Why I Paint, Part 4 (The Twee Edition)

I just want to warn you up front that this post is going to be mawkishly sweet in parts, not unlike that blackberry wine your grandmother used to serve every Christmas with her mincemeat pie. (See? I'm already dripping cheese.) But it expresses exactly what my aims are, and if you’re looking for something that’s almost like a manifesto for my art, then you'll just have to deal with it because this, approximately, is it.—JG

Also, if you want to see these pictures up close, just click on them.—JG, again

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music—Walter Pater

Yellow and White Palimpsest #1, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20

When I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I believed in a future millennial paradise during which I would be able to pursue my art with perfect freedom, in perfect mind and in perfect body. Like millions of other Witnesses, I thus deferred my dreams and ambitions to that delirious sky-scorching future, leaving me with a humanitarianly impoverished present of interminable Bible study meetings and door-to-door preaching rituals. Then came my spiritual crisis and loss of faith and one subsequent realization: that this life is not a rehearsal for something else. This, as Kenny Loggins says, Is It. To me, this knowledge is a gift, because it means that I should try to make each encounter, each project, each moment as special and meaningful as possible; that I should use the remaining time I have to do what I love. Like making art, for instance.

And, since I'm not going to be here forever, I want to leave something behind that will feed the next generation, starting with my kids, Max (21) and Liza (13); a body of work—writings, paintings, drummings—that’s just for them. My mission: to leave behind a diaspora of expressions that others may enjoy, but that express me so transparently that only my kids could possibly fully appreciate them and that, when they spend time with them, it will be as if they're hanging out with me. Conversely, it will be like a portal through which I can reach back across the planets to them (metaphorically speaking), offering the reminder only a father can best give, that whatever they're going through, it's going to be okay.

If you haven’t already clicked away, here’s where it gets really smarmy.

Just in case you hadn’t heard (or Robin Williams movies or the Facebook meme-o-sphere hadn’t told you), the time we could be investing in what we love is so easily squandered. And I’m not just talking about spending Hallmark moments with friends and family around the backyard firepit roasting weanies and glugging Safeway Chardonnay, but also hanging out with our own selves alone, pursuing the things that make us more deeply human and more fully alive.

I'd like to render the colors of time in such a way that they’re a reminder of how precious and vital each moment of our life is. Yet, knowing full well that none of us can tolerate living in hyperawareness each and every nanosecond of our existence, the paintings will operate on a gentle basis, quietly encouraging us to do the best we can. 

I'd like my art to be a distilled transubstantiation of the things I love, which I've found—through my life of accretion and subtraction—matter (or that are worthwhile, at least to me). Since I love to paint, this would be an ideal marriage of form and content. The medium will be the message.

This, I believe, is why I'm attracted to the cheerily autumnal shades of medium yellow right now. It's the color of decay and sunshine; of youth and its decline. I've never really articulated this before, but fall has always been my favorite season. (I suspect it's Alfred Hitchcock's, too, likely for the same reasons: hink of all his films that take place in a fall setting: Spellbound, The Trouble with Harry, Marnie). 

 Yellow and White Palimpsest #2, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20

Okay, I think the worst part of this post is over.

I’m imagining my art in musical terms.

Nope, there's more.

Guitarist Pat Metheny is one of my favorite musicians. But it was only today that I learned he grew up in rural Missouri and that he attributes his particular sound to his particular upbringing. In his music, you can smell the dust of the prairie and feel the hum of tires on the open road. Learning that makes sense. It adds meaning to his music.

Pat Metheny Group’s “Last Train Home,” which, for me, is both a homecoming valedictory and a giving-birth-to.

But some of his recordings are more challenging. For instance, I never really understood his 1996 “Quartet” album—dark, moody noodlings with trashy percussive effects and harplike twangs on his 72-string Pikasso guitar—until today, when I listened to it while working on a couple of large canvases about which I’m feeling a lot of insecurity and, frankly, terror. Simultaneously challenging, opaque and textural, that album is an almost perfect corollary to my aims in painting. It helped me solve a couple of problems I’d created for myself. If I ever get into a gallery, I want “Quartet” to play in a continuous loop during the show.

And Metheny is nothing, if not a reflective, thoughtful storyteller. Likewise, with paint, I'm striving to render the passage of time; of instances conjoined and participating in the experience of flow, which I envision to be like rumbling boxcars or movie frames that shuttle along before you, one after the other, in seemingly endless procession. (But of course, it does end. This knowledge is the key that unlocked my desire to paint—see above.)

