Spring Breakers in Tampa Bay: Glorying in the Pirates' Beautiful Wreck

This piece was originally commissioned to run in the online version of Creative Loafing Tampa.  It was apparently declined - all I know is that it never ran.  Maybe why it wasn't wanted will be more clear to you than to me (I have yet to get an explanation from the editor).

People in Tampa Bay have been fretting about director Harmony Korine’s new movie, Spring Breakers, understandably perturbed by a film set in their hometown that is, if the previews are any indication, a serving of debauchery with a side of carnage.  I moved to Tampa Bay in August of 2011, bringing a completely clean slate.  I had never even been to Florida, but I was offered a job, and so I came.  As an outsider who has now seen the length and breadth of the Bay, and who has now seen Spring Breakers, I think the film gets Tampa Bay right.  Not mainly in the hedonism, the crime, or the murder, though I know there are plenty of those around here.  As anyone familiar with Harmony Korine must have known (his last film was titled Trash Humpers, and that title is just as literal as this one), Spring Breakers is not the simple exploitation movie it’s being billed as.  It’s an uncomfortable meditation that captures a feeling unique to Tampa Bay.  It shows a truth that’s difficult, but that should be treasured.

Much of what I found when I came to Tampa Bay reminded me of my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas: brutal heat, tatty public facilities, and a sprawling highway system and six-lane surface roads that marked it as a driving town.  There were differences, too – from St. Pete to Temple Terrace, the poverty was more in-your-face than at home, with panhandlers on every intersection and condemned homes around every corner.  Those unlucky enough not to own a car raced, Frogger-style, across those wide roads, infants in tow, praying for their lives.  Groups of men lounged aimlessly in the green spaces of grocery store parking lots.

Also different from home, though, was the multi-species parade of brighter things mixed right in with that abrasive reality.  There were the professionals that occasionally ventured from South Tampa, sometimes classy and more often delightfully cartoonish.  There were the hipsters, legion with their tattoos and mustaches, in bars across the street from by-the-hour motels.  In October of 2011, there were anarchists in the streets.  There were hand-painted signs for jerk chicken and oxtails.  There was a creative class throwing together shoestring and tape and getting things done.  There were the mangroves and vines stretching through suburban backyards like Father Knows Best got transplanted to Borneo.  There were the nonprofits and activists striving to make things better.  There were lizards sunning themselves on sidewalks, scattering with each step.

Spring Breakers’ story of hedonism and bad endings is just a superficial detail, part of the trappings that let this slow, smallish art film pass as a big deal party-caper flick (Amazingly, it cracked the Billboard Top 10 this weekend, but given broadly negative reactions from misled audiences, watch for it to drop like a rock). The movie’s soul, ironically, is on its surface.  Korine’s focus is on the feeling he hangs on his inconsequential plot, a hallucinatory strangeness fleshed it out with garish colors, ethereal voice overs, blunted melodies, slow pans, and harsh lighting.  The vibe is lonesome and desperate, like it’s all a frantic display of confidence by someone whose soul is crumbling.  It’s a feeling Korine said he found in Tampa Bay as nowhere else in Florida – darkness and light, in struggle, in flux.

That’s not something any sane tourism board would put on bus signs, but that doesn’t make it less true, or less valuable.  Tampa Bay is a place of decadence, desperation, and degradation, but also of possibility and excitement and change – and all for the same reasons.  Think of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.  People lived in fear of being mugged or killed, but there was CBGBs and Keith Haring and Studio 54. Then Disney bought out Times Square and shut down the porn theaters.  Within what must have seemed like months, New York – the New York we dream of, the New York of Taxi Driver and Manhattan and Wild Style – was gone.

Spring Breakers is about the desire to change, and to escape, about how even when that desire gets pushed too far, it can still be beautiful.  Like New York in the 1970s, Tampa Bay is a royal mess because nobody owns it, and nobody controls it, because right now, nobody wants to.  It’s a place of both risk and freedom, where it’s easy to try something and the costs for failure (and here the film doesn’t get it quite right . . .) are low.  It’s a city being made before our eyes, a city whose future, unlike those of so many older cities, has yet to be written.

I was originally hired for a two-year job here in Tampa, but I’ve decided to stay and see what happens.  I think Harmony Korine would understand.

Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School

Hey, so a couple of years after writing this, I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

I spent a good chunk of last night strolling through the excellent blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School.  I'm reading it from a particular perspective - about a year and a half after finishing grad school, now with a couple of years of good employment under my belt and a slow, tentative sense that everything might actually work out okay.  I think the blog is great because much of what it highlights is simply facts about graduate school that, apparently, people don't necessarily enter into it fully aware of - the amount of work, the need to be truly fanatical about your intellectual interests, the difficulty of writing a dissertation.  But particularly in reading the comments, it strikes me that as factual as it may be, it's obviously set up to emphasize negative possibilities, and encourages a tendency of certain people to generalize their own experience to an entire institution.  So I just want to take a second to say one thing:

I spent six years getting my PhD, and it was the best decision I possibly could have made.  Therefore, GRADUATE SCHOOL IS OBJECTIVELY AWESOME and everyone should do it.

I'll show you the life of the mind.

