The value of cleaning out my desk

1413 / 50000 words. 3% done!

No, you're not misreading anything. A lot has happened with The Novel since last I updated you on it in . . . September? Geez. Anyway, school caught up with me and my writing lay dormant for several months, over which period I came to the conclusion that the novel as it was progressing really did not work. Not that the plot did not make sense, exactly, but the prose was sluggish and the characters dull. It's far from the worst thing that ever happened to me as a writer; rewrites happen. Moreover, I'm far, far happier with the novel as I've plotted it now than I ever was when I was struggling to jam it sideways into a broken mold. Am I more or less back at square one? Yeah, kind of. But it's a much more fulfilling square one than it was before, so I can't really feel bad about it.

Scraping the burnt part off the toast

So, apparently it's Autism Awareness Month? Well I guess I'll contribute then.

*ahem* Hey guys! Autism exists!

Are you aware now?

Sorry, that was snarky of me, but what does "awareness month" even mean? Knowing that autism exists? I'm pretty sure most people do, even if they aren't informed as to the particulars. Looking at puzzle piece ribbons? Uh, thanks, that's really helpful. Telling everyone about how they Totally Understand Autism (Because My Friend's Cousin's Niece Is Autistic?) Please god, no. 

I was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder when I was eight; I wasn't told about this until I was sixteen, because my parents decided that I would be better off if I didn't know I was "different." Here's the thing about this mindset, and the midset surrounding people with autism in general: the idea that we don't know we're somehow "different" is just plain wrong. We know. We might not know why, but when people edge away from us or lower their voices when we're around or whisper that something's . . . different about us, we notice. Autism does not mean being wrapped in cotton, walking through the world with no awareness of what's going on around us. Understanding and awareness are not the same thing.

Point the second: there isn't a cure. And even if there is, I wouldn't want one.

A lot of high-profile autism organizations like Autism Speaks put the focus of their "awareness" campaigns on the need for a "cure." They walk low-spectrum kids across the camera's line of vision and tell everyone how these children have been "kidnapped" by autism, how there really is a "normal" kid in there if only they could dig deep enough to find it. Their mission statement is to wipe autism off the face of the earth so that no parent ever has to deal with having an autistic child. Often they have the parents saying this while standing in front of the kids. (x) This kind of rhetoric isn't just damaging to people with autism (see what I said above about knowing that we're being treated differently) but it's just factually incorrect. A "cure" for autism isn't going to magically reveal the person underneath, because that person is fundamentally tied to their autism. It's part of us in the same way that our hair or fingernails are. I can paint my nails and dye my hair, and I can pretend to act "normal" in a crowd, but the fact is, my hair is brown and my nails are pink. And I have autism.

What people who advocate for a "cure" for autism really want is a way for their autistic child/relative to act and communicate "normally-" i.e. like a neurotypical person. They want the autistic person to stop stimming or repeating themselves, or hyperfocusing. They want to be able to communicate with the autistic person like a "normal" child instead of having to decipher echolalic thought or repeating themselves. They want an assurance that their child will grow up and have a life like they expected them to- going to college, holding down a job, maybe getting married and having kids. The thing is though, a disability- or discinclination- to doing these things isn't unique to autism. Lots of people either aren't capable to or just don't WANT to go down those particular paths. It doesn't make them deficent; it makes them individuals, same as autistic people.

I may sound like I'm knocking parents of people with autism. Believe me, I'm not. I grew up with autism; I know that it got hard for my parents at times, especially when I couldn't force myself to eat more than five foods (sensory issues are also associated with autism, and I have them to his day- restaurant outings are difficult for me, especially when people ask why I'm not eating) or throwing tantrums, or sobbing inconsolably because one shoe felt tighter than the other. I can't imagine they enjoyed my endless monologues on whatever TV show I was obsessed with that year (I can trace much of my early development to what show I was watching. "Oh, I was into Relic Hunter, so I was twelve then- The X-Files, so that's when I was fourteen . . .") or the struggle to get my teachers to understand that I needed extra time and patience. But there's two things I want to point out:

1. Plenty of people without autism have these problems,
2. The solution is to offer support, not try to force the autistic person into a broken mold

