Chris, Mick and the Fine Art of Artifice

 

artifice - noun - clever devices used to trick or deceive (Google).

Let's face the music and accept that for whatever reason(s), human beings embrace the concept of deception. And now that the Internet (via social media) has opened the backstage door for endless opportunities for a little or a lot of artifice, no one is safe from scammers, or in my case, ordinary people pretending to be rock stars. 

Because I am in the music business along with just about everyone else, I have to spend time on social media just advertise my original songs and get them circulating among listeners throughout the globe. Although I am a minuscule presence on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, I try to post at least three times a week to generate a following, which isn't easy as there are 100,000 songs released on the music streaming channels daily and 100,000 artists promoting them. Apparently as FB is the medium of choice for celebrities, more grifters use it to impersonate them than any other platform. I am lucky because the con artists who hit on me generally do not want money; they just want to take me to bed. Case in point, one man, who just happens to have the name Christopher Cross like the musician (who is actually the real imposter since his surname isn't actually Cross) tried to impersonate him in order to trick me into meeting him. Fortunately, I was onto him right from the start. Just in case this should ever happen to you (maybe on YouTube in the comments section), an authentic celebrity would never ask you when you became his or her fan. And most likely as an icebreaker, he or she would never thank you for being his or her fan. I know from experience that unless they are extreme narcissists, celebrated people tend to want to step away from themselves for a few and come across as being average. So it was clear that Chris wasn't the celebrated Chris since he made the mistake of doing what all trolls do initially: he asked, "How long have you been my fan?" (I replied, "I've never been your fan." Oh, well. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.)

Of course, it is true that there are famous types out there who do interface with fans and do use artifice (such as different names) so that they don't attract attention. I am contending with someone right now who claims to be Micheal Philip Jagger, which is Mick Jagger's full name. Even though he has the blue checkmark verifying his identity, my daughter claims that he is in no way real, mainly because eighty-year-old men don't know how to navigate FB. Sensible, smart she contends that Mick no doubt has troops of well-paid assistants assigned to connect with the public on social media. The real Mick, romantically linked to a thirty-six-year-old dancer, would not have a second to reach out to me. Which all makes sense, yet this inchoate swindler is atypical so far. Like Macbeth and most politicians after him, Micheal could just be quite good at duplicity until some day, his artifice is exposed as such, and he is uncovered and cancelled (the beauty of social media). 

On the other hand, I did read an article on the web stating that you can never truly be sure whether or not you are being hoodwinked. It is possible that the person is indeed the person he or she says he or she is. Just make sure you don't wire any money to him or her and you don't friend him or her. As far as my Micheal, I am playing his game, pretending I don't realize that he is attempting to be Mick. And I am acting as though I am the bigger celeb whose privacy is kept private. In the end, the greater pretender will win, I suppose, if there can be a winner at shenanigans. Let's put it this way, if the actual Mick should die, and Micheal keeps liking my posts, I'll have my answer. (I hope it doesn't come down to that, though, because I am Mick's fan.)

The obvious paradoxical takeaway here is that sometimes you have to be deceptive in order to expose deception. Truth doesn't come easily. 

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The Age of Atavism

 

atavism - noun - recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity (Google)

Author William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Which is something that certainly holds true today. It seems atavism is a daily occurrence as humans tend to enjoy nostalgia, visiting and revisiting the past. 

Take for example the recent coronation of King Charles, III. According to Time, the British people gave up approximately $125 million of their tax dollars to shift their Aston Martins, Jaguars, Land Rovers, etc. into reverse so that they could experience a bit of what their proletariat predecessors had witnessed for hundreds of years. Apparently, the UK is the last country to induct their monarchs so lavishly. And with 58% of the population unwilling to take a leap of faith and shift into drive toward an authentic democracy (albeit on the lefthand side of the road), it seems that atavism is the transmission of choice. I did manage to drive a car in reverse down a thousand-foot, serpentine driveway once. It was uncomfortable, but I did get to the end of it safely :). 

Yet another example of the past in the present would be the current trend backwards in recent fiction. I am just about finished reading Bangles' Susanna Hoffs's realistic novel This Bird Has Flown, just published recently. The first-person narrator,  Jane Start, who is 33 and a jaded rock star take-off of Jane Eyre, behaves like she is 23 and thinks like she is 64 (the author's age). She has an annoying case of nostalgic Tourette's Syndrome in that she is addicted to spurting out allusions to the 1950s/1960s, something no thirty-three-year-old woman I have ever met, shy of my daughter, is capable of doing. Nor would anyone that age regardless of what kind of parents she had care to do so. (Right, Millennial ladies?) Why Hoffs would want to reference Don Ho and "Tiny Bubbles" for any reason is beyond me. Comic relief? Why didn't I laugh? Naturally, the New York Times gave Hoffs, most likely sans any undergraduate writing classes, a glowing review, which makes me think that each manuscript the major publishers send to the newspaper is accompanied by cash, something similar to payola, maybe? Payola? Oh, no! I suppose I am guilty of a trip down Memory Lane myself. Oh, the irony of it! 

