Good, Evil, and Everything in Between

I've been reading since I was five years old. And not just the backs of cereal boxes or the label tags in clothing, but whole books. Non-fiction for edification, but novels for the sheer fun of a good story, which I like told through the eyes of big juicy characters grappling with brain busting themes.

But because those kinds of novels are few and far between, I'm also totally down with pop fiction. So long as it's not a Harlequin Romance (yuck) or something Chick Lit (Plum Sykes, I'll see you in heaven, ya biatch, and then we'll see who gets in the last badly written word on shoes). But Carl Hiaasen or James Lee Burke? Those guys are some of the best writers putting words on paper today. You can disagree with me if you want, but you know, deep down, that I'm right.

Still, I have been missing our current "literary" scene's lack of Big Novels lately. You know, something along the lines of Lonesome Dove or Gone with the Wind. And don't stick Don DeLillo in my face, either. Sorry, I don't care if you need a forklift to carry around one of his books, Delillo (I'll toss Jonathan Franzen while I'm at it, too) is a small writer.

Although, I think there's a glimmer of hope. I picked this up last week.


I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. If you haven't read it, do. It's epic.

The Problems in Hand are Lighter than at Heart

In honor of A.B. who, in response to these strange daze, recently burned down her blog and former persona . . . Be like the squirrel, girl.

Mute Monday: D is For

In the Time of Chimpanzees I Was a Monkey

Tip-toeing back into a blob post . . . 'cause, shhhhhh, who on earth knows what's going to set y'all off next. Given what's happened here this week, I have decided to put on the back burner a number of posts, including my rant against Dish Network's dumb ass decision to cancel its contract with Zoom Network, which means no beloved Fashion Television por Moi. Cough. Sputter. Light. Fading. Must. Hold. On.

Instead, I will share something that makes my heart so happy I'm almost embarrassed for myself. Beck is coming to Albuquerque's Kiva Auditorium on Tuesday, September 23rd of this year. Yeah, yeah, I know he's a Scientologist and for that I have yet to figure out how to forgive him. But I think Odelay and Midnight Vultures just might take care of that for me.

If, like Moi, you adore Beck so much you have a lyric memorized for every one of your life's experiences (you've only got one finger left, and it's pointing at the door) please feel free to share your favorite song and/or lyric. If you don't know who Beck is, goodness gracious, what rock have you been hiding under these past fifteen years – go find out now! And if you don't like Beck, then, WTF? Non. You are beyond zee help.

As for Moi, trying to pick a favorite Beck song is like trying to choose between Louboutins. But this one is up there for sure. One of the cheeriest pop songs ever written about a serial killer:

So Shocked, No Title Comes to Mind

New York City's Chrysler Building is one of the most hands down beautiful things ever constructed. Not only is it an American architectural icon, it is symbolic as well of a kind of clear-eyed economic and artistic vision that is in woefully short supply today.

And now Prudential Financial has sold its 75 percent stake in the building to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council. The business arm of Abu Dhabi's gub'ment.

What was that line in Blood Diamond, where Leonardo di Caprio responds to Jennifer Connelly's request for an interview? "No thanks, I usually like to get kissed before I get f - - - ed?"

Uh, huh.

No, But I Did See the Movie

You know, for a writer with aspirations of one day publishing one of the forty million crap novels I have languishing on my hard drive, I sure don't read a lot of contemporary literary fiction. That's because I think most of it is pretty lame-o.

Recently, my feelings were confirmed by one of my fave crap magazines of all time, Entertainment Weekly. Of their recent listing of the 100 Best New Literary Classics of Last 25 Years, I've read, oh, maybe a tenth of one percent.

But I've seen every single one of their 100 Best Movies.

