That Time I Was an Ice Queen

I was an exceptionally poor sport as a child. Whenever I played board games with my family and things didn’t go my way, I’d throw a fit. These situations typically ended with me smacking everything off the board or flipping it over entirely before being sent to my room to pout. A combination of good parenting and time corrected this, but didn’t erase the fundamental emotion. It wasn’t anger; I was just stubborn. And still am, much more so than I let on. Most would agree that I project a generally mild personality, which isn’t some sort of mask. It’s more of a deliberate mechanism I use to temper a deeply rooted competitive spirit, one that can often be unsympathetically aggressive.

But here’s the funny part.

My favorite board game by far was Candy Land, where players wind around a colorful track in a race to reach the Candy Castle. Literally the only requirement to play this game is the ability to identify colors. Along the track you pass by a number of Candy Land’s inhabitants, such as Grandma Nut or Lord Licorice, and some cards let you skip right to them. The best of them all was Queen Frostine. With her billowy blue dress and snowflake wand, she was a captivating and majestic figure. 

"Excuse me, but am I the only one around here who thinks
those Candy Crush bastards ripped us off?" - Queen Frostine

Nothing was more important to me than getting the Queen Frostine card. Sometimes the difference between a flipped board and a non-flipped board hinged on it.

For whatever reason, I became fixated on this female character. It got to the point where I had my grandmother stitch me a tiara and veil, and make me a wand. There are photos of me, when I was maybe five years old, running around outside with my uncle, veil flowing in the wind and wand waving proudly. I remember this happening. I also remember eventually getting bored of them, then moving on to whatever interested me next.

It’s remarkable how many implications can be drawn from a simple act. My mother told me much later that, at the time, she thought maybe this was indicating something. I was too young of course to understand why what I was doing wasn’t “normal,” it was simply fun to me. That fun just happened to translate into me pretending I was a magical frost queen who lived in a sugarcoated utopia.

We all perform our gender. It’s when we don’t adhere to the rules of gender performance that people actually take notice, and a multitude of assumptions are made. What we identify as masculine or feminine behaviors, preferences and attitudes reside at the apex of culture on high display, and are difficult to look away from. The focus is less on being, and more on doing.

 

"It appears we're at an impasse."

So maybe acting on my stubborn, competitive side when I was younger could just be another of case of “boys will be boys.” How does that reconcile with impersonating a cartoon queen, beyond the fact that I was too young to get it? A different example: If a woman is a feminist, then she will tune her gender performance to deflect men, in light of her clearly anti-patriarchal views. Either of these is a shortsighted assumption based on expectations defined by culture. Girls can be just as competitive as boys. Feminism is a complex structure of beliefs that contains more nuance than “Men suck,” i.e., just because a woman is a feminist, it doesn’t mean she finds men unattractive.

The point is basic – gender performance is a weak indicator of self, yet so observable that it receives more attention than it deserves. Individuals have to decide how much they want this to affect their lives, and it would be impossible to speculate what this means for each person. Or, you know, maybe you also frolicked around for a few days with a veil and wand like I did.

Sushi, Farts, And Brilliant Night Skies

 

I spent this past weekend visiting my step-mom’s family in Battleground, Washington. My aunt Shirley, her husband Kier, and their four kids own a house and property nestled between several fields and stands of trees on a hill just outside of city proper. It’s a strikingly beautiful location. Cows graze lazily in adjacent meadows, small farms dot the landscape, the wind meanders around the treetops, making them sway. A vegetable garden about the size of a tennis court sits just to the right of the main road entrance. There’s plenty of room for running and games as the property line cuts a wide circle around the house into the forest. You simply couldn’t ask for a better or more private location to gather a large group of friends and family.

One thing about the Gombart family is that they’re an immensely creative and imaginative bunch. They always take full advantage of this space by decorating the hell out of it each year in accordance with a specific theme, and spend months planning and putting it all together. The last time I went it was Pirates of the Caribbean, while previous years included a rodeo. For this occasion the theme was Asia. A massive paper mural adorned with all the Chinese signs and their corresponding birth dates was taped along the front of the house. Kier stood at the ready with a mallet in hand next to a small gong, clanging it as we walked past to announce our arrival. Around back was a structure made of lashed bamboo poles with lanterns and origami hanging down. Wide canvases painted with Japanese symbols were staked along the perimeter. There was a stage and even a sumo mat spread a few meters away from the porch. 

