Exotic Feline Rescue Center

We finally visited the Exotic Feline Rescue Center after 8 years in Southern Indiana, an excellent post-Thanksgiving day trip.

It’s a couple miles off 46 East on the way to Terre Haute.  The entrance has a vague resemblance to an autobody parts store or some such.  You pay your entrance fee, and one of the volunteers/employees explains the rules/guidelines (if you touch a cat you will be asked to leave; if a cat turns its rear end towards you, it may be planning to spray you; move quickly to the side) and takes you on a tour.

It’s an amazing place!  They have about 200 big cats.  A lot of tigers, some lions, and also leopards, bobcats, servals, cougars, and ocelots.  Most of them were rescued from abusive/neglectful situations: breeders, pet owners in over their heads, drug dealers, other shady characters who like the idea of having a lion in their backyard.  They do not breed animals and they don’t place them elsewhere; it’s a permanent retirement home.  They say that for every animal they can adopt, they have to turn down about 40.

The animals definitely seemed to pay special attention to the girls and another young boy with our group.

The animals tended to be fairly interested and would come up to check us out.  You’re not supposed to come within an arm’s reach of the cages, which at some points means you kind of have to squeeze through a relatively narrow passageway with giant cats sitting or pacing on either side.  It all seems very well run, but on the other hand, it’s just normal fences and padlocks between you and the animals, no high-tech zoo moats or walls.  At one point Iris got scared and didn’t want to come into one area; she eventually braved it by riding on my shoulders.

A few minutes into our tour the lions started roaring back and forth, a very eerie sound.  We saw one of the big lions chewing on a leg of some sort — the lady said that local farmers will often donate a cow or horse that dies.  The center goes through 3000 pounds of meat a day.

They’re definitely doing good work here.  Sad to think of so many of these creatures kept as pets.  There are no national laws governing exotic pet ownership so it’s a state by state patchwork; in Indiana (surprisingly) it’s fairly stringently regulated but in Ohio there are virtually no rules, anyone can buy a tiger cub, stick it in the back of the pickup truck and take it home.

This was a cute guy rubbing his head against the fence.

As we were leaving we noticed a little tabby cat walking around the entrance area.  She looked ridiculously tiny.  I guess she must know to stay out of the cages.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, shark, jump?

For a while this season I felt that Curb Your Enthusiasm had jumped the shark.  (No huge spoilers here, btw.) Or probably that’s the wrong phrase in its suggestion of a Rubicon-crossing into sudden badness; more a sinking into repetitive tics and self-indulgence of some of the show’s worst qualities.  Is it possible that every episode this season involved someone trying to get money out of Larry, especially in the form of a tip?  It happened so frequently that you have to assume there was self-awareness about it, but really, could I care less about how hard it is for LD to have every waiter and coffee guy expecting a $20 tip from him at every moment? And the drive for edginess/envelope-pushing in regards to race and disability was often painful.  Although I did like the running joke about Larry’s baldness as an identity category.

In the end though I did find the Seinfeld reenactment/reunion to be somewhat irresistible and fun.  It was great just to see Larry and Jerry riffing on random stuff together.  And as a viewer, I felt a bit as Cheryl apparently did: it had gotten tedious to witness Larry always moping around as a bored rich man at loose ends; it was invigorating to see him actually at work trying to produce something, and to have the purposeful action that creates Curb Your Enthusiasm itself seep into the plot of the show.  That is, there was always a (initially productive) tension in Curb in that its main topic is Larry’s dilemma after he’s made his fame and fortune with Seinfeld; what should he do now?  Of course what he actually did was create a smaller, semi-improvised premium-cable show, but we could never see that in the show itself, which ended up spinning off endless and often redundant riffs on the minutiae of Larry’s aimless, spoiled existence and his Honeymooners- esque fights with neighbors and associates, etc.

So, there was a kind of satisfying formal logic to the way this season wound up in Larry “putting on a show” once again.  (Echoing the Producers plot of a couple seasons ago.)  And also perhaps to the way he finally backs away, once again, from a life of purposeful action and employment.  Although I don’t agree with those who found Larry performing as George Constanza sublime; Larry’s “bad acting” is just too… bad, I think.

I don’t think Cheryl made the right call at the end, though.

p.s.  For those who know me well, the reason I watched the show as it screened was that I got a fortuitously timed three free months of HBO.

