Andrew Tate, Master Poet

Back in the eldritch aeons of 1989, art photographer Andres Serrano gained notoriety for his picture “Piss Christ.” The image involved a crucifix with Jesus, shown through the glimmering distortion of an amber liquid, putative Serrano’s own urine. The controversy came primarily through Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who aspired to become America’s national guilty conscience. This outrage was especially specious because Helms only noticed the photo after it had been on display for two years.

I remembered Serrano’s most infamous work this week when “masculinity influencer” Andrew Tate posted the above comment on X, the everything app, this week. Tate is a lightning rod for controversy, and seems to revel in making critics loose their composure. Sienkiewicz and Marx would define Tate as a “troll,” a performance artist whose schtick involves provoking rational people to lose their cool and become angry. To the troll, the resulting meltdown counts as art.

Andres Serrano remains tight-lipped about his politics, and repeatedly assures tells that he has no manifesto. Following the “Piss Christ” controversy, he called himself a Christian, but this sounds about as plausible as Salman Rushdie calling himself Muslim after the Satanic Verses fatwa: that is, a flimsy rhetorical shield that convinces nobody and makes the artist look uncommitted. I think something else happened here, something Serrano didn’t want to explain; the image itself doesn't matter.

Specifically, I think Serrano created a cypher of art. Unlike, say, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” Serrano’s picture doesn’t actually say anything. Instead, it stacks our loaded assumptions of religious imagery and bodily waste, and asks us what we see here. The image itself is purely ceremonial. Serrano cares more about why seeing the Christian image through urine is worse than seeing it through more spiritually anodyne fluids, like water or wine. Our answer is the art.

Critics like Helms, or let’s say “critics,” see art in representational terms. Art, to them, depicts something in the “real world.” This might mean a literal object, such as a fruit bowl in a still life, or an event or narrative, like the gospel story in “The Last Supper.” The representational mind seeks an artwork’s external, literal reference. This makes “Piss Christ” dangerous, because dousing the sacred image in something ritually unclean is necessarily blasphemous.

Progressive critics abandon such one-to-one representations. In viewing more contemporary art, from Serrano’s photos to Jackson Pollock’s frenetic, shapeless splatters, they don't ask themselves what object they ought to see. They ask themselves how the art changes the viewer. In the Renaissance, audiences assumed that art created a durable image of the transient, inconstant world. But artists today seek to amplify and hasten change. We viewers, not the world, are the purpose of contemporary art.

Ironically, as progressive critics tolerate more receptive non-representational standards in visual art, their expectations of language have become more exacting and literal. From religion to poetry to President Taco's id-driven rambles, they take words to mean only what they mean at surface level. Every online critic who considers it their job to identify “plot holes” in Disney’s Cars, or insist the Bible is disproven because we can’t find the Tower of Babel, makes this mistake.

At the surface level, Andrew Tate’s macho posturing seems like the opposite of art. His insistence on appearing constantly strong leaves no room for contemplative ruminating over language’s beauty or nuance. He doesn’t signpost his metaphors like Emily Dickinson, so it’s easy to assume he has no metaphors. Yet the weird prose poem above, with its apparent insistence that it’s now “gay” to be straight, defies literal scientific reading. By that standard, it’s pure poetry.

Tate seemingly contends that, in a world without obsolete gender and sexual designations, while nothing better takes their place, words become meaningless. If men feel sexually homeless nowadays, Tate lets us relax our burdens and shed our doubts. If words mean nothing, then words can’t control us. If it’s gay to be straight, then we can expunge archaic goals like love and stability. Yield to language’s poetic flow, let it transform you and be transformed by you.

This doesn't forgive Tate’s crass misogyny and weirdly self-destructive homoeroticism. He still treats women as ornaments and men as something to both desire and despise. As with any poet, it’s valid to say when something doesn’t land. (This one landed so badly that Tate eventually deleted it; only screenshots remain.) But we must critique it in its genre. Andrew Tate is a poet, not a journalist, and his words change us like art.

The First and Last Days of AI TV

When this screencap of a hypothetical AI-generated sitcom hit social media, critics focused, perhaps not unfairly, on the phantom hand holding the floating guitar. Notice also that it mashes Penny’s kitchen together with Monica Geller’s living room, or that some pieces of furniture are vanishing into other pieces, Beetlejuice-style. Or that both women are clearly Alyson Hannigan circa 2010. Visually, it’s a mess.

The source video was yanked shortly after posting, so heaven only knows whether this “sitcom” is funny. But how many of them are? Based on this orphaned screencap, it looks like an unholy collaboration between Chuck Lorre and Hieronymus Bosch. Worse, it looks like an inbred bastard child of every White sitcom of the last thirty years. Which explains why the poster, a generative AI enthusiast, thinks it’s great.

It also explains why, if programmers could successfully remove the psychedelic artifacts, networks will likely buy it. Since Friends debuted in 1995, most American sitcoms have featured some variation on its beat sheet. How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Community have been largely reskinned variations on Friends. But even Friends itself simply scrubbed the Blackness from Living Single and resold it.

Generative AI consumes the largest possible sample of existing media, whether images or text, and regurgitates something passably similar. The law of averages foretells that, the larger our core sample, the more the product will drift toward the middle. Thus, an AI enthusiast will regard the blandest, most derivative product as a triumph of the art form. We know it works because it resembles everything we’ve seen before.

Unfortunately, the network commissioners who buy content will probably also love it. I’ve written before, primarily about music, how the corporate conglomerates that control our media have become risk-averse. They literally have analytic software and focus groups, modeled on the latest behavioral economics, to reassure shareholders that all new content sufficiently resembles everything that’s been successful before.

We could argue that this happens because corporate overlords see their product not as art, but as content. It also reflects chokepoint capitalism, since all music, to succeed, must pass Spotify’s filters, and all TV ultimately heads for Hulu, Netflix, or Disney+. But it also reflects changes in consumption. The streaming services that control our viewing and listening require massive audiences to keep subscription prices low, and 🌟art🌟 can’t do that.

Gone are the days of subcultures and audience segmentation. Streaming services generate audiences, not by creating something innovative or uplifting, but by remaining minimally offensive. Admittedly, this isn’t new in mass media, as network TV’s largely interchangeable Westerns of the 1960s segued into spy thrillers in the 1970s. I’ve already commented on how Friends’ cinematic, character-driven style displaced Norman Lear-style three-camera sitcoms anchored to bankable stars.

Generative AI will reduce this trend to silliness. The nameless spec clip memorialized above shows how the system reduces storytelling so thoroughly, it pinches the same actress twice. If the existing model reduces BIPOC actors to contract players holding supporting parts, generative AI will eliminate them completely. One needn’t ponder hard how it will treat disabled actors, or even capable but slightly funny-looking actors. Like me.

Children and the aged are also underrepresented on existing TV, and often reduced to stereotyped, moralistic roles. Aging actors already struggle to get parts, especially if they don’t have established star power—and that goes double for women. If existing sample TV shows and movies have few children or older adults, the middle-of-the-road produce will inevitably have even fewer, a trend likely to only compound over time.

I don’t want to romanticize the past, especially the recent past. Disney currently shepherds talent like Ariana Grande or Olivia Rodrigo from childhood, molding them according to data and metrics, creating a media landscape already struggling with anodyne blandness. Constant remakes of lucrative IPs like Dune, Harry Potter, Gossip Girl, and Stephen King, reveals corporate leadership paralyzed with fear at even the most rudimentary innovation.

