A is for Awesome

Hello internet. I've missed you. (Well, parts of you.) It's been a hectic couple of months full of turmoil, magic, and synchronicity, because the universe is good like that. The tornado of change has dropped me into something like Oz, except there will be no attempts to murder women for their possessions and fewer tiny people singing and dancing. (Pretty much just me, actually. But I sing and dance a lot, and I'm short, so you can pretend.) The biggest and most fabulous change is, quite literally, an awesome thing: I am proud and honored (and still, to be honest, frankly sort of shell-shocked) to announce that the Awesome Foundation has given me a grant to make artist books and scatter them all over San Francisco. Really. (If you don't know about these folks, you should; everything about them lives up to their name. There are chapters all over the world, and every month every chapter gives away a grand to fund a project they think is sufficiently awesome. Yes: some very, very nice, generous, and potentially insane people think that I should get a thousand dollars to make art. I am okay with this.)

Miniature collage is my thing. There will be miniature
collages hidden in books all over San Francisco. 
Basically I make the art I want to find myself.
That makes sense, right?

The project I submitted was inspired by the "Portraits of an Ingenious Gentleman" project I stumbled across a few months ago, and I was doubly delighted to have been chosen for the grant because it felt, in a way, like I was being given the chance to show my gratitude for the amazing experience of discovering that work. Now other people will be able to stumble across and discover the work that I leave hidden in books all over the city. If all goes well (i.e. if I do a decent bloody job) the books I make will, hopefully, inspire the same feelings of delight and wonder that I experienced when I discovered Boethius's drawings. If not, it will probably just inspire befuddlement, which is sort of like wonder after wonder has had too many drinks and starts slurring its words at the bar....

A is for Art Bar and Other Awesomeness

So my partner, the spectacularly-bearded Santa Cruz street poet Kevin Devaney, just launched the IndieGoGo campaign for his truly awesome & amazing solution to the gutting of funding for arts education. It's called the Art Bar and the basic, brilliant way it works is this: since artists are always broke and working at bars anyway, what if you opened a bar that specifically hired artists and used the money from the beer sales to help them fund outstanding arts programming and free arts education in local schools? That is, what if the beer you're out buying on Saturday night was actually paying for your kids and your community to do poetry, painting, theater, visual art, dance, design...? Sounds like a great freaking deal, right? Right. (If you want to donate the cost of one beer to making this model of sustainable funding a replicable reality, you can do so by clicking here! You will get many thanks and also poems and other great perks!)

Did you know there's a whole category on Wikimedia Commons called
"Drunken People in Art"? I was looking for an appropriate illustration for
"Art Bar" but I just couldn't resist this. It's by William Holman Hunt and
it's called "The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness
attending the revelry (The Eve of St. Agnes)" from somewhere  around
1847. The Art Bar will not look like this, of course, except maybe for that
swell pink cape the  guy is wearing. Swell pink capes are always welcome.

M is For A Vision of the Future, Maybe

So last week I sorta saw my future.

Well, my potential future. My future in the event that I manage to manifest the insane dream of building a magical museum. Which is, let's face it, not exactly the world's most easily-realized ambition.

What happened to me between July 27th and August 3rd, however, served as a sort of week-long kick in the pants by a semi-benevolent universe. What the heck did I do? I attended a world-music-and-dance camp in the Mendocino Woodlands. It's called Lark Camp. It's another universe.

In the Lark Camp universe, people play music together eighteen hours a day -- not because they have to, or because they're obsessive virtuosos, but because they love it and it makes them happy. It doesn't matter how good you are; whether you've just picked up an accordion or you've been playing the fiddle since the age of three, you're invited. If you don't like what one group of musicians is playing, you can walk twenty feet and find another group of people playing something else behind a stand of trees. Or by the river. Or around the fire. Or in a tent.

You can't see them, but there are at least three different groups of
musicians playing within a fifty-foot radius of this idyllic little spot.

