Tuesday.  Girls come home all excited about a visit to their school from Sasha, a player on the IU women’s basketball team.  Aka “Big Sash.”  There was a special promotion going on in which each kid was sent home with an adult ticket for the game on Thursday night (kids are free anyway I think).  Mom was going to be busy at the studio helping set up the holiday show, but I agreed to take them.

Thursday, 5 pm.  Last minute work on Go IU/ Go Sasha flags taped onto chopsticks:

I guess that’s Big Sash at the bottom right.  The rainbows, hearts and butterfly really push the go-team spirit to the next level, I think.

6:30.  In the parking lot, we see Calley and her dad and Olivia and her mom.  Joyful, hopping-up-and-down excited group hugs.  It has been a whole three hours since the kids have seen one another.

6:35.  In the arena!  Game has started, you can see all the kids from school at one end with their red t-shirts on!  Big Sash is on the court!

6:40.  For the next 2 hours it’s like some hopped-up 5-8 year-old cocktail party with continual changing of seats, conferrals about snacks, walking up and down the stadium stairs, new groupings of kids, weird games involving cheers, waving signs and a pom-pom someone brought.  The parents exchange occasional amused chit-chat over the din and try to prevent things from getting too inappropriate or dangerous.  The kids pay only fleeting attention to the actual game.

For much of the game we’re down in the 3rd row or so with the cheerleaders right in front of us.  The role of cheerleader normally seems so gendered, a performance of exaggerated femininity in structural, Manichean opposition to the exaggerated masculinity of the male jocks on the court.  But here it’s two very different models of female identity, bodies, behavior, gesture, etc., which seems to destabilize or call into question the original opposition.  (For ex. the center on Florida State must be 6′5″ and built to bust through any pick.)  I was rooting for C&I to be more impressed by the players.

7:30 At halftime all kids are invited to come on court and form two masses through which the players run through, high-fiving (if you can call it that at 3 1/2 feet from the ground).  Pandemonium as 100-odd 5-8 year-olds rush the court.  It’s a slightly dangerous situation when they all return in a thundering herd, rushing right through the IU team’s layup drills.

7:45 Iris finally makes it onto the Jumbotron!  C&I and their friends end up getting filmed a couple times doing their little cheers and dances.

8:00  Celie cajoles one of the cheerleaders to throw her a t-shirt!  Size extra-large men’s.

8:30  It’s a close game for much of it, but finally ends with Florida State winning by 8.  (One silver lining: Big Sash got a double-double with ten rebounds.)  I drag the girls out.  They have a despondent manner which initially I think is just fatigue, but then they start saying: “I can’t believe IU lost!”  Sobbing, a little bit.

“Why did they have to lose?”

I offer various sententious commentary about the nature of sports, winning and losing, etc.  They basically ignore me.

“I HATE Florida State!”

“I feel so bad for Sasha, I really wanted her to win!”

And, poignantly: “It’s OUR FAULT!  We were playing with Faith and Gabe and we didn’t cheer hard enough!”  When I try to deny this: “No, daddy!  Cheering really helps you play better!”  It’s pathetic, but I also have to stifle a chuckle from the front seat.

This continues until they’re in bed.  They seemed truly astonished and appalled that IU, notwithstanding the whole crowd rooting for them, had lost.

The sting of defeat seemed to have faded a bit by the next morning.  But I’m still not sure they possess the emotional armor to handle team spectator sports.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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…

Saw an interesting lecture today by a writer/cultural historian named Rachel Poliquin about the history of taxidermy and its legacy in contemporary art.  She’s curated an exhibit that just opened in Vancouver, where the museum has had sitting in its basement a collection of old taxidermy that no one wanted to see for 50 years.  So Poliquin got a grant to refurbish and re-purpose this creepy, abandoned old collection.

She didn’t mention the fact, but could’ve, that the most famous symbol of the excesses of contemporary conceptual art and the art market is Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” a taxidermy tiger shark preserved in a tank.  It’s interesting that this is so, that an art-form (or whatever it is) so strongly associated with archaic old Victorian practices became the signature of 21st century conceptual art.

