The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Art Center Hubbub

One of my buddies asked me, after about our 2nd pint, why Stanwoodopolis wanted to build an Art Center. Hadn’t we artists done enough damage already? Mostly he was joking, tweaking me as usual, but on some level he really did wonder why we would spend 13 million dollars on a building for art. I’m sure he’s not alone. There are plenty of folks who not only could live without art in their lives, they’d prefer it. Ralph is one of these. He just doesn’t need it. His life, if you asked him, is full and I’d be the last guy to suggest he could make it fuller. Especially after 2 IPA’s on empty stomachs.

Ralph isn’t the first — and won’t be the last — person to ask why we want to build an Art Center in Stanwoodopolis or anywhere else. I make my living doing public art, parking large glass murals in new public architecture. You bet I get angry taxpayers asking why their hard-earned money should be spent on art. And so, over the years, at countless dedications, I’ve had to justify adding art to the architecture the Ralphs think are just fine without extra flourishes. For a new elementary school in Kent in front of hundreds of kids and their teachers, I gave this explanation:

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers? It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake here in Kent, we were in the old school. It was falling apart and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, state of the art teaching equipment, books and computers. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

But the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or caterpillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

Well, maybe if Ralph and I had ordered another round … I might have laid this on him. But we called it a night before I could get up on that pulpit. Sure, we might have flown home on new wings but instead we just drove our beat up rigs back home, saved beating our wings.

I was in the South End Trader Jimbo’s the other day looking for those hard-to-get-down-here items in their Land O’Yuppie aisles. Somehow I got waylaid by the organic pine nuts. Organic? Are we growing pine trees in nitrate infused woods now? Further down the aisle I found gluten free kettle corn trumpeting stuff that never had gluten in the first place. Not only that, they were guaranteed nut-free. The products, not Trader Jimbo. When I turned the corner, drove past the chutneys and the soft cheeses, I discovered Aisle 6, the no preservative, no additive, no GMO, no growth hormone, no antibiotic, no gluten, no soy, no MSG, no transfat, no caged animal row. About middle of the aisle there were three cans in a pyramid. Cave water. 12 ounces for $10.95. I took all three. Just so the row would be immaculate for a moment.

A friend of mine has a futon mattress that contains organic cotton. Softer maybe, like his head. Course I grew up with virgin wool — as if I care what the sheep do at night. These are dangerous times. Who knows what’s in those nettles I’ve been brewing beer with? They don’t come with an organic certification and what with acid rain precipitating out from Chinese pollution, I may be toxifying myself inadvertendly. My entire garden may well be a seeping cesspool of multi-syllabic compounds from the prevailing winds of Seattle and Gomorrah or contaminated from the tailings and runoffs of the South End industrial era. Natural? That’s no longer a designation to give anyone peace of mind. No government certification for natural, pal.

They tell me our water has elevated levels of natural arsenic. The neighbors on water systems filtrate for that and other minerals. We’re on our own well. Which means just that, we’re on our own. Forget worrying about contaminated nettles in my homebrew. The water’s got poison in it.

So where do you go to find the purity we so desperately seek? Where do you retreat to escape the toxic leaching of modern society? And where can a yahoo go to avoid the steady drip drip drip of new warnings, new labels, new GMO salmon species, new BMO milk products, new irradiated foods, new afflictions? The South End??? Sorry, we got the bio-hazard tape across the road now. No wonder people are signing up for the Mars mission. Even if it is one way only.

These are fast times we live in. You maybe remember when we talked about the Rat Race, that post-Eisenhower era when the corporations took over the South End and America too in a bloodless coup, ran a few efficiency studies, then busted the unions and paid us serfs paltry wages for long hours. The ‘modern’ citizen isn’t just in a rat race — we’re watching the information tsunami breaking over us, rocketing us forward on wave after wave of googled crap disguised as news or finance or sports, but is really a vehicle for advertising and a prescription for attention deficit when we’re tossed on the rocky beach of a fearful future.

You ask a friend or family member how their summer’s going, they say ‘crazy busy.’ We’re on our own treadmill now. Cellphones, laptops, text messaging, e-mails, sexting, online dating, online shopping, online everything. The truth is we’re not busy, we’re just half crazy, bored to death without a ‘device’ in our hands, constant stimulation but not anything with depth. Couple minutes max. Short text, quick internet search, got to move on to the next stimuli….

We don’t have time anymore for a walk on the beach, for reading a novel, for growing a garden, for learning new pursuits or new hobbies. No, we have to check our e-mails, messages, stock markets, ball scores and Facebook. We have to stay ‘connected’ and being ‘connected’ means keeping up with an accelerating digital glut. Not metaphorically — we’re rewiring physically. I guess you could say we’re evolving if you’re not a faith-based computer user, intelligent design if you are ….