In the Lark Camp universe, you can dance from 8 in the morning til 4 in the morning. There's the morning waltz. There's the afternoon swing class, or Turkish Roman class, or Morris dance. There's the evening Balkan dance, or Greek dance, or salsa party. There's the midnight ceili dance, the 1am country dance. Don't know how to dance? Whatever. You'll learn.

A...is for A Year Full of Gifts

Yesterday was my 25th birthday. (I meant to write a post the day of, but I was busy actually celebrating instead of blogging about celebrating, so you can just imagine that today is my birthday.) I'm not entirely sure why, but a quarter of a century seems sort of important. Maybe it's because in my head I feel like this is the year I've got to start taking myself seriously. Not too seriously (we can't have that), but seriously enough that I stop making the kind of excuse for myself that starts with "But I'm still young, so..." or "But I'm still a broke quasi-artist, so..."

Call it a turning point. I have some serious dreams and ambitions, and if I want to see them come out of the realm of pleasant fantasy and actually put forth roots in reality, at some point I have to stop imagining that I am working/what it will be like to work/that I might start working on them someday, and actually, well, get started. And 25 seems like a good year for that. But it's a scary thing. It's almost impossible for me to avoid falling into the trap of comparisons when it comes to creating a meaningful life for myself. How can I catch up to those friends of mine (or, hell, annoying middle school acquaintances) who are already published poets, or make $200K a year, or are famous performers with bands I'd die to get on stage with, or are getting written up in the New Yorker, or started their own wildly successful company...

...etcetera, etcetera?

"What other instruments are there, pray tell? Scratchy violins?
Screechy piccolos? Nauseating trumpets? Etcetera? Etcetera?"
(Hi, I made you some 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T gifs. You're welcome.)

XYZ...and BEYOND!

I realize this isn't a sculpture,
but I don't have pictures yet.
Monotype by the awesome
artist Lynn Peterfreund. She
makes pictures of crows!!!

So I totally failed to complete the A to Z blog challenge. I had ideas for X, Y and Z, honest- I pooped out because I spent the last four days of April getting paid to hang out without my pants on artist modeling for a renowned master sculptor & his class in the middle of nowhere on an idyllic farm in Ashfield, MA. I love artist modeling, and most of my best (and probably most ridiculous) ideas come to me while I am sitting very still in the nuddypants, being busily turned into art by very nice people who think I am a very good model except for all that pesky breathing stuff. (To be fair, they only voice the occasional wistful desire for me to cease being alive long enough for them to get the shadows on my ribcage right.) I thought up some swell themes for my final posts: Exhilarated and exultant for X (no, I don't consider it cheating - wouldn't you rather read a post about something I actually think about from time to time as opposed to some obvious and laborious excuse for an entry like Xanthippe or Xylophone? - although it should be noted here that my family does own a very fine xylophone, a large one, in a traveling case with stand, no less); yearning for Y; and zest for Z.

But to be totally honest, they're just variations on a theme. You want me to talk about zest? (No, I realize you didn't say you did. It's a rhetorical whatsit.) Okay, this thing here I said about vividness, it's basically about zest. Let me sum up my zest post for you: zest is a way of experiencing the world as being vivid and awesomely full of gifts. It's cool and stuff and it makes you excited and adventurous. Great, that's done. How 'bout yearning? BAM, this post is totally about yearning. Exultance? I pretty much got you right here. (Also, why is "exultance" not a word? One can be exultant; what one feels when one is exultant should be exultance. "Exultation" is a word, but it seems wrong to me, like a thing and not a state of being. I feel exactly the same way about the word evocative, although it is passive instead of active, which just makes things worse - one can find a thing evocative, a thing can evoke something in us, but what we feel when something is evoked in us is not evocation - a clunker of a word, without any hint of an essence contained in it - it ought to be evocativeness, or something. Also, eher I am tempted to make a slanderous remark about the idiotic use of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and his stupid madeleine-induced memory as an example of an evocative experience. I always found it entirely too ham-handed and convenient a recollection to fit what I understand the word evocation to mean. The origin lies in the sense of calling up or calling forth, as in spirits or demons, and I have always thought it is an entirely more delicate and evanescent process than Marcel's "ah, dissolving cookie! Hmm, what's this I recall? Of course, tea with aunt Leonie on Sunday mornings!" But I digress.)

