...Comes from some other beginning's end

'Beginning' always sounds hopeful.  "In the Beginning..." is ripe with potential that immediately puts one in a state of (positive) expectation.   But before God created light, the world was "formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep."

Some beginnings are dark.  Let's set the mood now.



(This song by R.E.M. was a plea from Michael Stipe to Kurt Cobain, during the 10 days or so that the latter retreated from contact with the world, and ended his life.  Dark enough yet?)

November and December of 1994 were, up until recently, the darkest time of my life.  Nikole broke up with me in mid-November.  People close to me at the time said my behavior was akin to someone who had just gone through a divorce.  To this day I don't know why it affected me so much.  Break-ups are always hard but this one set me on a roller-coaster ride for almost the next two years.

At the time I was taking my first actual painting class.  I was pretty excited about this class.  Art was beginning its hold on me (see previous post) and painting was the thing.  Picasso was a painter.  Drawing was pretty much a precursor to painting.  I was ready to figure this thing out.  My professor, Avery Falkner, did a nice job introducing us step-by-step.  First, get used to paint- black and white only. Next, add a couple of colors.  Okay, now add multiple colors.  All of it very representational- painting objects that look like the objects.  Then, we had to paint a scene through a window and work on contrasting the interior light with the exterior light coming through the window.  I remember staring for hours upon hours at this picture- focusing on the blank wall.  I was completely amazed at Edward Hopper's ability to use a myriad of colors to create what is perceived as a white wall with a shadow on it.  Not just white paint with an area of grey- there are greens and yellows and purples and blues.  It captivated me.  Art (painting) was more than the object depicted- it was the depiction itself- the colors and textures of the paint.  It is pure abstraction couched in a guise of realism.

Towards the end of the semester, in late October/early November we were assigned a painting project that would officially launch us into abstraction.  We were to find or create an object that would be the beginning inspiration for a painting.  The painting would concentrate on abstract qualities of marks, colors, textures, etc. but still retain a trace of the image of our object.

Well, hindsight is 20/20.  I had found these nails that were, like, 7 or 8 inches long.  They were huge.  I thought they looked cool and reminded me that the group Nine Inch Nails was named after the belief that Jesus was crucified, nailed to the cross, with nails that were nine inches long.  So I took a piece of plywood and started banging these nails through it.  As they broke through the back surface, the wood splintered and chipped, revealing the layers of wood and glue that make up the 'plys.'  For added measure I tied string around the points of the nails.  Sharp menacing nails, literally tearing their way through distressed wood, held together by a constricting tie.  Yeah, Freud could have a field day with this image and the state of my relationship with Nikole.  (I, however, never really studied Freud- I though everything was fine!)

If you've ever thought abstract art looks like crap- you should see it during the process of being made!  Ugh.  It was horrible!  Painting and painting and looking and painting and perhaps scraping away... it can be a grueling process.  But I was learning it is a very reflective process.  When you are painting an object realistically it's easy to know when you're done... when you've included all the details and it looks like what you're looking at.  With abstract art, you are propelled by a vague notion.  You don't know exactly what it's supposed to look like, but you just know it's not there yet.

I remember one class period just looking and journaling... I'm not sure if I even painted that day.  And I remember another day feeling that the way to represent what I was trying to represent (the mix of black glue and yellow wood that characterized the shattered plywood) was to repeatedly do a criss-cross pattern with a brush loaded with black and yellow painted.  I just did the same movements over and over and over... it was a strange sensation- doing something that didn't seem to work, yet believing that if I continued doing that same thing, it would somehow work out.

And it did.  In a big way.  After struggling with what seemed like painted mud day in and day out for about 3 weeks...it suddenly... clicked.  Nikole had broken up with me at this point- she dropped the bomb while I was in the middle of this project.  And I remember all of a sudden standing back and looking at my painting.  It looked like how I felt, and had been feeling that past month.   Picasso had made a big triangle foot because it somehow depicted the horrific feeling that was the subject of the picture better than a realistic foot.  It wasn't about the foot.  It was about the feeling- the effect.

The fish was caught- hook, line, and sinker.  I stood looking at the painting, a sensation like scales falling from my eyes, and the thought... "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life."