Everyone ate lunch together – salad, tea, limeade, homemade sushi, fresh fruit. Then we gathered on the lawn to watch the first of three scheduled events: Sumo wrestling. They pulled out all the stops on this one, including two of those “one-size-fits-all” plastic sumo suits. It’s your own personalized fat suit that you squeeze your legs into, hoist up around the shoulders, and then inflate via a nozzle behind your neck. When I put mine on I felt like I was wearing a space suit, except my belly and ass were spilling all over the place while my arms flapped uselessly at my sides. You’re also not able to actually walk in these things. I waddled and hopped awkwardly to the mat, my cousin scooting over in his suit to square up in front of me. Speakers were set up, and Kier downloaded a virtual soundboard with chants, gongs, a 3-second countdown, and even a gravelly voiced announcer with cool phrases like “First blood!” and “Megakill!”

He also had the foresight to include farts.

Sweaty and bulbous, we squatted down in preparation for the match when Kier triggered a thunderous fart. It echoed across the landscape and sent our audience into peals of laughter. After the countdown, my opponent and I lunged at one another, colliding our portly synthetic epidermises to the tune of several more rips of splashy flatulence. By the time I had knocked my cousin out of the ring we were both utterly exhausted from the exertion while everyone else was exhausted from laughing so much.

We moved on to the second event. A Ninja Warrior-inspired obstacle course that included a hay bale climb, a balance beam, and a stick attached to an old cherry picker. This last piece was interesting. Essentially you hung on for dear life while being lifted into the air and carried to another platform for drop off. To spice it up, three plastic bottles sat on sticks along the way, and needed to be kicked off for bonus points. Several valiant attempts were made at this with a few victors. During my attempt, my grip gave out while flailing my legs at a bottle and I sliced my hand as I fell. “Impressive!” boomed the fake announcer.

The final event was a rickshaw race. A rickshaw is a small human powered carriage with room for one or two people in the seat. The person in the back had to hold a cup of water steady while the driver ran through a course as quickly as possible. Most everyone took a crack at this, with one team making a particularly daring run with little to no regard for balancing the cup. As they flew around the final corner of a downward slope leading to the finish line, the driver’s legs slipped on the grass. He fell instantly on his face but held his grip, yanking the rickshaw to the ground and sending his poor passenger, whose focus at the time was on balancing the water, tumbling headfirst out of the seat. Luckily no one was hurt, and they even managed to retain a few drops in their cup.

The day ended with dinner followed by a talent show. Most of us slept outside in tents, but before turning in everyone watched Jet Li’s Hero projected onto a sheet hanging on the side of the house. I didn’t stay awake long enough to finish the film, but right before drifting off I took a moment to gaze at the sky. It was a cloudless night, and the last thing I remember thinking was how clear and beautiful the stars looked up and away from the light of the city.

War of the Worldz

"So yeah. Right about here, I think, would be a great point for my shirt to get ripped off?"

Here we are at last. World War Z. The movie adaptation of one of my favorite pieces of zombie literature. So, what did I think?

Goddamn it. Buckle your seatbelts…

First things first. I typically like watching film adaptations because I appreciate the limits and advantages of the medium compared with those of written works. Most of them suck, but a few of them are brilliant. James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential is a rich and expansive crime novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. The 1997 film adaptation was just as much fun because its script took everything dark, intriguing, sexy, and complex about the book and condensed it into a narrower framework that paid homage to its source yet worked beautifully on its own.

I’ll skip the part where I attempt to stand on a flimsy pedestal and seethe over how novels are better than their movie counterparts simply because they are novels. Virtually everyone who’s read the source material of an adaptation will agree that the original content is superior. Yes, books will always be a more effective vessel for exploiting the tool that best scratches our itch for creative satisfaction – that tool being the imagination. Fine and dandy. I watch movie adaptations because I want the visual representation to be distinct. I want it to simultaneously vindicate and surprise my imagination while at least maintaining the flavor of what it’s adapting.

Sadly, World War Z fails in this pursuit and happens to be an average horror/thriller anyway.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t make this point abundantly clear: the film is not actually World War Z. Sure, it shares the same title as the book, but that is quite seriously the only common thread I could identify. This movie is essentially what Sunny Delight is to orange juice. It could have just as easily been titled Zombeez, Zombeez Err’where LOL! and I wouldn’t have sat up in my seat yelling, “Hey! This is the plot to World War Z!” They are completely different experiences. The book deftly and realistically examines what the impact of a worldwide zombie plague would look like through a series of disturbing interviews with survivors of the war. While I would never say it belongs in the upper echelons of American literature, it’s provocative and mature, and gave me plenty to consider once I’d finished it.

