|
|
|
 |
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
NOTHING IS EVER LOST OR CAN BE LOST MY SCIENCE FRIEND
Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
Mute : 2002
[Buy It]
When I was a kid, drawing was my thing. I started in grade school, first copying pictures out of comic books, then making up my own. But even after I began to draw my own figures, I didn't stop copying - meticulous re-creation appealed to me for reasons I still can't articulate, and photorealistic drawing became my primary creative outlet through middle school and high school. I worked in many different media in art class, but given my druthers, I always worked in pencil or ink; I loved sharp contrasts of light and dark, and I loved the level of control over line and weight these media allowed. In high school, visual art was something I constantly received praise for, and, having been reared on achievement-based praise and thus addicted to it, I pursued it with all the fervor that a rebellious and prematurely world-weary teen could muster. There was an annual contest staged by the public library in which art students drew different hisotiric buildings around town, and the winner would received one hundred dollars. (My first architectural drawing effort, which I drew in 1995 or 1996, as a sophomore or junior in high school, is pictured at the top of this post.) I won this contest multiple times, and it began my first "freelance" career, as people who had emotional investments in various houses and buildings began to hire me to draw them. This petered out pretty quickly, as I was too invested in "partying" to handle a bunch of commissions. But I remember being in art class, often stoned, and spending the entire period assiduously stippling a shadow or etching a branch, displaying a dedication to something beyond hedonism that was uncommon for me at the time, and presaging a systematic sensibility that would come to define my later artistic output. Riding a wave of praise and really not knowing what else to do with myself, I enrolled in art school after I graduated from high school, and made it through one year before dropping out and beginning a career as a writer. Even as I was getting into writing, I never dreamed it would come to so fully supplant my drawing, which had been so crucial to my identity and self-esteem throughout my formative years. Now, I paint, and sometimes I doodle abstractly, but it's been a decade or so since I've tried to create one of my old, meticulously shaded, photorealistic drawings. This is a talent I was given and have let go to waste. At least, this is what I tell myself when I'm feeling blue in general, about lost things in general. In better humors I assure myself that as long as I'm expressing creatively, the form that energy takes is beside the point - that nothing is wasted - and I tell myself that my drawing skills are simply latent, waiting to be engaged. In this I feel rather like a smoker who says he could quit at any time, but doesn't want to. That these skills may just be latent, not gone, is not much of a comfort to me when I consider that I've let them slide into latency for years. Today won't be the day I reclaim them - as usual, I've got to write. When I think about my drawing, I find myself thinking about other skills I've acquired, then let languish - what they were worth, whether they're lost or simply lapsed, what is wasted, whether or not this is sad.
LOST TIME
Health
Health
Lovepump United : 2007
[Buy It]
E.g. - from my late teens until my mid-twenties, in a protracted transition between art-school-drop-out and *gulp* professional writer, I worked full-, then part-time as a projectionist at mainstream movie theater. This was actually a fantastic job for a writer: every couple hours, there was a half-hour window where I had to start the various shows on our six screens, and then, barring any technical problems, I would have a long block of free time, alone in the cozy projection booth (which was not the squalid closet we see in movies but a big ring-shaped hallway around the entire top of the building, with a hatch leading up to the theater's roof which was perfect for cigarette breaks). I loved it in that booth, it was dim and quiet and somehow amniotic - the low whirr of the projectors, the hovering beams of light - and best of all, totally private. Sometimes I would work a 12 hour shift, and at first, I spent all my down time devouring books (this was after I dropped out of college and began to reclaim myself from the deep mesmerism of suburbia and public education, and also reclaimed my childhood love of reading). Later, after I began to write for zines and local papers, I would spend that time writing my reviews, making money from newspapers while I was on the clock at the theater. It was pretty ideal for me at the time. But beyond the privacy and the good workspace, I loved interacting with the machines themselves. I liked having all this arcane knowledge. I knew how to build a movie, which arrived on six to eight reels and had to be assembled onto a horizontal platter with end splices. I knew about cue tape and aspect ratios and maskings and film gates and lenses and emulsions and maltese crosses. I liked presiding over the moviegoers seated in the darkness below, liked that they were waiting for me to create a world for them, sometimes looking up toward the booth, anxiously trying to catch a glimpse of the man behind the curtain. There is an undeniable feeling of power in being a projectionist, of presiding over this very private experience, of being the only one in the building capable of putting the picture on the screen. I loved threading the film through the projector, which involved running a Rube Goldburg-complex series of loops through pulleys and sprockets and rollers, and it got to the point where I could do this in one minute and sixteen seconds. But I don't do projection any more. I wonder if I'll ever get to use this skill again, and why every innate talent or learned skill I possess feels at once like a blessing and a demand. What am I losing right now? I need to play the guitar more. I need to draw more. I need to write more fiction, and play basketball. I need to get back to my old blog that's been dormant forever, and I need to start making masks. I need to finish this one video and I need to brush up on my Spanish before I forget it all. I need to get a thumb in every hole in the dike, but I don't have enough thumbs.
LOSING MY TASTE FOR THE NIGHTLIFE
Arthur Russell
Another Thought
Orange Mountain Music : 2006 (originally released in 1994)
[Buy It]
As I got out of the movie theater business, I got into the barista business. At this point, I write for most of my living, but I still work once or twice per week as a barista - I like working with and being around coffee, it's good for me to make a little of my money with my hands instead of my brain, and having yuppies talk down to me keeps me humble. I also think it feeds my self-image as something of an outsider - the whole romance of the "contributing editor at national magazine by day, lowly prole by night" thing. It keeps me in touch with the impotent rage of the service class. And if threading a projector sounds complicated, it's got nothing on making good espresso. Projection is a stable algorithm, you complete certains steps and the magic happens. Espresso-making is unstable, every variable - tamping pressure, grind consistency, atmospheric quality, extraction time, etc etc etc - interacts complexly with every other variable. There's tons of room for human error and if one variable shifts, you have to shift them all, so making espresso is less an algorithm than a series of negotiations and compromises as you try to find the sweet spot where it's chalky and bitter but not too chalky and bitter, with a nice blonde color and a nice thick crema on top, at a good volume and with smooth composition. It's something you start learning with your brain but finish learning with your hands, and like writing, you never perfect it - it's a lifelong learning process. Or it can be. There's going to come a time, probably sooner than later, when I'm not a barista any more. And I wonder what it means to me to be a "good writer" if that means writing has to gradually overtake all of my other interests and skills. These skills may have sifted out of my life, and my fondest hope is that even if my brain forgets, my hands will remember, that all of this is latent but not lost.
GONE
M83
Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts
Mute : 2004
[Buy It]
I know, it's overexposed. But we can stand to read it again:
"One Art"
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.Labels: brian, losing
posted by Brian
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
