Mel, the Maya, and a teaching moment to be squandered

Mel Gibson's new movie is about the collapse of the post-classic Maya.

You should be rubbing your eyes and re-reading this several times.

Now, I could easily pull the "responsible anthropologist" card and quibble propter hoc about the inaccuracies that have already come to light: it was shot in an anachronistic Yucatec; it pushes large-scale human sacrifice rather than self-mutilation; it features the Aztec sun stone as the official website's motif. Or I could be like every other smartass blogger and chortle at our auteur's face-fur.

I would rather get speculative--on very little evidence, admittedly--as to Gibson's artistic intentions. He could tell any variety of tale he chose to at this point. Why a society's collapse? Is there some larger domestic or global purpose than simply putting out a rousing bit of exotica?

For that matter, why stop at nearly complete ethnographic accuracy? Take some of that "Passion" paycheck and get that aging whiz-kid linguist who's cracking the Maya glyphs to do you up something synthetic like the "Stargate" team got from their Egyptologist (even though he was guessing at vowel sounds)?

Speaking of speculation: does this mean there is gonna be a sequel in 2012 when all the calendrical caca is supposed to hit the metaphysical fan? Or is that too New Age-y and heretical? Like Mel is worried about heresy, drawing on that batty nun's visions...

(Even if so, that would only be the end of a 144,000-day baktun, and I think that number is only special to self-satisfied neo-Calvinists anyway.)

When this flick comes out, it's a chance for anthropologists to begin to get back to where Mead and Montague and Krober had us in the public consciousness. Not with tossing cold water on a piece of entertainment just because we can. Not by confining our educative efforts to offhand deprecations in our classrooms.

Rather, we have to find a patch of the media spotlight the movie draws and get noticed. Argue that the story we're developing about the Maya, and about all humans--comprehensive, contextualized, factually grounded--beats the hell out of even good entertainment. Because that story isn't just absorbing (which more nonexperts would discover if we would just gang up and kick goddamn Jared Diamond out of our turf). It has the added benefit of actually helping us understand us. There ain't much bigger than that, and what there is we can also probably speak about.

Sure, the Maya have been so useful and profitable as a "mystery" that it's tempting to play that aspect up. (P.S. They didn't disappear, ya numbnuts; they're still living in the same area, just as prickly as ever. It was that particular manner of organizing themselves that disappeared.) But they are probably more useful and definitely more relevant when considered as fully figured humans making and (tragically) unmaking their world in ways we're still uncovering. That's neither prosaic nor boring, nor is it any less engrossing or relevant for being demystified.

With these kinds of insights, anthropology just might help save us--and not in the way Mel might hope.

Job-blog jitters

Since this is an outlet for what exercises my brain, and since I am now ineluctably on the other side of the academic looking glass, a natural topic source would be my exploits on the quads. As a prof I'm just getting started, but I've already got quite a potential backlog.

Don't expect to read anything scholastic here any time soon.

It's bad enough to hear about all the poor shmucks in corporate gigs - the forces behind Dooce, Petite Anglaise, and a couple dozen other blogs - who got canned for their content. The stuff ranged from plainly injudicious to completely innocuous; regardless, it was brought to the attention of people with great institutional power and senses of humor atrophied by the strenuous effort to protect their organizations' hindquarters.

However I'm much more spooked by tales of profs who have endured similar circumstances (cf. the Phantom Professor and her lightly fictionalized follies at SMU). They discovered that, even anonymized, it's too easy to identify students, colleagues, administrators, and schools--and thereby open themselves and their employers to legal action.

In one of my first blog entries I mentioned an adjunct gig in the most off-hand yet complimentary way. My wife, ever vigilant, scolded me for opening myself to a Doocing. I still maintain there was no defensible way even a malicious prick could misconstrue the post (or link it to me, for that matter). But the fact that I need to be careful to that degree with what I write - anonymously - dismays me considerably.

So am I to just roll over and accept that anything with potential blowback is off limits? There goes much of our 1st Amendment freedoms as well as entertainment value. As hard as it is to resist passing along these infuriating, titillating, laughter-inducing anecdotes, I can't decide which is a greater loss.

I guess I'll just stick to safer territory: insinuating that minor public television figures are gay.

Home accents

You know what keeps me up at night?

Among other things, a recurring fantasy of swapping the McLaughlin Group regulars for the personnel of various home improvement shows.

