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mrmichaelchadler · 7 years ago

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Bright Wall/Dark Room May 2018: An Essay on 'Punch Drunk Love' by Ethan Warren

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for their May issue is "Second Time Around," featuring essays on films that their writers once hated but now love, or vice versa. In addition to this essay by Ethan Warren below, there are also pieces on "Suspiria," "Adam's Rib," "Manhunter" "Paris, Texas," "Interstellar," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Assassin," "Drop Dead Gorgeous" and Emir Kusturica. The above art is by Brianna Ashby.

You can read previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or purchase a copy of their current issue, click here.

American adolescence is a marathon of milestones. In those wilderness years between the end of childhood and the onset of adulthood, every birthday seems to bring some seismic new authority—now you can drive; now you can buy cigarettes and a lottery ticket; now you can buy your own beer. But there’s another milestone that, while less often heralded, may be, at least to some of us, the most significant of all: on your 17th birthday, you can buy your own ticket to an R-rated movie, and enter that darkened theater unsupervised.

There’s something solemn and almost mystical about gaining access to a new tier of films. We go to the movies to gain insight, references, social cues that we can use to navigate the world. There’s so much that we experience first on a screen—faraway places, unfamiliar lifestyles, what it looks like to hurt someone and be hurt, what it looks like to love and be loved—and being granted entrance to grown-up movies is like being handed a manual for the adult experience, one you believe you’ve earned by virtue of this personal epoch shift.

That shift happened for me in 2002, and my friends and I spent that year gorging ourselves on the grown-up films of the day. We rushed out to see Adaptation, About Schmidt, Road to Perdition, and afterwards we furrowed our brows over Sprites at Chili’s and earnestly discussed the experience, test-driving analytical terms we’d learned in English class. It felt satisfyingly adult, but I have a feeling I wasn’t the only one with a nagging voice in the back of my head: would’ve been great to see Spider-Man or The Two Towers again instead…

I never voiced that feeling aloud, or even gave it full voice in my head. Because that longing for juvenile art reminded me of the most disturbing truth imaginable: despite this leap towards adulthood, I still felt like me.

One chilly Saturday night that October, my friend Josh and I visited a creaky old arthouse near his home on the south shore of Boston. I’d recently read a review in Entertainment Weekly—the publication of record to my high school mind—that described something fascinating: an Adam Sandler movie for grownups.

“The Sandler we see is, in essence, the same Sandler we have come to know,” Owen Gleiberman had advised, “except that the movie isn’t nudging us in the ribs to laugh at him.” To young men with almost no understanding of cinema except that they loved it, this was a thrilling and fascinating notion.

Ninety-five minutes later, Josh and I burst out of the theater enraged. That movie wasn’t just bad, it was appalling, offensive. We wanted to call the director and chew him out for wasting our time with that faux-artsy bullshit, and any intelligent and rational viewer would obviously agree. We shook with anxious fury as we stepped into the ice cream parlor next door—it was cold out, and Josh’s mom wouldn’t be there to pick us up for another 10 minutes.

Punch-Drunk Love—Paul Thomas Anderson’s fourth film as a writer/director, released when he was just 32 years old—puts you on uncertain footing from the first frame. With no title cards to orient us, we cut in on Barry (Sandler) hunched in the corner of the screen, making a phone call in what appears to be a barren warehouse. He mumbles about the finer points of some corporate fine print, but before we can get the drift, he’s distracted by a strange sound. He walks out onto a dreary corner of predawn Los Angeles and looks in vain for the source. In the distance, a car hits a curb and flips, a visceral and horrific accident that could well be lethal, observed with a detachment that emphasizes nothing. Barry flinches, and then a taxi pulls up, stops long enough for someone to place a harmonium on the ground in front of him, and speeds off.

This avalanche of input is accomplished in three minutes, and we scramble to organize all we’ve seen—was the strange sound relevant? (It wasn’t.) Will that accident be relevant? (It won’t.)

These opening minutes feature no score, and camerawork that’s mostly neutral and restrained. Over the next few minutes, the viewer can start to acclimate to this cold tone. But then, as happens so often in this film, as soon as you gain a foothold, the ground starts to shifts under you.

The eerie vibe lasts about 10 minutes, and then the score finally kicks in. A calliope-tinged waltz brings a sense of grace to the proceedings for, oh, about two minutes. Then that dreaminess is broken by an abstract interlude—shifting colors scored by an atonal aural collage—which is itself then broken when we jump into Barry’s morning as a distributor of toilet plungers. We watch him move about his warehouse in long, smooth takes, all set to a score of thudding timpani and various taps and creaks, which creates a mood of teeth-gnashing anxiety even before we witness the assaultive phone calls and potential for workplace accidents that surround Barry at all times.

As an adolescent, I thrived on the familiar. I fancied myself mature enough to handle avant-garde art, but in a pre-streaming world, I had little exposure to films that truly challenged me. I would pore over descriptions of Eraserhead and Putney Swope, wistfully trying to conjure them in my mind, but whenever I persuaded my parents to drive me over to Video to Go, the selection I perused had “daring indie provocation” defined as Chasing Amy—which, though I would never have admitted it aloud, did provide some shameful measure of relief; that Eraserhead sounded pretty freaky. In that old seaside arthouse, though, I experienced for the first time a full-scale assault on my understanding of what a movie could look and feel like, and I had no way to process a surging tide of intense emotion.

