Tag: art

Checking In: Not a Newsletter

~ Greg Beckman ~ Leave a comment

The state of L’État

Winter left Los Angeles this week; it’s 80 degrees outside and I’ve run the air conditioner a couple of times “just to make sure it works.” I saw a t-shirt this week that read something like: Los Angeles: Earthquake. Fire. Flood. Democrats. The first three plagues brought a half-sigh from me, as in “Yeah, we’ve been through it, haven’t we.” Especially the fires. Those were scary and I mourn with the people who lost so much. I’ve never known a person whose house burned down. In two days, I knew six.

But…Democrats as a plague? Would that such a plague descend on the whole of the nation! Evidently, my political people have recently decided to experiment with Taoism. “If you don’t resist evil, give it nothing to cling to, it goes away on its own.” WHERE ARE THEY??? Aside from a few quips and a kumbaya gathering outside USAID offices….crickets. MAGA says this is because “the Libs” are exhausted. Maybe. Anybody who feels the connection between recent calls for President Trump to ignore federal courts and Andrew Jackson’s 1830 orchestration of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears, or finds the President’s reference to Napoleon’s rehashed version of “L’État, c’est moi” a bit…repetitive, has got to be exhausted. Again with the fucking Empire???

It’s not that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it; it’s that those who know history are doomed to watch. It’s exhausting. It’s this….again. And again and again…because it’s the nature of the nation. Even drugged-out poverty-stricken I-Ching-ing Philip K. Dick realized something was coming to the Land of George Wallace and Home of Floridian HellQueen Anita Bryant. It’s just not that hard to imagine Nazis and Japanese Imperialists taking over a nation that already thinks it’s sport to scare the living daylights out of displaced Haitians and laughable to not laugh at Puerto Rico’s dignity because “it’s just a joke, man.” We weren’t ripe for the picking; we were already on the conveyor belt.

Which Is Why I’m putting out my first and perhaps last recommendation of What To Watch Next:

No review. No plot spoilers. Just Watch It. It’s like truth serum. Heroism is not automatic and neither is resistance. Both are chosen. And come in different forms.

If you’d like to read my take on HOW TO RESIST (I’ll leave heroism to the likes of Sophocles), see my French-channeled piece “Résistance.” (Click the word before “Click the word”) Centuries of ancestors whispered for weeks in my ear: Always remember, they’re hunting you. It was a sobering realization, one every single non-white-non-straight-non-male non-rich person understands intuitively if not physically. The only question is how we respond to the current pogrom. We might be tempted to sit still rather than face the fact that people who scare others into invisibility or cause nightmares that parents will be taken or stand mealy-mouthed behind exquisite pulpits cannot be our friends. They cannot be trusted. They cannot be reasoned with or hoped for. “Maybe they’ll miss us, maybe they’ll change, maybe they’ll…..”

No.

Resist. Pray for them if you must, but resist.

How you do so depends…on you. As Kala tells ever-beautiful yet tragically familied Wolfgang after he’s exchanged gunfire with his uncle’s organized crime syndicate in the wondrous Wachowski piece Sense8 : “I’m not like Sun. I do not know how to use my fists, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to fight” — right before she uses spices and a few kitchen implements to blow German criminals sky-high (or at least down the hallway).

She’s a chemist. I’m a thinker. You’re a whatever — lawyer, mother, teacher, bus-driver. We all know how to fight in a way that’s true to our nature. My Great-Great Grandpa-priest fought by running off with my Great-great Grandma-Nun and…BOOM! Me. Fight the way you know how. Because, as Kala says after she destroys Wolfgang’s enemies, “I am not ready to say goodbye.” Not even close.

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For your reading pleasure:

I’m really getting into the whole microfiction genre. If you want a great collection, pick up Robert Scotellaro’s New Micro here. If you’d like to read my latest entries, you can do so here. Of course I like them all, but “Matches” has received some really good feedback (the word “universal” was used). As in all things, have fun reading…which is much easier to do when the story is one-n-done in 300 words.

And just so you know that I know what a podcast is…

I’ve been listening to the Open University on poetic inspiration — as in how to I get inspired? Here’s the link. It’s awesome…and the Irish accents are so, so sexy. If you’ve found yourself where we’ve all found ourselves, time on the hands and nothing to say, listen. It’s about a place to start that DOESN’T involve sacrifices to those horrible Muses.

And for the weirdness factor: there’s a group-cast I listen to all the time called The Whole Rabbit. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics, but principally center on awareness and occult interests. Watch the one on QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS here. Because everybody’s got to have a side-interest.

