Essays

Essays


I must give.

It is a strange thing to go through life knowing you need, and scrutinizing every face, every street corner, every whispered secret for a clue – what is it I need? You can never reach the point of trying for the thing, because you cannot even begin to identify the thing. Ten years can be lost this way; most likely, entire lives are lost this way regularly. But ten years is enough for me.

We all hear the platitude, “It is better to give than to receive,” but we do not think much about it. When the adults told us this, we understood that giving makes one a “good person,” and that this is something that the adults were trying to make us want to be. But forget all of that, assume that Jesus didn’t believe in good people, only good life, and read the sentence again. The statement is a paradox. The resolution is simple: giving is an experience, itself a thing that one can have, and you want to have it. You need it. So take it! (Or, rather, you know…) People will say, if you want to be a writer, just write. Perhaps this is good advice for one who wants to be a writer, but I do not think that is what I want. I want to give my ideas and my passion to others; I want to change the world. So I will just do that.

I had a dream last night that I was living at my mother’s house, and she was telling me some story about my “father’s phone call,” which she was angry about. I looked at her and told her she was insane, and I told her that she tries to force us to love her through anger and threats, and that her whole world was negative, and that I wanted nothing to do with it. And, of course, she told me I could leave her house then. I woke up as the thought crossed my mind, “How many times will I have to go through this? How can I not have escaped this yet?” After all, she has been dead for four years, and I told her ten years ago that I was leaving, never to return. But still she is in my head, in waking life as well as dreams. When I was fully awake, I wrote this essay.

I was learning to take compositional photographs yesterday when I accidentally caught myself being evil.

Accidental Photo #1

Photography is a miraculous art. The invention of the camera enables the artist to capture the moment, a thing which until recent history could only be done by reconstruction. It is this unique characteristic of the medium that leads to a whole new category of art, accidental art, in which we acquire an image that was completely unintended, but is worth looking at.

I have a friend, Mark, who pays most of his attention to himself. I once made a joke that Mark’s world was like what John Malkovich finds when he goes into the tunnel. “Mark Meves?” “Mark Meves!” Well, it happened that some friends and I were eating breakfast at Café Zola, which happens to be Mark’s favorite restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor. While we were eating, I noticed what appeared to be a tiny door at the base of the wall, with a six-inch tall door frame, and even a shrunken doorknob. At first, I thought I might be mistaking an electric junction or something for some half-remembered figment of prior nights’ dreams, but no – we all agreed that it was, indeed, a door, or at least an intentional facade of one. I declared that it was the door to Mark’s brain. Weeks later, in an overheard conversation, I learned that there are many such doors around Ann Arbor, all done by the same artist, and that they are fairly famous – which is to say, there’s a website about them. People call them “fairy doors.”

Within a matter of months, the fame of these little violations of the mundane had grown to the point where they essentially became mundane themselves. Specifically, I realized there was one such in a coffee shop I occasioned, only to immediately discover the informative brochures atop the nearby table dedicated to this purpose. Such attention, of course, destroys the foundation of the doors’ aesthetic – they must by seen in the context of the everyday, not removed and put into the context of an “attraction.” Art of this kind – I suppose it falls under the umbrella term of “street art” – depends vitally on its context. Indeed, outside of that context it ceases to be art at all. The context is the point. I saw a picture of a photo-realistic bird, perhaps made from an elaborate stencil, at the edge of a row of houses in London, looking like it was flying it away. I laughed when I saw it; it’s perfect. I was in love. But the same bird put on a movable medium and displayed on the wall of a gallery would be worthless. In thinking about this, I realized that this is what makes street art different from “studio art”: one draws on a canvas rather than a wall precisely so that it can be moved about, and viewed anywhere. A canvas is “context free,” at least in the sense of location as the context. I know some people in Philadelphia making a documentary about the Toynbee Tiler. I foresee the day when cities will install plaques next to the Tiler’s works, and send in restoration crews to “fix” them, and perhaps even cordon them off, or remove them to a museum. This is when beauty becomes history. I would like to see beauty last as long as possible, but it seems there is more money in history than in beauty, so the odds are against me.

