erosdiscordia
cutting the other edge
Last Week in America
Aug 24th
Countdown’s standing at five days until I get on the plane for Paris, bound for a year abroad. What could I possibly do to my brain to make it grasp this reality? I’ve tried repeated dosages (some quite large) of Yuengling beer and Diablo wine, I’ve tried taking it out in numerous checklists, and I’ve tried ripping up the checklists and just burying my face in my cat’s soft grey fur. I’d like to take my brain out, blow on it, shake it a few times, stick it back in and see if it’ll jump start.
After a spring of applying to the study abroad program (as well as my Painting department) and a summer of alternately lolling around listening to Mofro and frantically running trip-related errands, it seems I’ve finally reached a deer-in-the-headlights mind-numbness about it. I’ve played the same fantasies in my head so often of how it’s going to be over there, that the mental pictures don’t excite me anymore, and anyways I’m bone-weary of preparation. But at the same time, I’m panic-stricken at the thought that it’s about to really begin. I don’t feel ready, but I’m tired of getting ready. Can you tell that there’s been a emotional roller-coaster aspect to this adventure?
I do feel certain, though, that once I get in the truck to ride with my dad to the airport, my natural love for new things will take over, and give me the rush it’ll take to move out of this fog. Maybe I’m clinging to my boredom now, because I know instinctively how exciting everything is about to get!
Dennis
Jul 18th
Branches come first. You start with the easy things, get them out of the way; otherwise, you tire quickly on the big stuff, and end up just kicking the small pieces around. So we told ourselves, though I admit finishing our preliminary beers had something to do with our decision. Still, it was an important job, and we wanted to be thorough.
We stood around the front yard of his grandparents’ house in north Santa Rosa County, an isolated property on the Coldwater River. It was still and hot that July morning, the blown-out dankness that hangs in the air after a hurricane. The sun shone brightly down on the blasted green leaves littering the yard, remains of Hurricane Dennis. From one end of the property to another, branches—and sometimes whole trees—pulled at the limbs around them, scrambled and pitiful.
Tossing our empty bottles in his truck bed, we set to work.
No one had heard of Katrina yet. New Orleans was still a vibrant—if apprehensive—city that afternoon in September 2004, when I put my face in my hands and cried in Richmond’s public library. Having no cable or internet yet in my new apartment, I relied on the library’s internet to show me what Hurricane Ivan had done to my hometown. There is nothing worse than being far from home when people you care for are in harm’s way. I had spent an agonized night as the Category 3 storm struck Gulf Shores, sending ten feet of water surging over the beach, tearing off my friends’ roofs. At the hour the library opened, I had gone straight back to the computers, bringing up the Pensacola newspaper’s website. I was afraid to look, but I had to know.
There was my favorite bar on the beach with its innards sucked out, looking less like a club now, and more like a wobbly old pavilion. There were houses of old high school friends, reduced to swirls of wood. Fort Pickens was underwater. My home, the place in the world that I love most of all, was truly battered.
My back had begun to ache from the bending. His grandparents’ property, while well-kept, was still a basic country A-frame, deep in the north county woods. Trees outnumbered open spaces by a large margin; but there had been enough room for the wind to pick up and fill the clearings with debris. The easy twigs and small branches were long since piled up. We had paced ourselves carefully, neither of us wanting to be the first to have to start dragging the large branches. We ranged over the property, sometimes following the strewn saplings to opposite ends of the field from each other; sometimes working side by side, him holding the black plastic sack and me filling it with sticky pinecones. I took a grim delight in the work, despite the increasing pricks and splinters. After all, I’d have given anything to have been here, doing this, the previous fall.
When my friends had seen the large green swirl bearing down on them on their television screens that September, almost all of them fled the area. The lucky ones stayed in motels, or found family out of the warning area. The unlucky ones got stuck in their cars on random Georgia and Alabama roads, listening to the remains of the storm pass overhead from inside rest areas and truck stops. When it was over, a spooky stillness fell on Pensacola. The town’s online newspaper was one of the few sources of information out of the suddenly-isolated area. I had internet access. My friends did not.
The newspaper sent helicopters with cameras to canvass the city, photographing damaged areas and posting the photos on their website. From all over the south, evacuated residents looked to the site to see if their homes still stood. And from my seat in the Richmond library, I looked on behalf of my friends, as they waited silently on the other end of our cell phone connection.