AI is thus not a declension, but an extension of already existing trends toward the mean. It accelerates corporate media’s desire to produce the blandest, most studiously inoffensive oatmeal. In the constant struggle between art and commerce, it supports the bean counters. By controlling the kinds of stories and faces available to viewers, it promises to continue starving the public imagination at a pace once unimaginable.

In short, it helps nobody but the shareholders. One wonders what will help them, when we shut off the TV and read a book.

Artists and the Schizoid Personality

J.K. Rowling—great artist, bad person

I’m trying to write a vampire novel. It’s a cheap grab for marketable attention, yes, but I need to restart my long-delayed writing career. Therefore I’m trying to overstuff the novel with cultural motifs of capitalist resentment, misplaced sexuality, and status envy, the three benchmarks of mass-market vampire fiction. I find myself facing a problem, though. I simply don’t know enough about nonstandard sexual expression to write about it comfortably.

Sure, I know something about the fear, anger, and desperation which all monsters and their victims share. But since at least Bram Stoker, and certainly since Anne Rice, authors have used vampires as metaphors for sexual appetites so socially repellent that one must squelch them. Vampires are, by nature, dominant, violent, and voracious, preying on trust and innocence—all things I’m not. I’m doubting my ability to finish this project.

I’ve had this problem before. I’m more than competent organizing words in ways that readers find pleasing, and multiple trusted sources assure me I should seek wider audiences. But it’s a writing truism that stories require conflict, and for every protagonist with a goal, they require some antagonist willing to do anything necessary to impede that goal. Somebody must always, from the storytelling perspective, be the villain.

Especially in this age of Marvel craptaculars and Starwoid blockbusters, readers feel dissatisfied with ordinary human-scale conflicts. MFA workshops continue producing countless “literary” conflicts of the Kramer vs. Kramer style, which indie presses publish for prestige, and which seldom get a second printing. To snag enough readers to buy groceries, authors must mass-produce generational traumas, planet-destroying weapons, and truly demented monsters.

Roman Polanski—great artist, lousy person

And to write those monsters with the full dimensionality audiences have grown accustomed to, writers must occupy the monstrous headspace. One cannot write monsters without, at least occasionally, thinking like a monster. After all, truly terrible creatures like Dracula, Iago, and Lord Voldemort aren’t mere mustache-twirling villains in the Snidely Whiplash mold; their evil comes from someplace, and serves some motivation deep within the character.

Crafting fully fleshed monsters, though, means the monster’s thoughts live within the author. We see this sometimes in what authors affirm, or what they deny. J.K. Rowling, for instance, created Lord Voldemort, a thinly coded Hitler analogue. But in creating that character, she also incorporated Churchill-era war propaganda about an assertively fair-haired Britain becoming overrun with foreigners and, ahem, bankers. Then these beliefs spilled into her private life.

Shall I continue? Cinematic genius Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in The Tenant, a thriller about encroaching urban paranoia and isolation, in 1976. In 1977, he was accused of—and confessed to—drugging and raping a minor, and has remained a fugitive from American justice ever since. Knowing what we do about sexual violence, the crime for which he got caught almost certainly wasn’t his first. Personal secrets undoubtedly drove artistic paranoia.

Many of Neil Gaiman’s best stories involve hurting women. Coraline, Stardust, and several Sandman plots all involve women fearing for their lives, going insane, or being held in captivity. Though Gaiman never went the full Green Lantern and stuffed women in refrigerators, he nevertheless motivated many of his best stories by causing fictional women pain. We now know that torture didn’t exist entirely in his imagination.

Neil Gaiman—great artist, terrible person

Art doesn’t emerge from whole, balanced, healthy minds. Like an oyster creating a pearl, the object of beauty begins with irritation and injury. Worse, in order to produce enough content to make a living in this media-saturated world, artists must do more than tolerate the irritation; we must prod it, feed it, and rip previously healed wounds open again. Even when it doesn’t produce literal violence, artists are unbalanced people.

When I describe artists as “schizoid personalities,” I don’t mean in the clinical sense. I mean in the older Greek sense, where the “schiz-” prefix refers to something torn or cut in two. The same prefix used in schizophrenia is the same root used in the word scissors, signifying something thoroughly torn, in ways it can never be completely repaired. Artists must tear themselves asunder to create fully realized conflicts.

And I must ask myself: am I willing to risk becoming torn likewise? Do I love art enough to create those thoughts within myself, knowing that I’m not immune to their lure? What if I create the monster capable of expressing such eloquent trauma—and then, like Rowling, Polanski, and Gaiman, I can’t control it? If artists aren’t unbalanced people when they begin, most will be so before they finish.

The New Dark Age of the Fake Self

Buffy Sainte-Marie

News broke last week that multiple award-winning folksinger Buffy Sainte-Marie isn’t Native American, as she’s claimed for sixty years. Since breaking into the Greenwich Village folk scene alongside Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Sainte-Marie’s public persona has included her putative claim of Canadian birth, to the Piapot band of the Cree nation; she was subsequently, she said, adopted by a Massachusetts couple. New documents claim she was born White, to an Anglo-Italian family outside Boston.

Sainte-Marie’s public career has focused heavily on breaking boundaries for generations. She was supposedly the first Native American to win an Oscar, and has won Grammy and Juno awards for Indigenous music categories. If the current accusations stand, that means she received accolades intended for legitimately marginalized persons. It means she’s participated in expropriating other groups’ stories, reselling them at a profit, and claiming the honors accruing thereunto. It makes her, morally, a common thief.

This is especially vexing in the music industry, where we expect professionals to speak from experience. “Authenticity” is the watchword among pop singers, poets, and dramatists. Nobody expects this of, say, actors; when Gillian Anderson played Margaret Thatcher on The Crown, nobody bellyached because she wasn’t really a Prime Minister. But whenever Kid Rock rehashes his “plain folks” redneck persona, somebody hastily reminds us that he grew up rich in Michigan, just cosplaying working-class roots.

Recently, the internet’s population of full-time professional offense-takers has become particularly militant around policing racial boundaries. Rachel Dolezal set the pattern eight years ago, but she’s gotten lost amidst the tide. More recently, netizens have pushed themselves into a tizzy about whether BLM firebrand Shaun King might be secretly White, or that MAGA glamour queen Kari Lake might be concealing Black parentage. Whatever the truth, we clearly expect politicians, like pop stars, to be authentic.

Yours truly, right, as an angel (there’s a stretch) withJeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey
in the 2017 Kearney Community theatre production of It's a Wonderful Life

The demand for authenticity sometimes produces strange effects. Actor Jussie Smollett’s case is almost comically extreme, but representative. Being both Black and gay, Smollett evidently believed he needed some categorical oppression in his backstory; but he comes from a middle-class background and a relatively low-friction life. So he paid two brothers to fabricate a hate crime. While most participants in the “oppression Olympics” don’t go nearly so far, lies and street theatre are depressingly common.

But simultaneously, I fear that “authenticity” creates siloes that restrict our ability to participate in culture creation. As a trained actor myself, I can’t entirely manufacture my stage identity. I can’t, for instance, use blackface. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder will probably be the last mainstream actor in my lifetime to use blackface on camera. Even then, he played a satire, a character too lacking in self-awareness to realize the harm in his actions.