W is for Wunderkammer

The cabinet of Ulisse Aldrovandi (b. 1522), an eminent naturalist and
owner of one of the first, largest, and most influential cabinets of
curiosity ever assembled. Check out some neat stuff about him here.

Wunderkammer, literally "wonder-room," is a (literally) wonderful term for the august and bizarre predecessor of the modern museum, the cabinet of curiosity. (Boy, do I have some swell pictures for you today.) Once upon a time there were no public museums, just a bunch of rich people who owned a fabulous amount of very crazy stuff, which they kept in rooms devoted solely to displaying their treasures. (Back then, of course, a cabinet was a decent-sized, inhabitable chunk of space, not a little thing to hang on the wall and fill with toothbrushes and lost oddments of drugs and jewelry, although that's its own kind of special collection - yeah, I'm sure it's been done.) The public was actually allowed in to look at this stuff sometimes, but often it was only if you were, you know, "respectable" and got the caretaker on a good day. (The first public museums weren't much more public, though - Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, reports that when the British Museum first opened, prospective visitors were required to request a ticket via written letter, which in the eighteenth century cut out a good chunk of the population.)

An 18th-century cabinet of curiosity, in more modern-cabinet form. A list of
its contents can be found here. Believe me, you want to know.

The early wunderkammer were full of an amalgamation of natural history artifacts, and could include everything from funny-looking bits of coral to somebody's teeth to a beautiful feathered cloak belonging to a member of an indigenous tribe who really in all likelihood would have preferred to keep it for himself. Stones, bones, taxidermied animals, bits of plants, shells, and other fun stuff all got displayed - but they were also set up alongside art objects, miniatures, scientific instruments, and other marvels made by human hands. (Athanasius Kircher, whom I mentioned in my post on the Museum of Jurassic Technology, was known for his collection, which included magic lantern slideshows and a "Delphic Oracle" a statue that would "speak" and move its eyes and mouth. More awesome facts about his collection here, but you'll be very sad you didn't live in the 17th century for maybe five whole minutes before you remember the existence of indoor plumbing.)

V is for Vivid

Poison dart frogs, one of the world's most vivid creatures.
Image via The Incredible Weirdness of Being.

Vivid (and its linguistic cousin, vivarium, which I'll get to in a minute) is one of my favorite words. It comes from the Latin vivere, "to live," and it was originally used to mean "lively" or "spirited" in the sense of an animal or a person - which is kind of interesting in itself, actually, because distinguishing a being as "lively" is kind of like saying they have extra life, since we as living things have a base measure of life already. So, at the root, vivid really means "more alive" or "extra alive." What is it, that measure of extra life, I wonder? What do we actually look at to decide whether something has it or not? It's not just energy; I think something can be energetic without being especially vivid, like a Jane Fonda workout video, or a politician. Later on, the word vivid came to be used on colors that were especially bright or strong, and as time went on we started using it for all sorts of things - emotions, dreams, experiences, smells. We use it mostly in the sense of intensity, something being very detailed or powerful or bright. And in some way we forget what it really means, that when we say something is vivid, we're designating it as more alive than other things, actually possessing a larger measure of life.

U is for Uncertainty

This is the very first image that comes up in the Google image
search for 'uncertain,' from the beautifully-written Water Foul
by Joe Nick Patoski, a lovely essay on ecology. Oddly, it came
up because it was taken in the town of Uncertain, Texas, not
because it's one of those weird quasi-inspirational stock photos.