Large branches down. Split trunks, limbs tangled in the powerline. Utter stillness. We got the chainsaw out, as the sun balanced at noon. The quintessential post-hurricane racket. Sawing through the still-living wood, dragging the pieces over to the bonfire pit, straining to lift them and fling them atop. The labor reduced itself to an endurance of unthinking motion—racket, saw, drag, lift, throw. With each step, I crushed underfoot my memories of last autumn’s agony, my fears for my friends, my remembered helplessness. I dragged it to the pit and threw it in, later to burn. My palms turned red and raw, the sweat covering me. All the frustrated pity I’d felt last fall, loosened and flowed out of me, leaving my heart through the ache in my muscles. This time, I could act.
When I’d been on the phone with my anxious friends, clicking hesitantly through the galleries of photo carnage, I thought it couldn’t get worse. When one of my friends, unable to evacuate, was missing for over a day, I didn’t think I could take any more strain. But the worst outcome of hurricane Ivan took longer to unfold. It began when my evacuated friends went home. The majority fortunately had homes to go to, but their tales of the wretched destruction all around them broke my heart. Here I was, stuck in Richmond, with no money and no way to fly down there and be with them. No way to help them. As they pitched in with their neighbors to repair roofs, bathed out of bottles, and ate a month’s worth of Army MRE’s, I slept in my air-conditioned house and wished I was anywhere but Virginia. All that was asked of me was that I turn away from their problems and focus on my easy life of being a painting student, but I couldn’t. I would have personally unearthed Pensacola Beach with a teaspoon, if I could have just gotten down there. I would have tirelessly worked to fix even the smallest piece of my hometown.
Soon there was more cleared ground than covered in his grandparents’ yard. The piles to burn had multiplied and towered over our heads, but the job was nearly done. Hot. That wasn’t even the word to describe us. We walked over to the well, our vision nearly tunneled with exertion and beer. As he primed the pump, I swayed a little on my feet. The water ran clear into the plastic bucket, and I could smell its coldness. He pulled on the handle, all machinery silent now, dead with lack of electricity. He’d gone a month without power, the previous fall. He’d lost ten pounds from the crappy packaged meals. But that was ten long months ago; and as he lifted the bucket and poured the shocking icy water over both of us, that time was washed away.
Paris Hilton = Damien Hirst
Jun 15th
After reading many, many websites over the course of the last ten years, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three main types: those that say something, those that ramble on about not much, and those that are carefully crafted to say a whole lot of nothing.
It’s the same way after a year of art school. The vast majority of student art is a whole lot of conflated blather about not much: labrynthine, “mysterious” depictions of repetitious personal issues; sophomoric, cookie-cutter attempts at current-event “statements”. Late-adolescent self-absorption aside (and I’m not judging; nobody was more self-obsessed than me at 19), there are left two camps of relatively serious artistic types–those who believe in meaning, and those who don’t. Those who believe in meaning view art as a way to say something, to place something of value from the inside of themselves, into another’s insides, through the medium of art. Symbolism, emotion, wordplay, mood, and setting, as well as all the formal elements of art, are simply tools to get the thing of value–concept/feeling/belief–across. Medium might be slightly subjugated to message, but both have a place of respect and a relationship with the artist.
Those artists who don’t believe in meaning would never tell you so. They make the kind of art that everyone pretends to understand and use big words about, and are in various stages of denial or cynicism about its true quality and worth. They are the current darlings. They wear trucker hats. They claim to play with the medium and let it speak for itself, but that’s a lie–the medium, as well as the audience, the concept of art, and reality itself, are victims of an attempted subjugation by the hollow ego of the artist. Every aspect of their art, formal and theoretical, is carefully calculated to add up to a great big nihilistic zero. Their artistry lies in how ambitious or complicated a piece they can make, and still have it arrive at complete meaningless degrading emptiness–either that, or how many people they can fool into thinking they’ve made something “so profound” that few could understand. They may not be completely responsible for the enthronement of empty trash, but they sure don’t mind benefitting from it. They are the ones who, having found their precious niches in postmodernism, absolutely refuse to let that movement organically die and be replaced by the next big thing–leading to a repulsive and ultimately empty cycle of conceptual bulimia. Garbage in, garbage out.
And yes, I think one way is better than the other, at least for now. I know, “values”, how biased and regressive of me. But you’d have to be a complete fool not to realize what a dark patch we’re going through right now, both as a country, and in the world. Nobody’s unaware of the horrifying illogic and madness the world is capable of inflicting on itself. Raping ourselves with nihilistic, meaningless imagery will only further teach us that insanity is normal. We don’t need any more education in that.
