February 2000
s m u g
smoking jacket
by Gregory Alkaitis-Carafelli

Road Signs

It is so rare to see a punk with a serious orthodontic fetish, specifically one so very into flossing and flossing well, that on the train the other night I stared, fascinated, repulsed, yet unable to look away. The lit train car combined with the suburban darkness outside turned the windows into semi-transparent mirrors, and it was with this aid Dental Punk was fighting vigorously plaque and messy buildup that can lead to the gum disease gingivitis. Every so often this happens: a traffic accident, neighborhood shooting, flossing train passenger -- suddenly the world is revealed very fast, very raw, in a way that demands you stop watching, my god it is making you sick to watch; but you can not turn away. In the extreme, Burgess' A Clockwork Orange turned raw visuals into a form of torture slash conditioning; strapped to a chair, eyes clamped open, our poor droog Alex was forced to pay attention through a whole mixed-media menu of human misery.

Less sensationally, in the real world death, like flossing, demands and commands attention -- and I am not trying to be funny or snide, because the general inability I see to turn away from misery bothers me. Most mornings the traffic report carries news of an accident, and also, every single time, there is a companion delay on the other side of the road, blithely dismissed by the traffic reporter as a "gaper delay." People slow down to watch the spectacle -- this is fact -- and while I would like to believe their lingering gaze is motivated by a sense of concern for the potentially injured, I know that it is not so. Maybe in the Reagan Eighties this sort of compassion flowed; maybe it even flows now (adjusted for inflation). I would like to think I am just looking in the wrong place -- but all signs point otherwise.

Unfortunately, once you know what a sign looks like you begin to see it everywhere, perhaps even in places it never was. Two recent examples come immediately to mind: "Magnolia," a film as much about death as it is about relationships; featuring the vulpine character Frank "T.J." Mackey driven by the childhood trauma of having to watch, alone, his mother die; the audience dragged forward through four or so suicide attempts (some successful) and the production of a few corpses, all paper to be wrapped around a delightfully heavy brick and hurled through the glass fourth wall. Dying mothers surface again in a recently published novel as much about the celebration of living as it is about the base awfulness of death. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers elegantly chronicles the dirt and shower curtain film no one wants to talk about when they talk about dying people, making the reality of raising his younger brother after the death of both parents funny, disgusting (I am thinking about the housekeeping skills of the two here) and vividly real.

These media products are appropriately uncomfortable, yet engaging in a way that attention must be paid. I saw "Magnolia" twice. And having been forced to think recently about death, on balance, I have come to realize that it is good people stop to stare at traffic accidents. There is always room for doubt -- it is easy to say possibly people are motivated by concern, that is their reason for taking interest. There is no room for such good intentions when traffic flows crisply past accidents.

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gregory@smug.com

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