I have, however, played characters dissimilar to myself. Onstage, I’ve been Jewish, gay, a veteran, and dead—none of which I’ve ever been offstage. I’ve affected Southern, Bostonian, Yiddish, and British accents. Okay, I’ve never discolored my skin to affect another racial identity, but I’ve adopted other external signs of groups I don’t belong to. Exactly how far from my “authentic” identity can I stray before I stop being an actor, and become something harmful?

A friend suggested Buffy Sainte-Marie could take a 23andMe test to determine her genetic quotient. Laying aside that she’s already done so, and found nothing, this testifies to the prevalence of pseudoscience in racial debates. As Richard J. Perry notes, these tests promise results they can’t possibly deliver. They only identify genetic markers existing in statistically significant concentrations in certain geographic areas. Race isn’t genetic, it’s social; did anyone treat Sainte-Marie as Indigenous growing up?

Please don’t misunderstand. I recognize why it’s important for public figures to not misrepresent themselves when speaking for their (putative) heritage. To quote one egregious example, political operative and notorious bigot Asa Earl Carter fled Alabama, moved west, and rechristened himself as Cherokee Forrest Carter. His fictional memoir The Education of Little Tree has actively preserved harmful stereotypes about Native Americans. Jamake Highwater and Hyemeyohsts Storm have similarly falsified their heritage and kept stereotypes alive.

However, ours is a time of shifting standards; formerly acceptable modes of imitation have become verboten, and the new boundaries haven’t solidified. While Buffy Sainte-Marie has her defenders, most reasonable people will agree she crossed a line, pretending to be something she isn’t. But most artists pretend, at least occasionally, and some forms of pretend are more acceptable than others. Some of us will certainly choose wrong; others will choose correctly, but be judged later.

Digital Art and Human Development

Art produced by Dall-E (my collection)

Friends widely embraced the Lensa AI art app this week for one simple reason: it could create faces. This year has seen remarkable advances in computer-drawn art, beginning with Dall-E, which took social media by storm this summer. But Dall-E couldn’t draw faces. Human likenesses came out pinched, distorted, with nightmarish proportions. Dall-E’s immediate successor, Midjourney, did better faces, but they were cartoon-like and whimsical.

Lensa, by contrast, could read users’ selfies, and the program could return artistic renderings. Though the pictures aren’t yet realistic, the computer was capable of making value choices which presented finished portraits that emphasized certain features like trained artists would. My friends uploaded their selfies, knowing they were relinquishing rights to a massive AI clip-art pool, because the reward was painterly renderings of themselves as wizards, spacemen, and cats.

Pushback began almost immediately. Not only did Lensa pinch your uploaded images, the claims read, but it also pinched legitimate artists’ hand-made work. The app created painterly renderings because it modeled itself on actual painters, the techniques they used, the decisions they made. AI programs are already putting human artists out of work, though not yet in huge numbers. The ethics were already creating headaches, and it’s likely to get worse.

I’d like to focus on a different ethical consideration. Yes, the human economic challenge is serious: just as American industrial jobs moved to Japan and China, where labor was cheaper and supply lines were shorter, AI art is likely to displace human artists because the renderings are nearly instantaneous. People are unlikely to pay more for slower human-made art just because doing so is right. But the problem begins much earlier than the point of sale.

Art produced by Midjourney
(Wikimedia Commons)

Many schools begin teaching art in preschool. We teach children to draw with charcoal and Conte crayon, to play “Alouette” on a plastic recorder, and to sing in unison, because these represent important developmental milestones. Art and music teach children important skills of hand-eye coordination, the ability to sit still, and patient dedication to tasks where the reward isn’t always immediately obvious. Children need all these skills in multiple disciplines.

As I’ve gotten older, though, and spent time on both sides of the classroom, I’ve realized students learn even more from art. When drawing, students learn what to include, and what to omit. The entire process begins by reducing the forms we’re rendering—landscapes, buildings, human bodies—to a few essential lines. Then the artist makes choices about which shapes, colors, and textures to incorporate. These are important value choices.

Anybody who’s witnessed the products of a freshman life-drawing class knows that a roomful of art students will produce very different images of one model. Photographers may get slightly different images from the same model, depending on choices like shutter speed, angle, light saturation, and Photoshop aftereffects. But human artists, looking at the same model, can produce wildly divergent paintings of the same base human form.

These choices are subjective, but not value-neutral. The proportions of the human form, like the proportions of musical notes in a composition, have mathematical relationships, and artists make choices about how much they value harmony, synchrony, and continuity. These choices speak to the artist’s inner process. But they’re also external, and speak to what kind of reaction the artist hopes to produce in the chosen audience.

Art produced by Lensa (promo image)

Someone must make similar choices with AI art. The person writing Lensa’s prompts, of course, chooses whether they like the image produced. But some programmer deep within the bowels of a Silicon Valley industrial park also chooses what proportions, textures, and colors the program will emphasize. That programmer made these choices months, even years, before the artwork was produced. But that person made these choices, on your behalf.

We already know that recommendation algorithms on streaming services like Netflix and Spotify both empower and circumscribe our choices. We receive access to more musicians and filmmakers whose work we might never have discovered. But we also wind up encountering fewer kinds of artists, and wind up watching or listening to the same genres repeatedly. Our tastes become deeper, but narrower.

If programs replace artists, which seems likely, these AI art generators are likely to have similar effects on students’ ability to make choices. As art becomes instantaneous, and not a process, students are likely to truncate their ability to even see the choices being made, much less implement them in their own work. Their worlds will become narrower. If choices are instantaneous, why make any choices at all?

Time and Relative Dimension in Space

When Picasso debuted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1916, it provoked outrage; critics called it hideous, pornographic, and “a loss to French art.” It’s now considered a pathbreaking work of Twentieth Century modernism. But it’s also somewhat overshadowed by time and familiarity. Like me, you’ve probably seen it reprinted in countless art history texts, coffee-table books, and cheap reproductions. It’s become comfy, bland.

Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence program Dall-E Mini, and its altogether more intricate cousin Midjourney, began shilling computer-drawn art online. I scoffed at both, not only because I disbelieved an AI program could make innovative artistic choices, but also because the programs kept getting clogged by users. Like disco or Bill Gates, anything that becomes too popular too quickly usually becomes toxic just as quickly.

However, I’m also curious, and when by happy coincidence I landed on an opportunity to use Dall-E, I grabbed it. As a fan of the British TV series Doctor Who, I decided to test-drive Dall-E by inputting an easy keyword: TARDIS. Then, just to see what would happen, I connected a second keyword: Picasso. Just to see what might’ve happened if the notorious Pablo Picasso had painted Britain’s most famous time and space capsule.

The experiment didn’t disappoint.

In Les Demoiselles, Picasso reduced the female form to its most rudimentary, stripping the niceties which art inherited from Renaissance realism. Though artists like Leonardo had rendered human forms in unprecedented detail, his successors had cheapened realism; art had descended from Renaissance verisimilitude, through Rococo frippery, and into cheapjack schlock by the early Twentieth Century. Picasso purged that habit of fake realism from his work.

But more important, in stripping artifice from painting, Picasso stripped artifice from his subjects. His Demoiselles were prostitutes, resident at The Avignon, a Barcelona brothel. Though these women tried to look enticing for men, Picasso captured the feeling beneath their erotic finery; they gaze through their audience with angle-eyed contempt that contrasts with their poses, exposing their scorn for the clientele upon whom the depend for their living.

