My son Julian recorded his four year old little brother's re-telling of the Goldilocks story. He then matched it up with his own illustrations, with a simple animation created in iMovie. It made me laugh. A lot.
The doctor in my mind wrote a prescription for me and the prescription was: Insert More Pelham Grenville into your life, daily, for several weeks.
I've been feeling droopy of late, lacking the ability to laugh at self, or to feel particularly chirpy about anything, let alone make a "Five Year Plan". This, coupled with a decided lack of sleep, and waking in the night a regular occurrence, finds me, these days, with my knuckles dragging on the ground. As it's the season when most things are coming alive, birdies are tweeting and gardens are growing, my state was irksome, to say the least.
The prescription was to re-read the very first P.G. Wodehouse book I ever read, preferably in the same paperback edition, for maximum impact. I knew that this book had made me laugh out loud, and laugh more than I had ever laughed reading any book ever. It was the one that confirmed me as a life long P.G. Wodehouse fan, particularly his Jeeves and Bertie series.
Problem was I had no idea which book it was. I'd borrowed the book from a friend at the time of reading. I knew it had a picture of someone in a boat, and a circular garden pavilion, and there was something about a hostile swan. But couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the collection. And there are quite a few novels and short story collections.
Thank you internet! Yesterday an online search for clues brought me to this wonderful compendium of Wodehouse, from the Russian Wodehouse Society. Yes, from the Russians! The really helpful thing was their inclusion of photos of the actual book covers used over many years of publication. I found my book! It was right there: the boat, the pavilion, the swan. I think the swan, anyway, the book cover is a bit tiny.
It was with me the work of a minute (or several minutes) to locate a used copy of the book online, for practically nothing. And soon my prescription will be winging its way to me. Thank you, oh nameless and meticulous Russians for your love and dedication to one of the wonders of English literature: P.G. Wodehouse, and for leading me back to a delightful pleasure from my past.
It's all the more charming that Russians have put this website together as Wodehouse liked to rib the Russian temperament regularly in his books. For example, this little excerpt from Wodehouse's Monkey Business:
I have a tender heart (said Mr Mulliner), and I dislike to dwell on the spectacle of a human being groaning under the iron heel of Fate. Such morbid gloating, I consider, is better left to the Russians.
I look forward to a lot less morbid gloating in my future.
Dog heaven, aka, Cherry Beach, with ice floes breaking up
One of the best things about my new Life with Dog is the outdoors, the fact that I am outdoors. It's walking and going places, in the fresh air, immersed in the landscape, whether I like it or not. And in the past, my usual inclination on a cold day was to not be outside.
Taylor Creek park, after a snowfall
This winter, however, has passed in parks, forests, fresh snowfalls, along wintry lakes with ice floes on the shore. I've seen beautiful skies, and sunsets. Lots of bad weather too, but the good outweighed the bad.
My dog, Izi, (Isadora) is still a puppy, just turned eight months, and she's now more of a dog, assuming her dog shape: legs are long, and snout is long and pointy. She's lost the cute bluntness of the puppy form, but stayed fairly small, which I'm happy about. I look at her sometimes and think: Don't grow, please stay that size, you're perfect now.
Izi on forest path in Greenwood Conservation Area
Taking the dog out, as much as it sometimes feels like the last thing I want to do, gets me out, and away from the laptop. There's one focus: I'm constantly on the lookout for playmates at various dog parks I haunt. She loves other dogs. A trip to the park with no other dog who's a pup or still has puppy energy is a letdown, as playmates help burn off that crazy puppy energy. As they say, "a tired puppy is a good puppy."
"I am too still cute," says Izi.
She's grown. The difference between walking into a dog park with a puppy on the end of a leash and a dog on the end of a leash is noticeable. Puppies generate instant oohs and ahhs. Izi doesn't inspire that any longer. She's not a fashionably cute dog, like the Goldendoodles or Labradoodles you see everywhere. She's a dog dog: a generic-looking classic dog. She's beautiful in her dog way, but no longer cute.
