Category: beauty

Reflecting Dad and the Negligee

I came across this old photo. That is my dad there at the top and reflected in the mirror on the left. This was 1973 at some doctor’s thing, my dad being a doctor himself. The photo was torn but taped back together. Everyone is looking at the camera, everyone except the woman sitting to the left of my father – the one who thought it would be a perfect night to wear her negligee to the doctor’s thing.

Her! While she appears to be with the dude to her right, she’s looking across the table at 

this guy. Who from this angle looks a bit too, what?, goofy? for the no doubt older negligee lady? I mean, she’s been around the block and that boy looks like he just fell off the turnip truck. But it’s a room with a mirror, so there are two images of each person, and we can see what she is looking at…

This. And it makes sense now. Doesn’t he look way cooler from this angle? Much better from her angle than from ours! Negligee lady’s right. This dude’s cool. 

Here’s the whole pic.

That’s my mom – the person at the table furthest to the left in the neat sleeveless white number with the big broach.

Always the best dressed, best looking lady in the room. Now, I don’t want to be mean, but…

This lady is freaking me out. The lighting in that room was not kind to her countenance. Although that vest says outsider at this doctor’s thing so maybe she’s like a proto-Goth and hoping to go into the future in this one photo as the coolest alt chick in the place. Or maybe it’s the red hair… She’s quite beautiful, although not as beautiful as my mom. This, according to me. 

continuums/continuui?

Dichotomies. Black and white. One or the other. Except of course for the gray areas where everything we consider “black” or “white” actually resides. There’s no true black (completely and absolutely black) and no true white (completely and absolutely white), but a continuum of black to white and back again. But that’s confusing, right? So we’ll just talk black and white. 

Nope. Introvert/Extrovert, Asshole/Saint, Liberal/Conservative. Two “opposing” sides of anything are in fact the two ends of a continuum. They touch each other like the two sides of a coin. That’s why questions at the doctor have like eleven choices: agree, somewhat agree, just sort of agree, thinkin’ about agreeing, meh, I’m intrigued… 

Atheism/Religion. Even those who’d scream “There is a god!” or “There is no such thing as a god!” right into your face, spittle and all; within each of them, at the very least, there exists a seed that if watered properly through whatever experience or experiences will grow and lead them to think somehow otherwise. We all have the ability to learn, to change; and we can’t help but evolve. 

Enemy/Friend. From frenemies to mortal enemies; from ghosting someone to killing them. But even mortal enemies would come together if it were truly needed of them – like if two mortal enemies (I don’t know about you but I’m picturing medieval chainmail mortal enemies) had to jump into a lake to save an old woman in a sinking Oldsmobile. They’d do it! Although chainmail and ponds make for a dangerous combination.

Bad thoughts/Good thoughts. Maybe it’s like a bell curve continuum, so there’s a long, sort-of plateau in the middle, the middle ground, where our thoughts go from bad to good, but the closer you get to one or the other the faster you fall into it. Or maybe not.

Remember the continuum. No one is all good. No one is all bad. 

Eddie Izzard

The first trans person I ever met was in about 1976 at Thomas Beach on Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. This was all very new to me at 13. I was sitting on the curb waiting for my friend, Ben, to come back from wherever the hell he was. Up walked this very tall woman in a bikini but covered with a beach jacket of sorts. She sat down on a picnic table and looked out over the lake. Then she looked over at me, staring right back at her. She smiled.

Lovely day, she said.

It’s hot.

One day you’ll grow up into something hot, son.

I’m sure I blushed, but it was summer in 1976 and I spent every waking hour outside, sans sunscreen, but soaked in Coppertone oil, so I was already some dark shade of reddish brown that probably hid said blushing. Someone shouted and she stood up and waved. Enjoy the beach, she said and ran toward the person. I’d heard about “cross dressing” and some talk of people transitioning through surgery and hormones. I believe they had to go to The Netherlands or somewhere to get it done. But now I saw one and talked to one. That blew my mind.

