Saturday, October 13, 2007
Modern Art Pissing Match
Erich Vieth posted a picture of a couple of modern art paintings and said that he "wasn't tempted to buy either of these paintings," which were going for $1,300 and $3,200. He indicated that he didn't "get" modern art, which is something I've heard a lot from non-artists. It's as if they feel they don't have the expertise to judge art based on how they react to it. I agreed with Erich, saying that I wouldn't buy the paintings either, and mentioned that our experience of art is subjective - trying to let him know that he could trust his own instincts when it came to paintings.
For opening my mouth, I was promptly challenged by a commenter with the screen name gatomjp to explain myself in detail and to show some of my own work. I felt that I was being placed in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If I didn't link up to my work, I'd be considered chicken. If I did, I'd be placing my art in line for potential potshots, which may or may not be based on the fact that I said something that was disagreeable to gatomjp. I don't have much up in the way of art on my blog, but I did link to my artist trading cards. Gatomjp also asked me to define why, precisely, I didn't like the two paintings presented in the blog.
My reply garnered this response from gatomjp: "Sorry, Mary that's not good enough." I was expected to give an essay on the technical aspects of why I didn't like the paintings. It wasn't good enough that I simply didn't care for them. Gatomjp also leapt to the assumption that I didn't like abstract art at all. He/she did indicate liking my artist trading cards, which was a surprise considering the tone of the rest of his/her comments. I was beginning to think that maybe gatomjp was the artist of the pictured paintings, or perhaps an artist who produced paintings like those pictured. I was stumped by the vehemence at which this person was going after me and thought that if I'd been at a party and someone jumped on me like this, I'd find a way to distance myself right quick. It's not that I mind be asked to give a more in-depth explanation for my opinions, but a little honey (i.e. nicely asking), rather than vinegar (i.e. making assumptions that aren't true) goes a long way in getting my cooperation.
I obliged anyway, giving a long, detailed comment about how a painting can be technically perfect, but if it doesn't speak to my emotions, it will have missed its mark. I used music as my alternate example, because non-musicians have no problem determining what sort of music they enjoy.
As I was thinking further about this issue, and waiting to see how gatomjp would respond to my long comment, I realized that there was more that I had to say about technical vs. emotional aspects in creative works, this time in the subject of literature. When I write short stories, I'm always concerned with the technical aspects of telling a story. How do I turn this phrase? What's my point of view? Am I using cliches? How's my spelling and grammar? Did I break that paragraph at the right time? Do I have any plot holes?
When I read a finished story to my writers group, I'm hoping they will catch problems with the technical aspects of the story. What I've discovered is that this rarely occurs. What happens instead is that the other writers start talking about the content of my story. What happens to that character? Hey, I've had that experience. What's synesthesia? (Or some other obscure topic I've brought up.) After witnessing this several times, I realized that the technical aspects of my storytelling were not jumping to the fore, screaming for attention. They are at least adequate in allowing the story to take center stage. (There's always room for improvement, though.)
This is how it should be with art or music or literature or any other creative endeavor. The technical aspects should remain invisible. The work should appear as though created by magic. Once you've hooked people, gotten them emotionally entangled, they may be curious about how you made it happen. Then you can explain the technique behind the work. If all people notice is the technique, then you haven't done your job as an artist. You haven't truly connected.
Labels: art, artist trading cards, creativity, dangerous intersection, erich vieth, music, pissing match, short story, technique, writing
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Tie One On
Where did I learn such a skill? Where any self-respecting girl learns such skills - from my dad. Back in high school wearing a tie with a boxy jacket was the thing - sort of Annie Hall - and I asked my dad to show me how to tie one properly. He showed me two different ways. I probably also borrowed the tie from him. He wasn't wearing them, but he had a bunch.
My husband doesn't wear ties, either. They strangle him. He wore one for our wedding and again for the awards banquet during the Atlanta trip. He told me he must really love me in order to put up with the noose, although I didn't make it a requirement for the Atlanta trip. He said if I bury him in a tie, he'll come back to haunt me. I don't intend to, so no worries there.
This all reminds me of a post I read on the Dangerous Intersection blog yesterday. Erich Vieth recommends that men all over America should get together and liberate themselves from neckties by having a tie-burning event. Hey, go for it. Most of us ladies gave up our girdles ages ago. (Thank God!)
Labels: atlanta, dad, dangerous intersection, erich vieth, husband, liberation, neckties, wedding, young son
Monday, June 18, 2007
A Tidy Summary
Labels: dangerous intersection, david michael green, erich vieth, george w. bush, iraq, karl rove, treason
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Ooh, Goody! I've Been Tagged!