I got the idea for this one from L.M. Murphy over at See Murphy Write - I was feeling utterly uninspired about U (what was I gonna do, universe? Little too big, guys, even for me) and so I will cop to searching #atozchallenge on Twitter to see what everyone else was up to. Which is how I stumbled over L.M.'s lovely blog. Although I am blatantly ripping off the thing that U is for, I am not  ripping off L.M.'s post, which you should read, and please note that I give her all credit for the idea and am humbly grateful to have been inspired. (Also, she thought it was cool that I was inspired - Twitter sez so, so it's TRUE!)

That being said, I would like to quote her. "Life is uncertain." she writes. "I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, as the glass-half-empty people like to point out. (...) However.... right now, in this very moment, no matter what happens tomorrow, I am content."

(In addition to having some awesome Buddha-nature on display here, she also wins points with me because she confesses her weakness for edible goodies in this post. I'm a fan of any gal who can be won over by treats as easily as me.)

T is for Touch

Glorious nectarine sunburst via Flickr. Yes, I am aware
of the, ahem, more luscious connotations of this image.

...and all the rest of our senses, and for the body that brings the world into us. We often think of beauty as something to be seen, but many of our most beautiful experiences come to us through other mediums: the power of a smell, whether a bouquet of freesias or your mother's curry or fresh bread baking or woodsmoke on a winter's night; the tactile sensations of toes on cool flagstones or dipping into fresh water on a day of oppressive heat, a loving body pressed against ours, the pleasing smoothness of an egg fitting into our hands, the fur behind a cat's ear; the taste of mangoes in summer and roast potatoes in winter, or a glass of water when we're thirsty, or the brown-gold warmth of coffee in the morning; the sound of laughter, or rain, or music. These are experiences that are fleeting and beautiful, and which often give us joy on a level so deep as to be almost unconscious. Sometimes we hardly recognize them except as a feeling of bliss or contentment or gladness, way down in our guts or souls, below the level of words.

If this month's posts are 26 inspirations for the Museum of Joy, perhaps this one is not only an inspiration but also the best explanation I can give of the exhibits I would like to fill it with and the way I want it to be built: a house of community, of festivity, of celebration,  and of the senses.

Look, I don't know how to put the quenching of thirst on display, or the taste of a summer tomato still warm from the sun, or the curve of someone's neck. But that's still the plan, really. To find a way to put these things, or the essence of them - distilled into art, or poetry, or song, I guess - into a labyrinth of lovely rooms, and let the people of the earth roam through it. I honestly don't care if it can't be done, because I'm pretty sure that even a loose approximation would be, to put it frankly, pretty fucking awesome.

If you were going to put one of your favorite small, sensual experiences on display for others, how would you go about it? Would you build a shaded garden for your friends to walk barefoot in? Give out fresh-baked cookies? Put together a room full of pillows and sunshine? Paint a picture full of the colors you feel when you smell thunder coming? Beat a drum? Would you try and remake the experience literally for other people to step into, or create an evocative representation instead? Think about it and let me know in the comments!

S is for Simka

My sister and I having a very important discussion on
the streets of Berkeley. (I'm the short one.) Note
the lampshade's elegant mustache.

Although the 26 entries of the A to Z blog challenge here at the Museum of Joy are all dedicated to inspirations for the Museum, this one might be the single most important. See, it was my amazing, brilliant, and lovely sister Simka who came up with the idea in the first place. Incidentally (or maybe not), Simka's name comes from the Hebrew word for joy, simcha, pronounced sim-hah with an extra-throaty h. (My parents were afraid of condemning her a life of being mispronounced in such senstive locales as elementary school classrooms and dentist offices, hence the alternate spelling. I figure they learned from their mistake with me. If I had a dollar for every time someone mangled my name, why, I'd be halfway to buying a few square feet of land on the Northern California coast by now!) (It's Jericha like the city of Jericho, if you were wondering.) Where was I? (Sometimes I get lost in my own parentheticals.) Oh yeah. Simka, my awesome sister. Simka is an inch taller than me for every year I am older than her (I'm 5'2" and she's 5'8") and the most empathetic person I know. In addition to a really extraordinary and sensitive emotional intelligence, she's also sharp, witty, booksmart like whoa, and loves math and cool nerdy things. I am praising her here in part because she's my sister and I love her, but also because, well, if I have a calling in life now it's all her fault.

