Lady Winter

Work has been good. Have been doing my thing. I'm tired, though, just juggling plates and what-not (figuratively, mind you, not literally -- although my grandpa could do that; he was good at that kind of stuff). December has stalked into the frame, taking hold of the season, even though it's not officially winter, yet, it's making what's left of Fall its bitch.

Some of the boys' Christmas presents have arrived, which I've stealthily stashed and wrapped. Loving that. They're none the wiser. Muahaha!

Working on some new fiction, am nearly 20,000 words into it after about three weeks. That's going well. I still need to get more organized -- need to give away a lot of stuff to charity, like clothes and toys and books the boys never use, anymore. That kind of thing.

Dreamy

I don't routinely post dreams, because nothing's more boring than reading about somebody else's dreams, but my dreams have been odd, lately, full of celebrity cameos and what-not. For example, I dreamed that I was in some kind of cop movie-type scenario, flying low across the LA River (if you really want to call it a river), with 90s-era David Bowie riding shotgun with me, and offering commentary on the chase. We were cops, apparently, and Bowie was keen to get the bad guys, who were racing down the LA River whatever-you-call it--concrete apocalypse?

Another was an "Avatar"-scaled kind of war movie thing, with massive amounts of lasers and explosions and what-not.

Stevie Nicks. Eyes UP HERE, Stevie.

Another was me chumming around backstage with young Stevie Nicks, who took me on a whirlwind tour of her world (there wasn't any other Fleetwood Mac folks around, although there were shadowy others around, but it was all about Stevie). And, ultimately, there was sex with Stevie Nicks, which both enticed and alarmed me in the course of the dream, because I was thinking "Wow, I'm having sex with Stevie Nicks!" and at the same moment, it was like "Oh, SHIT; I'm having sex with Stevie Nicks -- and I'm not wearing protection?!?!!" But the dream shifted before those thoughts went anywhere.

Still another had me in a protracted dispute with an Indian hair salon owner, who insisted that I owed her $800, and I as insistently pointed out that I didn't owe her place more than $20 for the haircut I'd just gotten, and we were going back and forth, and the stylist was embarrassed that their computer system apparently had no record of my transactions. I was arguing that I didn't have a running tab with the salon, that this was ridiculous. We both stood our ground, and the woman said she'd send me to small claims court, and I said "Fine. See you there!" and then the lady went back to her office and managed to find her financial records that showed that, yes, I had, in fact, paid my bill, and how sorry she was for the misunderstanding, and she wanted a hug to make things better. I was loathe to do so in the wake of the confrontation, but did so, while inwardly grossed out because the woman smelled like patchouli, one of my least-favorite scents in the world. Then I woke up.

Cool Yule

B2 loved that I'd put up the tree. He had run right up to it, and was just thrilled. He gushed about how the Christmas tree was his favorite part of the holiday, and went about rearranging some of the decorations on the tree. I loved seeing him so stoked about it. He would periodically go on about it, just how much he loved it. We set up the boys' GeoTrax train around the base of the tree, too, which B2 enjoyed, too.

This Christmas will be much better than last year's, thankfully, although I'm still being very prudent about what to get the boys, trying to pick things that they'll really want, use, and enjoy. There's nothing worse than facing some "must-have" toy that they play with for about 15 minutes. On the bright side, since we never watch commercial television anymore, the boys lack that hardwired consumerist instinct so many kids cultivate. So, I have it comparatively easy.

As ever the Christmas commando, I pride myself on being able to get gifts into the apartment without the boys seeing -- Exene already had B2 spot a present she'd bought; I don't know how she talked her way out of him tearing into that one! What amuses me is that, thanks to my good hiding places, neither boys are the wiser for it -- B1 would never think of doing it, because he's so honorable; and B2 doesn't suspect that I've got various niches and hidey-holes for presents. If he knew where they were, he'd totally ferret them out! This is the kid who, at 3 years of age, would methodically pull a chair into the kitchen, climb atop it, and then climb atop the sink in an effort to get something sequestered atop the fridge.

I'm figuring on four gifts per boy -- I think that's more than sufficient. And that doesn't count anything I put in their stockings, which are hanging from the windows, so Santa can see'em -- they loved that, too. B2 was already grilling me about a present, like "Will you get this, or will Santa?" and I said "I don't know, yet. We'll see."

Hugo (2011)

I saw Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" last night, after work. I'm a big fan of his, love his directing style, so I saw this one with much anticipation, and was disappointed -- not in his shooting of it. It's compellingly shot, of course, as I would expect from Scorsese, who can probably shoot movies in his sleep at this point. But I found the story lacking. Without wanting to go into spoilers per se, the movie is sort of deceptive -- despite the title, the title character really isn't the main driver of anything, so much as he's the catalyst. The movie is really about another character, and the boy is just a means of delivering some kind of creative absolution to that other character. I found the characterizations to be lacking, and the tone to be strongly sentimental and nostalgic, and Scorsese's own intense love of film-making to derail the story, itself. If it wanted to be a movie about movies, it needed to be that -- but there are other things thrown into the mix, and the result is that the movie doesn't convince or persuade -- at least it didn't do that with me (I say that because some folks applauded when it was over). In terms of the shooting of the movie, it was fine -- but in terms of the story, it was wanting.

They likely crafted the story of this cuter, cornflower-eyed waif boy in the train station to sell the real story, which was less marketable -- namely, this old film director who has, for some reason, lost his will to create movies. Again, because of the lack of deep characterization, the whole exercise felt less than convincing.

The movie will likely coast to some kind of Oscar nominations, but it's likely simply because of Scorsese's justified status as one of America's Last Great Moviemakers. It didn't work for me, however -- I didn't feel it exceeded the sum of its parts.

