"A long, elaborately-choreographed but awkwardly-executed dance"

Here is an article in which Jonathan Franzen and Clay Shirky debate whether technology is good, toxic or both.

The most interesting thing to me about internet culture is how it creates or facilitates relationships and interactions that would never occur otherwise.  This is particularly significant in the case of people who are reserved or not prone to making lots of new friends in their "irl" lives.  Suddenly, no one is totally inaccessible.  Potential friends and creeps alike have multiple avenues by which to pursue your attention.  In the past, when meeting interesting strangers or friends of friends, you generally had to rely on happenstance or time in order to get to know them.  You couldn't just go home and learn about them in anonymous privacy.  You couldn't just send a message that would instantly appear before their face, forcing the situation, the immediate extraction of a response.

Overall, I think it's a good thing that interactions are so easily had.  It makes it easy and less frightening to connect with someone you would never have a chance to know.  It helps the socially inept, the lazy, the reclusive, the avoidant and the noncommittal to carry on some semblance of a social life.  It helps to overcome otherwise deterring circumstances.

Example: I'm friends with someone my ex briefly dated.  I didn't know they were dating and she didn't know he was my ex.  It was a situation that could have been weird, but wasn't.  We chatted in person and later made internet friends, and I put her in contact with my out-of-town best friend because both women were about to move to the same city.  Weeks later I received a Snapchat of my old BFF and my new buddy drinking together in a bar in New York.  Technology!  The future!  Improbable connections made from random situations occurring thousands of miles apart.  In a historical context, I don't think it would have been possible for us to connect the way we did, with social mores generally dictating that we should be awkward around each other due to the nature of our mutual connection.  Or maybe she and I are just grown ass men who don't care about trifling shit.  Either way, it's a weird example, but they're all weird examples.

Still, in making private stranger-interactions so easy, the internet in turn makes them less meaningful, because there is almost no risk involved.  Interactions can almost seem random, motivated by boredom or curiosity rather than a genuine interest or purpose.  It's easy to stay in some vague contact with someone you don't care about, someone who otherwise would have fallen from your life like a dead leaf if you had to maintain that connection in person.  In the end, many of these relationships strike me as a false pantomime of human interaction.

Office Ghost

I recently learned that several people have seen an apparition in the building where I work.  Where does this apparition like to hang out?  Outside my office door.

Although I am generally skeptical of what most people believe about the paranormal, I still acknowledge that I have heard convincing stories from trusted sources, and have experienced some mid-level weird shit myself.  As a child, I was obsessed with ghost stories and had stacks of books of them.  This slowed into adulthood, but I have spent many an hour trawling Fortean Times' "It Happened to Me!" board, another source of high quality weird shit.  As such, I pay more attention than most when I hear about real, live stories of house hauntings.

Immediately upon receiving this rumor, I texted our admin and treated him to a Macaulay Culkin/John Candy in Uncle Buck style rapid fire questioning session.

B: I hear you saw a ghost and didn't tell me about it.
K: I've seen her three times.
B: TELL ME.
K: She's not very scary, she just stands there and looks at me.
B: When.
K: Late at night.
B: What is she wearing.
K: A white dress and large white hat.
B: Old fashioned?
K: IDFK!
B: Where did you see her?
K: In the back hallway...In the corner.
B: Which corner.
K: West.
B: AT MY DOOR.
K: Bingo.


Any time I try to re-decide if I believe that things like ghosts exist, I remember our experiences in my childhood home.  While I have no expectation of understanding that arm of the paranormal, I think it's there.  I wrote a creepy overview of my experiences in the house a few years ago.

Earlier today, I came across an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that I liked a couple of years ago and marked to remember.  A oddly-timed reminder.


The Little Ghost
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high - higher than most
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Til after she was gone-
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown's white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do - and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favorite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled
There was no hint of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused - then opened and passed through
A gate that was once there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1917

Is it always like this?

Music for Moody Children from initials bb on 8tracks Radio.

Music to have a tantrum to.
Just kidding.  This music is awesome.

There's a very young Nick Cave, then some more Australians, Cocteau Twins singing in their made up baby language, classic Cure, my favorite Dead Can Dance song, extremely depressing NIN, amazing mid-90s Siouxsie, an excerpt from the dreariest Cure album ever, and we prefer to forget the last news stories about Peter Murphy as we listen to songs from Love Hysteria. THE END.

Supernatural vigilantism

I hexed someone when I was 13.  This style of revenge may or may not have been influenced by the movie The Craft.

My mother's boyfriend was the sort of timeless asshole that no one wants for a step-father.  Self-importance, manipulation, toxic emotional issues and an unchecked temper were among his lesser qualities.  I had hated him instantly, and he knew it.  Our relationship was a power struggle; I was the mutinous pre-teen, he was the selfish adult who resented the presence of a prior child.  We fought constantly.