Where she was once the puppy being overwhelmed by the bigger dogs, she can even intimidate little pups now, with her enthusiastic playing. Sometimes she growls as she play fights. She pulls out all the stops to look fierce, bares her teeth. A couple of small dog owners have looked at her and pulled their dogs away. Where did this scary dog come from? It's over the top play-fighting, something that would have put me off too, in my days pre-dog. I'd think, "Are these dogs ready to kill each other?" Apparently its normal dog playing behaviour--the way a kid in a playground growls like a scary monster, chasing another one in a game. I remember doing it myself as a kid, vocalizing to make the game more authentic. Scary, but it stops in an instant. One second she's growling, the next second, she's looking down at the ground to inspect a stick, an extremely interesting stick. Izi, being eaten by GoldenDoodle
The two combatants will sit side by side to watch a new dog approaching the park. Yay, here come new friends to play with, to steal balls from.
Oh, the ball stealing. The agony of that. But that's a whole other post.
It appears I have a dog. How did this happen? It was a coup de foudre standing on the outside of a kennel looking in at 9 bouncing six week old puppies. They belonged to my neighbours in the country. He wanted to spay his Chocolate Lab and decided to let her have one litter before he did. I've seen 101 Dalmations, but really I was kind of shocked to think a fairly little dog would give birth to nine!!!! puppies.
This one looked right at me and jumped up against the side of the pen. I knew she wanted to jump into my arms. It was like she had searched her whole life for me and finally found me! How could I resist that call to action??? Can puppies hypnotize people? I think they can. I picked her up and she melted into my body, smelling like something not all that nice, Eau de Puppy Crate. Sawdust and remnants of whatever else. But I didn't care, she was so warm and just collapsed into me. After a couple of minutes of holding her my brain started working on its own saying crazy things like, "I want to have this puppy."
Finally we went back home, leaving her there, with her littermates and mother. My son and I fantasized about what we would do with a puppy, what we would call her, what our lives would be like if we had her. Julian instantly thought of a name, one which I thought was fairly appalling. Kubokan. I said, I don't think so. Too long.* But no other name popped into my head. We went for a walk in a conservation area, crossed a suspension bridge, and talked about the puppy thing. I said, look at that trail. If we had the dog, we could go walking down that trail, with her.
We went back to the city, 150 miles away from puppy temptation. We sort of forgot about the dog. But two weeks later I drove back out, and as I got in the car I suddenly thought, I wonder if I'll be coming back with a dog? My neighbour dropped by to talk about some stuff, he does maintenance for me at my place. I said, do you still have the puppies? I figured the one I liked, the smallest, the prettiest, the cutest, couldn't possibly still be there. He said there were three left. I arranged to come over and see them later that morning. Just to see them. Walked over and there she was. A little bigger, but still that same little face. Black, with butterscotch eyebrows. Too cute. She seemed to know who I was. Picked her up and it was game over.
That small rational piece of my brain did kick in slightly and I said, "I'd like to take her. But I don't know if it will work out at my place in the city. It's small. Real small. And I have the cats. I don't know how she'll manage with the cats. So, I can take her for a trial, as long as I can bring her back if it doesn't work out." My neighbour said, fine.
I'm still not totally sure how it's working out, but after almost 2 weeks of being a puppy owner I've had my heart melted, and my nerves fry repeatedly. Over and over and over again. One minute I think I can do it and the next minute it's, "No, what was I thinking? This is insane. She's gotta go back."
You see, I am an immigrant in the Land of Dog. Never had a dog. Never looked after a dog. Never really ever known a dog. Not well. I've always been a cat person. I've even been a little scared of dogs my whole life. Except for the ones that look like stuffed animals. Which is the kind of dog I'd been hankering after--off and on for the past few years. Just in an internet-browsing sort of fantasy way.
But I guess this is one of those Life Happens to You While You're Busy Making Other Plans kind of thing. I could still decide not to keep her, I guess. The bloom is off the rose for my son, definitely. He's wanting things to go back to the way it was, pre-dog. But as each day goes by, I'm getting a little better at learning this new dog language. I'm still on Ellis Island, and I'm waiting in line. Hoping for the best.
A friend pressed this book into my hand earlier this year: Love in a Cold Climate. She told me that she loved the way the cousins and sisters in the book really appreciated the things the others did, and told them so. In the book, this ability is called "exclaiming" and it's a mixture of noticing, appreciation and yes, in some cases, gushing. New pair of drapes? New hat? An enterprising endeavour? Do they like it? Are they proud of you? How nice to have your friend tell you so, enthusiastically. Nowadays I guess it's called "positive feedback" but I rather like the word "exclaiming". A sincere bit of exclaiming in this world of disappointments and failures is something I wish there were a lot more of in the world.
