“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.” ~ George Orwell
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” ~ George Orwell
Of delusions and grandeur, and rock-star excess, the expression of the inner wilderness can be a dangerous endeavor. Yet there is a sanctity to honoring the untamed impulse, a purity that is lost once social construction and reason come into structured play. That sort of timidity has no place here.
“During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realized once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life.” ~ Franz Kafka
Some stories require a million words to get across the simplest point. Others require the merest wisp of a whispered few to achieve the same breadth and effect. Still others tell their narrative with a single image. The Delusional Grandeur Tour Book, chronicling the Last Stand of a Rock Star, aims to tell its tale through a little of both. In this particular entry, however, the emphasis is decidedly on economy of expression, allowing a few choice photographs, and the slightest prayer, to expound upon a very dark story.
It’s a story that I’ll one day tell in far more chilling detail (perhaps), a story that touches on issues that run deeper than anything I’ve written about here (thus far), and a story that informs the very essence of this final tour (yes, it’s the last).
It’s also a story that can be interpreted in myriad ways, which is why I love this portion of the Tour Book so much. At first glance, it says something, but if you analyze further it says something else. Each version carries its own set of truths, but each has hidden aspects, and realities that are missing even from the most seemingly-blatant photographic evidence. There’s a phrase that people throw around when they want to sound mysterious and intriguing: nothing is what it seems.
I’ve rarely found that to be true. Most things are indeed as they appear, and the simplest and most stress-free way to live is to take those things to be true. Otherwise, we’d be doubtful of anything, suspicious of everything, and wary of the entire world. I wouldn’t ever want to live that way.
Yet sometimes things aren’t what they at first glance appear to be. Sometimes they’re not what they seem to be upon eight or nine glances. There is always room for the individual to change and grow, evolve and improve – and to count anyone out, especially a proven chameleon and exception to the rule, is foolishness that will always be exposed as such.
In the gray dawn before day, when the world looks black-and-white, and the glamourous trappings of the night seem frightening and remote, a sobering plane of vision slowly comes into soft focus. A window looking out into the yard frames a scene of sparkling frost: the insidious creep of winter, tapping gently at the glass, quietly at first but no less insistent.
And yet it was all a game, a ruse, a dramatic posturing so that he wouldn’t have to really go there. He wouldn’t ever truly destroy himself; he was too smart for that. Too clever and too resourceful and too stubborn to really ruin anything. He expected others to know that too. That was his only flaw.
When everyone begins to believe the myth you have made up, it’s very hard to make them see anything else, even when it’s the truth.
THE DELUSIONAL GRANDEUR TOUR: LAST STAND OF A ROCK STAR
Most rock stars burn brightly but quickly – too quickly – extinguishing themselves with the brightness and heat of their own flames. A rock star only knows how to burn. There’s nothing else.
And I, well, I did my best to be a rock star. I did it for you. I thought it was what you wanted. I believed that if I could make you remember me, your notice might make some sort of difference, that you would somehow make me matter. I wanted to leave an impression, to prove that I was here, to go unforgotten.
Perhaps I got carried away.
Perhaps the carefully-crafted myth took on a life of its own.
Perhaps I really did lose control.
I made you believe.
I made myself believe.
So much so that I almost forgot how I made the whole thing up.
At long last, the sad confession:
I made it all up.
A man can make himself quite lonely with the ghosts of make-believe, and the mirror is a two-faced trickster willing to whisper deliciously dangerous secrets to those who most want to pretend.
THE DELUSIONAL GRANDEUR TOUR: LAST STAND OF A ROCK STAR
The strange thing about hotel rooms is that they look familiar and seem familiar and have many of the accoutrements that seem domestic and familiar, but they are really weird, alien and anonymous places. ~ Moby
I need something truly beautiful to look at in hotel rooms. ~ Vivien Leigh
Power has got to be the most intoxicating thing in the world… and of all forms of power the most intoxicating is fame. ~ Diana Vreeland
Even now… after we’ve learned about how bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed talisman that cannot be destroyed by any known means. Still, still, the ones who go down can seem as if they’re more complicatedly, more dangerously, attuned to sadness and yes, the impossible grandeur. They’re romantic, goddamn them; we just can’t get it up in quite the same way for the sober and sensible, the dogged achievers, for all the good they do. We don’t adore them with the exquisite disdain we can bring to the addicts and miscreants. ~ Michael Cunningham
The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star continues with a stop in Ogunquit, Maine. The next stage of the Tour Book is the ‘On the Road/Hotel’ section, which is really just an excuse to bump and grind the booty, banned or not. There’s something deeper at work too, if you read between the crack(s). Most of us don’t want to go that deep, however, content to make a fuss over what’s going on at the surface. This iceberg runs far beneath that. Sometimes I think it runs on forever. Surely further than a shallow breath would allow…
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. ~ Albert Camus
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. ~ Jean Genet
She whispers ferociously in my ear. “It’s a return!” Flinging her sunglasses off her face, her eyes still smolder, her gaze is still entrancing. When I begin to doubt anything, she adjusts her turban and sweeps around the room with majestic flair. Enveloped in leopard print or sparkling in a beaded gown, she mesmerizes with a glamour that cannot be erased with the passing of time. It may fade, but it can never fully disappear. No one who makes such an impression can ever be forgotten.
