I'm going to write a post now. This one may be a long one because I'm not feeling tired and I have access to a laptop. I'm at my parents house now. I am somewhat stranded here. I left Jacksonville a week ago to go down to Ringling College in Sarasota to check out the school, as I had been accepted there (and offered financial incentive to go too). I rode down there with my friend Kevin who's a student at New College studying metal music. We arrived in Sarasota in the early evening. My goal to make it on time for 'Accepted Student's Day' had come and gone, as the night prior in Jacksonville my car was locked into a parking garage. The stipulations of the parking garage were visibly posted, but in the pandemonium which is One Spark, (a city-wide drink-a-thon masquerading as a 'crowdfunding festival') it was overlooked. Likewise, I was only planning to park in the garage for a couple hours, but I got sucked in to the excitement and stuck around to watch a band. So I made plans to ride with Kevin who was going down anyway and morning of, woke up early to scale the exterior of the parking garage and commondere my vehicle. I imagine I was caught on tape and may have to pay a fine for the parking garage draw-arm that I broke at the shoulder in my daring escape. I brought my car back to CoRK, where I parked it safely, then caught a ride with Morrison out to a Waffle House where he and I ate breakfast before parting ways while I waited for Kevin. I got in Kevin's car and we made the drive down. I fell asleep at some point on the way down. i think I was trying too hard to make good conversaation happen. I felt that I had little to contribute in terms of fodder, a theme that would continue during my time in Sarasota. So we got to Sarasota. I bought Kevin a tank of gas in thanks for the ride. We went our separate ways for a little while. I walked to Ringling to check out the aftermath of the Accepted Students Day and to see if I could corner a student or faculty and learn about what was going on around campus. The campus read like a ghost town. A big tent remianed in the student union where a hundred chairs were tucked into their places at rows of tables. From under the canopy of the tent hung vinyl banners, ten feet in length. "Congratulations!", "You Did It!", "You're IN!". I was glad at this point that I'd not come on time to accepted students day. I walked to the illustration department (I'd been on campus twice before, and knew where about some of the main buildings were). I opened a door and walked into a hallway where I saw student work displayed in glass cabinets. I saw an announcement board with class listings for the forthcoming semester. "How exciting!", I thought. Behind another door, I found a student gallery, where Emily, a sophomore and gallery attendant was closing up shop. I asked if there was anything around that I as a potential student might like to see. She turned the lights back on and allowed me to view the works in the gallery. There were some nice pieces, a few caught my eye. On the table at the front of the gallery were three student sketchbooks. I looked through those as well. Somehow, I was not as inspired, or something, as I once was about the school. It had a deflated feeling. Whereas a few years ago, all of the students seemed to me as titans of illustration, I can now pare away at thier paintings. I have improved greatly in my time outside of school. Nevertheless, I remian hopeful that in school, I will meet a group of committed artists with whom I can compete and glean insights from. The teachers no doubt will hae wisdom to impart. I digress. I thanked Emily, then walked to the library. I looked through some books of turn of the (20th) century expressionists and, from the refrence section was happy to find books with plenty of pictures from early photography days which interested themselves with capturing still images (much like those of the famous horse galloping images which yielded the first motion picture) of the full range of motion of human anatomy. The images included 'man carrying boulder up a hill', 'child walking', 'woman getting up from seated position', and my favorite ' a shock to the nervous system', where a bucket of cold water is poured over a naked woman without preparation. The postures which result seem condusive to good refrence material. How exciting that books like this exist! Around the campus, I should give due dilligence, I did see students doing school work- some were on their laptops, others were sculpting 3D charachters in clay, presumably for a charachter design course. It may be a shallow criticism that all of the charachters that I saw being molded from clay had pointy ears and midevil garb. Perhaps this was a part of the assignment. I hope that Ringling is not exclusively a 'fan art' school, which I get the impression by looking through their catalogues sometimes that it is. Regardless, it is my mission to transcend the school(s) in which I attend toward my personal goals as an artist. My idea, (which to some extent I have adopted as a sort of disclaimer/catch phrase, aiming to explain/excuse my choice of Ringling), is to use Ringling chops to freak out my art. IE to absorb theory and technique, and to run with it in any direction I so choose. This seems obvious even as I write it, but I believe it is worth noting, as so many students of such fine academies find themselves on the other side of a costly education where they are surrouonded by like minds and blind encouragement, to find that they have become proficient of a style which is considered as novelty and cheap. These same students, whom it has been drummed into their heads the value of their work. Who is there to recieve all of these puzzle solvers? Hasbro? Disney?
True that the pot is small to pull from for these corporations. How could one hope to be an illustrator for disney storyboards, having gone to a state college for fine art?