Problems had been escalating between he and my mother.  Although he had been sober when she met him, he had returned to bouts of problem drinking, which exacerbated his temperamental moods and combative behavior.  It was my best friend who suggested I find an alternative means to destroy him.

I've been interested in occult matters for as long as I've been able to read, but had never really considered witchcraft to be a viable hobby.  I had by this time rejected organized religion, but was otherwise fairly superstitious and possibly hoping that there might be some other natural force to take the place of religion.  At the same time, I was skeptical enough to be unafraid.  I planned the hex.

I bought a tiny glass bottle with a cork stopper and hid it in my room for a few weeks. The next time he made me angry, I went to his bathroom and removed loose hairs from his brush.  I needed to burn them, but wasn't sure how, so I grabbed some nail polish remover and a spoon.  I put the hairs in the spoon with a little pool of the remover and set it on fire while I watched after school TV in our den.  I blew the flame out before the noxious fluid could evaporate, poured it into my bottle, and corked it.

After that, I took the bottle outside and dashed it hard against a concrete paver in our yard while reasoning diplomatically that he had brought this on himself.  The bottle shattered into thick wet shards, which I kicked into the lantana.

I solemnly confided the story to my best friend the next day at school.  She was impressed; normally her role was to be the rebel and I was the square, and she hadn't believed that I would do it.  We both felt a little apprehensive of what was to come.  When a week passed without incident, I began to suspect the curse to be a dud.  Not enough hair, maybe.  Or maybe I should have said a little incantation.  Or done it at midnight, or on a full moon.  Something.  With no apparent curse activity, I soon forgot it.

A year or two later, I started to more actively read about the history of witchcraft (depressing) and the contemporary state of it (embarrassing).  I read about various rituals for various effects, and remembered my little curse.  I was thinking about how it hadn't worked when I remembered the timeline afterwards.

Shortly after that day, probably 1-2 months later, my mother's boyfriend fell and fractured his leg.  This was his "good" leg as he had lost the other one below the knee in a motorcycle accident years before.  The temporary disablement had badly increased his drinking and shitty temper, which erupted in a terrible fight with my mother in which she finally ended the relationship.  Breaking his last good leg and getting dumped and evicted did seem like a crop of unusually bad luck...

Naturally I refuse to allow one way or the other that my two-bit little kid hex was the catalyst to his misfortune and ultimate removal from my life, but the events certainly were timely, and I enjoy the story.  They say that people committing malicious magical deeds are subject to three times the damage that the hex inflicts, a sort of three-eyes-for-an-eye spiritual punishment for bad behavior.  I have no way of knowing if I received this rebuke from the universe for my hex, because I entered high school immediately thereafter, and untangling the regular troubles of that age from those inflicted by supernatural policy would be impossible.  I never tried any such thing again.

But just in case, make it a policy that you don't end up in anyone's bottle, especially not one belonging to a pubescent girl.

I've been tearing through a collection of stories by Dorothy Parker.  What a tricky trickster, hiding her caustic and wounding messages behind a screen of neutrality and intentionally sparse writing.  It must be highly disorienting for people who take everything (or anything) at face value.  We wouldn't know.

Someone I used to know referred to me for years as Little Dorothy Parker.  I was mildly offended at the time - "You make a couple of sarcastic remarks and suddenly you're the queen of the miserable blades?" but I got over it.  I don't think he had ever read anything I wrote, so perhaps he was just trying to let me know that he knew about a writer, namedropping the dead.

I'm always surprised (sometimes offended) by the way people perceive me, either because I do find it to be wildly inaccurate, or so loaded up with their own projections as to be useless or irrelevant to comment on.  Luckily, I no longer care how I am treated in the minds of people who aren't part of my ever tightening sphere.  I always said I didn't care before, but now it's real.  The magic of aging!  These days, the only people who are still able to set me into fits and reactionary tantrums are, of course, my parents.  They have lived to thrice regret every sideways comment they have made about religion or politics in my presence.  As they should.  #adolescent

In Parker's stories, everyone is deluded, a bore, smugly bourgeois, self-obsessed or all of the above.  She lets her characters hang themselves with no encouragement or comment.  That's a skill I'd like to master: silently and invisibly allowing people to show their flaws or ill intent without having to offer my commentations.  But I have so many of them!

In one of Truman Capote's later stories, the title of which I've forgotten but it's from the unfinished "Answered Prayers," he recreates, falsifies or recounts a night in which a drunk Dorothy Parker and Tallulah Bankhead show up to a dinner party where they meet an also-wasted Montgomery Clift. At this time, he is young, beautiful, on the cusp of his career and gay as a parade, which doesn't stop the crones from delightedly and lasciviously batting him around.  It stuck with me, although any story about him makes me sad.

Sometimes, those alarmist articles re: "What's wrong with Generation __!" strike a chord of fear inside me if I recognize more than two quirks of my own in those lazy numbered lists.  I begin to think that my behaviors are out of my control, are part of some sort of fated wave of bad luck and bad responses.

