"from the cunt to the head is/ a Mobius strip/ that connects us to death" --Eleni Sikelianos, excerpted from "Notes Toward the Township of Cause of Trouble (Venus Cabinet Revealed)"
Last Sunday morning, I took my mom to the Dupont Circle farmer's market. Amid the splendiferous array greens like purslane and French sorrel and the tables full of locally-made saffron-scented sheepsmilk cheese, we found a table selling real, honest-to-god black raspberries. You see red raspberries all over the place. Every once in a while, even Trader Joe's carries golden raspberries. And I'm not talking about blackberries. Black raspberries are different -- something special.
Personally, I haven't seen any of those little purple guys since I was a very small kid. When I lived on the farm out in West Tennessee, we actually had all three varieties of raspberries in our garden. In truth, I had no idea that raspberries were a luxury until I noted that you pay $5 for a quarter-pint in most grocery stores. As a kid, I ate them by the fistful--such opulent gluttony!
So, when I put the first one in my mouth, the sense memory of the summers when I was 4, 5, 6... was so terribly intense that it pricked tears into my eyes. I'm not exaggerating. I was standing right there on 20th, willing tears away. Tears over a raspberry.
This is the kind of experience that, I'm pretty sure, is unique to the farmer's market milieu. Unique in an urban environment, anyway. My raspberry was organic, grown in neighboring state Pennsylvania and flawlessly mold-free. Probably, it had been picked yesterday--at the very earliest.
And then, feeling freshly virtuous from our locavore's shopping expedition, I took my mom to see the new documentary, Food, Inc. Now, since I began this blog, one of the recurring themes (besides my own narcissism and my desire to have a lot of sex, I mean) is my conviction that the American food supply has long since gone to hell, tipped out of its handbasket and danced around in its own fecal matter once it got there. How many eco-food films have I admonished you, fair readers, to go see? Milk in the Land, Flow, Fast-Food Nation ... I can't even remember all the others. It's not new news that my anxiety about what we all eat and how we choose our foods is ever ratcheting itself higher. And as a result, I feel as though it's not even possible for me to scream loud enough. Especially considering my readership is, you know, modest.
On a day-to-day basis, I am frustrated that I'm not making any headway with even my closest friends and family members. My own dad insists buying organic half-and-half is a waste of money. I had an argument just the other day with a friend who prioritizes saving money in the short term over the exorbitant costs to the planet, to underprivileged peoples, to conventionally raised animals and to our bodies that buying from mainstream corporate venues makes inevitable. And even the friends who I know buy the argument that sustainability, organics and locally grown foods are not just the best way to eat, but the only way to eat, will still swing over to the grungy local Safeway more often than they'll admit aloud to me.
I blame bottlenecks in the information flow. The information that is to be found in a movie like Food, Inc. is simply not available to those who don't pointedly seek it out. Most people haven't seen footage of a feedlot (and probably don't want to). Most people don't have the foggiest clue as to what the inside of a corn refinery looks like. Most people, in fact, hear of a salmonella outbreak caused by contaminated spinach and simply stop eating spinach. They don't understand that spinach should never be contaminated with an animal-borne bacteria, or that the only way spinach could possibly encounter salmonella would be for it to be grown in the path of run-off from a corporate chicken house.
Now, I could go into plenty of detail as to the ecological and dietary carnage that you'll see in this film. Feedlots look like Auschwitz for cows, people. Commericial chicken houses? Chickens, grown too fast and too fat to support their own body weights on their little chicken legs, teem in dusty clouds of dried fecal matter, squawking like banshees. The brevity of their miserable lives is almost a blessing. And corn. I can't even begin to address the giant clusterfuck that compose the corn-producing entities in this country. So, I'm not going to.
I will, however, take this moment to offer a plea: see this film. See all the other films I liked above. Read The Omnovore's Dilemma. Read Fast-Food Nation. Read anything Alice Waters ever wrote. Read Mark Bittman. Read Deborah Madison. And then learn how to eat anew. How to value quality, untainted food over cheap food. How to consider the longterm ramifications of every dollar you spend affect every other single solitary human with whom you currently share the planet -- and all those who'll come after you.
And consider this: in 1950, the average American spent 10% of his or her family's income on food. Today, the average American spends only 3% on food. And bitches constantly about the price of an anti-biotic-free, non-rBGH, organic jug of milk. If these statistics don't show us that our priorities are out of whack, I don't know what might.
