The Black Box - Inner Workings

All of the other Boxes deal with Light. The getting of it, the making of it the manipulation of it. Wrestling it into art or code, or just getting enough of it in to shed onto other things.

The Black Box is about the Dark, what to do with the Empty, how to admit that there is no such thing as Empty, to use, code, and manipulate the things we pretend are Empty to make art. Or light.

The Black Box will invite the light in, but only on it's terms. Light is just another thing in the fullness of Empty.

In the Black Box we are expected to build things out of the Dark.

Now we are building Universes. Out of art.

It's a big thing. As a friend of mine says it's almost unfair - I have been worrying at the problem for a good deal longer than my boxmates. In the room where I turn light into art, I have also been asked to make a world out of someone else's art. All my rooms ask me to make Universes. All my rooms lead back to art.

But the Black Box is different – even time travel changes there . It is dual place. I have been here before and yet somehow it's new. I thought it would fill up the Empty places, it would shine the dark in the places I worked to only see light, so I could get back to the whole.

Here's the trick about my Universe in the Black Box - I'm building it to put other people in it.

They each have Universes of their own:

• an ancient storyteller's circle,
• a religion where the all knowing priest reveals the power of relationships and venerates the matriarch with blown glass and colored light,
• the warmth of an eternal eve of Christmas, fellowship and eggnog,
• a Universe of kindergartners with sparkly stuffed snakes, hungry caterpillars and vicious jars of playdough.

There are 7 Universes to go.

In each of their Universes I am somewhat me, but mostly I become who they think I might be. It's my job to fit in their Universe, their job to create a Universe where I can see what they want me to be. We have to experience it for each other to make it real. It's their Universe but they made it for me. When I make my Universe, I will make it for them.

Their Universes are all based on art that made them happy or whole. Mine is based on art that made me break.

I do not know how that will work for them. I will build it anyway. In the Black Box I am a tiny lonely god.

In between Universes, we do two things - explore who we are and learn how to be everyone else. It's hard to see this happen, so we also learn how to watch and how to evaluate the becoming of others. How to help others see the choices they would not make themselves.

When becoming others - it is easy to see how you might find the things living in your own Empty. It is not so apparent that you find those things when watching the others Become.

I don't know what it's like to have always had a Black Box nearby, to have experienced the sliding between action/observation. absorbing/becoming, experiencing/remembering while doing all of the things one does to exist. But the gap in time fills the Black Box Dark. I watch my boxmates struggle because sometimes there are places and choices and things that fill the Empty and they can't see them. It stops them from Becoming.

When we Watchers see them, its our job to share them. In the sharing we give them our own things that live in the Empty and I wonder if we become just a little less material ourselves.

The Black Box has coughed up some reality; caught in someone else's words, in someone else's worlds.

Warriors know where each of their scars came from. In some cultures we circle and tell the stories of those scars, our lives written on our bodies. The stories tell the warriors of things to know - not just to avoid - but to know.

Some battles are long won, it's rude to mention scars now. Our culture is about the perfect presentation, healing, moving forward. So maybe we are surprised when we tell about a long healed wound to find the time travel.

Maybe we are surprised to find out we were Warriors.

The pain is fresh in the telling, you use the pain in the Becoming, it's new again, but you leave the Box and it's just a scar.

There are two things here - surprise at the real time pain and surprise that you can still go there. But to share it outside the Box, people will label it - say things like " you're not really over it" insist that you "admit it" or "deal with it". Everything outside the Box is Present Tense, but only in the Now.

Inside the Box everything is in the Present Tense too, but it’s in the Always.

We are the engines that build the Universes, but we can also get lost between them.

And I'm beginning to think that maybe outside the Black Box we're just somewhat ourselves, but mostly we're what we need to be to fit into someone else's Universe too. And that sometimes that pain we carry around in the Empty is when we realize that sometimes we don't make that Universe better, because we can't.

I was prepared for that in the doing, I wasn't prepared to find it in the watching.

I'll build it into my Universe.

When the Universe is built I’ll put my boxmates in it.

Then they will be in my Universe, I’ll be in the Empty before and after that Universe.

I wonder if it’s like this for all the things that build Universes.

The Black Box - and the Unified Theory of Couches

It's always there.

