Video: Roxy Music, "Mother of Pearl"

This is a great clip of one of my favorite tunes by Roxy Music, "Mother of Pearl."

I get chills when I listen to it. It just flows beautifully. The inertness of the crowd is annoying, but maybe they were all too stoned to respond or something. But Roxy brought it on this performance, and Bryan Ferry's doing his whole supersuave frontman thing masterfully.

Narcissistah Souljah

I was thinking about this a lot (below), in terms of the brick wall I had bashed my head against for so long...

Diagnostic criteria (DSM-IV):

The essential feature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (either in fantasy or actual behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of situations and environments.

In order for a person to be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) they must meet five or more of the following symptoms:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requires excessive admiration
• Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations
• Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends
• Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her
• Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

I think all of these apply with Exene, scarily enough.

And this freaks me out, too.

Hornyscope

I had to laugh at my horoscope today (in the Chicago Redeye)...

Mars is heightening your sex drive. You'll jump on anything that moves. If you're single, you'll be tempted to look up that psychotic-yet-sexy ex for a hop in the sack. If you're with someone, you'll want to stay in bed all day.

Who says horoscopes aren't accurate?! Bahah! It's like they've known me all my life!

Reviews

I decided to migrate my reviews to another blog, just for shits-n-giggles. All the navelgazery, snarking, pettifogging, and whinging you know and love will remain HERE, Gentle Readers. But the reviews will be moved to Pirouettiquette.

I might even be super-industrious and shovel my Amazon reviews of yore onto that blog, too. Haven't decided, yet. Maybe, if I'm really slick, I'll take up that deal Blogger has with Amazon and review stuff that ties into Amazon, and maybe make a nickel or two for my troubles. How about that? We'll see how canny I am on that score. If there's a way NOT to make money from my work, by God, I'll find it!

In other news, the bus was crowded, and I stood for the whole ride, and it HURT (the hairline-fractured left foot). I just gamely did what I could, but it really hurt. Need more ice cream, obviously, to help mend my bones! ; )

Lena Horne, RIP

Aww, I saw that Lena Horne died (92 years old). I always thought she was kinda cool.

It Had Better Be Tonight

Henry Mancini composed that tune (he and I have the same birthday!)

All Better

B2 appears to have licked his fever of yesterday (he slept most of the day). He's his usual bouncy, angelic/impish self. That makes me glad -- when he gets sick, he's like me -- he just shuts down.

Great T-shirt Slogans

Saw this on the ONION store, and laughed so hard...


This one also made me laugh hard...

Sicko

Poor B2 -- he's got a fever, is under the weather. I can always tell, because he just wilts when he's sick -- he conked this morning, and I checked and could tell he was getting a fever. So, I'm staying with him today while Exene has B1 and is downtown at Celticfest. I'd wanted to go to Celticfest, but when B2 got sick, I decided it was better to hang back with him. At least the weather is good today -- cool and sunny and clear.

But it breaks my heart to see B2 looking all sick.

Happy Mother's Day

The Kinks, "Mindless Child of Motherhood"

Happy Mother's Day, mothers!

I'm personally conflicted about Mother's Day in my own household, because I typically play Good Cop vis-a-vis Exene, even though I think, stacking her up to all the moms that I know, she's not in the Hall of Fame by any means. I console myself by noting that, if not for her, I'd not have my wonderful boys, that she's 50% of their genetic makeup. By my standards, that's a pretty harshly pragmatic assessment, but it's what gets me through this day.

I'm always better about Mother's Day than she has ever been about Father's Day, but that's how our dynamic has always been -- I'm the one who pays attention to making folks feel appreciated (which is probably a stereotypically motherly duty, isn't it? Hah.) Even when we are (fucking FINALLY -- damn you Great Recession!!!) separated, I'll still want the boys to honor their mom on Mother's Day, because it's the right thing to do.

