Nonsense Verse

What makes a home a home

I have a pole in my apartment. A thickish pole, wrapped in bristly rope, that divides the living room from the short corridor (in New York terms, "office") leading to the bedroom. Various guests have puzzled over the pole's purpose, but in general, guesses have been narrowed to two things: (1) it's a supporting pole, plain and simple, or (2) it's a water pipe, wrapped in rope to protect against injury from fluctuations in temperature.

But these two things are not what I thought of when I first laid eyes on the apartment nearly two years ago. No, what I thought was much simpler, much more ... primal, you might say: Stripper Pole!

My reaction was so organic, in fact, that as soon as I stepped into the apartment, the broker fast behind me, I could not help but run to the pole, grab it, and spin around it in an acrobatic twirl. (I had been with the broker all of an hour, maybe two. But he was a good sport, this broker -- just sort of smiled and giggled and changed the subject to square footage.)

At the end of my apartment search, the choices had been whittled to two. There was the large-ish one-bedroom duplex with a tiny, walled-off kitchen (a minus -- a maker of crudites, canapés and other party treats must be able to socialize with her party guests) but also a deck off the second floor (a plus). And then there was the pole apartment: a large-ish, wide-open, loft-style thing with exposed brick along one long wall and, of course, the pole.

Now, some would argue that the deck should have won the day. A deck for a reasonable price is hard to find in this city. And a space with enough room for private sun-bathing and barbecuing is even scarcer. But you know who cares about sun-bathing room and primo BBQ action? Pale people (which I am not) and carnivores (which I am sometimes, but not vociferously enough to justify taking a particular apartment). And so, the decision, for me, was pretty much a nondecision.

But now, as happens with so many relationships, my love affair with the pole apartment is winding to its close. In a couple of months, I plan to move from my Hells Kitchen lair (it really is a lair, or maybe "cocoon" is a better word -- point being, the apartment doesn't get much light) to the E.V. or L.E.S., land of cheaper restaurants, more abundant bars and cafes, better boutiques and thrifting opportunities, dog runs for big and bitty dogs, and fewer lost tourists with the tendency to ignore the "walk" part of "sidewalk."

Most friends, when they hear of my imminent move, react with a "cool!" But on a recent pool-playing, whiskey-drinking outing, the reaction from one friend, who I will call Cute Overload's No. 1 Fan (aka CO1F), was more like overt disappointment: "No!!! What about THE POLE?!"

Me: "Well, I'm sure there are other apartments with poles."

CO1F: (whimper)

Me: "Seriously, I've seen other buildings with poles. In this neighborhood, too. Like, Grape & Grain has a pole kinda like mine."

CO1F: (whimper)

But fear not, CO1F, for recently, I found the answer to both our woes: the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit!

Yes, now you can have your pole -- and take it with you, too!

Broadsheet (subscription required) did a writeup on it, because apparently this thing was being sold in the little-kiddie toy department of the U.K. chain Tesco, and some family-values peeps got their knickers in a bunch. (Tesco is now selling the pole only as a "fitness" item, away from the toddler aisle.)

Now. Before any of my loyal and generous readers get the smart idea to buy and ship me the Peekaboo Pole, let me just say: thanks, but please, no. After all, I may luck out and find that dream apartment in the E.V. complete with exposed brick and hardwood floors and windows that let in daylight and a built-in pole, in which case a Peekaboo will not be required. And even if not, somehow, the Peekaboo strikes me as the kind of product one must really buy on one's own. Kind of like a leather bustier.

And even then, the pole component of my life may have had its day. After all, my commute is about to get longer, I may soon be going back to school, I am totally coveting a puppy -- who has time for pole twirling with all that?

Same old same old

This week offered the "beauty" issue of T, an NYT glossy. Typically I don't even bother reading T because it's geared toward people way above my pay grade, and although I'm a masochist, expensive pretty things don't register nearly high enough on my bar of Things to Justify Self-Torture. But the magazine did feature on its cover a picture of Evan Rachel Wood ("Thirteen," "Pretty Persuasion") looking ethereal in rainbow-bright blush and eye shadow, and because I'm a fan, I picked up the magazine to see if it had anything interesting to say about her (aside from the usual "mature for her age," "not the typical teen actress," "always aspired to be Jodie Foster"). Answer: not really.

But in flipping through the pages, something else caught my eye: this article and photo spread on handsome aging actors. "Love Among the Ruins," the headline said, and the subhed: "Their dissolute faces hold out the possibility of an inner life. And what could be sexier than that?"

