The Holographic Discourse

Pretty Lady does too have female friends!

It is something, probably, about the sheer fun of an inherently non-competative artist to communicate with.

This is exactly it, dear Boysmom, and Pretty Lady cannot understand why so many people cannot conceive of this particular notion of Fun. For it seems as though the very notion of Conversation as Fun and Art is unknown to most individuals in Modern Society.

Pretty Lady, of course, blames television. This has been her view ever since the day she endured an interminable brunch with a person who subjected her to serial re-enactments of daytime sci-fi TV shows from the seventies, and punctuated her performance with the extraordinary statement, "But why don't YOU contribute to the conversation?"

HELLO???!!!

Pretty Lady fears it is time to get back to the basics.

1) A conversation is not a performance, a monologue, or even an equal-time monologue swap.

2) Neither is a conversation a debate. Conversations do not have Winners and Losers. In fact, the essence of conversation is Win-Win, no matter how banal that phrase has become.

3) Neither is a conversation a mutual commiseration, whine- and blame-fest, with the conversees united in their disgust with the vile Powers that Be.

None of this will seem strange to Pretty Lady's friends, of course, but the sad fact is that Pretty Lady's friends are a rare and elite set of people, much as she strives for Universal Popularity. Because when these three verbal-interaction options are removed from the table, the overwhelming majority of Modern Folk seem to have nothing whatsoever to say.

In fact, most of them blow a mental gasket when Pretty Lady attempts a genuine conversation. Practioners of Non-Conversation Technique #1 are practically impossible to derail. They continue spouting inane jokes with an increasingly desperate gleam in their eye, and when Pretty Lady presents them with a direct question of a personal nature, such as "How have you been?" they issue some sort of meaningless wisecrack and scuttle away. It never, never, never occurs to these people to ask how Pretty Lady has been; she assumes that the subject of personal well-being terrifies them into complete mental paralysis. Such are the tragic results of being left at home during all of childhood with only a television for company.

Aficionados of Non-Conversation Technique #2 are mildly more interesting, but their company is ultimately brutal and nonconstructive. They are continually attempting to construct 'positions,' even entire 'identities,' not only for themselves, but for anyone else they find themselves exchanging words with. Their aim is to force their fellows into untenable 'positions' and inferior 'identities,' in order to demonstrate the untenability and inferiority of same, and thus establish themselves as both stable and superior.

Which is most tedious.

Pretty Lady needs not elaborate upon her feelings toward practitioners of NCT #3, as her views on Whining are extremely well-known, except to state that whenever she has confronted a career Whiner with their basic insupportability as a companion, said Whiner has been utterly, physically incapable of comprehending her statement. These people simply equate ritualistic complaint with Intimate Connection, and have never imagined anything else beyond it.

So, then, what IS beyond it?

Darlings, darlings all, EVERYTHING. Everything is beyond these three things; these NCTs are the prime obstacles to all the joy in the universe!

A genuine conversation is like a painting, a dance, and a hike up to the castle on the hill, all at the same time. It probes, it explores, it builds, it wanders. It experiments, tests, accepts, rejects. It speculates; it imagines; it reveals. It uncovers infinite reasons for allowing peace into one's soul. It is formed thusly by the meeting of minds which are both unique and perfect, it is the harmonious interference pattern which creates the hologram of the Universe.

One engages in such a joyful activity by 1) asking questions; 2) listening to the responses; 3) propounding notions; 4) allowing the other person to add, subtract, multiply or divide these notions as they see fit, depending upon their unique perspectives and experience. It is vital that no party be fixated on a particular outcome, i.e. convincing the other person of the rightness and unassailability of his or her position.

It is, of course, possible to arrive at desirable outcomes, such as solutions to problems, inner harmony, and Integrated Theories of Everything, via this process. The only requirements are that all parties involved be fully present, fully truthful, and fully willing to pay attention.

Retro theatre

It is perhaps ironically appropriate that Pretty Lady should find herself becoming good friends with a person who gets people to pay money to be sermonized in a cemetary.

On May 12, the ninth chapter of Melville’s “Moby-Dick” comes to life in the graveyard’s chapel with a performance of “Moby-Dick: The Sermon.” The interactive drama, in the last two performances of its nine-month run, is a joint effort by a new theater group, the Nimrods, and the Brooklyn Lyceum, the experimental Park Slope performance space.

“The chapel is not used as a location to sit to watch the action that happens on a stage — there is no stage,” Director Joe Rosato told GO Brooklyn. “The action happens around [the audience] as they enter the cemetery gates.” Upon entering the gates on Fifth Avenue, audience members are met by a lantern-wielding guide who will lead them through the dark to the cemetery’s chapel.

Once inside the chapel, the audience will get into the spirit by singing hymns before Father Mapple (pictured at right), played by various actors, takes the pulpit to spew his fire and brimstone: an ultra-dramatic take on the Old Testament’s story of Jonah.

What chiefly struck Pretty Lady, as she sat in the icy pews of a Gothic chapel, being hectored by a madman with Daddy-issues, is how much Rigor of Conscience has fallen by the wayside, in this latter century. We do not sit shivering in pews as a matter of Daily Penance, but as a sort of esoteric and slightly masochistic thrill.

Pretty Lady Heart Banksy

But not inordinately, you understand. The gentleman mainly seems possessed of a sense of humor coupled with a modicum of common sense; unfortunately, these qualities are passing rare in the world which calls itself 'art.'

I asked Unangst what more he could tell me about Banksy, and he replied, “The only thing I can say is he’s like everybody, but he’s like nobody.” And so began the koan of Banksy, whose own talents as an aphorist—“Never paint graffiti in a town where they still point at aeroplanes”; “Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet”—seem to inspire all who cross his path. Banksy has convinced nearly everyone who has ever met him that promulgating his image would amount to an unconscionable act of soul robbery.

“Banksy is a genius and a madman,” Unangst continued.

“He’s a guy from Bristol,” someone who knows him told me later.

“I’m not obliged to say more than I’m obliged to,” another loyalist said.

...

“I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days...“I don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, ‘If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.’ ”--Banksy

What does Pretty Lady think of Mr. Banksy's art? Well, it is cute, and there is a lot of it. But his invisibility does not interest her one jot, as every graffiti artist she has ever known has been equally invisible. The New Yorker culture editor needs to get with it.

Looky, Looky!

Pretty Lady is Beside Herself. k just Priority Mailed her a box of real live Florida mangoes. Pretty Lady is sticky, happy and a little buzzed. She wonders if certain types of mangoes might have a slightly psychotropic effect, when consumed exuberantly, after a mango-free five years in Brooklyn.

As a tribute, both to the generosity of this gift and to the temperament of k, Pretty Lady decided to photograph the mangoes (before consumption) on her humble Fire Escape.


You see that the mangoes, center, far eclipse the cluttered pots of baby gladioli, baby poppies, baby morning glories, and baby sweet peas.

Only Pretty Lady could really care about such babies. But since she has known them since they were little dry seeds in envelopes, she is infatuated with them, and has spent a lot of time on the fire escape recently, checking on them.


In the course of checking on her babies, it has been borne in upon Pretty Lady that the view from her fire escape is, perhaps not spectacular, but somewhat out of the common way. First, there is a church steeple directly ahead, backed by a glimpse of the Verrazano Bridge.


Farther along, beyond the freeway, one can glimpse the East River leading into the Gowanus Canal, various factories, interesting shipping contraptions that resemble things from Star Wars (Spielberg was a notorious ripper-off of shipyards), and the occasional tanker or cruise ship, passing to and fro. On less-hazy days, that big arched bridge leading somewhere heinous like New Jersey can be viewed in the background.

All the way to the right, there is a most interesting ancient grain factory, and a billboard above it which sports incendiary and non-permissional slogans, on occasion.


This may not seem like anything special, but when a person is sitting on her fire escape, sipping a brew and contemplating her babies, it is rather Nifty. Particularly on evenings when the sun is setting all pink and gold over the water, and the Queen Mary wanders by, and the factories exude steam, and the occasional excited emergency vehicle flashes past on the freeway. It makes one feel as though Life is Happening.