But to come out of my rant, and abstractions, Ringling is a serious school, and to come out versatile at all, I must approach with scrutiny and caution.
So I leave Ringling's campus and go across the street where Kevin has told me is a great coffee shop. The rumor is that the owner, after retiring from Enron, opened up the shop, pays his employees well, and does not take any personal salary. Furthermore, he works there himself and all of the food is sold (what seems to me- this was not clarified for me) profit free. For example, a coffee and breakfast sandwich rang in at $3. What a miracle! It's like a little micro-economy! So I got a shot of espresso and had a seat outside, where I struck up a conversation over a cigarette with some cafe-goers. Turns out, I knew one of the guys from playing music shows in Florida (small scene)! His name was Greg and his band used to be Cats In The Basement, but is now Pleasures. His buddy was Billy. They were quite friendly. I told them that I planned on going to New College that evening to see some bands play for their annual Woodstock Wall festival. They offered me a ride. When we arrived, they walked in with me. They knew what they were doing, breaching security. As local Sarasotans, they knew how to get into New College for events, a large part of which was looking the part, which they did. I found Kevin running the sound board as he said he would be. I'd relayed to Greg that I was looking to procure some weed. We got what we wanted in a matter of minutes. The last band of the set finished palying and it was time for a sunset intermission, wherein the students in attendance walked accross campus to the bay to watch the sun set over the water. I rolled a joint and we talked about the moment, which to me has always seemed redundant. At some point, I adopted a mild negative headspace, which pervaded throughout the night, despite the utopic environment. Back to the music festival. there was prep-work to be done for the second act. I saw lotus eaters and became anti-social. It had been some time I realized that I had interacted with people whom I felt capable of having an interesting and fruitful conversation with, and here I was sitting alone among them, not knowing where to begin. I felt isolated. I felt retrospectively selfish and foolish for my decisions. Why had I not applied myself or why had I taken such a narrow un-relatable path? What had I to contribute to this community? The charachteristics of paint? A testimony to the zen of plein air?
I felt tired. Isaw a group of young women doing gymnastics on a hillside. They practised handstands, and were taking turns supporting one another by the ankles and giving adivce and support. I stood and discreetly inverted myself into a handstand. I held it until my arms got tired. I had better controll of it than they. I was sad.
I walked over and asked if I could join them. They welcomed me. They had seen my handstand and asked for a lesson, whihc I happliy imparted. They were much more flexible than I was, and we practised our splits together. Music started up once again, this time inside of the student union. The night kind of went on in a continuous blur from that point. Perhaps I was just tired (likely, I was sleep deprived), or perhaps it felt just like another weekend show. There was beer and cigarettes, there were mostly-naked 18 year-olds, there were party trays with food. The illusion of a utopia slowly unravelling before me, some aspects complementing, some negating. I carried a cool disposition, and found myself in a conversation with a few young women, one of whom offered me a 'real New College experience'. I felt a wave of energy shoot down into my swim trunks. Woah! I don't know how I did it, but I played dumb until the offer was no longer valid. The next day I heard a man recount to me the advice that his father gave to him on his death bed, he said "Son, don't ever turn down pussy because it's the last thing you think about before you die." Admittingly, I am still thinking about those New College girls.
I didn't drink that night but did smoke weed. I met a few lovely women and left in the late late night. I crashed at Kevin's house on a spare matress. What a miracle!
Sunday morning I woke close to noon and went to the Cafe for a sandwich and a shot. Kevin and I drove to New College campus where he gave me a tour of the facilities. It was a great campus. I enjoyed the architecture and the preserved environment. I saw a community garden and a beautiful sculpture department. I saw (from a distance) the dorms, and toured in the fine art department. I would love to pursue a liberal arts education at this school, I concluded. Kevin and I went to the Library, where he split off to read an article for one of his classes. I read a couple books on Chinese economics, before parusing in theses isle. It only took a minute or so to find the thesis of my late uncle, Kemeys, to whom I can credit my middle name, (and by adoption, my common name). On the spine in gold letters was printed Goethe, Ecology and Property Rights. 1973.