This is the difference, I think, between contemporary art, and most of the rest of Western art: it is heavily context-dependent. In this case it is not the context of location, but the context of art history, that is essential. If the audience lacks an acute understanding of the topical subjects in modern art theory, they are lost. They may as well be looking, as the cliche goes, at the drawings of a child. Older art is different. Whatever the philosophical arguments to the contrary, older art is less tied to context of any kind, be it geographic, historical, or academic. Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait proved this to me on my recent trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. Though I had seen reprints of it a thousand times, to the point where it was more than familiar, I was stopped dead in my tracks when I came upon it in the gallery. Though it is not a realistic painting, Van Gogh somehow imbued it with such life, such a reality unto itself, that I felt as though a creature from another universe were standing there, gazing at me through a window. And that is not an exaggeration. I cried looking at the thing. Now, I am aware that the painting has some kind of significance in the history of art, which is why it is reproduced in every general book on art that exists, but I have to admit my ignorance of any more information than that. While I am sure van Gogh was, in some sense, making statements about the nature of art, his country, and so forth, I nonetheless “got” the painting. I assure you that I cannot say the same for anything in the Contemporary gallery. One piece in that particular hallway was a group of vertical fluorescent lights, arranged on the wall in groups of three. OK.

In light of these ideas, I have concluded that independence from context is an essential characteristic of art. For example, why do we not consider criticism art? It is not true that the critic does not create something. He creates a critique. Some are so brilliant that they are given prestigious awards, sometimes even the same awards given to writers of great fiction. But they are not art, because they depend entirely on another work for their meaning and beauty. So why is context-independence so essential? Because universality is a measure of greatness. If you make a brilliant point in a conversation with your best friend, and you do so eloquently, you still have not created art. To create art, you would have to transform the conversation into something that can be appreciated by people other than your friend. Otherwise, you are merely a good conversationalist – one with a narrow audience, at that. In this way, art and science are the same; what we call the scientific method is actually a way of communicating experiences (of a certain kind, to someone else. One need not follow the scientific method to know something; that is a falsification engendered by precollegiate teachers who have never done science. The purpose of the scientific method is to enable others to prove to themselves what you have already proved to yourself. That is why you must keep a precise record of your experimental methods, prove your mathematical results rigorously, and so forth. You must make the discovery universal for it to be science. Likewise with art.

So, the more universal something is, the more it is art; or, the better a work of art it is. What, then, of street art? That’s the elegance of the medium – it depends on context, but it is the most universal of contexts: the everyday. Anyone walking around London has seen countless rowhouses; most have probably grown up with them. Anyone can appreciate the bird that is forever trying to escape; let us be thankful that, at least for a little while, it will not.

I apologize for my hiatus. I know it was against the rules, but I have come to the conclusion that three days is too short, too noisy, to make a consistently worthwhile website. A week is more appropriate. Having already broken that rule as well, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that I’m working on a screenplay, and will subsequently be making it into a movie; and thus, this site may be delayed indefinitely. The screenplay is itself languishing at the moment; after the initial excitement wore off, I realized that my approach to writing it – to writing anything, in fact – is too serious to be any fun for me, or my readers. After writing one third of what promised to be world cinema’s most boring on-screen conversation ever, I decided I needed to take a detour and develop a better approach. My first step, I decided, was to make an anything-goes, quality-be-damned absurdist masterpiece. The other morning I thought of some very funny bits – I thought they were funny – and when I snuck away from work to get coffee, I found myself eyeing the girl behind the counter at Amer’s. She was beautiful, after all. I noticed that her blue shirt was adorned with a graphic making prominent use of a “Jesus fish,” that stick-figure pisces that symbolizes Christianity. (I just now looked it up, and discovered that it has a name. It is called the “ichthys.”) While that may put to doom the impure thoughts that were going through my head, I nonetheless liked seeing the little guy. I have always very much liked the Jesus fish; minimalism appeals to me, and the church we went to in my youth had one visible, somewhere, and I always wondered what it had to do with church. As it was a Catholic church, there were many symbols floating around the place, and each of them had some story behind it, and I always thought that one day, like my mother, I would know them all. I suppose I could have asked the beautiful girl about the ichthys, but as I was risking my job even being there, I opted to pay for my coffee and leave.

