The Rake Magazine

Month: December 2003

  • Robert Bly: The Dude Abides

    In his seventy-seven years, he has established himself as a world-class poet, teacher, social critic—and founder of the controversial “expressive men’s movement.”

    Standing in his studio—a nineteenth-century stable behind what was once a lone farmhouse atop Lowry Hill—Robert Bly is surrounded by books, papers, and icons. This is a monk’s cell. In one nook stands a simple bed. There is a prayer room, where gatherings of chanting and drumming are held for a regular group of initiates who sit cross-legged on Persian carpets.

    Bly himself is a tall and solid man. On these wintry days, you’ll find him cloaked in an enormous overcoat and black ushanka hat. He looks like a bear just out of the forest. Though he’s just embarked on his seventy-seventh year and his thick hair is frosty white, he displays a youthful vigor that reminds you he has lived a very active life.

    Like the heroes of so many fairytales he has told, Robert Bly is an archetype in his own history. Such mythic journeys require tasks that prove fortitude, and Bly has duly tilled the soil, fought with dragons, and lived as a hermit. He is legendary for banging down institutional doors and tackling giants. As an outspoken poet, philosopher, and societal gadfly, he has written the laws of the world as he sees them, and he’s gotten himself into plenty of trouble for it. Most people are more familiar with Bly’s opinions than his poetry. Many don’t know much of either. It’s not easy following his mystical lead. Yet his longevity and conviction have earned him the begrudging respect of many critics, even on the nasty battlefield of literature.

    As a studious pupil of many teachers, he learned the scholarly ways. He has been a supplicant in the church of Jung and knows the songs of Abraham, Muhammad, Shiva, and Odin. Bly has faced his share of demons along his far-flung path. Today he meets with me between his engagements as a still-active writer, speaker, and babysitter for his nineteen-month-old grandson.

    Although he is an accomplished poet, a renowned translator of poetry, and a National Book Award recipient for his 1967 collection The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly is probably best known for his role in the men’s movement. It has been a long path, but suffice it to say that by the eighties, Bly’s studies of Freud and Jung and the world at large had led him to see the struggle of human consciousness as the result of a breakdown of our masculine and feminine sides. Not only were they at odds, they were largely lost. He took up these themes in his writing and in his activism, and in so doing he became the subject of at least as much ridicule as admiration.

    Bly’s work with the men’s movement was inspired by his previous exploration of the Great Mother as a poetic theme, and by watching his two sons confront the cruelties of life. “My daughters were older than my sons. Daughters have a self-regulating mechanism. But sons are a problem. The world has so cuffed them about with such fantastic cruelty that becoming an adult male is a huge problem. Once I was with a thousand men at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I had an idea that overnight we cut up like two or three thousand pieces of red cloth and then I said, ‘I’d like all of the men here who have a wound on their body to tie a piece of cloth around their wound.” Bly shakes his head in sadness. “There were men with eight of those ribbons on their bodies. Motorcyle crashes, fights, war, everything.”

    The “father consciousness” needed tending, Bly decided, and masculine roles were rooted in violence. “It’s easier to socialize a young man into being a warrior than to be a father. You can do that in the Marines; men are geared for that in some way. But to socialize them into being fathers is a different matter.” Bly started the Minnesota Men’s Conference in 1984 near Sturgeon Lake, mixing teachers, poets, psychologists, and musicians. “In the seventies we were doing workshops with men and women. I’d always used the story theme of fairy tales, which is the old Jungian way to do things—but when I decided I wanted to teach a fairy tale to men, I didn’t have any. I read through the whole Grimm Brothers and finally found ‘Iron John.’ It is clearly a way of a man overcoming his shame. After all, he’s in the bottom of the lake.” Thus the “Expressive Men’s Movement” was born. When Bly put his work into book form in 1990, Iron John became an instant bestseller that inspired a competing reaction of acclaim and disdain.

    Feminists were livid. Women Respond to the Men’s Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan, collected several highly charged reactions from writers of merit, including Bell Hooks, Laura Brown, and Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver expressed dismay. “When I try to understand the collection of ideas and goals that has come to be called the men’s movement, what disturbs me is that it generally stands as an ‘other half’ to the women’s movement, and in my mind it doesn’t belong there. It is not an equivalent. Women are fighting for their lives, and men are looking for some peace of mind.”

