American Graffiti.

There was a feature in an issue of MAD Magazine I read when I was eleven or twelve that was called something like “Jobs Someone Must Have”. I think everything I read in MAD was memorable to me because my mother wouldn’t buy it for me so whenever I saw an issue at a friend’s house I went straight to it. But this feature was memorable to because it was funny but also thought-provoking. It was jobs like “the person who paints the black dots on dice” and the only other one I can remember was “manhole cover designer”. Painting dots on dice is probably automated but designing sewer line covers is a real job. I wish I could remember the others because, even if it was tongue-in-cheek, there are a lot of jobs most of us don’t even realize are being done. And if I hadn’t already gotten the idea from MAD the summer I worked for a temp agency really made me think about it even more. Maybe you’ve walked by the end cap displays in a grocery store without thinking about them. I spent three weeks putting those together and moving them across a warehouse into trucks to be delivered across the country.

Manhole covers are just one example but they’re a distinctive one. Japan is famous for their unique designs, and because most I’ve seen are plain—at least the ones I happen to notice since I’m usually not looking down—it’s nice to see a distinctive one. Most large cities probably have some. Here’s just one list of some really incredible ones around the world.

The cover I photographed isn’t for a sewer line, of course, but is similar enough, and also someone had to design it. It happens to be outside the Blair School of Music. If you go into the library there you’ll see this. It’s not someone’s job to decorate the bust of Beethoven but I’m glad someone does. Anything that adds a little art to our lives is welcome.

It’s been seven years now since I took that picture. I keep returning to it because it’s the first picture of graffiti I took, and while I’ve seen a lot that’s definitely better there is something special about it. I have no idea what the story behind it is. Maybe someone was practicing, warming up, or just bored and felt an urge to do something pointless. That’s just speculation. When I saw it I thought there was something funny about the way it just trailed off with a series of wave shapes. That made me think about how fickle inspiration can be. There have been times when I’ve been suddenly energized, feeling like I can do anything. Then, as soon as I sit down to write I come up with…nothing.

The conventional wisdom about inspiration is that you can’t force it. In classical literature poets often began by invoking one of the Muses, asking for help. At the beginning of The Amores Ovid acts annoyed that he planned to write a serious epic but Cupid interfered so he’s stuck writing love poems instead. Hey, take whatever you can get.

Anyway, while inspiration can’t be forced, sometimes it can be coaxed out. Several years ago I got a job writing about local art. My first assignment was to write about an exhibit by a visiting artist named Margo Kren. I wasn’t able to get in touch with her and there’d never been a formal opening so all I had to work with was the pictures themselves and a small pamphlet with a biographical blurb. I sat and looked at the pictures for a long time, unsure what to say about them. And I also thought a lot about the term deadline. I’d asked for the job, had been prepared to beg for it, and now I was faced with the terrible possibility that I’d miss my first, and possibly only, assignment. Unsure of what else to do I started describing the paintings. Though it happened slowly—I might even say painfully—I suddenly hit a nerve. Or an artery. I had pages and pages, but my hand couldn’t keep up with my head. In the end I had to cut it down significantly, and while I would use the same technique to write two more articles the magazine folded before they could be published. It was still a valuable lesson, though, and when it comes to writing I’ll take whatever I can get.  

Earlier this week I was walking across a college campus and passed by a poster offering help to students who are preparing to take the MCAT—the Medical College Admission Test that would-be doctors have to take, and pass, to start their real medical training. And it reminded me of a time from my own college days when my friend Jen took the MCAT. The day before she took it a bunch of us gathered in someone’s dorm room and made posters expressing our support and cheering her on. Most of the posters were the standard “GO JEN!” type, and they were really fun. One of our friends was an art student and hers were really good. She drew the MCAT as an actual cat, a supervillain with an “M” on its chest, being punched pour by Jen. I, however, am not an artist. I like to doodle, sketch, and even made a brief but disastrous attempt at oil painting, but that’s another story. However I was an English major so of course I’d taken Anatomy 101, not only to get that science credit out of the way but because I was, and still am, interested in science. I think that’s the nature of English majors, though, and writers generally: we’re curious about everything because anything can be material.