So, anyway, to the moms out there who actually rise to the manifold challenges of motherhood, I hope today's good to you, and people are nice and appreciative of you and the hard work that goes into it. Because I know how hard it is, how hard you work (and believe me, I actually DO know how hard you work -- of any dads out there, I most definitely do know), and how often it's taken for granted, so I hope your loved ones cut you a break today!

Enjoy today, whatever comes your way.

Dunster

The crazy who obsesses over Kirsten Dunst struck again. He (I assume it's a "he") papers a huge swath of the city with her pictures. Oh, and the Dunster (what I'll call this entity) seems to hate her, because a few times they'll write screeds like "Whore! Bitch! Jezebel!" on the pictures. This one above is a new addition, as usually it's just Dunst.

Stormy

Wow, it was very windy last night (up to 35-mph gusts), and cold. A storm blew in this morning. May in Chicago, always cool and stormy.

Today (weather permitting) I'm taking B1 to his soccer match, and will work on the screenplay revision.

I stubbed the fuck out of my right toes this morning -- I accidentally punted one of B2's large toy garbage trucks. He loves garbage trucks -- LOVES them. Cracks me up, how much he loves them. He's some amusing combo of actor and soccer hooligan, that one is.

B1 is sweet and sensitive and thoughtful -- he said the other day "I'm like Superman; [B2] is more like Lobo." For anybody who knows who Lobo is, you'll know that B1 perfectly characterized B2!

I was shredding old checks this morning (the fun never stops!) and the boys were LOVING that. B2 looked at the strips of shredded check I'd put in a bag and took a handful, said "This is awesome." Loved that. B2 does have the Instinct for Awesome -- that innate sense of things. Love that. He gets that from his daddy!

Exene was under the delusion that she'd always paid the bills in the past -- she blithely said that when were having one of our contentions, and I said "No, you didn't -- most of the time, I paid the bills." and she said "No, you didn't. I always did it." And wouldn't budge. Going through the checks, I held them up, said to her "Wow, look at these bills I paid, year after year after year. And to think you said I never paid the bills." She just glowered at me with her "It Doesn't Matter" Look(tm). A tiny victory, but it was nice for a sliver of reality to intrude a bit, there. Can't wait to not have to debate reality anymore.

Anyway, shredding the fuck out of the past. I was amused -- found two checks -- one she wrote on 9/10/01 for a crib; and one I wrote on 9/12/01 for a septic tank service company -- that nicely bookended our moving into the Black House in '01, in our fateful homeowning days... 9/10: crib; 9/11: terrorist attacks; 9/12; septic tank cleaning. I kept those two checks, just for the heck of it.

Caught a glimpse of a rainbow this morning. I tried to photograph it, but the light went and I'm not sure if I got it. I'll check.

Unbalanced

You know, Vivien Leigh (although a Scorpio, herself), managed a picture-perfect portrayal of a Libra in her characterization of Blanche DuBois. Blanche is the archetypal Libran. You think in that clip that the music's just part of the soundtrack, but astute observers of the Libran in action know that the music's actually just playing in their heads -- like when they get that far-off look in their eyes, they've gone off to their Happy Place, their castle in the sky, where candy-apple mares eat rainbows and cotton candy, and their Shining Knight will rescue them, sooner or later. Far, far away....

Oh, and I laugh -- Brando was an Aries, and the look on his face above (and Blanche's) aptly conveys the respective mental states of these polar opposites, when confronting one another (the above shot looks like Stanley's about to say "Earth to Blanche! HELLOOO in there?" and Blanche is busy being delusional about her gentleman callers and the kindness of strangers.)

Climb Every Mountain?

Ex and I got into it the other day (well, not true -- rather, I voice an opinion and she got pissed off and rather strident in her tone). It was one of those subtext-laden kind of things, where you're talking about something but I guess the behind-the-scenes stuff bubbles up.

I'd mentioned how amused I was that Gawker blogger and NYT darling Emily Gould's memoir had been received rather half-heartedly (typically saying that she wrote a memoir without having much to say). I've found Gould to be annoying as hell -- seriously narcissistic, and not nearly the writer we're supposed to believe she is (and she was given a very gushy treatment by the NYT a few years ago that set my teeth on edge).

