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MY HIT LIST Once you reach somewhere over 50, you would -- so I guess -- find what a wonderful world this has been. So much to bash! Stuff to ridicule is aplenty! And the beauty of it is: almost absolutely no one alive would dare or bother to counterstrike! This optimistic outlook came to me in the form of a small but conspicuous man, or more precisely dawned on me while he handed back my old CBS' old Andy Rooney book. It caused me a loud slap on the forehead. I should have thought about it before! Why couldn't I, while my frequent visits to the nearby grocery offers so deep an insight! There, the queens of everything are housewives over 50, who could say whatever they want in whichever way they please about whosoever they happen to hate -- woe to the sexually-inadequate males of any age and virtually everyone else under 40 around the neighborhood. But, as usual, imported goods seem to enlighten me quicker than the local ancient wisdom. This was the man's comment: "Gee, Rooney hates everything and he can say it only because he was sixtysomething. I wonder if he dared to twenty years earlier." Oh, yeah. Why not. I'm sinking away from the 30th year now. That means half his age when he played his verbal dart on the screen and in that book. I might never get to be 60. If I die without ever tossing around my real grudges, what a disgusting hell my next neighborhood would be! And based on what I have heard about hell, they don't even have my brand of coffee! So from here to the last dot I will dish out my hit list comprising the unfortunately alive and kicking human beings and social circles -- which, to this minute, have been a few miles away from my wrath simply because I wasn't yet 31. I intend to make a neat little alphabetical list, so we begin with the letter A. That means Art. I vow to be honest to the world from this day on, rather than to wait in nausea for the next 20 years. Or, see you then.
There are two basic sins this person commits: 1). being idiotic, and 2). being himself. He studied Fine Art and emerged from campus with several dozens of smeared canvases he dubbed "paintings". Nobody believed what he said, so he hid them somewhere and after long years of lamentation he re-appeared wearing a G-string that was meticulously dipped in some paint. He got a meagre applause when he walked the Main Street in broad daylight wearing a little less and adding more paint, especially from the pedestrians whose hazardous attempt to cross the street was made easier since drivers stopped and the traffic went into a coma when this thing happened. Encouraged by the earlier experience, the man started to sell it. By some miraculous simple-mindedness several people did employ him -- for art exhibitions' opening night, for book-launching, and the like, although he still whimpered that no one booked him for funerals. He got some support from the particular bunch (easily spotted, they all wear fake Afro) that calls this thing "performance art". Whenever asked, he replies that he does it because he doesn't want to commercialize his Fine Art, i.e. the stacked canvases nobody wants to glance at. If accused of doing so simply because he can't even draw the moon, he gets a nervous breakdown. You can get fined for jaywalking. What about jaywalking almost naked with green slimy chemical substances all over your narcotized body? Fined Art is a horrendous crime and whoever dares to commit it must be sent instantly to forced-labor camps, to sell insurance.
The list of her crimes consists of: 1). being unable to paint, 2). being unable to perform, 3). blindingly so. According to the homemade myth, she started to use her own body as the art medium when she couldn't afford oil and canvases. Newsmongers have vehemently denied this self-spreaded rumor, instead they stated that it happened because she tragically was a painter who couldn't paint. Self-accusations of "not having enough money to finance my art" were flatly rejected, the factual thing being her parents as big moneyed fishes nationwide, and their monthly cheques have been seen littering the bank she's a customer of. Despite the nonsensical bearing, the so-called visual art she champions gains currency -- helped considerably by the strategic decision to move along the right track where everybody on the way is gullible enough to be helpful. The trademark performances usually consist of herself, a few innocent inanimate objects, and a few disgusting actions such as smearing red paint all over a fine white cloth, dipping feet into a can of red paint, writing jerky common words on white pillows that never did anybody any harm, and the like. Very predictable, so are the reviews that uniformly say she is the avant-garde artist of the new millennium, the champ of women's issues, the brave feminist against the patriarchal world, etcetera, and so on, especially when they heard the plan to use more paint and no clothing. The truth will be unveiled one day, or exactly the opposite. It is better for the rest of mankind to punish her now while the future is uncertain. She got to be sentenced 6 years in a Fine Art class where she would be forced to paint like normal artists. If she insists on using her body, she must pay for a plastic surgeon and several sessions of exorcism to kick out the fake feminist demon within. She probably was contaminated when memorizing The Handbook of Simplest Feminist Jargons in the early 1990's. To be continued, of course. I won't be over 60 yet until 30 years ahead. Footnotes:
