Kit Stolz

Why gay men like Marilyn Monroe: Caitlin Flanagan

Caitlin Flanagan, the writer, has a lot of nerve, and the arrogance can grate on a reader. (And maybe grated on her editors at The New Yorker too, which might explain why she's not there anymore.) A writer who reviewed her most recent book went on air with her and Tom Ashbrook a year ago and wrote eloquently in Salon about "creepy condescension" of Flanagan, not to mention her "Michele Bachmann-esque disregard for the facts."

Yet and still, Flanagan can hit a nerve. Be curious to hear what others think of this recent idea of hers, in a review of a couple of recent biographies in the Atlantic, that the legend of Marilyn Monroe was more or less the product of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's 70's classic pop song Candle in the Wind. (Which is when Monroe became a star for my generation, really, before the over-the-top Norman Mailer hagiography, the picture books, the unpublished nudes, etc.)

To wit:

The song evokes a particular emotional state, one familiar to readers
of, say, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. It celebrates the aching
ardor that a certain kind of gay man can feel for a beautiful, tortured
woman, whose plight is to be dependent sexually and emotionally upon the
often brutal and brutalizing force of straight-male lust. The song has a
coherent inner logic, even if it doesn’t match up with the facts of
Marilyn Monroe’s life. Nobody else set her on a treadmill, and nobody
else created the superstar she became; full credit for both achievements
goes, deservedly, to Marilyn, who worked as hard for fame as anyone
who’s ever achieved it. But it’s the suffering itself that matters; it’s
the idea of some shadowy malevolent force sending a delicate soul on a
dark journey that was the appeal of the song and that was the true birth
of Marilyn Monroe as one of the greatest Hollywood stars of all time.

Swept away by this idea, I start to imagine (if Monroe had not died young) a somewhat older and harder-working actress taking the stage in "A Streetcar named Desire," bringing her beauty and her suffering to the role of Blanche DuBois. An appealing thought, no? And allegedly Williams himself saw her in the role of Baby Doll, so not completely crazy. But Tennessee set me right, in a harsh appraisal:

I
wanted to love Marilyn: I fall for myths, too. She was fragile and she
was beautiful and she was silly. She was the lost kitten in the rain, or
the kittens who were born on Carson McCullers' bed in Nantucket–you
wonder who will take care of them, because you know that you cannot, and
you cry like the child you were who saw the dog run over and the town
move on, uncaring and serious about getting their needs attended.

Marilyn
was also annoying and cloying and demanding. She knew her power and she
abused it, but in the demonstration of it she degraded herself and she
knew this, so the spiral of destruction deepened and intensified. Do not
think for a moment that I do not see this in my own behavior and that
of others: I am only offering a sobering lesson.

But maybe it's that "sobering" — like the harsh glare of a white spot light on a black stage — that gives Monroe her power. Without the suffering, what is the point of her beauty? Just another dumb blonde.

Norma Jean in Griffith Park, before she became famous, from a Time collection.

Katrina-sized hurricanes much more likely in 21st century

Kerry Emmanuel, one of the most prominent of researchers into the connection between climate change and hurricanes, edited a just-released study of hurricanes in PNAS that looks at hurricane magnitude and risk in a new way, by storm surge instead of wind speed or reported damaged, and finds that "Statisically downscaling 21st century warming patterns from six climate models results in a twofold to sevenfold increase in the frequency of Katrina magnitude events for a 1 degree Celsius rise in global temperature."

It's a complicated study, that looks at various measures of "skill" relating to hurricanes, including teleconnections such as ENSO, but concludes that "With a few notable exceptions, global average surface temperature is a better predictor of Atlantic cyclone activity (as measured by the surge index) than grid cell temperatures from almost anywhere else on Earth."

Most alarming:

The response to a 1 degree Celsius warming is consistently an increase by a factor of 2-7. [] All tests indicate confidence in the factor 2-7 increase in the number of Katrina magnitude surges for each degree of global warming. This increase does not include the additional increasing surge threat from sea level rise.

The study concludes by saying, in effect, we have crossed the climate Rubicon:

We find that .4 degree Celsius global average warming results in a halving of the return period of Katrina magnitude events. This is less than the warming over the 20th century. Therefore, we have probably crossed the threshold where Katrina magnitude surges are more likely caused by global warming than not.

The study, by Grinsted et al, also mentions the previous questions that arose regarding global warming and hurricanes, in particular the possibility that even if physics tells us that a warming world will produce stronger tropical cyclones, that increased wind shear might mean fewer hurricanes, period.