    Activist Hattie Gossett was perhaps the most reactionary, when she spat, “Well, what do they mean? What’re they going to the woods for then? Oh? Really? Sensitive? Does that mean they’re against rape now? When they come back from the woods do they issue statements against child abuse, wife battering, incest, lesbian battering? Do they pledge that, the next time one of their street-corner or health-club buddies is running off at the mouth about how he snatched him some pussy then kicked that bitch in her ass? These guys who paid all this money to go to the woods with what’s-his-name, will they silently organize a small group to take their brother for a little walk and show him some tongue- and penis-restraint exercises guaranteed to permanently clear his mind of all thoughts of ripping off pussy, or bitches, or kicking ass?”

    Susan Faludi swung back hard in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. She painted Bly as a particularly fiendish perpetrator of the suppression of feminism, calling him the “general of the men’s movement.” She wrote, “The true subject of Bly’s weekends, after all, is not love and sex, but power—how to wrest it from women and how to mobilize it for men.” Her tome dedicates several pages to what today seems a hateful attack.

    Bly looks quizzical and a little sad. “The women thought that the men’s movement came up to try to combat feminism. On the contrary, it was like a planned growth. It appears at a certain time. A tree doesn’t grow up because there’s another tree nearby. It’s got its own growth pattern. Women used to think of me as a huge enemy and attack me all the time. But now I find that a lot of women stop me in airports and tell me, ‘I’ve been reading Iron John. I can’t tell you how helpful that is in dealing with my own male side.’”

    Whatever the verdict, the hubbub brought Bly a measure of celebrity that still lives. The highly respected Bill Moyers produced A Gathering of Men for PBS, bringing Bly and his Wild Man into our national living room. Spin-off books by spin-off Jungians, shamans, and visionaries flooded the media. A cottage industry of men’s conferences of innumerable stripes flourished from church basements to Fortune 500 boardrooms.

    Dialogue was lost in the shouting of standard-bearers who had climbed into their opposing towers. Even politically motivated Jungians pecked at Bly’s interpretations as conservative. People took from Iron John whatever suited their own agendas. Feminists who were nervous in 1990 could point by the middle of the decade to scores of highly conservative and chauvinistic new men’s groups. It doesn’t take a psychic leap to guess that organizations like the Promise Keepers drew some of their energy from what Bly had started. Even worse, Iron John made for some of the best lampooning material in years. Men crying en masse, drumming, and chanting; it was all so easy. The image of a herd of naked white men plunging through the forest still comes to mind.

    Yet, fourteen years later, Iron John’s drum can still be heard. Bly offers a grandfatherly smile. “The Minnesota Men’s Conference will celebrate its twentieth year in September. I think men have been helped somewhat. I was over at Powderhorn Park one day and I saw a lot of men there playing with their sons. My wife said, ‘That’s part of the work that you and the others did, that many more men are taking part in raising their children.’”

  • Repetition Compulsion

    “We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

    “It’s so interesting that Canada doesn’t have anywhere near our percentage of murders. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we were the ones who had slaves and killed the Indians. After the civil war, we let men go and some went west. Martine Prechtal has said that many of these men had untreated trauma just as many Vietnam veterans had. Imagine what that was like after the civil war. Unbelievable, the brutality of that. We sent them right out West, where they became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing of war can do to a human being. We just send them out. That’s called the repetition compulsion. We have to look for more Indians and kill them. If we didn’t learn anything from the first killing of the Indians, every ten or twelve years we have to do it again. Bush, of course, that coward, was never in the war at all; he sneaked out. It’s not as if you have to be in a war to want the repetition. Now repetition is built into the American culture.

    “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake this country has ever made. The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism. I’ve translated much Islamic poetry and I admire the Islamic culture. We have no idea how great their poetry is, but you’re also looking at a social culture frozen by the mullahs, frozen in the eleventh century. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do, to get into an antagonistic relationship, and that is exactly what Bush did. Bush Sr. was intelligent enough to pull back and not go on towards Baghdad. There’s nothing we can win in this war. Our new war is a war against the terrorists, but Bush Jr. has created ten thousand new terrorists.

    “Bush and Wolfowitz and Cheney are repetition compulsion people. It’s wrong to give into them. We have veered off our own path completely. We’re pouring billions into Iraq, and Oregon has just taken nineteen days off the school calendar.

    “Lincoln and Douglas had debates. They’d go on for four hours in the afternoon, then they’d take a break and come back for two hours more in the night. You could say that people in the audience were watching them speak to see if their words fit their bodies. Is this the real person? But on television no one is real. They’re all being someone else. The entire American nation has lost that ability to decide if those words are genuine. That’s why Bush won the election. He never would have gotten near winning an election in the nineteenth century. They would have seen immediately that his words and his body don’t fit.”