Except, as I said, that meaning has become murky through familiarity. Picasso spent months perfecting this one painting; by his later career, he cranked out large-scale paintings at a breakneck pace of one canvas per day, hoping to recapture the magic he demonstrated in classics like Les Demoiselles or The Blue Guitar. He became an artistic assembly line, producing the artistic equivalent of wallpaper for a lucrative audience.

When Doctor Who returned to television in 2005, it enjoyed vastly improved technology over how it last appeared, in 1989. Producers could merge shots, allowing the TARDIS to materialize into tracking shots, or permitting the camera to follow Rose from an ordinary London street into the otherworldly TARDIS interior. I remember watching those first episodes, wide-eyed with childlike wonder. The show was as perfect as it possibly could’ve been.

But like Picasso, the BBC had to repeat the wonder of that first impression forever. It needed to constantly create more elaborate monsters, more apocalyptic catastrophes for the Doctor to avert, and more life-altering consequences for the Doctor’s companions to endure. Early story arcs, like Bad Wolf or Harold Saxon, turned into ridiculous multi-season extravaganzas like the Cracks in Time or Missy’s Redemption. Wide-eyed wonder turned to eye-rolling cynicism.

Dall-E’s renderings of the TARDIS in Picasso’s style are crude, especially compared to the detailed realism which Midjourney is capable of producing. Yet in their crudeness, in their simplicity, they reveal Doctor Who in terms I remember from watching low-tech Tom Baker episodes on PBS in 1982. Sweeps of pattern and color, of hard lines against soft contours, remind me why I first loved this series.

Art that once moved us eventually becomes familiar and banal. Mondrian’s Composition series, once a shocking demonstration of color and line, has become so commonplace that it’s used as a literal wallpaper pattern. The same happens with popular art—and I’d consider television “art” in those terms. Doctor Who, like Law & Order or Gunsmoke, used to feel trailblazing and dangerous. But the need to keep producing reduces them to gimcracks.

I sincerely doubt Dall-E or Midjourney can create innovative art. Both programs work from existing algorithms, and replicate choices which previous human artists have made; they don’t make new choices of their own. But, in combining disparate influences, they can nevertheless have a real emotional impact on the audience. Most important, they can remind us why the familiar art with which we’ve grown tragically comfy, once mattered so much.

Further Thoughts on Community Arts

This post is a follow-up to In Praise of Community Arts

My promo photo from the
local community theatre

“Hey, Kevin,” Brad said, sticking his head in the door of my office. “I saw you in the show on Friday. I didn’t know you were an actor!”

“Thanks,” I said back with a smile, leaning back in my chair. “I thought you knew that was why I couldn’t have a beer that afternoon.”

“I guess I just didn’t put two and two together until I saw your name in the program. We go to the community theatre from time to time, but we usually don’t know anybody in the show.”

When I worked in the field, my coworkers often knew I was an amateur actor. They understood that I couldn’t stay late or pull overtime because I had a rehearsal or show tonight, and had people depending on me to be there. But they also never attended the show; they begged off, saying they couldn’t afford tickets (theatre is admittedly not cheap) or that they had family responsibilities. They knew I acted, they just never saw me do it.

Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was my first performance since I got promoted to office work earlier this year. It also marks the first time any co-workers have recognized me onstage. It makes me conscious of my own relationship with actors and performances. Somebody who knows me from work, knows that I frequently cuss, have a precarious relationship with deadlines, and put my feet on the desk while I think. How do they respond to me acting?

Dr. Djoymi Baker, professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, has written that actors who become associated with a particular role, become a sort of “intertext,” an external commentary upon their own work. She specifically cites actors from Star Trek appearing in non-franchise roles: Bill Shatner in Boston Legal, or George Takei and Nichelle Nichols in Heroes. On some level, Dr. Baker writes, actors never cease their most famous roles.

What happens, though, when an actor’s most famous “role” isn’t performance? In Our Town, our central characters, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, were played by a married couple, a dispatch operator for a local haulage company and his stay-at-home wife. Most actors are students or skilled professionals, including local doctors and technicians. As you’d expect, the local university is overrepresented, including both students and faculty.

Jeff Ensz, left, as George Bailey, and me as Clarence Odbody, in
Kearney Community Theatre's 2017 production of It's a Wonderful Life

Everyone involved in community theatre, both onstage and backstage, has another local profile. When a famous TV actor appears in a play or movie—when, say Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart appeared together in Hamlet—they carry other acting roles into their current position. But when we amateurs appear onstage, the roles we carry reflect our outside responsibilities: doctor, lawyer, student, carpenter.

Further, as anybody who’s ever done community theatre knows, the companies are often in-groupish and clubby. A small handful of participants generally get lead roles and artistic direction credits. They might become locally famous, but they never stop being, say, a highly respected philosophy professor or radiologist. (Let’s just say.) They always have this duality, this contrast between their daily selves and their current onstage performance.

Experience tells me this goes both ways. Almost four years ago, when I still worked in the field, my company had a frequently contentious relationship with a client, a local dentistry firm. The company and the client argued frequently, and lawyers got involved. Then, late in the contract, I got assigned to the job. Tensions diminished almost immediately as several members of the client group recognized me from a recent performance of It’s a Wonderful Life.

I’d become a genuine local celebrity.

The term parasocial relationship has become common in internet parlance when audiences have deep personal affinity for public figures—YouTube celebrities and Instagram “influencers,” for instance. But community arts brings this home. We have parasocial relationships with community actors and directors, local gallery artists, pub musicians. And we have literal social relationships with these people through their day jobs and community involvements.

We local celebrities (ahem) also become what Dr. Baker calls “intertexts.” Except, rather than commenting on other acting roles, we comment upon social roles: jobs, families, congregations, and spending habits. When Brad stuck his head into my office, he was speaking to Kevin Nenstiel, apprentice proposal writer. But he was also talking to Simon Stimson, the passionate but drunken choir director at Grovers Corners Congregational Church.

When people see me on stage, they see my character, but they also see me. They’re conscious that the events portrayed are scripted, controlled, directed. Yes, they’ve looked at me and seen Simon Stimson, Clarence Odbody, Captain Lesgate, or Nathan Radley. But they’ve also seen me, and because of that, they’ve seen themselves. The relationship is difficult, nuanced, and strange. I haven’t figured it all out yet. But by golly, I love learning about it.

In Praise of Community Arts

Cast photo from Kearney Community Theatre's production of Our Town.
That's me, center back, in the black porkpie hat. Photo by Judy Rozema.

I spent much of the Kearney Community Theatre’s recent production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town staring at David Rozema’s backside. Because the character I played, Simon Stimson, is dead throughout Act III, I spent the entire act frozen, head forward, doing all my acting from the neck up. While David, as the Stage Manager, explained the scene to the audience with choric ineluctability, I had literally nothing to see except his dark-suited back and posterior.

My family has a long history of getting involved in local and community-based arts. Moving around throughout my childhood as a military household, we never stayed in any one place long enough to put down roots. However, my family’s commitment to the arts always made them leaders, even if only temporarily. My parents would join the church choir, and a year later, would be directing it. I’d join church theatre; they’d be directing that, too.

