the status quo
1. How much do we really need? Really. It’s a thought that crossed my mind recently whilst doing go-backs late at night at the store and realizing that there are more varieties of pretzels and seltzer water than I could have possibly thought. Among many other products–premixed marinades, breakfast cereals, dog foods, motor oils… I feel like I’m swimming in the excess of our culture for several hours every day when I cashier there. Maybe it’s just the time of year, pre-Halloween, but I’ve rung up literally hundreds of packages of confections and desserts recently… And we have the audacity to wonder why 2/3 of us are overweight? Yet another reason why every American should spend at least six months in another country. We need to experience the concept of moderation in reference to daily life. But honestly, a lot of my reaction is probably sour grapes on account of my quasi-vow of poverty at the moment–the last sweets I ate were a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts when my dad was in town and we stopped there before he headed back to Chapel Hill. I broke down and bought hummus and pita bread at the store today for the first time in fully two months. I used to live off the stuff. It’s not cheap, and it was wonderful.
2. Practiced more landings on Tuesday. I can fly the plane perfectly from takeoff, all the way ’round in the pattern and through the approach, until we’re just a dozen feet or so above the runway, in ground effect, and I’m flaring out (raising the nose) to touch the main gear first… That’s the hardest part of the whole landing to judge, and I haven’t had a really good touchdown yet that I don’t attribute to luck (I had a few early ones). The plane inevitably either floats quite a bit further down the runway than I’d like and I have to do a go-around (full power, flaps up, climb out) or the plane stalls 5-6 feet off the ground and settles to the runway with a *thump*. I’ll get it one of these days.
3. Incidentally, I love it when I’m running, or simply outside, and I hear a plane overhead or I see fresh contrails from a cruising airliner. It’s like a summons to someplace I long for. I want to buy a house under the landing or takeoff path of an airport–real estate nobody really wants, but that I would relish.
4. Mike (
And it is precisely with such unqualifiable, gender-jiggling definitions of sexuality (and hence beauty) that Americans remain uncomfortable – bred as we are to homespun, well-scrubbed principles rather than the jaded and deeply cynical beliefs about the human condition that mark the European mindset (especially around issues like marriage and infidelity). This discomfort may also derive, as a transplanted friend of mine insists, from the fact that Europeans see the connection between inner and outer beauty better than Americans do. Or with our readiness to assume, in our can-do, Yankee sense of enterprise, that anything to do with beauty must translate into a concrete and consumer-friendly product or service rather than reside in the realm of a phenomenological conceit, a flourish of sensibility.
Thoughts?
that’s very true. and i think the american ideal – intelligence, strength, wealth, all wrapped up in a beautiful package – contributes to a great, great lack of confidence on our part, which leads to over-consumption, misplacement of values, and a good deal of apathy.
i have a few friends from other countries, on the other hand, who may not be flawless according to american standards of beauty, but they have powerful grasps on their lives, are totally engaged in their educations, and dive into new experiences without a moment’s hesitation.
conclusion: i think america’s focus is crippling.
re: 1
Sometimes I feel overwelmed by choice. I find it harder and harder to buy food – I fall into the patterns of buying the same things over and over again and not varying my diet at all.
re: 4
To any lurkers, I highly recommend you read the whole article – the excerpt doesn’t do it justice (though reading, I’m not sure any excerpt would).
It’s interesting the types of beauty that we don’t recognize in our culture. Our two major images of female beauty, in my opinion, derive from Marilyn Monroe (the sexpot) and Audrey Hepburn (the girl-next-door). Neither archetype works well with words like ‘sophisticated’ or ‘regal’ for example. They both rely on a sort of sexual innocence that makes them hard for a sexually experienced adult woman to pull off. One of the strange consequences is that as people become sexually experienced younger and younger, we end up sexualizing (culturally) younger and youngers girls and it’s, to be honest, disgusting.
It’s strange. We had no problem with a young Catherine Deneuve as a sex symbol, but we, culturally, had a hard time with the mature hotness she demonstrated around Indochine. Damnit, she was almost fifty – 50 year old women can’t be hot!