In this way, I'm striving for groove just like I do as a drummer. I hope that people will see a cockeyed rhythmicality to my work. I’m aiming to express the rhythm of life radiated through the prism of my unique personal history as transparently as possible.

With this post, I think I’m starting to approach something like a coherent theory behind my art. More to come.

 Yellow and White Palimpsest #3, acrylic on canvas, January, 2012, 16 X 20

It's my story and I'm sticking to it: Why I paint, part 3

Preface
Writing about my artistic process feels obscenely self-indulgent. Is this really a necessary part of my artist’s journey? Do I need to compound my overactive self-loathing with voluntary plunges into Deadly Sin No. 4? Typing the first person pronoun actually makes my stomach lurch. Ow. Ouch.

But when one makes a commitment, one must soldier on until the task is complete. Read on.

Introduction
Here’s a distinctly American cultural trait for you—one I can identify with and that I've had to think through with regard to my painting: we (Americans) have a peculiar urge to fabricate histories for ourselves when little or none previously existed. Alexis de Tocqueville observed this way back in 1831 or whatever when he noted that members of our freshly minted nation were unusually passionate about antique furniture. He surmised—correctly, I think—that this was a consequence of our youth as a nation. As he saw it, we were retrofitting our homes with aging furniture to make up for the time we’d lost moving to the New World and casting off the Crown and its colonial history. Two centuries later, we’re apparently history’s most evergreen empire, still carrying these complexes of our youth.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read Tocqueville. I only quote him when I’m either trying to look smart or win an argument. I read that bit about him in an essay that appeared in Harper’s magazine about 20 years ago, by a gay interior decorator living in San Francisco who was musing about some of his community members' preoccupation with all things old. He quoted Tocqueville, above, and related it to their perhaps-sublimated desire to create a history that has been denied them.¹

I can’t speak for the gay community. While it’s possible that some may feel this longing for a history denied more acutely than others, in the mineshaft of American culture, everyone is a canary. And the impulse to create an artificial history for ourselves does seem to be an American phenomenon. You can see it in our fascination with distressed jeans, vintage eyewear, the naïve futurism of mid-century modern architecture, 75 percent of Pottery Barn’s inventory, Instagram’s faux-retrogressive filter settings, &c. And Americans have always been consumers. Logically, then, lacking a satisfactory story of our own, we simply go to the mall and buy a new one. (Critics may call us out for being phony, but when you look at the deeper yearnings such behavior implies, there is also plenty to understand and to love.)

The Harper’s essayist took it a step further, deconstructing the costly, time-intensive faux-painting techniques that carefully mimic the ravages of age. (He was restoring a Victorian house while writing the piece.) I don’t remember exactly how he put it (and I can’t find the damn article), but as I recall, the point was that such faux-finishes are an almost grotesque parody of our inclination to rewrite our backstory.

With the foregoing as my foundation, I can finally circle back to my own approach to painting and the fulfillment of my promise from Post No. 2 that I would start offering up some concrete theories about my work.

Body (A few actual thoughts about my theoretical approach to my art)
In creating paintings that are built up and layered and then sometimes scraped and then layered over yet again, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to recreate an ersatz antiquey-ness, or trying to recreate “found art.” If that’s all I wanted to do, my work would go a lot faster—or I would take up photography and move to Tuscany. I’m really aiming for something more essential than surface attributes. Bauhauist Paul Klee pointed the way when he emphasized that the aged look of his paintings wasn’t there merely to give them an “antique look” (nice to know that he, too, equivocated over this) but, rather, to give them the worked-over look of a finely crafted and revered object; to draw attention to his otherwise tossed-off-looking, whimsical pieces as objects upon which great care had been lavished.

You can click on all these pictures to get a better look:

Red Balloon, Paul Klee, Guggenheim Collection, 1922

My Great Friend and Muse, Meredith, observed the other day that there is no “creative vocation outside that of the storyteller.” ² And while some post-modern dickweed will probably come up with an exception or two to this rule, I think it’s basically true: every good song, guitar solo, dance piece, painting and so on tells a story. With paint, I’m trying to tell a story that words can't adequately express. I’m trying, through visual means, to convey a sense of narrative and, if you haven’t figured this out by now, a feeling of longing (Port.: saudade). If I’ve done a good job, these two elements—story and mood—will be easily apprehensible.

But that Harper’s article left me chilled. The author was pointing up the failure of faux-finishes to replace a story that’s not in our possession to tell. Reading it, I felt outed. By then, I’d already started collecting antiques, beginning with this piece of stained glass, my first purchase after moving back to Portland:

The fact is, so much about me is made-up (compounding hyphen added for emphasis) that I feel like a work of fiction myself.