Punch-Drunk Love continues to swing wildly between extremes. Over another stretch of about 10 minutes, we experience brutal rage (when Barry is overwhelmed during a date with Emily Watson’s Lena, a woman seemingly out of his league, he steps into the bathroom and kicks in the stall doors, grunting with volatile distress), we experience achingly sincere emotion (when the date ends with Lena unexpectedly calling Barry back up to her apartment for a kiss, he sprints down the hall like a man on fire rushing towards an extinguisher, underscored by strings and accordions straight out of an Audrey Hepburn romance), and we experience stark terror (after the date, Barry is accosted by extortionists and flees on foot as they pursue with hurled invective).

And I do mean we experience these extremes, rather than observing them, as Anderson uses every tool at his disposal to put us directly within Barry’s feverish worldview: When the score is oppressively percussive, we’re infected with Barry’s own excruciating stress, and when the score soars with romance under externally mundane events, we’re reminded of the heart-shaking significance of this moment in his life. When a shot goes agonizingly long without the relief of a cut, we’re left stranded along with Barry wondering when this anguish might end, but when a scene is shattered by a jagged flurry of cuts to accompany the introduction of some new character or information, we’re stranded again as both we and Barry struggle to process this sudden influx of input. And when a frightening outburst of Barry’s is shot with cold objectivity, we become implicated as Barry then turns to see everyone—ourselves included—staring at him, reminding us, somehow even more keenly from an outer vantage than if we were within his, how lonely it feels to lose control when everyone else has retained it.

For a young man trained on traditional film grammar, never forced to sort out provocative juxtapositions, this was all too much. Three-quarters of the way through the film, I broke. As Barry and Lena lay in bed on the verge of consummation, whispering flirtatious threats of violence—“I’m looking at your face and...I just wanna fucking smash it with a sledgehammer.” “I want to chew your face and I want to scoop out your eyes and I want to eat them.”—my discomfort flipped into revulsion. I’d made every effort to engage with this movie, and now I felt mocked, a sting that burned all the more for my low-humming fear that I was still too immature, and so worthy of that mockery. I built a wall between myself and the screen just before the finale erupted in a crescendo of cruelty, rage, courage, and love, numbing myself in the nick of time. Rather than grapple with any of my intense responses, I made a simple ruling: this was the worst movie I had ever seen.

Three months later, I went off to a new school, three hours from home. It was my idea, an attempt to shake some measure of courage and confidence into my life, but as my departure approached, I started experiencing explosive bursts of emotion. One night, seized by something I could neither understand nor articulate, I punched a wall, shattering the plastic casing around the light switch. I was shocked at how much damage I could do on a volatile impulse, and my anger melted into bitter self-loathing.

When I arrived and started settling into my new dorm, my new roommate and I tried to bond through that age-old young man’s ritual of comparing pop culture tastes. I mentioned that I had recently seen the worst movie ever made: Punch-Drunk Love.

“You probably didn’t understand it,” my roommate sniffed. He hadn’t seen it, but he knew it was artsy stuff.

“Yes I did!” I spat back. “And there was nothing to understand!”

I didn’t have the vocabulary to defend my opinion, only the memory of my amorphous distress. But before I could gather my thoughts, I was overcome with shame at being accused of intellectual inferiority. This was the imposter syndrome that I had crossed states to escape. But the invisible infection couldn’t be shaken that easily.

Slowly but surely, in fits and starts, I kept growing up. I was in college when Anderson released his next film, There Will Be Blood. I tagged along with two more enthusiastic friends, and while I expected a dreary historical epic, I was startled by how strange and lithe the movie was, shocked that it could have come from the director of the worst movie I’d ever seen. I was in grad school when Anderson released his follow-up, The Master, and I watched it alone out of tentative curiosity—then rushed back out immediately with friends, eager to share this enigmatic bruiser of a film. Before long, I was routinely citing it as my favorite movie.

I doubled back to his earlier films; I loved both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but they felt like the work of a different artist entirely, one less sure on his feet and more indebted to his influences than the one who’d produced these singular masterpieces in the past decade. Falling in love with his remaining body of work, though, never sparked any interest in reconsidering Punch-Drunk Love; I remembered everything I’d hated about it. But I was nagged by curiosity as to how this little film I recalled as so spiteful and ugly might serve as a link between these two eras in his work. When it showed up on Netflix, I finally bit the bullet, pressing play with the apprehension of a spurned lover at risk of being hurt all over again.

The intellectual response was the same: I have never seen anything like this. But as I experienced all the same whiplash that unmoored me a decade earlier, the emotional response was flipped, leaving me breathless with joy. Where before I had seen nothing but a haze of ugliness, I could now sort and compartmentalize the stylistic juxtapositions, and the result was one of the richest viewing experiences I’d ever had.

Early on, there’s something approaching the kind of conventional joke I had once expected from a grown-up Adam Sandler movie. In the middle of the first stressful warehouse set piece, Barry offers to demonstrate a new non-breakable plunger for potential buyers. He smashes the plunger on the table, and it shatters in a geyser of particles. He remarks, “OK, this was one of the old ones.” That moment could come from a comedy of any style, but a conventional one would use editing and sound design to help us process the joke. Here, the moment is only one note in a symphony of anxiety and it’s played so deadpan that it almost crosses the line into anti-comedy. On first viewing, I was so behind the 8-ball I would barely have registered the opportunity to laugh.

I now had the benefit of Anderson’s full filmography to decode the sequence. Each of his films has a prankster’s spirit that evinces an admirable lack of pretension. Even the towering Old Testament-style epic There Will Be Blood was largely influenced, he claims in interviews, by Tom and Jerry and Spy vs. Spy. That willingness to subvert genre expectation is a large part of what makes him so appealing as an artist. While some “serious” filmmakers feel the need to saturate their dramas with unvarying solemnity, Anderson has the confidence to play with every shade of tone available, knowing that this variance will make each disparate element pop to maximum effect.

