HE CRIED ABOUT HIS DEAD CAT - AND HE'S BRITISH - TALKING TO STRANGERS

I was walking with my dog one morning recently, and though she is getting older, and sometimes doesn't want to take a long walk, she is still cute.  A man was standing there and reach down to pet her.  She looked in his eyes and he burst into tears!"  I mean this man was sobbing.

"My cat just had to be put down!"  he cried.

Turned out that he had come to Los Angeles with his girlfriend, a local California girl, and his cat had been in the hospital a week when the decision had been made back in Britain.  His cat was only four years old.  So he had the expectation of it living a longer life and that he would see it again.

We talked as the tears kept coming.

"Well I said, you just proved the stereotype of the British with stiff upper lips is wrong!"

His girlfriend smiled.  So did he, still through tears.

The death of a pet usually is felt strongly by those who love them.

I asked him if he ever heard of Sylvia Browne, the now deceased psychic who wrote a lot of books and appeared lots on the old Montel Williams show.  He had not.  She was once well known, though towards the end of her life she took some criticism for a very wrong prediction.  Browne wrote about pets and heaven.  She assured everyone that when we go through the tunnel to the light at the other end ALL our pets are waiting.

Well, I feel really guilty about a couple goldfish,a turtle, and a hamster I killed not knowing any better.  I.E. don't make the goldfish bowl too clean, a turtle really does need a sun lamp and a companion, and do not feed a hamster a whole leaf of lettuce, which it will eat and then die of the shits over.

I hope these creatures have forgiven me. 

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT

DIANE VON FURSTENBERG with LINDA BIRD FRANCKE : A SIGNATURE LIFE : BOOK EXCERPT
C 1998 Diane Von Furstenberg Simon and Shuster Publishers

page 39-40

As a small child I immersed myself in books, trading places with the characters of the Comtesse de Segur. My mother added poetry, insisting that I memorize and recite to her the seventeenth-century fables of La Fontaine, such as "Le Corbeau et le Renard" and "La Cigale et la Fourmi." She was a young mother, and until I was about eight she treated me like her toy, alternately playing with me and torturing me with her demands. I was relieved when my brother, Phillippe, was born... I didn't particularly enjoy being a child, though my childhood was perfectly happy. I wanted to be older than I was and never liked people who patronized me because I was a child. I never played with toys or dolls. When I wasn't reading, I was talking to myself in the mirror and pretending I was in the theater. I played make- believe, but it was somehow always about plain real life. I couldn't wait to grow up. After my own children were born, I would always make a pointy of treating them with respect as individuals and encouraging them to grow up within the realities of the world.

MUSES WITH WORSE PROBLEMS THAN MINE - TALKING TO STRANGERS

Talking to strangers seems natural to me and it's helped me when I need to interview someone or take a poll. I'm not a snob about it. I talk to people from all walks of life. I wasn't always at ease like this but I think it started when I was in sales and I grew in confidence also when I went back to college and loved classroom discussions. Walking my dog, I've been part of many conversations that start on the basis of dogs and expand out.

In recent weeks I've had a number of encounters that left me feeling personally "What Problems Do I Have?'

First there was the lady I met in a thrift store I'm not really into thrift stores like some people are I rarely go to them but I like to find art supplies in them. There was a woman looking through clothes and holding dresses up to her body. She asked me what I thought of a dress and we got to talking. Soon the conversation went like this.

"Do you notice that I'm pregnant?  Five months.  And I'm 38 years old."

"Yes  you are!" I said, noticing her prominent belly.

"I had a bad day yesterday.  I went to the hospital.  They heard no heart beat.  My baby's dead."

The woman threw her arms around me hugged me and began to weep, huge tears running down her face.

I hugged her back and asked God to protect her.

I wondered where the father was.

She needed to be held and to cry.

"They weren't nice about it.  They didn't know I lost another baby just six months ago.  They told me to go home and wait to miscarry.  But I think I felt something this morning - a flutter.

Maybe the test was wrong."

***

I was hot and tired.  I had my dog with me on the bus in her wheeled carrier that's like a suitcase. The air was polluted by the fires. I was having trouble breathing. I'd taken her into an air-conditioned office with me for the day. I was so allergy sick I was dull. I wasn't looking forward to sticking to the mattress all night. We need a HEALTHY and HAPPY living environment, I was thinking.  We needed that Yesterday!

The driver said, "You've got to have FAITH in God."

