All rise for Judge Mental...

I watched the Democratic Convention, something I never did from 1972 to 2004. During that time, not only did I rarely vote, I was fond of saying things like, Artists don't go bowling and of writing in Frank Zappa for everything from president to JP, when I deigned to visit the polls. It was my way of underscoring the Olympian detachment needed for creative work. My reward for this pissy outlook was The Current Occupant, and I've never missed a chance at the ballot box since. Also, as the world continued its collision course towards hell in a handbasket, I started reading newspapers, blogs, and the tea leaves, to understand why so many of us were making idiotic choices. Perhaps memory blurs everything into a fine mush, but even during the fuzziest counter-culture times, I don't remember most Americans as either chicken or gullible. But it seems those are the settings on the Politico-Meter these days.

Now it's the RNC up to bat, along with a storm named Gustav, and why not, plus a blinkered VP pick who seems to have trotted out of Northern Exposure, custom-tailored for the wack factor. Pertaining to the wanly-credentialed Sara Palin, as one ghastly revelation follows another, each is seized as a positive talking point by the right. Her 17 year old daughter is up the stick by a self-professed redneck? "It's a challenge every family can relate to." Her support of The Bridge to Nowhere? "She has always been a firm opponent of government earmarks." Her stated belief that the founding fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance? "She is a true patriot who has energized The Base."

Black is white, day is night, the earth is flat, unicorns exist, and the Rapture is coming.

In the meantime, there have been sizable (a reported 8,000 participants) protests at the RNC. In these virtual times, that's a great big burning hunka-hunka protest. Plus, said protestors have been showered variously with tear gas and rubber bullets, members of the press have been arrested, and raids on so-called "hippie-houses" were conducted avant the RNC. I only discovered this by scooting over to Alternet and The Daily Kos, since all this has been predictably ignored by the MSM, and what else is new?

When millions participated in global marches against the Iraq war, this was also ignored by the MSM. Here in Dallas , thousands marched in one of the largest protest displays the city had seen. When I looked for news about it, there was no TV coverage, no newspaper coverage, and even our counter-culture rag, The Dallas Observer, ignored it too. At the time, I was stupidly bewildered. Why was the news so biased? Ans. Get a clue. I was, I discovered, dangerously checked out. Somehow, like a fly trapped in honey, I was stuck in a gluey world compounded of NPR, flawed memories of the 60's, unexamined progressive truisms, and a misplaced faith in human nature. It took some seismic and very painful upheavals to dislodge my comfortable limosine-liberal outlook.

I suppose all this tsuris is good, as Buddhist theology postulates. It's better to be awake and aware when the house is crashing down around your ears.

Better than dozing, only to find you're buried in rubble.

Tabloid to mainstream in one easy sleaze...Part Two.

With the injured sniffiness of a knocked-up Victorian parlormaid, The Huffington Post features David Perel, Editor in Chief at The National Enquirer today. Not content that his bought-and-paid-for story was, yes, true, David Perel makes a semi-argument for his rag's respectability, while utterly missing the point. He also unearths some of the insults levied at The National Enquirer by the mainstream media, apparently most hurt by Canada's Globe and Mail, which pronounced The Enquirer, "icky", and offers a little insight into The Enquirer's fondness for atavistic terms like "love child".

Actually, it's terms like "love child" that make The Enquirer icky, as well as its pursuit of icky stories like the amount of blubber Kirsty Ally is currently hoisting or Hillary Duff's pocky butt. And The Enquirer isn't alone here, in the pantheon of tabloid sludge. The UK's Sun and Daily Mail are both equals in exposing the bastards of the rich and famous. Reading any of these doubtful journals, a reader is hard-pressed to find a newsy world beyond people who microwave their pets, drunken celebrities and their lack of underwear, and unions between unsuitable species ("Elderly Woman Marries Dog").