So I present to you... "Nails & String" (I deliberately did not want a heavier, more profound title)... and the song that was playing in my apartment when Nikole walked in on that 'fateful' night.  The end... that prompted a new beginning.

Every new beginning...

Semisonic has a great song called 'Closing Time' with the poignant line 'every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.' It will be a few more years before that song comes out and enters my soundtrack, but the sentiment works at this moment- because the new beginning that was my life as an artist arose from the end of my relationship with Nikole. Of course, life rarely presents clear breaks without some sort of foreshadowing, so let's start with the art thing.

I actually began my tenure at Pepperdine as a business major. I took one business math class (which academically I had no trouble with) but I looked around at my fellow business majors and thought, "This is not my crowd!" Not knowing what else to do, I became an art major. You would think with my drawing ability that decision would have been a no-brainer. But that decision was fraught with anxiety- because at the same time I took that business math class, I was also taking a class called 2-D Design. It was my first introduction to abstract art- and UNLIKE business math, I didn't get it. The whole argument, "The artist meant to do that" was, I felt, a load of crock. And even if they wanted to do it that way, what skill was involved?

All that changed the next year when I took a couple of drawing classes. These were no problem for me. While I learned much, the skill of rendering an object or person in front of you came easy to me, I'd been working on it all my life. But during one class our professor, Joe Piasentin, took us to see a show of Picasso's 'Weeping Woman' series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While we were pretty much on our own as far as meandering through the show, our professor did focus us a bit: "I want you to look at the different ways Picasso portrayed the crying eyes." So, for example, the image here, notice how the eyes are actually bowls pouring out the tears. It struck me.

But I was struck more by another drawing I saw in the exhibition, a small study for one of his major works, Guernica. The drawing depicted a mother, distraught over the death of her baby, whose lifeless body she holds in her arms. She is climbing a ladder, presumably to escape the horror that terminated her child's life. (This picture is NOT the drawing but it's very similar, to give you a visual.  I have yet to find a reproduction of the actual one that I saw.) The drawing was a simple line drawing done in pencil- which was important because I could see the 'ghosts' of the lines he erased. In particular he had drawn her leg 'correctly' - you could follow the curve that delineated the hamstrings, curving in at the back of the knee, bulging out at the calf, and tapering along her Achilles' tendon to the roundabout curve of her heel. A single line that was perfect. A 'perfect' line that he erased. He replaced it with a big fat triangle that resembled nothing of the human figure.

I didn't understand it.

But I did understand one thing- it was deliberate. The artist meant to do it that way and there was no denying it. You could see his choice- the initial, 'accurate' rendering, and its subsequent erasure and replacement with something...else.  This was the beginning of the beginning for me.  The fish was moving towards the hook.


Meanwhile, Moscow (for me) and Uruguay (for Nikole) had brought much reflection.  We had some serious discussions.  We decided to stick with it- and even decided to 'have a song.' In hindsight, though, I think it is telling that the song is a question... can you feel the love tonight?  In the romantic sense of the movie, the answer is of course yes.   But the question is not rhetorical, the choice remains open...

From Russia with Love

Here is a picture of Red Square, with St. Basil's Cathedral on the left and the Kremlin on the right, the 'center' of Moscow, Russia where I travelled on a mission trip with Let's Start Talking in the summer of 1994.  It was an amazing experience, though not quite what I expected.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I have followed Erasure since their 1988 album 'The Innocents.'  It was probably the first time I feel I really had a 'musical identity.'  I followed suit with 1989's 'Wild' and was able to buy 'Chorus' the day it came out in 1991.   But those came out before I was 18- and this blog is a soundtrack of my adult life.   During the three years that transpired I threw myself into my growing music sensitivities.  And shortly before I left for Moscow, Erasure released a new single- 'Always'- which exceeded even their expectations in terms of critical acclaim and radio play.  It has an odd sense of tempo, at least for my unknowledgeable ears- but it's an 'offness' that draws me into it.  Sometimes if something sits too comfortably with you it can sink into the background until you lose your awareness of it.  This song resists that- a lesson that would later feed into my artistic education.  

