A long time ago I was watching Natalie Merchant’s entrancing video of her song “Wonder,” and I realized I had completely misinterpreted a quote from my favorite photographer.
The quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson, as I knew it then was:
“After a certain age, you got the face you deserve.”
Bresson was a famous, pioneering photojournalist (1908-2004) who captured many haunting, incredible portraits.
Being a little snarky by nature, I had always thought this was a backhanded slap against people like our former president, who were not born ugly, but whose sins and hatreds leave a mark on their faces. (Note: I wrote this in April 2024 when he still was a “former president.”)
After misunderstanding the quote for 30+ years, I watched Merchant’s video and realized that getting the face you deserve is just as true for people who deserve beautiful faces. I’m not talking strictly traditional beauty—from all my years of photography, I have photographed many people with lines, scars, or untraditionally beautiful faces, who have earned faces worth deserving. In the video, somehow Merchant and the women and girls all look like they are carrying their own light.
This came back to me recently as I’ve been adding Merchant to my recent playlists again and developing an even deeper love of her music.
Because I did some searching, I was techno-magically referred by Instagram to a new podcast called “The Great Creators” and it’s a recent episode featuring a long, heartfelt conversation between the podcaster Guy Raz and Natalie Merchant.
She comes off here as a thoughtful, gentle person (with a steel backbone nonetheless.) [Podcast here or click the image above] I think she is exactly the person who shines through her music.
Regarding the song “Wonder,” there is another YouTube video you might want to watch. It will fill you with both joy and pain as Merchant talks about many of the people the song has touched. In particular, are two sisters she befriended who were afflicted by a terrible genetic disease. Merchant says here “I had written the song about them, I just hadn’t met them yet.”
Cartier-Bresson Understood
I did eventually discover that the quote I had heard back in Photo-J school was incomplete and that, in full context, Henri Cartier-Bresson knew better than me.
The full quote is below:
She said, “Oh my wrinkles” and I told her it’s your own interesting thing, your wrinkles, after all it depends how they fall. Which is true, it’s life, it’s a mark of life. It depends how people have been living and all this is written on their face. After a certain age, you got the face you deserve I think.
Originally posted on March 14, 2023 on befuddledmuse.com
Everything ‘movie’ in my mind changed for me—all at once—recently. I went and saw the move Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.
In truth, it wasn’t a huge change. But when I sat down and thought things through, it was a telling change. I realized something important and personal. The movies and stories I love most find reflections in my own writing.
For over twenty years, I have ranked the enchanting movie Amélie, as my “favorite” movie. This is just a personal thing—I don’t actually keep lists of such things. No people I know, especially members of my family, think of me as a great movie critic.
But for me, Amélie was the gold standard. In all those years, only one other movie seriously contended for first place and that was Arrival.
But for me, Amélie was the gold standard. In all those years, only one other movie seriously contended for first place and that was Arrival. I actually debated for a while (in my own mind), which I liked more. Eventually, I left Arrival in second place as a movie, but decided I had a new favorite author in Ted Chiang who wrote the novella Story of Your Life on which the movie is based. The movie is great, the book is even better. Chiang’s writing is impeccable, but it’s his glorious, unique, mind-bending ideas that make him great.
After Everything finally took the crown, I thought more about it for a while. What did I like in each of these movies? What draws me to these strange, absurd worlds? And I realized it is the same thing that draws me to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the radio plays are best), and the 1966 classic The King of Hearts (Le Roi de Coeur).
When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I learned to survive through everything.
Waymond Wang, from Everything Everywhere All At Once
What draws me into these stories is the humorous, ironic but never cruel surrealism. I like movies and books and stories that allow us to look at reality in a skewed, weird, sometimes humorous way that makes reality more, not less, clear. Each of these stories takes an “everyman” (or woman) who is a bit skewed in their own right, and forces them to come to terms with reality by looking through a prism of new and unexpected ways of seeing.
Ultimately, I think my own best fiction is like that. Even when I write tragedies like A Sticky End, The Singer of Starfish, or even the very dark Something That Will Not Let Go, my characters—and I—find a kind of a silver lining at the end, even if it is a dark one. June from Something is at peace with her end as she burns down her terrible childhood home. Ee-ah-kik-ah from The Singer of Starfish knows what she accomplished even in her own terrible loss. Russ Hennessy in A Sticky End is resigned to his own fate and worries more about how his shipmates will react when they are awakened to see miscellaneous pieces of his remains stuck to the robot.
