June 2024
UArts, Cicadas, Grids, and Malls
I started putting together this entry during the last week of May. I woke up on June 1st to news that the University of the Arts in Philadelphia was closing within a week, with no warning to anyone. This article states the school had 1,300 students and 77 full-time faculty, which seems a lot lower than when I taught there in the ‘00s. My memory may be off, but I think the painting department alone had four or five full-time professors during that period. I assume they were no different than most schools and did not replace retirements with new hires but just spun the ever-thickening Rolodex of Philadelphia-area artists with MFAs to staff through adjuncts.
My sympathies go out to everyone at the school. I enjoyed teaching there even though I was probably was not that good at it. My focus was elsewhere at the time with studio deadlines, etc. That was the part of my life when I was in the studio 70 hours a week and taught about 15 hours.
The school had a great gallery program and there were a number of engaging faculty in the mix who I respect equally as artists and as people. Camille Paglia taught there. We never met. I was told, “Never go to lunch with Camille. She will talk the whole time.” I did not think she was looking to have lunch with the drawing/painting adjunct instructor who worked in a different building than her, but if she did ask, I would have hoped that she did talk the whole time.
The UArts news comes within a year of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts announcement that it would soon no longer be offering degree programs. PaFA will keep the museum, K-12 programming, and educational classes but the rest is getting too expensive to maintain as numbers drop. UArts opened about 150 years ago. PaFA was the nation’s oldest art school/museum, opening in 1805. The Memphis College of Art closed. In Nashville, Watkins was absorbed by Belmont, as was O’More. Private art schools are a tough experience to sell these days.
In Nashville news, the cicadas are almost gone. If you have no idea what I am talking about, consider yourself fortunate, but also understand that you missed an act of nature that is beyond comprehension in a number of ways.
I was born in Wilson, NC, and lived there until I was eight, except for an 18-month detour to Tupelo, MS. Wilson did not and does not have 13- or 17-year cicadas. My mother has no memory of them as a child. It is safe to assume that Clinton, NC, my father’s hometown, also has no cicadas because he has no memories of them as a child either. Both have said that they may have just forgotten about them, but I have been through this a few times between the ages of 8 and 50, and it seems impossible to forget the awakening of a cicada brood. We moved to Hendersonville, TN, in 1983, just in time for a cicada takeover. I do not think any of us knew what was going on. My parents were temporarily confused and thought this was an annual event, not understanding why anyone would live through this every year.
The peak of this year’s brood lasted for about two weeks. I did not measure the noise level in our neighborhood. We have a lot of trees. It was loud. Uncomfortably loud. Difficult to hold a conversation loud. A friend measured the volume in his part of Nashville, which has equivalent tree coverage. It was 82 decibels. A quick search says that 80-85 decibels are comparable to an air conditioner, heavy traffic, or lawnmower and can be damaging after two hours. Imagine walking around for a week with a lawnmower. Now imagine the cicadas think your lawnmower is the mothership. In about one hour of yard work, confused and irritated cicadas flew into me ten or more times. I was hit directly in the face no less than three times. What is the cicada’s reaction to running into my face? Yelling at me as it flies off. Learn to drive, sir or madam. It is hard to tell.
The swarm is tapering off. At first, we had cicadas having sex in the street. Then, there were cicadas having sex in the street next to dead cicadas. Now we just have dead cicadas. See you in 17 years.
The studio progresses. With the last show, I worked my way to a minimalist approach to color. I had a question at my artist talk about why so many pieces were monochromatic. My answer was, “I can’t remember,” which is true, but only because I had not thought about that work for almost five months. The answer is that I wanted to see how much I could boil something down and still be successful or satisfying. That philosophy did not last long. I am pushing it the other way. Brian Wilson expanded the Beach Boys’ concept of songwriting when he found himself restricted by three or four chords. Maybe I feel similarly. Currently, I am at nine colors. I have a set composition I repeat and plug a new palette into each piece. This project is winding down. I will move to a new composition soon. The past year has pointed to using the grid, so I may as well accept my painterly fate and arrive at that endgame of painting. I also want to incorporate more gestural brushwork into the mix, but that might not work out.
