They appeared quite different one black, one white; one a quiet small town guy and the other an urbanite with a big smile.
But, they had a common obsession.
And a common Temperament: Artisan.
They were competitive. Very competitive — actually they both wanted to be the best, period.
We all know him.
Oh, maybe not by his face. Or even his real name. But we know him.
By his work.
Around the world. All us kids. You remember his stories. And his rhymes. His times. His rhymes. His times.
“We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?”
“My answer then, and now, was that it is worth it.”
She did know the risk.
And she still took the risk.
Finally lost this time — and she was the story. The story was..
This is the title of her autobiography.
As she says:
What are you saying? Who am I?
Well I’m me — I’m what is called the power behind the throne. I’m your — your character. Isn’t that what they call it?
Yes, Kate. That’s what we call it. Character. You were certainly an interesting Character.
Character: a configuration of habits.
Oh, but Kate, we have another word that you never knew much about. The word is Temperament.
Temperament + Character = Personality
What you didn’t know was your Temperament. But I doubt if you would care. You had an interesting and full life anyway. However, you might have understood yourself and others a little more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTnSEFsInp0
… Artisans are definitively practical, that is adaptive, resilient, flexible, hence unconventional and unorthodox, both in the sense of being spontaneously so inclined, and in the sense of acting in ways that only they can appreciate if not understand, given their insistent and persistent adaptive agenda. They do this by adapting their ways of using words and tools to the necessities of the moment that come about when some tactical maneuver goes awry. [Personology page 191]
And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind.
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
I´d have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.
Candle in the Wind, Elton John & Bernie Taupin
She is an icon of modern culture. A legend.
She had been in foster care most of her childhood. She wasn’t wanted, her mother was too unreliable to take care of her. She was convinced to marry young for that way her guardians could go to Florida without her.
“My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”
He is grateful for a second chance. And he is doing well with it – at least for now.
Yes, he screwed up before – royally. He knew it. “I had burned bridges”
No, it wasn’t the addiction. No, that wasn’t it.
“It was the anger.”
“I had issues with anger. I wasn’t behaving professionally. I wasn’t accountable, no consequences, no rules.”
They are two of kind; they are so… different. They are same. They are different. He is the father, and she, the daughter.
Can they have a relationship?
They are alike in a fundamental way: they have the same Temperament and Type. Different in other ways: male versus female, different generations, and different life experience.
Competitive. Contending.
Co-stars in the hit movie, Paper Moon, the daughter, 10 years old at the time, Tatum O’Neal, won an Academy award for her performance, as a tough-kid in a father-daughter grifter team in the Depression. She was the youngest actor to get an Oscar ever. They were inseparable at the time, when Ryan O’Neal took care of her, because her mother and his ex-wife, Joanna Moore, was an alcoholic, and neglected to take care of her.
“We were a team,” “we were very close; I was closer to her than any of my wives,” Ryan O’Neal has said.
But then it all changed.
Latin intro – vert: to turn within
“My daughter is not an introvert,
— she’s pretty”An anonymous mother’s exclamation
One Babe had a problem. She was an introvert – she was what they call shy — but she wanted to be an actress.
This Babe was lucky. At 17, she encountered “the most unforgettable character I’ve ever met.” The rest is history: for he, Salvatore, her unforgettable character, was not “intro-verted” — in fact he was far more gregarious than shy, or, in Latinized German jargon, he was “extro-verted.” He had wiggled himself into the Los Angeles music scene; he had paid his dues as a gofer and backup singer for Phil Spector’s record company.
She had said: “For better or worse, I never plan my life. I focus on today. I love spontaneity. That is what has put me in some strange and wonderful places in my life.”
So how did this shy but ambitious teenager, a high school dropout, once one of Warren Beatty’s uncountable hook-ups, with no plans, become The Diva of Rock?
“Lady Gaga was born that way.
You can’t explain that“.