Cs AND THE ARBITRARINESS OF FORMS

While re-reading Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s excellent Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, I came across this humourous (and true!) passage:

When the cubes of ice intended for a refreshing lemonade (or a more severe potable against academic malaise) melt while we are explaining to a student who has telephoned that his or her "C" is only a letter, a convenient form explaining nothing deeply relevant about his or her psyche, we grasp a notion of the arbitrariness of form.

If there is a solution to this problem, I'd love to know it. On a slightly more substantial note (though not much of one), Baker's book is excellent not only because of the quality of his argument, but also because it is filled with passages like the above that demonstrate his lightness of touch even with his most complex material (this passage appears in the midst of his definition of the strategy of "mastery of form"--exemplified by Booker T. Washington's mastery of the minstrel mask, enabling him to sound "back and black" to whites). The combined effect is to tun what could be a slog into a rather enjoyable read that balances impressive readings of texts with some heavy duty theorizing without sacrificing the author's character and personality. 

 

THE DANGERS OF BIKE SHORTS

One downside I've noticed to the return of school and the deluge of freshmen: many young men and women have decided that wearing their workout clothes as daily attire poses no problems whatsoever. With the amount of skin and spandex I'm seeing (particularly the amount of skin my female students are showing in my class), I'm uncomfortably reminded of this passage from "Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From it All":

"...there is, I'm afraid, a frank sexuality that begins to get uncomfortable. You can already see some of the sixteen-year-olds out under the basketball hoop doing little warm-up twirls and splits, and they're disturbing enough to make me wish there was a copy of the state's criminal statutes handy and prominent."

I must be getting older because a) my first thought is always to accost these young women with the question "Does your mother know you're dressed like that?" and b) all my students look so young to me that any display of sexuality on their parts does seem, well . . . uncomfortable. Like something I should not be privy to (or something I might be in trouble for being privy to). A friend mentioned that it's "Freshman Mating Season" at the school where she teaches, but my students, I'm convinced, are too young to have any part of that--even if they seem very desperately to want to have one.

I realize that this makes me sound totally uncool and kind of like an unenlightened misogynist who wants to dictate what is appropriate for females to wear and to control their sexuality, etc., etc. I've got no real response to any of those charges. I guess I just find it hard to teach when I'm wondering if I might get arrested for the amount of cleavage on display in the first row.

WILD THINGS: AN EROTIC LIFE

This has nothing to do with any of the "serious" work I should be doing (or, rather, feel like I should be doing--that serious work being the syllabus for my class that starts in just over a week [!!], the stuff on chillwave/hauntology I've been goofing off with all summer, and my thoughts on The Pale King [which I'll have to get into shape pretty fucking sharpish, as I've asked a friend to help set up a panel on it for a conference]), but for a Friday night, what the hell, I'll let my hair down.

I was browsing the website Crackle earlier this evening, trying to find a movie I felt like watching. Crackle's selection is limited (though they have some gems, like So I Married An Axe Murderer). What I came across at the end of their selection blew my mind, however. I saw the title Wild Things* and immediately laughed. Wild Things came out when I was not quite old enough to be able to sneak into a theatre to see it, and as it was never on TV (not that I ever saw, anyway), it had something of a continued mystique (that's not quite the word I want, but I can't think of any one word to sum it up: essentially, I knew there was something vaguely licentious about the film and, coinciding as it did with my pubescence, it held something of a fascination for me as a cultural object that I both knew and not just understood but felt was predicated solely on sex; at the same time, though, I also knew it was, inevitably, not going to be that sexy, but without having that illusion shattered, the possibilty that it might just be as sexy as my fevered little imagination conspired to make it was kind of tantalizing) for some time after it had generally faded from memory (until college, really, when I realized the kind of males [and it was only males, in my experience] who owned the movie and claimed to like it). I've still never seen Wild Things, and I have no real desire to ever see it, but I might have watched a few minutes before turning it off in embarrassment were it available for streaming. Fortunately (unfortunately?), Crackle had a bigger surprise in store for me: the movie my mouse hovered over was not Wild Things, but Wild Things 2. Yes, they made a sequel. I almost fell off my chair. Crackle was not quite done, though. Looking at the very next movie in its list, I discovered that Wild Things 2 has a sequel: Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough (full disclosure: I looked up Wild Things on Wikipedia [I couldn't actually remember in which year it came out] and discovered there is a fourth Wild Things movie, Wild Things: Foursome [I guess at this point they figured why even have the pretense of being anything other than softcore porn]).

The fact that Wild Things has a sequel (let alone three of them!) is, for me, the most shocking movie-related moment I've experienced since watching Ralph Bakshi's American Pop (another movie I have a long, strange history with) and realizing it was trying to tell me that the history of American popular music reached its apex with Bob Seger's "Night Moves." For your pleasure, allow me to reproduce (with minimal commentary) the capsule summaries Crackle provides for Wild Things 2 and Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough (sadly, the first movie in the series is not available--this seems to be a theme on the site with erotic thrillers: Basic Instinct 2 is present, but not Basic Instinct):

Wild Things 2, starring Susan Ward, Isaiah Washington, and Joe Michael Burke; directed by Jack Perez [Ed. note: and I'm sure that went on the form Christmas letter that year]
"Teenage girls Maya and Brittney [Ed. note: the two 't's add that extra bit of trashiness you want in the main character of your movie] go on a sex and killing spree to win millions."

Wild Things: Diamonds in the Rough, starring Sarah Laine, Sandra McCoy, Linden Ashby, Ron Melendez, Claire Coffee, Michael Mantell, and Dina Myer; directed by Jay Lowi [Ed. note: I'm sure this is the first (only?) line on his resume]**
"Bad girls just want to have fun. Continued steamy antics and erotic Florida locals." [Ed. note: "erotic Florida locals" is a phrase that inspires untold amounts of dread and terror in me]

So there you have it: Wild Things, a movie I've not thought about in years (had anyone?) has two (hang on, three!) sequels. This little interlude added a welcome touch of surreality to what had been a mostly unremarkable day. I hope it can offer you the same.



*For those of you unfamiliar with this cinematic milestone, it is an "erotic thriller" that came out in 1998 and stars Matt Dillon, Neve Campbell (as I recall it, the primary draw in my eyes), Denise Richards, and Kevin Bacon (Wikipedia also mentions Bill Murray [!! or, rather, ?! I don't know if I want to see Bill Murray in anything "erotic]). From that same Wikipedia article: "The movie gained notoriety for featuring several sex scenes - in particular, one involving a man and two women simultaneously - that were more explicit than is typically seen in mainstream, big-budget Hollywood movies."