favourites

I noticed the other night out with friends that I have a lot of favourites. I think it’s because I like to define myself based on my choices and opinions… not because of them but that they reflect who I am.

so, for example, it’s obvious why neon green is my favourite colour. It radiates. It attracts attention. but at the same time, it has no problem just being there. Sometimes neon green likes to find itself in a heap on my floor. sometimes it finds itself up in the closet locked away. it still wants to be neon green, but it doesn’t really want to be noticed. it likes to be worn underneath dark black… as if to mask itself from the world so that it doesn’t have to be defending its brilliance all of the time.

and it’s obvious why charlie and the chocolate factory is my favourite movie starring Gene Wilder featuring chocolate, toys or adventure. I mean, for one, there is a leader in the movie that guides people beyond their normal self-inflicted borders of the absurd and the bizzare. and there is a shimmering eternal knowledge about what is right and what is wrong. and there is chocolate, lots and lots of it, churning on waterfalls, flowing in the river, melting inside of the trees… and social justice, featuring the more equitable distribution of wealth that is bestowed upon charlie over and over again… whether it be the money in the street or the savings of his grandpa that don’t buy tobacco but rather buy a gift for charlie… or the fact that they live in a wonderful factory in Austria at the end. Magic.

Or perhaps for the moment let’s notice my love for Salman Rushdie’s use of English. I’m not even sure if Rushdie’s first language is English. (Wow, he appears in two posts concurrently on this blog… yikes, I must be feeling guilty for not reading all of the Rushdie I’ve bought.) It’s beyond creative in certain passages. it’s difficult and obscure and inspiring and painting and wonderful all at the same time. it’s prose that walks into a bar and orders a drink no one has ever ordered and magically conjurs up that drink in the hands of the uneducated bartender who secretly wishes he had the creativity to mix such a drink on a nightly basis… he thinks the ladies would have been impressed with this concoction. It’s that level of mystique. That’s why Rushdie is my favourite writer, even though I’ve barely made it all the way through one entire novel and have only started the surface introductions to three others.

Finally, to the red star. That perfect shape that has its history in so much of the world’s politics and yet means so little to so few in north america anymore. It shimmers down and says, I am Mars, I am raging and I am war, and I may be the sister planet to yours but I am not hospitable to you. I want to be righteous and I want to be absolute and I want to be miserably cold and lacking oxygen. I don’t want life on my land because I know of the pain it will inflict on each other. And the red star is that… absolute ideaism. The kind I thought I had at age 20, when I thought I knew evertyhing there was about activism, and what I thought I knew about the world being unjust was so full and comlpete of a world view. Did I see that union leaders could be corrupt or that business executives could have any positive motivations? did I ever imagine NGOs would have a cult-like following to process that they would become inefficient and uncompromising and unapologetic for their lack of accomplishment? Did I envision myself wading through the stores that represent the largest forms of success in capitalism and admitting to myself that I likely won’t have the influence necessary to change their ways single handedly? Oh, red star, you represent the ideal to me, that utopia I know wants to arrive and I allow myself to paint, whether it be in writing or on canvas or in the freeflowing thoughts on my fingertips…

these are the reasons I develop favourites. Maybe someone else out there also shares this borderline insane thirst for life.