Not that I'd find their politics any more congenial, though you never know. Rather, the trick is to pick panelists who--like Buchanan, Blankley, Clift, and the Big Guy himself--are sporting distinctive regional phonologies and/or lexicons.

Sweet dialectal dissonance!

The Extreme Team are out, because Ty and his goddamn bullhorn constitute an unfair advantage. And most of the crews on TLC and HGTV are just to linguistically bland to put up much of a fight. I might, as a bit of affirmative action, pull in P. Allen Smith; he is a gardener, after all. But I draw the line at Christopher Lowell, dammit.

My dream match-up, however, would be the Min-ne-soh-tan long vowels of "Hooooometime" up against the Beantown blather of "Aaaaahhhsk This Old House" in mortal rhetorical combat.

Just imagine McLaughlin trying to moderate those two teams as they duke it out over North Korea or stems cells or Barack in 2008...

And if they had two-by-fours with protruding 16-penny nails in easy reach...

Mr. T is my life coach

Apparently I'm nice and that's a problem.
(What? A Minnesotan? Nice??)

I guess as long as there are weasels and chingones and smirking frat bastards willing to screw others simply because they can, helpfulness is a character flaw.

I guess I have to shed my dysfunctionally responsible upbringing like a too-tight pair of bikini briefs.

"Please." "Thank you." "Can I help you?" Kiss my ass.

I need a cognitive makeover. ("Starting Over" is on in the background; it might be coloring my thought process a bit.) But you can take your Iyanlas and Dr. Phils and shove 'em.

I need Mr. T.

No fool receives his pity, no jibber-jabber his toleration. He kicked the ass of poverty, drunks, lymphoma, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and a bunch of pesky allergenic trees. He stands up for moms and calcium and getting an education and (for Conan's benefit) Chicago.

That's a role model.

So, if in the near future you see me wreathed in gold chains with a very narrow hair-do and a determined countenance, you can bet I've been T'd up.

En contra del calor de la chingada

It is friggin' hot in Chi-town.

This is not a complaint. It is an unbiased, context-independent statement.

(After two years in Southern California, I have no leg to stand on when it comes to whining about hot weather. All I'll say is, where one might compare SoCal heat to what could be expected on the inside of an oven, summer in NE IL must equate to parboiling.)

The new tradition at our place, born from the proximity of Mexican produce stores - and a heat-induced lethargy laced with fear of raising our ambient temperature - is to Cuisinart a vat of gazpacho to last us through the hot spell. Since I likes the knives, I gets to chop.

Thus I pass on to you gazpacho gigantesco a la minnesotana:

• cucumber - 1.5 large or 2 medium, peeled/seeded
  
• green pepper - 2 large, seeded
  
• white onion - 2 medium
• parsley - 2/3 cup
• tomato - 4lb, seeded
  
• garlic - 4-5 cloves
• jalapeño chile - 2, seeded
  
• tomato juice (V8) - 2 cups
• red wine vinegar - 1/2 cup
• olive oil - 6 tablespoons
• salt - 4 teaspoons

In the order listed, disassemble and then finely chop the vegetable matter in a Cuisinart or blender, adding the processed result to a large bowl. Stir in the remaining ingredients, sample, and adjust a su gusto. Chill. Serve with chips, guacamole, and either Negra Modelo or Hamms (with lime slice, of course).

Feeds 2...
...for at least 5 days.

Let sleeping moths lie

My wife, who devours fiction voraciously, can expect a significant chunk of her for-fun reading to be adapted for one or the other screen at some point. The Lord of the Rings was a massive blast from my reading past, and I certainly can't help having discovered the works of Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick long after they began to be butchered by screenwriters and producers (here's hoping A Scanner Darkly is an exception). Yet the out-there but ostensibly nonfictional books I cherish are hardly ever tapped by the entertainment industry.

So when I catch wind of any potential media cross-pollination - or cooptation - a queasy mixture of delight and trepidation curdles in my gut. "Holy crap! How cool is that! But you know it's gonna suck..." Since I don't have to deal with this conflictedness very often, I vacillate wildly between a panting anticipation and the sour-grapes cynicism of the bruised optimist.

Just such curdling and vacillation erupted with a vengeance when the first ads for The Mothman Prophecies ran on TV.

