reading romeo and juliet apparently makes some people very defensive. in a class discussion the other day, i piped up for the first time this quarter and said that i didn’t think romeo and juliet were actually in love, because they didn’t exercise any degree of reason in their 3-day love affair and because they were adolescents who had no conception of love beyond what their libidos were telling them. and out came the claws!
it was the general consensus of the class that romeo and juliet’s brand of immediate, uncontrollable, dangerous passionate love was an elevated form of love, that their love was somehow more pure than the long-lasting, mundane love that most people experience. someone even went as far as to quote neil young and say “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” how poetic.
call me square, but i just fail to see the appeal of this kind of love, if you can even call it that. i feel forced to bear my post-romantic teeth at the thought of such awesome recklessness/immaturity/selfishness falling under the category of love. i just try to imagine what their lives would be like if everything didn’t go tragically awry for them: they would have lots of passionate sex for a while, but then romeo would develop a roving eye, juliet would cuckold him, and there would always be that underlying tension of their families hating each other. there is no way they could maintain that intense level of passion for any longer than they did, so i guess there was no choice but for their story to end tragically; maybe that’s why people like it. in my mind, passion is kind of like caffeine: you can only run on it for so long before you get burned out, and either start looking for something else to get you going or allow what was once a high to become a routine. and everyone knows that teenagers are incapable of knowing what love is because a) they’re self-centered (and self-centered is the opposite of love) and b) because they don’t know themselves. you would think that if romeo really loved juliet, he could have restrained himself from killing her kinsman and getting himself banished and generally mucking up all their plans, but no. hrmph. fortune’s fool, indeed.
conclusion: i just can’t bring myself to romanticize their relationship (or any relationship that resembles theirs, for that matter). they were not great lovers, they were idiot kids who lived in the moment and died as a result of their inability to exercise restraint and plan ahead. and as dr. amorose said, this is the last shakespeare play that should ever be taught in high school english classes… it’s too great of an encouragement for moronic teenage lovers to be more reckless and moronic than they already are.
i get nervous about money sometimes/a lot of the time. i went to buy groceries today after class, spent $47 and felt physically ill afterward. little pieces of green paper shouldn’t have such a violent bodily effect on me, right?
so i watched rear window this past weekend, and while i have an irrepressible love for jimmy stewart and his cute voice, i was preoccupied for most of the movie with something that jimmy’s character’s nurse said at the beginning of the movie:
“we become a race of peeping toms. what people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”
which made me think celebrity gossip magazines and e!news and such things, and how easily they can turn people into peeping toms, to a certain degree. it’s so alluring to let yourself be absorbed by someone else’s life and problems, and in that sense, it’s a sort of escapism; we love to see famous people screw up their lives because it makes us forget for a moment how much we’ve screwed up our own lives. i’ve read a lot of magazine articles where actors or musicians were interviewed, and voiced their extreme contempt for the invasiveness of the paparazzi. i’m always incredulous when i read something like that, because paparazzi seems like the smallest part of the larger problem; photographers are just trying to make a living by giving the public something that’s in high demand. it seems to me that the real problem is the everyman’s obsession with famous people’s lives, which are really not that different from their own (aside from their heightened public visibility and economic standing). and then i thought about the irony of that nurse’s statement in a film, which also kind of turns people into peeping toms on a fictional world and which also functions as escapist entertainment. and then i laughed.
i think they are called grizzly bear? (or something like that).
1. the moore theatre is a very fitting venue. even though i was way back in the first balcony, it was still a great seat and the acoustics were perfection.
2. all four band members are so incredibly talented. usually you can pick out a band’s weakest link, the one who’s not quite as talented and that doesn’t pull the same weight as the others and is potentially expendable (can anyone say ringo starr?). there is no weakest link in grizzly bear… they are all essential.
3. i saw them a couple summers ago when they opened for feist, and one of the things that made them so unforgettable was the light show. their light technician is a master of his craft, and i would pay lots of money to see them again simply to experience the fantastic lighting.
4. i love how really good bands attract other really good musicians to their shows that i happen to attend. robin pecknold of fleet foxes walked right past me in the lobby. robin pecknold! i could have reached out and touched him.
