If you’re the sort of person who hates running without music, don’t subject yourself to it just because you’ve bought into some weird paradigm that running without a tool is better than running with one. There’s nothing about running with music that makes it inherently worse than running without–there’s only what works for you, an individual person.

When I first started running, I was depressed as hell. I was living in New York City and doing a lot of exercising because a) I had access to a gym for free and figured I should use it because when do you ever get free gym access, and b) you’re supposed to exercise when you’re depressed because exercise makes you less depressed (I understand that the actual argument/science is more nuanced than that, but in my depressed and nonthinking state, that was basically the extent to which I was able to explain it to myself). I do remember trying to build a running routine in Colorado before I left, so on some level I was carrying on with that, but also I was running explicitly because I knew that running was Good and binge-watching entire seasons of The Biggest Loser on my computer before falling asleep was Bad. I didn’t even have real running shoes (just vegan saucony jazzes) or shorts (just these cotton cargo pants from Old Navy with an elastic waist). I remember running at night through Columbia’s campus, or up and down the Riverside Park. I never felt like I was going fast. I never felt like a runner. I don’t remember ever feeling a “runner’s high.” I ran because it was supposed to be good for you. In my memory, I never even got my feet off the ground. I just…puttered. That’s my memory colored by depression, though.

When I moved back to Colorado, I tried again, this time with my roommates’ dog to help motivate me. I finally built up some momentum, and finally started running regularly and building a habit. I still had a pair of tights from when I’d played soccer like 15 years before, and umbro shorts. A pair of cotton yoga pants. I bought trail running shoes (for running in the park and on the roads), and that was my gear. That first year, I wore out the crotch in the old soccer tights. I bought new running tights, on clearance at REI, and that’s how I ended up with a thick, winter-weight pair. But I ran in them anyway, in all weather. I ran a mile without stopping, then I ran 20 minutes without stopping, then I ran a 5k. Then a 10k. Then a half marathon. I ran to Wash Park (a few miles from my house) and back.

(Then last year, I got tendonitis in one knee, and something else made the other one hurt, and then I stopped going to the gym to lift and then the pandemic happened and my running slowly petered out. Every time I try to run right now, my knees/legs hurt for the first mile and a half.)

I still don’t have a smartwatch. I had a fitbit for a little while, but it made my wrist itch and I never used the information in a way that actually helped with my training or made me faster. I still don’t have a heart rate monitor. I still buy all of my running tights on clearance, and my running shirts are all the free ones that you get when you sign up for a race. I splurge on running shoes, but that’s because I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. So I have this one running playlist, and my semi-fancy shoes. Those are my crutches, and if I thought anyone was actually going to take them away from me or even cared that much, I would say that you can pry them from my cold dead hands.

If an NBA player listening to a specific playlist to hype himself up before a game, is that a crutch? Or a baseball player who wears the same socks throughout the playoffs? Or a hockey player growing a playoff beard? What point of expertise do you have to reach before crutches/routine/superstitions are no longer frowned upon, but are just cute and quirky? Or part of being a professional?

tl;dr: Just run. Do the thing. You don’t have to be fast. You don’t need fancy tools. You can run with crutches, or not. Anything that gets you out the door is a good thing. Are you doing it for fun? Let it be fun, whatever that means.

Fiction Free Write

September 6, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

I signed up on a mailing list from storyaday.org to get a writing prompt every day for the month of September. Yesterday was the first day I actually tried one of the prompts (I set a timer for fifteen minutes, which is why it just kind of stops), which came from excellent writer and human Mary Robinette Kowal. I liked how it turned out, so here it is. The first sentence in quotes is Mary Robinette’s:

“Of the things that could go wrong while crocheting, opening a portal had seemed like a low probability.”

Especially since she had just learned to crochet this morning and was, if she was honest, still unclear on the distinction between crocheting and knitting (why do you need multiple ways to make cloth out of string and sticks?). An hour of laborious work had given her a pitiful start on the potholder she was supposedly making, but then, spooling off the yarn she had strung together, a sparkly little void opened, dripping off her crochet needles like extra-dimensional drops of water. They held together into a little window that was about as big across as the palm of her hand.

