It’s difficult to say anything definitive on the matter of making art.
Generally, when talking about art with friends, the very mention of the word causes violent outbursts of maniacal laughter. The word is enunciated slyly, and spoken with uber-irony. Invariably, the face of the speaker contorts hyperbolically – the lips moving so grotesquely to frame the word “art” that they can be read from across a room; and the eyes flash with conditioned, Daliesque madness. At a gallery show not so long ago, an acquaintance eruditely informed me, in a tone of melancholic resignation, that art is ‘the refuse of the psyche’ – that is, mental trash. At another exhibition opening, the same acquaintance, when I asked him how a recent project of his was coming along, confided: ‘Fine, it issues forth … Art is cerebral vomit, so, you know – I continue to make myself nauseous.’
The Pig Jumped Over the Moon
A certain painter I know, when bidding farewell in order to return to his work, invariably tells me: ‘Taco, I gotta go make art.’ And then the muted outburst of reflexive, self-deprecating laughter, which I’ve come to interpret as a kind of reverence for the ineffable core of art-making – as if the compulsive nature of the need to make art precludes any rational explanation of the meaning of the act.
Horse Jam is about coming to grips with an amorphous, chaotic structure – and about trying to frame complete sentences within this “framework”.
We embrace atavisms in this neighbourhood – circa 1970’s heroin addicts, hand painted signs, churches converted into strip clubs, ’sports’ bars. We achieve illumination on the main drag – purchasing our Portuguese loaves and instant Korean noodles with glee. We thought we chased ‘The Idea’ into the end of time; but it turns out we didn’t. There are lights and rain and crime scenes. Erosion in the land of animism. Spray painted foot bridges, piss-soaked railway junctions and convenience stores named after third world countries. There’s Mafia shootings in dog parks. Naked trees in limbo beneath electric lines – a decades old party trick frozen in time. And so we imbibed the concept of ice, of a clean, crisp beer on a Monday night. There are still some who adamantly refuse five minute cab rides – we pace the back alleys of the soul after a light dusting of frost.
Before discovering the alchemical recipe for Horse Jam in The Secret Life of Salvadore Dali, there was my epochal encounter with the Dancing Chicken in Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek – an event which essentially laid the groundwork for this blog. Without the Dancing Chicken, there would be no Horse Jam. It was the frenetic strut and clawing of the Pavlovian-trained fowl – and to a lesser extent the percussionist duck and firefighting rabbit – that tilled the soil in which the fruits flourishing below took root.
So you have some sense of what on God’s good green earth I’m talking about, take the time to watch the video:
I originally bought a copy of Stroszek in Xi’an, China in the summer of 2005. I was there with my now beloved wife, and it was our last stop on our journey along the Silk Road (the stretches currently under control of the Chinese Communist Party, anyway). Although our stay in Xi’an consisted mainly of drinking ice-cold beer in the heavily commercialized Muslim Quarter of the City – there was an average daytime temperature of about 45 °C at the time – we also decided to stock up on bootleg DVDs before getting the hell out of the Middle Kingdom. I picked up Stroszek knowing absolutely nothing about the film, and very little about the director except that he was the man behind Where the Green Ants Dream, a rather surreal film that chronicles the plight of a tribe of Aboriginal Australians as they attempt to halt the exploitation of their lands at the hands of a powerful mining company. I originally watched this film in an anthropology class titled ‘Indigenous Spirituality’, and it stuck with me as a bizarre study on the irreconcilable conflict between tribal societies and so called civilization, particularly their attitudes towards the environment, and their opposing perceptions of time – namely cyclical vs. linear … but I digress.
