is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Time Warp.
I finally saw the documentary Waste Land last night. Not sure how or why it took me so long to see it, given that Vik Muniz has been a favorite artist of mine since roughly 1997. Point one: you should see it. It will make you think... in all kinds of ways, about garbage, about human beings, about art, about what we owe to others and to the earth, about recording stories on film, and so on.
Point two: Seeing it made me remember that I once wrote an essay on friendship inspired by Muniz's work on Seeing is Believing, a show he did at ICP in New York in the late '90s. The show was transformative (of me). At the time it was such an extravagance for me to buy the exhibition book... it cost something like $60 which was, you know, a lot of groceries for a poor graduate student. But attending that show was like being drawn into a religion by the spirit, and I simply could not just leave it all there when there was also something I could bring home with me. (In some way that means I am of a type animated more by the book than by the spirit, which should not surprise you.) (And now I've just learned from a websearch that the book is rare and worth some money, not that I'm going to sell it.)
So the documentary reminded me of an essay written long ago and then forgotten. And it, the essay on friendship, is pretty good. I say that like I'm not commenting on my own work. I wrote it in 1998 or 1999. I've done a lot of thinking and aging since then such that I both am and am not the same person who wrote it. And, in any case, it is interesting to live long enough to create something good and smart and interesting and then forget entirely that you ever wrote it, only to have it return for you later and function as a surprise gift from someone else. I would say some things differently now; they would not necessarily be better things or better said.
The best part: at some point in the mid-2000s Vik Muniz himself found the essay on the www and then wrote me an email thanking me for it. That is like best of all worlds with no need for a pangloss. The funny thing is that I had attended a lecture he gave once, where I had introduced myself and then shyly handed him a paper copy of the magazine with the article in it, which he had apparently never read (which is entirely understandable; I've never been anywhere close to famous and yet I've never read probably 75% of the papers people have handed to me at conferences. As Riff Raff has said, "time is fleeting; madness takes its toll" aka there both is and is not a lot of time for everything).
I suppose it's too bad that Vik Muniz read (and you, if you click, will read) the utterly unadorned web version rather than the version illustrated (with permission) by his works and contained in a magazine with individually signed and numbered linoblock printed covers. But that's how it goes.
I wish Waste Land hadn't been up for best documentary the same year as Exit Through the Gift Shop, and that Waste Land had won one year and Banksy the next. But it is not news to me that what I value is not usually what gets offered any bigtime awards.
(Even the tiniest of things, a really funny sitcom that I enjoy, gets a life of two months only to be pulled and replaced by PAUL REISER who is the human equivalent of a sad trombone noise. Of course, any look at the current state of things around us will suffice to show that it might not be a good thing to find oneself in the midst of anyone's successful imagining of the norm right now.)
Better to create something for yourself, with others.
Speaking of which, I went to a really interesting talk about Street Art last night. Jordan Seiler and Gaia were awesome, but the dude from Wooster Collective was much MUCH less interesting than he thought he was.
12:42 p.m. - April 10, 2011
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