  • Robert Bly’s Greatest Hits

    Selected Poems, 1986
    A “best of” anthology of a kind, these are really good poems—and the mixture of work sheds light on Bly’s stylistic and topical meanderings. You’ll find “Counting Small Boned Bodies” and other lamentations on Vietnam, as well as more than a hundred examples from three decades of work. The prose poems from This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) are beautiful and show off Bly’s command of the unwieldy form.

    Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973
    To understand how Bly got to be so Blyish, look back to some of his earlier work. His third poetry collection is filled with vigorous incantations on the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it is punctuated with a long discourse on the Great Mother. The essay makes a good primer for Iron John and The Sibling Society.

    The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, 2001
    This is Bly’s most recent collection. If you’ve joined the current Rumi rediscovery trip, you’ll have a better appreciation of why Bly seems to be jumping all over the place—that’s part of the beauty of this old Islamic form (ghazal). He’s trying to get your head to stretch some great distances, to make those “psychic leaps.” Even without knowing anything about the Battle of Ypres, you can easily appreciate Bly’s incredible energy, insight, and wit.

    A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988
    This is a highly readable collection of essays that offers up “the philosophy of Robert Bly” in less than one hundred pages. He explains his connection to Jung and gets into the feminine, masculine, and then some.

    The Sibling Society, 1996
    It’s an artful diatribe on our moral decay and the dominance of American popular culture. But unlike other polemics of this ilk, Bly digs deep and blames our own selfishness for squandering the knowledge of how to live in community. The result: permanent adolescence. Be prepared to look in the mirror.

    Iron John, 1990
    Read it and you’ll be able to start an argument at nearly any party. If you want to understand it, though, you may want to take a few classes in psychology, mythology, classics, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and men’s studies. It’s heavy stuff, and it’s very easy to get lost in the forest. Bly is extremely blunt and often his take on male-female relations can sound harsh toward women. No good pickup lines here. We’re supposed to embrace our differences before we can enjoy our sameness. For some that’s not so easy to swallow.

  • Flip Your Wig!

    You can do it!

    Here are the answers:

    Magers—the King; Robinson—the Count; Santaniello—the Helmet; Binkley—Bozo the Piece; Grayson—Best in Show; Diana Pierce—Ferret-Glo; Murphy—the Wet Mop; Gatenby—the Rust Bucket

  • Bubbleheads!

    Bobbleheads have recently become all the rage among collectors of sports souvenirs. Those oversized craniums, wobbling on springs as if Parkinson’s disease were desirable in a doll, are a pleasant diversion when perched on your mantel or flanking your computer monitor.

    They’re funny not just because of their striking ugliness, but because they point beyond themselves to some disturbing home truths—at least the football bobbleheads do. In real life, the craniums of 300-pound linemen are incredibly vulnerable, despite appearances. Blows to the head, no matter how thick the skull or its natural padding, can lead to serious brain injuries, most commonly concussions. They are the type of injuries that can cut short careers. Thus the most recent attempts to improve the safety of football players have focused on helmet technology—specifically, efforts to make the headgear lighter, stronger, and cooler.

    “It’s a question of simple physics,” said Vikings tight end Hunter Goodwin. “A lot of concussions are caused by a whipping effect of the head and neck, and with less weight to propel, there’s less whipping.”

    Goodwin is one of a handful of Vikings wearing the most modern version of protective lids. After a four-year study of both head-on and lateral collisions, Riddell Sports introduced the Revolution.

    The most noticeable difference is its size—if you thought Jim Kleinsasser, Bryant McKinnie, or Chris Claiborne appeared a bit bubbleheaded this year, you’re right. The Revolution’s shell is bigger than standard models, to accommodate extra padding. It’s also got six oval-shaped holes across the crown to provide better ventilation, and it wraps around the mandible to protect the jaw.

    Goodwin said that after years of little change in helmet technology, Bike—a competitor of Riddell—came out with a space-age prototype that he tested in 2000, when he played with the Miami Dolphins. “I was the players’ association rep in Miami, and in a players’ union meeting the safety issues were discussed,” he said. “We saw the results of the tests between the Bike and the old Riddell helmet, and that made it a conscious decision for me.”

