Goldstone Potential
Some of my favorite things include an undercurrent of mild cowboy content or on listening to way too much Orville Peck and reckoning with the cowboy as an American symbol
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GOLDSTONE POTENTIAL*
One of the most memorable parts of the 1959 Western film Rio Bravo is the song “My Rifle, My Pony and Me”, sung by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a jailhouse. It is a brief moment of calm in-between the kind of showdowns that are really the meat of any older movie of this genre. Martin is reclining and smoking a cigarette, one of his ankles crossed over a knee, and his hat tipped somewhat low over his face. Yet, his voice rings out with none of the dust of his character (the town drunk) and costume and all of the honey you’d expect from a star of his stature. Ricky Nelson is playing guitar with perfect hair and a perfect teenage heartthrob smile, giving Dean the lead but surely getting to your heart once given a chance to chime in. They are observed by a third character, played by Walter Brennan, who is meant to be goofy-but-well-meaning in a manner that dehumanizes him a touch, almost cruelly marks him as inferior to the other two Western-appropriate men. Appropriately, his character is crippled and has a funny, lispy voice. He is delighted by the song and contributes to it with his harmonica. With child-like glee he requests another after Nelson and Martin are done with rifles and ponies and they oblige with a more upbeat, but less sentimental “Get Along Home, Cindy”. I’m not sure I could recount much of the plot of Rio Bravo, though I have seen it dozens of times, but this jailhouse singalong has been seared into my memory. I remember watching the YouTube clip of it over and over during long nights of problem sets and essays in college, and I think of it every holiday season when someone tries to breakout the inevitable Dean Martin Christmas record.
This fondness for “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” is an odd and complicated one. Certainly, the Western genre was not very respectful or charitable to its women in the 1960s when Rio Bravo was made, and the three men co-star alongside John Wayne for a potent assortment of idealized and misguided masculinity. Much of Martin’s plotline is a choice between being a drunk and getting on the straight and narrow by means of picking his gunslinging and law-enforcing (he and Brennan are deputies to Wayne’s sheriff) back up again. Nelson is pretty but his worth is still in his gun skills. Brennan is the comic relief in many scenes but not immune from having to prove his worth in a gunfight. Even the song itself reads like an ode to a lone, violent man – he is traveling to his “sweetheart darling” and hoping to retire from cow-roping yet the rifle remains one of his “three best companions”. This is not a song or a movie made to be beloved by someone like me. However, I used to watch Rio Bravo with my father when I was young, that and the Magnificent Seven, and I always loved it. And I loved its dusty frontier men. I don’t think I registered that they were all considered to be in one or another way very attractive, but rather I identified them because I too wanted to be dusty and skilled and maybe get in on some ponies and riffles. My grandfather, while he was still alive, often referred to our cabin in the woods as a “ranch”, inspired by watching similar Westerns on Italian TV (the only foreign channels around) when he was younger. I ate that stuff up like it was candy.
Though some of my favorite things include an undercurrent of mild cowboy content – Jonathan Hickman’s East of West, the cult anime Cowboy Bebop, Johnny Cash’s American records, even some of the language in William Gibson novels from “console cowboys” in Neuromancer to the bit about putting on a cowboy hat correctly in Pattern Recognition – I hadn’t put much thought into it until the very queer country of Orville Peck became one of my big pandemic media consumption comforts. It is not so much that I am puzzled by being obsessed with his music as a I certainly have a tendency to listen to the same thing over and over again when I am stressed or tired, as much as his persona has made me think of the cowboy and the West as constructed characters in American culture that have somehow been with me from way before I ever lived in the United States.
Scenes of John Wayne Westerns are one of the many pieces of popular culture that are cut together with documentary footage in Raoul Peck’s 2016 I Am Not Your Negro which centers the writer James Baldwin. A black gay man, Baldwin is also disturbed by his identification with the cowboy, the frontier man, and the violent conqueror of land and “savages”. In the film, he states, and his overwhelming charisma and sharp oratory make it impossible to not listen to him when he talks, that “My school really was the streets of New York City; my frame of reference was George Washington and John Wayne.” Later, he follows it up with the dark side of having had these iconic places and figures at hand for modeling the world upon: “It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you.” While Westerns of the kind where Indians are being shot and massacre and genocide of this sort is being celebrated are much more rare today, Baldwin’s shock is not necessarily unrelatable. The idea of who gets to be a hero and what sort of weapons a hero has, has really only transformed into different costumes and backdrops, but many of us can still see ourselves in someone who’s hurting is being celebrated on film. The pain of women or queer people or tragic stories of people of color still carry so much valency in our culture. Stories and films about vigilantes and enforcers of justice have also not fully lost their appeal, no matter how much the conversation about low enforcement and what is being deemed criminal and where has changed in recent years. The appeal of the country and Western aesthetic, however, does not seem to be haunted by this specter of exclusion, discrimination, violence and what can very charitably be dubbed political incorrectness. The cowboy is a beloved icon, seemingly claimed by everyone at some point in time.