Perhaps to you this was Richard Gere in a love triangle with TV's "Grace" and a fiery-eyed flying humanoid. To the director it was "a meditation on the existential dilemma of humankind seeking stability and certitude in the flux and chaos of the phenomenal world." (I may have put some words in his mouth, but dude basically said that. Basically.) But to me, this was a treasure uncovered in a childhood spent raiding small-town libraries, one of the few books I ever checked out repeatedly, a riotously iconoclastic oddity in a genre characterized by its oddness.

I couldn't bring myself to pay to see it in the theaters, nor have I laid out cash to rent it. Just a half-hour stolen from motel HBO on our cross-country move last summer. It was enough.

Enough to confirm that (a) the movie deviated from the book in frustratingly predictable ways, which confirmed that (b) studio-system hacks have no faith in or respect for their source material. You're making a creepy supernatural thriller; is the story not creepy enough as it is? Flying saucers? Poltergeists? Honest-to-God Men in Black intimidating witnesses? Phone calls filled with mechanical noises, strings of numbers, unplaceably foreign voices? And a seven-foot winged sumbitch with glowing eyes who chases people down back roads in the middle of the night? What?!?!

So the screenwriter may have to prune some of the overabundant detail and frequent digressions with which John Keel seasoned his punchy journalistic prose. And it probably is not necessary to do anything but hint at Keel's acid-tinged synthesis of ufology, paranormalism, and demonology. I'd even be OK with setting the events leading up to Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapse in the present day, if only to avoid bloating the production budget.

But how the hell does it improve the story to saddle our heroic investigator with a tragically ended marriage as his connection to the Mothman? What's wrong with a lightly fictionalized Keel simply following his curiousity and getting way in over his head? Why play up characters' personal psychological struggles, especially belief v. doubt, when the public epistemological and cultural issues (like how we can shrug off such a concentration of reported anomalies) are even heavier?

I'm gonna rant more about Hollywood adaptations in subsequent postings, fear not. In the meantime, treat yourself (or spook yourself) and read the book. And don't forget to look up.

"...At the eyeballs' last bleeding."

As I tap out these words, the sounds of our joyously martial national birthday continue to boom and crack and sporadically drown out my typing.

I love fireworks. I cheered the day Target began selling packages of Chinese goodies in the Midwest. I look forward to when my sister and I can blow shit up in the frigid North Woods at New Years.

So what am I doing blogging when there are bombs still bursting in air? Blame Skokie.

The assault began around 9:10. From our dining room window, we were able to make out a line of decorative destruction stretching along the horizon from northeast to northwest. In turn or all at once, Evanston and Park Ridge and Morton Grove and Niles launched their celebratory barrages.

Some were high and tight (especially the annoying ones that fly up and simply BOOM with hardly any sparkle). Most just peeked over rooflines and trees. Soon the Navy Pier display added its rumbles and reflected flashes. A few of our neighbors provided their own snickering, illicit counterpoint--a bottle rocket here, a roman candle there.

But no source of fireworks approached Skokie for sheer endurance. Every other municipality was packing it in by 10:00. Skokie kept plugging away. They must have put up a solid hour and fifteen minutes of flash-bang-boom. It got to the point that my wife went off to clean the cat litter and I had to move away from the window to rub my cramping legs.

Damn. We feel independent already. Now some of us have to get up in the morning.

Out among the stars

Stashed surreptitiously in the programming of a PBS affiliate near you is five of the wierdest minutes of science you are likely to see on TV. And I mean that in a good way. I think.

The host, creator, and motive force behind these minutes is one Jack Horkheimer. He is really, really pumped to point out to you all the interesting cosmic phenomena you can see from your backyard. (The fact that it was initially called "The Star Hustler" led many to believe it was breaking new and daring ground for naked eye astronomy. Alas.)

Now, I like a good - or even passable - program on stars and shit. I've been known to say up to watch Astrophysics 101 telecourses. But something about this show is...queer.

Jack has always had, shall we say, a distinctive presence. Yet lately I feel like he's sliding perilously near parody. Not of himself. Rather some ungodly hybrid of Andy Rooney and Rip Taylor.

Maybe it's the voice. Maybe it's the "hair". But I half expect him, legs dangling from the low-res rings of Saturn, to toss shiny confetti at the camera and crow "Woo-hoo! Perseids!", then slip in a cranky aside about how "planetariums are too darn cold," before signing off with a snarling "Keep looking up. Until that arthritis gets you."