THE MUTATION - UNDERSTANDING THE YOUNG MAN'S GIFT
BONUS BEAT - WOLFBOY MIXTAPE - GLAM PLUS
A DOCTOR WRITES, SUNDAY AUGUST 24
Chemical changes bully the adolescent male, wear him out, and confuse him. In his spring the adolescent’s testicles ripen as fruits on the vine, and soft hairs braid in new places, but what starts charmingly soon becomes a savage, enfeebling assault. The adolescent is at the mercy of an erratic gland in his brain that has decided to produce hormones that will equip him for physical survival and reproduction in the years ahead. It’s for the best, it is, being an adult is for the best and essential to the survival of our species, but a painful fact stands: a minority of adolescent males will survive this period of their life.
The fundamental threat of this mutation is that the adolescent male, completely baffled from start to finish during this whole process, can rely only on his instincts, and his instincts are useless now, confounding themselves and reversing with every sunrise. Regardless of his intelligence, upbringing, or peers, the adolescent’s hormonal needs force him to behave without integrity or foresight. The temple of self-knowledge and self-esteem, a human being’s most powerful erection, crumbles, pillar by pillar, as the adolescent male listens only to the idiotic howl of this glandular fever.
And it’s more than sexual inappropriateness and ignorance of self that ferments in the lad’s psyche. He says the wrong things. He looks the wrong way. He stutters and fixates, fascinated, over obsessions and obsessive behavior, gaining deep but unshareable intelligence. And he overcompensates for his all-consuming embarrassment. He self-caricatures in order to function among his peers and the objects of his affection. He seeks comfort in an engineered consistency, lending him a predictability, a reliability, a palette of interests, and perhaps a nickname that will tail him through his adult years. He creates boundaries in order to temper his experiences, thus learning of bad timing and regret. He attempts to compete with his mutation, through equivalent powerful chemicals found in a kaleidoscope of intoxicants, but can only open doors erratically, at times plunging his heart into another fetid, pointless bog. It is very difficult for me to oblige these miserable matters into words, but we must, for the sake of this story, confront them now.
THE MAN KILLED BY A SNAKE
Nicolas Poussin was a 17th-Century French painter who favored group scenes from Classical antiquity, often quite intricate ones, painted in a sharp and meticulously arranged fashion. He remains a vital figure in contemporary art debate thanks largely to the canonical scholarship of Anthony Blunt, mid-century Director of the plummy Courtauld Institute of Art in London, disgraced knight, Marxist, homosexual, and KGB double agent, an extraordinary and true eccentric. And the artist’s influence on contemporary art practice was firmly established during the French Cubist movement, and holds fast today. Picasso went as far as directly emulating Poussin arrangements in the seldom-discussed, never-taught paintings of 1919, weird paintings, but Poussin’s mentality runs much thicker through the veins of Cubist thought. Poussin employed a mathematics of formal arrangement, a kind kind of malleable hierarchy and a weighing of all elements in the landscape that made every discrete presence in the painting in some way an animate participant in the narrative. The equal rights of figure and ground and the timeless example of this balancing act helped spur and justify Cubism and, with it, the first changes in modern abstraction. Poussin is a natural teacher and an enabler. Indeed, his Landscape with a man killed by a snake from 1648, usually on display in a weird gallery with a carving that says ‘Yves Saint Laurent Room’ in London, delivers the first lesson in our pursuit of a reasonable life for the adolescent male.
Shaded in gloom at the composition’s foot, a black snake wraps the tightening overture of his meal around the lifeless, sickly-green form of some poor chap. All that soul’s anguish, leaving the now gone body, need not travel far before infecting another. A second young man, walking innocently by a moment ago, now flies in response to the horrors of the scene. A woman washing clothes a little further away, spared sight of the snake by a bluff and a bush, does not know what the fuss is about, but is alarmed by the wild look of the running man. Her cry arouses the interest of a fisherman on a lake, but he sees neither the running man, shrouded by thin trees, nor the dead man. And all the while couples amble in the afternoon sunshine on the far bank of the lake, oblivious to everything. It’s perfect. An ethereal and unpaintable concept, information, is the painting’s primary subject, and it can be precisely followed as it blows back through the scene. It dissipates through the exact architecture, and speaks here of humankind’s inbuilt need to transfer emotions to one another, there of the gulfs between social strata, and over there of the inevitable decay of messages’ meaning as they travel. Poussin speaks of and to all people.