Upon viewing Stroszek, there was a palpable ah ha moment when I grasped the Dancing Chicken as the ineffable metaphor par excellence – that which perpetually transcends linguistic description. I laughed good-natured, maniacal laughter, and replayed the sequence a number of times. When played with director’s commentary on, I was even more delighted to discover that Herzog considered the Dancing Chicken sequence: “the finest I ever shot.” Like Horse Jam, it is post-verbal and ecstatic; as Herzog puts it, it is “a grand metaphor, for what I don’t know.” Overall my response was something I can only describe as existential glee. It was the Myth of Sisyphus with the absurdity meter cranked to ten. Menacing and disarming, yes, but in the same way that brushing your teeth, cooking a pot of chili or taking your daily shower is menacing and disarming … the Dancing Chicken compels the viewer to chuckle and marvel at the ever-present menace of life and nature, of existence itself. And everything I just wrote – the metaphor transcends, shedding conceptual hanger-ons like water off a ducks back.
I understand that for certain individuals, the site of a chicken trapped in a coin operated machine in a North Carolina funhouse, dancing automatonically for its next ration of seed, is simply too much to bear. Ian Curtis of Joy Division, for example, hung himself shortly after watching Stroszek, and it is widely believed that it was the Dancing Chicken sequence that pushed him over the edge. It should be noted that the sequence includes a scene in which the protagonist, Bruno S., presumably commits suicide on a chairlift – presumably but not for certain, and it is how the viewer perceives and digests the Dancing Chicken that largely dictates the mood felt at the end of the film (For an illuminating discussion on art and perspective in the Curtis-Stroszek case, click here). Clearly, as post-verbal, ecstatic metaphor, the Dancing Chicken also functions as a mirror onto which viewers project their wildest, most inspired or desperate perspectives.
And lets not forget the percussionist duck, because there’s a connection here. I have plans – scripted plans – to feature the noble ducks of Toronto’s High Park Duck Pond in the closing scene of the second iteration of the Horse Jam Film Project. The idea must have surfaced somewhat subconsciously, because I didn’t realize it was a purely Stroszek-inspired invention until late last week, after attending the North American premiere of Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done at TIFF.In the film, the psychotic lead character, Brad McCullum, takes his two pet pink flamingos hostage. The flamingos, referred to as ‘eagles in drag’, are absurd, beautiful, dangerous entities that infuse the film with that characteristic Herzogian strangeness from the outset. And there’s also a darkly humorous scene at an ostrich farm owned by Brad’s uncle. It is there that Brad procures the weapon he eventually uses to kill his mother. The frenetic flock of ostriches (essentially giant chickens for Herzog) instill the scene with the menace of the Mesozoiclizard brain; and the viewer feels, on some level, that which we intuitively associate with the lizard brain – a “profound stupidity” often mistaken as evil, and the inherent nihilism in what we call ‘creation’. But like the Dancing Chicken, the ostriches rise above these knee jerk reactions to inhabit the space of ineffable metaphor.
The final link in the chain came the following afternoon, at the second TIFF screening of Herzog’s, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. In the climactic shootout scene towards the end of the film, the very same music that accompanies the Dancing Chicken sequence – i.e. Sonny Terry’s Hootin’ the Blues – erupts, and the soul of one of the murdered gangsters rises from a cluster of corpses and break-dances until it is extinguished by a final hail of bullets.
And there it was – from Sonny Terry to the Lizard Brain to the High Park Duck Pond – full circle.
I attempted to ask Herzog in the Q and A period his reasons for using the Sonny Terry music again, if he felt there was some thematic and aesthetic affinities between Stroszek and Bad Lieutenant, and if the spirit of the Dancing Chicken inhabited his latest films. But time ran out, Herzog had a plane to catch, and I’ve been left to ponder these enigmas the past ten days.
When engaged in Horse Jam Espionage, one must start the mission by drinking no less than four cups of strong, medium roast coffee. A certain degree of caffeine-induced sketchiness and depersonalization is absolutely critical in order to be effective. But I should rewind a bit here, firstly, one requires an assignment of the utmost absurdity – an assignment straight out of a Kafka novel, an assignment so ridiculous that to give an example right now would not clarify things in the least. Then, and only then, can one get in to the mood. One must be consumed by mood – then comes the coffee. Once the coffee kicks in, one starts to refer to oneself as ‘one’, which is just one step away from referring to oneself in the third person (a state reserved for the more advanced stages of Horse Jam Espionage). Then you select your espionage instrument of choice – a digital camera, a mini-DV camcorder, a digital audio recorder, crayons, construction paper, a Portuguese loaf, a crowbar, a wire and mike taped to one’s ribs, a key glued to the side of your forehead – whatever the assignment calls for.
