Things, arranged.

Good Wood

I used to hate the sight of a hammer, nails, saws and for that matter anything that had to do with building stuff out of wood. My father, an architect who specialized in designing low cost apartment buildings for greedy developers insisted that during my high school summers I work at construction sites. I earned well and was able to buy my own beater car, but the crack of dawn shuffle to the job site and the monotony of it all was torture. Breaks were too short and lunchtime always left me hungry and sour. Busted fingers, tired arms, the teen bitterness of not being free.

After a couple of these sorry summers, I was a decent enough framing carpenter. So what. The skills I had learned meant nothing to me. When I was finally able to convince my disappointed father that I would earn more and be happier at my newfound busboy job, I was elated. No more bashed fingers, stubbed toes or sweaty and foul construction dudes cracking awful cracks with their sweaty butt-cracks all day. Besides, restaurant people were more my kind of people: they read books and hated heavy metal.

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It was decades before I ever picked up a hammer in earnest again. Here and there as events or happenstance would have it, I might help a friend on a project or find myself having to work  some wood for one reason or another. In general I hid my carpenter's past like a guilty secret.

Then at the age of 60 and single, I bought a house. A nice northwest mid-century with a bit of traditional Japanese personality: wide hardwood floors, vaulted ceilings and wood slatted walls with bright windows at the roof line to let in every bit of light. It has clean lines, a simple elegance and is a quality home. It needed a little work.

Lo and behold, there was a shop in the garage. The previous owner had been into woodworking. Some old tools, two sturdy and worn workbenches, an iron vise and a decent saw. I thought about the back patio steps, rotted and aslant. Could I recall enough of my old skills to replace them myself? 

After a few trips to the hardware store and the lumber yard, I was turning my simple pencil sketch into three dimensions of wood and nails. The initial going was slow and a few mistakes were made: even though the steps were only three in number, the rise, width and run of stairs are tricky, especially when it comes to making sure the top step is perfectly aligned with the flooring it is attached to.

Once I beheld the magnificent perfection of my work and experienced the satisfaction of creating something out of wood for my own use, a strange obsession took over. I was now a woodworker.

It was now necessary to buy tools. Lots of tools. Also drill bits, screws, glue, dowels, clamps, sandpaper, more tools, tape, speed square, carpenter square, T square, table saw, planer, more tools, rabbet bits, chop saw, peg board and containers for everything, a good carpenter's pencil and more tools. 

Standing there in my canvas apron with a heavy duty tape measure clipped to my side I was now the master of my woodworking domain. I began to sketch out and build side tables, chairs, boxes, benches a terraced hardwood bookcase. Damn, I actually know how to do this! The cut scraps fell to the floor. The sawdust flew. The radio blared an accompanying soundtrack.

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Wood. Good wood. A miracle of nature. From seed to seedling to stately and grand the trees grace the land in quiet splendor. Mankind's need to grow and to cut down trees has always been a relationship fraught with madness. Clear cutting has led to erosion and the destruction of countless ecosystems around the world. New techniques that allow forests to recover and thrive have staved off a once inevitable vanishing, but this is not true in Brazil, where the rainforest is decimated daily. Yet another human contradiction: destroy what you need, need what you destroy. Ask any woodworker about wood, and you will hear reverence and even awe at this wonder of nature. There is nothing like it in the world. If only we could have it without destroying it.

For a simple home carpenter, the appreciation of wood is in small moments. A straight, unknotted 2x4. A fine piece of planking. The various personalities of cherry, walnut, oak, pine, maple and poplar. Each demands a way of working it and offers unique results. Sanding and finishing requires attention, a feel for the surface of the wood and an understanding of how wood absorbs, dries and reveals its fine finished look. Working in wood requires imagination, attention to detail, patience and most importantly, feel. Your hand and the wood need to understand each other.

