Furry Bomber Hats, Vegan Food and Vomit

On the bookshelf, the furry bomber hat covered the mannequin’s bare head and her large 70’s sunglasses rested on the tip of her nose. There was an old record player sitting on a worn oak dresser under the gaudy vintage lamp. Original artwork covered the plywood walls. Eclectic mugs filled the doorless cupboard. Everything was in place on this hipster stage. If you tried to think of something hipster that was not in that apartment, you would be there until someone started playing a top 20 pop countdown, i.e. forever. Everyone was in place. Guys, in their tight jeans and puffy retro vests and dirty sneakers, had their messy curls falling out of their snow hats just right. Girls wore their coy, apathetic “damn it all unless you want to make out” expression and were appropriately attired in their Urban Outfitters uniform. “Welcome to Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” Val said to me.

And then the show began. Cecil perched himself on the wooden chair, licked his lips and apologized for his quiet guitar. His awkward twitching while he talked and tuned was my first tip off. But it was too late to escape. Before I knew it, he was wailing about “human huggies” and his “pinched penis on the wall” and stringing random words together like he was hurling pieces of trash he had blindly fished out of a dumpster at innocent people walking by; as if language was only meant to confuse. He would shake, convulse, scream, hit his head, pound his guitar and moan and wail and choke. All in the name of art.

And everyone watched, most even with straight faces. I bit my lip and practiced self control. And after reveling in my inner hipster and relishing the Beat-ness of it all, I couldn’t take it any more. This was not art. Or at least, this was not beauty.

It was self-expression. Cecil, I’m sure, was making sense to himself because he was expressing himself. The only problem was that he was just vomiting his inner self out, and it was rather offensive to the ears and the soul. In fact, if any of us just vomited out what was deep down inside of us, we would all severely offend. Cecil was not offering his audience anything worthwhile. Instead, he was divulging his unsanctified crap, without any effort to sanctify it himself. And no one wants that. We have enough of that on our own. He might have felt better after throwing up, but no one else did.

Art, rather, should be an attempt to order, even sanctify, all that is ugly within and without us. This does not mean it all needs to be cleaned up and sugar coated. It can still remain raw and bloody, but the artist’s job is not to just vomit what is inside him but rather to enact some sort of force onto it so that it can become something worth consuming, not just mopping up.

The artist is a chef (to be perhaps overly simplistic). And I don’t care if the artist only uses organic vegan produce from Whole Foods cooked in a hipster kitchen. All that I want to see in art is one person’s personal attempt to actually mold, marinate, color, pound, heat, flavor, tweak, whittle, process the shit and the beauty in him and in the world. Again, I say the artist must be proactive. The artist has the rare tools needed to give meaning and purpose to the amorphous. The artist possesses a sacred function because the artist holds a dash of sanctification in his fingertips. Sometimes that makes things bitter, sometimes sweet, sometimes unusual and sometimes familiar. But it is always artful and beautiful. And that is what nourishes us. Not vomit.