Restless

It’s 4:33 AM, Monday morning. I can’t sleep. Not because I’m tormented by anything, but just because I made the mistake of taking a long-ish nap yesterday afternoon and I’m not someone who recovers from that sort of thing well. It can mess up my sleep pattern for a couple of days. I’m a bit delicate that way. So I may take a long nap one afternoon and then that night I’ll fall asleep at what is a normal time for me but then wake up 15 minutes later completely awake.

So that’s what happened tonight and I thought, “Well… shit,” because it’s annoying. And then I thought, I’d make lemons into lemonade and just write a “stream of conscious” style post. This might be a terrible idea. It might only mess up my sleeping more. I was tempted to call this post, “Restless #1” because there’s a good chance it happens again in the future, but I decided I don’t want to jinx myself like that.

Speaking of making lemons into lemonade, I was once at a fair in New York when I was a kid. I made friends with another kid there whose family ran a food stand that sold spiedies and “fresh squeezed lemonade.” Spiedies are (is?) a Central New York dish. This Bon Appetit article describes them thusly:

“It's cubes of marinated meat—chicken, pork, beef, or lamb—skewered, char-grilled, and served in a hoagie roll or a slice of fresh Italian bread. The zesty marinade tastes a little like Italian dressing, and when it hits the grill, it caramelizes quickly on the outside and remains super-tender on the inside.”

It’s good stuff.

Anyway, the kid said to me, “Hey, do you want to see how we make fresh squeezed lemonade?” Don’t worry, the story doesn’t get disgusting. That sounded like fun to me. (Everything sounds like fun to me. I have some sort of disorder.) So he pulled off the near empty, clear multi-gallon container from top of the lemonade dispensing machine. It was something like this:

He walked me through a flap to an area behind their stand. He dumped out what was left in the jug. I was about to see how they made fresh squeezed lemonade. Do they have to cut each lemon? Does a machine do it?

And then he ripped open a large pack of Country Time Lemonade drink powder, dumped it in the container, filled it up with hose water, stirred it, then tossed in a few real lemons for looks.

It was pretty disillusioning.

Let’s see what I’ve got in my email…

Here’s an email from 12:58 AM

Amazing art you posted today. Always happy to learn about someone new and discover his work. Thanks. (Badass in barn with 4 women was my favorite) —JF

Ah, I was happy to hear some people took to Mort Kunstler’s art as I have.

Hmm… I think I’ve just had a revelation.

Here’s a painting by Monet. One of his paintings of water lilies. I guess he did a bunch of these for god knows what reason.

That is, apparently, great art. I’m too dumb to appreciate it. But I guess it is.

To me, this is great art.

This is Kunstler’s painting called, “Nine To Go.” What a story this tells! Not that it really tells a story. It’s not a comic strip. But there is certainly a story to be gleaned from this image. And that’s why it’s great art to me. You may read something different on the woman’s face than I do. You may imagine a different motivation for why he’s killing these guys than I have. But regardless there’s definitely a story told here.

I often write about the importance of story in the magic I perform. And then I always have to clarify by saying something like, “I’m not talking about tricks where your patter is a story that you’re illustrating with cards or something. I’m talking about the ‘story’ of this interaction.”

I don’t want to tell a story to go along with a trick. I want the tricks themselves to imply a greater story. Stories about magic, about me, about the spectator, about the fiction we’re experiencing—the world where such a thing that just happened could happen.

I look at the water lilies painting and I don’t get it. I mean, it’s fine, but I don’t really have appreciation of art for art’s sake.

Similarly, the cups and balls is one of the worst tricks in magic, in my opinion. With a few exceptions, it’s just magic for magic’s sake. There’s no story there, it’s just a ball vanishing and reappearing.

I lack the ability to appreciate art for arts sake, or magic for magic’s sake. I like art and magic to be in service of a story. I’m not making a judgment call on the relative worth of these things. Just my own ability to enjoy them. One of Monet’s lilies paintings sold for 80 million dollars. If you gave it to me and told me I had to keep it in my home, I’d put it in my fucking closet behind a laundry basket. So what do I know?

I’m not sure what my point is. I’m tired and not thinking super clearly.

I think what I’m getting at is this… I don’t think my inability to recognize the worth of art for art’s sake, and magic for magic’s sake is something special about me. I think the majority of people are like me. I think the majority of people need to relate to a piece of art (a painting or a magic trick) via story. The ability to appreciate a standard chop cup routine, for example, is probably rarer than magicians believe. We act like it’s somehow ingrained in people to enjoy magic as long as it’s fooling. But I’m not sure that’s true. We think it’s true because we surround ourselves with people who like magic for magic’s sake: other magicians.

Let’s look at that Monet painting again. I think there’s something interesting about it.

The interesting thing is that that’s a different painting than I posted earlier. But most of you probably didn’t notice that. So perhaps you can relate to laypeople who can’t differentiate between a trick where the jacks switch places with the aces and back again, and a trick where the four aces gather into the leader packet. For someone without a deep appreciation of paintings or magic for their own sake, it’s hard to make a distinction between things that tell the same story. Whether that “story” is a bunch of water lilies, or the story is, “I can make cards change.”

Ok. The sun came up a while ago. I’m going to go get breakfast. And then hopefully formulate some way to recapture a normal sleep schedule.

Update: A few people have written in to educate me about Monet. Thank you. There’s no need for anyone else to do so. I do understand his contribution to art and the style that he ushered in. That was, in part, the reason I chose him. The fact that you need to do research to truly appreciate Monet’s contribution, is the point I was getting at. Most people would have to have an appreciation of art history (that is, an affinity for art for its own sake) to be moved or enthralled by Monet’s work at this point in time. And that’s because there’s not an inherent story in the artwork. For those who do have the knowledge to appreciate Monet’s work, it’s because of the story behind the work, which they now understand. It’s not the image itself.

That goes along with the theme of this post—that story is the primary element that resonates with people in any type of art. (And that, in my opinion, one of the big weaknesses in magic is that we are so often presenting things to people that are completely story-less.)