The 4x8 foot sheet of 3/4" plywood was a simple enough piece to work. It would end up one piece of a tabletop. I had cut and shaped many before. Deploying my table saw in the carport next to my shop, I measured and scribed the wood where I would remove the excess trim. I laid the sheet onto the saw and made final adjustments to the rail and finger guard. Gloves on, eye protection on. I think Fleetwood Mac was playing on the radio. I flicked on the table saw and slowly began feeding the sheet into the saw blade. "And if you don't love me now, you will never love me again...." A little sawdust cyclone released that distinct scent of freshly cut wood. Bliss.

The most dangerous moment when using a table saw is at the end of a cut. There, the wood is liable to twist, splinter or jump, causing a kickback or flying fragment. One has to be sure one completes the cut with confidence and sureness to avoid such a mishap. Knots are also a concern. A knot at the end of a cut can be troubling. When my saw blade hit that stubborn blemish, I bore down on the sheet with insistence and authority. After all, no puny knot would defy my command. 

That was when the 2 inch wide, 4 foot long missile launched past me and into the driver's side window of my one year old Jeep Sahara Unlimited. The window shattered and the projectile continued through the interior and hit the passenger side widow, cracking it into an opaque web of tragi-comedy. The piece of wood now lay still on the passenger seat, demure and triumphant. I turned off the table saw, removed my gloves and eye protection and went over to inspect the damage. Like a deadly accurate shaft launched by Achilles himself, the wooden spear had done its duty. I had this thought: "Better if I had been standing a few inches further to the right, then the damn thing would have impaled me and saved me the indignity of this moment." 

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After the cleanup, I put the table saw away, swept up the broken glass and sawdust and leaned the trimmed plywood panel against the carport wall to deal with later. I turned off the radio. I think Dylan was playing. "It's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard rain's gonna fall."

I picked up the culprit missile and took it into my shop. I adjusted a couple of hooks on the tool peg board and placed it like a trophy above all the other tools. It sat there in silence like a storied weapon from some epic battlefield. A talisman, a warning, a trophy and a memory all in one. It seemed to say, from its perch: "Never forget: You work the wood, but the wood also works you."

Dreaming Steelhead

 

You don't fish for wild steelhead. You hunt for wild steelhead. You arm and armor yourself to the task: chest-high waders, studded or felt bottom boots, twelve-foot double-handed spey rod, carefully selected self-tied fly upon which you heap benediction upon prayer upon hope and a fatalistic determination of spirit reserved for desperate causes. The middle of winter is the most obscene time to do this in the dark and damp pacific northwest. That was when all this happened.

There is a special kind of wetness one experiences in a northwest winter rainstorm when you are waist deep in a rushing river casting a double-handed spey rod over and over after a series falls, slips and missteps off mossy boulders, slick logs, and puddling riverbanks. Bone-soaked. Wet beyond wet. Dissolving wet. Steelhead wet.

Consider that these remarkable fish move down the river as fry from fresh water to the salt, journey hundreds and even thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, return and make their way back to their spawning grounds, then do it again and again up to four times. Even the legendary salmon fish cannot claim this kind of repetitive endurance. All the while these trout are cheating death at the hands of humans, animals, chemicals, nets, ships, waste, toxicity, and chance. Their saga is remarkable and their survival as a species is very much in question in our time. No wonder we Washingtonians chose it as our state fish.

Working a trout run is a kind of a moving meditation. You select the area after scrutinizing the current, color, dynamic and shape. You sniff the breezes and note their direction. You watch the treetops, tree line, bushes and fallen logs for any signs or omens. Then you carefully wade in. Most likely the trout sense your intrusion from their hiding places. Maybe some move off to another part of the river. Maybe some don't care. Steady. Let the water settle again. Cast, swing the fly across the current, retrieve, take a few careful steps, cast, swing the fly across the current, retrieve, take a few careful steps and so on until you reach the end of the designated section of the river. When one is working a run alone often an altered state of being takes hold; the river, the rod, the fly, the wind, the trees, the birds, your hands, your feet, your breathe, your thoughts all begin to take on a simultaneous heightened presence and a melding into a larger, impressionistic picture of some kind of rhythmic ritual. Your attention is focused on the part of the river you cannot see: the trout's secret domain beneath the roiling surface.

