On Downton and Happy Endings

IF YOU'VE still not seen the series finale of Downton Abbey, I'll ruin it by saying everything turns out splendid. I counted at least seven actual or hinted-at couplings. A new business is formed. A wildly 'advantageous' marriage is made. Everyone stays alive.

By any standards this is an audaciously cheerful outcome, but it is particularly so for a show that often wallowed determinedly in gloom. Through six seasons we suffered world war, unjust imprisonment, shocking deaths, familial feuding.

The final season cleverly foreboded all the things that could go horribly wrong. The earl of Grantham bursts an ulcer, splattering blood on the dinner china; Barrow slits his wrists in the bathtub; Henry is terribly near a fatal race car crash—but all survive. 

In the final episode Anna makes everyone nervous, bopping about with maidly efficiency when she's eight and a half months pregnant and feeling unwell. Her water breaks and she says, This doesn't seem right, giving us all flashbacks to Sybil. But the final moments of the series find her abed, glowing, holding the bairn alongside proud Bates. The couple who voiced reasonable doubts about whether lasting good could ever come to their lives get to be ridiculously happy.


HAPPY ENDINGS are often considered cheap. Tragedy is more artistically respectable. But as any Jane Austen fan knows, a well-woven happy ending is heftily satisfying and a great narrative feat. Such brightness creates an especially lovely contrast among the English, whose dourness the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the final episode, explains by saying, I blame the weather.

It may well be easier to strike characters with tragedy to buy easy narrative gravitas, rather than go to the effort of creating a plausible happy ending. But the thing is, sometimes life does actually go absurdly well. Rarely, perhaps, but it happens. Why not end there?

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The Disappointing Femaleness of Hillary Clinton

THE BEST reason to vote for Hillary Clinton is, apparently, that she is a woman. Who is wowed by her platform, record, leadership? And yet, much as I would love to see a woman become president, it would crush my soul for Hillary Clinton to be that woman. (It would also crush my soul to have a terrible president for 4-8 years, and as that is a likely alternative I'm braced for heartbreak in any case.)

It would crush my soul because Hillary Clinton does not own her femaleness. She dons and doffs it in that shape-shifting manner aptly called Clintonesque. When she hopes to prove her capability she sheds femininity, wearing her dour Serious Face, and when she hopes to demonstrate kindly relatability she puts on a softened, grandmotherly smile. Neither feels genuine. She wears her pantsuits not in a badbitch-butch Ellen DeGeneres way, but as if aiming for the least-offensive common denominator.

Where is the pride in electing a woman as president if her demeanor conveys the message that being powerful must mean acting like a man?

It dismays me, too, that we call her by her first name, since her last name is, well, kinda already taken. I find this symbolically fraught, an uncomfortably unfeminist reminder that she is ever in the shadow of that other one. She occasions much use of "in her own right," a meekly complimentary phrase whose accidental patronizing grates on my ears.

HILLARY EMITS a vibe of obligatory sisterhood. She nudges, like, Don't forget: I'm female! It would be historic! This seems in rather poor taste. Is it not more honorable, more feminist to want to be measured on the merits?

Barack Obama got no easy pass with African American voters in 2008. On the contrary, they were pointedly skeptical of any assumption that Obama repped them by default. He had to earn that support, in part by demonstrating that he truly had grappled with and got what it means to be a black American. Clinton should be held to the same standard. Has she truly grappled with what it means to be a woman in an often anti-feminine society? If not, why should she presume she represents me, or any woman?

Hillary came up in an era when it was extremely rare and difficult to be a woman in power, and seems never to have transcended the contradictory weirdness and defensive posturing inherent to that struggle. She never found her individually-crafted path to female power as did other trailblazers of her generation, like Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ann Richards, Nancy Pelosi.

This is not whatsoever to say all female people ought to be girly. (If Rachel Maddow ran for president I'd steal identities and vote ten times.) It's about being one's authentically gendered self. Hillary Clinton's authentic self is notoriously elusive. And nothing about her sends the message, You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be, and be powerful. Michelle Obama telegraphs that every time she opens her mouth, or bares her elegantly muscled arms.

