Modern Artifact

The Stanley Cup walked past me last Friday. I suffered through an all-company meeting at my day-job to be rewarded with a hearty view of the mythical cup, carried by two gloved handlers. The victorious Chicago Blackhawks were celebrating a post-parade after-party in the hotel lobby that hosted the company meeting. Needless to say, the Stanley Cup is a beautiful object.

After the meeting, I found myself at the Art Institute, wandering through the lackluster Matisse exhibit, and stopping to study the vibrant H.C. Westermann and accompanying printmaking exhibit. En route, passing through the antiquity sculpture room that features stone Buddhas and ancient artifacts, I couldn’t help but think about how neatly the Stanley Cup would fit in this room. After watching the Hawks hold and kiss the cup, parade around with the cup, drink libations from the cup and even tongue the cup (thanks Patrick Kane), it’s hard not to compare today’s athletes with Greek Gods and the cup as manifesting intense masculine power-- homoerotic, warlike, pagan, communal, victorious, spiritual.

The parade was pure Chicago-- loud, colorful, raucous with a hearty mix of die-hard Blackhawks fans and drool-case lemmings who crave any excuse to join an outdoor party and glom onto somebody else’s success. Traveling on the el to work that morning, it was a unique spectacle to view a large cross-section of worshippers of the athletic apollos-- many bloated, drunken, out-of-shape humans donning their favorite player’s names on the uniform and saying idiotic declarations such as “we did it,” as if they trained, strategized and shed blood and teeth along with the players. Incidentally, when a team wins, the mantra is “we did it,” but when a team loses, it’s “THEY lost." I wonder why sports fans don’t try harder to emulate their heroes-- like run some laps and engage in some physical activity besides guzzling cheap beer, huffing nachos and staring at the television.

I love sports, but generally dislike sports fans. But I understand the excitement this tournament generated, nonetheless. The Blackhawks were fierce and beautifully focused.... artful.

Sometimes I feel as if technology encourages people to occupy such a mentally remote space within society at large that we are distancing ourselves from history at an alarming rate. Scrolling through tweets and status updates, humans seem to float within their personal bubbles of reality. And despite the addictive nature of this activity, it perhaps makes people feel more alone than anything else. And as social people in an individualistic world, we crave community. So, when a sports team wins, people grasp onto some form of communal joy that unites a city or country, and reminds us all that human beings really haven’t changed much through the course of history. And the Stanley Cup is a symbol of this perceived communal victory.

Congrats, Hawks, champions and heroes of Chicago.

Oil

I’ve got a major issue with teeth grinding and clenching when I sleep. A great tornado of tension and anxiety wreaks havoc on my choppers during sleepy-time and it’s not all because of an angsty artistic temperament. My recent bout of externally-induced jaw fatigue comes from British Petroleum’s arrogant disrespect for people, birds, fish, shrimp, oysters, dolphins, turtles, sea cucumbers, sand, water, plants, algae and life in general...

For those tea-bagger types who fear government’s intrusion into “their backyard,” I wonder how they feel about private, profit-driven, unregulated corporations controlling the nation’s backyard, specifically if it is the Gulf of Mexico, or farmland in the midwest, or protected parks and wetlands. These same people claim that they don’t want the government involved in their healthcare while insurance companies and big pharma mine sickness for profit. Idiots.

And when an oil rig explodes or the banks are broken by their own greedy unethical actors, these private, barely regulated creeps come running to the US government to bail them out of the pickle.

I’m confused about this populist sentiment about “government out of my backyard.” During the first week of the oil catastrophe, Fox News and other conservative outlets seemed more preoccupied with comparing Bush’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina (which they denied in 2002, by the way) to Obama’s reaction to the oil spill than they were with reporting the news-- the horrific failure of a private corporation to regulate themselves resulting in great devastation of the natural world. Incessant editorializing seems to be an accepted form of journalism on most 24 hour news channels. At least newspapers with standards of journalistic excellence know to separate editorial content from news stories...

I digress. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster and did indeed fall under the responsibility of the US government to come to the aid of the citizens suffering in the Gulf Coast-- a good use of tax money. British Petroleum is a private company and responsible for their own disaster. Clearly they are not strictly regulated by the government (thanks Bush!) and they do not regulate themselves internally much either. They had no properly functioning “plan B, plan C or plan D” in the event of disaster. Surely, the government must help, but Obama’s response cannot be compared to Bush’s delayed, lazy, insincere mobilization of forces in response to a natural disaster versus a corporate disaster.

I chuckle when Republican colleagues and neighbors parrot Palin’s small government rhetoric, then turn around and demand government intervention when they are personally involved with or suffering from some perceived injustice by a corporate goliath or crafty grifter.

Perhaps this highlights an inherit philosophical difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans tend to seek some impossible world of perfection and infallibility: Government is bad, private enterprise, when not regulated, is good. Ironically, they seem to want to censor the hell out of citizens and inject religion where it does not belong, but leave business alone! Democrats admit to overall imperfection and seek some compromise closer to reality while protecting a citizen’s first amendment rights. And separation of church and state protects both church and state. YES, we are grifted by our own government and YES we are grifted by private enterprise as well. There is no perfect system, yet we should work diligently to pull back the reins and regulate both powers, keep dancing the dance with the understanding that the closest we will ever come to any sort of social justice relies on maintaining the freedom of speech, as well as the freedom of the press.

Welcome to my weird world...

Writing a blog scares the daylights out of me. In my 30-something years of life, I’ve come to realize how intensely private I am and reluctant to share. My one consolation is that probably nobody will read this. Even having a website feels strangely narcissistic to me. But like all artist-types, I feel the need to “express” myself. So welcome to my psychotherapeutic blog. Feel free to stop reading anytime.

If my artwork seems cryptic to you, then be consoled that it is to me, too, and that’s intensely bothersome. I’d love to declare in a crafty artist statement what it is that I do, but any attempt at verbalizing my intentions seems insincere and artificial. Like, “my artwork is about borders, walls and transitions between subconscious landscapes and the tangible world.” or “my artwork celebrates the interconnectedness-- universality of human beings, nature and nomenclature...” But that would be a bunch of bullshit.

I hate all that art-drivel. The most honest thing I can say is that my artwork comes out of my brain, down the spinal column, through the hand and onto a surface-- a visual improvisation.

A little about me: I hail from a very close-knit midwestern family. There was an is a lot of love in my family and was raised to believe that love is all that truly matters in the world. Yeah, I‘m a helpless peacenik high on luuuv.

I’ve been creative all my life and artistic pursuits of all stripes excite me beyond anything else... except for maybe food and good beer, travel and nature. I’ve been damned with a lazy constitution, however, and I am a failure when it comes to sales, self-promotion and general career development. As a consequence, I’ve had jobs in more fields that the average human. I could be a job anthropologist. Would somebody please pay me a lot of money to provide an assessment of various and sundry workplaces? Please?

Seriously! I mean it! Perhaps I belong in human resources... I’ve worked on a TV series, as a bartender, waitress, shoe salesman, in radio, with stop-motion animation, self-employed failed artist, barely-paid video editor, bank employee, temp employee and office dweeb at a large not-for-profit. I have a lot of experience in a bunch of different fields. I empathize with the underling because I’ve never been the boss. And truly the worst is working in corporate America. More on that later...