When I returned to my booth in the parking structure, I wrote the following scene, which I laughed at until embarrassed myself:

Shot of beautiful girl with big breasts, smiling with eerie constance behind the register. She is wearing a tight t-shirt with an eye-catching “Jesus fish” on the breast. Cut to our man, who is staring at her breasts, also steadily. CU Jesus fish. Cut back to our man. He should continue staring steadily.

MAN: Jesus.

After a moment, Man 2 ENTERS FRAME. After Man 2 finishes speaking, Man should take a conspicuous amount of time to turn to Man 2.

[dialog]

The two men EXIT FRAME. After a moment, right when we expect the scene to cut, Man’s HEAD REENTERS FRAME, looking you know where.

Later that day, I decided I should watch a movie every day. I ran next door looking for my friend who might lend me movies, manic on my quest to “infuse myself with media!” She wasn’t there, so I instead I watched Waking Life, which I had in my possession but had only watched once, years ago. I found I liked it at least as much now as I had the first time; for one thing, I found myself laughing a lot more. There is a scene near the end of the picture in which a man playing pinball (the actor is the writer/director himself, Richard Linklater) tells the main character about an essay written by Philip K. Dick, in which he (Dick, that is) tells of a story he had written that was later uncannily mirrored in reality. I remember being intrigued when I heard about it before, but my suspicion that Dick was a drug casualty dissuaded me from ever researching it. Well, this time the movie had fired me up in all directions, so I found the essay online. It’s called “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” If you have never read it, you should do so now. Go ahead, I can wait. (I am text, and therefore inanimate.) Did you cheat? Did you skim, instead of read? Did you skip over the part about the ichthys around the girl’s neck?

Now, you either think things like this are extraordinary, or you don’t. Some people are comfortable calling anything a coincidence, no matter how improbable the event. I am not one of these people. In a future article, I will discuss some experiences I have had along these lines (one was very much like Dick’s – writing something as fiction which I later witnessed, against all odds, as fact). But for now, I bid you vale.

As I said in my first post, the purpose of this project is two-fold: work and humiliation. The two are in inverse proportion: one rises as the other falls. And as I have done no work for the past two days, I can expect to be utterly ashamed of the quality of this post. I have cheated a bit, which is itself shameful, by including material I already wrote.

When I was squatting in Philadelphia, I had a friend who created a hoax Myspace page for – well, I can’t say, as he has continued the hoax to this day. He managed to convince the roving bands of traveling crusty punks (all of whom, surprisingly, use Myspace) of his clever deception. That my friend had not only created one of the boldest, most outrageous parodies I had ever seen, but managed to pass it off as genuine, inspired me to try a hoax myself. I imagined we could create an entire universe of Philadelphia lore, that, like his creation, paralleled reality just closely enough to convince the indiscriminate reader. I also had an ulterior motive: as a squatter who wished to remain hidden from roving bands of crusty punks, I sought immunity through rumor. I created an alter ego under my nickname, Normal Guy. (You have one guess who it was who gave me that name.) Among other things, Normal Guy is 6′8″ tall, and own a rottweiler named Maxwell who roams Camp freely (where Camp is the area surrounding my cabin) and attacks any person unfortunate enough to cross the nearby train tracks. The deception apparently worked, at least to some extent: the cabin shown on Normal Guy’s page is in fact the cabin of my campmate Pat, and to this day the travellers mistake it for my own, leaving my cabin virtually unmolested.

The following is my favorite of Normal Guy’s writings. It is a poem for his Taiwanese girlfriend, Xiu Ng. (Nice name, don’t you think?) It is the first poem I have written in many years:

Poem for Xiu

No form opens out quite like a woman
your body next to classical chemical texts
in an old library, but they are all
open to the same page. Moth and butterfly – both
come from the worm, but I do not know what
to think of you. My bookshelves are full, and I know
nothing worthwhile. Your body next to mine,
beside the bookshelves. We both come from the same text
and we read back and forth to each other,
each in the same tongue. I’ve read the first page of each
one, every one of these books. But you give
in no order, and I take the pages and fold
them up in a drawer with pencils and odds
and ends. You would never know where to look, so you
ask. And I read you the first page. And we
come together
under the shelf
like children playing a desperate scenario
and we are there now
and we are not leaving.
Not for anything.

You can read the rest of his stuff here: Normal Guy’s page

« Previous PageNext Page »