it ain't graceland....

and jefferson was VERY anti-king. i'm just saying.....

Pi$$ Elvis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

Graceland.

In the very funny movie Spinal Tap (it ranks an eleven on a scale of one to ten), we find the members of the band staring at the grave of Elvis, having pilgramaged to Graceland seeking inspiration but instead finding the reality of his death and, by implication, their own mortality. After attempting a hilariously lame rendition of Heartbreak Hotel (an attempt they deride as “f-ing barbershop reggae”), they return to their glum silence. Nigel says, “Well, it certainly puts perspective on it, now don’t it?” To which David St. Hubbins replies in a huff, “Too much! Too much f-ing perspective.”

You can say that again.

Graceland. What to say?

Here’s the deal. It’s all about Elvis. And let me remind you of one thing you mustn’t forget about Elvis: He wore a cape. He wore a cape when capes were so last century. He wore a cape when he met President Nixon. Who thinks to himself, I’m meeting the President today—why can’t I find my favorite sequined cape?! Elvis Presley wearing a cape in 1973 would be like Donald Trump going to work today in a huge pumpkin carriage. He could do it, I suppose, but why would he? Why did Elvis wear that cape? To my way of thinking, the two most likely possibilities are: (1) he had a keen sense of ironic detachment and knew that in a democratic society all talk of kingliness is an act of playfulness--a little wink at the audience that everyone involved is on the gig; or (2) because he believed that a cape was somehow fitting for who he was.

I think the correct answer is probably the latter. Because let me tell you this. Any irony at Graceland is altogether unintentional or brought to the place by the tourist. Graceland is the single most earnest spot in the universe. Although everything Elvis did was ridiculously over the top and hilariously gaudy and excessive, Graceland treats his every move as the simple and natural expression of a simple downhome Southern boy who loved his mama and his fans. And one gathers from the displays that Elvis viewed things the same way.

Graceland is billed as an opportunity to get closer to Elvis, to understand his world a little better. I left Graceland confused and bewildered and feeling that David St. Hubbins was right--that it did put a little bit too much f-ing perspective on it all.

Graceland is a shrine to two things: money and simulacrum. Everyone knows about the money end, so I’ll pass that by here. Graceland is virtually nothing but simulacrum piled upon simulacrum upon simulacrum. There are literally thousands of images, maybe tens of thousands of images of Elvis from the gift house (gift complex? Gift Village?) to virtually every room of the house. Of course through his vocal recordings, Elvis’ voice will carry on through generations. But his visual image reigned supreme at Graceland. Like Stalin in the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Elvis becomes a god in Graceland through the ubiquity of his image. The Bible says that when two or three of His children are gathered in His name, He will be there. Elvis does God one better at Graceland. Whether alone or with others, one cannot escape the gaze of Elvis’ omnipresent visage. It never ceases to shine down upon you, whether you want it to or not.

At various points in the tour, Elvis returns from the dead through the magic of television and audio recordings to directly address the tourist to explain the significance of this artifact or that stage in his career. We hear his music at multiple points and see film images of his life on one of perhaps a hundred video monitors in the house, sometimes several of which are blaring simultaneously. In time I felt like a prisoner in a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors, except I did not see a multiplicity of distorted and fractured images of myself; instead it was Elvis here, Elvis there, Elvis everywhere.

I visited Monticello a few weeks after visiting Graceland, and Jefferson’s presence filled his home just as Elvis’ presence fills Graceland. But at Monticello one discerns Jefferson’s presence slowly, almost disappointingly subtly, and one comes to feel his presence by recognizing his vision for the place. Jefferson’s life was arguably devoted to ordering and remaking the social universe to reflect the principled order of eternity that informed his own mind. Those principles and ideas suffused everything Jefferson did and the things he could not make to reflect their power he hid away (like his slaves’ headquarters). Radiating ever outward from his mind--to his study to Monticello to the University of Virginia to the United States of America and, through its example, to the entirety of the world—Jefferson’s plans for the human race were ambitious beyond comprehension. Yet despite his ambitions, only a portrait or two of Jefferson grace the walls of Monticello. His life was an attempt to make principles take on flesh and blood.

In contrast, Graceland begins and ends with Elvis himself—think of God before the Creation. Graceland is all Elvis all the time. The point of Elvis was Elvis. The tour takes us through his world and the last stop before one exits his home is a dazzling display of visual stimulation (and simulation?) led by a giant audio-visual screen that overwhelms the viewer into a kind of awed submission. Elvis is made god. To hammer home the point, the audio tells us that Elvis’ light continues to shine and has never shone brighter.

But here’s the problem with the “light shining ever brighter” principle:

Elvis has left the building.

The tour concludes with a visit to his grave. And like the members of Spinal Tap, I found that it was a most depressing stop.