That's because in almost every case these days, it seems, the movie ends up being better than the book. You couldn't prod me to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy for all the Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby in the world, but I thought the movies were nothing less than breathtakingly epic. Same goes for No Country For Old Men (we'll get to McCarthy's books in a second). About the only exception to this rule that I can think of is The Golden Compass, which sucks major ass. The only entertaining thing about it is:

A. Scoping out what, exactly, Nicole Kidman has had done to her face (Ah, hah! There, see, she raised a brow!)


and

B. Trying to decide if Daniel Craig is, indeed, über hawt or only meh-I'd-do-him-in-a-pinch-I-guess hawt.


Sorry, where was I?

Oh. So, I couldn't disagree more vehemently with Entertainment's choice of the number one best books in the last 25 years than if you'd suddenly pitched Moi into a room full of Marxists who were all wearing Crocs and gypsy skirts.

Why? Because Entertainment magazine's pick for best book is, steady now, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Yup. That's a big 10-4 WTF!?!?

Let me cut to the chase: In my opinion, Cormac McCarthy is no writer. Yes, I said it. He may be a thinker, and, as such, reveals an unusual willingness to take Big Mac-sized bites out of grand themes like good versus evil, man versus nature, fate versus free will. But he executes those themes with all the elegance of a third grader wielding a Sharpie to illustrate what mommy made him for breakfast that morning. McCarthy doesn't write so much as he lists. And he does so with such joyless, humorless determination, one has to wonder if his preoccupations are more sadistic than they are redemptive.

And my Gah do the critics just dribble themselves silly extolling the virtues of McCarthy's "economic" style. Puhleeze. There's economic and then there's downright stunted. Take Hemingway, for instance. That man put the curt in economic for sure. But he was also elegant and eagle-eyed, every word serving both form and function. Witness his cut-to-the-chase description of Francis Macomber's wife in one of the finest short stories ever written. After a couple short paragraphs of spot on observations about her hard-heartedness, he sums her up by calling her, "simply enameled in that American female cruelty."

That's so excruciatingly well done, it makes me never want to pluck at another keyboard for the rest of my life and just go sell candy at the mall.

McCarthy, however, gives me hope.

Check this out:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.

That, Party People, is The Road's freakin' opening sentence. A sentence so clunky and tongue twisting, it just makes me want to throw the whole thing into the compost pile where all those clunky little words will thankfully decompose and bring their beauty not to the world of words, but to my basil plants instead.

Wait, though; it gets better. Check out what passes for dialogue in Cloud Cuckoo McCarthy Land:

Can I ask you something? he said. Yes. Of course. Are we going to die? Sometime. Not now. And we're still going south. Yes. So we'll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what? Nothing. Just okay. Go to sleep. Okay. I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay? Yes. That's okay. And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something? Yes. Of course you can. What would you do if I died? If you died I would want to die too. So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay.

Whoa. Not only is McCarthy smoking some pretty good weed, his editor is for sure whacked on crack. 'Cause that shit don't float unless you're high on drugs and sporting an extremely itchy case of The Emperor's New Clothes.

So what do I think is the greatest book written in the past twenty-five years? To me, it's a three way tie between Lonesome Dove, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Where did they fall on Entertainment magazine's list? #24, #73, and #57, respectively. All behind Waiting to Exhale, which is a nifty lil' piece of Emancipated Chick Lit If You Happen To Like That Kind of Thing, but come on, and Jonathan Franz's The Corrections, a novel so stultifyingly insignificant that you need a microscope to plumb all one-quarter-of-an-inch of its depths.

Another surprise? Not a single book by James Lee Burke, in my opinion, one of the greatest writers putting words on paper today.

I swear, someone just needs to put me in charge of everything. Until then, I'm putting the book down and heading off to the movies.

Mute Monday: Old Man

Phoned Home

Perhaps only those who are fashioned obsessed would be saddened by the news of Yves Saint Laurent's death two days ago. Still, if you are a working woman between the ages of, say, 20 and dead, you can bet his work touched your life in one shape or another.

