So friday night was spent mostly outside philthy phil’s smoking cigs with Mikey Jackson and chatting about nonsense…which is probably the best kind of chatter, in all seriousness. I ended up “dancing” with some girl for a few minutes, and as we were dancing she yelled “you’re cute!” and all I could think to say back was “you’re not bad.”
If this exchange hadn’t taken place on a deafeningly loud dance floor and had been within the context of a proper conversation I would have told her that I’m obviously not cute as I generally can’t even get the girls that can’t even get ugly, trashy dudes…and that if in some magical fantasy world I happen to enter into where everything is turned upside down and I can briefly be considered attractive for some brief period of time…well it’s a fleeting phenomenon. It’s also an illusion, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat(only when I do it, it ends up more like the Rocky and Bullwinkle version.) And of course, all illusions, like puzzles, and other math problems…lead to reality when solved.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Alice in Wonderland. The 1972 film “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” had a profound effect on me a child, mainly on my imagination, as it showed me how to view things differently and think against conventional Wisdom. That so much of what we think is so, isn’t so, or is only so because we think so. I always look for others with this attitude, but rarely find them. “How can you be wearing a sweater in the middle of August?” Just as Alice is perplexed and bewildered by the customs and logic of wonderland, so too would the rabbit, the mad hatter or the knave of hearts, see preposterity if they were to suddenly find themselves immersed in “our” world as witness to the contrarian norms and prevailing groupthink we have come to know as the natural order of things. And as such,
a person or anthropomorphic creature are resigned to live a certain dual identity when they are an outsider in one of these worlds. They adapt to fit in while at the same time opposing the madness they are attempting to fit into. The idea of paper money is silly, but if I obtain money I can purchase things…therefore I suppose I will play along. Or in Alice’s case: I don’t want to go among mad people, but let me get this straight, if I eat one side of the mushroom I shall grow taller and the other side I shall grow smaller? Of course, Alice essentially dreams up the imaginary world she is lost in(too bad we don’t all have that luxury!), though perhaps only because she is maddened and unfulfilled by the real one she traveled from(maybe then we do have it after all.)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland aired many times on HBO in the mid 80’s. I believe this was because Fiona Fullerton(who played Alice) had gained renewed stardom with her role as an evil Bond girl in “View to A Kill” around that time(incidentally what I consider to be the first “bad” James Bond film. Octopussy is the last good one, and there hasn’t been a decent one since.) Anyhow, I hadn’t seen Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland in over 20 years, but some of the scenes stayed with me. Last night I bought a dvd of it from Zia, and ended up watching it while drinking a glass of wine. It was better than I remembered and stood the test of time.