Strata Lucida

Don't take my tuna melts away

The reporter with the name everybody wants -- Jennifer 8. Lee -- reports on a decline in tuna consumption after a federal warning about high mercury levels in white albacore tuna. Typically, overblown media coverage and a headline-scrolling TV culture rips the subtleties right out of context, and makes people fear all types of tuna, or even all types of fish:

Never mind that the federal advisory is just for young children and women who plan to have children. Never mind that the advisory covers only white albacore tuna, and not light tuna, which has a lower mercury content - and is cheaper. Never mind that the advisory actually recommends limiting consumption of albacore tuna to six ounces per week - that is one or two meals - as opposed to eliminating it entirely. And never mind that the federal government says tuna is actually very good for people - an affordable, low-fat, high-protein source of the omega-3 fatty acids that reduce heart disease. ...

"The message of fish being good has been lost," said Eric Rimm, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, "and people are learning more about the hypothetical scare of a contaminant than they are of the well-documented benefits of coronary disease reduction."

Who the hell is Kirk O'Bane?

Thurston Moore has a great editorial marking the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death today. Moore really shows the lasting influence Cobain had on the rock underground, which continues to produce vital music that the commercial venues mainly ignore. He also gets a chance to tweak the Grey Lady for publishing the made-up grunge lexicon foisted on it by clever PR folks at Sub Pop (Nirvana's first label).

Here's the nut of Moore's editorial:

When Kurt died, a lot of the capitalized froth of alternative rock fizzled. Mainstream rock lost its kingpin group, an unlikely one imbued with avant-garde genius, and contemporary rock became harder and meaner, more aggressive and dumbed down and sexist. Rage and aggression were elements for Kurt to play with as an artist, but he was profoundly gentle and intelligent. He was sincere in his distaste for bullyboy music — always pronouncing his love for queer culture, feminism and the punk rock do-it-yourself ideal.

(Devoted Nick Hornby fans will recognize my subject as a line from About A Boy.)

Self-reliance

A.O. Scott has a very interesting short take on Eternal Sunshine today. He uses Stanley Cavell's history of 1930's and '40s marriage comedies to show how Charlie Kaufman weaves dense philosophical strands into Sunshine's script:

How much do we know, Mr. Kaufman asks - about ourselves, about the world we inhabit, and, most crucially, about other people - and when do we know it? What do we do with this knowledge, and what good does it do us? If learning can be dangerous, is unlearning - in this case the literal erasure of memory, as practiced by Tom Wilkinson's ethically compromised Dr. Mierzwiak - any safer?

I felt this way when I saw the film, too -- that it was addressing not just relationships but the nature of the mind, and the self, in general. Many scenes play as concretizations of the unconscious, with all its slippery, associative logic; meanings shift, perspectives skew, contradictions are embraced.

The film drives toward a moral conclusion that it is possible to weave a peculiar kind of "stability" out of this chaos -- a stability that is not metaphysical and monolithic, but temporary and provisional. Clementine tells Joel, "I'm going to get bored and freak out, that's just me" to which he replies, simply, "Okay". He doesn't need to spin grand protestations of his love here; he merely responds with a pragmatic, workaday affirmation. His acceptance of her faults does not occur on a cosmic plane, grounded in abstract, glowing, eternal love; it is practical, local, specific. Scott:

[Joel and Clementine] are profoundly imperfect, possessed of a prickly individuality that leaves him or her often out of sorts with the rest of the world. (This restless, nonconforming urge, the true meaning of Emersonian self-reliance, is evoked by her ever-changing hair and his feverish notebook jottings.) The only cure is for them to become more themselves, which they can accomplish only in each other's company.

For a film so sensitive to the vagaries of memory and the mind, I don't think "Emersonian self-reliance" is quite the optimal framework. Maybe, rather, a postmodern self-reliance, one which brackets the notion of self within the idea that it is shifty, dependent, interwoven with the other; a concept of self that does not try to trap the other, or itself, in a permanent or isolated definition. Yes, become more yourself, but do it with the recognition that your self is constantly changing, and that it is bound up with the selves of others.