Next Wednesday at 6:30, I’m reading in with hyper-inventive playwright Mac Wellman, Fiction co-founder and Edge.org contributor Mark Mirsky, and fellow MFA students Anna Marrian, Kerry Carnahan, Diana Redman, Tejas Desai, Michelle Brule, JP Howard, and Laurel Kallen.

Your mission, should you choose to venture to Midtown after work for a dose of (possible) culture and (probable) humor:

Wed., 1 April, 6:30 p.m.
Martin E. Segal Theatre
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th
Free

The Turnstyle reading series “features the faculty and students of four CUNY graduate creative writing programs.” Performers “will read a mix of non-fiction, plays, fiction, and poems.”

More info at www.centerforthehumanitiesgc.org.

• Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini
• The Rohonc Codex, ?
• The Voynich Manuscript, ?
• Rongo-Rongo, the Rapanui (the native people of Easter Island)
• The Garden of Forking Paths, Ts’ui Pen

It is not too difficult to discern the shadows of an Oedipal drama swimming below the surface. Here is the baffling, autocratic father represented most powerfully by the image of Andre the Giant (whose positive counterpart is the Good Father Obama). There is the beguiling, possibly dangerous mother embodied in many images of nameless, alluring female warriors. And the son is portrayed in pictures of Joey Ramone, Sid Vicious and other young rebels who would stand in for Mr. Fairey himself and who would depose and replace the Bad Father.

—Ken Johnson, New York Times, 17 Mar., 2009.

Joey Ramone gets a hyperlink while Oedipus, Freud, Bush, and Obama get nada. Also hyperlinked, earlier in the article, are Led Zeppelin and Andy Warhol. I’m seeing a potential trend. Mr. Johnson equates Shepard Fairey with pop, populism, canned “rebellion,” fading and faded fads, and the acquisitive-capitalistic urge to sell la Revolution to the rebels.

This is perhaps a good way to enter into Fairey’s world of late. Andre the Giant, now a motif for thousand-dollar handbags. Like Murakami Takashi, Fairey is enjoying post-indie/post-rebel popularity. He’s spreading his ideas and probably saving a few bucks.

But Mr. Johnson also dismisses Fairey’s art as impersonal and predictable, as if these characteristics are not found throughout the annals of art. The impersonal aside, what is Warhol, what Roy Lichtenstein, if not a little predictable?

My own favorites (Schiele, Dalí, Picasso, Kandinksy, Ernst, Tanguy, Giacometti) are perfectly predictable: If you’ve seen “The Persistence of Memory” (the drippy clocks painting), for example, you can probably identify other Dalís. (Look for ants, lions, clocks, vaginas, burning giraffes, furniture, transfiguring messianic depictions of his wife—all battling it out on the Catalonian waste at eventide.)

My point is simply that predictability is not necessarily the great enemy of art. All art, in a sense, is art-by-formula, even if that formula is “always do something different.” Most artists, as rebellious as they may be, want to be associated with their own work (predicted). They want to be identified with their own “artist”-ness.

Fairey—good or bad, pop sell-out or tru skreet innovator—has created certain memes. His Andre the Giant/Obey campaign has influenced thousands of other artists, whose work can be seen in some ways as Fairey-esque (again, regardless of whether that makes such devotees progressives or idiots).

Moreover, visual artists (like writers) “quarry out” genres and forms and themes. (This idea I got from Robert Alter’s Rogue’s Progress.) We only have X number of years on earth; we only have Z number of interests. Trying to cover too much ground inspires some artists, keeps them on their toes. Others find a single zahir/idea/theme/grail so intriguing that they never need to (never can) look away. (In the literary world, look at Thomas Bernhard. Or listen to the falling-apart rhythm-language of Beckett, from Watt to Molloy to How It Is.)

Look at Maya Lin or Richard Serra: Their geographic art is stunning, timeless, and open; it makes us look at our own world in a new way; waves of earth and mountains of steel remind us of our own inelegant smallness and mortality. And yet both Lin and Serra move in perfectly predictable patterns.

If Serra started painting miniatures of ponies and kittens (the way poet John Ashbery started making collages of pin-up girls and cacti), then he’d lose some predictability. He would not necessarily gain “innovation.” Innovation—adding some new tool to the box of art, expanding what art is, showing previous ideas in a new light, changing how we show anything at all—is not the opposite of predictability, which, while staid-sounding, is nonetheless bound up with the very idea of association-over-time and thus of identity. We are ourselves only when we are predictable. The more we defy patterns, prevent identification, escape meanings, the more we label ourselves “crazy” (or prophetic).

