I'm sick of writing out the word "narcissism" or "narcissist". Too many esses and eyes. I never know if it should be capitalized or not.
If I'm going to bleed this sucker dry, milk it for all it's worth... then I need to go shorthand.
N.
Capital n. From now on, it's all about N.
N is everywhere, in this country. N is especially prevalent on your TV.
TV gives you a POV full of N. After a while, you can see how everything in the media, popular culture and public affairs is affected by N.
I was watching Oliver Stone's The Doors on VHS. I used to be a great big fan of Jim Morrison, until I saw this movie. It was rated 'R', and I was 16 or 17 when I first saw it. Seeing Stone's interpretation of the life of an interesting rock performer was a travesty, because it said nothing to me about Morrison's life, or my own life for that matter. It spoke volumes about Stone's life, however, and so it qualifies as N.
Jim Morrison was an N, for sure. What I thought were attractive qualities in the man turned out to be my juvenile fascination with his all-encompassing N.
I watched Mighty Aphrodite for the first time earlier today. It's one of Woody Allen's best, but he's an N also. His movies are ripe with N. That's why so many people dislike his movies-- because they're all about him and his little world.
Seinfeld owes a lot to Woody Allen in its exploration of the N in four different New York individuals. Jerry Seinfeld is an N but he's a gracious N-- the show was named after him and yet he was always willing to let his co-stars share the spotlight... because they were under his name! And NBC, well... they have N in their acronym.
N is in all things. But N is running rampant in your mirror.
Go take a look at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? Do you see yourself? No, you don't.
You're seeing N.
You're seeing what you want to see. You're ignoring the things that lower your N-supply: the love handles, the blemishes, the crow's feet, the open pores, all of it...
You stay focused on the things you like: the way your nose curves at the tip, the slight bags under the eyes that give it a world-weariness that you couldn't buy for all the money in the world, the arch of your upper lip...
Long live N. I'm taking it to the Nth degree, and running with it.
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The painting is coming along swimmingly. I did half an hour today and I forsee that I'll be done, at this rate, by week's end. After that, I have this screwy notion of starting a series of portraits. All of the subjects will be women I have either dated, loved, or been loved by, and I will title it my "muse" series....
This is tricky territory, you know. I have to appeal to a woman's sense of N-supply, and that can take a long long time. A woman's vanity is a prized possession. I must be careful about how I go about it, and also I must keep the paintings under wraps until each one is done-- I don't want people claiming favorites or anything like that.
Most of all, I have to capture the essence of each woman in a way that doesn't condescend or offend. It's going to be tough, but also I imagine it will be fun, and even therapeutic for me.
If anyone out there paints or wants to take it up, I highly recommend listening to jazz when you do it. I played the Miles Davis/Bill Laswell CD again as I started on the second phase of the painting, and it is really inspirational to me. It helps me to establish a mood. I will try out The Best Of John Coltrane on my next painting, or maybe towards the end of this one, when I'm retouching and adding details. Painting a picture to the sounds of "Naima" or "Equinox" will be a treat, to say the least. I used to have a copy of A Love Supreme on CD but, in a fit of anti-jazz obsession late last year, I sold it.
I know this sounds pretentious and pompous, but for the first time in my life, I feel like a real artist. I have the easel up in a space in the corner of my apartment, with a large dirty sheet covering the carpet and brushes strewn about; I have paintngs from artist-friends on the walls; I have the weed stash on the coffee table next to the glass bubbler and I have very little food in my fridge; I have an electric guitar in the corner and a picture of Earvin "Magic" Johnson on one of my living room walls; I have rows of books in my bookcases and a line of vinyl records on display...
I don't want to glamorize the hand-to-mouth living and the slight seediness, but at the same time it seems to go well with the whole vibe. I realize that part of me is living out some weird sort of fantasy where I struggle to make ends meet while also living under the radar and existing in a Los Angeles of my own creation, but it isn't delusional. I understand that my life is getting stabler, even as it seems to have the chaos that I thrive on...
I just want to look back on this time in my life, ten years from now, and throw my fist in the air and nod my head and say, "Yeah... now that was living!" I look back on those reckless days in North Hollywood, with Paulie as a roommate and scores of musicians, patrons and passerbys paying visits to our slummy apartment, and I marvel over the daily adventures that went down. It was exciting, and I guess I want that excitement to sustain itself somehow, even if it's on an infinitely smaller scale...
I think part of my enchantment at my current predicament has to do with being proud of where I've come from in the last two or three years. Going from being on my own to down-and-out and back on my own again has done wonders for my self-esteem. I am in love with life again, and art has been instrumental in this personal renaissance.
So, I will get back to work now, and then I will go home and sleep it all off, and awaken and paint, and then go out to The Garage and work, and then go home and nap until it's time to work again, and in-between I'll be daydreaming, like I always do...
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT:
Your Brain is 46.67% Female, 53.33% Male |
Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve |
Just as I always suspected...
PEACE
3 comments:
Hmmm... Good question... I would have to say the N causes us to distort our self-image into something we have control over... if you magnify the flaws, it's a way of beating someone to the punch, so to speak, a way of softening any perceived blows. The fact that others don't share the exaggerated sense of your self-image compounds the need to magnify the flaws.
I say this because, at one time in my life, I was convinced that I was devastatingly ugly. One day, a girl set me straight and said, "Stop acting like you're ugly. You just want pity." And I think she was right.
Granted, I'm not Brad Pitt, but my days of trying to claim "fugly" are over. And let me go one further and assure you, Ayelet, that you are a lovely, beautiful woman with some of the prettiest blue eyes I've ever beheld in my life. If you don't believe me, fine, but I am sure as hell not exaggerating when I say that.
My brain is 60% female, 40% male.
I think it means that you don't ignore the things you don't want to see-- you acknowledge them. However, as in Ayelet's case, your own perception of your self is going to be different than what others think. What you might think of as "bad" might be, in actuality, something good and nice. By saying it's "bad", you preclude any judgement.
I mean, I have terrible teeth, from smoking and drinking black coffee. It hasn't stopped girls from telling me I'm attratcive, though. I have to get over my own hang-ups and realize that not all women are going to be hung up on my choppers. However, women are more accepting of a man's flaws than men are accepting of a woman's flaws, in this shallow N-soaked society of ours.
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