Well, she thought. That’s interesting. She poked her fingers through the window. It was raining, over there in Wherever. As she pulled her hand back through and marveled at the water on her fingers, she smelled damp grass and decaying leaves. Rain. She leaned down to try and see into Wherever, but the window was too small to get a good look. Just a closeup of tree bark. Of course her first interdimensional window through time and/or space would faceplant her into a tree.

If I keep crocheting, she thought, maybe the portal will get bigger, and I’ll be able to see more.

If the portal gets bigger, she replied to herself, what if it starts sucking this world into it, like a hole in the side of an airplane? What if I fall into it and it turns out the portal is 30 feet up in the air?

Do you even know how to close it? another part of her asked. Open it further or close it completely. You can’t leave an interdimensional portal through time and/or space open in your living room. Not even a small one. “What’s this?” “Oh, nothing, just my portal.” “Really? Where does it go?” “I dunno, it just opened up one day and then I did literally nothing about it and went back to watching The Good Place for the fourth time.” “Ah ha. I see. Yes, I can see why you would make such a discovery here, in your living room, and then do nothing.”

She stopped the internal hypothetical conversation because it was starting to sound too much like an XKCD comic strip.

So she kept crocheting. In another hour, she had a wobbly doorway about the size of her cat (now there was a whole other set of worries: a cat that travels through time and/or space by disappearing through a portal to chase birds). Big enough that it was less like looking through the peephole of a door and more like looking through a small basement window. Still, there was the tree, which looked like a pine or a fir or something carniverous (no, not that word, the other one. Conifer-us) and she could see the horizon and a hill nearby, and hear the patter of the rain coming down through the leaves, and knew she could go through the portal without falling to her death.

How many possible deaths do you cross off the list, she wondered, before you had an acceptably low number of possible deaths, such that stepping through an unknown magical portal into an unknown land didn’t seem like a suicidally mad thing to do?

On the other hand, and again, the other part of herself told herself, are you really going to just…not go through? How long does the list of possible ways to die have to get before you decline to enter the magical portal in your living room?

I should call NASA, she thought. I bet they would know how to explore it. Or at least do a risk assessment.

NASA can’t even explore the Moon. You’d be better off calling Bezos or Musk or some other mad billionaire.

So they can make money off of it and then toss in a car for shits and giggles? No thank you.

Well, before you go in, just remember to text somebody about where you’re going and when you expect to be back, so they can report you missing and/or avenge your death if you don’t return. Basic safety.

Three Memories

August 18, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

A minifigurine shaped like a panda, and several D&D dice, including a D20 and two D10s.

I don’t have a good picture of Comic Con, so here is my panda minifig from my D&D game.

July, 2017. I’m at Denver Comic Con, in a room full of rows of chairs, and a projector on a cart set at an angle to find the screen in the corner. I find a seat on the aisle (I always find a seat on the aisle), as near to the front as I can get. We’re in a mid-sized breakout room for this panel, which is called “Marvel: Then and Now,” and it’s crowded enough that people are filling the seats, standing along the back wall, shuffling bags and cosplay weapons to try to make space for someone next to them.

The panel has three generations of Marvel writers and artists: Two old guys (like, in their late 80s, they rolled into the panel on mobility scooters) who were at Marvel in the 1950s, a white English man who started at Marvel in the late 80s, and a black woman who works there now and whose titles include Black Panther, Iron Man, and World of Wakanda.

The first question that the moderator asks is about how Marvel has changed since each panelist got into the business. One of the old guys said (and in spite of the quotation marks, I’m paraphrasing), “I don’t want to get political” (so don’t then) “but” (uh oh) “I started at Marvel during World War II, and the nation was one. And I think we need to make America great again.” (please be being ironic right now) “We need to just give him a chance” (oh dear) “He’s going to take down the Mexican mafias just like he made it safe for a black woman and her kid safe to walk down the street in New York” (stop talking) “and why can’t we be as one” (seriously though stop talking). He goes on citing “fake news” and random crime stories for several minutes. I’m not sure why the moderator didn’t interrupt or redirect; he certainly should have. The few people of color who were in the audience get up and walk out. I noticed some white people too. After a weirdly agonizing minute, as my ingrained training about being “civil” (or at least “not rude”) battles with my desire to not look like I was endorsing this shit by continuing to sit here and listen to it, I get up and walk out too. I feel like everyone is staring at me, even though I’m sure nobody was. Someone sitting on the floor probably crept into my seat and that was that.