But the projections don't bear that theory out.

Quite the contrary. The denier crowd tries to wave it off here.

What to do about cigarettes, and why: Mayor Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg thinks cigarettes are bad for you and should be kept out of sight, like porn:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, fresh off a defeat in his campaign to limit large servings of sugary drinks, proposed legislation Monday requiring stores to put cigarettes out of public sight and to increase penalties on the smuggling and illegal sales of cigarettes.

Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference that the proposal would make New York the first city in the nation to keep tobacco products out of sight. He said smoking remained a leading cause of preventable death, killing 7,000 New Yorkers a year.

As an ex-smoker, I enthusiastically endorse Bloomberg's condemnation of nicotine-delivery systems. As an example why, here's a dismayingly great (and alarmingly painful) essay about loving your dad, a smoker:

We pleaded with him, of course, to treat himself better – though always
with trepidation, since the subject annoyed him and, if pressed, could
send him into a rage. Most of the time we did not even get to the
subject, he was so adept at heading it off with a joke: when a man who
is quite visibly at risk of heart attack, stroke and cancer crushes out
what is left of a six-inch mentholated cigarette before getting to work
on a lethal fried meal ("a hearty repast" as he would have called it),
clinks his knife and fork together, winks at you, and says, with a
brogue, "Heart smart!" you are disarmed.

From a memoir by John Jeremiah Sullivan, in The Guardian.

It's important to point out that Bloomberg's "nanny state" measures have effectively reduced smoking in New York City, saving many lives and much money. From the New York Times story today:

Unlike some other changes whose effect has so far been uncertain, like the ban on artificial trans fats and the posting of calorie counts in restaurants, the consequences of the smoking limits seem fairly clear-cut.

The adult smoking rate dropped to 14.8 percent in 2011 from 21.5 percent
in 2002, at the beginning of the Bloomberg administration, Dr. Thomas
Farley, the city’s health commissioner, said Monday. The drop was
particularly steep among young adults, which suggested, experts said,
that they were not picking up the habit in the first place.

And here's someone who cares not a whit about your health, from her talk at CPAC:

Is it just me, or does touting a Big Gulp make Sarah Palin look really stupid?

When the L.A. River (and Sisar Creek) ran wild

This month in this part of Southern California, we've had a lowly 36% of average rainfall (although precipitation in this region of the world is so variable that "average" is more of a mathematical construct than a reality to be relied on). Still, we've had about five inches of rain, roughly half of what it takes to get our local stream running. So it makes me wistful to come across this story in Los Angeles Magazine blog CityDig, about the Los Angeles River, which once upon a time really was a river…believe it or not.

From historian Nathan Masters:

"Imagine the Los Angeles River before its metamorphosis into a concrete flood control channel, and Mark Twain’s quip about falling into a California river and coming out “all dusty” might come to mind. But the historical record, including photos like the one above, paints a much different picture.

Before human civilization transformed it, the L.A. River flowed in some places through grassy oak woodland. In others it coursed through a dense forest of willows, cottonwoods, and sycamores. Steelhead trout swam through its currents, antelope and deer paused at its banks to drink, and grizzly bears ambled into its waters for food.

After a winter storm, the tame stream became a whitecapped fury. In the parched summer months, the river plunged below the surface where it encountered the porous soil of the Los Angeles Basin. But at the Glendale Narrows, shallow bedrock forced the stream aboveground, guaranteeing a year-round flow. In other places, where the parking lots of Beverly Hills, Compton, and Hollywood bake in the sun today, groundwater hydrology conspired with seasonal flooding to create a vast system of marshes, ponds, and other wetlands teeming with plant and animal life.

For centuries, the Los Angeles River also sustained human life in the area. As Blake Gumprecht explains in his masterful history, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth, Gabrieleño (Tongva) Indians collected tule from its banks to thatch their huts, and later the Spanish agricultural village of Los Angeles built a system of ditches (zanjas) to irrigate its fields.

In the photo above, circa 1900, the man in the bowler cap works a sluice gate for the city’s Canal and Reservoir system. One of many systems that diverted water from the river for industrial, agricultural, and household uses, the one pictured here took water from a point north of Griffith Park, through the hills of the present-day Silver Lake district, and into a reservoir that eventually became—in shrunken form—Echo Park Lake."

