posted: undated
I sometimes think that I should come with an instruction booklet. Not one for me, but one to be handed out to all my friends, relatives and co-workers. It would probably look something like this:
Dear lucky bastard (insert sardonic chuckling here)
You have just become the intimate of a truly wonderful and fucked-up human being. If this is a combination with which you cannot cope, run far and fast right now, before either of you becomes attached. (Warning: contents are beautiful, charming and witty, but NOT low maintenance.)
Still here? Terrific! You are about to embark on a strange and curious phase of your life in which you shall be amazed, amused, disgusted, repelled, entertained, bored stupid, worried over, worried sick, vamped, mother-henned, helped, hindered, confused, cornered, corrected, enlightened, annoyed, loved, hated, bewitched, bothered and bewildered. Buckle up.
As with all human-beings, the unit included here is uniquely crafted and truly one-of-a-kind. Thus the physical and personality variations you may observe are not flaws but unique features of the unit, adding to her particular, quirky charm. Most notable are the tendencies to smart-ass remarks, obscure witticisms and depression. Do not be alarmed: none of these has been known to be fatal to anyone (yet). In the event of the last, be careful to indulge in eye-rolling and exasperated sighing out of the unit's immediate vicinity. This only pisses her off and makes her more determined to annoy you. In cases of the first two, laugh, nod and look like you're enjoying yourself. Hopefully you won't have to fake it for very long.
Do not tickle as this may induce vomiting or hysterical screaming... unless inducing vomiting and hysterical screaming is the desired effect, in which case, tickle away.
Care and feeding of the Kat should be accomplished frequently. She is a terrible pest for recognition and approval and suffers from low-blood sugar, so enjoys regular doses of food. Be sure to provide her with chocolate once a month or face the ugly consequences. Also, discuss books and movies with her frequently, if you do not, in fact, provide same. Music is good, too. If you play an instrument, yourself, expect to be asked to play for her benefit. She may decide to sing, if she is particularly charmed and knows the lyrics. Singing Kats are a joy to hear. Unlike singing cats, which are quite nasty. Occasionally, she will avoid playing the piano, which is as close to an instrument as she gets these days. Beware of the radio, as she may have the irresistible urge to sing along. Hackneyed 80s music is particularly prized by the unit, though she does have the grace to be embarrassed about this.
Never be alarmed at anything she may say; at least half of it is strictly for effect. The rest is dead-serious, but you'll have to take your chances on figuring out which situation you are facing.
If you are violently opposed to genre fiction, puns, innuendo, guns, knives, violent or silly movies, loud music, conservative fiscal policies, beer, spicy food, abolishment of the IRS, liberal abortion and family planning practices, ferrets, boats, or fast cars and motorcycles, you would be advised to watch your mouth. Not that she won't listen reasonably to your point of view and respect you for arguing logically and clearly, but she may think you're a wanker if you go on and on about it. Or she may decide you're a total jerk and never speak to you again.
Be prepared for whining. Once whining has reached saturation, tell her firmly, but in no uncertain terms, to shut the fuck up and stop feeling sorry for herself. She will huff off and sulk for a while, but it's really the best thing you can do. For your own sake. It really won't hurt her. She's a lot tougher than she looks.
Never tease her about her work or about being a jinx to other people's cars. She may lose her temper. She may start hanging around your car....
In the event of mental or mechanical failure, tuck the Kat into bed and give her aspirin and alcohol. This may not help her that much, but she will shut up and go to sleep.
If catastrophic overload occurs, sound emergency klaxons, close all blast doors and shields and brace for impact. Wear earplugs. Be gracious and accept profuse apologies afterward.
If the relationship should fail utterly and horribly, well... it was nice knowing you.
We hope you will enjoy your new Kat.
Manufacturer is not responsible....
posted: undated
I have just come back from seeing The Maltese Falcon on the big screen. I had forgotten not only how funny parts of the film are, many of them intended and many not, but how different it is from modern films in the same genre. Mary Astor, for instance, as the amoral and twisty Brigid O'Shaughnessy, looks only fleetingly beautiful under the makeup and lighting of the early Hollywood film noir style. She was accounted a great beauty at the time and a great actress, although her past eventually caught up to her in real life, as it did in the film. I remember her as I saw her in images from the infamous trial: a fallen socialite, perfect hair, perfect face, perfect clothes, imperfect life. Life didn't imitate Art, but it did take a twist from it.
