Thinking About What to Think About

Walking slowly to work, downtown's alleys still black and slick with last night's rain. As if the tide crept after midnight, when everyone was sleeping, gently curled around the dumpsters and scabby patches of sidewalk grass, then retreated just before dawn, carrying the city's cast-offs with it, drawing them out into the open, into visibility as themselves.

Tolagson writes from the island: "I've been reading lately about Van Gogh's brief flirtation (via Gauguin) with painting completely from his imagination. Gauguin thought Van Gogh's reliance on visual observation of his subject and adherence to basic ideas of perspective was tiresome and backwards, and encouraged Van Gogh to, y'know, 'Loosen the fuck up!' But when VG tried to emulate Gauguin's imaginative, otherworldly style by painting tapestry-like pictures of his usual subjects from memory, his work fell flat, literally! The observance of things, the visual observation, was the thing for him (no matter how much liberty he took with it.) Van Gogh also supposedly blew his top when Bernard sent him a sketch of a proposed painting he was about to begin depicting Christ on the Mount of Olives, (a visionary painting depicting Christ's suffering, etc etc.) His tantrum ran something along the lines of, 'I'm down here busting my ass painting real olive groves, which are more than capable of conveying any meaning you'd like in and of themselves, including the death of Christ, and you're yammering on to me about historical painting?' Or as he put it to Theo in a letter: '...in my opinion it is our duty to think and not to dream.'"

Some things I saw on my walk today: pink and lime-green bath towels, carelessly draped from dumpsters like battle flags. A busted-up couch, jammed sideways in a narrow easement between two run-down 50s apartments with peeling stucco siding, its short wooden legs projecting up in the air like a mortally wounded animal that had crawled away to die. Condoms, syringes. Inexplicable little asphalt piles: macadam bearscat. A pair of sneakers protruding from several cardboard boxes (Mac Fries; Sunkist; Hitachi) joined to create a square-sided corrugated tunnel: a "found Wurm." A woman in a black hoodie pushing an overloaded shopping cart full of bulging plastic bags, covered by a sky-blue tarp, and, balanced on top of this, a fluffy orange kitten, secured to the cart by a thin silver chain that sparkles in the sun. And a white-faced sweaty crackhead trying to wheedle his way onto the bus with the same faux-obsequient tone they all have. "Please, sir" -- that sir as full of hate as it sounds -- "my pass is in my other coat, sir." Standing right on top of the driver, blocking the rest of us. "It's $2.25," says the driver patiently, "or you can't ride." "You know, I only have this problem with East Indian drivers," says the crackhead. "With curry-eaters." "Better to eat curry than to be a fucking white-trash racist," is my unsolicited contribution. "Fuck off off the bus. None of the rest of us want to hear your bullshit." The crackhead spins, sizing me up. "No one asked you," he spits, backing down onto the sidewalk. As the bus pulls away, he shouts, "What an embarrassment you are, a white with no race pride."

Guilty as charged!
- posted by cjb @ 10:44 AM