An Essay by Drew Cushing
From Wikipedia, the wisdom of the masses presented as fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superflat
When I insist that history is different than the past and that my representation of the past is act of accusation (an accusation assigning the past to an artificial history, a history leveling actions and truth and language in a theory of representation) I am advancing my American kind of Super Flat. I take from New Narrative the writing of the body and the self, biography as story and story as an inventing of the self, and layer it with poetic language flattening story and language into a single text, endeavoring to make a Super Flat surfacing in words. A complex poetic language betwixt and between art, artifice and amusement, I layer words and narrative compositing the elements into an imaginary history. A history that is different from the past.
I say surface is sufficient, is substantive as a one-dimensional wonderment. And that the Flatness Murakami describes reflects beautifully the depth of meaning found in surface.
But then Emily tells me: Surface is different from Flat. And I think she is right and that my representation of Super Flat is insufficient. What is a complex statement of art within Japanese culture and society is for me something to sample and taste, without being burdened by a relationship to the history and circumstance that made it.
When I try to write my mother's story, I can only write of her wrongs. Her hopes buoyed by an ample bosom, beautiful blonde hair, blue eyes and a belief in heroes articulated in acidic observation of the quaintness of her surroundings and circumstance. My mother is a layer I cannot peel back. An archetype, a piece of personal history and a mythology all her own. Blond bombshell, rebel playgirl/career girl turned happy homemaker, gladly giving up her freedom to raise four beautiful children.
When I write her, I invent her, better and worse, then and now. Does she even remember there was another version? An alternative edition to this happy homemaker doll, an exotic erotic other substituting for all these drab details excitement and intrigue?
Murakami posits a relationship between graphic arts and traditional illustration through the shared insistent two dimensionality of representation. This flatness of representation in past and present creates an alternative reality. He posits that this alternative reality provides a way of escaping the oppression of the everyday. Thus the endless enthusiasm for the illustrated art and stories of anime and mange.
When I compile a composition of stories/narrative lines and linguistic explorations in an effort to enact S/Experiments in K/NEW NARRATIVE I build my own story in layered surfaces past and present. I invent a narrative biography borrowing from the ready pool of pop. And then in my twist of subject and form I insert “real” characters in these fictional and factual stories.
My mother, an elegant Hiropon[1] dressed in the robes of fallen nobility, looms over the narrative of origin implicit and explicit in my tortured telling of truth. A child of prosperity, marrying late into an accidental life of less, she discovered previously unimagined disappointments.
The little boy with the elfin ear, the original me, my rock, my foundation, the ground upon which I will build my nation, he, all of time and I, all of him, is absent from these compositions. Another version of My Lonesome Cowboy[2] he escaped from the only future I’ll ever know.
The missing artifact in my telling, my cowboy held onto the past as if it were the future and hope could be still found there. But Hope could not rescue him. And so, there he remains, caught in the yellowed amber of eternity.
A flash of a house.
A house of horror.
A house of…
Green walls.
Flashes of curtains
Terrible
Tragedies
These curtains,
Playing out in the suburban calm of the picture window's frame.
When my mother's parents decided that instead of continuing to pay for a Nanny they would travel around the world. And my father said my mother would have to look after us herself and her precious [3] Borg Worg, the last of a long line of rare and expensive cars from her youth, left on a flat bed truck destined for a Canadian collector’s home, the past and the future collapsed into a sea of color and the page of her story turned.
The Page, a Page with a page in hand—better than that old bird—took a stand. A graphic representation of a long lost nation. A ridiculous riddle: A framed page from a book showing a Page (18th century French) holding a page from a book. Drawn to the representation of an absent idea—the sex was real, real good. And that’s all that’s ever really mattered to me.
Minor characters appear.
Lines in a puddle.
Life in a muddle.
Kevin tells me I could make this a book and publish it and I think the idea of an illustrated text (a recommendation I have resisted) is not entirely out of the question. Ann asks what determines for me if a text has pictures or not and I say, I don’t know.
Discovering in the artifice and expression of Super Flat an alternate reality, my invented little boy plays again. Oh, My Lonesome Cowboy, Super FAT, juicy and delicious, monster muff nutritious, he comes from
BLEAK APPLE. A Homeric referent, after Jack Spicer.
Smooth as butter. A last tango. Hiropon will always have
Boys, Books and Purple Page Prose:
In a manic jumble all the boys I've fucked and been fucked by, appear offering themselves up as easy and available as ever. An animated illustrated cartoon of the past and the future, my myriad manias, my desperate desires dance on the edge of reason.
He walks toward me stroking his hard cock. Confident in his attractiveness. Assured by my own hard cock of my desire. But I do not give myself to him. I do not desire him so much as I dare desire abstractly and obsessively. A few well placed words, a simple sentence or two, make a page more than a page. An illustrated man, I span the earth like a colossus.
An,
A Yes, and A Careful.
The Careful came a knocking,
The van she was a rocking.
Seeing in the clouds,
Hearing amidst the noise,
Artifacts of rejection.
Collectable dolls coordinate with art and artist. Multiples, as the collectors say, multiply.
