Your Legs Feel Like Sandpaper, You Can't Do Anything Right

From 1725 to 1890, the Salon de Paris was the academic organization which selected the subject matter, artistic execution, and categorization of all art that was to be exhibited publicly. In 1863 avant-garde artists rebelled against the Salon de Paris, declaring that the jury of the Salon de Paris was too conservative and inhibited true expression, experimentation, and advancement in the visual arts.

To appease them, Napoleon III established Salon des Refuses, where Jury rejects could be shown to the public and given a shot for recognition. From this stemmed the Impressionists’ independent salons in the 1890s, and since then there has ceased to be any kind of academic or government control over what art could become the next big splash in the western world. In essence, the control of art was removed from the institutionalized few and instead given to the masses.

And look at what a mess has been made of that. I don’t want to blame the masses; I want to blame my very favorite and always deserving punching bag: the press/PR world. The media has successfully disemboweled people of any inherent taste or discernment in the art world. The same people who gave us the blown-out controversy of Pastor Terry Jones and the Quran burning last September, the classy classy folks who prey upon people’s disgruntled feelings and vindictive tendencies in order to get fodder for their next cash-cow scandals, these same Masters of Hysteria and Hounds of Hell-bound Controversy have demolished the simple dream of an artist placing his creations in a gallery and allowing those interested to peruse the work for an image that appeals to them.

I may or may not have watched Exit through the Gift Shop last night, and it could or could not have caused this bitter diatribe on the fate of contemporary art. It shows how pervasively this grasping, leering façade of “being in the know” and the It Crowd has choked off individualism of taste or cognizance of preference. Bah, I banish all of you.

I’m going to take a beat and step away from the hair-pulling frustration to talk about one of my longest living loves: Anne Decatur “Poe” Danielewski. Poe has been one of my touchstone music artists ever since Daisy Krakowiak introduced me to her eleven years ago. Poe grew up in Provo, was an incredibly angry oppressed female rocker in the mid-90s with her first album, and in her second she exhibited an achingly eloquent full set of daddy-never-understood-me issues. She’s pretty much everything that is good and pissed off in this world.

And yes, eleven years is a long time to stay excited about only two CDs and about 25 songs, but hey, it could be worse. I could be thinking that Avril Lavigne is legit. At which point you’d all be forced to leave me in a room paneled in bad pop art rip-offs and pipe in mediocre local whiny bands until I promised to behave myself in a more circumspect fashion. But that isn’t necessary, because I know what company I keep, and my friends Fiona, Joan, Bjork, Janis, and the ever present, ever fabulous Poe would never let me down.

I’ve come up with a very fragmented theorem about friendship. Jason and I were talking the other day about levels of intimacy in relationships—strictly platonic ones—and I think that one of the key frustrations many people have (I’m going to keep this discussion to single people, because it’s the only first-hand experience I have) is linked to their mistaken idea of the permanency of friendships. I’m not talking about dramatic circumstances with people turning crazy overnight and deciding to put Nair in your shampoo instead of going to the movies, I’m talking about the impermanence of intimacy levels in friendship. Because in the end there are always two people involved, and people are inconstant in their commitments and how much they wish to open up.

It’s like there are a million planes of familiarity within a friendship, starting with the surface and moving on down as confidences are shared and favors are given and taken more freely. I believe that friction within friendships starts when one party bumps another up a few planes back toward the surface end. Because everyone is out there thinking that intimacy levels are like staked-out territory in the Wild West—once it’s been seen and mapped out and claimed once, it’s there forever, you can mine away at your leisure or run off to another ranch for six months and come back and it’ll still be there. When in reality I think it’s more like trying to set up a claim on a wet patch of beach and fending off the sand getting pulled back into the surf by putting your hands up as barriers—there are far too many dimensional ways that everything can slip back to where it originated.

So when one person is having a bad week or an anti-social moment or a shift in priorities, the other is left infuriated by this withdrawal but without the vocabulary to express the frustration because the basic understanding of how friendships work doesn’t operate in the reality of vacillating behaviors, it’s constructed in an ideal world of cemented landmarks on the road to deepest friendship. I don’t know if that made any sense, I’m going to have to tweak this some more, I’ve just been musing on the true impossibility of bringing two people together in any kind of fortressed battlement of deep friendship—one of them can always desert their post without malice and still bring ruin to the whole operation. I’d like to think that if people got a better perspective of how changeable all of this is, there’d be better communication and fewer feelings of betrayal: it’s so infrequently intentional, this separation, but it’s even less frequently fully understood.

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about this, I guess it has something to do with my preoccupation with the fact that I’m the Bad Guy in somebody’s story. Ok, let’s not kid ourselves, probably many more than one somebody. But that realization is still just a few years old, and it’s a painful one to accept for a control freak like me who wants to be able to dictate that everyone understand the method and motivation for my actions, and when those still make me look like the Bad Guy then they should also take into account my larger life situation at the time, and when that still doesn’t justify it then the wronged party should just assume that I feel really really bad about it and leave it at that.

See? My expectations are ridiculous and even more absurd when you hear my own woe-is-me-for-once-he-wronged-me-greatly tales. It’s at these moments that I just take a deep deep breath, consider holding it forever, and finally exhale with the momentary acceptance that there are some people who won’t like me and I can let that go, followed immediately by another attack of nerves as my controlling nature bucks against the idea of surrendering to bad opinion.

In the end I’ve found that a cocktail of Poe’s “Beautiful Girl,” “Dolphin,” and “That Day” keeps the craziness at bay just as competently as anything else.