wilting

My balcony has become a graveyard for dead plants.

A few weeks back, the Guy and I went out and saw Brotherhood of the Wolf, which is a French action flick. NPR did an interview about it with the director, who claimed that it would open up a whole new genre; the French are stereotypically artistic with their films, so he said that he was getting a lot of grief from the French critics about having made an action movie "like the Americans do." He told NPR's interviewer, in polite language, that the French critics could shove it. After all, there were lines all around the movie theatres in France of people waiting to buy tickets to see this film. The critics could say anything they liked: he would laugh all the way to the bank, thank you very much.

Flamingo wrote to me several times, reminding me about this film. "Every time I see a preview for it," she told me, "I think, 'Yuhri!' I have no idea why."

So, I saw it. It was fun. It was a little artsy with the slow-motion camera shots, (very nice when done once for dramatic effect. After the ninth time, it gets a little old.) It's also sadly obvious that French directors don't have much experience with filming martial art combat scenes. But hey, it was a relatively entertaining couple of hours. I'm not complaining.

Here's what gets me. During the NPR interview, the director was commenting about the Mark Dacascos, (aka Eric Draven from the TV series "The Crow: Stairway to Heaven"), the Hawaiian who was cast to play Mani. Mani was the Native American Indian Tonto sidekick of the main character, Gregoire de Fronsac. (According to his bio on imdb, Dacascos is mixed Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, Irish, and Japanese. Interesting to know. To make one Native American: blend equal parts . . . .) He did some real ass-whupping in the film, which isn't spoiler information because after all, the dude is a kung-fu champion and who the hell knew that Native Americans knew kung-fu?.

Back to the NPR interview. The director was commenting that Mani represented the Eastern harmony with Mother Nature, where the Gregoire de Fronsac was supposed to represent the Western philosophy of cold hard science.

Guess which character dies before the end of the movie.

So let's bring this back to me and my balcony.

Somewhere along the line, Asians -- at least my type of Asian, the Japanese-Asian -- has been associated with gardening. Bonsai, Japanese gardens, flower arranging, yada yada yada. It's one of those things that I'm apparently expected to know, automatically. Plants are supposed to sprout spontaneously in my footsteps. My mother, never one to swim against the stream, obligingly perpetuates this stereotype by having the mutant green thumb. She could spit genetically altered sterile apple seeds onto a concrete mixer and have orchards in a week.

Somewhere deep inside my little black heart, I have the vague feeling that I'm supposed to be adequate with the whole Nature Nurture Nutter thing as well. Every time I wander by a nursery, I buy something fragile, vulnerable, and green. I buy a little pot to put it in. I decorate a window sill or a tabletop, and at some point, inevitably, it gets moved out to the balcony.

With the rest of the dead things.

How is it possible that with all these good intentions, this genetic predisposition towards raising little sprouts into magnificent flora and fauna, this ancestral inheritance and inclination towards aesthetic arrangement of the natural world, I've somehow become like George Dubya Bush and civil liberties: fatal?

"What's that called, that place they sell plants?" I asked the Guy, who was busily Lolling. "Greenery? Greeneries?"

Ha. This'll show him.