The Looking Glass Zoo

During my time in high school doodles were constantly being drawn on the side margins of the class notes. This wasn't unusual; many people doodled on their notes. However, a teacher saw the doodles and felt disturbed enough by them to call in a meeting with my parents. The doodles eventually stopped.

They weren't doodles of any teachers, but rather of myself. More often than not the images resembled Edvard Munch's "The Scream." Why it's considered art on a canvas and a psychological concern on notepaper is beyond me, but there you have it.

A few years later, at the university, these drawings started popping up again. This time I would cut them out of my notes and paste them or tape them in my diaries, which I kept for nearly ten years, and labeled them "The Looking Glass Zoo".

Ignore the words in those years of entries. There might be a tidbit of wisdom here and there, but most of the words in the diaries aren't really worth repeating. That's a part of my past better left buried, only to be exhumed after my death when people can then discover how much of a jerk I was before I matured.

Since I've been getting back into art and drawing, I've gained an interest in looking back through these drawings and sketches - particularly for some raw ideas that never developed back then. I hope to document these images over time and improve upon them. The journaling is more reserved and in this digital form (the blog), which helps to keep me from writing some of the more libel thoughts and gives me a chance to edit the few I do post. I miss the handwriting, though. That's something lacking on the web - too much type and too little personal handwriting.

Fading Melody

Years ago, half my life away, I wrote poetry and music regularly. They even won contests. Even though the poetry itself is backed up on some dusty floppy disk, the creative swarms are lost along with most of the colorful friends I had at the time. One activity I was engrossed in, and what helped during uncreative times, was poetry or lyric interpretation. I would go deep into some poem that already had enough levels of complexity that English teachers feared to tread into them because they could alone spawn half a semester of banter and commentary.

For example, T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men", which tends to address the journey of the soul from a newly acquired state of death to its completeness. There are allusions to Dante, Conrad, Morris and Kipling tied together to show political angst supposedly towards the Treaty of Versailles. I'd tend to think, as others do in this trying time, that most politicians are hollow, stuffed and already dead. Didn't Dante dedicate a special canto in hell just for them?

Other poetry was much easier to cypher, like Edna St. Vincent Millay's "A Few Figs From Thistles" which is primarily about blazing through life, though you'll make regrettable mistakes along the way ... and tends to go into typical relationship taboos such as adultery, cheating, lust and bondage.

Rush, Sixpence None the Richer, Tori Amos and Sarah McLauchlin were bands that I frequented concerts to, as news of them came to me, in the Austin area and had all albums available and ready to be brooded upon. The styles of the last two particularly influenced my style of music, though some strong religious differences and some blatant blasphemous songs from Tori Amos sent me on a decade long boycott.

For some time, music was what I breathed, ate, drank, slept. I surrounded myself with music every moment of the day when it made sense. But over the course of the past ten years that craving became more of an emptiness. Music lost most of its meaning and lyrics were chaff in the wind. Some of that is because of the gross amount of bad music that started coming out. But it had more to do with becoming more "responsible". Though the probability of most of these risks are the same, the consequences are much higher.

But what was interesting when reflecting over how the apathy towards music increased was noticing that, as one "civilizing" or "taming" event came after another, my spirit was eventually broken. My passion for much of anything was chopped at - hacked away - by worldly forces and I felt myself become just another work drone. I remember one employer laughing at me after one of those experiences and literally saying: "So you can be broken!"

Ugh!
Yes - but by breaking people you lose ... the creativity, the passion, the responsibility, the fearless risk taking, the adventurous spirit ... you kill it ... it dies like a fading melody into the grave of white-noise that was so easily attainable to begin with.

These are all necessary for art, beauty, entrepreneurship, adventuring, exploring - in short, it's required to really live out life. I have never met a suicidal person who was passionate about life and enjoying it. I have known one or two who were passionate but constantly getting brow-beaten by the world until they had nothing left to live for.

The challenge is to remember these lessons when my seven year old gets permanent paint on my jacket, or looks up longingly for approval on some messily crafted crayon drawing, or her eyes light up eagerly to pick up an expensive clarinet though she hasn't learned how to play a note. Eventually, and directly from my reactions, she'll either learn to love messes like Pollock and Picasso, or dream of it while she passively files papers. She'll either color the grey world like Julian Beever, or she'll quietly beat the pavements with the masses. She'll croon the world with new music like Goodman, or puff out sad sighs and conform. I don't want her to end up like me - at least not like the me that exists today.

Just like how trees that are chopped to the ground can grow back, that root of inspiration is still buried deep in my soul somewhere. It's a mess getting through the scar tissue and it's a fighting struggle to be enough of a conformist to support my wife and four kids, yet have enough creativity to show them that the world God made for us has more beauty in it than the government would have us believe.

The creative photographer

Joseph O. Holmes | AMNH

Where there are thousands of fantastic photographers there are hundreds of thousands of amateurs who have taken fantastic photographs. I've had to think a bit lately about what separates the two. Some very well established photographers have posted work up on Flickr or on their personal site that I thought - ehhh, that's okay. Likewise, some very average photographers have posted some striking photos on Flickr that draw my admiration.

What is it that gives a photo that "WOW" factor? I think it's the ability to give notice to things and move us by visuals that nearly everyone else takes for granted. It is also the ability to tell a story in a unique way, such as Carl Iwasaki's famous photo of teenagers going steady. Sometimes it's an unexpected gamble that produces a photograph, like Phitar's photo: salomé spinning. Sometimes it's just seeing a detail in the environment that others overlook.

I could try to imitate, but that only takes me as far as being a good imitator. It seems that in photography, using a fresh approach is what gives any shot the potential. That frustrates me because I feel so stale - writer's-block, inhibition, whatever you wish to call it.

Joseph O. Holmes' gallery of photos of people staring at African veldt dioramas is an extraordinary example of a good artistic result. (These pictures somehow remind me of a related Ray Bradbury story.) It would be amazing to delve into his brain with a few questions: What made him think to do this series (AMNH)? Did he naturally envision the result and go for it, or did it strike him at the moment? Was he inspired to do this work, and if so, what inspired him? Is this an imitation of another piece of art that he's seen? Whatever his answers might be to some of these questions, I think we can all agree that he well deserves the $650 a-piece that each of these photographs sell for.

Poughkeepsie Journal Article on Joseph O. Holmes