Over Burnham Park

It was 3 in the morning. Someone's crew was walking down the street below; I could see them from the balcony of the rented apartment my dad had found. It was right across the street from the park my dad grew up playing in.

"This place has changed so much" I remembered him saying. "Dirtier, poorer." He had planned the trip for two and a half weeks, and was ready to go in four days. It just wasn't the same. He tagged along on our adventures anyway though.

For some reason, Camille really wanted her hair straightened while we were there. She spent a week trying to figure out who would do it for under $60, which was a couple thousand pesos. Not much, considering we were American. My dad asked if I wanted mine done too.

"Sure" I said, wondering if he was serious. He was though, because the day came and we followed him through and around Burnham Park, through a shopping center. There was a big sign for a recording studio just over the overhang bridge that was just about as busy as a metro station platform during rush hour. Filipinos like to sing. I could even hear someone performing just at the end of the bridge for the money I didn't really want to give them.

We wound through the run down shops and into an alley, then came out in front of a condemned building, which we cut through in the back stairway. At the top, we were approached by a security guard who spoke a few words in Tagalog to my dad that I didn't understand. He nodded and let us by and we found ourselves in what could have been the second story of a mall, except for the windows that were boarded up with cardboard.

They weren't all like that. There was a store that carried shoes, one carried bags, another carried fake Gap clothes. There were three salons, spaced between them, and my dad went straight to the one in the middle.

The receptionist was a very skinny, tall, feminine guy with bleached orange hair. That's what happens when a person with black hair bleaches it. It turns orange and looks damaged. He also was a shampoo boy I later realized. There was a man in a red t-shirt with the sleeves cut off who's English was better than the others. He did Camille's hair mostly, though he rinsed mine once. A girl did my hair. She had a low voice and when she spoke to me it was in broken English. She was tall, which is one of those things that makes people over there stand out. Filipinos are small naturally.

My hair isn't as thick as Camille's so I got to leave earlier. What I found was the main floor of the building was a market. There were tiny stalls set up with homemade goods, from shoes to rugs to some kind of battle ax my dad thought was cool and brought back to my mom as her present, claiming them as decorations to the customs official when we got back to the States.

Clarissa was particularly good at getting good prices on everything. That means she's a good liar...by Filipino standards anyway. Or it means that they were willing to play the game and pretend so she would come back more often and they could sell more things.

Camille showed up three hours after the rest of us had finished and gone back to the apartment. We were watching some Disney channel rerun when she walked in.

"When did you finish?" she asked me. She had fallen asleep while waiting for the chemicals in her hair to set the during the second cycle.

"A couple hours ago"

"Did you remember to give that guy a tip?"

"Dad tipped him, and I had a girl"

"No, it was a guy" she said, a smile creeping over her lips.

"No, it was a girl" I said. She shook her head and insisted that it was a guy. My dad chimed in an agreement.

"Lalakway" he laughed before heading up to take a nap. Transvestite, I translated in my head.

I wondered, as those boys passed on the street below me, if that had been one of those things that had changed too. There was one lone street light in the area. A taxi drove by, it's motor loud in the still summer air. I went inside and turned on the t.v.. I wouldn't fall asleep for another hour or so, I knew.

Burnham Park, Baguio, Philippines, 2006 in the daytime from the apartment balcony.

Bittersweet Ambition

Ryan Brown was crazy. He wanted me to drop everything and go to Florence. That's in Italy. He's always been like that I suppose, but somewhere in our teacher-student relationship that quote just to the right by J Fettingist became more and more true, and I had stopped receiving all the things he was putting into my head and was blatantly objecting to them. I only did that because he was crazy. He wanted me to go to Florence.

I did learn from him though. He and Wulf Barsh von Benedict would give me theory articles to read. I was a good student then (a phrase which really 'means I read them'). One of the things Ryan harped on the most was taste. He would come in every morning with a liter of diet coke and crack something about how I was short (he's 6'2"), then he'd sit down for a couple minutes and give his lecture about whatever had pissed him off in the last 48 hours.

I have to make a side note here: you know how there are certain teachers you gravitate towards? Makayla knows, certainly, because she gravitates back to Dr. Cronin. Well, that was me and Ryan. I took Observational Drawing from him. Then the senior illustration course on gesture drawing. Then Intermediate Life Drawing. He pissed me off every single day, and yet at the beginning of every class, I was ready to face him again.

One day he sat down on the edge of the model stand with a stack of papers and handed them out. It was an article called "A Note on Taste." Actually, it was a section of a chapter, "Tone and Colour Design" in a book, Oil Painting, which I'm going to guess is by someone relatively old. Anyway, whoever wrote Ryan's inspiration of the day said that taste is determined by familiarity, and that good taste can be developed. What really seems to sum it up is the last sentence of the chapter, which says:

All good artistic work is new; but its newness is of the inevitable sort that naturally grows from sincerity; not the forced newness for the sake of difference, which characterises so much of the peculiarity that in theses days masquerades as originality.

His point in the whole thing was that it isn't so much about being as it is being while meaning something. And while someone can develop a taste for something, that doesn't mean the antithesis can't exist. It also means that on the individual scale, good and bad are entirely relative, but on the grander scale, they are definite. There is such a thing as skill, and whether one possesses it or not will determine if they are good or bad.

Ryan was huge on that because here's something of a little secret: art is not just about the idea. It has to have one, but there has to be a structure. I like to think of it as language. Movements change it, but it is rooted in a place that it draws upon for stability--for definition. The thing is, once you know what good art really is, crafted through study and reflection and skill, taste is redefined.