At the Beginning, shortly after the Big Bang there must have been this one Couch to symbolize all the couches that ever were or ever would be. It is the same couch every time, locked in every black box anywhere.

It will be busted and old, and made of the odd paisley-like muted floral pattern that seems both timeless and trapped in the type of time labeled "past"

And then it will come into the the Black Box and pretend to be

a loveseat,

a swing,

an entire penthouse apartment all by itself,

a chaise,

a restaurant booth,

waiting room furniture,

a bus stop bench,

a bed,

a crib,

a psychiatrists couch

a designer couch.

Sometimes it will branch out and be a car, or a sculpture, or even a tree.

But it always looks the same. It's always looming somewhere near the curtains waiting for its moment. It is terribly accommodating during the rehearsals or workshops or class, absorbing the hung over, or the unserious in its broken, warm, springless embraces.

The serious are usually pacing, or sitting in hard chairs looking to keep the energy they will need for becoming:

the lovers,

the kids on the swing,

the divorcing couple in the penthouse,

the crying woman,

the man waiting for his date that will not come to the restaurant that night,

the woman waiting for her test results alone,

Marilyn Monroe,

the sleeper,

the baby,

the psychiatrist,

the designer,

the driver,

the artist,

a bird.

I wonder about who gives the Couch to the black boxes. When they shopped for it and first bought it and put it in the place of pride in the living room did they think -" This looks like the shiny new version of every old couch I ever saw backstage?"

Is it a cult ritual to buy couches like this and keep them until they are too worn for the living room and sent to the family room, and then to the weird uncle's den, and then finally the young man's first apartment from which he then donates it to the Black Box to impress the hot starving actress chick he'd like to have sex with? Does that first purchase happen because they hope it might be the One True Couch, destined to be in the Black Box?

There is a whole journey in this Couch that silently works just as hard as we do at becoming.

It is jarring to see the same couch through time and space no matter which box I am in, trying to be something plus what I already am. There is a lesson in it's effortless becoming, which only happens after it's epic journey before the Box.

Here in this box, at this time, the couch collects my box mates, they are sleepy, they are unsure and do not appreciate hard surfaces. They like the couch better when it is not expected to be other than what it is. But it's distorted now - it's been so many things it can hardly hold the shape of a couch at all. It's holding all of the shapes it could be, making it amorphous.

I wonder- when the Couch forgets it's shape altogether, where it will go? Does it ever really leave? Does it go out into the world, or is it like a phoenix where it will become ashes and then reform as the next shiny new version of itself to live through the whole life cycle again?

Just so it can be beaten and worn and universal enough to be back in the box again.

Inside the Black Box the couch is Everything.

Outside the Black Box, it is only a worn out, dated couch.

Couchy Phoenixes.

No.

Phoenixy Couches.

It's the only answer.

The Black Box

When you enter the box , first you see the lights and then the floor and then the curtains – maybe.

When you enter the box first you see the black and then the lights - sometimes.

When I entered the black box I smelled the black.

Oh. Yes, of course. Here are the curtains, the boxes, the scruffed floor that proves it’s true.

When you enter the box it is a trial, a transformation, a test.

It is for everyone. Move. Reach. Feel.

Hurt. Scream. Love. Stretch. Know.

Show.

In the black box I learn how far my puzzle pieces are from the center of my snap apple puzzle. I am marked and measured in my native language that goes deeper than the words.

Oh. Right. Sorry I forgot. I didn’t mean to. I thought I was doing the right thing, Stop apologizing? Ok sorry, I mean . . . never mind. I’ll practice quiet now.

We stand in a circle at readiness. The knees are slightly bent, the hands are loose, the feet need to be ready to spring forward. We are trying to learn telepathy.

My body and mind remember, and slide easily to that place, aware from the center seeing/not seeing. Almost. It is almost easy. I can no longer see behind me. I shut that down when I wasn’t in the box. Here in the circle now it feels like a withered arm being asked to lift.

I try not to hate myself for that.

When we are one we need to leave the ground. We need to leave it knees up, like a spring letting go of the ground not a piston showing that we are leaving it. We need to surprise gravity, not defy it. We need telepathy, not show and tell, to leave it.

