Aug 20 2010 2:52 pm
it's dumb in its bigness
It’s like that time John Lurie added me as a friend on Myspace because I had him listed as my hero. It felt that cool. But then again, who uses Myspace anymore? So now I guess John Lurie will have to add me as a friend on Facebook. Either way, the article about him in the latest New Yorker is pretty weird, but it also contains a refreshingly straightforward perspective on what makes good art good.
And Frank could have used that perspective last week when, after his small show at the Open Concept Gallery in Grand Rapids was poorly received by critics, he locked himself in his one bedroom apartment for a week living primarily on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine. Of course he was thrilled to even get the show in the first place, what with all the wet sex and profanity, but he’d shown at some other galleries around west Michigan and showing only goes so far. And of course he was thrilled that the critics came at all, but he’d had critics come before and any press is good press only goes so far.
When Lisa showed up on the eighth day and forced her way into his apartment she found a man reduced. He was sweating and pale and tired on the couch sitting with a pea green afghan over his knees in front of a pile of pizza boxes and cigarette butts. He stared at the floor. Lisa said, “Let’s go. It’s been a week and you are being a piece of shit. This is not attractive Frank. It’s not attractive on many levels.” Frank nodded and tilted down slowly to his side, barely moving his legs to curl into the fetal position.
Lisa, standing with hands on hips, sighed heavily and with a shuffling of purse and clanging of keys dumped all her gerunds and stomped across the room and opened the curtains and the light streamed in through the dust and Frank squinted and then closed his eyes. Lisa said, “What fucking right do you have to be so depressed? You made bad art. So fucking what. Deal with it. You’re a single man without a care in the world making a living as an artist. So you won’t win ArtPrize. You also don’t have cancer, your wife won’t get hit by a car, and you won’t die of dysentery in a remote, flood ravaged village in the Punjab. So buck up and let’s go out. If you get a shower and smile I may even suck your dick.”
Lisa was raised in Dallas or Houston, I’m not sure, whichever one has the natural gas wells downtown. She was raised on a cul de sac with a very nice yard and very nice edging and very nice mulching and only average hedge trimming. They took a two week vacation in Colorado every year where they would fly fish and ride bikes and stay in a condo on the side of a ski mountain and Lisa remembered thinking it was the weirdest thing when she was a kid to go to a ski mountain in the summer.
Her neighborhood in Texas was wide open and hot and there was every convenience nearby. Starbucks and Kohls and Applebees and Best Buy and Barnes and Noble and Home Depot. She would just hop in her daddy’s car and down the divided highway they’d go except one time when her daddy was really drunk. Then they barely made it out of their subdivision because he hit one of the neighbors with his car and that neighbor was very bloody and died in the street.
Aug 11 2010 11:31 am
the blue state theory
Michigan is probably the most weirdly shaped of all states, the direct contiguity of land masses being of first importance when adjudicating shape weirdness. It’s all fucking wonky. The Lower Peninsula itself is like you piled a bunch of dirt and rocks on a piece of paper in a foot of water then tried to lift it out with only one hand under the paper. And I’m sure Wisconsin is pretty pissed about the whole Upper Peninsula thing, or Canada maybe, and Ohio? While the Toledo War was relatively bloodless, the psychological scars run deep.
Why Michigan has such good fishing and beer is probably unrelated directly to its shape. The shape and the fishing certainly share some common cause, but why do some areas of the country have great craft beer and others don’t? What do California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, for instance, all have in common? They all voted democrat in 2008 (and, except for Colorado, in 2000 and 2004 as well).
Do liberals just like better beer? Surely it’s more complicated than that: liberals are more creative, interesting, and willing to take risks than are conservatives. Just kidding. Sort of. I’m sure conservatives would respond with the arrogance, faux-sophisticate counter attack: liberals like to feel superior and “cultured” so they make and drink expensive, fancy beer. If only beer was more French, then they would have an argument. Wink. Wink.
Wink.
