2 X 2 / The Reckoner
"Cityscape: Interrupted"
<The Reckoner>
<i.>
As artistic mottos go, "First thought, best thought" ranks near the top of my personal favorites. Not just for the obvious reason, either -- sure, working off the cuff is a terrific skill to cultivate, since you won't the luxury of a second thought in most life situations. "Fake it to make it" is an equally inspired motto, but if everyone tried to plot that ideal out...you'd never seen too many fakers, let alone makers.
The best reason to go with your first take, or first thought, boils down to energy. The longer you beat an idea to death, the more tired you feel, and the less inspired you get. Honestly, unless your creative antenna's highly attuned, the more likely you'll stray from what made that first thought so good in the first place. That's my take on it, anyway.
Which is how I wound up with these two pastel artworks and the following journal entry below. I did both as part of a Saturday afternoon art journaling session, built around the following idea: "This practice is about developing that muscle of mindfulness. Research shows that spending two hours every week in a creative process will reap mental health benefits." I'll go with that one!
So I duly spent an hour putting my free associative powers to work, followed by a half hour of writing about the works I'd just created. Though I no longer live in an urban area, I can't seem to stop drawing those types of landscapes, which is how "Cityscape <Interrupted>" emerged. "Let Be Who I Am" nods directly to a line from the MC5's "Kick Out The Jams," in which I imagined how one of their full-throated shows might look like, once they'd finished.
Funnily enough, the latter work coincides with the original band's last major milestone. Forty-six years ago this, week, the MC5 took its last bow on New Year's Eve, 1972, at the Grande Ballroom, the scene of their initial success -- where their epochal debut album, Kick Out The Jams, had been recorded, among other early triumphs.
This time around, the thrill had evaporated in a haze of broken corporate promises, missed opportunities, and substance abuse. Instead of thrilling a sold out house of 1,000-plus fans, the band would collect a mere $500 for entertaining a few dozen diehard fans. The situation left lead guitarist Wayne Kramer feeling so distraught, that he left halfway through the gig.
The night marked the last one for the MC5 and the Grande, which both disbanded after the dust had settled. Dreams of subverting the world through the power of rock 'n' roll had taken a back seat to the grim existence of the journeyman, unsung and unmissed, left to toil in the shadows.
That's where matters would rest, until 1992, when the first of several resurrections ignited ... but that's another story, for another time. My impressions about these artworks, and the emotions they conjured up, follow below.
<"Let Me Be Who I Am">
<ii.>
TIRED, TIRED, TIRED -- spent loads of time massaging my keyboard, tap-tap-tapping away on the old transcript circuit, so I can make those figures go round and round a bit more. It's the old in-out, in-out of money, isn't it, that they've got us all dancing to, the powers that be, so we don't get round to doing anything else, making no other mark in particular...but it's either that,
I guess, or resign myself to the grind of this part-time job, 'n' that part-time job, patched together like so many crazy quilt fragments of time, sweat 'n' tears, another piece of your energy pushed out the door, dribbled one corpo-suggestion at a time ("Did you find everything today?", they're supposed to say, even as you hold one particular blue bag of potato chips in your hand).
Anyway...all jokes apart, all that aside...lots of mini-mountains to move, lots of individual hills to climb, campaigns to mount, and schemes to launch.
That's what it's all about, for me, anyway, the energy of confederation, the rhythm of subversion: how do we set the world alight this week, exactly? These are the thoughts that have run riot in my mind, over the past week and a half, as I struggled with back pain, muscle pain, gout pain, all brought on by a cold and/or flu, seemingly imported from the ninth or tenth circle of Hell.
The Squawker curled up, sick, too, which made equally bad. But now that I'm over it, I hope Squawker gets across the finish line, too, in short order. We have so many different orders of business to discuss, so many projects to launch, even if our energy only allows us the luxury of rolling out one at a time.
But we will get three, I think. This is what it's all about, and how it's done. --The Reckoner <12-15-18, circa 145-245 PM>
No comments:
Post a Comment