“Leaves of Grass 101″ is part of the 101 series. I write down what I think about something in 101 words, no more, no less (excluding this preface, of course). Enjoy!

Who knew that stoner movies could be directed towards an intellectual audience? In Leaves of Grass, Edward Norton splits two roles of twin brothers, an Ivy League philosophy professor and a pot dealer. The two brothers spend the movie mending their broken relationship. I felt as if I was watching a version of Pineapple Express for people with a master’s degree. Even if you don’t hold the aforementioned document, Leaves of Grass won’t disappoint as it is both funny and violent. I believe this to be Norton’s best role, even better than Fight Club. Keri Russell and Susan Sarandon both support.

“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”

- Japanese Proverb printed in the “Frelon: This Year’s Remix” program

The lights dim, the stage goes black, the crowd stirs, and then, chaos!  It’s another year of Frelon. Frelon is fascinating simply for the fact that people are dancing.  And why not?  Why not dance down Academy St., and, upon the acceptance of a double mocha latte at Biggby?  Why not perform an interpretative interlude as you make your way to your morning classes?  Why not dance as you do your homework?  Why don’t we dance while driving our cars?  People only dance in certain settings because dancing is the most naked state a human can be in.  Immediately, a dancer is stripped of all their protective social garments, and they stand there, contorting the bodies in tune with the music and their senses, naked as before Eve knew shame.

To whom is this license for this public nudity granted? Is it the most beautiful of each gender?  Those with professional or formal training?  Only those with impeccable rhythm and musical sensibilities? Each year at Frelon, the fire of exclusivity within dance is brought down from the hoarding gods, and released to the public masses.

As in the past, Frelon has its hits and misses.  To the casual observer, some routines seem to work, and some not so much.  Many appear to be spot-on to the intended choreography, while some feign articulation for unrefined precision.  This year is no exception. With such an amalgamation of performers, there is disunity not only between dances, but within individual dances themselves.  More experienced and engaging dancers not only themselves stand out, but reveal their less tantalizing counterparts as well. The best dances–such as Pointe Percussion, choreographed by Marina Takagi–were marked by internal unity glued together by obvious technical refinement.

Yet to isolate the dances of Frelon on a scale of “meh” to “wow” misinterprets the spirit of the program on the whole.  Frelon has, and I hope will always be, a celebration of the human spirit to physically express itself in an attempt to articulate the individual. The chaos grants us fools the opportunity to dance to make sense of things, should we take it.  Several Frelon routines begin with flashing lights, loud noises, screaming, running around, sirens, and the like.  This chaos begins to fade into rationality only by progressing into the choreography of the dance.

Frelon is significant as a litmus test for our generation’s contemporary musical tastes.  While on a road trip with my mother, I once asked her if the music of her generation–from the late ’60s through the ’70s–spoke to her generation as a musical representation of their experience.  This phenomenon of mainstream popular music being the soundtrack to average life is most overtly seen in the blues and many jazz forms such as bebop, and, to a more mythologized extent, evident in the rebellious nature of some rock ‘n’ roll.  For years, however, there seems to be a disconnect between our generation and the mainstream music produced for and by us.  While we may dance to whatever it is they play in the basements of house parties, we are not dancing with the message and musical-cultural ramifications of that music.

Frelon affords an opportunity to explore this notion of generational soundtrack.  Whereas only those with exceptional social clout are able to control what it is people dance to at house parties and mainstream clubs, at Frelon, people are not only able to choose what they dance to, but how they are going to dance to it, and to some extent, who is going to be doing the dancing.  The one exception to the aforementioned pop-generational discrepancy of note is Lady Gaga‘s “Bad Romance.”  It’s nonsensical opening of onomatopoeia narrates an angry trans bass with enough energy to topple sky-scrapping fortifications of meaning and emotion, shaking them to their very cores.  While it is love the speaker claims to want, Gaga does not sound like she wants love at all, but calling for more decapitation than intimacy.  Soon after this proclamation, the song transitions into its trademark chorus of “I want your love/And I want your revenge/You and me could write a bad romance [...] Caught in a bad romance” in which the lyrics solidify the duality between pleasure and pain, resolution and conflict present in the song’s schizophrenia.