I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M FRIGHTENED
I KNOW MY WAY AROUND HERE.
THE CARDBOARD TREES, THE PAINTED SEAS, THE SOUND HERE
YES, A WORLD TO REDISCOVER, BUT I’M NOT IN ANY HURRY, AND I NEED A MOMENT
I’VE SPENT SO MANY MORNINGS JUST TRYING TO RESIST YOU
I’M TREMBLING NOW, YOU CAN’T KNOW HOW I’VE MISSED YOU
MISSED THE FAIRY TALE ADVENTURE IN THIS EVER-SPINNING PLAYGROUND
WE WERE YOUNG TOGETHER…
I DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE, THAT’S ALL IN THE PAST
THIS WORLD’S WAITED LONG ENOUGH, I’VE COME HOME AT LAST!
AND THIS TIME WILL BE BIGGER! AND BRIGHTER THAN WE KNEW IT! SO WATCH ME FLY, WE ALL KNOW I CAN DO IT. COULD I STOP MY HAND FROM SHAKING? HAS THERE EVER BEEN A MOMENT WITH SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR?
For twenty years she has haunted me. For twenty years I have felt her passion and her pain, her heartache and her hopefulness, her determination and her desperation. In many ways, she inspired my very first tour, and this false notion of being a star.
No One Ever Leaves A Star…
In the same manner she believed her fame and notoriety preserved through all those years, I built a legend and a sense of celebrity to everything I did. I wasn’t famous enough to fade. I wasn’t known enough to be forgotten. Yet I carried myself as if I was the Greatest Star of Them All.
Now it’s time to let her go. To let myself go. To break the delusional mirror at last. It’s not a good thing to be stuck in the gauzy, glamorous solitude of a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, no matter how pretty or decadent the trappings may appear. It’s not a happy place to be. It’s not a safe place to be, and at this stage in my life there is a lot to be said for safety, and warmth, and comfort.
Yet a part of me will always belong to Norma, and a little bit of Ms. Desmond will always reside in my heart.
The whispered conversations in overcrowded hallways
So much to say not just today but always…
We’ll have early morning madness
We’ll have magic in the making
Yes, everything’s as if we never said goodbye
Yes, everything’s as if we never said goodbye…
We taught the world new ways to dream!
THE DELUSIONAL GRANDEUR TOUR: LAST STAND OF A ROCK STAR
Before she slashes her wrists open, before she withers beyond the point of salvation, there is a moment when Norma Desmond has the hope that everything will, finally and at long last, work out. That she will get the guy, and that the guy will love her in return. It’s a sad and deluded take on what is happening – the belief of a person too desperate to face the truth of the situation. Yet there is something noble and honest and raw about her happiness. It’s the stuff of childhood, the stuff of innocence. The sort of earnest belief that a lifetime of delusions will foster and encourage, but it carries with it a purity and grace that far less jaded individuals too often fail to exhibit, or even know.
In the name of that innocence, she dances a dance few of us have the guts to execute.
It is a dance of unabashed happiness, a dance of dreams.
Yet at the end, it is only a dance to the death of remaining hope.
RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW, A MIDNIGHT WISH TO SHARE WITH YOU
YOUR LIPS ARE WARM, MY HEAD IS LIGHT, WERE WE ALIVE BEFORE TONIGHT?
I DON’T NEED A CROWDED BALLROOM, EVERYTHING I WANT IS HERE
IF YOU’RE WITH ME NEXT YEAR WILL BE THE PERFECT YEAR.
He tries to tell her, he tries to ease the news, but it’s easier not to, easier to leave before landing the final blow. As misguided and mistaken as she is, Norma is never dishonest. Her want is raw and open, her desire is stated, and boldly at that. She puts it out there, and leaves her heart vulnerable for the taking.