Believing that, and believing in soul, is one of the reasons why I feel perfectly alienated in the heart-of-darkness art world of America today. It’s claimed its position, and so have I.
Belle Isle
Jun 13th
The walkway hangs over the river on suspension cables. Walking across, I feel the vibrations of trucks crossing the Lee Bridge above me. It’s not so noticeable near the banks of the river, where the footbridge connects to land; but as I reach the middle, suspended over the James River, the vibration becomes a slight bounce when semis cross.
I lean against the steel railing. Far below me, shadowed by the bridge, the clear brown water of the river speeds towards me along its wide path. It’s headed towards downtown Richmond, whose skyscrapers rise behind me in the morning sunlight. After that, it will narrow again, taking a sharp turn towards the south and away from the old city.
Ahead of me is a class III rapid, fierce and white, the only one of its kind within the boundaries of a major city. Its drop is gradual, but the tortuous path the water takes though the hulking rocks tests the skill of any kayaker that tries it. I see them out already in the cool morning, small dots of red and blue disappearing and reappearing, paddling hard to stay stationary in the roiling water.
I walk to the end of the footbridge, looking up occasionally at the graffiti painted by daredevils on the underside of the Lee Bridge. It makes me dizzy to imagine climbing the service ladders all the way up there, even if I did have something to say in spraypaint. I feel better as soon as my feet touch the dirt of the island. Belle Isle is in the middle of the James, slightly east of downtown Richmond. It’s one of the most peaceful, natural places in an otherwise hot and crowded old city, where people escape the noise of traffic and the smell of summer alleyways and revel in the sound and smell of fresh water. I love Richmond, but a bit of green does everyone good from time to time.
A path runs along the shore of the island. I walk west along the north side of Belle Isle, away from the downtown noise. The island is covered in forest, dotted with cavernous abandoned buildings, and carved with hidden cliffs and an opaque green pond. The rapids are on my right. I walk through the woods, looking occasionally through breaks in the trees, out at the river flowing by. I am searching for the perfect sunbathing rock.
The rapids in this stretch of the river are due mainly to an abundance of large sand-colored rocks and boulders, scattered from one shore clear across to the other. The river flows and squeezes between these rocky interruptions, pitching itself in whitewater fury through whatever openings it can find. Only downstream does the current mellow; here it is quick and confused.
Children leap from boulder to boulder, their mothers talking and sunbathing on the flatter rocks. I’d rather be somewhere quieter, so I walk farther. Soon a likely rock comes into view, far enough out into the water to be isolated, but not too difficult to get to. I take off my shoes and begin to wade out. The current is sluggish and shallow in some places; but in others it sucks at my feet, balanced on the slimy rocks, and rises to my thighs. At last I reach my boulder and climb up.
As I spread out my towel, I feel a low rumble through the rock, under the sound of the river. I look over to the far shore. There is a train, making its slow way into view. It is weighted down with coal; I can see car after car mounted high with black piles of the stuff, coming from West Virginia and bound for Hampton Roads on the coast. The train pulls slowly along its river-level track. Four engines take it into downtown Richmond, glittering slightly in the distance. It stops for fuel while still in sight.
I lie on my towel reading. The hard rock beneath me grows warmer in the sunlight. The noise of the rapids becomes a monotonous hiss. A long time passes, and I can feel my skin darkening in the heat of the day. I decide to lie on my back for awhile. As I lift myself up off the damp towel, I make eye contact with a heron, wading no more than three feet away. The bird and I hold motionless—it on one half-raised leg, me pushed up on my arms with my hair in my face. Its little black bead of an eye stares right into me. The rapids behind it are a white blur, against which the heron’s stillness looks unnatural. The something catches its eye. It debates; then takes a stab at the water to its left. I sit up. The bird, having missed its meal, sees my motion and takes flight. Its wings beat the air violently, and then it is up and speeding away, around the far end of the island.
It is hot. The sun is past its highest point, and the heat beats down onto the rocks. I step carefully off of my boulder and into the clear, cool river water. The bottom is very slippery; I have to place my feet carefully. It is not unusual to slip into a deeper part of the rapids and be carried twenty feet downstream before you can find your footing again. But the water is so refreshing, with that distinctive leafy river smell. The James begins in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the freshness of that place is carried all the way down here, to the fall line.
