Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Smoke screens, bad love and Lady GaGa



Fire season is full upon us now and it’s early. About 260 fires so far and 260,000 acres burned including the Farewell Lake lodge that the firefighters vowed to protect and then pulled their gear out of there to fight somewhere else. The original cabin had been there since the 30s. One fire is less than 20 miles from here and burning this way. It would have to jump the Knik River to get to this house but the smoke is all over the place. (That's the mountain in front of the house obscured by smoke.) I had to drive through it on the way to and from work yesterday.
Before work I was surfing the T and V and came across something called 19 hours of Lady GaGa and it made me a little curious. I have been aware of her and her outrageous outfits and somehow I think unconsciously I recognized a kindred spirit though I am pretty sure I have never heard a single song all the way through. So, interspersed among music videos, there was a fairly serious interview with her, done last November. No wild outfit, although a wild wig, and you could actually see her eyes, but she spoke very softly and very confidently. Over the years I have thought about and talked about with a few people, the creative process and the creative personality. Here is one. One thing a friend and I were discussing not too long ago was the sensitivity it takes to write. Her point was, considering how extremely sensitive you have to be to write, how can there be any writers with all the people in the world quite willing to criticize? So this Lady GaGa admitted to the interviewer that she often cries as she is writing her songs. That to me is artistic sensitivity. And I can understand the wild outfits in that context. My answer to it was develop an overwhelming, if false, ego and express it loudly. Hers is to generate outrageous outfits that draw critical attention away from what is really important to her and protect her sensitivity.
The interviewer kept trying to get off topic and she kept reminding him the agreement was to talk about her music. No romances, no sexual preferences, no catty remarks about other artists, she very deftly deflected those questions. One other moment struck me. She expressed an interest in Andy Warhol’s art, which seems obvious. But she spoke of looking at a Warhol in the Louvre. Get this, a wild rock star going to the Louvre. At any rate, she said the painting looked nothing like the Warhol works she was familiar with. At some point in this viewing she admitted to crying again. Then a curator explained to her Warhol painted the particular work early in his life, when he was 23. Her response at least during the interview was, wow, that’s how old I am now. I have so much more in me, I have so far to go.” This from a person who is at the top of her game and her genre already.
And, oh yes, the bad love in the title. In one song she sings I want your ugly, I want your pain and some other phrases along that line. The interviewer asked her what that meant, bringing up negative images in a song about love. And, her thought was, love is total, you don’t get to pick which parts of your partner you wish to love. You love the beauty, but you also have to love the ugly and you don’t have true deep love until you love the whole person.
Enough, I guess. I was just impressed with a very complex person who showed a fascinating creative intellect. And I bought two songs on iTunes. Ga Ga ooo la la
And the fires keep burning and life continues to be obscured within different kinds of smoke.
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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

A poem is an egg with a horse inside” — anonymous fourth grader

“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.― Kurt Vonnegut

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”―Stephen King

The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

Swiss General: “Well, I suppose every one of my soldiers would need to fire twice.”

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

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Sports malaprops

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Sister hits moose on way to visit sister who hit moose.

Man caught driving stolen car filled with radioactive uranium, rattlesnake, whiskey

Man loses his testicles after attempting to smoke weed through a SCUBA tank

Church Mutual Insurance won't cover Church's flood damage because it's 'an act of God'

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Owner of killer bear chokes to death on sex toy

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Give me all your money or my penguin will explode

How zombie worms have sex in whale bones

Crocodile steals zoo worker's lawn mower

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Nude beach blowjob jet ski fight leads to wife's death

Woman stabs husband with squirrel for not buying beer Christmas Eve

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