Super Flat: An extended artistic ideal made real by readily redeemable certificates of value. Multiples made in a singular act, branding not width standing.
And Hiroshi Fujiwara says: Now everyone is trying to be a DJ and make toys.
A kind of material—a fabric
Covering, an enveloping, another material object—A thing of matter—something that matters—a matter of concern—a thing whose very thing-ness we consider and then disregard in an affirmation of our ... our immateriality.
Mom and Apple pie. A checkered red and white mange sky.
A Page at play. Language at breaking point. The playbook still being written. Words upon…
Lads leaping, laughing.
What's the matter? The subject of our Super Flat subjectivity.
He is his own invention, short a third dimension. An artist.
What is the material constituting the matter of concern that we uncover and cover in an act of layering of thing onto thing, matter onto material, material onto girl? Girl onto history. His story onto her story. Page upon Page.
What is the matter? Who is the matter? How is his matter the matter whose end is madder than anger could ever represent? It is the matter of childish things we do. Put away but played again for a future, soon to unbecome.
HANGMAN
Slippery slope—Loss of hope
Tie the rope—Taught to try
Learn to fly—Paper passion play
K is to D as D is to K
Lang Lang will play
TAP TAP TAP
The reapers wrap.
A cloud so loud
He wore a shroud.
Swing low
Sweet cherry
Sing low
Mother Mary
Ascending is pretending
Makes a garden grow.
A future suspending.
A thing to know.
Death's just another
Must go on.
Buck shot.
Big shot.
Heart of
A bar
Too far
A man aloof
Raise a roof
Builda—a house
Cater a mouse.
Mickey & Minnie
Forever skiing
A story of love.
Exercise the eyes
Exercise the thighs
Everyone buys
The farm,
Words, what harm?
And yet we are present waiting for the Present to present. A gift of glam. The all contemporaneous now spreads itself wide, legs open welcoming all cowboys coming.
Kevin says the hangman poem doesn’t engage the dynamic of the game if refers to, he is right and so I add:
A letter for a line
A line for a life
A future ends in strife
Aligned
Compared
Completed
A short story in a word.
A thing of matter, a matter of concern. A concern, an ongoing enterprise. And forever it is Super Flat uni-dimensional single and surfacing. A submarine of matter, an evolutional object of desire, affection, understanding and concern. And for Dodie, a matter without a mater.
A representative representation. A doll for an animated nation, Hiropon’s milk is the sweet succor Lady M never gave her dashed infant.
When Othello said: What's the matter?
Was it a question of subject? Would an object specific and present answer the query? Or was it topical? Requiring an occasion of conversation, the locution of controlled communication?
Does it matter the matter if the end is tragedy played out no matter the answer?
Good night sweet prince. Good night. Good knight. Good to have.
And yet still, without sheep to sleep there remains…the Counting Down of the Clowns.
A humorous happy gaggle of Greeks, pretending to Roman roots, a later Imperial power, present a dumb show for an indifferent audience.
The Greeks, really Cypriots, have no agenda other than to entertain. And entertain they do. They entertain thoughts and ideas outside the Performance. Inside the Performance they entertain only themselves. The indifferent audience embodies the kind of absence that can only occur when physical presence belies conscious engagement.
Their mute and dumb show complete, the Greeks depart and departing, divide and dividing conquer, and conquering claim an ancient history of intellectual enlightenment which illuminates their quest for quiet contemplation.
Engaged in the kind of quiet contemplation only allowed the leisure class, the Greek's submissive silence gives rise to a terrible tomorrow that only the Ancients could anticipate and this tomorrow, one of many more to come, wends its way forward toward another and another.
And history, no more a mystery, collapses into his story. A Greco-roman neo noir jap-anime way—a father for a grateful nation an emperor rising and falling with the coming and going of traditional arts and the legacies of shared cultures.
When I write about my mother, I am unconsciously cruel. Is the characterization unfair? Perhaps, the stories skewed, concealing qualities that would render her more favorably. But then she is a fiction, an inverted idea of who I think she should or could be given the focus and interests I enjoy in a character. She’s really just a model, a machete for a marvelous manic monster of a mother artfully penned on the page representing an alternate ideal of character.
She is my flattening, my animated other. A single aspect—a unifying idea—a representation of all of history, her story and the past remembered so it too can be forgotten. She is a layer flattened into the layers of stories and boys and pages and words and images and ideas and all of it as easy as ever. A surface I can polish into all of history that has happened and which I remember none of, a matter of eternal emptiness. Perfectly pictured on a Page. Super Flat.
[1] "Hiropon" is a fiberglass sculpture of an anime-style female, taller than average, with gigantic breasts and wearing an undersized bikini top, which fails to cover her adequately. A stream of milk, which she is squeezing from her right nipple, wraps behind her to her left nipple being squeezed by her other hand, resembling a jump-rope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami
[2] "My Lonesome Cowboy" is a similar sculpture of a nude male holding his penis as he ejaculates a stream of semen, which he guides with his other hand to swirl upward, resembling a lasso. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takashi_Murakami
[3] Borg Worg – A custom designer car of the 1950s, it required a mechanic be flown in from
