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All the things you try to hide

One Saturday morning in the spring of 1998, I woke up and thought about Stacy Guess. I hadn’t kept up with him in the five years since I’d graduated college, and decided to look him up online. This was pre-Google and pre-Wikipedia, so it took some effort. Also, computers were powered by coal back then.

Stacy and his girlfriend Holly came to Hampshire together from North Carolina. She was a dance student around my age; he was five years older than me and the coolest guy I’d ever met. I’m talking Chet Baker cool, not Fonzie cool. He was a trumpet player, a philosophy major, and a good conversationalist. He was incredibly thin, with Peter Weller cheekbones, and could wear a fedora without douchebagginess. He was hip. I was the guy who looked like Napoleon Dynamite.

Stacy and I lived in the same dorm, the “silent floor” of Dakin house, a 10-room hall nicknamed “The Morgue.” Despite our age and coolness gaps, we got along well, trading music and shooting the breeze along with another Morgue-mate, Mark F. Stacy returned my copy of Thomas Dolby’s Astronauts and Heretics CD all scratched up and unplayable, but I was too much of a pussy to mention that to him.

I graduated, and five years later I woke up and wondered what had become of him.

Within a few minutes, I discovered that Stacy was in Squirrel Nut Zippers, the NC Dixie, jazz, swing, klez-fusion band that had scored a hit the previous year with “Hell.” That’s the one about how in the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife. The album, Hot, went platinum. David Gates wrote a neat little piece about it. I thought, “Awesome! You made good, pal!”

A few clicks later, I read, “Stacy had left the band by the time they recorded Hot.” I thought, “Dumbfuck! You got out right before the getting got good!”

I kept searching and then discovered that Stacy had died of a heroin overdose just a few weeks earlier. I thought, “. . .”

I got in touch with Holly the following Monday. She told me that they’d split up long before the end, but that she was still devastated at the news. She told me she and Stacy had stayed in touch with Mark, which I’d failed to do because I was a dick in my last years at Hampshire.

She got me Mark’s info, and said he’d like to hear from me. He told me some anecdotes of Stacy’s manipulative, self-destructive behavior in his last years. I felt sad for Holly, Mark, and Stacy’s family. Of course, I thought about that Squirrel Nut Zippers song, but not in a “drug addicts go to hell!” kinda way; it was more in a “man, that guy’s life must’ve been hell” kinda way.

A few years later, in a used record store on St. Marks, I found Legacy, a compilation CD of Stacy’s music from different bands and solo recordings. Proceeds went to a music scholarship at his high school in Chapel Hill.

On Facebook, Holly posted a note that Stacy died 12 years ago today. She’s doing well: living in NC, a couple of cute kids, likes to sing. At least, that’s what I glean from her FB page. So that’s why I wrote about it. Sorry to be so deathy this year.

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What It Is: 3/8/10

What I’m reading: Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, and The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte.

What I’m listening to: A new Mad Mix I’m finishing up.

What I’m watching: Shopgirl, which felt like Steve Martin’s poor attempt at being LA’s Woody Allen.

What I’m drinking: Death’s Door Gin & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Well, Rufus is celebrating his second anniversary in our home today, but Otis got a little too aggressive with a neighbor’s dog a few days ago and nipped the poor guy on the foreleg. That said, I warned the owner around a million times that Otis isn’t good around smaller dogs, and that it wasn’t a good idea for her to bring her pup over. No harm done (her dog has really thick, curly fur that kinda protected it), and she was the one apologizing. Also:

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Where I’m going: Nowhere, although I’ve got a court appearance this Wednesday as part of the never-ending process of recovering the vet fees that resulted from Rufus’ attack lat May.

What I’m happy about: Two years of Ru without rue. Also, it’s my mom’s [cough, cough]th birthday! Congrats!

What I’m sad about: Amy won the rodering battle at her birthday dinner at Marea on Saturday night, with her Baccala antipasti. Who new salt cod, polenta and beets would whup everything else on the menu (except for the Ricci, of course).

What I’m worried about: How I’ll deal with the fact that I didn’t win an Oscar before turning 40.

What I’m pondering: What I should be doing with my reading and writing. I kinda want to write a long-form essay that would require 10 tons of reading and work, and I can’t imagine any sorta market for it.

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Sometimes

I don’t open books at random too often, but I just did, because I’m kinda bored with Shopgirl, and this was the book I was using as a mouse-pad for my new jerry-rigged media center:

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there — I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television — you don’t feel anything.

Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television. When you’re really really involved with something, you’re usually thinking about something else. When something’s happening, you’re usually thinking about something else.

—The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)

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What It Is: 3/1/10

What I’m reading: Alec: The Years Have Pants, and an article in the New Yorker about Montaigne that one of my pals forwarded me a few month ago.

What I’m listening to: The soundtracks to Sunshine and Moon, as recommended by Jason Kottke.

What I’m watching: The Conversation, Frost/Nixon, Funny People, Coraline, and the U.S./Canada gold medal hockey game. That was the only event I watched from the entire 2+ weeks of Winter Olympics coverage.