Let’s start with my last name. Originally, it was Larimer (Irish-English), but my biodad dropped out of the scene early on and when I was ten, my mother and stepfather filed for a name change, adopting me into the family name of the latter, Carroll Gunz (Germanic). Sure, as a result, I get to have a really cool last name, but it isn’t my own. It tethers me to an ethnicity that’s not in my veins. As a family, we tried valiantly to breathe life into a story that Carroll was my sisters’ and my “real father”; following the adoption, we actually used that term in general conversation, and my biodad (rather flaky, but otherwise not a bad guy) was all but off limits as a topic for conversation. This was an intentional effort to rewrite the story of my family origins. In a bid to inject some fact into this fiction, I became obsessed with my geneology. My aim: to trace my family tree back far enough to discover an actual blood tie to Carroll (or, lacking that, a hint of royalty). But the line petered out at my step-great-great-grandfather in Dornbirn, Austria.

The fictionizing didn’t end there. I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religion that popped up in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the late 1900s. But the Watchtower authors claim that representatives of the “faithful and discreet slave”—AKA true, anointed Christians (AKA proto-JWs)—actually stretches back to apostolic times. Like a doofus, I spent hundreds of hours researching non-Trinitarian, blood-refusing, politically aloof Christian sects, trying to reconstruct that pedigree. It doesn’t exist. (Are you detecting a pattern here?)

Looking back, it seems I was groping for truth in the fog of a fiction to which everyone subscribed but me.

At the same time, I was making up my own stories about myself.

I come from a blue-collar family—Carroll was a mailman—and for much of my youth, this was a source of embarrassment to me (c.f. my motives behind my genealogical project, above).³ I tried to distance myself from this fact and rise above it. Incorrectly surmising that better-bred people knew a thing or two about art, literature and gourmet food and wine, I decided to bone up on these subjects too. For instance, after saving up my lawn mowing money, I would hop the bus to Lloyd Center and spend it all at the posh Aladdin Restaurant, where, to my shock, I was first addressed by an elderly black waiter in a yellow waistcoat as “sir.” I must have been about 10 at the time.⁴

The Aladdin's floor-to-ceiling windows (left) once overlooked Lloyd Center's Ice rink. In 1990, the restaurant was shuttered and replaced by a food court. 

At the same time, a glass dome was clamped over the top of the mall. Before that, it was open-air; birds flitted in and out of the space and it featured fountains, abstract bronze sculptures and spiral staircases like this one. 

Most of the interests that characterize my lifestyle are a set of methodically acquired tastes that I once associated with “high culture”: food and wine, literature (the classics and modern), art history. I can tell Brahms from Bartok. But this is all a put-on. I picked out these Richie Rich-inspired trappings of “culture” because I didn’t like the real ones that were handed down to me. Now, at 47, I’ve been doing all of this for longer than the earlier years when I didn’t. By dint of longevity, this now is my story. But it is just a story. What started out as a sort of charade became something kind of like the real thing-ish.

Still, I don’t regret when, at 18, while on my graduation-gift trip to New York, I blew my vacation money on dinner at the Algonquin Hotel, where I rubbed shoulders with the ghosts of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and, in a bottle of Mâcon-Lugny “Les Charmes,” ’82, discovered a corner of my soul that I didn’t know existed.

This label matches that of the 1982 vintage that I ordered in the Algonquin dining room in 1984. It's hard to say where my infatuation with Mâconnais wines began—with the waiter's presentation of this gracefully aristocratic label (a difficult balance to achieve, when you think about it), or with its contents. Although this is a low-res image, you can still pick out the dark metallic gold of which "MACON-LUGNY" and the border is comprised. The famed vineyard, Les Charmes, is given pride of place and set off in an elegant cursive, while the idiot-proof descriptor "white Burgundy wine" was likely added as a hint for American consumers, along was the further-explanatory "Chardonnay," both in smaller type, almost as an apology to more educated consumers. This label harkens back to the late 60s/early 70s era of Time-Life's "Foods of the World" cookbook collection, which my mother owned and I pored over as a kid and still refer to when I want to take a mental trip back to the Old Country (which I've never actually been to). 