Of course, this is not to suggest that women and queer people and people of color did not exist on the frontier and did not become gunslingers and cowpeople or that all ranchers today are cisgendered straight white men. Even in country music this is not quite right despite genre radio stations being lowkey notorious for only creating hits for a certain type of country artists. However, the quintessential cowboy, the one you think of when you buy a wide brim hat or a pair of cowboy boots to lean into their periodic trendiness, is not an emblem of diversity. The stories we see from this region and this time period have only in recent years caught onto something like inclusivity and more truthful representation of the world. The myth of what goes on in Westerns and in the West has for a long time been made by people that look one certain way and awarded only to people that look just like them. And the cowboy on the frontier is such a symbol of America that it is impressed upon kids abroad even more than those growing up here in the United States.
As a child, I read comics written by Italian creators about a character named Zagor who hung out with Native Americans, had a cartoonishly Mexican sidekick (that would certainly be considered offensive today) and went on adventures that involved riding horses, shooting revolvers and yelling about righteousness and justice. I watched a cartoon about a caricature of a cowboy called Lucky Luke based on the work of a Belgian cartoonist and he was essentially a gunslinging, glorified cop with a very chill talking horse. My dad and his brother, as young boys, read Zane Grey novels about the Wild West, something that was inexplicably popular in communist Yugoslavia. And though I can now turn to Instagram and see a friend has sent me a photoset of a queer rodeo or some similarly 2020 piece of aesthetic that millennials send to each other, the notion that there was something beyond John Wayne’s characters, a figure that embodied a discriminatory and toxic idea of what righteous means in so many films, came to me only after I had already done enough critically reexamining of everything else I like to be open to it.
My partner and I did not manage to go on a honeymoon after we got married but we kept talking about a hypothetical one, first delayed by our graduate work, then rendered nearly impossible by the pandemic. And what we were talking about last October, and what we are still mentioning to each other in moments of shared daydreaming, is going to the desert. The kid in me who loved her grandfather talking about spending school breaks on “our ranch” still wants to vacation on one. My partner, in typical fashion, is quick to bring up Jodorowsky’s El Topo or maybe some other piece of psychedelia that makes one think that you can find anything and everything, including yourself, out there in the dust. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never went as so many of our shared fantasies work best as just that – as excuses to build fictional worlds together and live in them in the moment to forget whatever may be in our future - but I have been thinking about honeymooning on a ranch in the mornings when I walk my fifteen blocks worth of lower Manhattan before I get to school and become Mrs. Callaghan for the day. In my full teacher drag, slacks and button down and that one cardigan with the big “I love physics” button, I have been listening to Orville Peck and thinking about being somewhere spacious, somewhere empty, somewhere wild and just a bit unsafe and dirty.
Orville Peck is a pseudonym and the artists real name is one or two Google searches away. However, he wears a mask and pretends that none of us actually know him. In interviews, he acknowledges the artifice of the mask and the persona. He underscores how much, somewhat unexpectedly, of a tool they are for putting forward something honest. In an official statement concerning his identity being revealed by the fans he said “I understand there is a temptation to try and unmask what I do, but to do so would be to miss the point entirely.” and later, “I ask is that people respect my work and, more importantly, my fans enough to maintain this crucial part of my expression as an artist.” Every artist wears a mask to some extent and Peck is just really honest about it. Or maybe just incredibly savvy about using it to further his project and keep control over his own myth.
The idea of a constructed persona is also essential to contemporary queer culture. Peck is gay and he speaks that language. When he discusses his masked persona as giving him permission to be more vulnerable than he might be with his barren face, it is in harmony with drag queens appearing in his videos and the hints of kink in his outfits. (His song Buffalo Run opens with “Hitch a ride on my makeup” which reminds me of the early 2010s “eyeliner so sharp it could hurt a man” that was a staple of a Tumblr kind of feminism that has influenced me greatly at that time.) In many ways, this is not different from 80s heavy metal bands and their over-the-top adherence to big hair and tight pants, some of which you can still see at, for instance, an Iron Maiden show. Again, Peck just seems to be more self-aware about it. This sense of performance and visual and identity invention also gets to something crucial about all symbols of Americana that manage to propagate abroad and add color to drab and dark history at home – they are also constructed. While that construction had historically been dominated by straight white men, the likes of Peck are providing a counterexample made up of a whole other set of ingredients. The fact that 2019 was marked by a very real “yeehaw moment”, best exemplified by Lil Nas’ X who is another queer artist with a strong penchant for country, makes this a sort of hopeful project.