The film, on the other hand, jettisons this approach in favor of spectacle and peril. It’s a shallow and ironically soulless movie about U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), who is tasked with traversing the globe in search of clues to thwart a sudden viral outbreak that is rapidly turning the world’s population into mindless screeching beasts. I don’t really recall the names of any other characters because, frankly, the film didn’t make me give a damn about them. You’ll meet a character, they’ll say or do something to point Gerry in the right direction, then usually die or fade into the background a few minutes later. Its story is riddled with enough horror clichés and bone-headed mistakes by the characters that by movie’s end you’ll likely be shaking your head and chuckling, flabbergasted by their stupidity.

Also, the movie just isn’t particularly scary. Sure there are a few jump scares, but they’re rather cheap, mostly due to the watered down tone of the film in keeping with its PG-13 rating. Whose idea was that? If they were trying to make the movie more palatable then all they succeeded in doing was make it boring. I don’t need excessive gore for thrills, but zombies are brutal and gruesome by their very nature. By making the movie almost entirely bloodless, the filmmakers put a leash on a critical aspect of what makes zombies so horrifying. In my view, this was a mistake. What you’ll mostly see are hordes of zombies running pell-mell at the fleeing populace, pouncing on anyone they find and then sort of slapping them to death. 

"Holy shit, run! They're ferociously tickling everyone in their path!"

It’s frustrating, considering this is pretty much the first highly publicized, big-budget zombie film to be released since Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.  The ending does leave a door open for a sequel, which makes me equal parts nervous and hopeful that Skydance will somehow improve this mess. And while I’m sure when the day comes I’ll haul myself to go see it in theaters, my expectations will certainly be lower than they were for this film. Which is a shame. But my little heart just can’t handle being broken like that again.  

*sniff*

Lovability

Ice, ice, baby...

A couple of days ago I watched a man on the sidewalk as he stood next to a sign that read, “Love. A Feeling or a Choice?” He was surveying those who passed by which one they felt defined love best. I did not approach him, but I mused over the question for a while before deciding that neither option was satisfactory. They don’t go deep enough, because love cannot simply be a choice or a feeling. It’s both – it is an ability.

A character in the film Dan in Real Life (a very funny and sincere movie) mentions this to the protagonist at one point. I’ll try to explore my interpretation of its meaning. When I say love is an ability, I’m not referring to it as a skill so much as the basic idea that it’s something you are able to do. You possess the will and the emotion, a synchronized harmony, that is necessary for love to be cultivated between two people.

For argument’s sake, let’s claim that love is just a feeling. I agree with this to the extent that I do not believe we can choose who we have feelings for. Love can be sneaky. It can also stampede right past you and leave your head spinning like a top. But the emotion happens some way or another. It can be blindsiding, or it can be a slow burn that requires a little patience before it ignites. So at the end of the day you have all these feelings floating around. That’s great, but now what do you do with them?

Circumstances dictate the tempo of our lives and every single one of us experiences moments where we swim with or against the current. Love doesn’t respect this system and it certainly doesn’t cater to what is convenient, only to what is true. This is where choice comes into play. You can harbor all the feelings in the world for someone, but will you choose to act on them? I’m going to sidestep this for a moment, because you might be thinking, “Cameron, look! You said ‘feelings’ before ‘choose,’ so your logic reveals that love, at its root, is a feeling and not a choice.”
 
You’d be right, but not entirely. Again, I think that, fundamentally speaking, we can’t choose to feel authentic love for a person. It just happens, like an itch or a spontaneous craving for Jelly Bellies. You could fake it, but it wouldn’t mean anything. I also believe that in order to experience true love, the emotion has to genuinely exist and come foremost. That’s just my opinion, but the argument that this means love can be defined as only a feeling is flawed when considering the bigger picture.

Going back to where we were: You have these warm & cozy emotions, but they’re essentially worthless unless acted upon. How are you supposed to share love with someone, not simply have love for them, if they’re unaware of your affections? Something at sometime somewhere needs to coalesce, and that requires the choice of action.

Now, you tell me which one is more valid. The feeling, or the choice?

I say neither. How does the saying go…It’s not what you feel, but what you do, that counts. Love is not this black and white, but the idea still holds weight. The love you feel isn’t tangible unless you are willing and able to do something about it.