Hillary Clinton is not, to borrow Maya Angelou's lovely phrase, 'a woman phenomenally.' She is a woman hesitantly, awkwardly, convolutedly, focus-groupedly. There are rich, beautiful possibilities in female leadership. Hillary, alas, does not embody them.

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Harvesting Honey

 

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The Good, the Bad, the Throwback

WHEN A throwback station hit the Bay this summer it answered a prayer I didn’t know I had. Who’d been doing market research in my brain? Yes, I want to hear Big Tymers’ “Still Fly” and E-40’s “Rapper’s Ball.” No, I don’t want to hear another Big Sean song. Thank you for being so responsive to my needs, throwback radio! When I was driving home and “Ms. Fat Booty” came on I nearly wept for joy.

This honeymoon could not last. I knew it was over when Q 102 played “It Was a Good Day” and my car companion changed the station, saying, “I’m sick of that song.”

Sick of it? That song? The disarmingly melodious strains of Cube’s classic, emerging serendipitously from the radio, have long been my harbinger of a good day to come. This magic began twenty years ago, when my clock radio nudged me from slumber with Just waking up in the mornin, gotta thank God. I had a bangin hair day, got an A on a geometry test and smiled reciprocally at a cute boy.

Imagine my despair upon realizing that, actually, I too was sick of it.

EVEN THE best music is ruined by excessive play–in fact the best music is likeliest to suffer that fate. There were thousands upon thousands of hip hop tracks made between, say, 1985 and 2005 (the approximate “throwback” timeframe), but inevitably radio, in its maddening, consumer-tested, none-shall-change-the-station way, hones in on a tiny number and plays them to death. At least with current radio the limited selection is constantly updating. You hear “Wet Dreamz” until it’s spent and then “Hotline Bling” rotates in. Not so with oldies. They get canonized. Some stat geek determines that practically everybody loves “Hypnotize” and “Gin and Juice” and those tracks go in the Play At All Times pile. A formula is set. And we all start to hate the songs we love most.

Throwback radio is the emerging beast of the airwaves nationwide. It’s a nifty way to target us crotchety thirty-somethings (with our presumable money to blow), who hobble about, muttering, “Who is this Fetty Wap feller anyway? Play another Dre track!” Like bubblegum oldies and classic rock, throwback is a deft repackaging of old music, tapping into nostalgia with a precision both infuriating and irresistible.

I DON’T resist. I have many moments of throwback bliss. They usually come when non-robot Scotty Fox is in the mix, during high listenership hours. On a recent Saturday afternoon I vibed my way to the gym on “Next Episode” mixed into “Go” mixed into “Just Kickin It” and life was good. But I’m wary now. I hear Pac’s voice and quickly change the station, lest his soul rebellion lose its power. Some things must remain sacred.

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Dark Tunes from The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey

"Terrence Loves You"

 

Lana Del Rey sounds wet-eyed in her new single, singing, I lost myself/When I lost you. It's a far cry from the usual kiss-off playlists, whose standard message is embodied in Beyonce's classic "Irreplaceable": I could have another you in a minute. The snarling kiss-off is meant to be empowering, but that equates power with bitchy invulnerability and blame-dumping, with a little man-hating thrown in for spice.

Lana does not do bitchy invulnerability. "Terrence Loves You" is equal parts sadness and acceptance (Youuuuuuuuu aaaaaaaaaare/What you are) and no parts righteous indignation. 

Undoubtedly her critics will deride the notion of losing oneself in a relationship's end as disgustingly weak and self-misogynizing. But we do find ourselves through love. And when love ends we must find new selves, yet again. I still got jazz, she sings, a hint of triumph.

Lana lets her heart break. That's real power.

"The Hills"

The Weeknd sings about love and tenderness, but he's not really about all that. His voice vibrates most in sinful subject matter; like some evil fungi he thrives in dark places. He really digs into those swamps and excavates, using an unlikely combination of erudition, falsetto and meanness.

He plays a self-aware asshole on "The Hills," which is far more resonant than his other radio hit, "Earned It," on which he plays nice. The "Hills" beat is as bombastic as any Dirty South banger and drops into the hook like it's falling off a cliff: I only call you when it's half past five/The only time that I'll be by your side. Dude is badly using half-past-five chick and he knows it. The drugs are "feelin like it's decaf" and the hazy lyrics might be regretful, unrepentant or just amoral. But they do cop to bad behavior, which is pretty original among the heaps of lyrics in which women are badly used and it's too unremarkable to merit thought.