When a bleak drama is subverted by jolts of laughter, it’s a relief; comedy subverted by unvarnished pain and distress, though, is a much more acquired taste. Watching Punch-Drunk Love now, I marvel at the unbearably tense warehouse scenes because I recognize the puckish spark and unique vision in that discordant cinematic symphony. But as an adolescent, I didn’t yet have the necessary experience and context to laugh along with provocation. Feeling mocked, I responded with a very adolescent outrage.

From my current vantage a decade and a half removed, though, my adolescent response strikes me as appropriate. Josh and I weren’t just irritated in 2002, we were rattled to our cores in ways we could only process with agitated babbling and shrill jokes. That disturbed intensity, it seems so clear now, was an unconscious attempt to control the narrative for why we felt how we did, to assure ourselves that we were sophisticated cinephiles with complete perspective on our revulsion. But if we’d truly had perspective, we would have been recognized the truth too awful to reckon with in that moment: that Punch-Drunk Love functions on a very specific level for adolescent boys, one so precise and intense that it’s easier to look away from than to accept. It’s simultaneously an expression of fantasies they don’t dare express, and a bleak realization of their darkest fears.

Each of Barry’s defining traits perfectly matches the profile of a typical adolescent boy. He’s agonizingly uncomfortable in his own skin, constantly shifting posture and expression in search of some elusive social ease. His trademark primary-blue suit, which appears at first to be a flourish of heightened production design, is quickly revealed to be a deliberate affectation—when an employee asks why he’s wearing a suit, Barry responds, “I bought one. I thought it would be nice...and I’m not exactly sure why.” I would wager most adolescent boys have experimented with similar sartorial trademarks in hopes of crystallize their identity—Maybe I’ll be a hat guy, maybe I’ll be a Chuck Taylors guy. On that chilly October night when I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I can say with virtual certainty that I was wearing the canvas jacket I’d recently festooned with carefully selected pins and patches, and which I would wear daily for the next several years, convinced that as long as I wore something distinctive, I could project the illusion of a sense of self.

But Barry’s emotional troubles are more severe than social anxiety; he seems plagued by turbulent pubescent hormones, leading to mood swings that are unbecoming in a teenager but horrifying in an adult. When he’s teased by his sisters during a party, his bruised feelings surge so hot that he punches out the panes of a sliding glass door. Moments later, he confesses to his brother-in-law, “I don’t like myself sometimes,” then collapses into sobs, clasping his face as though to literally hold himself together, and lurches away moaning, “I’m sorry.” There’s a dark comedy to the sequence, but it rings recognizable to me now in a way I couldn’t have allowed myself to see as a teenager. I remember the snap into destructive rage that made me break my parents’ light switch, and I remember so often wrestling with a shame over my very existence as I struggled to imagine where I might fit into the world. Some alarm must have triggered in my teenage subconscious watching this film—there’s a chance you could feel this way forever.

At my darkest moments, this alienation convinced me I might be unworthy of romantic love. Barry clearly never outgrew this fear, and it sparks the twin plot strands that braid into a vision of simultaneous fantasy and terror. When his sister suggests introducing him to Lena, he instantly tries to sabotage the potential setup: “Yeah, I don’t wanna do that!” he responds with a sort of shocked awe. “I don’t do stuff like that!” It’s so much easier, as I knew all too well at 17, to avoid trying than it is to invite the inevitable pain of rejection.

But Barry aches for connection, so he calls a phone sex line late one night. He finds brief satisfaction for his lonely urges in the operator’s unnaturally erotic voice, unzipping his pants in a tense hunch at her direct order when he can’t delay it any longer. The next morning, she calls back and begins extorting him, a call he takes in a tight hallway, literally boxed in. It’s the realization of any anxious virgin’s darkest fear: if you accept anyone’s offer of help alleviating your loneliness, you’ll pay for it.

The extortion follows Barry throughout the rest of the film, first in phone calls that seem almost supernaturally able to track his location, then in the team of enforcers who accost him after his shockingly successful date with Lena. The fact that this blackmail threatens to destroy what seems like Barry’s first real shot at love only heightens the tragedy from an adolescent perspective.

Lena is so kind, engaging, and assertive in her desire for Barry that she’s not so much too good to be true as possibly divine. She’s the platonic ideal of a first girlfriend, the kind of girl your mom would love but who’ll eagerly participate in your most embarrassing bedroom desire (say, Barry’s urge to whisper violent threats as foreplay). She’s the teenage ideal, and this miracle is put at risk because just days earlier Barry accepted his unworthiness of love and paid for sexual relief. It’s a perfectly calculated recipe for teenage despair.

We learn very little about Lena, and why she might pursue Barry with such intense focus despite his initial resistance. Her nigh-supernatural goodness does beg the question of whether she represents a complete character; we’re left to fill in the blanks about her, and while Watson’s performance paints a vibrant portrait, she’s certainly thinly sketched on the page. But in a story that places us in the mindset of an overgrown adolescent, a preternaturally perfect love interest seems appropriate. How many adolescent boys are actually capable of considering the objects of their affection as three-dimensional beings? If the happy ending, the promise of a future with Lena, offers Barry the chance to finally leave adolescence behind, then the perspective it takes to actually deserve Lena, to see her as a complex person, is a door that opens as the credits roll—a door that I, as an adolescent identifying with Barry so strongly that I repressed it as a coping mechanism, would be only dimly aware of for years to come.