I know exactly when we are supposed to release the floor and how we are supposed to address the air. The mind and the body send the signal and the meat and the muscles say no.

Split seconds – speed of thought.

My will is stronger than the meat and the muscles, but gravity is not surprised. I go up but barely. It’s a victory. A quiet one.

It shouldn't have been a battle.

The other 11 are trying to understand the place where all thought is no thought. I know that place – I fall back there like a bead in a well oiled groove, but those hard fought four inches – straight back, knees up, no bounce –was a ten year war played out in the space of that neuron-synapse interaction.

Here is the trick to telepathy in the black box, the fact that you have to focus is a given, but it will only work if you actually care. Right now- this first day – it is still a child’s game to them.

The Black Box though, is the entire world to me.

I’ve just spent a lot of time pretending that it’s not. Enough time for gravity to stake a higher claim on the meat, but the black still has my soul. It’s my alphabet.

It doesn’t take much for the Black Box to strip me down past the excuses, measure the damage. It exposes things caught between the lights and the floor.

So much more complicated than Scylla and Charybdis

You don't choose between them here in the scent of the light warmed black. You stand in the center and become the third thing.

And all the Men and Women Merely Players

Sometimes, it's not the loss that causes the melancholy, it's the effort needed to rebuild.

There are things I thought I put away, not childish things in any form, but passionate ones. I played with little shadow versions of them, like puppet show passion plays. Those would/could/should be enough.

"Passion - Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latinpassion-, passio suffering, being acted upon, from Latin pati to suffer."

Isn't it funny how we've taken a word whose meaning is based on suffering and changed it into a kind of ecstatic frenzy - a euphemism for sexual love? A desire for more passion in our lives or our marriages takes on a whole different meaning when you bring it back to the root. Ultimately a possibly unhealthy meaning.

I was passionate about a boy once. When I look back on it, it seems like a derangement. Every moment was vibrant and alive with possibility, unpredictability, intese joy, intense sorrow. In the throes of passion doesn't mean the bedroom - it means all of the time you are controlled by this passion whatever it is, who ever it is based on. The connection to the suffering is real and immediate, everything else seems shallow and chalky and gray. Only the things related to what or who is the center of the passion seem real and bright. Everything is just something that leads you to the chance to surrender, to participate in that presence or action again. All the times you are not near or engaged are all the "moments before". The time of suffering while waiting to see what passion will bring. As poor fools in the throes of it all, we will call it many, many, things and we will try to use that word "passion" to make it fit those other, safer things.

But it will still be passion.

I got over the boy. If he even remembers me now he will remember our time together very differently than I do. Passion is a kind of insanity. You cannot build a life on it. Not the real kind where you don't die young, or end up stabbed 23 times by Senate.

Passion based on a person is by nature transient. The idea of suffering because I am not near someone if foreign to my understanding of love. When I am alone and I am loved, I am happy because I know my love for the other person is not based on proximity but security. I love them just as deeply two continents away, or two hemispheres away as I do when I am next to them, when we are entangled together. Distance is nothing to love. Love is like Damascus steel to me - tools we share, my beloved and I so that we can build and fight and defend to and craft together.

All of my beloved - family, lover, children - I am not passionate about them. The greeks who separated love: agape, eros, phillia, storge, they missed a word or category for this kind of love. Maybe "storge" but it didn't make it into a lot of literature, (possibly because it doesn't lead to tragic or comedic actions). But it is not passion.

I was passionate about an artform once. I had convinced myself that I could use the past tense. I could learn from it and chuckle with fond memories and traumatic ones and move on.

I am utterly and devastatingly wrong.

The tense is present tense. It's much stronger than a simple passion for a boy. Everyone knew it then. People who knew me later knew it still. People who know me now got glimpses when I played with the shadow versions. Then I stopped playing with those. Now the people in my life are blissfully ignorant of it. All was quiet on the passion front. Not the modern one with it's garish calls to buy things at Victoria's Secret or the pretty religious ones trying to create some form of agape with ritual and structure. Those puny passions are fine. I put aside the suffering. I became an audience ( for the first time?)