The only love in this song flutters in at the end with a female voice singing sweet nothings in Amharic. The Weeknd seems to be winning World's Most Famous Habeshah, and he is catching up to Drake in the category of Depressive Realness with Infectious Beats.

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Beautiful Agriculture—and Fiber Rabbits

I GOT rabbits. And thus have I graduated from average urban farmgirl to full maniac. These are farmstead animals, employed members of my backyard system. I'm not going to eat them. They're fiber rabbits.

Fiber rabbits! A few years ago I didn't know there was such a thing. Fiber rabbits belong to a special category of utilitarian farm animals that are adorable and don't have to die. That would be along with milkers, egg layers, bees, guardian animals and non-rabbit fiber animals like sheep. As a sensitive wuss vegetarian and farmstead enthusiast I really appreciate this category.

Even with the egg layers and dairy animals some loss of life must take place. Boy goats and roosters don't make eggs and milk, but eggs and milk cannot be produced without their existing at some point (as breeders or offspring) creating a conundrum most readily solved by someone--not a sensitive wuss vegetarian--eating them. Fiber animals of both sexes give humans something nice without anyone having to die. 

THERE ARE those who believe using other animals for any selfish human purpose is wrong. Animals exist for their own reasons, they say, suggesting we leave them to it. And I fear these presumable vegans are right, though I selfishly hope they are not entirely right. The thorny fact is that laying hens and milk cows and fluffball sheep would not exist without our having bred them into existence. So I think maybe technically, for better or worse, they exist for reasons inextricably bound to us. Same goes for dogs, cats, roses and most things we eat. 

All this human selection is a tremendous responsibility. There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is cruel to breed sheep and rabbits so heavily furred that they depend on us to regularly relieve them of their coats, or poultry who cannot survive the wild. I don't know yet whether I can adequately justify taking advantage of such breeding, but nor am I convinced of its inherent wrongness. 

Animal rights sorts aren't the only skeptics of agriculture, of course. It is rather hip in certain circles to pine for hunter gatherer days--paleo eating and squatting to defecate and all that. Some people find it more honest to hunt or trap a wild animal than befriend, cohabit with and take advantage of a domestic one. I respect that way of thinking, but take a different view. And not just because I love cheese and bread and tomatoes and wool and a bunch of other things agriculture makes possible.

I THINK agriculture is beautiful. Done right. Joel Salatin is fond of saying that good agriculture should be 'aesthetically and aromatically, sensually romantic.' Good agriculture can give its participants bliss. I recently grew a buckwheat cover crop on one of my raised beds and watched my hens tear it up. In that moment was bliss--theirs and mine. They clucked self-actualization as they turned the soil for my fall crops.

Agriculture is a millenia-long collaboration among humans and other species. It's bold, messy and morally complex. It has the capacity to be epically destructive: to the land and to the lives of all who work for or eat from it. So even when you have a postage stamp city homestead, producing piddling quantities of anything, there is much to consider.

And consider I do! The ethics, the economics. I fret myself silly until I decide to go ahead and see if I can, say, keep a pair of Angora rabbits happy and healthy in my yard, and make clothes from their spare fur without ever hurting them, and actually come out ahead when I crunch the numbers. I weigh the costs of housing, organic pellets, grains for sprouting fodder against the benefits of making myself and everyone I know dope luxury scarves and hand warmers of absurd softness. From my own freaking bunnies! I think the numbers look good. We shall see.

My buns are two months old now, learning the ropes along with me: when to hop about the yard and when to rest and digest in the safe hutch, how to relax into my grooming attentions, why collaborating with my wishes is worthwhile (treats!). I was at their conception. I met them hours after their birth.

Luckily I have had about six months to practice on my neighbors' English Angoras, one of whom birthed my own bunny bairns. They have taught me rabbit ways, rabbit treat preferences, how not to offend. (I did not realize this, but rabbits are easily offended.) They shed, I brush them, I accumulate luscious heaps of Angora wool. I watch Netflix, I spin the wool on a drop spindle, I knit the yarn into items of clothing, I wear the clothing. Every part of the process is meditative and gratifying.

