A Little Nature, A Little Culture
I'm really all over the map with this one
Cancel Culture
Today I heard (PYT) Pretty Young Thing on the radio and I thought that if we can’t agree on whether to completely cancel Michael Jackson or not, we should all at least agree that the song that is literally about finding young people attractive ought to be out of the rotation, right?
My Millions
The Powerball is over $425 million again. I usually don’t start fantasizing about how I would spend my winnings* until the jackpot is high enough to get news coverage about how excited gas station owners are about their lottery ticket sales. But $427 million is a lot of money, and I was on a long drive, so I started making my plan. First, I would buy my winning lottery ticket with cash so they couldn’t immediately trace it to me and I could remain anonymous while I contact my financial planner and lawyer. After I collected the money, I would do the obvious stuff like setting up college accounts and paying off mortgages for my family. I would pay to build affordable housing in Oakland and charge below-market rates for it. I would give a lot of money to small newspapers, and maybe even buy a few and set up small endowments for them. I would open places that have recreational activities, like bowling and billiards. I’d open a roller rink and some arcades. Like a lot of these places so it’s not that crowded.
Finally, I would fully fund The Society for the Renaturation of Seashells, of which I am the founding and only member (that I know of). A preoccupation of mine is a belief that seashells should belong in the ocean and that all the seashells that people have collected should be returned to the ocean. When I’m a kooky old lady or a multimillionaire with money to waste, I will buy people’s seashell collections and then dump them in the ocean, preferably near the area where they were originally found. That last part’s a little tough but I mean, I’ll try to figure out what ocean it’s from or part of the ocean it’s from. I don’t intend to try to determine if a shell is from Nantucket or Myrtle Beach or whatever.
Seashells are irresistibly beautiful, I understand. But they belong to the ocean, which has a use for every seashell. Some are shelters for animals, some are food. Some crumble to bits to make new sand. They are treasures to be enjoyed by everyone and they can’t be if they are sitting on a shelf gathering dust, or worse, glued en masse to a chandelier.
No one agrees with me about this, and fine, whatever, but my Powerball millions will right this wrong.
Kull-chah
We have been watching a lot of TV lately, which I assume is not unique now that there are 500 channels and 50 streaming services, but we can’t all watch everything, so I’ve watched some stuff for you.
Ultimatum: Queer Love: The premise of this show is that five lesbian couples are brought together for 7 weeks to trade partners. Each couple had one partner who had issued an ultimatum demanding marriage and the other had cold feet. They each found a new “trial wife” and spent three weeks with her, and then went back to the person they came with and did another three-week trial marriage. In the end, they had to leave engaged to their original partner, be in a relationship with their new girlfriend, or be single. It is as utterly inane as it sounds, but it had some real lessons to be gleaned from it. The main lesson was that regardless of their gender or sexual orientation, people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid going to therapy.
Another lesson: everyone, even polyamorous women and butch to the point of probably trans people, feel enormous pressure from society and their partners and friends to conform to evangelical Christian models of marriage. So much talk about rings and weddings and babies and saving for IV treatment! It was like my new moms’ group in Montgomery, Alabama. The most loathsome woman on the show, Vanessa, initially said that she was polyamorous, and then the rest of the show was her being shamed for having any pleasure while dating or with her trial wife. Meanwhile, her butch partner Xander fell in love with a very beautiful (and honestly, pretty sweet and cool) femme who also wanted marriage and babies. Xander was essentially the hero of the show. Vanessa absolutely made things worse for herself by being a manipulative narcissist as well, but I’m just saying, the heteronormativity of the whole affair was intense. Obviously, the point is to be like, “Lesbians! They’re just like us!” to a straight audience but it ended up being sort of boring as a result.
Silo: Ten thousand people, no more, no less, live in an enormous underground silo built 140 years prior by The Founders to keep its citizens safe from whatever is outside the Silo. They are governed by a document called The Pact, which prohibits conveyances, including elevators, apparently, and any glass object that could magnify. I don’t know why, yet. There are a lot of other rules, too. All the history books and records were destroyed in a rebellion that was put down. The victory of The Founders over the rebels was successful in eliminating dissent. The Pact is overseen by Judicial, which can order people to go outside the silo to “clean” which is wiping dust off the camera lens that peers out onto a bleak landscape. Then they die. To make a very long story short, some people start to believe that outside the silo is not as it has been portrayed through the supposed camera lens and intrigue ensues. It’s good. I recommend it if you like bleak sci-fi shows.
Here’s what I want to say about it though. It’s a lot like Severance. A small group of people make the mistake of asking a couple of innocent questions and find themselves on the wrong side of an evil institution that they believed had their best interests at heart. In Severance, the villain is a corporation; in Silo, the villain is a government that is run by survivalists. These shows/types of shows derive from a Matrix** mentality - that there are the ignorant masses and a chosen few who KNOW what’s really going on. That mentality has infected a part of the American public into believing shit like Q-Anon and Pizzagate.
The fact that I am rooting for the underdogs in Silo and Severance is natural, but the cynicism gives me pause. I think we are really at a point in time when no one trusts the institutions we once assumed were at least benign if not outright good. That’s been fed both by the bad acts of corporations, the anti-government mentality of the GOP, the cowardly inaction of the Democrats, and the occasional failures of bureaucracy. Some people don’t even like libraries anymore, because they dare to be inclusive and free and a place where ideas are allowed to flourish. In fairness, other than the library, I can’t think of many institutions that have worked to regain or build our trust. It’s bleak.
Here’s something that isn’t bleak: The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson. I read it last Saturday (it’s less than 200 pages) in honor of the summer solstice, and it did not disappoint. It’s a series of vignettes involving a little girl and her grandmother and occasionally other characters on a secluded island in Finland, and it’s a lovely book. You feel like you are lying on a bed of moss and leaves as you read it, or have your toes squished into the warm sand. It’s much harder to be cynical when you are living vicariously in a beautiful and quiet place.
Tonight we are going to watch I’m A Virgo and I recommend you do too. It’s made by Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You***, The Coup) in Oakland and it’s getting rave reviews. Have a nice weekend!
Footnotes
*if I played the lottery, which I don’t.
**I appreciate that the theme precedes The Matrix as a literary device; The Matrix is just a handy recent reference point.
*** If you haven’t seen this movie, please do so, stat. I’ll probably write something about it at some point when I write about all the movies and shows that are about labor.
Big hug. Thanks for the recommendations.