But all that aside, which is only a small part of the book, reading Love in Cold Climate was a happy experience. I was thrilled to discover a writer this entertaining. Almost a cross between P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen. Nancy Mitford, writing in the 1930s was funny and astute. In her life she was a privileged child, debutante, book store clerk, essayist and finally, succesful and famous writer, who spent most of her adult life in Paris. She was a good friend of Evelyn Waugh, and their letters have also been published - now on my list of things to read. (I've always been an Evelyn Waugh fan as well.)
Love in a Cold Climate and the Pursuit of Love (two short books packaged together) are very loosely inspired by her own experiences growing up-one sister of many-in an upper class family in the countryside in England. This was a time when girls still were not routinely sent to school, and mostly grew up in an atmosphere of benign neglect. Marriage was the main goal. Surprising that in 1930s England, not much had really changed since Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice.
A couple of gems from the book that I didn't want to forget:
On Mirrors We then sallied forth into the street, looking at ourselves in every shop corner that we passed. (I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection and take furtive peeps into their hand looking-glasses, it is hardly ever, as it is generally supposed, from vanity, but much more often from a feeling that all is not quite as it should be.)
On marriage prospects of Linda, main character in the Pursuit of Love I looked about hopefully for a possible life partner, but though I honestly tried to see the best in them, nothing remotely approximating to my requirements turned up.
Every now and then, usually while web surfing, something reminds me of Spy Magazine and I'm thinking it may be time to drag out my old copies, saved from the 80s and early 90s.
Spy was a funny, very funny, scathingly brilliant publication with beautiful graphic design, edited by Graydon Carter, who is now the editor of Vanity Fair. (I think he's still there). It was the first to christen Donald Trump as a "short fingered vulgarian".
The title came in part from the society gossip magazine for which Jimmy Stewart’s character works in the suave 1940 movie The Philadelphia Story. With relatively little budget for design, however, Spy’s editors saw their best route forward in giving ambitious designers a free creative license. Doyle, who had recently quit M to form his new partnership, found his own inspiration for the prototype in the typographic density and variety of sixteenth-century Polyglot bibles and 1920s type-specimen books. He recalls a reverence in design circles at the time for art directors like Fabien Baron, who in the late 1980s gave Italian Vogue a spare elegance reminiscent of Alexey Brodovitch’s midcentury designs. “In the 1980s there was this annoying supposition that Baron had invented white space,” Doyle says. “This was our reaction against clean minimalism.”
Quote above is from a great article about Spy. Read more here. Some issues, one in particular (that I somehow lost), actually made me cry with laughter. It was an article that had something to do with made-up names, and the names themselves were the key to the unstoppable shrieking and guffawing.
Of course I can't remember the Spy issue or even the particular article that set off my marathon laughing fit, but I will be racking my brains trying to remember it. Off and on. When I remember.
Spy was also the venue of a monthly column about life by Ellis Weiner, who now writes on the Huffington Post and is very funny and brilliant. His columns were always one of my favourite things in Spy. It's great to find his writing again on the web. Here is his entertaining and informative deconstruction of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Ellis is also the author of a number of books: The Joy of Worry, the unjustly neglected but hilarious Drop Dead, My Lovely and The Big Boat to Bye-Bye, and Santa Lives! Five Conclusive Arguments for the Existence of Santa Claus.
He is co-author, with Barbara Davilman, of Yiddish With Dick and Jane and Yiddish With George and Laura, both published by Little, Brown.
I just realized that I'm not a fan of the "must see before you die" gambit as a method of nudging people towards a valuable experience, because....well, how else are you going to experience anything? Presumably you will be alive while watching or doing anything on a "bucket" list. I'd prefer to use the words: "see while you are alive", if anything. However, with that bow to my peeve regarding the author's phraseology out of the way, I'll simply say: Take a look at this excellent list of documentary films. (The list's author includes pictures and an illuminating recap of each film.) See a bunch of these films! After reading it today, many titles will be going on my zip.ca.
Ear Worms: those songs that infect your brain and play over and over and over and over again in your head and you just want them to stop. Sometimes it's a song you hear on the elevator or the mall that gets lodged in there. A song comes on the radio. Or someone talks about a song they hate, and they hum a few bars, and then it gets instantly fixed in your brain cells, the ones that have full orchestras and bands.
