Camping: A Dream

Emily and I are driving in a ratty old truck in our wet suits and we’re hauling a beautiful old teardrop camper. It’s yellow and rusting at the edges.
We pull off on the side of the road. Dust flying about. Crickets sounding off. The pavement is warm and wet like after an August storm.
There’s a house up on a hill to our left and the lights are on. We’re figuring out how we will keep from waking them up as we get the camper into the cornfield where we’ll be hanging out. But we’re waiting for someone.
Mac rolls in driving a ratty old truck much like ours. He smiles. We laugh. I’m worried we won’t be able to camp where we are so I offer to look ahead. I carry the camper and Mac and Emily sit in the bed of Mac’s truck eating Twizzlers.
I am walking and quite suddenly the landscape turns into a modernized (Lloyd-Wright) suburbia. It’s like Falling Water turned into an alleyway.
All of the windows to the houses are huge and the lights are on and I’m worried that everyone will see that we’re trying to camp in their backyard. 1950s moms are feeding their kids dinner behind each window. Laugh tracks sound off in the distance.
The alleyway of Lloyd-Wright homes culminates in this open circle that looks down on the atrium of a shopping mall. The second floor where I stand is part of the mall but it has been overrun by nature. The elevator music still plays and inside the storefronts are not clothing displays but 1950s moms with their families at dinner tables.
Downstairs, a river is running through the Gap. I come to a bridge and see that I’m near the woods. Other people crossing the bridge have tent bags and other camping equipment. I crinkle the old camper into a bag I have so as to make it look like a tent in a bag.
It’s just a ball of old rusted tin.
The man at the middle of the bridge is the keeper of the camp ground and you have to seem like a camp type to get across. He asks questions at random and you have to know the answer because if you know the answer, that means you’ve gone to the seminar, and if you’ve gone to the seminar, you can successfully wrestle a bear and know how to boil camp water.
The man is wearing khaki shorts. Typical boy scout attire. He shows me a chart with a tent on it.
“How do you set up this tent?”
“You hook this up to that and that to the ground and so on.”
“Welcome.”
I get across the bridge and the sun is shining. Falling Water in a shopping mall.

Make Way, The Future Is Here!

Futurist manifestos have shown me a serious detestation of the past among communities of artists. Writers of several of the manifestos I have read act as if the human qualities and emotions shown through past works no longer exist in the modern psyche. I am hoping that these are merely satires of a concept, but my fear is that artists truly believe they are creating something never done before. Without a knowledge and appreciation of past forms, art becomes narcissistic and lacks cohesion. I am a Futurist in the sense that I see I need for art to progress into something new and brilliant--but I have an understanding that such newness requires something old. Futurists look at the world outside of their own pocket of creation and say, "No one understands me."
We all understand you. You are human just like us. The fact is, you like the idea that you are different from all of us. You seek persecution; go ahead and play the part of "The Misunderstood Martyr." Afterall, witches were burned because of their science. Futurists hand us the lighter fluid and kindling just so they can cry out that no one gets "it."

Leo Tolstoy is my Main Man

Leo Tolstoy's What Is Art? has drawn so many of my concepts of art out into the light and I'm only 5 chapters in. Everything Tolstoy says adds up for me, but does so with an eloquence that I lack. The idea of life as art is such a refreshing concept, but instead of leaving that sweeping generalization, Tolstoy seperates good art from bad art by indicating the necessity of conscious art. Art is a means of union among men. Brilliant.
Artistic community is one of my key aesthetic principles that I adhere to but Tolstoy seems to make the arguement that all community is artistic community. I agree with that, however, just as an artist should be conscious of what he creates, he should be conscious of who he surrounds himself with. Existing within the community I've been planted in--both immediate and global--is vital to my growth as a person but as an artist, it is equally as vital to seek out those that appreciate art and to work with them, learn with them, and create something of meaning with them.

Avatar

This is all I will say about the phenomena of Avatar:
It was beautiful to look at and packed with emotion, Fern Gully, and Pochahontas. It also is apparently causing people serious depression when they take off the 3-D Glasses.
There has been an outcry online about how to deal with the "Avatar Blues." The answer is not James Cameron turning this into a trilogy. The answer is also not the obvious outbreak of idiots in blue that we're going to have to deal with on Halloween.
The answer to this phenomena is this:
The only viewers that are getting depressed after viewing Avatar are the mentally unstable who only derive meaning from what media outlets feed them. So, they take off their 3-D glasses and realize that they still work at McDonald's and don't like their wife and will never be a giant blue person that can hook its butt up to a flower and talk to it.
When we can get those link things though, sign me up. I'd hook myself up to a fridge and watch Jersey Shore all day.