R is for Reverie, Reverence, & Robert Seydel

Robert Seydel, Untitled (To Joseph C)
via "Ode to Robert Seydel" from This Is The What

Robert Seydel was the chair of my thesis work at Hampshire College and one of the most extraordinary thinkers and artists I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. He died of an unexpected heart attack on January 27th, 2011, three days after my 23rd birthday. The world has less wonder in it without him. That there would be no Museum of Joy without Robert is unquestionable. Robert was my professor from my very first day at Hampshire, and his approach to the making of art is so deeply branded on my consciousness that I cannot imagine my life without having met him.

It is hard for me to talk about him, because I want so much to describe him to you, especially now that he is gone - to keep alive forever the way he paced around the classroom (always caught up in the rapture of a piece of art, abandoning his sentences unfinished, grinning to himself and shaking his head, flailing his hands), the particular way he spoke (always full of idearrrrs instead of ideas, as if he had to ground them in the world with the long tail of rolled rs so they wouldn't float away), the leaps his mind made (a student of his recalls a photography critique with him: "After we finished talking about it, he said, 'Well, it's obvious you need to take a linguistics class.' Only Robert would say that... but of course, he was right.")

Q is for Questioning

Here are some nice people inside my thesis installation work.

I was lucky enough to get to go to Hampshire College for my undergrad. Hampshire is a school known in most circles for its goofy quirk of having no grades, which SNL everybody knows means that we all studied ultimate frisbee and did a lot of drugs. Of course, it's simply impossible to take your education seriously when your professors obstinately refuse to tell you exactly what to put in your papers and give you essay-length evaluations of your strengths and weaknesses instead of competitively ranking you using a numerological system that gives no information about the quality of your work relative to your own abilities. Snarl. Okay, okay, I'm sorry for the snark. It's just that if I describe my year-long senior thesis work to someone without telling them where I went to school, they tend to get really excited. If I then accidentally drop the word Hampshire (or, god forbid, mention it first), they get the kind of slow, dreamy, glazed look of someone who is trying very, very hard to restrain themselves from laughing their drink all over my shirt.

This is very sad. People slack at every college in the country. Not everybody who goes to Harvard is a genius, gives a shit about their studies, or goes on to become an interesting person. Plenty do - but then, so do plenty of people at Hampshire, which has excellent graduate school acceptance rates and sends hundreds of kids out into the world every year who have managed to create a completely self-determined thesis work usually before the age of 23.  The system at Hampshire simply amplifies the tendencies of its students more than most schools - you can slack harder and you can work harder. Whatever. I'm over it. If it works for you (and it did for me), Hampshire is an awesome and extraordinary place. And part of that comes from the fact that it forces you to question. What's so groovy about that? More after the jump.

P is for Petrichor

"Magic Street" by Leonid Afremov. This guy, while kind of a
one-trick pony compositionally, nevertheless paints in
exactly the way I saw things in my head as a child.

"Petrichor" is the scent of rain on dry earth. Is this an inspiration for a museum? Absolutely. What would a museum of joy have in it but the smell of the rain, the sound that snow makes as it silences the night, the pulped sunlight taste of fresh nectarines, the pleasure of a tiny wind-up toy? What makes these things joyous is that they can't be kept. They are absolutely and completely transient. That fragrance, that particular musty sharp hot smell rising up from the dirt, the loveliness of it - gone within minutes, sometimes seconds. The snow, the way it almost creaks but doesn't quite, how it disappears the horizon and turns the world into the quaint close dome of an ornament - if you're lucky, a few hours. The nectarine might linger on the tongue but you can only take so many bites. The toy - well, if you're anything like me, a great part of the joy is the longing for the toy, either before it is yours or long afterwards, when you are remembering it, and wondering what happened to it, and if anything so wonderful actually even existed and maybe you made it up, or read it in a book, or had it in a dream.