I have a few that come upon me sometimes without notice. They usually arrive during a stressful day, when I'm performing some task that doesn't take a huge amount of brainpower. Usually some other problem is preying on me at the time, but I'm not consciously thinking of it. But that bloody song is there, in the forefront of my awareness.
My own private Ear Worms are completely nonsensical. There is no reason on earth that the soundtrack in my brain should so effortlessly default to these annoying and randomly selected tunes, but there you go. I'll be carrying myself about my day when suddenly I have the awareness that the Theme to The Odd Couple has been playing on a loop in my brain for the past 3 hours. Somehow the awareness that it is happening drives it even deeper into my brain. That's the insidious and evil nature of EarWorms.
The Odd Couple Theme is one of my very worst ones. Not that it's such a terrible tune. In fact, I liked the TV Show, and the opening of the show where the tune played was friendly and fun and made for a happy anticipation of 22 minutes of fairly benign entertainment. I can't blame Tony Randall for any of this or whoever composed the thing in good faith. It's simply that the difference between hearing it once in its proper place and hearing the cartoon-y Ear Worm version of it in your brain repeated 732, 576, 000 times in succession is quite vast.
Even just writing this post I am tempting fate. I'm listening out for tell tale notes now: that cheerful plinking intro, that — no I can't even describe it, it's too dangerous. Click on link at your peril.
Yes, I, Sarah Palin, did support the bridge to Nowhere, (Ketchikan, zipcode: 99901) during my 2006 campaign for governor....All I got was this lousy t-shirt I had printed up for my campaign, and the millions of federal dollars of "bridge money" that I in fact kept to spend on other things in Alaska. So, yes, I was for the bridge before I was against it, meaning that once everyone in the US starting saying how stupid and wasteful it was, and with the accompanying heaps of scorn thrown at our state, I decided that the t-shirt would be much cuter on me. Don't tell anybody though!
After a particularly lazy, work-free, and daydreamy summer where I've been fighting off pangs of guilt for being so lazy and unproductive, I was quite happy today to read this interview in Defamer with filmmaker, and now opera impresario, David Cronenberg.
DEFAMER: I've heard you say that you are lazy, but you seem like such an obsessive guy. How is that possible?
CRONENBERG: I get other people to do work for me and then I take credit for it. I say it jokingly, but it's true. I have a desire to be creative, but that's not the same as obsession. I'm happy reading a book or riding my bike through the hills. I get up late, I stay up late. I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized. But left to my own devices, I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find. I nap all the time when I make movies. Often I give my cameraman a very difficult lighting set up so I can get a longer nap.
David Cronenberg is currently launching an opera based on his 1987 cult classic, The Fly.
Anyway, his comments about the importance of fallow time for creative people rang true to me, because I was just having this conversation with my sister about this the other day. Good to see this idea reinforced by super-famous, successful movie director.
It's getting to be a somewhat annoying routine. I'm reading some political talking head essay or blog, or watching someone on TV talking about the latest outrage or gambit by a politician and all of a sudden, even though I am fluent, actually quite fluent in English, I suddenly have NO idea what someone's sentence just meant. The other speaker runs with it and continues the conversation, obviously in the loop but I am baffled. The insidious sports metaphor has struck again.
How did this happen? And how have they suddenly become so ubiquitous that anyone who doesn't follow sports and the accompanying jargon can be so often mystified by a fellow English speaker's flow of conversation or train of thought in an essay.
I'm happy to look up a word in the dictionary if I'm reading a book or an essay and I'm just not sure of the meaning. But nowadays there are so many of these jargony phrases- and they are usually phrases- tossed around that of course everybody must know the meanings of - well, it's becoming annoying. I have zero interest in sports, don't watch it, don't care, don't know the teams, don't want to know. The world of sports is, I gather, frigging full of these colourful, mystifying terms. Today's term is "work the refs". I was just about to look it up by going to google and hoping to find a definition, but I got so annoyed about having to go to the trouble of doing all that I thought, no. Before I look up the meaning of "work the refs", I'm going to post a blog about it, and therefore lessen my pique. In a moment, I'll deliver myself on Wikipedia and, with hope, discover just what Barack Obama was on about. But for now, I'm simply begging them to stop, so I won't have to keep doing this. But I know they won't. It's hopeless. This blog entry was simply my Hail Mary pass.