Perhaps you’re willing yet, for whatever reason, still unable. This doesn’t mean your love for someone isn’t genuine or less meaningful, your ability to love this person has simply been cut short. Maybe the timing is off. The circumstantial flow is sweeping you in another direction. Love is rather pesky this way. Some are able to oppose the current, while others are not. There’s no right or wrong answer here. It’s a personal choice that doesn’t necessarily have bearing on the emotional element, but the ability to love is affected nonetheless. A few are lucky enough to find both their lives and their love ambitions moving in the same direction. Whether by providence or preparation, if this applies to your life, don’t ever take it for granted. Love completely and for the right reasons. Make it worth it for those who are still searching, still wanting, or still waiting. Everything has a way of working itself out in the end.

We choose to feel; we feel, therefore we choose.

A Day In The Barmy Army

Jeld-Wen officials enshroud the Timbers Army in smoke, attempting to obscure all the middle fingers from TV viewers.

  OK, full disclosure: I should admit that I don’t have a history of being a soccer enthusiast. Nor would I try to claim to be one even now. This is due in large part to ignorance. There was no culture of soccer in my house growing up. I never played it as a kid because my friends and I were into Pokémon cards and Mario Party. Whenever soccer came on the television it was usually because I just happened to flip past it while searching for reruns of Batman.

Major League Soccer is on the rise, but the majority of Americans still haven’t bought into it. Soccer is, after all, a game about tension. Both teams poke and prod one another, searching for weaknesses before moving in for the kill. To the uninitiated, it would seem as if nothing is happening. But the tactics involved run far deeper than appearances warrant. Consider it this way: Think of football as the roller coaster ride that constantly dips and weaves at high speed in all directions, assaulting your senses with adrenaline for its duration. Soccer would be a long track that moves in one direction, but has probably three or four steep, exhilarating drops. The euphoria comes in bursts, and the excitement in the crowd builds over time before cascading over in a roaring torrent of hugs, cheers, and jubilee.

It is an electrifying buzz.

   
I only started to appreciate it after joining a city league team at the behest of my roommate at the time. I had no idea what I was doing, and I began watching soccer games to figure out how they worked. After playing in several games myself, I was humbled by the amazing levels of fitness the professionals attain. All they do is sprint for 90+ minutes and make plays on the fly.

The Portland Timbers have been around for a while, but the club only joined Major League Soccer in 2011. Their fan base is raucous and fiercely loyal. They pile into the Jeld-Wen stands with flags and scarves to spill beer on one another and launch fusillades of expletive-ridden hymns at the opposing team until their windpipes give out. This is soccer, and often there are long stretches where not much is going on, so the Timbers Army makes up for it by singing as many obnoxiously vulgar songs as possible while someone bangs away at a bass drum to keep the tempo.

Why, yes, this is a bratwurst wrapped in bacon with beer-soaked onions on a pretzel bun. Nope, I didn't eat it.*


*Lie

  It’s a brutal and unforgiving atmosphere. If any Timbers player takes a hard foul and remains on the ground for more than a few seconds, the entire stadium shrugs until he’s up on his feet. But if opposing players get the wind knocked out of them and stall the game, they receive boos and are relentlessly mocked as pussies. Chants of “There’s no pity in the Rose City,” and “Shoot him like a horse!” ring loud until play resumes.

   

So when an official makes a poor call, I can scream, “That’s fucking bullshit!” at the top of my lungs, and no one pays me any mind because they’re all doing the exact same thing – maybe with a sturdy middle finger or two held high for good measure.
    
Now, I absolutely loved being a part of the game day experience at Autzen Stadium. It was brilliant fun and will remain with me for the rest of my life. But I must say, after being on the proverbial leash of the Oregon Marching Band for five years, I took cathartic pleasure in being part of this completely unhinged form of cheering. I could never (openly) swear in uniform. I couldn’t balance a cup of Widmer Gold & Green in one hand while swinging a scarf above my head like a madman in the other. One could argue that the Autzen student section raises plenty of hell on its own. They do, but to a point. I see the Timbers Army as what a marriage between the student section and band would look like. As a band member, whenever the fans would cheer I had to play my instrument. If a particular call sucked and fans started booing, I still had to play my instrument. At the Timbers match I didn’t have to be a good sport. I didn’t have to play Mighty Oregon if something bad happened. Instead, I got to put my arm around the guy next to me and sway back and forth with everyone else, singing “Fuck’em All,” over and over again.

And my oh my, was it bliss.

Chewing It Over: Part 1

"(groan) We must be swift as a coursing river (groan) with all the strength of a great typhoon..."

During the Superbowl I watched the insanely chaotic preview for the upcoming Brad Pitt film, World War Z. It's the screen version of Max Brooks' novel, and I retched at the idea of yet another Hollywood adaptation that appears to grievously alter not only the events in the book, but the commentary and logic of it as well. So I decided that explaining my thoughts on the themes and ideas the book gets right would be a nice topic for my initial post – to be followed up with the worries I have about the Hollywood version, then perhaps later I'll fit in a review of the film upon its release.