At which point the steam started rising ... to my ears.

Do I object to the substance of the words? No. Do I agree that these are all wrinkledly appealing individuals? Sure, most of them. Jeremy Irons: hot. Sam Shepard: totally. Ed Harris: hubba hubba. These are men whose organic marks of age, divine talent and smoldering eyes combine to distinguish them from mere over-the-hill pretty boys, the sum of their parts making the heart beat a little faster and the knees go a little wobbly. Catch me. I swoon.

But I did have to sigh dejectedly at the presence of this spread without what would have been a refreshing, even daring, counterpart: a photo essay extolling the sexiness and elegance of similarly mature women -- and without the digital erasing. It brought to mind one of the many dispiriting truisms to be found in The Beauty Myth, in a passage in which Naomi Wolf quotes a women's magazine editor, then weighs in herself:

"By now readers have no idea what a real woman's 60-year-old face looks like in print because it's made to look 45. Worse, 60-year-old readers look in the mirror and think they look too old, because they're comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine." ...

How do the values of the West, which hates censorship and believes in the free exchange of ideas, fit in here? This issue is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one's own future and to be proud of one's life. Airbrushing age off women's faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened. ... To airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history.

In a "beauty" issue packed with advertisements featuring near-naked, nubile young things -- not to mention a 19-year-old on the cover -- how amazing it would have been to open to a black-and-white pageant of timeworn yet alluring women divulging their "inner lives" through "dissolute faces." But thus is the nature of the culture. The men are depicted as having attained an intensity, an increased sexual vitality, with age, whereas the women -- well, they seem not to exist. In fact, the one woman to make an appearance in the finished product -- the essayist -- falls right into the usual role of background voice, in which she not only slathers on the adoration, but takes the audacious step of reminding us (female) readers of our "natural" position:

Even if you were raised by feminists and the men who divorced them, females are still hard-wired to be accommodating and supportive, the shadowy figure behind the throne.

Also:

We ladies may be self-determined and independent, but hormones are hormones, and hard-wiring can't be short-circuited by ambition, careerism or anything containing batteries. ... One night is all some women can stand; for the rest of us, though, the unwritten genetic imperative trumps celibacy, serial dating and spending holidays in bed with Netflix.

And:

There's something about a man carrying the world's ills on his back that makes us want to lie down on ours.

Uh ... barf?

What at first glance appeared to be an opportunity for us gals to get hot and bothered over some hunky pictures instead turned into a chance to remind us that our rightful place is in the shadow of the man; to warn us that we'd better not be tempted by ambition, lest we end up like one of those feminists destined for divorce court; and to tell us how silly it would be to try to deny the "hard-wiring" that tells us to settle down, make babies and spread our legs every time our world-weary guys give the spine-tingling signal.

I have nothing against the veneration of these accomplished men slipping into their august years. But I can't help but feel that here, a major opportunity was lost. And major insult was added to injury.

Ushering in the decline of civilization, one tattoo at a time

I was at the gym today reading an article in Vanity Fair, "Empire Falls," by Niall Ferguson, in which Ferguson compares what he sees as the decline of the modern-day West with the decline of the Roman Empire.

The article starts off all right, with Ferguson drawing his parallels and bolstering his conclusions with facts and what comes off as sober, levelheaded reasoning. His argument is by no means fresh (yes, Virginia, we're doomed -- and we've heard it all before). But for the first four pages or so I found his corollaries interesting enough to just sort of go along, as I bopped away on the elliptical, and consider here and there and think, "Hm, interesting point."

But then, I got to a section that left me so flabbergasted, I barely thought I could read on. In discussing what he sees as a relatively recent shift away from religiosity -- specifically, "the de-Christianization of Britain" -- Ferguson slings this quotation: "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything." He also, by way of extension, cites one G.K. Chesterton, who wrote, "You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief -- of belief in almost anything." Ferguson then goes on to volunteer numerous of his own examples to illustrate why these quotations are Oh So Right (italics are mine):

"Evidence to support [Chesterton's] point is now abundantly available in post-Christian Europe, where all kinds of New Age cults and irrational beliefs flourish. Otherwise intelligent people choose apartments on the basis of feng shui. … They are simultaneously against poverty and against global warming, when it is precisely the reduction of poverty in Asia that is increasing emissions of carbon dioxide. … With the decline of Christianity, Europe is also experiencing a rise in what politicians euphemistically call "antisocial behavior." The restrained civility that was once a hallmark of English life has all but vanished, to be replaced by a startling rudeness. … Shame has gone; so has civility. On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunken, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police. Another striking symptom of this new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire."

