I love learning about the law by eavesdropping on law students at coffee shops. I’m gonna pass the bar one of these days and then you’ll all be sorry.
Archive for ‘fief’
Dumbo: The subtext in that film is RICH.
It’s a fairy tale about modern labor relations, and the moral is “If you do a good job we will let your mom out of jail.” It was made during a vicious animator’s strike at Disney, which is why it’s short, and the people who finished the film were the ones who Disney didn’t fire for trying to unionize.
The clown scene in silhouette, where they’re drunk as skunks and talking about going to ask the boss for a raise, was animated by two union organizers who left immediately afterwards. It’s a rather pointed dialogue, if you notice.
The clown scene ends with the spilling of champagne in the water bucket, and this causes the Pink Elephant sequence. It ends with Dumbo up the tree, having flown for the first time. That is a shamanic journey, my friend. Not just for Dumbo, either, but for our whole society.
I’ll point out that LSD was actually invented in 1943, and Dumbo came out in 1941. This is a pre-LSD society that came up with Pink Elephants. That fact continually blows my mind.
People who dismiss the crows as racist caricatures are missing the fact that nearly every single character is black. The elephants are explicitly juxtaposed with the faceless black circus workers during the tent-raising scene, and it can’t be overlooked that Dumbo is an African elephant born to an Indian elephant. The animators who were still working at Disney were examining their perceptions of the black experience in America in the 1940s, comparing it to their own experience and the compromises that they were having to make to stay employed at Disney, and expressing it through one of the saddest and most harrowing tales about employment that America has ever produced.
By the end of the film, Dumbo has given up. He will never be free. He tried on a number of identities, including the alcoholic and the clown, and none of them were functional. The crows have taught him how to fly, but he does not use that to escape. Instead, he stays at the circus, and trades his labor for his mother’s freedom.
It is presented as a happy ending.
I’d wager that the animators that stayed behind at Disney were, generally, the ones with families to support.
A few facts about Walt Disney:
1. He was from Kansas City, where he grew up very poor. It’s fair to surmise he knew a fair number of black people, though I don’t have any way to confirm that.
2. His father was a good-for-nothing socialist who would steal his own children’s money and had a fierce temper. (Just to be clear, I’m a socialist too, I’m not putting socialism down, I’m saying Elias Disney does not appear to have been a good father or a good provider but he appears to have been a real loudmouth socialist caricature). He was such a genius that he tried to make a living as an orange grower in western Kansas. Have you ever been to western Kansas? It wouldn’t take much sense to know that made no sense.
3. After Disney’s enormous success in the late 1930s, he bought his parents a house. The house had a gas leak and killed his mother almost immediately, in 1938. His father died shortly thereafter, during the production of Disney and the artist’s strike, in 1941.
It turns out that spindles aren’t sharp.
A spindle’s just a dull wooden rod that you twirl with your fingers as you spin. Back in the day, I’m conjecturing, it was a funny joke to compare the spindle a penis. That may be where the word “spinster” gets its start.
So when the audience of the day heard Sleeping Beauty, and heard about a spindle that drew blood, they were all like, oh I get it. Losing your virginity.
So I’ve been editing Harper’s Ferry for what, four months now? Because this is what it takes to properly edit a story. I see that now.
I started writing the story in April 2013 and I’d really like to be done by April 2015. I want to get back to War on Christmas, that story is important and I’ve been away too long.
But, seriously, thank God I spent the time to edit this thing right. I thought it would result in a 10% improvement. It resulted in a 100% improvement, and the knowledge that, if I edit it again, I can probably get another 50% out of it, or even more. The higher levels of synchronicity and historicity are only available to those who edit the fuck out of their shit, and if the dialogue improves as much from draft two to draft three as it did from one to two then I’m gonna be some sort of latter-day Shakespeare.
Reading a whole big chunk of the script out loud helped too. The dialogue in the first draft was SO BAD.
I’m working on #3 right now, “Farmers and Mechanics,” which is completely different from the rest of the story. It’s the chapter where Fatima is the main character, not JDB, and some very strange and unpleasant things happen as I attempt to look at the legal side of the American slave system. I’m trying to work a young Stagecoach Mary Fields into it right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Fields
Which should be interesting, because there are serious constraints. She would have been 27 at the time of the raid, a fiery age. But it was not a good time to be black and waving a gun around, so I really don’t know how she would have handled events. Oh well, interesting things for the author to think about usually translate into interesting things for the reader to read about.
I hit the mother lode:
http://medicolegal.tripod.com/weldslaveryasis.htm#tableofcontents
Here are all the atrocities of slavery that you could ever ask for. An author can just pick and choose to make any story more gross and horrible, or they can just read the whole thing and really depress themselves.