Pretty Lady Is Irate

James Lileks, shocking as it may seem, needs your help.

My column will end a week from this Friday. (There’s a series of pieces I can’t wait to write.) After that, it's just-the-facts-ma'am - and I'll no longer be telecommuting, either. This means I will start burning my share of hydrocarbons like a good American. Hell, I may leave the vehicle running all day outside the building just to make up for lost time. Maybe I will put a green roof on the car to balance things out. Some turf, some switchgrass. It's murder on the paint but we all must do our part.

Would it matter if you contacted the paper? It very well might. Here's the reader's rep's page.

My dear Star Tribune Reader Representative, whoever you may be:

I shall be brief. What on earth does the Star Tribune think it is doing, canning James Lileks? Are you all fools? Do you not understand that the columns of James Lileks are the one thing that may, possibly, in the misty reaches of time, earn the Star Tribune a place in the History of Journalism? That the rest of your paper is worthless, foolish, forgettable garbage in comparison with James Lileks' mastery of the wry, rambling, sardonic, neurotic, self-referential English Language?

And you would THROW THIS AWAY? Throw this away in favor of forcing this quixotic genius of a man to churn out bland, factual, banal journalistic prose like the rest of your Star Tribune drudges?

Let me tell you something. James Lileks will transcend this insane sabotage on the part of envious and shortsighted editors, oh yes, he will. It is not James Lileks I am worried about. It is you, and your karma, and your immortal soul. You are besmirching your characters to an extreme degree, by attempting to smother the incandescent glow of James Lilek's genius.

A word to the wise.

Seriously annoyed,

the Lady

The Myth of Frailty

Bobert labors under yet another misapprehension about Pretty Ladies:

Unless you are a lot stronger and bigger than your photo indicates, you're talking about raking gravel around.

Ever try to move--much less lift--a cubic foot of solid stone?

Bobert, Bobert, Bobert.

Pretty Lady has memories of the days when she was young and frail; in the sandbox days of art school, the days wherein she amused herself by picking up cubic feet of solid stone at a little-known marble shop in Oakland, transporting them to the yard outside the sculpture studio, and whacking away at them with mallet and chisels, cheerfully if inexpertly, stopping every now and then to contemplate the view of sunny Alcatraz.

The resultant sculptures made good doorstops, as early sculptures are wont to do. Such are the atrocities a youthful idealist inevitably perpetrates, in service to the Creative Process.

As Pretty Lady has mentioned, however, those were her days of demure, flowerlike Youth. Having subjected herself to twelve years of classical ballet training, at an academy whose main aesthetic influence was that of Balanchine, she had not yet achieved maximal upper-body development. George Balanchine was an odd fellow; he liked for his dancers to exude the illusion of sylphlike ethereality, even as they performed superhuman feats of athleticism with legs and feet. Thus, the formation of visible biceps was Frowned Upon. Fellow dancers would exchange secrets for rendering their bodies above the waist ever more skeletal, while maintaining the illusion of femininity onstage, with artificially painted cleavage-lines on their sunken chests.

Horrifying, indeed.

But those days are far, far in the past. For nearly a decade, Pretty Lady has been earning her living, quite literally, manually. She carries large, heavy, cumbersome objects cheerfully up and down three flights of stairs. She instructs people to undress, then pounds them into jelly. She has been known to cause career bodybuilders to whimper, and request that she lighten up a bit.

(To be fair, this is at least as much about Leverage as it is about Strength; also, it seems that it is always the strapping muscular dudes who have the lowest pain thresholds. The petite Filipina ladies eternally instruct her to 'bring it on, harder!')

To be certain, Pretty Lady herself has not completely adjusted to the notion of Self as Amazon; she is frequently amazed when she catches a glimpse of herself emerging from the shower, pectorals rippling. For she has never particularly focussed upon strength training as an aesthetic end in itself; it merely happened, as she went about this fascinating business of living.

For it seems to Pretty Lady that whatever a person's mind requires, the body will eventually deliver, within rational limits. If the mind is enthralled by the notion of marble caryatids, the biceps will come. She imagines that this is equally true with cobblestone pathways. A person only has to manipulate a single cobblestone at a time; what is so all-fired difficult about that?

Lady, with Power Saw

Speaking of Problem-Solving

There are three things that Democratic political candidates tend to do when talking with constituents: they display an impressive grasp of the minutiae of their constituents’ problems, particularly money problems; they rouse indignation by explaining how those problems are caused by powerful groups getting rich on the backs of ordinary people; and they present well-worked-out policy proposals that, if passed, would solve the problems and put the powerful groups in their place. Obama seldom does any of these things. He tends to underplay his knowledge, acting less informed than he is. He rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in the passive voice, as things that are amiss with us rather than as wrongs that have been perpetrated by them. And the solutions he offers generally sound small and local rather than deep-reaching and systemic.

...

Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back.

It has always seemed to Pretty Lady that the fundamental problem of politics is, well, politics. That is, the pitting of one side against another in an illusory dichotomy which requires that somebody lose in order for somebody else to win, regardless of the fact that everyone's perspectives contain both flaws and merit. It is this illusory dichotomy which leads to oversimplication of issues, distortions, outright lies, and vulgar rants of every flavor.

If, as the surgeon's experience suggests, the solutions to any problem are inherent in the problem, it seems to Pretty Lady that the best way to solve these problems is to calm down, ask questions, and listen to the answers. No matter whether the people answering the questions are Democrats, Republicans, or fringe-element nutcases. Propounding Forceful Solutions before a person has done this would then seem to be counterproductive; wholesale name-calling, even more so.

Caveat Emptor -or- How Not To Buy a House

3,500 Lbs. of Bat Guano Found in Attic

BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. — An upstate New York couple didn't think a few bats in the attic were much of a problem when they were buying a house last summer.

Months later, they found out how wrong they were when they discovered more than a ton and a half of bat droppings up there.

Nick LaBoda and Jenna Caputo say a home inspector informed them about the bats. They called an exterminator, who told them to wait a while before removing the bats because the babies were too young to fly.

Then they forgot about the bats until they smelled a foul odor in January. When they checked the attic, they found dead bats and piles of guano.

An exterminator says hundreds of bats had been living in the attic, leaving behind 3,500 pounds of droppings.

It cost $25,000 to clean up the mess, and the couple's insurance company wouldn't cover it. They're fighting it out in court.

Pretty Lady has no sympathy for these people at all. Because:

1) Who would buy a house without even glancing into the attic? Attics are Extremely Important! Pretty Lady herself would make a point of visiting the attic on her very first perusal of a potential homestead! Attics could contain trunks full of antique dresses, or Private Archives, or Chippendale furniture, or swords, or skeletons, or first editions, or hundreds of bats!

2) If the attic was large enough to sustain 3,500 lbs of bat guano without collapsing the ceiling, these people's incuriosity as to the contents of said attic was even more inexcusable. Such pedestrian minds do not DESERVE any attic at all, bats or no.

3) Who in their right minds would pay anyone $25,000 to remove bat guano from their attic? That, by Pretty Lady's calculations, is seven dollars a pound! For that kind of cash, Pretty Lady would have no trouble spending a couple of weeks with a shovel and a case of heavy-duty garbage bags.

4) Did these people not even think to contact a fertilizer company, or several, and auction off their guano to the highest bidder? Pretty Lady is willing to bet that whoever cleared it out is making more than a pretty penny on the transaction.

5) If these people knew they had bats in their attic, why did they not gather every evening at sunset, with a couple of lawn chairs and some beer, and watch the bats come out, first in ones and twos, in corkscrew flight configurations, then in a massive, eerie and awesome cloud? Pretty Lady has traveled to more than one exotic location and paid good money to do this.

In conclusion: These people are stupid and boring, and deserve whatever trouble comes to them.

