Aesthetics

           Art and Music

I listen to music almost constantly,

and until 2009 I compulsively applied

blobs of paint to canvas surfaces.

Unsurprisingly, I have a definite aesthetic

about what constitutes art for me

in regard to both sight and sound.

The main thing is that

representation doesn’t do it for me,

which means that

as far as I’m concerned

the more abstract the better.

With paintings, for instance,

I prefer, with some exceptions,

those that don’t attempt to look

like anything other than paint on a surface.

Most of the exceptions are cartoonish ones.

The music I prefer tends to be mathematical.

I prefer to avoid evocative music,

particularly if it’s emotional,

maybe because my opinion of emotions,

whether mine or others’,

is basically negative,

but I also prefer to listen as little as possible

to stuff that evokes

expressiveness, drama, nationalism,

heroism, majesty, triumphalism,

or anything else hormonal or tangible,

and I’ve stopped listening to stuff with singing altogether.

The point is that I like art and music

that draws me in

instead of forcing itself on me.

                         Pop Culture

Many years have slid by, moment by moment,

since I’ve had any first-hand knowledge

of what’s popular in pop culture,

that semi-global phenomenon

in which billions of people –

or at least hundreds and hundreds of millions of them –

listen to the same music,

watch the same movies,

recognise the same celebrities,

and sit through the same TV shows –

or at least the same types of TV shows.

I’d shunned popular, and sometimes also alternative,

music radio on and off since the seventies,

and have avoided exposure to both

continuously now since my daughters were finished

with adolescence.

My withdrawal from all pop culture, however,

since my last domestic partnership

fizzled painfully into nothingness,

seems to have found its way deeply

into the essential nature of my being,

and become a part of what is me.

This isolates me from most other people, of course,

but it’s not the only thing that does,

and it’s not as if I weren’t isolated already.

        Kindergarten and Picasso

My older daughter came by to visit

and also to stow some stuff with me

before taking off for overseas

in order to get over the dissolution

of a multi-year domestic partnership.

I mentioned whilst putting away a box

containing such things

as her childhood’s stuffed animals

that I still had her and her sister’s

kindy art in my office’s wardrobe

and some of her other childhood paintings

on my office wall.

She said something about not being much of an artist.

I replied that that’s why I’ve always thought

that the world’s best art

is produced in kindergartens,

where the artists are just having fun

and don’t think that their pictures

have to look

like anything in particular.

I recalled something I’d read

that Picasso had said

about everybody being born an artist,

but most people learning how

not to be one as they grow up.

She replied that it seemed as if

Picasso had never grown up.

I agreed that that’s why his art’s so great.

            Commercial Designers

The identity of the people who design

abstract and semi-abstract patterns

on such commercial products as

linoleum,

women’s tights,

shower curtains, wallpaper,

cheap ceramic and plastic tableware,

sheets, pillowslips, bedspreads,

bath towels, tea towels, paper towels,

serviettes, tissues, toilet paper,

and suchlike

has always fascinated me.

Who are these people?

What do they think about their work?

What are their personalities?

their aspirations? their politics?

Do they have other artistic pursuits?

Are they drinkers, stoners, both, or neither?

And on and on and on.

I have this picture in my mind

of a moonlighting intermediate-school art teacher

with frizzy ginger hair, baggy clothes,

and a thin, intense husband wearing thick glasses

who is some kind of ineffectual mental-health professional.

She’s also a crafts instructor at a socialist summer camp,

and drinks sherry and plays dominoes

with her elderly, infirm, but still sharp-as-a-tack grandfather

one evening a week.

Her children are sullen but well-behaved.

She considers her job of designing the patterns

for bathroom-floor linoleum

to be meditational.

Of course, by now most of these designers are probably Chinese.

    What They Create

I read many novels,

most of them mysteries.

With some of them

I look to the end

to see how many pages

I have left to read

because I want to get there

as soon as possible.

With others I check

to see how far I have to go

because I hope they’ll go on

for a long, long time.

The first kind are the ones

that create suspenseful tension.

The others are the ones

that create entire worlds.

                                Book Review

Sometimes I take books that I call blind flyers from the library,

books by authors I don’t know.

One of these was an anthology

of translated Russian short stories

called Moscow Noire,

one of a large series of noire collections

set in various locales around the world.

I started – but didn’t finish – three of the stories.

They featured witless, dreary, and deeply ugly characters

in stupid, dreary, ugly situations

doing witless, dreary, ugly things.

The number of books in the series

indicates that a large market exists

for witless, dreary ugliness.

I’m just not a part of it, that’s all.

It was a shame that I spent as much time with it as I did,

but at least I didn’t buy it.

        Struggling Against Blizzards

I like to read mystery novels.

The better-written the novel,

the more fascinatingly real the characters,

the more satisfying the mystery’s resolution,

the more I like them.

I don’t like adventure literature.

The more close calls courageously overcome,

the more prolonged and excruciating the tension,

the more tedious they seem to me.

In the two mystery novels

I read before composing this,

both by authors whose work I’d previously enjoyed,

the heroines were caught in life-threatening blizzards

too far from the end of the books for them to die.

The descriptions of their agonising struggles to survive

took up an inordinate number of pages.

Both times I skimmed over those pages

until the real stories began again.

          Proposal For An Air-Freshener Entrepreneur

Although I suppose that reptilian multinational corporations

know how to go about maximising their bottom lines

at the end of every single day,

it struck me that maybe some room exists

for some entrepreneur to wriggle into the air-freshener market

with scents other than cloyingly sweet florals, such as:

freshly ground coffee,

a new-mown lawn,

bread that’s still in the oven,

the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather,

Thai green curry,

clean sheets fresh off the line,

the oceanside at low tide with a salty on-shore breeze –

think of your own favourite.

Since I don’t use air fresheners,

I asked Abbie, who does, what she thought about this.

She said it was a great idea,

but I’d have to be careful to make it smell authentic,

and not bad when the smell fades –

‘you wouldn't want freshly ground coffee

to smell like stale coffee in a couple of weeks!’

I reckoned that would be the job of the chemists

or other people with the requisite skills.

Of course I lack the necessary management, marketing, and finance skills, too.

It’s for somebody else to do.

Shit, I don’t even know if somebody else is already doing this.

Meanwhile, after opening each new 200g packet of plunger-grind coffee

and putting its contents into the sealable Click-Clack canister,

I leave the empty packet open on the kitchen bench for a few days

until the aroma fades away.

                  Worlds Of Their Own

Some of the more

superficially obnoxious and repetitive

minimalist musical compositions,

such as Steve Reich’s ‘Violin Phase’ and ‘Electric Guitar Phase’,

do what the best novels do.

They create entire worlds of their own,

and leave a sense of emptiness

when those worlds disappear

at their completion.

Tardy Exegesis on ‘The Boy and the Ball’

A credentialed expert

call it a ‘metaphor of life’,

but I didn’t buy into that,

despite my mother sneering,

‘What do you know about life?’

dismissively, thereby giving the man’s opinion

at least some credibility.

No, it was more a fictionalised report,

its facts fuzzed up to protect the truth.

The boy with the ball

didn’t really have a drunken father at all.