Of course, the minute I got out into the hallway, I realized, well shit, now I don’t get to hear Alitha Martinez talk about her career, the things she’s done and what she enjoys about drawing for Marvel. Ain’t that always the way: old white dude takes up too much space, too much oxygen, pushing out other voices or making them impossible to hear. I find her booth later in Artist Alley, and buy whatever I can. She’s really nice, there with her teenage son, who’s helping her sell art and books when he isn’t off doing his teenage son thing.

Artist Alley. Remember Artist Alley? And how close everybody had to stand to each other in order to move around at all?

Laura Jane Grace from the band Against Me! sings at Riot Fest. The picture is of the large screens so Laura can be seen from far away.

Big Laura Jane Grace is big.

September, 2019. I’ve been awake since 2:30am, and only had four hours of sleep total anyway. Showered and walked to the train. Didn’t manage to fall asleep on the train. Got to the airline gate with enough time to spare to buy a bagel and cream cheese at a Smashburger, the only food place that’s open on the concourse. They don’t spread the cream cheese on the bagel even though they have a full kitchen. Just drop a couple of individual servings in the bag.

I doze on the plane, at least for a little while. I was the sort of tired where everything around you and inside you starts to feel fuzzy and unreal. Being locked in a dark tube as it hurtles through the air doesn’t help with this impression. After we land, I take the train into town and and find the hostel I’m staying in. Check in time isn’t until like 4pm, but they let me store my stuff in the luggage room so I can head right back out and take the train to Douglas Park, where Riot Fest is happening.

I have almost always gone to concerts, music festivals, things like that, by myself. It’s not weird to me. And I like being able to choose my own schedule, decide which acts I want to see, and not have to discuss it with anyone else. I like being able to pull up a patch of grass and read a book when I need some downtime. Chicago in September is sunny, and warm, but not unbearably hot. The Sears Tower (or whatever it’s called now) looms in the distance like a giant, hibernating Transformer. Riot Fest rents out lockers so I don’t even need to keep my backpack with me most of the time. The lines to the port-a-potties, though on the long side, move quickly. Same for the water bottle refilling stations. People are handing out free individual packets of Pedialyte to keep everyone moving and hydrated. I am not filled with the amplified excitement that I used to get when I was younger and looking at the lineup for Warped Tour, and I’m not interested in getting myself clobbered in the mosh pit anymore, but I am perfectly content, standing in the shade to see H2O over here, dancing in the sun to The Selecter over there, buying ice cream that is way too expensive, checking the Riot Fest subreddit and meeting up with a random guy who happily gives me a pair of foam ear plugs. There are a whole lot more Latinx people here than I remember seeing in the scene in Denver, and I remember how multiracial punk is, or could be, or should be, or has been.

I see Anti-Flag, who are still singing about how dying for your government is shit after all these years, calling for a circle pit “everywhere” (please no). I randomly see a band named the Thin Lips, they were good. Wander around the merch tents, the usual collection of tie dye and Bob Marley posters and skate decks and anarchist bookstore tents. I sit under a tree and watch Hot Water Music from a distance. I have a locker that I can lock and unlock, so every now and then I take out my homework and work on it in the grass while I wait for Andrew WK or the Village People to take the stage. .

There’s old punks, with grey hairs and battered Vans. Young punks, with shellacked hair and pristine Docs. It’s like Warped Tour, but more low-key, and with more older punks. There’s a breeze, trying to clear out the humidity and the smoke from various types of stimulating leafs. The grounds crew tried to fill in the soft spots in the ground with wood chips to prevent mud pits, and it’s…slightly effectual.

The last day, Sunday afternoon/evening, is the reason why I really came to Chicago for this. Against Me!, Patti Smith, and Bikini Kill play one after the other on the same stage. Sometime over the summer, I jokingly tweeted at Laura Jane Grace that I needed her to make sure that her and Smith’s and BK’s sets didn’t overlap because I needed to see all three of them. I know that LJG doesn’t have any control over stage order at a huge fest like Riot Fest, but I got my wish, and I decide it’s because of her. I head over to the stage almost an hour early, and get as close as I can. In the manner of fests, there are two big stages next to each other and they alternate which one is in set up mode and which one has a band playing on it, so even though I’m only seeing three more bands, I’m going to be in this spot for about six hours. I have already peed and also monitored my fluid intake so I won’t have to go to the bathroom. I have clif bars in my backpack. I have a book to read. I am not front and center, but I’m close enough to see the band members’ faces, far enough away to not have to worry about the pit, and near to the big screens on either side of the stage that I can look at those if I need to (and when I take pictures on my phone, I mostly take pictures of the screen, because as dusk falls my already-crappy phone camera gets even crappier). I’m surrounded by other women, and we are all so so ready.

