Reckless Thoughts in Progress

Nerdism

I am a nerd. Always have been, always will be. I knew this in high school and was continually reminded throughout my life in higher education and the work place.

I focus on details. Actually, I obsess over them. I live through my fantasies so often they have, quite literally, become an alternative reality.

It has become a place where I can hide and take comfort.

Try as I might, I am not a risk taker, a trend setter. I follow my own path, that is certain…but that is a solitary path with no interested followers.

I have been very fortunate to have been afforded a life of normalcy with episodes of incredible opportunity. I have accomplished a few things that will add my name to the margins of some obscure reports. I have rubbed elbows with notoriety.

But I have mostly toiled in obscurity, following an archaic path that reflects the unique qualities of an esoteric profession.

There was a girl who caught my eye at the university. I pursued, stalked is the term commonly used today. There was conquest, them a relationship, then a mutual history. But first impressions rarely hold true over the long run, conditions change according to events and experiences. What was once the ideal eventually becomes what must be endured.

This is generally acceptable. Unless fate steps in. Fate with its malicious intent. With a personality that rivals Loki, must throw his monkey wrench into the fray.

There is a woman.

Filled with creativity as well as anguish. A self torment aggravated by unfortunate events. Still, this soul presents so much hope, so much potential…

This person echoes the nerd in personal history and experience. There is an uncanny parallel in thought and consideration. An unspoken agreement of sentiment. So much commonality that it causes the psyche to overflow with emotion. The long separation marked by surreptitious peeking only heightens the pain. An unpleasant sensation only tempered by the memory of shared pleasures.

Unfortunately, the nerd in me cannot let go. The nerd cannot forget since that is a consistent failing….an obsessive mentality that will not subside. The nerd has experienced Beauty. A Beauty that is beyond physical measure. It is a comprehensive accumulation of appearance, acumen and ability.

The nerd has little alternative. It has tasted exquisite excellence with little chance of a repeat performance. This means the nerd will resort to the shallow actions that afford at least a little comfort. Small acts of kindness. Small gifts that represent more than the nerd can actually provide. Moments of nurture. All in the hopes of a glance or at best, a touch. A touch that will warm the soul of the nerd more than can be realistically understood.

The pain will remain. But pain is so common as to be no more than a trifle to the nerd. Disappointment, unrequited emotion…. all part of the make up of the nerd. Since junior high through adulthood the facts are inescapable. The nerd is nondeserving of the Hollywood ending. I only wish the object of desire is aware and a bit considerate. I only wish things could be different. I only wish I could be different.

Postwar Supermen and Cultural Kryptonite

The people I grew up with are the last of the baby boomers. Most of my oldest friends are sons of immigrants. That makes us prime examples of the American Dream. The quest for freedom, economic and political, was our Pablum. Our object lessons consisted of the mythologies of the old countries. Our characters were forged through the intensity of the cold war while being nourished off the post war glut of commercial goods. Our childhood was good, our parents succeeded through us. We are invincible.

Half a century later, we still grasp those early ideals as a lifeline of reassurance. The difference is the change in today’s sociopolitical landscape. Our parents’ feared nationalistic golems are long dead, the soviet menace has been defanged and our economy is reeling like a punch drunk boxer facing Tyson. Still, as a generation, we cannot be dominated. We saw the end of polio, whooping cough and tuberculosis. Medicine fixed all ills, chemistry made us indifferent to the rest. We drove the best vehicles, travelled with impunity to the farthest reaches of our imaginations, saw new worlds and experienced the unknown.

Today begins the end of our era. Fatalistic as this may sound, we are a shrinking demographic. Our parents are setting before us beyond the horizon while friends are contracting illnesses that should not have the temerity to even come nearby. Our invincibility is starting to show fractures along the edges. Injuries linger and aches morph into symptoms as the heart looks for new avenues to explore. My friends are succumbing to outrageous slings and arrows on all sides impelling me to reassess my physicality in an effort to stave of the inevitable. Our band of immigrant sons (and daughters) is condensing into a refined essence. A purified idealism that we attempt to pass on to our progeny and this is an expression of our faith.

Our common religion is based on tenets arrived at through our family experiences. We hold to these beliefs as a security blanket that we in turn pass on to our next generation. The faith derived from our experiences give us hope. We may show our mortality now, but we do not acknowledge that part of our humanity. Our conviction in the science behind us helps us to face the unexpected. Our devotion to those who made the great leap to bring us here causes us to continue the immigratory process. We endure because know it is possible to do so. We also impart this to our children because we know commitment to our experiences provides an indomitable confidence that can protect all who believe in it. I am a believer. I drink this Kool Aid of 50’s propaganda because I have experienced its successes. I believe it enough to endeavor to bring up a second generation in the face of a diminished national luster. I do it because my parents did more than this long ago. I do it because my friends do the same. We have faith in ourselves.