O is for Ordinary

Things that will never fail to make me happy:
Zachary's pizza, Star Trek references.
Picture by me, from their Berkeley location.

Joy is a funny fish. Now, happiness is pretty straightforward - we usually have a pretty good sense of when something will make us happy and when it won't. Of course, occasionally it fails, and we discover that a seventy-foot yacht or a large chunk of sparkly extra-hard rock or a boyfriend who looks just like the psychic you went to in seventh grade said he would somehow fail to make us less empty inside, but when it comes to the small stuff - ice cream, making art, having the cat sleep on your stomach - it's pretty easy to say, huh, you know, no matter how rotten I feel, this will alleviate the misery at least a little bit (or, best case scenario, make everything better forever.) But joy is a thing so much of the moment, a kind of transcendent flash, that it's almost impossible to predict exactly when and where it will show up.

There are things we can do to help. For example, the redwoods of Northern California are one of my favorite places in the world. They are cathedral trees, a complete, encompassing, magnificent experience. (I'm not going to give a picture because something 600 pixels high is so far away from the experience of a redwood forest that I'd be better off writing the words AWESOMELY HUGE AND MAGICAL in ninety-point font instead for all the good it would do getting the sense of them across.) Usually I experience joy when in the redwoods. There in the shafts of green silence I often feel an almost paralyzing sense of peace and clarity. But, honestly, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I just have a very nice time and it is pretty and that's all. That unbearable lightness of being doesn't always visit just because I stand there smelling treebark. Often, yes - but, perhaps unsurprisingly, usually when I have not gone there specifically to seek it. If I travel to the redwoods looking for my nice tidy fix of joy, that evanescent feeling tends to harden into something clumsier - a memory of joy, or a longing for it. If I think too much, if I seek too hard, it's gone.

N is for Natural Building

A cob house featured on the Mud Girls blog.

There is a very simple reason that natural building is an inspiration for the Museum of Joy: I am a poor artist. I will almost certainly never hit it big. The probability that I will be able to afford to buy or construct a conventional big shiny museum building is smaller than the seven dwarfs on the eye of a needle. But natural building - methods like straw bale construction, cob, etc - ? Ah, well, that's a different story. I was introduced to the idea of natural building by someone (probably my mother) who sent me a photo of Simon Dale's hobbit house in Wales. He built a wonderfully magical house for himself and his family for three thousand pounds - depending on the exchange rate, something in the vicinity of five thousand American dollars.

Five thousand dollars.

For a house.

And not just any house, but a beautifully designed construction built with low impact to the land on which it's situated, a house that looks like a childhood fantasy or a daydream cottage. Sure, it's small. Who cares? I could - hold it - I could build a bunch of them! And connect them! And fill them with windows, ledges, shelves, spirals, skylights, nooks, crannies, crevices, altars, dance floors, fire pits, whatever I damn well want.

I could have a maze of museum.

M is for Miniature

Here's a picture of some amulaic stuff of mine. Not all the
bottles feel like amulets to me, but the smallest ones do.

No, M is not for Museum. Of course museums are an inspiration for the Museum of Joy, but I'll be getting to those when we hit W (which is for Wunderkammer, obviously). See, don't get me wrong; talking about alternate landscapes and dream worlds and mystical inner universes gets me fired up and all. But I can't in all honesty discuss the evolution of the most magical scenery in my mind without going all the way back to early childhood and my abiding, obsessive, frantic love of miniatures. Tiny things do something to most of us (who doesn't have at the very least a secret meltdown over a kitten in a teacup? and I mean a lot of people seem programmed to like babies, which I genuinely cannot understand at all) but there seems to be especially a power associated with miniature things - by which I mean scaled-down versions of life-size stuff, not things that are naturally diminutive - that I can only call amulaic.