THERE ARE other perks. I take very seriously my role as a curator of cuteness in this world. And goodlord: it's almost unbearable how plush these wooly bunny bodies are. The creatures themselves are wonderful much like Angora scarves are. Fluff comfort. The purest kind of soft.

The rabbits eat things neither the chickens nor I particularly care for, like kale stems. And they love to chill in shady nooks neither the chickens nor I can squeeze into. They produce tidy, round fertilizer nuggets that can be applied directly. I am starting to see their niche in the backyard ecosystem.

As I look upon my yard these days--hens laying, bees foraging, bunnies furring, corn looming, beans working the pole--I am amazed at all the creation. Maybe humans love agriculture because it makes us feel like God. But I'm not sovereign over my yard. I'm just semi-competent designer slash manager. I'm in awe of what is going on back there, the crazy way all of us creatures are making something together.

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The Good Old Thug Love Duet

REMEMBER the video for "I'm Real"? JLo in hoops, bun, pink velour jumpsuit, smiling over how real she is. Ja Rule in a white do-rag, growling Ja Rule-isms. It epitomizes a classic rap sub-genre: the thug love duet.

Turn-of-the-millennium thug love duets have a bubblegum quality that predates the darkly complex sex-love relations of the Drake era. Think of Cam'Ron's bouncy "Hey Ma" or Jay and Bey's "'03 Bonnie & Clyde," from before she was Ms. Carter.

IT'S A WORLD where men rap hard and ladies sing nice. The guys are wild and profane, but the women are endlessly sweet, holding them down with smiling hooks. Down to ride to the very end. Thug love duets are about badboys and the good girls who love them; only the earnest heart of the good girl can melt a thug. All I need in this life of sin.

Undisputed princess of the genre is almond-eyed Ashanti. She mighta been singing "Foolish" over these fools later, but she made an ideal thug lover, her innocent smile the perfect foil for rapper grimaces.

The ladies aren't just relegated to hook duty these days; they rap hard as the dudes when they feel like. Thug love bangers may be naughtily retrograde, but they are so delicious. It's that polarity of masculine and feminine, hard contrasted against soft, plus a notion of love that's wonderfully simple: opposites attract.

Listen to my Thug Love Duets playlist

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Homesteady

I SOMETIMES feel strange for loving homesteady things like I do. I chill in my backyard recliner for hours, watching preening hens and homebound bees, scheming how to grow cucumbers on the coop roof. And my love does not always express in sweet, reasonable ways; it frequently veers into obsessive fiend territory. Storey guidebooks and goat kid YouTubes are my bedtime porn.

I might be crazy. But maybe my fixation is rooted in wholesome earnestness. I think this stuff touches depths in my soul.

Nothing satisfies me quite like producing something in collaboration with soil and plants and fellow creatures. With enough health and space I think I'd enjoy producing a significant portion of my own food. In such case I would treat my homestead chores as a job, one I love, one that has clear meaning and is as basic and necessary as work can be: the work of providing for oneself.

The usual model in our time is to pay various someones to provide all or most of our vital needs. We specialize in some niche, earning money to fund our food, clothing and shelter. This model is effective, of course, but it's so ingrained that providing for your own basic needs can seem like a cute lark, while the Serious Business of Life is assumed to be designing apps or distributing parking tickets or whatever one's specialty happens to be. Apps and parking tickets are important, but still.

On the spectrum's other end are the Preppers, whose doomsday expectations seem both paranoid and reasonable. They seek self-sufficiency in preparation for imminent system collapse, when we'll run out of oil or be hit by a mega-earthquake and only those milking their own cows shall survive. They do have a point about the fragility of the systems we take for granted. But I suspect their world-bout-to-collapse alibi partly serves to justify to themselves and others why homesteadiness is urgently valuable, when some Preppers simply feel compelled toward that way of life for less articulable reasons. I bet they're kinda in love with it, like I am.

HOMESTEADY THINGS may seem like a lot of unnecessary bother. I've often felt like I should think of it that way, open my eyes and realize I can just buy honey at the store and save myself the bee suit hassle. 