Platitude Peddlers

A dear friend of Pretty Lady's once recommended to her that she obtain Paolo Coelho's 'The Alchemist' as literary fare for a long plane journey. Pretty Lady is still vaguely irritated. Not only was the text in question ridiculously inadequate to occupy her even halfway to Charles de Gaulle, the storyline was suspiciously familiar. It took a mildly exasperated New Yorker profiler to jog her memory; it was based on a story from 'A Thousand and One Nights,' which Pretty Lady first read at the age of six or seven. No wonder it seemed a bit clichéd.

Pretty Lady cannot really begrudge Mr. Coehlo his overwhelming Popular Success. He seems harmless enough. She is merely mildly disheartened, at the incontrovertible evidence that the vast majority of human minds are shallow, plebian, unimaginative, unoriginal, and not only satisfied with such pablum, but actually uplifted by it. The fact that these people are easily manipulated comes second, in her selfish opinion, to the fact that they are staggeringly boring conversationalists.

Well, there you go

More proof that in a degraded society, bad manners will land you in prison:

I had never before been in a prison of any kind, for any reason, let alone such a filthy, decrepit, Victorian heap of stone and sadism as the Scrubs. That I found myself there at all may be put down to a collision of intractable forces -- first, my own loudmouth pigheadedness, which has landed me in trouble before; second, a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant; and, third, the heightened tension now common to air travel, thanks to real and imagined threats to public safety resulting from the worldwide "war on terror."

...

My sins, in brief: When the cabin crew refused to radio JFK to see if I'd left my laptop at the gate and also declined to move me to another seat, "an altercation ensued" -- not physical, but verbal, with the flight attendants becoming snootier by the minute and me becoming, well, let's say, more American. I behaved badly in-flight, yelling at the crew, "I am an American citizen! You are our lapdog ally!" and other remarks of a vulgar and unhelpful nature. Very vulgar, I'm afraid: At one point I called that tired stewardess the worst thing you can call a woman -- you all know what it is -- but by then I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do.

Pretty Lady finds it oddly poetic, if not exactly comforting, that calling a British stewardess the c-word will land a person in a Deep Dark Dungeon for an indefinite period of time.

The Psychodynamics of Polarity

MikeT swings the wrong way:

I'm not sure if some of these feminists are actually people sometimes. They often come across as MIT-designed artificial intelligences because of their ability to craft superbly hypocritical content. No normal human can deplore something in others, see it in themselves, and then celebrate it when they're doing it the way they're doing it!

Mike, Mike, Mike. Such behavior is anything but artificial. It is deeply, deeply human.

You see, Mikey-poo, 'these feminists' that you are referencing are certainly people. The sad and unfortunate proof of this fact is that they are damaged people.

Pretty Lady has often noticed that the Most Radical members of any given social, political or religious movement are the most highly likely to be reeking of Unresolved Trauma. In throwing themselves into Activism, they are pursuing the time-honored tradition of 'making lemonade from lemons,' 'learning from the past,' and 'making sure that that Horrible Thing Does Not Happen To Anyone Else.' As such, Pretty Lady has nothing but compassion for them.

The fact that they often go much, much Too Far in their endeavors, get hold of the wrong end of the stick, or attempt to make an apple into an orange by making the Personal into the Political is, sadly, par for the course.

Once a person realizes how often this sort of thing is true, it tends to decrease her will for engaging in Matters Political at all, at all. Because a problem cannot be solved on a level other than at its source. If the problem is, indeed, Personal Damage, a Political Solution will not be forthcoming, and any attempt to argue politics with a damaged person is doomed to failure and frustration.

As a tangential, but perhaps relevant, matter, Pretty Lady read a splendid essay while standing in a bookstore this weekend, about problem-solving in backwards villages and in hospitals. It seems that whenever there is a problem with an obvious solution, that solution can never be effectively implemented by outsiders coming in and imposing it. For example, all efforts by well-meaning Westerners to march into Africa and tell them to curb the AIDS problem by using condoms have been abysmal failures; all attempt to curb the spread of disease in hospitals by urging doctors to wash their hands, similarly so.

However, if an outsider goes into a hospital, assembles the healthcare workers, and asks them, "How would you suggest we make it easier for you to wash your hands between every patient?" reams of Excellent Solutions pour forth, and are implemented.

The trick is, once these solutions are found, to go into the next hospital and ask the same question. Simply attempting to implement the successful solutions will not work.

So, MikeT and friends, the next time you hear someone declaiming thus irrationally and hypocritically, Pretty Lady suggests that before you confront them with their blatant hypocrisy, that you first STOP. Stop and ask them, "What's this about? What's the problem? What happened?"

Solutions may not be found, but you, MikeT, may learn something.

UPDATE: The book was called 'Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance' by Atul Gawande. It was good enough to read standing up, but was not yet out in paperback, so Pretty Lady didn't buy it.

The Female Gaze

Pretty Lady has commented before, in passing, on her impatience with those pusillanimous, victim-type females who quail, rant and whine about the objectifying and aggressive qualities of the Male Gaze. It is her firm opinion that those who are reduced to impotent fury by a mere rude gesture on the part of another are beyond any reasonable assistance, whatever Draconian Legislation or re-vamping of Societal Mores might take place as a result of their activities.

And seeing as how she has been on an Old Movie binge of late, she is delighted to discover that Anthony Lane agrees with her.

Film theory has dwelled, with justice, on what is called the objectifying male gaze—that is, the power of the camera to ogle and depersonalize, and to encourage the viewer to follow suit—without always remembering that, at Hollywood’s height, there were plenty of people who could take that gaze like a punch and throw it right back. Stanwyck, by her own account, had practiced the response long before she stared into a lens: she recalled meeting the playwright Willard Mack in New York and regarding him “with impudent assurance, just to keep from turning around and running away.” Master your own fear, in other words, and you end up frightening others.

Pretty Lady is no Barbara Stanwyck, to be sure. But she rather doubts she will ever again be seriously intimidated by Latino construction workers, Italian limosine drivers, or knots of callow adolescents who are inclined to express their appreciation of her person by hissing, whistling, or using coarse epithets. For she has never once experienced any negative consequences from the simple act of nodding courteously at her admirer and walking on; occasionally she will even bestow a smile or a wave on the fellow, which is deeply appreciated.

You see, ladies, it is paramount to understand that a vulgar male who behaves this way is not serious in his attentions toward yourself. It is, simply, Not About You, except in the most tangential way. He is attempting to prove his masculinity to his peers, express himself as a True Male in the world at large, and giving tongue to his inarticulable feelings about the female in general.

It is then entirely your choice as to how to receive this chance attention in passing. You may choose to rail against nature, biology, and the vagaries of social class; you may choose to engage on a social, political and emotional level with these immutable forces. You may get All Worked Up, and have your day ruined.

Or you could think, "Yes, that's right, I am the most gorgeous thing you've seen today," and leave it at that. Because in Pretty Lady's experience, it is statistically improbable that the vulgar fellow, thus encouraged, will chase you down and assault you. In fact, he is much more likely to be intimidated.

Ingredients of Evil

Regardless of its illustration of obvious fact that if a person possesses a hammer, the whole world begins to resemble a sticky-outy nail, Pretty Lady quite liked Cintra's article:

Malignant narcissists seek a "narcissistic load" -- their drug of choice -- which is ATTENTION. Positive attention and negative attention are one and the same -- attention is attention. People suffering from this disorder tend to blame others for their difficulties, fly into a "narcissistic rages," and seek revenge as their due. Attention is the drug, the victory, the raison d'etre -- the narcissist simply needs to be the center of attention, and will get his fix by any means necessary.

Cho's successful domination of the news cycles condones, justifies and rewards his behavior... and encourages it in others who suffer from this affliction. Infamy is the same thing as Fame, for the malignant narcissist.

She wonders, though; is it genuinely, thoroughly true that an essential component of Evil (and Pretty Lady will not entertain the notion that Evil is merely a semantic construct, and is prepared to pulverize those foolish individuals who seriously propound it) is a need for Notoriety? Are those evil people not equally dangerous who hide in the shadows, fearing and loathing the light beyond all else?

She must think on it.

Receiving Clues

Pretty Lady had an Annoying Client Encounter this weekend. This person had the temerity to call her on a glorious Sunday morning and peremptorily demand an appointment within the hour.