Amulaic is a word that I apparently made up. As proof of this, I submit that the first four google search results for it are 1) a review of a 438-page book called The Ends of the Earth, 2) an Etsy listing for a hippy bag with a felted spiral patch on it, 3) a record of an email chain about the shape of the fingers during a certain Jewish blessing, and 4) a post on this blog that vanished when I revamped it. It has a very simple meaning, which is functioning as an amulet. Something that has amulaic powers serves as an amulet, whether it's a tiny china seal (the first amulaic item I remember) or your lucky rabbit's foot (does anyone even have those any more? I feel everyone I know would despise me for even acknowledging that that's a thing.)

What makes a miniature amulaic, and how does it work, and why should you care? Well, I'm glad you asked...

L is for Landcape

Remedios Varo, who I think of as one part
Escher and one part Bosch, paints landscapes
that look to me like coming home to myself.
It's a nice place, really.

Each of us lives in two landscapes: the one that surrounds us, and the one that we surround. Inside us all, opening up somewhere into the alternate space behind the brain or breastbone, is a world populated with the things that make us tick, a cabinet of curiosities that is bigger on the inside, a mountain range or a single room with shadowy walls. We are each of us museums of our own being, collections of our own dreams and fears and memories and longing and concrete shards of experience in bright colors and dim lights and that one name somebody called us one time. Sometimes it's a frightening place, a realm of darkness and slimy corners; sometimes it's a land of light and magic such as Disney himself would murder for. Much like, well, our own experiences, things mingle within us; we're a box of many spices, and some of them are bitter, but oh, dear god, the pungency of some, the sweetness, the fragrance!

This will be a short post, because I'm already playing catchup today, and not much needs to be said. Listen. It's really very simple. I want to make a Museum that reflects the natural makeup of the worlds that unfold within us, with their strange chambers and nested rooms, their bright spots and dark chapels. Joy is partly joy because we don't have it all the time, because it is mingled with loss and longing and nostalgia. I want to build a place to wander through that feels like walking into the shape of your own soul. Even if my soul speaks a different language (old cities and kaleidoscopes where yours is zombies and futurescapes, dead roads or tawny mountains, biker bars, black glass), if I do it right, you'll still feel like coming home to a place you never knew you'd known, a house that belonged to you before you thought to question your memory, something you saw under the sky once when the stars were out. What's a Museum of Joy for? Why, to remind us that joy is a living thing, entwined with history and also with our own story, coming up through the roots and blooming on the cheeks of the fruit upon the branches. As long as there have been people there has been suffering, perhaps, but as long as there's been people there's been joy also. And I want to make you a place that is a mirror you can melt through like Alice on the mantlepiece, back into a world where things speak to you and are not mute but wise and living, watchful, full of meaning. I want you to remember what it feels like to play, absorbed in an imaginary place and time that all of us have been to but most of us forget. I want to put you back so close to wonder that you trip on it and when your face hits the earth all you think is oh, I'd forgotten how good the dirt smells after rain. Delight is a place. As Liz Lemon likes to say, I want to go to there. I'd like you to come too. What else is there to say?

K is For Klezmer & Kevin & Krazy Kat

via Toonpedia

Things that inspire me: cartoon music and musical cartoons. Why? Because they create zany, playful, wild, wonderful worlds that bring out the joyous & the imaginative in all of us. And, there to help the pursuit thereof, is also my wonderful K-initialed boyfriend, who I will avoid gushing about because there's no need to embarrass him on the internet, but whom I will take as an example of the awesome things that can happen when your significant other supports and encourages you in your weird and wacky dreams.

