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First Wives Always Know, and other inconvenient truths

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Novelist Rick Moody thinks authors shouldn’t blog. Maybe he’s right. What do I know, other than when I was at grad school at Columbia, scuttlebutt had him putting rips in his own jeans to give himself credibility, because we all knew he came from a rich family?

He’s a decent writer. Being loaded and coming from the Upper Middle Class doesn’t preclude talent. I acknowledge his competence, though I am not interested in his work. I personally think cynicism is the easy way out. It’s what spoiled, entitled folk give themselves instead of the more difficult dignity of faith and hope. They seem to mistakenly think that the “sophistication” of such negativity is faith and hope. Whatever. If people like his work, they’ll buy it.
I am an author, and I blog. I think voraciously, I am evolving, I am exploring, and I blog. What I think now might not be what I think in a year, or ten. I am engaged in this inscrutable question of life as a human being in this vale of tears. I am learning and growing.
Hence this blog, the title for today’s posting having been suggested by Al Gore’s movie. I like Al Gore. He would have made a fine president. I don’t care that he’s divorcing Tipper and that he fell in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Gore is still a smart, decent man. I have that feeling about him.
Besides, what do I know about global warming? I’m not sure I believe in it. From what I can tell from my own research, and yes, I’ve done some, the Earth goes through long periods of complicated climate change and weather instability. It may be a neat ‘n’ easy package to blame the military-industrial-pharmaceutical-biotech complex for causing greenhouse gasses. But can we really be sure? I mean, I want to blame and hate industry. I fork over the extra $$ for organic veggies, after all. I am heart-broken over the rending images of our beautiful Mother Earth in disarray. I’m just not sure that in this case–and I pretty much see Monsanto as the face of the 666 Anti-Christ and herald of the Apocalypse–I’m not 100% convinced that it’s all so tidily laid at one ugly, fungus-riven, toenail-shrivelled foot.
It goes this way: people think anything natural, in the wild, is wonderful and clean, etc. But there are plenty of rivers in Colorado you can’t drink from because the beavers are crapping, tainting the water. And there are plenty of natural substances I don’t want to ingest, like cobra venom.
This may get me scorned by a lot of other card-carrying registered Democrats, of whom I am one. But one thing, in an insecure world, is for sure: no one is more vicious than an angry liberal whose set-in-stone, holier-than-thou truths have been questioned. Those people are out for blood. Notice how much vitriol they spew when Obama is questioned–the same people who called Bush 1 and Bush 2 anything but a human being.
I wasn’t crazy about the Bushes, either. Marie Antoinette, anyone? Which leaves me wondering, where the hell are the moderates? The socially-liberal, fiscally moderate folks who aren’t trying to shatter our Constitution and turn our country into a replica of socialist France? I am pro-gay marriage. I am pro-life and pro-choice, both at the same time. I am hawkishly pro Israel. I am pro having an entire government comprised of people of color. I just don’t want a big, paternalistic government who takes money away from the middle class: are you listening, President Obama? Give scholarship money back to the middle class. Stop “going beyond the Constitution.” Stop it right now. I like the Constitution.
I don’t care if people worship Adonai, Jesus, Buddha, or Zeus: I surely don’t want a mosque on the World Trade Center site. I was in NYC on 9/11, standing on the roof of my husband’s parents’ building, watching the towers fall in a viscous cloud of soot and poison. I am always up for a slanted perspective on things, but I think those people are CRAZY NUTSO CUCKOO who claim it was the US government or Israel who caused the collapse.
So I like Senator Joe Lieberman, who seems to share many of my values. But if he teams up with Sarah Palin, who is a first class idiot, I will have to send him a strongly worded letter expressing my dismay.
Enough of politics, a topic which came out of my riffing on truth. We all know that politics and truth are incompatible bedfellows. I meant to say this: first wives are always right about their husbands. They just are. This said, a second wife can know something else about the same rasty man–and so get better results out of him. I’ve seen that a lot, too. Men can learn. Women can learn. People do change, if they want to. If they’re willing to work REALLY hard on themselves.
And teenagers are always up to something. There are two kinds of parents in the world: those who accept this truth, and those who are delusional. The parents who are the MOST sure that their baby boy would never use such vile language, or that their precious daughter would never act like a slut, are exactly the parents who son is widely known to be the most foul-mouthed kid to walk the high school halls in twenty years, and whose daughter was surfing internet porn at age 10 and sending cell phone pix of her bare boobs to boys when she was 13. This is fact. Watch the parents. The more controlling they are, the more they try to regulate who their kids see, the more judgmental they are about other parents: the farther out on a limb their teens are going. Some kids have good parent-management skills and hide it well, that’s all.
Having teenagers is a lesson in humility and, if you can keep your sense of humor intact, ruefulness. It’s a divine comedy. I was just emailed this by a psychologist who knows my intelligent, talented, precocious, beautiful, wild teenage daughters all too well: “Don’t feel stupid. My advice going forward is not to ask ‘are you?’ But to say ‘how much are you?’ to whatever question you are asking.”
When parents go to a kindergarten party, they can take a page from my book of life: realize that half these adorable kids will be dealing drugs before they get out of 11th grade.
What else? I don’t know, I’m still in a process of discovery. Was this worth sharing? Can’t say for sure. Moody may have a point.
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Bittersweet: About Karma

