Recollections of last Saturday

Dear diary,

I’m a mistake-maker, cheerfully naive. That’s my strength. I don’t think any of us living creatures have a purpose when we’re born — you must invent your own purpose, according to a process of introspection, and whatever we call the opposite of introspection: a labor of getting to know thyself while getting to know thy non-self, thy world, thy ‘it’ — one must look hard at oneself, while keenly listening to one’s surroundings, and consider one’s place within the encompassing whatness, and sorta roll with it all (like the idiom “roll with the punches”, because this dimension is like one super-galactic PUNCH from the 1987 video game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!), until you bring into focus the beauties that you evince naturally which seem to be needed in general and yet are generally absent in others. Following this easy 3-step plan, I find that my most attractive and valuable attribute, which thus becomes the purpose of my existence (my raison d’être) is that I’m a mistake-maker, cheerfully naive.

I’m less afraid than your average angel to make mistakes in the realm of creativity. That’s what I mean. And I’m cheerful about this, to the point of naivety: my optimism (again, present solely in the art realm) is almost indistinguishable from the curse of plain bad judgment. However, in what we call life —

But can such an idea truly be detached from art? I always say that art and life are one. The truth never matters; the only thing that matters is that you make big money off your non-monetized blog; so I’ll talk of life as separate and independent, distinct and disconnected from art, because that’s the way that this age’s zeitgeist is blowing.

So, in what we call life, I am the polar opposite of optimistically naive and error-happy. I’m very terrified of making mistakes in life, which is why I doomed myself to recluse-hood. And I’m pessimistic to the point of ridiculousness. I don’t believe that anything good can ever happen to me. For instance, let’s say that I wanted to eat an egg. First, I believe it is impossible to cook an egg. It’s even impossible to procure an egg to be cooked, if I grant the premise that the act of cooking is within reach of our species. Finally, even if two miracles are allowed to infiltrate our hypothetical, and we grant as givens that, say, we stumbled upon a fresh egg in the forest — it was just sitting there, free for the taking, like a perfect trap — and we also grant that there is a godhead basking in the sun nearby, freshly decapitated from the neck of one of the recently defeated Titans (in Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of deities: members of the divine beings that succeeded the primordial Gods and preceded the Olympians; they are considered the finest deities by bloggers like Bryan Ray becuz bloggers like Bryan Ray assume that Prometheus, the god from the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, was a card-holding Titan), and this forehead is so hot (remember, it’s been basking in the sun all afternoon) that we are able to fry our egg upon it; even then, I say, it would prove impossible that this egg would not make me ill. (For I assume that an egg will stockpile foodborne diseases like hamburger meat, especially when undercooked. And it WILL be served undercooked.) And we’d also learn that the ostrich or dinosaur from whom our egg was stolen was mistreated by her captors. So nothing can go right, in the actual world. But I’m an optimist when it comes to art.

And what I mean by that last statement is that I have a tendency to overrate the worth of anything that I myself create. I know this to be a fact, because I’ve proven it by way of Empirical Science. Here’s what I did:

I performed an experiment wherein I created a number of unfunky rhythms and called them “Furniture Beats”, after Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement. (NOTE. I did not want to link to the web page where these rhythms are stored, but I felt that if I neglected to do so, my million-strong readership would suppose that they had caught me in a fib.) Then I let these rhythms sit for more than two years, so that I could forget that I ever made them. Then I visited my boss yesterday, and he said: “You know what? I’ve been thinking about something lately. I’ve been thinking that I should branch out into other avenues of business; besides computer programming, where I operate at present. I was thinking that I should get into the business of making beats. You know, like beats that people listen to.

“Because my wife was playing a rap song in the car last weekend, for Christmas, and I didn’t like its vocals or its beats. So that made me want to make my own good beats. What do you think of this idea? I could showcase my beats on a website and make them freely downloadable. I could even devise a computer program that would ‘read’ the beats, so that it could understand their content and store this knowledge in a database; then, whenever a customer entered our shop, we could say, ‘May I help you?’ and the customer could answer ‘Yes, I’m looking to purchase two good beats,’ and I Ron the boss and owner of The Good Beat Store would say ‘Well you came to the right place. What type of beats would you like?’ and the customer could say ‘I’d like one beat that makes me feel happy, and one beat that makes me feel sad,’ and I would go to our computer website program and enter the terms ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ into the text box of its search function, and the program would spit back two beats that match those criteria. Then the customer would say ‘These beats are just what I wanted. How much do I owe you?’ and I’d go to the cash register and press some buttons, and the register’s bell would ring, and I would answer the customer, ‘Your total comes to zero U.S. dollars, because our beats are all free downloads.’ Now what do you think of this idea, Bryan?”

