Virtual Ransom

Last week my home computer was hijacked by a virus in the catagory of "ransom-ware."    I am awaiting the arrival of the Geek Squad, but may not be back online until February 12.  Please return next week to see whether I've found another way to post an entry.

Good Skin

"I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place."  So begins Dr. Richard Selzer's essay, "Skin," one of 19 in his 1974 collection, Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery. "Upon which is writ" may be the key to my generation's skin aesthetic.

Skin, which was most often issued to us as neonates unmarked, was to be tended with great care, valued and aspired to as "good skin." Acne and other dermatological diseases were the enemy. Smoking and too much sun were suspect, but not yet understood. For us, clean, young, glowing, golden and caramel expanses of unblemished skin -- unsullied by moles, hair, freckles, the pathology of scabs and rashes and bumps -- was the ideal. Beautiful and sexy, so desirable it was airbrushed onto models, that blank canvas was summoned by those who wanted others to "show some skin."

Then came the writ-upon part. Inevitably, we knew, time and experience would mark us up, add scars and discolorations, wrinkles (and their athletic cousin, weathering). But American culture had also responded with an aesthetic of acceptance, although not totally embraced: aging skin, upon which life had written its owner's story, revealed character.

Last week the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported "Millennials' Judgments About Recent Trends Not So Different," citing a range of societal issues where attitudes of approximately a third of our population, those born between 1982 and 2003, are compared with attitudes of earlier generations. From cell phones and online shopping to the purchase of green goods, our attitudes are not so different.

Until you get to the issue of The Growing Number of People Who Get Tattoos. There, 15% of the Millennials saw the trend as a change for the better; 51% of the Boomers saw it as a change for the worse.

Most of my generation, as we slough off the dry and ashy and lather on the Retinol, hyaluronic acid and SPF 50, hold on to the aesthetic of healthy, natural skin (and there are still those whose religions forbid tattoos and other defilements of the body). We are uneasy about body art beyond the single tat of a butterfly, especially the arms forever sleeved in ink.

For better or for worse, we were not encouraged to write upon this scabbard ourselves.

The Material Netherworld

This Christmas, my daughter gave me a lovely necklace and bracelet made of muted green and mauve-brown beads. Their marbled variations, pleasing click of the polished pieces against each other, heft of the material – all felt right. So right, in fact, that I wasn’t curious about its origins. My visual and tactile aesthetics had been met, and I was unequivocally pleased.

She told me the material was taqua or vegetable ivory, a fair-trade, sustainable plant matter that is botanically known as the endosperm of the genus Phytelephas, a palm native to Central and South America. Grown and harvested in the rain forest, carved into small statues, buttons, ornaments and jewelry, dyed and polished, this palm ivory reappears in stores like Ten Thousand Villages, where its beauty is enhanced by ideals, by context.

Like the dining room table and the reed basket, tagua is dead plant matter. And lovely and long-lasting in its current state, more durable than my leather chair. Today, there is something delightfully humanitarian in choosing materials derived from plant life rather than animal life.

Material context is altered through time and space, independent of logic. There were centuries in which it was desirable to write on uterine vellum, the processed skin of an unborn ungulate. We would not walk into Office Depot today and ask for a box of dead lamb skins to feed into our laser-jet printers, but we might wander over an aisle or two to fondle a calfskin brief case, inhale its new leather smell, feel its suppleness, check the price tag. 

Our critical sensibilities about plant and animal-based materials change over time, and can be influenced by cultural shifts. The Victorians' penchant for sentimental human hairwork jewelry seems slightly ghoulish in 2010. Yet, in Philadelphia, there’s a contemporary artist who makes delicate jewelry from owl pellets, arranging regurgitated mouse and shrew bones into geometric shapes that are not immediately recognizable as animal matter. And in the 90s in Milwaukee, small alewives – those unwanted invaders of Lake Michigan -- were coated with epoxy, sold as trendy brooches.

What triggers the ick factor in our response to biological materials? (Why is a cowry shell necklace prettier than a pin made from a dead minnow?)

I’ll be exploring our reactions to the functional and non-functional employment of biological materials this month, as I research a topic for my next “Plein Air” column in http://www.terrain.org/ due February 1.

Question of the week: leather or pleather in 2010?

Best of 2009: Why I Loved the Wedding Dance Video

Both of my weddings were alternative. The first was an elopement, an impulsive act of folie a deux that put us in a borrowed car and drove us over the state line to Waukegan, where we didn’t need to wait for a blood test, parental intervention or better judgement. I wore a librarian-ish brown dress and was married at twenty-one in the dreary basement office of a judge whose pronounced lisp made the exchange of vows nervously surreal. On the drive back north to Wisconsin, we stopped to pick up a hitchhiker, a sailor from Great Lakes Naval Station -- someone who could share our amazing news, someone who might congratulate us.