One of Poliquin’s points I especially liked was that a shoe or an upholstered arm-chair is, essentially, taxidermy.  Abstract taxidermy, maybe.  We make a lot of things out of animal skins.  When they look enough like animals, we call them taxidermy.

What kind of sign is a taxidermy animal?  Is it indexical, iconic?  A taxidermy fox is often taken to represent the fox species, and so is an iconic sign of the larger group and concept.  But it is also indexical, a representation of the individual animal that it was.  In fact it is presented not as a sign but as the thing itself.

Here’s a bit of the handiwork of my favorite taxidermist, the Victorian Walter Potter:

I’m looking forward to Rachel Poliquin’s book Taxidermy and Longing which will supposed be published by Harvard UP in 2010.  Here’s her website.

A loyal Moonraking reader (thanks Judith) asked why it had been so long since I updated.  Oddly, I checked my stats and visits have been high lately despite no new updates.  Is it all random Google visits?  Who is out there?  To be honest, I think I crave more interactivity and lately have been more likely to take my random observations to Facebook.  But, I will see if I can get my blogging mojo back.

I’ll briefly mention some of the pleasure reading I’ve been doing lately.

My big recommendation is Lorrie Moore’s The Gate at the Stairs (I must say I dislike that title which seems very generic to me).  I’m a longtime fan of her short stories.  In preparation for reading the new one, while I waited to get my library copy, I read one of her two previous novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which is excellent although not as memorable as the new one.  The Gate at the Stairs actually could easily be accused of being contrived in all kinds of way in terms of plot but the “voice” of the narrating protagonist is so funny and moving that I didn’t care so much.  Sentence by sentence it’s consistently sharp, resourceful & hilarious.  Very self-aware about language, fascinated by puns and wordplay and nuances of speech and idiolects.  A novel about race and adoption, about childcare in relation to class and power, a girl’s coming of age novel.  Also it all takes place in a Midwestern college town (Madison) so that was another plus.

In 1996 or 1997 I called up “the Connection” (Boston NPR talk show) and asked a question on-air to Lorrie Moore.  I had only read a few of her stories from Self-Help and asked some question about her uses of semi-experimental fictional form that kind of missed the point of her work, I think, and seemed mildly to annoy her.  Since that experience I’ve always thought of her as a bit imperious and intimidating, but I heard an interview with her last month that made her sound charming and almost kind of girlish.

Chess Story by Stefan Zweig.  New York Review of Books reissue of this novella, the last work Zweig wrote before his 1942 suicide.  Made me want to play chess again… just in case I’m put in solitary confinement by the Nazis.  I’ve never read Zweig and this made me want to read more.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer last year, has been recommended highly by various family members I respect, and is about characters in Maine, but I didn’t like it quite as much as I hoped I would.  It’s definitely good and involving fiction, well-observed, it draws you in; the character of Olive K. herself is kind of great — she’s a really difficult and in some ways unpleasant lady — but somehow I found it all just a little… predictable, or trying too hard to do what “good fiction” is supposed to do.  And/or, I liked some of the stories much more than others (it’s a kind of Winesburg Ohio-esque story cycle, with the Kitteridges coming in and out of the stories).  Also I have to say that I think that aspects of this novel may be pitched especially to an over-60 or so readership (hey, we have Y.A. fiction, why not Older Adult fiction?)

Wobble to Death — this is Peter Lovesey’s 1970 Victorian mystery, the debut of Sergeant Cribb.  The plot revolves around a competitive race-walking event in London in 1879 at which contestants keep dropping off.  I spent the whole time I read this thinking, “am I really reading a mystery about Victorian competitive race-walking?”

Arnaldur Indriðason’s Arctic Chill.  I am in the middle of this moody Icelandic mystery, by the author of Jar City which I read a year or two ago.  Very Henning Mankell-esque, a bit derivative maybe (the detective’s relationship with his daughter seemed a little too close), but/and totally gripping and enjoyable.  A bit more stripped down and focused, more of a straight procedural maybe, not as ambitious in terms of depicting a whole society.  Very similar dynamics involving immigrants in the closed Nordic society — here a young Thai boy is found murdered and the detective is probing into the life he and his immigrant mother and brother have lived, the racism they’ve faced, and so on.