This is the current version of the label, which takes advantage of more advanced printing techniques to offer bric-a-brac scrollwork as a distracting underlay to the text. In comparing the two labels, it's easy to discover a change in priorities. "Les Charmes" is now given standard Roman typographical treatment, while, in order to lure more sophisticated American wine lovers who appreciate terroir's site-specificity, the term "single vineyard" has now been added. Conversely, in order to satisfy less-knowledgeable consumers' unslakable demand for the world's number-one best-selling white varietal, "Chardonnay" pops out in large, bold, blue type to actually upstage "Les Charmes" and "Mâcon-Lugny." As such, while the earlier version quietly states its case and, secure in its value, waits to be noticed, this label strives to be all things to all things to all people (in its target market). Mâcon-Lugny Les Charmes remains one of the world's great wines in its price range. The vigneron who decided to maximize its marketing potential deserves to have his ass kicked. 

Because, which is a more “real” reality: my somewhat artificially cultivated affinity for Mâconnais Burgundies that is now linked to some of my most cherished memories, or a very genuine drive home from work that I can hardly remember?

Conclusion
My story may not have a lot of “truth” behind it. Fuck, it might even be one big lie. (Isn’t that what storytelling is, anyway?) But my experiences have been very real; over time, as these layers have accumulated and gotten smudged and futzed over; my story has become true—even better than true.

I'm doing my best to tell you what I'm trying to get at here. But I think the best way might be with paint.

And with that, I’m sorry. This post hasn’t included as much concrete theory as I’d hoped, or promised. Please don’t give up on me. I’ll try to do better next time.

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1 Even fuller disclosure: I can’t find any of these Tocqueville passages, nor I can I find the Harper’s article that I’m trying to recall from 20-odd years ago. I could have dreamt this whole thing up!

2 She posted this on a Facebook thread at more or less he same exact time that I was (narcissistically! Ouch!) thinking about the meaning of my art, which is why she’s my muse.

3 Carroll Gunz was also embarrassed by his career choice. Siring a child too young, he dropped out of medical school to support his then-wife and took the civil service exam, subsequently joining the nation’s army of postal workers. Later, he divorced her, joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and married my mother. As an elder in the religious community, all that’s left of his youthful dreams is an impeccable bedside manner.

4 In all fairness, a good deal of my fooding-and-wining and high-cultural aspirations are influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, who also came from humble beginnings and seems to have tried to elevate himself to a higher class by way of food, wine, fine art and, eventually by setting sail for America where he could finally get the respect he felt he deserved. I never made the connection until just now: I started geeking out on him right around the same time I began refashioning my life into something that better sense for me. Huh. ^↩

Why I Paint - Part 2

"Living, for you, is an exercise in finding things to write about." That's what my great friend and muse, Meredith, had to say to me. She's almost right. The fact is, even though I make my living as a writer, I'm not sure if this is my best mode of expression. I think in images and abstractions; translating that into English can be rough going. In conversation, I fish for words and say "um" a lot. So I'd like to amend Meredith's observation to state:

Living, for me, is an exercise in finding things to create about.

If I'm not doing something creative with paint or words or music, let the record (and my Internet history) show that I'm just not good company for myself or others. Plus, I've always dabbled in visual arts, messing around with graphic design like this:

or mixed media stuff like this:

59 degrees and 54 feet North, 10 degrees and 54 feet East, magazine pieces, found paint and found glue on wooden architectural scrap, 10" x 5.25", 2011. 

...and this (they come as a pair):

Haugesund, They Say, Is Built on Herring Bones, magazine pieces, found paint and found glue on wooden architectural scrap, 10" x 5.25", 2011.

I also do conceptual installation-type pieces, like this:

Hazard, typewriter, wooden box with scary stickers, driftwood, 27" x 27", 33 pounds, 2009

None of this may be to your taste. And that's okay. I'm just trying to illustrate a point. But paint has always lurked in the background; specifically abstract stuff, like this really tacky riff on Japanese calligraphy that's so bad I can't even show it to you:

Thus, as I take up painting once again, I'm feeling the exhilaration that comes after a long dry spell: I feel myself coming alive, like a tree warming to its sap after a long winter. When it comes my neo-expressionist stuff (their label, not mine), that dormant season extends back to before I can remember.

Joel's Painting Improved: Now with 30% More Piss!

When Alfred Hitchcock's masterful Rear Window was released in 1954, conservative critics complained about its subtext of voyeurism. Hitch responded by saying that "no amount of moral consideration could have prevented me from making this." The way I see it, those are eternal words to at least consider in every area of life. What does this mean for the kind of painting I'm doing right now? My current project was borne out of a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo at the alt-healthcare clinic mentioned in my last post. The walls were bare, we had no budget to do anything about it and business had gone into its seasonal decline. I had a little extra time on my hands and a lot of pent-up, frustrated energy. The project emerged from a big bucket of FUCK IT.