All things considered, this has been a terrible year for all symbols of America and all American myths. Writing this a few weeks before the presidential election, I am struggling to give shape to my discomfort over liking anything that reads as an avatar of a violent American past in the way that a cowboy does. The states in which “cowboys” live are marked by their voter affiliation and country music is firmly associated with one side in an increasingly extreme political rhetoric and, more dangerously, decision making. The American brand of righteousness that had us cheering for John Wayne shooting someone on the big screen is still hurting people of color, Native people are disproportionately suffering due to the pandemic, and toxic masculinity, the ponies and the riffles and the love for sweetheart darlings that just sit and wait for their men, is front and center in, well, nearly everything that matters politically. Why does it have to be right now that I am finding myself thinking about running away to a prairie, kicking up my feet like Dean Martin, dusty boots crossed at the knee (instead of the more feminine ankle)? How is it that country turned queer dream-pop is the sound that soothes me early in the morning and after a long day (and all days now feel ten years long)?
The truth is that the notion of being unbound, of being free to roam, of being allowed to make mistakes and lash out without much punishment, just transcends so much of the political baggage of our current circumstances. That cartoon, Lucky Luke, it always ended with the titular character riding off into the sunset. He was self-sufficient and he could leave any place that he did not like. He had the kind of lack of responsibility that often only the most privileged among us get to experience. For most of us right now, there is no horse, no riding, no sunset, just the confines of pandemic-proofed spaces and the endless panicked shootouts between competing apocalypse scenarios in our minds. Imagine then being able to refashion yourself as a mythically free persona by the virtue of a hat and a bandana. It is corny but it is also true that we all just want to be free and that is the appeal of so much American pop culture, from cowboys to superheroes. It takes courage and hope and a remarkable flexibility of imagination to picture ourselves as truly free once this is all over, no matter how big the “all” is. But as Peck sings: “Nowhere left to go, goin's all we know.” That persona, the one that just manages to keep going even when they don’t know have any certainty in anything else, is the most truthful one I can be right about now, whether she’s dusty or in school-appropriate slacks.
Best,
Karmela
*The Goldstone potential, often called the “Mexican hat potential”, though this is certainly an inappropriate naming convention, is a particular mathematical form of a potential (a quantity similar to a potential energy) that is present in systems that exemplify the principle of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Plotting this mathematical form reveals a symmetric upward dome with a circular through attached to its base. It has rotational symmetry in the sense of looking the same way when rotated by some amount. To be more precise, an item such as a marble existing in this potential that sits at its top is in a state that has rotational symmetry. If the marble rolls into the through and stops there, however, this symmetry is broken as now rotating the whole system puts the marble at different places depending on the rotation. A quantum field theory version of such a change in symmetry is called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is related to the existence of a particle called a Nambu-Goldstone boson. This type of particle is closely related to the celebrated Higgs boson that imbues all other particles with mass.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING: I pitched and re-pitched a story about quantum cryptography to a few magazines without much success, but got some nice, encouraging emails from editors in the process. At this stage of my work as a writer, I am valuing connections and editors remembering my name only slightly less than actual publications so though this week left me without any commissions, it still was not a complete bust. My graduate alma matter has also been reaching out to me concerning writing opportunities within my old department. Projects along the lines of what is being proposed to me now have not always materialized in the past, but I am still cautiously enthusiastic about taking them on. It still isn’t easy to balance my teaching time and my writing time on top of the mechanics of daily life, but I seem to be getting a slightly better grasp on it these days.
LEARNING: On the teaching front, I am realizing that I have to learn how to sometimes take a hard line and let some students deal with imperfection. Because of the disruption the pandemic has caused to schools in the past year, and partly because I am new to working with young students, I have been pretty lenient with late submissions and endless revisions of quizzes and problem sets. In the college-level calculus class I am teaching, I planned for extra days whenever my students, especially in the fully remote sections, seemed above average spooked by the material. This late into the semester, however, I can probably keep doing some of the former, but certainly not the latter. In other words, I need to learn how to be empathetic and supportive, but also keep the class moving even when not every single student feels a hundred percent confident in their skills. This is a slightly weird place for me to find myself in as I have generally always gotten feedback about being a touch too cold and at times a touch too harsh in the classroom (and to an extent in all other settings as well) and now I’m worrying about being too understanding. This is another in a succession of tricky balances that teaching full-time is pushing me to establish. On some level, I am grateful for that little push towards character building for everyone involved. With my younger students, I am definitely also learning how to give them more space to have fun and finally feel like I am connecting a little more with some of them on a social, interpersonal level. It feels like I am a billion years older than any given 9th grader some days, and social distancing and masking rules do stifle some interactions, but this past week I took on implementing a few hands-on, inquiry based learning activities and was genuinely happy to see my students jump into them with something like enthusiasm. (Tip: kids like toy cars.)