A few months later, we were cowed into a church ceremony to please my husband’s family. This time I wore a conservative pink dress and matching coat. The Greek Orthodox priest – who I’d been told would simply bless our civil marriage – instead began with an incense-laden betrothal ceremony, followed by a candle-holding marriage ceremony. Tapers, smoke, everything repeated three times, endless standing, an unanticipated requirement to obey my husband.

I remember how the priest took away my candle right before I fainted, how no one caught me, how I hit my head on the way down, how the cantor was dismissed, the ritual hastened, while I sat, pale and propped up on a folding chair, my left shoe cast off by the unexpected.  And still, no friends to witness our rites. I don’t know if the support of friends would have made a difference. Our marriage was fraught with power struggles and shame from the start. Torn between families’ expectations, we failed them all. What was expected of me was to have married in my own church, in my own state, and to have selected nice china and silver patterns. Not the fainting or little purses of sugared almonds or lamb on a spit in the in-law’s back yard, not holy promises of subjugation. Not the uneasy feeling that I was being annexed, appropriated into a world where my husband’s family had become a substitution for friends.

I married young, joylessly, without ever buying a bridal magazine, trying on white dresses or making decisions about music. Having skipped that developmental stage of event planning, I never even indulged in the retrospective fantasy of how it should have been. Thirty years later, when my daughter’s friends began to marry, I found their wedding plans appealing, but suspected there was a dark side of compromise that had the potential to make any wedding more trouble than it was worth. I’d seen Rachel Getting Married, and knew that even when you try to be inclusive and celebrate unity, even dress up the family poodle like a little elephant for your theme wedding, your crazy sister can muck up the day.

I expect something to go wrong at weddings, something so big that it contaminates the good parts of what has been choreographed. And so, when shortly after I returned from visiting my daughter in St. Paul this summer, and she sent me the link to a YouTube video meant to extend the Minnesota experience a bit longer, I was surprised to find myself sobbing at the rightness of an unknown couple’s celebration.

St. Paul, the summer of 2009. “Forever,” performed by the less than romantic Chris Brown. Jill and Kevin’s wedding. Their friends in simple, easy-to-dance-in clothes. Sun glasses and plastic earrings. Slightly schlubby groomsmen. Happy young women swinging each other down the aisle as if they were on the playground. A groom who can do a forward roll, then straighten his tie, nonchalantly. A bride who looks comfortable in her dress and her skin. But most of all, heart. Five minutes of it stored in cyberspace for sharing.

I am one of the more than 37 million people who have watched Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz’s wedding entrance dance. And then cried and watched it again. In some ways, it seems uniquely, progressively, Minnesotan: Lutherans getting down, a woman pastor, the altruistic donation of funds raised going to the Sheila Wellstone Institute.

But clearly, as evidenced in its adaptation by the NBC comedy “The Office” in the Pam and Jim’s wedding episode, more than Minnesota quirkiness resonates with the original video’s viewers and the creators of its parodies and adaptations. Why do we love this sometimes clumsy, ecstatic wedding dance?

The fictitious wedding of Pam and Jim helped to clarify the universal appeal of Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance. It’s not only about friends celebrating a marriage by executing dance moves – it’s also about our acceptance of our friends, the people who care enough about us to boogie down the aisle with a Gerbera daisy in their teeth, friends whose moves may be less than expert, less than rhythmic, but who come together to honor our union through joyous gesture. We value them.

We are reassured of the rightness of community celebration even as we feel a questioning twinge of doubt – is this sacrilegious? It’s not quite praise dancing. Chris Brown being played in a church? Women in strappy summer dresses moving in slo-mo at the altar?

And then we realize that it’s okay. One of the most memorable scenes in The Last Temptation of Christ is that of Willem Dafoe as Jesus, arms raised, dancing joyfully at the wedding at Cannan. There's a pseudo-biblical precedent for this kind of physical expression.

I had two weddings, yet my marriage didn’t last. This popular video seems like the litmus test for what a wedding should be, and it's what I wish for my daughter. It is the well thought-out alternative wedding I never had or attended. It is the opposite of obsessing over details and big spending, or doing everything right. It begs the question: can you bring together people who love you, who will circle you in a horah of joy, a handstand in the narthex, who will be for that day and days to come a community of laughing, accepting friends? If so, you’re off to a good start.

Sometimes I find myself driving to work and humming “‘Cause we only got one life, double your pleasure, double your fun.....” And for a moment, I’m so happy for Jill and Kevin, and their one life that lies ahead of them, even their first married Minnesota winter. And thankful for how they’ve invited millions of people to witness and feel the contagious joy that comes with finding the right person.

We dance down the aisle with them, and effortlessly, there’s enough wine for all the guests.