Wow. Just…wow! Who is this guy? I thought. And there I was, still quite a ways from being done with my workout, and committed to attend a meeting at work thereafter, and so I had to wait until hours later to sit down and look this dude up. In my mind, I'd imagined a crusty old white-haired curmudgeon, most likely egg-shaped, dressed in crisp white collar and corded navy sweater. So imagine my surprise when I Googled the bloke and up popped this youngish L.L.Bean-looking guy posed all foreign-correspondent-like next to a monument of a tank. Turns out he's a Harvard professor with a reputation as a "controversial" and prolific commentator on society and empire and stuff. Who knew.

So of course I'm no Hah-vahd gal, and, sans pedigree, who am I to argue with the above-quoted observations, right? Problem is, I just can't help myself...

Ridiculosity No. 1:

"Evidence to support his point is now abundantly available in post-Christian Europe, where all kinds of New Age cults and irrational beliefs flourish."

Here, by his spare choice of words alone, Ferguson implies that anyone who does not subscribe to Christian beliefs is, in essence, irrational. One must also assume, based on this sentence, that pre-post-Christian Europe was the height of rationality. Never mind the people who see Christian beliefs as irrational in and of themselves. (What? Mr. Ferguson wasn't aware those people existed? Oh, O.K. Well maybe we'll give him that one. Just this once.)

Ridiculosity No. 2:

"Otherwise intelligent people choose apartments on the basis of feng shui."

The horror! This is certainly the end of civilization as we know it -- that modern-day apartment-hunters might dare to demand some design, some aesthetic pleasure, some feeling of harmony in their living spaces. Dastardly indeed, these misguided heathens.

Ridiculosity No. 3:

"They are simultaneously against poverty and against global warming, when it is precisely the reduction of poverty in Asia that is increasing emissions of carbon dioxide."

Foolish post-Christians, wanting to save the people and the world, too. Can't they see that we've gotta keep the poor man down, lest we destroy the planet?

There are so many things wrong with this logic I don't even know where to start. I mean, sure, take a nation of billions and transform it from an agrarian culture into a quickly industrializing one, give the people electricity and access to motor vehicles and build a bazillion factories and high rises and whatnot, and emissions are going to rise. But Ferguson is trying to say that the modern-day concerned individual -- the post-Christian who believes in lifting up the poor and saving the Earth (wicked, delirious wishes, these) -- can't possibly have it both ways, that any rational, Christian person would see that this cannot work.

Sorry, pal, but -- might I interject? It seems to me that there are ways to go about lifting the poor out of their condition without harming the planet. It's just that those in power haven't yet figured out how to make a happy people-planet symbiosis a priority. That sort of thinking isn't compatible with the preferred short-term cost-benefit ratio. It would be possible to reduce poverty without harming the planet if the mobilization of a people progressed only with a green, renewable, sustainable plan for growth backing said mobilization (a plan that would have to include some combination of widespread education and continuing availability of birth control and major investment in green technology). For all sorts of reasons both political and economic, the Great Leaders of the developing world (and their allies) are largely not bothering themselves about that -- so far. Yet one might infer from Ferguson's tone that he is suggesting we stay out of the vexing anti-poverty/anti-pollution argument altogether. It's so complicated, after all. It's certain to work us into a hippy-dippy tizzy. Better to refrain from meddling, stay quiet, be polite to our neighbors and just pray to God to fix the problems of our modern world.

Ridiculosity No. 4:

"The restrained civility that was once a hallmark of English life has all but vanished, to be replaced by a startling rudeness."

I don't disagree that civility has declined. But I do disagree with Ferguson's assertion that the decline has its roots in post-Christianity. In my experience, startling rudeness comes not from any lessening of religiosity, but from a failure to instill discipline. I personally didn't learn manners from the church, but from adults who made it very clear when I was young that it would be in my best interest to demonstrate good conduct -- OR ELSE. I learned etiquette and restraint from parents (and uncles and grandparents and teachers) who declined to indulge my every childish whim. The church is not the sole vehicle through which to teach the young how to respect their elders, how to dress, how to speak with "inside voices" or how to say "please" and "thank you." I think we all either know or have observed some extremely "Christian" people who are also outrageously rude. Ferguson is giving the church way too much credit when he traces the decline of civility (and of "culture" in general) to the demise of the tradition of church on Sundays. (The practice of standing, kneeling, singing and eating stale wafers on demand, over the course of an hour or so, does not alone a well-behaved, saintly soul make.)

