Does having a serious crush on Regina Spektor make me a dirty old man? She's just so darned pretty and talented and creative and smart. I feel like writing her name down with little hearts around it. But then I just feel a little silly.
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SF Bay Area
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Unsu...
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05/13Well, not living in NYC (or anywhere close), I had to google Regina Spektor. But my feeling is, crushing on anyone with a public persona gets a free pass. Unless it's someone under the age of consent (like Elmo, say). But that's sort of fandom and not crushing. For instance, my crushes on Ben Browder or Nathan Fillian or Elvis Costello are ultimately less personal, less intimate, than my crush on an oh-so-compatible but much younger man in my children's martial arts group. I'd admit easily to the first two, and never to the last. That says to me that public-figure crushes lack that electric spark of the possible and the skull-and-crossbones of the off-limits. -
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05/13
"That says to me that public-figure crushes lack that electric spark of the possible and the skull-and-crossbones of the off-limits."
--and that says to me that you can really write! Thanks for the sentiment - and the words too.
I like what you bring up about the social distance and unattainability of celebrity, but I still think it's a crush - just in that high school "Tiger Beat" kind of way maybe. I guess it's also crushing from a safe distance; you never have to know if your crush chews with his/her mouth open, or talks endlessly about him/herself - during the movie! ;) The crushes I've had that can hold up to close quarters are the hardest to get over in the long run, and have the least clearly defined boundaries.
And after reflection, it may actually just be "old" part of "dirty old man" that worries me the most. I'll have to google Ben Browder and Nathan Fillian. And luckily I've never had a crush on Elmo or any other muppet - well okay, Miss Piggy. -
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Unsu...
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05/14ohhhhhh, Tiger Beat. Leif Erikson! Are the crushes we later look on as lamentable not truly crushes, or do crushes evolve as we do? For many years in my 20s, I bought every Elvis Costello album, went to every concert within driving distance, memorized lyrics, felt a CONNECTION. Then, one day, I read a review of an autobiography of Bonnie Blue (I probably don't have her name right), who was (maybe) the inspiration for "my song" Almost Blue, and at any rate whose tale of Catholic-angst rejection by my erstwhile demigod made me realize that not only were his feet clay, but most likely more northerly parts as well.
But, still, I hear "Alison" and hear my life in the song, hear "Almost Blue" (although now I prefer the Chet Baker version) and feel myself stretched to breaking by the yearning of the lyrics. I don't think Elvis Costello is "god" anymore, but the way those songs make me feel is more than precious to my sense of who I am. Is that a crush? Or iconography?
Similarly, does my almost subliminal obsession with the forms of younger men count against me in the cosmic weighing-in of intention? Youth is wasted on the young --- who said that? If I were not so lamentably old and laden with children and the body shape that comes with children, the beautiful youth who can quote the Bhagavad Gitas would have no place to hide from me, the breathtakingly proportioned young man who can execute effortless handstands would also learn my name. But life is a series of plateaus, of stages, and where I am now will have to provide me with compensations for the temptations in their 20s I'll have to forego (not through common sense but because I am acutely aware of how SILLY I would look!).
Damn. Crushing isn't funny. It wasn't in high school, when the world turned (or failed to) on who loved you, and it still isn't even when all that's at stake is your sense of self-worth (oh, wait, that's still the same). Conclusion? Crushes are cruel, and painful, and even when you don't have to think about the Senior Prom it doesn't get much better. -
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05/17Almost blue is so poignant, and I think I have a crush on the song, but not the man. I am in love with the song - does that make any sense? That song is so true to a feeling of how a series of flirtations can try to sum up the parts of crush/love/obsession? Yet in the end they will fail, they must because the "perfection" of the moment in the past is trapped in the amber of the past, and exists purely in memory, and that memory falters, and emphasizes, fades and erases. It's also why Felinni's 8 1/2 is my favorite movie. Here's a movie about a director essentially trying to cast his memories; his film, his life. Yet he can't, and his flashbacks clearly show how far off the casting sessions are. Yet when all is said and done, the flashbacks work so the casting must have worked as well, and there's nothing to do but dance in a circus around a failed sci-fi movie set.
"Not all good things come to an end now it is only a chosen few. I have seen such an unhappy couple. Almost me, almost you, almost"
So then is the unhappy couple he sees less or more unhappy? One of the interesting things about crushes is that if or when they are realized they transform into something else, a tryst an affair, etc... So crushes are all about projection I suppose. Projecting an unfulfilled desire, an unrealized passion, the repair to something broken... The crush is the anima, the other, the container of the lack we feel. We push out the emptiness we have and put it behind the a picture we hold of someone else. I suspect that I've had crushes like this. Probably not all, but maybe many to one degree or another.
boy howdy, that was long winded and heavy. I'll be more spritely and brief in the future. -
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Unsu...
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05/18No, I feel that. That we project into our crushes the thing we most need to find in ourselves. And, of course, in realizing any closer approach we see that they aren't, at all, what we imagined. Or maybe what we truly needed.
The crushes I've had on songs have withstood the test of time so much better!
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