This conflicting sentiment of yearning for both pleasure and pain is emblematic of uncertainties pervading today’s American youth.  Confronted with persistent murmurings of an uncertain economy, we prepare to leave the relative safe zone of undergrad.  We will encounter an America not in decline, but in transition, jockeying to restructure so as to globally keep the emerging China and India US-dependent sub-powers.  We are entering a society that meets lovers on the internet in relationships built upon qualifications entered into electronic boxes followed by a button that says “save and continue.”  These relationships are subsequently not consummated until Facebook pages have been notified.  We are a wartime society living a peacetime civilian existence, our armed citizens overseas under fire without the support of public forethought and effective protests encouraging their safe return to American shores.  Simply put, we are a young generation living in an America of yet-to-be resolved contradictions.  So what is our theme song?

Lady Gaga

Ultimately, Gaga wants her “bad romance.”  She is a masochist.  This makes Dwight Trice’s Frelon interpretation of the song in his “Bad Romance” all the more interesting.  The message of his crowd-pleasing and effectively theatrical choreography was terrifying.  Trice is the male in a bad romance with Frelon director Kristen Jost providing his better half.  Trice is emotionally and psychologically abusive, leaving Jost to her own lonesomeness and pain.  Whereas Gaga derives pleasure from just such malaise, in Trice’s dance, Jost rebels against it, rejuvenating into a vengefully healed individual.  While in the song, Gaga wants not only the complications, but an orgy of past lovers to make her hurt-felt love all the more dramatic (I want your love and all your lover’s revenge), a renewed Jost reappears with an army of girlfriends assumed to be her confidants, but who, according to the song, are Trice’s ex’s, back to dole out comeuppance.  Trice is then physically abused by this army of bad dates, conquered, and left for dead as the audience roars in approval.

What is interesting is not that an army of women destroy a hurtful man, but that the dance completely reinterprets Gaga’s already conflicting masochistic anthem.  The struggle between pleasure and pain in Gaga’s song is transformed into triumphant revitalization in Trice’s choreography.  The relationship in the song ends as it begins with unintelligible sound words related to “Roma,” suggesting that Gaga is just as confused and stuck with wanting her love as she was when she began singing about it some five minutes earlier.  She has gone nowhere, but in Trice’s relationship, a complete reversal has occurred.  Gaga’s audience has articulated meaning in social mobility from an inherently contradictory song without a message, and applied it to a modern relationship.

The fact that Trice was able to make sense out of chaos, articulating the individual despite its environment, is significant, as it is the task of our generation.  It is the contradiction within Gaga’s anthem that makes it such an appropriate candidate to be the soundtrack of those soon to be entering a society without all of the answers, pervaded with the conflicting notions of War-Peace, Love-Math, America-World, and Ambition-Structure.  While what our generation’s soundtrack will ultimately be is still open for debate, the always enjoyable Frelon provides the perfect proving ground for what it is we choose to dance to and how we choose to do it.

Frelon continues to run through Saturday, April 24 at 8:00 pm in the Dalton Theater of Kalamazoo College.  Tickets $5, $3 students.

Full name: Wesley Mortimer Wales Anderson.

Age: 40.

Height: 6’ 1”.

Occupation: Auteur filmmaker.

Influences: John Ford, Francois Truffaut, J.D. Salinger.

Originally an aspiring novelist, Wes Anderson decided to become a movie director after meeting aspiring actor Owen Wilson in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin. The two of them hit it off, entered a short film in Sundance, got noticed by a producer, and launched their cinematic careers. As an auteur, Anderson writes, directs and produces his own films, often acting as soundtrack supervisor and art director as well. Anderson was nominated for an Oscar for co-authoring the script of 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

Long, long ago, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I sat in a sticky-floored multiplex with a handful of Jujubes and saw this commercial:

Back then the only film directors I knew were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, grizzly, humorless veterans who wore frumpy T-shirts and rumpled parkas and mumbled during interviews. They didn’t hold much interest for me. But right away, this guy got my attention. He was different. For one thing, he was young. And unlike Lucas and Speilberg, he seemed friendly, spoke quickly, and wore a safari jacket. In one minute and thirty seconds  he illustrated the ins and outs of filmmaking, making demands of prop people and giving orders to underlings, all the while eating half a sandwich. I was impressed.

“My life is about telling stories,” The Mysterious Young Director said as he hopped in his director’s chair and swung up on a big dolly facing the camera. As an aspiring novelist myself, I found that pretty intriguing. I asked myself, “Who is this guy?” I went home and tried to find out who he was, because I was the sort of kid got a kick out of researching things thoroughly. I was a quintessential nerd. By the age of fourteen I’d written a novella, started a desktop publishing business, and authored my life plan for the next decade. I was obsessed with pirates, astronauts, and extraterrestrials. I spent more time in my artistic and academic pursuits than in the company of peers, and consequently I was a lonely kid, and kind of melancholy too.