"You must book in advance," Pretty Lady replied. More than one hour in advance, she explained. Pretty Lady is Flexible and Accomodating, but not so accomodating as that, particularly for persons with whom she has had no prior connection.

After much whining and confused logistics on the side of her potential client, and much soothing pragmatism upon the part of Pretty Lady, an appointment in two hours was agreed upon.

Pretty Lady hustled; at the time appointed, the doorbell did not ring.

Shortly thereafter, Pretty Lady plugged in her cell phone, and discovered that for reasons unknown, the client had called her Other Number and left a message requesting the selfsame directional information with which she had already been explicitly provided.

Pretty Lady returned the call and re-stated the information. The client declared, "I don't have time now."

Pretty Lady blew a gasket.

Normally she doesn't do that. She understands, normally, that people in pain become confused, and do foolish things. She is generally patient, understanding, accomodating, flexible, and only occasionally stern and unyielding. Moreover, blowing up at even potential, flaky and needlessly whiny clients is bad for business; she is nothing, generally, if not practical.

So after hanging up on the never-again client, she did what she should have done first, which was to call the friend with whom she had been feuding and make it up. Because she knows, and has always known, that when a person blows a gasket, it is never about the Situation At Hand. It is about the Past. The Past is, definitively, Over. And she is happy to declare that the Present is lovely.

In Search of Equality

Pretty Lady cannot, for the life of her, understand why all these forward-thinking women are so upset with a gentleman for simply making his boundaries known:

When my wife found out she was pregnant, which was an accident, her instant reaction was that she wanted an abortion. There we were in the bathroom with the home pregnancy test kit in hand reading positive for pregnancy and she gets all histerical, crying and raving on and on about how her life is now ruined and how she can’t go through with being pregnant, etc.. I told her it’s her choice, but if she kills my baby (has an abortion) that I would divorce her in a heartbeat and I would never speak to her again.

The ladies present all found this reaction to be horrendous, dreadful, and in violation of the woman's basic human rights, if Pretty Lady is reading them correctly.

Pretty Lady has only to ask herself, well, what if this situation were reversed? What if Pretty Lady found herself with child, and the other responsible party insisted that she dispose of it, because he was unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenthood?

Well, Pretty Lady's response would be precisely along the lines of the gentleman's words above, and she rather suspects that most of these Up In Arms women would feel the same way.

So, what is Pretty Lady to make of this? Sadly, it seems all too clear that there is a Double Standard still flourishing mightily, even among the vanguard of Female Progressivism.

The Path to Freedom

Pretty Lady, in her wild, untrammelled, Bohemian life, often meets fascinatingly Progressive Thinkers. Pretty Lady being who she is, is always charmed. There is nothing she likes better than a late-night conversation about oft-misunderstood doctrines of seventeenth-century philosophy, and the tragic results of these misinterpretations extrapolated into the present day. She can really get her teeth into a good discussion about the Problem of Evil, the glamorization of misanthropy, and the crumbling edifice that is Modern Society.

Pretty Lady's fundamental problem in forming long-term friendships with these sorts of people, however, stems most unfortunately from these same roots. A person who views the flaws in Modern Society with a clear and jaundiced eye is inclined to reject all of its conventions wholesale. And Pretty Lady is pretty darn tired of supervising serial attempts to reinvent the wheel from scratch.

Because a nearly universal hallmark of this sort of Progressive Thinker is a categorical rejection of the notion of Commitment. 'A Trap!' he naturally, progressively thinks, as soon as he shudderingly considers the hellish tangles woven by Family, Society and Culture; 'I shall avoid it, and then I shall be Free! Free to Improve the World, living by my own inner guidance and unfiltered notions of Right and Wrong!'

Oh yes, Pretty Lady has heard it dozens of times before. And she sighs, hangs her head, and continues upon her unwilling and solitary Bohemian path. For the only true entrapment is the pathological need to keep all of one's options eternally Open.

This notion is, to the Progressive Thinker, so counterintuitive as to be utterly unconsidered. But to Pretty Lady, having been a dancer, it is and always has been obvious.

For freedom is Movement; Movement is Change; and to move and to change, a person has to put one foot in front of the other. Then--and pay attention--a person has to commit her entire weight to that foot in front, in order to lift the foot in the back, and move it to another place. In other words, without commitment, no movement is possible.

Pretty Lady felt this fact most acutely during the years she was hobbling around with an injured ankle. It is very difficult to keep putting one foot in front of the other when one foot is not holding one's weight; progress is miserable and slow. During those days, Pretty Lady often thought of her unipedal condition as a metaphor, for being in relationship with a person who is permanently Undecided as to whether or not this thing is for him. Nothing could happen, nobody could go anywhere, because any new logistical situation required the re-negotiation of the entire affair.

This is not to say that a Free Thinker ought to commit her entire future on the basis of one late-night conversation, or even several. A true Progressive makes her commitments cautiously and carefully, after due consideration, plenty of time, and assembling of Facts. But then she must leap, she must spring, or she will never learn to Fly, which is the only reason anyone should ever take up dancing. A leap into the air requires trust, and a relinquishment of control. The commitment-phobic would-be Progressive never gets that far.

Furthermore, the fact of categorical commitment-avoidance does not mean that commitments are never made; it merely guarantees that such commitments are of the lesser-of-two-evils-at-gunpoint variety. For a refusal to decide is a decision in itself, and one that Pretty Lady inevitably will fly away from.

In Praise of the Maiden Auntie

Tsk, tsk. Little Voxy-poo is all Up In Arms again, about the disaster which is College Education for Feminist Non-Brood-Mares. It seems as though fully one-third of college educated women are failing to breed! The horror!

Or perhaps not. Sometimes it seems to Pretty Lady as though her anti-feminist friends have two parallel brains; the brain that sanctifies the female as the Nurturess Over All, and the one which allows that some women are Fiends Incarnate, who should have their fallopian tubes cauterized at birth.

Really, boys! How many psychotic, neurotic, frenetic, generally messed-up females have you have the priviledge of knowing, and do you really think that all of these women ought to be in charge of babies?

It has been Pretty Lady's unfortunate experience to have encountered a great number of messed-up persons of both genders, Pretty Lady being a magnet for that sort of thing. And the sober conclusion that she has come to, after knowing these sorry people in an intimate way over a long period of time, is that some people should not breed.

One of the most interesting things she has noticed in her ad-hoc psychoanalytic adventures is that the vast majority of persons who were permanently scarred by a Mommy from Hell had mommies with abnormally high IQs. Pretty Lady doesn't know whether female valedictorians are more likely to mess up their children, in an orgy of thwarted ambition, or whether they merely are able to do so in more flamboyant ways.

Be this as it may, it strikes Pretty Lady that providing college educations to all potential Fiends Incarnate is a grand filtering process for weeding out the psychos, and safely installing them in civil-service middle-management positions, where their sadism can find a relatively harmless outlet. Ultimately, this race of twisted pseudo-humans will die out, or morph into cool-ass Maiden Aunties, an archetype for which there is ample historical precedent.

Because in Pretty Lady's considered opinion, the way to save Western Civilization is not to produce more forcibly Western Civilized humans at all costs. It is to produce stable, well-adjusted humans, who are pleased with their lot in life because they voluntarily chose it, and wish to pass this well-adjusted bliss along to the next generation. Creating a generation of traumatized individuals who were unwillingly raised by Mommies who would much, much, much rather have been backpacking through Nepal does not serve this end.

The Structure of Discourse

Hmph. It seems that Pretty Lady's Troll Count is up to two! She is not certain What This Means--has she Arrived? Or has she merely Slipped? It is so difficult to tell.

Pretty Lady hates to stoop to mention that Imus person, particularly as, to her knowledge, she has never heard Imus doing whatever it is he used to do, before the recent Unpleasantness. But the issues with the Unpleasantness, she hears, have something to do with Freedom of Speech.