Where the Wild Things Are as family therapy

Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is kind of like a long, whacked-out family therapy session.  Maurice Sendak has commented that the monsters in the book are all based on his Polish-Jewish aunts and uncles back in 1930s Brooklyn.  Homage seems to be paid in the Wild Things’ names in the movie: Judith, Ira, Carol — they sound like they could be those aunts and uncles.  (It’s funny that the most Jewish-seeming one, Ira, is voiced by Forrest Whittaker.)  But I wouldn’t be surprised (just guessing here) if Jonze based a lot of the movie on memories of his own parents’ divorce and family-therapy sessions.  Many of the antics on the island feel like different forms of play-acting and role-playing in that context as Max works out his rage against his mother, his fears and anxieties, loneliness, with these other equally-troubled characters.

One memorable scene occurs when Max is on the run from Carol, the Tony Soprano-voiced character who seems an avatar of Max himself in his uncontrolled rages.  Carol feels betrayed by the revelation that Max may not in fact be “the king” (i.e. the good parent, the one who makes everything OK — could be the absent father, but the mother is much more important in the movie and book).  Max encounters K.W. (whom Carol loves and feels rejected by), who seems to be the sister-figure monster.   She urgently instructs Max to hide from Carol in her mouth.  He hesitates at first and then, as Carol approaches, down the hatch: he slides into her mouth and into her gullet (where he finds a raccoon foraging).   Once Carol leaves, he climbs back out in a slimy birth scene.  Pretty amazing!

Sarah commented that the movie has a lot of John Cassavetes in it and that it can be a bit hard to take in the painfully intimate and claustrophobic, dysfunctional behaviors of the monsters.  “K.W. may be psychotic, with her owls” (that she believes to be great sages), Sarah observed, Carol flies into dangerous bipolar rages, Judith is, as everyone comments, an endless “downer,” manipulative and passive-aggressive, Douglas (the goat one) is very depressed and self-undermining.  Also (still channeling Sarah here) you have to have a pretty high tolerance for wet plush animal fur, which is the defining and sometimes oppressive texture of the movie.

It has occasionally arch/cute moments in that Dave Eggers way, too, but I thought it was pretty great overall.  Great on childhood creativity and imagination — loved Carol’s elaborate sculptural mountain world into which, if you place your head in just the right spot, a fully-developed three-dimensional scene with moving figures on a river surrounds you. This struck me as one of those manifestations you sometimes see in Jonze’s movies (Michel Gondry too; and maybe Wes Anderson?) of a desire for film to be a handmade craft/art project, something tactile and a bit like a child’s fantasy world.

I’m glad the movie has done well, as it would be nice to see more 100 million dollar movies like this one.

p.s.  If we’d tried to bring C&I to this one, we would’ve been out of the theater in 15 minutes.  It’s quite scary, I wouldn’t bring any kid younger than maybe 8.

Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry

Sometimes it feels like we’re continually being hit up for money via the girls’ kindergarten.  What I don’t like about it is the sense that the school or the PTA are using the kids for fund-raising — invoking the nag factor to get us to pony up.  If they wrote directly asking if we could pay a certain amount per month to pay for extras the school can’t otherwise afford, we’d have no problem with that.  But the reading marathon, the contests, the Scholastic book orders (of which I presume the school gets a cut) get tiring.  Especially at this age when my daughters, at least, really do not understand money at all.  Or odds or probabilities.  We had several complete meltdowns around the Reading Marathon because they were convinced that they were going to get to ride in a limo (the final top prize for one student in the school).

So anyway, we weren’t prepared for the Scholastic Books order.  The girls came home with pieces of paper on which their librarian (I think) had written the titles and prices for three books each in which C&I had expressed interest.  These would cost a total of almost $50 and they somehow presumed it was a done deal that we’d be buying all of them.  Screaming, crying meltdown over this.  Finally we compromised and got one book each and one more to share.

I also am not too impressed with the books’ general level of literary quality.  I don’t think it’s a promising sign about a book’s merits when it comes with a cheap dollar-store style necklace included (that’s why they wanted the book, of course).  Actually to be fair, when I actually went to the sale with them set up in the library, they did seem to have good books mixed in with the necklace/book hybrids my daughters unfortunately gravitated towards.  Showing a 6-year old girl a book with jewelry included is not really playing fair.  Normally we’re pretty good at telling them that they can’t buy something, but somehow all the peer/school pressure involved here made it very difficult to manage.  Maybe part of what was galling about this was that Grandma Suzy had just shown up with a few bags of wonderful/classic children’s lit from the 1950s-70s, next to which these looked especially tawdry.

