A Sterling World

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places but where are the “over the top bitch you can pee all over this shit” high-end homes? Much of it is “been there owed that”.  Seriously, what happened?  Not everyone went poor, I know that. Come on you dick-less chicken asses. Take this to another level. For fuck-sake, what’s the point of being filthy dirty stinking rich if you don’t use it to make something so shocking, so outrageously cool that people lose their minds?

Whatever ……………. tossers. Fuck you all. I’ll do it.

John Tate was awarded the Abel Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, for his theory of numbers.

THE MIDDLE GROUND

David Kucinich was right. We should all be on the healthcare plan that every Federal Employee is on, or at least have the choice to be. But we aren’t and we won’t. And the reason is, we compromised. We elected (you elected) President Obama, Mr. Compromise, Mr. Middle, Mr. Gay Rights but NOT GAY MARRIAGE.

… and comes your rebuttal …

… who is better than nothing and certainly better than the alternative.” You’re right. No. I agree, you are right but what you don’t get is that you’re right only because of who you are you, because of the kind of people you are. But you’re also wrong too.

You’re wrong in the sense that it did not have to be this way. I’m sorry, but it didn’t. This did not have to be the “best of all possible worlds”.  If there weren’t so many like “you”, people who would rather reach a compromise, who would rather look for ways to accommodate disparate wants, but if they were instead much more like me, things would be very very different. This would not be the “best of all possible worlds.”

And that my friends is what YOU don’t seem to understand – and I know you don’t “get it.”  How could you?  You’re you and you don’t think the way I do. I know you can’t help the way you are put together but it’s the reason I hate you so much. I hate you because you are so willing to give in, so willing to compromise, so willing to bend.  But that’s just who you are so I can either choose to accept that fact or I can choose not to.

From my vantage point, that doesn’t seem like much of choice at all, does it? I can’t change who you are anymore than you can change who you are, so what choice is there? There isn’t one. I have to accept that so I do. I accept it on those grounds but I don’t have to accept what you think is true because it’s not. I love you personally but I hate who you are which is in the middle. I hate the middle. The middle is not great food, literature, music, art. It’s not great anything. It’s nothing. It’s mediocrity… yuk!

That’s not what life is about, not to me. So… I love and I accept you, for you cannot be any other way, but I loathe your mediocrity. I loathe your banal taste, your small passions, your banausic timid cubicled and limited lives. I always will.

Moving on, however abysmally slowly, thank you.

[revised 24-Mar-2010]

My last boyfriend had very refined taste. No. Actually, he had truly exquisite taste.

He repeatedly sent the Nob Hill/Sonoma stylish elite into orgasmic fits of “aestheta-poxia.” It was too, too…..oh it got too stupid for words.

Of course, I did love the fact that he had great style, and that he RECOGNIZED great style.

In an image-obsessed faux-culture age which would rather regurgitate mash-ups of the past and call it fresh and inventive—he was quite rare.  

Can you recognize La Belle Epoch or Beaux Arts at a glance and tell me if it’s “period” or a reproduction? Most of the TV design hosts couldn’t.

But … he knew how good he was, in comparison. He was at the top of Christie’s or Southerby’s personally invited guests.  

I disliked that he wore it like personal amour. It was incessant, unrelenting, oppressive. It was also ruthless, ungenerous, and unkind.

Here was exceptional style. On two occasions, I think my heart stopped. Once, I actually cried. Me! I know, crazy.

But…… it was utterly humorless. My jocose was met by sacrosanct imperiousness. Lemme tell you, that shit really pissed me off.

Finally, I did something most people couldn’t. I critiqued him.

“Flawless but tone-on-tone isn’t challenging.”

“Eclecticism isn’t a regenerative process, so don’t extend the pretense that it is. This sort of speciousness is beneath you.”

“You merely ‘recognize’ but do not create, which means you’re a curator, restorer, aficionado. You are not an artist, an originator or a creative.”

“This portends you are incapable of recognizing that something new is truly great until after someone else has. Your talent in the world of art and culture will always be dernière.”

From the acidic level of this particular rebuke, I doubt anyone would be surpised to learn that our relationship was on its last legs.

And as much as I want to fault him for being an insufferable style-obsessed snob and arrogant bore, I cannot avoid the fact there have been times the same could be said of me.

I, too, have been an intellectual tyrant and, to put it bluntly, an intolerable bombastic jackass. It’s not the kind of class you should expect from the son of an aristocrat and a descendant of nobility.

Yeah.. I’m still working on that. I’m living proof that taste does not prevent you from also being majorly uncouth.

Silence will find us often when its already too late
Scattering my trussed up thoughts and his beguiling vices
Hurling down with the rain they head straight at us
Others hook sideways and slice round the trunks of trees
Some rifle right through the vertical slats in fences
All deadly sharp just like God’s Gothic cathedral spires

— Sterling Kekoa