There are certain levels of creativity that transcend technique.
I don’t like nearly all modern painters. But have you ever stood in front of a Van Gogh? It’s terrifying stuff. There is technique in it. He did his thing, over and over, always pushing forward, getting faster, further out, until he was simply expressing himself directly. He was deranged. If art is a look into another man’s mind, he gave us a peek into a maniac’s thought process. For example, you don’t critique his painting of the postman. You deal with it.
I think it’s twice as ghastly because he liked the guy. This is my friend. his fingers are turning into snakes.
Just when you’re reeling from that sort of thing, he announces he can take it up a notch, or ten if you’re interested. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds got nothin’ on him:
Moving on, what, exactly, made titanic egoists like Hemingway, Joyce, and Eliot flop on the floor in front of Ezra Pound, and declare him “il miglior fabbro“? It’s from Dante, and means “the better craftsman,” or something close to that.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Poetry (April 1913)
There’s audacity figured into all this. Some people are good at eliciting gasps. Pound sure did. But audacity alone is just shamelessness. Madonna and a million other talentless people show you what 100 % audacity and a certain moral flexibility, bordering on contortion, can yield. It ain’t art.
The video is Dan Hicks, along with some agglomeration of his Hot Licks. I’m not sure what it takes to put yourself out there like that. He had the chops to be normal, but not the desire. He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever. At least he had time to break off rock music’s femur and beat it over the head with it while he was sailing along.
I got up at 3:30 this morning because I had to write something, or die trying. It was about the 1970s. In the dark, alone, sweltering in the silence, I scared myself, just thinking about it. I stopped for a moment to salute il miglior fabbro.
7 Responses
Isn’t there always someone better? Better not to weep but enjoy.
I’ve had an extraordinarily long connection with Dan Hicks. First came across him while on a trip to the San Francisco area scouting out colleges I might want to attend, in 1968.
I last saw him a year or so before he passed, a between Christmas and New Years show at the most recent The Met, in Pawtucket. A good size room, and there were maybe twenty people there. He gave us two full sets, while endlessly ranting about post Christmas crowds, venue promotion, musician’s travel issues, and whatever else crossed his mind between songs, in a very entertaining way for the few of us there.
Thanks for the link.
Hi Bob D- It’s like a letter from home to hear about the Met Cafe (either one). Thanks for that.
I you want to scare yourself you should read Dan Hicks’ autobiography. Appropriately, he titled it “I Scare Myself.” The boy hit rock bottom and stayed there a real long time. If they had ever met Vincent would have told him to get a grip, in one his moments of lucidity. He had them. So did Dan but he augered in like a kamakazi for spell.
Will do.
I never saw any of Van Gogh’s paintings in a museum. I spent the first 2 thirds of my life ignoring art. But then the pharmaceutical factory I worked at for 17 years got bought out by Bain Capital, and the government paid me to go back to school in my middle age. A guy at the government program office that Looked like Fred Sanford pushed a piece of paper in front of my nose and showed me the classes that were available that I could take, with all the good ones crossed off, and there was left only pipe welding, mortuary science, and photography. He became upset when I picked photography. Classes were starting in three days. I drove to my old high school and got a physical Microfilm copy of my graduation and grades, and hand-delivered it to the office at the junior College in Miami. On my first day of class, they told me I had not been registered because they never received transcripts from the high school. I went to their office, and they said they could only accept records in the mail. I could not hand deliver them, and they had never seen records from the 1970s that were on microfilm. I waited three hours to talk to an old lady who ran the place. She let me go to class.
For some reason, I had to take art classes if I wanted to take photography classes. I had only been able to draw stick figures my whole life. However, one day I ended up at a museum on campus that had a collection of old Dutch masters on loan to the school on display.
I had never seen paintings from the old Dutch masters in person before. I could not take my eyes off them. It was like they were speaking to me. They made me proud to be a human being who was somehow related to the people who managed to do this, a wonderful, magical thing. Good luck with your writing. The best stuff in life isn’t what you want to do, but what the voices compel you to do.
Hi Robert- Thanks for reading and commenting at Sippican Cottage.
If pipe welding, mortuary science, and photography were all gathered into one subject, now that might be interesting.