It's no secret to anyone with a learning disability that the school system is pretty damn broken when it comes to neuroatypical kids. That's not to say that there aren't good educators out there; I have some absolute heroes in my school career, without whom I would never have finished high school, and the only reason I'm not naming them here is because I don't know if they'd be comfortable having their names on the internet. But overall, there's a binarism that faces kids with learning disorders- AND people with autism- that makes getting through to teachers and other students a struggle. My mother told me a story about me being in tenth grade, and discussing my performance with one of my teachers. My diagnosis wasn't in my student files, and when she mentioned it to this teacher, his whole demeanour changed: "Ohhhh, she's IDENTIFIED? I didn't know that." Being Identified turned me from a student who wanted to learn into an object of pity- no need for her to try and keep up with the others, she's IDENTIFIED. (Of course, I ended up graduating as an honour student, so I think we can safely say that that teacher didn't know what he was talking about.) But I did graduate. I graduated because the special ed teachers were willing to put in the time to work with me and my teachers (well, some of them) were willing to recognize me as a person and not a dignosis. So if you want to be supportive of autistic people, here's what you do:

• stop penalizing any behaviour that deviates from the social norm. If they're actively HURTING themselves (i.e. banging their heads against a wall) that's one thing, but stimming and echolalia never hurt anyone. 
• work to understand US instead of making us struggle to understand YOU. See above re: fitting us into a broken mold
• start including us in conversations about autism instead of assuming we have nothing to say. Even those of us who have trouble with verbal communication still have minds.
• support programs intended for autistic adults. You would not BELIEVE how difficult finding assistance is for autistic people over the age of eighteen. You're not a kid anymore? Sucks to be you, you're on your own! But autism doesn't vanish upon legal adulthood, and the needs involved don't either.
• don't assume that anyone with a specific set of behaviours is autistic and anyone without that set isn't. Autism is a VAST spectrum, and one autistic person is just that- one autistic person. No one of us represents the whole spectrum. We can't.
• instead of talking about "curing" us of our autism, start embracing it as part of who we are.

See, that's the thing about autism- it's not like a cancerous growth you can cut out, or a burnt part you can scrape off a piece of toast. I wouldn't be the person I am right now if I didn't have autism. I wouldn't be the person I am, period, if I didn't have autism. And, unlike toast, we're not made to order. "Curing" autism doesn't mean eradicating a disease; it means wiping us out. And I don't think that sounds nearly as appealing.

Further reading:

• ASAN (Autistic Self Advocacy Network)
• Just Stimming
• Changing Minds: Advocates Reshape How We Think About Autism
• Navigating College (an ASAN project for autistic people entering higher education)

How hating a movie sent me to film school

I follow Film Crit Hulk on twitter, and if you're at all interested in film, you probably should too. Hulk is hilarious, erudite (well you kind of have to be, on twitter) and almost always on point, even when I disagre with him. Earlier today, Hulk tweeted an article he had written for Badass Digest, entitled "Never Hate A Movie." I have to admit, when I saw the title, my eyebrows went up- never hate a movie? Even the offensive ones? Even the ones that hurt me deeply in my feminist soul? But when I actually read it, I found that I agreed with a lot of what Hulk had to say. But not quite all of it.

We say "oh, I hate X" fairly frequently, and not always with a lot of venom behind it- "I hate snow!" "I hate cats!" "I hate broccoli!" Often, it's shorthand for "I don't like this very much," but the thing we say we hate doesn't consume us unless we're brought into contact with it. Thus is it for me with most movies; even if I spend the entire time in the theatre groaning and rolling my eyes, like I did with Ghost Rider, I rarely think about them after the credits roll. Like Hulk says, it's not really worth the emotional effort. I have so many movies I LOVE, why would I want to waste time hating one? I can only think of one film I ever watched that stuck in my head like a burr for weeks afterward, itching and rubbing at me whenever I tried to sleep. And as it turns out, that film may have been the instrument that got me to apply to film school.

I love movies. I always have. I'm one of those weirdos who insists on arriving to the theatre at least ten minutes early so I don't miss seeing the trailers. I dissect movies after I've seen them on Livejournal and Tumblr. It's not just something I do for fun- it's practically a reflex for me. As a writer, storytelling is something that inherently fascinates me. Why did the filmmakers chose to write it that way? What was the purpose behind that word choice? And as an actor- not anymore, but almost all the time in my child and teenhood- the way the casting process and the acting craft functions fascinate me. Movies are a culmination of many, many things that fascinate me, so it's no surprise that they fascinate me as a whole.

