You died for three days straight

You died, and you died, and then you died some more.

But that was later.

Before, you liked to drink something called “Tarkhoun” – green like absinthe, and sweet like candy. Your nineteen-year old boyfriend burned up in a fighter plane in WWII. That day you said goodbye to him on the platform, when you went off to fight the war as well, he ran after the train and waved, laughing and crying. You recited Edgar Allen Poe at dinner with your heavy accent and perfect diction – “Nevermorrr!” Your earrings dripped down to your shoulders.

My mother liked to quote you. You were quotable in all situations – when you put on your lipstick, when you stepped out of a taxi. You threw out your philandering General (while my grandmother kept hers), your first love was dead anyway. You prepared for the End of Days with a black poodle for company. Maybe you had a bit of a Faust in you, who knows? You worked with the dark strains of foreign languages, your heels clickety-clacked down the gleaming corridors of power. I don’t remember 1986 much at all – but I was a warm mess in your lap right after Chernobyl. You said that I would “blossom at seventeen.”

At seventeen, my cousin and I bounced through the summer rain puddles on your street. We sang, “I’m walking, I’m pacing, through Moscow. And I can also get across – the salty Pacific, and the tundra, and the taiga.” We were walking toward your flat. People in the street turned their heads and watched us pass. In your kitchen, with the gas-stove on, you asked us about the nonexistent men in our lives. We kicked our legs out and laughed. You utilized your pension to buy us little blocks of ice cream in cardboard packaging. Over tea, when the shadows began to lengthen across the faded Persian rug, you told us our future, and when we walked out of your flat in the evening, we began walking toward this future, heedless of the fact that these were our last days with you.

The remnants of your russet beauty lingered on in the 21st Century. You heaved yourself over the threshhold, and then you waited. Winter came late to Moscow this year, but it wasn’t about to let you go. I wonder if you were scared. I am scared for you now, when it no longer matters. I am scared for you – but I am really scared for myself, because for you, the bloody sheets, the bulging veins, and the crashing silence are all over now.

I sliced my finger open last night. I could see the blood standing still for a moment before it gushed out, and I imagined you gushing out of the world, finally. I had forgotten you for a while, and I will too be forgotten.

For Jenia. 

How “300” Spartans Drop-Kicked Me Down the Rabbit Hole

Modern-day storytellers are circumscribed by reductivism. Adopt a classical method – and you’re out of touch, a coward channeling a bunch of unfashionable dead white guys. Adopt a classical method and innovative technology – you are not merely out of touch, you are also a corporate whore.

This is the problem with much of the critical reception surrounding “300.” The mention of the “war-weary times,” (as if most of us know what it’s like to be war-weary in the first place), the shudders of horror at the stylized violence, the sneering suggestions that the filmmakers are not self-aware when it comes to the various forms of eroticism the movie portrays – these things add up to the feeling that we are missing something here, something older and much more mysterious. The both sincere and studied critical responses point to a self-devouring culture that couldn’t appreciate a fun mythology if it stomped on said culture’s collective bum with a big, sandaled foot.

The reactions of ethnic Persians to this film are understandable and important – on a variety of levels, myths are (to borrow a word from today’s fashion experts) fugly, and we should not forget that. But Persians aren’t the only ones who ought to feel at least slightly uncomfortable: the movie aims to kick you around no matter who you are. It’s a splendidly wicked story; it doesn’t quite push one’s buttons as much as jackhammers them.

The end result is both pleasurable and painful to watch – the post-battle tableau of pierced, bloody, beautiful Spartans, arranged as lovingly as figures on the Sistine Chapel, can be read as a nod to the death-cult of warfare, an exercise in spiritual ecstasy, a pin-up worthy seduction, etc. The image is attractive and terrifying at the same time. And perhaps one of the reasons why “300” is such a hard pill to swallow for some has to do with the way in which it doesn’t invite interpretation – you can simply sit back and let it pound you, and there is some guilt inevitably attached to that, no?

“300” also speaks to the viewer visually – the dialogue is the backdrop, and not the other way around. This set-up reminds me of the band Nightwish – masterful guitar-work and very secondary lyrics. The film is also visual in the manner of Little Red Riding Hood re-tellings (no, no, I’m not just saying that because of the Spartans’ blood-red capes) – identity is created through colour, through artful, manipulated imagery. This style is classic in the way that folk tales are – and as lovely and dark as the deepest recesses (rabbit holes?) of the creative mind. It’s no wonder that the film begins and ends with the words of a storyteller.

The Spartans were, as the fictional Xerxes put it, a “fascinating” group of people, noble and savage, and so is this twisted, gorgeous spectacle of a narrative. Said narrative is told from their perspective and with them in mind; we in the audience are the soft-bodied, pathetic, popcorn-littered bystanders. It’s a great device and it doesn’t have to alienate the viewer – especially if the viewer can tear himself or herself long enough from post-structuralist Marxist methodology, or whatever it is that the kids are snorting these days.

“But Natalia!” You might say. “Don’t be all lame and interpretive and crap! Let’s talk codpiece!”

Yes, indeed. No matter how you spin the other aspects of the movie, there is always the film’s spank-you-with-a-copy-of-The–Histories attractiveness, the twinkle in King Leonidas’ eye that keeps on suggesting that we will, at some point or another, get to, at the very least, hold his spear.

They walk in and out of my line of sight

… The characters, that is. I go out to people-watch even when I’m feeling anti-social for weeks on end – because otherwise, I would never, ever get anything done. Even if I’m sitting next to a high school girls’ volleyball team, while writing about marauding space-monkeys; I need the gabbing volleyball players to focus and re-focus the narrative of said marauding space-monkeys (perhaps one of them will end up complaining about patellar tendonitis, a lot). People, strangers in particular, are like sockets I can plug myself into.

Consider this “socket”:

He looks like he may have once been a Southern fried version of Robert Redford. He doesn’t like his new neighbours; they’ve moved to Charlotte all the way down from Noo-Yawk for “the good properties and lower taxes,” but they make fun of his “plantation” accent. He wears a thin cashmere sweater and gold-rimmed glasses; his chin trembles with indignation.

I want to get up and give him a hug, but I jot him down instead.

“300” – Reaction & Review.

“300” is popular because it combines a classic narrative and a revolutionary technique. The story – related by an Ancient Greek for Ancient Greeks, mind you – is an invocation of a true myth: bloody, biased, sexual, exaggerated, and morally ambiguous. This myth is channeled by Miller and Snyder into lovingly constructed bursts of images and sounds – a modern take on the age-old act of storytelling.

It’s understandable why our country’s established cultural elite should wrinkle their noses at such unapologetically dark and unpretentious fare.

The kids, however, get it – and the kids are alright.

– Me.

(As written to the editors of TIME – who will never publish this, but may chuckle for a bit – minus a comma error)

In response to this (I usually like Corliss’ stuff, if only because I think he’s a cool writer, don’t know what happened here), and other assorted intellectuals. With a special shout-out to Comrade Che.