And I said to my boss, “I like it. I think there’s a potential for you to make a lot of money with such a creative business plan. And you just reminded me: about two years ago I made a bunch of beats and shared them on my alternate YouTube page. (See the link in one of the paragraphs above.) Remember the old pseudonym Tertius Radnitsky, which I took as my identity back in the past, in the ancient days of Facebook? Well later I took those two names and smashed them into one single all-caps joke TERSHITSKY, and I named my YouTube page TERSHITSKY’s Furniture Beats. Here, I’ll use my new smartphone to navigate to the site and see if any of the videos are available to play.”

Then I played a number of the tracks for my boss, and my boss nodded his head in approval and said:

“Too many of your efforts sound like the background music for a video game about ghosts in a haunted house.”

And I said, “You’re right: I agree that they leave much to be desired. I can now see their flaws clearly because I am no longer so close to the short-term memories of the artist who created them; I feel more like an unsuspecting onlooker now. However, way back when I was slapping the beats together, I thot that each one was a work of genius. And the same thing goes for my books. Back when I wrote them, I thot they were all masterpieces; but now I think that some of them are only extremely interesting: not everything that I wrote deserves to go down in history alongside the Bible.”

So that is how I proved the thesis of this blog post, as stated above: I have a tendency to overrate the worth of anything that I myself create. For, in order for this to be falsified, I’d have to freeze time; or at least freeze myself so that I do not change or adapt to my environs & mature, thus I’d be like an Ice Man within Super Time — only then would I continue to believe in the high appraisal of my endeavors.

Frozen minds don’t think much anyway, however; so the price of apotheosis equals divorcement from flux. And I love flux too much to give it up, even for eternity. But I do sometimes wish that I could sustain the best moments down here on earth, so that they’d last a little longer; and speed up the bad times (A.K.A. the shitty times), like how you can skip past a scary scene in a movie by pressing the button on your remote control labeled “FFW” (A.K.A. “fast forward”) — or you could spin the reel faster, if you’re watching a film via the old celluloid filmstrip projector, or take the film out and physically cut it with a scissors, and edit out the bad parts and then tape the strip back together so that the film is totally restructured to accord with your will alone, like the deacons of the church would do to all the objectionable material in the soap operas that they’d present to us in Sunday School, so the story would go:

• plumber shows up at door of lonely housewife;
• plumber begins to fix sink;
• lonely housewife gazes lustfully at backside of working plumber & begins unbuttoning top two buttons of blouse;

[now cut film with awkward immediacy to scene depicting:]

• lonely housewife at front entryway with hair disheveled bidding goodbye to plumber currently hatless and with hairstyle equally disheveled.

Alternately you could also use your hands to shield your face from the most frightening episodes in life and just peak thru your fingers.

But this revelation of the badness of my artistic output did not phase me much, because I quickly zeroed in on a different way to interpret my true worth: that’s why I started out this entry by praising myself for what amounts to my heroic superpower: making cheerfully naive mistakes. This is good rather than bad, and positive rather than negative, because polls show that people strongly desire an exemplar to blaze the trail so as to show the public that we need not be afraid to bumble around in the realm of art and make fools of ourselves. Don’t be angels always waiting on the sidelines, no: enter Hell freely. Rush in, run around. Or take a seat if you prefer. There’s really no rules here; the only mistake that anyone can make is neglecting to participate. And by participate I don’t mean that we all have to be artistic creators: for art is a two-way street, like any conversation; it requires one to speak and another to listen. And both of these roles are EQUALLY IMPORTANT. For if everyone’s talking at once and nobody’s listening, there’s void chaos formlessness. Yet if everyone’s listening but nobody’s talking, there’s pure fucking silence.

Sorry for using the eff word there — I’m just quoting that scene from Fargo (the 1996 film whose screenplay was written by Joel and Ethan Coen — I love the Coens because they are brothers from Minnesota; which is something I can relate to, cuz that’s my homeland, and my brother Paul and I are also brothers from Minnesota) — I say, I’m just quoting the scene from the movie Fargo where Carl and Gaear are driving the car, and Carl gets annoyed at Gaear for not participating enough in their conversation:

I’m sitting here driving. Doing all the driving, man. The whole fucking way from Brainard, driving. Just trying to chat, you know. Keep our spirits up, fight the boredom of the road. And you can’t say one fucking thing, just in the way of conversation? Ah, fuck it: I don’t have to talk to you either, man. See how you like it. Just total fucking silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We’ll just see how you like it. Total silence.