After watching the Republican convention last night, (with the helpful antidote of livebloggers who saved my brain from exploding out of my head at the lies and vitriol that just got piled on thicker and thicker from Huckabee, to Guiliani and finally to Miss Alaska, Sarah Palin herself) and then this morning watching the media congratulating her "grand slam" and her "charisma" and her down-home, real life folksiness, I was desperate to find someone from the reality-based community to counter this insane juggernaut. One of the best, sanity-restoring responses comes from Gloria Steinem.
She writes eloquently on Sarah Palin today in the LA Times: Some highlights:
This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues
There's a difference. There were no sobs, no liquids emanated from her eyes. She was hit with a well of emotion, while answering a fairly personal question, which was, "How do you do it?" and the emotion in her answer came out in her voice: a slight catch. NOT crying. There is a difference. The media is going on and on about "Hilary's crying". They are asking: is it a female thing. Did it help her, did it hurt her? Even, amazingly, did she FAKE it? Give me a break. It was obviously a slightly emotional moment for her. She is obviously human. She's not out of control, sobbing, breaking down.
Feeling all argy bargy. Trying out new things like this quiz form I just discovered while trying to find out what is going wrong with my G4 laptop. I've been getting these scary horizontal and vertical lines in multicolours on my display. Someone on the web with a similar experience described the pattern as an IKEA duvet cover. Very apt. This is not what you want on your laptop screen, believe me. This problem erupted a week ago and has been filling me with dread ever since. There's been alot of agonized surfing and relentlessly scouring help forums since that time.
You never know WHAT you are going to find when you are on the web. Like just coming across this forms web tool from www.woofoo.com. Pretty cool.
After a few months away, I've been back to teaching myself how to design pages for the web. When all part of me really want to do is putter around in a greenhouse.
Maybe that's not true. I obviously want to learn all this stuff if I am reading books about html and code, and staying up late and using all this time of my life trying to get Ye Old Head around it.
But I despair somewhat. Why did my chosen field get so technically complicated? When I started it was all about waxing machines and gouache and magic markers. Really tangible stuff that was sticky and smelled like something. Part of that was great, but part of it was tedious too. Drawing out grids by hand with rapido graphs that clogged. Hated all that. I do love computers and what they do. I LOVE command z. And instantanteously seeing what a certain font looks like in my chosen text. But there is so much to learn now, and it is getting faster and faster all the time. I long for a 6 month moratorium on software upgrades. Just to catch up.
Maybe more ginkgo is needed? Wondering if my splishy-splasshy slapdash methods are really the right sort to properly execute anything on the web? Yet I seem to want to learn this. As it is the means to a very fun end.
I think.
Ask me next year. I'll have a new quiz by that time.
The only way to describe the feeling I have right now is: tarnished. I've just read another book about Warhol and his gang in the 60s, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties. And it's left me feeling a bit depressed.
Why? Because it exposed the tragic, dangerous and nasty truths about those Factory years in the 60s. Starkly. It's a catalogue of every player in every aspect of Warhol's artistic output from 1960 to the end of the decade: from film, visual art to theatrical and rock and roll collaborations. The collective wallop of the stories left me feeling saddened and deadened.
All those desperately drugged people, all that waste and excess are detailed down to the minutae. It's mostly a strict retelling of facts and quotes: This thing happened, then this thing happened. This person said this. One one hand fascination, yet often horrifying and saddening. The sheer volume of drugs ingested daily by everyone, including Andy himself was detailed. Amphetamines mostly: Huge quantities. Daily. Constantly. Andy took speed, but a little less of it, all prescription.
As a callow 18 year old aspiring artist, I once said: "The only thing sacred are the early works of Andy Warhol." Elegant, and punchy. Mad colours. Sexy. Also this: Often funny. (See "Tunafish Disaster". Just the word tunafish is funny. That he picked that article out to use in his art. Well, you had to love the guy.)
I adored his Marilyns, his Liz, his Elvis. Seeing a Flower painting in the 70s was a religious experience, the same kind of feeling I had seeing on Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art. Yes, I was a serious Fangirl.