8 Random Things About Me . . .
1. I love birds, but free birds, not captive ones, so I won't ever own a bird as a pet.
2. I once gave myself an acupunture treatment - at the direction of a naturopath - to liven up the dead area around my C-section scar. It worked.
3. It is my greatest desire to be musical in some way and my goal is to eventually write a song.
4. When I was in middle school, I had a friend who was the oldest girl among three siblings. Her middle sibling was a boy and her youngest sibling was a girl. I thought that was the best arrangement for children because each was in a special place - oldest girl - middle only boy - youngest girl. I wished for that arrangement of children and I got it - only in the boy, girl, boy version.
5. I was taught not to talk back to anyone and, consequently, openly and verbally disagreeing with someone is something I have great trouble doing.
6. That whole free bird thing? That's the reason I like cats instead of dogs. I don't want to control animals and dogs won't listen to me anyway.
7. Almost every work day for lunch I eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Mostly because they travel well.
8. I've kept a daily calendar journal since 1996 and hope they will be useful when I go down in history. (Is "going down in history" a euphemism for dying? If so, eek! Not to worry. I'm not dying until I'm at least 97.)
As for that tagging part, I don't know too many people who read this blog who also have their own blogs, so I'm going to tag
Rianna - who can answer in the comments section.
I'm also tagging
Kevin at Copyrightings
and
Erich at Dangerous Intersection
although I can't be sure that they check in here. The two people I would tag, Kim and Joanne, have already been tagged, so it'd be kind of silly for me to tag them again.
I'm dreadful at tagging because I read a bunch of giganto blogs that don't take comments. Sheesh! I do enjoy the memes, though.
Labels: acupuncture, birds, blog, cats, copyrightings, dangerous intersection, family, journal, knit whimsies, meme, music, poppy seed heart, tagging
Saturday, May 05, 2007
More on Magical Thinking
Erich Vieth, of the Dangerous Intersection blog, posted about his “trip to the neighborhood psychic store” with his daughters recently. His posts are always quite thoughtful, and this one is no different; however, this particular post left me feeling as though the only enlightened people on earth are those who don’t fall for all that woo-woo stuff like tarot readings, astrology, psychic readings, aura photography, Reiki, and etc. Well, okay . . . .
Let’s just start at the beginning, shall we? I have long been interested in the various woo-woo aspects of life. In elementary school I was checking books out of the library on ESP and my brother and I would conduct tests, one sending thoughts, the other trying to receive them. The results were inconclusive.
My dad, a man who has a chemistry degree, was forever watching programs on the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot and alien encounters. As Catholics, my mom and her mother were equally entranced with the woo-woo. (If you believe in transubstantiation, and a man literally rising from the dead, I think you’re a shoe-in for woo-woo belief.) There was a crystal ball in the house that my sister and I used to try to read. Never could get that thing to work. There was also a deck of cards in the game closet with a witch tending a cauldron and fortune-type sayings on the other side. I now have these cards at my desk.
In high school I went through my astrology phase. I still have the first astrology book that I bought; it’s all marked up with my chart and the charts of friends. I also sprung for an “official” astrology reading, a print-out showing the planets in their various houses and the conjunctions between the planets at the time of my birth. It’s from the American Astrological Association and, if I remember correctly, it cost me the unholy sum of $11 (it was definitely under $20), which was a lot of money for a broke high schooler. During my high school Research Paper class, I wrote a paper called “Astrology and Eleanor Roosevelt: Do They Stand on Common Ground?” Why did I pair Eleanor Roosevelt with astrology? She and I share the same birthday.
Since that time I’ve dabbled in other forms of the woo-woo: aura reading, feng shui, angel readings, Chinese astrology, looking for signs from the universe, meditation, the power of positive thought, reflexology, homeopathy, acupuncture (you might quibble that this is not woo-woo, but come on . . . stick a bunch of needles in your skin and get well?), numerology, dream interpretation, Reiki, and tarot readings. I own two tarot decks and made myself a pack of angel cards. I’ve discovered that a great-aunt, my great-grandmother’s sister, read crystal ball, the very one I had played with as a kid.
This is where I’ve come from, a life filled with magical thinking. And it continues, sometimes in ways that are out of my control . . . .
This past year, two women entered the museum where I work and asked if they could find an obituary. That’s not out of the ordinary, as we assist people with genealogy and obits are a great source of family info. I asked for a name and date, so I could find what they were looking for. One of the women was a little evasive at first. She said she didn’t know a full name or date. All she had was a first name. Finding an obituary using just a first name is almost impossible, and I indicated as much. The other woman, a younger sister of the first, started explaining what had led to their request. It seems that the older woman’s three-year-old son was seeing someone, a woman with a damaged face, and this woman, who had told the boy her first name, was directing him to follow her out of the house. No one else could see this woman. Sometimes the boy indicated that the apparition was in the house. Other times, she was outside beckoning him into the street.