Yet even as they took point in local (usually church-based) art, my parents gave me, let’s say, conflicting values. As important as song was in worship, for instance, they pooh-poohed the value of concerts. Why pay exorbitant prices and travel across town for somebody’s curtain time, they asked, when we already have the CD? Same for theatre: movies are cheaper and more convenient. And by “movies,” I mean we waited for the VHS to drop.

Thus I reached adulthood with lopsided information: I’d learned the rudiments of art, music, and theatre as actions, but remained blissfully unaware of processes. That is, I could act and write relatively well, and showed promise at drawing or painting, but I didn’t understand how skillful people with bure promise translated those skills into careers. A vast gulf existed in my head between practicing the pure skills, and getting that lucrative publishing or recording contract.

Don’t misunderstand me: my parents didn’t deliberately mislead me about art. As an adult, I realize that attending concerts, gallery shows, and theatre, involved the logistics of finding our way around cities that they didn’t know very well, because we moved so often. Because neighborhood congregations are small and intimate, there’s a level of personal closeness that one can’t match in a massive midtown proscenium. My folks did art, essentially, for their friends and neighbors.

Your humble blogger as Simon Stimson in Our Town. Photo by Corbey Dorsey.

I’ve long considered myself an introvert, given my preference for solitude, and my tendency to gather information before I speak. But recently, I’ve come to doubt that. My parents remember me as a gregarious child, quick-witted, eager to entertain others. Somewhere around third grade, though, I shifted. My clearest memory of third grade is getting discouraged trying to fit into my Cub Scout troop. I think that’s maybe about the age when I burned out.

The realization that I’m maybe not an introvert, but rather a discouraged extrovert, an affable team player who simply got tired of trying, explains why I’ve always joined community arts organizations. I’ve done theatre through churches, schools, and community theatre companies. Despite my limited musical ability, I’ve joined ensembles and given my best. Even my writing, the least intimate art since you’re seldom there when the audience reads it, was written to share with others.

The least productive times throughout my life have been when I’ve had no artistic outlet. When I can’t share with an audience, when I can’t have that creative intimacy with others, everything else in life suffers. My job tends to stagnate, I have difficulty building and sustaining relationships. Without art, and the exchange between performers and audience, I’m not me. Art remains the tool I use to feel close to others when other tools fail.

In Our Town, my character, Simon Stimson, is a self-hating drunk. The script says he’s had “a peck of trouble,” but doesn’t state why. To justify this, I played him as deeply closeted. Yet church music remains deeply valuable to him. He desperately wants to conduct a choir that the community can take pride in. Partway through rehearsals, I realized: like me, Simon feels fully human only when art lets him connect with his community.

Recent personal upheavals mean this might be the last time I perform with this company. I may have to relocate before year’s end. The relationships I’ve cultivated, not only with other amateur actors, but also with the audience, won’t travel with me; I’ll have to forge new ones somewhere. Yet looking back, I can say, no matter how tired community theatre often leaves me, no matter how discouraged, this is when I’ve felt most human.

What, and Who, Is Art For?

Banksy, Snow, 2018 (source)

Someone recently hit me with a shopworn Banksy quote: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” The anonymous British graffiti artist, whose success is as much a triumph of public relations as artistry, rewrites an axiom beloved by creative professionals, satirists, clergy, and politicians worldwide, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. This chiasmus has precedents in the Bible, where Mary says:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones
    but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
    but has sent the rich away empty.

Sounds great, certainly. But one wonders what exactly this means, coming from Banksy. Earlier this year, one of Banksy’s canvases sold for $20 million, a new personal best, and a price range beyond anything us pedestrians could afford. Though Banksy became famous for semi-illicit guerilla work in outdoor spaces, the artist’s ability to continue making public art is subsidized by producing portable canvases which only the insanely wealthy can afford.

I began actor training in the early 2000s, when one couldn’t go thirty feet in any American theatre department without hearing somebody loudly singing excerpts from Jonathan Larson’s Rent. That play’s exhortations against post-Reagan malaise and the racism and casual homophobia of the late Twentieth Century took on an explicitly rebellious edge. The play implied all of Manhattan’s bohemian Alphabet City would rise against stultifying conformity and change the world.

Twenty years later, my acting career sputtered following some poor choices; Alphabet City has gentrified; and though casual homophobia isn’t instantiated in law anymore, the revolution never actually came. As YouTube critic Lindsay Ellis has explained, theatre often embraces the rhetoric of insurrection. But it absolutely requires the financial backing of corporate donors and rich patrons, because the soaring overhead means theatre bleeds money most of the time.

Artists, including me, consider ourselves incipient revolutionaries. We have messianic delusions that, like Mary’s Magnificat, we’ll overthrow rulers and raise the proletariat. (Mary sounds almost Marxist.) Yet art regularly loses money, and requires someone else’s generosity to cover the bills. Maybe it’s slightly better in Britain, where public subsidies mean the working class can afford theatre, orchestra, and opera tickets, but even that makes art beholden to the state.

Since my acting career has translated strictly into community theatre, I’ve discovered how risk-averse management frequently is. Not only will boards avoid anything with raunchy themes or controversy, which is perhaps understandable, but they’ll also avoid anything too new. I’ve witnessed decision-makers moot the idea of producing material written locally, but it always dies quietly, as only something road-tested on Broadway will likely pull audience numbers sufficient to entice sponsors.

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952 (source)

This means our company will never do anything likely to challenge our community’s religious, political, and economic suppositions. I don’t even mean Augusto Boal’s sometimes self-righteous precepts that theatre shows society to itself, exposing our worst sins and social rot. Sam Wasson writes that Paul Sills and Mike Nichols invented Chicago improv to wrest theatre from elites, yet the companies soon became dependent on high-demand ticket prices.

It’s tempting to say these points describe in-person art, which always suffers from high overhead. What, one wonders, about recorded music and movies, which can amortize costs across much larger audiences? Even that doesn’t bear scrutiny, as most recording artists lose money and depend on concerts and personal appearances to get paid. And with Disney’s acquisition of Fox, Lucasfilm, ABC, and Marvel, one company has a stranglehold on Hollywood.

Fundamentally, art needs the system it rebels against to remain solvent. Not even profitable, but just above water. Artists individually may believe we’re doing God’s work, but in the aggregate, like politicians, we kowtow to whoever carries the checkbook. Great art, like a pearl, originates in friction and suffering, yet we wind up defending the system we abhor, because sooner or later, we get hungry. We can’t help becoming complicit.

These complaints aren’t unique to art. I’ve heard parish pastors voice the same struggle: they ultimately can’t drive the moneychangers from their temple, because somebody has to keep the lights on. Politicians campaign against the very fundraising practices that subsidize their eternal reelection bids. I only focus on art here because, as I struggle to find buyers for the manuscripts I’ve written, I still need rent and groceries.

But I’ve surrounded myself with art, and its baggage, too long to read quotes like Banksy’s without flinching. That statement seems directed at me. But, like Banksy, I still need someone to buy my art.

The Process of Art, and the Art of Process

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 92
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

From an early age, most people make art. Children love to draw, sing, tell stories, and stage theatrical sketches. Yet at some point, nearly all of us stop. We all have unique reasons for this surrender: lack of mentorship, bad experiences with critics, the need to focus on “useful” skills. But every expressed reason boils down to one deterrent: fear.