Pretty Lady is, of course, All For freedom of speech. She is a very firm believer that when a person possesses factual information to the material detriment of the Powers That Be, whatever powers they may be, one has a duty to coherently assemble this information and Speak Out. Her understanding is that the framers of our constitution believed likewise. The reasoning behind this freedom, so her recollections of high-school history class go, is that if the Powers That Be go down the wrong track, and start oppressing people or doing something else stupid, Freedom of Speech is one of those early-warning trip-switches that keep the whole shenanigan from going down the tubes.

As far as she knows, the framers of our Constitution did not think too much one way or the other about people's freedom to utter inane, untruthful vulgarities about complete strangers. They didn't have to. The rules for this sort of behavior were laid down in a parallel social code which has nothing to do with the Constitution; these rules are called 'Manners,' and Manners strictly declare that such behavior is Rude.

There are still, Pretty Lady understands, a contingent of persons who assert that Manners are trivial, unneccessary, and downright Oppressive. They feel that adhering to such an archaic and arbitrary code trammels their Creative Self-Expression; they feel that they are using their vulgar diatribes to some Higher Purpose, whatever that may be. They have a perfect right to feel this way.

However, Pretty Lady asks that such persons, before spewing their offensive trash, first make a coherent, rational, fact-based case for why they believe that such trash is providing a point of departure for constructive discourse. If their point is conceded by a majority of Pretty Lady's polite friends, they may proceed unhampered.

If, however, Pretty Lady and a quorum of her most trusted associates deem that such commentary is providing no direct, indirect, tangential, or purely diverting information regarding--well, regarding anything, this commentary will be excised from the record. Pretty Lady hates to be draconian, but she has to draw the line somewhere.

Because when Manners are discarded by the majority, eventually someone somewhere will become sufficiently offended to bring the State in. And then it is All Over. No Freedom of Speech, ever again. So, in supporting Manners, Pretty Lady believes that she is enhancing, rather than assaulting, the cause of Freedom.

Optimism Day

Darlings, Pretty Lady is terribly sorry to have neglected you. But at least she has been smiling at you. The truth is, she had so many things to say all at once, she found herself unable to say any of them. Also, she has been so engrossed in dear Cintra's book that she hasn't been getting enough sleep.

Perhaps this is the reason that, although she seems to see something with startling clarity, she cannot at all communicate right now.

"You just loved crucifying me. You loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul all the time...You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic, bored life you were extinguishing. ...Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and impaled upon a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life."

---that deranged young man

"The journey to the cross should be the last 'useless journey.' Do not dwell upon it, but dismiss it as accomplished. If you can accept it as your own last useless journey, you are also free to join my resurrection. Until you do so your life is indeed wasted. It merely re-enacts the separation, the loss of power, the futile attempts of the ego at reparation, and finally the crucifixion of the body, or death. Such repetitions are endless until they are voluntarily given up. Do not make the pathetic error of 'clinging to the old rugged cross.' The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross. Until then you are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose."

--A Course In Miracles

Sometimes it seems to Pretty Lady that the purpose and gift of the deranged is that they show us ourselves, in such caricature and clarity that we cannot look away or deny it. For this, on some level, and in some way, we may be grateful to them.

Bette Davis Overload

Pretty Lady has figured out that the chief benefit of her new hairdo is that it goes so well with her CarolAnn Wachter hat collection.


Sadly, if this phase continues, she's going to have to invest in another tube of Pompeii-colored lipstick. The old one has fossilized from lack of use.


Ah, well. Back to the twentieth century with thee, Bette, dear.


Update: How do y'all like this for a new profile photo?

Okay, that does it

Pretty Lady has formally capitulated to her Little Brother. She just sent him a note to this effect. Her mind is made up. It is High Time for her to purchase a firearm, and learn how to use one. Not necessarily in that order.

Pretty Lady's Little Brother has expressed some Quiet Concern about her safety, in the past; he even went so far, back in her San Francisco ghetto days, as to present her with a stun gun for her personal use. Her sadomasochistic then-boyfriend expressed some prurient interest in the possible erotic side-effects of the recreational use of this weapon, but did not go so far as to volunteer as a test case. She parked it on the molding above her bedroom door, and as far as she can recall, it is still there.

But as pacifistic and fundamentally uninterested in weapons as Pretty Lady may be, she has always trusted that her Little Brother, and others like him, were Around. It is still her instinct, whenever something pesky and mechanical requires attention, such as the starter on her car or the drainpipe under the sink, to drop her hands and call for Little Brother, even though he lives half a continent away. Similarly, she never worries overmuch about deranged lone gunmen bursting through her door and spraying bullets everywhere, because something in the back of her mind relies upon Little Brother to unclip the 9 mm. from under the dashboard or silverware drawer or kitchen table or wherever, and take the fellow out.

It is slowly beginning to dawn upon her reptile brain that not only does Little Brother live too far away to arrive in a timely manner, but when he got here he probably wouldn't be allowed to traverse the Holland Tunnel. Not with all those weapons in his trunk.

However, if Pretty Lady put her mind to it, she would probably be a fairly successful weapons-smuggler, simply because she's Not The Type. She can't imagine that it would occur to the most paranoid police officer to frisk her or her Pathfinder for contraband, after she rolls down the window and greets them with a cheery invitation to do so. At least, they have never done so in the past.

(Vehicle registration card and insurance, though--that's another matter. Pretty Lady hates paperwork.)

At breakfast this morning, Pretty Lady was mildly irritated by the sound of helicopters. After a bit, she glanced out of the kitchen window; several of these ominous machines, marked 'NYPD,' were hovering nearby, carooming back and forth over the canal. An experimental call to '311' produced nothing but a beeping noise. The radio continued providing perky little updates on the war in Iraq, and NYTimes Online supplied more reams of grainy video about the Virginia Tech Shooter. Queries regarding 'Helicopters Over Gowanus Canal--Breaking News' turned up a blank.

Let it be known that Pretty Lady is not becoming a Paranoid Right-Wing Freak who looks over her shoulder at every suspicious noise. She is not Cowering, she is not Terrified. She has simply decided that the sensible thing to do is to have a few more Practical Tools at her disposal. She's got the power drill (or rather, her neighbor has it, this week), the socket wrenches, the pliers, the iron and the vacuum cleaner--all, come to think, supplied by the A.A. in gentler days. A shotgun or two would not come amiss, perhaps rolled up in a failed canvas, or strapped over the studio door.

In other news, Pretty Lady volunteered for an ad that said 'Hair Models Needed,' and lucked out! She got the cucumbers-on-the-eyelids treatment, bergamot conditioner, and the Best Haircut Ever, for free! Of course she tipped. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Go read this

Now.

Wow

Pretty Lady and Dano struck gold yesterday evening. They highly, highly recommend that you all visit Edmar Castaneda's website and listen, although the experience will necessarily be dimmer and less all-enthralling than sitting in the back room at Barbés and hearing him play a live WFUV broadcast. He does not precisely play; he dances, joyfully, with his Columbian harp. Pretty Lady has never seen a roomful of slightly intoxicated alternative-radio fans hunker down in quite such a hypnotized fashion.

UPDATE: OOP! It was WFMU radio. Where Pretty Lady came up with WFUV, she doesn't know...hmph...

On Integrity

Pretty Lady is delighted to discover that her Daddy has a fan club! A fan club, moreover, not dominated by aficionados of state-of-the-art fighter planes!

So, to wash a little more Angry Atheist venom out from between her molars, Pretty Lady would like to indulge in a bit of instructive Daddy-worship, if it's all the same to you.

The legend in Pretty Lady's family goes back to her Great-Granddaddy, Pops. Pops owned a hardware store, out in the middle of nowhere. Folks would come into this hardware store, stating their interest in purchasing a new stove.

"What's wrong with the old one?" Pops would inquire.

"Dunno, it just stopped working."

"Have you tried changing the whosamajiggy?" Pops replied.

"Nope, can't say that I have," said the customer.

"Look, I'll make a deal with you. Take this little whosamajiggy, put it in the old stove, and see if that takes care of the problem. If it doesn't, then I'll sell you a new stove."

Well, dad gum if that didn't take care of it.