Ridiculosity No. 5:

"On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunken, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police."

Really? Does this happen that often in the U.K.? Because it's funny: I've had a few friends either breeze through the country on holiday or move in for a stretch of months or years, and not once did they report back with harrowing tales of knife-wielding youths. I feel so misled.

Ridiculosity No. 6:

"Another striking symptom of this new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I practically fell off the elliptical machine, I couldn't believe what I'd just read. The adornment by tattoo is a sign of the new primitivism?! Jesus H. Christ.

Full disclosure: I didn't stick with my religious studies long enough to get to the part where they talk about tattoos being a desecration of the body and therefore a sure sign of savageness, so if I'm a bit off on what comes next, apologies. My guess, however, is that Christianity says the body is sacred, and therefore it ought to remain pure and unscathed, and therefore tattoos are a big no-no, right? O.K. Christianity celebrates the sacredness of the body by clamping it in a chastity belt (both literal and figurative) and dressing it in clothes that button all the way to the neck. People -- entire cultures -- who dare to go bare must be infidels. Never mind the abundance of cultures throughout the world (cultures pre-Christian colonization, at least) that treated the "sacred body" as something not to be feared, but to be celebrated and adorned, with paints, with baubles, and, sin of sin, with tattoos.

As an ink-stained member of the tattooed barbarian hordes, I'll cop to it: Yes, Mr. Ferguson, there is a vast post-Christian conspiracy to undo Western civilization from the inside out, first by imposing our feng shui on unsuspecting Christians, then by swearing loudly and repeatedly at our Christian elders, and finally by strapping all the pre-post-Christians to tables and forcibly branding them with skulls and bones, butterflies and roses, kanji and calligraphy, and horrendous tributes wrapped in little red hearts and treacly banners -- like "Mom" and "Winona Forever." A sure signal of the apocalypse, in fact, will come the day they let my tattooed body into Harvard. Luckily for Mr. Ferguson, and for the rest of the Western world, that's highly unlikely to happen.

Football: Bad, but not all bad

There are a lot of reasons I don’t like the culture of American football. I don't like the zealotry. I don't like its relegation of women to cheerleader status. I don't like its hypocrisy (good god, it's Janet Jackson's breast -- hide the children! good god, son, it's the commercial with the mud-wrestling bikini chicks! now those are real women!). I don't like its rampant homophobia. I don't like its hijacking of God and country, as in "God is football," and "football is patriotism." I don't like its commandeering of horrible, cataclysmic events (see 9/11, see Katrina) as a vehicle for fanning its fans' passions. I don't like its position in academia, the way it so often relegates learning in high school and college to the backseat. And I especially don't like its potent powers of zombification: Since football season started, I haven't been to the gym once without seeing a guy, walking from one apparatus to another, stopped dead in his tracks by game highlights playing on the TV, as if some alien spaceship has trained its beam of light on him and zapped his brain, rendering him helpless. And the guy stands there, eyes glazed, mouth open, practically drooling, watching guys with no necks rehash highlights he no doubt watched already, live, over the weekend, but which he is incapable of turning away from.

Pathetic, I think. What a spectacular waste of brain capacity. And yet…

There are times when I am extremely conflicted about football, because I know what it means to so many people. For many players, it's their one ticket on the express train away from Povertyland, USA. For so many towns (so many families, even), it's the one positive thing they have to rally around. For so many strangers, it's one of the few things to bind them to their neighbors. And let's be frank: Come playoffs and the Super Bowl, it's a damn good excuse to have a blowout party.

I get all that. And so as much as I don't like football, I can't condemn it wholly. Typically I just don't bother watching it, or reading about it, or caring about it. When I do watch I tend to enjoy not so much the play itself, but individual players' occasional moments of honest-to-goodness greatness (not to mention so many of the players' fantastically cartoonish names). And every now and then I'll read something that does make me feel better about the game, despite its many flaws, its posturing, its sanctimoniousness.