Once called the fish of a thousand casts, all wild steelhead hunters in our era know it is now known as the fish of five or even ten thousand casts. That number will only increase as the future inevitably arrives. There will soon come the day when the wild steelhead is only a rumor and legend. That day is coming swifter that we would like to admit. Such is the way of things when we humans exercise our wanton need to destroy the natural world around us in the name of progress. Always elusive, never easy to find, the wild steelhead holds a special mystique for all traditional fly fishers. When asked why the traditional fly fisher will not simply engage in the lazy practice of dropping bait from a boat drifting down the river, usually the fly fisher refrains from pointing out the kind of person one sees doing this activity. That would be rude. Instead, the fly fisher may refer to the hunter who stalks the deer instead of going to the supermarket to buy their meat or the bird watcher in the woods who would rather seek and wait for the view than go to the aviary at the zoo and stare. We feel it is important to stand in the river, the fishes domain, to hunt it. That is why we are considered snobs. I will take that as a compliment, thank you. The steelhead deserve nothing less.

The Nehalem River runs in a rough loop south to north to west in Oregon until it meets the Pacific Ocean near the Columbia River.  Profound and quixotic, the river runs for about 120 miles down the mountains towards the sea. Often swollen and petulant, sometimes calm and collected, its waters are the historic home of some of the best wild steelhead fishing in north America, or at least they were. The best runs which hide the elusive wild steelhead are mostly tough to get to and treacherous to wade into. 

Hooking into a wild steelhead is like grabbing a live electrical current on a lightning rod. There is a vibration, a tug, a feeling, a yank and then there is a special kind of madness: the blistering speed with which your line screams from your reel and the darting, pulling, spinning, dragging force of the powerful fish. A wild steelhead has the temper of a bull in a ring along with incredible strength and remarkable intelligence. The fish whom you fooled with an artificial fly is enraged. Under logs, around submerged boulders, down river, upriver, towards one bank and then the other the steelhead fights for its freedom. This battle can last ten minutes, twenty minutes. Mine lasted near half an hour. My guide calmly directed tactical battle instructions to me as I flailed through the treacherous dips and bouldered traps of the river: "Let him have the line. Work your way further out. He's gonna head for those rocks and break you off. Easy. Reel in. Now let him have the line again. Uh-oh. You okay there?"

When at last this great fish is exhausted, it drifts towards your net, into your hands, and settles, trying to regain its strength. This is when, all the while cradling this magnificent creature gently, you remove your barbless hook, hold the fish's head pointing upstream and let is sit quietly in the water. After a minute or two, the fish will let you know it is ready to be freed. You dip your net deeper into the water, you slowly take away your cradled hand and you say, either out loud or to yourself: "Thank you, wild steelhead for this encounter. I wish you many more days in the river before your time comes." Then you watch the glory of silver, red, speckled, or banded gold swim away, it's always open eye already looking into the deeper parts of the river where it will now go.

On that day I was so exalted from my victory I decided to go further upriver in a wild-eyed quest to seek another steelhead encounter: hubris, pride, arrogance, ego flowed through my veins as I stood high above another section of the river like a triumphant god, staring down at possibilities. A steep, muddy slope of ferns, trees, and various obstacles. A boulder strewn bank, giant slick bowling balls of dampness. A wide and strong current, various shades of green to black: pea, emerald, luminous, murky, greying and finally deep pocketed darkness. Then a step, a slide, a bracing of hands and balancing of rod. Tipping this way and that. Digging in of heel and toe. Gloved hand gripping mud and flora. A move to the left, a shift to the right, standing slide, sitting slips, then...

The drop.

An instant, and yet an eternity of falling. An audible crunch, and then stillness. It turns out the crunch was both vertical bones that once comprised my left ankle.

As I lay there below that fateful boulder, booted feet in the water, I thought about the strange and ethereal color of a wild steelhead's sides and wondered about that incredible beauty. Then I thought about the piercing pain in my left ankle and stole a look in that direction. Bent off weirdly at an angle, my left foot was partially submerged. I think the icy water eased the agony a bit. However, the teeth-rattling shock of pain that fired up my body and out the top of my head into the sky is something I won't ever forget.