Perhaps you dears may wonder how Pops stayed in business at all, what with his extreme unwillingness to part with high-ticket items upon explicit request. Well, his attitude bred such unaccountable loyalty in his customers, that along about Great Depression time, Pops stayed in business when nobody else did.

This habit of looking out for the rock-bottom interests of all parties to transactions, and not merely those of self, then, is a multi-generational tradition in Pretty Lady's family. It is part of the air we breathe, and at this point is scarcely subject to conscious consideration. Pretty Lady practices this habit in her own business, unlike her former employer the Wall Street chiropractor, whose business plan entailed corraling a few paralegals and UPS couriers with generous health-insurance plans, and threatening them with crippling disabilities if they didn't come to see him three times a week. Pretty Lady got pretty sick of rubbing down the same hairy-backed UPS guy all the time, she can tell you that.

When Pretty Lady's clients ask her how often they should come in, she invariably replies, "Listen to your body, dear. You're responsible for your own health, and I wouldn't want to bankrupt you. Although if you wait longer than six weeks, we'll be starting again from scratch."

Pretty Lady is thus not rich, but her clients trust her.

Back to Daddy, though--one of the things about Daddy is that Pretty Lady has never, never, never heard him adhering to a legalistic argument in order to weasel out of an implied responsibility. Perish the thought. Once a commitment is made, it is total and unquestioned, no matter if unforeseen and inconvenient circumstances arise. Daddy is the Rock of the extended family; he has shepherded his parents, siblings, cousins, wife's siblings, stray friends and offspring through more sticky and embarrassing and, sometimes, financially draining crises than anyone has bothered to count. Nobody has ever heard Pretty Lady's Daddy utter the words, "Well, I never said I would...". He simply does, and does not hold a grudge afterward.

At the same time, Daddy never pretends to be someone he is not. Early in her parents' marriage, they moved to a new town where some distant cousins were members of High Society. Like good cousins, they invited Pretty Lady's parents to High Society dinner parties. Daddy, a young engineer, was seated next to many expansive oil millionaires who casually discussed the charter jet they'd taken to the party in Baja last weekend, with their twelve best friends. Daddy was rather bored, but polite.

Then the complimentary tickets to the High Society Ball arrived. Daddy returned them, with thanks, and the comment, "Thank you very much, but I am afraid we cannot afford to sustain this kind of lifestyle." Mommy kept a stiff upper lip.

Many times in latter years, particularly in adolescence, Pretty Lady suffered from snide comments and party-invitation-exclusions from Noveau Riche social climbers, who were aspiring to membership in the High Society clan that Pretty Lady's family had voluntarily exited. The knowledge that this sort of thing is gauche, tacky and low-class in the extreme did not entirely make up for her empty social calendar--but really. As Daddy says, and Pretty Lady concurs, those people are boring anyway! Why bother?

(Now, of course, when Pretty Lady goes home, the society ladies who volunteer at the Modern Art Museum are all agog to hear about her latest New York exhibition, but that is all by the way.)

And it goes without saying that cheating on his taxes, or on Mommy, is something so inconceivably beyond the pale in Daddy's universe that it does not bear discussion.

Whenever Pretty Lady has an ethical decision to make, the first question that springs to her mind is "What would Daddy do?" When she once borrowed a friend's five-year-old, factory-second camping tent, and the tent was subsequently stolen out of her trunk, she paid the friend the original cost of the tent without question. Then she received another call. "For another two hundred dollars I can replace it at REI, with a money-back guarantee. The old one had a money-back guarantee. Please give me two hundred dollars more."

At the time, Pretty Lady had not only suffered a robbery, but an assault, and was surfing friends' couches while searching for a home in a safer neighborhood. She was barely making financial ends meet in the ghetto, and needed to come up with the down payment on a new and more expensive place. She was also in a state of shell-shock. Her first inclination was to hang up on this so-called 'friend' and never call back.

But, after much consideration, and discussion with other friends, she sent the girl a two-hundred dollar check. Then she cut the connection.

"I didn't want to worry that I wasn't fair to her," she told Daddy afterward.

"You did the right thing," said Daddy. Which made it all worthwhile.

Pretty Lady Runs Screaming from the Room

Darlings, Pretty Lady has a confession to make. It has been a rough couple of years for her. You see, upon moving to New York City, Pretty Lady made a Stupid Mistake. She got involved with a paranoid, psychotic, abusive individual.

It has taken Pretty Lady a great deal of Quiet Time to mend the after-effects of her relationship with this person, on her sensitive psyche. She has tended toward an unwonted Reclusion. She has done a lot of yoga, and taken some road trips. She has, as you all know, blogged a lot. She is doing much better, now; thank you for asking.

One of the things that Pretty Lady has done, to distract her mind from horrors best left undescribed, is to Meet New People. She has gone seeking in Different Horizons; she figured that whatever was drawing her toward paranoia and psychosis, would be likely avoided in territories having nothing to do with Angry Atheists from New York City.

And now this.

9/11 was minor in comparison to biological/nuclear terrorism. If, instead of a couple of buildings collapsing, a tactical nuclear device were to be detonated in New York harbor, rendering all of Manhattan and depending upon wind direction, all of Long Island instantly uninhabitable for a period of up to 30-60 days and hazardous for decades afterward? If instead of a single city, this was multiplied by tactical nukes going off in multiple coastal cities, and add in an EMP burst, launched from a container ship in the Gulf which takes out most of the electric grid and all communications systems?

Desert Cat, you are channelling the Angry Atheist. This text is ripped verbatim from a typical Angry Atheist rant.

Crom, you too. And even Boysmom is in on it.

Pretty Lady is feeling faint. She is Reeling. She feels as though the world is collapsing down to one diseased, paranoid psyche, with her in it. There is no escape. None! Do you hear? Pretty Lady has gas in her Pathfinder! She has the zero degree down bag, she has bolt-holes both North and South, she's got a good pair of boots, a big box of safety matches, a tent and knowledge of basic woodscraft!

BUT THIS WILL NOT SAVE HER. She sees that now. Nothing can save her from the voices in her head. The voices of Doom, of Stasis, of Fatalism; the dirty bomb that is forever about to hit Manhattan, the reason all optimistic and healing endeavors are pointless, the reason Pretty Lady's affection and joy is never the center of anyone's heart, but merely a pleasant and temporary distraction.

Desert Cat, it is too late to save Pretty Lady's sanity. She is, and has always been, a Marked Woman.

'I Beg Your Pardon?' Department

AVON PARK, Fla. -- Police arrested a 6-year-old Florida girl and even handcuffed her when she acted out in class. Police officers said Desre'e Watson, a kindergarten student at Avon Elementary School in Highlands County, had a violent run-in with a teacher on Thursday.

"I was scared," the little girl said.

Police claim the little girl got angry and began kicking and scratching. She even hit a teacher attempting to intervene in the disturbance.
...
The kindergartner was booked in the Highland County jail and was charged with a felony and two misdemeanors.

Via Fetch Me My Axe.

How very strange

Pretty Lady does not understand at all why people think this would be useful:

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

This strikes Pretty Lady as being quite similar to the USDA requiring farmers to submit to draconian standards in order to obtain a USDA-approved 'organic' label. It seems like a whole lot of fuss for not very much. Pretty Lady has not, as yet, seen the need for any 'manners' labels on her blog; she simply says, "Darlings, behave," and you darlings do. What is so difficult about that?

Ladies Only--or--Why Women Are Not Running the World

Gentlemen, Pretty Lady is afraid she is going to have to ask all of you to look the other way today. Go look at pictures of sports cars, or fighter planes, or Anna Nicole Smith or something. Today she is only addressing the ladies. Thank you ever so much! Ta-ta!

All right, girls. Pretty Lady must have a very, very Serious Talk with you.

She sees, here and there, a certain amount of Carping about how Men are Keeping Us Down; how institutionalized sexism is the reason for low female wage rates, glass ceilings, and male-dominated industries and professions. She endures Sad Stories of hate speech on the Internet; she contemplates the ever-present threat of rape and sexual harassment. Confidentially, she is also aware that the boys have a bit of a head start on us, when it comes to World Domination, due to their superior upper-body strength, engineering skills, and low rates of maternity leave.