I'd almost forgotten about my Warhol worship. I'm kind of an art dropout. Art and Preoccupation with Art has been on the back burner for me for a good (bad?) long time. The back burner element is broken, needs replacing. Many reasons for that, which I won't go into now. So it was very exciting to revisit Warhol, the art, the time period, the friends and collaborators. I stumbled upon Factory Girl. It had been panned (20% on RottenTomatoes) but I was curious to see it because it was Warhol. How could I not?
While the film is no masterpiece, it was a thrill to watch, particularly the beginning. The combination of the music, the fashions, the people, the art, and (virtual) Andy himself gave me a buzz. Warhol was personified amazingly well by Guy Pearce, the best on-screen creation of the man I'd ever seen. Not that there are many real documented versions of Andy to compare it to.
The focus of the film is meant to be Edie Sedgwick, who has been resurrected as a modern day figure of fascination - the idea of her has captivated a whole new generation, if youtube tributes are anything to go by. Sienna Miller did a wonderful job of portraying her, the beauty and vulnerability, her distinctive scratchily-soft speaking voice. The flavour of the times, with the exception of a couple of questionable casting choices (Jimmy Fallon as Chuck Wein was clunky- However, unlike most, I actually didn't mind Hayden Christensen as Bob Dylan) was well captured.
Hearing certain songs from the mid-sixties juxtaposed with certain visual cues gets my blood going. I was too young to really be "in" the sixties in the sense of acting or participating - but I was old enough to be sponging it up through my ears and eyes and through the air. It was a time of great energy, great fun, great possibility, great hope. My character came into being during that age.
Seeing Factory Girl was a poignant reminder of all that. The stuff that I was missing in my life. Creativity. Enthusiasm. In addition, there was a new piece of the puzzle to explore. I hadn't known anything at all about the Bob Dylan/Edie Sedgwick connection, so I was compelled to revisit the time period.
I got the book out of the library. I had high hopes of drinking it all in, being voyeuristically immersed in that era again, but instead of getting inspired, the more I read, the more down I got. I stopped reading for awhile because clouds of dull lurking depression were forming around me; but I had finish it to find out what happened. It was the book version of not being able to look away from a car crash. (Am I not the essence of a perfect Warhol fan?)
This isn't the first time I've experienced Andy angst. I read the Diaries when they came out in the 80s. Compulsively. With each entry, his sheen was peeled off. The Diaries gave me a new understanding of the man, as a fallible, worried human, which helped soften any disillusionment. The fact that underneath his cool exterior lived a creature full of -- if not self loathing, at least major self doubt. The fact that he mostly felt like a "nobody", (his word) no matter what success and adulation he acquired. He definiely fits the pattern for creative types. Self doubt is usually us. So this warmed me to him.
The thing that turned me off was his new business model for art in the 80s. Art had become "Just business" and making money. "Friends" were kept for what they could do for him financially. It was so calculated. That seemed a loss. Admittedly, he could have been making his "just business" pronouncements for effect: to cover up his ongoing lack of inspiration. For years, he just did the portraits, and coasted. But, that's speculation. On the face of it, it was his abandoning of pure art that saddened me. I became less of a fan because of it.
My love affair with Andy fell away in dribs and drabs. He was part of my past. But then a portrayal of Warhol would pop up in a movie, Basquiat, for example, and it was always exciting to be reminded of him. David Bowie's portrayal was full of fun, and a self deprecation. But the film ultimately made Andy out to be a creep, a bloodsucker, user - fitting of his nickname, "Drella". (Dracula and Cinderella) But the beauty, intelligence and humour of his early artwork were always there. No amount of personal creepiness could take that away.
Reading Factory Made I discover that Warhol switched to serious paintings mostly on the advice of Henry Geldzahler. Prior to that, he had been making art, getting "known", but hardly ever selling anything. Then, when he finally got his first show at the Castelli gallery, when he "made it" into this prestigious space, Geldzahler told him "Lighten up, you need to do something lighter", and that led to his Flower series. They sold like crazy. Is it true? Maybe it's just Geldzahler saying it, and Andy would have made these creative decisions on his own, but I found it dispiriting to read. It appeared to be a confirmation of the Art as Business Andy.
On the plus side, Andy was a sponge. He knew what advice to take and what to ignore. And on the minus side, Andy was a sponge. He knew what advice to take and what to ignore. He made business descisions. In his professional and personal life he absented himself. He abdicated. People suffered.