But my homestead chores don't hassle me. They ground me, and tie me to the non-human world. Sure, they're a pain in the ass sometimes, but I love the steady discipline they require and the calm routines they create. Plus I dislike the notion of household duties as drudgery to be avoided. I think you can take pride in mucking a chicken coop. That's how you know you're doing the damn thing. If I'm not cleaning up after chickens (or scrubbing a toilet, or washing dishes) someone somewhere is doing it for me. I think that's worth remembering.

Far be it from me to preach, like, Everybody should grow their own food! Just try to do one small thing! Grow potted herbs on your patio! I don't like to presume that what is good for me would be good for anybody else. If you work long office hours and eat only takeout, hey: do you. There are plenty things I prefer to have other people do for me (like, say, plumbing). This is not a "you should" diatribe. I just don't want to feel like a weirdo for prioritizing this stuff so much. I don't want anybody to laugh when I start churning my own butter.

Self-sufficiency seems old-fashioned--why do such things when we don't need to anymore? Maybe we don't, practically speaking, need to provide for ourselves, as in we won't otherwise starve. But homesteadiness satisfies the soul. It grants a deep sense of accomplishment. Providing my sustenance is the realest feeling I know.

WHEN YOU provide any portion of your own foodstuffs you also realize how uncertain a game that is. Disaster abounds. Man plans and God laughs, as we pessimistic Yids say. Weather is cruel, pests merciless; your own body betrays your intentions. Coworkers of other species are no more reliable than human ones. And sometimes you just screw up. 

This winter I had two disasters. My original bee colony succumbed to some combination of ailments, ant invaders and my own mistakes. Then Mrs. Darcy, my big, bitchy, beautiful Wyandotte, fell incurably ill. Two friends with an axe ended her miseries. To the extent such failures are my own (and it is impossible to quite know the extent) they make me feel almost unbearably guilty. I question whether any living thing should be entrusted to my care. But I always dust it off and try again. I still trust myself to take better care than a great many food producers would.

Most of us are far enough from the rural life that we imagine it as fundamentally peaceful, but it so is not. I don't ever plan to be a farmer, not least because it's hard. But then hard is real. Sometimes hens quit laying and lettuce gets coated in aphids; any insistence that it be otherwise leads down a road most of us dislike, paved with chemicals and animal abuse. Managing the constantly churning series of backyard catastrophes teaches me a lot.

Peace comes in those glimmery moments when the whole thing is mostly working. When the systems I have painstakingly devised actually allow plants to grow heartily and creatures to live a cushy lifestyle, all harmonizing to give me sustenance and earthly beauty, it seems like a goddamn miracle. But peace comes too in mid-disaster, when I'm burying a hen or taking swarming bees from a high branch, thinking, This is the business of life.

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A Brief Poetic Analysis of Weezy's “Truffle Butter" Verse

THE FINAL lines of Lil Wayne's verse on "Truffle Butter" are magic. Not the words, of course; they're just a grab bag of oft-perverse rapperly braggadocio (e.g., paraphrasing, Beware my city is so hard people die over sneakers). But the SOUNDS. What use of language for mellifluous effect!

Goes like this:

I'm so heartless, thoughtless, lawless and flawless
Smallest, regardless, largest in charge and
Born in New Orleans
Get kilt for Jordans
Skateboard I'm gnarly
Drake, Tunechi and Barbie


Why is this so delightful? My poetry terms are rusty, but I think the delight results from a complexly intertwining rhyme scheme with assonance (which, as you may recall from a bygone English class, means repetition of vowel sounds.) 

He opens with two internally-rhyming lines (heartless-thoughtless-lawless-flawless/smallest-regardless-largest), and simultaneously begins an assonant pile-on of 'ah's that carries through the end of the verse (thought-law-flaw-small-regard-large-charge-Orleans-Jordans-gnarly-Barbie). Course you gotta say 'Orleans' and 'Jordans' the proper Tunechi way for it to work.

At line three the structure changes utterly, in mid-sentence (enjambment!), without any break in flow. The phrases shorten, the lines start to end-rhyme, the meter shifts. The first two lines are roughly trochaic tetrameter, so four sets of stressed/unstressed syllable pairs; the assonant 'ah's are stressed and the rhyming 'ess' endings are unstressed. Lines three through five are dactyl-trochee pairings: SKATEboard I'm is a dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed) and GNARly is a trochee (stressed-unstressed).