Hypothetically, if William Faulkner, who wasn't a Buddhist as far as I know, were alive today, I'm sure he wouldn't have a problem with the current wave of atavism. In fact, he would probably use it to bolster the authenticity of his words. As much as we try to think we are living in the now, creating and perpetuating uniqueness, all we are doing is reinventing the past, adding our own twist to what once was. Author Christopher Booker claims that there are only seven original plot lines. If that is true, we may be in repeat mode indefinitely. Even with advanced technology (just say no to A.I.), perhaps the Age of Atavism will be sticking around for a long time to come. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #philosophy, #truth, #critique, #literary criticism 

Working for "Soul Cash"

 

"soul cash" - the gratification or "income" received when something is done voluntarily out of the goodness of the heart (Source: Jay, the electrician)

When it comes to everyday living, I have come to expect the unexpected. Philosophers can and will show up at the door on occasion. On Monday morning as I was frenetically trying to get organized for a recording session some fifty minutes south, I heard a knock at my front door. Upon opening it, I found a disheveled gnome of a man with wild, gun-metal gray hair and gaping, blue eyes, smiling intensely at me. I told him I had not made any appointments with any maintenance companies, but he insisted upon staying to give my full-house generator a tune-up. I figured that if I had dismissed him entirely, he might never come back, and I did need the machine serviced. So I told him he had 45 minutes and mentioned the session, which sparked commonality. Apparently, he was a composer experimenting with prog rock vibes, which is not surprising since just about everyone is these days. Always blatantly honest, I informed him that since 100,000 songs are released a day, there is no monetary success available in the music business and that I just put my original music out there for a few people who might get something out of it. "Oh, so you are in it for soul cash," he commented. "Soul cash?" I asked. "I made it up. It is when you do something out of the goodness of your heart, and the payback is greater than any monetary amount you could receive."

Wow! Soul cash! What a concept. Today, I started to take a mental inventory of all the soul cash I had received over the years and realized that it amounted to quite a bit. Which made me happy. How could it not? I am probably a millionaire when it comes to my soul-cash bank account. 

And the moral of the story?

If more people were intent on earning soul cash as opposed to authentic cash, the world just might be a better place. 

Enough said. 

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The Assiduity of an Iguana

 

assiduity - noun - close attention to what one is doing (Google)

I am always quite amazed at what one can learn from creatures great and small. At the start of this week, I found myself trying to recover from the flu (round two for me inside of six months: shoulda, woulda, coulda gotten the flu shot) in Aruba of all places. As I lay on a chaise lounge chair in my five-dollar Primark black bikini, trying to escape a sunburn under the fronds of a palmetto adjacent to the waterfalls of the hotel's pool, an iguana that couldn't have cared less about me was attempting to climb the trunk of the palm tree. His assiduity was impressive. Although distrustful he would occasionally look over at me to ensure I wasn't up to something egregious, his focus was on getting to the top of the tree. Unfortunately, just when he thought he'd made progress, he would slip down to the starting point. At one point, he gave up altogether and headed for the falls so that at one point all that could be seen of him was his long tail, painted with green and black scales. But since he kept coming back and trying again and again, I figured that there must have been a reason. I looked up into the tree and saw his motivation: his Iguana mate dangling precariously, seductively from one of the palm fronds. Sex sells. I figured Mr. Iguana would keep making repeated tries to reach his goal, so I decided to give him and her some privacy and made a beeline to my room. 

What can be learned from this modern-day parable, starring his and her iguanas is that the world functions well on tenacity. All creatures are motivated to behave one way or the other, and many of us in the human and animal kingdoms have the same wants and needs that we are willing to work for patiently or impatiently. Ultimately, we all do what we do to survive and to maintain a

balance between pleasure and pain.

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The Tintinnabulation of Interesting People

 

tintinnabulation - noun - a ringing or tinkling sound.

I discovered the word tintinnabulation while reading a novel featuring a magician protagonist that a friend of mine had authored and self-published. During a recent trip to L.A., his home for the past forty years, he gave me a copy. It acted as a corporeal manifestation of good tidings since before that luncheon we had not seen one another since college, some 45 years ago. After hearing about what he had accomplished in the interim (an advanced degree in astrophysics, careers in space science, acting, and magic), I could hear the tintinnabulation of amazement as it was hard to believe that one person could achieve so much in such a relatively brief time period. 

And he was not the only friend in L.A. who had managed to become proficient at doing interesting things. My other friend, who had also been involved in the same university theater program as the astrophysicist and me, has been a successful, professional storyteller for years. And I bet you never thought that weaving stories orally in front of audiences could be lucrative. She told me that her occupation has defined her over the years and that she could not imagine life sans it. Of course, she could only live in either New York or L.A. to keep her passion alive, but those are the only two places she would want to exist in anyway. On the flight home, the tintinnabulation I heard was either the sound of the jet engine or my inner voice concluding that L.A. attracts interesting people. Maybe it was both?