The bands are great. How do I describe how great they are? What are the words I can use to convey how happy I am? Laura Jane Grace laughs her way through her set and Patti Smith rules the fucking stage. Bikini Kill is still making their own clothing and digging through thrift store discount bins for stuff to wear on stage. And to see Bikini Kill, who (along with their friends and the rest of the riot grrrl community) started their own revolution, who stand for so much and who put their voices in the mouths of so many girls and queer kids, to see them play for thousands and thousand of punks, to see them close out Riot Fest, to hear Kathleen Hanna talk on stage about the same things I’ve heard her talk about in 500-capacity theater venues…that was something. That was great.

Dare you to do what you want
Dare you to be who you will
Dare you to cry right out loud
“You get so emotional, baby”

Double dare ya,
double dare ya,
double dare ya
Girl-fuckin-friend yeah
-Bikini Kill, “Double Dare Ya”

A medium-sized brown dog, standing on a gravel path, stares across green grass to the ocean beyond. Her back is to the camera and she's wearing a green harness.

Hazel Dog checks out the ocean (sound? bay? big thing of water).

February 2020. Some friends of mine, who I used to dogsit for until they moved to California, ask if I want to dogsit for them in California. Instead of giving me money, they’re giving me a free trip to California, and use of their car. They live outside of San Francisco, at the tail end of one of the BART lines, in what seems to be a working class neighborhood that can’t decide if it’s sliding downward or sliding upward. Hazel (the dog) and I go to a different park every day, this one a big off-leash park on the coast where she can sniff at and play with other dogs, that one a walk through some redwoods up a big hill (though never quite high enough for a big vista). The air is sunny and crisp, and I find a little park on the coast a mile from their house, where I can go running every morning and appreciate doing a cardio workout at low altitude. I carry a jacket with me but hardly ever wear it. I go see Hamilton (yes, again) in San Francisco. I know the soundtrack by heart but every time I go to see it live, there’s too much to see and it’s overwhelming and my brain forgets to remember what happened. So, I go see it whenever I’m in a city that’s not NYC with tickets that are vaguely affordable and buy a beer in the lobby that costs like $15 fucking dollars holy shit. I’ve never seen Hamilton in the city where I live–just when I’m traveling. I find Chinatown by accident while I’m trying to find the City Lights Bookstore. I think to myself, I could live here, I just need to figure out how to quadruple my income. I understand why people want to live here. The air is just fucking fantastic, and since I barely need to leave the house once a day, I don’t care about the traffic. I write. I go on walks with the dog. I sleep as late as she’ll let me in the mornings. I cook messy things in the kitchen (everything I cook is messy to some degree). I have takeout burgers and takeout Korean food and a random gyro because that’s all I can find right before Hamilton. I see the ocean. I watch classic movies like Silence of the Lambs and Swing Time, and have a long conversation with a friend about genderqueerness and -phobia and Silence of the Lambs. It’s like a staycation, but since it’s not my own house I’m not distracted by all the projects and cleaning that I’m not doing. It’s just me, and my brain, and the dog. I’ve been casting my mind back to it the last six months, those last feelings of freedom, before I knew what was coming. Appreciating the sun and the sky with no impending sense that it might be gone soon.

July 19, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

From Greek myth. A frightened and wild-looking Kronos eats one of his children.

Saturn, by Goya. 1820-ish.

There’s a painting by the Spanish artist Goya. It lives in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but you’ve probably seen somewhere. It’s a very famous painting. You can buy it on t-shirts and mouse pads and things. The Prado website just calls it “Saturn,” though I’ve also seen it called “Saturn Devouring His Son.” On a dark background, the Titan Saturn (the Roman version of the Greek Cronus), an old man, wild and desperate, is shoving a bloody, helpless body into his mouth.