Ted Orland and David Bayles teach photography at the University of California. As such, they’ve encountered every excuse aspiring artists use to justify not making art. Harsh criticism, especially from parents and teachers, often breeds a fear of making mistakes or being wrong. Lack of moral support after graduation leaves even accomplished artists feeling listless and alone. Hunger narrows the artists’ horizons. You name it, they've heard it.

The difference between successful career artists, and disappointed ex-artists, our authors insist, is how they approach this fear. Working artists have this fear, even learn from it, but don’t let it determine them. “When you act out of fear,” our authors write, “your fears come true.” Instead, they approach fear as an opportunity to continue improving, to grow as artists, and to create work that makes important conceptual leaps between pieces.

Yes, this sounds like a bromide. We all heard something similar in high school, and we’ve seen comparable fine-sounding axioms on motivational posters in workplaces worldwide. Bayles and Orland distinguish themselves from the mass of self-help books and creativity boosters (they pointedly eschew the word “creativity”) by focusing on how they, and artists they know and work with, translate these bromides into actions and outcomes.

The authors approach multiple aspects of artmaking with an eye toward keeping us engaged, even when the process seems overwhelming. Lack of goals, for instance, often impedes artistry: without an exhibition, pending sale, or letter grade, it’s difficult to create intrinsic motivations. That’s perhaps why so many artists stop creating after finishing school. They discuss the creation of meaningful goals to maintain momentum through down periods.

David Bayles (left) and Ted Orland

They also discuss education’s discouraging impacts. Though schooling is necessary for most people, its effects can often, inarguably, be discouraging for actual art. This includes both students, whose artistic expression gets subordinated to “skillz drillz,” and teachers, whose energy often goes into teaching rather than creating new art. The process of striking a balance isn’t easy or obvious, but our authors show ways it happens, and why.

Worst of all, of course, is fear of making mistakes. They write, “You find reasons to procrastinate, since to not work is to not make mistakes,” and I feel pangs of recognition. In childhood, our parents enthused wildly about us making something, anything; somewhere, though, adults around us became focused on identifying our mistakes. And not screwing up became more important than the act of creation.

No wonder so many of us stop creating… or bury our creations in a closet somewhere. Yet the importance of human imperfection remains a thread throughout this book. Without flaws, we have nowhere to go to make the next conceptual leap into further art. Just as important, without flaws, our audiences have no dissonance to resolve internally, and therefore little relationship with the art. Imprefection isn’t just inevitable, it’s desirable.

Even the simple recognition that we don’t have to face these fears alone provides motivation to keep creating. Many artists (including me) stop creating new art because we feel we’re alone, or because the rejection slips seemingly isolate us from others. The process of art is truly contradictory: we’re engaged in forms of self-expression, but cannot create strictly for ourselves. Our authors’ anecdotes reconnect us to our audiences, and to our peers.

As photographers, the authors draw the most references from photography. They probably cite Ansel Adams more than any other artist, talking about ways he bucked critics, maintained his vision, and stood fast against discouragement. However, our authors draw generously from other genres, citing Frank Lloyd Wright, Ezra Pound, and countless other artists from across the spectrum. This process really applies to all artists, not just one category.

I admit, this fear plagues me too. The fear that everyone will recognize me as a hack, or that the business aspect of art will overwhelm the creation aspect, or that I’ll drown in rejection slips and vanish, unnoticed. Therefore I read this book again every few years, to remind myself I needn’t face these fears alone. Art can be a discouraging calling. We must remind ourselves that this discouragement isn’t a barrier, it’s part of the art.

One Million Ways To Die in the Star Wars Universe

Greg Stones, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire

One stormtrooper fails to shoot first.
One stormtrooper doesn’t let the Wookie win.
One stormtrooper fails Lord Vader for the last time.

Back in 1963, macabre cartoonist Edward Gorey published a storybook for grown-ups called The Gashlycrumb Tinies, in which twenty-six children meet horrible ends. Did you ever wonder how that would look if nerds rewrote it for their favorite franchise? Yeah, me neither. But Greg Stones, author of Zombies Hate Stuff and Sock Monkeys Have Issues, apparently did. And boy am I glad, because this book is funny.

Stones imagines different ways stormtroopers die grisly deaths. Stomped by AT-AT Walkers; frozen in carbonite; fed to the Sarlacc; stationed on Alderaan. The deaths incorporate images from all eight live-action movies, though mostly the original trilogy. Some deaths probably refer to ancillary material I haven’t read yet. All are hilarious in the deadpan delivery of frankly gruesome content that the characters probably hated.

As with Gorey, however, the real life comes from Stones’ illustrations. His flat, cartoonish look contrasts with the three-dimensional, computer-generated style favored in so many picture books these days, a deliberate nod to his adult audience’s nostalgia for their childhood reading. The approach is playful, with oversaturated colors and not-quite realistic proportions (nobody casts a shadow). The stormtroopers are drawn wearing armor from the original trilogy.

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Stones’ poker-faced prose, never more than one sentence per page, and childlike folk illustrations, give the gruesome content its ironic comedy. There’s always something hilarious about stating awful things like you’re discussing the weather, especially when you know it’s fiction. Stones’ understatement of the truly awful gives his storybook a Gary Larson-ish tone of gallows hilarity. Who doesn’t love laughing in the face of certain death?

This book is, undoubtedly, part of a marketing push to make Star Wars timely with Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Funny enough, I’m okay with that.  Despite the cynical marketing edge, if publishers can release books that bring happiness into customers’ lives, I say let them. Stones’ playfully grim take on Imperial incompetence will give nostalgic grown-ups the boost they need while awaiting the next movie release.

Grown-Ups Deserve Some Playtime, Too

Steve McDonald, Fantastic Machines: a Coloring Book of Amazing Devices Real and Imagined
Cate Anevski, Invisible Cat Activities: a Complete-the-Drawing Book
Tim Leong, Star Wars Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Dude, why the hate for adult coloring books? We know coloring helps children improve manual dexterity, spatial recognition, and tri-dimensional vision. Coloring increases the chance your kid will become an engineer, doctor, or other highly qualified professional, besides being just fun. Do we think adults don’t deserve such educational play? Or have we become so strangled by social roles that we cannot allow ourselves to breathe freely for five minutes?

Despite the title, line artist Steve McDonald’s coloring book mostly spotlights real (or realistic) machines: a souped-up funny-car engine. The International Space Station. An ore extractor. A pump-bellows pipe organ. His one-tone illustrations, which look like they were done with a simple lining pen and basic drafting tools, are massively complex, inviting children and adults to apply colors and make the pictures look as realistic as what he’s already begun.

But he does more than that. By inviting participants to color the components of, say the Mars Rover, or a Victorian diving bell, he encourages users to understand the relationships between the components. A London city bus is even more complicated than McDonald’s drawings, and most people don’t contemplate how dependent we are daily on thousands of moving parts. McDonald encourages us to think about things we take for granted.

One of McDonald’s inventions is purely fantastical: a jet-powered flying ice cream truck. It’s pure Jetsons escapism. Yet McDonald renders even this d with intense attention, not only to the device, but the cityscape behind it. That’s why adults should color: because this seemingly escapist gewgaw actually jibes with something more complicated and profound. It makes us think. It encourages us to see the moving parts beneath the surface.