Jen, by the way, not only aced the MCAT but has had a long and successful career as a doctor. To celebrate that, and to cheer on all those preparing to take the test, and just for fun, I decided to recreate the posters I made. These aren’t too far off from the originals. Like I said I’m not an artist but a little knowledge can be a funny thing.

Every time I go to the dentist I pass by these flowers. They’re plastic so they last but they’ve been there at least three years—I’ve written about it before—and someone regularly refreshes them, adding new ones and making other changes. There’s still no note, nothing to explain why they’re there, but I still assume they’re some kind of memorial. I still respect the privacy of whoever put them there. Even though it’s in a public spot their reasons for putting the flowers there are, I believe, personal, and should remain that way.

Still that got me thinking about how we interpret works of art. There’s a deep impulse to find meaning in things and it does seem obvious that if someone made something they had a purpose. At first I thought about how it applies to visual arts. Paintings and sculptures often get interpreted based on what we know about the artist and the time in which they lived, though titles can help too, and some artists are happy to explain their work. Others aren’t. Writing—both poetry and prose—can also have layers of meaning, and there are writers who are happy to talk about their inspiration, their craft, and whether there were deeper ideas they were trying to convey but didn’t state explicitly. And there are others who won’t do that. Cormac McCarthy regularly turned down often large fees to come and speak, saying anything readers wanted to know they could get from his books.

There’s an episode of Sanford & Son that opens with Fred and Lamont in a museum. The tour guide shows them an assemblage of metal pieces and asks, “What do you think the artist was trying to say?” Fred quips, “Stay off the freeway!”

Source: YouTube

It’s a joke and I still think it’s funny but even when I was a kid and saw that episode for the first time I thought, that could be right. My parents regularly took me to art museums, which I think is the source of my interest in art, and I learned pretty early that there’s no one way to interpret anything. Maybe that’s why I’ve remembered it and even as an adult think the assemblage could be interpreted as a statement about the perils of technology and the speed of modern life.

Fred is inspired to build an assemblage of his own, but it’s dismissed as worthless, not a “real” work of art, and he tears it down. Why? I wondered. As a kid I was often frustrated by sitcoms that seemed to get into something really interesting right as they hit the twenty-two minute mark and there’d be a quick, cheap resolution that reset everything just before the credits rolled. That still annoys me and I still ask questions like, why is an assemblage in a museum a valuable piece of art but one built by a junk dealer in a backyard worthless?

There’s no right answer to that question.

The first camera I had was a hand-me-down. It was vintage, really, a kind with a strap that went around my neck and hung to my stomach so I’d have to look down into the viewfinder. I think it was some model of Kodak Duaflex. What I’d see through the viewfinder wasn’t very clear and, as was so often the case with old cameras, I really wouldn’t know what the picture would look like until it was developed. And that meant using up the whole roll of film first then taking it to a little hut in the middle of the Kmart parking lot, then leaving it for a week or so with a guy who looked like John Fogerty, probably because he was John Fogerty.

Most of the pictures I took with it were disappointing. I remember one very specifically that I took on a very cold winter day. There was a vacant lot behind my house that I loved exploring. It had a high rocky wall at the that held all sorts of treasures such as a cache of smoky quartz crystals and brachiopod fossils, and what looked like a dinosaur tooth but was probably just an oddly-shaped rock.

There was one spot where water trickled down over a series of jutting rocks, runoff from the hill above it. I transplanted some moss to one of the rocks, and some staghorn lichen, and some British soldier lichen with its crimson caps. All of it grew really well, a strange miniature rock garden of my very own.