In the fall semester of my third year of undergrad- this past fall- I had a chance to take a class called "Religion and Film" at my university. It was taught by Douglas Cowan, and if you haven't read his book Sacred Terror, what the hell are you doing wasting time on my blog? As the syllabus promised us, we were going to look at a variety of movies in a variety of genres, some of which you'd never think to associate with religion- our first two movies, War of the Worlds (the original, none of that Tom Cruise shit) and The Day the Earth Stood Still come to mind- but about midway through the course, he introduced us to a little film called Stigmata.

I had never seen this movie. I had never heard of it. I had only the vaguest ideas of what it was about. But sitting in class while the film rolled, I felt an emotion. A deep emotion. A powerful emotion. Watching this film play out on the projector, I felt very deeply, and that feeling was hate.

I fucking hated this movie. I hated everything about it. I hated the aesthetic. I hated the hammer-on-the-nail blue/orange colour contrast between the two main locations. I hated the direction. I hated the painful symbolism. I hated the weird habit of using voiceover to remind us of dialogue that had been spoken not five minutes earlier. I hated the ridiculous Da Vinci Code plot, which was actually written several years before DVC came out. At various points, I was actually grinding my teeth with rage. When the movie was over and the lights came up, Dr. Cowan turned to us and said "This director will never be accused of subtlety."

"He'll never be accused of talent, either!" I shouted. (This was the kind of class where we were actually encouraged to yell our opinions, which is probably part of why I enjoyed it so much.)

When I got home that night, I tweeted about this awful, stupid, rage-inducing film I'd just watched, and a friend of mine responded. "Oh my God, Stigmata? I love that movie!"

"WHAT" I said.

"I know, it's awful!" they said. "But it's so much fun! Watch it again and see!"

I agreed. I kind of had to; I had to write an essay on it. Alongside the class discussion, this was probably the part of the course that benefited me the most- writing an essay on the films we watched every week meant I had to hash through what I'd felt while watching it and come up with why it had affected me the way it did. The catch being, of course, that we couldn't just vomit inarticulate rage all over the paper; we needed to back up our conclusions and ideas. Also, it was based solely on our personal reactions, so we didn't need to do research or cite sources. If you've ever taken a university course, you'll know what a relief that was. And as I was raging my way through this essay ("EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!1!!" my notes screamed in all-caps) I came to realize something: I hated this movie so deeply and angrily because, had it taken maybe five steps to the left, it could have been a movie I loved.

The themes! The idea of God coming to an atheist and how the atheist would deal with this! The corruption of organized religion! The function of love as a way of growing closer to God! I might have set aside the voiceovers and the colour scheme and the symbolism- all of it- if the movie had just made a few choices differently and put the emotional focus on the character who should have been the lead- the stigmatic herself- and not the priest character, who should by rights have been the secondary lead, I would have walked out of class that day singing this movie's praises.

I did not, naturally, write any of this in my essay. Instead, I wrote about the idea that the budding romantic relationship between the two main characters was an expression of the idea that love was a better conduit to God than organized religion, slapped my name on it, and handed it in. I got a 17/20 on that paper, and I'm pretty sure the hard copy is still floating around my room somewhere. Boom, bang, done. Dust yout hands off and move on to the next movie. It's over.

BUT IT WOULD NOT LEAVE ME ALONE. Like a cut that you keep poking open, I went back to the movie again and watched the scenes that infuriated me the most. "Why does the film not address this?" I cried as a highly non-consensual attempted sex scene took place. "WHERE IS HER AGENCY?" I howled as the main female character lay unconscious in bed while the male characters ran around punching each other in the face and having spiritual debates. I went out to look for other exorcism-themed movies to see how they approached similar material, and ended up writing a whole blog post about it. I think at one point the friend who'd told me she loved the movie might have been concerned for my mental health. I know my tumblr followers were. But I'd discovered something, in all my movie-watching and hate-blogging: for all I despised this movie- and I did still despise it- this movie fascinated me. I wanted to take it apart piece by piece to see how they fitted together, and then polish the individual pieces and put them back together, better. What I wanted was to make a different movie. A better movie.