So it's been weeks now and I'm still bummed about the ending to the Sopranos. My favourite show. Really the only TV show I've been invested in for decades. And instead of seeing the final episode and wanting to watch it all over again from the beginning, like I thought I would, I just want to forget the whole thing. Like a bad date.
How long has it been since the ending? Don't even remember. I'm supposed to be getting over it by now. Appreciating the genius of David Chase. How perfect it all was. But I don't. I think it will be a long time before I can think of watching any old episodes again. I'm that put off. It is almost irrational. Why such an aversion? Why can't I see it as an artistic choice? A valid one? Well I can't. It just seems like some crazy person went in and finished off my beloved show in some insane and random manner.
It just didn't seem to to be the David Chase I knew. The one who gave us that fantastic season opening with the Peter Gunn theme mixed with Every Breath You Take. The one who devised the most compelling marital fight I've ever seen on TV in Season 4. The one who showed us Tony Soprano in the early days, drunk and elated that "he didn't hurt anyone". The one that showed psychiatry and therapy as potentially life changing. The one that treated dreamlife and the inner life as carefully as real life. The one who made Tony Soprano a human - who made you see some human core underneath the vile killer/gangster.
I suppose the thing that made me feel the worst about the finale was that there was not one iota, not one scrap of a possibility of redemption. The redemption that he teased us with over all those seasons. He toyed with the spiritual theme, the higher planes human beings could get to, could at least reach for. Then, nothing. All of that dropped. Melfi—his spiritual touchstone—dumped him in a most irrational and un-professional manner, and that was the end of that story.
Tony and his family were just bad people with no hope. No possibility of change. No insights. No regrets. No future.
I read somewhere on some other blog that Chase was disillusioned with the way people were drawn to the Tony Soprano character, and he wanted to prove to everyone how much of a scumbag he really was: how misplaced our connection was. But he wanted to have it both ways. I had hoped for something, a small bit of transcendence. A clue. Nothing major. Something. Anything. Some little aside that suggested some hope. Something to come. But instead we got onion rings, Journey (ack) and blackness.
A big nothing. I thought he was going to rail against the Livias of the world. Instead he got in bed with them.
Just as an exercise a couple days after the finale I amused myself with this list of endings, as David Chase might re-do them. Of course there are a million of them on YouTube now. But for what it's worth, here's my list:
Gone with the wind: Scarlett: Rhett, where will I go? What will I do? Rhett: Frankly, my —
Some Like it Hot: Joe: (taking off his wig) I’m a man! Mr. ____: No—
Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swanson: There's nothing else - just us - and the cameras - and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m—
Casablanca: Rick: Louis, This could—
King Kong: Oh, no! It wasn't the airplanes. It was —
The Wizard of Oz Dorothy: and you're all here! And I'm not gonna leave here ever, ever again because I love you all! - And oh, Auntie Em, there’s no—
Just joined this site today. Someone named Andrea K invited me. I hope that is who I think it is.
Anyway it appears to be a Virtual Bookshelf. It's a fun way to list all the books I've been reading. I have areas of my life where I like to be organized and linear; and lists of "books read" is something that appeals to me for some reason. I've been keeping lists of amazon bookmarks for my own reference but this is much more appealing.
I'm wondering if I can convince members of my book club to join. Alas the members of my book club are mostly internet averse. I've been gently badgering them to sign on to Facebook for a while now with no success.
Anyway, Shelfari! Hmm. Sort of sounds like an old John Wayne movie. I do like to see all the pretty book covers all lined up against each other.
Strange. More than a year has gone by an I still have the same things happening. Annoyances re: amounts of money in the bank virtually the same.
Cat willow, the foot attacker, is still neurotic but perhaps slightly less so.
I have one more to add to the cat population in my house. Fisher moved in a year ago. Got him from abandonedcats.ca. Yes, I found my new pet on the internet. He is fluffy and chock full of static electricity. I remember in science class in high school we were given these little fur patches that we would rub on various objects to demonstrate static electricity in action. The little patches were made of cat fur. I keep wondering if there is some kind of Bounce for living cats, so I can touch my cat without every bit of his fur standing on end before it all attaches itself to my clothes.
My sister has cat-attracting legs. Only activated by wearing black pants. It is one of the scourges of her existence. I myself long for slavish adoration from my pets, but it never comes. My cats are aloof, standoffish, complete snobs really.