Then, when I first disclosed to one of my business partners that I was going to take this art project on, he expressed doubts about my ability to pull it off (as he'd continually been doing about a business that was—and is—doing quite well). His defeatist attitude gave me a gunpowder-spark I could use to show him, myself and whatever audience the the paintings might have that I could produce material art. FUCK HIM.

Also, when I was a Jehovah's Witness, I allowed my path as an artist to be quashed by a code of arbitrary, byzantine rules laid down by its governing body. In that world, your life is expected to revolve around studying Watchtower literature, attending Kingdom Hall meetings and, of course, going out in the door-to-door ministry. Any other interests were supposed to be mere hobbies. But if you're going to create anything of lasting value, you pretty much have to orient your life around that artistic pursuit, one way or another. For years, I dealt with those warring interests. Keeping art in my life then was an act of rebellion; ten years after leaving that religion, I still feel like I'm transgressing.* FUCK THEM.

As you can see, there is anger behind my work. But that doesn't mean my work is angry. I just want to contribute something beautiful to the world and, in view of the obstacles I face(d), I've been able to leverage the caustic value of my anger to make it happen. When used properly, anger can be the Ajax Cleanser of the soul.

Though I did dip into the business for a few bucks, most of the money to take this on came out of my own pockets—money I could ill afford. For me, then, the "moral considerations" that I needed to repudiate came in the form of discouragement from others, the morality of financial responsibility and the ingrained Witness code of "normal behavior." That latter obstacle was a doozy for me. It kept me in a screwed-up religious community that, if allowed to continue, probably would have killed me.

Jungian philosophy argues that the obstacles we face are actually created in our subconscious; that they are equal in size to the life we want to build; that they are there for this express purpose: to be overcome. The point is, I had to deal with a lot of demons—internal and external—just to clear away the space needed to create something of any worth. That's part of the ongoing process that I'm trying to document here.

What I'm trying to get at is the big WHY. Why the hell am I doing this art thing? Why am I writing about it? It seems 50 percent too pat—too MarketingRetreatBreakoutGroup—to call this a discovery project. I feel like I'm digging a tunnel through a mountain from two opposite ends: on the one end, I'm trying to articulate my (presumably pre-existing) theoretical underpinnings; on the other end, it seems as if I'm conjuring up theory where none existed before. The latter sounds off-puttingly haphazard, as if I'm making theory up as I go along. (And that feeling might account, in part, for the fear that many artists have, that they are mere hacks.) But there does seem to be a scientific basis for it. I think there's a whole meta-branch of physics devoted to considering that moment of singularity where hypothesis and discovery fall into each others' arms and sculpt reality as they go. Isn't there?

All right, that's enough of me! I'm going to take a whack at explaining this in more concrete terms in my next post.
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*If, contra Witness teaching, the "kingdom" that Jesus was always yammering about can be equated with reality, then his words can be reframed suchly: "Seek first reality and all these other things will be added to you." "Authenticity is within you (or, 'in your midst')." "Our ultimate truth who art beyond the veil of maya, let thy reality come." This is the only way Jesus' teachings make sense for me any more.

Why I started painting -- and, now, writing about it

At the suggestion of my great friend and muse, Meredith, I've started to articulate with words what I hope to accomplish using paint. The idea, she says (and I'm paraphrasing here), is to document the process of creation, for this can help bring about a sense of clarity and focus.

(This is my thought, not hers:) if we cannot clearly state what our artistic aims are, then maybe we don't have any -- unless they are so subsumed behind overt intentions (dreams of fame, daydreams about actually making a living at this) that in the execution we might miss a deeper mark, in the manner of a swimmer who, crossing a channel in the fog, misses his/her island goal. Conversely, chronicling your work as you go can also help you to find a higher purpose for it than mere "weekend arts and crafting" (her words) could ever hope to accomplish on its own. The point (and, once again, I'm paraphrasing -- albeit in my own voice, with my inflections) isn't to just make pretty pictures, but to find your own voice and cut a path to expressing it as clearly as possible. That's why I've started writing about my art.

Meredith's suggestion was to journal these thoughts -- to put them in a private place where only I will see them. At first, she expressed doubts about my desire to put them into a blog, because it's not the publishing (fr. Latin publicare, i.e., to make public) of my aims that matters, but that I ''took the time to think things out.'* Well, I don't work that way. I don't keep private logs of my activities; hell, I can hardly maintain an appointment calendar. I write web logs -- blogs. And since that's what I do, this is what you get.