But it's not the who-the-hell-cares aspect of the tabs that's objectionable, it's their prissy disapproving point of view. Since Amy Winehouse and her remorseless drug use currently makes these people a good steady living, I would think the tabloids would praise her coke smoking/snorting/shooting to the skies: "Amy Hoovers Eight-Ball In Front of The Queen! Whatta Gal!" Instead, as the paps snap Amy slumped among her garbage cans, the tabs are careful to include quotes from her faux-concerned friends, We're all terrified she'll be dead in six months. Right.

But Perel seems to feel that the bright line between journalism or not, has to do with whether a story is "true", rather than whether it should be told at all. Triumphantly, he notes that when the story of a Bigfoot corpse surfaced, it was the MSM that published pix of an obvious gorilla suit in a freezer-chest, not The Enquirer. But this just seems to be an argument along the order of who's-stupid-now? rather than having much to do with newspaper standards.

Personally, I am a omnivorous reader of crap and non-crap alike. In the crap sweepstakes, I always favored The Weekly World News, with its patently false images of Hillary and her lusty affairs with aliens, its eye-catching headlines ("Famous Psychic's Head Explodes!"), and its on-going discoveries of Bat Boy, the child raised by bats who, wuddya know, looked just like a bat! As someone deeply appreciative of traditional forms, I enjoyed the way The Weekly World News tirelessly recycled the same headlines year after year. There were the moody adventures of Bat Boy, reportage of unlikely animal activities, the influence of space aliens in the White House, heads exploding, the end of the world linked to the pope or Brittney Spears etc. To my potent joy, I've discovered that The Weekly World News now has a website, www.weeklyworldnews.com, and advertises itself as "The World's Only Reliable News", which is sort of like a grifter murmuring, Trust me just before he vacuums your wallet clean.

A dear friend took me to lunch today. During the pad thai, our talk turned to the subject of unsavory information. And since she's around my age, we reminisced about the dear dead days when news did not include either crazy shit or grubby shit. "Prurient interest," my friend said, dreamily, forking a noodle. "I remember that my parents talked about things that just appealed to our prurient interests."

Like most structures, organic and non-organic alike, humans contain little cess pools and garbage-pails within themselves. But after the age of four or so, most of us have lost our fascination with these parts. But some of us never do.

A shame, really, since the world is so much bigger than its toilets.

Normally I would end with that last sentence, since I'm such a fan of the snappy closing remark. But I'd like to add that my weblog list now includes athensboy.wordpress.com, which is my husband's new blog. He specializes in discovering the surprising, the startling, and the strangely humorous. In all our years together, which are many, he has never failed to crack me up at least once a day. I urge you to check him out and add an unexpected joy to your hours.

Tabloid to mainstream in one easy sleaze...

I see that, apres le Edwards, the progressive left is turning a quizzical yellow eye to The National Enquirer as a possible intelligence source. For some time, the Inquirer's headlines have blared a series of rude questions, Is Bush on The Sauce? Is Laura Leaving? One poster noted that, after all, they got the John Edwards thing right, so don't discount tabloids, okay? Except that tabloids pay their sources and don't correct their brightly lurid tales when wrong. Getting your info from a tab is like eating at Mom's Home-Cookin'. You'll probably get food-poisoning, but now and then you might get a hamburger that won't kill you outright.

As Smiley, the archetypal operative, notes in one of John Le Carre's novels, when it comes to intelligence, pedigree matters. Otherwise, the National Intelligence Estimate would be banged together out of what a psychic has to say, a couple of horoscopes, and the musings from a Metalica fan. This is not to say that Bush isn't boozing it up. Over an eight year period, I've spotted several instances of his public slurring and stumbling. But drunks are always the elephant in the room and, for some reason, no one ever wants to mention it. It's too large and too scary, this elephant, so we choose to let it trumpet loudly, mash the furniture into matchsticks, and scare the baby.