I said, "I can only try to have faith."

She said, "No you must TRUST God,  You must BELIEVE.  You must KNOW that he's going to come through for you."

I simply cannot make myself think or feel this way.  I need proof.  My ideas about God are that there is this Intelligence to the Universe but I don't think He cares so much about me, even if i do things His way. So I didn't lie to her. But I didn't want to put her much stronger spirituality through any tests.

Then she said, "I've got a situation. There's just me and my two kids. My husband disappeared months ago. He flew into Atlanta. He went to Tennessee. The last anyone saw him. He was there.  Me and the kids - we have dreams of him.  I KNOW he is alive.  I KNOW he is out there."

I don't know that he's not.

I've seen too many TV shows.

"Have you done everything?

"Yes, on TV, everything!"

A few days later I waited for this particular bus driver to go past, even though I wasn't getting on.

I handed her a note that said, "David Paulidis Missing 411."  "Look this guy up on the Internet - on YouTube - Don't Freak! - Big Foot I almost whispered. He's an ex cop and maybe he can make sure for you that they did everything right in the investigation."

She took the note.

And I have not seen her driving that bus since.

***
She got told about the huge number of photocopies she was making and that her copies seemed to be jamming the printer. She was a lady with obviously dyed hair and clothes 10 (or more) years too young for her. She meant to be nice. She offered to bring her own paper. The place closed and so we headed out the door at the same time. She was in there looking for work. Verbally she gave me her resume. She had done a lot of physical labor - painting.  I tried to relate with a story about how I once hung wallpaper - three clients before I quit.  I didn't know anyone hiring. I respected that she'd once contracted with a huge apartment building. She told me she used a toothbrush on the light switches.

"You need a ride home?" she asked.

"Well I only have a half hour walk and it is a beautiful day. I was going to stop and get my dog some food at the market."

"Get in I'll drive you there."

So I did get into the car she was living in. Not obviously. She drove me first to check in with her friend living in his van. In the five minutes to the market, she told me tomorrow was going to be an even better day.

Her boyfriend was coming out of prison.

***
All three of these people are muses, each in their own way, and not on purpose.  But don't judge me on how or why.

C 2018 - 2025  Christine Trzyna

WARREN BEATTY - STAR by PETER BISKIND : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

I don't normally review books that I wouldn't give one star, but there is a purpose in not recommended this book and that is the whys I hated it. 


This book was so unbalanced a star bio of Beatty (whose film REDS is one of my favorites) that it's as if a personal vendetta got the backing of a publisher.  (Shame!  Shame!)  One half step above the trashing typical of a Darwin Porter book, Biskind's entire effort is - cringe worthy. I kept listening in hopes that I would finally come to some redemption.  Unbelievable to me is that so many hateful people would be willing to be quoted and so few loving.  My guess is that the loving wouldn't speak to the author out of their respect for Beatty, that is if the author tried to talk to them.  Attacked so, its no wonder Beatty and many other stars are hell bent on guarding their private lives and personally refuse to cooperate with a memoirist or biographer, even refuse to defend themselves or comment.  Pretty much deemed a failure by the author, I come to the defense of Beatty in that if he is a failure, he is a failure who kept on trying, and how many of us would love to fail as well as he has!  Funny how so very many people undoubtedly heard of the difficulties of working with him but kept signing on.  OK, I know everyone is desperate to make a living, but still.  Beatty has managed to hire a great number of talent people in his years as a film maker.
Biskind also suppose that it's Beatty's reputation as a sex symbol and seducer that makes him famous. He implies the star only married and had children after becoming a washed up old man.  In a ridiculous attempt to compare Beatty's career accomplishments, he brings up Clint Eastwood!  Excuse me but are we comparing road warrior movies that include a pet chimp with the Russian Revolution?!


And so this book reminds me that a friend always sees the best in you and an enemy always sees the worst.  As a writer involved in memoir or biography, aim for the truth, but keep mean spirited analysis and bullshit psychobabble out of it. 


Enough said.


C 2018  All Rights Reserved   Christine Trzyna.

MRI PROVES READERS EXPERIENCE WHAT THEY'RE READING

SALON : RISE OF SOCIAL READER - GOODBY VIRGINIA WOOLF'S SOLITARY

EXCERPT:

Virginia Woolf, writing to her pal Ethel Smyth, noted that “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” Hers was a 20th-century vision of a reader — someone who gets lost in books, someone whose identity is subsumed by the identity of another mind, a narrator. She’s describing a metaphoric experience: the reader becomes someone else.