The day I took the picture the water trickling down had frozen into icicles. I wasn’t worried about my garden; even then I knew lichens are ridiculously tough and can even survive in space. I just thought the whole scene was beautiful: mottled grays and greens, and even traces of azure from the lichen. I probably took as many as three pictures—film was limited and expensive both to buy and process, but I still wanted to make sure I wanted to capture the scene. What came back was dull, blurry, barely recognizable to me, and I was the one who’d taken the picture.

I realize now that even with a better camera it would have been difficult to get a proper picture. There wasn’t a clear focal point, no real composition. The best I could have done was focus on one of the lichens but they were obscured by ice. The sky was overcast so the lighting was awful. With all that I actually liked the picture. It was an excellent lesson in what not to do in photography and even now, with digital cameras that can show you exactly how your picture’s going to turn out before you take it, I think about how challenging it can be to even get a halfway decent shot. So many factors, which the photographer has varying degrees of control over, have to come together. I still haven’t managed it.

The music video for Bishop Allen’s Click, Click, Click has a camera similar to the one I had. And it’s just a fun video and song.

I was walking through a hospital when I was taken by surprise by a pair of googly eyes. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. It’s not exactly pareidolia but people like to turn things into faces by sticking googly eyes on them. There’s even a Googly Eyes Foundation that promotes the googlification of everyday items by providing free googly eyes.

That led me down a rabbit hole of the history of googly eyes but that’s where murky. The name may come from the syndicated comic strip Barney Google And Snuffy Smith which debuted in 1919 and more than a century later is still making lazy, awful jokes based on tired stereotypes of rural people. Check out The Comics Curmudgeon to see the strip regularly get the treatment it deserves.

Googly eyes may have originated from German dolls made in the early 20^th century, and the term “googly” may even have come from German. Like I said the history is murky. They really became popular in the early 1970’s with the invention of Weepuls which were a really big fad at one time and while it’s died down it never completely went away—there’s still a Weepuls organization.

As much as I like digging into history I also like it that there are some things that remain mysteries, that may always be mysteries. Like who put the googly eyes there.

A lot of street art is just tagging. I cringe whenever I see simple scribbles, usually done with just a plain black magic marker, on a lamppost or wall or dumpster. I think, if you’re going to leave your mark why not make it good? So even though I defend street art as legitimate art as well as the most free expression, a true testament to the idea that anyone can be an artist, I am a little bit of a snob. I try to keep an open mind but I still have standards. And there are examples of creative and, in my opinion, well-done tagging: many street artists put up their signatures in vivid colors using block or balloon lettering. After the simple tags elaborate signatures may be the most common form of street art.

It’s nice, then, to see something very different. It was so surprising and funny that at first I didn’t realize the artist had signed their work, but they did, off to the side. You can find and follow Sqish on Instagram if you’re so inclined. They do some amazing stuff. But I also felt like a signature wasn’t needed. The work itself is distinctive enough that it is their signature. Some artists are like that: their work is so iconoclastic they don’t even need to sign it. I play the game Artle every day–guess the artist from four of their works. Once in a while I get it in one. Even if I don’t recognize the work itself the style gives it away. Sometimes I have to get up to the third or fourth painting because artists’ styles evolve over time and even the ones we think of as the most distinctive and recognizable experimented a lot with different styles, but that’s another story.

Although it’s also the nature of street art that, even with a name, it’s still basically anonymous, the artists themselves unknown and their work left to speak for itself.

I have so many questions about the small scenes created in the hollow of a tree on a regular walking path I take regularly. Sometimes there’s nothing there, just the empty hollow, but other times there are toys. Maybe some of them have been dropped by children. Others seem to be marking the season. Did someone put them there deliberately? Is it the same person every time? Who takes them? Is it just something fun? It probably is—it’s unlikely there’s any deeper meaning, but my mind still considers the possibility that someone has a purpose in creating these scenes. I have all these questions but, as I walk on, as I pass by people on the same trail, any one of whom could be the artist, I think, some things are better left as happy mysteries.