5. the harmonies! they sounded like heaven.
so the other day in my shakespeare class, we were talking about platonic love versus romantic love, and how in the days of shakespeare, it was vital to keep them separate. and my brilliant professor, who loves his social statistics, mentioned that the majority of women would rather go to their female friend with their problems than their husbands/significant other. which is interesting, considering that in this day and age, one typically looks for someone they feel both platonic and romantic love for when they’re looking for a husband/wife. in response to this, my professor posited that perhaps that’s why more than half of marriages end in divorce, because we’re with someone that we expect to be everything to us, both friend and lover, and it’s just unrealistic and too great of a weight for a single person to carry.
i find the balance between platonic and romantic love to be very delicate; you want to be besties with your significant other, but the passion/sexual attraction has to be there in order to qualify as something beyond just friends; but if you’re all about the romantic passion, you have a relationship with no substance. i’m sure it’s strange for some people to imagine spouses in other cultures who aren’t confidants, and who are together simply for economic or reproductive purposes, but i have to wonder if those people are the ones who have it right, and we’re the ones who are so arrogant to think that we can blend the lines between friendship and sex and be sure that’s the best and right way to do it.
i’ve been asking my friends who have significant others what their relationship consists more of, platonic or romantic love, and most of them say that it’s primarily platonic. for the most part, they just hang out with their significant other and talk to them like they would with a friend. it seems like platonic love in same-sex friendships is generally really strong (“bros before hos,” etc), and sometimes strong in male-female friendships, depending on the people, i guess. but i wonder if a male-female relationship that is really platonically strong is enhanced or hindered by adding sex into the mix. on the one hand, sex can be a really intense physical bond between two people, a plus; but on the other hand, sex is fairly accessible outside the relationship if the relationship were to go sour, a negative. i don’t know if the former argument holds up against the latter in terms of incentive to stay in a relationship, so maybe it is best to keep platonic and romantic love separate and it’s “bros before hos,” indeed.
i love her because she was gorgeous and sassy in her youth, and because she was scary and creepy in her older years. i watched whatever happened to baby jane? last night and was torn between feeling utterly awed and utterly frightened by bette davis’ psychotic character, baby jane.
sometimes the scariest types of people are the ones who don’t know how to transition from childhood to adulthood. which creates a strategic segue-way for this thought:
capstone was incredibly intense tonight because this professor, who has always seemed to me very serious and stoic, completely poured out his heart to us. apparently he had a really awful relationship with his father, and that affected his faith because, as he said, people tend to superimpose the image of their biological father over what they imagine (or expect) their heavenly father to be like. which is something i’ve found to be tragically true. it seems that it would be almost impossible for people who have dysfunctional relationships with their fathers to embark on a functional relationship with god, or to even be attracted to such a thing; and it is, i suppose, a sad fact of psychology that someone looking to find solace or peace in a spiritual being can be thwarted by their past, arrested by it even, to where they can’t grow, but remain stuck in a conditioned state of sadness or self-deprecation because that’s all they’ve known, and all they think they deserve. i guess my thought is: is this an unfair (albeit completely arbitrary) advantage?
i’ve had the roman polanski documentary “wanted and desired” in my netflix queue for months, but in lieu of his recent arrest in switzerland, my attention has been sufficiently piqued and i decided to sit myself down this afternoon and watch it.
it was a really disheartening film, but one that i think is important for people to watch if they want to have any kind of educated opinion about the situation polanski finds himself in. the film does an excellent job of giving reasons why polanski should perhaps be pitied (the death of his mother at the hands of the nazis and his childhood struggle for survival in poland, the murder of his wife by the manson family, etc.), but ultimately doesn’t deny that his furnishing a 13-year old with quaaludes and then having sex with her was wrong and inexcusable. the film focuses more on the trial, and how the fame-whoring judge presiding over his case treated polanski and his case completely unlawfully. so much of this story has been skewed by disreputable media sources, that having all of the information sheds a new light on this debacle.
after watching this film, i feel even less sure of my opinions about this situation. obviously, it was wretched that he had sex with a minor, but there is something about him and his life that impels me toward empathy. i think polanski is often painted as either a monstrous figure or a duplicitous one; i just see him as a person filled to the brim with an overwhelming amount of sadness, and as a person who made a really big mistake and simply wants, after thirty years, to be able to move on with his life. he’s an incredible artist, but no one is above the law; similarly, the representatives of the law had no right to abuse him because of his celebrity status. it’s a big twisted mess, if you ask me. watch the film and tell me what you think.
EDIT: there was an article in the new york times movie section today about “wanted and desired.”
i’d never listened to the dead weather before watching this (on recommendation from a friendly kexp dj), but i’m in love with this video. allison mosshart is pure sex, and jack white, though usually too odd for my taste, is pretty sexy too. it also seems like a decent visual metaphor for a relationship, which is my way of justifying my intrigue of such glorified violence, i guess.
