American Graffiti.

OPTIMISM, n. The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.–Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Everyone who knows me seems to think I’m a very optimistic guy which always surprises me because I know I have a dark side. Apparently I just keep it well hidden. When asked if the glass is half full or half empty I always say it’s half full. What I don’t say is, “So what’s in it? Battery acid?” Not that it really matters what’s in the glass since we’re insignificant specks on a small planet in a very cold, very large universe, and even if we aren’t steadily moving toward our own self-destruction and if our planet isn’t hit by a rogue asteroid or gamma ray burst our sun will eventually explode, destroying the inner solar system. Even if our species somehow manages to survive all that, which seems unlikely given that it will happen in about five billion years and in that time it seems likely we will have evolved into something that’s as distantly related to us as we are to, say, Periophthalmus gracilis. And even if Homo sapiens has still somehow survived all that they still have the eventual cold death of the universe to look forward to as space continues expanding, the distance between stars becomes so great they’re no longer visible to each other, and then the eventual breakdown of matter itself and its steady dissipation into dark radiation.

On the bright side none of that will, I hope, happen for some time, because I’ve got some Doctor Who episodes I’d like to catch up on.

Yes, my usual inclination is to look on the bright side when someone tells me bad news, but I’m just as likely to look for the dark when someone tells me good news. When I ask a friend how they’re doing and they say “Great!” I wonder what they’re not telling me. There’s something about graffiti telling me “OK OK OK” that just set me off on some pretty dark musings, maybe because things aren’t okay, but then I took that picture months ago and even at the time I thought, That doesn’t look like the work of someone who’s OK. That looks like a cry for help in the form of hysterical laughter. And maybe it wasn’t graffiti at all. I often see marks spray painted on sidewalks by construction guys marking where it’s OK to drill or something, so, great, that marks the spot where they’re going to tear up the sidewalk, and why did they have to mark it three times? If one “OK” wasn’t enough I’m not exactly reassured that two more are going to get the message across.

Maybe I was always like this, but I also think I was profoundly shaped by two books I read at the same time, switching from one to the other, when I was twenty: A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain and Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. And speaking of the latter that reminds me of the time we got an announcement at work that we’d be having a “breakfast of champions” morning meeting and I got really excited because I thought we’d be having martinis, but that’s another story.

These aren’t books you’ll find on the standard dystopian bookshelf. After all Twain’s book is mostly set in 10th century England and Vonnegut’s book is set in what was for him, at the time, the present, and, unlike some of his other books, doesn’t really look forward to the future. And yet they’re two of the bleakest, most cynical books I think I’ve ever read, especially when combined. Twain’s book ultimately concludes that technology can’t change human nature–which is not a spoiler since it should be obvious, although Twain sets up the final trap so perfectly it still surprises me every time I reread it. Vonnegut wrote Breakfast Of Champions as a fiftieth birthday present to himself and, well, it turned out not to be such a happy birthday. In its final pages he confronts himself with the limitations, and failings, of art, and concludes that it really can’t change things.

So there you have it: art and technology are futile, ultimately meaningless pursuits. On the bright side both books are pretty funny, at least until you get to the end.

Source: CMT.com

Art, like everything else, is affected by nature. Paint colors fade, marble or metal gets worn away, materials break down. Even in museums with really strict preservation efforts it’s only a matter of time before everything, including the museums themselves, disappear, which is a good reminder that “nature” and “civilization” is a false dichotomy. We’re part of nature no matter what, even if it is our, well, nature to try and wall ourselves off and do our own thing.

The partial destruction of the Basement East on Nashville’s 12th Avenue South is a good reminder of how much we’re at the mercy of the natural world, but here’s the great thing: the mural created by artist Adrien Saporiti back in 2012 survives. It was originally inspired by the 2010 floods and has since become a local icon and selfie spot. It’s also been vandalized, but repainted.

I’ve been to the Basement East, once for a live recording of The Moth storytelling event. There was supposed to be another Moth storytelling event at the Basement East this Sunday, in fact, but it’s been cancelled.The subject for the evening I was there was “animals” and I was supposed to go on but had to leave early so I didn’t get up on stage, but my skunk story is another story.