I'd written scripts before- I spent most of eleventh and twelfth grade writing a Robin Hood TV series that I was never able to sell because a) I was a sixteen-year-old with no credits to her name, and b) Canada has this thing called the CanCon, or Canadian content rule, which says that a certain amount of Canadian TV has to be set in Canada. A period drama about medieval England clearly didn't qualify, as every agent that replied to my queries told me, so I sighed sadly, put the script in a drawer, and went back to writing novels. My newfound fascination with a terrible horror movie wasn't going to change CanCon. But . . . that didn't mean I couldn't write something else, did it? I could try to write a horror movie, couldn't I? I'd seen just about every exorcism movie I could find. I knew how to write dialogue. I knew the tropes. I knew the themes. I knew what I wanted to write about. I opened Scrivener and started to write.

Writing wasn't the only thing that occurred to me in the wake of that movie. I'd been struggling for years to figure out what I was going to do post-graduation, with a vaguely-named Liberal Arts degree and no applicable skills I could offer to an employer. There were film schools in Canada, weren't there? And if I wanted to write- and maybe direct- movies, I should learn from the pros, right? I sat down and started researching film schools.

I'm still not finished my undergrad, so I can't end this story with a happy "and then I got into film school and graduated with honours and won a million Oscars!" But I can say that watching this terrible, terrible movie set me on a path I might not have realized I wanted to be on. I want to make movies. I adore movies. I want to spend my life working on movies. And whatever else this course and this film did for me, I'm glad I realized it.

The movie still blows, though.

And this is gonna get really awkward if I ever meet the
director at a film festival.

Chewer versus the Canada geese

My dog Chewer is very elderly now, but when she was a puppy, there was no greater joy in her life than chasing other animals. She was a pound puppy first, so we still don't know what her breed is- the vet guessed "border collie/German shepard cross-" but whatever it is, she is undoubtedly a herd dog, with the a herd dog's instincts, and has been merrily herding me, my parents, and my cats for the past fourteen years.

Now, when we moved to what is currently my parents' house, the area had been a farm until very recently, and most of the neighbourhood was a field of mud and grass. Nowadays, it looks like any recently-developed suburb, but at the time, we were more or less living in a marsh. The animals- two cats and the dog, at the time- were in heaven. They spent their days roaming the field, hunting mice (many of which appeared, headless, on our doorstep) and getting sprayed by skunks. Chewer wasn't well-behaved enough to be let off her leash in the residential area, but once you got outside the neighbourhood and far enough away from the highway that she wasn't in danger of running in front of a car, my dad would unclip her leash and let her run free. She was ecstatic.

At the end of the street- well, what we considered the street- there was a steep hill, and at the end of that hill, there was a fairly sizeable pond. During the spring and summer months- when we moved there- it was home to a flock of Canada geese. Those of you who have never encountered Canada geese probably assume that they are fairly docile, noble creatures- the swan's slightly uglier cousin. This is false. Canada geese, like their cygnian counterparts, are evil. They are vicious. I have never gotten close enough to one to try and strangle it, but if I had a reasonable amount of alcohol in my system, I am sure the prospect would look like a good one.

Chewer, herd dog that she was, adored those geese. As far as she was concerned, they were not only her flock- they were her own personal playmates. There was no greater joy in her life than charging down that hill and watching the geese scatter in every director, honking indignantly. It was her own personal nirvana- a dogvana, if you will. So when the geese decamped for the winter, she was a little sad, but there was snow to roll around in and other neighbourhood dogs to wrassle with, so she got over it soon enough. She didn't forget those geese, though.

In the spring, the geese returned, as geese are wont to do. But, also as geese are wont to do, they hadn't just come back to swim in the pond. They'd come back to lay eggs. And the one thing testier than a Canada goose having its habitat disturbed is a Canada goose having its nest threatened. You do not go near wild animals who are protecting their young, especially when they are long-necked, sharp-toothed, avian animals. Unfortunately for Chewer's sake, her "wild animal" instincts had faded in the face of spaying, regular meals, and a fireplace to sleep in front of, so she had no idea that the geese were on the offensive. As far as she was concerned, her playmates had come back, and it was time to party.

My dad unclipped the leash. Chewer began her sprint down the hill, as usual. The geese looked up. They stood up. They puffed up their feathers. And then, as one, they leaps forward into the air, charging towards my hapless dog with a great war cry of "WAWK-WAWK-WAWK-WAWK-WAWK!"