Make Good Use

My most recent reading in Manifesto: A Century of Isms was on the movement of Symbolism. The most controversial of the symbolist thinkers was Oscar Wilde, with the famed quote "All art is quite useless." I have to unpack this loaded statement and try to understand the Symbolist Mind.
Wilde, along with other symbolist thinkers, place art with a capital "a" on a pedestal, saying--as James Abbott McNeill Whistler did in The Ten O'clock--that art "is a goddess of dainty thought—reticent of habit, adjuring of obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only—having no desire to teach."
As Wilde contests, art cannot be moral or immoral, no matter what the moral intention of its creator.
This idea of art as a useless goddess we must pay homage to is an unhealthy idea of symbolism. Art is in fact very useful. No, you cannot brush your teeth with art, you cannot cure a cold, but what can you say of other abstracted things such as beauty or emotion?
The pragmatic man--and apparently the symbolist man--would cast aside these ideals because they waste time. However, this is not Hard Times, and if it were, the point would be proved that there must be room for fancy, for if there is not, what joy can a child have?
Without things such as beauty, man would be miserable. There would be no joy in work or leisure. Art is a vehicle of beauty, and therefore is very useful. Without these unpalpable things that keep us vivfied, sanity would be a thing of the past.
Art grounds us to reality through its interpretation of the world around us; rather, to break from the symbolist idea of Art, the artist grounds us to reality through his or her interpretation of the world around us.

Truth's Anatomy

I isolate myself with objects just like people do with walls. I integrate them into my art so that to discard them would be the abortion of an art concept.
I am a slave to art, then, not a slave to truth. If I am going to be a slave to anything, it should be truth.
I create crutches out of canvas and mustaches and second-hand everything. I hide behind the characters I fabricate and breathe into life.
I hide.
Art should not hide the truth, it should strip it of its excuses, its outer defense, and show the naked beauty of truth's anatomy.
That is the danger of "life as art." To step aside from your art is to declare death. Art and artist must coexist, but man must rule over art, or art will consume. Man and art are not parallel. They are both progressing towards perfection and one must overthrow the other.

Isolated Incidents

I think to start into what I'm trying to say, I have to tell you that this is not healthy community. It is so fitting that fallen man, who exists in an imperfectable community, would create the same thing virtually in hopes that it would fix everything. It's like when people walk around saying that the town they live in has ruined their lives. We've ruined our lives and we can't provide the cure through the internet.
More specifically, look at the quest for information. We ask questions of the internet not because we need the answer but because of a curiosity born from boredom.
Further, if I wanted to read Hard Times by Dickens and went to Barnes and Noble to buy it, there would be no chance of finding pornography or spam inside that book.
Conversely, if I were to Google Hard Times, I would receive more than what I asked for. That's not healthy.
Advocates of Web 2.0 point to the response made possible to global crises due to the internet. That's lovely. However, what of the local crisis? We are so immersed in online social networks that our real community is so crippled that we don't know our neighbors names.
The words "friend," "neighbor" and "community" connote something different from what they used to. It is great to think globally, but chances are, that's all you think.
This has all had an immense effect on me. I have recently noticed a habit of mine to avoid people. This evasiveness made itself manifest in my teepee.
My whole aesthetic is a deeper look into why I behave the way that I do, and the teepee is the key object that describes my behavior. The dichotomy of childish delight and adult reflection live together in this one object, and it compels me to lurch forward into this "SamSamLand" of nostalgia and its effects on adulthood.
I cannot help but observe my change in social desire. The teepee has become a hideaway that I find most neccessary when there are large groups of people walking about the hall I live on or when I am in a state of distress over whatever.
It is my prayer tent. It is my nap nest. It is my private den.
I feel the need to justify my socially evasive lifestyle not because I think it is wrong but because I know it is percieved as such. And it is in direct contrast to how I have behaved most of my life, so I need to understand.
I have burned myself out socially to the point that sitting inside this private den of mine is pertinent to my survival. However, when it comes time to be sociable, I often shell up inside myself and hide behind the backs of good friends until the unknown individual is gone. It's not impolite if I refuse to believe the person is even there.
This is all quite ridiculous, I know. The SamSam persona that I am creating for this manifesto is becoming more enticing as a loophole for awkward interactions. However, there is merit to my newfound social construct. How can we be private people in the current climate rife with internet social networks and Web 2.0? We cannot, is the answer, unless we refuse such networks.
I understand the implications of my social ineptitude, but I also see some good in all of this. I value the friends that I have. Not the grocery list of Facebook friends, but the true friends that I love and count on. Why should I spread myself--as jam--across the burnt toast of social networks when I have the real deal sitting in front of me? The answer is, I shouldn't. And I won't.
This is an important aspect to my aesthetic, and it clearly needs to be stripped of its outer garments to show the naked truth of it, but I am currently afraid of the implications that truth has on my life.