Anyway, Exene was also not happy about that, which led to a discussion about memoirs in general, and we both agreed that only doing something noteworthy should be memoir-worthy. Simple enough, obvious point, right? I remember being on the commuter train in Indiana, and Hoosiers asking me "What're you writing? Your memoirs?" and I said "Memoirs? I haven't DONE anything, yet."

Then Exene made the mistake of referencing scaling Mount Everest as something memoir-worthy. She was under the (mistaken) impression that only 300 people have done it. I said "More like 2,000." And off we flew -- she got pissy about it, vehemently saying that a memoir about scaling Everest was a much worthier topic than a memoir by some narcissistic New York brat.

And I said "Well, they're BOTH lame, in my view." And I pointed out that maybe the first ten people to climb Everest might have something worth sharing, or perhaps a scaling that was in some way unique (up there, uniquely bad is likelier to be the outcome), and that, in my view, scaling Everest was as narcissistic as being a blogger in New York, only that in doing so, a person was spending far more money and actually risking people's lives for their vainglorious effort to summit Everest -- something nearly 2000 people have already done before you, and over 100 people have died attempting to do.

That really set her off, and she said how it was still more significant than the writings of a whiny, slutty New York chick. And I said "What's going to be said in an Everest memoir? It was cold. It was hard to breathe. It was dangerous. It was deadly. It was high up." I said maybe if a climber was abducted by aliens or saw a dragon, it might be interesting, but, by and large, it was the same story -- see mountain, climb mountain.

She went on a diatribe about the personal discovery a person scaling Everest might feel, contrasted with the navel-gazing of a former blogger-turned-writer (she didn't put it that way, but that was the key point), and I stuck to my contention that both efforts were lame, both were reflective of a deep narcissism -- whether "I live in New York." or "I scaled Mount Everest." -- both were lame, in my view. I said "Let me see the memoir of the first person to land on Mars -- that's something nobody's done before. But when you're the 2001st person to summit Everest? Yawn."

Now, either she's got it in her head to scale Everest, or she's perhaps conflating her marathon-running hobby as somehow deeply significant in the same vein that scaling Everest would be. That's the only reason I can figure on why she might get so up in arms about that. I mean, she was pissed! Like angrier than I've seen her in, well, the past two years (seriously, even angrier than when I told her I wanted to divorce her -- heh, if anybody should be writing a memoir, it should be ME -- "My Life with Maleficent"). I think maybe she thought my pointing out the ersatz and hubristic (and pointless) accomplishment of scaling Everest was, perhaps, a dig at her marathonning (which it wasn't, to be honest -- I wasn't even thinking of that at the time -- because it's not even in the same ballpark -- coming in 20,000th in a 40,000-runner marathon isn't even in same neighborhood as scaling Everest -- and only the delusionally hubristic would even think it is, which might be begging the question, yes?).

I don't know. I always look at those "extreme sport" things with a gimlet eye. The first, second, and third person who does something like that, sure, they're trailblazers. But after 2000 times? C'mon. Mountainous masturbation! Barring something extraordinary happening, it's not extraordinary -- personally meaningful, sure, but really, what moral lesson are you going to bring down from Mount Everest that already hasn't been learned? What, that it's HARD? That it's dangerous? That life is GOOD? That death is BAD? And sure, in a world of 5 billion people, you're one of the 0.00000004% to have scaled Everest, but I still think "Whoopity doo, goody for you. You're willing to risk those poor sherpa's lives, willing to pay out the nose for your little micro-sliver of personal accomplishment? What does that say about you?"

I remember reading that real climbers kind of look at Everest with a jaundiced view -- that the true lovers of climbing think it's kind of a circle jerk -- it's the mountains the "tourists" always want to climb. I didn't bring that up in my discussion with Exene, but I did think that.

Climb Every Mountain (had to be done). You know, at some point, I'm going to write a story exploring that impulse -- something darkly comic, to be sure.