I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 6, we get a little weird with Salvador Dali.
I've seen Captain Beefheart referred to as “the Salvador Dali of
rock music”, which is just critical shorthand for “he's a really
weird cult-like figure who made peerless, visionary art.” Whether
or not you like Beefheart or Dali, there's no denying their totality
of vision, their originality. I see them as being separate people who
happened to exist in the world in a way so out-of-step with normal
reality that they become akin to twins or brothers. I'm not grasping
at straws trying to tie the two of them together. Once he retired
from music, Beefheart became a painter of some repute himself, after
having been a child prodigy artist in his youth.
The big difference, at least as far as the art they produced goes,
is that Salvador Dali never purposefully dumbed down his work to
appeal to a mass market. He wanted to make money—I'm pretty sure
some of the portraits he did were commissions—but never at the cost
of having to change or edit his vision. Beefheart's music sometimes
had to bend to the will of the commercial world, so there's a stark
contrast between overproduced AOR albums like
Bluejeans &
Moonbeams and unfiltered madness
like Trout Mask Replica
(which, fun fact, contains a song called 'Dali's Car').
What drew me to Captain Beefheart
is the same thing that drew me to Salvador Dali: they're weird as
hell. It's a bit broad to say I've always liked weird things without
being able to get more specific but it's also kind of the truth. When
I was young, I liked Ren & Stimpy
because it's weird. When I was a bit older, I liked EarthBound
because it's weird. When I was even older, I liked David Lynch films
because they're weird. Each of these is weird in a different way, but
there's a characteristic “other” quality to each one that becomes
immediately obvious when you compare them to most of the rest of
their respective mediums. For instance, Inception
is kind of a weird movie, but it's completely normal compared to
Lynch's Inland Empire.
So what I meant by 'a characteristic “other” quality' is that
you'd have to file it under “other” when categorizing it, as you
would with Dali. I mean, there's no “weird” genre category on
Netflix, is there?
Salvador Dali is, to me, the king
of weird. It's difficult to have a conversation about weird or
surreal things without him coming up because he's like the nexus
point of weirdness. I'll never forget watching
Un Chien
Andalou, the surrealist film he
made with Luis Bunuel, during a film class in college. This movie is
from 1929 but still has the capacity to unsettle and confuse modern
audiences. It's timeless in the way all great art is timeless to
someone with an open mind. This is to say nothing of Dali's art,
which is still as popular today as it ever was. I'm not that informed
when it comes to visual artists but anyone I've ever talked to who
is
more knowledgeable has agreed that he's a genius.
This is the book I have, though the cover is in English
I may not know my art too well
but I do know my Dali. I have a huge book containing every painting
he ever did, and I've gone through the entire thing several times.
During the Summer of 2011 I had this daily routine where, when I got
home from work, I would put on music, smoke some pot, make some tea,
and sit in the sunshine beside my living room window while smoking
clove cigarettes and looking through as many pages of the book as I
could before it was time to go make dinner. I used sheets of paper to
mark off pages that held my favorite pieces and each time through the
book my favorites kept changing. I don't think you need chemicals to
enjoy doing the same thing because I'm also obsessed with Dali even
while sober...but they certainly didn't hurt.
Dali was inspired by the
unconscious, of course—you could describe each one of his paintings
as being its own dream world—but his vision also encompassed one's
conscious visual imagination while awake. His work created with the
“paranoiac-critical” method is like the art version of optical
illusions and images that change depending on how you focus on them.
A good example of what I'm talking about is shown below—in the
first case, you can see either a rabbit or a duck. In the second
case, the work 'Paranoiac Visage' (1935), Dali took a postcard of
African villagers sitting in front of a hut and painted it so that,
when turned on its side, you see a woman's head. It's like a more
advanced version of how, if you look with the right eyes and
imagination, electrical sockets and the front of cars can look like
faces.
Rabbit or duck?
Villagers or face?
The reason Dali means so much to
me is that, once I got beyond the initial delight at how weird his
art is, I keep coming back to him because there's more going on than
just weirdness for weirdness's sake. You can throw together any
mish-mash of ideas and images, post it online, and have people look
at it and go “LOL so random!” Indeed, much of Japan's weirdness
seems built on this foundation. But with Dali, there's an
intelligence and vision to his works that go beyond him just trying
to make weird looking things to amuse himself and freak out the
squares. I may never know what he's saying with some of his pieces,
or if he's saying anything at all, but it always strikes me more as
playful than nonsensical. With his greater works, I seem to either
see new things in them each time or I react to it in a different way.
With something as dense as 'Hallucinogenic Torreador' (1968-1970),
you can always pick out new details you missed before, provided you
have a high quality version of it to look at—the little boy in the
lower right corner of it is Dali's portrait of himself as a boy, and
appears as an ongoing motif in a few other paintings.
Might have to find a bigger image to get the full effect
With a lesser known and
minimalist piece like 'Dark Tapeworms' (1978), I feel something
different every time I see it. I don't really know what it is about
this painting that sticks with me. I doubt any other Dali fan in
history has liked this one as much as I do. His other better known
images that have become part of the collective consciousness—like
the burning giraffes, the melting watches, the paranoiac-critical
method paintings like 'Swans Reflecting Elephants' (1937)—may be
what the public goes to when they think of Dali. For me, though, he
has become as much about 'Dark Tapeworms' or his shockingly normal
paintings like 'Glass Of Wine And Boat' (1956).
Peaceful, eerie
In this way, Dali's importance to
my life has been to remind me that we are, all of us, never just one
thing. Dali isn't just the weird-ass artist because if you look
beyond his two or three best-known works, he surprises you with some
some still life's, nudes, and landscapes that no one would guess are
his. Captain Beefheart isn't just that weird-ass musician, because
his early music is pretty much bluesy garage rock and he went on to
make a living as a painter. And as for me, I'm not just a guy who
writes about music. I wrote a novel, once. I write poems, sometimes.
I make music, sometimes. I like booze and crazy experimental music,
but I also like quiet afternoons and tea. Not to mention, this 30 For
30 series encompasses videogames, books, music, movies, TV shows, and
artists. If this makes me a dilettante, I guess it's better than
having monomania.
In spite of my taste for weird, I really love this one
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