The hard part about writing this post is that I didn't drop everything and go to Florence. I stayed. I wont lie, there are days I sincerely wish I had gone. But what really sobers me is that Ryan taught me so much about life, art, humanity, God, and myself that it seems almost like I owe him something. It is a similar feeling towards Mully; but the fact is, Ryan shared what he felt and what he knew to be true on a daily basis. And some days he was completely off. I wont lie--he's an arrogant conceited jerk...but usually he was right. Ryan inspired me to be a great person. I studied every reference he gave me. I aimed as high as I could with every line until I stopped caring. And he said to me that June day in his studio, "Look at you! You're coagulating right in front of me! I don't know what happened to you, but pull yourself together. You don't even get dressed for the day."

I could hate him for that day. But the thing that I've realized as I sit with Makayla and discuss her relationships with Cronin and Muhlestein is that I miss every second of Ryan's influence in my life, and that I will always regret the day I walked out of his studio and never went back.

I didn't draw this. This is a photo of Ryan.

(My mother never knew what he looked like, but she hated him to the core.)

Matter of a Feline Nature

I remember it like it was yesterday.

"Make sure as you skin your cat, if you have a female, which I think most of you do, to check for mamillary tissue!"

Casper rolled his eyes and picked up the scalpel to start cutting the horrid calico open. His name isn't really Casper. It's David. Weird kid. He was one of those kids who was just too smart to fit in. Plus he was relatively sadistic.

Our cat didn't have mamillary tissue, but it was pregnant anyway. We cut her open to find this monstrosity of a uterus...only we didn't really know it was the uterus right away. We couldn't figure out what it was, so we asked.

"Oh my goodness! Didn't your cat have any mamillary tissue?" Obviously Mrs. Schlossnagle was as perplexed as we were, especially when we all shook our heads and she checked for herself. But we were right. No mamillary tissue whatsoever.

So we performed a C-section. There were 5 kittens.

Actually they weren't kittens yet. But they were advanced enough to have claws (kinda like Juno...when that Asian girl tells her her baby has fingernails). They looked like little dogs actually. And they were pinkish white. They were also pretty small. They fit right in the palm of your hand. We passed them around then dropped them into a jar of formaldehyde, so they would be back in familiar surroundings, and stuck them on the shelf next to the almost ancient goat embryo. I'll bet you $5 they're still there.

The cat dissection turned into our final exam. We numbered a piece of paper to fifty and rotated from cat to cat, identifying the different parts and identifying what their uses were. There turned out to be only one male cat, so he was easy. He had all the parts the other cats didn't. I looked at my cat. It looked like a broken toy, especially with the way the uterus spilled out of it.

It looked like a leathery balloon, or a piece of one at least. The C-section didn't make it look very pretty. "Snowden's secret," I remember whispering to Casper. He laughed like I knew he would. I didn't laugh though. It wasn't funny. It was tragic. I told myself I should respect the dead more, but myself answered that if they were dead it shouldn't matter.

But it does matter.

Everyone dies--what is so special about that?

I don't know, it just does.

It matters because it is matter, and that's as common as a grain of sand on a beach. It is a grain of sand on a beach.

It should matter.

But it doesn't. Remember a couple months ago that crazy sniper kid went around shooting people? Life went on as usual. Remember that spine you did?

What about it?

You did that during the sniper attacks. It would have turned out the same if those people hadn't died. The anatomy is the same.

But it should have mattered.

It didn't.

Is that a vein or an artery?

Isn't it all the same?

No, I thought. It matters.

Why?

I had to stop for a moment before I figured out my answer. Because...

Because...?

Because then there is no God.



That's all I remember.

8:29 am. Monday

The people I went to high school with were...completely insane. No, really, they were. But on top of that, they were insanely brilliant. Their minds worked in ways I am only beginning to comprehend. I was the dumb kid. No really, I was. I really should have been in remedial everything, but I kept passing those stupid standardized tests.

The reason I mention this is because they would write this amazing prose and the title of it would be a date and time, in numeric form. They were big on time/space binaries. And good writing in general. I digress though; I figured that since I am not writing my paper that is due at 9, I may as well describe the moment for lack of something better to do.

***

They tell me I'm crazy for thinking "The Yellow Wallpaper" is about a woman's need for use-value. But they're all crazy for thinking it isn't. What I really don't get though, is why they teach us to make huge stretches of the imagination only to invalidate it with some crap theory by someone named Fish. The whole school thing seems incredibly counterproductive. Which is why I will not write my paper.

Actually, that is a lie. I am perfectly willing to write my paper, if someone actually cared. What difference does it make, I wonder, if all that is ever going to happen to it is some perpetual student of book-learning gives it a grade? I'll tell you. Once a teacher gives a student a grade, he creates a hierarchy of intelligent people he feels he can support in order to reproduce himself. If anyone was wondering, that is how teachers like Muhlestein and Cronin create their lists of favorites. They choose the people most likely to carry on their own ideals of academia, scholarship, and sense of humor. Which means, that in reality, the education system is really the source of corruption and evil...and the downfall of humanity, which I personally don't support--therefore I refuse almost violently to write my paper.

Or, maybe I'm just above writing papers in general. I detest them. They are the gross wad of three month old gum stuck to the underside of my desk that makes me puke inside when I happen to accidentally touch it. They are the bane of my existence. They are a useless form of busy work. I will not write my paper.

The truth of the matter is there is no reason for me not writing it other than I just don't want to. The greater truth is that I will eventually do it because I am trapped in an undemocratic institution that dictates that I do so. I do so or I fail and leave school. I fail and leave school for a life poorer and joyless life than I previously had. I fail or type, fail or write, fail or die in some miserable state....and all at 8:29 on a Monday morning.

I will not write my paper...yet.