LIVING A PLAY We can cry a bit, if only we let ourselves tamed.... It has been zillions of writings since I sat on my desk, pretending to mind Geometry, when in fact I was reading Antoine de Saint Exupery's Little Prince (1946). Only a thin book, only a translation, though luckily it was a good one. Those were the days of glam-rock and I was dreaming of becoming a member of a local one, regardless of the fact that I didn't meet the requirements -- such as getting oceans of booze and as much drugs as possible at school breaks. We lost our drummer that way. I guess he is still 15 now, up there rocking in hell, wishing to bring the house down and break some legs; considering what we continually see here it looks like his wishes have been granted and even with some bonus. The eighties was great. At first I thought it was only me and my premature ageing, but it turns out that everybody around my age misses it - on the mention of the decade, my friend C displays a look commonly found on a dentist's chair, T cringes as if some giant ants were attacking his painting or any other vital spot of his, J boldly spits and says "damn this millennium", while E doesn't look like anything but a sobbing 34 year-old woman. Since then, there has been nothing but heartache and Britney Spears and heartache again and James Cameron's Titanic and more heartache and Korn and additional heartache and "clever novels" of the nineties. How do we remember, how do we file the remembrance? Our minds are not running on Windows or Linux -- yes, they melt down habitually, and maddeningly insist on having it their own ways, but we are not those tidy though intricate structures. We function at random. We are the haphazard movements. A desert is more beautiful because it hides a spring somewhere..... At one moment it is a smile of someone we love, then the wind that blows away the papers on our lap, the whiteness of the clouds, the C2O released by a passing 12 year-old Ford, a cat that chases its own shadow, Rage Against The Machine on a radio, a mother crossing the street, a relapse to 1970, uncle Bob's fishing rod, Simply Red's song lyric, the front page of a web site, the skinny kid at the police station, the horse near the Buckingham Palace, the death of JFK, the blue lake, 300 dollars, a con behind bars, payday rush, a nondescript shriek, George Clooney, a green telephone, Lothar Matthäus, Scottish kilts, the Alps, a program that will not launch, a plan to take the son to the dentist, the Seine, A Fish Called Wanda, a digital freak on the internet, August 13, a clock that is an hour and fifty-three seconds late, a dirty notebook with stains of Colombian coffee, the taste of peach, people in thick raincoats, a line from Toy Story, a resolution to marry someone, the smell of summer, a dog that stops at the hydrant, VGA card, a long talk with mom, auburn hair dyed blond - Sometimes we think we are going insane because our minds refuse to dig deep into one thing and shove aside the others for some length of time. Society has taught us that systematical thinking is the best -- that we must do it, because it has given us the parallel time, the light bulb, the gramaphone, the internet, capitalism, the law, marriage, religions, and everything else that matters -- that has been put into our skulls as what matters -- Matthew Arnold and Albert Einstein and Søren Kierkegaard and John Dewey -- they have been conspiring, and so far look like succeeding, into making us believe that random thoughts of ours are the indisputable evidence of our detour from sanity. Only little kids know what they are looking for. They waste their time playing with a rag doll, and to them the doll becomes very important, if it is taken away, they cry..... And we feel stupid not knowing what we are looking for, what we are supposed to be looking for, what we are thinking of, what we are supposed to be thinking about. But the truth is simple -- it is impossible to tidy up our minds. Everlasting concentration is a pie in the sky. Even the eyelid blinks. Let the mind roam as it wants to. Just follow the course. It is like rafting, like surfing, like going on a ship -- you are bound to reach Somewhere, no matter how jerky the ride is, as long as you don't fall into the water too hard and could not resurface. The time that you are wasting for the rose is what makes the rose so dear to you..... The little prince learned many things out there in the desert; the eighties is maybe laying dead. However bumpy the ride is, though, every time it is a somewhere, and sometimes there are even shortcuts. Footnote:
JUST
