Paul Thek, Knife, 1965; Sol Lewitt, Still from Serial Project #1; Giotto crucifix.
Kafka’s An Imperial Message…
The Emperor — so they say — has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death — all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs — in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door — but that can never, never happen — the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
“We’re entering a world that needs to be made strange before it becomes familiar.”
Michael Silverblatt
Old video study
Interview with Michael Silverblatt
Michael Silverblatt hosts Bookworm, a weekly literary interview show I’ve been listening to for at least ten years. I love this show. Check out the Bookworm site and look up interviews with David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, George Saunders, Guy Maddin, Dennis Cooper, Harold Bloom — to name just a few off the top of my head that have inspired me over the years. Then check out the Bomb Magazine interview with Silverblatt, who has an amazing ability to pry open the swarming world of ideas that lives within and around our best literature.
It’s really good to start with what you love for a certain kind of writer. Another kind of writer needs to start with what he hates. It can take years for a writer to discover what kind of writer he is. And usually that discovery is marked by an extraordinary change of voice and also a great response — not just from critics but from people too. People responded to The Corrections as if they were hearing a long absent voice of truth about the family, as informed by love, by despair and exile. And that really made that book very interesting — that a writer who had been something of a social satirist found a place where he could join his satiric and fierce impulse with love.
When did we become a thing to hold on to rather than just something to hold? We didn’t know America was in love with us until it was too late. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. America fell in love with the idea of us, with some fantasy of us, some fantasy of what America and us together would be, before we had a chance to tell him it could never work, we weren’t ready for a relationship, we weren’t comfortable being needed, we didn’t have the resources to be America’s dream.
So since the bus ride home this evening I’ve been working on something new. I’m calling it either “The State of the Muscle” or “States of the Muscle” or “Ed Muscle: My head looks very plump and disturbingly round in photos in a way that has nothing to do with reality”.
Loosely modeled after the annual presidential State of the Union address, this piece will attempt to articulate the present condition of Ed Muscle studio and outline future plans, however dreamy or outlandish. I’m not sure what this piece will end up looking like — right now I’m thinking one long-ass web page filled with images and text and videos, whatever it takes to articulate the message (which is still sort of vague as I write this).
This could take a weekend, or many weekends. In the meantime, I will keep updating Girl Muscle Girl and we’re getting close, very close, to re-launching the Francis Muscle site. I’m excited about the new thing though, and I’m delighted to announce it in such a head-scratchingly premature way.
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The Stoked American by Out Hud
In other news, I survived layoffs at my day job today, so the Muscle for America tour I had planned will have to wait. Sorry Houston, sorry Binghamton.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Vanity Fair a while back…
It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of — in no special order — insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran.
And now, a commercial break featuring a few lines from Michael Burkard’s Ruby for Grief…
I’m fond of the bridges the sea makes in my mind, although far away.
Even with a shallow life before this one, or a life
after, I know my life is short, each is. The sea
bridges such familiar territory the life makes. The sea
measures such mending I make, and gives it colors:
ruby for grief, yellow for choice, flint green for staying awake.
Back in 2008, I started work on a series of images based on apologies I wanted to make to friends. The project went off track and morphed into something else, but I still remember how I felt trying to make those pictures. Hard to explain, but the feeling was something resembling joy. Looking back, I think I was excited by the prospect of trying to embody really personal apologies in visual ways, to take stuff that would come off as sentimental in speech and transform it all into something that felt irresolvable and complex, more alive, and in a way, more direct.
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Glad and Sorry by Faces
Thank you kindly
For thinking of me
If I’m not smiling
I’m just thinking
I think there’s a bit of an apology in everything I make. The apology is for all the time I spend working on shit that’s by nature frivolous, inherently useless, socially irredeemable. Lots of guilt follows me around, but I’m still compelled to make the stuff, to see where it takes me. I think I know why, but I can’t figure out how to talk about it. Maybe someday. Watch this space.
Anyway, one large format painting came out of the apology series. Here she is…
17 Murders and 16 Apologies for Brother James, 2008
“The allegory is ended, its coils absorbed into the past, and this afternoon is as wide as an ocean. It is the time we have now, and all our wasted time sinks into the sea and is swallowed up without a trace. The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future.”
From The System by John Ashbery
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“What the fuck is this?”
“A… blog?”
“A blog? With your feelings in it? Ed!”
“It’s not about you, it’s more like an idealized version of you that like says more about me in the end, about how what I want overlays what’s there and makes a new reality…”
“Wait. Ed. Why is your forehead so shiny right now?”
“And the form of the thing is like totally dictated by the feeling. The form and the medium itself actually, it all comes from the feeling, which is abstract, I think. And then later on, the content, the story, comes from the form. So that’s why I have to know all these different things — web stuff and drawing and taking pictures and being able to write directly about what I feel. Because the images I need to make are totally fractured, like the feelings…”
“The story is like a piece of glass dropped from up high, I know.”
“Yeah. But so I have to do this. And the thing is, as weird as this shit is, as out there and impossible to imagine as all this is, it’s the one thing in my life I’m sure is going to work out. I can see it. It’s going to happen.”
“Barring tragedy.”
“Barring tragedy. Because all I need is a little more time. Nutrients and time. And computers.”
“What do you want from me? And why are you rubbing your hands together like you’re trying to start a fire?”
“I need time, some of your time. And you know, some real conversation. Because: No end to the things made out of human talk.”
“What we say matters. How we say it, when we say it. It’s all we have. Don’t just think it, say it.”
“Yeah! So like go ahead and ask me…”
“Ugh. Ed.”
“One more time please please please.”
“Fine.”
“–”
“Ed…”
“Yes ma’am?”
“What is this Muscle in me?”
“Well how ’bout we set this silly boat on fire and find out!”
Melodrama isn’t life exaggerated, it’s just life uninhibited… it’s your feelings, it’s just uninhibited versions of them. It’s your waking life that’s inhibited, and that’s what’s called naturalism. But what can be more natural than the feelings that you experience when you’re dreaming?
Charlie Chaplin’s bum is at the mercy of a cruel world. Keaton, with his impassive face and a hat flat as a pancake, is a stoic. He confronts one setback after another with serenity worthy of a Buddhist monk.
It’s high time I start acknowledging the influence Buster Keaton has had on my worldview. In the coming years, I hope to steer the Ed Muscle enterprise toward more performance-based work and Keaton, for now, is a model.
“But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.” I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you’re saying is, “I don’t think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought,” and you’re wrong. You’ve got two things going for you. You’ve got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it’s the closest thing to magic you’ll experience in your life. Second, you’ve got the entire planet listening and there’s just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.
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