    Riddell introduced the Revolution at Super Bowl XXXVI, where Rams fullback James Hodgins was the first player to wear it in a game. Riddell made the Revolution available to the rest of the NFL in time for the 2002 season. Other companies are working on similar models. Schutt Sports unveiled a new brain-bucket at the Army-Navy football game a couple weeks ago. Schutt claims its helmets borrow from technology used in the Army, meaning we’ve come full circle since John T. Riddell allowed the U.S. government to borrow his patented suspension helmet design in 1939 to protect Allied troops in combat.

    The suspension model—an unpadded plastic shell literally suspended above the player’s head by crisscrossing straps—was still the helmet of choice in 1975, when equipment manager Dennis Ryan joined the Vikings staff. In fact, Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton was one of the last to change to a padded helmet, and Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page never did make the switch.

    “When Page went to Chicago, I think we had to send his helmet there, which they painted blue,” Ryan said. “He also wore an aluminum face mask. They bent a lot, and what was scary is, they would collapse. There were a couple of times where you wondered if you were going to get the helmet off the player’s head, they would be smashed in so far.”

    So even though the old helmets were good enough to protect the bean of a future supreme court justice, one would have to be pretty thick to deny that today’s models are a decisive upgrade. But it’s still too early to tell if the Revolution has helped reduce concussions league-wide. “It’s tough to say one helmet is better than another,” Ryan said.

    Of course, the lack of data—scientific or anecdotal—is both a blessing and a curse. How can you tell which blows should have caused a concussion, but didn’t, thanks to the new helmet? “I haven’t noticed anything, but I guess that’s a good thing,” said Revolution-wearing Vikings tackle Mike Rosenthal. “It must be working.”—Patrick Donnelly

  • Sweet and French

    Who now reads Charles Morgan? Some years ago there was a revival of his novel The Gunroom, which proved to anyone who was interested that the middle one of Churchill’s three Traditions of the Royal Navy (Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash) was a living reality for young officers of the Edwardian Era.

    Morgan’s masterpiece is The Fountain, a thoughtful love story set during the First World War. The unkind complain that the characters talk more about doing less than any others in literature (even those of E.M. Forster, his older contemporary), but what could be more absorbing than serious reflection on serious sentiment, especially if it is presented in dignified English prose rather than modish modern psychobabble?

    It was not only inner lives Charles Morgan could delineate; he was expert at placing people in a landscape. The Voyage begins in 1883 among the green chalk combes of western France, north of Bordeaux just inland from the Atlantic, the land bisected by the river Charente, the land where Cognac comes from. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the vineyards of Europe were being laid waste by a tiny insect from the East Coast of the United States called Phylloxera vastatrix; the name means literally Dryleaf the Devastator, which sounds like something out of Tolkien. In its own land it lives by sucking sap from the hard roots of the American vine Vitis labrusca so when it came to France and found the soft rootstock of Vitis vinifera the European grapevine, it behaved like a mouse munching through a wheel of Brie. It took years to perfect the science of grafting French vines onto hard American root stock; it was during this hiatus in brandy production that Scotch whiskey really established itself as a popular alternative in the smoking rooms of London clubs. In the meantime Charles Morgan’s hero Barbet was having anxious discussions with the parish priest about the spread into neighboring vales of the vine pest, “the accursed green fly.”

    This is a novel full of food and drink. In the first scene, Barbet, an amiable man as unworldly as he is wise, takes a big pot of homemade stew to the six prisoners in the local jail, which he runs in his old farm buildings. Charente is a part of the world where eating and drinking are taken seriously. Even today, in a France where young folk are supposed to be knee-deep in McDonald’s wrappers, one may read in a Jarnac school newsletter that the children are to benefit from a program of éveil sensoriel (sensual awakening—it sounds better in French) based on discovering the pleasures of eating local produce. Lucky old them, I say.

    No doubt as part of their awakening they will meet (in suitably moderate quantities) the sweet local wine Pineau des Charentes. This appealing pudding wine is made in both white and rosé, though the white is much more easily found than the pink. It is of varying ages, from twelve months to twelve years—the older the better. And it owes its sweetness not to the grape varieties from which it is made (claret grapes for the pink, a whole range of varieties for the white) but to the local brandy used to arrest its fermentation as soon as the grapes have been pressed. One part spirit to three parts grape juice prevents the grape sugars from turning into alcohol.

