The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker
Good Morning Andrew
Conceptually Oriented, Practically Confused
Thaw #1
Finally. After five long months of frigid, often painfully cold temperatures and people, the first hints of spring are starting to tease Minneapolis. Like a cheap hooker that only shows you she’s a tranny after you’ve paid your $50, the cityscape is beginning to reveal all of its dirty little secrets. These include the usual list of suspects that testify to survival strategies in what I can only call “The City Goes To Bed at a Reasonable Hour”. Bottles of cheap Skol or Aristocrat vodka, lost photographs, a few stilettos that couldn’t pass through our record snowfall — these are all the flotsam and jetsam of the life of a contemporary Minneapolitan.
Vault Adventure
One of the many perks of my job is getting to go on random treks through the two buildings that make up the college. Yesterday I had the pleasure of traversing through the underground vaults of our building on Hennepin Avenue in MPLS. It was a very creepy and smelly place… but the abandoned bank vaults were too good to turn down. Take a looksy.
The Unbearable Lightness of the #18A Bus
A Snippet of (Now) Edited Reality in My Kitchen
Conversation overheard on the #18a bus this morning:
A woman in a puffy trashbag-like Northface winter coat is complaining that every artist (from “That Beyoncé” to the Jacksons) lip-syncs. She looks puzzled as she tries to explain her dislike of the practice of dubbing and lip-syncing live performances to the half-asleep, rapidly drying-out middle-aged woman next to her in a blazer roughly the color of freshly laid dung. A heated debate follows with both reaching the conclusion that all live music since (I’m not kidding) Wayne Newton has been pre-recorded crap.
This is where I finally became thought conscious in my morning haze.
Why do we have such an intense aversion to the knowledge that our favorite pop-culture music icons can’t duplicate their studio performances in front of a live audience? Just when I thought I had shed my thick patina of MFA/grad school mentalities, it dawned on me. Baudrillard was right in saying that the simulation of reality is always more real than reality. In the case of music, we prefer the perfect studio recording (without audience noise, feedback, mistakes, off-key renderings of “Its Not Unusual”) to the real thing. In a world where a highly edited version of New Jersey is popular on television, why shouldn’t all live performances of music be edited to the artist/label’s heart’s content?
I wish we could take this a step further and “undo” Milan Kundera’s paradoxical situation in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. I want to be able to create a perfect, studio-edited version of myself, my life, my actions, my speech, my mind… that I am able to summon up and present to the world as soon as I feel a mistake coming on.
If only.
December 13, 2009
White Flower, 1960. Oil on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 inches (182.6 x 182.9 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Anonymous gift 63.1653. © 2007 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
As the slide into full-blown winter solidifies, the concepts of failure and reduction have taken over my thoughts. When one thinks of improvement, of being a “better person”, the tendency is to look at what we lack and emphasize what we can acquire. I feel like I have been caught in this quagmire of acquisition for way too long (perhaps roughly 27 years).
Reduction.
Simplification.
These are my new goals.
By all intensive logic, I want less.
I want to fail.
What does it mean to fail? According to Agnes Martin, failure is a state which exists only when one has exhausted all means and possible courses of action. Failure is a terminal condition–an end of possibilities.
Can one consider it a victory to stop doing something? To cease to acquire? To cease to care? Is that really failure? Or is the act of losing all choice, movement, and flexibility that elusive apex of liberation I have been searing for?
Just a bit more Agnes and then I am going to call it a night, crawl into bed, and be blissfully unconscious.
“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”
I really cannot think of anything I would like more.
TPTP Paris…
TPTP
AH! Finally some exceptionally good news comes my way. I have been selected to participate in an exhibition at TPTP in Paris. It looks like an amazing, energetic, and fun gallery space and I am thrilled to break the spell of exhibition drought with this show. Thank you Phillip Tonda, for selecting my work!
I will have further details on the exhibition as it begins to take shape…
20 Rue Muller - 75018 Paris