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Earl: “Look! Shampoo that’s not tested on animals. I feel bad for those lab animals running around with dirty hair, but if it’s better for the environment, that’s the sacrifice they have to make.” Jason Lee as Earl Hickey, MY NAME IS EARL Karma is a funny thing

 
There are some humorless men in my life. A few months ago I sent an email to two of them. It was pretty funny: UFO’s, aliens, subliminal programming with muzak, ex-CIA agents who can be hired to forcibly waterboard someone, without their consent, and beating my rascally middle daughter with a stick in Riverside Park were all mentioned. Admittedly, my sense of humor is offbeat and irreverent. Still, this email was juicy. But did they respond to it AT ALL? Oh, nooooooooooo. They just pretended it didn’t exist.
 
This current husband of mine read the missive before I sent it. “Don’t send that,” he said, with a flat expression. Hmph. My third husband will have a rich sense of humor. He will be able to laugh with me. At me, okay, that’s gonna happen, alas. Even I spend plenty of time laughing at me. (Definition of ‘rueful,’ anyone?) But, definitely, also, with me.
 
Over the last few years I’ve been working with Buddhist concepts and with the Bhagavad Gita. In the spirit of “what goes around comes around,” I have to wonder, when did I not laugh at people that has reached fruition with this overabundance of humorless men in my life?
 
Should I rack what’s left of the gray matter rattling around my cranium to recall anyone whose joke I did not get, then make a list, seek them out, and make restitution by letting them tell me their favorite jokes, which culminates in my laughing uproariously? Will that plant new seeds for me, seeds that will sprout into men with some sparkle to their personality?
 
Maybe it’s a past life thing. I was an uptight guy in the 17th century who inflicted lethal self-seriousness on the long-suffering women in my life. Now I’m reaping my just rewards, and there’s no going back to pull the poker out of my former derriere. Karma’s a complicated thing, and hard to navigate exactly. Those of us like me who aren’t enlightened can’t parse it.
 
It’s easier to see the working of karma in other people’s lives. I tread carefully here, being mindful of Rabbi Jesus’ words, “Why worry about the mote in your brother’s eye when there’s a beam in your own?”
 
But I am a careful observer of people, both because people are a novelist’s raw material, and because I’m fascinated with human beings, those conscious and inconsistent creatures. While not positing myself as a perfect person, I can discern. I can learn from others.
 
There’s a man I know who’s recently had many business reversals. He’s brilliant, educated, competent, personable. Indeed, he exudes a charm that many people can’t see through. I’ve watched with breathless awe as he’s snowed them totally. It’s a virtuoso act.
 
Unfortunately, the charm obscures a negative side. He’s acted from that negative side over the last several years, threatening me and others with litigation, co-opting tactics of bullying and intimidation, twisting reality to suit the ends of malice, never using a kind word when hostility will make the point for him. And there seems to be no one in his life who will call him on his stuff. His family has always lent him blind entitlement, and his close friends only affirm his better points, of which there are many.
 
I suppose this is when I am grateful that my close friends hold me to a high level of personal accountability. “So Traci,” my friend Gerda will say, in her patient voice, “are you acting out of negative intent? Are you acting out of fear or out of love?”
 
Or even my friend Marcia will ask, “Yes, but is that about your self-esteem? Can you phrase that in a way that’s less ambiguous?” Rachel usually foists a zinger, with less concern for my vulnerability and more concern for the bull’s eye of painful truth.
 