York University psychologist Raymond Mar has done the MRI scans to back her up. We now know that when we’re reading novels, our brains light up as though we were experiencing the same things the hero experiences. When we read, we rehearse the lives of others. We are, in other words, exercising our empathy.

But Woolf’s ideal reader, who disappears as she reads and tries on alternate identities, is now under siege. Our stories are going social and, as new platform technologies remake the reading experience into something increasingly interactive, we now must ask what we’re giving up in the bargain.

THE SLOW SLOW SLOW CLIFFHANGER

THE ATLANTIC - WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF A CLIFF HANGER

EXCERPT : What’s the opposite of a cliffhanger? Tension, suspense, mysteries presented and then left deliciously unsolved—this is all the longstanding stuff of televised dramas, ported over from serialized novels and soap operas to guide the plots of shows that have their own literary aspirations. Cliffhangers themselves (the term arose from Thomas Hardy and his preference for unsubtle plot twists) are time-honored narrative devices, and when executed well they have proven extremely effective at sustaining audience interest and attention and frustration. Dickens used cliffhangers. So did Dallas. So have many, many shows, of the past both distant and recent. 

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

page 108-109

Wash out, then, the "land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers" : all these are here, but not with the lush, verdant fragrance that you have probably imagined.  A celebrated movie comedian is credited with the remark that "the flowers don't smell and the women do," but in my observation nothing smells.  Wash out the girl with the red cheeks peeping coyly from behind a spray of orange leaves.  The girl is here, but the dry air has taken the red out of her cheeks; the orange trees are here, but they don't look that way: the whole picture has too much pep, life, and moisture in it....

Wash out the palm trees, half visible beyond the tap dancing platform.  Palm trees are here, but they are all phonies, planted by people amused with the notion of a sub-tropical climate, and they are so out of harmony with their surroundings that they hardly - notice.  Wash out the movie palazzos, so impressive in the photographs. They are here, too, at any rate in a place called Beverly Hills, not far from Hollywood; but they are like the palm trees, so implausible in their surroundings that they take on the lifelessness of movie wets.  Above all, washout the cool green that seems to be the main feature of all illustrations got out by railroads.  Wash that out and keep it out."

Page 112)  Here Cain tries to come up with the positives

First, I would list the unfailing friendliness and courtesy of the people.  It is a friendliness somewhat different from what you find elsewhere, for it does not as a rule include hospitality.  The man who will take all sorts of trouble to direct you to some place you are trying to find does not ordinarily invite you into his house; it is not that he has any reason for keeping you out, it is merely that it does not occur to him to do it.

Hospitality, I think, comes when people have sent down roots it goes with pride in a home, pride in ancestors that built the home, conscious identification with a particular soil.  These people, in one way or another, are all exiles.  They have come here recently, and their hearts are really into the places that they left.  Thus, if they do not do as much visiting with each other as you see in other parts of the country, or the gossiping that goes with visiting, they do have the quick friendliness that exiles commonly show, and I must say it is most agreeable...

With the friendliness and courtesy, I would bracket the excellent English that is spoke her.  The Easterner, when he first hears it, is likely to mistake it for the glib chatter of a habitual salesmanship....


Writing Los Angeles

A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

MUSES ON THE GROUND IN SANTA CRUZ

MUSES ON THE GROUND IN SANTA CRUZ

One day I just got up in the fogpit and drove to the smogpit.
One world and another linked by fast highway.
Sometimes your other world is across the street and doesn't require drastic measures like mileage or time zones, but what did I know?
Walk in closets and toilets in parks were called "alternative housing."
I had to get out of there.

From somewhere high up, the clouds, or maybe the sea cliff, I left an imprint first.
I dragged my heart through the ocean waves before I left, dangling it in a bag made of net, that also held semi precious stones, letting the salt water do its work.

I left muses on the ground in Santa Cruz.
Some made me do what I wanted.
Some made me do what I didn't.
Some just left me terribly confused.

And I heard this song coming in from somewhere, in my head, Bob Dylan's Girl From North Country, so I went out and bought the album it was on so I could hear it again and wonder
who I left behind, who loved me. That and Alanis Morrisette's Ironic.

There were muses on the shelves of the libraries.
There were muses in binders left in coffee houses.
There was a muse who came up to me and pronounced my surname properly.

I had to hide my signature.
I went from handwriting to penmanship.


