daily prompt

Starved for Attention

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What I Did for ‘Like’

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In this social media-saturated (and social-media-about-social-media-saturated) era, in which both of my parents, one of them an octogenarian, have active Facebook accounts, and in which people who have told me to my face that they do not understand Twitter themselves have a couple thousand followers apiece on that very service, drawing attention to one’s writing or art or craft or charitable work without purchasing advertising time on the radio to scream for 30 continuous seconds can seem daunting. For me, a naturally quiet sort, sharing the publication of a new piece feels unnatural, like actually recording that 30-second Janovian advertisement. Screaming is so unseemly.

(Perhaps I will go ahead and record that.)

In the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore film, “Bedazzled,” poor Stanley Moon (Moore) wants the affection of Margaret (Eleanor Bron). The Devil, George Spigott (Peter Cook), offers him seven wishes to win her. In one, Stanley is a gold-lamé-costumed rock star whose new hit song “Love Me!” drives all the young women, including Margaret, wild. The lyrics, and Moore’s performance, are little more than him screaming for 30 seconds, “LOVE ME!”

The very next act, Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations, wins the entire screaming audience over to the Devil, George, as he speak-sings his dripping contempt for their affections towards him. “I’m self-contained. Leave me alone,” goes the new hit, and his dry loathing for them makes the women in the audience desire him all the more. Stanley gets run over by the crowd that once briefly adored him as it rushes to the Devil at the end of his song. (The video clip that follows below the fold here both takes up too much space and is set too loud. Brace your ears.)
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Little Glass Houses

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The architect Philip Johnson would have been 110 yesterday. He died in January 2005 at the age of 98, at his residence for the previous five decades: his famous Glass House (above), which he built in 1949.

The idea behind the house is intricately simple: walls are an interference (obviously) between us and the world. What if the views on your property provided your home’s natural walls? Of course, my cynical brain brings me to memories of neighborhoods in which I would have happily lived without any windows, where “the view” (not the TV show) was exactly what I did not want to see. Heck, my cynical brain brings me back to apartments in which there were not enough walls between me and … me.
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False. Evidence. Appears. Real.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Hatred is its only reality. Racism is a part of nothing larger than itself. The simple word “Fear” yields many acronyms to reflect what fear is in its essence: “False Evidence Appearing Real” is a famous one. So is “Eff Everything And Run” or “Eff Everything And Retaliate.”

America. July 2016. The bitter angels of our nation’s nature seem to have won. Lately, part of me wants to declare victory for F.E.A.R and its glorious absence of nuance or shades of gray, its loving embrace of nothing except its own bright-red lust for violence for its own sake. “Hate Wins” would be the headline. “‘Just Hate Everyone,’ Experts Suggest” would be the sub-head.

Murder is murder. It is not an idea. It is a vacuum, and vacuums are totalitarian in their lack of purpose. I used to think that ideas can fill the vacuum, the murderous vacuum, but that is wrong. Ideas are ephemeral. No one kills for an idea. Many murderers will tell themselves that they are killing for a reason, for an idea; there is no human thought more corrosive, more dangerous, than self-justification.
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