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Obsessing about New Orleans. The Wild Tchoupitoulas stompin' some romp under fifteen feet of murky water. Coffins floating on the surface. Anne Rice vampires winking and standing each other shots of O positive in flooded jazz bars. Can you tell I've never spent serious time in New Orleans?
I watched the Weather Channel night before last with a sense of vague disappointment. The hurricane had been downgraded to Category 4. What was that about? Had the special effects budget run out? Woke up this morning to the appalling yet somehow satisfying news that most of New Orleans was now under water. All right! Now you're talkin'! Now I can spend all day crouched in front CNN and Fox TV News watching media vampires milk stunned people for their personal tragedies.
What is it that makes us all so desperate to buy into this shit? I mean this is not empathy. This is some impulse more primative than schadenfreude, something right up there with eating the still beating hearts of your enemies: if it happened to them, it can't happen to me plus GMC is still giving an employee discount on all those great cars!
I remember being similarly glued to my television set on September 11, 2001 but that was different somehow and when I think about why, it comes down to something very simple: there were no commercials that day. It's the ads that that clue you in: this isn't news, this is entertainment, programming designed to lull you into the complacent stupor that lowers your resistance to buying decisions.
Once I figure out the domestic equivalent of OXFAM, I'll donate money to relief efforts.
In other news, Max was down from Deep Springs for a whirlwind visit. Visit got off to a bumpy start – in the way of younger brothers of dazzlingly accomplished older brothers everywhere, Robin is convinced I love Max best and thus did the patented Cal Trask skulking thing for the first 24 hours or so. Tactically difficult: of course I wanted to reassure Robin but at the same time everybody's passive aggressive schtick always makes me want to scream: get over yourself! Robin is every bit as brilliant as Max; the difference is that he's never felt an internal pressure to live up to other people's expectations and so he doesn't.
We went out to breakfast at Rosine's and Robin sat at the table looking sullen and miserable. Wouldn't eat bacon. Bacon is one of his his favorite foods. I'd ordered him a special side. "I don't eat things with faces," he informed me loftily. "I don't like meat."
"Since when?" I asked. I was pissed. The side order cost five bucks.
"I've never liked meat," he said.
"You ate chili last night," I reminded him. "That has meat in it."
Otherwise silent, he kept doling out pieces of bacon to me, to Ben, but not to Max, throughout the breakfast conversation. Notice my suffering, the bacon said. Notice that I am an outsider to this family dynamic. It was hard for me to notice anything else.
But by last night, all the kinks in family togetherness had been ironed out. We had a rollicking family dinner. Max cooked – or I should say under-cooked – salmon, did an herb butter as garnish, baked his Grand Marnier cake. Maya came over. It was lovely to see her. Max entertained us with descriptions of Deep Springs variants on Capture the Flag.
"How do you choose teams?" Robin wanted to know.
"Various ways," Max said. "Sometimes it's East Coast versus West Coast. Sometimes it's circumcised versus uncircumcised. Sometimes it's rural versus urban – that's the hardest because I never know how to describe Monterey. It's a suburb, right?"
"Monterey is not a suburb!" Maya scoffed.
"Monterey is a small city," I said.
"A very small city," said Max.
"What's 'circumcised?'" Robin wanted to know.
"You know, Patrizia, I really want to see The Go-Between," said Maya hastily. "Now that I've read the book,"
And this was really sweet of her because I knew I'd put The Fear into her on one of those innumerable occasions last fall when Max had invited her over and then decamped leaving her to the mercy of his crazy mother. (Maya came over a lot last year when she was quote having problems at home – although how she could be having problems at home with her incredibly perfect family in that incredibly gorgeous Coralitos spread is still something of a mystery to me.)
I had been helping supervise her independent English studies – Maya had dropped out of school for a year and was educating herself – and had chosen books with the general theme of the Discovery of Self. The Go-Between is one of my favorite novels, containing as it does the most perfect opening lines ever written – "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." So naturally I'd assigned it. BUZZ: wrong move. Maya hated it, found nothing whatsoever to connect to in the story of an adolescent boy caught in a British class struggle disguised as a love affair.
The movie is everything a beautiful, contemporary sixteen year old girl hates. But that didn't stop me from trying to make her watch it and I can only imagine her distress – Max ditching her for some prior engagement, stuck with his insanely over-intellectual mother who wouldn't let her watch Bad Santa, who was forcing her to listen to Harold Pinter dialogue for God's sake –
It was very sweet of her to forgive me.