But I don’t think it is just a matter of age, I think it connects to our view of sexuality. We tend to either want women virginal or nympho. One of the reason many modern French films are so appealing is that the women make mature assertive and thoughtful decisions about sex. They ponder what they really want and account for libido and desire without being overwelmed by it. (I would say that they act with a decisiciveness and thoughtfulness about sex that on men have/had the freedom to do in American films… but actually the men aren’t that thoughtful either).
Consider Camille (Emmanuelle Béart) in Claude Sautet’s Un coeur en hiver (Heart in Winter) who enamoured with Stephane (Daniel Auteuil) takes risks with her heart that seem jarring based on American film conventions. She is the aggressor – and there is nothing coy about her. So unamerican!
agreed.
conclusion two: move to Europe!
It was hard to find a blurb that encapsulated the theme of the article reasonably well, so I just picked one I found interesting. Perhaps this would have been a better choice:
It’s interesting the types of beauty that we don’t recognize in our culture. Our two major images of female beauty, in my opinion, derive from Marilyn Monroe (the sexpot) and Audrey Hepburn (the girl-next-door).
I agreed wholeheartedly. As the article mentions, we have a cookie-cutter image of beauty that is wholly out of touch with the way it should be.
They ponder what they really want and account for libido and desire without being overwelmed by it.
It’s absolutely true. Having lived in Europe, and more specifically France, for five years and having been more or less immersed in the culture there, I can personally testify to the notion that French women in particular are very in control of the image they project as far as attractiveness and sexuality. To them it seems to have tie-ins with many different levels of their personalities (unlike the American notion of sexuality–primarily all surface), which gives them a depth and allure unknown to many women here.
If you’re in the mood for French cinema, a film that illustrates the concept well is La Désenchantée. Granted, the protagonist of the film isn’t physically unattractive by any means, no matter whose standards you adhere to, but her attitude toward the men she encounters and what she finds attractive in them is thought-provoking and revealing.
An uninvited comment, but couldn’t resist it.
I feel like I’m swimming in the excess of our culture for several hours every day when I cashier there
Well nothing can be as confusing and over-excessive as the cereal aisle.You hit the nail on the head.
This over excessiveness can be only be answered in one way, by a better Yahoo Maps/Map quest site with product names,aisle number details and store aisle diagrams for shopping convenienece.
having spent the summer swimming in anti-processed-anything propaganda (http://www.newstarget.com/) via my job, i find trips to the average grocery store a little naseating. the artificial sugars, dyes, flavorings, preservatives, etc, seem to jump right out of the plastic packages and chase me down the aisle. i usually feel better in the produce department, but to get there you have to walk through bakery, where you must dodge holiday shaped sugar cookies and cupcakes frosted in technicolor high fructose corn syrup paste.
i also shirk from excess packaging, packaging i can’t recycle, and foods wrapped in “serving size” pieces of foil and plastic. i’m for buying in bulk and divying up serving sizes in reusable tupperware.
of course, to shop at a hoity-toity health food store like wellsprings, wild oats, trader joe’s, or wholefoods, you must 1) live in a decently sized city and 2) be rich enough to spend $600 a month on food as a single person.
hahahaha
Of course, of course. Too much is not enough.
How about I add you and we can forget all this uninvited comment nonsense? Consider yourself invited :)
I don’t have enough brain capacity, time or money to eat that healthy and responsibly. It’s all I can do just to exercise daily and make sure the food I eat doesn’t have too much sugar or saturated fat in it. I really don’t care to comb the nutrition labels for much else. And it’s not even so much the artificiality of everything that I have issues with (though to be sure that definitely bothers me) but just the excess of it.
In other words, those sugar cookies still look good to me. Just not fifty packages of them in every color imaginable :)
You just called yourself a lot of botheration. Normally, I dont get what people are talking about and even if I do my comments range between the lewd and the irrelevant.
But I’ll take it. Vice-versa you are added to my friends list too which means you can now find your comments (on my friends’ page) interspersed with a lot of trivia about Coldplay that 13 year olds would be interested in.