Downtown Los Angeles is located where it is because that's where the river ran, just as in our neck of the woods in Upper Ojai, the Chumash had a trading post on a local stream. When the waters ran wild…

Nathan Masters of the USC Libraries blogs here on behalf of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, cultural institutions, official archives, and private collectors hosted by the USC Libraries and dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden histories of Los Angeles.

Editorial ‘toons w/facts: illographix from Brodner and Rall

The marvelously talented Steve Brodner, nominated for a prize by the design community, says he is pioneering a semi-new kind of drawing, the "illographix," which involves graphing and charting as well as illustration. Here's one example, worked out with two notables editors, and submitted for a prize:

Not sure how new this concept really is. After all, Ted Rall often draws cartoons based on shocking facts. Here's his latest:

Rall also has a spectacularly informative talk/essay (for SWSX Interactive) on the facts of political cartooning in the age of the Internet…and a solution for content providers and papers!

Why Obama should ask a farmer to lead on climate change

The acerbic Timothy Egan of the NYTimes has an interesting idea, re: the politics of climate change:

It’s one thing to persuade hipsters in Portland, Ore., or Brooklyn to grow organic — hey, how cool is an artisan radish — in their rooftop gardens. It’s a much tougher push to get Big Ag, made up mostly of stubborn older men, to change its ways [re: climate, especially since it may be costly].

But imagine if a farmer led the cause against climate change. Franklin Roosevelt chose Hugh Bennett, a son of the North Carolina soil, to rally Americans against the abusive farming practices that led to the Dust Bowl. Big Hugh was blunt, smart and convincing. “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people,” he said, without apology.

Egan goes on to highlight Oklahoma rancher Clay Pope, who in a YouTube plea to the president points out that FDR took on the Dust Bowl in his l938 State of the Union address. FDR warned that farmers did not have an inherent right to devastate the future by mismanaging their lands. Pope sees the same lesson today.

"It's not our inherent right to burn up our natural resources while altering the very climate that allows our civilization to thrive," Pope points out.

So encouraging to hear such good sense from a man of the land.

Speaking of climate change and ag, here's a graph of the risks seen in this state, from "Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change in California Agriculture," a report put out last year by Louise Jackson et al of UC Davis.

Report finds that the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the Salinas Valley, the corridor between Merced and Fresno, and the Imperial Valley were at greatest risk in California.

Could climate change explain good spring job numbers?

David Drayen thinks out loud:

…experienced jobs-report watchers have noticed an odd trend over
the past several years, one that could temper optimism over the
positive indicators for February. Since the start of the recovery in
early 2010, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] reports have shown solid growth numbers in the
winter and early spring, followed by a slowdown later in the year. A
look at the monthly numbers
reveals the pattern. Last year, the two months with the highest
increases came in January (311,000 jobs) and February (271,000). In
2011, the February and March numbers were high, cresting in April
(304,000) before coming back down to earth. The February 2013 numbers
follow a similar trajectory. Of the five highest recorded monthly jobs
numbers since 2010, three of them fall in a January or February, with
the others in November 2012 and April 2011. Economists like Jared
Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have taken notice of this trend, calling it an "anomalous up-and-down cycle."

This
isn't supposed to happen. In fact, the BLS tries hard to account for
seasonal factors. The jobs numbers you see every month do not actually
reflect the raw amount of hiring and firing in the economy, which is quite volatile
for a number of reasons (more on them in a moment). The BLS employs a
"seasonal adjustment" mechanism to smooth out these factors, and provide
a better representation of the underlying macroeconomic trends. This
helps policymakers understand what’s really happening in the economy, so
they can set policies accordingly. As the BLS indicates on its website,
"accurate seasonal adjustment is an important component in the
usefulness of these monthly data." But what if the BLS' seasonal
adjustment isn't working as well anymore, and the resulting numbers
consistently show relatively good winters for jobs, and subsequently
more tepid summers? There's one explanation for why this may be
happening that could surprise you: climate change.

It's too soon to know for sure, but it's not too soon to speculate:

Climate scientists have spent years warning of changes in the
seasons due to anthropogenic climate change. It may no longer be
accurate to refer to higher temperatures in January and February as
indicative of an "unusually mild" winter. This is gradually becoming the
new normal, with implications for agriculture and marine biology and a
whole host of environmental issues.

A good "what if" story from the (genuinely) new and improved New Republic.

The Sierra Club High Trips and why women liked them

In the High Trips, for about thirty years at the start of the 20th century, the Sierra Club as a mountaineering club peaked, surely. On those brilliantly organized journeys, as many as 200 people at time went into the High Sierras, having committed to a walk of a minimum of two hundred miles, over several weeks of hiking. Though the club's founder John Muir was too old and too busy battling the Hetch-Hetch Dam to go, he greatly encouraged these trips, and they were led by the likes of Norman Clyde and David Brower, with great campfire talks and performances as well as great mountains.