In the final line he lets Drizzy and Nicki be the stressed syllables, leaving his own moniker humbly unstressed. Perhaps an acknowledgement of his semi-emeritus, godfatherly role in today's rap world?

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On Pain

III. Appreciation

I love to complain about how Pain fucks with my life. (And lately it sure has done so.) But in rare, shining moments, I appreciate certain things about it.

I resent the Pain 96% of the time. It makes me dull, tired & stupefied. It makes my dreams seem beyond reach, because you can't reach for shit when you're lying on the floor. And Pain is self-centered, demanding you forget Wellness.

That 4% though. Moments when I appreciate the teachings of Pain make me feel calm and wise. If I can imagine that Pain gives me something worthwhile my perception of the Pain experience changes. Hardship can enrich your soul if you look at it right.

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Day of the Consumption

AH, BLACK FRIDAY, the holiday of American consumerism, when demon-eyed shoppers fight for discount flat-screens across this great nation. It's not the sort of holiday you can wish somebody a happy one of. It's more like gloomy Yom Kippur, when you wish people 'an easy fast.'

I am not strictly opposed to consumerism; surely we can all enjoy a bit of exuberant retail now and then without harm. But the consumerism of Black Friday has a maniacal, desperate tone. It is not billed as a fun day out shopping, but as a sort of mall armageddon. Getting gifts becomes, in this model, a massive, panic-stricken mission rather than a cool opportunity to think up a few things loved ones might enjoy.  Talk of 'door-busters' and 4am store openings, frantic ads during Thanksgiving football, whip buyers into a retail feeding frenzy.

Walmart challenges you to win it.

Black Friday ads are designed to create a perception of urgent need and brief abundance, to be followed by dire scarcity. These deals won't last, they grimly warn. Get yours NOW, before they're ALL GONE. Women in commercials compare their bag takes, implicitly competing for some 21st century homemaking prize. The shoppers at big box stores look like looters, grabbing what they can while the getting is good. Walmart challenges customers to 'win the day.'

The very name has the ring of doomsday. Black Tuesday was when the 1929 stock market crashed, for godsakes, ushering in the Great Depression. This is how we kick off the Most Wonderful Time of the Year©?

The purpose of the madness is for everybody to get what they want on Christmas, without it costing a fortune. That sounds like an okay idea. It is amazing how many shiny gadgets, lovely clothes and complicated toys can be had today on a reasonable budget, and, hey, I'm all for bargain shopping and not immune to shiny gadgetry. And yet it sounds awfully nice for retailers not to manipulate us so crassly, for kids not to expect Playstations, and for moms not to feel obliged to camp out at Walmart to buy them.

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Dawn of the Booty Supremacists

ONCE UPON a time, women longed to have flat butts. 'Big tits, tiny ass' is how my mother described the body ideal of her youth. How times have changed. I have a forty-two inch posterior and no complaints.

Well, one complaint. Now that we the callipygian have risen to power, I don't want us lording it over the assless. In the pop culture vanguard, the lording has already begun.

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Food Religion

WHICH IS healthier? Soy or beef? Your answer will depend upon the food religion to which you subscribe.

I know, I know. It's obnoxious of me to refer to it thusly. I've annoyed everyone I've talked to about this subject, probably because no one wants to think of herself as believing in a 'food religion.' People say, Religion is based on belief. My nutritional choices are based on facts.

Wholesome plant nutrition or GMO phytoestrogen?

Ah, but. Most people make at least some effort to eat healthfully, and we all think our healthy eating choices are based on nutritional fact. And yet each of us chooses, often quite adamantly, to eat different things. One person says beef is artery-clogging, hormone-riddled and murderous, while soy is packed with wholesome plant protein. The other says soy is naught but an allergenic, GMO phytoestrogen, while land meat is the hearty fuel of our ancestors. Old reliable Science does not unequivocally discredit either point of view.

