Art Appreciation and Me

Whenever I find myself wandering the pristine halls of an art museum I’m always there with someone else, someone who is both better looking than me and more finely attuned to the intricacies of artistic expression. The attractiveness part I can come to terms with; it’s the latter that makes me more than a little jealous. I just don’t have the ability to dissect a painting or see past its surface. At best I’m either pleased or turned off by a shape or a mixture of colors, a nice image or maybe an expression on a subject’s face. I cannot tell what the artist was thinking when he captured the soft circle of a woman’s bare breast, or when someone shattered glass around an iron scaffolding. And instead of experiencing the subtle joy and elation that others feel, I’m left like a hillbilly child visiting relatives in the city, mouth toothless and gaped with uncertainty.

As a rule, I tend to stay away from places that remind me just how uncultured I am — a fine wine tasting, Shakespearean plays, restaurants offering anything other than cheeseburgers or spaghetti — mostly out of fear that I’ll make a fool of myself, that I’ll be found out. At best, the image I’ve carved out for myself through years of careful lies and deceit is one of me keeping up with culture, nowhere above anyone else but barely treading water. In reality, I’m the guy who steps into a fine restaurant wearing a t-shirt reading “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look,” and when I’m asked to please leave I’m not sure why. On the rare occasions I’m not dressed like a slob or an overgrown teenager and I do manage to get seated, if I’m not careful a gazing couple might spot me trying like a buffoon to crack open a lobster tail. And so it’s just easier to avoid such places.

Shakespearean plays hold a similar danger. By default anyone looking forward to attending a performance of Shakespeare must have an IQ of 150 or above; as for me, I’m usually dragged there by friends, theater people themselves who can recite perfectly metered love sonnets and soliloquies in their sleep. In high school, though I never would have admitted it then, I was really in the same league as the jocks and the hardcore stoners when it came to matters of Shakespearean tragedy. Had it not been for our textbook’s annotations I would have floundered in the lines of iambic pentameter forced upon us, and even with the textbook’s help when we were asked to write a report on a play it was like being given a handful of wooden blocks and told to build a fully-functioning locomotive. Overcome with anxiety, I might find myself searching the internet for someone’s online notes or, if a deadline was fast approaching, an entire paper that I could purchase and pass off as my own. At live performances that same sense of helplessness falls over me, and before the first act is up I’m listening not to the actors but to my fellow theatergoers, searching for that collective intake of breath that precedes a laugh or a groan, something that they’ve all caught and I haven’t. Then I’ll laugh with them, and keep my charade as a genuine purveyor of intellect and refinement. One of their peers. An equal.

At an art museum, however, it’s a little easier to slide by unnoticed. For the most part museums are quiet places where the people around you have something to look at and distract them from the fraud in their midst.

Several of my friends are quite good at judging artwork; my friend Rusty, an artist himself, can take a look at a painting and tell me any number of things about its technique, placement on the artistic timetable, and its similarity in style to other artists’ works. Whenever he does this, I’m left in awe. “How do you know all that?” I’ll want to ask, but I don’t, because my inquiring would make me seem less upscale and erudite. Instead, I simply nod, scratching my chin as if contemplating, and mumble, “True, true. Yeah.”

Amber, a high school friend of mine, might lose herself in the swoops and circles of a painting for what seems like hours on end. And even without the aid of drugs — prescription or otherwise — she can find something to focus on, something the canvas triggers in her and makes resonate. Meanwhile, I’m wondering what the hell a series of concentric squares scribbled in harsh yellow lines is supposed to mean to anyone, and I’ll look at my watch for the hundredth time to see how soon we’re going to eat lunch.

The one part of the museum I can enjoy is the statues. Although I can appreciate the fine craftsmanship and extensive detail in all of them, my favorites are the ones that appear to have been in severe personal accidents. There’s nothing more interesting than a statue of a woman, staring off to the side longingly, with arms that stop at her elbows, or a bust of a face with its nose and finer features askew and exaggerated. Maybe it’s just the morbid part of me that’s engaged by these, but I find them the most interesting part of the museum experience not because of what the particular artist was trying to express, but because onto them I can project any number of gruesome scenarios.