I was not witness to this personally, but my dad was, and he's told the story so many times that I can picture exactly what happened next. Chewer skidded to a stop, paws splayed forward. She took stock of the army of geese bearing down on her. Now, I don't know how smart my dog is- she's been known to stockpile treats for future eating, but she's also been known to be defeated by the puzzle of a beaded curtain. But somewhere in that doggy hindbrain, instinct kicked in. She recognized a threat when she saw it. She turned around and dashed back up the hill, angry geese snapping at her tail all the way.

The pond was filled in about a year after we moved there, in order to make way for a high school football field. The field was fenced off and locked, so there was no way to take the dog for walks there. The geese, berefit of their pond, took their goslings off elsewhere. I assume that the geese Chewer terrorized have long since died, and the story of the suburban predator is but a gleam in their great-great-goosechildren's eyes. But what I do know is that from that day on Chewer has never been known to go on the attack against a Canada goose. She learned her lesson that day. Dog or no dog, some predators are too dangerous to tangle with, and there are none more dangerous than the proud. The majestic. The deadly. Canada geese.

Get thee behind me, she-devil!

As you can probably tell from looking at this blog, I put a lot of thought into the media I consume. I'm not saying this to brag about what a smart person I am; I just do it automatically. If you don't think about what you're taking in, how can you enjoy the nuances of the plot and characters? You have to put at least some thing into what you're watching or reading, or you're just staring at a screen/page for hours on end. You don't have to go in-depth with your analysis or anything, but it's pretty basic media consumption to think "X did Y because they were motivated by Z." Again, it's not about whether or not the viewer is smart; it's just how we're wired to interact with media. I think I tend to look a bit closer because I want to create media myself, and so I look at the ways other people have gotten it right or wrong. As a woman, I'm also invested in/tend to notice the way the media I consume treats female characters, because the way we are portrayed in fiction reflects the way we feel about ourselves in real life. If I want to do anything as a writer, it's boost self-confidence rather than deflate it. I want readers to know they're not alone.

So, I've been watching a lot of movies lately! I watch a lot of movies in general, and since I'm taking two film courses this semester, I'm watching more than usual. I've also been looking at horror movies, since Hallowen is approaching. And what I'm finding is . . . disturbing. I'm familiar with the way the media in general views women; you can't be a consumer of fiction and NOT be aware of it. What I wasn't aware of, at least not personally, is the way the horror genre treats women- specifically, how much it loves tearing them to pieces.

Let's look at a proto-example, The Exorcist. You probably know the story: a little girl gets posessed by a demon, and a priest struggling with his faith has to overcome his doubts in order to save her. What are two things you notice about that summary?

One: the person in peril is a little girl, specifically a twelve-year-old. Two: the focal point of the story, the character who has an arc and emotional journey, isn't the little girl at all. She spends most of the movie under control of a (gender-neutral) demonic force. It's the priest. The movie isn't about the person being put through hell and having control of their body taken away; it's the one who Feels Really Bad About It. And the man. The male role here is the important one. It's even the title of the movie: "The Exorcist," not "The Posessed." Regan, in the grand scheme of the film, doesn't matter. Moreover, the way the film uses her to make a point- I would argue- says a lot about what we value as viewers and what frightens us. Remember this scene?

Of course you do; it's one of the movie's big shocking moments, and certainly one of the most controversial. Regan, now fully under the demon's control, "masturbates" (I'd argue it looks more like stabbing, but the intent is there) with a crucifix while her head rotates 180 degrees, and when her mother enters, the demon drags Chris's head down in an attempt to make her fellate her own daughter. Disgusting, right? Of course it is- it's incest. But it's also playing on a lot of our fears about girls, especially preteen ones who are just beginning to be aware of their own sexuality. What's the scariest thing in the world? A young girl masturbating, apparently. And masturbating with a crufix- intentionally profaning one of the holiest symbols in Christianity. So young girls > female masturbation > blasphemy. Starting to see my argument?

You can argue the point; Regan's mother Chris is, after all, a character in her own right who influences the plot. She has feelings towards her daughter, and she isn't removed from control of her body like Regan is. But she still isn't the focal point of the movie itself- Karras is. We may sympathize with Regan and Chris, but Karras is the one we're meant to root for. He is the one who's here to slay the dragon and bring the princess home to her castle. I ask you, then: why isn't her mother given that chance? I know that within the logic of the film, Karras is needed because he's a priest and priests are the ones who perform exorcisms, but what he does in the end is simply invite the demon to enter his body and then kills the demon by killing himself. Did that really need a priest?