The next critical step is to work oneself up into a state of raw egolessness. There is a certain kind of strut that facilitates this, known as the Mr. Bojangles, and it entails walking slowly and mindfully, and stopping dead in one’s tracks at random intervals and staring vacantly into the middle distance, as if passively discerning the inner workings of the fifth dimension. The Mr. Bojangles is a variation of an ancient technique passed down to me from an octogenarian Chinese sage I met seven years ago in a suburb of Hong Kong. I initially spotted him shuffling along the sidewalk sporting a ‘World’s Best Mom’ t-shirt, which at the time did not strike me as absurd in the least. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, he stopped walking and simply stared out into the void for five, perhaps ten minutes. Hoards of pedestrians flowed past him as naturally and unobtrusively as water around a large rock, taking virtually no notice of his seemingly anomalous behavior. It was immediately clear that this man was on to something, and that this was a technique worth employing in what was then the incubation period of Horse Jam Espionage.
Finally, when weilding one’s instrument of choice out in the field, appear conspicuous, but only to yourself – this is perhaps the most important, and the least respected, of the Horse Jam Espionage commandments. Be absolutely, resolutely paranoid and dissociated at all times, otherwise you might as well fold the operation, go home and make chili.
What is it about Canadian politics and raw seal meat? There must be some inexplicable connection between the two, for it appears that the consumption of seal meat is an integral rite of passage for important Canadian politicians. Our up and coming political science students should keep this in mind – i.e. that success in Canadian politics can be measured by one’s ability to stomach raw seal meat. Michaelle Jean set the tone in May 2009, when she consumed raw seal heart – with a visible degree of gusto – on a trip to Nunuvut. She was compared to everyone from Braveheart to the brutal Sarah Palin, but the consensus amongst my circle was that she had effectively brought sexy back.
To segue a moment, Michaelle Jean remarked that raw seal heart reminded her of sashimi. This in turn got me thinking about the sheer volume of salmon – both farmed and wild – consumed daily in the Japanese restaurants of the developed world. It’s interesting, in light of the seal hunt issue, that no one seems to give two shits about salmon. Most people think like my dear friend Drew Simpson who – in a heated discussion on fish consciousness – made the anthropocentric claim that “salmon have no feelings!” But who can honestly say they know what it is like to be a salmon – whether it be Sockeye, Coho, Chum or Chinook?
Do Salmon have feelings?"
Anyways … just this week, while those of us in Southern Ontario are pleasantly roasting in the mid-August heat and humidity, our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in Inuit territory doing exactly what Canadian politicians are required to do when they travel that far north – he’s eating raw seal meat (and giving a big screw you to all those horse-eating EU types who have succumbed under the pressure of Paul McCartney).
Not only is he eating raw seal meat, but he’s bloody well enjoying it. Below is an excerpt from an email that Harper’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall sent out to national media outlets (Sourced from the Globe and Mail article, Harper Dines on seal meat)
“I can confirm that the Prime Minister and members of cabinet did have seal meat at lunch. The Prime Minister said, ‘I really enjoyed eating seal meat and look forward to having it again,’ ” … “The Prime Minister wants members of the press to have a chance to experience seal before they leave.”
I like that – ‘the chance to experience seal meat …’ Reading that line makes me a little envious – in a detached, unarticulated sort of way – of the Governor General, the Prime Minister, and the members of the press who have had the chance to experience such a savory, nutrient rich meat.
I’ve subjected the Horse Jam philosophy to a variety of rigorous tests – of both the empirical and abstract variety. We made a short art film, deviating from the original ‘ingredients’ as laid out by the great Salvadore Dali, but remaining faithful to the basic style and structure of Horse Jam. I applied the philosophy to a morally ambiguous phenomenon known as ‘The Great Canadian Seal Hunt’, and was rewarded by results at once profound and utterly hilarious.