But whoever this director guy was, he seemed to get it. He was nerdy and unafraid, and he seemed like the kind of guy who’d get a kick out of research too. Unfortunately, I found out that all of his movies were rated R, and as a fourteen-year-old living in a socially conservative household, I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies. I thought this meant I would never see any of the Mysterious Director’s films. Cue more melancholy.

I forgot all about this until some years later when I had a friend who, after obsessing over T.S. Eliot and Stephen Sondheim, went through a Wes Anderson phase. He wouldn’t shut up until I had watched The Darjeeling Limited. And boy, am I glad he didn’t. I was hooked from scene one, and to this day, Darjeeling is the only film where I have sat through the entire end credits.

Like most Anderson fans, what arrested me at first was his style. Each of his films boast a look so meticulously assembled that they’re sometimes accused of coming off as phony and contrived. This infamous clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, for instance, is strictly Andersonian:

I loved every facet of Wes’s style, though, from the heavily symbolic Louis Vuitton luggage featured in Darjeeling to each carefully composed frame of The Royal Tenenbaums. His films made sense to me, and I felt at home in them.

The more I watched Wes Anderson’s movies, the more I realized that his characters were like me. They were outsiders. In short, they were weird. They were self-contradictory eccentrics who sometimes spewed banalities like “I’m going to go sit on that thing over there” and sometimes spoke in Latin, just like I did. They were morally ambiguous, virtuous and heroic one day, and the scum of the earth the next. They were strange people with strange problems, and I could relate to all of them. Take, for instance, Max Fischer, the son of a barber who gets into elite Rushmore Academy on artistic merit and becomes a career Renaissance man:

Or take the titular hero of Anderson’s latest film, an egotistical fox who can’t kick his chicken-stealing habit:

“I think I have this thing where I need everybody to think I’m the greatest—the quote unquote Fantastic Mr. Fox—and if they aren’t completely knocked out, dazzled, and kind of intimidated by me, then I don’t feel good about myself.”

Here, Mr. Fox has stumbled upon something important, for with all this outsiderness comes an undeniable, self-induced pressure to be exceptional.  I can relate to this too: I’ve written fourteen step-by-step career plans for myself over the last couple of years, and most of them have involved becoming famous. Max Fischer also has delusions of grandeur:

But after this scene, Max wakes up from his dream, and he’s drooling. At the end of the day he’s just another poor kid with too many hobbies. Things are little easier for Mr. Fox, and his son, Ash, a scrawny fox who lacks the athletic or academic prowess of his older cousin, Kristofferson. Like me and my astronaut obsession, these guys just don’t really fit in anywhere.

As I watched Anderson’s films, I asked myself, “Why all these outsiders? Why all this misfit-hood?” I couldn’t figure this out until I saw Wes interviewed on Charlie Rose one day:

After watching this clip, I finally understood why this man and his work appeal to me so much: he’s a misfit too.  He admits that when writing Fantastic Mr. Fox, he accidentally based Ash’s character on himself and Kristofferson on his older brother. “My brother was the perfect one, and I was the maladjusted, awkward kid,” he said.

In fact, I’ve discovered that most of the people I talk to on a regular basis feel like outsiders. Perhaps not coincidentally, I’ve successfully made Anderson fans out of several of them.  It could be that I’m just attracted to outcasts and thus unconsciously surround myself with them. But I think what’s more accurate is that everyone, on some level, feels inadequate. Everyone thinks that everyone else is part of some super secret club, and if we try hard enough and if we’re just plain lucky, one day we’ll be part of it too.

Maybe there is a secret club. I don’t know. And I’m not going to pretend that after thinking about this I’ve suddenly stopped feeling left out and am in harmony with the rest of the world. That’s just not true. Ask my mom. I was pretty darned irritated at the rest of the world when Fantastic Mr. Fox only made $9 million on its opening weekend, an injustice I tried my best to remedy by seeing the film four times.

But after becoming an Anderson fan, I’ve learned to embrace my outsiderhood, if for no other reason than knowing that there are others of us out there. And who knows—maybe my obsessive research tendencies and  NASA knowledge will come in handy someday. At the end of Fantastic Mr. Fox, our hero and his son are only able to save the day because they are eccentric.

Perhaps it is Mrs. Fox who puts it most succinctly. “We’re all different,” she says to Ash, putting her paw on his scrawny shoulder. “Especially him.” She points at her flamboyant husband, who is wearing yellow- and red-striped pajamas. “But there’s something kind of fantastic about that, isn’t there?”

Indeed there is, Mrs. Fox. Indeed there is.