This was a highly evolved society, divided (roughly) into "mountaineers." of the likes of Muir and Brower and Clyde, and "meadoweers" who didn't care for the heights. (Likely I would have been one of the latter number, had I been so fortunate to have been present on the trip.)

When I talked to Brower on this and other topics, a few years ago, he bemoaned the fact that the National Park Service will no longer approve long trips for Sierra Club backpacking groups. The limit (in the Sierra, at least) today is about eight days.

In his gentle but insistent way, Brower argued that the transformative power of the wilderness is lost if it is restricted to a handful of days.

True, and perhaps the time has come to remember those extraordinary trips, before everyone alive who remembers them has passed away…for one, the camp photographers included Cedric Wright and Ansel Adams! Here's my fav pic from their 1929 efforts, by Wright, showing a High Trips expedition summiting at Mount Resplendent:

[Sorry about the angle: comes directly from the hand set Bulletin (pdf).]

These High Trips were for the elite of the Sierra Club, and set out to attract intrepid women, and succeeded (although the trips were predominantly male, the women who did go were as adventurous as any man).

In her gender study of women in the wilderness, "Nature's Altars," Susan Schrepfer finds some interesting examples of women who were drawn to the wilderness because it gave both them and their mates a chance to shed their gender roles. That was part of the idea of the High Trips, that women weren't the domestic slaves. Wasn't easy on these trips, but after a day of mountaineering, a woman didn't have to do the dishes too.

The club secretary, William Colby, made this clear in a letter to applicants to the High Trips:

The irksome duties of cooking, dishwashing, and provisioning will be turned over entirely to a commissary department. All transportation of outfits, etc., will be attended to by a committee, such relieving the party of all drudgery and leaving their time entirely free for the enjoyment of scenery and mountain life. The trip will be particularly attractive for women, and every effort made to secure comfort usually lacking in excursions to the high mountains.

Isn't that a dream? "To relieve the party of all drudgery."

Only in California…

A pilgrimage to the snow on the mountain: 2013

Every year for the past fifteen or so I've walked up our local mountains, called Topa Topa, during the snows. This year, as you can see, we've had only dustings…

…but still, I was not alone. Saw nearly two dozen fellow travelers, from age one or so to seventy, in all shapes and sizes, with dogs and alone, in large groups, or alone, outfitted immaculately, or in sneakers and t-shirts. Most heading up to the ridge, at about 5000 feet, where the snow lay a little more thickly.

A sort of pilgamage to winter. Sensed a little excitement around the rarity of the snow this year, now that it did come, at least a little. How reassuring to see the patches of white, feel that cold wind blow.

Was a lovely day, sunny but cool, with lots of smiles. Some kid on the trail called me "sir" and actually appeared to mean it. Holy cow.

Be true to your depression: James Hillman

The late great Jungian analyst James Hillman, on depression. Christian myth, the soul, and the path depression offers to those who experience it.

From his compilation A Blue Fire:

"Depression. Because Christ resurrects, moments of despair, darkening, and desertion cannot be valid in themselves. Our one model insists on light at the end of the tunnel; one program that moves from Thursday evening to Sunday and the rising of a wholly new day better by far than before. Not only will therapy more or less consciously imitate this program (in ways ranging from hopeful positive counseling to electroshock), but the individual's consciousness is already allegorized by the Christian myth and so he knows what depression is and experiences it according to form. It must be necessary (for it appears in the crucifixion), and it must be suffering; but staying depressed must be negative, since in the Christian allegory Friday is never valid per se, for Sunday — as in integral prt of the myth — is preexistent in Friday from the start.

[edit]

Depression is still the Great Enemy. More personal energy is expended in manic defenses against, diversions from, and denials of it than goes into other supposed psychopathological threats to society: psychopathic criminality, schizoid breakdown, addictions. As long as we are caught in cycles of hoping against despair, each productive of the other, as long as our actions in regard to depression are resurrective, implying that being down and staying down is sin, we remain Christian in psychology.

Yet through depression we enter depths and in depth find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul."

If this is a path, it's pretty clear why it's not often taken. I always sensed there was some reason I didn't like the Christian allegory. Never understood so clearly why before.

Or, as Robert Frost put it,

The best way out is always through.