Okay, kidding aside. I had a great time in grad school, and I knew many other people who did as well.  There's no denying there are a larger number of people who have a negative, or just a more complicated, experience - but I think it's just as important to attract the right people as it is to warn off the wrong people. Maybe if I present where I came from to have such a positive experience (and what I'm beginning to suspect might become a good career, but who the hell knows) it'll help people make the right decision at least as much as having a list of warnings about potential negatives.

From Here On Out: Where Occupy Tampa Has Been, and Where It Can Go Next

Yesterday, Tampa Food Not Bombs and Occupy Tampa jointly held a luncheon at Voice of Freedom Park near central Tampa, Florida.  Voice of Freedom (VoF) is a park privately owned by Joe Redner, a Tampa entrepreneur and frequently outspoken public figure.  The event included not just some great food from FNB, but several great activities for local kids and training for Occupy participants.  There was some press coverage,  a good number of visitors both from out of town and from the local community.

Though it was by design small and casual, yesterday’s event represents an important evolution of Occupy Tampa specifically, and may offer some useful points of reflection for other Occupy groups. 

Against Greatness: Tim Ferriss and the Ideology of Achievement

Two days ago I managed to grab the last copy of The 4-Hour Body on display at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku.  I can't lie - I'm a devoted follower of Ferriss, which started about two years ago when I adopted a simplified, catch-as-catch-can version of the "slow carb" diet that he endorsed on his blog.  By following the eminently sensible advice to cut white carbs almost entirely from my diet, I lost about fifteen pounds in something like three or four months.  I've since plateaued at a very respectable 181 lbs (at 5'11"), and I picked up the book in hopes of following some of the more detailed advice in it, and getting past that plateau. I'll be writing at least a little bit about that process at my other blog, Flexy Beast.

So, I'm a fan, and I believe in his program - I've seen for myself that at least part of it works.  But at the same time, I find myself questioning the whole premise of his project (I'm like that scorpion - it's in my nature).  Should we, as the tagline for the new book puts it, be interested in "becoming superhuman"? Achievement, excellence, and overcoming are the foundations of Ferriss' empire, in a very concrete sense -  his financial success was initially built on selling vitamins, which (true or not) promise miraculous personal advancement. His first book, "The 4-Hour Workweek," is intended to help you 'have it all' - to have both the money provided by a successful career, and the time to enjoy it.

In my own work and life, I constantly encounter people for whom this model simply doesn't hold.  Musicians, writers, artists, and activists have measures of success that don't map to how much you can deadlift or how much money you make.  Last week I talked with DJ Muta, the producer and turntablist for the group Juswanna, and he couldn't have been more explicit: "If your aim as a musician is just to make a living off your music, you're setting your sights too low.  I make music so I can help people, give them the inspiration to go out there and make it through their struggles.  That's the top of the mountain.  Money is only halfway up the mountain."  We were talking about this while sitting in the closet-sized space of his studio, which is actually the 'living room' of his tiny apartment in western Tokyo.  Muta, despite something that's probably closer to a 70-hour workweek, seems like a pretty happy guy.

But he wouldn't be considered a 'success' by Ferriss' standards, which, though they often remain implied, are only slight modifications on the Anthony Robbins "achieving greatness" vibe.  Though Ferriss clearly has a (narrow) creative streak, and a hunger for new experiences, what he doesn't seem to have much of is capacity for or interest in reflection, either on himself or on society.  Most obviously, he has no apparent use for art or culture.  More subtly, his entire approach to life - scheduled and strategized to the nth degree - leaves no room for real leisure, aimless laziness, even boredom, all of which actually leave the space for new things to emerge.

It's not surprising, then, that Ferriss' books are both bestsellers - he appeals directly to the way our culture already works, to the values of the ruling class, basically defined by the desire to both live a materially rich life (iPad in one hand, four-dollar latte in the other), and also to be "fulfilled," whether that means climbing mountains or doing aikido in your free time.  This "fulfillment" is rarely associated with, say, writing poetry or other creative pursuits, but instead by more quantifiable achievements - a fact Ferris has capitalized on, quantifying everything from his world-record in Tango to, in The 4-Hour Body, his utilitarian, mechanistic guide to the sex.

Now, like I said, I've drunk the kool-aid on much of this. There's a part of my brain that's very competitive, and I take pride in all of my accomplishments.  Particularly, I'm proud my current situation, which, while temporary, is a version of Ferriss' own globe-trotting lifestyle, earned by doing what I love (you can see even there how much I, like Ferriss, love not-so-subtly touting my own achievements).  Every success I have gives me a little jolt of endorphins - but as I get older, I've started to register just how quickly those doses wear off and every "achievement" begins to look like the new normal.  It takes something far more profound and deep than success to get to that most elusive achievement of all - happiness.  From reading Ferriss' book and seeing how he presents himself, he seems like a genuinely happy guy, and I'm sure that has fueled his success.

But I wonder what the relationship is between Ferriss' relentless achievement-orientation and his apparently genuine happiness.  In The 4-Hour Body, he explicitly lays out his belief that achievement leads to confidence and from there, to happiness.  But as others have pointed out, "achievement" can also become a framework for hilarious and pathetic self-delusion, and a distraction from the real substance of life.  I can't yet say I'm practicing this - I pulled a ten-hour workday yesterday, followed by yoga - but even as I pursue some of the tips Ferriss provides in 4HB, I also want to recommitt to indolence, to aimlessness, to self-abandonment.  I think they might be where the real joys of life lie.