I was listening to a podcast about the myth of Cronus eating his children this past week, and (perhaps using the Goya painting as an inspiration) it was very detailed in its description of how Cronus’ body changed and failed him after he started eating his children, who could not die, but who he also could not digest. How swollen and distended his belly became. How he became bedridden, trying to hide from the other Titans how uncomfortable he was, how weak. Cronus, who castrated his own father with a sickle, and was afraid of a prophecy that said that he would be deposed by his son in return.

There’s a lot of myths about power and how to use it, and some of them are about how power corrupts (hello, King Midas), but very few myths about it turning somebody grotesque, misshapen, monstrous. It makes me think a little bit of No Face in Spirited Away, eating customers in the bathhouse, or even of Chihiro’s parents, eating enchanted food until they turn into pigs. Jacob Marley, maybe, weighted down in the afterlife with chains and locks. It also made me think of the episode of The Simpsons when Springfield legalizes gambling and Mr. Burns gets even more filthy rich, and starts taking on qualities of Howard Hughes (oddly, it doesn’t make me think of Howard Hughes, who clearly had some mental illness stuff going on in addition to his enormous fuck-off levels of wealth and power, but Mr Burns has the privilege of just being cartoonishly evil).

A square of four images: No Face from Spirited Away, swollen and misshapen from overeating; Chihiro's parents from the same movie, turning into pigs; Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, chained up and pale; and Mr Burns from the Simpsons, bearded

Being corrupted has consequences, eventually.

What if the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth was a metaphor for power, and not just greed?

There’s a song that’s been running through my head basically since DJT was elected, but especially since George Floyd was murdered and America started going to protests instead of our jobs (because so many people had lost their jobs). It’s called “Timebomb Generation” by the hardcore band Strike Anywhere, and it was released in 2001. “What does it mean to take their power and push it away?/To overcome this culture and the lies they tell them everyday?/Find a voice for a better future and a place for you and I to face our fears/Fall down to rise back up.”

America is sick. For awhile we could call it polarization, division, culture wars, whatever. It started with racism, and it started with white people having power and wanting to keep it, and with every cultural revolution, white people scrambling to keep their power. Even if it harmed us economically, even if it harmed us spiritually. I suppose if we couldn’t be bothered about the physical and emotional trauma that we were inflicting on millions of African-Americans and Native Americans and Chinese people building railroads and Latino migrants in hieleras, it is particularly white-girl-naive of me to think that we would give a shit about our own spiritual, mental, and economic wholeness. We put billions of dollars into colonialism and imperialism and imprisoning and disenfranchising a huge part of our population, instead of building a system of empowerment and liberation that would surely benefit everyone. Right now in multiple police departments across the nation, officers are turning on the citizens they ostensibly protect with weapons of war because the citizens had the audacity to say that they don’t want to be policed any more, not this way, not at this cost. We cannot build a system of justice because we are too invested in our system of power, and too afraid to try anything else.

America is a wild-eyed, broken, bow-legged old man, terrified and eating his children in a futile hope to keep the world from changing.

Cronus created his own demise by eating his children (Greek myths are full of people who try to escape from fate and end up creating it). Next to him was his sister/wife/victim Rhea, losing child after child to his endless fear and appetite. Her desperation grew, and out of it came anger, and then vengeance, and a plan. Out of it came Zeus, and swaddled stones, and eventually, a warrior who could depose his old, sick, corrupt father.

What if Cronus had made different choices? Interestingly, in Greek myths, characters are often both ruled by fate and yet entirely in control of their own destiny. What if Cronus had accepted his deposition from power as inevitable, even beneficial, for the continued health of the universe he ruled over? What if he nurtured his sons and daughters, raised them to be a family, and work together?

What if he took the power and pushed it away?

How do we both acknowledge the power that we have, and use it to the benefit of those who have none…and then push that power away? Not in the silly context of saying “I renounce my white privilege!” as if that’s all it takes, but if we as a culture truly reckoned with what it would take to dismantle that system that gave us all this power, and corrupted us deep into our souls?

And what would the world be like if we did?

We Deserve a Better Storm and other thoughts on race and the X-Men

June 15, 2020 / spandrella / Leave a comment

Picture of Fox cartoon Storm aside, this entry is about the X-Men movies.

I don’t remember where I saw the comment. It was probably a tweet. I don’t even remember what the wording was, exactly, but the substance was something like: why, just before the climax in X-Men: Days of Future Past, are all the characters of color standing sentry (and then dying) outside, while the white dudes (and white lady) stay inside and save the world? How had this comic book franchise, of all the franchises out there, fallen into the same white-centered tropes and patterns of so many other Hollywood movies?