Always

The second song here, called 'Take Me Back,'  literally takes me back to Moscow every time I hear it.  First of all, I was excited to have something new by one of my favorite bands.  Plus- I had always felt something was missing from their previous album, 'Chorus.'  Though they've always been an electronic band, there was something different about the sound of that album- it was even more electronic- less 'notes' and more 'blips' and 'bleeps.'  But when I heard this track, I was instantly pulled in.  They continued their electronic sound but it had a fullness that 'filled the space' better.  (It was many years later that I learned the reason- 'Chorus' was devoid of chords- it was all 'isolated' notes.  'I Say, I Say, I Say' brought the chords back.)  But it's arrival coincided with my departure for Russia and the two are forever linked in my mind. 

Take Me Back

As I alluded to earlier, it was an experience like no other.  Not that I could even have any expectations of what my first venture into world travel would be like- and to Moscow, Russia no less- for so long 'the enemy' as I grew up.  I was going to do missionary work with a program called Let's Start Talking which used an 'easy to read' version of Luke to teach conversational English while exposing our 'readers' to the gospel of Christ.  Nikole also participated in Let's Start Talking that summer, but to the surprise of many we went on separate teams to different hemispheres.  She went with a team to Uruguay in South America.  It was a time of incredible reflection for me.  A time to ponder the world in a way that few get to.  A time to ponder my faith in the act of sharing it.  A time to ponder my relationship with Nikole in a time of separation from her.  It was a time of pondering what art was- something that was really just coming into my consciousness for the first time in my life (even though I had been drawing all my life.)  I thank God that my team's experience there was out of the norm in the sense that we had far fewer 'readers' that we worked with compared to other teams.  From my perspective, God was giving me time and space to grow.  And for that I praise Him.

A cool aside:  we had a day layover in London on the way there so we decided to take the opportunity to eat at the original Hard Rock Cafe.  The Hard Rock was started by a couple of Americans in London in 1971.  Unbeknownst to us until we got there, but we happened to arrive on the anniversary day that the restaurant opened.  So for that day only- everything on the menu was at 1971 prices!!  Inflation has its priveleges when it is temporarily suspended.

Best New Band

In 1992, England’s premier music magazine, Melody Maker, highlighted on their cover the ‘Best New Band’- It was a group named Suede. And at the time of receiving this rather distinguished honor...they had yet to release any music. A few singles were released over the next few months with their debut album finally arriving about a year after their cover appearance! Their music was to play a prominent role in my 'musical life' over the next year. Even to this day, their first album is one I return to often.

First- I didn’t subscribe to any music magazines, domestic or overseas. I had never been to England (that would change the following summer) and rarely listened to the radio. So how did I find out about this group? Enter (stage right) the man, the myth, the legend- Jeff Partain. We grew up going to the same church, connected early on over comic book collecting, and were leaders in our church youth group... And we became roommates at Pepperdine for the ’93-’94 school year, my sophomore outing- his freshman. Jeff essentially introduced me to music and I owe my allegiances to R.E.M. and U2 entirely to him (Read my previous post ‘America’- those were his tapes I borrowed.). He introduced me to Suede, but I wasn’t sold on them at first. He and another friend had gotten tickets to their first concert in L.A. (they were doing a double tour with a group called the Cranberries- who subsequently were catapulted to mega-stardom while Suede slipped into relative obscurity in the States). Nikole and I’s first kiss coincided with that concert. Their sound had to grow on me but I discovered that sometimes, the really best things need time to grow on you, while the ‘quick hits’ easily fade into an empty nostalgia. Suede’s guitarist, Bernard Butler, still holds sway in my mind as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

So here are a couple of songs to enjoy. The first one, “Pantomime Horse,” is one of my favorites from their debut album- a somewhat brooding song but it strikes a chord with me and to this day I still don’t know quite why... The second one, “Stay Together”, has an extended ending that makes me stand in awe of Bernard Butler’s musical genius. And while you’re enjoying these songs you can read some of the memorable moments from “The Year that Was”- a tribute to an extraordinary collaboration between my good friend, Jeff, and I. This one’s for you, bud!

