Nattering Nabobs of Negativism

For years, I thought this phrase was attributable to Spiro Agnew. It turns out, as I discovered in a radio eulogy for columnist and speechwriter William Safire, that it was he who coined the alliterative epithet. This may mean I'll have to rethink my estimation of Safire; for years I've wondered, "What special qualifications does this cranky old conservative possess that suit him for writing On Language?" Well, now I know.

Historical regret is like a phantom limb or an aching joint; it's ever-present, but recedes into the background because immediate matters are more demanding of attention, but every once in a while it twinges or throbs on a cold morning or in a sudden rainstorm. If only Safire's talent could have been directed to a worthy cause, say, ridiculing the opponents of liberal politicians, or libeling the architects of the Vietnam war instead of its critics... ah, well, I suppose that's the crux of why I became an artist instead of an historian. Too many things have gone the wrong way, and I don't think I have the fortitude to report it all accurately, without giving in to the temptation to improve it by rewriting.

R.I.P., William Safire, right-wing writer of withering witticisms. My grudging respects to perhaps the last man I can remember who made political invective worth listening to.

If you're fighting a robot...

...don't try to win with blunt force. This is a common fallacy I've seen in many movies, and, in terms of effectiveness, it ranks right up there with hiding under the bed to evade a masked killer. Unless you are extraordinarily strong or plan to amplify your own strength with power tools, don't try to punch or kick the robot or beat it with a stick. Most robots don't feel pain, so it is extremely unlikely that you will weaken one to the point of submission in this way. No, when fighting a robot there's really only one sure way to go - bodily dismemberment.

Goin' down d'Ocean, hon!

I'm leaving this morning for my family's condo in Ocean City, Maryland. I'm planning on coming back to Penland on Saturday. I haven't been there since Melanie's wedding in 2001, but I have fond memories of the place. Hopefully, it will be the thing to slow down my heart-rate. I plan on listening to Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders" on tape in the car.

More recent artwork

Here are some drawings I did in my final class of the summer, "Illustrating the Personal Narrative," with Ruth Marten. She's most famous for her cover illustrations for Peter Mayle's "Year in Provence" novels. Many students in the class made books; I had just finished a books class, so I decided to draw storyboard panels as though I were making a movie. The story is an imaginary version of the death of Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece on his way back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The middle of August part II

I wrote this little poem walking home to Morgan the other night:

Even today, 

a few red leaves on the green grass;

in the fruits of summer,

the seeds of fall.

The middle of August

Last night, when I left work at 8, the sun had already dropped below the mountain behind me; golden light touched only the tops of the mountains across the knoll. Summer is almost over... I'm not ready for it to end. I'm not ready.

More recent artwork

These were made in "Transforming the Landscape," a 4th-session photography class taught by David Graham. Using natural light softened with tissue paper, I got up close to the interiors of books with Marianne's Canon Powershot G9 (I should really think about buying one of my own), which has a wicked built-in macro lens and astonishing resolution for a non-SLR digital camera. Perhaps because it felt a little like working with a large-format view camera, these photos look very MCAD-y to me. I haven't decided if I like that yet, but I do like the images themselves. I call the series "Illuminated Manuscripts."

Today

At breakfast, I talked to Ledelle Moe about what it's like to live in Baltimore. Then I cleaned my car and bought 2 CD/DVD organizers, a 3-ring binder, a pack of 8.5 x 11" sheet protectors, and a new pair of jeans. I hunted down all my stray CDs and put them all together in the new case. I scanned, uploaded, and backed up work images from this summer. I backed up some other stuff that had been sitting on the public computer for a while. I put all my DVDs/CD-ROMs of work files in the new case (made of steel for protection), and I checked out what was on all the blank burned DVDs that were floating around, labeled and stored them. I pulled together and organized the objects and prints that I've made this summer. I cleaned out the car. 

This evening, it came to me gently, with a mixture of sadness and exhilaration: today was the day I started getting ready to leave Penland.

Recent Artwork

Here are some prints I made in "The Visual Narrative," my second-session class in photography. The instructor was Fritz Hoffmann, a National Geographic photojournalist. Hoping to use my familiarity with and access to the Penland dishroom to my advantage, I photographed the work-study students (with permission, of course) as they cleaned up after meals. In the process, I discovered that what I was really drawn to in that situation was the action of working bodies in space, the interaction of bodies with bodies, and of bodies with the crowded, challenging environment; it was like visiting a filthy, sweaty, soapy sculpture garden. Over the course of five days, I shot about 700 photographs, and then edited down to these final 11. They were taken with a Canon Powershot G9 (thank you, Marianne!), printed on handmade paper (again thanks to Marianne Dages), and hung on the dishroom wall for a day to get splattered with food waste and greasy suds.