This is one of my favorite moments in cinema because it demonstrates in an ironically humorous fashion how threatening verbally to hold your peace forever doesn’t get you anywhere closer to actual heavenly quietude. As long as there’s movement, the thing is still alive. So that’s like art: cuz even if you make BAD art, you’re still an artist. And lousy poetry is composed by genuine poets.

In other words, it’s impossible to fail at art. Cuz as long as you’re either acting or observing, the phenomenon subsists. It’s a journey thru peaks and valleys. When you succeed at art, that’s nice for you and also nice for your fan base, but it sorta stifles your compatriots, for those who are makers in the Art World must pause and recognize the superiority of your success, at least momentarily, which expends (& if I were biased I could even say WASTES) precious time that could’ve been used to create further art. Plus a successful artwork strikes the fear of god in fellow artists, so the art that follows in the wake of the highest art is always just a bit lower than its predecessor:

From the peak of the mountain, the land that abuts this climax has no choice but to act out the subsidiary level of peak-ness. From Marlowe you glass-ceiling to Shakespeare and thenceforth reverse course and penultimate back down to Jonson. (Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593; William Shakespeare, 1564-1616; Ben Jonson, 1572-1637.)

You can try to cry aloud how silent you’ll be, but you’ll only end up adding to the beautiful din. Likewise you can try to crate BAD art, UNINSPIRED art, COMMERCIAL art, LOUSY art, and you’ll only end up being an aspect of the mountain slope of your own goddamned generation.

This explains Andy Warhol, and artists like him. So-called POP ART. (I love pop artists.) If you’re good at art, like Shakespeare was, then you get envied and loved by everyone yet smeared by all but the best of the subsequent artists. If you’re bad at art, like my enemies, then you lure the best souls to try their hand at art. And if you’re mostly OK at art, but often mistaken, and not afraid to trip fall & die six million times in front of an audience — like me myself — then you’ll encourage everyone who lives in your small town to become an artist, because they’ll say to themselves “Well if Bryan can do it, then so can I; because I see how he’s not too adept at turning his words, or at making those beats.” So you become a walking encouragement, a monument to the potential of the human spirit.

And think how dogs are universally adored, precisely because they’re so stupid and drooly. People love to feel superior. If you’re a bad artist, you just might become the most popular artist, because lesser artists will want to save your works and reference you frequently, since you serve as the perfect foil to eke out the brilliance (to set off what passes, in Dullsville, for brilliance) of those lesser artists’ flubs.

*

Well, anyway, me and my boss whose name is Ron got talking about Lars von Trier, because I told him that I watched von Trier’s most recent movie; and Ron had not seen this most recent movie (the subpar one about the serial killer), but Ron had indeed screened, within the last week, von Trier’s earlier film Nymphomaniac (2013); and I was surprised to hear Ron admit this, because Ron doesn’t usually go searching out all on his own the official releases of great directors (he’s usually forced by me to watch such films, because I say unto him “This movie, which I have chained you down to enjoy, is unavailable at my library system, yet I see that it is able to be streamed via Netflix, and you own a subscription to Netflix while I do not, therefore let us now sit down together—you in chains; I quite free—and watch this movie at your house instead of working on our computers”); so, upon hearing that Ron had voluntarily screened von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, I said:

“Wow you really sought out, by yourself, and voluntarily suffered thru, all on your lonesome, von Trier’s Nymphomaniac?”

And my boss said, “Yes.”

And I said, “Did you really think that the graphic sex scenes were necessary? Cuz I think they weren’t. And you know that I’m all for pornography and erotica, and there’s nothing in this world I’d rather see than naked people making love. But I think the movie would be improved if an old church deacon would just go thru it and cut out the sex scenes.”

And my boss said, “No, I disagree with you. I think the sex scenes were necessary, because they established the character’s psychology. They helped to show that she was addicted to this sensual pursuit.”

And I said, “But isn’t it sometimes more effective to IMPLY the main matter at hand? Doesn’t it sometimes just distract from the thrust of the artwork, to focus in on a vulgar detail, especially in the touchy realms of sex and violence? I mean, if you wanted to deal with the subject matter of death, and your movie was about a little boy growing up on a family farm, and this little boy makes friends with one of the pigs on the farm, and he even ends up naming this pig and treating it like a pet (or like a member of his family), and the boy develops a bond and a love for the pig; but then one day the boy’s father comes into the room and says, ‘For the feast of Christmas tonight, I’m going to slaughter our choice hog whom Bryan has named Clarissa,’ (for the boy is a blogger named Bryan Ray, who named his pig after the epistolary novel Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, published in 1748); now, would it be necessary to SHOW, that is, TO VULGARLY FILM some poor child’s actual pet hog being slain and chopped into pieces, just to ‘realize’ this scene? My own answer is a firm and confident NO: I say that you could simply have the father enter the shot and say what I said that he says above (that is, the famous line: ‘For tonight’s Christmas feast, I’m going to slaughter your choice hog Clarissa’) and then walk out the door and let the door slam behind him. We the audience will fully understand what events will transpire after this declaration; and the decision to leave the slaughtering of the hog off-camera and thus implied and thus imagined is stronger because…”

Here my boss interrupted and said, “Yes but in Nymphomaniac I found the graphic sex to increase the credibility of the character. When I saw the woman actually performing those actions that she was talking about, it made her disposition more convincing to me.”