Not that a certain measure of unpredictability is isn’t necessary, especially in art. Perhaps surprising-the-self is good for the self; it adds options, clarifies past choices. Recently I cut my hair. Now I surprise myself when I look in the mirror. If the artist is a mirror held up the world and the societies of the world, then perhaps we do want to be surprised now and again by our own collective appearance. Someone has to cut our hair. Back in his Andre days, perhaps that barber was Fairey. In his handbag days (today), I’m not sure.

Of course, to spin the question of associations-with-self around yet another axis altogether, it’s always possible that someone co-opts your own “predictable” style, perhaps years after your death, for their own purposes. Check out the familiar painting styles of Dalí and Ernst, now selling cars. Or do as Mr. Johnson recommends and compare Fairey’s provocative anti-war prints with Maoist posters.

Either way, what is predictable today will be innovative tomorrow (”retro”); and what once seemed gloriously strange (Dalí, Andre’s mug telling me to OBEY) will soon seen worthy of the MoMA store, at best, or the collective catalogue of overly familiar “hip” T-shirts, at worst.  (Right next to “Cougar Hunter,” “Canada: America’s Hat,” and of course Che.)

Formula rex, formula mortis. *

(* Or something like that. I learned all my Latin from the names of dinosaurs, who I hear tell were both highly unpredictable and impersonal, like a bunch of gargantuan mesothermic clones of Rush Limbaugh, on acid.)

Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very deeps of the last days,
to shine—
and to hell with everything else!
That is my motto—
and the sun’s!

—Vladimir Mayakovski.

Courtesy writer and friend Jack Gendron. The sun’s motto. Jammin.

From Judy Battista’s “For Cardinals and Steelers, Differing Pasts and Expectations,” New York Times, 21 January, 2009:

The Cardinals could be excused for letting their giddiness overwhelm them a little longer after earning their first trip to the Super Bowl. They have spent nearly their entire history being a team apart, peripatetic and sometimes even a little pathetic. Nobody wears vintage Cardinals jerseys, because, like wine turned to vinegar, the vintage was always pretty sour. That makes their unexpected arrival this year all the sweeter.

Now, I understand that sour wine is nasty, and that the Cardinals are nasty; ergo the analogical function of the metaphor is complete (nasty old Cardinal jersey : remembered-sense of Cardinal’s nastiness, in NFL :: old, cheap wine, turned to vinegar : felt-sense taste of vinegary sour nastiness, in mouth).

But the analogy I have just now reconstructed is not actually present in Battista’s insane simile. She says: (vintage Cardinal jersey : wine[?] :: vinegar : sourness, both as nasty prior experience and as felt-sense of sour taste in mouth), which makes no sense at all. You can’t wear a liquid, at least not for long, at least not so long as you want to be a pro baller.

And the Cardinals, according to her, never were “wine.” They never had a golden era or Namath or Joe Montana or Plaxico; ergo they never had “vintage” jerseys which could “sour.” So the thesis of her simile, that the Cardinals have a “sour vintage,” is broken, an example of overreaching not just in rhetoric (using a simile that doesn’t make sense in place of a sturdier species of description) but also in sports history—by her own account of it.

Further, to reconstruct any football franchise’s past failures as “sour” is a leap into culinary metaphor that I am not totally willing to make. We sometimes describe as “bitter” those past experiences that we regret; we certainly do describe positive remembered events and subsequent affect as “sweet.” I have even thought of some experiences as “hot” or as having left me “cold.”

But sour is tricky; I think of Chinese food, lemons, and lemon-scented cleaning fluids. I certainly don’t think “sour” is a bad way to describe failures and the feelings failures engender; it’s only that a fallen franchise or vintage or pedigree as “sour” is a specific extension of this (new) notion of failure as sour. Fallen, sour, once-gold, tarnished…

Again, we’d need our real clement, the franchise (or whatever it is) to have been positive, powerful, or successful at some point in the past. The souring describes a process. Wine is sweet; wine gone sour is vinegar, a new substance. This alchemy of liquid (wine —> vinegar [ —> mother-of-vinegar { —> mold}]) mirrors the alchemy of the franchise (Michael Jackson c. Thriller —> okaaay, so he likes monkeys, music kind of falling off 90s MJ —> crazy bankrupt toucher MJ) which mirrors the linguistic process by which we arrive at a description of that franchise ([{good —> } neutral —> ] failed —> gone bad —> gone bitter or been tarnished or bruised or rusted —> “soured”).

I would add that this process even mirrors my reading of Battista’s metaphor, which went something like: (bad simile —> wait, didn’t she just say the Cardinals were never any good? —> “peripatetic” makes me think of feet, sweaty feet, gross, sour —> what a wack sentence; I don’t really know what she intended to say —> let me try to sort this out).