I took it off the shelf and found a desk upstairs under a skylight where to read it. I sat for hours turning pages before finishing the reading. The thesis pertained to natural resources and who, if anybody, had the right to use them. What laws protected our rights to clean air, water, land, etc., and do not these same rights apply to corporations or those who use the resources for by what the free market might signify as the greater good by their demand. How does affordability paly into the equation? Can we afford to use resources at the rate at which prices 'regulate'? Who can put a value on such things as cleanliness of environment? I thoroughly enjoyed reading his thesis. He concluded in short, that the hangup was a political one. The lack of specificity in existing laws gives huge opportunities to those looking to profit from the use and overuse of clean resources in exchange for goods who's value has been possibly programmed into the psyche of the consumers, yields apathy in the courtrooms in whihc cases against the misuse of resources appear. If not apathy, then a sort of 'I don't know what to do with this' due to to overgeneralized language of existing legislature. I believe Kem's (as he is credited in the thesis) thesis still holds relevant today as it must have during the Nixon administration. Which to me begs, why has nothing changed? What interest have we in perpetuating the same discussions without change? I admit, learning about the hippies of the 60's and 70's made me want to spend my teen and twenties years out in fields tripping on acid and doing away with material goods. And in part, I have done this (as I type into a 1200$ laptop). But I think we humans, or the ones I have met thus far, the 'sane' ones, are those who are addicted to familiarity. I live in a southern drinking town which asthetically relates itself (despite the invention of the miutherfucking internet) to the fifties. It's like we (liberal, progressive millenials) are all burying our heads in the sand, buying organic because, eating Obama and NPR, and playing house with fiat money (and in this house, we like to drink, and eat, and watch tv). All of this hullabaloo makes me want to vomit most of the time. I did have one conversation at New College with a beautiful soul named Magdelene. One of the things which snapped me out of my self-loathing spiral was our acknowledgement of the state of our environment. Specifically, that we live in a satirical world. Like a self aware, and self destructive-for-the-sake-of-sometihing-happening kind of world. One in which the educated and non-educated alike lead us into our own self-fullfilling compromiseathon into oblivion. And they all knew it was coming and they all told you so, the educateds, who have learned themselves the right to eat as they see fit and sell salvation to the redundant populations (those uneducated) as they see fit. And everyone does fulfil their roles quite nicely. And how horrifying!
An evil voice: "But what else is there to do?"
MAKE ART! (or make your life art. That is, live consciously)
Monday came and went. I talked with Ringling's financial aid department and their admission department, both of which bored me thoroughly. I bought toilet paper for Kevin's house because I hadn't brought my photo ID and it was the next most useful thing to give to a home after a bottle of whiskey. I got a ride from another guest in Kevin's house, a frenchman whom I did not exchange names with. He took me a few miles into town where I caught a city bus out of town to a greyhound station, where I caught a bus heading north toward Panama City. On my way to Panama City, I called my mom. She suggested that I get off a few stops early and come visit her and dad in Crystal River while we organized for the big trip (to go to Panama City, with grandparents to witness and welcome our newest addition to the family, Loxie Ann Smith to the planet). Is the name Loxie...? I don't know. I can't wait to be a super-wierd uncle though. She's going to have to be exposed to some otherworldly stuff if she's going to come out of my sister's fostering well rounded. Hegemony. I was happy to get off the bus early. It reduced my riding time from 18 hours down to six, and I'd already burned through my reading material which I bought at a pit stop in Tampa. At my folks house, I relayed to them my new fasicination with New College and my boredom with the beaurocracy of Ringling.
In the guest room which is half-decorated with things which my parents associate with me, were four art-books that my grandmother had passed on to my mom for me to look through. i felt in a reading mood and took the first off the stack, The Expressionists. It was about the schools of painting that emerged during the turn of the (again, 20th) century in Germany. While the French and Dutch were producing impressionist paintings, the Germans, began rapidly producing work in distinct schools, each with their mystic theses. The paintings served as vehicles for a spiritual conversation which consumed the artists (many of whom refocused to painting mid-career, such as the school in Munich which consisted in part of ex-architects who were quixotically taken by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, and the likes. Kandinsky, Russian, became involved in one of these groups for some time, though his work was much more matured than those who wre still getting out their 'first thousand' paintings. I thought it interesting that while the common perception of Van Gogh was one of a severely underappreciated artist in his own time (he committed suicide in a moment of clarity after completing a painting in a filed with ravens), he managed very shortly thereafter to inspire so many painters in the successive movements, which before the second world war there were no shortage. After the war, the mysticism which perdominated asthetic thought yielded to absolutism.
I think of monochromes when I think of making paintings after such an event as world war two which of course, I cannot speak from experience.
My grammy came into town today and I made a great meal for her and I. I took carrots, blueberries, mint, and rosemary from the garden. I made an egg cake, and a vegetable dish, in addition to a dish with sautéed carrots, celery, and pineapple, all seasoned with cumin, turmeric, and salt and pepper. I cooked some talapia as well. together it was a beautiful dish. On the side I ground together some mint, rosemary, and apple cider vinegar, and served it with the blueberries. Together everything worked well, though very non-traditional.
Tomorrow we (mom, dad, and two grandmas, and I ) will load up the caravan and drive to Panama City, where we will await the birth of our newest family member. And with that I will conclude this entry.