Holidays

Got the tree up last night. I love Christmas trees. The boys will love seeing it when they finally return, of course, they'll be wondering where the presents are. All in good time. I'm tickled that both boys still believe in Santa, and that I've been able to successfully carry out Santa operations in my apartment without the boys being the wiser. Daddy the Christmas commando!

Fort

I made a nice fort for the boys in their room, having cleared out the storage space where the Christmas decorations boxes have been. I made a nice fort in the corner of their room. They are loving it, are both in there. Forts are always fun!

Exene's family is in town, doing their usual "Thanksgiving for Exene" thing they do, where they drive up, cook the bejeebers out of a pile of food, watch the boys, and Exene partakes of it and then goes running. The boys'll at least enjoy seeing their relatives, and Exene will enjoy the repast that they serve up for her.

Me, I think I'll catch "Hugo" at some point. I work tomorrow, so I don't have a superlong weekend or anything.

Pepper Pike

I admit I am amused about the whole "Cop Casually Pepper Spraying Everything" meme that cropped up in reaction to the UC Davis debacle. There's your 15 minutes of fame (or infamy), Slick. Some people are known for inventing things, or creating works of art, or writing, or any number of other things; you're known for casually pepperspraying protesters in the face (I wonder if he went to Pepperdine?)....

Umbrella Man

Having forgotten my umbrella today, and, correspondingly, getting spritzed with rain (thankfully wearing my squall jacket, so only my slacks and shoes got reasonably wet), I saw this short film in the NYT, on this 48th anniversary of the JFK assassination...

The Umbrella Man

Which is pretty good, worth a watch!

Randroids. *scoff*

Reading an article about something else, I saw this good piece on Ayn Rand from a few years ago...

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/11/how_ayn_rand_became_an_american_icon.single.html

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave.

She was nuts, too, apparently...

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. … Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."
It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people, so she wanted to strike back at them—through theft and murder. In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write her first novel, We the Living(1936), and in the early drafts her central character—a crude proxy for Rand herself—says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."

And a manifest authoritarian, too, a cult leader...

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority.
As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."

Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into total agreement with me.

A fitting end...

She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right—if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars—this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?

I would say that "Atlas Shrugged" is the "Mein Kampf" of American fascism, truly.

Q101

I haven't regularly listened to radio since, I dunno, 1995 -- that was the last year I remembered hearing anything remotely compelling on the radio. After that point, I increasingly just listened to music on my own, followed my own interests and preferences, bought a lot of CDs. Of course, even that trailed off from about 2005 onward. That, in itself, is kind of curious for me -- I have so many CDs, but as I found fewer and fewer current bands compelling, my music purchases declined, and I just relied on my existing archive of music, stocking up my iTunes to the critical mass of music I needed, which was about 7000 songs. I have the good fortune to work at a job where I can "plug-and-play" and listen to music while I work. But while I listen to music, I don't listen to music radio. There just wasn't anything out there that was interesting enough for me, and the lack of control of the format was perhaps less appealing, after years of iPod and iTunes.

Now I read this article about Q101 being turned from an "alternative" station to news, and I'm very surprised. Q101 was a kind of musical institution in Chicago; it may not have played music that I considered alternative, but you could at least count on it to play rock music -- now it's news? I wonder where all of those orphaned listeners will go for music? Again, it's sort of a weird thing for me, because I haven't regularly listened to radio for over 16 years, but I'm still sad for the demise of a major local player like Q101. And since I'm admittedly no longer a radio listener, I don't even know where those people will go. It's just curious to think about it that way, how alien such an omnipresent medium has become to me (and, likely, so many others).

Walkin'

Walked home from downtown tonight, just because the weather was relatively nice, compared with what it has been. Fun to see downtown light up for the holidays. Of course I snapped a few photographs of window displays and what-not.

Amazing that Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means Christmas is that much closer. Lordy.

Koff

So far, so good -- just had a sore throat yesterday, but it appears to have mostly abated since then. Hopefully my body fought off the cold. I've been pretty lucky with that the last few years. I had a sneezing fit yesterday, but that was it.

Found $.25 today, so I finally broke the $50 mark on found money for the year! A personal best!

Had conferences for the boys. B2 is rocking kindergarten; he's ahead of where he should be on all things, and is very well-behaved in class. His teacher was really glad to have him, and commented that she'd had B1 last year, and was amazed at how different the boys are, how serious B1 is, relative to his happy-go-lucky baby brother.

B1's teacher had less sanguine stuff to report; B1 is hit-or-miss on his schoolwork -- if he's focused, he rocks it, but sometimes he loses focus and the work suffers. He's particularly off-put by standardized testing. I suspect he's stressing about the time factor involved. So, Exene and I are going to work with B1 independently, help him navigate that stuff.

Scratchy

I am catching a cold, irritatingly enough. I can feel it starting up in my throat. Hopefully, if it's been like the other colds of the past few years, it'll be comparatively mild for me. We'll see. Bleah.

The boys are with Exene the next few days; B2 didn't want to go, hid in the kitchen, crying. I had to pick him up and cajole him, get him transitioned to go to Exene's. They never fight about coming to my place; it's only when they're going to her place that they get down. B1 just  grimly resigns himself to it, while B2 fusses.

I really need to clean the apartment, like top to bottom, front to back. Fall cleaning, I guess. I just want to purge a lot of the toys the boys no longer play with, but which are still around, cluttering their room. And vacuuming the corners, sweeping it up, all of that jazz. I'm going to do that the next few days, since I won't have the boys in the mix.