If nothing else, I like the work that I have finished. The studio goals for the summer are to follow this path wherever it leads, relearn screenprinting, and finish writing the two books that I keep promising myself. One is almost finished. No one told me this, but you can edit forever. At some point, you just have to say you are finished.
Is the almost-finished book good? The only person who has read it likes it. Most days, I wake up and think, “This is so unnecessary,” but so are a lot of other things. There are some projects I undertake, and I justify them by telling myself that they will help me not die as a mystery to my son. Maybe that is enough. I am not writing a book that will end up being Oprah’s pick. I should lower my expectations for myself. It is a collection of essays about a suburban kid who wanted to be an artist. Nothing terrible ever happened to him. He did not have any addiction issues to overcome. He had little adversity put in his way other than his own neuroses. It can sound unnecessary. It is like growing up in the church and then meeting someone who had a dramatic “Saul on the road to Damascus” level of conversion, like being homeless after destroying everything in their lives with heroin. My simple story of being raised and taught this stuff can feel inadequate, but it really is enough. Any path that leads to God is remarkable. It is not a competition. Neither is becoming an artist. All paths to art are valid if your intentions are good. No matter where I live, I will always be a suburban kid. I felt this way even when I lived in a city for 14 years. Maybe some suburban kid needs to know that growing up in a somewhat boring environment, riding bikes, and playing baseball in a cow field will provide an artist with enough material to get started.
There is a quote attributed to Graham Greene but no proof he said it- “Childhood is the writer’s bank balance.”
Morrissey sang, “Sing your life. Any fool can think of words that rhyme. Many others do. Why don’t you? Do you want to?”
Everyone has a right to put a story down on paper, even if it is just mowing yards while listening to Whitesnake.
Books:
I have only finished one book recently - Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. It is the first fiction book I have read in a number of years. Martyr! is Fine! It had one heck of a press push. It was reviewed by every major news outlet and like a Taylor Swift album, you are not allowed to say anything bad about it.
I have started Randall Sullivan’s The Devil’s Best Trick - How the Face of Evil Disappeared. I assume most people will recognize the title comes from the Charles Baudelaire quote, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” And if you don’t know that Baudelaire said it, you will at least think Kevin Spacey did. I am only a third of the way through it. So far, it is a book that toggles between a true crime story from Texas in the 1980s and an exposition of the emergence of Satan in cultural history. Presumably, the disappearance of Satan will take over as the book progresses. I do not know why I am surprised by the evil content of this book. It is about evil. It is right there in the title. But it is still shocking.
I also began Terry Hayes’s The Year of the Locust, a very long terrorist thriller I bought because it was 40% off and I wanted a long book for the summer. I read slowly so I bought it rather than tie up the library’s copy. Seems wrong to do so. It is over 700 pages. Why was it 40% off? Because the geniuses at the Streets of Indian Lake shopping center in Hendersonville could not negotiate with Barnes and Noble to renew the lease in that spot so B&N had a closing sale. The bookstore had been there for 16 years. More than likely, a gym will take over the space. Before this closure, Hendersonville had two bookstores, Barnes and Noble and a used bookstore. Now, it has one used bookstore. How many gyms does Hendersonville have? More than 20. The people need more. Less reading! More rowing machines!
Plus, it is going into a shopping center deliberately built to act as a fake, theme-park-looking town square because Hendersonville is one of the rare small towns in middle Tennessee that does not have an actual town square. A town square with a movie theater, collection of restaurants, radio station, ice cream parlor, clothing stores, etc. It works well enough, considering it was plopped down in the middle of an old farm property 25 years ago. The bookstore was a good anchor for it. But never in my life have I thought, “I sure would like to go to a movie and then conveniently walk over to the gym and work out.”
