The Manifest: O For Art's Sake!

BEYOND P.C.

O For Art's Sake!

ARGUING CULTURE WITH THE PEDALING MIDWESTERNERS

By Jessica Schneider

A FLORIDIAN EVENING, sky full of clamor, grass filled with sharp stickers that like to cling to socks and anything cotton when walking through. If barefoot, such circumstance can be painful, quite, as each pointed side sticks into the baby laid flesh within the sole of foot. Not the heel, where it’s a little tougher, but the tender underfoot that screams with every step, demanding next time—shoes. Perhaps because it’s always so warm, is why I always forgot to put my shoes on when I had to run outside. On several occasions it was to look for my fat orange cat, who liked to creep out the side door when either my mom or I wasn’t paying much attention.

If the earth was an ecosystem, then the idea of space was clean. Utterly clean. Looking up to the sky, crowded with suburban stars, I think how difficult it is to imagine how something so beautiful and wondrous as The Milky Way could also suffocate you to death by lack of air. Perhaps it was just The Fates reminding us where we stood, but also for us to realize that they were kind enough to share glimpses of their world with us, even if it was only by looking up at a star-cluttered suburban sky.

I’ve never gotten the privilege of witnessing a shooting star, so I’ve never been able to wish upon one. One cannot wish upon something unseen, but the wishes didn’t go unwished. I did, however, see Mars while in an airplane, and despite being so high up in the air, the planet didn’t look even an inch closer than if I were standing in the pit of a canyon looking up at the same thing. Now, I do not live in Florida, and I haven’t for more than a dozen years. Rather, I’m at my job in Minneapolis, standing in the break room, eating bagels because it is someone’s birthday (someone who I don’t know that well and who doesn’t well know me), and as I bite into the cream cheese smothered bagel, I can’t figure how the hell I ended up here or why I just wouldn’t leave.

“Have you ever read Grapes of Wrath?” one of the girls asks.

“Yes—Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad,” another replies. I cannot reply because of the smothered carbohydrates in my mouth, but I am utterly shocked.

“I didn’t like it either,” another girl says.

“It’s so, so depressing,” the second girl says. I can’t seem to swallow my bagel fast enough because I just badly need to comment on such stupidity. Ah! I swallow quickly, almost slicing the side of my esophagus with the unchewed crushed onion, pasted over the bread.

“Depressing? It’s about The Great Depression!” I retort, my throat sounding full, then take a sip of water.

“Yeah, I know but…” the second girl says.

“To say it’s depressing is an understatement. Considering the subject matter, I’d say that it’s apropos,” I say.

“Apro-huh?” a fourth girl says, while chuckling to herself.

“Appropriate,” I say. I am speaking to the Pedaling Midwesterners. There are four of them, standing in the break room with me, three of which are from Wisconsin and one from Minnesota. All love cheese, and I don’t mean just the dairy product. One of them, the one from Minnesota, likes Stanley Kubrick movies, as do I, so I think that she and I will have something to discuss.

“I just looove Dr. Strangelove. At first when I saw it I thought it was really boring. But now I just looove it,” the Minnesota one says to me.

“I like 2001: A Space Odyssey. That one is my favorite,” I say.

“See, I just can’t get into that,” she says.

“What about A Clockwork Orange?” I ask her.

“Oh, God—no. I, I can’t watch that. It’s so violent—so much killing,” she says. And that was the end of our conversation on Stanley Kubrick.

“The ending of Grapes of Wrath is so dumb,” girl number two says. We are back in the break room.

“I thought it was perfect,” I say. The girl only shrugs, and continues to eat. Do I tell her how I wouldn’t mind having written it myself?

“Then there is that metaphor about the turtle crossing the road. What better symbol for The Great Depression could there be?” I say. More stares. More chewing.

“Oh Mandy, I saw the best movie ever. You have to see it. It’s just the best movie in the world,” one of the girls says to Mandy, the girl from Minnesota.

“Which one is that?” she asks.

“Life is Beautiful! It’s a great movie,” she says.

“Isn’t that about the Holocaust? I don’t want to see anything depressing…”

“Oh, no. It’s not depressing at all. It’s about hope and survival.”

“Well, I guess if you look at it as when you watch it you will hope someone would just put the lead character out of his misery, and that you’d survive until the film was done,” I said while snickering to myself. They just stared. This was getting old.

“Oh c’mon. That actor was so annoying,” I add, and continue to mention how the person I watched it with was glad that the lead character died because of this fact. They all paused and stared at me, again. You think I’d have said I just sodomized someone. I will try to explain myself.

“What? You can’t tell me that that Roberto guy isn’t annoying,” I add. Silence.