We will focus on the running man. He has nothing else to do but run in fear, with no clear destination beyond an ambiguous ‘away’. The woman is afraid because she does not understand him or know where to put her sympathies, and no one else even knows that anything is wrong. The shock is beholden only to him, and the burden of processing the apparition is his alone.
The running man is the tragic figure and ultimately the greatest victim of Landscape with a man killed by a snake because he has no hope, and no plan, and thus no future. Such is the tragedy of the adolescent male in this world of exchanged knowledge and emotional transactions. Confronted by something he does not understand, that has entered his consciousness without asking and at an unpredictable moment, the young man’s world changes instantly. There is no explanation why it must change, and there never will be.
HOW TO MAKE TOMORROW LIKE TODAY
People make a meal out of the existential and meditative clout of On Kawara’s work. Over the past 40-some years the Japanese artist has made more than 2000 paintings of the date of the painting. If he doesn’t finish the painting that day, if he takes a nap or gets drunk or goes to the movies, he destroys the painting at bedtime. And there is plenty for you philosophers to chew on if you’re so inclined. Kawara is reminding himself that he is alive. Kawara is noting that every day is completely different but exactly as long and as eventful as the ones that bookended it. Kawara finished a painting today.
There are a million ways to love this work, and its economy has never been more popular. Amateur art enthusiasts, as in people who go to galleries and museums but do not read contemporary art criticism, are intellectually inspired by his work in ways that a particularly inscrutable piece of intricate post-modernism, like the Rachel Harrison sculpture that was centrepieced at New York’s Museum of Modern Art all spring, cannot inspire. The MoMA has loved to remind visitors of a few days in December 1979 since 1981, and that week will continue to lodge itself in visitor’s minds. Indeed, the 12th is up again right now. People love having their picture taken with these paintings, and that’s enough to merit a special parking space. And it’s Kawara’s paintings’ total ambiguity that is their greatest appeal. They are a rare black hole of mega affirmation that will embrace and embody any of the viewer’s hopes and needs at the moment of viewing. Unless you hate being alive, it is impossible to dislike him, because he hasn’t done anything wrong. Throw questions of intent and tone out the window and rummage deep for those nuts you’ve been meaning crack for ages, if you’d only found the time. Go for it!
I hold On Kawara very highly indeed, but I increasingly think less of the spiritual awakenings in which his work allows me to indulge and more of the inspiration to be drawn from the gift he gave himself. Kawara’s mature mode found a means of notation that would always serve him and never let him down. Works from his immediate post-adolescence, years that bracketed the American massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contained grisly, bleak, detailed figuration. He clearly couldn’t handle the delivery, clearly needed more distance from the canvas and a quieter voice. By the late 1960s he was making work that reduced everything he had to say into a clearly legible and appealing top layer. Only he need know of his problems, of the war between desire and sense that roils below the unbroken crust of the painting. No one is ever going to understand that. What matters is that he can know it is there, for that knowledge has bought him one more day of not having to figure out the unsolvable conflicts inside of man. And the notation he employed was enough to satisfy the artist. And it will continue to satisfy the artist for the rest of his life.
There are other excellent practitioners of pure, beautiful shields, it’s a long, living movement. Painters alone consider Ad Reinhardt, who made ultimate paintings for a while up to his death, and Daniel Buren, who remains fully committed today. And they are great too, fully worth championing. But Kawara is the king, because his emotional segregation is the most addictive, because his rush works every time.
A DOCTOR WRITES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 31
Emotional segregation sounds like a bad thing but, scientifically speaking, it’s very necessary, and a blessing to the adolescent male. Great notation is not a means to hide from one’s emotions, rather, it’s a means of translating one’s emotions into a presentable form. The degenerate ghouls who embody the adolescent male’s hormonal urges are not safe enough to roam, free, among the hearts and minds of others.
The thing is, adolescence must be a private experience. Every nuance of the phantasmagorical journey is unique to each male, and no part of it would make sense to another. Besides, the story changes so quickly, and so radically, that there’s no point in sharing it. All discoveries are fleeting and rendered null and void by their immediate follower. Great notation allows the adolescent male to hide the embarrassing specifics of what he’s going through while still, just a little, looking like a normal human being, and functioning with others. Great notation allows a glimpse at oneself from the outside, a chance to take a breath, a moment where, if you were a bandit on the run, the heat would be off.