A question has nagged me since I first revisited Punch-Drunk Love: was my old roommate right? Did I, in fact, not understand this movie on first viewing? With a few more years’ perspective and many more viewings under my belt, I don’t think so. I may now have the context to recognize Anderson’s goals, but that doesn’t mean I watched the film incorrectly before. Films aren’t cold and static objects. They’re dynamic organisms, built to provoke emotional responses, and as long as our inner landscapes can change, a film will change with us. You can watch a film until you’ve memorized every inflection of every line reading, and still be caught off guard on the hundredth viewing thanks to some new significance that couldn’t have coalesced before you became the person you are today. A final, definitive understanding of a movie is as elusive as final, definitive understanding of yourself.

In my mid-20s, I noticed a pattern: whenever I look back at who I was five years ago, I feel disappointed in the choices I made, embarrassed by what I thought was important. I feel relief that those times are behind me, and a temptation to believe that I’ve finally got it figured out, that I’ve won the game of growing up and it’s smooth sailing from here. But with every half-decade’s leap, I can sense another me five years in the future looking back in disappointment. It’s tough to grapple with this knowledge that you’ll always be a work in progress, but there’s liberation in it, too. It can be such a burden to know that you’re irrefutably right, and that any challenge to your worldview is an act of spite.

Whenever anyone asks why Paul Thomas Anderson is my favorite filmmaker, I say that his films only grow richer on repeat viewings, largely because they always leave with some question. I still puzzle over the symbolic value of the car crash that opens Punch-Drunk Love and is never remarked upon. I haven’t managed to fully track the role the harmonium plays in Barry’s emotional journey, though I’m developing a hunch that you could compare it to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that reading might help contextualize some of those weird sound effects. Better watch it again through that lens and see what happens.

It’s so tantalizing to feel like enlightenment is just beyond my reach, that the next viewing will bring me that much closer, and that maybe, if I’m lucky, someday I might catch that missing piece that brings it all together.

Punch-Drunk Love changed for me once again on my most recent viewing. I was struck more than ever by the ending.

I had just enough time to squeeze in that short runtime while my wife and daughter went out to brunch—it turns out my fear of never loving myself enough to be loved, the fear that once made the film unpalatable, was yet another certitude that just needed a little patience and perspective.

We actually settled very close to where Josh grew up—and he settled, along with his wife and son, only a few miles from where I grew up; funny how life rhymes that way sometimes—so I often go back to that drafty seaside arthouse where we underwent that formative trauma. It’s the best place around to see challenging films, so I went back this January to see Phantom Thread, the eighth feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson. His career is twice as long now, and I’m twice as old—making me the age that he was when Punch-Drunk Love was released; another rhyme—so I’m even more tuned in to the way his style has grown in sophistication, how his thematic concerns have deepened. But that prankster energy is still there in the way he subverts period romantic drama with deviant sadism, and that penchant for a strange and incongruous obscenity—it’s impossible not to laugh in disbelief when Reynolds Woodcock shouts that, “no one gives a tinker’s fucking curse,” or when Lancaster Dodd processes his frustration in The Master by cutting off his thought with a sputtering, “PIG FUCK.” There are so few important directors working in important genres so willing to get so weird. His movies may be even more grown-up now, but goodness knows he’s still him.

I’d never before been particularly struck by the final line of Punch-Drunk Love. But this time it took my breath away. As I kept an ear out for my family’s return, I considered Barry sitting at his harmonium—I’ll crack that riddle next time for sure—and then I considered Lena, wrapping her arms around this overgrown adolescent who may finally have a fighting chance at becoming a man. I considered that quiet moment at the crossroads where one story ends, and so many more are about to begin.

“So,” Lena says quietly, “Here we go.” Time for another great leap forward.

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usnewsaggregator-blog · 7 years ago

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The Baltimore Cops Studying Plato and James Baldwin

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/the-baltimore-cops-studying-plato-and-james-baldwin/

The Baltimore Cops Studying Plato and James Baldwin

BALTIMORE—Sitting in a classroom one day in September, a police officer studied a passage from James Baldwin’s 1966 essay on policing in Harlem, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” and read a few lines out loud: “Some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been white … but these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them.”

An instructor, standing in the back of the room, pressed the cop for his reaction: “Tell me, does that give you any basis for our understanding of any modern circumstance?”

Beyond the age of mass incarceration Read more

It was humanities hour at the city police department’s in-service training facility, and Detective Ed Gillespie was presiding, a gun on his hip and literature on his lips. Officer training is front and center in the national conversation about police reform, with advocates and progressive police departments alike promoting lessons on de-escalation, implicit bias, and the like. Gillespie thinks cops need something else, too: the humanities. In his classes, he teaches them Plato, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, and Baldwin.

About 10 minutes after their initial exchange, the same officer spoke up. “It’s 1966, so policing a white neighborhood [versus] a black neighborhood was completely different. Black neighborhood was looked down upon, and [to] this day and age, some people are still carrying that fear,” said the officer, a white man who’s a veteran of the force. “They’ve heard stories from their grandparents and stuff like that. And look, it hasn’t been that long ago …”

Gillespie agreed that the events of the ’60s were recent enough. “No,” the officer persisted. “I’m talking about even in my career—that has happened, you know? That [if] you ran, you got your punishment when you got caught.”

This connection between literature and everyday life is exactly what Gillespie hopes to facilitate. Police officers, he told me, “deal with the human condition constantly.” Books offer people “a safe way to look at circumstances and ask yourself, ‘What does this tell us about us? … What does this tell me about myself? What does this tell me about the human condition?’”

And, more to the point: “What does this tell you, officer, about policing?”