Let us take this as read; let Pretty Lady inform each and every one of you that Men are not our biggest problem. Women are.

Sit down and shut up. Pretty Lady is not Pandering. She sent the gentlemen out of the room, remember? She is merely telling it like it is. Women are going to have to learn some cold hard Facts about Power Politics, or we as a gender are Toast. She is sorry to be so harsh with you, but there it is.

The fact is, men know a few things besides incorporation, and how to fix a carburator. They know that to Maintain Power, other habits are necessary. Habits such as loyalty, competence, healthy competition, and the realistic nurturance of these things in the younger generations. They may shout, they may punch each other, but they take care of it in the alley and go out for a beer afterward.

Women, on the other hand, are never really satisfied until an inconvenient rival is divorced, bankrupt, unemployed, universally ostracized, and living on the streets with a bad haircut. Look into your souls, ladies. You know it's true.

Pretty Lady, in her own professional life, has noted over time that it has proven nearly impossible to find a Female Mentor. That is not because there are no older women in her profession, or that Pretty Lady lacks the competence to attract the attention of such; it merely means that when she does, she has had to Watch Her Back in a very big way. Without boring you with too many horror stories, let her break down her experience into a few basic categories of Poisonous Women to Watch Out For.

1) The Poisonous Professional.

This woman is one of the few women to have succeeded in a male-dominated profession, in the Early Days of Feminism, and by God, she's going to make sure it stays that way. Her demeanor is tough, competent, and reasonable, with an undercurrent of vicious rage. She surrounds herself with flamboyantly attractive younger men, and actively promotes their careers, in a motherly sort of way. Should any talented, hard-working young women take her class, work as her assistant, ask her to supervise their thesis, or request a recommendation, these young women will be treated with competent, reasonable, vicious dismissal.

2) The Poisonous Administrator.

This woman, thwarted by social pressures, timidity, and possibly an early encounter with the P.P. above, has ended up in the Development Department of the profession that she would never admit to wanting a starring role in. She is pretty, well-dressed, and charming; she is socially well-connected and consoles herself with the fact that she, at least, earns a steady paycheck. She is proud of the fact that she knows and supports so many talented young fellows, and is the center of attention when she goes with them to parties. When she meets a woman around her age who is still pursuing the Main Profession, she is charmed by that girl's sweet little hobby, and makes sure the grant goes to one of the boys.

3) The Callous Opportunist.

This woman will be your Best Friend. She works four jobs, never takes a vacation, maximizes her credit, and founds organizations in the same field as she stars in. She is a Phenomenon, and everybody says so. She will take and take and take, collapse in your living room, cry on your shoulder, then ditch you and stab you in the back.

4) The Smarmy Communist.

We're all sisters! We love each other! We support each other! We swap skills! We are all Equal! Her skills are valued at full retail markup, of course, while those of her sisters are calculated at discount wholesale, or better yet, free.

5) The Cool Girl.

She doesn't seem to have many female friends, somehow, she doesn't really know why. What was your name again?


Now. This is not to say that there are not splendid women out there; women who balance Support with Healthy Competition, who understand the delicate art of networking, who will listen understandingly when you are in crisis, applaud your successes, purchase your commodities, talk you up to important people, and write a feature article about you. They will edit your grant application, show up at your door with a pitcher of sangria, take you out to dinner when you are broke, and get you a massage for your birthday. These are the Flower of Womanhood, living proof that all is not lost; that women, with nurturance and training, will one day be capable of just about anything.

But first we have to kill those bitches.

Whee!!

Gracious, darlings, Pretty Lady did NOT expect to be taken up on her Rules, at least not so quickly and so seriously. She is Overwhelmed! After spending two days without leaving her studio (the fumes are so dense that even the extractor fan cannot seem to overcome them), she finally checked the mailbox, and whee!! She now has more new CDs than she can fit in the disc changer all at once. In honor of Easter Sunday, she put on the Tijuana Brass, first. Boop-be-doop-be-doop.

Many grateful returns!

P.S. Chris, the cotton duck will make an excellent new dropcloth. The old one has been toxic since I accidentally stomped a tube of yellow ochre and tracked it all over the house.

Speaking of conflict

A rather tactless maneuver on the part of Eggers & Co. sends our thoroughly Gamma friend Jamie into an uncharacteristic diatribe:

I find myself compelled to write you angrily regarding the letter and "Proposal" you recently sent to lifetime subscribers thanking us for helping you through your “infancy” but now inquiring whether we might be willing to “move on,” that is, to begin paying you for a “normal yearly” subscription, now that you’re a full-grown and thriving professional magazine. In short, I respond: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

When Pretty Lady, herself not having been as prescient as dear Jamie in obtaining a lifetime subscription to McSweeney's for a mere c-note, read the offending proposal, she could understand his ire. For all its trademarked clever irony, the document comes across as distinctly passive-aggressive. Distinctly.


(Click to Read In Full. In fact, she highly recommends that you darlings click to read the entirety of Jamie's rant as well; the gentleman has certainly surpassed himself.)

What chiefly strikes Pretty Lady about this incident is that the selfsame tactics of self-referential irony and slapdash iconoclasm which rocketed our dear friend Mr. Eggers to fame and fortune are aging rather badly. What was cute and forgivable in a permanent adolescent are despicable, and perhaps legally actionable, business tactics.

This whole brouhaha, moreover, could have been avoided by the simple expedient of Owning Up to One's Mistakes; if McSweeney's, as an organization, had done the honorable by approaching its subscribers, hat in hand, and explaining, "We find ourselves in the embarrassing position of being the victims of our own success. Honestly, we didn't expect to survive for this long--not long enough to have our publishing house go out of business before we did. We made our name by sticking it to The Man, and now, we find to our consternation that we ARE The Man. And being The Man is more difficult than ever we imagined. It involves, for one thing, having to charge market rate for our subscriptions."

Of course, Gawker broke the news about this before ever Pretty Lady heard about it. Such a retiring life she lives, these days.

Conflict Avoidance 101

Well, Pretty Lady knew more than she thought she did:

Cops might want to put down the billy club and forget about psychology, new research suggests. An analysis of the TV show “COPS” reveals that the best way for police to calm down hysterical citizens is to look them straight in the eyes...police rely on a steady gaze to calm individuals in many situations, including getting them to cooperate during questioning and arrests, and keeping them from interfering with emergency workers.

Pretty Lady figured that one out by accident, while lunching in a Very Bad Neighborhood one afternoon. She had been reading some uplifting thing or other, and was feeling sanguine about life, and all her brothers and sisters in it.

Suddenly, an enraged and distraught individual became belligerant toward the girl behind the lunch counter. The girl, frightened, picked up a broom and brandished it. An Ugly Scene looked to be on the brink of playing out.

Pretty Lady stood up and regarded the enraged woman. The woman declared, "Whatcha gonna do? Ya gonna hit me?"

Pretty Lady replied, "I'm not going to do anything," in a friendly manner. The woman mumbled something unintelligible and wandered away. Pretty Lady resumed her lunch, and pleasant daydreams.

A few moments later, a confused and stinking older man stumbled in, agitated and shouting. Pretty Lady looked him in the eye and smiled. He relaxed, quieted down, and left.

Pretty Lady has often thought that it is not so much the eye contact specifically, which appears to have this effect; it is the recognition. In effect, her demeanor is saying, "Hey! There you are!"

This is, she feels, often the only thing any of us require.

The Rules

Pretty Lady must give a sigh of amused exasperation; her friend Crom appears to be determined to push boundaries today.

not knowing your opinion on strangers sending you packages, I decided that discretion would be the better course of action and did not send it. However, should our acquaintance last throughout the year, perhaps a bottle of Booker's will wind it's way to the Big Apple for a very merry Christmas, after all.

As a general rule--being, after all, a Lady--Pretty Lady will accept modest tokens of respect and esteem from relative strangers. These tokens may include books, flowers, original artwork, concert tickets, CDs, bottles of liquor, and Paypal tips.