So, in lieu of a full-on review (in hopes that my guilt trip and paucity of my characteristic spoilers will lead you to the theater), I offer three takeaways:
Our mainstream food supply chain was designed by Heironymous Bosch. Everything we eat may as well be coated in petroleum, then shit, then money. That's not a metaphor. At least not the oil and shit parts.
Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are the prophets of our age. If you're not listening to them, not reading them, not taking their wisdom to the bosom, you are tolling the death knell for middle class, comfortable American life as we know it. Clean the fucking cobwebs from your eyes. They know the light and are desperate to bring it to you.
Activistic consumerism is the most viable, valuable, powerfultool for social change we've got. Engage your soul when you spend. If your money is going in the opposite direction of your personal code of ethics, you're either underinformed or a hypocrite. More than likely, you're the former. Fix that. Educate yourself about the companies from which you buy. Do they mistreat their work force? Do they raise sick animals that are bound to make your family sick as well? Are they contaminating the water tables with their putrid run-off? Will their practices make this planet uninhabitable in under two generations? If the answer to any of these question is yes, show them you don't believe in their practices by not buying their products. The demand for organic foodstuffs is growing by 20% every year. That's consumer, not corporate, power, folks. And 20% remarkably high number--one of which we should be proud. It's us--not the corporations--who control where we spend our money. We are in control of the food industry because if they aren't making products we'll buy, they'll start making ones we will. We're witnessing a sea change, my friends. On which side will you be when the tide comes in?
Because I mean to put my own efforts and money where my mouth is, I've renewed my commitment to the locavore life. Because it is my strongest of convictions that every person's individual sense of responsibility with regard to ethical consumerism is the very thing that need reach the proverbial critical mass in order to turn this heavy boat around, I mean to make a tangible adjustment in my own life. I'm putting it in print because I hope telling you, a handful of strangers I may never meet and a slightly bigger handful of friends and family members, of my resolution will help hold me accountable. And also... well, maybe because I secretly hope that I can motivate at least a handful of you into changing your buying habits alongside me. Ultimately, though, I can't, in good conscience, spend another dollar on food without considering the effect that dollar will have on the global community.
So here you go:
Every weekend, I'm gonna haul myself out of bed at a very early o'clock and buy as much of my weekly rations as I can at one farmer's market or another. DC is full of farmer's markets, with representatives mostly from farms all over Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The variety of products is certainly ample enough to support the most omnivorous diet. For any local readers, check out the DC Harvest blog (their tweets are plenty informative as well) for some great tips on what's good where. Everyone else? Your research is only a google away.
This morning, I went back to the Dupont Circle market. It was a glorious morning. Healthy farm boys handed out apricot samples. Pretty women pushed strollers or flicked ponytails. Everyone had on a maxi-dress. And I found grass-fed lamb summer sausage and beer-washed sheepsmilk cheese. I bought some pitch-perfect cucumber mint vodka gelato. The tomatoes--dear goddess, I would have sold my firstborn for those tomatoes. And apricots that boy handed me were flavorful like you just can't get, not even at Whole Foods. It's expensive to do this, no doubt. But I don't think I've ever felt so happy forking it over.
So, because all this puts me in a good mood, how about a recipe for a salad I just made up?
A Mid-Summer's Night's Salad
For the salad: 2 small fennel bulbs, chopped 1 bell pepper, chopped (I found purple ones--gorgeous--but any color will do.) 3 small new carrots, chopped into rounds 1 luscious summer tomato, chopped 5 or 6 radishes, sliced 2 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon leaves
For the dressing: 1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil Juice of 1/2 a lemon 1 clove garlic, minced pinch of salt 1/2 tsp cumin cayenne pepper to taste
Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. This would probably serve up to 3 people, but I just ate the whole thing for dinner. It was a lot of vegetables, but it felt so virtuous (after all the sheep cheese I ate earlier) that I couldn't stop.
Take, for instance, the really beautiful packaging and marketing of Agatha Bois' Carnival Wax perfume oil line. It's inspired by all manner of carnie oddities. Sexy, no? Intriguing, even.
Bearded ladies show their tits. Circus midgets dress for burlesque. The tattooed lady is usually just plain naked, her skin creating its own inky, illusory costume. Somehow the spectacle of carnival freaks is rarely not suffused with a certain kinky sexuality. Do you want to fuck the hot feminine body topped with the face full of very masculine hair? Does it make you a freak, rotted through with gender confusion, if you do? What about the girl who can't drop her uniform at the end of the day? She may be beautiful-- she may not--but you can hardly see her through her markings. To what deep-down dirty desire in you does her self-obfuscation speak? These are the implicit semiotics of the sexy circus freak.