SO A year ago I swore to myself that I would never, ever, again use these words since a ferociously idle technogeeky busybody rummaged through my verbal junkyard and came out with some digitally-processed data that inscrutably said I've almost never done anything but overusing: a). curses, b). Hitler, c). Death, d). Myself. This was a devastatingly cruel exposé of virtually everything -- initially I hoped that nobody would notice that that was what I've been doing while pretending to be really writing. Politics, art, or whatever else I have tossed in as a theme were just decoys. From that day on my mind had been colonialized by troops of remorse: 1). I should have never let him touch my computer, 2). I should have never let him touch my computer, 3). I should have never let him touch my computer. Now I'm expected to write something about this entity called Bunga Jeruk, from a heavily personal point of view, staying clear of indecent advances toward fine art, and observing the taboo of naming names (words from the sponsor!). I can't possibly follow these rules without breaking another, so that's where Hitler, Death and Myself came from. It happened to be my birthday, today. That said, let's BJ the page. It's harder to learn about a person than learning German, though both are equally useless and unattractive. The State said I'm BJ's biological sibling, but the State also said that it does and doesn't support the U.S. attacks of Afghanistan, so the basic question remains the same: How am I supposed to know? We didn't really grow up together -- there were times when BJ and Afghanistan were just as far (or near) to me. On the other hand, I've known myself longer than BJ does -- this is a convenient ground for being smarty-pants. The following jerky tunes are all that I can claim knowledge of. But here's a problem. BJ wants me to be matter-of-factly -- a disease I've never been blessed with at all. I guess that's the same shortcoming as the one that besieges the composers of SMS jokes about the Talibans. But I'll try my best here. The actual evolution of BJ started with the emergence of a plump, wide-eyed, pouty-mouthed, scanty-haired infant that was only terrible if good things were. "Evolution" is the right word -- even physically, BJ has never deviated from the prototype of a human she was in 1972. I can say so because it is so. I've looked like a specimen of some chemical experiment that goes awry, a subway bum, housewify, or -- worse -- my idea of myself, in radical changes. It's never BJ's fate. She always looks the same, though much has changed when it comes to certain things unavoidable -- long thin braids, her trademark all through the first 12 years, have gone, been dethroned by nice-wavy-creambathed bob; baby powder was ousted by The Body Shop; Giorgio Armani scored; Bata shoes made way for Rotelli; and eye-witnesses would testify under oath that, after dormant years, around 1988 she was all of a sudden very beautiful. But other things remain the same. Roaches scared her to death ten years ago and they still do today. She's always been a magician when it comes to fruit -- a five-kilo watermelon would just disappear tracelessly when she's around. Her pierced ears are allergic to any kind of metal but gold (I swear it's a true and tested fact). She's almost obsessive-compulsive when it comes to dirt and dust. She keeps her place unbearably clean but she doesn't have the expected spiffy taste in arranging and decorating. She's never been a scofflaw and she's never been scholarly; she tends to go for the scintillating and she loves chicken. There are some stuff that we both agree upon, and some that are irreconcilable. Similar background doesn't have anything to do with the more basic rift between personalities. In the past the yawning gap was apparent; on getting the same trophies, what she saw (and still sees) in them were (are) hers and not mine, the motives behind the fight for them were (are) not the same, the aftertaste was obviously different. So here, so now, I'd just assemble what I generally think of BJ as it is -- I won't try to nail the picture next to mine and judge whatever isn't my own wrong. To my caffeinated eyes this extreme overhaul of her personal site is an exorcism -- BJ's trying to flush her demons out of the mind right into the toilet. It's never a tidy business to anyone. It's sort of rattling bones. So perhaps I've underestimated her -- where did the guts came gushing in from? On re-assembling her cyberbiography here she re-scrutinized herself and other beings, yielding an output that raised some brows, and a bewildered passersby exclaimed "Is this the same BJ?" Of course it is. She was put on some pedestal and made to be a role-model for little girls once, because she used to display what characterize a good mini human: she made no sound, she never poured out, she showed not a drop of some sense of humor. But, as always, looks are the least reliable clues to what's going on. The next usual misreading of her involves these misapprehensions: 1). She's an elegant airhead, and/or 2). She's a damsel in some series of minor, albeit urgent to dissolve, distress. Whenever we were about to cross a street on our way to wherever, an older homo politicus or a cop almost always came to the rescue -- of her alone. She looked like needing some help. She's still a case of the worst street-crosser ever, this very day, which I suspect is the consequence of such unsolicited help. Well, I got to admit that this part is sort of biased, but the truth is still here. Those good people out there didn't lend me a hand to grab when crossing the street, simply because I was Lizzy Borden lookalike. That my real ambition was not so bloody, nobody cared. Anyway, BJ isn't what she looks or sounds like, most of the time -- especially whenever she didn't sound like anything since she tends to clam up. Osmosis worked for