No Home Here

I believe my downstairs neighbor just had a messy breakup with his boyfriend, which I would regard with sympathy were it not for the fact that he has taken to locking the apartment building's exterior door to keep the boyfriend from knocking on his interior door. This is ridiculous on the face of it because the boyfriend can go around back and knock on his other door. My apartment is in fact the only apartment in the building that must be accessed through that shared exterior door. And the lock on it is mostly busted; it's easy to latch, but very hard to unlock from outside with a key. Where it's dark because there's no light. And this neighbor also turns off the inside light in the hall. Leaving me standing outside at 2 in the morning when I get off work.

It also means my mail can't be delivered. (Why these eternal struggles with mail? I love mail.) It's probably not worth vandalizing the lock, since I leave in a week. Probably. I could tell my neighbor "don't do this" but of course as soon as he feels emotional turmoil again he will be compelled to run out and lock the door.

The ex-boyfriend also does stupid shit like stand in the driveway when I'm trying to pull out or block the stairs for five minutes while I'm carrying something heavy, by which I mean five minutes or the amount of time it takes for me to tell him to fuck off.

In any case, our relocube was delivered today, and Ciro has declared that he wants to abandon art and academe for the life of a relocube driver, by which he means not the truck but the three-wheeled forklift which carried the cube to the back of the house. Apparently, it was a sight to behold. I still have perhaps four or five boxes of packing left, which I was not able to complete this morning because I ran out of packing tape. But I have picked some up on my lunch break, and all will be fine and dandy. Following that, the only significant business I will have left in Texas is early voting and the state fair.

[Update 10/22: Ciro says this is not a boyfriend, but also that the door is being locked exclusively because the neighbor is being a dick, and has been reminded several times "don't do this." Ciro just bangs on his window until he opens the door, however late it is, because asshole.]

Mortification of the Flesh

I have a love-hate relationship with the blog Apartment Therapy. At its best, it offers me beautiful pictures of spaces in which I like to imagine spending time. At its worst, it espouses decluttering, not in the moderate sense of throwing out trash or putting property in its proper place (as stuff and not a cage), but with wide-eyed zeal that labels books as dust collectors and fervently "purges" every few months regardless of whether, you know, there's a problem to be solved.* God save me from the new asceticism, where we're all vegans who don't read books. Kellogg called for bland food and no sex, so I know this strain of American society has always existed, but I find that horrible rather than reassuring.

As part of the move, Ciro recovered several boxes from Ed's attic, containing mostly cookbooks (hooray!) but also odds and ends his parents thought were valuable, by which I mean glass swans and ceramic thimbles from the Franklin Mint (which we will send to his grandmother, and serves her right). The height of absurdity to Ciro: extremely miniature versions of U.S. historic coins, and a loupe with which to look at them. The culmination of my hopes and dreams: same. It is coins. They are very small.

Further investigation reveals they were minted four days after I was born. Happy birthday, Rome. Love, the universe. Ciro says I must not touch them or they will tarnish, but of course I plan to touch them. Every day.

* It's very consumerist. "Get rid of your stuff so you have space for more stuff." "Trash your cleaning products and buy new cleaning products." There's also a strain of new New Age "make room in your house for new ideas." Because artists and creative types are known for their productive lack of clutter. It's about purity. If you cleaned your closet and did the master cleanse in the same week, you'd probably be able to astrally project.

The spellcheck refused to recognize either "decluttering" or "loupe," and the other day I ran into a program that wouldn't accept "lachrymose," among other things. I dislike that dictionaries have stopped being a place one looks for histories and nuances, and have become Scrabblized: This word isn't in here and doesn't exist. Oh I assure you it does.

Written on Sand

I've been trying to work up some narratives that will help me out of my current hopeless malaise. Not "everything happens for a reason" pablum or "I'm going to win the lottery" fantasies, but concrete examples of people I respect who went through dark and hopeless times and succeeded against all odds.

I am trying to keep in mind that George Washington thought he would lose the American Revolution. He had no support and was very lonely. He was doing something nobody had ever done. He was condescended to and backstabbed. A story that is more important than the cherry tree, with the added benefit of being true.

It's a shame that history is treated as inevitable, as the unstoppable working out of social forces. It doesn't feel that way at the time. I'm not saying great man theory isn't terribly flawed, but at least it gives people agency and fear and doubt.