OK, so, it stands to reason that, collectively, we'd have a hard time parsing sexual deviance from other forms of weirdness. After all, they make such a luscious, macabre and transgressive picture together. However, I mean to argue here that a conflation between perversion and a more generalized nonconformity begets a multi-stranded brand of bigotry that ultimately profits no one--except the people who seek to make themselves feel better about their own weirdness by scaling it next to the weirdness of those onto to whom the designation of Official Freaks is conferred.
This post, of course, is generated by the yesterday's death of Michael Jackson. Firstly, I should say that the day any celebrity dies is also the day thousands of other anonymous folks around the globe die. Practically speaking, I don't suppose fame lends more momentousness to one death than another. It really doesn't. People die. Big deal.
And even this death in particular. Sure, I was a little kid in the 80s. I have very specific memories associated with many, many songs in Jackson's oeuvre. Some of those songs elicit nostalgic affection and others, well, forgive me, get on my nerves. His celebrity in and of itself doesn't seem a thing worth mourning, for sure. But, even if you don't actually enjoy his poppy output in an aesthetic way, it's very difficult to deny that the spark of creative genius dwelt within him. I don't much like Elvis or Sinatra. Will I acknowledge they each contributed some rather remarkable accomplishments to American pop culture? Well, sure. Why wouldn't I?
But I'm no music critic. What the hell do I know about music? I couldn't care less how people take sides on the earth-shatteringly important, tremendously divisive issue of Michael Jackson's talent. What does bug me, however, is the way folks think a) they have a right to opinions about celebrities purely by virtue of their being celebrities (and, subsequently, how much they relish those opinions when they're negative) and b) their opinions are informed enough to be meaningful in the first place. My disclaimer here, of course, is that, no, I don't think everyone's entitled to an opinion. I think everyone's entitled to an informed opinion. If you don't feel like bothering to get informed, well, then, shut the fuckityfuckfuckup. (Also, whether immunity from strangers having opinions about your personality is something you sacrifice when opting into the fame-and-fortune game is a whole separate issue that would constitute a digression, so forgive me for not addressing it here.)
But sadly, I've been reading a lot of uninformed opinions about the man that Jackson was. Twitter's been full up to the brim with so many pedophilia jokes I'm half-tempted to run out and grope some boys my own damn self. (Shut up. You know nothing.) The reality is, folks, that we know very little about Jackson himself. We know there were charges brought against him. We know the father of the kid openly admitted he was after a hefty pay-out. We know our legal system offered Jackson full, unconditional exoneration on, not one, but two separate occasions.
However, we also know that calling Jackson eccentric is an understatement. This morning, I posed the following question on Twitter: why insist upon conflating sexual deviance with more generalized oddness despite multiple unqualified legal exonerations? In response, I got some layperson shrink-speak that I found sort of annoyingly presumptuous... something about symptoms of sociopathia or some such. To me there's a pretty grand disconnect between what we know of those who achieve stratospheric celebrity and what we could deduce from seemingly similar behaviors in our intimates. So, in general, playing armchair psychoanalyst to these people strikes me as a keenly fruitless endeavor. Celebrities aren't our friends. We have absolutely no context for their nuttiness. We are never given anything in reasonable semblance to the full story. Therefore any opinions we form around them are inherently uninformed, and therefore not worth much.
That said, please allow me a moment to engage in the aforementioned fruitless endeavor for just a minute. Before I do so, however, let me also say that I posit the following as pure speculation. I do not know what I'm talking about. I'm peering in at the life of Michael Jackson through a wee pinhole, same as you.
OK, now: it seems reasonably plausible to me that everything we've seen of Michael Jackson that appears aberrant to us "normal folks" is what might happen to a person whose psyche crystallized when he was a very young child. The high-pitched voice, the gravitation towards people who are of a similar mental age, the complete disregard for the value of money, the toys, the tree-climbing, the trouble anticipating the consequences of things like hanging a baby over a banister, the naming of his real estate complex after a fantasy-land from Peter Pan, etc., etc. -- I'm sure we can all think up a handful more examples. Everything about him suggests "child" to me. Not "pervert."
Perhaps you'll call me naive for saying that, but bear with me. Just hold the Jackson-as-developmentally-retarded model in your head as a possibility for just a minute. Now, we can conjecture further that the pressures put upon him during his actual childhood did some irreparable damage--we all know the story--and he then spent the rest of his life trying to escape the very grown-up burdens that were thrust upon him long before any normal human would have developed the proper mental tools for coping with them. Add to those burdens a particularly heightened sensitivity as is common among people blessed with inordinately impressive creative abilities? Roll him in chopped pecans and you've got a recipe for a real nutbar.