Recently, I've seen several old movies, or at least older movies, movies which are either "classic" or nearly so in the reference of my past. I don't remember the films, themselves, really, but, rather, an interpretation and belief about them that is made up of the actual story, sound and images, mixed with impressions, inaccuracies, influences, associations and so on, layered over the actuality of the films with time and distance. The accretion of life over memory.
The same is true of other images. For instance I remember Dali's The Persistence of Memory quite a bit differently than it actually looks and find it curiously dull and disappointing in Real Life. There's an exhibit of John Singer Sargent's portraits at the Art Museum and Portrait of Madam X still has spectacular impact on me. Though I remember the painting itself with almost-crystal accuracy, I stare at it and see, not just Madam Gautreau, who almost cost him his career, but all the things I think and feel about Sargent and the women he painted and the time and the social order they represent.
I don't experience the same thing with sound and music, however. I have associations with them, but they are more distinctly separate from the sound and I recognize them. Music may make me cry or smile, but I see it coming. With image, especially film, I see my experience since first viewing, as well as my experience at the time, multilayered and confusingly intertwined with the film itself. It is a whole.
There is another interesting thing at work with films, too. The technical aspect is also to be considered. For instance, the lighting in Falcon, which made everyone seem changeable, ugly, harsh and dark-souled is both deliberate and accidental. It's film noir and that was part of the genre's requirement, but there is also the fact that technology has changed and the same effect now would be acquired in an entirely different way. While some of the effect wasn't really desirable at the time, it's just what you got. But I remember it with modern eyes.
Our standard of beauty is different, too. The thin-plucked and penciled eyebrows of the women seem almost ridiculous and doll-like. Bogart, though still pretty young at the time, has lines under his eyes and stifles his smile with a self-conscious, tough-guy twitch, which became a caricatured mannerism we all recognize as "Bogey" instantly. To me, he is not an attractive man, though he's fascinating to watch.
Then there is also the place of films like Falcon in the architecture of society and the development of modern film and film style. Bogart's Sam Spade is the archetype of the tough, hard-bitten, but inherently decent man doing an ugly job. His secretary, Effie Perrine, has a heart of gold and almost no sense at all. Caspar Gutman, the apparently jolly fat man, who turns out to be so utterly heartless that he willingly leaves someone he calls "as close as my own son" to be a fall-guy. We see these characters all the time in modern movies, but they have put on new clothes and new ways of speaking and we think they are different. They aren't. Their interpretation and presentation is more sophisticated, more subtle, sometimes, and more familiar, yet they resonate with that long history of the archetype. Is Russell Crowe's essential character in the newly-released Proof of Life actually significantly different from Sam Spade? Not really. They are the tough guys, the men of long, unpleasant pasts and unpleasant duties, whose hearts are yet as human beneath their hardened hides, and just as inevitably broken, while they keep a stone-hard face and turn aside a tear which never falls. We look for them on the street, we know them, these characters, in reflections in the way we see ourselves and our friends.
I grew up in film-land and I think in images I garnered from film. I know films, especially old films, not as detailed studies, but as simple facts of life. They are like the places I lived or the people I knew. Coming face-to-face with the original image, I have to pause and re-evaluate how it has changed in my mind and changed me, how memory and image meld into my own iconography and into the iconography of the world I inhabit and observe.
If I had my way, I often think that I would live in a movie, but not one that already exists, or even one of a form already codified, but the iconographic, mind-scape version of a million crystallized images, a lifetime's billions of feet of celluloid dreams, reeling, perfected, across an impressionable, unreal screen.
Does that mean that I want to live in the past? In some dream-space of my own mind, outside reality? And if it does, is that really bad? Don't you want to live the movie-version of your life, too?
posted: undated
Slay bells ring
Are ya listenin'
Down the aisles
Teeth are glistenin'
A horrible sight
There's carnage and fright
Shoppin' in the mall at Christmas time.
Gone away
Is my sanity
Here to stay
Is inanity
My brain's turned to paste
My money I'll waste
Shoppin' in the mall at Christmas time.
In the food court you can hear some singers
Singing saccharine-sweet to make you choke
There is no avoiding wretched singers
And through it all you shop until you're broke.