The boy’s mother was a bit sheepish in describing the boy’s behavior. Whenever he mentioned the woman’s name, she would try not to lead him on in conversation and she never brought up the woman’s name herself. She didn’t want to encourage something that was a figment of his imagination. Unfortunately, her son kept seeing the apparition and was doing whatever he could to get out of the house in order to be with her. Extra locks were put on the door to keep the boy in, but the situation wasn’t resolving itself, so the women decided to try to find answers. They wondered, because of the apparition’s damaged face, if there had been some sort of accident involving a woman with this particular first name.
Deep breath. Now, at this point I could have told the woman that I thought she was full of it and left it at that. I’ve never experienced ghosts or apparitions and am completely neutral as to their existence. That means that while I’ve never seen a ghost, I’m not going to deride someone else for claiming to have done so. Regardless of whether this apparition was real, it was obvious that this boy was seeing something and it was having very real consequences, so I decided I would do what I could, all the while thinking this was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.
I entered the first name and our county into the state’s death database and came up with three hits, which was strange in and of itself. Only three people with this first name had ever died in our county? No way. Of the three, one was quite young. With death date in hand, I went to the newspapers and found the obit. Turns out this woman had died in a car accident that had killed several other people in a spot not far from where the mother and son lived. Coincidentally, she had the same last name as the mother and son, was the same age when she died as the mother standing before me, and had a young son with the same first initial as the boy now seeing her.
The eerie, prickly feeling that overcame me at the time still comes over me today when I think about it. I don’t know how to explain this situation and I don’t even want to try. It simply is what it is.
It’s very easy to think of people who believe in magical thinking (like me) as crazy, overly-susceptible crackpots. We aren’t living in the real world. By golly, if it can’t be proven with a double-blind test, why it simply isn’t so! Unfortunately, a good share of life is subjective and difficult to explain. We cannot drag that three-year-old into a laboratory and prove what he is or isn’t seeing. (By the way, since when has life ever mimicked a laboratory setting, except in a laboratory?) That doesn’t mean his visions weren’t having an effect; they were. It doesn’t mean that somehow we’re “falling” for something when we believe such things. Most of the people I know who believe in or have experienced the woo-woo, are not extreme about it. We chalk such things up to the “Very Interesting” category of life and fit them into our personal schemas without having a need to have them fully explained. My husband once had an out-of-body experience and he is extraordinarily skeptical about most woo-woo phenomena.
Those who attack the world view of magical thinkers are trying to negate some very personal experiences. That disdain is not useful, even if some of us go off the deep end periodically. (What happens when you force someone to let go of something? They hang on tighter, right?)
Rather than approach these various woo-woo subjects as things that must be explicitly proven or chucked as utter hogwash, why not question the origins of them? For example, Ben, who posted this comment on Erich’s Vieth’s post, said, “Why are there only 12 zodiac signs, and how the heck can even ONE person have the EXACT SAME horoscope as me, let along 1/12 of the population?” Why, indeed? Why are there twelve months in a year? Why are there twelve signs in the Chinese zodiac? Why are there twelve inches to a foot? Why are there
As for the veracity of astrology, I think the origins of the system have some pretty solid roots. The sun and moon have an effect on earthly life; why is it such a stretch to believe that the other planets in our Solar System might also affect us? Isn’t it amazing to think that our ancestors recognized these effects (in fact, they were probably much more guided by them than we are) and codified them into a system to show us our similarities? Even if the predictive functions are useless, this is something worth noting.
Tarot cards as a future-divining tool are derided in Erich’s post, yet they have another purpose. They can be used by an individual to tap inner resources in solving a sticky problem. That’s how I use them, anyway. In addition, they are fascinating artifacts from the standpoint of the artwork and the use of archetypes. Once again, here is something of intense complexity developed by our forbearers.
I can’t go without mentioning the Akashic Records, which were also brought up in Erich’s post. I’ve talked about this before, but for those who don’t know, the Akashic Records are supposedly the record of all thoughts, words, and deeds of life written in the ether. Don’t ask me where this ether is kept, or how this stuff gets recorded, but someone imagined this thing they called “Akashic Records” and, I’m telling you, if the Internet isn’t the best example of making this idea real, I don’t know what is.
Ultimately, looking at the origins of the woo-woo will lead us to wondering why human beings are driven to magical thinking. On an evolutionary level, there was probably some advantage to our species in doing so, but don’t ask me to prove that. I don’t have my laboratory or double-blind studies set up.
Labels: a mad variety of woo woo phenomena, akashic records, astrology, belief, crystal ball, dangerous intersection, erich vieth, family, ghost, husband, magical thinking, museum, tarot cards