I cannot make sense of my love for these fish and my longing to torture them. The arguments that engulf the act of fly fishing are well-known to me and other fly fishers. Those of us in the "catch and release" and "keep 'em wet" camp imagine ourselves more evolved. We never kill a fish. We always let them go and do our utmost to treat them with care and kindness. We have even come to the point where we scold others for the unfortunate "grip and grin" habit of lifting a fish out of the net and taking a selfie with them. We think that is vanity and unnecessary. We say, "Leave it in the net and in the water, bend your face down close to the fish, take your stupid picture and then let it go." We think we are morally superior. This after we have also dragged the unfortunate creature from its natural habitat in a struggle of great violence and desperation. Who are we kidding? The act of fly fishing is an act of moral arrogance: I tie the artificial fly which deceives the fish which bites the hook which leads to the battle which results in the strange exultation we crave. Then we let the exhausted and terrorized fish go and think: "See, I am one with nature because I did not kill this beautiful fish." A bizarre maelstrom of denial upon argument upon accusation upon self-righteousness.  Of course, these absurd debates occur in my own mind as I carefully lift my steelhead out of the water for my own hypocritically embarrassing "grip and grin".  As I gently return him to the water, I can feel the pulse of power in his body: experience, resilience, instinct, stamina, will.  Perhaps a few drops of these qualities will make their way into me somehow.

Looking back now on that fateful day when my winter steelheading adventures came to an abrupt and painful end, I feel a mix of fond memory and a bit of awe that I was so undaunted in my quest to wrestle a steelhead that neither storm, distance, danger nor great risk could deter me. Who was that man? These days it is mellower, slower, shallower waters that you will find me in. I still use a double-handed rod, I still work a run the same way, still savor the gift of being out there with the trout and the river. A tug or a bite from a rainbow or brown does not have the same charge as a steelhead strike, but it still satisfies. 

Still, I dream of his eye: knowing, sage, wise and wild I see it ever. In that eye, ten million years of seeing the watery parts of the world. What does he know? Is he still out there, roaming the ocean and swimming ever towards whatever fate awaits him? Is he back in the river, seeking to spawn one more time before his time is over? Has he been caught again? I hope not. I like to think he and I were fated to meet that day, my only steelhead and his only human being. We taught each other something and learned many things through the battle. Perhaps he will examine things with more scrutiny, bordering on the cynical. That is what experience can do. Maybe his encounter with me will increase his caution, his awareness that there is yet another force trying to stop him from existing. 

When spring comes, and I am shin deep the clear shallow riffle of an older gentleman's more civilized trout run, my thoughts will once again turn towards that great, steely fish. Ahab-like I will contemplate the singular relationship we once had. If I feel a slight twinge in my semi-metallic ankle, I will smile and think: "You gave me no peg leg, but surely a war wound. Well done, my friend." Soon I will leave fly fishing behind for good. I will snag my final trout, watch it swim away after releasing hook and net and saying thanks. At my age now even the kindest streams are beginning to whisper warnings to my unsteady feet. No matter. I have the memory this day to reflect on.

O fish of majesty and wonder hear my song;

Upon your battled flanks the story told

Enigma of oceans, ghost of rivers long

House of stone and water never old

Who am I to stand among your kind?

Sanctified by wind and rain today

Seeking here that which I hope to find

Nature's panorama soft array

Line and lure a message then to all:

I must command this moment, yea, I must

For I will wither sure as autumn falls

My ridiculous rod will surely turn to dust

After the battle we become one thing

A pilgrim and his god communioning

Baptized we bid each other unsaid sounds

Until what is lost becomes what is found

The Is-ness of things

Walking up a trail in the Tiger Mountain state forest near my home, I came upon a lovely waterfall. According to the conveniently posted information sign, the canyon created by the water was considered a "young" one. The fall is steep, rocky and rugged. The sign went to explain that in a "few million years" the area would be transformed into a much wider, flatter and meandering waterway. A few million years.