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Lana Del Rey and the Forbidden Feminine

LANA DEL REY evokes a world of red lips, intoxicants, deceptively innocent dresses, punky badboys and slick-haired sugar daddies who take you on fast drives down the coast at night. Her songs sound so lushly beautiful that you almost wish to be in them--until you remember how miserable that would be, since they are made of gilded angst, as dark-skied as pop can be. Lana has a Mad Men-esque knack for slathering glamor on turmoil until it's gorgeous. Her new album Ultraviolence is darker even than previous releases and edges into a hazily adulterous, abusive space. Even when she's cooing Ooh baby ooh baby/I'm in love it sounds like a scary place to be.

Her fascinations with quicksand sexuality, meekness and a badgirl variety of transactional romance are irksome and anti-feminist to some. "If we as a society accept the disempowered form of femininity that Del Rey embodies, young women are truly in trouble," read a recent denunciation in Ms.

I think such irking is important. Feminist thought tends to wish away some common, deep-rooted habits of the female mind, like yearning for male attention, fearing aloneness, being enticed by wealth, and that ancient craving for the protection of muscles. (He holds me in his big arms/Drunk and I am seeing stars/This is all I think of, Lana disempoweredly sang on "Video Games.") Even if we choose to sensibly repress such brain habits, lifting the rules to see what may lie beneath serves a real-keeping purpose.

Lana keeps it thusly real. Her sisterly defenders point to every woman's (feminist!) right to be screwed up, and I do not disagree. Lana's music contains disturbing scenarios, which should be heard as earnest art, dark subject matter handled with nuance and skill, rather than judged as bad role modeling. But her words are rarely as shocking as He hit me and it felt like a kiss; she is mostly criticized for the submissive fragility and phallocentric romanticism of her lyrics. The singer Lorde said of Del Rey, "It's so unhealthy for young girls to be listening to, you know: 'I’m nothing without you.' This sort of shirt-tugging, desperate, don’t leave me stuff."

But surely many a woman has had not-proud moments of "don't leave me" shirt-tugging, if only in her own head. Weakness, fear, neediness--and the use of seduction to paper them over--are authentic parts of female experience, and it is valuable to hear a voice that admits to loving foolishly. Lana, singing Need you, baby, like I breathe you, baby, takes us to vulnerable corners of the female psyche that feel forbidden. Her unfeminist vices let us question the unflappable power pose of contemporary womanhood.

WITH HER bombshell image and helpless romanticism, Lana sings sex and love in unusual ways. She doesn't care about uprightness, suitability. She sings desire, desperation, unseemly devotion. She sings the kind of sex that makes you feel unpowerful in a good way (In the land of gods and monsters I was an angel/Looking to get fucked hard) and the kind that makes you feel powerful in a wrong way (Fucked my way up to the top/This is my show.)

She has sufficiently intact romantic sensibilities to remake the deliciously treacly Disney classic "Once Upon A Dream," darkening it almost beyond recognition but still honoring the love dream of the original. The punky badboys and sugar daddies are her antagonists, but also her romantic heroes. This is an artist captivated by love, in all its soaring and crashing. The Lana of her songs is exquisitely, sometimes tragically, vulnerable in love, but savvy enough to know that vulnerability carries its own form of honest power.

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Farm Dreams (Are Made of Bees)

MY YARD is full of dreams come true. The yard itself, sunny and alive, I dreamed up during a cold, hard Brooklyn winter. I saw the Craiglist ad for a cottage in Oakland with fruit trees and I cried; it looked so much like my dream, and I figured that meant I couldn't have it. (But I got it. That still amazes me.) I dreamed up the foot-high cedar raised beds with tidy rows of carrots and leeks. I dreamed the flock of hens chilling in the shade of the fig tree, and, later, I dreamed the banty subflock, roosting in a barn-red mini coop perched preciously on stilts.

Cat & corn

Dreams are messy, of course, in the coming true. I've lived in '1 BR Cottage with Fruit Trees'  for ten years now. I had to cut down the loquat and the old lemon. The decrepit peach succumbed to disease, and the figs, which aren't very tasty, besmirch the patio. I've had hens murdered by predators and my vegetable beds infected with equally deadly Verticillium wilt.

But none of those disappointments ruin the dream. Such woes are the price of realness; they cannot outweigh the satisfaction of imagining something wonderful and bringing it to fruition. The lemon and orange I planted the year I moved in are big, productive trees now. I open a high window and grab some bout-to-be-juice.