***

Since Freddie Gray suffered a fatal injury in the back of a Baltimore police van in 2015, setting off days of protest and rioting, the city has been pushing through a wrenching overhaul of its police department even as violent crime has surged to unprecedented levels.

Gillespie works in the division that teaches retraining courses. Once a year, every cop is pulled off the street and thrown into the classroom to take refreshers and learn new policing techniques. This in-service training used to last for one week. This year, the commissioner doubled it, requiring far more hours than many other departments.

Drawing on his master of liberal arts degree from Johns Hopkins University, the 48-year-old Gillespie teaches a curriculum that includes bite-sized chunks of literature, philosophy, and history. “You can get so into the outcomes, into the methods, [that] you don’t look at the ethic with which you’re operating in many cases,” Gillespie said. “And we’re trying to get officers to delve into it.”

In a course on Plato, he introduces officers to the philosopher’s idea of the tripartite soul, which can be governed by the intellect, by the “spirit,” or by the appetites. Gillespie has his students discuss real stories of police misconduct in Platonic terms. “The ultimate point is that you have to … take a moment, and stop and use your intellect, and ask, ‘What’s driving me right now?’” he explained to me.

Gillespie is trained to teach nuts-and-bolts courses on terrorism response, extremism, and gangs. But since the unrest of 2015, humanities have occupied the bulk of his time. The strategy is unusual in police training. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve never heard of an instructor using this type of approach,” said William Terrill, a criminal-justice professor at Arizona State University who studies police culture.

But he nevertheless understands the general theory behind it. He’s authored studies showing that officers with higher education are less likely to use force than colleagues who have not been to college. The reasons why are unclear, Terrill said, but it’s possible that exposure to unfamiliar ideas and diverse people have an effect on officer behavior. Gillespie’s classes seem to offer a complement to the typical instruction. Most of it “is mechanical in nature,” Terrill said. “It’s kind of this step-by-step, instructional booklet.”

Officers learn how to properly approach a car, say, but they are rarely given tools to imagine the circumstances of the person in the driver’s seat.

***

When he enrolled as a cadet in 2005, Gillespie’s police-academy instructors assumed he was there to write a book. When he brought reading to an assignment that involved a lot of waiting around, his supervisor told him to stop. Another cop once said to him, “You say some good shit, but I just hate the way you fucking talk.”

Gillespie related these stories to me with enthusiasm as a window into police culture and the discomfort some officers have around issues of education. “I feel comfortable here,” he explained, “but definitely, I’m kind of an odd man out.”

He was raised in the Philadelphia suburbs; educated at a private, Quaker school; and attended George Washington University and Hopkins. As an undergraduate at George Washington, he enrolled in ROTC, intending to become a Marine Corps officer. But an injury forced him to drop out of the program. Gillespie became a teacher instead, working at elementary, middle, and high schools in Maryland and Ohio. His master’s-level classes at Johns Hopkins were scheduled to begin on September 11, 2001. After the attack, Gillespie decided that once his studies were done, he would try again to find a career in public safety.

Gillespie, who is black, started as a patrol officer in Sandtown-Winchester, a low-income neighborhood in West Baltimore where police would later arrest Gray. “I never had any experience with anything resembling Sandtown-Winchester. When I went to work there as a law-enforcement officer, the culture shock was just unbelievable,” Gillespie told me. “And it had nothing to do with race. It was about economics, it was about … personal history.”

In class, Gillespie frequently refers back to his patrol experience. He raised his discomfort with Sandtown when I visited, addressing one student, a former colleague, directly: “You sir, you, working the central [district], pulled me aside more than once and said, ‘You know what, the way you talked to that person wasn’t really professional.’ … You really helped me recognize I had biases about dealing with people in Sandtown.”

Gillespie’s personal stories remind officers that he is one of them, not an ivory-tower critic. At the same time, he argues that front-line police need to understand the roots of their work. “Tradition is a big thing for officers, and we are in the tradition of the western world,” Gillespie said. “We’re kind of government on the ground. I mean, we have to represent democratic values. We have to represent those Enlightenment values in a very immediate way.”

Cops also need to embrace the complexity of their jobs, he suggested. “We’ve reached a stage at which policing has to be taken seriously as a profession”—not just, as cops often call it, “the job.”

“I heard a lot of officers talk in terms of how simplistic it is,” he told me. But “it’s actually very complex. And it takes a sophisticated thinker.”

***

On the day Gillespie was teaching Baldwin, he asked the 25 assembled officers to do some brainstorming on the meaning of various terms essential to policing, like “neutrality” or “respect.” The conversation about “respect” turned to the way officers interact with people from different communities. One officer assailed the notion that cops should employ a uniform style. He raised the scenario of a kid loitering on a corner in the Gilmor Homes, a public-housing complex in Sandtown.

“I’m like, ‘Shorty, come here. You can’t be here. Come on. Go on. You know better than this.’ … He gets that. That’s not disrespectful to him,” the officer said. “I can’t [say], ‘Young man, you have to leave this corner’ —’cause then he doesn’t get that.”

The same language would not work in tony Roland Park, the officer said: “It’s not a disrespect to either one,” he explained. “It’s communicating at a level that they understand.”

The fact that a Roland Park resident lingering on a corner is much less likely to be shooed away did not come up. But the officers were nevertheless grappling with what they see on the beat. As others chimed in, they were emphatic that their goal was to show respect.

Gillespie told me they aren’t always so easy to engage. That day, he handed one group a sheet of paper with the word “cynicism.” “I’m cynical about all of this,” groused a rotund detective. Later, the same group was contemplating the meaning of “procedural justice”—the notion that justice hinges not just on fair decisions, but also on fair processes for making those decisions. The detective declared that it means officers must “treat everyone with kid gloves.” A colleague replied: “Policing’s changed.”