As to Laura leaving him, I wouldn't blame her but my experience with such wives is that they cling unto the bitter end. You see, next to a drunken fool, they look like Mother Theresa, Mary, and Mrs. Claus rolled into one, and who wants to give that up? Of course, someone should whisper to Laura that if standing next to The Current Occupant makes you look good, maybe it's time to take some courses, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or get religion.

So I don't think we can look to the Inquirer as a reliable source, except when it comes to documenting celebrity fat. And that's a relief. Bottom-feeding can be a real chore.

All you get is a mouthful of mud.

Bad company and bad faith...

On the subject of liars, a subject near and dear to my heart of late, I've been reading two new books about forgers. One forged paintings and the other forged lit'ry correspondence. The painting fraud, Han van Meegeren, operated during WWII, and cranked out fake Vermeers. I remember my 19th C. art history professor talking about him, and remarking on what an crappy painter he was. Today, my prof said, Han van Meegeren wouldn't have a prayer, because the viewing public is simply too familiar with what a Vermeer actually looks like.

This innaresting factoid has come about because of modern color printing, movies, and blockbuster exhibits, which are recent phenomena. As late as the 19th c., seeing a real chunk of art was generally impossible; there were no art museums, so art lovers glommed what they could on the academy viewing days. In the 1960's, I can remember buying an art history book for the unprecedented amount of $10. Until that time, art books mostly reproduced work in black and white, because color printing was terrible to begin with and, anyhow, ordinary people could never afford a volume with color plates.

Movies, like Girl With A Pearl Earring and the endless Van Gogh dramas, popularized art and artists, while the museum jumbo-exhibit concept got going in the 70's when Hoving ran the Metropolitan. One of the reasons Han van Meegeren picked Vermeer is because he's been the platinum standard for collectors. There are almost no Vermeers in existence and the prices for his work have always been stratospheric. So, with Vermeer, our grifter got big bucks and an ignorant public, both necessary when you're pulling the long con. Eventually he was caught but avoided prison, and died from his life-long alcoholism.

The lit'ry fraud, Lee Israel, was a respectable-enuff writer of popular biographies until she fell on hard times and gin. Waking up one day, surrounded by flies, bags of garbage, and no working utilities, she forged some Fanny Brice letters and discovered her true franchise. With a collection of antique typewriters, she cranked out innumerable fake letters and signatures of celebrities of all stripes. Later, just before the FBI came knock-knocking on her door, she started visiting collections of rare books and papers, substituting her cat-bird versions for the real thing. Looking back on her criminal past, she writes, "I betrayed some people whom I had grown to like. With whom I'd made jokes and broke bread. And in doing so I joined, to my dismay, the great global souk, a marketplace of bad company and bad faith."

This, to my mind, is an excellent reason to avoid lies and bad acts. It puts you into play with dull, untrustworthy creeps, who gobble up your time and patience. And then, there is the matter of self-betrayal: the debasement of a talent, whatever its size.

Afterwards, predictable as the paper boy, a bill for your scam will come due.

And it's always an interest bearing account.

Meers...

I've read that Queen Elizabeth I had two phobias: snow and mirrors, which makes me like her even more. For one thing, the two go together well: the fake ice of the mirror and the cold bleachy snow. They're also pretty classy for phobias when the more common types are bugs, elevators, and vomit. Her mirror phobia intrigues me, though, since Elizabeth was known to be vain. However, given the cosmetics of the time: white lead, vermillion, and carbon, coupled with court aesthetics: small boobs, bad teeth, plucked hairline, and half-moon eyebrows, I imagine a glance in the mirror could be pretty startling, even at the best of times.

When I came to Texas as a painting instructor, I told my beginning classes to add a mirror to their supplies, since I was going to assign a self-portrait. They all favored me with that white-eyed zombie stare, until one was brave enough to say, "You mean a meer?" "A what?" I asked. "A meer," the girl said insistently, "a meer, a meer, a meer," until I understood. So, yes, a meer for that old classic: the self-portrait. Although I was an abstract painter and not likely to rip off the odd self-portrait, I kept a meer in my studio, hanging in a little alcove. While painting, often I would get into such an out-of-body state, I'd have to check out my reflection to remember what I looked like.

