The Glamor of Being in the Psychiatric Unit

Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of those movies that gets under your skin without really working too hard.  It does a sort of slow, sad, hallway walk into your soul.  Based on his novel from a decade or so ago, the movie lovingly cannibalizes John-Hughes movies for its textures and rhythms, and somehow deepens those moments through a misty-eyed adherence to the importance of nostalgia.  It makes being in a psyche unit feel like going to Sundance and having hot chocolate with a bunch of other sad kid actors.  Glamorizing sadness and depression is an old movie staple, but Chbosky gets it so right you feel a sort of gorgeous depression slowly seep into your consciousness as you watch the movie.  There's something about lead actor Logan Lerman's wide-open but still a little closed-up face that allows us to feel that self-involvement is an artform, and Emma Watson and the ecstatic Ezra Miller playing Lerman's Island-of-Lost-Toys sidekicks gives the movie's atmosphere a stylish, kinky kick.  Whoever lit this movie must know how to write extremely effective love-letters, because the lighting in every scene has an unbearable lightness of being to it; you feel yourself aching to ache in those suburban houses these kids live in, and in the penultimate scene, the three of them riding through a tunnel blasting David Bowie's "Heroes," you truly want to become a part of their miserable little clique.  Perks is a masterpiece of sad-sack outsiderness, celebrating those feelings you often just have to shrug off in order to get things done.  This movie wallows in beautiful self-pity, and that somehow is its genius.

Diligently Inevitable

I read "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick aloud in class on Monday.  Damn.  It's one of those stories that make you want to stop as your surge forward but you can't stop because every part of what you're reading and seeing inside your head is so diligently inevitable you feel tossed aside and yet pulled within, caught up in something that destroys and disappears and destroys and disappears.  Ozick's story gives us direct access into horror, and yet at the center of everything is a sort of insanely beautiful sensuousness, evidenced by this last paragraph:

"All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly toucan a silver vine. And the moment Magda’s feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arm splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence; but of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her mouth with it, stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up, the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried."

You earn that kind of poetry by staring violence and ugliness and vileness right in the face.  You suck in the putrid air of what people can do, and you exhale the grace they are capable of.  As I read out loud I felt the room get quiet and uncomfortable, and the whole way through the discomfort increased.  No room for laughs, just recognition.  When you can create something this humorless and yet so incredibly accessibilie, you find other ways to connect outside of "likability" and "relatability."  You find the core of every one's existence, all of it guided through the consciousness of Rosa, and you locate morality in the death of a baby you truly feel is your own.

Above is a drawing by the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, who died in 1945.  Her drawings, prints and paintings have the same mysterious and effortless clarity as Ozick's writing, so clear and pure it feels like the world is about to disappear.

About Last Night

Last night we had an opening at Thunder-Sky, Inc. for a show Bill curated called, "Glory Be!  (a Historical Romance):  Works by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck."  It felt like old times somehow.  Like 12 years ago in fact.  Bill and I first curated a show of "outsider" art back in 2001, at a place called Base Gallery.  That show featured Antonio Adams, Raymond Thunder-Sky, Paul Rowland and Richard Brown, all artists we had met doing our regular jobs helping people with developmental disabilities.  That gig was titled "Art Thing," and it truly was a groundbreaking moment for me because I realized how art can allow you intense moments of grace and happiness that can sometimes push you forward to do bigger things.  Without "Art Thing," we would not have started Visionaries and Voices, and without Visionaries and Voices we would not have opened Thunder-Sky, Inc. 

 

What has changed in the last 12 years for me, though, is an evolution of trying to figure out how to do shows and projects and events featuring great art by artists often consigned to the background without having to frame their work with their diagnostic biographies:  without having to say what they've accomplished is a product of what a doctor says they have, or has happened "in spite of" this or that diagnosis.  So in "Glory Be" and in every show we do now, the idea of "disability" and "outsider" gets critiqued through stone-cold silence.  That stuff just does not get mentioned because you don't need to know how "outsider" the artist is in order to enjoy the beauty and peculiarity of the art.  Major case in point is "Glory Be," a show featuring three artists whose works have a lot of things in common, but whose demographics aren't really in sync.  Matthew's intimate, playful drawings of famous presidents, Paul's text-infused drawings of the names of presidents and other historical figures, and Britni's sly, sleek, blithe sculptural inventions cracking the code of historical gloss and pomp -- all these works belong together, and we can relish the way they fit and knock into each other, creating both mystery and meaning.  And we don't need to know who went to art school and who didn't, and we don't need to know IQ numbers or socioeconomic indicators.  We just need the work to be here, pulled together succinctly, given room to expand.

 

Last night, too, I felt a weird, beautiful reconnection with the idea of congregating around art.  I have a major fear of groups of people, but at the opening reception last night the groups of people felt organically okay somehow, as if they had come together to feel better about being people, not so they could feel charitable or sympathetic.  Matthew's family brought enough food for a huge family reunion.  Britni had a sweet soulful crowd of her own.  It all just came together.   And I got it:  this is what we're supposed to do, what Thunder-Sky, Inc. is.  Gatherings of people with lots of food and art and that's enough. 