For those around me it was a good call. True Roman Stoicism for the good of the community and all that. There is a reason after all that they call it "suffering for one's art" and it is pretty obvious that great artists that could truly be brave for art or scientists (those monomaniacs of discovery) always had someone supporting them or no ties at all. But if you are the support - parent, breadwinner, wife - your art is best something to be dabbled with, shown proudly by offspring or spouse when visitors come to call. Art for Art's sake as long as it causes no one else any inconvenience.

And I believed that so completely that I didn't even realize I wasn't putting things together, I was breaking them apart. Or maybe breaking me apart.

So now - when I checked the recent damage of self and current competencies - all of the ways I used to take inventory and maintain and repair had failed. Not because they were bad systems, but because I had used them up. They were finite measures meant for specific or surface damage. They worked bravely and well for over a decade. They are simply the wrong tools. There to fix- like love, not to upset and destroy and recreate - like passion.

That's not enough. Love does not conquer all, it cannot heal by itself and sometimes you can't fix things unless you break them a bit first. Maybe I needed to break them alot.

And so with a long hard look at what was broken, I stood on a crossroad with a different devil on every choice. I blinked instead, and refused the road alone. I invited the devils to follow me but I needed to go back. Or down. Everything that was wrong - all the pieces damaged, and battered and missing - I thought I had learned them in other places, through life or jobs or school or relationships and simple survival. That was the mistake. I had learned them all in theater.

All of them. Every last one.

Dammit.

Now I'm awake. The question is what am I going to do about it?

There are four devils following me to school. Dionysus is laughing behind them because they don't realize they're pulling the chariot. I'm hoping that Minerva is travelling with him.

We'll try not burn or break too much.

****

Passion - Date: 13th century

1 often capitalized a : the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death b : an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion
2 obsolete : suffering
3 : the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces
4 a(1) : emotion (2) plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason b : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction c : an outbreak of anger
5 a : ardent affection : love b : a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept c : sexual desire d : an object of desire or deep interest

passion applies to an emotion that is deeply stirring or ungovernable passions.

World Fantasy Con - Collaboration Happens

Here is what is now officially titled " The House Where Halloween Things Live When It Isn't Halloween"

This is a picture when it was still in front of Poppetropolis Proper.

(Poppetropolis is the area in NYC where the Embarrassed Embassy is based, it's like Chinatown, or Little Italy but where all the expats from Poppet Planet live).

The Embarrassed Embassy is not yet a year old - but it's 1st anniversary will be soon. Like many construction projects in many cities, it has undergone some changed scope and is behind schedule. It is part and parcel of my reaction to Lisa's art. Lisa and others have told me that my reaction to her work is art. I'm still struggling a little with that.

But it is what it is.

In September, when she asked if I would do something with her for Halloween, I said yes. I had an idea that didn't belong to Poppetropolis and it would be more fun to do it with her. Then later we decided to bring it to the World Fantasy Convention and debut it there. Which is really grand but a little scary because we hadn't met in the Meatworld.

And so we got to explore a little of the surreality of our relationship and reaction to each other. There is no question that we had a relationship, but it was in the new ether of the internet, which is not the same as in person. We were now collaborating cross country, but the first voice contact we had was a phone call to let her know I was at the hotel.

We had emailed and shipped and consulted, and had pictures of each other and, I think a place in each other's lives, ( unbalanced, but equally real) and yet we were still introducing ourselves to each other, but we do know things.

One of the things we knew, is that we were both people who had been involved with conventions before. This ended up being a very useful thing over the weekend. I helped with the set up, I was very happy to be useful. I am always happier when I'm useful.

We set up the art show together and talked while we did. Here are the pictures of most of it without the bid sheets - for posterity . .

The sculpture in the center of this shot is called Blackbirds, and I believe Lisa will be making an 8ft version of it in the next year.

I was not the only person who travelled from distant coasts however, Lisa met with a Poppet Collector from Australia, who asked for a picture of the Poppet that Has Travelled to Australia and Back and the Creator of Poppets.

She is a wonderful lady and an excellent dinner companion. She was actually Queen of Australia and New Zealand, so I was honored by her Poppet's acceptance of an invitation to visit The House Where Halloween Things Live. This marks the first Visiting Poppet to that House.

He is an Outside Steampunk Poppet.

Here he is being greeted by Elul, who made the trip out to show off the House along with two of the Jackos and about 10 other East Coast Expats.