At my grad school, over in the performance art department , the director was completely obsessed with meers. He dragged his students all over the map so they could assist in his pieces. These consisted of naked people holding chunks of meer next to their flabby bits, thus making two flabby bits. Besides feeling sorry for his goose-pimply students, I thought it was a dopey idea, even after he published a scholarly monograph. I much preferred the work of his student and personal hot ticket, Ana Mendieta, who traipsed all over Iowa setting up mass-murder scenes made of torn clothing, the single eloquent shoe, a scrap of paper full of incoherent ravings, and everything decorated with lashings of cow blood. A walk in the dullsville landscape outside Iowa City could be pretty zippy, if you stumbled into one of Ana's scenes unawares.

After grad school, I rented a place, generically known all over town as The Pit. To spruce it up, I installed a mirrored wall and then spent the next month jumping out of my skin, because I'd think there was someone else in The Pit with me. But I discovered something. We don't come upon mirrors unaware. When we do, our encounters with our reflection are generally spooky, showing us either a quick shadowy figure or someone too old and/or fat to be recognizable. That's one reason the narcissist fascinates us, as he stares into the pool, in love with his twin mirrored self. As a vice, self-love must take enormous awareness and cool preparation so the encounter never surprises.

I realized, after the John Edwards debacle, that I was haunted with that video of him combing his hair, looking in the mirror, seemingly pleased. And then, much later, too late really, I thought of him confessing to narcissism, as though it had come upon him unawares, like a flukish case of the measles.

But that's the thing about meers. When we look into them, we already have a very good idea of what we'll see.

And, we already know we'll like it.

Extra helpings of Schadenfreude, please

Until last week, I didn't realize that I was prophetic in writing a John Edwards blog. Of course, I wasn't writing a John Edwards blog; I was just taking issue with the idiocy of the phrase love child as a reasonable 21st century term. But on Friday, the world went nuts over the terrible results of Edwards' terrible judgment in dilly-dallying with a daffy New Age-ish bimbo. I floated over the blogosphere just long enough to note the joyful satisfaction in his doom.

Many were the postings on How Could He? and Cancer! and Elizabeth! and Apologize! and Enough? and Not Enough! But below them all, the oily sheen of delight in another's certain pain was all too evident. Sometimes a screed carried a light frosting of the Women's Movement, or there was the creamy topping of the betrayed populists and, at other times, there was a crunchy sprinkling of the character issue. But it was still the same sweet dessert: that good-hair pretty boy got his, and about time too.

I'm not sure when Schedenfreude became our national past-time, but we're there now, honey. And a poor business it is, keeping us within a dreary circle of either agreeing that John Edwards is a rat, or fighting over his choice of bimbo vs. cancer-ridden wife. Either way, mass-culture cooties are taking up valuable brain space .

So I retired from the fray, as I predictably do when I'm in disagreement with the zietgeist, which is about 90% of the time. I dove into writing a new short story and my client work, which is where I've been these many days.

Despite anything the retro show Mad Men may suggest, the 50's were not a golden age lost. However, it was a time that offered some useful strategies. Just like now, there were seedy goings-on with the famous and infamous alike and, just like now, these doings were published, often with grainy photographs. However, parents and teachers made a distinction between garbage information and okay information. When Lana Turner's daughter stabbed the no-goodnik Johnny Stampanato, this was classified as garbage and thus of no real interest. My mother dampened my desire to gulp up movie mag accounts, saying it would just give me bad dreams.

I think she was onto something. Our gleeful obsession with bad news makes for troubled sleep, and from there bad dreams arise.

Bad dreams and nightmares.

We're all Victorians now...