Okay, you argue, but The Exorcist is only one movie. There are plenty of horror movies- exorcism movies, even!- that don't involve the demeaning of a girl or woman for the benefit of a male character. Okay, then. Where are they?

How about The Exorcism of Emily Rose? Who's the protagonist of that one?

Oh

Well . . . okay, how about The Last Exorcism? Does that have a female lead?

Not so much, no.

Okaaaaaaaaaay . . . Stigmata! That's the movie I watched that spurred this whole ponderance on my part. That one's got to have a woman who gets to reflect and act on her situation- she's billed on the poster! Surely they won't take yet another story about a woman being tortured and robbed of her bodily autonomy and make it all about a male crisis of fai-

Oh, for the love of God!

I'm not writing an essay (I have to write about five for class anyway); I can't claim to have drawn a definite conclusion from this. All I can say is what I've seen for myself. And what I've seen is . . . an endless parade of women being battered, bruised, and beaten while a man stands nearby weeping quietly over their suffering. But the final shot isn't the women's face. She doesn't get a say in what happens next. Whether she lives or dies (we have a 2/2 ratio on that one, though I'm told that if the director of Stigmata had had his way, it would have been a 3) it's not her story. It's his. This is veering genres wildly, but do you remember the posters for the first season of The Good Wife?

Like I said, completely different genre. But if you take the tagline and flip it, you've got a pretty good description of the horror genre- at least, the subgenre I review in this post. Her suffering. His story.

Sometimes, you just need a self-affirmation

I've heard it said that high school English is specifically designed to make students hate literature. Having gone through four years of it and earned relatively good marks all the way through, I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. If you're not interested in English in the first place than it's soul-crushingly boring, but that's true of just about any subject: high school math class didn't make me hate math. Math made me hate math. As a dorky, lit-inclined sixteen-year-old, high school English gave me a creative outlet for my various feelings on the literature we were reading. It also gave me a bitchin' excuse to read Lady Macbeth's part out loud when we covered Mackers. Admittedly my creative writing course did briefly make me hate writing when my teacher advised me to think of myself as a conduit rather than a writer and let the words "flow through you to the page," but I got over that quickly enough. I still wanted to write, I just didn't want to write that. And at the end of four years, I left with a diploma and my faith in literature relatively unshaken.

No, high school English did not make me hate literature.

College English, on the other hand . . .

The way we've structured higher education in general is pretty much designed for maximum pain, regardless of what you're studying. You spend four years, minimum, cramming information into your brain at a rate that you can't possibly process, and promptly forget about it during the next block of classes because you have new information to cram in there. You squeeze yourself through a meat grinder of papers, tests, and evaluations with the goal of "get good marks" rather than "learn." At the end of those four years, you have the option of either launching yourself into the workforce with the knowledge you've forgotten, or go on to incur even more debt and forgotten facts by going on to graduate school. Congratulations! You have successfully navigated through our culture's rite of adulthood. As a prize, you get student loans!

Our culture's attitude towards grades is- pardon the language- really fucked up in general. There's a narrative that says your grades (usually equated with your intelligence, though the two actually have relatively little to do with each other) mean you're a better person, a smarter person, a more patient and hardworking and generally worthwhile person. Why? Because you can explain algebra? Because you understand the literary significance of the scarlet letter? These things are your abilities, and you have the right to be proud of them. But they don't make you a good person, or a kind person, or a person who does good in the world. Hell, even all of those things don't make you a worthwhile human being. You're a worthwhile human being because you're you. You bring something new to the table simply by virtue of being an individual. If what you want to bring is pumping gas or working in a bookstore or staying home with your kids, congratulations. You're making it. You're making it because you are doing something that changes the world, however small. You think pumping gas doesn't change the world? That person who needed to get to work might disagree. Working in a bookstore? You may have just sold a book that will inspire the reader to get up and keep going for another day. Staying at home with the kids? You're raising the next generation, and God knows we need more kind, caring people in the world.

A friend of mine, Hannah Johnson, has a book out called Know Not Why. I'd recommend it because it's an excellent book in general, but there's one passage in particular that I go back to when I'm feeling down about my purpose in life:

It's like she's thanking me for something way bigger: getting her kitten out of a tree, helping her granny across the street, I dunno. It's funny, how stuff that seems so small can be so important. I guess there's no real way of telling how much something can mean to somebody else. Maybe even this job is sort of important.