And you may think, so what? It is a Barnes and Noble. I saw You’ve Got Mail. I know those gross chain bookstores put mom-and-pop stores under in the 90s and blah blah blah. Maybe they did. But not in Hendersonville. The bookstores in 1980s Hendersonville were a Hallmark store and the magazine aisle at Kroger. The Hallmark store sold greeting cards and had a wall of books akin to something you would buy for a summer beach read. They seemed to know enough to order dozens of copies of summer reading books for local junior high and high school students. Other than that, eh. Then we got a Waldenbooks, which if you never went to one was just a slightly bigger version of one of those Hudson News airport stores. Best sellers, classics, and magazines. Why did Waldenbooks go out of business? Because they deserved to. This Barnes and Noble served a purpose. So, thanks, U.S. Properties Group.
Somewhat related, this story indicates a developer would like to build apartments and more near Cool Springs Galleria in Franklin. That dovetails with the new apartments proposed in the old Macy’s parking lot at Rivergate Mall. That is all good with me as long as you figure out how to revitalize the mall at Rivergate. They will not do it. They will slowly tear it down and build more apartments. You already tore down my childhood movie theater and put up an effing BJ’s Wholesale Club with no regard that I saw dozens of movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rocky IV, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Red Dawn, and Wayne’s World there. Whatever. I am sure buying 10 pounds of peanut butter and new tires for their car will leave a similar imprint on a child’s soul.
Any walkable development that can be built around malls gets a thumbs-up from me. It strikes me as a good starting point for making the suburbs less car-based. I am not a person you will hear bemoaning malls. My support for them is a running joke in my family. And it is not because of our consumer society or anything like that. I have never spontaneously bought anything at a mall. When I was a kid, if I wanted a Dominique Wilkins poster, I went to the sports store, bought the poster and left. Now, if I need pants, I go to a store. I buy pants. I leave. I walk around, but not for the temptation of buying other stuff, but because walking indoors in Nashville in August is preferable to walking outdoors.
The mall’s decline marks a significant shift in how American teens operate. It was a free place for kids to congregate. Yeah, your child is addicted to their phone, but where do you want them to go hang out for free? You moved them out to the suburbs and put a phone in their hands. What did you expect? Give them a place to go. A kid can only bowl so many games, putt so many putt-putts, and squash so many pennies on train tracks.
Movies:
To tie a lot of the above ramblings together, a family friend of mine has released a trailer for a new movie. Ted Welch is an actor based in Nashville. We grew up in Hendersonville. You can read through his IMDB page and see he is a steady worker, appearing in shows and movies like Justified, True Blood, The Help, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
His new movie, Hey, I Made This for You, appears to have been filmed in Hendersonville and Madison. I do not know how much the movie will roam around Hendersonville, but the trailer sticks to the older parts- the rundown, small-town grunginess that I grew up with and love that is slowly being replaced. If nothing else, I will still be able to revisit these places in some form one day. Some of these properties will probably change due to the “revitalization” efforts being proposed by the city, and others were hit by the most recent tornado, so I am glad Ted got them on film.
I met a new Hendersonvillian a few years ago that is “embarrassed” by the west side of Hendersonville. He always tells his friends which exit to get off Vietnam Vets so they do not have to see it. Go back to California.
You can watch the trailer to Hey, I Made This for You on Ted’s Instagram account.
Finally: I have very little interest in Disney or Star Wars. My son was told long ago that the only way he was going to Disney Word was on his own dime. The Star Wars movie franchise has been an output of diminishing returns for me since 1980. So what possessed me to watch a 4-hour critique of the now-closed Star Wars landlocked “cruise” hotel? I have no idea. I read an article. I am still not sure who Jenny Nicholson is and I do not want to do too much research to find out because her video needs nothing more. I do not need her origin story and I do not need a sequel. This is how you critique something. Well-researched, informative, entertaining, and humble when she knows she is not privy to all of the information she needs. She offers up suggested fixes that sound a lot better than what she is critiquing. So far, this video has been watching 6.5 million times. I suggest watching this thirty minutes at a time for a week. Here’s the link.
That is it. See you next month. I will be overwhelmed by heat, saturated by humidity, but less bothered by cicadas.
“Back to the grid…” I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (who teaches at Art Center or used to), but he and his co-collaborator Rebecca Norton (a friend) have an interesting series of meditations and disruptions on the grid. Together they are known as “Awkward x2” or A2. https://www.awkwardx2.com/