C 2018-2015  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Reserved

FAKE NEWS IS REAL

Even with an open mind, listening and watching YouTube videos, you know that many of them are not NEWS but conspiracy inspired opinion pieces and there are a lot of people out there who have no way of knowing that.  Especially when the "NEWS" is speculation, and has been proven to be so, these videos are time wasters.

But on a more personal level, anyone who has been slayed by gossip whores knows there is such a thing as FAKE NEWS.

ENOUGH ABOUT

ME!

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

1) Roses with no scent.
2) Roses that smell like roach killer.
3) Roses that were bred not to have thorns.
4) Sinus medication that smells like roses.

PAUL MC CARTNEY's SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY and THE RINGO SHOW AT THE GRAMMY MUSEUM

Just watched the video of the recent Late Late Show with James Cordon, in which Paul McCartney makes the rounds with him singing songs.  So they were in Liverpool and what got to me - during the near half hour video - was when they returned to the house Paul grew up in, where he composed his first songs and had John Lennon over.  Such a little row house, with the sink his dad hand-washed undies in, and the bathroom as the best acoustics in the place. Clearly the house Paul grew up in is something of a local tourist spot since there are early Beatles photos on the walls and so on. Paul said he had NEVER been back there since the early days. That surprised me.  So I had to wonder if he went home and then processed it. I also found it interesting that his mother, who died of breast cancer when he was about 16, had come to him in a dream, saying "Let It Be!"

As you may know if you've read this blog from the beginning, Paul McCartney makes occasional appearances in my dreams, and usually he is cheerfully on the move.  When he shows up in my dreams I take him to be the spirit of creativity.

But last year - wish I'd written down the date - I had an entirely different Paul McCartney dream.  He was sitting on a chair, not in movement.  Yes he had his left handed guitar in his lap but he wasn't playing it. I sat down across from him. And when I briefly touched the top of his left his hand with my right, he allowed this. Our eyes also fully met.  And Paul looked like the aging man he is.  So maybe this had something to do with continuing to create even as one ages.

Watching the video this morning, I was thinking about the Grammy Museum, one of my favorite spots, and the Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey) Show.  Sadly, I missed the previous George show and John show.  On display was a black and white TV set that looked like it was from the very early 1960's and through some video magic, Beatles performances were being played on it continuously.  I found myself smiling, but then everyone standing around me, and all through the exhibit was smiling.  The vibe was just tremendously positive and happy.  I must know the lyrics to most of the Beatles's songs, and listened to all of them hundreds of times, yet I have no attraction to a local Beatles Songs radio show or going to see the reenactment groups that tour.

I didn't grow up with the Beatles, but then I did, simply because I had older female cousins who were into them who lead the way. And then in high school I had a friend who got an allowance and did some extreme "baby-sitting" (child-care) who had almost the entire Beatles collection, plus a hot robin's egg blue bedroom that was full of Beatle's posters.  So we'd sit and listen to these albums together.  Yet, all these songs were already Oldies.

She moved away and one day when she came back to visit, she handed me ALL her Beatles Albums and I still have them, though I have not had a stereo system to play them on in as many years. Sometimes I think I'm going to sell them.  Sometimes I think I'm going to surprise her and ship them back to her.

In a sense I was too young or too old for the Beatles.  In the question about who I idolize, I said I had stopped having idols after my teenage years, so no one.  And this is true.  Though Paul McCartney has been showing up in my dreams since I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, and in the fifth grade I made the claim that he was my boyfriend (!), my friend and I used to sit up in her tree house and go through magazines she bought, such as Creem, and try to decide who was the cutest of any number of Beatlesque mop tops.  I'm now savvy enough to know how well I was marketed to!

C 2018 Christine Trzyna  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

IN BOUQUETS I LOVE

Peonies, Hyacinths,Tulips - but not in the same bouquet.

I hate Bird of Paradise, any kind of Lily.

JERUSALEM : DAN BERN

I was reading some commentary on this song.  Basically, I think people are assuming that this is a love song and that Dan, the singer, is first singing to a woman who wants more of him than he is willing to give.
My interpretation is that, it is the Messiah (be that God or Dan as God) who is singing to YOU.  Don't test my love because maybe I don't love you all that much.

FAVORITE BACKGROUND MUSIC

Jazz from the early 1960's and back.  Louis Armstrong.  Mickey Hart's Planet Drum.  Played low - just a hint - no lyrics.