Birds of the West Indies

Exhibition and book by Taryn Simon

When I hit the teen years, I started going off to camps, followed by attending a boarding high school. I also started filling stenography pads with words. I would sit in our living room- that place without the television- and write and write. The journeys away from home are relevant because I recall the first few years as: take a trip and then come home and write about all the feelings that had been stirred. Perhaps I should have brought a steno pad with me when I traveled?

Having got involved in the theater a few years later, I spent a few nights contemplating my pile of writings (which I had started transporting). Poetry predominated, but other forms filled many pages. I started tearing out pages and sorting them into piles. For a couple months, I shuffled pages and edited. Eventually, I turned it all into a play which became part of a new playwright festival.

For any artist, their work becomes a conversation with the world around them. That aspect is easy to see in my initial writing when I would see in that big brown easy chair and try to make sense of whatever had happened while I was outside my comfort zone. In many regards, those poems and miscellany are what we think of as art. Certainly, they needed editing and expunging, but that’s the process leading to an audience.

Instead, I horded the words and left them sitting near at hand. One of those weird aspects to being an artist is the fact that we move away from our own creations. (This is not like watching your children grow up, despite the repeated claims.) Simply put, you wake up one day and realize that you have become a consumer of your own work.

Happily,

I still held all the rights to my notebooks and began a second stage of my relationship with them. Essentially, I brought order to the chaos of a part of my past and transformed those words into new work.

Taryn Simon helps bring order to chaos on a much wider scale as her palette takes the familiar, identifies confusion, and provides a mechanism for a new relationship moving forward. Whether it is James Bond, criminal justice, or nuclear power plants, her work feels to me as though it also goes through that two step process that I outline above (though hers is on a much more advanced level). First, you have your initial artistic reaction to the world. Once that reaction begins to abstract for you as an artist, then you take your new viewpoint and turn that into a second artwork, which becomes the piece for public consumption.

Two further thoughts–
This all feels very modern. That may also explain why modern art becomes difficult for many audiences. After all, the intrusion of the artist on the work becomes more apparent. Also, the line between heart and brain appears to favor the brain.
Isn’t this basically how all music works?

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 105 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1)

Stories written by Philip K. Dick

At this moment, Philip K. Dick feels like another piece of the cultural pie forced into the common parlance because he was adored by lovers of science fiction and comic books. In both cases, it took one hugely successful film to leave us saturated with super-heroes and science fiction based on questioning the nature of reality. For comic books, it was the first X-Men movie and for Dick, it was Blade Runner. There has been no escape from either ever since.

If you zipped back in time and told me as a youth that I would see so many such films, then I would have happily awaited the day, certain that it would mean a better world for everyone where we understood the positive mythology of superheroes and the cautionary tales of PKD. Of course, superheroes have become props for blockbuster films aimed to generate massive amounts of cash as quickly as possible while remaining as forgettable as possible so that we look forward to the next fix without too much trepidation.

Come to think of it, that sounds like something Philip K. Dick would dream up.

Or maybe not. Check it out yourself. His short stories have been lovingly collected in highly readable volumes. They are a nice dip into some wonderful science fiction of Fifties and Sixties written by someone who was fast enough to crank them out and brilliant enough to make you forget how many he wrote so quickly.

As much as anything,

PKD provided high entertainment value. One of the ways he did this was to rely on some standard themes, which he masterfully altered and evolved. The short stories often feel more concrete than his novels.

Let’s face it, one of the appeals of adapting PKD to the screen is that he gives you a plot that can be defined in conventional terms surrounded by various twists of the lunacy dial. Blade Runner feels like an exception in that the film feels almost more unconventional than the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Or maybe that’s the secret to the desire to bring PKD to the screen? Directors can demonstrate their own creativity by expanding on the initial weirdness provided by the story.

Ultimately, some artist had to capture the general zeitgeist of dystopian angst built up around our growing technological and pharmaceutical dependencies. Maybe we’re still too close to him in time to truly appreciate his importance. Maybe it is simply the curse of science fiction that once the predictions feel dated, then we move on to the next artist with a reconstituted vision built on more current knowledge.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 106 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.

Good to be on the Road Back Home
Song written by Tjinder Singh and performed by Cornershop

“Make room for a lady”

That’s the moment that gets me every time. I have to reach for the volume and turn it up.

Every decade that piles up adds another couple presidents and innumerable moments of asking “What the…?” By now, I look back over the presidents and see waves of one political stripe giving way to another until they change places again. Sure, plenty more is involved, but here I am most interested in the similarity of political ascendancy to the weather in Rochester, NY- if you don’t like it, wait a bit and it will change. Obviously, the challenge is waiting a bit, especially if you happen to be on the outside (or worse) looking in.

Movements- political, artistic, social, etc.- all have their day. Pokemon Go, we hardly knew ye.

I am part of a generation that is moving with tentative steps into the age when we are more often found on front porches cursing “those damn kids.” (And a great ancient quote would look really good here, but I did a little research and found it was bogus.) So, I have heard my contemporaries living up to expectations and complaining that there isn’t any good music being made anymore. I do wonder if it isn’t just an excuse for not bothering to look. After all, we have plenty of entertainment available already. Why keep making more? I rather like the excuse myself on hectic days.

In my better moments, I remember to wait for the next wave, because there have been so many good waves already. In the ebb times, the challenge becomes remembering that new art is coming. Somewhere, in a dingy apartment, ideas are being worked out while the macaroni and cheese simmers on the hot plate.

Sometime ago, between Lyle Lovett and Wilco, the tide brought Cornershop to my ears. They received the “fresh” sounds moniker from a lot of people, but that would have been useless if they hadn’t offered a way into their sound for ears that were not as fresh. They had a hit that transcended expectations of the radio.

It is hard to express the importance of those waves in building community. As much as we hold deep political views and cling to self-defining tastes, we ultimately define ourselves by the people that share those tastes and views. When we feel isolated, it is because our internal voice has found little corollary in the external world. Those ebbs break down our communities because we feel that no one cares what we think. If you are not reflected in the popular entertainment, in the voices of your leaders, then you no longer feel a part of the population.

The miracle may be that Cornershop broke through to significant success in the late 1990s. But the necessity is that a place remain for them and, just as importantly, those to whom they gave an outlet and a voice.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 107 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.