The Australian Outside Steampunk Poppet converses with the Raven and peruses the House Where Halloween Things Live Library.

Of course there was Poe. The book on the table is The Purloined Letter.

Many things happened at World Fantasy Con, I'm still sorting a bunch of it out. I'll write about it while I'm processing it. I have funny anecdotes, and weird ones, and serious ones. I will probably not tell them all. I have anecdotes that involve food:

Anecdotes of Lisa and the Poppet who lives on her desk.

Our mutual love of coffee.

and what it means when people ask you questions like "What do you do?" or "Don't I know you" or "What do you want out of this."

And of course the big one "Why are you doing this"

I think I have begun to have an answer for that last one -

I used to process all the things I couldn't say through words, but I put the words aside. It stopped being safe.

I used to use all the things I felt to communicate, when I was wearing the skin of someone else, so the personal could become universal. It was like breathing, but I learned how to hold my breath and now I cannot exhale.

I used to build things to create small worlds or hold other worlds at bay. I'm still doing that.

The words are too complex, the feelings are too deep to show in someone else's skin, I may have spent to much time trapped in my own. I can't use the older tools I have to process what happens to me when I react to Lisa's art. So I'm building things to help me understand my own reactions. I'm building things to share and show what's going on on the inside.

I'm having trouble telling the story, so I'm building it instead.

It's a stealth story, I've hidden it inside things you might use to tell your own.

And if you see or play with something I've built, then you're wearing my skin, sharing my world which is all ajumble and full of art. So it shouldn't surprise me at all that there are Poppets there.

I am just a little (very!) surprised that other people like it too.

The thing is, I would make it anyway. I don't think I could not make it.

Maybe that makes it art after all.

Important but Quite out of Character

Warning - this is something I do not normally do on this blog but it's important. Possibly for me it's the most important thing on the Internet. 

I am going to write about someone else's blogpost instead of fiction or theory or hidden reality. 

This is a public service message to those who mistake the Dreamtime for the Meatworld.

Ready. OK. 

George RR Martin is NOT your Bitch. 

Neil Gaiman said so, and in saying so highlighted the interchange that has bothered me so very much on every internet comments board I have ever read. 

Please note that I didn't do the "Highlight link" common to blogs on either the quote or Mr. Gaiman's name. I will give you the link but I'd like to make my comment linearly first, and then we can get all non-linear afterwards.

The Summary

Some poor gentleman by the screen name of Gareth asked Mr. Gaiman his opinion of a circumstance where Mr. Martin blogs about his work but won't cough up a release date to his readers for his next book. Gareth is in reality both polite and introspective about it, but he is frustrated. He was looking for a reality check to his frustration. 

Rather than reinforce his discomfort in the echo chamber of Mr Martin's comments section, he reached out to what he thought of as an accessible and open peer of Mr. Martin's for his opinion of whether or not his own frustration was reasonable. While it set him up to really be ripped a new one by the ravening hordes of the internet and indeed illustrates the ease of access we have to creators in the incredibly democratized internet world, it does in fact, show that he realizes his needs might not be the only needs involved. I know you're itching to see what he wrote. I'll link to it. I promise.

He asked Mr. Gaiman if the audience actually has too much input into an author's actions because of all the blogging and tweets. And if Mr. Gaiman's readers would think he was "slack" if he announced a book and didn't say anything about it for two years.

However he also asked quite reasonably but still, with a sense of entitlement, if all the blogging and the exposure to his fans meant that Mr. Martin had more of a responsibility to finish the story than someone who didn't engage the public.

Neil Gaiman responded quite accurately - No. George RR Martin is not your bitch.

Ok - that was important to me because I wanted to make sure that Gareth's very real attempt to get a reality check on his sense of entitlement was not dissed out of hand, because it's important ( although weird that he had open access to another famous writer to do it).

Because if you like Mr. Gaiman then you will be all in Gareth's face, and if you think artists are automatons you will be all in Mr. Gaiman's. And honestly, they both deserve more thought than that.