Here, a woman unfortunately decides to reach under the lawnmower for her fallen wedding band. There, a man realizes too late that the uncaring escalator will not relinquish his dangling shoestrings. And my personal favorite is the baby born with an elongated head to a drug-addled mother, or maybe because of a rare genetic disorder. True, sometimes these ideas don’t exactly make sense, but they make for an interesting way to pass the time. When I’m at the museum, I can’t exactly share these thoughts, as it tends to place upon my listener’s face a look of harsh disapproval followed by a mellower but no less scathing glare of superiority. I’ve learned this time and again after mentioning to, say, the birdlike woman standing next to me, craning forward to investigate each ridge in the clay, or the frumpy professorial man running a hand through his thinning hair as he contemplates the artist’s intention in giving his subject only a top row of teeth.

Instead, I keep my thoughts to myself and try my best to fit in. Just as I would with Rusty, I might find myself staring down a Monet, my eyes held open to increase the chance of them watering. If I’m lucky, it’ll look like I’m crying, moved by the grace and beauty of something so wonderfully captured. If not, I’ll be seen as either the wide-eyed eccentric lost in his ruminations or the out-of-touch sociopath wrangling his twisted visions. Neither, I suppose, is that far off the mark, and they both beat out being viewed, simply, as stupid.

By the time we leave the museum, my compatriot and I, I’m usually feeling tired and weak. Not physically, but mentally, like I’ve spent hours trying to churn out plot points for an entire season of a soap opera. In a way, I guess it is sort of the same, and I have to wonder if that’s similar to what happens with my friends and all those other people who come to look at these pieces of art. Are the experiences they have with a horizontal mosaic of primary colors or a dark-hued portrait of a man dressed in a hooded white robe just their projections reflected back, not so different from me pushing tragedies onto arcane statues? Maybe so, I’ll think, but I’m always ready to move on, to stop thinking so hard. And in stepping out of that brightly lit building so full of creativity and introspection, I find myself wishing that, instead, we’d just gone to see a production of Hamlet, where I’ve almost learned exactly when to chuckle and when to cry.

A (Not) Ghost Story

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts—ITALO CALVINO

In between graduating from High School and graduating from college I worked the graveyard shift. I did this for two and a half years—eleven o’clock at night to seven o’clock in the morning, five days a week. Though I frequently griped about it, I actually sought this schedule out. The reason being is: at night there is simply nothing going on and you don’t have to deal with people.

Working an overnight shift as a security guard in the lonely streets of downtown Kansas City was both horrific and wondrous. The big, vacant office buildings and rusty industrial complexes seemed ripped from Hollywood horror flicks—and yet the closest thing I have to a ghost story from this period of my life happened one morning after I’d gotten off work.

When the sun came up, I’d go home, say goodbye to my family as they left for work—eat a quick bite and then go to bed until later that afternoon. Then I’d get up and go back to work or I’d go to night school, depending on what day of the week it was.

My one “ghost story” occurred after a particularly rousing after-shift meal of microwaveable mini-cheese burgers (with spicy Chipotle mayo). Upon finishing my greasy breakfast, I decided to take a leak and hit the sack. Instead of pissing downstairs in the basement, where my bedroom/bathroom was, I decided to stagger upstairs and use the houses “common” bathroom shared by all.

Hanging over the toilet was a little wooden shelf/cabinet-thingy. It was here that my sisters kept their girly make-up and a variety of gaudy plastic hair clasps. Also, sitting on one of the shelves was a candle in a frosted glass jar and one of those special “long barrel” lighters. As I stood there peeing into the bowl, the lower shelf was about at eye level.

Now, after being up all night one does get a little “punch drunk,” and sometimes a person in this loopy condition will do or say things that even they themselves cannot fully explain. I didn’t set out to commit a mysterious act, or cause any trouble. It wasn’t a mischievous scheme that I’d concocted that night while I stared blankly up at the square metal roof of the security booth that I lived in at the edge of the empty parking lot that I guarded. There was no malice or forethought involved—all I did, I did because I was trying not to fall asleep while taking a piss.