    Pineau des Charentes was allegedly discovered when someone in the 16th century poured brandy into a barrel of freshly pressed grape juice. The legend seems set a little early for the development of brandewijn by the Dutch in the seventeenth century—though this was indeed one of the areas where canny Dutch merchants of the Rembrandt era got their grapes. Whether or not either legend is true, white Pineau des Charentes goes well with creamy things, custard, or Brie. And the rosé is that rare thing, a wine that goes well with chocolate. Lightly chilled, this is one of life’s simple pleasures. As innocent and as amiable, perhaps, as Charles Morgan’s Barbet.

  • Keep Your Friends Close, Your Enemies Closer

    A few months ago, Intercontinental Video reopened its doors. It had been closed for more than a year, after a fire destroyed the West Bank store’s irreplaceable video collection of almost 50,000 titles. The store was always a sure bet if you were trying to up your cool factor with an attractive potential mate by finding some obscure title. Om Arora, owner and operator, had been gathering foreign films for twenty years. He is originally from India.

    It might have been a good time to get out of the business, what with the rise of DVDs and DirecTV. But Arora decided to resurrect the shop, after scores of loyal customers and desperate singles encouraged him to. Starting over made it easy to convert the business; Arora now deals primarily in digital discs. This is not the first time he’s had to convert from one format to another. Shortly after he launched the first time, a new format called VHS was beginning to take a bite out of Beta.

    Arora started the business as a hobby while he was finishing his Ph.D. in genetics at the U of M. When I stopped in to check out the new digs, he took the broad view. “It’s a fresh start, after twenty years. Now it is like a takeoff for me. When an airplane takes off, it is slow of speed and then it gets fast. Whether that speed will come for the store again, I do not know.”

    Intercontinental’s seedy old Cedar Avenue charm has been replaced by a white-and-green sheen, spotless décor, and the tidy economy of DVD boxes on thin shelves. Still, the shop holds the same old wealth of dubious offerings. Here’s a copy of the depressive subtitled foreign flick Stroszek. There’s the kitschy cult classic Vampyros Lesbos.

    Around the corner, on Riverside Avenue, is World Beat and Video. The friendly competitors are just out of view of one another. Together, the two stores encompass the largest and most diverse video collection in the state. World Beat also has plenty to crow about in the way of recent improvements. The store’s owners, Solomon Cherne and Erdoan Akgue, have enlarged the DVD stock, including Bollywood titles and the African films that appeal to the neighborhood’s burgeoning Somali population. They have also installed a café on the store’s ground level.

    Solomon Cherne is originally from Ethiopia. Erdoan Akgue came from Turkey. The two met when they attended junior high together in Minneapolis. For the past twelve years, they have gotten along remarkably well, working together in the store every day. They occasionally disagree on the merits of particular inventory, however. “This guy can get excited about a movie like My Dinner With Andre!” said Akgue with disgust. “Not for me. I need movies with more action.”

    Arora, Cherne, and Akgue seem to agree that there is enough business for both stores to thrive. But it’s probably not something to chalk up to the cosmopolitanism of Twin Citizens. Any owner of an eclectic, independent video store holds this maxim dear: When the going gets tough, the tough fall back on steady porn rentals.—Jeremy O’Kasick

  • My Shizzle: Gone Fazizzle?

    If you’ve watched television at any point during the past ninety days, you’ve probably seen the latest ads from Old Navy, a brand that dispenses irony like VH1 serves up nostalgia: cheap, shameless, and unfiltered. In a commercial I cannot for the life of me get out of my head, a waxy Fran Drescher brays, “My shizzle’s gone fazizzle.” She enunciates these words in a way that suggests she’d like very much to be told what the hell “shizzle” and “fazizzle” mean. Needless to say, she’s not the only one.

    Lil’ Kim is featured in another Old Navy ad that offers a race-reversed variation. In it, L’il Kim wears the sort of outfit a prep-school girl might pack for a trip to Killington with Muffy and Biff.

    Outside the world of inexpensive clothing manufactured by impoverished Asian children, Jerry Stiller stars in an advertisement for the latest Satanic incarnation of America Online. Stiller appears unannounced in the home of a middle-class couple who, like the rest of humanity, feel only contempt and hatred for the AOL discs sent to them on an hourly basis. They’re so turned off by AOL, in fact, that they’ve constructed an elaborate fish sculpture out of the discs. This is upsetting to AOL pitchman Stiller. He suggests that they complete their sculpture with a Snoop Dogg CD. This prompts the arrival of a visibly enraged Mr. Dogg, who admonishes the couple to “wait just one minizzle.”

