Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song performed by Belle and Sebastian
Lyrics and Music by Stuart Murdoch

“Judy wrote the saddest song
Showed it to a boy at school”

I treat Belle and Sebastian like a singles band, picking and choosing favorite songs (Dear Catastrophe Waitress, for instance), but Judy and the Dream of Horses makes any list of great songs. Life is better knowing that someone made this so well, so beautifully, with such rhapsody. Speaking in the moment, this is my favorite use of a melodica in any song ever.

Has any song ever captured the artist’s anxiety better? Has any song ever presented a better salve to said anxiety? Soon as those vocals start soaring halfway through the song, don’t you want to create something? Don’t you want to grab the nearest person and ask them if they have heard this tune? If you need art in your darkest moment, then look no further. Ultimately, this is a song about the solace and ecstasy of making art. Neil Gaiman has spoken about the importance of taking mistakes, personal setbacks and tragedies and turning them into art. The ability to make art is what saves many of us. Judy steps outside of herself and takes the chance.

Clearly, Judy and the Dream of Horses is an ideal exemplar of the need to communicate that drives the songwriter. She shows the song to someone, seeking understanding. The contrast between what she could simply tell the boy at school without the song and what her song expresses is that divide between not art and art, resolved by the structure imposed by the song that Judy writes. She cannot express how she feels in mere words, but can reveal something about herself through the veil of art.

Self-referential art (art about art) provides a forum to talk about the structure necessary to define the edges of art rather than simply existing as a piece with structure imposed upon it. Paul Valéry and others have talked about the difference between poetry and other forms of written communication, drawing a comparison to the difference between dance and walking. The very act of imposing a structure on a piece of art allows it to be the means of communication. With normal spoken words, we look to grammar and expression while allowing freedom of structure. Art uses structure as grammar and the template for expression, adding to the power of what is presented. The painting says more because of the artist’s efforts in the creation. When we walk from here to there, we feel an experience vastly improved over the mere act of standing still. The structure of a pop song provides the same forward impetus, granting a through line to those three or so minutes. Great art is the successful imposition of structure (craft, if you will) on unformed ideas. The more abstract the idea expressed, the more structure helps convey the meaning intended. Consider Judy and the Dream of Horses without the building horns. The song potentially becomes a tragedy and her life a farce, legitimizing unfortunate views of the song already out in the world.

Speaking of which, interpretations abound of the lyrics, including the salacious and downright disturbing. In the end, art is communication, passing information from the creator’s brain to the spectator’s brain. The message received may or may not be the message sent. The message received by one may not be shared by any other. The artist’s responsibility ends at the boundary of their brain.

A word in favor of libraries: when money was tight and the child was young, we spent a lot of time at the neighborhood library, a luxury that made us better, happier people. The library stocked everything, from the expected tomes to compact discs and videos. New music purchases were outside the budget, but borrowing music was limited by what we could carry (and the ten discs at a time limit placed by the powers that be). We cycled through everything, but made fewer new discoveries than you might expect. The library does tend to stock the expected (really popular pop music) and the extremely unexpected (international folk music selected by someone who made their selections based on a limited budget and limited time). So, the first Belle and Sebastian CD was a very pleasant surprise.

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. 299 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

We went to Mexico for Christmas. 2015 took more than I was prepared to offer, so we spent the holiday drinking mojitos and kayaking on Banderas Bay. It was beautiful, but different from the previous fifty years of festive times with family. 2015 took my mother and my oldest friend, as well as dear cousins and the last vestiges of my mother’s siblings- not my first bad year, but it stands out. My family found themselves on Christmas morning watching Santa para-sail over a beach, because I wanted to be somewhere else. In the end, of course, travel may offer an opportunity to review the life ledger, but it always entails a return home.

My mother was an artist her whole life, as was Ron. Even at the end, Mom was concerned about getting into one more show. And now I look at my computer and my drawers and see all those words that I have. It is probably time to stop being so Emily Dickinson about it. Less than ten years ago, the local weekly published me regularly. A lot more avenues have sprung up since.

I have begun writing again seriously. While much of my time must be spent building up those writing muscles as well as learning the business as it has evolved so dramatically in recent years, I have the luxury of wanting to spend some thought on this craft that I have only practiced in the shadows for a couple decades. Time and experience have finally intersected in my life with the blessing of living when self-publishing has moved into the mainstream. Readership may not be guaranteed, but it never was.

As a tentative step into the virtual void, I plan to spend some time thinking aloud (thus blogging) about work that has spoken to me, especially as it applies to writing. Specifically, I plan to couch my thoughts in an exploration of books, movies, visual art, and such-like. Hopefully, you will find this of passing interest and discover items of inspiration or curiosity- if nothing else, perhaps reminders of past pleasures.

I want to:

• Spend some time thinking about the works of art that have touched me with the hope of becoming a better artist- failing that, at least a better person;
• Share the music, words, people, and places that have given shape to my life so far, perhaps illuminating the path ahead by looking at the road behind (and touched by a tendency for the occasional road less travelled); and
• Pay homage with a little thought to the art and artists that have filled a lifetime blessed with the opportunity to see, hear, and listen to their work.

While I am drawn to regular posting like anyone tapping away at the coffee shop, in the attic, or at the laundromat, I seek a format that can dovetail exploration of art with the short form required of posting. Criticism can be the public effort to understand a work of art. Often, it is wrestling with the creator’s message in the center of the bar, sometimes breaking a few tables and often leaving some bruises. The parties to the altercation had never met before, but they choose to step outside their comfortable nests back home and venture out where the real people go.

In his Criterion Collection introduction to 8 1/2, Terry Gilliam talks about the difference between his favorite films and the films that he refers back to for wisdom and inspiration. On the other hand, this could just be my extended response to that moment in Garden State when they stand over the abyss and scream. With You’ve Got to Check This Out, I am aiming for that darker corner in the tavern where the thoughtful people sit, the ones looking for something interesting to read, to hear, to digest. I want to sit down and try to understand the work before me and see if anyone else struggles with it the same way. Ultimately, I perceive this as a two-year meditation on the meaning of art and invite you to find new experiences.

How to decide what art to consider? The intent is not to be the person to hold the spoon to your mouth and say, “Taste this, does it seem bad to you?” The first requirement then is that I actually like the work of art. The only other requirement is that the it be worth the attention. If I can’t write about it, if I can’t see the value, if I can’t come to terms with the emotion behind the work, then it is not going to appear here. In some ways, this is a reaction to all those pedantic bucket lists that never speak to me. The disingenuous nature of creating my own such list does not escape me.

I am starting with a goal of three hundred columns, publishing two to three per week. One hundred will focus on music, one hundred on the written word and one hundred on all that other stuff that fills the art world. They will be in no particular order. Life stopped being linear some time ago in all but the starkest sense. Let’s blame the Internet for that and not our obsession with new modes of visual storytelling.

I reserve the right to update any column, including this one. Open minds change.

Nothing can offset my recent losses, but little else is so life affirming as finding that art you never knew you loved. Over the past year for me, James Carr, Charles Bradley, Of Monsters and Men, and Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats kept music vital and my heart beating. Almost a year ago, I dashed into the National Gallery in D.C. and spent a few minutes in the presence of two Odilon Redon paintings that I needed to rediscover. In addition, I have taken advantage of social media to follow artists of ferocious talent, industry, and craft: Jonathan Carroll, John Sokol, Richard Chizmar, Bill Sienkiewicz, Thomas Monteleone, Andy Lee,… Perhaps these next 300 blogs will create just such a positive experience for one reader.