Spontaneous creative expression is the ultimate in intuitive improvisation. It is also the riskiest. How well will the message be projected? How well will it be received, if it ever is? Such a spontaneous moment where genius is born, or another asshole is unleashed upon the world… visionaries blossom or fools are spawned. The old adage, “think before you speak”, comes to mind. But then with pause comes risk management. What is now the agenda behind the message and who gets to deliver it? Enter the proactive edit. Enter censorship.

Art is weaponry, technique and craftsmanship the launch pad and vision the missile. It is the armament shielding against the prevailing validity and reaffirmation. It is first strike and it is reciprocation via escalation. It is an insurgent release of the comedic, the tragic. It can be censored, but it cannot be quelled.

In the Cape region of South Africa, I was dumbfounded by the lack of rage in their street art. Maybe it is more prevalent farther north; yet, after ages of subjugation, oppression, and now repression?—I would think a new found democracy with uncovered atrocities would lend to an art renaissance. Yet this release I could not find. As I wondered through shop, gallery, street fair, and by graffiti-ed wall, I found minimal expression of former anguish, current emancipation, and fear of uncertain futures. From my eyes, their art was purely decorative, tribal, and expressionless of the pain of injustice and the salvation of freedom. Is there still an imbedded fear of reprisal? Have they yet to learn from so many oppressed centuries, how to piss at the wind? Or is the message so subtle, I just can’t see it.

How do they vent their rage beyond violent acts of revenge? I sensed impending danger, like knowing a friend who for too long bottles up so much and then explodes in a rage befitting an equal or greater negative response from any or all affected. I fear more than a self inflicted ear lopping.

           I’ve always been drawn to artists who evoke an emotional response or even just a raised eyebrow, a single moment of questioning in the eye of the beholder. The more fringe the more fitting, but I think that had to do with youth rather than the message. My friends are Guerilla artists, social pranksters who can insert a disruptive micro-moment into the flow, a hiccup in the continuum, insidiously subliminal or shockingly insurgent; the disruptive effects ranging from the minimally amusing to the most prosecutable with the common purpose to jar awakening in the moment, a reversal of the collective mental environment… consciousness. Adbusters out of Vancouver, BC is the most organized in this aspect, an anti-media medium whose sole goal is to break a hypnotic meme by fighting fire with fire, gloss over gloss. I can’t tell if it’s working on the collective consumer consciousness or they are just preaching to the anti-choir. I do know it only matters that they exist and are determined not to be silenced.

           A friend, small in stature but not in fortitude, is a metal sculptor and the epitome of the minimal subliminal. She takes on quite large installations and yet sees them as too small. Ladders, bucket trucks, cranes, and spark of torch are her tools; grinded, polished, welded scrap-metal her medium. Formerly an oil tanker captain, yet with humble Buddhist footprints, her expressions to the receptive eye are profound. She envisions her monoliths erected throughout the valley in receding farm fields desperately warding off the poisons of over-development. She sees monuments of purpose with labeled titles of ‘Frustration’, ‘Anger’, ‘Denial’, and ‘Punishment’, all physical manifestations of her feelings toward war, intolerance, indifference, and injustice. If the farmers only see a free artsy-fartsy tourist draw, and the tourist only sees an anomaly worth investigation, then mission accomplished. A layer has been penetrated. A different type of seed has been planted in tired soil.

It’s enlightening to take time to smell a different rose. I’m always looking for and applying the original spontaneous, the intuitive off-the-cuff, sketches, paintings, graphics, art, writings, poetry, whatever and wherever contrary dissent oriented; anything that encourages an underlying undermining mental environment that is contrary to the perceived absolutes of the prevailing one… the one that’s purpose is solely for the pursuit of pure profit regardless of the human condition. Why? Because Lord Acton’s epic warning that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is no more obvious than it is today. I’m also quite a curmudgeonly contrarian. And remember, rarely does anyone get paid for this passionate form of expression, so occasionally invite them to dinner. More than likely, they are a little gaunt.

Peace

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In the winter of 2001, my wife and I journeyed to Beijing to stand on The Great Wall; a barrier long ago conquered, broken into segments by the erosion of time and neglect. We wandered in awe through majestic ancient courtyards of a former royal extravagance, sipping tea at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City; excessive testaments to reasons why servitude revolts exponentially violent to such displays of indifference. We walked the length of Tiananmen Square several times; another tourist attraction promoting bronzed sculptured heroes of The State that inconspicuously doubles as a place where authority and brute force once melded like the perfect fit it is.

We had our expectations, our preconceived notions tweaked by our own culturally biased talking heads and the usual promoted fear and loathing of ill-informed idealist as to why ‘those’ people are the way they are, why we are better, and how careful we needed to be. It wasn’t until conversation took place outside the professional drivel of others’ most likely paid perceptions, that we found glimpses of truth and via a medium neither printed nor broadcasted. This truth was transmitted by the presentation of food; food harvested, procured, and prepared with the delight of a sharing host, and eaten with the delight of gratitude of a guest. Sustenance, the ultimate ancient pursuit to negotiate for, to war over, to leverage, and now it is something else; oil, market share, maybe the ego of influence. This enlightenment was our spontaneous moment of collective consciousness. This was our awareness. This was our stone soup.