    These campaigns at once highlight and satirize the state of race relations in the U.S. They’re funny, one supposes, precisely because they offer such improbable juxtapositions: Fran Drescher and black slang, Lil’ Kim and tweedy ski wear, and Snoop Dogg mixing it up with George Costanza’s dad. These ads are part of a wave of humor based on the lazy melding of black culture with white idiocy. In Bringing Down the House, one of the year’s most popular films, a far-too-enthusiastic Steve Martin adopts a ghetto-fabulous wardrobe and spouts horribly dated Ebonics in an attempt to help real-life raptor and costar Queen Latifah. In Malibu’s Most Wanted, Jamie Kennedy plays a Wafrican-American (White African-American) who doesn’t let his privileged background or white skin get in the way of behaving like a particularly sorry would-be member of Master P’s No Limit army. On HBO’s hilarious Da Ali G Show, a white Brit named Sacha Baron Cohen adopts the comic persona of a clueless Indian who desperately wants to be taken seriously as a B-boy.
    There are countless other characters whose humor is predicated on the contrast between their white skin and their black behavior. The feebleminded “wigger” is by now a stock comic character, the walking embodiment of the culture-clash school of comedy.

    From an entertainment point of view, it’s easy to see why the wigger is a popular character. It’s an easy gag, one so embedded into our nation’s background that it’s almost a part of our mythology. Why did the chicken cross the road? We still ask that question not because it’s a hilarious joke, but because it’s part of American folklore. Similarly, a movie need only introduce a white character kicking it street-style to win an unearned laugh of recognition.

    “Wigger” became vogue shorthand to label white kids who behave in ways considered black. The word gives a good indication of the low esteem in which these characters are held. People who wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “nigger” seem to have no such hang-up about using the word “wigger,” even though it’s nothing more than a contraction of “white nigger.” (Some have argued that blacks themselves coined the word not only as a contraction, but to label someone who had “wigged out” about his or her racial identity. This punning is itself an example of how wonderful authentic black street talk can be.)

    White comics who act black usually emulate a particularly debased, broad caricature of black behavior. This sort of comedian is a descendent of the minstrel performer of yore, the clown who earned his daily bread reassuring racist whites that all the negative stereotypes about blacks were true.
    The main difference between the minstrel-show performer and the Wafrican-American comic of today is that the latter’s buffoonish behavior is supposed to reflect negatively on whites rather than blacks. He functions as a supposedly self-deprecating white person, the message being “Don’t white folks look ridiculous when we try to emulate cool, black culture?”

    But just how incongruous is the Wafrican-American? Black popular culture is increasingly becoming American pop culture, to the point where the two are pretty much one and the same. In practice, plenty of white kids grow up listening exclusively to rap and R&B. Doesn’t it make sense that they’d pick up the affectations of their black heroes? After all, kids are nothing if not impressionable. As the U.S. becomes an increasingly multiracial place, the Wafrican-American caricature continues to suggest the regressive idea that black is black and white is white and never the twain shall meet. (Kids, of course, are smarter than that.)

    This is particularly ironic considering that the most controversial, influential, and admired pop star in the world is Eminem, a white rapper whose unironic embrace of black culture is widely and correctly attributed to his natural affinity and deep reverence for it, rather than self-hatred or the delusion that he’s a black man stuck in a white man’s body.

    The Wafrican-American stock character isn’t likely to die out any time soon. But there are small signs that artists are increasingly recognizing the complicated and ambiguous state of race relations. One of the many subtle touches in Barbershop, for example, was a white character whose mimicry of black culture is depicted as a natural admiration and respect for black culture, rather than a pathetic attempt to be something he’s not. Eminem’s character in his autobiographical movie 8 Mile was depicted this way too.

    Unfortunately, characters like that are still exceptional. But artists in the future would be wise to acknowledge that the boundaries between black and white culture are increasingly fluid and ambiguous—a fact of life refuted by the very existence of the comic Wafrican-American.

  • The Year of the Onion

    The Chinese calendar declares that 2004 is the year of the monkey. Anyone born this year will be intelligent, well-liked by everyone, and have success in any field they choose. Lucky monkeys. The loquacious and red-faced Democrats have claimed 2004 as the Year of Change. Athletes and festival purists may see 2004 as the year the Olympics return to Athens. In addition, most of us have our own personal brands for the year, as in 2004: The Year I Run Three Miles Every Damn Day, or 2004: The Year of the Sex Change. But those have more to do with resolutions than an actual annual manifesto. Thus far, nobody has seemed to get it right, so I’m calling it. This 2004 will be a year of complexity and strong reactions, many will peel away the layers of their lives to find their true essence, we’ll see widespread acceptance and global success, and there just might be some tears in the process. For all intents and purposes, this will be the Year of the Onion.