Pantomime Horse


Stay Together




· I worked in the housing office so I was able to hook us up with one of the best rooms on campus- with an impeccable view of the beach/ocean (even though Pepperdine is essentially on the beach- very few of the dorm rooms could actually claim a good view.)
· We’re big Depeche Mode fans so when they came around for a concert we had to go- to the extent that Jeff decided to sell almost all of his textbooks less than halfway through the semester to pay for his ticket. (Having a roommate a year older, who took many of the same classes, and who still had his textbooks proved to be a blessing in disguise.)
· Taking an all night drive up to Hearst Castle, peeing off a rock, and heading back down to Virgin Megastore (open 24 hours)- left around 9:00 pm on a Monday night and got back around 6:00 am on Tuesday- decided to sleep through my Tuesday morning drawing class. (Incidentally, ’93 was a big fire year- those huge fires that have been plaguing SoCal for sometime now- this was one of the early ones- anyways, we saw it’s foreboding glow late at night as we were driving back- before there had been any news reports of it.)
· As the fire swept its way toward campus Jeff decides to try and preserve his CD collection (at the time in the neighborhood of 200-250 CDs). You had to be there, but a series of minor mishaps amidst changing reports of ‘we’ll have to leave campus’- ‘no, the fire changed course, we’re all fine’ – ‘oh, the fire changed course again, we’ll have to leave campus’- etc., etc. made the whole scene quite hilarious in the end. If you want to ask me about it, I’ll be happy to replay it.
· ‘Bootlegs and B-sides’- the title of our radio show. Jeff, the ultimate music fan, had a sizeable collection of singles, bootlegged live or studio performances, and special edition releases that had the rare songs only the die-hards knew about. We decided to share with the ‘masses.’ Only Pepperdine didn’t broadcast over the air so if students wanted to listen they had to get a special connection to hook their stereo to the cable line. So basically we had one or two listeners, one of which always phoned in and requested the same Duran Duran song to listen to while she was getting ready for class.
· ‘Cigar night’- an actual school ‘sponsored’ dorm event. Jeff and I decided to give it the ol’ college try- failing miserably by smoking the wrong end of a Swisher Sweet. (But it made our second one much better once we figured it out!)
· We were unaware that we had a heating unit in our room. We discovered the hard way when one of our dorm-mates decided as a joke to crank ours up. It was a miserable night of extreme heat and sweaty, sticky sheets until the next day when someone said, “you should turn your heat down!” and proceeded to crank the knob back down to an appropriate level.
· We met another new student- a drummer named Davin. During this time Pepperdine was building a new collection of dorm rooms called the ‘Towers.’ At this point it was just the framing and wood paneling that was up. Davin decided he was going to throw the first rock through a ‘window’ in the Towers. So he lobbed a rock through the open expanse where a window would one day go... then we heard the crash of broken glass of something inside. Whoops!
· As I mentioned earlier, I have the extraordinary ability to listen to the same thing (song or album) over and over again without getting sick of it. One night I was really into a particular song so I put that one song on repeat. We feel asleep listening to that one song playing continuously until it drove Jeff nuts, gave him nightmares, and caused him to wake up at an ungodly hour to turn the stereo off. Sorry, man.
· Since I started this post with Suede, I’ll end it on that note. ‘Stay Together’ was being released as a stand alone single in between their first and second albums. It was supposed to be released on Valentine’s Day in 1994-which fell on a Monday. On Friday the 11th, on a whim Jeff decides to call the music store to see if it’s in- and what do you know, they had just gotten it that morning, 3 days early. We (myself, Jeff, and our friend Ian) immediately hopped in the car and drove into L.A. and while Jeff rode around the block a few times (parking was non-existent, I collected everyone’s money and ran into the store and bought 3 copies. It’s always nice to say you got something the day it came out, especially when you catch it coming out early.

As with any stroll down memory lane, especially as it relates to college, the list could go on and on- but I think this is a pretty good sample of probably my favorite year at Pepperdine. Here’s to your own memories of times like these!