As an added bonus, it comes with the most bad-ass introduction of all time. Check this out:
The guilty, according to their own showing, are always innocent, and cowards brave, and drunkards sober, and harlots chaste, and pickpockets honest to a fault. Everybody understands this. When a man’s tongue grows thick, and he begins to hiccough and walk cross-leggcd, we expect him, as a matter of course, to protest that he is not drunk; so when a man is always singing the praises of his own honesty, we instinctively watch his movements and look out for our pocket-books. Whoever is simple enough to be hoaxed by such professions, should never be trusted in the streets without somebody to take care of him.
The man who robs you every day, is, forsooth, quite too tenderhearted ever to cuff or kick you! True, he can snatch your money, but he does it gently lest he should hurt you. He can empty your pockets without qualms, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick. He can make you work a life time without pay, but loves you too well to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with a relish, but is shocked if you work bareheaded in summer, or in winter without warm stockings. He can make you go without your liberty, but never without a shirt. He can crush, in you, all hope of bettering your condition, by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he can coolly torture your feelings, he is too compassionate to lacerate your backāhe can break your heart, but he is very tender of your skin.
We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse. “Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him; clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for him. Give him an hour to prepare his wife and children for a life of slavery. Bid him make haste and get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for the come chains, then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have nature’s testimony against slavery.
Good stuff! Quality sarcasm.
Celebrating seven years of conservative whining because the Democrats finally coughed up somebody who can play the game. Thanks, Obama. You’ve been the best politician of my life time. A halfway decent President, with some horrific exceptions, but if you’re going to dislike a President because of a few atrocities and a couple thousand corpses and some wrongly imprisoned people, well, you’re not going to like any Presidents.
Maybe Carter.
I had some very complicated ideas about the name for this story that have not quite panned out. So I decided to start misspelling it and such. That was the idea from the beginning, so it’s time to get around to it.
The name for the comic is a verbal joke, chosen because it’s a multi-directional pun and it’s a little but dumb and goofy sounding. The name of the comic has not yet appeared in the comic (the weird Tron world where the real Leda has been trapped is a fief of a larger kingdom that is much too hard to draw). I should really start dealing with this issue directly.
I’ve experienced two very real forms of loss lately that I don’t often think about. The first was the death of my dog, something that I’ve never had to deal with for a very long time. Losing a dog is not losing a cat and it is not like losing a human. It’s somewhere in the middle.
The second, as I mentioned, is losing our ancestral family home. My mother’s mother is moving out of her home, and our family’s home, of more than fifty years. It is a surprisingly heart-felt loss for me, as I lived here for five years and visited at every opportunity for my entire life. I feel like I am losing a symbolic connection to many, many people who I loved very much. Even though they are gone, this house kept the memory of them alive for me.
I’ve always been close to my grandparents, all four of them. My mother’s father, my good friend through childhood, passed away in 1990. The other three all lived up here and from 1995 to 2000 I was with them nearly every day. That might seem odd for a guy in his early 20s, and it was. It was odd. I was an odd kid. And I didn’t appreciate them — I lashed out that them, criticized them ceaselessly both behind their backs and to their faces, yawned and yelled and somehow still kept coming around. I can see now why; because I loved them. Maybe I loved my grandma, my mom’s mom, the best. She’s the one who lives here, she’s the one I lived with. It began with her indulging me anything because she was my grandmother, but it ended with me growing up enough for us to become real friends. And I’ve always visited, over and over, outstaying my welcome every single time but never hearing a word of complaint. And I was an expensive guest, especially at the beginning. I ate what I was paying her for rent in the average day, not even counting my callous wear and tear on the house. I was hell on this house. But hey, I was young. I respect my grandma for being crazy enough to let somebody like me into her home.
Part of the trouble that I’m having in letting this house go is what it represented to me. The time when I lived here, the middle of the 1990s, was easily the most affluent and opportunity-filled time of my life. I’ve never earned anywhere near the money I did when I was 20 years old, and I’ve never had anywhere near the career opportunities that I did when I was young, at loose ends, and living five miles from New York City. It was here that I lived when I was working at Marvel, at Acclaim, on indy movies in Greenwich Village. I lived here when I was a film major, when I took my first steps into the world of comics, when I was a young secretary at a major national camera company. I started learning to draw here. I lost my virginity in this house.
I don’t want to romanticize those days too much. I was a dateless loser, a miserable manchild, and I wasted all the money I made on freakin’ Warhammer miniatures, of all things. I wasn’t even cool enough to waste it on drugs. Except for alcohol; this was the only place where I ever approached a drinking problem. I moved out of New Jersey because this state made me utterly miserable and that hasn’t changed. New Jersey was not a good place for me to live.
But good lord did I love this house.