When the last poor suffering bastard staggered home from Vietnam, and when Nixon was safely locked in a subterranean vault of carbon steel alloy 1090 somewhere wet and deep in Orange County, and with Jimmy Carter safely buttoned up in his sweater-vest inside the White House, many of us old hippie-activist-malcontented-socialists wiped our salty brows, went whew, doggies! and said, Goddamn, I'm glad that's over with.

You see, we thought we'd checked everything off The List and answered all the questions: Can black Americans vote without getting their necks stretched? Ans: Yes. Are undeclared wars illegal? Ans: Yes. Should the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, and/or the AFSA spy on, secretly photograph, intercept mail, and wiretap regular Americans? Ans: No. Are American women allowed to make decisions about their own bodies? Ans: Yes. Etc., etc.

Well, you get the idea. It was quite a List, but we thought we'd covered the bases, done what we had to, and things would stay put for a while. So with a quiet sigh, we turned back to our own little lives, finished our degrees, came back from Canada, got socially meaningful jobs and had naturally-birthed kiddies. Now, you have to remember we were very young when we first made The List and there were some questions we didn't ask, like: Is there a cure for human stupidity? (Ans: No). So it's not surprising to me, since we're currently in The Middle Ages, that there are well-organized dopes who want to teach creationism in the schools, who, in fact, will fight like pit bulls to teach their little dopettes how cavemen once rode upon dinosaurs, that women have one less rib than men, and how certain lucky-ducks will be sucked skyward come The Rapture.

What does amaze me is John Edwards' Love Child.

I confess. I spent a half hour today Googling (and goggling) John Edwards' Love Child and got pages of hits. This kid, whoever he is, is listed no other way: not as Little Googan or Johnny's bastard or Baby Doe. He is, just simply, John Edwards' Love Child. What I'm astounded by is the extended-pinky prissiness of it all. I can barely watch commercial television without burying my face in the sofa cushions during ads flacking erectile dysfunction pills, yeast infection products, heavy-flow tampons, adult diapers, or that smartly dressed couple bragging about their brand of love-lube. There are photos online I skip right over, not wanting to be treated to yet another shot of Lindsay's, Brittney's, or Paris' well-documented vadge. And with all this, the news media is talking about ::wink wink:: John Edwards' Love Child?

Not only does John Edwards have this Love Child, he's been snapped fleeing like some shy deflowered maiden from photographers. I'd like to think, given these pig-ignorant times, John Edwards could face down the paparazzi with a snarl and say, Yeah. I cheated on my brave, intelligent, cancer-ridden wife to get some poon on the side. Yeah, I got a kid out of it. And, yeah, we call him Skeezix. What's it to ya?

I'd really like to think that.

Otherwise, what's the upside to a dissolute age?

The schmucky non-macaroni-cooking me...

I've spent the past two days immobilized on the couch, cracking an eye now and then to take in Law and Order episodes, which I find as soothing as a cold soaking compress on the brow. Beginning with the thumping musical intro, the first glimpse of the corpse by a startled jogger, all the way through the wise-cracking cops, until the cold-as-ice DA makes her starchy appearance, then to the righteous end where the malfeasant is led away, angry yet-chastened (unless he's a psycho, in which case he's usually creepily smiling). What I'm saying is that Law and Order is a nursery tale: utterly and happily predictable. This seems to be what I require in my undone state, like a restless toddler listening to Dr. Seuss for the 400th time or Goodnight Moon. (Goodnight corpses, Goodnight Logan, Goodnight Benson, Goodnight DA, Goodnight wits, Goodnight skells, Goodnight perps...)

I have a couple of chronic conditions although it's hard to know what sets them off. Both my maladies are painful and one involves lots of non-lethal bleeding. There's not much in the way of painkillers or any modern miracle that helps. But when one or the other disorder topples onto me, there's no bargaining. I'm just there, squashed under the rubble like a half-dead survivor, having no thoughts about anything, except a glimpse of eventual light and the dim sound of human rescuers.