Problems also shape the course of new dreams. The dread Verticillium has made tomatoes and squashes (and hella other things) hard to grow, which depresses me. Last year, as I watched my cucumbers wither and my strawberry leaves turn crisp brown, I started thinking of ways to produce food from my yard that would not involve soil. I began to dream about bees.

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Happy

I THINK I might be happy. Feels strange. 

There have been long, cold times in my recent life. Sustained happiness is a feeling I had kinda forgotten--perhaps even wished to forget, so as not to suffer unpleasant comparisons. I have been (mostly) glad for good happenings in the lives of other people, but tried to keep such concepts at a safe remove from myself. Better not to dwell upon that which is not quite an option.

But I'm pretty sure I recognize this warmth on me, feeling like For lo the winter is past. Looks like happiness.

I DON'T know about this happiness business. Really though. It's disturbing. Unhappiness has a cool certainty and deflated expectations. Happiness is such a wild risk. It's bound to crumble at some point. What if I get accustomed and can't bear the crumbling?

And if this whole happy thing keeps up...will I become obnoxious? Will I become the sort of person with an endless parade of charmed-life Facebook status updates, tormenting those less fortunate? What if I start expecting my life to be good, rather than being grateful for goodness? Will I turn into a total brat when little shit goes wrong? Will I avoid the sorrows of others, lest they tarnish the sheen of my bliss? I suppose I make the depressing, psuedo-Buddhist assumption that misery makes you empathic and happiness makes you arrogant. But I know some humble, happy people. Wonder how they do it.

Perhaps the best way to avoid these troubling questions is by dampening my emergent happiness with worries about the nature of happiness itself. Phew. I feel better already.

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Why Negative Rap Is So Damn Good

WHENEVER I listen to the Talib Kweli classic "Get By,"  I am transported to a land of rainbows and sunshine. In such a state of bliss, it is easy to think, 'Man, why can't rap always be about love and uplift and the beautiful struggle?' Indeed, many an earnest hip hop fan has, at one time or another, wished rap could quit being so wrong so much of the time, and just be more positive. Such laments are often accompanied by forlorn remembrances of the good old days, when rap was pure.

But such thinking is based on illusion. Rap has never been pure, and never should be.

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On Pain

II. On Ice

I WAS FROZEN for a couple years. On the upside I don't seem older than I did pre-freeze: my face hasn't seen much sun and life hasn't had much chance to wear me out. On the downside years have gone by and things have happened and I had no role in them. I couldn't. I was on ice.

I was frozen in my house, supine on an ice pack, for six months or so, then occasionally upright for the next year, thawing ever so slowly. Then refreezing, then thawing, again and again, up to the present pleasant thaw, three years later.

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On Pain

I. The Weird World of Variable Disability

I DON'T SPEND my days lying on the floor now. I do things, which is lovely. It is a great pleasure to blast the radio on the way to the grocery store, or walk from a parking spot near the lake to the gym, where I yoga and sauna.

It is difficult, then, to explain how Pain infects my life. So many of my dreams and ambitions feel stunted by Pain. One might suppose the operation of Pain on my life would be logical, a static set of limits, within which I function freely. The truth is more chaotic. Pain can overwhelm, even when it's not at its worst. Everything becomes hard. Thinking becomes hard. At some point Pain becomes a sickness. It's not just discomfort felt in one place; the whole body becomes incapable, lethargic, like when you can't run or speak in a dream.

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The Drizzy-Jhene Duet of Smooth Ambivalence

   "From Time"

   Drake ft. Jhene Aiko

   Nothing Was The Same

YOU DON'T really hear straight up love songs nowadays. Artists are too cool for You're mine baby I love you old-timey stuff. Everything has to be complicated, flippant, vengeful, sexual, ambivalent.

Drake is undisputed king of complicated, flippant, vengeful, sexual, ambivalent sorta-love songs. He excels (so Jewishly) at hyperanalytic relationship talk. He seems to spend ungodly amounts of time ruminating on woulda-couldas and past flames, which I find endearing and relatable. "From Time" is easily his best riff on this theme, with his neurotics calmed by some understated piano and the placid voice of Jhene Aiko.

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