Well, shit, I thought. I love the X-Men comics precisely because they’re diverse and tell stories of othering and oppression, but the Forgotten Commentator was right. The X-Men movies (which, let’s face it, have been pretty white from the beginning) duplicate the tropes that have gotten so common and so tiresome over the decades: White people save the world, people of color are expendable. White people are the leads, people of color are the supporting cast.

I’ve been mulling this essay over in my head for months, and have been hellishly blocked on it, but also unable to forget about it or move on. I watched all the movies again, taking notes, trying to make some kind of quasi-objective evaluation that didn’t feel right. I wrote a bunch of it and it was boring to read, even for me. And I could also write a whole thing on how if people of color don’t have any substantive parts in the X-Men movies, well, that’s totally natural, right? When you have actors as good as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, and a character as popular as Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, of course there aren’t any prominent characters of color who last for more than half a movie. There just isn’t space in the story, you see. It’s a perfectly natural narrative/money-making decision. Why would they make a movie about Storm, who was perfectly terrible in the first movie, when they could make one about Wolverine, who was amazing?

Well. Let’s think about Storm for a second.

On the one hand, the X-Men franchise does a reasonable job of avoiding some of the most common racist tropes in cinema (Sassy Black Woman, Black Best Friend, Black Guy Dies First, etc). They avoid these pitfalls by…not having any Black people in the movies other than Storm until Days of Future Past. And Storm has basically no lines, especially in the first movie, where almost all of the ones she does have simply provide exposition (she asks how the adamantium got bonded to Wolverine’s skeleton, for example).

Storm also has these conversational moments (in both the first movie, talking with Senator Kelly, and in the second movie, with Nightcrawler) where she sort of…stands in to speak to where prejudice comes from? Which is a little bit of a weird choice, from a character point of view. When she’s alone with Senator Human Purity, he asks if she’s afraid of “normal” people, and she says, “Sometimes. I think…I think I’m afraid.” She’s a member of a persecuted minority, being afraid isn’t a prejudice, it’s a reaction to her life experiences. The power dynamics are never addressed, it’s just fear=prejudice=bad. The Senator never reflects out loud where he thinks his prejudice came from.

That said, the emotion behind this line worked fine with the late-90s/early-00’s. Conventional wisdom back then was that bigotry stems from lack of understanding. But I don’t like that line anymore. I can see why Singer (a gay man who definitely saw mutaphobia more as a metaphor for homophobia/gay panic than anything else) included it, but hatred of a thing isn’t always because of fear of that thing. Sometimes hatred is a cynical power grab, because if you can convince other people to fear the thing, you have power over them. If Senator No Education For Mutants had more air time, I bet he would be the second. He doesn’t fear mutants. He thinks he can control and exploit other people’s fear of them.

Anyway. Back to Storm. Goddammit, old white dudes, still distracting me from talking about Storm. In the comics, Storm is amazing. Her mother is Kenyan, her father American. Born in America, she grew up in Cairo, and as a young girl, survived a terrorist attack that killed both her parents and left her an orphan. She survived by learning to pickpocket, and eventually traveled south to the African plains and lived with a tribe there, where she learned how to master her mutant powers. She was already a powerful mutant in control of her abilities before Xavier ever found her and brought her back to New York (and yet somehow, later on we’re to believe that Jean is the true badass here? Pffft). She was the bedrock center of the X-Men team for a long time, taking over leadership of the team when Cyclops couldn’t do it. She eventually became the Headmaster at Xavier School for the Gifted. She always prefers negotiation and preserving life to fighting, but when she decides to fight, she is one of the most formidable opponents you could ever imagine. She beat Cyclops in battle. Storm is a fucking badass. She is amazing. Also, Bryan Singer had Halle Berry, an Oscar-caliber actress, in his cast! So what does he do? “Do you know what happens to a Toad when it gets struck by lightning?” Goddamit, Singer. Just…goddammit.

To be fair (?) to Singer, his problem may not be black women, but just women, as I also have serious problems with how Rogue is portrayed (Rogue is not some frightened, delicate flower who hides in her shell. Rogue is also a fucking badass. She is sassy Southern, not demure Southern). Mystique doesn’t have any lines, but she spends much of the climax fighting Wolverine, so you know she’s tough. Jean is powerful but there’s hints that she has powers that she doesn’t use because they are uncontrolled and “dangerous.” But Rogue seems lost, and Storm does nothing. It’s infuriating.