“I’m going to have another bagel,” one of the Wisconsin girls says, in attempts to change the subject while reaching over into the brown paper bag. Her tone has lifted, and it sounds forcefully jolly, like when she’s on the phone, only then proceeding to hang up, saying “bitch” or “asshole” to herself once the person is gone from earshot and the receiver is in place. I supposed this similar thing would happen to me this morning once I left the room. I can tell the girls can’t wait for me to leave, so they can talk about how inappropriate it was for me to reveal the ending to this annoying Holocaust movie. Still my mind finds reason to justify my brash opinion.

“Actually, that movie is very much like movies set in the forties,” I say.

“Well, it’s about World War Two,” one says while snickering.

“Yeah, but I mean in style.”

“Oh.” They say. Silence. I also want to mention how the film is a rip off of Charlie Chaplin, but what would be the point? The closest one of these girls got to seeing a Charlie Chaplain film was Disney’s The Kid, starring not Jackie Coogan, but Bruce Willis. Still, my argument struggles to push on.

“C’mon. It’s a Holocaust movie. You know the lead character is going to die so his son can live. You’ve seen it a thousand times,” I say in attempts yet again to justify my rudeness. And again, silence and stares. I suddenly feel myself being pulled into that Sylvia Plath poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree” where I am the moon- “bald and wild” and they are the yew tree- their message being only “blackness- blackness and silence”.

“Oh, Patty, do you think you can pick me up that rug from Pier One this weekend?” one of the Wisconsin girls asks of another.

“Sure, I can get you that discount like you wanted,” the other girl says.

And that was the end of our conversation on books and film.

I half-heartedly apologized for revealing the ending to this predictable movie, and I felt sick to my stomach. I could not finish the bagel I still held in my hand. I tossed it out and excused myself. They waited until I was out of earshot until they officially bad-mouthed me.

“Jezebel is sort of a pop-culture snob. And I mean that in the most respectable way,” one of the girls said.

I’m not a snob--I just believe in recognizing quality, I’d think to myself.

“I can’t believe her. She’s so rude,” the Minnesota girl would say, quietly to herself, and the others would nod in agreement. Later, nothing would be said about the situation while I was in the room. I was not like them. Star Wars put me to sleep when I was a kid, The Matrix was just a jizz of special effects, and Gladiator was a fifth-rate Spartacus. But these were only my opinions, and what did I know? And more importantly—what right did I have to express them in a room of people who so clearly disagreed with me?

Truthfully, I didn’t expect everyone to agree with me, only smarter people. Clearly those seeking out tabloids like The National Enquirer and vesting energy into them were not on my list to have discussions with. This, of course, is separate from those just reading it for fun and nothing more. Once while over a friend’s house, the friend mentioned how his wife’s brother brought over some films to watch, of which was the Reese Witherspoon movie, Legally Blonde. In response, the friend said, “Some people like Kubrick, and some don’t,” with a snicker. I then responded that I like both Legally Blonde and Kubrick. It’s just that I know how not to confuse the two. The friend laughed to himself, and I wasn’t sure if he knew what I meant by that.

I admit I did expect more out of these girls, but then I should have realized that the more you expect the less you will get. Or, if you expect nothing at all, you’re bound to not be disappointed. Eventually, any talk on film and books ceased with the Pedaling Midwesterners. And I do not attribute their ignorance on being from the Midwest—I attribute their narrow-mindedness as being attributed from such. Instead, they spoke how they wanted to have a “girls’ night out” and go see The Vagina Monologues. They even asked, in a moment of forgiveness, if I would like to go, and I might have, just to humor myself, if the tickets weren’t so damn expensive.

Growing up in many different cities, including the East coast, I didn’t always think before I spoke. Sometimes I didn’t think at all. I was told to just speak up. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” is perfectly acceptable to say—that is until you actually do it. But these Midwesterners always, always thought before they spoke. They thought and thought and thought until the suns went down, and months went by, and mouths went dry, where one day you thought everything was okay, until word got around from others that your fellow Midwestern co-worker was holding a grudge for something you said six months ago that you can’t remember saying.

And if I hardly ever thought before I spoke, my other, the New Yorker that he was, never thought before he spoke. When they would eventually ask to meet my other, I imagined myself telling them, “oh, well, you know. He’s a New Yorker- you know how it is,” and so it goes.

A few months earlier, more arguments on art ensued. This time with family.

“What is it with men? They start listening to Steppenwolf thirty years ago, and now thirty years later, they are still listening to it,” my aunt says. She is my father’s sister who flew in from California to visit me and my mom.

“Yeah, well, you know, guys are just like that. They get stuck on something and can’t let go—no matter how bad it is,” I say while reaching over the table for a dinner roll.

“I just don’t see how anyone can like something so outdated,” my aunt says who was always into the hippest music and philosophies—or so she thought.

“Well, liking something and being good are entirely different. You like that crappy poetry written by that singer, Jewel. But it’s crap. But it’s okay for you to like it though,” I tell her. She looks at me, shocked. Again, you would have thought I had just said I sodomized someone.