That, of course, sounds a hell of a lot more like astrology than psychology, and even though my pinterest has 47 instances of 17th century etchings of star paths, I hope it's clear on what side I fall.

The "quirk" that frightens me most about the pop culture generation I belong to is the Peter Pan thing.  I hate the idea of being emotionally frozen between adolescence and adulthood.  I accept that people like myself will APPEAR to be grown children to older generations, but that's just because I don't have kids and use most of my disposable income buying rocks* on the internet.

But I think that the appearance of one's life - however ridiculous - is fine as long as they continue to mentally evolve.  Rejecting the traditional life milestones does make it hard to mark movement along the path, though.  The easiest way for me to measure whether or not I am a sophisticated-ass grown up is imagining how I would respond today if met with the various interpersonal offenses I experienced in my twenties.  Infractions, negative encounters with friends and lovers, the usual stuff.  Without even having to think about specifics, I know that none of the various instances would either have happened or have been stood if they were to occur now.  Confusing way to describe what I am saying, but I think racking up emotional intelligence points is going to be the only criteria that I care about re: Am I successful?  What is my life about!  Do I exist?  That and having enough $$$ to continue shopping at Mainely Agates: Agates from Maine.

---
*not a drug reference.  just regular silicate mineral stuff.

When your niceguy facade finally melts away at work,

Weirdest weekend.

My mom asked me to attend a funeral with her.  He was a high school friend of hers and someone I had never met.  Normally I wouldn't have gone, but knowing that she knew that and asked me anyway, I figured it was important to her.  Observing the funeral of someone you never knew is strange, awkward.  I felt like a spectator.  Still, it was somehow moving in a way I didn't expect, and I felt that I sort of knew some of the people there.  Not that I thought that I had met them, but in that their lives were parallel to mine in some way.  This guy grew up where my mother did, his children are my age, and his story was both familiar and fascinating.  I felt affected by it in a way that I couldn't explain, and was moody and contemplative for the rest of the day.

Or more than usual.

Shearer

Norma Shearer's a pretty good writer.  She describes being rejected by silent era director D.W. Griffith at the beginning of her career:

"The Master looked down at me, studied my upturned face in the glare of the arc, and shook his eagle head. Eyes no good, he said. A cast in one and far too blue; blue eyes always looked blank in close-up. You'll never make it, he declared, and turned solemnly away."

She was rejected on appearance alone so many times that it is amazing to me that she continued on her dogged path.  Her primary "flaws" were being stouter than the rest as well as having one eye that wouldn't quite stare in the same direction as the other.  She does look somewhat cross-eyed in some scenes, but it comes across as either endearing or exotic.  Her strange eyes make her seem almost cat-like in early films, and when she tilts her head down and scowls determinedly, she's almost frightening in a witchy way.  Earlier in life, she had learned daily eye exercises that allowed her to exert more control over the errant one, although only for periods of time, not permanently.

She was rejected for her eyes and figure instantly and vehemently for five years, only gaining a foothold by killing a couple of minor roles and striking up a cautious camaraderie with ferocious genius Irving Thalberg, a very in-charge producer in Hollywood at the time.  She later married him, etc.

Although she played "bad girl" roles in a very authentic, disarming and terribly modern way (The Divorcee and A Free Soul, already discussed on this blog), my favorite role of hers is Mary Hanes in The Women, the greatest movie of all time.  Mary simpers around a little bit, but mostly she's a very enlightened, noble creature who, while not quite a badass, fails to take shit from anyone.  All the best lines belong to comic foil Rosalind Russell in that movie, but the heroine never gets to be funny.  Isn't that stupid?

The Divorcee

The Divorcee - See?  I said witchy.  Some Theda Bara shit here.

Nixa

No offense, Ky-Ky, but I prefer the Nick-Blixa combination here.  Nixa.


Oh god the violin.

I have multiple itunes libraries living on a couple of computers, and when transferring music from one to the other, discovered a cache containing a library circa 2007.  It was full of all sorts of music that hadn't made it over on a transfer made at that time.

Now I am continually hearing songs that I loved in past lives and somehow forgot about when they went away.  I still love them.  Hearing certain songs for the first time in years is sometimes shocking, thrilling and gutting.

I had PJ Harvey's "Dry" on tape (am old) and have scarcely heard it in the last decade.  I listened to it the other night and felt like screaming.  THIS IS SO GOOD.







Is Suede not super famous?  I thought they were.  I find living entirely in my own world to be an accomplishment, but sometimes it leads to confusion.


I forgot about this song, and Disintegration in general, until I watched Marie Antoinette last summer.  I was amazed at how good it is.  What the hell have I been doing?  I think I should do a Cure song trawl post where I ramble excessively about my various feelings about various songs.  FUNSIES