Losing a parent is a difficult event to accept. Losing a second family member adds insult to injury and adds more salt to the wound. My cousin was the only relative outside my parents to successfully immigrate here. He was an adult with one marriage and two children behind him when he arrived. After trying to gain an exit visa for over twenty years, he was able to escape the economic doldrums of his mother country. A new setting with unscripted possibilities faced my cousin. At the end, he found a new love, added to his family and created a bridge between different cultures for all his local relatives.

What does this mean for me? It comes down to trying to understand an emotionally draining malaise that sucks any will to create faster than a double black hole. A personal inertia has taken hold and there is no manual or textbook to help guide me. There is also a pain that can split me in half and continue down past my toes as it tries to reopen the San Andreas Fault Line. Every bad moment in my sad history file comes to the forefront in sharpest focus. What ifs and if onlys fill my trains of thought.

My cousin was only a concept when I was growing up. My parents, brother and I were the only family outside the home country. My cultural background did not match my friends and classmates as a child. An ethnic island misunderstood and ignored. Stories kept the image of my distant family alive in my mind. A trip to the old country when I was two was just another page in our family mythology. It was just us and then everybody else. After high school came the trip that set me on my self awareness phase of life. I met the family and they became real and visceral. They accepted and reassured me. I identified with them though I do not know the extent of their reciprocation. I met my cousin once more and grew to know him on that trip. I realized the depth and sophistication of my culture through him. I experienced the support that only an extended family can provide through him. He showed me a side of the home country not found in travel guides and expressed an impressively broad store of knowledge. I viewed him as an intellectual equal, one of the few I would admit since I was such a smug self satisfied smartass at that time. I learned so much in the three months I spent with him that I was challenged to add anything significant to his scholarly gems for years.

My cousin finally arrives here and begins to reinvent himself and accomplish new things. I spent much time with him at first, but my life quickly took precedence as I struggled with school and stumbled into a career. A family came next for me and now my concentration was even more narrowly focused. All this effort came at a cost to our relationship. The next thing I now, my cousin has a career, then a new wife and son bringing with it another cultural addition to our immigrant family. My cousin’s role had shifted from relative to friend and teacher, then to extended family member and cultural bridge. My personal career and family arcs took me out of the inner circle of our nuclear family and sadly removed me, all too often, with regular interaction with him.

Now he has passed and with him ends my mother’s direct lineage in North America. I am racked with remorse over my lack of familial interaction and obligations. Regret dominates my thoughts. This compounds the pangs caused by the loss of my mother. Idleness overwhelms any inclination to actually accomplish anything. My only answer to this feeling tonight was to drive. Ever my favorite means of avoiding responsibilities, I could drive for hours and days on end. Since learning to drive at the age of eleven, this has remained the one consistent thing I can do. I would drive in high school, leaving campus during the period before lunch and returning at the end of the school day. With classmates or alone, it did not matter. With gasoline at fifty cents a gallon and a never ending supply thanks to my father, I learned all the major roads in and out of Los Angeles County. So, tonight after the reception for my cousin’s memorial I drove. Without anyone to share this evening of mourning I took to the streets to try and remember past events and sites. My memory failed me in the most perfect manner. Houses no longer recognizable, streets long changed and a greater number of fellow drivers stymied any attempt to wax nostalgic. Still, I think best when driving alone. I came to realize the effects of many forces and stresses working upon my emotions. I realized my need for contact, an attraction to beauty and the need for mental stimulation that has occupied my attention for the last month. These interests echo the conversations with my cousin as he was also a cryptic soul. The similarities of natures are obvious, the success in our abilities to achieve personal satisfaction, not so much.

Loss leads to reflection. This reflection can include different responses but these too, are dependent upon one’s emotional state. Work through it, I tell myself. But I am torn between seeking personal dreams or continuing on the path I have forged many years ago. I have not been able to resolve any of my dilemmas, neither does there appear to be any available resource that can lay out the best possible scenarios. I miss my mother. I miss my cousin. I have no answers for the empty set stuck within my parenthetical heart. All I can do is warm up my ice with another hit of Jack. Perhaps the new week will present options.

A Long Walk Overdue

I finally hit the trail behind my house this afternoon. It’s something I should do regularly because it’s good exercise, convenient and relatively isolated. Life tends to crowd personal time into a corner. I’m guilty of allowing this to happen, subsequently there is a price to pay for this practiced inactivity. I started off during the last waves of the afternoon heat planning to climb up for an hour before turning back. I wore my woven slouch hat and brought the camera along knowing that would cause me to stop periodically and hopefully keep from overheating. I realized after fifteen minutes that I wasn’t gasping for breath, sucking in flies as my heart raced. I was actually feeling pretty good and averaged a fair pace. These realizations lead to another concerning my eating habits and physical activity over the last two weeks. This is where the trip shifted from an early evening health walk to a voyage of contemplation.