What Halston was to the dizzy disco queen, Saint Laurent was to the working career woman. He burst onto the Paris haute couture scene at the astonishing age of 19 and two years later took over as head of the House of Dior. It was here that he began to create clothing for women that, in his words: " . . . was not only supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms with themselves."

Today, we take this for granted. In the late 1960s, however, it was revolutionary. Prior to that, designers decorated women. But Saint Laurent saw fashion as a way for women to find their unique sense of self. Unlike some designers, who went out of their way to create ever more outrageous, unwearable outfits in a continual loop of the Emporer's New Clothes, Saint Laurent never once made a joke out of his work . "It pains me physically," he once said, "to see a woman victimized, rendered pathetic, by fashion."

Hence, his first collection for Dior, anchored by the trapeze-shaped shift dress, was all about freedom and ease of wear. That shift remains a working girl's fashion staple to this day. So does the evening suit, whose legacy lies in the designer's famous Smoking Suit, a looser, less angular reinterpretation of the butch-ish silhouette made famous by Marlene Dietrich that suddenly provided savvy women everywhere with an alternative to the Little Black Dress. And can you remember a time when the safari style jacket (ah-hem, Old Navy Spring 2008), peasant blouse, or Palazzo pants have NOT been in style? All Saint Laurent.

(Look – I just found this: my tres chic mother, Saint Laurent-ized! Pay no attention to the fashion disaster with the skinned knee. And we won't even go there with my brother in his Lederhosen.)

* * *

Bo Diddley's death yesterday from heart failure is no less tragic a loss. What Saint Laurent was to fashion, Diddley was to music, a bridge between the blues and rock and roll, inventor of the harder-edged, more driving rhythms that would form the backbone of this new style. Listen to "Who Do You Love," which he wrote in 1956, and you'll hear the revolution coming - not to mention some of the baddest-ass lyrics in all of rock and roll.

Diddley also lived for years right here in the Land of Enchantment. From 1971 to 1978 he was a happy denizen of Los Lunas, where he also served for nearly three years as Valencia County's Deputy Sheriff. During this time he not only continued to make music, but was instrumental in bolstering the financially strapped county's law enforcement efforts, his largest contribution being three highway patrol cars he purchased with his own funds.

RIP to you both.

Splash in the Bath or Roar in the Sea

Here's a question that has always puzzled me: why don't we buy more art?

We fill our homes with computers. Ipods. Big screen televisions. Video games. But when was the last time you or someone you know made a trip to a gallery, not just to browse or nod thoughtfully at the stuff hanging on the walls or perched on some pedestals, but to actually purchase something? Something that stirs you. Makes you think. Hits you in the gut or makes chocolate mousse out of your heart.

Maybe it's because most of us don't know squat about art. Which brings me to another question: why don't we teach art appreciation in our schools? Art is a language after all, just like mathematics. And like math, it serves an important function in helping us order and understand our world. Which means we really, really need artists, we need them as much as we need airline pilots and computer programmers and shoe makers. But artists don't create in a vacuum, you know. Michaelangelo, he was a genius, but he didn't paint for kudos. He painted for cold, hard cash.

So I'm going to have one of my bossy moments and order each and every one of you to go out and buy some art before the month is out. Then I want you to share it on your blob. And tell me what about it made you buy it. If you've done this recently, then tell me about that in the comments section to this post.

I'll start. Here is my most recent purchase:



Artist: Found here
Why I Purchased: I am drawn to the way in which she explores her relationship to the natural world. Sometimes this expression is exuberant and slyly humorous, like Otto above. Sometimes it is wistful and melancholy, hushed and almost holy. Like this:


Sometimes, her work tells stories of the places she's been, the music she's heard, the animals she's loved. I'm a sucker for narrative and for mood and for finding within myself that same feeling, sinking in a hook, and dragging it to the surface.

I'm also a sucker for pretty. And boy, can she do pretty:

Mute Monday: Change

Mute Monday: Greatness

Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun. – Frank Lloyd Wright