I started making neo-expressionist paintings in October, 2012. A year and a half earlier, I'd started building an alt-healthcare clinic and among my other tasks (setting up the business and pretty much running it single-handedly) it was also my job to provide interior design and decoration. We were in start-up mode, bootstrapping the project as we went, and there was no budget for artwork. Hence, the walls went bare. Finally, irritated at this bleak situation, I took matters into my own hands and decided to create art for the clinic, mostly at my own expense. Having just visited the astounding Rothko show at the Portland Art Museum, I thought I could create a few knockoffs of his paintings -- pale imitations of his masterpieces that would nevertheless add color to those otherwise eggshell walls. Not sure about how to go about doing this, I surfed how-to videos on YouTube until I found the the documentary Gerhard Richter: Painting. Immediately, I knew I'd found what I was looking for -- along with a great instructional video that would help me get there. To be sure, Richter's a skip and a jump from Rothko, but somehow his large-scale abstractions resonated. It's what I was meant to create. I didn't know why at the time, I just knew.

Here's the first piece I did:

Untitled, Acrylic on cabinet door, 19" x 20" (October, 2012)

It's a flawed attempt, but the sheer pleasure of schmeering paint across the surface of that cabinet door was a joy, not unlike the pleasure I, as an infant, must have had, dragging a crayon across a blank page or the inside of an expensive book or a living room wall just for the sheer thrill of seeing pigment appear as if by magic. I hope to never lose that thrill. So far, so good.

That was the circumstantial beginning. But the deeper, teleological, story can be traced back to my teen years. I think my first real exposure to abstract expressionism came from the cover art for Stan Getz' and Joao Gilberto's "Live at Carnegie Hall" album. It stuck with me. In fact, my painting above is blatantly derivative:

I loved that cover art by Olga Albizu as much as I loved the music.** As a teen I would sit on the floor in front of the stereo with my knees up and prop the album cover on my thighs, tapping my drum brushes along to that featherlight bossa nova locked in place by drummer Milton Banana, while Joao Gilberto softly sang "Samba de Minha Terra." The Brazilian concept of saudade -- a free-floating, melancholic longing for a lost home, homeland, friend, family member or lover -- is pretty much my default mode. And (surprise, surprise) I tend to be prone to bouts of depression. Listening to Joao and Jobim and Stan Getz helped connect me to those feelings and Albizu's paintings will always be a part of that.

My abstracts are an attempt to seek out my lost past (or, frankly, a past that never existed no matter how much I might wish otherwise), to express it in the form of a multicolored EKG, a radar sweep that says I was here. And here. And here. To be more specific, they are about my yearning to reconnect all those lost, perhaps never-existent, dots; an attempt to get at the marrow of my history, in the way that I might chew on a cold sore; a returning to the process like a dog who finds meaning in worrying a bone. Freud called it repetition-compulsion.

At 47, I've created a history for myself and there are layers of relationships both maintained (such as with my children and a handful of old friends) and ended (through divorce and separation from my former religious community and all the others ebb tides of life), all of whose influence will undoubtedly stay with me all through this life. New relationships are constantly being formed as well.

Thus the layers of buildup in my paintings are like the accretion and attrition of lives lived, conversations shared and subsequently half-forgotten; persistences of vision obscured by new images, the parchment and palimpsest of my unique story. All that remains, all that exists in this moment, as I sit alone in my apartment typing on my laptop, is the memory of accumulated experiences.

There's more to come, but that's all I've got for now. Boa noite.

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*As Tony Wendice says in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
**Albizu's work appeared on several albums, primarily from Verve, but also from RCA.

Addicted to recovery: why I'm respectfully wary of 12-Step programs

I think the addictions we fall into (and none of us are exempt from addiction) say a lot about us. Alcoholism is often associated with frustration with one's environment, e.g.: "my partner/job/neighbor drives me to drink." Conversely, sex addictions often work the other way, e.g.: “I'm not good/beautiful/worthy/desirable/spiritual enough.” Less destructive addictions—TV watching, shopping, Internet surfing—also speak volumes about the architecture of our psyche. For that reason, I agree with psychologist David Bedrick, who wrote in a Psychology Today blog post that “people use substances for hundreds of different individual, almost idiosyncratic, reasons.” 