I was completely alone on the trail, probably because of the heat, giving me a perfect opportunity to think about my state of mind without interruption. The last two weeks were epiphanic with the assistance of a good friend helping me to shake out emotional cobwebs and rid myself of a pervasive lethargy. This period began with a cleansing that was both actual and mental. Clearing out the accumulation of the last nine months lifted an unimaginable burden and assisted me to transition emotional residue.

This realization then connected with the fact that I have, for some unknown reason, started to reread Lacan and his structuralist concepts. Piecemeal as my reading is, it struck a harmonious chord in how I experience a good artist friend’s work and the way the incomplete image carries just enough detail to suggest but not too much that it closes the experience in a finite sense. Lacan’s notions of “the lack” and its relation to desire pierced me, leaving a visceral pang sending me back to the books to look for more definition.

Hopes and wishes had occupied me for the last nine months, or so I believed. Reviewing my philosophy notes reminded me of the concept of desire. Desire explains the feeling that’s been filling me since May. A desire to accomplish and complete. To attempt and compete. This feeling comes from a lack. This is not an appetite for satisfaction but it does involve affections. I begin to wonder if these unspoken desires can become a driving force, pushing me to realization.

This trail of thought also referenced the “other” as a self-not self. Looking inward but not seeing myself. I’ve rarely been able to apply this type of thought to myself. With that thought I was hit by an understanding of the French philosophers idea of “self as other”. By not applying theory to any personal experiences I have been looking outside of my “self”. If only I could have pondered this way when I was in school…

The trip back down the mountain was all too quick. I was repeating the concepts I had thought of knowing I would forget most of them by the time I got home. I did forget most of it, but the germ of understanding was still there. The past two weeks have been an opportunity to see things new and reorganize. These provide comforts badly needed that mend the soul. It was an opportunity to recharge the batteries. Next week promises to bring the return of stability on a new footing.

A trip to the California Plaza yielded a visceral explosion of the senses that I had not experienced for far too long. A dear friend’s suggestion prompted me to leave my studio cocoon and make the drive to the our city center. Seun Kuti (son of Fela Kuti) leading his father’s band, Egypt 80, courtesy of KCRW and a couple of other sponsors. I have been to performances at this venue before, but these were always staid presentations. The throng of fans raised a significant murmur as they awaited the performance. The music delivered on its promise and the audience responded exuberantly.

A concert can be fun on its own, but tonight’s event was made exquisitely perfect because of the friend who invited me and the others found at the venue. The night was filled with heady discussion of art, social behaviors, creativity, processes and aspirations. Personal accounts added poignancy and strengthened long held bonds. All this transpired with a feverish soundtrack backing the scene. Connections are reinforced by revealing desires and this helps to expunge negative or destructive motives. Creative batteries were charged in my case, especially with the one on one interface of talented artists. A personal need to constantly make new and challenging art is a desire to seek out a catharsis.

The evening continued after the concert at the posh loft of a past student of mine in an historic downtown building. This person received her degree from Occidental College with honors in art but did her printing at Pasadena City College. Her graduate portfolio was exquisitely done and truly gave me a boost. The evening ended with the closest of friends and intimate discussions of the essence of our existence and creative possibilities.

I sadly had to go home eventually, although without an ounce of sleep in me. Once home, it was straight to the darkened studio to shuffle papers and prepare materials. I am now sitting in a cloud of fixative trying to finish a poor write up of a uniquely memorable evening. The sun is barely up and I fear today will pale against last nights experiences.

Piruca en el Norte

In 1958, Ignacia Mercedes Zarate flew from Buenos Aires to begin a new stage of her life. The trip took over one and a half days, hop scotching innumerable cities and towns northward to the United States. Arriving in New York, where many an American family can trace their roots, her new voyage would take her westward across a different continent.

Mercedes has been a wife, a mother, a homemaker, a wage earner, and a grandmother after thousands of miles and fifty three years had passed. Along the way there have been happy times and sad, friendships made and lost, but always every challenge was faced, every opportunity exploited. She was the matriarch of our family and even as she passes from our world, this is only another stage in her voyage. Through our sadness we feel gratitude to have shared our lives with her. The sadness will pass eventually, the love she inspired and that we continue to experience will endure. Her strength of character fills us, even now. We will love and keep her in our hearts forever.

