trying to write and record new material sometimes. It’s Wednesday. Yesterday I was recording some bass, and after about 45 minutes I was starting to fall asleep. I don’t know what it is about the creative process, but when it’s like that, I just have to stop. The weather lately, hasn’t been helping. It’s just gotten colder and colder, and yesterday it snowed for most of the day too. The cops drove by at one point and broadcast some warning in Spanish. I had no idea what it was about. At the Wal-shit-Mart this morning they were playing Mariachi music (which I like) and almost everyone shopping there was speaking Spanish. This is upstate New York. Good work Democrats. What are we, Mexico now? The winter really does get tiresome at this time of the year. We’ve all had enough. There’s a few things we’ve all had enough of, but lets not go there now. In less than I month I’ll be at the beach, all things going well, so that will be a nice change from wearing overcoats constantly.
I watched a BBC series about Frida Kahlo a few days ago. It was ok, other than the fact that the idiots who made it insisted on placing every bias and progressive narrative they could find at the feet of Saint Frida, who of course, was solely responsible for of these ‘woke’ and revolutionary breakthroughs including the entire LGBTQQQQ plus tax, movement it would seem.
Frida would have felt very much at home today. She pioneered the selfie/Instagram/tiktok idea of constantly focusing on ‘me’. Very early on she had developed a ‘look’ which she pretty much never wavered from for the rest of her short life. She had a long affair with famous portrait photographer Nikolas Muray in New York. It was he who was responsible for all those iconic Frida pictures in those colorful outfits which are seen everywhere today. Her art is all about her too, and that’s fine. Her relationship with Diego Rivera was puzzling at times, but nevertheless she stuck with him despite his many affairs, including one with her own sister. When Frida met Diego he was the great artiste, and she was just a young girl trying to get ahead. By the end of the story she had eclipsed him entirely.
Everyone has heard of Frida Kahlo, but Diego Rivera has somewhat faded in her shadow. Diego was an on and off communist, having been expelled from the party for being too involved with western capitalism. When he included a portrait of Lenin in a John D Rockefeller commissioned mural for the New York Rockefeller center, he was then expelled from the US as well. This may have endeared him enough to be re admitted to the communist party, but his relationship with Trotsky prevented that from happening. It’s unclear (from wikipedia at least) whether he was finally admitted or not, but I don’t really care either way. Frida did her part by shagging Trotsky, so at least he enjoyed some hot tamale before his appointment with the ice pick.
Over time, Frida Kahlo gradually became much more famous, and struggled through the last years of her life with a number of health issues, particularly involving her spine which had been damaged when she was much younger, when the bus she was riding in was hit by a tram in Mexico city. She had also contracted polio when she was six years old which resulted in her having one leg shorter than the other. She had many medical problems throughout her life. In 1953 her right leg was amputated at the knee due to gangrene, and she was in constant pain. Rivera at the time, was having yet another affair which most probably drove her over the edge of despair. She died in 1954, from what was rumored to be an overdose of pills. On the 13th of July, her body was taken to the Palacio de Bellas Arts, where it lay in state under a Communist flag. Rivera died three years later.
To sum up, it appears that Frida Kahlo was a talented card carrying communist who profited from capitalism. (not that there’s anything wrong with that) It makes no difference to me. I like her paintings. She was a fool in love though, I think, but what do I know? I’m just trying to be creative myself, and it sucks because it makes me so tired sometimes that I start to hate the whole thing. Yeah, writing music and playing in a band seems like the perfect life, but like any other job, sometimes you just want to go and do something else. What that something else is, I don’t know. Creativity is hard, man. I’m not trying to compare myself to Frida Kahlo. I’m not a commie for a start. The Frida show on the BBC was probably the best we can expect in a documentary these days. The ideology hasn’t yet excluded the facts as far as I know. I could have done without the warnings about “offensive language”. I still don’t know what I was supposed to offended by. I imagine it depended upon what triggers you based on your level of mental illness. Fucked if I know.
A final word from BBC.com
“Nov 17, 2021. A painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold at Sotheby’s auction house in New York for a record $34.9m (£25m). It is the highest price paid at auction for a Latin American artwork. The record had previously been set by a work by Diego Rivera, with whom Kahlo had a decades-long tumultuous relationship. His piece sold for $9.76m in 2018. Kahlo’s painting “Diego y Yo” was one of her final self-portraits.The work depicts a tearful Kahlo with her husband Rivera painted above her eyes.”
Who’s crying now?