The 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is still the best alcohol treatment program yet devised for mass consumption. But it seems to only work with a specific type of alcoholic: the person who has reached a desperate "rock bottom" condition, possibly accompanied by homelessness, job loss, divorce, etc., because only then, it is assumed, will one finally be willing to engage in the total surrender to a higher power it takes to overcome his or her addiction. In fact, AA literature sees alcoholism, not as a problem of willpower, but as a disease of the Will itself. And until you've hit that existential wall, the program won't work for you: AA members who relapse are dismissed as having not reached that anti-grail. Those who are mandated into the program, such as by law enforcement, fare even worse. Still, that smaller, narrowly defined group reports a high success rate. 

AA books reject behaviorist approaches outright and emphasize the need for surrender to a spiritual higher power. This approach was actually recommended to one of its founding members by Carl Jung, who insisted that relief from alcoholism can only be found in a deep spiritual conversion.

While that’s what AA literature teaches, too often, AA—as a fellowship—isn't much more than the same-old same-old behavior accountability group found in recovery and high-priced treatment centers everywhere. As Alfred Hitchcock once observed, “everything’s perverted in a different way.”

When I was disfellowshipped from the Jehovah's Witnesses, I was convinced that I was a sex addict. (I was, I have to admit, looking at a lot of porn.) So I entered a 12-Step fellowship called Sexaholics Anonymous. Then, concerned that my glass-or-two-of-wine-a-day habit was too much, I also attended AA meetings. Because my finances were a shambles, I attended Debtors Anonymous. 12-Step groups often recommend that newcomers attend 30 meetings in 30 days. Always an overachiever, I did a 180 in 180. In addition to all that, I enrolled in one-on-one and group psychotherapy. In fact, for nearly two years, hardly a day went by that I didn't attend some kind of recovery meeting and frequently I attended two or three.

I actually read the Big Book of AA all the way through.

I learned a lot and grew from the experience, and wouldn't trade it in for anything. (Except for maybe more sex.) In the long run, however, practicing the 12 Steps didn't change my behaviors much. True, I actually got a one-year chip from SA for abstaining from masturbation for a year, but afterward I quickly made up for lost time. My drinking was never really a problem to begin with. My finances are still in chaos. For me, the problem was one of perception: believing I had these addictions actually fueled a Slinky-storm of downward spirals. Once I learned to cut myself a little slack and stop trying to please a legalistic, finger-wagging Jehovah, the destructive fury of these compulsions was diverted to more productive endeavors.

All of which is to say, my life is about as manageable as a sloppy joe is for an amputee, but I've never loved myself more—not in spite of these imperfections, but because of them. For instance, I still have a bona fide monkey on my back. He has a red demon face that's permanently twisted into a rictus of anger. Off and on throughout any given day, he gets up in my face and says, "You're a failure! A fucking failure!!" I've learned to love even him—after all, for better or worse, he is part of me. I quit fighting him and now he gives me the motivation I need to get up in the morning and put on my bigboy pants when I'd rather bury my head under a mountain of pillows. But that clarity didn't come through any 12-Step program. (Full disclosure: it was the result of a conversation with David Bedrick.)

As a result, I'm ambivalent about the efficacy of 12-Step programs. Many of my friends are convinced that working the AA program keeps them sober. I applaud that. And to these friends who might be reading this post, I say hey man, whatever works. I honor and support you 100 percent. In addition to these benefits, 12-Step programs offer something that most other approaches don't: they're free.

But 12-Step programs have become a huge part of the recovery landscape in this country and I feel the need to raise a critical question or two. 

Every AA member knows the Serenity Prayer by heart:

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

Penned by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, this prayer was originally untitled. Then someone (probably a reformed drunk) dubbed it the Serenity Prayer, which was unfortunate—that title throws the whole thing off balance, emphasizing "acceptance" over "courage." Such a lopsided reading might help some, but it doesn't help all.

AA certainly preaches only the first half of the prayer: members are urged to humbly accept the flaws of others and imperfections in the systems in which they live. Very little consideration is given to incite courageous acts of change in one's circumstances. That might be right and good for some alcoholics, but I have hard time believing it is true for all. And other types of addictions operate on a very different level. Some addicts might be better off applying the second half of the prayer, seeking ‘courage to change the things they can.’ For instance, in SA, I encountered members who continue to beat themselves up for sexual transgressions committed years ago. Consumed with guilt and shame over their past misdeeds they remained unable to find—much less hold—a healthy sexual relationship in adult autonomy even as they attended meeting after meeting to confess to lustful thoughts about the bare midriff they caught themselves gazing at on Hawthorne Boulevard. For them, the courageous change might be to leave their 12-Step program and try living life in its terrifying glory.