I took in the aggressive landscape: downed trees, jagged stone, the flotsam of seemingly random flora and the jigsaw-ness of it all. Time, nature and the laws of physics created this fascinating feature. I wondered about the millions of little forces that were brought to bear in the making of this scene: rain, wind, cold, heat, gravity, leverage, the pushes and the pulls.  So random, as the kids say. Or was it? Each little influence came from a previous influence, and a previous and a previous, back to the big bang or the prime mover or Shiva's toss.

Finally, I settled on what I believed to be the message of what I was witnessing. It just IS. It is there. I cares not about who it pleases, who it punishes, who it affects.  The only thing that mattered in that moment of revelation was what my own response was. Was I someone who wanted to turn it into a freeway, a logging resource, a park, a preserve, a Starbucks? It didn't know. It didn't care. However whomever came across it were to react, it would either continue to be, be altered or even vanish forever. It either IS or it ISN'T. Or it becomes something else which in turn, IS.

The world, the universe and I simply ARE.

I am the one who ponders this and considers "purpose" and "meaning." 

Often I try to emulate and understand the teaching of the waterfall: to just BE.

When I can get to that state, I feel a profound sense of connection and belonging that puts all my human needs, wants and desires in perspective. I know I'll be back to listen to the lessons of the waterfall again and again, as long as we both ARE.

As...

As he who wandered home to Ithaca

As he who home through Dublin

As they who wait and wait and wander on to no where

As she who wanders still in heather and in snow

As he who raged into the deep against the wandering whale

As those did wander in the desert slouching all the years

As he who wandered golden helmed from Mandrino

As he who wandered past the western gate aback an ox

As she who wandered from the Moorish wall all yes and yes

As all those figures gone before and evermore

All wandering on the ramparts bitter cold and sick at heart

List! List! O List!

Thus, I my wandering begins.

Leon, Spain

Before the town wakes.

Yorgos Lanthimos Changes Everything in "The Favourite"

The way Lorgos Lanthimos envisions the nature of a dramatic scene is entirely unique and utterly connected to true life. Instead of the standard "rising action" model, where characters overtly escalate tension and conflict leading to a breaking point, Lanthimos has his characters withhold much of what is going on with them; sort of a very slow, almost imperceptible boil until at the last moment, one character almost nonchalantly sticks a knife in the other character. Sometimes literally and metaphorically. If you've ever seen a horrible scene unfold before you in real life, you know that very often things seem very under control until suddenly, things get out of control. Often this occurs without warning.

Lanthimos creates relationships and worlds filled with real stakes, to be sure. In The Lobster, characters must either begin a meaningful relationship or choose an animal to become for the rest of their lives. In his new film The Favourite, the characters played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone vie for the favor of Olivia Colman's Queen Anne with their futures at stake.

There is an intriguing social critique at work in both films that suggests the things we fight for or fight our way out of are far beyond our own control, and are the result of some strange cosmic absurdity on the scale of Samuel Beckett. Nevertheless, the characters in his films struggle, and struggle mightily. Yet the tone he sets is one of discomfort and impending doom, with an avoidance of revealing emotional indications on the part of the characters that we are so used to. This restraint makes Lanthimos' story structure astonishingly dramatic and tension filled in a completely unique manner.

Whimsy also plays a part in the worlds Lanthimos creates. Manners, behaviors and societal rituals are turned into hilarious, sometimes grotesque displays of human excess and vanity. This touch enhances the sense that the world we strive so hard in is often childish, clownish and even depraved. Watch the scene with the oranges and the naked man in The Favourite to experience this touch.

It takes a particularly disciplined actor to work in Lanthimos' worlds: one must find a way to carry the inner yearnings of the character while at the same time appearing to toss away any overt need. Weisz and Stone do this with great detail and depth, as the volatility of Coleman's Queen Anne puts both of them at risk at every moment. Playing it cool has never been this good.

Cinematically, Lanthimos' breaks new ground by employing extreme wide angle lenses that give the audience a literal "fish eyed" view of the world of The Favourite. The ornate palace rooms are captured as sprawling, distorted landscapes in which our characters to and fro in a strange, balletic manner. Lanthimos was involved in experimental and physical theatre early in his career, and his ability to choreograph actors bodies in space and time adds a deft layer of tension to the film as well. 