I've referred to Krazy Kat here before, but never with the appropriate adulation and enthusiasm due such a shaper of my dreams. And I don't think I've ever made the fuss I ought to make about Klezmer music, and my father's old radio show The King of Prague (don't bother googling it; as far as the internet's concerned it doesn't exist), and their effect on my sense of the bizarre and the joyful. So please, today, come enter a mildly lunatic and lunar landscape, full of beards and bricks, and learn a little about the Old Country of the my mind.

J is for Joseph and Jurassic

The amazing 17th-century Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher's
magnetic divination devices at the MJT.
Via Running Wolf Productions.

...as in Joseph Cornell and the Museum of Jurassic Technology, two major inspirations for me in my dream of the Museum of Joy. (Obviously J is also for Joy, but that's a cop-out post.) Both the man and the museum I'm invoking today are magically adept at putting enormous and fantastical worlds into very small spaces, thereby simultaneously expanding the universe and filling it with very cool stuff. I've written about them both before in my post on marvelous museums, but they deserve a revisit today because they've been so intensely influential. They're important enough to me that they serve as catalysts for the imagination: if I'm feeling stuck or dispirited, I just need to spend a little time in contemplation of one or the other and I feel refreshed, revitalized, and full of creative zip and zest. (Actually, there's a thing I forgot to put in my guide to fishing for inspiration -- casting your line into the wild aquariums of other people's awesome ideas!) (Is this metaphor getting out of hand? George Orwell would not approve.) So here, today, just a  quick and tantalizing sample of stuff from the minds of men who think they way I'd like about evocation, dream, wonder, and the weirdness of the world...

I is for Imagination

Alphonse Maria Mucha, Poetry, 1898.
Via the Alphonse Mucha Art Gallery

...and for its elusive cousin, Inspiration. I've been reading articles over on The Creative Mind, a fascinating blog about psychology & creativity, and been getting into gentle little comment arguments on a few of the posts, which all seem to be saying, repeatedly, that it's not helpful to think about the muse or divine gifts or whatever when approaching creativity -- that waiting for inspiration to strike holds us back, that genius is not some special thing granted to the lucky few, that frustration and problem-solving make for the eureka moment and not some kind of touch from above. The thing is, I agree with all of these statements (and the articles are fascinating) -- it's just that I also believe in the muse. Not to belabor a point here, but I've said in a  few posts now that something really vital happens if we treat the things that give us the most joy and delight - like, say, our creative abilities - as gifts and not something that belongs to us by right. Does that mean I think anyone who doesn't feel "naturally inspired" should go ahead and give up art? Hell no. Listen, I woke up this morning to the sound of someone revisiting their breakfast in the alley outside my window. While that might be inspiring to some, I don't do 'gritty street humor,' and I hate the sound of vomiting. (Also, I was waking up from a dream in which I had to perform an impromptu bellydance piece with my boyfriend, which might have been okay if a little weird except that someone in the audience had just turned into a bright green zombie and was stumbling around mumbling about being hungry, which made me really nervous.) I just mean that thinking that we own our talents is as crippling as thinking that we're not responsible for them at all. (After all, if our talents are all our own, when we don't feel inspired, it's our own damn fault. You know what's crippling? Guilt, shame, and a sense of horrible failure. If you believe in the muse, you can just call her a fickle wench and go have a beer.)

"'Our digestions, for example, running sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars -- the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.'" - G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

I said Inspiration is the  elusive cousin of Imagination. Actually, I take it back. Inspiration is a species of iridescent fish that swims in the great sea that is the imagination, and I think our job as creators of art is basically to go fishing. But please, leave your industrial trawler at home. You know how a fishing trip is supposed to go, right? You go out in your little boat, you bait your line, and, well, catching fish is not really the point, is it? Even if you're a fisherman by trade, there's a lot of waiting around and enjoying the view...and then, snap, zip, you reel in your catch. And here are five ways to ensure you have a fruitful fishing trip on the vast rainbow ocean of the imaginary.