As we ate, we found a lust for conversational English at each pause, our suspicions heightened as our personal space was constantly bombarded. That was our problem. We found a transformation of minimal survivalist mercantilism towards a burgeoning middleclass and streets full of the art of the dicker where we bartered as ugly Americans do, looking for that trophy buy and bragging rights to our prowess for getting something for nothing. That was our arrogance. We found a six-foot genetically suspect Mongolian guard complete with an automatic weapon standing stoically emotionless in a packed MacDonald’s. We found jazz. We found a young idealist who thought North Korea is the epitome of a pure socialist state. We blinked. He argued that Tiananmen was nothing but a protest against bureaucratic corruption and now all is well. We smiled. We found a dancing midget in eighteenth century garb promoting geisha-looking escorts in front of a suspect looking bath house. We found Starbucks.

We discovered an old woman living in a soon to be dismantled ghetto called a Houton, a place where capitalistic momentums were needing space for concrete and steel expansion and we asked her questions, knowing she had survived the communist and cultural revolutions, periods of mass starvation, the social cleansings and re-education. She replied that the reason her skin was so smooth at the age of seventy-three was because she only washed her face with cold water. She said she liked Americans, but feared our country because we have no one but our nuclear powerful selves to hold us accountable.

Our stay was all too short. We left Beijing with understanding, many of the dots connected, and yet quite fearful of environmental, economic, and thus politically charged reactions to a massive populace awakening with explosive consumption. Governments lie and manipulate. Institutions sell an agenda whether product or ideal twisting verbiage and history, elevating themselves at others’ expense. We folk, our global brothers and sisters, can choose to be shepherds or sheep at any given emotionally vulnerable moment. We can choose to be collectively manipulated by fear and loathing or irrational exuberance. Or we can transcend all of this by something as simple as the creative expression of sharing versus summits of positioning. We can break bread and teach our leaders to do the same. We just need to get out more often.

Â
Peace.

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It has taken a brief and bitter struggle with myself but, now at one a.m. of a new day I am going to write. I could have left myself in the comfort zone and tomorrow, rested, record today’s events as a coherent and pretty whole. But that would hardly be an accurate picture. No, this must be presented as the shattered, multi-faceted image it is. I’m playing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the background, partially in the hopes that the literary spirit of the great HST will give me some semblance of inspiration, partially to heighten the sense of lost sanity I find a day begun at the other side of the country, with an extra hour squeezed in where no one wants and no one expects it to be.

I awoke in Salthill, in Galway city, the Atlantic Ocean barking at me a stones throw from my window…actually that’s just poetic licence, I didn’t really have a window, just the living room floor of a friend’s apartment. Its window wasn’t mine, and it faced in the opposite direction to the sea, onto the back yard of a rather unappealing bar. But the sea was audible and I knew it was there.

The friend I had visited had changed since I last saw him, in that most meaningful of ways, where your tolerance for him has been decimated. One incident is all that’s required to illustrate this.

[Setting: Nighttime, ext. Brendan and Paul sit on a wet rock beside the Corrib river and a canal. Brendan drinks Belgian beer, Paul a bottle of mixed berry cider]
Brendan: Do you know what’s nice? Having someone to love.
Paul: Yeah…Not to sound like a prick, but how often do you think about how you feel about her?
Brendan: Well, not constantly, but every now and then it intrudes into my thoughts like…
Paul:[sharp intake of breath] That’s not a good sign.

I reckon he’d have came up with that, even if I’d said something along the lines of “I ponder my feelings for my girlfriend constantly, and refine my concept of how I feel about her on an hourly basis.” Paul moved from his home and university to be with his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the beginning of his marking out a monopoly on romantic understanding. In all the years I knew him in Dublin he was always locked in some long term relationship or other, which took up most of his time and, all the more irritating, parts of his conversation. And now after two months without seeing him, these comments stung fresh. Their subject was closer to my heart than before, and my recollection of them blunted. He was rarely correct in his statements, but there was always the chance I could be wrong in mine. I haven’t laboured the point. But I think I love my girlfriend, and every now and then something she’s done or said intrudes into my thoughts and I know.

Paul’s brother Kevin had come to Galway with me, and returned with me today. Kev and I are also good friends, and play in a band together. Unlike me however, Kev has taken the jump and immersed himself in music, studying performance and music technology, while I’ve taken the surer path and chosen law. It’s about now that the band is building momentum, and unless something drastic happens our paths will undergo a jagged schism - my band will no longer be mine, and I’ll just be a barrister who plays drums and classical percussion - which I can live with, but all the same, it’s sad. Today was the first time we talked about it, the unhappy details about the point at which I’ll have to take my final leap from the whole flaming vehicle and how we’ll get a replacement to clamber on. Taking a bus across a country is different to taking it across a city - you step out the other side a different person.
When on the first day of college I looked for words of wisdom from my tutor through a beer tinted haze, he said something I thought unlikely.

“You’ll probably find you’ll make new friends at college” he said “And the people you hitherto thought to be your friends were really just people you were hanging around with.” He was right in the first sentence, and about the implied fading away of my old friends, but unfortunately, he was about the ‘just’ part. They were and are the people I love and slowly, slowly they are going away. Our paths our set to split and I shall miss them.

On that note, dear readers, I shall sleep.

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