Now I'll post the link

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

My Personal Bit

Here in the House, the residents know that I have been waiting to send an e-mail to Mr Gaiman to ask his permission to use something of his in the Poppetropolis Project. They also know I feel odd about it, because I am intensely aware of the fact that I do not know Mr. Gaiman personally and that I have been more exposed to his work because of Lisa's than the other way around. I have not sent the email yet, at least partially because I know that he is swamped due to his blog and I have no wish to add to it. I will eventually, because I really wish to use that thing and since the internet is open and the Poppoetropolis Project will be there I would like clear permission to use it. But it almost feels like an invasion of Mr. Gaiman's space. I also have to send a similar e-mail to Cat Mihos, who I do know, but it's an odd request and it feels a bit "look at me" and I'm not comfortable with it, although probably in the end not only will both parties not mind, they will most likely forget it within 2 minutes of seeing and/or answering it. 

So it boggles me that everyone is so absolutely sure that the author or artist SHOULD do what they want or listen to them or work on their schedule. Things go the way they go. Gone With The Wind took 10 years to write and has a devoted following and fan fic. JK Rowling's whole life morphed in the decade that she started writing Harry Potter to the end when it was done. Things change in a decade. Susan Boyle started getting flak for dying her hair when she saw herself on TV and realized she looked old. 

Why do people think they own you because they see your image and care? Obama's donors who donate 10$ think they have the right to demand fealty to their ideas because their 10$ got him there. In some sense they are right, every 10$ counts but he needs to listen to the other guy who gave him 10$ that doesn't agree with you and the guy who gave McCain 10$ because that guy is still a citizen. There is a difference between "support" and "ownership".

There is a difference between "I love your work" and "Here we are now - Entertain Us"

And there is a difference between "You entertain me." and "Because you entertain me I can judge you, because you entertain others I hate you"

And of course there is the eternal problem of "He/She/It's a public figure so they asked for it." 

No. They didn't. 

Because IT changed and They are all swimming in the current of that change trying to navigate IT and still do what they are driven to do. 

They are still human and private. Their public lives were never meant to crawl inside their windows and strangle their private lives in the cradle so that their personal ups and downs could be judged by people who want more than what they already offer. 

Politicians should be judged on voting records, artists on art, your lover on fidelity, you favorite actor not so much. 

Artists don't exist to comfort, they confront. Someday Poppets may not speak the language Lisa does anymore, that will mean that she should make something else. I do not need Lisa to make Poppets just because they speak to me. I will wonder and wait for what she makes next. 

The exchange of cash only rents a prostitute for so many hours. Then that prostitute does whatever she/he/it will do without you. The book in your hand is a whore. If you demand that your artist do what you want, you are not a fan, you are a wannabe pimp, attempting to force the artist behave the same way as the whore in your hand simply because that whore pleased you for a few hours. 

I miss some of the sense of being humbled by people who work hard and have talent. I've met some very famous writers and am lucky that I can separate the work from the artist. But the internet causes such a sense of intimacy without knowledge of other people's craft, that it blurs things a bit and people might feel like they know. 

It's a short step from there to having them feel like they know enough to make judgments. I understand. I disapprove. 

I remember when artists were allowed to stumble and fail. It was how they grew.

You do not own the one you like, it is not your duty to destroy the ones you don't. 

Really.

A Small Delay and A Slight Side Trip

I have just completed my yearly foray into Time Travel. Time Travel is exhausting and this excursion has made me think very deeply about how to move forward in the future. However,  it has also delayed the coherent execution of the Tales of the Tiny Alien, which will be Continuing Soon.

So if you are going through Tiny Alien withdrawal, please be patient, Crash is driving my energy back home as fast as he can.

For your entertainment, and proof that I am still alive, I humbly submit a Wordle for Dreamtime Drinne, if you click on it it should take you to the larger version on www.wordle.net.

Distortion

Ok, you may have to bear with me a moment here. I've read a number of things that are connected for me in the last several days that have got me thinking:

Women and men have always caused themselves pain or exposed themselves to danger or dismemberment for beauty. Everytime I wince at the descriptions of the white mask powders that Queen Elizabeth used, I think about the fact that women now insert silicone into themselves for a type of otherwise unattainable beauty. And before anyone lets men off the hook let me just remind people that high heels were originally popular in Europe to make men's calves more shapely and masculine and that in Italy during a period we refer to colloquially as "the Dark Ages" Men wore short tunic and tights to show off their butts. It was a guy who was searching for the fountain of youth in Florida and he wasn't looking to sell it off to L'Oreal.