So in this movie, which is establishing the universe for future movies, there’s one character of color, and that character of color has almost no lines or character establishment. The white actors (who are great! Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman are all amazing) dominate the movie, and fans and movie-goers responded accordingly. With everyone responding positively to Wolverine and nobody responding to Storm at all, it becomes that much easier for the screenwriters to give Wolverine screen precedence on the next outing.

The racism we have here might be called where the fuck is everybody, because we are supposed to accept that just outside of the most diverse city on earth, in a school devoted to serving a population that are the result of random genetic mutations, most of the faculty of the school, and even most of the students that we see, are all white. Except for Storm. And that just carries on for another 5 movies and 13 years (including two solo Wolverine movies), until we get to Days of Future Past, where it turns out that the PoC characters who have been established are expendable. No setting up a multi-movie arc for Bishop or Warpath here.

Days of Future Past isn’t even where the expendable PoC tropes begin. In X-Men: The Last Stand (the third movie), a bunch of new characters are introduced when Magneto recruits new followers. Lots of these folks are PoC, which is cool (I really like Arclight, for the record), but we never get to know them, and a bunch of them die at the end of the movie. None of Magneto’s new recruits survive to have an impact on subsequent movies in the franchise. As far as I remember, none of them even appear in any of the subsequent movies.

And look, I realize that this is maybe not on purpose. The studio can certainly make an argument that there’s a finite amount of marketing space, a finite amount of space in a story, a finite amount of space in merchandizing, and that Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and Hugh Jackman just take up a damn lot of space. And a lot of folks will see that argument as having merit. But racism isn’t always on purpose, and impact doesn’t equal intent. And it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: Storm doesn’t have enough of a following to get toys made in her likeness or a movie made about her, so kids going to see the X-Men movies never learn enough about her to get curious, so they don’t demand more Storm, so the studio doesn’t make a movie that it doesn’t think people would be interested in. And we can all talk ourselves into never having people of color on screen and make it never about race at all.

So, no more Storm. No more Bishop, or Blink, or Warpath. No Sunspot. No Jubilation Lee. We had Lady Deathstrike, for a hot minute, but she’s gone. And whatever reasons you or the studio wants to give for why we had three Wolverine movies and no movies about Storm, I think that sucks.

Random Tangent #1: I know that Magneto often plays the role of the villain in the comics, but can we just take a minute and sit with the fact that all the villains in these movies who hold systemic power and influence (Senator Kelly, Colonel Stryker, Bolivar Trask) are tertiary villains, passing fads, while the primary, unkillable nemesis is…Magneto? The Jewish war refugee who lost his family (twice!), whose anger and grief is deep and cold and bottomless, and whose reaction to oppression may be summarized as, “You killed my family and there is no justice for that so come on, just try it, try anything, because I have been looking for an excuse to drop a football stadium on your heads”? That’s…not how oppression works at all, actually. Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender are both great. And it’s really hard to make a compelling narrative about fighting a power system (see also: the Captain America: Civil War movie, which took all the thematic conversations in the comics about freedom vs oversight and made it into a personal beef between Captain America and Iron Man). But also, making the survivor of a genocide into a perpetrator of terror while white villains disappear in between movies is not a politically neutral decision.

Random Tangent #2: Speaking of evil-doers, in X2: X-Men United, the most queer-coded movie of the entire franchise, the baddie is Col. William Stryker, who enslaves mutants as part of his master plan to eradicate them. Near the climax, it’s made clear that his son is also a mutant. Stryker declares that he “has no son,” rather than accept the fact that a) his son is a mutant; b) he has subjected his son to brutal scientific experimentation to control him because he can’t accept him; and c) he is sitting right there. (Perhaps it wasn’t intended to refer to this at the time, but when I watch it now that line makes me think of the ex-gay movement that holds gay kids captive and brainwashes them into trying to be straight). There’s adults out there who haven’t talked to their parents since they came out in the late 90s, because their parents disowned them. There’s kids out there right now living on the street because they can’t safely live with their parents, because their parents are homophobes. William Stryker declaring that he has no son is perhaps the most pedestrian, believably evil line in that entire movie.