Without special effects or CGI / digital excess, Yorgos Lanthimos changes everything. He reminds us that the cinema is a young medium that is still evolving and ripe with possibility.

The Stage and the Soapbox

The plays we have held as classics have one thing in common: the theatre as a metaphor. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Carol Churchill and beyond, great playwrights have understood that the power of theatre lies in the imaginative. A few people on stage, an artificial world, language and story all wrapped in a larger metaphor of human experience. Even Brecht, with his alienations and direct political messages still used metaphor: the chalk circle, the city of Mahagonny, etc.

What happened?

Most of the time when I attend the theatre these days, which I admit is not often, I am usually blasted with a polemic, didactic and rather obvious set of statements couched as theatre.

Identity politics drama and social issue plays are actually extended blog posts (like this one) intended to convince of something I already understand: racism, sexism, intolerance are bad.

I get it. Do you have anything original in mind?

Also, it seems like the audiences at these shows are the sung to choir of the cliché. They nod knowingly and embrace the stuff going with a strange sort of "we are with you, we get it" cultism.

Don't get me wrong: I'm about as leftist as they come, somewhere just to this side of Ché Guevara on many issues. However, the liberal soapbox that is the typical stage event makes me embarrassed to be a liberal.

Do the artists putting on the play, which is expensive, difficult, laborious and unprofitable not realize they are speaking to an ever shrinking club of enablers? There is no one's mind out there in the audience that needs changing. It's all your friends, Facebook and actual, who are egging you on. You are hollering into an echo chamber.

Where are the playwrights exploring worlds that provoke my imagination? Where is the stagecraft that transforms a simple setting into a universal symbol? Where are the stories that touch my deep human need for myth, fable, folktale? Also, why are you yelling at me?

If the theatre continues this slide towards becoming a very small soapbox, it should come as no surprise that most people have no use for it. Netflix is so much better and a lot less expensive.

Theatre has always had a special set of elements that make it a unique art form: a live event where imaginative forces touch on powerful themes through language and images that can only occur in real time.

I'm still seeking that kind of theatre, but I seem to mostly find reductive, badly staged, predictable and polemical theatre in my home town of Seattle.

Waiting for Godot is a pretty good play. It's two guys and a tree. It's also a powerful metaphor for the human experience.

I wish more theatre makers appreciated that. 

The Studio Seattle

After decades as a professional director of television and theatre and university professor of drama, I am now embarking on a new venture.

The Studio Seattle is a place where actors can go deeper, challenge themselves, explore more and improve their craft with a focus on getting actors ready for the real profession.

There is a vibrant and dynamic acting community in Seattle, but there is a dearth of instruction from teachers who have actually worked at a national level. I'm talking prime time television and nationally ranked professional theaters along with top-ranked MFA actor training programs.

I've been there. I know what it takes. 

If you are interested in taking your craft to the next level, check out The Studio Seattle's workshops and classes. And yes, I have a blog there about acting, too.

Because there is no substitute for real experience.

We all live in Plato’s cave now

Recall that in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners are shown shadows on the wall created by firelight and diffuse sunlight. These shadows are created by those who aim to distract and deceive. After a time, the prisoners accept that the images on the wall are reality itself.

Indeed, should one of the prisoners be freed and led into the true light of day above, they would be painfully blinded by the sun and desire to immediately return to the familiarity of the cave.

It doesn’t take much to see ourselves as those prisoners, gazing intently as we do at our mobile phones, tablets and computer screens, Facebooks, Twitters and Instagrams. It doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to envision outselves as gaping cave dwellers as we switch from FOX to CNN to MSNBC to SNL to Oprah to HBO to NETFLIX and back again.

Our reality is the reality we consume for most of our waking life. It is a manufactured reality in the age of convergence where fiction, fact, fake news, entertainment, headlines, commercials, causes, spin and ratings all blur into one great miasma of non-stop images and sounds.

For me the most important aspect of Plato’s allegory is the notion that the prisoners actually prefer the shadows on the wall to reality. It is far less painful and far more entertaining.