What I did: I reached out with my free hand and picked up the lighter. I flicked the flame on a few times, and then I lit the candle. Without a second thought I zipped up and headed downstairs where my bed laying waiting.



Nine hours later I woke up and found my house embroiled in controversy.

My mother and my father were having a heated exchange. Though I was still groggy, I was able to make out that one of my sisters had done something bad. At least, that’s what my Mom thought.

“I don’t know which one of them did it,” she told my Dad—who was leaning against the counter with a look that told me he was patiently waiting for her to finish ranting.

“But one of those girls did it, and I’m going to figure it out…”

When she was done, my father calmly told her who he suspected had perpetrated the mysterious ill-deed: “I think it was the ghost.”

Sitting down at the dinner table, I prepared myself for the fireworks. My parents were on opposite ends when it came to our house’s “ghost.” Every since we’d moved, my Dad had harbored suspicion that whenever anything went missing it was “taken” by a mischievous spiritual entity that craved familial discord. All sorts of things went missing—shoes, keys, important documents, and things that one rarely used on a daily basis but would need at odd/unexpected moments. Of course, the reason we could never find these things was twofold:

1. My sisters and I were not big on putting things away exactly as we’d found them.

And

2. My father, a compulsive-cleaner, would often scoop things up and put them away without really heeding what went where.

My mother, a realist not prone to the same flights of fancy as my father, wasn’t convinced that our house was haunted. As I sat there, listening to them bicker, I became curious as to what had happened. My sister Amber showed up and loudly proclaimed her innocence in a way that suggested she’d done so many, many times that day.

“Ugh, I didn’t DO IT!”

“Do what?” I asked impishly, glad for once that I wasn’t the one that had caused any trouble.

“Well,” my mother said with a shrug, “maybe it was Lindsey?”

Lindsey? This was too good!

Lindsey, my younger sister, never did anything that got my parents so riled up (to this day, I’ve never heard her swear—even though I’ve offered her a LITERAL cash bribe to say “ass” or “shit”). I was literally bursting to find out what she’d done, but I decided to play it cool. Sometimes when my Mom or Dad noticed how excited I was when one of my sisters got in trouble, they would shift some of their anger my way.

I wasn’t keen on catching any of this heat—so I waited. Finally, when I could stand it no longer, I once again asked what had happened.

“When I got home this afternoon I found a candle burning in the hallway bathroom,” my mother told me.

“I’m telling you,” my Dad said. “It was the ghost…”

My heart skipped a beat. Wait a minute…candle? Hadn’t I lit the candle this morning, when I was taking a leak? At first, I nearly confessed to the crime, and then I thought about it. Leaving an open flame burning while I slept downstairs wasn’t just dangerous, it was downright stupid. Admitting that I’d lit a candle, and then passed out from exhaustion was like saying “I’m a total idiot.”

Besides, for some reason I wasn’t even being considered a suspect—which meant that all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I’d get away scot-free! On top of that, the sheer amount of vitriol being bandied about by all parties—both the accused and the accusers—was downright frightening. More so than any spook or specter could ever hope to be!

I decided to admit nothing.

When asked if I knew anything about the mysterious candle, and rather than lie, I gave a non-committal shrug. My baby sister came inside from playing for the night and whined that she too was innocent.

My mother later confided in me that she thought it was her anyway, and that she was angry that Lindsey had “fibbed.” Hearing this made my insides churn and provided me with an interesting mix of guilt and indigestion, yet I kept my silence. When I’d awoke that evening I entered a strange, new world where my parents household was split, divided like in the Civil War—between those who thought a ghost had magically lit a candle…and those who were pretty sure it was Lindsey.

Or maybe Amber…Amber might had done it, too.

I waited a for a few years to pass, and for the controversy to subside before confessing that I had, in fact, left the candle burning. The first person I told was Amber, my closest confidant. I expected her to laugh or shrug it off like it was no big deal.

Instead she twisted her face into a mask of angered-shock.

“Nu-uh! It was you?” she shrieked. “I’m telling Mom…”

My confession did more than get my sisters off the hook, however—it also killed my father’s greatest proof that a ghost really was pestering our household. Luckily for me, the statute of limitations on impersonating the undead is only six months...