    Such a mundane veg for a potentially fantastic year, you say? Maybe you don’t know how emblematic the onion really is. Rotund and ready to roll, the onion has character, not giving in so easily under the knife. It bites back. Once tamed, though, the onion gladly softens, sweetens, and plays backup to other foods, rarely hogging the limelight in most dishes. Sautéed with a bit of garlic, you have the smell of home-cooked memories hanging about. Like any great work of art, onions have been both maligned and exalted by kings, and misunderstood and appreciated by the masses. And they have stood the test of time to land smack-dab on your hot dog in this great year of 2004.

    It is actually believed that we’re coming up on more than five thousand years of love for the onion. Most anthropologists agree that the onion probably grew in its wild form throughout the region from Israel to India, where primitive man presumably first pulled them from the earth. The earliest civilizations knew the value of the onion. Egyptians saw in its multilayered skins a symbol of the universe, peeling back the layers of eternity to find the two stems of life’s beginning. The onion appears in art among the feasts of the gods and was a true companion in the tombs of Pharaohs. In 1160 BC, King Ramses IV was mummified with onions in his eye sockets.

    Maybe with the return of the Olympics to Greece we’ll see a return to the old practice of competing athletes devouring pounds of onions, drinking onion juice, and rubbing onions all over their bodies in preparation for competition. Maybe not. High-society Romans were the first to brand the onion as peasant food, going as far as passing laws on certain times of day when it was okay to eat onions. Apicius, the first gourmand, does little for the onion, whereas the foot soldiers of the Roman Army wouldn’t go marauding without them.

    Easily cultivated in many climates and soil conditions, the onion spread throughout the world. The genus Allium is extensive and includes garlic, shallots, onions, leeks, chives, scallions, and lilies. Since cultivation began, there have been several different sizes and types bred, which has led to much confusion. If all green onions are also scallions, are all scallions green onions? Onions are best lumped into two categories: the round globe onions with single bulbs and the tubular cluster onions. The latter never form bulbs; instead they grow a cluster of stem bases with long green leaves and are referred to as spring onions, oriental onions, green onions and sometimes scallions. But the term “scallions” can also mean young leeks and sometimes the tops of young shallots. These onions are the oldest and most used ingredient in Chinese cooking and the only onion commonly used in Japanese cuisine.

    Papery, spherical, and robust, the globe onions are usually bought mature with the dry delicate skin hiding the pungent flesh. The fresher the onion, the milder the flavor, so an older onion with very dark papery skin will have more kick. The basic grocery store set includes Bermuda onions in white or yellow, the usually yellow Spanish onion, and the red Italian onion. And then there are the juicy, sweet debutantes of the onion world that show up every once in a while to steal the show, the Vidalia (which can, its Georgian creators claim, be eaten like an apple) and the wondrous Walla Walla from Washington. These are great starters for those afraid of the onion’s bite. And how does one tame an onion so that no cook shall be reduced to tears? Simply chill the onion for 20 minutes before cutting to slow down those sulphuric compounds, or if you don’t have the time, a welding mask also works.

    The very Zen onion often finds its way into sauces and dishes as merely a flavoring agent, propping up the other ingredients with no thought for self glory. But it is this quality that makes it indispensable. The chicken-fried rice at Kinhdo is the best in the free world, in part because of the healthy proliferation of onions. And then there are times when the onion can unexpectedly take center stage, like when you grab a Polish sausage at the Bulldog and heap it with sauerkraut and onions, just to be close to the gods. Then, of course, one of the best ways to enjoy the delightful nuances of the onion is to find a hearty bowl of French onion soup, slathered with melted cheese and crusty croutons. The Panera chain makes a good bowl, but I’d like to suggest a real special sleeper: Keegan’s Irish Pub in Nordeast serves an onion-rich broth topped with a half-inch of the finest Irish cheddar. Yum! My challenge to you this Year of the Onion is twofold, just like the twin hearts of a Texas Sweet 1015: Seek out the best French onion soup in the city and seek in your inner onion.

  • From Norway >> UFOs in the Fjords

    After threading his car through a few harrowing switchbacks on a Norwegian mountainside, Erling Strand stopped the car and pointed. “It started down in the valley and someone saw it moving up the hill there. The lights are yellow, many white, some are blue, very few green, also different types of colors. It’s been so bright that part of the valley is illuminated at night.”