A few years ago, I worked at a museum where part of my job was to help pick up artifacts from donors. The first trip I went on was to a woman's house, where she told us all about the problems she was having with her son and her landlord. As we were driving away, my boss explained to me that the real purpose of the job wasn't picking up the artifacts: it was letting the donors talk it out for as long as they needed to. Sometimes they just needed a listening ear. Of all the things I learned in that job- cataloguing, restoration, museum curation- that's the lesson I've kept with me the longest. Sometimes it really isn't about the letters you have after your name, or whether or not you can explain Godard's King Lear. It's about whether you're happy with what you're putting out into the world. If you are, I think you're doing okay.

Music theatre Mondays: The mailman won the lottery

Firstly, while we are on the subject of music: check out this Kickstarter! It's for a children's folk album about historical figures (Johnny Appleseed, Harriet Tubman, Che Guevara, etc) that needs a total of $2000 to get off the ground. It's actually passed its goal now, but CD production is always expensive, and it's for a good cause. Go, go, go!

And now, on the other side of the historical figures spectrum: Assassins. I really, really doubt any children's folk singers will be making a CD about these guys any time soon, and that's probably a good thing: I have a high opinion of what kids are able to understand, but tht doesn't mean I want to explain the Manson Family to a three-year-old. Not to mention the questions of didacticism: I'm actually told that some people object to Assassins because they think it's trying to make the audience feel bad for people who want to shoot the President. And . . . I can sort of see it. In just about any work of fiction, with RARE exceptions, you're supposed to feel something for the characters. You don't necessarily have to like them, but you should at least understand what circumstances and personality traits lead them to where they are at the end of the story. I don't think Shakespeare was endorsing regicide when he wrote Macbeth, but if you don't feel anything for him, the play falls apart. Same goes for Assassins: for the most part (I'll get to the exceptions in a minute) you're not meant to view the assassins as people to admire or emulate. They're just . . . people. Deeply flawed, violent people, who make terrible decisions. You know: musical theatre!

The base premise of Assassins, if you're not familiar with it, is this: various murderers or attempted murders of American presidents gather together on the stage- which is set up like a shooting carnival game- to interact and play out their stories. Like First Dance, it's very much a revue show: the assassins don't have a narrative, such as it were, they just sing and interact. This is how you get numbers that would make no sense if the show was trying to be linear ("Unworthy of Your Love," or the one where Lynette Fromme and John Hinckley Jr. sing about their respective objects of creepy, creepy affection) and scenes that, likewise, make no real logical sense- like all of the assassins appearing to Lee Harvey Osward in a dream sequence telling him to shoot JFK.  But for all that the songs are separate from each other, there is a sort of theme going on: disaffection, lack of identity, and the need for connection. Obviously many of the assassins are not the most balanced of individuals- specifically Hinckley, Byck, and Guiteau- but it's surprising, looking at them, how many do what they do because they want to stand for it. Booth, obviously, is standing for the Confederacy. Lynette Fromme does what she does because she thinks it will benefit the Manson Family. Czolgosz and Moore both think their actions will benefit the poor. Zangara was- uh, I don't really know why Zangara does what he does. I don't think the musical does either, because the song dedicated to his actions- "How I Saved Roosevelt-" is about the crowd's reactions, not Zangara himself.

For as much as the show is about the asassins themselves- and they are, obviously, the main focus- the music also does some of the same things Bonnie and Clyde did, in that it uses the building blocks of history to discuss the larger issue surrounding it. As much as I don't agree with the actions of the assassins (seriously, please don't send the Secret Service after me) I do like a lot of what "The Gun Song/Ballad of Czolgosz" has to say. Like B&C, it's about economic justice: specifically, the disparity between rich and poor, the lie of "bootstraps" ("in the U.S.A, you can work your way to the head of the line!") The point of "Another National Anthem," which I quote in this entry's title, is that the assassins "forgot about the country," because they think they're owed attention and adultation. Same with "Everybody's Got The Right," which opens and closes the show. And as awful as the assassins are, they're also oddly pitiable- they're people who think they're lost, and their response to this is to pick up a gun. There's tragedy in that, I think, no matter who you are.