Leonard Cohen, 1992

My therapist succinctly noted the other day that life is complicated.  As grateful as I am to Mrs. Duh, I think when Didion sat on the floor of the Doors' studio as they recorded their third album, she had no clue.  Neither did my grandmother, who rose in the ranks of the Communist Party and commanded honor and respect that materialized in caviar and trips to Paris at the height of the Cold War, she had no idea that years later, while reading Isaac Bashevis Singer's "The Repentant" to her granddaughter, she would think about her Judaism but only in passing.  

Complicated comes with so many fascinating clues to just how it will only be exacerbated.  I think the trick is to embrace the impending now and capitalize on the consuming moment that has no before and whose after doesn't matter. I curated a mini exhibition about this.  

brilliant image by Tod Seelie

It makes perfect sense to call it that because it's about serving the servants.  This one time, some girl from Spin dot come asked me at a Jarvis Cocker concert what the best command a lyric has ever stressed was and I said "Serve the Servants," duh.  It's not so much about teen angst or rebellious retaliation  or even nostalgic mind meanderings as it is about giving back.   You give back to no one in particular but it's like that old wise saying about not spitting from the top during your climb up, or something to that effect. 

  Three very important J.C.'s.   

It's about being in love with today and when I say that, I try not to be a dirty liar and mean it.  I'm not sure how God figures in the existential point of existence but just in case, I write Him letters in my journal.  They're selfish but with good intentions.  For example, this one time, I asked for a nice Jewish husband who would be funny, kind and generous; I included a parenthetical note to Him where I pointed out that I never mentioned "rich" as a quality.  I thought He would find that funny. I did.  It followed this snooze machine of a diatribe about wallowing in my piss puddle of deceit and disappointment.  But then, I love crying rivers.  I even wrote this obituary about this girl who cried so much, she drowned in her own tears.  Stupid slut.   

I don’t have any excessive passions to which I can say I devote my life with ardent fervor.  I fancy the occasional torrid love affair as much as the next guy, but my formative years were not spent getting inculcated with any excessive jive that would then become my foundation as a person.  My parents were not in a cult; we’re Jews so Jesus was never an issue; actually, even God in the Judaic sense never really figured more than a good Milos Forman feature or a trip to the Baltic beaches.  This was in Russia.  In America, we had bigger concerns such as forging a new life or in my case, post-Kurt Cobain syndrome and ripped fishnets.  
I’ve heard of blind devotion – Manson followers who killed Sharon Tate-Polansky, the Waco, TX compound suicide, Satmar enclaves who attended Ahmadinejad conventions in Iran – but I could never empathize.  I mean, obviously.  Recently, a buddy invited me to attend Chulent, a weekly gathering for former Orthodox Jews who’ve become, as they say, wayward in their departure from the community due to personal misgivings, qualms, doubts and other forms of free-thinking tendencies that the community apparently disproves of.  The kids gather to discuss what they hate and yet can’t ever shake.  

Chulent is a sloppy concoction that can stew through Shabbat when the laws prohibit lighting fires.

An Orthodox Jew from “the community” started this group as an open forum for those very same kids whose disenchantment with their staunch formation drove them away from this community.  What’s fascinating to me is that no matter how far they run (one, for example, enlisted in the army and changed his last name to Anarchy), they can’t run far enough.  This tenuous God and the many ramifications are embedded in their essence regardless of who or what they become.  How does a community inflict its strength so deeply into a child’s mind, that this child will forever be tied to its stronghold despite his ostensible relinquishing of its teachings and ways?   The guy who runs the program calls it anti-establishmentarian, which he claims, is very Jewish.  While that may be true, doesn’t blind adherence inflict that very life by proxy that Guy Debord decried so profoundly in Society of the Spectacle, the only true notion of anti-establishmentarian that we can consider in all seriousness?? To be punk, don’t you have to question the higher authority?  Sure, these kids do or would like to, but there’s no shame to feel the comfort of the familiar.  And if it’s a fear and paranoia that drove them back to these roots, it’s only because they were inculcated with the teachings that instilled their neurosis.  
They found a community within a community that is, in fact, a microcosm of the fucked up real world; there's something misplaced yet strangely connected, like a mystical synergy of many anarchic parts. I guess that's what they mean when they say it's "gevalding."

Nostalgia is a bizarre concept with no place in the postmodern discourse. I'll elaborate and promise not to smother with a pretentious harangue.  Dictionary.com defines nostalgia as "a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time," which makes perfect sense.  When applied to art, however, those artists we dismiss as "nostalgic," or worse "romantic," have a skewed sense of the present and an impossible penchant for some sort of historical contextualization that forces a contrived meaning rather than a probe of the persistence of now.  After all, when Morrissey, asked "How soon is now?" he simply meant that the present is indeed a series of contiguous nows and questions that retrospectively preclude solid introspection. 
My point is about Bob Ross.

I've been thinking about nostalgia and how easy it is to get all consumed by it.  Bob Ross painted his "happy little trees" not because he was a kitschy romantic who wanted to emulate some crappy bygone era of idyllic landscape but because he was a giant hippie who seized the moments of happiness in the very process of creating each little bush, river, and mountain in the span of half an hour.  I was reminded of him by David Smith, an artist who had a brilliant piece about Bob Ross and the color field paintings of the minimalists in the exhibition Squaring the Circle, curated by Summer Guthery.  Ross wasn't striving for his big solo show or gallery gig.  It's funny but someone so not integral to the art historical discourse is such a renegade.  Bob Ross's voice still makes me smile.  Smith's piece was a darkened room, not unlike Bob's studio, where Bob's voice resounded over projected color circles that overlapped to create simple fields, just like Bob once did. 
Funny how everything comes full circle but not to poke you in the eye with a jolt of memory but to make art with references that point to the heightened perceptions of the now, for whatever that means.  Thanks, David, for such a great piece!

A mysterious artist, who shall remain nameless despite my privileged access to this information, placed this very tall bench on the traffic island at Houston and Suffolk.  Almost immediately, probably within hours, the Department of Transportation seized it and placed a note to the "owner."   Image and letter posted below.

Only in New York (note to NYMag: another reason to love this city) can an artist and the DOT have an open dialogue to which the entire public is privy.  Kudos to the artists for pulling this off, amassing some press, and receiving a personal love letter from the Department.