The thing that inspired this little rant was actually this article from this past weekend's New York Times magazine, "The Ballad of Big Mike." It's about a kid who had been abandoned, homeless, unable to read, unable to even comprehend the world around him, and yet who had physical gifts that made him destined to play in the NFL. And it's about the family who took it upon themselves to lift him out of what certainly would have been a destitute existence. And yes, they were born-agains on a mission, and yes, they and their ilk are homophobic as all hell, and yes, if I overheard these people's conversations at a football game I would probably be very, very freaked out. But I can't begrudge them their good deeds, even if I don't agree with the agent behind their benevolence. This family helped changed a doomed kid's life. And so did football. In fact, with articles like these (it's a stirring, exciting, heartbreaking and heartwarming article -- do be sure to read it), the kid is already on his way to becoming football legend.

I spit on YourSpace. Ptooey.

Saying "fair point," a faithful reader sent me this excerpt from an interview Tom Wolfe gave earlier this year:

Mr. Wolfe says he has "no theoretical bias against any of it," but still, he seems to find our relentless digital pitch rather cretinous. "Using the Internet is the modern form of knitting," he continues. "It's something to do with idle hands. When you knitted, though, you actually had something to show for it at the end. Thomas Jefferson used to answer all his mail from the day before as soon as he got up at dawn. In his position, think of the number of emails he'd have had. He never would have been Thomas Jefferson if he'd been scrupulous about answering all these things. I think email is a wonderful time-waster. It's peerless. Here it is," he concludes, "you can establish contact--useless contact--with innumerable human beings."

TOTALLY.

This is exactly why I've never been enthralled with the Friendster/LinkedIn/Tribe/Ryze/MySpace phenomena. When these things first started launching I kept getting messages and having weird interactions at cocktail parties where people would look at me as if I were an alien because I hadn't "linked in" yet: "Oh my god! You're not on Friendster?! How can you not be???" At the time, I was living in Washington, D.C., a place where people become particularly aghast when you tell them you have no interest in networking with them or their people.

"Because it would be a huge waste of time, and I don't have that time," was my standard answer. Sometimes I'd mix it up: "I already have enough friends who I have enough trouble keeping up with. Why the hell would I want more?" Or sometimes the simplest answer seemed best: "I don't like people. Leave me alone."

The best answer I've heard from another "social networking" denier was, "Um, because I'm not 12."

Full disclosure: On invitation only, I did sign up for LinkedIn, to see who else might be on it, because one of my closer friends had invited me. To this day, I've gained nothing from that effort. I also created logins for Friendster and MySpace -- Friendster, to check out the photographs of someone a friend of mine thought was "hot," and MySpace to check out the photographs of someone I thought was "hot." But in each case, I checked in maybe twice before logging off forever and going on to forget all my usernames and passwords. (And no, I didn't write the usernames and passwords down, because I knew I'd probably find the services useless anyway.)

Don't get me wrong: Now that I have the Internet and e-mail, I don't know how I'd get along without them. I love writing and receiving real-for-sure paper letters, but come on -- who has the time these days? And who can write a proper letter without getting horrendous writer's cramp? You've got to really want to write that letter.

I do not, however, use the Internet just to whittle away the hours. Besides needing it for e-mail, I use it to read The Latest in News and Opinion, and for research -- research of facts, research on how to spell something, research on what the hell that dude in the band was singing the other night because I couldn't freakin' hear it over the bass line. And, okay, I do spend the teeniest fraction of my day perusing the latest in cuteness.

But I don't understand people who sign up for these sites to accumulate 250 friends, some of them acquaintances at best but most of them totally random and anonymous connections. Even if the people you're communicating with on MySpace are people you know in real life, why do you need to do it on MySpace? There's this amazing new invention. Maybe you've heard of it? It's called e-mail?

I'm not counting the use of these services as business conduits; by all accounts these sites are great ways for bands, authors, actors and whatnot to publicize their mad skillz. (And I suppose I'm not counting it for people who use the sites solely to meet strangers for sex -- of course, needs are needs.)

But for the bazillions of other people who sign on and then get listed as faux friends of obscure people they will most likely never meet in real life? Good god, folks, what is the purpose? There are so many other worthwhile ways to stay entertained: books to read, galleries to visit, parks to play in, movies to see, instruments to tickle and pluck and strum (not to mention other "instruments" to tickle and pluck and strum), songs to sing, classes to take and, not least, real f'n people in the real f'n world to have an f'n cocktail with.

Really.

So yeah, I am so not cool because I so do not have 250 "friends" in my network. Oh my god, I am, like, too sad to live.