Somewhat related, I was reading an article yesterday about Eddie Izzard and remembering when Ms. Izzard was in the news for coming out as transgender way back in the mid-eighties. She’s been busy, real busy over the last 40+ years as a comedian, stage and screen actor, pilot, very active in LGBTQ issues, and is now again running for Parliament in the UK. She’s also a crack athlete and has run hundreds of marathons (more than a hundred for charities). Here’s what really blew me away:

“It’s not just the sheer number of marathons that Izzard has run that’s impressive: it’s that she runs them one after another. In 2009, she ran 43 marathons in 51 days. In 2016, she ran 27 in 27 days. And in 2021, she ran 32 in 31 days.”

Got that? She ran 32 marathons in 31 days. Damn.

#eddieizzard

Faux Poverty

I was walking around Lake and Hennepin in Minneapolis with my girlfriend back in the 80s and we watched an expensive BMW come around a corner. The trunk popped and a young man, dressed in ratty shorts and t-shirt with old flip-flops, and shaggy messy hair, jumped out of the passenger seat, opened the trunk, pulled out a beat-up skateboard and skated off.

A while later and a block away that same young man came skating up to us and asked, “Hey, man, you got a quarter?” I said, “Hey, man, you got a ‘Beamer?” And he rolled off.

Was it the hippies who inaugurated what my dad referred to as, “faux poverty”? Dad was a surgeon back then and he just loved to mock the very idea of people with plenty of money dressing like they had none at all. He had a field day with the new trend of pre-torn jeans, produced, marketed and actually torn by huge, multi-national, highly profitable corporations.

I’m guessing it was the hippies, but no doubt it was a statement about poverty and our consumer society for them. Hippies liked to make statements and if you look back over time, they were pretty much always right. But they made it cool and it made its way to artists, musicians and the like, who were then aped by those who adored them.

Like me. The surgeon’s kid. That’s how I dressed as a teenager (and I still do on occasion but mostly when I’m painting). The only difference back then was that you couldn’t yet buy ripped jeans so we had to wait for ours to fall apart or wear the oldest pair we had. It staggers the imagination just how quickly a teenager can wear out a pair of jeans, by the way. You could have a properly ripped knee in a few months. On another note, it was the seventies and I had jean shorts that were cut so high that the only thing between my legs was the seam. The pockets, often filled with bubble yum (or a film canister and pinch hitter), would hang down and out from beneath the material. Lovely.

And it’s still going on, of course. But you do grow out of it. You realize you look kind of stupid (unless you’re in a rock band) looking that way. I wonder just how many rock bands shot their gritty black and white photos in industrial areas, junk yards and abandoned buildings. (I was involved in a shoot like that, too.) Then you skedaddle back to the shag-carpeted, split-level home with a comfy bedroom featuring a Marantz stereo system with glowing blue dial, Magnaplaner speakers, black lights and rock posters of poor looking, exceedingly wealthy rock stars.

Why do we do that?

Right!

“What we measure is the Earth kind of moving in this sea. It’s bobbing around — and it’s not just bobbing up and down, its bobbing in all directions,” said Michael Lam, an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav),*

I was thinking about joining NANOGrav. 😐

*I’ll find the source if anyone wonders.

Ambient Sunday: 4

Here’s a relatively new release for your listening enjoyment. This is Ian Hawgood’s Mysterious Shapes and Remembered Rivers, which makes one think of China Crisis’s Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms. It came out in 2022. He does a song with Stijn Huwels, with whom he’s done a lot of great music, and Friends We Found, who I know nothing about, but will. It’s just great ambient music. That’s all.

Ambient Sunday: Thursday or Friday edition, depending on where you are right now

Being that we’ve veered a bit from Sunday, let’s veer a bit from traditional Ambient. Susumu Yokota‘s “sakura“. It’s an amazing record by a young man that I came across in 2014 and started following him and he died suddenly in 2015. It was a really strange feeling. I had the same experience with Mitch Hedberg. But this record is just a stellar example of what this man created. Check him out! If you’re into that sort of thing.