A friend—who helped me with Tudor use of profanity—wrote this to me about the book when he finally read the whole thing:
“It exudes brightness and originality, is optimistic in tone throughout and so entertaining…”
Even ignoring his hyperbole—you can ignore it, I, personally, will continue to revel in it as is my right—it is interesting that he calls my stories “optimistic” considering how many of my characters die or suffer irreparable losses. But I think he is right, even the worst of my “tragedies” are not truly tragedies but transformations.
By and large, I am not religious; I don’t believe in magic or fate or any supernatural intervention. My own life has had pain, insoluble problems and some tragedy of my own, but I still think of myself as mostly very lucky. For all that the world is random and dangerous, I do believe the world is a more magical and weirder place than our minds can completely fathom, even without mythical magic, and I try to reach for this in my writing.
In some ways, the hot-dog fingered people and the sentient rocks in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the shy woman who is wickedly good at pranks in Amelie, Arthur Dent, of Hitchhiker’s Guide, who looses the earth he knew, not to mention his house, to discover a whole new weirder universe, are all alike. They all teach us to look at the world as it exists through a filter of fables, magic and absurdity. Maybe that is also the power of religion, I just prefer my surrealism to be explicitly fantastic.
In Songs of a Befuddled Muse, you can find stories where the world is somehow different from our everyday reality, where clowns view themselves as living a lifestyle, where a terrible sci-fi author gets to live the remainder of his life inside his own stories, where a man finds his creative muse is a very real, demanding, sensuous woman. Even though I write in many genres, each of my stories pick at similarly strange and wonderful ideas and alternate realities.
And that, I think, is what ties together my odd collection of stories and, I hope, ties me to the great weird, wonderful stories like Everything Everywhere All At Once and Amélie.
Is it okay to use real people as characters in your stories?
This wasn’t an issue for me when I wrote the stories; I didn’t know then I would fall in love with them and want to publish them.
But when I made the decision to publish the collection, I had to give some hard thought to what it meant to use real people in my fiction. I am not so much worried about legal danger, but I struggle with a few ethical questions.
Like any writer, I use real people from my life as inspiration. I’m not at all concerned about these inspirations. I have obscured their identities for people who don’t know who they are.
Those who appear as attractive characters have been discreetly told they inspired my stories. A few others who inspire some of the worst people in my stories are out of my life and, well, they don’t need to know and probably wouldn’t recognize themselves anyway.
Then there are several real people who are identifiable because I use real names. Even within this list, several shouldn’t have much problem with what I wrote. For example:
I did use the name of the real sheriff of Elmore County in The Big Gumshoes but he is only referred to, never appears directly. I chose Elmore County because I loved the name and the story of the town of Wetumpka, which really is famous for having an impact crater.
Angella Reid is the name of the long-serving Chief Usher in the White House at the time I first wrote Heart’s Desire in 2015. She was unsurprisingly let go (or left) during the Trump Administration. By all public accounts, she was very good at her job and I felt no qualms portraying her as such.
A number of other celebrity names were also tossed out in Heart’s Desire as being out on the town with the First Gentleman and all have been linked by gossip rags as friends of Bill. I’m not worried much about insulting them because they mentioned only in passing.
But four stories, Heart’s Desire, The Offering, Times of Life and DeathandThe Severed World, contain real people depicted in ways that I had to think long and hard about. Maybe I let my ego get away from me, but these are some of my favorite stories from the collection and I couldn’t imagine leaving any of them out.
Times of Life and Death and The Severed World feature Lady Jane Grey and various members of her family and her husband’s family.
Times of Life and Death and The Severed World feature Lady Jane Grey and various members of her family and her husband’s family. With them being dead five-hundred years I’m not much worried about anyone being bothered by my depictions, except perhaps Tudor era scholars who love to argue about who really knows the truth about her life and death.
Perusing The Tudor Society website, I find there is disagreement among scholars of Tudor history (shocking, I know) about whether she was the ingenue caught up in events or someone who was actively involved in plotting the events that eventually led to her execution.
She was, by most contemporary accounts, a bright, well-educated and animated girl. I chose that version because it fit into the story I wanted to tell about a time-traveling historian infatuated with one of his research subjects.