The first major breakthrough occurred in a dream in which I was the captain of a 19th century Japanese whaling vessel – we were at sea in the middle of the Pacific, anxious to fill, strangely enough, our Giant Squid quota for the Emperor. In another dream, a woman peeled back the skin of her bicep, revealing a key embedded in her muscle tissue; this key, I was informed, would open an underground chamber where some 10,000 seal skins were curing.
These dreams conjured memories of an old friend, Sakurai, who as a child was happily raised on whale meat. He condemned the worldwide beef industry as barbaric, and the banning of the Japanese commercial whaling industry as hypocritical. I thought of the collapse of the Norse Greenlanders, and their dogmatic refusal to eat seal meat, which amounted to societal suicide. And in the manner of a Chinese politician, precisely three factors dawned on me that perfectly explained the disdain Paul McCartney feels for the Great Canadian Seal Hunt: seals bare an uncanny resemblance to Paul McCartney himself; seal cubs are incapable of fleeing from their predators – they merely waddle on ice, and they cannot yet swim effectively; and finally, clubbing something to death, conceptually, seems mean-spirited.
Under the lens of Horse Jam, the issue took on depth and dimensionality that I scarcely knew existed. The question was not to club or not to club – that much became crystal clear. I distanced myself from a firm moral position, choosing, rather, to paint a picture of a stout Newfoundlander in the act of clubbing a seal. This invited confused looks and in some cases outright scorn from my contemporaries, but when Michaelle Jean, Canada’s Governor General, ate a slice of raw seal heart in the presence of reporters from top national media outlets, I was vindicated. In the future, I plan to apply – or superimpose, if you will – the philosophy to other morally ambiguous phenomena, such as the Rise of China and the War in Afghanistan.
The atemporal Horse Jam dynamic, what we’ve also come to refer to as the Horse Jam Wellspring, consists in a spontaneous yet intelligent movement that integrates disparate, seemingly contradictory and unrelated ‘things’ into an ineffable whole. Horse Jam is not merely a belief system, it is first and foremost a mode of being, with its own rites and rituals that are proven to facilitate existential alchemy, that is, the transformation of both perspective and intentionality. It illuminates, without being so vain and deluded as to explicate, the very core of the inspiration-creativity-art trinity. We have another short film in the pipeline, which we hope shall be produced with a semblance of professionalism. It has a more coherent narrative structure than the ‘art film’, it has actual characters, and it attempts to touch on the heart of Horse Jam – as elucidated above – whilst staying true to the established aesthetic of the philosophy.
Before I wrap this up, a few words on the parameters governing a Horse Jamist’s behavior. In a nutshell, there are rules that are not really rules at all. One rule dictates that a Horse Jamist must brush his tongue every Monday evening, while another rule says ‘be wary of imperatives’, and still another states ‘be kind to bacteria’. As a Horse Jamist, it is not, for example, hypocritical for me to hang a portrait of the great John Paul II in my office, or to construct alters to Bolivian saints whose names I can hardly pronounce (to be continued) …
The trip had been planned for approximately five months. Three couples, one small animal and an itinerary that gave new meaning to the word ‘ambitious’. We were to visit a remote village in North-Central China, a settlement enveloped by jagged badlands, and virtually unknown to cartographers and self-stylized 21st century Marco Polo types. In fact, the village could only be reached by hovercraft. We had done our research, and discovered that a disproportionate percentage of the population of this village could – inexplicably, I admit - understand basic Spanish. This was ideal, because several of our group spoke basic Spanish, while only one of us spoke a bastardized, dysfunctional Mandarin. We felt that this peculiar condition would contribute a sense of continuity to our journey, seeing how the second leg would be in exotic and peligroso Colombia.
We spent those months leading up to the trip plotting, planning and itinerizing – we would spend four nights and three days in the virtually nonexistent Chinese village, and the last three nights and four days in Colombia, for a total of one week of intensely authentic cultural exchange and travel. Our three days in Colombia were planned around the annual Sino-Mexican Games, which was to be held in the heart of the Tatacoa desert. Why it wasn’t being held in either Mexico or China was a mystery we didn’t dare attempt to penetrate. And it wasn’t until we got to the desert, until we were in the grandstands drinking cerveza and eating diminutive perros calientes while the Mexican and Chinese national softball teams battled it out on the field below, that the answer was finally distilled out of what seemed a frothing contradiction.