Emusic recently got the rights to the Husker Du catalogue which I’m pretty sure was also previously not available on iTunes.  Who do they think they are, the Beatles?  Anyway, good news even if you have to DL entire albums, can’t cherrypick songs, which disappointed me because I always saw Zen Arcade as a bit of a mess with a lot of somewhat-interesting stuff I didn’t actually want to listen to (“Hare Krishna”) along with a big handful of fantastic songs.

This may seem obnoxiously obscurantist in the “I prefer their early stuff” vein, but in some ways my favorite Husker Du record has always been Metal Circus from 1983, their first record with SST and I think their second more or less studio album, although it’s really a 19-minute 7-song e.p.  It’s all great, unrelenting, and has a kind of scrappy lightness of touch, with guitar leads that sometimes sound almost rockabilly, like X maybe, that reminds me a little of some of the early Replacements (their exact contemporaries) records like Stink from 1982.  I have this memory of trying to explain to my sophisticated NYC aunt in 1983 or 1984 that in fact, the most exciting new punk music was coming out of not NYC or San Francisco but Minneapolis of all places — not sure if she bought it.

Anyway, I loved everything about Metal Circus definitely including the black and white cover that looks like, what, the view out the window from inside a generic, depressing office room?  An employment agency for the down at the heels?

One of my favorite rock show experiences ever was seeing Husker Du in some community center or something in a suburb of Boston in maybe 1984; definitely before Zen Arcade came out.  I remember cramming into someone’s parents’ station wagon and ending up in this basement-y space not really knowing where we were.  (All the future Lemonheads were there, I think.)  I think the sound was atrocious so it was not exactly a “good show” properly but I loved them and it was a total thrill.  Actually now that I think about it, this was the second time I’d seen them because I also saw them opening for R.E.M. in a gymnasium at Harvard (!); I didn’t really know who they were at that point (must’ve been 1983?) and I didn’t really get it.

Metal Circus feels very 1983, very Ronald Reagan, Cold War, nuclear anxiety.  It’s conceptually coherent with lyrics defining an ambiguous political outlook, or maybe “political feeling,” angry, scared, apolitical as a variety of politics.  I love the lyrics to “Real World,” the fantastic first song:

People talk about anarchy And taking up a fight/ Well I’m afraid of things like that/ I lock my doors at night/ I don’t rape, and I don’t pillage Other peoples’ lives/ I don’t practice what you preach/ And I won’t see through your eyes/ You want to change the world By breaking rules and laws/ People don’t do things like that In the real world at all/ You’re not a cop, or a politician/ You’re a person too You can sing any song you want/ But you’re still the same

It’s about hardcore punk politics, a response/rebuttal to “anarchy” punk manifestos.  (I always heard it in relation to Minor Threat’s “In My Eyes.”)  I probably identified at the time with Bob Mould, a very normal homely/uncharismatic guy who was both a punk and a thoughtful, tormented liberal.  I guess the lyrics could be read as expressing pure political quietism, but I’ve always found them to be honest and brave, less a considered expression of a developed political philosophy than a kind of feeling — take it or leave it.  (In the equally great “It’s Not Funny Anymore” Mould signs sarcastically, “you can do what you want to do, say what you want to say… don’t worry about the result or the effect it has on your career” — wow, quite the college counselor!). “I’d like to protest but I’m not sure what it’s for/ I’ve heard it does some good if the television people are there… I know I’ve got no control over the threat of a nuclear war.”

One of my favorite songs from this era was Husker Du’s buddies the Minutemen’s “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs.”  They were all trying to figure out: how can you write a punk protest song without falling into pompous liberal folk cliches, or predictable punk cliches?  How can a punk protest song express ambiguity and doubt along with anger?

