"Wow! What a wonderful post, Patricia.This is an interesting plot for a Lula romance. Patricia enjoys a few cognacs, but more than one small glass of red wine is anathema to Rob's health. A marriage with problems from the start? Will Patricia be able to sacrifice her penchant for a few glasses of cognac in order to achieve harmonious union with Rob? We're holding our breath for the next episode."
Ray, you simply have to consult with our people who will, in due course, consult with your people. We are ever open to negotiation and the exchange of business ideas. Perhaps LuLa might care to sponsor a boat trip along the Canal du Midi (with full mariner support included, of course, though an adventure by hotel barge instead would save the sponsor money on ancillary staff)? You know whom to contact.
I wonder about your twin options (I accept you cover your bets by including all the stops in between) as motivators for hanging a photograph, but I suppose there’s truth in both the extremes. Where there is no room for argument, however, is in your belief that your own work is the best. Of course it is. I have always shared that point of view – how else could one face the commercial world with less personal armour than that basic tenet?
“First, the obvious and most prevalent reason to hang any picture on a wall is because it has emotional relevance. It resonates with some past experience. It may be a picture of a dog, one's marriage, one's kids, one's wife, one's graduation ceremony, the Bratislava cup for Ice Hockey, one's father, one's great grandfather, the scene down the road, or even an Ansel Adam's photo of Yosemite because one visited the place and was mightily impressed by the beauty of the scenery, etc etc.”
I think you have posited the main reason for the young hanging posters in their bedroom. However filling the home with photographs of weddings, children, their children (ad infinitum), students wearing grad hats, all of that tends (to me) to smack of obligation rather than personal choice; I sense the presence of dominant others. Those photographs belong in albums or large biscuit tins. As an aside, I worry about the concatenation of dogs, marriage, kids and wife; whatever created that?
There’s some truth, borne out in my own experience, in the idea of the value of the photographic memento: we bought some prints (and books, too) from a talented photographer at his gallery in Sarlat. But, I really wonder if the motive was as simple as something to hang on the wall – in our bedroom, in the event – rather than something on which to hang! Emotions are strange things; I sometimes wonder if premonition can strike a decade before its time.
“At the other extreme, one may have the need to create a persona that attempts to describe a fictional representation of who you would really like to be.”
That’s a real and ever present danger. But, can one argue that if the need is already there to create that representation of self, then that’s who and what one really is, that it’s only circumstance that prevents the flowering of self that would permit what might otherwise be seen only as façade, a fiction of self? I certainly hope that most of the people that I’ve met are not really only what they appear to be!
“You may then choose paintings or photos to hang on your wall that correspond with that artificial persona. Paintings or photos that indicate to others that you are a person of taste, and/or great wealth, or simply 'cool' or avant-garde, etc. etc.”
The flaw in the position, of course, is that without that native taste one wouldn’t really know which things to choose in order to create the mythical ‘you’. (I am excluding, here, those who can afford to hire professional interior designers/decorators, by which stage they have no need to apologize to anyone for their decorative style. Was it not ever so?) And, even more fundamentally, would one even be aware of the lacking elements in one’s desired image were the intrinsic quality not already there in the current manifestation of the perceived self?
As I have noted before, and modern technology bears out, there are always more answers than questions, not a commonly shared opinion.
Rob C