The I BELIEVE IN NASHVILLE mural isn’t the only one in the area. Here are a couple of others.

They may not be permanent but they are a good reminder that it’s in our nature to persist.

A little explanation is warranted so here goes: I was seventeen and in a pool hall with a school group. A couple of my friends—let’s call them Adrian and Denise since their names were Adrian and Denise—seemed to be having an argument.

“I’m telling you I can hit two balls with one shot,” said Adrian.

“There’s no way,” replied Denise. “There’s no way you can hit two balls with a single shot.”

The details are a little fuzzy because this was, well, let’s say it was a few decades ago because it was a few decades ago, but I was intrigued. Even now I think it’s plausible that someone could hit two balls positioned at opposing corner pockets with a single shot, if that someone happens to be, say, Mike Massey or Charles “Spitball” Darling or anyone else skilled at trick shots. I’d seen Adrian play pool, though, and I doubted he could do it. I’m pretty sure Adrian and Denise asked for my help solving the argument, though, and I agreed to help.

“Okay,” said Adrian, “I need you to stand at the end of the table with a finger on each of those balls.”

This is the point where, in retrospect, I feel really stupid. This is the point where I wish I could go back in time, grab myself, and say, “Don’t be a schmuck!” And in the moment I did briefly wonder why, if Adrian was going to hit two balls with a single shot, he needed me to stand at the far end of the table. And why he’d arranged a few coins into a small ramp right in front of the cue ball. The details are a little fuzzy but I think I was about to ask when Adrian drew back on the cue, propelled it forward and hit two balls. And Denise, quick with the camera,  captured the moment for posterity.

It was an experience I’d mostly forgotten until I found the picture in a box of old items. Anyway here’s a mural on the side of the La Rosa Café in Nashville.

I’m now a little older and a little fuzzier and let’s say a little wiser, or at least I hope I am. Let’s say we put that to the test. Who’s up for a game of pool?

In my dissolute youth I went to science fiction conventions and one of my favorite parts—a part that never seems to get any attention in spite of the popularity of cosplay and convention panels, or maybe because of the popularity of cosplay and convention panels—was the art room. There was always a lot of science fiction and fantasy-themed art on display, and sometimes artists would sit at tables in the art room and work on pictures. I once sat, rapt, for about half an hour watching an artist paint a spiral galaxy. When he stopped to take a break I asked him if he minded me watching.

“If I minded I wouldn’t be working in here,” he said.

Fair point, but I thought it was only polite to ask.

Anyway there was one time that a guy, not one of the artists, just a regular attendee, did a crude drawing of a robot and stuck it in the art room. Works in the art room weren’t just on display; they were also on sale, and artists would put a starting price next to each painting. There was space below the prices for people to make bids, and on the last night of the convention there’d be an auction with the last bid as the starting price.

The guy who’d put up the crude robot drawing was asking ten cents. I thought this was funny, and I also thought it was cool that this guy had just stuck his drawing among all the professional paintings. It had never occurred to me before but I loved how it made a statement about how anyone could be an artist. I don’t think he had any high-falutin’ intentions, but, hey, it’s all a matter of interpretation.

I added a bid of fifteen cents. Someone else came along later and upped it to a quarter, which I thought was very presumptuous and, sensing an opportunity, I added a bid of thirty cents.

By the time it went up for auction the price had gone up to $1.50 and it ultimately sold for $3.75. What started as a joke took a serious turn as the price war got the picture more and more attention and people really started to want it, either because they liked it or didn’t want to be outbid, and if you’ve ever wondered about the bonkers prices sometimes commanded by terrible works of art just imagine the same thing happening among people with millions of dollars and massive insecurity complexes. Tax breaks also help, but that’s another story. And none of that would have happened if the guy who’d made the drawing hadn’t decided to stick it in a place where a lot of people would see it.