LISTENING: As you might have gathered from above, I have spent the week almost exclusively listening to Orville Peck with a brief detour to Jeannie C. Riley who was mentioned on Slate’s Hit Parade and seemed to fit the vibe.
Thinking about what I am consuming for comfort under the triple threat of the pandemic, working in a school and the election, this episode of Ringer’s The Watch also resonated with me. Similar to the hosts of this show, I have recently often been emotionally exhausted by the type of “prestige” TV that makes it impossible to turn your head or attention away at any second of any incredibly long episode. In past times I would have likely had more stamina for this sort of media consumption, but right now it feels mismatched with the world outside of TV screens and the discussion (albeit at times quite unruly) in this episode highlights some similar feelings from more of a media-insider point of view.
READING: My friend Adam’s newsletter which mixes photography, personal writing and, most recently, some comics.
This really effective and quite stunning comic-like approach to discussing language around invasive species and their history by Leise Hook in The Believer magazine. This piece is really graphic story telling at its best and the subject matter is complex and heavy enough to benefit from this medium much more than it might from an essay.
I also pledged to support a Kickstarter campaign spearheaded by Christian Sager, another friend (and frankly something of a creator role model), for the first issue of CORRIDOR Magazine. CORRIDOR is a horror magazine that will include an impressive assortment of comics, short fiction and essays related to the genre within a busines model that centers creators and is in its first issue already showing off a kind of inclusivity that is not always present in comics or horror. Over the past few years I have become mostly convinced that creative industries have no desire or tools for supporting authors and artists and that the most ethical way to consume fiction and media is to form personal relationships with them and invest in direct patronage. My financial means have always been rather limited, but this campaign is a great example of where I want to put my money and I really hope it will be successful. The fact that I chose a support tier that will get me some really cool art if it does for sure also helps. If you like horror or weird fiction definitely consider checking out the CORRIDOR.
WATCHING: We finished watching The Prisoner and though I have been very much enjoying this show, I have to admit that the last few episodes threw me quite a bit. A brief internet search reveals that there is some disagreement on the order of episodes between the first and the last two, but from the watching experience me and my partner had, it certainly felt like there was a noticeable shift in tone in the last quarter or so of the show’s run and the finale came at us mostly unexpectedly. Having heard of The Prisoner before (and not just in Iron Maiden lyrics) and having listened to the Supercontext episode on it, I was ready for some twists. However, the last two hours of the show were much more chaotic and incongruous with the rest of its run than a single shocking reveal or a bit of surreal nonsense. The ending did stick with the themes that the show focused on throughout, and its take on individuality and rebellion is in a way interesting, but I wish the quick slide into song, dance and near-fantasy hadn’t been so sudden. It almost reminded me of later season of the X-Files where the finales desperately try to make sense of a cobbled-together conspiracy that writers have clearly lost control over. In either case, though, I remain fond of the monster-of-the-week episodes and will probably be revisiting The Prisoner as much as I have revisited the X-Files over the years.
I watched a few episodes of the 90s X-Men animated series since we briefly have access to Disney+ and I remember loving it when I was younger. The characters are more campy than I remember, but the appeal of the show hasn’t fully faded away. I’m guessing I’ll turn to it a few more times before gathering the strength to invest myself and my time into some more serious and more contemporary piece of television.
EATING: Leftover grains with kimchi and avocado as a really quick and lazy lunch.
Mediterranean food in our neighborhood to celebrate signing a lease for an apartment (because nothing is more celebratory than giant, warm, puffy pita bread and soft dips salty and bitter with tahini).
Vegan grilled cheese with homemade tomato soup and smoky rainbow chard.
Soft, velvety soup made form roasted pumpkins, peanut butter, ginger and a generous amount of warming spices, studded with green peas.
Shredded beets, parsley and cabbage generously dressed in tahini, lemon juice and sesame oil.
Turmeric sweet dough buns stuffed with red bean cardamom and ground almond paste glazed with orange marmalade and toasted slivered almonds.
Vegan apple cider donuts stuffed with cardamom apple compote at Hester Street Fair in lower Manhattan.