(enter Nikole stage left)

Sophomore year. School's back in session. But rewind a bit to the end of my very first week as a freshman at Pepperdine. I'm sitting in the amphitheatre reading a book when my soon to be good friend Carl Flynn walks down the steps on his way to his car. Carl Flynn is an amazing person. A profound Christian whom I admire a lot. But for my purposes here he is amazing for a special role he played at Pepperdine the first week of each year. New Student Orientation- where 800+ freshman descend upon the campus amidst of range of feelings from excitement to fear and anxiety. As a Campus Ministry Intern, Carl Flynn wanted to meet and get to know every single incoming freshman, and at least know all their names by the end of orientation week. (That's right, that's approximately 800 names/faces in one week.) If memory serves me correctly he got about 700 names down my freshman year, but my sophomore year he met and knew the name of every incoming freshman within that first week. As testimony to his ability, the owner of the campus bookstore (located just down the hall from the Campus Ministry office) would bring new students who did not have their student IDs with them down the hall to Carl for 'proof' of their enrollment status. Yeah, crazy.

Anyways, at the end of that first week he comes across me (having already met me and knew my name) and invited me to the apartment of a couple of Christians on campus who were having a spaghetti dinner for friends and new students. One of them was a girl named Nikole DuTemple.

We seemed to hit it off pretty well. At sometime during the evening she said I could come over 'any time.' Now, I'm sure, looking back, she said that primarily as the 'polite thing to say.' But I have an inclination to take people seriously so I ended up just going to visit her- almost on a weekly basis. Of course it was just as friends at the time, because I was dating Michelle back home. But when I arrived again my sophomore year... well, Michelle was no longer part of the picture. And things started to turn romantic.

There was a euphoria there that I hadn't felt with Michelle. The emotional 'high' was completely new to me- and it just so happened that at that time Pet Shop Boys released an album called 'Very' and one of the tracks in particular, summed up in words and music, what I felt in the early days of our romance.

ReflectionnoitcelfeR

A bit of a deviation from my normal posting. I found this live version of 'Country Feedback' from R.E.M.'s "Out of Time" album and it is absolutely incredible. This song is me. Maybe all the words don't apply to me. Sometimes some of them do. But the feeling of it, the mood, is very much me. I'm introverted and at times moody and brooding. When I heard this song (over and over again on that summer trip) it struck a deep chord with me- and it is still the song I often turn to when I want to reflect- when I've had a bad day and I feel like I need to get away- retreat into the cave of my mind.
And it was fitting. Driving on the open road... out in the Country... quietly distilling what the vast openness of America and experience and God and love and life meant to me... and receiving that Feedback.

When I listen to it now, I'm more tuned in to the guitar- it 'speaks' just as clear, if not more, than the lyrics. I'm generally drawn to European, particularly British, songwriters and guitarists. I feel like they on the whole treat the chords and strings as a language, talking alongside the lyrics- instead of as a musical interlude and little riffs between the lyrics- which is my impression of much American rock/alternative music. Peter Buck is one of the few American guitarists who I feel doesn't do that- and shares my preference for the abstract language of the electric guitar. We'll revisit this thought when I introduce you to Suede in a couple more posts.

America

In the summer of '93 I had what I consider to be my experience of America. As mentioned in my previous post, I drove 'cross-country' (from So. Cal. to Oklahoma) with my girlfriend, Michelle, and her family. About 90% of the view on that trip resembled the landscape above. But the wide open expanse struck me. Without having any foreign experiences to compare this to, I still felt that this was a singularly American experience- I don't know how else to describe it. The wide open frontier, that amidst all the overpopulation of places like Southern California, still existed as largely wide and open. And it was accompanied by a soundtrack of a uniquely American band- R.E.M.
The following two songs, Nightswimming and Find the River from their album Automatic For the People, have a quality about them that I think would make you feel nostalgic even if you had nothing to feel nostalgic about. They brought me to a reflective place where I was free to roam in the empty landscape around me. And they helped define America for me- a definition that I cannot express in words, but is a feeling that I get when a I look at pictures like the one above, and listen to the songs below.


Nightswimming


Find the River

Summer '93

The summer of 1993 was a summer of trips: I took, like, a two week long trip with my girlfriend, Michelle, and her family to visit their relatives in Oklahoma (but I also got to see some of my relatives who lived there, too) which was followed up by a week-long trip with my family to some of the beautiful landscapes and parks of northern Arizona and southern Utah. My music-loving friend Jeff loaned me several cassette tapes for the trip as I had very little music of my own and because he didn't need them since he had just gotten a CD player for his car. Included in the mix were the likes of Erasure, Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey, and of particular note for this blog- R.E.M.