So in short order I read about Lisa Rinna, I saw a really interesting photo of Brad Pitt where he specifically requested a photographer who uses derrogotype  , I read a number of female movie critics who were trying to find a way to talk about the effects of plastic surgery on the ability of actors to act on film, I saw this review of a series of intentionally altered photographs, I read comments in FARK about how a woman who wrote a blog entry about a French Politician went back to work a couple of days after a c-section, and those people called her a "fatty" ( the blogger not the politician, who actually looks like she could use a sandwich) and quite honestly that blogger looked normal/PTA-mom-not-gross-attractive to me. I will not link to the comments, FARK is not for amateurs and I think that they were posting in a manner that is true to the nature of FARK. I was NOT offended by it but it did get me thinking about the nature of attractiveness used in the media. 

Then my favorite artist was writing about the few extra pounds she put on, and quite honestly I look at her pictures with a certain amount of envy, because she is talented and beautiful and quite frankly thin. Then in a completely unrelated action I had to weigh myself and find that my weight was lower than I thought it was, and certainly lower than I felt, but that didn't help. Then I saw this picture of Kelly McGillis ( a farking brilliant actor) then and now, and thought "wow I wonder if anyone will hire her" and then I saw poor Nikki Cox and went " Oh dear I wonder if any one will hire her?"

It is Nikki and Lisa that stayed in my mind most as I was reading all of the other items. These women are beautiful and while I think Nikki is a gifted comedic actress, I think from everything I've every seen from Lisa Rinna that she's a genuinely nice person. Here they are before they felt that they needed to interfere with their aging process - Lisa, she's the one on the far right, and Nikki. Lisa flat out admits that she went too far and I'm not sure what Nikki was thinking but honestly, I really hope it fades. But what made these women feel that what they were looking at in the mirror needed to be so drastically altered?

But I know. I know the dirty little secret. These women don't see themselves in the mirror, they see parts, and each part is looked at not through their eyes but through the eyes of the people they are trying to get to cast them. It's not about youth or sex or any of those things. Nicole Kidman's forehead is frozen because when she looks in a mirror there are slight lines in it and she can only see those lines, not that they are altering her ability to act. None of the rest of us can see those lines, and unless you are Brad Pitt, you are not allowing anyone to photograph those lines, because you don't have enough power to make people accept them.

 And that's the reality in the U.S. Since only about 2 percent of the people in the world have the right bone structure to look good on film, that leaves the other 98 percent out struggling for "character" roles . Roles, incidentally that they seemed to have stopped writing, both for women and for less than attractive people. The "ordinary best friend" role is played by the brunette pretty person, Jeneane Garafolo is considered the "ugly one" in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs". If she's the measure of ugly on film, I was SOL until I was old enough to play bag lady extras in the background.  

So here's what I am thinking - I don't really know what I look like, but I have learned that I don't see what other people see. My mirror is distorted. I can look regal and ugly and interesting but there is no part of me that ever sees "attractive". Because I see myself the way I must look at an audition. I have no idea what I look like "in life". And trust me I'll never get cast as Juliet, but I was cast as Romeo once. Nowadays I might have a chance at the Nurse. These women all had a chance at Juliet. 

When these actresses look in the mirror, I think they see "how much longer will they let me act?" and then, because they see the nose, or the chin or the lips instead of themselves . . . they change those things. Their view is distorted  so the changes they make are distorted too. 

There is no Linda Hunt or Margaret Hamilton paving the way for character actors who are female and less than beautiful. The only older women we get to see are Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, and Diane Keaton, who were not exactly normal looking when they started out. Also they get to be old because they've won Oscars and such, and have mad skillz. Do you think we could even find anyone to cast in a remake of Arsenic and Old Lace? 

These women, Nicole, Nikki and Lisa are truly beautiful in every conventional sense of the word, and a large number of the unconventional ones, but they aren't alright with themselves either. I wonder if any of those funhouse mirrors are even capable of being broken. If they are distorted to themselves, how distorted are we?

Sigh. Pass the clown suit, but I think I'll skip the surgery. My starting material isn't the same caliber as theirs so there's a lot more room for error.