I felt the need to publicly thank Betty for not only tolerating me but not mocking me while I watched PBS’ Great Performances of Sting’s Journeys & Labyrinths a few nights back. This one is by far the most pretentious of Sting’s projects, and despite the music being beautiful, the video was silly (& in parts kept reminding me of Monty Python). Sting and his lute-player, at one point, seem to be laughing to themselves over the silliness of watching two historians debate the finer points of religious politics of the 16th Century.
However, Sting is wearing a pair of boots in one scene that I swear must have been made from the skins of Calabrian shepherd boys and their pet goats. Of course Sting being Sting, he may be protesting his own boots in the near future.
The songs, though, are beautiful, and so is Sting’s voice even when it’s not best-suited to these songs. So yes, I still want to be Sting when I grow up. & Not just for the boots, but that he’s willing to be pretentious and experimental, & knows that doing this CD will get a ton of people – me included – to listen to music they might not otherwise listen to. Throw in the house, the organic farming, & the labyrinth garden, of course. But what I admire the most, to be honest, is his seeming surety, confidence, nearly arrogance: he knows he’s talented, he knows the world is his oyster, but also seems to take his power & privilege seriously, like some kind of Philosopher-Musician, or Musician-King, which only earns him more scorn from people who mock him.
& I keep meaning to write more about the whole idea of who aspires to be what as children; at the AMC wrap party, I had an interesting conversation with David Harrison about the idea, since he always wanted to be an actor (not an actress) receiving an Oscar as a child, despite being female-bodied. & It got me thinking about my own aspirations as a kid, the people who reflected what I wanted to be the most, how many of my role models were male & not female, & on top of all that, a friend noted, while reading SNTMIM, that she went into Religious Studies in order to be something like Indiana Jones, which reminded me this kind of cross-gender aspiring isn’t restricted to me, or to trans people, & may instead have something more to do with Jung’s animus idea, or the lack of women role models for certain ways of being.
Someone remind me to flesh that idea out, please.
& This, alas, is Gracie, the other of Betty’s parents’ cats. She doesn’t like the flash – thus the grumpy look – but otherwise is quite a sweet lap kitty.