Category: ultracultural

catchymemes:

I remember stumbling across this book in the New Dorp branch of the library on Staten Island when I was young. Looking at the publication date now — August 1984 — I realize I must have seen it just when it came out, right before I started my freshman year of high school. It had to be at least that early, because I distinctly remember being on the lookout for Keith Haring‘s subway drawings all through high school, when I commuted to the Upper East Side every day. Sure enough, I saw them show up a few times at East 86th Street a couple of times, and occasionally in other stations. I had no clue that Haring was already a name in the art world, so these always felt like secret treasures to me, connecting them only to this little book I found in a local library when I was looking for stuff about drawing cartoons.

This little book — and Haring himself — made an impression for all kinds of reasons, not all of which I could really pinpoint when I was just turning fourteen. It was the first time I thought to think of street art as real art, or vice versa. It was art that was fun, an idea I was starting to wake up to. I loved the drawings shown — so much! — and I also loved that they were quick, forbidden, and took advantage of really specific opportunities:

The advertisements that fill every subway platform are changed periodically. When there aren’t enough new ads, a black paper panel is substituted. I remember noticing a panel in the Times Square station and immediately going aboveground and buying chalk. After the first drawing, things just fell into place.

That seemed so cool to me when I was just a kid who drew comic books but was getting ready to jump into the wider world around me. Also, Keith Haring was cute — so cute! — in a goofy, nerdy way that was great; not like a model or a TV star but a real way. Although I couldn’t make any sense of that reaction at the time it certainly fit a pattern that would eventually be clear.

Lucille: I’ll have the “Ike and Tina tuna.”

Waitress at Klimpy’s: Plate or platter?

Lucille: I don’t understand the question, and I won’t respond to it.

[Season 1, Episode 11]

It doesn’t have nearly the same magic without Jessica Walter‘s exceptional delivery, but this is still one of my favorite jokes from Arrested Development. If you need just a tiny little hit of Jessica Walter to ease the pain of living without Arrested Development, she’s also doing some hilarious voice work in FX‘s animated series Archer.

I quite like, but I do not necessarily love, the work of Gilbert & George. It’s cheeky, it often looks great, it’s interesting, and all, but it can get a little heavy-handed now and again, and I really think they went off the rails visially once they got their hands on a copy of Photoshop. But whatever: these things happen. There are very few artists of any kind who manage to produce work that feels just as fresh and resonant all the way through their careers.

I do appreciate a number of the themes that run through what they do, however, many of which are summed up nicely in this manifesto-slash-list of commandments-slash-performance piece:

1. Thou shalt fight conformism

2. Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms

3. Thou shalt make use of sex

4. Thou shalt reinvent life

5. Thou shalt create artificial art

6. Thou shalt have a sense of purpose

7. Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it

8. Thou shalt give thy love

9. Thou shalt grab the soul

10. Thou shalt give something back

I usually like steampunk better in theory than in execution. I mean, it works well on paper: I love the mashup of historical and futuristic ideas and technology, and I’m certainly a ardent supporter or artisanal crafts and gadgetry. (Not to mention a man in goggles.) It’s a groovy idea, but as a subculture it generates so much kitsch. And not the good kind. It’s so often too earnest for its own good, with just a touch too little awareness of the inherent fantasy, despite the fun of it all. But when it’s good — when it’s really original and when it works on more than one level — it’s so unbelievably cool, like the work of this guy:

[Above: “Raptor” Fighter Pilot Mask by Bob Basset]

I’ve had this TImes article sitting in a tab in my browser for the last day because it rang true in so many ways and I wanted to write about that, but frankly I don’t have the time or the energy (which is another lengthy post in itself, really). In short, though: I prefer living over here and a lot of Americans get on my nerves when I stumble across them, but until I read this I was having trouble articulating what I actually liked on the whole about Americans, and what Europeans always try but fail to explain about what they like about Americans. So good work, Mr Dyer.

My American Friends, by Geoff Dyer

A nice tidbit From Gulliver’s Travels, circa 1726:

His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”