(3) images as a portrait of myself

(3) images as a portrait of myself: august 2014

I've written the film portion of this blog post three times trying to decide whether Fight Club or the Before Sunrise trilogy merits more mention. However, I eventually decided that I can't say anything about Before Sunrise better than Richard Linklater can say it (the man is a god), so here we are at Fight Club (1999). I once read that Fight Club is "a coming-of-age movie for people in their thirties", which is such a brash and awkward idea highlighted so well by David Fincher's dim aesthetic and dark edge. I love rotting houses and soap making. I love the gross, gritty exploration of society's ills. I love, inexplicably, watching Edward Norton beat up Jared Leto. I love an artist (an author, a director) that understands an innate need to destroy. I often joke that Fight Club has everything a movie could ever want, besides a decent depiction of women (there's a picture of Marla Singer in the dictionary next to "flat". Chuck Palahniuk himself said that Marla represents a "grail object" (yes!!! he actually uses the word object!!!) rather than an actual human being, which means Fight Club... literally fails the sexy lamp test. Grrrrrr.)

I have no idea how to talk about who I am as a person without talking about poetry. Poetry is so tied to my identity that I could write this entire biography just about poems. I've had periods of my life where I've written a poem every day and periods in which I've agonized over the same poem for months, but I am never not ravenously writing and reading. Writing is what I've always known I'm supposed to be creating, supposed to be consuming, supposed to be absorbing. This is part of the cover image to Richard Siken's book Crush. Crush is my favorite book of poetry ever written. I read it during my spring break during my sophomore year of high school, in which my family and I traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I couldn't sleep but wasn't allowed to keep the light on in our communal hotel room, so I retreated to the bathroom, closed the door, sat in the bathtub, and read Crush cover to cover. Eventually my mother walked in on me crying my eyes out in that hotel bathroom at about two in the morning. Embarrassing, but real. My girlfriend has recited Crush to me over the phone late into the night. I quote Crush every time I borrow a jacket or see a boy with green eyes. Crush is so important. Crush deserves the world.

Feminist and confessional art is my one true love in this short life. I have an immense passion for art history and discovering contexts to apply to artwork, deriving both a cultural and personal importance from a piece. Art created after 1900 always seems to hit me the hardest. You know that person in the art museum who's always "is this supposed to be art"ing, "I could do that"ing, I am the anti-that person. I am first in line to promote the masterpiece a child could create. My favorite artwork is canvas full of red, dribbled and spilled paint, sculptures that are simple cubes. And, of course, words carved into benches. This is a picture I took at an art museum in Minneapolis of a Jenny Holzer bench. Jenny Holzer is an absolutely amazing artist who works a lot with text, merging fine art with raw and interesting writing.  Her series like Truisms (1977-1979) have been printed anonymously on wheatpaste posters, T-shirts, stickers, benches, plaques, marquees, LED signs, and projections that have spread her messages throughout society and broken into public consciousness. She works with themes such as violence, oppression, sexism, feminism, war, power, and death. The thought that she inspires and the genuine depth I feel from a Holzer truism makes her, in my opinion, one of the greatest artists of all time.