“Oh, because you say it’s crap, it’s crap? There’s no arguing it? How closed-minded is that?” she says in a flippant tone with a shake of her hand, offended.

“Being open-minded doesn’t mean not having an opinion,” I reassure her. “I’ve studied poetry, and I know bad poetry when I see it—and hers isn’t really poetry, it’s more like thoughts,” I add.

“But these are her feelings. What right do you have to judge her feelings?”

“I’m not judging her feelings. I’m just saying that her writing is poor. I can do that. Why can’t I do that?” I ask.

“So you’re being just like grandma and all her religion. Saying your way is the only way and there is no discussing it?” she says.

My other grandma, who is also my aunt’s mother, is a religious fanatic, often storing canned goods in her closet, waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. Throughout her lifetime, she had been attempting to “save” us all and grant us Salvation by trying to get us to believe in her mumbo-jumbo. Needless to say we were all going to hell on her list. But don’t get me wrong—she was a good grandma, who when I was four, supplied me with my first Bible. When opening it years later, I saw that I had colored in blood marks squirting over Jesus while hanging on the cross. Apparently the pictures were not bloody enough for my four-year old mind.

“This has nothing to do with grandma’s beliefs. I’m talking about something on a page— writing in a book that can be critically analyzed and discussed. If nothing is bad then nothing is good. Then, by that standard, when you compare Jewel to W.B. Yeats, who falls flat? By your standard, they are equal.” I say.

“I’m not comparing her to anyone,” she says.

“Yeah, well get used to it because I am.” My aunt had always gotten along with my mother more so than me because my mother was no threat to her opinions. Not that my mother was dumb, she was just a little more on the bleeding heart side than I would have liked. I rolled my eyes and felt trapped. Later, the waitress said she had heard us talking and offered her comments on how once a teacher of hers looked at some of her writing and told her it was bad. Then she admitted to feeling low self-esteem for all those years because of what he had said to her.

“I couldn’t write for so long because of him, but now I’ve gone back to school, and I even started writing again!” Naturally, my aunt and mother cooed while I just stewed. Just who did this girl think she was for butting into our conversation? And why was it the teacher’s fault for her developing such low self-esteem? She probably did write bad poems or stories or whatever, and he was just being honest. What’s the matter with that? Did she expect him to lie? Whatever happened to good old-fashioned criticism? Are we just all supposed to praise everything we see because we are afraid of hurting people’s feelings? Now, I’m not saying that the teacher should have been disrespectful, but for Christ sakes- you’re not helping anyone out by lying. That’s what these filmmakers like to do with their wimpy points of view that no one would possibly disagree with.

Lets take a stand against the establishment—but be sure to set the film in the 1950’s, during the repressed Eisenhower era—a time that no one would possibly agree with. Women should have lives of their own, be educated, possess a strong mind, separate from her husband, who is not afraid to voice her opinions. Yet if you asked my dumb aunt, being from California and all, if a woman should be strong-minded, express her opinions, and really stick up for what she believed to be true, she’d say one hundred percent that that’s what every woman should be. That is, until you have an opinion she disagrees with.

“You know, I just subscribed to Oprah Magazine. And it’s just amazing. On the front cover she says ‘dare to improve your life’. God. Why would she want to improve my life? She’s always so thoughtful, thinking of others. I mean really, why would she want to improve my life?” my aunt asks herself while we are driving away from the restaurant and the insecure waitress. I roll my eyes.

“Because she wants you to buy her magazine, you dope!” is what I’m thinking in my head, but do not say it because I do not wish to get into another argument. And then I realize that I’m just as bad as these Midwesterners— I’m not saying exactly what’s on my mind. Why? Because it’s not worth it. After that weekend, we hugged goodbye at the airport, and I have yet to hear back from my aunt, who, pushing fifty, could not take having her ‘radical’ opinions challenged.

* * * * *

If you disagree with the norm, it can be lonely. The line between self-expression and downright rudeness is very shady. After all, say the wrong opinions around the wrong audience, and you will be labeled as rude. Rude and uncouth. And who really needs to travel back to the 1950s to find narrow-mindedness? It’s all around us, and we don’t need to look too hard to find it. Just turn on the television, and it is there, disguised as political correctness.

We enter a movie theatre, or begin a book, or review a poem we’ve often liked, leaving our sloppy lives behind, only to enter the neat world of art. I don’t dare tell these girls that I could have written any number of those scripts from those movies they seem to love so much, and which I thought were so God-awful. I don’t dare tell my aunt that I could have written those crappy poems in under four hours. Because, you know, I’ve dabbled a bit, and nothing brings more pleasure than browsing through a bookstore, marveling over the wasted paper. No, nothing….

* “Vagina Monologues” poster image by Pashmina.

Jessica Schneider is the wife of Cosmoetica.com editor Dan Schneider, whose harrowing "Inside of Ridgewood" appeared last issue.

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