Thoroughly depressing.

In a bizarre and perhaps superficial way, I found that my visit to Graceland helped me understood Spinal Tap a bit better. As is well known, the film’s dialogue was largely improvised, and though the actors were in character when they filmed their Graceland spot, it’s my belief that they were in fact genuinely depressed to see Elvis’ grave. I know that I was bewildered, confused, disoriented, and emotionally disjointed by the entire Graceland visit. However, I did experience clarity when I visited his grave.

Elvis was a human being with human hopes and dreams. For good or for bad, celebrity does not remove the need to release one’s bowels from time to time. Elvis belched and picked his nose and lusted after women and suffered from the occasional nightmare and pretty much experienced the fate of all persons. Cause and effect had as much bearing on him as it does on everyone else. When he ate too much he got fat. When he took drugs his mind began to escape him.

No matter how many capes he wore, and despite every effort to fool the tourist to the contrary, Elvis was not a king. Nor was he an immortal, a god. The thousands of images of Elvis are so many particles of dust that do as much good for him now as my long-lost baby teeth do for me today.

Here’s the too much f-ing perspective part. Elvis’ light is not shining. Not at all. True, his life had a huge impact on his followers, and one can argue that that level of impact entails a kind of eternity. But it is a kind of tepid eternity that ironically does nothing for the one invested by that brand of eternity.

Underneath the dirt of his grave marker is not a torch burning brightly but a pile of bones.

Bones wrapped in a cape.

The man without a head. Or body.

them bones....

plato's cave

Red

Fun with moving cars and nights and negative images.

I like to take pictures. I really do.

stalagmites and stalactites

or are they stalactites and stalagmites?

The same shot as above but as actually seen in the cave. I greatly prefer the doctored photo above-ah, the wonders of computer magic.

ruby falls

A nearly two-hundred foot waterfall inside a cave. The cave "authorities" (cave people?) illuminate the falls with different colors, thereby creating a surreal effect. The picture has not been doctored. The place is cheesy with an unmistakable tourist trap atmosphere, but the splendor of the falls itself is not completely negated. Cheese is the price you pay for having others do the hard work of digging an elevator shaft four hundred feet into the mountain, securing a half-mile walking path through the cave to the falls, and providing tourist guides. I can't imagine why the persons who did (and do) all that would want to be compensated for their efforts. So: no cheese, no experience. My one complaint is that to herd adequate numbers of people through the cave in a timely fashion each tourist group spends literally no more than five minutes at the falls.

swish

took a picture of cars driving by in the dark of night. naturally the photo came out as blur of the black of night and the red of the car lights. this is that photo's "negative." i really like the result

luck matters.

lace

pebbles and water

burning field

spilled

A ripped bag plus an explosion of kernels plus a little sweeping equals a grand photo opportunity.

Asleep

self-portrait

Nothing says fun like broken sunglasses. For a while these were the pair I wore while driving to work and about town. They worked surprisingly well. Or maybe my left eye isn’t as fussy as the right.

negative eggs

Recently I saw a guy with different kinds of chickens at a park. Each kind of chicken laid a different colored egg: brown, white, tan, blue. I snapped a picture and digitally created a negative. I like this picture: Nothing evocative, just pretty.

broken mug

Know thyself--or maybe not.

lost

Chicago: the new Beantown

self-portrait

A house divided....

totally stoned on beauty

insert here: goethe quote about frozen music

gehry through the bean

light and shadow on giant steel bolts

self-portrait

4:00 a.m., trying to wake up

self-portrait

dude posing like stone savior

walking into the light

stone savior

kid having fun at the bean

steel shadows

self-portrait

self-portrait

If brains were on the outside....

who owns the city?

Saw this plaque and others just like it cemented into the sidewalks all over downtown Chicago. People bustled in and out of the cold, going to their workplaces or to the Dunkin Donuts or to hear a band or to buy some new underwear, but they all seemed oblivious to these plaques.

Why did they strike me as vaguely threatening?

Are they still legally binding?

Who is their audience? (Just a reminder, you frozen walkers: WE are in CONTROL!!!)

Can the Dunkin Donuts in front of the sidewalk legally kick people off the sidewalk?

If so, should I fear Dunkin Donuts? And how can I? Their donuts and coffee are so scrumptiously delicious. Please don’t make me fear Dunkin Donuts.

Who owns the city?

Nations don’t have souls (Georgia will not go to heaven when it dies) but when people talk about the soul of America it’s not the gibberish of the scary people I saw hanging outside the train terminals--you know, the vaguely crazy people who ignored everyone else and made a beeline directly for me to ask me for money so they could wipe me down with a squeegee. (And I've got to say being soaked is no fun when it's freezing outside--and I wished the squeegee people would clean out their water more often. But I digresss.) We kinda know what they mean when people talk about the "soul" of a place. But is there one essence that separates nation from nation? Is it a hundred different things? What is a nation? Well, it’s gotta be at least the following:

Land.
People.

