A post in which I demonstrate my earnest naivete

My big boss arbitrarily decided I should attend an expo, held yesterday, of women’s health research at Tulane and LSU. At first I was a little annoyed because there was no practical, job-related reason I needed to go. But then I started to think about it in terms of not having to go to the office on Monday.

The luncheon speaker was Vivian Pinn, who is the director the the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health. She made the trip downtown worthwhile, though my impressions of her before she gave her talk were mixed. She was a very well turned-out woman in her late 50s/early 60s, the kind who makes you realize that being that age can definitely have its perqs. She was very chatty and social with us underlings. But the way she joked about taking home the leftover lunchtime jambalaya made me roll my eyes. It was bad jambalaya, okay? So it seems she is either disingenuous or has bad taste.

But when she started to talk (fast, and then faster as she tried to say more in less time) her great intelligence and savvy became apparent. She oversees this great complicated mess of research, and she seems to grasp the big picture and the details all at once, and navigates the science and the politics. At least that’s the impression she gave. Maybe she’s actually less than competent at her job, but I doubt it. She was a black woman who graduated from the University of Virginia medical school in 1967 and went on to have a big research and academic career. It would be pretty hard to pull that off with smoke and mirrors and good lighting.

People like her make me feel all naively optimistic and ambitious. Look, Virginia, people can make a difference! The government can do good things in the hands of good people! Do you want to smack me yet?

I’ve been feeling that way times a thousand because I’m reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer, who is on a mission to bring first-world quality healthcare with no excuses to the poor of the third world, starting in Central Haiti. It’s a really good, engaging book, too—not too dry and wonky.

All that said, I have to admit that when the afternoon sessions got a little dull I snuck out and went to a matinee. Don’t judge me too harshly, I’m in the middle of working 12 days in a row between my two jobs and I’ve got to get in my goofing off when the opportunity arises.

I went to see The Ballad of Jack and Rose. It got some bad reviews, but maybe that’s because it’s a troubling movie. It bothered me, it creeped me out a bit—but I thought that was the point. It’s sticking with me, partly because of Daniel Day Lewis. I recently re-watched My Beautiful Laundrette, in which he was the gorgeous young (gay) gutter punk with a peroxide Mohawk. His hard-living scars and crooked nose were just beauty marks, highlighting his youth and beauty. In Jack and Rose he is gaunt, with lines on his face and incipient gray hairs. Devastatingly handsome still, but the “devastating” means something different in this reference.

He plays a 60s holdout who has raised his only daughter on the remains of a commune on an island off the coast. Now he’s dying and he invites his casual girlfriend, played by Catherine Keener, and her screwed up sons to live with them on the island—the idea is that she will tend to him in his decline and serve as a surrogate mother to his daughter, Rose. He pretty much buys her services.

The problem is that Rose is a dewy, beautiful, wild little fucked-up nutbar who’s in love with her dad. And he’s made her that way.

I almost wanted to identify with Rose, so young and lovely and full of fire and life. But she’s such a wreck. And when I was a little like Rose I was also a miserable wreck. And not a beautiful one.

Then I was disturbed because I saw too much of myself in Keener’s character. Needy and drawn to fucked-up men, trite and ordinary and unloved. I’m not going to be like her anymore. I refuse.

I sympathize with Jack’s radicalism. He’s right, those new houses on the island are horrid. When Jack and Rose go to the mainland and they’re driving down the strip and she asks him “why do people like things so ugly?”, that’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times, since I was little, and I want so much to do something about it, stop the cancer of that bad-development kind of ugliness.

I don’t think Jack’s answers are the right ones, though. I do understand the back-to-nature urge, and I'd hate to deny anyone their Walden. But the problem is that going back to nature can turn out to be selfish and elitist. Everyone wants their Walden, and the next thing you know Walden is circled by houses. We don’t need to go live in the woods, we need to repopulate the inner cities. Redevelop what we’ve already developed, not build even the humblest new shack in what little is left undeveloped. Cities are the places where we can live most efficiently and wih the smallest overall footprint. So let's stay and make our cities better, rather than running away from them.