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Cate Anevski goes a different direction. Inspired by those “invisible” cat memes, she presents minimalist illustrations of cats caught mid-motion, and asks us to fill in the missing background: monkey bars. Duelling pianos. Volleyball. Where coloring books encourage users to imbue life into somebody else’s drawings, Anevski wants us to create new drawings around highly expressive cats doing, y’know, cat-ish things. Because who wouldn’t love that?

The back-cover synopsis shows simple line drawings around Anevski’s cats. But the pages themselves are wide-open beyond the cats, which Anevski depicts as simple line drawings with sepia-toned accents. So be as ambitious, or as simple, as your imagination moves you. When Anevski calls for the invisible beach ball, give her the entire beach: swimmers, partiers, waves, and Jaws. That’s the point: you control the final outcome.

Like coloring, this activity book works for children or adults. It encourages imagination, but sets limits for audiences to work against. It disguises practising complex motor function and brain exercise as simple play. And the pages I’ve tried are simply fun. It requires more personal motivation than coloring books’ pre-established lines, but it works similar parts of the brain, with similar rewards in both mental practice and grown-up playtime.

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Tim Leong, chief graphic designer for Entertainment Weekly, sadly disappoints with his attempt to create graphic representations of themes running through Star Wars. Not because it isn’t colorful, or packed with content, but because there isn’t much to do. Though beautifully designed, this paragon of licensed merchandising has little content per page. There’s little to hold my attention, and nothing I, the audience, can contribute.

Leong’s brightly colored illustrations sometimes are just cute pictures, like Chewbacca or C-3P0, with colors supposedly representing something informative: how often C-3P0 says “We’re doomed,” for instance. Others are actual statistical graphs, like how much of certain characters have been replaced by cybernetic parts, or who saved whom how many times. Sadly, with little text, readers will flip past Leong’s quite good designs quickly, in less time than most dinners.

And unfortunately, anybody considering this for Christmas presents will be sorely disappointed. By then, Episode VIII will have premiered, and this volume will already be out-of-date. What good is a gift book that’s destined to be obsolete before gift-giving season? This book offers no participation, little complexity, and minimal content. I like the idea, but Leong, a designer, needs a writer to give his content heft.

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In conclusion. I’m a new convert to coloring and activity books for grown-ups. We adults deserve both the sensory pleasure and the mental complexity that completing the picture provides. But a pretty picture isn’t enough; we need something we can contribute to creating the finished product. Audience members who consider themselves too cool for coloring, only deny themselves the pleasure and education that finishing the picture can provide.

The Best Comics Artist You've Never Heard Of

John Higgins, Beyond Watchmen and Judge Dredd: the Art of John Higgins

As the title suggests, Liverpool-born comics artist John Higgins is best known as colorist (“colourist”) on Alan Moore’s Watchmen novel, and elaborate handpainted watercolor strips in Britain’s Judge Dredd series. He doesn’t have name recognition like Frank Miller or Jack Kirby. Yet this book makes a persuasive case that we should know him: he’s collaborated on Batman, Doctor Who, the Terminator, Star Trek, and more.

Now Liverpool UP collates a massive selection of Higgins’ portfolio for an oversized book that’s half coffee-table art spectacle, half autobiography. The assortment ranges from his early days, paying dues on medical illustrations and line art for children’s game books, through prestige work on the best-known comics titles, for every major publishing house. The story of how he became John Higgins is as engaging as the visuals with which he peppers his memoir.

A school-leaver (what Americans call a high-school dropout) who joined the military to find discipline and guidance, Higgins found himself naturally using available time to draw. Eventually he completed his education at a prestigious British art college. But good-paying art jobs aren’t plentiful, not even in the 1970s, when ambitious young upstarts could schlep their portfolios directly to publishers’ doors. So he spent years paying industry dues.

Before the comics which became his mainstay, Higgins did multiple freelance jobs to develop cachet. He spends an entire chapter on his children’s line art, a style my generation will recognize from our family-friendly horror novels and game books. He shares a selection of cover art he did for science fiction novels. This selection includes full-page spreads at the end of most chapters, allowing readers to revel in the majesty of Higgins’ elaborately detailed art.

This diligence eventually paid off. Artist Dave Gibbons discovered Higgins by reputation, then eventually met him face-to-face. So when Gibbons and writer Alan Moore created Watchmen, Gibbons knew exactly who to contact for colourist work. The trio collaborated to a degree seldom seen in the 1980s, a time when comics creators were salaried work-for-hire, and colourists about equal to pack mules. This collaboration helped start a new trend.

A recent watercolor of Judge Dredd in Higgins' distinctive, hyperrealistic style

Higgins deconstructs the comics coloring process for untrained eyes. Though famous for his intricate watercolors, Higgins was forced to compromise for the industry standard in pre-digital comics, CMYK dot printing. As he demonstrates this involved some anonymous color separator, working for pennies per page, probably at a kitchen table in Illinois, literally distributing Doctor Manhattan’s eerie blue glow across the page with the corner of one thumb.

Over thirty years later, it’s easy to forget how innovative Higgins’ pathbreaking color work really was. Though he minimized bright primary colors for Watchmen, favoring muted tones and secondary hues, he lit scenes cinematically, bathing characters in one another’s castoff glow. But he took the exact opposite tack in The Killing Joke, oversaturating colors so everything appeared painfully bright, trapping readers in the Joker’s carnivalesque mindscape.

At times, Higgins was strictly a hired man. His art for cross-marketed properties like Carmageddon and BattleTanx, video games that needed the heft a printed comic provided, showcase his style, but only in serving another’s vision. Later, Higgins graduated to having greater creative control. His title Razorjack never found its commercial stride, but that’s probably an effect of media saturation; the art reproduced here is stunning.

Higgins’ survey of comics technology mingles with his life experiences, though he’s sparing in sharing his personal life. He laughs about finding his three-year-old daughter “helping” complete an early line drawing, with a green permanent marker. Nearly forty years on, he remembers the scene with good humor, though since he describes looming deadlines, I suspect it wasn’t comical back then. Such details, rare but apropos, give Higgins’ professional memoir a poignant touch.

And the art is spectacular. By his own admission, Higgins is best-known for images of monsters and carnage, from orcs and zombies in kids’ books, through the horror boom of the 1990s, and the noir pervasion of Razorjack. Here, his early-career work doing illustrations for medical journals shines: looking at a shuffling corpse, or a cyborg offering a child a flower, one can clearly imagine the bones and musculature necessary for that moment to happen.

It’s possible to read Higgins as only a memoirist of the industry. His autobiography, supplemented by powerful artwork, allows such casual consumption. But there’s something greater happening here, an investigation of how the medium’s capabilities change within one career. Though not famous, Higgins demonstrates why audiences love comics, by pushing the capabilities of the visual form.

The Art and Science of American Racism

We stumbled into the Lawrence Arts Center at the tail end of an exhausting weekend. The events in Charlottesville had hypnotized the country for days, and Sarah and I desperately needed something quiet, something aesthetic, not carrying the stench emanating from the upper echelons of American power. We thought surely an art gallery would ease the tensions. We had no idea Iola Jenkins’ textile art would greet us inside.

Jenkins, a self-taught African-American outsider artist, uses a mixture of quilting and embroidery to create dynamic, multicolored images based on her beliefs and experiences. Her textile art includes portraits of Whoopi Goldberg’s character from The Color Purple and activist professor (and sometime fugitive) Angela Davis. She also has pictures of African market days and folk scenes. The depth Jenkins extracts from what look like discarded scraps makes mere paint look one-dimensional and wan.