And I loved being young and rich. I’ve spent the last twenty years chasing the opportunities that I threw away then. I had exactly what I wanted, what I’ve always wanted, but I wasn’t the right person to hold on to it. Now that I’m the right person, now that I need those opportunities, now that my economic situation is no longer a game, I can’t seem to find my way back.
Maybe realizing that is part of letting go, or maybe realizing that is part of winning through. I don’t know, though I know what I’m going to do.
I had to go back to Austin, but this two weeks here were two of the best weeks. This was the first time that I really felt aware of what I truly had. I was glad that I had even that bit of time. Plus it means so much to return here, to the site of my greatest mistakes, with my beautiful wife and my beautiful child. To present my beautiful child to this home, to say, look, see, it’s alright now. It took a while, but it’s alright now. I know I scared you, and I know I let you down. But I did it. I survived. And it’s thanks to you.
So, thank you.
The house is strange and things are missing and nothing is quite right. My grandma is moving out of the ancestral Davidson home and it hurts.
The clock is off the mantel, my great-grandfather’s sculling oar from Cambridge is gone. The rooms are all oddly empty. It echoes oddly.
If it wasn’t for Amelia this would be unbearably sad. She’s reminding us that things are changing. It’s somebody else’s turn with this house now; their turn with this space. Honestly, since the house next door has sat empty for six months waiting for a buyer, and the house on the other side just sold after a struggle a year or two ago, I’m betting this will be apartments. Maybe nobody wants beautiful old homes any more, but they sure want land that’s near New York City.
I think that’s why they cranked up the taxes so high that they’re squeezing everybody out. That seems to be the plan.
So Grandma can’t stay, and maybe now I see that she should have left a long time ago, that it was maybe partially my sentimentality that kept her here when she should have left. I think she’ll be happier somewhere else now. She doesn’t need to spend her last ten years as a curator for these ghosts. There was a time when we thought one of her four kids or sixteen grandkids would rise to take the house, but it never happened.
Gewel and I aren’t the ones. It’s a wonderful house, but it’s surrounded by New Jersey. New Jersey is not the place for me. It’s huge problems and no direct benefits. Great schools, but I won’t need them for another five years. It’s barely closer to my parents and no closer at all to Gewel’s mom. That’s leaving aside that I’m making about one tenth as much money as I’d need to make to maintain this place. Maybe I’m not even doing that good. The monthly tax bill for my Grandma to live in her own house would shock you if I told you. To live in New Jersey is to be trapped in traffic, stuck at work, and easy prey for organized vultures.
New Jersey is a place for rich young couples with lots of kids.
And since those people don’t really exist, it’s sort of turning into a ghost town.
It’s breaking my heart that I won’t have much family in Jersey any more. My aunt and uncle and cousins are up here, and we’ve always been pretty close, but I don’t know how it would work out, me showing up out of the blue and staying for two weeks with wife and child in tow. Maybe they’d let me but I’m not sure they’d enjoy it as much.
Jersey was always the foundation of our family, to me, and 705 Larch Avenue was the seat of the family. Losing this house is a lot like losing a member of the family.
Right here, on that staircase, that was the last place I saw my great-grandmother. And my great-grandfather. And my cousin. And so many other people who are still alive but I still won’t ever see again.
I know this house has to go away. Life has no use for the old and it never did. We are all of us mired in our particular slice of time, and it is only through procreation that we can send tendrils in either direction. This is all there is.
I am burning some leaves and twigs in the back yard right now, fifty years of yard waste collected in the northeast corner. Waste isn’t the right word. What happened is that they left that corner alone, to turn into the Davidson National Forest as we called it, for squirrels and earthworms and probably the occasional homeless guy. My father and I were clearing it out for the first time ever, raking the leaves back to reveal the beautiful black soil, the best soil on the entire property. Bagging up the leaves and taking them to the dump, to be composted for the good of the whole city; that’s sort of a weird choice, but that’s what he wants to do. I’m just burning as much as I can. It feels like I’m spreading the ashes of the property on itself. I mean, I know that I am, but it has a funereal aspect to it.
In a very real way, this house made the family. The Davidsons — the four Davidson siblings (of whom my mother is the oldest) and their mother, my grandma, have traveled together for sixty years now. This house was their ship. We’re a close family, closer than some. We know each other, like each other, see each other every year. No matter how far the Davison family has flung, we still come together and this house is the nucleus. The new nucleus will be wherever Grandma is, and we’ll meet there for Christmas. But we won’t be in the same enormous house. It won’t be the house where we all live.
It is sad to watch this house die. This has been a very, very, very good house. It has kept alive so many special human beings. I’ve been here my whole life.
There has been a lot of sadness lately. Winter in New Jersey.