Just the previous year 'Automatic for the People' had been released, once again showing my impeccable timing in discovering a musical group- but I'll save that for the next blog because for this trip I also had to catch up on some of their older material- beginning with 'Document.' They rose to considerable fame with this album due to 'The One I Love' and 'It's the End of the World as We Know It"- and those are fine songs- but nothing grabbed be so much as the opening track "Finest Worksong." I seem to have a slight predilection for going against the grain so it is often the case that I latch onto songs that maybe aren't the most popular or the hit singles from an album- so perhaps I'm subconsciously reinforcing this when I'm choosing this song over the other, more popular tracks. It's good to be aware when you are supporting a mental construct- it may be helpful when you need to dump that construct in the face of a new reality.



Going back in time further to 'Green' I'm following the same course of action by choosing "Hairshirt" and "You are the Everything" over the more popular "Stand" "Orange Crush" but I think there is also the concept of the 'song choosing me.' Can we really help what strikes us? I'm drawn to things that are a little 'off'- and these songs contain some awkward passages- but that sets the really harmonious elements into greater relief, and to me, that contrast, is a beautiful thing.





"Inside Out" just rocks.



The summer ended on a down note, though. After the trip with Michelle and her family, after four years of dating (yes- 4!) we broke up. Somewhat 'incidentally' though- at the beginning of the summer, during the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, I met this girl named Melinda Sibley. (She becomes a major player in the 'soundtrack'- but not until track 52 or so....)

Pepperdine, 1992-1993

I have the uncanny ability to listen to the same song/group/album over and over and over and over and over again (and again and again.) My freshman year at Pepperdine, I would wager about 90% of my music listening time was devoted to this album. It didn't help that the light in my dorm room made a little 'tink-tink-tink-tink' sound when it was turned on that was surprisingly similar to the sound that starts off this album. So I would walk into my room, turn on the light, and go, "Oooh, yeah... I wanna listen to that!"

This album also highlights a certain quirkiness in my timing. You see, I pretty much completely missed the 80's- I saw Star Wars in the late 70's and I was lost in a galaxy far, far away for a long time. Consequently I 'discovered' for myself artists of the 80's after their initial claims to fame, after everyone else discovered them. So I caught up with Depeche Mode not with their live tour of Music for the Masses that culminated in their '101' live album, but with their 1990 release 'Violator.' And though I remember hearing and seeing videos of R.E.M.'s 'Stand' of '88 and 'Losing My Religion' of 1990, it wasn't until 'Automatic For the People' came that I latched onto their bandwagon. Similarly, I had friends who ogled Bono in his 'Joshua Tree' days but it wasn't until 'Achtung Baby' came out in late 1991 that I seriously gave them a listening. I find it interesting, though, that the times I get into a group are often when the group or artist is changing, or is coming under a critical revision and so I find myself coming into things in the midst of change. And this phenomenon has extended beyond the realm of music, too. It fits my predilection to look behind things /people/events and look at their motives- for it is precisely these moments of change that cause people to rethink where they are coming from and where they are going to.

Most of the time on this 'soundtrack' you'll find that if I'm interested in an album I focus on three songs. And the three songs here really do speak of what was going on in my life, but at the same time, almost every song on this album speaks to me- I feel it is truly a work of art. The first song, 'Zoo Station' speaks of the change that is occurring- a change musically for U2, and a change in my life: of essentially moving out of my parents house into my own life. 'One' is just a great song, and along with 'So Cruel', just flows - one of those happy artistic moments when everything is aligned so that the words and the music just come together and so perfectly reflect what you're thinking and feeling at that time. The guitarist The Edge spoke of those songs as a couple of his favorite on this album for those reasons, and thematically they spoke to some of my doubts about my long time relationship with a girl named Michelle. Anxiety and doubt, properly expressed and reflected, can become beautiful moments. I hope you enjoy.

Zoo Station

One

So Cruel