They do not, however, encompass jewelry, automobiles, lingerie, electronic gadgets, or four-page calligraphic proposals of matrimony. Neither do they include the only extant photo of your birth mother who sold you to the Americans when you were an infant, the original handwritten manuscript of your unedited first novel, or any severed portion of your anatomy.

If you send Pretty Lady an unsolicited nude photograph of yourself, however artistically posed, she will not respond to any further correspondence she should happen to receive from you. The male of the species is recurrently prey to the delusion that ladies appreciate the things that he would appreciate, if the situation were reversed; nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Perils of Projection

Crom betrays a basic ignorance as to the limits and possibilities of cyber interactions:

Statistically speaking, I would offer the idea that meeting a like-minded individual in the cliquish familiarity of cyberspace is greater than that of meeting anything remotely resembling a Real Man by your definition in the Five Boroughs.

First of all, Crom, Pretty Lady holds no truck with statistics. Statistically speaking, Pretty Lady permanently dwells at the extreme end of the bell curve; in her experience, this is rather like approaching the speed of light, in Einsteinian physics. Everything you thought you knew turns out to be not only incomplete, but inapplicable, from your asymptotic perspective. Statistics, in Pretty Lady's world, may be a decent tool for after-the-fact analysis and understanding, but as a guiding principle in her life, they are useless. Pretty Lady does what she does, and allows the Holy Spirit to take care of the steering.

This is all by the way, however.

The fact is, Pretty Lady has been meeting 'like-minded individuals' through the Internet since 1995. She is not only a pioneer in this regard, but she has been goofing around in cyberspace long enough to know that, inasmuch as it has its revelations and intoxications, it also has its Major Pitfalls. The biggest pitfall being that it is possible for a reasonably intuitive and socially skilled individual to apprehend more about a person's basic character and personality in five minutes of face-to-face interaction, than in six months of in-depth cyber correspondence.

The Internet, my dear friends, is more like one big Group Therapy session than a genuine community. It can be useful, informative, entertaining and productive. It allows for rumination, experimentation, and postulatory dress-up; it is also an excellent way of finding bargains on second-hand cars and bicycles.

However, by far the most major and unacknowledged commodity trafficked upon the Internet is Projection. When we know nothing of an individual except words on a screen, our minds creatively fill in the blanks. We fill in the blanks with whatever fantasy or animosity we have lying around in our own brains; such filling-in rarely corresponds, even remotely, to the physical actuality of another being.

That is why, if Pretty Lady meets a person on the Internet, and she does not meet this person for coffee and a chat within a month or so of the initial correspondence (under two weeks is by far the best) she tends to write off the possibility of ever knowing that person in person, in more than a casual 'Hey! It's you!' sort of way.

She has entertained too many long-distance marriage proposals from delusional, incompetent twerps, and been used and abused by too many self-involved players, to do otherwise.

Now, if a person meets Pretty Lady in person, and then becomes cybernetically involved with her meanderings, this is a different story entirely. This individual is merely fleshing-out and deepening his original impressions; that is all fine and dandy, and can lead to very rewarding friendships indeed.

But all of this speculative nonsense about the possibility of Pretty Lady's bestowing her deepest affections upon a textual construct is simply obnoxious spouting-off. Pretty Lady has an email address, a phone number, and feet. Any gentleman who lacks the confidence or capability to make use of these facts does not figure in her day-to-day life with any degree of significance.

Draconian aesthetics

It is official; Pretty Lady has No Conscience.

Merely reading the letter from the lovely lady who inherited all her mother's paintings, and has every one of them hanging in her apartment, is enough for her to determine this.

For when Pretty Lady sublet a large house from a very-much-alive artist, who tendered this same house into her hands with every available wall space sporting a specimen of her own original artwork, the sun had not gone down before Pretty Lady had taken every one of those paintings off the wall, and stored them under the staircase. Prudently positioned upon risers, against flood, and covered with plastic, against dust, of course. Just because Pretty Lady does not share another artist's aesthetic, does not mean she is wantonly and disrespectfully destructive of it.

Pretty Lady was even known to declare, publically, "If X Artist believes that her house is standing as a permanent X Artist vanity gallery and shrine, X Artist has another think coming."

Aesthetics, Pretty Lady believes, are both deeply significant and deeply personal. Pretty Lady herself has been known to redecorate hotel rooms, during the length of her stay. The objects with which we surround ourselves impregnate our every present moment with a powerful energy, which we fail to consider at our deep peril. The present moment is, literally, all we have got; do we wish to Sacrifice All upon the altar of another artist's screaming, headless nightmares? Or even upon a smattering of sweet but banal autumn landscapes?

Pretty Lady's answer to this question has always been a resounding NO. If this makes her a Bad Person, it is the cross she must bear.

The Real Man

My lands. Pretty Lady cannot believe the number of times she has answered the question, 'What do women want?' and been greeted by a chorus of head-nodding, only to have the question repeated. To be fair, it is rarely Pretty Lady's friends who are asking this question; it is the unenlightened Others who do so. However, it is so reliably guaranteed to pop up in the community on a regular basis, that Pretty Lady feels she can go on answering it ad nauseam, without any fear of boring her readers.

In brief: Women want a Real Man.

Definition of a Real Man:

One who 1) knows who he is; 2) knows what he wants; 3) engages with her; 4) consistently.

All of these elements, darlings, are crucial.

The vast majority of whining, carping, frustration, rage, and lack of empathy with women comes from wannabe Real Men who wish to cut corners on one or another of the above criteria. The Pathetic faction is heavy on the end of Allowing the Woman to Define him; he is the sort who will go off and drink a gallon of aloe vera juice because the lady demonstrates an interest in holistic health care, and come running back, expecting a pat on the head. The Boorish faction, on the other hand, hold no truck with this sort of thing, at all, at all; he goes after what he wants, attains it, and parks it. He is the sort who invented the immortal line, 'Of course I love you. I married you, didn't I? What else do you want?'

Gentlemen. Please.

A lady does not wish to be the prime motivating factor for all of your actions. This is too much pressure, and it makes her feel decidedly unsafe. It gives her the uncomfortable sensation that if she were to become engrossed in her own activities for half an hour or so, you might go off and commit hari-kari for lack of sufficient attention; she does not want your blood on her hands. When she tells you to 'get a life,' she is being literal and sincere about it.

However, it gives a lady a warm, fuzzy, proud feeling to know that on some level, she is a prevailing influence in her man's life. There is nothing sweeter than the sound of the words, 'I was thinking about what you said, and I've decided...'. These words make a lady feel as though she is more than a decorative possession, to be flaunted or stowed at will. They make her feel that she is an ongoing force to be addressed; a challenge, if you will. Certainly she is more than a combination brood mare and chambermaid.

Pretty Lady would like to point out, as a side note, that a man who pursues several different women simultaneously is NOT a man who knows what he wants. He may claim that what he wants is several simultaneous girlfriends, and a concomitant freedom from responsibility; he may, in fact, want precisely that. However, such a man is incapable of engaging on an intimate level with anyone, and is thus unable to fully know himself. He is constantly shuffling communication modes, is frequently trying to remember which story he told which lady, and is never fully present. How is it possible that this man is honestly cognizant of the contents of his own mind? Let alone that he could have space in there to understand anyone else's?

Pretty Lady notes that all the men she has known who were like that were initially fascinating, having perfected the art of the initial fascination through assiduous practice, but got exponentially more boring every time the tape repeated itself. In pursuing breadth of experience, depth is inevitably sacrificed.

By the same token, a man who does not consistently engage with the woman in his life becomes, inevitably, a tedious lump who ultimately is not worth the space he takes up on the sofa. His routine may be straight, narrow and reliable; he may thus be shocked when the woman who has loyally washed his sheets for thirty years precipitately files for divorce.

But the fact is, circularity serves no ultimate purpose. Whether it be the same circular argument, the same scurrilous betrayal, or the identical carping comment of a political nature repeated every evening for three decades, circularity is a characteristic of Hell. Life, to be ridiculously cliche'd about it, is a journey. What women want is a trusted and intimate companion in a landscape which is always, and intriguingly, new.