For the sake of argument, let's just say my own armchair-shrinkery up there is all completely dead-on correct. (What? It could happen.) Michael Jackson was a child who had unusual taste and had been given limitless access and money. Up to this point, all his behavior could be easily assessed as outcroppings of those parameters. So, what I'm wondering is when, exactly, in the course of our understanding of any authentic nonconformist, do we fetishize, eroticize and translate hyperbolic strangeness into full-on perversion? In this case in particular, I want you all to think back: weren't you saddened when you first heard about the accusations? I mean, Jackson was the quintessential eccentric genius when I was a kid. Even then, I remember feeling plain ol' disappointed that such a black mark would forever after be associated with him. And then relieved when it turned out that first kid's dad had put him up to it. Given, I'm not one who reaps some schadenfreude-laced reward from watching celebrities flail. Lindsey Lohan breaks my freakin' heart. But tell me honestly: did it not ever occur to you that there might be some merit to the idea that that kid's dad was an opportunistic fuck, who saw a freak and tried to exploit him on the basis that it wouldn't be too hard to convince the public that a freak is a freak in every way?
Let's stop for a minute and think about Michael Jackson's outward sexual persona(e). I've read an awful lot of people calling him "effeminate" and "creepy" and even "dirty." Personally, I find all those descriptors to be a realy quite divergent from my own perceptions (and, again, they are merely my perceptions). To me, Jackson's stage persona is actually aggressively masculine. He curls up his lips and bares his teeth like some kinda sepulchral coyote. That thing he'd do where he'd puff out his chest, throw back his arms and scream? It's the same kind of gesture you'll see, like, Wolverine make (OK, maybe Hugh Jackman's not the best example of raw, manly beastiness, but you probably get my point anyway). The pelvic thrusting, the crotch-grabbing? Those are not feminine dance moves. They, in fact, scream, "I have a penis, watch me grab it, thus asserting my status as a fully intact male." OK, you don't have to believe me about that either, but really. Just try. Watch some of these video clips of his performances running in infinite loop on every TV station ever right now. Report back to me what kinda swishy, girly preening he does. Honestly. I don't see it. But I'll eagerly await being corrected.
But what about his off-stage sexual projection, you ask? How can I deny his limp-wristed, twee little ways? Easy. I don't see any sexual projection when he's offstage. Again, folks, I'm just telling you what I see. You may well see something different and you may be right. But so might I, and here's why: he is a man-child. Well, not quite. Children often have very real, very perceptible sexualities. He is the man-child of his own platonic-ideal-of-a-man-child fantasy, i.e., a wholly asexual being, not particularly consumed with the "corrupting" impetus of sexual desire.
In the last several years, he's voided himself of virtually all secondary sexual characteristics--of either gender. On her blog today, Susie Bright said, "MJ was not only denied childhood, but his gender feeling, his sexuality— everything real about him had to be refuted." That's not something someone who wants a whole lot of sex does. His ongoing self-sculpture process, which, by the way, I do tend to conceptualize as part of his creative output, was not designed to be sexually attractive to anyone-- men, women, adults, kids-- anyone! His visage called up, not kinky sexuality, but asceticism. If you listen to interviews, he used the word "innocent" like a wistful refrain. His usage was not in the sense of "not guilty." He uses it to mean, alternately, "chaste" or "youthfully unencumbered." Try as I might, I can't see someone who goes to such lengths to de-sexualize himself and who so idealized the idea of "untainted youth" as one also consumed by lust for mid-pubescent boys.
Again, I, like all the rest of you, am only looking at Jackson through a weensy chink in the wall. But I don't see a pervert. I see an emotionally stunted whackadoo. And once again, with zero standing evidence supporting the accusation of child molestation, a whackadoo does not a pedophile make. If someone wants to find me said evidence-- and no, unmitigated conjecture doesn't count--I'll be happy to change my tune. But no one was able to provide it in either of two legal proceedings, so, for the time being, that's good enough for me.
What's more, I like whackadoos. Right. I know you're shocked. In my experience, an authentic nonconformist is rarely such by choice. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, being weird is not about getting attention. Sometimes garnering attention is a result of being weird and sometimes the weirdo in question really likes the attention, but the weirdness itself, from what I can tell, is nearly always self-propelled and self-perpetuating. When it's real, anyway. And as great as witnessing weirdness can be for all the rest of us (I mean, it is great. You are hardly ever bored in the presence of a strange human, even if the strangeness does, indeed, make you uncomfortable), it's a very tough way to live for the weirdo him- or herself. What I mean when I say that noncomformity isn't a choice is that, well, why would a person choose to feel alienated from every other human on the planet, at all times, if he or she didn't have to? Inevitably, a life spent swimming upstream leaves scars. And most of us are too chicken or too myopic to do more than glance askance at a freak's scars, for any number of reasons. The bizarre, the outre, the unexplainable-- they're all just plain scary for a lot of us. We do worry about contagions and all, don't we?