More traditional brewing states like Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, and even Ohio and Indiana share some obvious social history in that they hosted large German immigrant communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but Indiana and Ohio have fallen off the pace over the past twenty years, Three Floyds and Hoppin’ Frog notwithstanding, though they are making giant strides recently. Is the blue state theory of craft beer enough to account for these trends? Probably. If nothing sticks to Teflon, how does Teflon stick to the pan?
Either way, it’s widely known that you don’t get rich playing Keno at the Sandbar. Say, Wade, what happened to your website dude?
Aug 1 2010 12:51 pm
necessity
The architecture of my conceptual facilities is baroque in the extreme. Like paisley. Like Persian vegetables and a sick Wikipedia. For everything that has an end must have had a beginning. Hard to believe, I know. But I find it patently obvious that everything that has a beginning does not necessarily have an end.
The topography and connections of my leanest concepts seem necessary. And through this necessity they are secured. They are warranted, standing up to the world or at least some deep psychological quirks, which are nonetheless in the world. What is it about necessity that is so compelling? Which concepts and connections themselves make necessity? And how are we to provide a necessary and secure foundation for them? What about necessity is so satisfying?
These structures of thought are not only compelling, they are also necessary themselves. Not in the logical sense, not in the coherence of concepts sense, but in a primeval, necessary to carry on one foot in front of the other without giving up to pure insanity kind of sense.
Are they as necessary as a clean weld? Are they as necessary as meat and potatoes, beer and friendship and hard work, big brown trout blowing up on a mouse at midnight, as masturbating only on the third Monday of every month, as getting a Fishbeer sticker on the back of the Ween tour bus?
Perhaps. But I tend to think not.
Jul 22 2010 5:57 pm
the toad life
The ferry sucked cars off the dock in Charlevoix for thirty minutes before I climbed on and plowed over 31 miles of upper Lake Michigan. Kevin was waiting on the dock. A few hundred feet away was a bar. They had Short’s Huma-Lupa-Licious on draft so I had one of those which might have been a mistake because I hadn’t eaten anything all day and that beer is on the strong side so I picked up a good buzz straight away. Steve wasn’t back from his trip yet so we went to another pub and had a few more beers, some wings and a big bowl of fish chowder that was white but seemed yellow I think because it was so buttery. Finally caught up with Steve and went back to that second pub and had more beers and I had the local perch fry which was pretty great.
In a fit of fascination Kevin insisted we go to the three day music festival. We stopped and got some beer and a bottle of Popov, loaded up the cooler and hit the road. Turns out there are actually a lot of roads on Beaver Island though most are dirt. Many residents have island cars: no license plate, rough around the edges, old. It’s hard to get kicked off the island but it can happen. We shot south through fields not wearing seatbelts sipping vodka tonics, jumped off the asphalt and onto the dirt, diving into the woods where all the leaves on the side of road were coated in a thin film of gray dust.
We turned onto a two track in a tunnel of trees and cars were pulled off into the woods and there were hippies everywhere, dusty tent cities, a row of booths with fortune tellers and jewelry vendors and a wooden stage in a big hole in the woods on a small island in a big lake and a bonfire and a few hundred people milling around with drinks in their hands.
We ran out of the harbor and between different islands idling from four hundred yards out then cutting the engine in two foot of water where the rock and sand flats stretched far away dropping off abruptly into the deep blue and green water in the distance. Both the giant smallmouth and the carp are spooky as hell on these flats but the smallmouth spook only for a second, usually coming back to check out whatever it was that made all that noise. The carp, on the other hand, spook out on a bad cast and won’t take a fly again for weeks probably. The smallmouth fishing up there is ridiculous. Absolutely stupid. The fish are all big and they are everywhere in shallow water.
The waves build toward the end of the day and the run back to the harbor can be a shade rough but apparently 2-3 foot seas ain’t shit up there. The points of my ribcage hurt from sleeping on the floor. The whole trip was pretty surreal.
Check out this video on Third Coast Fly. Have no fear, I’ll have the adults-only version up here sooner than later.