When I put her in danger in The Severed World, I was faced with a conundrum, how could my historian save her so I can write more stories in this series, and, well, because that is what the narrative required. I enjoyed the time I spent on The Tudor Society website and it eventually came to me that my (completely invented) scholar-hero would have as his “super-power,” the ability to rally other historians and scholars to his aid. So in my story, The Tudor Society of our day has both continued on into Ian’s 2085 and also exists in the 2085 Ian and Jane returned to after changing history. It is fun to make scholars into heros.
So there are two uses of real people that did give me pause if I should publish my stories about them. Between Heart’s Desirewhich features President Hillary Clinton making a deal with the devil and The Offering about 19th century artist Gustave Guillaumet, you might be surprised to know that the latter is the story I feel more ambivalent about fictionalizing the main characters—not because I am afraid of angering anyone—but because I don’t want to “Salieri” Guillaumet.
The Offering tells a story about two real 19th century artists; Guillaumet, an orientalist painter enchanted with Algeria, and Louis-Ernest Barrias, his friend and mentor, and the man who crafted Guillaumet’s tomb. It was actually seeing Barrias’ graceful sculpture A Young Girl of Bou Saada in Montemartre Cemetery in Paris, that inspired this story. I did incorporate Guillaumet’s real and strange end into the story—he was indeed shot at the home of his mistress, and taken back by his wife for his last months as he died from the wound. But pretty much all the other events in this story are complete creations of my imagination.
Stereo photo by me of the sculpture Young girl from Bou Saada by Ernest-Louis Barrias, which graces the Tomb of Gustave Guillaumet in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. This image is in Parallel view. to see over 3D formats, see my profile on stereopix.net
In the printed and Kindle versions of this story, I added an “author’s note” indicating that this is complete fiction. In the audiobook version, my narrator suggested, and I agreed, that the author’s note wasn’t needed and might distract from the story.
So I did, in fact, “Salieri” Guillaumet. I took a short passage from a NY Times article contemporary with Salieri’s death and invented a wonderful narrative about his life and death that is almost certainly untrue.
In 1984, I was in my twenties and completely failed to impress a very attractive young lady by asking her to go with me to see “A-MOD-e-us.” That said, I did eventually get to see “Amadeus” and did eventually learn how to properly pronounce its title.
Amadeus is a good movie, if long, and the creepy scenes of the evil Antonio Salieri scaring Mozart to death were quite effective. I was pretty upset to find out that the basic storyline of a bitter rivalry between Salieri and Mozart is based completely on highly suspect rumors. Salieri is considered a fine composer in his own right and is not suspected by most historians of murder.
The ghost of Guillaumet can take cold comfort in the probability that The Offering will probably never be made into a multi-Oscar winning movie, but I have to admit, I do feel a little guilty about not finding a good way to at least add a disclaimer to the audiobook.
Heart’s Desire is the other story in my book featuring real people as my fictional characters. This story was written before the 2016 election and features newly-elected President Hillary Clinton playing poker with the devil. After “winning” a hand, Clinton learns the devil’s gifts can hold more pain than his threats.
I don’t think anyone will take this story literally, except maybe some of the Q-Anon crowd. Nor is it truly meant as a knock on Secretary Clinton. It is political satire. I think it is funny, and I think the “Former Guy” comes off—in the background—much worse and more true to his real personality.
While I think I am safe from legal problems, I hope I am safe from being too offensive to anyone. I spent a decade as a reporter and got to learn that pretty much every politician has to make several proverbial deals with the devil just to do their jobs.
I would, however, be very interested in hearing how people react to my use of Clinton and Guillaumet in Heart’s Desire and The Offering. Add a comment on this post or on my Instagram.
My daughter Jamie is the muse that kicked me in the butt to get me back into writing.
I have written all my life. As a kid, I wrote as a way to deal with a challenging home life. I spent ten of the best years of my working years as a newspaper reporter.
Even after leaving journalism, getting married and having two daughters, becoming a graphic and web developer and eventually a programmer, I still tried to keep writing. I wrote a few pretty good stories, always planning that someday—after the girls were grown—I would find the time to start writing again seriously.
But life got away from me and I have always had a distinct problem using the word “no” so I got involved with so many things that I could never find enough time.
Jamie, who was finishing up at the Cleveland Institute of Art, saw through my excuses and came up with a simple solution she knew I couldn’t resist. She suggested a collaborative challenge. We would find a creative prompt every month, she would create some form of visual art, and I would write a story.