Complete Criticallity

Thanks to a heads up from an artist friend (JT), I just finished watching Robert Hughes’ 2009 documentary for the BBC, The Mona Lisa Curse. I enjoyed it on many levels, first of which was to find Mr. Hughes still in the land of the living and very much the sardonic curmudgeon. This extended video rant can be found on Youtube.com in twelve pieces, making it about an hour and a half long. The transplanted Australian critic displays his hot knife through butter dissections of contemporary art but in this work he turns it on the business of art, particularly in the way commodification has overtaken the main objective of fine art mirroring Wall Street’s carnivorous merger and acquisition mantra from the 80s up through today.

Hughes marks the Mona Lisa’s trip to the Metropolitan Museum in 1963 as the point when art shifted from a cathartic exchange of philosophy device to a mere commercial product with great investment potential. Leave it to crass post-colonialists to corrupt the purity of individual expression. The folk who stood in line to glimpse Leonardo’s spectacle did so on their own terms, most armed only with the knowledge that this was an important painting without any extra information. It was an experience similar to the nascent television offerings of the day. Americans are notorious for ignoring precedents as well as skipping historical lessons. What more was needed to be known considering Nat Cole sang about the painting ten years earlier. The U.S. in 1963 was still flexing its post war muscles while basking in the glow of a healthy atomic economy. Anything needed could be manufactured or simply purchased and shipped over. The mentality of the time allowed for quick fulfillments to any lack. At the time, the country was even producing its own modern art, eclipsing the need for old, musty European versions.

The Critic bemoans the rise of monetary value over emotional content in art and commiserates with the artist Jim Rosenquist over today’s sad state of affairs. The importance of Sotheby’s 1973 auction of the Scull collection is pointed out and images from a documentary of the event are screened which shows Robert Rauschenberg going up to Robert Scull after the event and administering a stern admonishment. Scull responds by stating that the fortuitous hammer prices will benefit the artists, as well. Warhol’s factory production and diminishing standards of quality are noted, as is the obsessive collecting of Andy by a Saudi mega-billionaire and his son. Damien Hirst is Hughes’ ultimate whipping boy for the exorbitant price tags and insipid lack of traditional artistry.

I found The Mona Lisa Curse to be entertaining for its quick and informative pacing but found that acid analysis on Hughes’ part to be most reassuring. At the close of the documentary, I was filled with the urge to tell Mr. Hughes, “Well, what did you expect?” The critic shares some of the blame for today’s speculation in the art market. His book and film, both with the same name, The Shock of the New (1981), displayed the progression of modern art from the mid-1800s through the 1980s. The film series based on the book is more telling as it begins at a pedestrian pace, gaining momentum as it covers all the ‘isms of modernism until it becomes a near stroboscopic blur of contemporaryness. The directorial structure of the documentary presages the shift in the control of cultural power from salons to artists to patrons to museums to collectors to multinational financial corporations.

Hughes truly shows his years when he dismisses Damien Hirst and his formaldehyde-swigging ilk based upon the lack of artisanal skill and inability to insert significant pedagogical content. Hirst, Koons, Prince and their brethren function in an ether created by a post-postmodern economy. An economy not simply based on production and consumption, or even supply and demand. Production of art is secondary to producing an aura around art. Reality TV is a phantasmal echo of the conniving and manipulation of Art. The art of this latest generation lies not within the brush, or even in the hand that wields it. It resides in the mindset that can create a commotion about an object, roil the waters of adorers and imbue it with a scent of theatrics. Oh, and within this cloud of popular lust there is a kernel of an object, complete with title and date, dripping in sarcasm, vacuum sealed within a prophylactic shield of systemic endorsement.

Today’s museums lament their current inability to compete with investment-minded collectors, but their historical existence is less than that of Modernism. The Patron has been the unseen hand that has guided, and continues to guide, the creation, collection and display of art. The Artist has been the indentured object maker far longer than the autonomous creative force of most of the 20^th century. The social services remain the same; it’s the pimp that changes over the ages. Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein may have missed out on the money train in the beginning, but ultimately Robert Scull was right, crass as he may have been in saying so, the artists did benefit. The pop artists did it by controlling production. They limited their exposure through galleries and they began to keep part of their own art. This type of homemade retirement plan presented the following generations of artists a business plan on which to build. Self promotion as spectacle, popular culture reified as invested content combined with modern manufacturing created an opportunity for the modern day P.T. Barnum.

After all is aid and done, The Mona Lisa Curse lays out a depressing representation of art and the business of art in today’s landscape. But this inflated art bubble will burst and this economic event will occur for several congruent reasons. Art purchased for reasons devoid of aesthetics is indistinguishable from any other portfolio asset. The piece is tethered to the ebb and flow of monetary economies. Content is inconsequential. If the market that includes art investment fails, all the inclusory contents are absorbed by creditors. If the creditors end up with confiscated art, how will they be rated in order to classify them for liquidation? Judgments may have to be made on such crazy notions as quality of construction, artist skill or even socially significant content.