Also, if you haven't already guessed, I'm kind of a zombie fan.

        
  Machiavellian Intelligence tells us to maximize success of ourselves in any social setting, achieving a higher level of "fitness" by utilizing the appropriate strategies as warranted by the present situation.  Following this, the protection of any success gained becomes the utmost priority.  A keen Machiavellian thinker might lie, coerce or kill their way to the social apex, all the while receiving overwhelming praise from - or instilling crippling fear in - those around them.  This ensures that no one, in any capacity, will threaten their position of dominance.  Theory of Mind describes how we think we interpret the thoughts of others, playing heavily into the two main strategies of Machiavellian Intelligence: deception and cooperation.  Additionally, Theory of Mind seeks to explain how we, as beings of consciousness and reason, often project such qualities upon objects, animals or entities that do not possess them.

             
When applying zombies to these ideas, it gives everything a refreshingly bizarre spin.  How do we humans, the most dominant species on Earth, deal with the presence of something that cannot be tricked, frightened or bargained with and whose sole purpose is to rip us apart?  And how do we project our qualities onto something that was us – that in many ways still is us – yet is definitively not us at all?

           
The novel version of World War Z explores these very questions from myriad perspectives.  It is a series of first-person accounts chronicling a decade-long struggle against the spread of an unidentified virus that, after killing its victims, reanimates them into roaming, flesh-eating monsters.  It realistically depicts the sociopolitical response that society would have to such a blatant violation of the natural world. There are elements of violence and horror, but this is primarily a book about human nature and social contract theory.

           
So, from this Machiavellian standpoint as far as zombies are concerned, the human race is pretty much fucked.  In the book, the complete collapse of civilization reduces the world's population to the vigilant and the dead, or dead-ish. These zombies do not have feelings.  They are not motivated by revenge; they are not motivated by anything.  They are, for all intents and purposes, a plague that causes a dilemma in Max Brooks' idea of Machiavellian strategy.  The walking dead being the outward threat that they are, it’s ironic that humans would turn inward and compete with one another not for increases in favor but for a better shot at survival.  

You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved.  They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the…the whole shit storm that we now call ‘the Great Panic’; I think that killed more people than Zack [the zombies].

This, however, only solves the short-term goal of: “How do I survive on this day?” instead of the long-term goal of: “How do we as a species reclaim our dominance?”  The only way to achieve this is to use violence, but even here there are problems to overcome.  A human being can be dissuaded from maintaining conflict through several means: dissolution of morale, fear, and physical harm.  Aside from the destruction of the brain, zombies are immune to all of these.

Real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.  Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for…But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed?  Not just won’t, but biologically can’t!

It is impossible to convince a zombie that you are not the one they want to eat, that it’s that guy over there who’s far tastier.  To this end, wiping out each and every one of them is the only way to improve social standing in a word dominated by the undead.

           
Now, getting rid of the living dead is hard enough, but learning how to cope with their very existence is another matter entirely.  After all, zombies were at one time human beings just like us, capable of thought and feeling.  What does it mean when we project ourselves onto our former selves, and can we go too far?  Are they still capable of forming thoughts like we can, even if they can’t act on them?  If they look like us, move like us but are not alive, do we treat them as objects or as creatures?

             
WWZ handles this subject in a few ways – some subtle, some not so subtle.  For instance, an earlier quote included the term “Zack”, which was used to describe the undead.  Giving the entity a name when science has none to offer is one way to control, or validate the existence of something that shouldn’t be.  The book describes another way that humans do this, though it’s a far more hellish method.

There’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.  They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.  Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it…It put them right over the edge.  They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people.

It’s a futile attempt at cooperating with the dominant Other, while at the same time qualifying its place in a world that at one point rejected even the possibility of its existence.  Even so, we cannot predict that zombies will act in ways similar to ourselves just because they look like us; they are an entirely different organism – husks of what they used to be and nothing more. WWZ understands that popular concepts of human interaction and behavioral psychology are warped by this fact considering zombies are ostensibly human on the outside, and thus difficult to separate from. We feel as if we should know exactly what they’re thinking, what drives them, and what they require to survive.  How humans fit into the equation might not be immediately clear at the inception of an actual zombie plague. Ultimately, though, the extent to which a man needs to socially evaluate the zombie advancing toward him will be less than the extent to which he can swing a 9 iron at its skull. We'll see if the film finds any balance between the two.