So I said, “Well that answers my question; now I see that we simply approach art and film from differing philosophical perspectives. Because I believe in suspending my disbelief. That’s why I love poetry, artifice, FAKE OVER REAL. I’m willing to be an accomplice of any earnest artwork: I will imagine blissfully anything it suggests. That’s why, when people say, ‘I didn’t like this or that movie because the special effects suct,’ I never care about the believability of such effects: they’re just trinkets to me. I never dislike a film for lacking pyrotechnics. On the contrary, I find myself more often annoyed that films go to such great lengths to ‘convince’ us of the ‘reality’ of the mayhem or what-have-you, the fantastic elements, instead of respecting the audience by simply proposing the idea and letting us imagine, however we wish, whatever it is. This is also why I prefer BARE TEXT to audiovisual works. Text respects the mind more, the imagination. It makes the visible a little hard to see, which is a distinguished stance.

“Thus, for me, von Trier’s Nymphomaniac would improve, if the narration of most of its sensual acts were considered sufficient to indicate that such acts occurred, and the actual footage of the rutting were edited away, or alternately if it were filmed in that (normally annoying) ‘Hollywood Post-1930-Motion-Picture-Production-Code’ way of FRAMING OUT the comely copulation. Letting the fun stuff (or unfun) remain implied by leaving it offscreen. That’s also why I don’t understand the masses’ hatred of directors who let the strings show on their sci-fi spaceships: what I mean is that the multitudes seem to dislike the science fiction films that depict flying saucers ‘lazily’ by using a paper plate taped to a line of twine. You hold the twine with your hand, just out of frame; and the plate, standing for the ship, appears to hover in space. What’s the problem with this? I like it. I understand what the artist is attempting to represent: and that is sufficient. I willfully play along; I suspend my disbelief: I am eager to imagine in tandem with my friend Ed Wood. I don’t care for realism. Reality is what I’m attempting to ESCAPE by attending your feature film, for crying out loud.

“But lest you think I’m totally against this type of nudity and filmed copulation that pervades von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, I want to give an example from his earlier movie where I think the same exact idea magnificently WORKED. In the very first scene of Antichrist (2009), you have the child crawling towards the window while the married couple are fornicating in bed: both acts are filmed in ultra slow-motion: you see the infant nearing the open pane, and this is juxtaposed via editing with the bedfellows’ pudenda doing the old in-out like a tongue bejutting the lips of its own face. I wouldn’t want to delete the visuals of slow-mo copulation from this intro scene, which is the best scene in the whole movie and alas the only one I’d recommend re-watching. If you were to take away the sight of the sex organs from the cross-cutting, you’d lose the ‘race to the finish line’ quality of the scene: you’d ruin the poem. (Cross-cutting is a film editing technique that establishes the relationship between two subjects by cutting from one to the other. For an example of this, I always think of the climactic scenes near the end of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, originally titled The Clansman.) So I understand that this type of material can make itself necessary; my point is only that it’s far less necessary than one would presume.”

Also I mentioned to my boss, at a further point in our conversation, one of the many controversial ideas that I am currently toying with: that maybe the depiction of sex itself always ruins a story, because it yanks the audience out from its place as listeners and lures them to want to be part of the action themselves. But I phrased my point carefully — and it wasn’t really a point but more of just a wondering; cuz I remain puzzled by the effective use, in art, of life’s overarching “existential” aspects, like sex and death.

And now I remember that scene near the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) where a naked ham is actually killed on-screen. It’s just a brief moment, a split second, and it’s not technically butchered in the sense of being dressed and sold on the market; in fact, it’s not much sliced up at all: I recall it as being simply whammed on the head with a sledgehammer and then, I think, the fat chef slits its throat. I’m just speaking from memory: I don’t want to go back and watch that moment again. Plus I’m getting tired of writing about these issues; so, with your permission, I’ll stop here. Just keep in mind that everything I reported myself as having said above, in reality, was articulated far more eloquently and with genuine fervor and exuberance; but all this mostly gets lost when attempting a recount.