It’s more than a small leap but the graffiti above reminded me of that event because it’s pretty well hidden. Like a lot of graffiti I only found it by accident–well, technically I was looking for graffiti, but there are no galleries, museums, or other traditional art spaces I can go, so it’s almost always a surprise when I find something and an even bigger surprise when it turns out to be good. The artist clearly put a lot of thought and effort into that graffiti and yet it’s hidden away, almost as though they didn’t think anyone would appreciate its true value.

I forget what year it was exactly but I remember it had snowed enough that we were out of school and I’d been at my friend John’s house. When I left I noticed his younger sister had build a snowman in the front yard and I thought it was a little odd that she’d apparently left his carrot nose and what looked like some beads in various colors scattered on the ground around him. Maybe, I thought, she’d been working on it, gotten too cold, and had gone inside and was planning to come back and finish it later.

When I got home I remembered something I wanted to tell John and called him. His sister answered.

“May I speak to John please?” I asked politely. I was always very formal when speaking to my friends’ younger siblings. I’m not sure why; maybe I was just trying to set a good example. Anyway I wasn’t prepared for her to start screaming at me.

“YOU DID IT!” she shrieked. “YOU PULLED OUT THE EYES AND THE NOSE AND THE BEADS!”

I’m pretty sure she said even more than that but her voice had reached a pitch only audible to dogs and I was completely confused. And amused. When she finally handed the phone to John I couldn’t remember what it was I wanted to tell him but it didn’t matter because I was laughing too hard to say anything. Eventually we figured out what had happened. Our friend Dave, who’d also been at John’s house and left about half an hour before I did, pulled all the decorations out of the snowman and left them on the ground, probably because Dave was the kind of guy who liked to set a bad example. And the whole matter probably would have ended there if I hadn’t impersonated John’s sister’s verbal barrage, and then John copied it, and pretty soon all of our friends were doing it and it became a running joke. It became such a running joke, in fact, that Dave’s part in it was completely forgotten and I’ve taken the blame in perpetuity. Decades later when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy I got a nice note from John’s sister, now an adult, wishing me a speedy recovery and adding, “I forgive, you, too, even though YOU PULLED OUT THE EYES AND THE NOSE AND THE BEADS!”

Snow sculptures are, by their very nature, ephemeral. They only last as long as temperatures stay below freezing, and while Nashville has had a few exceptional winters when the mercury didn’t rise above the melting point for days and even though snow deflects heat eventually they all disappear. The memories, however, last so much longer.

Also for the last time IT WASN’T ME. IT WAS DAVE THAT DID IT.

“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”—Mitch Hedburg

So I was walking along and I noticed this attached to a lamp post:

That’s nice, I thought. Someone had a fake flower for some reason and rather than just throw it away they decided to share it with the world, or at least with anyone who happened to be walking down that particular street. I assumed it was an accident until I got to the next one.

And the one after that.

There’s an extensive world of flower symbolism that varies widely across cultures, although most people don’t think about it. The Victorians had a whole language of flowers, but then the Victorians were terrified of ever saying what they meant out loud so they had all sorts of subtle codes for everything and could turn your standard grocery store flower arrangement into a novel. Now most of that flower symbolism is forgotten. Roses—specifically red roses—are still understood to mean love, and every once in a long while I hear someone referred to as a “shrinking violet” or a “pansy”, but for the most part if flowers mean anything it’s usually “I have feelings for you” or “I have some flowers for you”.

Was there a message being conveyed on the lamp posts? Probably not. Part of the problem with flower symbolism is you have to recognize the specific flowers before you can know the meaning, and aside from a couple of handfuls of popular ones I couldn’t tell a dahlia from a delphinium, although I do enjoy reading Skye Ent’s adventures in gardening.

I know some people feel the world we live in now lacks subtlety, that there’s too much sharing, too much openness. They complain that some things should be left unexpressed, and I wish they’d shut up about it.