ID 1

Because of some funny scheduling issues, Penland celebrates Independence Day today, July the 1st this year. I've volunteered to help fire off fireworks this evening. I've also been asked to present trophies to the winners of best-parade-float awards. When she approached me about it, Stacey Lane said, "usually we have some really glamorous woman do the presenting, but this year we'd like you to do it." Apparently, she got the idea after seeing my self-portraits as a woman in one of my slide presentations. Since I don't really feel like stepping out in drag this evening, I'll be presenting the awards in the persona of a cowboy (well, sort of a posh cowboy, I guess). As I was dressing this morning, I thought of a great idea for a piece of sketch comedy: The Cowboy Congressman. Basically, he's a stereotypical cowboy, elected to the US Congress, and every time someone disagrees with him in a debate, he shoots them. Also, whenever there's an important vote, he rounds up all the members of his caucus with a lasso. Genius, right? I'm waiting by the phone, Tina Fey. As I'll be spending the real 4th of July cleaning the Pines for changeover, let me wish you all a happy Independence Day today.

A vocational question, tossed into the ether...

So if one loves making film/video art and literature, how does one become a successful video artist/art-filmmaker? How does one find the financing to make work on anything other than a tiny scale that is challenging and unconventional in its structure and relationship to its source text?

Mustasche March

This March, I participated in a competition to see who could grow the best mustache. The thing was dreamed up in February by Adam and Slate, who by their own admission saw it mainly as an excuse to have more guys walking around Penland with creepy mustaches. The rules were simple: the mustache had to be grown of the participant's own hair, on the participant's own face, and each contestant had to start the month with a clean shave and agree to pay the winner a dollar. Voting took place at lunch in the Pines, on Monday the 30th, and the winner was announced at lunch the next day. I am pleased to announce that my mustache took home the cash prize and a trophy, which was beautifully crafted by Glass instructor Martin Janecky and gilded by studio assistant Carrie Battista. I believe that the reasons for my victory were twofold: 1. fast-growing facial hair, and 2. the courage to grow and wear it as a mustache for the entire month, rather than growing a beard and shaving the excess near the end as many of my competitors did. Cheered by the crowd to make an acceptance speech, I offered these words: "I'd like to thank my parents for giving me the genetic material that made this victory possible, and the good people in the kitchen who fed me such a delicious, high-protein diet. Also, thanks to Adam and Slate for having the vision and making it a reality, and to all of you good people for your encouragement and your votes. I hope that my victory today may go some distance toward rehabilitating the popular image of the mustache. It seems that somewhere along the line, the mustache fell out of favor in our culture. Maybe this is because (as my fellow core student Mark Warren suggested) many of us grew up with an unconscious fear that Burt Reynolds would steal our mothers from us (though in my case, it was Tom Selleck); or perhaps we watched one too many cheap pornos in college or saw Charlie's Angels kidnapped by one too many mustached men in a conversion van. Whatever the reason, I think it's a mistake, and I am here today to declare that I am not a child molester, nor a 70s porn star, nor your 6th grade gym teacher. I am a good man, a gentle man, a friendly man, a man with a mustache."
It was a proud moment for me. But one shouldn't rest on laurels, and it seemed that a March mustache might be bad luck in April, so that evening before bed I snipped, clipped, and shaved my upper lip back to the factory preset, as it were.

Dante the pilgrim

I was watching Peter Greenaway's TV Dante on Ubuweb yesterday, and it called to mind a moment from the fall of 1995, when I was a student at Anne Arundel Community College. I was enrolled in a course in World Literature (which to its credit was truly global in scope - we read bits of everything from Indian theater to Mayan creation myths, from Chinese poetry to Faust), and we were discussing Dante's Divine Comedy. My professor remarked, somewhat offhandedly, that the directness of Dante's narrative and the richness of his descriptive verse could only be the result of lived experience. This struck me as an odd thing to say, and so I asked him if he meant to say he believed that the poet had literally experienced the events related in the Inferno. "Yes," he said, "That's exactly what I mean. Dante lived this story, or at least he believed that he did. This stuff is for real."