The other really great track is Grant Hart’s ominous, anguished rape-murder dramatic monologue “Diane,” which has a lot in common with Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover:” “We could lay in the weeds for a little while/ I’ll put your clothes in a nice, neat little pile/ You’re the cutest girl I’ve ever seen in my life/ It’s all over now, and with my knife.”  “Diane”’s bassline reminds me of Joy Division and of course, now that I think of it, the visual aesthetic and even title of Metal Circus may have been influenced by the Factory Records look/feel/sound.

When the definitive book is written on queer punk and post-punk, I hope Husker Du gets their due.  The indie/postpunk scene in the 80s was very homophobic; Mould finally came out of the closet in the early 1990s.  (I think everyone always figured Hart was gay.)  I love that Mould worked for World Championship Wrestling as a scriptwriter for a while.

We finally made it to a Rollerderby match (or “jam” “bout,” to use the technical term).  Our local league is the Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls.  As the website explains,

Gone are the golden days of the 1940s and ’50s, when roller derby was more like a grueling test of endurance than a sport. Gone are the cheesy pro-wrestling-style derby bouts of the ’60s and ’70s, when the MANY fights were staged, scoring seemed like an afterthought, and oh my, that huge hair!   Today’s roller derby is a rough, tough, athletic competition, but with enough trash-talkin’ attitude, wipeouts and injuries, and short skirts and fishnets to keep audiences of all ages on the edge of their seats.

This turned out to be a match between two home teams, the Farm Fatales (who have really cool t-shirts — were out of Sarah’s size, unfortunately) and the Slaughter Scouts.  RG advised us that the atmosphere was a bit less heated than would normally be the case, since both teams were local and so there was no one obvious to root against.

The atmosphere was a bit more wholesome than I’d expected.  The players all have sort of pro-wrestling style names, often with a campy, Russ Meyer or John Waters twist, e.g. Boogie Tights, Lotta Trouble, Violet Outburst. (We were actually proud to realize that we know Boogie Tights, the mother of a kid who used to be in the girls’ preschool class.)  And many of them wear fishnet tights, leopard-skin short shorts, and other stripperish gear.  Yet, the matches take place in a brightly lit gymnasium with an eager crowd perched on bleacher seats munching on cheese sticks, and the players are all really focused on the game.

Here’s a good summary of the rules of play from a NY Times article about the resurgence of the sport:

Reduced to its basics, roller derby is a simple game. There are two 30-minute halves, during which each team fields five women at a time in shifts (called jams) that last up to two minutes. They skate counterclockwise around an oval track, slightly smaller in circumference than a basketball court. There’s one jammer per shift, who scores a point each time she laps an opposing skater. After her first, nonscoring pass through the opposing team, the leading jammer also has the strategic option of ending the jam prematurely by tapping her hands to her hips [this is called "Calling off the Jam"]. The other eight players skate in a pack and make judicious use of their hips and arms to clear space for their jammer and stymie her opposite number.

Here’s a few shots from last night.  The woman with the star on her helmet is the jammer.

By the way, here’s a fascinating article from 2008 about Daniel Eduardo Policarpo, aka “Devil Dan,” the guy who created the first modern rollerderby league in Austin.  As the article explains,

under disputed circumstances, the man known as Devil Dan eventually sneaked out of Austin, or was chased out, leaving his weird brainchild to the women he had recruited as team captains. Widely acknowledged, perhaps reluctantly, as the progenitor of the modern roller derby, Daniel Eduardo Policarpo, now 39, settled here in Tulsa to watch the sport spread across the country, though not exactly in the form he had intended.

He explains that he “envisioned low lighting, quick flashes of red, blue and green, glow sticks, drummers, a cramped track, violence and microphones everywhere.”  He wanted women “with tattoos, Bettie Page haircuts and guts.”

Roller derby, he said, “exceeded my vision, actually; I had my vision of what things could have been, but it was so fanciful it wouldn’t reach that.”  (His original vision involved “a crazy circus with these clowns unfortunately stabbing each other, these bears on fire on these unicycles.”)

We’re hoping to take the girls to the next bout.  Seems like it can’t be a bad thing for them to see women (including the mothers of classmates) violently body-checking one another on wheels at high speed in the pursuit of athletic victory.