There’s no way to assess whether Gillespie’s teaching has actually made a difference on the street. Two policing experts I spoke with said that a few hours a year is unlikely to have much impact. Maria Haberfeld co-directs a program that offers free courses on ethics, leadership, and diversity to New York City Police Department officers. The NYPD Police Studies program, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is a four-course sequence that cops take in addition to their day jobs, often as a first step to pursuing a full degree.

“In-service training is just a Band-Aid,” said Haberfeld, a professor at John Jay. If the goal is to change how people talk or think, she added, “You cannot do it in two hours or two days.”

Gillespie agrees that his classes are just a small nudge, but he remains optimistic about what they might achieve. “We’re building a culture, so it has to be something that’s progressive,” he said.

My efforts to speak with Baltimore police brass about why they support Gillespie’s work were unsuccessful. But the fact that they’ve made his curriculum part of routine training is significant. Police culture is unlikely to change simply in response to pressure from outsiders. It can take insiders to make new ideas seem legitimate, like something real cops talk about.

That’s what Gillespie does. And he understands that not every conversation will take off. “In many cases, officers feel like they’re somewhat under siege. ‘Why are you criticizing me again? Why are you trying to tell me things I already know? Why are you implying I’m racist, implying I’m biased?’” he said. “And then they kind of shut down.”

Or the opposite can happen. The class I observed saw a heated round of venting about how social problems—from family arguments to mental illness—fall into the laps of police. Gillespie had to remind the officers to calm down.

Later, he told me it’s all part of the process. “You have to let them go and bring it back around to the point that you’re trying to make,” he said. “By letting them talk, they’re more open to hear.”

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thaiyogamassage-blog1 · 8 years ago

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Thai Yoga Bodywork / Yoga Nexus

5 Points in a Thai Yoga Bodywork / Yoga Nexusby Bernie Gourley

I’d arrived in India with a long list of activities to try and skills to learn as part of a plan of self-betterment. That TYB course was the first item on the list to be scratched off. I’d been in the country a little over a month. The strange thing about that was that TYB was the activity farthest outside my comfort zone. I wasn’t a complete stranger to yoga or meditation when I arrived in India. And while I was new to the martial arts of Kalaripayattu and Muaythai, I’d practiced a Japanese martial art my entire adult life. So while I wasn’t skilled at those arts, I had a level of transferable confidence to counterbalance my lack of skill. The same couldn’t be said TYB. It was all new. But that’s the magic of moving around the world, everything is outside your comfort zone, so you might as well go big or go home.

Small world. A couple years later, I’d be in that same Meditation Hall for the capstone weekend of my 500-hour yoga teacher’s course. I remember lying in that Meditation Hall, resting after having learned the advanced cleansing practices (shatkarma) of hatha yoga. (By then there was an entirely new level outside my “comfort zone” as I’d purged my entire alimentary canal.) At any rate, the Fireflies Meditation Hall was just a piece of geographic connective tissue that linked my yogic and TYB educations. I’d like to discuss five more substantial links.

5.) Anxiety management: Let me begin with a theme that I mentioned in my introduction. It’s an aspect of personal development that I’ve spent a lot of time working on recently, and that’s moving outside one’s comfort zone to dispassionately observe one’s anxieties. Both Yoga and TYB present practitioners with opportunities to observe and tame anxieties in a safe way. In TYB, one’s anxiety might be about injuring the person one is working on, about doing a poor job, or it could even be just about touching strangers. People have various reasons—from various social anxieties to germophobia—for discomfort with physically touching people they don’t know well. (Being an introvert, I have a tinge of this discomfort that would likely be much worse if I hadn’t studied martial arts. But, having studied a grappling-centric martial art for so many years, I’d developed a bit of transferable confidence about being in close physical proximity with people I didn’t necessarily know well.)

In yoga, the sources of anxiety are often gravity related (e.g. inversions and arm balances), but can be quite varied. I mentioned shatkarma as another example. And I’ve found external breath retentions from pranayama to be a potent area in my own personal practice.

At any rate, what both Yoga and TYB do to help one take on one’s anxiety is to insist that one confront it in a mindful way. Just practicing forces one to experience the anxieties, but the crucial second ingredient is that one must keep one’s attention on the action—preventing one’s mind from engaging in the escalatory patterns by which it makes molehills into mountains. While it’s true that there are many other activities that this should be true of, it’s common in many fitness activities to practice distractions. People often blare portable music devices to drown out their body and mind as they exercise and practice other self-betterment activities. Such distractions aren’t an option in [good] TYB or Yoga instruction (Note: I say “good” because one can see a sad wave of distraction yogas out there that bury the sensations of practice in cute animals, alcohol, and—even–frat-house style raves.)

4.) Anatomical intuition: Both TYB and Yoga expand one’s understanding of the human body. A great feature for those who practice both systems is that the two systems are complementary. They present both overlapping and non-overlapping means to insight into the body. Yoga provides insight through all of one’s senses—not just the five we think of, but including proprioception (the sense by which a person is aware of the position of his or her own body parts and their movement) and balance. In other words, yoga allows one to see inside one’s own body as fully as possible. On the other hand, TYB offers the opportunity to learn about the wide range of variance in human bodies—feeling all their varied characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses.

I think a yoga teacher can learn a great deal by practicing TYB. It encourages a greater understanding of the strengths and limitations of others. At the same time, TYB practitioners benefit from yoga’s high degree of intra-bodily awareness because the Thai style involves many assisted stretches that require strength, balance, and awareness.