But I don’t think the benighted man in question, may all the gods bless him, has anyone speaking this way to him. Nor does there seem to be anyone reminding him about the Law of Return, that whatever you give out inevitably comes back to you. So it is no surprise to me that, despite his many talents, he is suffering business losses that cause him personal anguish.
 
Not that he would or could ever see the relationship between his abusive actions and the unfoldment of his life. It’s hard for all of us. There is the real cause of things and the apparent cause. What is apparent is the economy, the paternalistic government, the state of the world, etc. But in this view that seeks to go deeper than appearances–and even the Talmud talks about “measure for measure” and “As one does, so they do to him”–we are all guided toward spiritual forces of cause and effect.
 
Which leads me back to the lab animals with dirty hair, making sacrifices for the environment. I can only hope they transmigrate species, and reincarnate as higher beings. Perhaps humorless men.
 
Daniel Silva’s THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR
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Daniel Silva’s THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR

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THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR by Daniel Silva
The Rembrandt Affair by Daniel Silva: Download Cover

My former father-in-law, whose qualities of intelligence, groundedness, and sanity have caused me to appreciate him more over the years, called me a week ago to discuss his grandchildren, my daughters. He thinks they’re great, and isn’t that the sweetest gratification for a mother? At the end of the call, he inquired about my writing. Then he brought up Daniel Silva.

“Why can’t you write more like him?” asked the father of my former beloved.
Or maybe he didn’t actually say it straight out–though I never mind when people talk straight to me. Maybe I projected the question into a heavy implication, out of my own writerly envy. My former in-laws, much as I admired them, had a talent for minimizing my accomplishments. Whatever.
Either way, Silva remains one of my favorite writers. This is no small feat: I read everything, literally, everything. I sat once with a literary agent, who, after running through, well, all of the pop culture authors, said, “Yikes, you really do read everything!” I could claim that it’s market research. I could say I’m keeping an eye on my competition. Both are true. Truer still is that I just love BOOKS. BOOKS ARE LOVE.
And I love story. Here is my current working definition of story: story is how your protagonist doesn’t get what he or she wants. The transcendence of story is how we attain enlightenment. In which case: I’ll be seeing you around for another 10,000 lives, because story rocks!
Daniel Silva tells a good story, and he tells it well. Line for line, his prose is wonderful, and it’s getting better with every book. I’ve been following his Gabriel Allon character for years. With every book, the characters get more sharply drawn, the prose gets more musical yet always accessible, and the plot gets more interesting.
Silva is growing with his craft. I love to see that, and I admire it. There’s a lot of drek out there. Most bestsellers are mind-numbingly badly written. If people are reading less, it’s the fault of publishers: why would anyone eat when they are being served crap? They lose their appetite.
Which makes Silva even more of a pleasure to read. Great characters, great story, great writing. And I’m not just saying that because he deals with one of my other passions, the Old Masters. Sure that gives Silva an additional 100 IQ points in my estimation. But I’d read a well-told story about something I dislike–like the IRS. Oops, did I say that out loud? I totally admire the IRS.
Pick up a copy of THE REMBRANDT AFFAIR and be fascinated. Be swept away. It’s compelling reading.
“Hard Times: An Artist’s View” at the Salmagundi Club
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“Hard Times: An Artist’s View” at the Salmagundi Club