I rowed out in my boat today, fighting wind and swells, to drop some crabpots. From far offshore I could see our house up in the trees back off the road, mostly obscured, but peeking out. I suspect my life is like that now, an anachronism peeking out from behind a woods no one ventures into anymore, a very long distance away as the waves pushed by a new wind crash up against my little dinghy and I’m in two places, but both are growing smaller and smaller, just specks on a receding horizon.

The other day I overheard a conversation at the Diner between Fairlane Freddie and Janet Jorgenson, actually more an argument, precipitated by Fred when he complained about Stanwood upgrading its streets, putting a landscaped separation between lanes, erecting a metal and art entryway coming into town, all upgrades Fred declared were a waste of money. “My god, Freddie,” Janet shot back, “give that town some credit. They’re trying to make improvements.”

“Gimme a break,” Fred retorted hotly, sloshing coffee on the formica between them. “Like that walking trail around the sewer lagoon? You think they needed that?”

Janet shook her head and forked in a mouthful of pancake. When she finally swallowed, she asked, “You ever walk that trail?” Fred, of course, had not. “Why would I?”

“I dunno. Maybe the view of the Olympics, the Sound, the river, our island? They’re making a new park at the Ovenell farm, another by the train depot and I think one past the library, you know, that corner at the Y.”

Fred didn’t know and furthermore, Fred couldn’t care less, all a waste of time and money, he said. “Now they want to build a damn Art Center,” he practically shouted for the rest of us to hear. “Just what we need, more stupid art!”

“Just gonna draw more stupid artists.” Yeah, I said that from two tables over, happy to stir this particular pot. Janet seemed relieved to watch the argument move downstream, give her time to finish her cold pancakes. Anita, our waitress, groaned, half done refilling my coffee mug. “Wind him up,” she muttered, “all we need this morning.”

“You guys never stop,” Fairlane replied. “Took Terry’s Corner off the tax roles to build your goofy Visitor Center, run that Mother’s Day Tour that clogs traffic every year — who asked for all that? Used to be a nice rural island and Stanwood was a quiet little town. Couldn’t just leave well enough alone?”

“Aw, Fred, you know us artists, the last thing we could do would be to leave well enough alone. You drive that ’63 Ford, plenty good enough for you, but big fins and dual exhaust dinosaurs got to make way for the Jetsons’ flying cars, probably EV’s.”

“I spoze you’re all FOR that new art center,” he sneered.

“What, me?” I said. “What have you got against new growth down in the floodplain? Give it some new life, maybe draw folks down to the Pearson House, The Floyd Cultural Center, the History Museum. Hell, Fred, you could stop in at the old library, probably hate our new one on the island. Stanwoodtown is up the hill now – you want to save the old, might as well embrace the new down below.”

The couple at the table between ours, figuring they’d stumbled into a DMZ no-man’s land, hastily finished their breakfasts and headed for the safety of the cash register by the door, no point becoming collateral damage in the Culture War.

“We better stop, Fred — we’re scaring away the tourists,” I said. Janet laughed. “Pretty soon they’ll be coming to that Art Center,” she said.

“Swell,” Fred grumbled. “More damn art.”

“You’ll probably survive the shock, Fred,” I told him. Anita was going to get a big tip from me this morning….

I got a friend who has turned into a Day Trader, buying and selling stocks, ebullient that in the past year or more, the Market is running wild, setting new record highs, making him even richer than he was before. The rich, maybe you’ve heard, are getting richer. Most of consumer spending isn’t spread across the nation’s demographics equally, it’s the result of spending by the wealthy. If you think they’re worried about the cost of groceries or the price of gas, you obviously aren’t in the 1%, maybe not even the 10%. Should have maybe taken out a second mortgage and tossed it into the S&P 500. Or better yet, any of the stocks hitched to the Artificial Intelligence bet.

Folks I know who are betting their farm on the AI wave think all stocks rise on an expanding bubble. The Dutch who paid thousands of guilders for rare bulbs thought the price of tulips had no ceiling, same as the banks who collateralized shaky mortgage loans, same as the investors of the Roaring 20’s who bought on 10% margins. I’m not envious of their profits — while there are profits — I just hate the collateral damage when the bubble bursts and the economy crashes.

What goes up, I tell my friend, inevitably comes down. But he doesn’t believe that old chestnut. AI is different, he claims, nothing like the tech bubble of the 90’s, totally impervious to the laws of gravity. Sure, I reply, and rare tulips still hold their value today.

Probably time to buy Trump meme crypto, if for no other reason than to hedge the bets.