What then should those of us do that are willing to endure the harsh sunlight in order to better ourselves in the long run? We will have to engage the parts of our minds that have been atrophied over time and by those who prefer we not think too much.

Critical thinking. Slow thinking. Dialectical reasoning. Semiotics: understanding the difference between a Sign and The Thing Itself. Recognizing who and what is to gain when a new shadow is presented to us in the cave. Seeking elusive objectivity. Resisting the urge to seek the lowest common denominator. Embracing complexity. Living with uncertainty and doubt. Denying extremism and polarization. Exalting learning. Valuing intelligence. Knowing reason.

These once lauded attributes are becoming rarities in the 21st century as more and more of our reality becomes digitized, pixelated, commercialized and profitized. I can attest to being a first hand witness to the extinction of whole mind thinking. For 12 years I taught in higher education as a tenured professor who always endeavored to inform every subject I presented to students with a caveat: develop the tools so that you can make up your own mind. In order to do that, develop a mind first. Learn how to think critically. Most of my students simply wanted to know what was on the test and how the material being presented would help them since employers never listed having a whole mind as a job requirement.

Thankfully, a small percentage of my students came to believe that thinking critically was important. Perhaps one day they will come and lead us out of the cave and into the sunlight. If it hurts too much and we need to crawl back inside, we can always return to our virtual reality and lose ourselves by spending too much time writing and reading articles online.

Fast Food May Days

 

On May 1 2018 some people decided to petrol bomb a McDonald’s in eastern Paris.

It was the 50th anniversary of the famous student May Day riots of 1968, which was a turning point for French cultural, political and economic thinking. The May Day events of 1968 were begun by students. Workers, unions and their supporters joined. President Charles De Gaulle fled the country, and when he returned he dissolved parliament and called for new elections.

It’s hard to say who burnt the McDonald’s. They wore masks and are called the “black bloc” by authorities. It’s doubftul students were involved, because most of them really like McDonald’s. Same with workers and union types. They eat at McDonald’s often.

The Paris riots were a level up in violence from May Day demonstrations past and those that took place in other parts of the world.

Why is the “black bloc” so angry at McDonald’s?

There is the symbolism of attacking a global capitalist enterprise that pays low wages and has no regard for the health, safety, culture or well being of the countries in which it chooses to open stores.

There is the resistance to the seemingly inevitable corporatization of the globe, where sameness and lowest common denominator goods, products and services come with a heavy dose of crassness and shallow profiteering.

There is the highlighting of the wage gap and working conditions of poor workers who increasingly feel like lifelong serfs.

However, the so-called “black bloc” seems to be less concerned with messaging and more interested in provocation. That’s what you do when you are an anarchist. You don’t actually want to promote anything, you just feel a deep passion for tearing things down.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the poor of the world need events like May Day to remind us all that poverty, disaffection and dissilussionment are very real. Curiously, a watershed work on global poverty by Bourguignon and Morrison proposes that fewer people on earth live in “extreme poverty” than ever before in human history.

(Our World in Data: Global Extreme Povery by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

Perhaps the May Days of out time are not about highlighting, resistance or symbolism. Perhaps they are about visibility. Perhaps they are about the deep human need to be acknowledged as existing. Perhaps the target of the petrol bombers on May 1 2018 was the singular, greedy eye of the a corporate cyclops, who obsessively counts its sheep and guards its cave with covetousness. Perhaps the petrol bombing was a kind of heated stake driven into the eye of this global cyclops. An act of literally “sticking it to The Man.”

As Norman Mailer wrote in his 1974 Esquire article on the graffitti phenomenon: “Perhaps that is the unheard echo of graffitti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apolcalypse less and less far away.”

(Test Pressing; Esquire magazine, March 1974 http://testpressing.org/2012/06/esquire-the-faith-of-graffiti-norman-mailer/ )

Did you know that the French name for the Big Mac is “Le Royal”? Did you know that the first two names McDonald’s tested for the Big Mac were “The Aristocrat” and “The Blue Ribbon Burger”?

Vive la revolution and one Happy Meal, please.