"Blago gets the boot"

I think I'm going to miss Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Seriously, the guy had really begun to win my sympathy in his last few days in office. It's not that I disbelieve the charges against him, nor that I thought of him as a particularly venerable political figure. Rather, it occurs to me that for much of my adult life, I've been growing accustomed to watching the winners in politics act like gloating, petulant jerks, even as ever more of their victories could be chalked up to fiat, dishonesty or error, while the losers were expected to behave politely and contritely, in the interest of stablity and decorum. Reading excerpts this morning from governor Blagojevich's final address to the Illinois senate, I realized that I had begun to get a special pleasure from watching a loser defiantly refuse to give in, even as the tide of inevitability rose all around him. Having spent the last few weeks recoling from the sickening grey spectacle of George W. Bush leaving the presidency with the false air and gestures of a gentle, respectable statesman, it's been a refreshing change for me to watch a villain boldly refuse to go quietly. If all politics is theater, Rod Blagojevich's was at least an impassioned, compelling performance.

Warmth and light

On Thursday, I looked up from my email at 6 p.m. to discover, though the sun had sunk behind the mountains, there was still light in the sky. Friday was brilliant and clear, with a high temperature in the 60s. A bright sunrise filled my bedroom with early light, and it occurred to me that I've been waking progressively earlier recently, in little bits and increments. I drove to the grocery store in a sweatshirt, with the windows down, listening to the Hallmark Sounds of Halloween tape that Marianne gave me. In the evening, Marianne, Andrew and I walked to new resident artist Amy Tavern's housewarming party. The warmth and light of the day were liberating; in the winter, I feel trapped, cut off, but Friday I felt a part of the world, free to walk around in the open air. It was like being reborn. Today it is chilly and gray; winter is far from gone, but I have gotten a hopeful reminder that it won't last forever.
In Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, Kathleen Norris writes,
"Weather Report: February 10 - Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day."

A dream

A few nights ago, I dreamed that my grandmother was still alive and making dinner for my father, my aunt and I. She was cooking very slowly and we were tired of waiting, so dad took me out to eat instead. As we ate microwaved pizzas at a folding table in the freezer aisle of a grocery store, he looked me in the eye and told me I should give up art and become a writer. The next morning on the radio, Garrison Keiller quoted someone famous (whose name I can't remember now), saying "How does one become a writer? Try to do something - anything - else." So by that reckoning, dream-dad, I'm right on track.

A new age of Hollywood musicals?

I think it's time for the crowd of young Hollywood filmmakers who keep giving us mediocre depressing-and-uncomfortable-life-situation comedies with brilliant, loony musicals buried in them to admit that they are better at creating brilliant, loony musicals than depressing-and-uncomforatble-life-situation comedies. Seriously, Nicholas Stoller, jettison the rest of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and just show us the Dracula puppet rock opera. And Andrew Fleming, why not cut the dead wood that makes up the other 60 minutes of Hamlet 2 and just present the musical in it's entirety? Dare to let go of your ironic detachment, take sugar over saccharine, stop acting like you're too smart for the things you're good at and we (the audience) are too smart for the things we enjoy, and you may just begin a new age of Hollywood musicals.

Last night,

I woke up suddenly from a dream I can't remember, my heart filled with terror and self-loathing. Today, I feel as though I am lost in the woods, and I don't know how to find my way again. So I think that for now I will live in the woods. I've got The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross with me, and I will read by the winter light filtering through the trees. I may also watch the Ravens game tonight. For some reason, Baltimore has been very much on my mind lately, and I find myself strangely interested in the outcome.

Do you read the New York Times?

I do sometimes, most often while waiting for paint, oil, or wax to dry, because there is a stack of last year's Sunday Times kept in the wood studio for use as drop-cloths, and I usually find it depressing. It's not because of the quality of the journalism, which is very good, or the political bias, which tends to coincide fairly often with my own. It's the tone of the writing, and the aesthetic stance that informs it, particularly in articles about music and art. There's a knowingness to it, a sort of numb hipsterish point of view that yearns to be moved, but has seen too much, and is too dismissive of each new thing it sees to let it happen, as though it believes it has already thought critically a few steps ahead of the artists. Reading the Times, one might be led to believe that beauty can be found only fleetingly, in weariness, like a tiny delicate flower in a big ugly city, and it sometimes leaves me feeling tired and angry.