3.) Appreciating the Slow: Modern life shouts at one to do everything faster. Yoga and TYB are two activities in which there isn’t any payoff for being faster, and, in fact, there are costs. In TYB, the massaged individual will find a fast tempo massage less relaxing. If one has ever been handled by a masseuse or masseur like a baker making bread, one knows exactly what I’m talking about. Hatha Yoga also emphasizes slow movement. Even when one is doing an active style like Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, there’s an emphasis on maintaining control of the body throughout, and that requires engaging musculature to counter the forces of gravity and momentum.

2.) Core stability and muscular endurance: Both TYB and Yoga build and require core strength and muscular endurance. Bodywork is a physically demanding job. When one learns TYB, a great deal of attention goes into the minutiae of handling the client so as to minimize the stress and strain on one’s body. Still, there’s no way around the fact that one is manipulating another person’s body and one has to bear that weight so that the client can be relaxed as one stretches them out or turns them over. Commonly, those people will be larger and heavier than the person delivering the massage. Even if one isn’t doing TYB all day, one will likely feel it—perhaps all the more because one hasn’t developed that core strength and muscular endurance. Yoga can also help the TYB practitioner to keep supple in a job that can easily make a person sinewy.

On the other hand, yogis and yoginis can learn a thing or two about balance and control of the core from the challenging act of manipulating another person through their stretches.

1.) Attentiveness to Subtle Sensations: In yoga teacher training, one is often shown Wilder Penfield’s homunculus. Penfield was a doctor who studied the functional organization of the brain, and particularly the sensory and motor cortexes (the parts that process sensations and commands to move body parts.) He was eager to map the motor cortex so that he’d know what portions of damaged or cancerous tissue could be removed without causing paralysis or the like. At any rate, you’ve probably seen either a flat or 3-D version of the homunculus. It’s notable for its huge lips and hands and comparatively tiny chest and thighs. That’s because the size of a body part on the model doesn’t represent its anatomical size but rather its size in the brain, and our hands have a truly astounding piece of cerebral real estate.

What’s fascinating is that for all this capacity for feeling through our fingers, one has to practice to get the fullest out of that ability. In the beginning, it can be quite different to feel huge knots in the muscle during TYB sessions—even though our ability to differentiate tiny tactile differences is tremendous. In yoga one isn’t so much engaged in feeling with one’s fingertips as one is with one’s internal sensory suite, but the point remains that we have a great deal of capacity that most people leave unused.

I suspect there are many more points of confluence between TYB and Yoga that haven’t occurred to me. If you’ve got one, feel free to comment below.

About Bernie Gourley

An American writer and martial artist living Bangalore, India. A desk life and workday stressors once made him doughy and left him with an accumulation of minor health problems. As a result he begun an intense practice of yoga, started teaching yoga, learned the basics of Thai yoga bodywork (TYB) at the Inner Mountain School of Healing Arts and the Wat Pho Thai Traditional Massage School, and have continued to build a challenging martial arts practice. He has 500 hour yoga teacher certification (RYT500) and Children’s Yoga Teacher certification (RCYT) from the Yoga Alliance through a1000. His formal educational background is in the social sciences. He has two Master of Science degrees, one in International Affairs and the other in Economics. The former is from Georgia Tech and the latter is from Georgia State University.