Thus was born the website Songs of a Befuddled Muse and I remembered just how much I loved writing.
Thus was born the website Songs of a Befuddled Muse and I remembered just how much I loved writing. Many of the stories in this book came from this challenge, though, as you will see, I tend to take the prompts pretty loosely. After the first few standard writing prompts, Jamie and I began creating our own and feeding off of each other’s creativity.
In the next series of posts, I will talk about the many inspirations for the quirky, wide-ranging stories in the book and also show off Jamie’s work. Both of us have grown a great deal in our artistry since we started this challenge, but it was from these humble roots that Songs of a Befuddled Muse was born.
I am optimistic—but not sanguine—that when the dust clears in January and Trump’s attempts to invalidate the election and try to stay in power fail, (I so look forward to him being dragged out of the White House in cuffs by the Secret Service),that Joe Biden will be president.
Once Biden is president, he has one very big thing working in his favor; he can’t possibly do worse than his predecessor.
If we’re lucky and smart, he will also have one other advantage, party control over both the House and the Senate. Even if they remain supine to the executive, they will be supine to a much better executive.
But I pray to God (atheist in a foxhole here) that Biden will be surrounded by the best people because what he and his administration face on day one is going to be hell.
Here is some of what is against him:
The country will be even more solidly in the grip of a pandemic. Look at how many new cases are developing daily now. By January it will be far, far worse because Trump and his minions are actively trying to make it worse.
The government is broke, far more broke than at anytime in our history. The Trump administration debt was at the high-water mark before the pandemic for no apparent reason. With all the free money being distributed and promised and demanded now, it is hard to believe we won’t double our debt by January.
The Trump administration has systematically fired all the competent, diligent, honest, and knowledgeable people it could. The ranks of the State Department have been decimated. Much has been done to remove any semblance of science in the NOAA, the EPA and even the FDA and I am sure, much more.
Worse yet, Trump flunkies and Q-Anon believers are being put into key roles in the military, the Voice of America, the State Department, the Department of Education, and the EPA. When elected, how fast can a Biden administration find and root out these Trumpian sleepers without bringing the government to a halt?
How long will it take to re-fill the jobs of Inspectors General that have been removed to hide Trumpian corruption?
Who knows what will happen at the Department of Justice? It has been under attack from Trump and Barr, but it sounds like at least some modicum of honesty and self-respect still clings on there.
Trump has done tremendous damage to the reputation of the United States in his time. He has insulted and betrayed our allies while sucking up to people like Putin and Kim Jung Un, Erdogan and Xi who know how to manipulate him. He has pulled the US out of leadership positions in fighting climate change, in fighting for world health, in fighting against tyranny. Russia, North Korea, Turkey and China are not our allies now but pretend to be because Trump will do what they want. They will drop all pretense once Biden becomes president. It will be years, if ever, before any of our natural allies, Canada, the EU, Britain, Germany, Mexico, Japan, just to name a few, will ever trust us again. The remaining Kurds will stand testament to why no one should trust the US as an ally.
The current revolt against police brutality and institutionalized racism is long overdue, but it is not likely to be patient enough to give the the new administration time to find its feet. Things beyond anyone’s control could blow up in the new administration’s face and make their lives all the more difficult than they could be.
Trump and his grifters and his white-power senior citizens and his lost-cause lamenters and the idiot Q-Anon believers are not going away. Since they have no sense of shame or reality, who knows how far they will go to continue to undermine the US Government. Fox News isn’t going to suddenly turn into responsible journalism and frankly, as much as I despise Trumpian claims of fake news, the so-called Mainstream Media, which seems to include everyone but Fox, Breitbart and OANN and their fellow travellers, will not cease their attacks from the left even if they are far more responsible and honest than Fox. I fear any Biden honeymoon will be short and bittersweet.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Arctic is burning, polar and Greenland ice is melting at record levels, the permafrost is melting in Siberia, probably releasing the far more dangerous greenhouse gas, methane. Hurricanes and typhoons are worsening yearly (except so far this year because of the record Saharan dust storm!). The insect apocalypse continues, etc…
I wish Biden well, he has suffered and survived enough pain in his life that I don’t think he will collapse under the weight of what he will face. But he will need all the support, strength, good advice, and goodwill from everyone around him to face the coming hurricane.