    Erling was describing an unexplained light spectacle in this land of the northern lights. “It’s not the aurora borealis,” he cautioned preemptively. “The lights are down in the valley and there are no houses there. Even the Norwegian air force has seen something and can’t explain it. When a plane comes, the lights go away, but often come back afterwards.

    “I try to avoid the term ‘UFO,’ because most people immediately think of it as nonsense and then no scientists want a part of this,” said Erling, who during the day is a lecturer in computer science at Østfold College. “We try to use the term ‘Hessdalen Phenomenon,’ after the name of the valley.” Just so, Erling has helped the café in town fabricate a “UFO Senter.” It exhibits numerous photos of the mysterious lights, video footage of UFOs, and paintings of bug-eyed aliens.

    As Erling drove on up the mountain to an observation point, his cell phone rang. One hand worried the steering wheel of his Suzuki jeep while the other held a Nokia to his ear. His face turned grave from the news. He closed the phone like a clamshell and said, “That was the police. There’s a missing person in the area. So I have to stop and talk with them, because we have many observers scattered around this area.”

    After checking in at a ranger station on the top of the mountain, Erling returned to the car. Oddly, he saw no relationship between the potentially abducted person and the mysterious lights. “The missing man is mentally unstable, so they’ll use a plane first to see if they can see him in the valley.” This reminded him: “Many of the police have seen the lights too.”

    Erling summarized the situation. “I’ve been working on Project Hessdalen for more than twenty years, and the phenomenon has slowly diminished. There’s no good theory to explain it; no solution can really cover all of the things that happen here. Some think it’s because this is one of the areas of Norway with lots of sulphur and copper. But Røros has copper too, and there are no lights up there.” After two decades of careful research, Erling obviously has his theories, but he remains inscrutable. He seems to want me to make my own conclusions.

    “People weren’t aware of the lights before. But if you know they exist, you start seeing them too and realize that your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Sometimes we’re not sure if we actually see the flashes, though. That is when we check our machines.” Just then, Erling turned off the road, put the Suzuki into four-wheel drive, and revved up a field to a little automatic monitoring station.

    He opened a closet-sized metal building whose roof blossomed with antennas, satellite dishes, and cameras. Inside, gadgets and monitors filled the walls. “We control all this through the Internet,” Erling said proudly. “Whenever anything happens, the cameras will photograph it.” Erling showed me a stack of photos of the phenomenon taken by a spectral camera. (They looked like headlights at dusk.) He boasted in rather an American way that his video has even appeared on the
    Discovery Channel.

    Next stop was a hytta, a small mountain cabin filled with students ranging from twenty to forty years old. They were in Hessdalen to study the lights. A flying-saucer jungle gym stood outside, and “Alien var her” (Aliens were here) was spray-painted on the wall. Inside, a map of Stjernehimmeln (the starry sky) was tacked above a coffee table loaded with Geiger counters and various electro-magnetic sensors.

    Some students were still sacked out in sleeping bags on the floor after spending the night on a “UFO Safari” in the hills. They used their rucksacks for pillows, while others boiled “Yum-Yum” brand ramen noodles. “There was this rising light and many people got very excited,” one of the students said. “We all started taking photos, but it was just the moon rising with the clouds in front of it.”

    “Later on, though,” added another student, “we saw small blinks and a light pole slowly rise up the hill. That was real.”

    “The biggest observation was when we stood up quickly and got lots of little stars going on—about fifty or sixty of them,” said an impish man with a perfect Southern twang, acquired from a wayward year in Alabama. The others laughed but weren’t fazed by his skepticism. “It’s very exciting to sit there and to take measurements. We took photos of sparkling lights down in the valley…”

    “…and then we stopped drinking the moonshine,” the southern Norwegian added.

    In the car ride back over the mountain, Erling said, “It’s too early to say what causes this light phenomenon. I could make all sorts of silly theories, but we’ll wait till we get better info. Some people in Hessdalen claim they haven’t seen the lights”—here, he scoffed in rather an American way—“they just don’t want to be connected with it.”

    I asked Erling if he’d ever seen any unexplained phenomena during the day. “Yes.” Just lights? He hesitated and chose his words carefully. “No, I’ve seen metallic-like objects and something that was cigar-shaped.” Then, taking the measure of his interviewer, he quickly added, “I choose to focus on the lights, though, because it has been a proven phenomenon.
    —Eric Dregni

    Eric Dregni