The point is, with a 12-Step group for just about every vice imaginable, including alcohol, hard drugs, soft drugs, gambling, debt, sex, overeating, cluttering (?), underearning and workaholism and beyond, it seems to me that at least some of these programs render a disservice to those they would try to help. AA principles just don’t translate that easily.

AA really is geared for the specific—i.e. narcissistic—issues many (but not all!) alcoholics deal with. It emphasizes the need to take one's own "moral inventory" and avoid taking the inventory of others. For them, such an intervention is often helpful. Sex addicts, by contrast, know their own weaknesses all too well and ritualized self-inventory could actually contribute to the shame cycle that fuels their addiction. Such an individual might actually be better off doing the exact opposite of what AA prescribes, taking critical stock of the character flaws of the people or institutions (church, employment) around them, with a view to 'changing the things they cannot accept.'

TV, video game or Internet addicts, on the other hand, might want to take an honest inventory of the quality of their real-life relationships. (Am I the only person who finds it both interesting and ironic that all successful video games involve the acquisition and exercise of power?)

True, 12-Step programs didn't help me deal with my behavior issues all that much, but they were by no means a waste. The way I see it, the real problem with humanity isn't addiction, but our weird push me-pull you relationship with Reality. Most of us claim to be realists or claim to be inclined in that direction. But as that purveyor of nightmares, A. Hitchcock, once said, "reality is something none of us can stand, at any time." The real insanity—the real addiction—is that retreat from reality. Some withdraw with a needle; others use that meta-drug, reality TV. 12-Steps' true raison is that it methodically and—if you work the program—relentlessly pushes its members to confront reality. It forces you to see your life as it is. No wonder its favorite locus is the purgatory of the church basement, with a libation of shitty coffee. It was in such basements that I caught fleeting glimpses of my true self and, just as important, saw, really saw, for the first time, the reckless beauty of my fellow hairless bags of humanoid flesh. 12-Steps' report card for addiction recovery might be a mixed bag. But as a spiritual path for the secular, western mind, it's almost without parallel, and it's these benefits that hit you like a sneaker wave.

As a Jehovah's Witness, I was indoctrinated from an early age with the belief that I and my fellow door-to-door ministers were the only possessors of spiritual truth and divine love. My paleomammalian brain was marinated in such religiously arrogant canards as "We worship the Only True God!" and "Only Jehovah's Witnesses have love among themselves!"

And then I found fell among 12-Steppers.

Among them, I witnessed (and was the recipient of) extraordinary acts of selflessness and love made all the more remarkable because they were offered routinely, without any expectation. I encountered members from a variety of faiths who'd had soul-shaking spiritual experiences. This wasn't supposed to happen. I'd joined these 12 Steps so I could become a new and improved Jehovah's Witness. Instead, I found that the tools I'd been given as a Witness fell short of my need, and where those needs ended and my behavior began was an enormous void that I'd been trying to fill with the styrofoam of religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.

I broke. And then I began to heal. I got what I needed from 12 Steps. And then I left. I still look at porn. I still drink, sometimes to excess. I really need to get caught up on my bills. I discovered that what Hemingway said wasn't necessarily true: you're not always stronger in the broken places, and the acupunctural meridians of my psyche can cough up surprising and poignant pains when I least expect it. That said, I'm not really a fucking failure. I just play one on the TV of my mind. I manage to find time to write and create and build businesses and otherwise make myself useful to my kids and those I love.

And make no mistake. AA members are just as prone to fundamentalism as are Christians. I saw that, too.

But what, exactly, is an addiction? I have a friend who is a very gifted artist. She feels compelled take time to draw every day and insists that this is compulsive, essentially unhealthy, behavior. For her, it doesn't much matter that her artwork is astonishingly beautiful, because it’s a compulsion; presumably, she would like to have the freedom to be able to draw less. Other people are addicted to reading and, sure, if the books are good, this behavior will boost their IQ, but it may take them further from other, more valued, connections. In these cases where do we draw the line between good and bad, healthy and unhealthy?

For that reason, I'm wary of the term "addiction" itself, just as I view conditions such as ADD and Asperger's Syndrome with suspicion. The human mind works in mysterious ways, and who are we to pathologize behaviors that might actually serve a very useful purpose? As Bedrick points out, “people want to use [drugs] for very important and powerful reasons.” I would add that those reasons are deeply personal and that a one-size-fits-all solution is antithetical to what the situation calls for. Rather than squelching the individual’s voice through interventions, perhaps a better strategy would be to listen to the addiction. It seems to want to be heard anyway.