Today is May 1st - International Workers Day · the ‘merican worker should have known they were in a heap of trouble when its day was splintered off to September 1st and renamed Labor Day. But as we can all see by the armed mooks storming government buildings demanding their rights as consumers to freely spend their money, just how successful the coopting of that holiday honoring work has been in service of the corporate overlords. Me, i like to work - always have though i’ll damned if i understand just how weak i’ve become in my older days. The farmer neighbors were clearing a field some months back, and in solidarity i tried to contribute. There have been days when i would dig hard ground with a shovel for 10 hours a day, and get up and do it again, day in and day out - no more. I was lucky to spend two hours with a hoe scraping shallow weeds in sandy ground, but i tried. That is the thing about labor - all you can do is your best. Where work gets dicey is when it becomes sedentary, or worst cerebral. I know this because i spent 13 years in engineering bullpens, drawing, figuring, calculating and counting. l won’t lie and tell you it was to build bridges or anything useful - i rented my grey matter to the military industrial complex - it paid for my college degree in English.
My last job of the many i’ve had as a failed artist was as a private investigator/probate analyst for a shady outfit out of Tucson Arizona. On the surface it would seem to be the ideal occupation. I spent my days at the superior court of Los Angeles monitoring estates as they became public. The problem is no one in my office explained that i was expected to monitor estates by any manner or means, legal or illegal, public or private. The objective was to control the unknown heirs of intestate decedents - the richer the decedent the better. There was a lot of gray area, as well as money to be made in this racket; for example if an estate entered probate court with a thrice-removed 2nd cousin as the sole heir, you can bet, which is what my company banked on, that there was an unknown blood relative closer to the decedent than those claiming. Find them and 50% of the estate could become yours. It was a dirty job for the simple fact that it was dead people’s money that was being played for - faceless dead people whose dreams and ambitions no longer figured into the equation - it was simply a foot race to discover unknown heirs, and without revealing who was dead, explain that for a hefty percentage of the inheritance you would reveal who had died and how much they could expect as a blood relative.
I’m very good at parsing things and didn’t know how my competitors continued to get the jump on estates - i had good ideas, but messenger services that were the weak link resented my scruples. However when after 3 years i figured a way to link who was getting documents stamped at the probate window by simply drawing their portraits at the time when when the probate window was busiest; I was also fired within a week of being able to determine which law firm filed which document at what time. It was a revelation amongst others about working with Judges, Attorneys and dead people. When i began that job i told the fellow who hired me when asked, that the list of jobs i haven’t done was growing smaller than those i had. I once drove horse cabs in NYC, worked on the Space Shuttle, and was a building superintendent in a Salvation Army group home for unwed mothers in East Los Angeles. My all consuming passion however and the reason i’ve been in so many different occupations was that of artist. So much so that i could barely acknowledge that to anyone who might ask, though i might have been carving stone decades or 1,000s of studio hours drawing live models. Somewhere along the line my art training became a sacred act, and those dilettantes who, like those who preyed on dead people’s money, published, schmoozed into fame and fortune were no longer amusing, but usurpers.
I do not share this myopic conceit proudly for it was formed from bitterness and resentment about my own failures, yet here is the magic that art has always provided - once that pattern of small-mindednes within my own normally cheerful heart became incessant, it also became an object of study which is the soul of the creative process. I could no longer dismiss Bob Dylan as a dilettante just because he could sign his name to his paintings and they would command astronomical prices simply by virtue of his autograph. I had long known of this aspect about the celebrity nature of fine art; as a young turk my instructor Jose De Creeft was able to tell 1st person accounts of many famous figures in pre and post war Europe. One was about Pablo Picasso and his mendacity - one example my instructor shared was that Pablo virtually spent no money during the last years of his existence because he would pay for everything using cheques - depending on the item being purchased, Pablo’s autograph was often of more value than that which was being bought. Along with anatomy, color theory and composition i was exposed to the darker aspects of the art market.
If i had to do it all over again, i would - my life has been infinitely richer from having studied fine art and literature. The only thing i might have given up is my “tin ear.” It is a function of the confusion between my brain hemispheres i am sure - oh well. In the scheme of things while i watch the young so easily subverted by a digital shackle which when techno-nazi chief scientist at googol kurzwell has his way and devises uploads to the human soul they will no longer have to carry phones with to get their instructions, like elon’s electrical cars, the young will simply have to sidle up to the nearest bluetooth and presto-chango the transfer of knowledge will be accomplished, and we all know how time is no longer money - date is. Still i will go to my grave grateful to my farmer neighbors for the temporary lone of a hammer these past few indolent “shelter in place” days if only for the muscle memory of the months and years hammer in hand looking to hear that ring of metal to metal and watching the mystery of a stone shedding its skin at my own hands like some mineralized butterfly shedding its skin for a new incarnation into a planet which may very shortly not even have humans left to criticize its less than artful shape.
jts 01/05/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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