“I was a Catholic boy. I was redeemed through pain, not through joy.” - Jim Carroll
Apocrypha collector - Misunderstanding can become a way of life, especially for a young(ish) artist desperate for some sort of new vision. Maybe not an “utter derangement of the senses” but a selective amnesia, selective denials, not Freudian slips but Freudian misunderstandings. Here are some little scraps of things I've held on to over these lean years -
Captain Cook and the possible derivation of the term “nailing” as in “to nail someone” -Captain Cook and his men were exploring some remote corner of some flyspeck of a Polynesian island when they discovered that the gorgeous native girls would trade sex for nails. Once the sailors had completely exhausted the ship's inventory of surplus nails, they began to pull them right out of the ship itself, until their vessels were a heap of useless lumber on the shore. There's a part of me that loves those men for their recklessness, explorers made stranded by their own lusts.
The final freeze frame in Once Upon a Time in America is the hippest thing I've ever seen - Speaking of derivation, I read somewhere that the word “hip” comes from the sore ass one would get laying on the floor of an opium den back in the early 1900's. I really loved that one but never could find that particular explanation of the word again, but recently came back across it in Martin Torgoff's fantastic Can't Find My Way Home.
The bibles of the poor read through a glass, darkly - In a college art history class we learned that the stained glass windows of the great European cathedrals are thicker at the bottom than the top, a phenomenon caused by the slow run of the cooling glass over centuries. Unfortunately, that is, like Santa Claus and Castro's failed try-out for the Yankees, completely not true. The variance in the thickness has something to do with how the glass was held as it was crafted – I don't know, read the wikipedia article. But goddamn I was sad to let that one go – I think I might have even repeated it in my own art history lectures. I love the slow atom drip, the trapped light of the once hot faith pooling now at the low end, something thick for our heavy feet to trudge through. There is also this awesome notion of a mirror fashioned of glass thick enough that light is slowed in its passage, so that in the end the glass reflects the “past” - this is an idea called “slow glass” that I think was first posited by the sci-fi writer Bob Shaw. More on that later.
All answers floating in aether, with spoilers – In the film Waking Life two characters discuss a study where test subjects were able to solve day-old crossword puzzles easier than “fresh” ones because of some sort of collective unconscious/world mind that now knew the solutions. I accepted this when I first saw the movie as fact when I saw it in my 20's because in my 20's I believed everything in the movies – or at least the good movies. I've been researching this one a little this morning but I can't find anything to really substantiate it, other than some theories of a guy named Rupert Sheldrake who most folks don't seem to put much stock in though I want to read a little more of his stuff now. I want to live in a world where yesterday's knowledge makes today's living a little easier – isn't that the point of all this? Anyway, this idea also kind of resonates nicely with another sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick, particularly his novel Time Out of Joint about a guy who lives in this sort of simulacra of 1950's America doing crossword puzzles – telling much more would definitely ruin the book.
Stanley Kubrick plays handball and Paul Schrader gets an ulcer – This was after Kubrick finished Barry Lyndon. According to his secretary there was a frequent and alarming thud from his office – one can imagine that Stanley was not the kind of guy to bother when he had the office door closed, so the sound continued unchecked. Later it was discovered that the maestro was making his way through a huge stack of paperbacks, looking for a “property” to adapt. The sound was each successive novel smashing into the wall as Kubrick read a few pages and hurled the book. Finally The Shining made its way to the top of the stack, the thudding stopped and film history was made. Kubrick is Jack Nicholson throwing a tennis ball at the wall, the echo booming through the snowbound Overlook Hotel – one of my favorite scenes in the film. Screenwriter Paul Schrader's own Overlook Hotel is a snowbound car (I think he was living in LA tat the time but in my mind it has to be snowing). Schrader is working on the script for Taxi Driver. He has just lost his woman and his home and he has not spoken to another human in at least a week. It is America, it is the 1970's. It has to be a typewriter in his lap, just for the violent clang of the carriage at the end of the line. He is writing about a man who is also car - bound and alone and by the time he is done, like his protagonist, he will be in a hospital bed. For all of that, he will eventually say that he misses those times when the writing comes easy.
Artmaking as a form of shadowboxing, Jake LaMotta is an action painter – All my art metaphors are violent metaphors. All my art heroes are strugglers and reckless explorers and lost causes and all of them are way down in the dark with their own worse selves. I have always seen the whole thing when its done right as a physical act like fucking or fighting. When I am painting and it actually starts rolling, it is almost like hacking through a veil, like sculpting something rough hewn out of all this confusion. When Martin Scorsese's childhood priest saw Taxi Driver he told him it was “too much Good Friday, too little Easter Sunday”. I had a professor in grad school that said it shouldn't be hard and I wanted to choke the guy – one more proof that I was in the WRONG place. I still believe in art as some sort of holy redemption and I think you have to really earn it. Somewhere between those two moments, the sound of a trashy paperback's spine breaking and the orgasmic final bang of the typewriter's carriage in a snowy car live pretty much all my feelings about art-making.
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