Source: Wikipedia

A hundred years ago Amedeo Modigliani died at the age of thirty-five. One of his paintings, Seated Man With A Cane, is currently the subject of a complex legal dispute because it was stolen from a Jewish family by the Nazis, and recently new evidence has come to light that helps the original family’s claim. When I heard about this on the radio I didn’t need to see the picture itself to have an idea what it looked like. Modigliani wasn’t a member of any movement even though he spent most of his art career in Paris at a time when it seemed like every artist was either joining or founding a movement. He was an outsider whose painting style is so distinctive you only need to see one or two of his paintings to recognize his other works. He took up sculpture late in his life and even those works are, well, let’s just say you can tell they’re Modigliani’s. And yet his works aren’t repetitive. He created a distinctive style but he also kept pushing it, finding new and creative ways to apply his style to a variety of paintings–including nudes, but also portraits. Even though he wasn’t part of any specific movement he was such a good artist he always gets a mention in textbooks and other surveys of art history, even if they skip over other artists who were part of or significantly influenced major art movements. It’s unfortunate that he died so young, from tuberculosis, which was exacerbated by the fact that he was pretty much broke. He’s like Van Gogh, but sexier and less self-mutilating.
What I’m getting at is that it’s interesting how an artist can have a style so distinctive they create similar works and yet still manage to make each work good on its own.

There’s a lot that can be said about what’s not said. And that’s not just true in terms of speaking. The move toward abstraction in 20th century painting started with the simplification of forms and shapes. If you’ve ever taken a drawing class you probably started by breaking something down into triangles, circles, and squares before adding details. The artistic simplification of forms continued until it finally arrived at “pure abstraction”, with paintings that weren’t meant to represent anything specific but were meant to be evocative, although this wasn’t really a new idea. Abstract or non-representational art can be found throughout history. And not all artists went to pure abstraction either. Dorothea Tanning’s paintings, and then sculptures, became increasingly abstract but were always meant to evoke the female form, and Edward Hopper’s late paintings, although they’re of rooms, are studies in light, color, and form. There’s also just the nature of the edge of the painting, the frame. In a way every painting isn’t just about its subject but also what it doesn’t include, all the things that it doesn’t show, and just try and wrap your head around that.
There’s also what’s not said in literature, and not just what authors deliberately leave out. There are lacunae in ancient texts from the epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Aristotle and Plato and others, not to mention lost plays of Sophocles and other classical writers.
And as any writer will tell you there’s always the question of what to say and what not to say when telling a story because, like a painting, a story can’t contain everything, and sometimes what’s not said can say a lot; it can give the reader a chance to fill in what’s missing and draw their own conclusions. Sometimes too what’s not said is just a matter of economy. In a college class I read a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason that included a line about someone squeezing Joy into a sink full of dishes. There was a footnote that said “Commercial brand of dishwashing liquid” and I think almost the whole class that day was taken up with a discussion of how much a writer needs to tell the reader and how much can be understood just from context. The teacher finally summed it up by saying, “A writer should assume the reader is ignorant but not stupid,” which is a fine idea, but knowing what the reader can be trusted to fill in by themselves and what they need to be told is tricky.
So anyway it’s obvious that there’s a lot that can be said about what’s not said, what’s unsaid, what’s missing, what’s left out–in fact there’s so much that can be said about it you probably wish I’d shut up.

There’s a long history of art being used as a form of protest and I’m not going to go into it because I’m laughing at the pothole bugs a woman in Lincolnshire, England, painted. Karan Holland lost a tire—or “tyre” as they spell it on their side of the pond—to a pothole and decided to protest the local government’s delay in fixing it by spray painting a bug around it.

Source: Lincolnshire Live

Normally when I see graffiti—or even a commissioned mural, or advertisement, on a wall or even on a road, it’s because it’s an empty space that someone decided to fill with something. Nature may not really abhor a vacuum but people like to fill space with stuff, although most of the time when someone decorates an empty space the plan is that whatever they’ve made will last. Holland’s drawing attention to the potholes hoping they’ll be filled. The local authorities claim she’s delaying the pothole repair because now they also have to clean the paint off the road, but I have a hard time believing that. Leaving the paint there wouldn’t hurt anything, unlike the potholes that have already been there a long time.

The real irony here, though, is that usually protest art criticizes something the government is doing, but she’s calling out the government for what it’s not doing.

She’s also painted the occasional penis around a pothole and something something filling a hole.

Source: Lincolnshire Live