The syncretization of the Dali-inspired Horse Jam aesthetic with personal thoughts and reflections on the scrotum-boggling debate surrounding the Great Canadian Seal Hunt, resulted in the following video:
The ‘Goodbye 730 Lansdowne, Goodbye’ bit at the end is an homage to the former home of Drew Simpson, a.k.a. The Best Worst Best Man – this joint housed most of the art you see at the beginning, and provided spiritual refuge and a place to drink for a number of disturbed, wayward souls from August 2005 through to April ‘09.
In other news, Governor General Michaelle Jean has not only brought sexy back, but has made a bold statement on where the Canadian government stands on seal clubbing by eating raw seal heart at a festival in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. In the Globe and Mail video covering the event she appears deeply moved by the experience, giving one the impression that eating raw seal heart is a rite of passage that every Canadian must undergo in order to truly understand this vast frozen land mass of ours.
The story below is based on a dream I had that happened to coincide with the commencement of the 2009 Annual Spring Seal Hunt in Canada’s Maritime provinces. I was not consciously aware of the impending club fest, nor have I ever given much concentrated thought to the matter. I now attribute it to a story that goes back to 2006, which at the time was just a blip on the radar, but evidently had some insidious, far-reaching unconscious influence on my psyche. Paul McCartney and then wife, the hysterical Heather Mills, spent early 2006 protesting the hunt, calling on the Harper government to remove this ’stain’ on Canada’s character. The highlight of the whole affair was watching the McCartneys battling it out with Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams on Larry King Live. Although downright hilarious, this heated debate underscored the fact that the seal hunt lies in an obtuse mist of ethical ambiguity. That’s not to say that I agree with it. In fact, I have a miniature seal pup carved out of soap that I keep beside my computer.
The Arm Key (March ’09)
I’d like to imagine that I have a long history of venturing out on annual seal hunts with the men of my family – my father, grandfather, uncles, cousins … perhaps my own son – in some projected idealistic future. All before the celebrity outrage over the clubbing of seals, of course. And before I heard the absolute psychedelia of their underwater mating calls (see: Herzog’s ‘Encounters at the End of the World’). In the good old days they were valued more for their significant levels of body fat than their cute whiskers and vaguely humanoid countenance. The value of the fat, and the oils it contained, outweighed the negligible psychological repercussions of clubbing them to death. And this is to say nothing about the skins. Oh, the skins … We used to store them in what we called The Precambrian Locker Room – there were benches, drying chambers, actual lockers, the psychic residue of ironic misogynistic conversation. It’s not that women didn’t partake in the seal hunt because it was some kind of exclusionary, boys-club like activity. It was just the fact of the clubbing, the humanoid countenance.
We kept The Precambrian on lockdown during the off-season, which happened to be most of the year. To get to Profligate Bay we had to travel a network of serious geological arteries. What looks like critical veins, valves and pumps when you turn the map of the world upside down – the way we should of been looking at it as children. We would do this for fun, read our navigational map ‘upside down’ so that the peninsulas of North America were emphasized, and Tennessee looked like an island. We knew last year’s skins would be hanging in the chambers; and that there would be Scotch and cigarillos. We knew that in order to get to the locker room we’d have to descend below sea level, to a space reminiscent of the Acropolis, except largely made of dirt. There was one master key for The Precambrian Locker Room, and it was stored in Uncle Vito’s arm, just beneath the skin enveloping his right bicep, on the far side from his torso. Each year, we would take a razor and slice along the U-shaped scar line - reopening the original surgically carved pocket – and peel back the skin. Invariably, the master key would be there, inert, coated in a film of watery blood and viscous fluid. It was a ritual celebrating the immanent commencement of the annual seal hunt. Cousin Jerry, a pharmacist, would close the wound with this liquid band-aid product that’s all the rage in Germany. A little antiseptic, a little antibiotic, a little Scotch … and soon Uncle Vito was in his high chair, churning out stories about the good ol’ days growing up as the son of a chicken farmer in a village north of Genoa.