If you have ever looked in the mirror and asked yourself why you are bored with your life, why everything that you do is part of a routine that boils down to cacophony rather than tintinnabulation, it is probably because you lack passion for what you do and are afraid to throw a wrench in the banality and make a change because it just may take some effort. Allow me to give you a few words of advice. FIND PASSION. Or FIND A PASSION. Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. The road from Point A to Point B is not as circuitous or stressful as you may think. It could just involve a small risk, like going down to the local community college and signing up for a class on something you have always wanted to pursue but could never find the time to do so. If you are over sixty (in my box), many course offerings could just be free. You never know. You might just find that you have a hidden talent, which will propel you from dull to fascinating in just a few months. 

As always, everything in life involves choice. Of course, if you are content living an ordinary life, then disregard all of the above. If you need some spice in that taco of existence, it is easily obtainable. It could be on the table right in front of you.

Life is short. Make the choice to live passionately.

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To Be Sanguine

 

sanguine - adjective - optimistic or positive in a particularly difficult situation

I have a favorite saying that of late has become a bit of a mantra or at least, a refrain for me: "Everything works out in the end." To be sanguine in any situation isn't easy, but sometimes, to keep one's sanity, it is essential. It also may give way to a self-fulfilling prophecy if Fate is in your corner. 

Last Monday, I looked at my adult daughter's twenty-five-year-old, free-standing basketball set-up leaning precariously in the direction of the garage and decided to sell it on Facebook Marketplace. Within a day after posting the ad, a polite yuppy who had just bought a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in an adjacent, upper-middle-class town messaged me to say he would buy it. Although I forewarned him that he would need a large truck and a few friends to lift it, he drove into my driveway in his shiny new Ford pick-up alone, armed with minimal tools, and the desire to perform miracles. After working unsuccessfully for an hour, he pretty much threw up his hands in defeat, gave up on the project, leaving me with payment and a fallen basketball set-up, the body of which lay disabled, prostrate on the macadam. The next day, I called several junk removers who speculated that it would cost me $200 to remove the mess. Armed with my optimistic mantra (and a brief prayer), I kept the faith that someone else on FB might just be interested in it for free. I was right. 

A man, ironically named Jesus and just as authentically Christian as his namesake, arrived from the wrong side of the tracks with all of the right tools, a big enough truck and a precocious, teenaged son (named Lucas, close enough to Luke), who had all of the right questions and answers both in Spanish and in English. Between the two, they were able to eliminate the unnecessary weight in the base of the stand so that they had the remains of the set-up in the truck within minutes. Jesus handed me a twenty that I didn't want to take, but he insisted. The whole ordeal I chalked up to serendipity as I watched them drive off  with smiles on their faces and a lot of metal in the way back. If you are thinking what I am thinking (this woman is under the protection of angels), both of us are probably correct.  

The moral of the story is binary: 1. Sanguine individuals who put positive vibes out into the Universe (particularly around high holy days) are rarely disappointed. 2. "Everything works out in the end." 

Rest assured that everything does work out, one way or the other, in the end. 

Happy Easter! Happy Passover! 

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Netflix and the Secret of Loving Longer

 

longevity - noun - long existence or service (Google)

The word longevity usually refers to length of life, but it also can relate to any abstract concept, like love, that lasts a long time. Last night, I turned to Netflix hoping to find a documentary that would speak to me. One that came with a 98% recommendation was "My Love," a short series of biographies detailing the ordinary lives of couples who have somehow managed to stay together through thick or thin for fifty years or more. As I am always enthralled by how some people can swing romantic longevity, I clicked on the start arrow. 

Admittedly, I did not make it through all of the first episode due to the fact that it was extremely slow moving, I was tired, and my foam mattress was beckoning to me from the next bedroom. However, I did learn something from the twenty or so minutes that I watched. The Vermont couple featured, wed for sixty years (give or take), were (and may still are) the owners and operators of a farm producing maple syrup (no surprises there, given regional stereotypes). Given what I know about ardor in the 1950s, their backstory seemed quite ordinary enough. They had met in high school although she had not paid him much heed owing to a crush on his friend. Yet–albeit initially unrequited–his love for her had been at first sight. A few years later, at 24, he proposed to her. Despite being nineteen at the time, she accepted. They wound up marrying, raising six children together, and staying put in the same clapboard farmhouse for decades. 

Sounds a bit ho hum? No, not really. These two have succeeded in solving a confounding equation involving an uncommon denominator: the longevity of romantic love. Ostensibly, what it takes for two to last forever is as follows: 1. Affection: Although both husband and wife are in their eighties, neither has been capable of keeping his/her hands off each other (at least during the taping). 2. Common purpose: Both have been involved in the daily operations of their company for a very long time. 3. Unconditional acceptance: The husband has tolerated his wife's vibrant personality in the spotlight, whereas she has condoned his being antisocial in the shadows. 4. Consistence: The husband has never fallen out of love with his wife, and she has never failed to return his love. 5. Engagement: There has been a lot of back and forth in terms of communication. Neither has shut out the other. 

So there you have it. The five-part secret of how people stay together interminably has just been revealed. Yes, love longevity is possible (if only in Vermont :) ). 

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