Perhaps if we could wear wine (or vinegar), I would have less of an issue with Battista’s surely little reflected-upon choice. Perhaps I am missing something innate in wine or in the Cardinals (tannins? sulfites?) that would connect the various clements in the metaphor, creating a happy new association. But for now, I think of sweaty, sweat feet and bitter-sour vinegar, and I don’t for a moment wonder why I avoid football just exactly as I avoid the gout, because, like the gout, football is a painful medical condition. Or something like that.

Says an actual sports fan, friend and fellow writer Jake of Bread City:

That metaphor makes no sense whatsoever, and you’ve pretty much nailed down all the angles on its complete terribleness… Just more reason that this writer is a total moron: The Cardinals actually had some of the best jerseys in the 90s, and any true fan knows that nothing gets you more points than an old jersey that proves you’ve been on board since before your team was good. Sigh.

Jake also recommends that we would-be sports-deconstructors check out Straight Cash Homey Dot Net, a daily review of sports-jersey culture. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be looking at here; the site mostly consists of snapshots of men wearing jerseys, showing off their Local Sports Franchise Enthusiasm, or, as I plan to call it from now on, their “Lospofram.” Sounds like a heart drug.

Wythe Marschall… tells a fable about a legendary kangaroo king. The king presided over a fairy-tale court wherein only anecdotal evidence was permitted. One day the king fell ill (a grasshopper jumped into his pouch), but before he died (official cause: confluxication of the rhinomphalos) he told a parable about a king and a grasshopper. We, his subjects, couldn’t parse the king’s allegory until a dolphin named Jacques Derrida pointed out that we were trapped in the fable I’m telling. Then everybody had lemonade and Mexican beer.

***

Some people think postmodern philosophy is depressing. Well this pun—a Derrida snippet, on a Derrida conference, about being the guy the conference is all about, about feeling dead while still alive—proves them all wrong:

If I am applied Derrida, how can I bear being here? It’s unbearable. To be dead without being dead: unburyable.

(Emphasis added.)

J. D. was always punnin’.

Apparently, T-Pain doesn’t quite understand the economics of strip clubs: Male patrons typically pay female dancers for their time and their nigh-physical/pseudo-amorous attentions.

Likewise, patrons pay too much to drink liquor; the liquor boost confidence, restores a sense of manly dominance in men who could otherwise be described as submissive to the wiles of well-paid, bouncer-protected women.

Granted, perhaps T-Pain has been lucky enough to go home with a stripper every now and again. (Perhaps T-Pain doesn’t always wear the tophat…) But he certainly could’ve written a much sharper/less economically clueless second verse for such a big single.

It’s as if Wu-Tang had dropped a reference in “Protect Ya Neck” to cable-knit scarves: Should I be worried about my neck, I might have wondered, because it’s cold out? Or because some cold-ass motherfucker’s going to swoop down and cut my neck off with a motherfucking Chinese broadsword? Wu-Tang make their case (my second hypothetical) quite clear via any number of rhetorical strategies.

Put another way, via their collective ellusion of the cable-knit scarf (and ruff, and ascot), Wu-Tang provide adequate negative space for their listeners to envision the proper number and tang of broadswords.

T-Pain, on the other hand, confuses me both as to his ability to impress random women at their job-sites (an ability apparently lacking) and as to his understanding of the workings of his “favorite” club(s). He might have gone the absurdist route of R. Kelly and thrown in a dwarfish bouncer, at least—or a huge country belle with a pie.

But my confusion doesn’t end with T-Pain’s relationship to the idee of a strip club; I’m also confused as to why such a baller, such a rich-ass pop start can’t just pay the sixty bucks, continue to charm his sighted quarry, and convince her to go home with him at a later (perhaps not very much later) hour.

T-Pain, thus, comes off as an ineffective rake, a naive buyer in a commonplace (if seedy) flesh-market, and a quitter.

And yet… It’s a damn catchy song.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

—Norbert Wiener, Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth).

Courtesy my brother G., an aphorism about the best command-model for cat-thinking-about: Think about the cat you actually have. Problem of cat-concept solved.

This brings up the hilarity of phenomenology in general: What is the best (the only) description of a thing? The thing. (The thing beyond description. Chillin in its own little multiverse of thing-ness.)

Applies also to music: “What’s DOOM’s new album sound like?” “Well, you know—[insert comparison to other DOOM albums], [insert me humming a few bars]. It’s good.” Which is not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy going into figurative overdrive to describe DOOM’s work—only that my description would be inadequate for someone with little or no experience of paratactic/rhizomatic rap music about food, cartoons, and rap music.

This is all to say: I anticipate eagerly the new DOOM album, and if I have to paint a cat, I guess I have to paint my own cat, even if neither of us knuckleheads is happy about that situation.