He does not take it. He tramples on it. Lightly at first, but it is unmistakable, and a declination, no matter how kind, stings however it is delivered. When you love someone and are told that you are not loved in return, there’s a sort of pain that’s different than dealing with anything else. It isn’t blameless, like death, and it isn’t random, like an accident. It’s a deliberate verdict on what you mean, or don’t mean, to another person. It is a dismissal.
ANOTHER CHANCE, ANOTHER START
SO MANY DREAMS TO TEASE THE HEART
WE DON’T NEED A CROWDED BALLROOM
EVERYTHYING WE WANT IS HERE
AND FACE TO FACE WE WILL EMBRACE THE PERFECT YEAR.
She wants so much to be wanted.
She wishes so badly to be loved.
She asks for so little… and so much. She asks for everything.
She gives her heart to this final dance, not knowing it will be their last. That’s just how she lives. A dance isn’t worth dancing if you’re not going to take the chance. She goes hard that way, burning brightly and at all expenses. The magnificent white-hot brilliance of pouring the whole of your being into the existence of another.
“What you’re trying to say is that you don’t want me to love you. Say it. Say it!”
She is dangerous.
She is devastated.
Above all else, she is delusional.
It carries her through to the very end.
It was the only way she could survive.
THE DELUSIONAL GRANDEUR TOUR: LAST STAND OF A ROCK STAR
A woman sits in a dark room, shrouded in a cloud of tuberose perfume and topped with a turban befitting royalty. Even in the dim light, she wears sunglasses – perhaps to add an air of glamour, perhaps to hide tearful eyes, perhaps to shield her from the prying gaze of others. Whittling the months and years and decades into splinters of time and decaying dreams, she went from having the world at her feet to being forgotten and isolated. What terrors lurked in her great, dim mansion? What nightmares tormented her sleep? Is it better to have never known such happiness and adoration at all, than to know it and lose it and spend a lifetime trying to win it back? It must have been a brittle existence, a fragile and lonely one ever on the verge of breaking apart, shattering into a thousand jagged shards.
WITH ONE LOOK I CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
WITH ONE LOOK I PLAY EVERY PART
I CAN MAKE YOUR SAD HEART SING
WITH ONE LOOK YOU’LL KNOW ALL YOU NEED TO KNOWÂ
WITH ONE SMILE I’M THE GIRL NEXT DOOR OR THE LOVE THAT YOU’VE HUNGERED FORÂ WHE I SPEAK IT’S WITH MY SOUL I CAN PLAY ANY ROLE.Â
This is Norma Desmond. On this day she waits, for what she does not yet know. Joe Gillis is about to pull his car into her driveway and hide it away in her garage. For now, though, in this early morning of a sunny day which once again won’t allow any sunlight into her grand home, she sits quietly nurturing the heart that survived the only way it knew how. A belief in the grand illusions of her faded fame. A hope planted on the fantasy of her implacable glamour. A delusion that saw her through decades of a lonely existence. The things we believe in order to go on living… and the things we refuse to believe.
NO WORDS CAN TELL THE STORIES MY EYES TELL
WATCH ME WHEN I FROWN, YOU CAN’T WRITE THAT DOWN
YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT, IT’S THERE IN BLACK AND WHITE
WHEN I LOOK YOUR WAY, YOU’LL HEART WHAT I SAY.Â
She is a sad creature, but she doesn’t see that, not in the way that most people might see it. She’s not sad in a pitiable way, in the way that makes one feel sorry for her – she’s internally sad that she can no longer thrill like she used to thrill, that she can’t make her art the way she once did, that there is no longer a place for her in a changing world that left her old-fashioned craft behind. She’s also sad because she’s had her heart broken. No doubt she’s broken a few hearts in the process too, and sometimes that’s worse. Sometimes that takes a deeper toll, a toll whose devastation only becomes clear long after the fact, in the ruined years that follow. It’s a toll that doesn’t ever seem to find comeuppance, a hurt and ache that finds no resolution or relief. A guilt that bears down on everything that comes after it.
WITH ONE LOOK THEY’LL FORGIVE THE PAST
THEY’LL REJOICE I’VE RETURNED AT LAST
TO MY PEOPLE IN THE DARK, STILL OUT THERE IN THE DARK…Â
Yet she is not broken. She has not yet cracked. There is the distinct possibility that a return is possible. Not a comeback. Don’t ever call it a comeback. She hates that word. But a return, yes. A return to form, a return to glory. A return to being loved. Why should she be so punished for wanting that again?