Thai Yoga Massage

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imosha-blog · 8 years ago

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Thai Yoga Bodywork

5 Points in a Thai Yoga Bodywork / Yoga Nexus

by Bernie Gourley

It was October of 2013 and I found my way to the Meditation Hall at the Fireflies Ashram off Kanakapura Road outside Bangalore’s southern sprawl. That morning, I’d begin learning the sequence of actions of the Chiang Mai style of Thai Yoga Bodywork (TYB.) I would struggle to remember that sequence as I awkwardly groped about trying not to drive my thumb into the bones or nerve junctions of my fellow students. But over the course of those ten days, I progressed to the point that my awkwardness was less apparent, and I could get through the sequence without forgetting much. I’d arrived in India with a long list of activities to try and skills to learn as part of a plan of self-betterment. That TYB course was the first item on the list to be scratched off. I’d been in the country a little over a month. The strange thing about that was that TYB was the activity farthest outside my comfort zone. I wasn’t a complete stranger to yoga or meditation when I arrived in India. And while I was new to the martial arts of Kalaripayattu and Muaythai, I’d practiced a Japanese martial art my entire adult life. So while I wasn’t skilled at those arts, I had a level of transferable confidence to counterbalance my lack of skill. The same couldn’t be said TYB. It was all new. But that’s the magic of moving around the world, everything is outside your comfort zone, so you might as well go big or go home. Small world. A couple years later, I’d be in that same Meditation Hall for the capstone weekend of my 500-hour yoga teacher’s course. I remember lying in that Meditation Hall, resting after having learned the advanced cleansing practices (shatkarma) of hatha yoga. (By then there was an entirely new level outside my “comfort zone” as I’d purged my entire alimentary canal.) At any rate, the Fireflies Meditation Hall was just a piece of geographic connective tissue that linked my yogic and TYB educations. I’d like to discuss five more substantial links. 5.) Anxiety management: Let me begin with a theme that I mentioned in my introduction. It’s an aspect of personal development that I’ve spent a lot of time working on recently, and that’s moving outside one’s comfort zone to dispassionately observe one’s anxieties. Both Yoga and TYB present practitioners with opportunities to observe and tame anxieties in a safe way. In TYB, one’s anxiety might be about injuring the person one is working on, about doing a poor job, or it could even be just about touching strangers. People have various reasons—from various social anxieties to germophobia—for discomfort with physically touching people they don’t know well. (Being an introvert, I have a tinge of this discomfort that would likely be much worse if I hadn’t studied martial arts. But, having studied a grappling-centric martial art for so many years, I’d developed a bit of transferable confidence about being in close physical proximity with people I didn’t necessarily know well.) Fig 1. Fear of breaking others In yoga, the sources of anxiety are often gravity related (e.g. inversions and arm balances), but can be quite varied. I mentioned shatkarma as another example. And I’ve found external breath retentions from pranayama to be a potent area in my own personal practice. Fig. 2 Fear of breaking oneself At any rate, what both Yoga and TYB do to help one take on one’s anxiety is to insist that one confront it in a mindful way. Just practicing forces one to experience the anxieties, but the crucial second ingredient is that one must keep one’s attention on the action—preventing one’s mind from engaging in the escalatory patterns by which it makes molehills into mountains. While it’s true that there are many other activities that this should be true of, it’s common in many fitness activities to practice distractions. People often blare portable music devices to drown out their body and mind as they exercise and practice other self-betterment activities. Such distractions aren’t an option in [good] TYB or Yoga instruction (Note: I say “good” because one can see a sad wave of distraction yogas out there that bury the sensations of practice in cute animals, alcohol, and—even--frat-house style raves.) 4.) Anatomical intuition: Both TYB and Yoga expand one’s understanding of the human body. A great feature for those who practice both systems is that the two systems are complementary. They present both overlapping and non-overlapping means to insight into the body. Yoga provides insight through all of one’s senses—not just the five we think of, but including proprioception (the sense by which a person is aware of the position of his or her own body parts and their movement) and balance. In other words, yoga allows one to see inside one’s own body as fully as possible. On the other hand, TYB offers the opportunity to learn about the wide range of variance in human bodies—feeling all their varied characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. Fig 3. Finding their limits I think a yoga teacher can learn a great deal by practicing TYB. It encourages a greater understanding of the strengths and limitations of others. At the same time, TYB practitioners benefit from yoga’s high degree of intra-bodily awareness because the Thai style involves many assisted stretches that require strength, balance, and awareness. Fig. 4 Discovering your own limits 3.) Appreciating the Slow: Modern life shouts at one to do everything faster. Yoga and TYB are two activities in which there isn’t any payoff for being faster, and, in fact, there are costs. In TYB, the massaged individual will find a fast tempo massage less relaxing. If one has ever been handled by a masseuse or masseur like a baker making bread, one knows exactly what I’m talking about. Hatha Yoga also emphasizes slow movement. Even when one is doing an active style like Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, there’s an emphasis on maintaining control of the body throughout, and that requires engaging musculature to counter the forces of gravity and momentum. Fig 5. Graceful manipulation attempted; This was that first course in October of 2013 Fig. 6 Control throughout motion 2.) Core stability and muscular endurance: Both TYB and Yoga build and require core strength and muscular endurance. Bodywork is a physically demanding job. When one learns TYB, a great deal of attention goes into the minutiae of handling the client so as to minimize the stress and strain on one’s body. Still, there’s no way around the fact that one is manipulating another person’s body and one has to bear that weight so that the client can be relaxed as one stretches them out or turns them over. Commonly, those people will be larger and heavier than the person delivering the massage. Even if one isn’t doing TYB all day, one will likely feel it—perhaps all the more because one hasn’t developed that core strength and muscular endurance. Yoga can also help the TYB practitioner to keep supple in a job that can easily make a person sinewy. On the other hand, yogis and yoginis can learn a thing or two about balance and control of the core from the challenging act of manipulating another person through their stretches. 1.) Attentiveness to Subtle Sensations: In yoga teacher training, one is often shown Wilder Penfield’s homunculus. Penfield was a doctor who studied the functional organization of the brain, and particularly the sensory and motor cortexes (the parts that process sensations and commands to move body parts.) He was eager to map the motor cortex so that he’d know what portions of damaged or cancerous tissue could be removed without causing paralysis or the like. At any rate, you’ve probably seen either a flat or 3-D version of the homunculus. It’s notable for its huge lips and hands and comparatively tiny chest and thighs. That’s because the size of a body part on the model doesn’t represent its anatomical size but rather its size in the brain, and our hands have a truly astounding piece of cerebral real estate. What’s fascinating is that for all this capacity for feeling through our fingers, one has to practice to get the fullest out of that ability. In the beginning, it can be quite different to feel huge knots in the muscle during TYB sessions—even though our ability to differentiate tiny tactile differences is tremendous. In yoga one isn’t so much engaged in feeling with one’s fingertips as one is with one’s internal sensory suite, but the point remains that we have a great deal of capacity that most people leave unused. I suspect there are many more points of confluence between TYB and Yoga that haven’t occurred to me. If you’ve got one, feel free to comment below. About Bernie Gourley An American writer and martial artist living Bangalore, India. A desk life and workday stressors once made him doughy and left him with an accumulation of minor health problems. As a result he begun an intense practice of yoga, started teaching yoga, learned the basics of Thai yoga bodywork (TYB) at the Inner Mountain School of Healing Arts and the Wat Pho Thai Traditional Massage School, and have continued to build a challenging martial arts practice. He has 500 hour yoga teacher certification (RYT500) and Children’s Yoga Teacher certification (RCYT) from the Yoga Alliance through a1000. His formal educational background is in the social sciences. He has two Master of Science degrees, one in International Affairs and the other in Economics. The former is from Georgia Tech and the latter is from Georgia State University.

#thaiyoga #thaiyogamassage #thaiyogamassageindia

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