I have also found cheering the following paragraph from Hermenaut, via Hilobrow:

Art, as we all know, is “something everyone can do.” What everybody cannot do, however, is brilliantly express a singular vision of reality. Art made by the kind of artist who can do this is often derided — particularly when he or she works without sufficient resources, or in a despised medium (science fiction, comics) — by audiences brainwashed by the smooth, shining surfaces of capitalist realism, as fake.

On the other hand, it is a bit nauseating to be in a position where I respond to a lack of audience support by concluding that I am an exceptional paradigm-shifting artist. Seems fairly high risk, that. I observed to Ciro last night that I worry I'm going to turn into Van Gogh, by which I don't mean "famous after I'm dead" but rather "surrounded by people who upset me, horribly self-doubting despite my accomplishments, uncomfortable everywhere, and ultimately insane."

In any case, I have continued to have trouble writing the essays I would like to write, which keep coming out self-serious and hard to follow, when I think the ideas themselves are neither. The gist of one of them, because I don't have time for both:

The Real Thing
I have two stuffed animals on my bookshelf, which is not known for holding stuffed animals. They are Salacious Crumb (lizardy thing from Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi) and His Blueness (head Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine). When I acquired them (as gifts), they made sense because I have watched Star Wars and Yellow Submarine countless times and they are formative.

For all intents and purposes, neither of these things now exist. The Yellow Submarine DVD release added a ham-handed scene by animators without the talent or philosophical astuteness of George Dunning (and removed part of the original to do it), dulling the story when it should be triumphant and working in direct opposition to the gnosticism of the rest of the work. Lucas keeps tinkering with and mangling the Star Wars films to make them slicker, and added prequels which made the Force itself hierarchal, regimented, and diagnosable; in effect, he took the films and made them Imperial, not Rebel Alliance.

I own DVDs of three different versions of Brazil and three different versions of Blade Runner, but these feel different, more like an acknowledgement of the different needs of the collaborators on a film. Even the risible "love conquers all" version of Brazil doesn't feel like an obstruction of the real film so much as an attempt to translate what someone didn't understand. It reminds me of the British translation of Camus' The Stranger, which makes him jolly.

Part of the problem is timing. Submarine and Star Wars take films that were accepted into the culture by decades - accepted by their creators, and not simply released against their will - and then takes them back and says "they weren't yours, really." It's worse because they're turned out of myth and into children's film, which at present means "film you make to get money from parents who don't themselves like it." They aren't cultural touchstones. They're commerce. Which film always has been, but has never only been. And the children who are seeing them will not have the context to know they have been defanged.

The greater problem is illustrated by the following announcements, which happened in the same week: George Lucas is working on 3D version of Star Wars, and the Back to the Future Special Edition DVD release includes some of the footage shot with Eric Stoltz before he was replaced with Michael J. Fox. (Stoltz was famously replaced after more than three weeks of shooting, when they viewed an edit and decided his chemistry wasn't right.) The Star Wars announcement is horrifying and feels like something is being taken away rather than given. The Back to the Future announcement is delightful, a groovy alternate universe to imagine.

This I think is the key. We can enjoy the Stoltz Back to the Future because it is alternate, not a replacement. We have all agreed what Back to the Future is. We have all agreed that it is a decision made by all of us. And because we have agreed to this, we can build on it referentially. We can, if we wish, write fanfiction, parodies, references, and not worry that they will be made obsolete. We can also recommend the movie or say we like it, and not have to fear that a few years down the line it will be modified so as to become its own antithesis.

In an internet culture where news pages can be edited indefinitely and without record, this is an important guarantee. But it would be anyway. Artistic creation always builds on what came before, whether by referencing or reinterpreting. In Star Wars, we are dealing with an entity we cannot reference (because our references will be made obsolete) or reinterpret (as a retelling would be a violation of copyright law).

We have sacrificed the ability to reach across time that comes with the birth of recording (so that a reader today can follow the mythogical, biblical, and Shakespearean references in, say, 19th-century literature), and we have also lost the ability for close relevance that comes with an oral tradition (as Homeric bards or Mystery players could tailor their tales to the audience).

And so I am not really sure what to do with these stuffed animals. I could hold on to them and say that my experience is real and true and should not be obliterated by the bad behavior of a few copyright holders, or I could get rid of them as a rejection of properties which have become hucksterism rather than storytelling.