I dip my hands into the water, pulling up smooth rocks, throwing them far into the center of the river where the rapids run violent and white. I walk slowly around the rock I’d been laying on, picking carefully through the dips and loose stones under the water. The current of the river divides and flows around the boulders, sometimes rejoining the main flow, sometimes forming little lost pools and swirls. Sticks and leaves, and the occasional branch, shoot over miniature waterfalls and float quickly downstream.
Back up on my rock, I pull out my lunch. I wonder if the heron found something to eat. Minnows congregate in the quieter pools closer to shore, perhaps she found something there. Away in the distance, on the other bank, I watch tourists on the high bluff in Hollywood Cemetery. Their bodies are little dark specks wandering about the larger white shapes of the monuments. They form a small group around the tomb of Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President. Behind me, on Belle Isle, was a prison camp for Union soldiers. They were purposefully kept in conditions so demoralizing that many died, and most were unable to fight again. Their graves are not in Hollywood Cemetery.
I am tired of the sun and the heat. Gathering my things, I pick my way back to shore. The afternoon light slants through the forest, giving a green tinge to the path back to the bridge. Bicyclists whiz by me on the leafy path. As I reach the footbridge, I see them nearing the far end and starting down the ramp to the mainland. I follow them, pausing for a moment in the middle of the shaking, vibrating walkway, to watch the afternoon sun turn the James River gold.
Ahhh…Success!
Jun 7th
Sitting in the basement of the VCU Cabell Library, blogging via wireless internet. I wanted to make sure that the AirPort card was working properly before I made it over to France. I’ll be using this laptop to connect to the internet there, and I sure didn’t want to get there and find out there was a problem getting online. But all is well.
Sure is creepy to know that websites are flying through the air, perhaps through my body, to reach this little machine. Sure is strange to think that when I hit “publish”, my own words will swirl though the air, passing through skin and plastic and wire before reaching your screen. It’s one thing to say “all is one”, and quite another to literally sit in a vortex made of your own information.
Over and out.
Click!
May 28th
As an early birthday present, a congratulations for getting through AFO, and a practical study-abroad gift, my parents have decided to buy me a digital camera. Big deal, right? Well, I can’t say that I’m anything more than an amateur photographer, but I’m past the beginner stage. I’ve taken two college-level classes in photography, and I’m fairly camera-literate. I’m also rabidly analog–mmm, darkrooms. I swore film photography would never die, not as long as I could contribute. Besides, digital cameras hate me–little plastic-chip things that break if I look at them sideways, grainy photos, five-second shutter lag, software that shuns Macs. I can hear their little cackling as I mess up picture after picture. Just another thing to bust or worry about getting stolen, right?
But as soon as my mom and dad said that they’d like to buy me one, I got interested. Buying one for myself never had much draw, but now I want one even if I have to pay for it. I did a lot of research on the internet about different models and brands, and I’ve decided to go with a Nikon Coolpix 7900. It’s not meant to replace my Minolta SLR–I’m taking that too, for the artsy stuff–but just to record snapshots of the places I go on side trips from Aix-en-Provence, my study-abroad “home base”.
I still wanted good image quality, and the little movie capability is attractive too (Nikons record movies in Quicktime, which my Mac likes, instead of Canon’s AVI, which it doesn’t). I take pictures of everything when I travel–recording the place, recording the trip, artistic stuff, whatever. It’s really excessive. I can’t help it! This translated to sixty rolls of film during my first month-long trip to Europe. My next trip will be for nine months. So, in the interest of not paying $5,000 in film and developing, not to mention hauling 50kg of developed photos home, this might be a godsend. But I feel myself being assimilated! I still love you, Minolta SLR! Will I stay true to film, or capitulate to the dark side of convenience and immediate prints? Stay tuned!
Richmond Weather
May 23rd
Alright, you know what? I’ve finally had it with the weather here. I know that being from Florida has spoiled me silly, but isn’t it supposed to be warmer than 55 degrees in late May? Two days ago, that’s what we had. And I mean that was the *high* that day. Right now, it’s 77, but it’s also hailing. With the sun out. Winter apparently lasts eight months here. And before you say, “Well, at least Virginia doesn’t have hurricanes”, talk to the people who lost their roofs in Isabel in ’03, or those folks in Shockoe Bottom who saw the 17 feet of water that Tropical Storm Gaston dumped on them last fall. There are a lot of things that I love about Richmond, but the weather here is NOT on that list.