This is the book/necklace title.  Ballet, rainbows, magic, fairies, and jewelry, a potent brew:

Torture Porn Lit

Just read Heartsick by Chelsea Cain which I picked up looking for something else because, I think, Amazon named it the top thriller of 2007.

I didn’t altogether enjoy it — it seemed derivative (of Silence of the Lambs, although it does have the wit tacitly to acknowledge the debt when the psycho killer mockingly refers to the journalist as Clarice) and very, very gross.  It is gripping and well done in some ways — I wanted to read to the end to find out what would happen — but I was struck by the sheer bloody sadism of it.

It reminded me of a silly argument my brother and I had a while ago about the ethics and politics of so-called “torture porn” film, namely the Eli Roth Hostel movies.  It was silly because I think at that point neither of us had seen the movies… so if anything, I’d have to say he won the argument b/c it’s difficult to take a moral stance of condemnation about something you haven’t seen.   Although part of my point was, I refused to give in to the logic that because this on-the-face-of-it objectionable cultural object has become notorious, “you must see it yourself” to decide.  On the other hand, it’s hard to argue the position from ignorance.

Anyway, what I didn’t like about Heartsick is the back story involving the protagonist detective’s ten-day-long ordeal being slowly and lovingly tortured by the psycho serial killer he’d been investigating.  It actually works pretty well as back story to explain his particular trauma and what’s at stake for him in current case… but annoyingly, the novel is interwoven with day by day chronological accounts of that week and a half.  It’s really hard to take — painstaking description of what it’s like to drink drain cleaner, anyone? — and just seemed sadistic/self-indulgent in a mode of “can you top this” grossness.

I was mulling over the cultural meanings of ‘torture porn’ and thought of several possible explanations/causes for why this has trend emerged so clearly in the last decade or so.

• Most obviously: sheer oneupsmanship in a modernist logic of greater and greater, purportedly more and more “daring,” transgressions.  This was basically the point I was making to Jake: within Modernist art of the early and mid 20th century, various forms of transgression, obscenity, and more and more realistic depiction of sex and violence became closely linked with artistic expression and a cultural vanguard.  One could think of this as the “First Amendment theory” of modernist transgression, in that to be “censored” or deplored becomes an almost necessary sign of artistic expression and integrity.  The thing is, though, that this dynamic has become tired and predictable when every gangsta rapper and thriller novelist or director participates in the same game.  Sorry, Eminem and Marilyn Manson, you are not James Joyce or Picasso bravely defying the philistines with your cds and DVDs sold at Walmart to every wanna-be radical tweener in America.  (Or for that matter Tarantino: I think he’s at his worst when he falls into this mode; most of the more interesting aspects of his movies have little to do with pushing the transgression envelope.)   And in this case, Chelsea Cain’s novel being that much grosser and more explicit than The Silence of the Lambs does not make it more daring.  Given that you can find stuff on the internet with a few keystrokes that would’ve made Henry Miller or James Joyce blush, that whole logic, which relies on certain dynamics of scarcity and concealment, is basically moot.  These days really radical, daring art is more likely to avoid this whole game of transgression entirely.
• post-9/11 culture, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.  Needless to say a lot of the obsession with torture in pop culture comes directly out of this political/cultural dynamic: e.g. the t.v. series 24.  I’d assume that Saw and Hostel are part of this too, albeit less directly.
• One other thought, a slightly less obvious one: in this novel anyway, there seemed to be a fascination with the idea of the body as art-work, and the serial killer as a kind of conceptual artist, carving and sculpting her victims’ bodies into new shapes.  A break in the original case came when the detective Archie noticed, looking at photos of all the crime victims, that the shape of a heart had been carved into all the torsos (hard to make out amid all the gore).  The journalist protagonist dyes her hair pink which I think is meant to link to this theme.   Like Jack the Ripper, these murderers are artist/author figures who leave their “signature” to be read by the police.  So here too we could link the trend to plastic surgery and various kinds of body-based conceptual art that views the human bodily as “plastic,” malleable and part of culture not nature.

Anything else going on here?  There’s always the possibility of whole-scale moral degeneration, I forgot that one…