her, all through her life, that way. Through her first years on earth she's been more of a cool observer than an aggressive participant; she's been more of an audience than a performer; she's been more BJ than anything else -- a football watcher that stays impassive but couldn't bear looking when there's a free-kick for her team. She couldn't stand witnessing the shot amiss. But silence is the widest of all oceans. It could mean anything, or some things at once. The tragedies in her life tend to occur under this pretext -- people's mistake of assigning a different meaning to the same old silence that was hers. At one point of her gamut, she wanted recognition as an authentic individual from everybody alive: the grocers, the art dealers, the colleagues, the ones to whom her existence matters. There the fierce, hidden egocentrism awakes; stubbornness -- her mental backbone, which feature has been continuously transmitted every time but miraculously keeps escaping people's antennaes -- is put on the table, hard to smash. The BJ that I know is an opportunist (I take the kind of neutral sense of this word), calculating fighter. She's been so for -- ever. She knows what she wants. This, too, is BJ. Once she was cognizant of how she actually looked like in other people's myopic eyes, she chuckled and let it be, consciously from then on, when needed. This little trick of hers is a surefire against some people -- fortunately the right people, and so it helps unrolling her red carpet. Blood is thicker than wine, and BJ's roots are snaking deep in an old, weird familial ties -- so I got to say that she's just a nut like the rest of the flock, and if this escapes you somehow, just digest the factual notion that there are a zillion ways to be crazy. BJ has her own brand of this; her own quirks, phobias, allergies, unreasonableness, superstitions and the usual stuff. Probably she's been riding instead of taking them as a scourge in what is taken as a normal life. Browsing her winding takes on everybody, looping back to the family, might be a shocking surf to some defiantly outdated BJ-watchers. Some spots on her map even managed to surprise me. I know that she's been the only realist in the so-called family -- which members are more or less incurable daydreamers -- BJ's realism has been her arsenal. So let it be noted by traffic cops everywhere upon the globe, though she still can't cross a street. She no longer wants to sit on the backseat though she still can't drive. She's stronger than she seems. She's been the one determined to have the last laugh. And the impression that she's a Leviathan that slices the sea of life in a mission to wreck and loot El Dorado is tragically wrong. Bank notes don't shine. ;-P From where I stand, yup, she certainly emits the aura of one whose nose is geared to follow dollar bills -- but I don't send such persons to the firing squad as long as they don't commit crimes in being so. BJ is a hard-worker -- her claims of bossing the show is quite correct. (This is a real sloth speaking here). Moneylessness has been the demon under her bed for the last 29 years; her sandman is worldly-dispossessedness. But exactly because of this, she'll never be the one who robs Peter to pay Paul -- every species of bill-handing creatures adore her. From a more personal angle it's probably correct too if you say she's much in love with herself -- but to be fair it's really pale if contrasted with a whole platoon of true egomaniacs I've known, and it's a sane thing if you consider the disgustingly growing numbers of heavyweight self-loathing artists, and it could even procure a saintly scent if you mind the statistics that show how many artists out there are drenched in fake anti-oneself attitude -- which they shout about from the rooftops and scribble down in art exhibition invites, and litter the galleries with. The everlasting love between BJ and BJ even boosts something good: she doesn't contain the ingredients of a busybody. Aloof, alright; cold, maybe sometimes; blind, in worse times -- but she won't barge into your private chambers and mess with the furnitures. She's a notoriously compartmentalized brain in her little intimate circle. She told her ex that she didn't want him anymore, that so and so was scared of taking paracetamol, that her dog was really cute when pulling out flowers, that the car she wanted was some million IDR and it's already down from the price a month before, that Eddie HaRa's cat came back after a few days being katze vermisst -- all in one breath. And it's still the same BJ that cried watching the canine film Buddy. She's a realist, alright, in a very mundane sense -- yet at the same time the BJ that I know is always a few steps outside realities -- things that happen nowhere near her core I maybe appear as hazy animated pictures seen late at night on a broken TV. Most of the time she stays unaffected. When it touches her, emotional build-up is slow, reactions are delayed, harsh encounters are avoided, brutal honesty is cancelled. She's more of a noun for years, then she's probably all verb, but never an adjective. You can rely on her to get an "objective" view of anything outside herself -- contrarywise some certified morons I know always believe that everything -- from the bombings of the Afghan territory to the lyrics of Robbie Williams' songs