WITH ONE LOOK I’LL IGNITE A BLAZEÂ I’LL RETURN TO MY GLORY DAYSÂ THEY’LL SAY, “NORMA’S BACK AT LAST!”
Somewhere downstairs, off the terrazzo where rumor has it Rudy Valentino once tangoed, her butler shuffles about. A car rolls into the driveway, and she peers out the slats of a window shutter. A man walks toward the door, out of the sunlight, into the shadows of the house on Sunset.
Norma Desmond rises. He is not who she thinks he is, but he may be altogether better.
And there’s that hope again, that innocent belief in herself, and the possibilities of the world, even when it’s done nothing but dash her against its cold rocks. She emerges from her boudoir, regal bearing intact, ready to demand the love of the world, or the love of a man, or simply the chance to do it all again.
THIS TIME I’M STAYING, I’M STAYING FOR GOOD
I’LL BE BACK WHERE I WAS BORN TO BE
WITH ONE LOOK I’LL BE ME!Â
THE DELUSIONAL GRANDEUR TOUR: LAST STAND OF A ROCK STAR
How sad to finally say it, how sad to give up that ghost.
It’s easier to believe in something, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how ridiculous, than to face an empty truth. Some of us, like Joe Gillis, believe right up to the very end. The bullets tearing through his back must have come as quite the surprise. The first one doesn’t even stop him, so intent is he on walking out the door, away from the dream, into the future.
Most of us just stumble along, happily or sadly as circumstances allow, without the drive to move toward or away from something. I’ve always admired those who make the effort to do more, not only to steer the way, but to actively rev the engine. It’s a lazy thing to simply react to the world. To take a first step into something, no matter how unknown, is an act of courage.
To take the last step requires something more.
Resignation.
Reconciliation.
Redemption.
When at last we grip our bloodied chests, when our final breath floats to the surface and disappears, we find relief at the end of a journey.
The splash, and then the slow gentle sinking
Of a dream
Of a wish
Of a beginning.
The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand Of A Rock Star
It begins with a man floating face-down in a pool. Not just any pool, the pool belonging to Norma Desmond. The man has been shot, Ms. Desmond has gone delusional, and at this 40-year-old crux of my life, I feel sympathy and empathy for both. The dreamer destroyed by a world that passed him by; the dreamer destroyed by a world that passed her by. Both treated roughly, and both deserving it a little, because we all fall victim to our successes as much as to our failures. The sun sets equally on everyone. It cannot be stopped.
Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along. ~ Joe Gillis
My fascination and love of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ runs deeply. It runs darkly too. Ms. Desmond did, after all, slash her wrists in an act of desperation, hopelessness, manipulation and love. It was an act of defiance too, and, in a sad way, of nobility. She was a survivor, but not a successful one, and merely surviving is not the stuff of grandeur. We want to pretend it is, and we bestow honors on the Miss Daisy’s of the world to make it be true, but comebacks are never as glorious as that first initial high. It’s the nature of the beast.
You don’t yell at a sleepwalker – he may fall and break his neck. That’s it: she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career. ~ Joe Gillis
Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond are brittle and bitter, not wholly likeable, and selfish enough to want and want and want, but they were made that way, and why should anyone be blamed for being a product of their surroundings, of a world that so easily discards those who dare to dream and want? It’s a harsh view of our nature, a cold and contemptuous take on greed and fame and love, and there is little redemption to be found in the way either of them end up.
There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25. ~ Joe Gillis
The darkness on the approaching edge of evening, the stiff breeze that portends change to come, the elegant wisp of smoke curling from some devil’s lips – these are the shadows that foretell of transformation.
Do not be afraid, though your heart tells you otherwise. Do not draw back, as fear proves more hospitable for him. Do not run away, because it’s the only way out.
‘Cause I eat boys like a cannibal, Fuck hard, howl at the moon like an animal, Eat me, drink me, straight down the rabbit hole White lines, white lies, straight down the rabbit hole
When I fall in love, I fall down the rabbit hole Down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole Fall in love, I fall down the rabbit hole Down the rabbit hole
When I fall in love, I fall down the rabbit hole Down the rabbit hole, down the rabbit hole Fall in love, I fall down the rabbit hole Follow me down the rabbit hole…
Of course, there’s also the original ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane, with imagery that conjures Alice in Wonderland. Rich source material indeed, even if its author was super-creepy and questionable of moral turpitude.
One pill makes you larger,
and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you,
don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead And the white knight is talking backwards And the red queen’s off with her head Remember what the dormouse said Feed your head, feed your head…
