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Kim can paint
Sunday, September 5 1999
A year ago yesterday, Kim and I began our expedition across the continent to change our coastal identity. I didn't know it at the time, but I was leaving behind a peaceful world of slackerly decadence to settle in a new, optimistic world of high-pressure corporate demands. The only clothes I brought with me to this new world fit easily within a small back pack, first on the back seat of my Dodge Dart, then into a small dark corner of an overpacked transamerica-bound Volvo sedan. Along the way Kim added a few odd tee shirts to these basic provisions, and before I went job hunting I went to a thrift store and added some clothes superficially suitable to job interviews. But still, during this year, the size and diversity of my wardrobe has been at a lifetime low.
On Friday night, Kim was in a drunkenly playful mood when she decided to set the seat of my old black jeans on fire with her plastic Harley Davidson bong lighter as I bent over to search through the CDs to find music to play. I'd worn those pants to work earlier that same day even though (what with their missing top button, the small seat hole and uselessly rotted-out pockets) they'd been only marginally appropriate for weeks, even in my nominally casual workplace. I guess I'd gotten my money's worth from those black jeans, which I'd originally rescued years ago from an Oberlin dumpster at the wasteful end of another rich kid school year. In the aftermath of Kim's pyropranksterism, my pants were officially in an unwearable state, even by my meagre standards.
Today, though, I decided to actually take the necessary time to breathe new life into my wardrobe. I got Kim to take me to Hillcrest and I went to the Baras Foundation Thrift store and blew $13 on a some pants and a tee shirts. Proceeds from this $13 will go, I'm told, to helping troubled kids in the greater San Diego area. If instead I'd gone to Target and blown $50, proceeds would be going to, well, you get the picture. One of the tricky things about the Baras foundation is the fact that clothes are almost completely assorted on the racks. Petite women's slacks are mixed in with bulky farmer brown dungarees. It's a maze of confusion and I wouldn't recommend shopping there while stoned.
I drove us out of Hillcrest through the remarkable semi-arid topography that lies in the vicinity of the San Diego Zoo and Balboa Park. As we neared the zoo, Kim sort of wanted to do something touristy until she saw the enormous number of people already there, queued up in their minivans and Terrain Humpers.
The sun never came out at all today and temperatures stayed in the 60s. For all the raving I've heard about San Diego weather, I'm completely underwhelmed. Here it's usually just a little too cold, even in the summer, and the ocean is a perpetual icebath, more suited to sexually repressed college freshman at Liberty University than the likes of me. But beyond that is the mundane lack of variety. You can't imagine how I miss the sound of a good soaking rain, the overwhelming swelter of East Coast August humidity, or the bright bluish winter's light sparkling off a trillion fallen snowflakes.
After picking up some provisions from the pathetic little Ocean Beach art supply store, Kim and I stayed inside most of the afternoon, both of us painting. Kim started out with watercolour and moved on eventually to acrylic. I'd been telling her from the start to just use acrylic, since they're the most responsive & forgiving of media result-wise. The fact that children start out in school doing watercolour seems to have convinced a lot of people that watercolour is the easiest type of painting, the way to get started on an artistic career. But they're overlooking the fact that watercolour is chosen as a child's first paint media because it is the most forgiving of media material-wise, not result-wise. A watercolour brush accidentally left out to dry can be recovered. A neglected acrylic brush, on the other hand, is a total loss. One must have compulsively clean habits when using acrylics or the cost of working with them quickly becomes prohibitive. I was a little concerned that perhaps Kim was too much of a kosmonaut to use acrylics, that the phone would ring and that would be the end of another $20 brush. So I warned her and warned her and told her about the need to develop compulsive cleanliness habits, and this all seemed to pay off.
I awoke from a Corona-induced nap to find that Kim had actually painted a picture. It wasn't really a picture of anything, mind you, but it showed all the classic signs of a good early-stagen realist painting or, perhaps, an abstract work in the tradition of Kandinsky. The composition was excellent, and even the colours were good. I was particularly struck by how fresh and confidently she'd laid down the big white slashes of titanium acrylic. I looked at the painting and I could see something compelling woven in there, a fox chasing a chicken through the forest, viewed through the wings of a huge hovering mosquito in the foreground. Someone still needed to go in there and bring them out, but that sort of work is relatively trivial compared to putting them there in the first place.
Still, none of the things I'm saying about Kim's painting haven't also been said about rave-review works that turned out to have been done by chimps and elephants.
At various times today Lisa's new roommate and a female friend came over to hang out with us and experience the pleasure of illegal smoke. Later on in the evening we ordered a pizza and watched one of their videotapes, the flick Dead Man Walking.
Unfortunately, the pizza arrived just as the dialogue entered its least pleasant phase. For this and other possible reasons, the bong hit I'd had never managed to induce hunger of any consequence, and I only managed to eat a single slice.
Dead Man Walking was a fascinating movie, especially so for its moralistic ambivalence and the fact that its male protagonist, though compassionately portrayed, was only marginally sympathetic at best; the path that led to his death row cell was characterized by the typical animal urge-catalyzed bad luck of all the redneck losers I've known.
Such complexities are indeed refreshing in the morally-absolute world of cinema.
But I wasn't especially impressed by the ensemble of actors chosen for the roles. Certainly there were plenty of people on the streets of Hollywood who could have done a more convincing job of "oldest redneck brother" than Eddie Vedder. And the actress who played the redneck mother of the condemned was far from convincing in her role. She lacked the hollowed-out cheeks, the cigarette-hardened eyes and, above all, the accent. Having spent most of my life in Redneckistan, I found these cultural infidelities distracting.
The movie had one feature that more than made up for all its failings: it drew my attention to a fundamental trait of that idiotic primate dude lurking within us all. The condemned, as played by Sean Penn, is on death row for an incident in which he and a friend abducted and murdered a couple they found making out on the side of the road adjacent to their parents' property. What with their warped sense of redneck justice, they surely felt that every escalation in their murderous act was somehow appropriate retribution for this "infraction." In their deluded state, they saw this kissing couple as villainously flaunting their sexuality, an unforgiveable insult justifiably punishable by rape and murder.
As I considered the anti-social logic that brought the murderers to such evil, I realized that it was probably rooted in a deep animal urge, the same urge that causes a small, weak rooster to attack a big powerful rooster indisposed upon the back of a hen. I also realized something else, that societal repression of the expression of human sexuality must have an entirely pragmatic origin. Humans, like most animals, tend to feel violent urges when they see others engaged in sexual behaviour. Establishing a morality which requires people to suppress their public sexuality probably leads to a society with greater stability.
This is the painting I've been working on.
It's a really bad photograph; the painting is much better.
This is most of a painting made by Kim today, using water colour and acrylic.
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