as things that are designed for them truly. Frankly I don't have any idea what BJ's dreams are made of, save the Swiss banks scenes and episodes that contain flying first class to Paris. Bailing herself out of the past she hates so much to remember is no longer a dream, it's partly done. The benzoin-stained acknowledgement of her most private agonies might do its job, cleansing the soul as aimed. But what are her dreams, nowadays? I did ask, but no articulate answer is here yet. Maybe she simply doesn't dream -- not the way I do. Maybe that's another missile in her fancy backpack. Maybe it has been helping her aground -- maybe that's why she's so rarely let down by herself. Because every time some horror was unveiled, BJ closed the window -- it's the howling wind. It's circumstances. It's other actors on the scene. If she's a rare item on God's showcase, it might be so out of the fact that she's never, as far as I know, stopped to yell "How stupid I was!". Maybe she really never was. Her mother wanted her to be a teacher of fine art and (no, not "or", not here) an art critic -- too bad that BJ could paint, and as though this isn't heartbreaking yet, her paintings are salable. So her mom got to get real. BJ isn't a frozen numbskull either. She doesn't find reading extremely amusing, but so what. She's only willing to know about what she has an interest in -- but ain't we all? Personally I like a little of her works, and this is already a heavy concession because I believe that smearing clean canvases with paint is a sin. What kicks the eye is BJ's attitude that she just doesn't care a straw about what might crawl around her colleagues' minds, when it comes to her art -- until she started to vomit, like just now. Afterwards she'd wipe her keyboards and go on like before. She's almost untouchable when the shield is on. The Planet Art could give her a seat in the second row if it wants to, BJ said; so what, I won't attend the gala anyway, I'm too busy painting. She's let down by the fact that even the critic who's closest to her art treats her in passing, and that the fellow-artist who once shared her everything couldn't comprehend her, but redundancy has given her an immunization. Being aloof is risky in this business and she's got a taste of enmity there. Schadenfraude is hyperactive at times too. But after the pang recedes she just sits again and paint. A good many things about her is made none of her business. That's why I got the creeps -- maybe there's something that we've never been told all this time, like, when BJ was 2 she was atomized and shipped to some intergalactic lab where half of her soul was Fausted for some übermenschen immunity. The creative mammal inside her is -- I guess -- characterized by a few obvious things: a sort of supernatural penchant of colors, a very personal realism, an all-out evasion of whatever is commonly seen as vulgar, an allusion to some gigantic meta-narration via the smallest grain of canvas-smearing. She's more of a narrator than a zealot armed with stone-faced arguments. But she throws out what she has digested, so her system's fingerprints are all over the second-hand reality on collectors' walls. And she can't escape the DNA stuff in her -- she's cynical just like the rest of the beings on the family tree. Some of her stuff were too simple for me. The messages conveyed were just a slight blush-on finishing a makeup. Ideas gurgling within them were bulimic supermodels. Whenever she took off the storyteller's gown, the work became a vigorously disinfected hospital corridor. But some others were concealing real thoughts -- some disbelief in the establishment, disgust at the social gangrenes, questions only patented wackos are entitled to raise. Her ex-boyfriend's super-mushy line was, "BJ's an artistic intellectual". That's two cans of beer speaking. BJ's never been an "intellectual" -- a cum laude university graduate is nothing but a cum laude university graduate -- but she's smart enough to understand the knowables, and she's smarter on canvas. As a friend, I hope she keeps on going her way and doesn't stray from the path she had paved; once a tint of hypocrisy or a dash of fake concern creeps in, she's finished. The prevalence of pretensions within the artistic sphere is sickening -- I just hope that she'd never get corroded by the same substance that has infected many. As one that shares some DNA codes with her, I only hope that whatever mess I've made of my life she'd never dive headlong into the same ditch. So -- I've only known BJ for 28 years, in a haphazard coexistence. There are people who share a name, a bed, a kid, a life for 50 years straight without ever knowing each other -- this non-unique mental myopia could be my alibi if any of my observations is way too fictional. This bacteria named self-delusion is rampant anyway all through our 2000 years. My BJ might be different from yours. The characteristics might be alien to the BJ-ness of BJ that BJ herself believes in. But of course you're entirely free to deconstruct your own BJ and reconstruct it after what you've just downloaded from her. Now I got to get back to hybernation. By the way, BJ's a good candidate for whatever decent role you have in mind -- as a sister she's certainly one. 26 Schmutzstrasse, October 2000 |
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