alex the girl

Last week when I went to put my key in the lock of my front door, I heard this humming and bumping noise. Looking up I saw a hummingbird flying and hitting the skylight over and over again; the light confused him as he thought it was a way out.

Worried that he'd die of exhaustion on one of our hottest days, I ran into the flat where I luckily had some bright red tissue paper. I made a mixture of sugar water in a large bowl which I placed out on the stoop above the tissue paper, hoping that this would somehow lure the bird down.

A few days later, the same thing happened. Again, I got the tissue paper and water to lure the bird down.

Today when I came home, once again the same hummingbird was caught flying around the skylight, trying to get out. I no longer had the tissue paper and I didn't know what else to do. How many times should I save the bird from the same problem? How would I explain to that bird to come down and never go back? It can't understand. How often am I to get involved in the same issue and worry myself over its fate?

When I came out later I didn't hear the buzzing and looked down. There was the hummingbird still on the ground. So beautiful and intact as I think it died of exhaustion fighting the same problem for so long.

I picked up the little hummingbird and took him down to the garden. I dug a small grave, buried him and said a little something {I'm not well versed in hummingbird burials}. I felt a little sadness over the whole thing but decided that sometimes one has to stand back and let nature take its course. With birds, with people.

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May 06, 2006

The contrast between what is glamorous now and what was glamorous in the days of Cary Grant and Norma Shearer says much about how American society has changed. Glamour used to present an idealized version of adulthood. Now it presents an idealized version of adolescence. In the old days, glamour was all about unattainability, i.e., fantasy projection. These days, it has become unthinkable that a major Hollywood director might echo Cecil B. DeMille, who instructed Edith Head's department at Paramount to make clothes "that make people gasp when they see them. Don't design anything anybody could possibly buy in a store."

Today glamour is tied to the idea of shopping to maintain the illusion that you are (a) kind of famous, or (b) on your way to being famous, or (c) essentially the same as famous people, because you share the same taste in home furnishings, core values and dog shampoo. Some of the stars with whose dog shampoo brand we may be intimately acquainted don't even appear in the movies, or at least not often. They may appear in TV shows that aren't so much TV shows as a chance to observe celebrities in their natural habitats. Which kind of resembles ours. Mainstream magazines have transformed themselves from facilitators of idol worship to guides to glamour consumption.

From a great article in the Los Angeles Times