Ultimately, I think that what makes us so uncomfortable about Jackson is not that he may or may not have been capable of molesting children. It's that he screwed around with his own gender identity to such a degree that we don't have a framework for understanding it. That's unnerving for the herd. But then, what's so great about being part of the herd?
To that end, why, you ask, do I like freaks so much? Do I identify with them? Do I have some kinda romantic aspiration to be one? Am I secretly one myself, but cover well with all my good personal hygiene and whatnot? I can't say I want to populate my life with nothing but freaks--that would undoubtedly be a greater emotional load than I could bear--but I certainly adore the ones who grace my existence now (and there are a few--gleaming gems, all). As for whether I identify with them? Well, not exactly. Personally, I think I'm deeply, tiresomely normal. Why wouldn't the things I do seem perfectly normal to...me? In fact, I often grimace in the face of my own mundanity. However, oddly enough, most other folks with whom I interact, both cursorily and intimately, seem to think I'm kind of a whackadoo my own damn self. So, I supposed I've internalized a little of that feedback. I negotiate both spheres, perhaps. Neither very well, maybe.
I do think, however, that I'm pretty good at empathizing with oddness, whether or not I'm terribly odd myself. Or rather, I appreciate the pain of the abrasions caused by rubbing our culture the wrong way--and think flouting social rules that feel unnatural is a goddamn honorable way to earn those abrasions. And for that reason, I find I'm far sadder reading commentary that speculates about and makes light of Jackson's supposed sexual proclivities than I was reading of his death itself. Again, I don't care if you liked his music or didn't. I don't care if you thought he was a laughable fop or if you respected him as an iconic superstar of your childhood. I just hate to see a bonafide nonconformist get raked over the coals in the court of public opinion, primarily because of his inability to square himself with the rank and file, when the court of law found him blameless. That hurts my heart, people.
Beyond my somewhat kneejerk championing of our culture's rarities and throwbacks, however, I'm also fairly deeply concerned about the wider ramifications of, as I mentioned on Twitter this morning, the conflation of a more generalized weirdness with sexual deviance. How quick are we to assume that a person who deviates from the norm socially also deviates from the norm sexually? When you stop at your local independent coffee roaster (I'm watching you! No effin' Starbucks, ya here?) tomorrow morning, try playing the pin-the-thigh-restraint-on-the-kinkster game. Who is the weirdest person in the room? The the uber-friendly barrister who thinks forcing social interaction with sleepy customers equates with good customer service? The ponytailed girl with a Coach bag sitting at the sunny table? The girl with smeared kohl under her eyes and holes in her fishnets? My point is that social maladroitness, unusual wardrobe choices and sexual aberrance can certainly appear in the same person, but there isn't much more than a tenuous correlation amongst the three. In other words, not every tattooed lady is your good-time gal. But sometimes the redhead in the tasteful retro pin-up pumps is.
It's a crying shame to think that we have no way to conceptualize weirdness without fetishizing it and associating it with perversion. And make no mistake: sexualizing nonconformity does, indeed, fetishize it. The social consequences of not maintaining a cognitive distinction between eccentric behavior and sexual deviance can only ever be drastic and unfortunate. If you assume all nutbars are pervs, we may as well go ahead and force them to sign sex-offender registries right now. Yeah, let's restrict all their freedoms. Let's apply the most suppressive, most limiting normative dictums to the authentic noncomformists among us just in case they get a wild hair to stage a performative hog-fucking ritual in front of The Limited at your nearest shopping mall. Because you never know with those people. (C'mon. Try to tell me Michael Jackson isn't your Other. Just try.) Or, better yet: let's enact boatloads of legislation that restrict how we touch each others' genitals, how we get aroused thinking about the sort of genitals we'd like to touch, what sorts of tools we can use to touch each others' genitals... all on the grounds that both weirdness and kink are both inherently terrible, awful, very bad, no good things.
Except that neither of them are.
Here's where I land: There is a lovely edenic locale, somewhere between empathy for a tough life and appreciation for a talent of geologic proportions, that bids us resort to neither crucifixion nor idolatry. How 'bout we all go there? I bet they have carnies. And they'll hold you like the River Jordan.