So I read to take my mind off various unhappy sensations, and, I've discovered afterwards, that I always form a black resentment towards whatever book I seized on. Like a savage, I see my paperback as a repository of pain, pain that was sucked off my hours of desperate reading and might still live inside the pages like a malevolent little demon. This time I chose The Purple Decade by Tom Wolfe, and I still feel like going grrrr every time I walk past it.

This time, flopped in a suitably darkened room, I considered how unlike myself I was at that moment. Getting up to feed the cats struck me as equivalent to climbing K-2, and I broke out in a sweat at the very thought. It also occurred to me to make some packaged macaroni, but the effort of putting water in the pot made me tearful as a whipped child. And then it occurred to me, This blubbering incompetent is me.
How innaresting.

A humbling thought. As myself, I write, and as myself, I blubber and can't make Extra-Cheesy Macaroni. And when I think about it, there's no difference between us. I'm me when I'm a wreck and I'm me when I'm not.

I could say the cure is attitude--just pull yourself up with yoga and a handful of wide-spectrum vitamins, but I think that's crap. Anyway, there's a real joy when I come blinking through the cannon smoke, my infinitesimal battle over, at least for a while. Personally, I like what George Herbert said, after a hard 15th c. bout of plague, syphilis, leprosy or whatever the poor bastard had:

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light.

Me too, Georgie-boy.

After the crud, I live and write.

And what a white-hot blessing it is.

Blinded by the light...

Yesterday I got word that a story of mine is now up on The Sun's website. The address is http://www.thesunmagazine.org/archives/1933 should you care to have a peek. Just checking out the magazine will be worth your while. It's a really good publication: one of those rare ones like the New Yorker, where readers feel they've discovered a personal friend. There's something raw about it, which fits in nicely with my own sensibilities.

Anyhow, as I wrote a friend who'd sent a congratulatory email, This is the story that ate my lunch. After I published this story, I couldn't get arrested, and that was eleven years ago. I could blame various others, but that would be dumb, not to say deluded. I suspect that all barriers, as usual, are within my own punkin head. The story, How To Find Him had a lot of success, which I didn't fully understand at the time. My husband, who reread it yesterday, and who touched me mightily with his reaction, said, "It's a perfect portrait of the time then...It should be required reading for all nineteen year old girls." And that is the usual reaction I've gotten, one that's nice because it's an unintended bonus.

The story was written in one bout of about six hours. It came about because I wanted to experiment with narration done in the second-person singular, which sounds like a bloodless reason for writing anything. Still, I was excited by the idea and by another developing notion as I wrote: using a broad expanse of time within a short story, something Alice Monroe does so effortlessly. Both these mechanisms fall into the New Toy school of creativity I learned as a painter. That is, sometimes when you're jammed up, just getting some new brushes can unclog whatever is roiling around inside.

After it came out, whatever I sent in to whomever was roundly rejected. Pawing through a pile of my orphaned manuscripts, I realized How To Find Him had taken up residence in my head as some kind of yardstick. If this was as good as HTFH, they would have accepted it, I'd think, or This is better than HTFH and these dolts can't see it. Success like this had happened to me a few times before, and always stalled me out. A painting I did a few years after grad school got a lot of attention and became one of those fateful markers-in-the-brain, as did a sonnet cycle that turned into a limited edition book, and sent me sailing off into public readings.

At my ripe age, I think I've realized that success isn't always good. It took me quite a while to get over myself, to understand that my tiny triumph was good, but not all that good in the cosmic scheme of things.

Anyway, it's not something that should concern an artist. Going into the next thing, while trusting that sometimes you'll speak to people and other times you won't, is the business of a writer. We're not critics, after all. That's a job we aren't good at; it leads to paralysis by analysis, and causes us to go dormant, stung into inaction by our own poisons.

But go ahead, read the story. You're in luck: it can't clobber you like it clobbered me.