 

Like "Art Thing" back in the day.  We did a full-color catalog for that show, back in 2001, and below is the back-cover, our mission statement at that time.  I wish I would have known then what I know now:  I would have taken out "disability" and "outsider" from the get-go.   As in:  "The Art Thing Project Is...  ART and helping artists gain access and credibility and success on their own terms."  Why do you need "outsider" or "disability" slapped onto any of these concepts and ideas?  Is it the idea that first you need to assess/label/diagnose people prior to helping them?  Like a doctor?  Bill and I are not doctors.  I don't really know what we are.  But I truly understand, I think, what we're supposed to do here on out, and it has nothing to do with systems or charity, and it has everything to do with what happened last night, and what happened 12 years ago:  finding ways to allow everyone to leave all the bull-shit behind, and proceed accordingly...

 

 

 

 

Below are photos of last night's opening of "Glory Be! (a Historical Romance):  Work by Britni Bicknaver, Paul McGurl and Matthew Waldeck," and from March, 2001's opening night of "Art Thing:  Drawings, Objects, Paintings and Words by Antonio Adams, Paul Rowland, Raymond Thunder-Sky and Richard Brown." 

 

 

"Glory Be!"



 

 

 

 

 

 "Art Thing"

 

 

Enemies of the Balloon

I read Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon" aloud to my class last Monday, part of an ongoing thing I'm doing to figure out how great short stories work and feel when they escape your brain and go out into the atmosphere.  In a compressed yet voluminous manner, Barthelme's tale builds not through scene or character but pure rhetoric, as if the story is a speech at some dreamworld political convention.  It's absurd but grounded in a space inside your mind where all the bull-shit of being an upstanding citizen in an overly informed republic lingers and sprouts into narrative/non-narrative, a story that moves forward without moving.  As I read it I felt the students get a little unnerved, but then the whole room began to understand:  it's a joke.  But right when the joke gets good, the joke transforms into a proverb.  The titular balloon gathers meaning and blankness simultaneously.  It is a potent symbol and a huge piece of crap filling our lives with mystery and boredom.  Nothingness becomes the engine by the end.  But the final words let you know there is no ending really:

It was also argued that what was important was what you felt when you stood under the balloon; some people claimed that they felt sheltered, warmed, as never before, while enemies of the balloon felt, or reported feeling, constrained, a 'heavy' feeling.

Ballroom Blitz

 

Movie reviews get on my nerves.  Just googled A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth Die Hard movie that debuted last night on every screen in America, and ran across bitchy, pissy little critiques about a movie that truly is just what it is:  silly, sleek, pointlessly violent, with the brain of a dog and the heart of a high school football coach.  We went to see it last night, and I loved it.  Bruce Willis looks fantastic as an elderly gent still rocking the working-class blues, and his son, played by Jai Courtney, is his reluctant prodigal CIA son with a penchant for gritting his teeth all the time.  The plot, the visuals, the situations are all rote, but comfortably so.  It's exactly what is required, and then some.  There's a setpiece inside an old decrepit Russian hotel ballroom with a helicopter hovering outside the glorious windows that simply is too stupid and wonderful for words, crafted by John Moore the director to look like a crappy-chic music video from 1988.

1988 was the year Die Hard came out.  Seeing it back then was a revelation.  I was snobby at first but then when I saw it I got mesmerized.  It had an elegant machine-like veracity laced with blue-collar discontent.  The tall gleaming skyscraper during a Yuppie-pretentious Christmas office party was the perfect setting for Alan Rickman's prissy villain to sashay into.  Willis played John Mcclane with a sort of exhaustion burgeoning on fury.  He was pure white-trash, bare-foot and gun-toting and over it.  He became iconic.

Good Day is not iconic in anyway, but it is not a piece of shit either.  It's just what it is:  a way to revisit McClane, now an old grumpy guy wanting to help his grumpy young son out of an international mess.  By the end of this one, you don't fee let down; you feel just happy and content.  Bombs and guns went off.  McClane and his kid saved the day.  Time to go home.

Missed His Shadow When He Was Gone

Missed his shadow when he was gone.  He was a silhouette mostly.  Sometimes though I caught him whole, looking down, like a bear wanting into a cave. 

Still think about him when I'm down there, looking up from wires and cables, breathing in that damp-rat smell.  One night it was cold as hell, crystal-clear sub-zero cold, and we were working on laying in new cable-pipe, and I remember just looking up and I could see him almost floating up there like he was stuck in glass, motionless, just staring down at me.  I saw his eyes, open wide like he was taking in all in, his brain just a big camera inside his skull.  He needed to know.  You got that feeling, and I looked up there and said something hey buddy or whatever and as soon as he heard me say something, as soon as he realized I was looking back he was off. 

But then he'd be back an hour or so later and I understood. 

This was our relationship.  I didn't even know he drew pictures.  Just thought he was interested in the work we were doing. 

Still miss him.  Even now.

You Will Be Missed



Dont't worry about what happens next.  Simply walk through the door, and you'll find all that you once feared has turned itself inside out.  I used to be like you.  I used to fall into that same trap, but birds don't need restrictions.  They need sky.  They need air.  They need destinations.  This isn't makebelieve either.  I wore myself out getting here, blistered and cut, scorched and frozen, a little bit pissed off.  I've flown over wars, carnivals, traffic jams.  My eyes are smaller because of it.  You came out of that room and you were terrified, but then it all went away.  I came at you like you knew it was about to happen, the fury and finesse pulling itself out of the moment and into our convergence.  Birds don't belong indoors, but I wasn't a bird anyway, just a flicker.  Then you knew.  It wasn't really over particularly, just a rought start.  You continued walking but you were already laid out on the floor.