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Is it uplifting enough to count as art if a painting stirs the soul to compassion?
Does that kind of upliftment via images of impoverished or disenfranchised people create beauty?
Does evoking the deeper sense of the degradation and pain of our shared humanity–‘there but for the grace of God go I’–catapult the viewer out of the stupor of our daily lives into a state where transcendence and transformation can occur?
These questions came to mind last night as my husband Sabin and I attended a panel discussion at the Salmagundi arts club. Our friends dancer Lori Belilove and musician John Link accompanied us; Lori had suggested the outing.
Sabin was quick to dismiss most of the paintings: “They are illustrative.” He meant that as “merely illustrative,” criticism indeed from an artist of Sabin Howard’s caliber. He was right: most of them are illustrative. This exhibit at Salmagundi is uneven, though ambitious in scope: “Ask artists to paint instant history, to reach into their souls and put onto canvas their expression of the toughest economic times since the great depression.”
Then there were Burt Silverman’s paintings, which were informed by intelligence and grace, so that even the ugliness of the subject matter did attain something, some higher metabolism of representation and humanity.
The panel discussion ranged from from curatorial matters and historical imperatives to practical ones: Who buys these paintings? There is always that scourge of investment hanging over the art market, the real or imaginary perception that a piece of art is a safe place to store value. Artist Max Ginsberg mentioned that taste is too often made by someone who is promoting something for sale, and that when people see an abstract piece that doesn’t move them, the trend is to say, “I don’t understand it” rather than “it doesn’t move me.”
From me, novelist Traci Slatton: Honest people, who aren’t afraid of pissing off the emperor by mentioning his nakedness, will say, “It’s ugly crap.”
Burt Silverman (yes, I am a huge fan of his work and his eloquence) was asked about the political nature of this exhibit. He said that he resists the categorization and politicization of art because those are temporal and transient labels. I agree that art should resist time. It was most fascinating to hear him come out and claim, “I am uncomfortable with the increasing dominance of photography and the corresponding abdication of the artist’s personal human vision.” He talked about the importance of the “fulcrum of discovery” in art.
These are matters of some importance. The exhibit, though uneven, is worth seeing. These are not modernist nor post-modernist pieces; they are not done with sneering irony, denigration of beauty and value, and adolescent mockery of the common humanity that twines us together. Are they the next step in the evolution of art? Sabin says “no,” that an integrated vision of the heroic ideal and oneness of life comprise the “next step.” But these are an important part of the transition, as the collective consciousness grows out of silly modernism.
The Salmagundi Club is located at Fifth Avenue and 12th street.

Salmagundi Club

Dinner with Friends
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Dinner with Friends

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Prelude No. 5 in D Major

There’s a great moment in the movie INDEPENDENCE DAY when the always watchable Brent Spiner, playing wacky scientist Dr. Brackish Okun, in charge of the secret alien research project at Area 51, says, “As you can imagine, they… they don’t let us out much.”
I laugh every every time I recall this quote, and Spiner/Okun’s affect, and not just because I relate to the crackpots, conspiracy theorists, misfits, and geeks of the world. It’s because, as a working mother of four children, I don’t get out much. Not as much as I’d like, for sure. And my monastic husband has, as far as I can tell, few social needs other than watching the Tour de France. He’d be content to spend 7 days a week in his studio, sculpting.
I’m not sure he even enjoys conversation with me. He says that when I die, he’s going to have me stuffed and mounted, so he can enjoy the pleasure of my company: in silence. (Kinda creeps me out, that.)
Which makes it all the more pleasurable that we’ve found another couple we both enjoy. I like them because they’re smart, funny, and good-hearted. Theoretically that makes an impression on Sabin. I suspect that what he really enjoys is that they are both successful working artists and they have a lot to say on the topic of art.
John Link is a mad genius of a musician and composer, who has translated Chopin’s preludes into vocal compositions for 5 voices, guitar, bass, drums and violin. “As Chopin meant them to be played,” he claims. Lori Belilove is a mesmerizing dancer and brilliant choreographer, and the dynamic head of the Isadora Duncan Foundation. Her “The Everywoman series: The Red Thread” is one of most moving pieces of dance I have ever witnessed. Sabin Howard is the greatest living figurative sculptor. I write fiction. So we come to the table, literally, representing 4 arts: music, dance, visual art, and story telling.
Last Friday Lori and John came to dinner. They were subjected to my cooking but didn’t complain, though they had every right to do so. Really, my salmon aux herbes Provencal came out with too many herbs, and not the right ones. It’s hard to mess up baked salmon, but my native ingenuity was up to the task. I think they forgave the cuisine because we got involved in a discussion of critical importance: the nature of creativity.
Lori talked about watching some of her dancers choreograph, how they do it for love. They want to be loved and appreciated, and their dance is both an offering of love and a request for love. I had to ask about a pure creative impulse that is a kind of radiance, a flowing forth from the core. Sabin, who is fundamentally solipsistic, favored that paradigm. John leaned toward the relational model; he wants his pieces received by an audience, as I want my books read by people.
Performers like to perform, and John and Lori are both performers. Sabin as a visual artist does not perform. He intends to create a piece that will, literally, stand forever. Bronze sculptures endure for thousands of years. Sabin’s vision of beauty and humanity are meant to stand the test of time. Music and dance are meant for something else–perhaps to intensify this moment now into timeless, transformative immediacy–though, naturally, John and Lori would dearly love for their work to survive them, and their grandchildren.
So, this business of creating art: I think of it as a disease. An infection. I have to tell stories because they roil about my brain like a fever. One story is barely written when I am starving to tell the next one. Perhaps the virus of art is the next topic at dinner?