Until later, thanks for clicking your way to me. Be well. And remember, if people who hate like you, something’s wrong.

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Art vs. entertainment. Finally.

~ Greg Beckman ~ Leave a comment

First, something from Gertrude Stein:

Then commenced the long period which Max Jacobs has called the Heroic Age of Cubism, and it was an heroic age. All ages are heroic, that is to say there are heroes in all ages who do things because they cannot do otherwise and neither they nor the others understand how and why these things happen. One does not ever understand, before they are completely created, what is happening and one does not at all understand what one has done until the moment when it is all done. Picasso said once that he who created a thing is forced to make it ugly. In the effort to create the intensity and the struggle to create this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness.

Stein, Picasso

I suppose it’s appropriate, and perhaps even artful, that the clearest expositions of artistic process is found in one of the most poorly punctuated essays I’ve read outside a high-school English class. Stein loved commas, but didn’t seem to know where to place them. I love poetry, but don’t know what I’m doing.

We’re both struggling. A perfect relationship.

What Stein is getting at — having had a front-row seat to the cubist drama — is the difference between that which comes first (which is art), and that which follows (which is entertainment). Or, put differently, Stein believes creation is distinct from understanding in the same way that inspiration is distinct from monetization. Her Picasso lived in the space of heroic vision, not in the sense that he believed he had something extraordinary to communicate, but instead something that was indelibly his — something that flowed through him rather than being produced by him.

This Picasso did not want to draw what everybody already saw; he wanted to express what he saw, almost how he saw. That vision, before it became an -ism, looked strange. Dark lines appeared on very warped faces. Nudity was not often ….provocative. While others competed in the realm of representational art, learning their crafts in structures which either applauded or denigrated fidelity to the aesthetics of the time, Picasso created. Not a movement. Something else, something Stein intimates he did not understand.

He put down, as clearly as he could, his focus, and kept moving forward. Later, his vision would be codified. Viewers now, having been trained to see what is suspiciously similar to a two-dimensional representation of (newly emergent) quantum physics, can finally see something more than what had been seen. But only after the artist created a path to a place he couldn’t describe until he got there.

Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

That is, I think, the difference between art and entertainment — and by “entertainment,” I also mean much of academic discourse. Music. Stories. Anything that can be sold. Or claims to have a handle on a world that is constantly moving, but is really a progressively more polished (and boring) version of what is already understood. We read, or watch, or listen to the professionals, those who have perfected the technique of storytelling, or moviemaking, or songs. But — and this is important — we are not really reading, etc., in these mimes anything but ourselves. We’re not really seeing anything but what we’ve already seen.

This is entertainment. And it is fine, good, wonderful. I need to be comforted, every once in a while, by something that confirms my worldview. I can’t be challenged all the time. But it is also comforting, for me, to read that perhaps the value of art likes not in its perfection, but in its ugliness; that the first few sentences we strung together as children were not structurally perfect, but still beautiful to those listening; that I get a thrill out of listening to bands that are finding their way much more often than I do when listening to those that have become masters of their trade; and my best poems, like my best stories, are not the ones that I “techniqued” into perfection (like lectures I’d given a hundred times), but those off-the-cuff moments of honesty that seem ugly and imperfect even as they move.

The truth: I really did enjoy being infuriated at Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs more than applauding Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. And perhaps like Stein, I find more value in one ugly-but-unsettling sketch than I do in a reproduction that has been purified for public consumption. Which is why I love the fact that Stein is more concerned with content than punctuation. She’s repetitive, somewhat unstructured, a little dictatorial. But then she has to be. She creating a new view and all. Hers.

Want to read more? Click here.

The Temptation of Fame: Art and Motivation

~ Greg Beckman ~ Leave a comment

…or, why writers, like bands, are better before they’re discovered.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.” Virginia Woolf

I write because I like the world — as it is — and want to see it, up-close.  I can’t find the world in many people’s books (by and large). The real world seems like a faded copy of a copy in a lot of stories; even the grit is unreal, much too thoughtful to do any damage. I read many stories, everything from University of Iowa grads to porn-pervs, and am largely left with an elevated sense of distance. So much of what “writers” do places their talent front-and-center; what might have otherwise been a quick trip to the park becomes an exposition of (boring) botanical expertise. Why do they have to mention the names of trees —  every tree?  Is that a requirement — authors must wear long, drapy scarves, not know how to say hello in a coffee shop, and know the names of trees? 

What I want is a story I can walk around in, where characters are actually people who have jobs other than “writer,” “teacher,” “bookstore clerk,” or “student”  — and don’t know the difference between beech and magnolia trees. 

Want more? Click HERE.