What I’m drinking: Old Raj and/or Hendricks and Q-Tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Neither of them is too happy about the 20″ of snow we got pasted with last week. Otis managed to eat a mouse that had died from the bait trips we left out for it in the garage. Apparently, my library was on his little mouse bucket list, so he died in the middle of that room, where Otis found him and swallowed him whole. I tried to get Mickey out of his mouse, but by the time I got to him and pried his mouth open, all I could see was the end of the mouse’s tail going down Otis’ gullet. It doesn’t look like there was enough poison in the little guy to affect Otis, happily enough. With his propensity for curling up in a tight ball in the sun, we always joked that Otis is part-cat. Now we know the horrible truth; he’s all cat.

Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, but I managed to get roped into a round-trip to Philadelphia that literally amounted to 3 minutes of parking before driving back (130+ miles) home. All this to pick up a collection of files that could have easily been packed into a box or two and shipped up to me. I’m peeved about this.

What I’m happy about: It stopped snowing. AFTER FORTY-EIGHT HOURS.

What I’m sad about: That I finally watched a hockey game all the way through, and my country failed. I’ll never watch hockey again. Sob!

What I’m worried about: Flying from Brazil to Paris.

What I’m pondering: What to get my wife for her birthday (it’s Wednesday, btw).

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Crazy Apes

I haven’t posted an ape-attack story in a long time (ook!), so here’s the sad story of the Connecticut policeman who had to shoot Travis, an enraged, 200-lb. chimp, to death last year. Travis, you may recall, had mauled a friend of his owner.

It’s a little Reno 911!-like to visualize the chimp actually opening the police car’s driver-side door, while Officer Chiafari was in the car, but his description of the scene and the Ms. Nash’s wounds is downright horrifying, so don’t click through if you’ve got a weak stomach.

Even as Officer C. struggles with PTSD and depression, I think we can all learn from his closing words:

“I consider [Travis] a victim,” he said. “He should have been in the jungle where he’s supposed to be. Not in a house drinking wine and taking Xanax.”

Sometimes I feel that way myself. Then I switch to gin and Ambien. Ook!

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Crumbs

It’s entirely possible that I have brain damage. In the main, I see virtually everything abstract in terms of geometry and/or symbolic logic. Listening to a baseball game on the radio, I’m rarely visualize anything more than a standard scorecard diamond. Any hit to right or left field only travels along the foul line.

Storytelling, I make some pretense at imagination, but I usually over-engineer stories to make them “airtight,” to ensure they fit unobtrusively in the world at large. I spend so much time considering the implausibilities and details that the stories themselves end up lifeless. Maybe that’s why I’ve gained some interest in photography; at least there I’m capturing something that already exists.

(Maybe I’m also still guiding myself through depression and denigrating myself a bit much.)

In my Salinger post two weeks ago, I included a video excerpt from Crumb, the documentary by Terry Zwigoff about Robert Crumb and his brothers. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out, even if you’re not into cartooning. It’s one of my favorite movies, exploring notions of art and sex via unforgettably and entertainingly messed-up characters. (There’s also a cringe-worthy segment with Trina Robbins complaining about Crumb’s cartoons’ meanness toward women, but it was 1994, so hey.)

This recent post by Frank Santoro put me in mind of one of the best scenes in Crumb. Santoro writes about a 1992 NYC in-store appearance by the great French cartoonist Moebius. At first, he was amazed at how perfect and quick Moebius’ sketches were as he illustrated the front pages of fans’ books. But then he noticed some of Moebius’ sketchpad pages:

The loose pages were finished pages for a new Major Grubert story. I knew he drew “automatically” out of his head, with no pencils, but I wasn’t prepared to see how precise and loose his originals were. They were made without ANY discernible hesitation.

There was one page and one panel in particular that really stayed with me. It was a canyon rock wall that curled away in the distance. Floating along in it was a boat with a shadowed figure in the front. I remember it so distinctly because the marks that comprised the boat were like an intricate latticework, like a wicker chair. The sheer number of lines made the boat dark and it stood in relief of the canyon. It didn’t look drawn and shaded, it looked etched into the paper. Did he lightbox those lines? There were no pencil lines at all. Even the handwriting was eyeballed in straight pen. The page was perfect. I was in awe.

Read the rest of it, which includes Santoro’s encounter with that very page when he picked up a Moebius book on a recent trip to France. (Oh, and here’s my pic of Frank from the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Hey! You all should come to this year’s TCAF! Amy & I will be wandering through!)

Which brings me back to Crumb. I hesitate to call this segment the centerpiece of the movie, but it is one of the more illuminating examples of what art is, and how it differs from whatever it is I do. In the scene, Crumb looks through the sketchbook of his son Jesse and the two of them compare drawings they’ve made from an old photograph.

Clip copyright 1994 Superior Pictures, “Crumb“, until they make me take it down.

At the end, we get the following exchange:

Jesse: YOU didn’t go to art school and look, you’re rich and famous!

Robert: [laughs] We’re not talking about rich and famous; we’re talking about learning to draw.

Unspoken — or just barely hinted at in Robert’s “heh” preceding that comment — is, “Well, son, I’m a genius and you’re not.”

“Genius” isn’t a shorthand way of describing Crumb’s art is naive or unschooled. He possesses a virtuosity that comes from countless hours of labor (instigated by his brother Charles, shown in that clip I used for the Salinger post), but his genius, as displayed in that clip, comes in knowing what to exaggerate, in knowing how to see.

How does the eye then see inward? How do artists like Crumb and Moebius reach the point where the imagined is evoked so surely and beautifully?

Sometimes, I think they’ll examine my brain after I die and discover that I was missing some important piece, like the way Pete Maravich turned out to be missing a chamber of his heart.