Later on When I'm sleepin'
In my bed I'll be weepin'
To think of the way
I've wasted the day
Shoppin' in the mall at Christmas time
It was terrible! There were little kids with voices like icicles, chopping though my brain, running, darting, tripping me. There were very fat women in very red coats and pimply teenagers who looked like they hadn't eaten a decent meal since they were six. And yuppies in chic leather, with cell phones grafted to their ears. And it was all so... grim.
All I wanted to do was return a pair of pajamas!
This is not my idea of Christmas shopping. There's a giant inflated dog on the side of Nordstrom's.... The Holiday carousel is bland and has no lights on it. The only scent of greenery is from the leavings of the carriage horses on Fourth Avenue.
And where is the music? Only the bookstore was playing any music at all and that was so refined, I thought I'd stumbled into Tea at the Vanderbilts. No Little Drummer Boy? No Santa Claus is Coming to Town? No Silent Night? Well, of course no Silent Night... wouldn't want the shoppers to fall asleep and forget to spend their money. Ave Maria? The Hallelujah Chorus? Come on, guys, I'd settle for Feliz Navidad... Chipmunks singing Oh, Christmas Don't Be Late....
Is this Christmas? Half the lights on the tree and the decorations weren't lit, the huge, illuminated star on the side of the Bon Marche was dark. Even the elves bravely rapelling down the sides of the building looked a bit done in. Maybe they'd been to see Vertical Limit and were feeling queasy.... The only music to be heard in Westlake park was a lone bagpiper (and I wish he'd been a bit more lonely--like about another 50 miles off) playing Bring the Torch, badly. It sounded like a cat being squeezed through a crumhorn.
Earlier, I waited with a friend to have her two-year-old photographed with a department store Santa. Luckily, the lighting was dim, or I'm sure more people than I would have noticed that Santa was either an automated mannequin or very, very... medicated. He was the scariest Santa I'd ever seen outside of a Dean Koontz story. Obviously, the kid noticed something was wrong: she wouldn't smile.
After a cup of coffee, I waved my friend and her kid goodbye and went to return the pajamas.
"Can I return these here?"
"You want to return something? Already?"
"Yeah. My husband hates them. So, what's the problem?"
The clerk rolled his eyes. "No problem." I could almost see him cursing me for forcing him to restock. He gave me all my money in coins, all $24.16 of it. Sacajawea never expected to become the object of such a dirty look as I gave the poor woman on being handed 24 one-dollar coins. I could almost hear the clerk chortling as I stalked off.
After the pajama affair, I decided I needed some food and a bit of eavesdropping. Snarfing down my sandwich, I heard a group discussing whether they should give in and buy their mother a new refrigerator for Christmas (yeah, show someone how much you care by giving them a major household appliance). The debate wasn't so much if they would give her a refrigerator, but whether they should buy one with a built-in TV.
"Hey," said one of them. "If it breaks down, who do you call; the refrigerator repairman or the TV repairman?"
None of them had an answer. What I really wanted to know was: how do you wrap that thing and have it be any kind of a surprise at all? I mean, let's face it, a refrigerator looks like a refrigerator, no matter how big the bow is. Or, in this case, maybe it just looks like a really big TV set....
And what do I want for Christmas? I keep looking for something I want, but I don't see anything I can't have any time or really give a hoot about. Well, I do see a few things, but they are so expensive it never occurs to me to ask anyone to give them to me. I really must stay away from Bailey, Banks and Biddle... and Cartier... and Porsche dealerships... Nikon dealers, Central Gun Exchange, high end stereo and computer stores, and Scarecrow Video (I don't want large portions of their selection; I want to move in).
Oh, yeah, I know, the winter holidays are supposed to be about Peace and Love and Joy in our fellow Man and all that good stuff. But I could certainly take those fellow Men a bit more easily with a few nice decorations around. A little wrapping, some bows. A few silly hats, stuffed reindeer horn headbands... and some lights. And some music, goddamit! Where's the stinkin' music this year?
You just can't let some people loose with a holiday, I'm tellin' ya. Give 'em an advertising budget and they blow it on newspaper and radio ads, instead of tree decorations, lights, decent Santa Clauses and silly music. If I must be stuck in a mall, let it at least be a decorated one....
Do I ask for much? I don't think so. A little fir and cedar, a few holly leaves and bayberries (I'll settle for poison ivy and deadly nightshade, in some cases), a few lights.... What's so hard? I'm easy to please. I just want it the way it was when I was a kid: shiny.
I want my Christmas shiny. Is that too damned much to ask?
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