Sarah and I paused before twinned portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama. Rendered in exceptionally bright colors, the images had a certain quality of a 1990s comic book, but that didn’t undermine their depth. They looked like photographs taken under tinted stage lights, or possibly run through an oversaturated Instagram filter. They captured the energy and potency African-Americans like Jenkins must’ve felt seeing a couple who resembled themselves in Washington.

We stood there, dumbstruck, for several minutes. Both quilts were dated 2015, when President Obama was riding his highest crest of popular support, before the primary election campaign heated up. Jenkins must’ve made these textiles when Donald Trump still looked like a longshot protest candidate, a spoiler meant to agitate a wounded but angry Republican base. She might’ve made them before Trump declared his candidacy. I don’t know.

I threw my hat on the floor.

Many protesters in Charlottesville were unambiguous: they felt emboldened to express their vile opinions because Donald Trump became President. Though it’s overgeneralizing to say Trump caused the Charlottesville violence, his discourse—calling Mexicans rapists, spouting decades-old stereotypes about “the inner city”—emboldened whites who already had racist tendencies to express them. Trump’s failure to condemn people toting swastikas as Nazis hasn’t helped.

Unlike many American prairie communities, Lawrence, Kansas, didn’t spring up spontaneously. Activists from the New England Emigrant Aid Company deliberately founded Lawrence as an abolitionist colony during the Bleeding Kansas fighting, to provide anti-slavery forces an added edge in determining the future state’s future. The city’s main downtown corridor, Massachusetts Street, reflects the city’s abolitionist heritage. As often happens, contemporary attitudes mainly reflect historical foundations.

Historian Ibrahim X. Kendi writes that beliefs tend to follow policy. By this he means that public opinion, on multiple issues but especially race, tends to reflect the ideas floating from the top of politics, economics, and culture. Racism, as we experience it in America, didn’t really exist in pre-colonial Europe. People we’d now consider “white” hated one another and fought violently: French versus English, Spanish versus Portuguese, Germans versus Germans.

After plague and warfare decimated the Native American population, rendering North America fit for colonization, Europe started dumping its undesirable denizens on distant shores. According to Nancy Isenberg, America’s first English settlers weren’t called heroic pioneers at home. The English used colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts to unload what they called “the offscourings of the land.” The word “offscourings” refers to shit that clings to your ass and needs wiped off with paper.

England bound this goulash of beggars, debtors, thieves, and other outcasts together, by telling them: well, at least they weren’t Black. Parliament created policies forcibly separating white settlers from slaves in work, residence, and even food. England initially regarded Indians as whites with extreme tans, until Native pushback against English adventurism turned violent; then policies changed to separate Black, white, and Red. White beliefs accommodated these policies.

So racism became a response to public policy. After the Revolution, when Northern states couldn’t reconcile their rhetoric of freedom with slaveholding, they changed policies to emancipate their Black slaves and white indentured servants. But once the policy of race took hold, nobody could undo it. Northerners still saw themselves as Black, white, and Red. Even abolitionists progressive enough to colonize Lawrence, Kansas, carried the idea of race into their new homes.

Iola Jenkins made her art during a time when it appeared the legacies of colonial policy might finally disintegrate. But electing a Black President, a political moderate with big-tent views and even bigger smile, couldn’t reverse the trend. As Charlottesville proved, the vile colonizers simply moved underground, awaiting their chance. The persistence of abolition in Lawrence, and of racism in the Trump administration, proves boldly: problems don’t go away because head operators change.

They simply take new form. And the fight, physical and policy alike, must adjust appropriately.

The Least Passive People In America

I just spent the most remarkable evening, among the least passive people I've seen. Deep in the wild heart of Lawrence, Kansas, I witnessed two groups of people not content to receive pre-packaged culture, so they made their own. In some ways, it ratified ideas they have percolate, unvoiced, inside my head for years. In other ways, it upended my expectations, and I may never be the same again.

In the first part of my evening, I participated in a painting session. About 32 people gathered in a storefront studio with photographs of their pets, and turned their images into acrylic-on-canvas memorials to how much humans can love small animals. For only about $25 per head, the participants, mostly but not exclusively white women, received paints, prepared canvases, and guidance from experienced artists to recreate their fuzzy or feathered buddies for posterity.

Then, still flush from the creative moment, my companion and I hurried across town to a downtown watering hole where, every Sunday afternoon, nearly two dozen musicians, a group as racially and sexually diverse as their famously polyglot town, gather for a three-hour Celtic music jam. At its peak, the jam included eight fiddlers, four guitarists, two banjos, three percussionists, two flutists, and a concertina player.

The two were very different experiences. The former was scheduled, with a fixed start and end time, a buy-in cost, and designated professionals. The latter was more free-from, with skilled and unskilled players drifting in and out throughout the night, and no definite leader. Some of the musicians, like some of the painters, were appalling compared to others. And both events created venues for undiscovered and unpolished, but gifted, artists waiting for guidance to great accomplishments.

Yet they had more in common than their differences. Both allowed people who almost certainly did something else for a living, people who, I'm sure, don't identify themselves as "painters" or "musicians," to create something worthwhile together. Simply sharing a space and a goal gave their lives shape and definition, even if only for three hours. For that time, they weren't consumers, mere statistics in someone's supply-side graph. For that time, they were creators.

I did it myself. Acrylic on canvas.

Watching these events unfold (and, in the former case, participating), I remembered back in college, when my friend Roger and I led our small prairie town's local pub quiz. For nearly five years, we led what I believe to have been Nebraska's first and, for many years, only British-style pub quiz. At our peak, we filled a good-sized bar, in a moderately prosperous university town, from wall to wall, two Tuesdays per month.

Yet we never achieved my goal, to cultivate a maker culture in our town. Because Roger and I stood before the assembled crowd, engaging (admittedly good) banter into the microphone, while the crowd watched and listened, our making remained one-sided and hierarchical. The few occasions we had balls enough to relinquish the Mike to crowd members, a whole different vibe developed. Yet I lacked perspective enough to recognize what happened.

Until now.

Roger, who is from Scotland, used to mock Celtic music, claiming he moved to the American prairie to escape what he called "deedly-deedly-dee" music. Yet hearing that music created before me, I realized why Celtic music tends toward repetition: because it's not meant to be heard, unlike Anglo-American pop music. It's meant to be created and, if necessary, constantly re-created. No wonder the earliest Irish albums were just live recordings of pub-house craics.

I love attending concerts, and travel to the Kansas City area to attend big-ticket live concerts two or three times per year. But watching the Celtic music crowd, I realized I wasn't seeing a concert. In a concert, the musicians face the audience, who face the musicians, reinforcing a strict hierarchy of makers and consumers. The effects be entertaining, but ultimately dehumanizing. At the Celtic event, the musicians crowded the room and faced one another, creating a truly small-d democratic experience.

Besides concerts, I've long enjoyed museums, poetry slams, and community theater. All reward a maker culture, and encourage people to participate in culture creation... to a point. Unfortunately, all three also enforce a division between artist and audience. Having witnessed two truly participatory creative experiences, I can't shake off the gap between these and what I've seen elsewhere. Sadly, I have no easy solutions. I just have a vision for a society that demolishes the wall between active creator, and audience.

If you need me, I'll be studying chiaroscuro and practicing my mandolin.