Culture and cultural artifacts, past and present. Stuff like art and architecture, language, laws, institutions, and customs.

Are all of these items of equal importance in defining a place? Or does it depend upon the place? In other words is, say, Key West defined more by its physical location than, say, Des Moines? Dunno.

Take Chicago. Chicago is a great city, my favorite city that I have personally visited. For decades it chugged along being Chicago with all its colorful Chicago history. Most people acknowledged that Chicago was a culturally important city and many people, like myself, thought it was a great city. But the main point for what I’m trying to convey is that it had an identity. Common signifiers came to mind when “Chicago” was mentioned.

And then in 2004 Chicago opened Millennium Park.

Millennium Park is the happiest place in the world.

Note the lack of qualifiers.

The happiest place in the world. You heard me.

Really. It is.

Or at least in America. Hey, I’ve been to Disney Land and Niagara Falls and the St. Louis Arch and the Golden Gate Bridge and the Grand Canyon and seventeen other national parks and loads of cities and museums and on and on. But nowhere but nowhere have I seen so many people, and such a remarkably diverse set of people, smile and laugh and giggle and act foolishly happy and feel the rapture of being alive (to paraphrase ol’ Joseph Campbell) like I did at Millennium Park.

More specifically they felt such rapture at "Cloud Gate," created by architect Anish Kapoor. (No, I’m not really smart; I have access to Wikipedia.)

Cloud Gate. AKA The Bean.

The Bean is catnip for humans. It taps into our human feelings of:

1) Identity
2) Play
3) Being
4) Sociability
5) The connection of inner and outer.

It really is the most amazing place I’ve ever been. It was like how I think of Heaven: happy folks gazing on Being (or, here, gazing on Bean—nyuh, nyuh, nyuh) with play and delight.

Anyway, back to where I was. I loved Chicago before it had Millennium Park but now wouldn’t you know it that Chicago has gone and redefined itself. Much like Paris redefined itself through the Eiffel Tower.

So, what gives something its essence? For me, the essence of Chicago (and life??) is The Bean. But Chicago was still Chicago before The Bean. But now it’s even more Chicago.

Who owns the city?

Church through a Picasso

Rococo reflection

steel curves

reflection of steel

definitely some red chairs. yeah. definitely

grooves and pipes

steel wing

controlled burn

Recently I took a hike with my children on a path that had been freshly subject to a controlled burn.

Controlled burn.

Oh how my daughters peppered me with questions of how a controlled burn works. They are too young to know how burning works at all but they are old enough to know that the interesting (or certainly more practical) question isn’t why things burn but how one can stop something that is burning. Intuition points to fires burning until there’s nothing left to burn. That’s what fires do.

So, they asked, why didn’t the entire forest burn down?

Who puts the control in the controlled burn?

I did not know the answers to their questions.

take it anyway you can

oh, funny funny death

Obviously there’s nothing special about the picture. But I saw this tent at an outdoor Cancer Benefit that I recently attended. Though the event had several exceedingly poignant moments, including a survivors walk which brought tears to my eyes, the thought of a funeral home showing up to sponsor the event using their graveside tent as shading struck me as a mixed message at best.

It made me laugh.

And then I felt horrible for laughing. But I don’t know why. What kinds of subjects are themselves off limits to even inward feelings of humor? (I can think of a couple of rules: It’s better to poke fun at the powerful than the powerless, and one buys oneself a little license for humor if one is willing to be self-deprecating first and foremost.)

But all in all I confess there very few subjects I consider to be inherently out-of-bounds for me. Humor and irony are the most distinctly human things in the universe: neither God nor animals seem to indulge in them as much as do humans.

And I’m pretty pro-human.

The great big DNA strand from the sky

Science is a lot of things including, perhaps especially, a methodology. But it’s also a set of assumptions. In particular, one of the assumptions science holds is that effects have causes and that material effects have material causes.

So from this perspective, scientists attempt to explain weather patterns and comets and the gestation period for zebras and the rate at which helium escapes earth’s atmosphere all from other phenomena that can be measured and traced back to material forces.

But for some reason, many people, mostly Americans among the citizens of the West, are extraordinarily (and hilariously) embarrassed to trace human DNA to material causes. They believe in the products of scientific thought (such as satellites and microwave ovens) but would rather reject scientific thinking with respect to life. How did we get DNA? Oh, from God.

Well, sure. No way we can dispute that. Nor should we have to. But why we should stop our thinking there is a little beyond me.

Dead rose stems in water

Desiccated Rose