We were on our way out of India in five hours and it finally hit me that the country truly does operate on mystical terms. Just when you think you’re paranoid it’s justified, or, conversely, utterly refuted – in the tragic-comico sense. We were walking down Main Bazarre and K said something like, ‘the five most fucked up things that I won’t miss about India just happened in the last 200 metres’ – there was the usual frenetic solicitation, an attempted rip-off on a bottled water purchase, incessant honking, footless beggars, prolapsed cow assholes, …
We were approaching the square to find an auto rickshaw to take us to India Gate. I was expecting the worst – to pay, at the very least, one hundred and fifty rupees. Shakeel, a man with a gentle Kashmiri countenance, pulls up, wags his head, and says, ’50 rupees’. My instinct was to bargain – ’40 rupees’. ‘It’s a fair price, sir,’ he tells me, ‘it’s 25 to Connaught Place, it’s far beyond that, 50 rupees is a fair price’. Then the dawning realization that occasionally you get quoted the right price in India – that not everyone is a pathological liar. And then this is followed by the strangely comforting realization that if and when an Indian lies to you it’s for a reason – that it’s inexplicably tied up with your karma.
We drove to India Gate, registered the scope of the grounds, the temperature, and then negotiated a price for an afternoon tour of New Delhi. We drove down Rajpath and K, suddenly, was instilled with awe and respect for the capital of India. Prior to this there were journal entries like, ‘I find it hard to believe that this is the capital of a country this vast and significant.’ I’ve requested that she update the journal. The broad, tree lined streets of New Delhi, it’s British framework, respectfully incorporating the domed ruins of the Sultans and Mughals, breathes imperial pomp. K noted, as she tends to note such things, the sublime blending of Roman, Mughal and Imperial British architecture in the buildings flanking Rajpath.
We visited the Indira Gandhi memorial, solemnly tread through her former residence with a subdued herd of middle class Indians. The cause was evident – peace. Outside, we bought a chilled bottle of water and asked Shakeel to take us to Nizamudin shrine. Being a Muslim of Sufi persuasion, he was pleased to take us.
As we approached the sociologically quarantined old neighbourhood of Nizamuddin he said, ‘the shrine is very inside.’ We walked into a narrow, medieval alley of flower sellers trying to coerce us to leave our shoes with them, spouting shyster lines such as, “sir, you cannot pass beyond this point with shoes’ – apparently a standard scheme amongst Nizamuddinites, and very Indian in feel and scope. Intimidation and hustle at ‘holy’ sites always somehow makes the experience more authentic.
We finally did leave our shoes with a shoe-wallah outside the main gate of the shrine. Inside there were ancient Sufis and seemingly pious Muslims reluctantly trying to rope us into a spiritual hustle – like, ‘come here, you must visit this shrine before you visit Nizamuddin’s’. The hustle soon deflated as it dawned on people that hustling us may be contrary to scripture. There really was a sense of moral awakening – the lighting flash that sporadically illuminates one’s day in India. A man lent me his skull cap so that I could enter the inner sanctum of the shrine. Devotees generally ask the saint for something but I couldn’t think of any particular request at the time. Later, when K asked what I asked for, I said, ‘a pure heart’.
From the shrine we made our way to the Bahai Lotus temple in south Delhi. We arrived, numbingly oppressed by the 47 degree Celcius heat and bought bottles of water for ourselves and Shakeel. K, as usual, demanded a bag of Lay’s. We entered the Lotus temple by one of its nine entrances, shuffled solemnly towards the pews and sat in silence for twenty minutes. There was a brief, eloquent prayer service that we sat through before circling the inner recesses of the nine petals. Nine, the highest single digit number, and the perfect symbol for unity within diversity. There were pools surrounding the Lotus temple, the wind blows and cools as it passes over their surfaces and then enters from one or more of the entrances. The place had circulation and a real sense of tranquility. K felt it after moving around in the heat all afternoon, the unnerving sense that she’d found something.
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