Good morning love bugs….
So I feel this weird sense of ‘good-pathedness” today….
I didn’t even watch The Golden Globes last night, but of course, one couldn’t escape the postings of the quips from Meryl Streep’s speech from her Lifetime Achievement Award, which, by the way, I think she’s very deserving of. It took me a long while to get fully on board with the Meryl train. While I always thought she was delightfully skilled, I just didn’t see *how* much until later years. My first true appreciation actually came from her with “Postcards From The Edge”, and the irony of that is not lost on me especially in light of this posting. It’s one of my all time favorite movies.
I haven’t been checking Facebook with my normal fervor of the past for the last week, although Instagram postings have been going over there and I have allowed sharing of the blog to the FB feed. I’ll probably continue that practice as I try to build up my blog follows and memberships here. But that’s not what this is about. In fact, checking it only once or twice a day has been great, and allowed me to be able to share a magical little event with a couple I married a little over a year ago, concerning some branches from a tree in my back yard and a need they had for those branches… a tree which in itself has some special meaning for me personally, and now has spread to others in a special relationship… that magic circle of life is so awesome.
Kenny
Kitchen
1.9.2017
So, back to Meryl, what she said, and what surrounded it. I personally thought what she said was just fine. If you’ve spent your life in the public eye, performing and giving to basically “the world” with your art and craft, you develop very interesting and different views from your experiences…and I think she was right to point out the incident that stuck with her in regards to the man we’re putting into the highest office and the incident of mocking a disabled reporter…. that’s also an image that won’t ever leave my mind, and it shouldn’t leave yours. He did it, we all saw him, and it was on camera in front of the whole nation… and it was shameful. What Meryl said, and I quote:
this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.
THAT is, in a nutshell, what is seriously wrong with a major portion of our society. Children see it, think that it’s okay to do, and it simply, is NOT. It invites disrespect, and those that do it and think somehow it’s “funny” to their inner circles, whether they’re looking for approval for inclusion (which is usually the case, so they’ll be liked, etc. ) creates the propensity for other situations, that can lead to violence, bullying, just like she goes on to say in her speech. After as many years as she has had in the business, well, I feel she did have the right to speak her mind about this. I only saw one person criticize her negatively last night; everyone else seemed to agree with what she said.
So to move on, to move on from the speech, I felt very good, because as I’ve been getting my life organized this week, slowly cutting out certain projects that I can either have no effect on or that I just cannot devote the appropriate amount of time to, I’ve been also trying to see what I can do to increase my knowledge and training on as well.
With music still being my main focus along with acting endeavors, I enrolled in two classes: Advanced Music Theory and the second is a refresher Piano course, to get my playing back up to speed. The Advanced Music Theory is basically 3 years of Theory rolled into 1 class and about 32 lecture hours and the Piano class is around a 3-month deal. As I’m re-attacking my writing in a different angle, I thought it best to go into it with the sharpest tools possible and this seemed like the best and smartest way. I’ve already started class 😉
So to hear that Streep’s best friend, “Princess Leia”, told her “Take a broken heart, and turn it into art” – well, to hear this at the end of a cycle where I’ve been trying my hardest to reconcile and place my broken heart of loss and sadness – right at the point where I’d not only made these decisions and was moving forward as positively as I can…. – made me feel like I’d just received a message from a galaxy from far, far away…, and that I had received it from someone who I felt might have actually understood me, if we’d ever had the chance to meet. I have been saying this near-exact same thing now for the past several weeks, and it was one of my main “goals” in redirecting my attentions from as much social media time to creating “more” with music & film. I shoot a film this coming Friday as a matter of fact….
One can only take the spackling that life’s paint throws on you so much; soon it will all just start dripping off you and landing on the floor. It’s only at that time when you start realizing you’re standing in the paint that no longer makes a nice design and you gotta start doing something about it – heartbreak isn’t a pretty color on anyone but everyone stands on that canvas at some point in life. We all do, and you can only pretend you don’t for so long. Step back, let the paint hit, pick the best colors and go. Figure out which ones work and find the best shades.
You’ll find you have much more in common with others when that happens, trust me.
I’m gonna go get the errands of the day done, and remember that there’s a lot of life left out there to enjoy, and a lot to accomplish in the next 6 months. I hope you’ll subscribe to the blog!
Love & Light,
Kenny