"If you really must see it, email me and I'll mail it to you," I said, playing smiling matriarch to the hilt. "And Robin, we'll talk about circumcision later. After we eat."
I watched the Weather Channel night before last with a sense of vague disappointment. The hurricane had been downgraded to Category 4. What was that about? Had the special effects budget run out? Woke up this morning to the appalling yet somehow satisfying news that most of New Orleans was now under water. All right! Now you're talkin'! Now I can spend all day crouched in front CNN and Fox TV News watching media vampires milk stunned people for their personal tragedies.
What is it that makes us all so desperate to buy into this shit? I mean this is not empathy. This is some impulse more primative than schadenfreude, something right up there with eating the still beating hearts of your enemies: if it happened to them, it can't happen to me plus GMC is still giving an employee discount on all those great cars!
I remember being similarly glued to my television set on September 11, 2001 but that was different somehow and when I think about why, it comes down to something very simple: there were no commercials that day. It's the ads that that clue you in: this isn't news, this is entertainment, programming designed to lull you into the complacent stupor that lowers your resistance to buying decisions.
Once I figure out the domestic equivalent of OXFAM, I'll donate money to relief efforts.
In other news, Max was down from Deep Springs for a whirlwind visit. Visit got off to a bumpy start – in the way of younger brothers of dazzlingly accomplished older brothers everywhere, Robin is convinced I love Max best and thus did the patented Cal Trask skulking thing for the first 24 hours or so. Tactically difficult: of course I wanted to reassure Robin but at the same time everybody's passive aggressive schtick always makes me want to scream: get over yourself! Robin is every bit as brilliant as Max; the difference is that he's never felt an internal pressure to live up to other people's expectations and so he doesn't.We went out to breakfast at Rosine's and Robin sat at the table looking sullen and miserable. Wouldn't eat bacon. Bacon is one of his his favorite foods. I'd ordered him a special side. "I don't eat things with faces," he informed me loftily. "I don't like meat."
"Since when?" I asked. I was pissed. The side order cost five bucks.
"I've never liked meat," he said.
"You ate chili last night," I reminded him. "That has meat in it."
Otherwise silent, he kept doling out pieces of bacon to me, to Ben, but not to Max, throughout the breakfast conversation. Notice my suffering, the bacon said. Notice that I am an outsider to this family dynamic. It was hard for me to notice anything else.
But by last night, all the kinks in family togetherness had been ironed out. We had a rollicking family dinner. Max cooked – or I should say under-cooked – salmon, did an herb butter as garnish, baked his Grand Marnier cake. Maya came over. It was lovely to see her. Max entertained us with descriptions of Deep Springs variants on Capture the Flag.
"How do you choose teams?" Robin wanted to know.
"Various ways," Max said. "Sometimes it's East Coast versus West Coast. Sometimes it's circumcised versus uncircumcised. Sometimes it's rural versus urban – that's the hardest because I never know how to describe Monterey. It's a suburb, right?"
"Monterey is not a suburb!" Maya scoffed.
"Monterey is a small city," I said.
"A very small city," said Max.
"What's 'circumcised?'" Robin wanted to know.
"You know, Patrizia, I really want to see The Go-Between," said Maya hastily. "Now that I've read the book,"
And this was really sweet of her because I knew I'd put The Fear into her on one of those innumerable occasions last fall when Max had invited her over and then decamped leaving her to the mercy of his crazy mother. (Maya came over a lot last year when she was quote having problems at home – although how she could be having problems at home with her incredibly perfect family in that incredibly gorgeous Coralitos spread is still something of a mystery to me.)
I had been helping supervise her independent English studies – Maya had dropped out of school for a year and was educating herself – and had chosen books with the general theme of the Discovery of Self. The Go-Between is one of my favorite novels, containing as it does the most perfect opening lines ever written – "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." So naturally I'd assigned it. BUZZ: wrong move. Maya hated it, found nothing whatsoever to connect to in the story of an adolescent boy caught in a British class struggle disguised as a love affair.
The movie is everything a beautiful, contemporary sixteen year old girl hates. But that didn't stop me from trying to make her watch it and I can only imagine her distress – Max ditching her for some prior engagement, stuck with his insanely over-intellectual mother who wouldn't let her watch Bad Santa, who was forcing her to listen to Harold Pinter dialogue for God's sake –
It was very sweet of her to forgive me.
"If you really must see it, email me and I'll mail it to you," I said, playing smiling matriarch to the hilt. "And Robin, we'll talk about circumcision later. After we eat."