THE WORST OF THE MODERN ADOLESCENTS
Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse by the Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin, makes for our third case. Pushkin told the story of Onegin’s prolonged adolescence in a serial published in 9 parts from 1825 to 1832, and it is a journey that is essential to our investigation.
Onegin is an aristocratic and educated young man in command of a great touch with the ladies, with everybody. He has wits and charm, a canny ability to be ostensibly tender while simultaneously, privately, ahead of the game, a gift that brings success to his feet, always. He doesn’t, however, feel or desire anything. He grows weary of cosmopolitan society and the dearth of challenges it presents, so he ships out to a lavish country pad inherited from his uncle. His best friend Lensky introduces him to his girlfriend Olga’s sister, the cute, naïve, and mildly country Tatiana, and she falls for him. His passions are aroused, yet he coolly rejects her. And it is a vicious act but it stands as the most decisive thing he’s yet managed to pull off, his first cobbled synthesis of high intelligence and adolescent instincts, and it finally marks a significant moment in the young man’s life. The seasons turn. Lensky invites Onegin to Tatiana’s coming-of-age party which, instead of a humble, private ceremony, is a grand society ball. Tatiana has grown up in all the ways that Onegin has not. This whole setup upsets the already-bummed Onegin enormously, and he flirts and dances with Lensky’s girl all night. Lensky ditches the party, challenges Onegin to a duel the next morning, and is murdered at dawn a day later. As Lensky’s men clean up the corpse Onegin simply shudders and walks away, with no recognition that he’s slain his only friend and, in the process, reached the second concrete benchmark in his adult life. The seasons turn. Onegin meets Tatiana again, now a polished society lady and wife to a man of high standing, and falls in love. He pours his heart out to her, risking all, as she had to him years ago, but she’s not remotely interested. Indeed, he rejects her as emphatically as he had her when she was a girl. We leave Eugene Onegin as we met him, alone, and with nothing to show for the years.
Onegin is unable to accomplish anything in his life for he has not developed any sort of notation that will accommodate life changes. Opportunities will ever drift past him. He is aware but never in control of his concscience’s distant whisper, always a little too far from the right move, never near enough to the long view of life. His intelligence, his good fortune and his literacy seem a crutch more than a gift, indeed, when Tatiana rifles through his library in his absence after the duel she understands Onegin to be nothing more than a composite of the characters he’s studied so intensely with his hours and his education, a chimera. His only notation is the scribbling in the margins of his books, shorthand, distillations of, and shortcuts to, the lives and loves of others. Onegin did find a means of navigating his adolescence, but his means was the progressive erasure of awareness to everything he was going through, carried through until he stopped going through anything painful, until, eventually, he stopped going through anything at all.
Pushkin narrates the novel as a nameless contemporary and observer of the protagonist, an acquaintance who happens to be able to read Onegin’s mind. And he grows to despise him. The narrator is attuned to the masses of unfeeling growing inside the young man’s thickening head, disappointed with the decisions he makes, and delighted to take leave of him. The narrator’s final kiss-off to Onegin, in the immediate aftermath of Tatiana’s epic rejection, is executed with celebratory zeal, and in a brisk, clinical few lines: “But a sudden clink of spurs has sounded, / and Tatiana’s husband has appeared, / and here my hero, / at an unkind minute for him, / reader, we now shall leave / for long...forever... . After him / sufficiently we on one path / roamed o’er the world. / Let us congratulate / each other on attaining land. Hurrah! / It long (is it not true) was time.” He’s delighted because he’s free. What a relief it is to be free. Eugene Onegin was a real asshole.
The narrator, however, is not our hero either. The reader will realize, freed of Onegin, that the narrator was a waste of time too. For the reader has indulged, through him, countless references to obscure literature and, say, favorite restaurants, or obscure parts of town, have followed asides and soliloquys miles away from the plot, endured pockets of leaden grumpiness and inertia in which one almost feels embarrassment, heard the narrator talk of girls who aren’t even in the story, and read a novel in which, essentially, only one thing happened, an extremely brief and dull duel. The searchings of the narrator provided relief from the pigheaded lead, and the narrator is certainly a sympathetic figure for fuming at Onegin’s flaws, but he ultimately makes no more progress during our shared time than the randy, bourgeois idler. ‘Can it be true that I’ll be thirty soon?”, he asks himself at the end of a particularly long existential digression, aware for a moment that he is not much closer to the adolescent’s answers than the man whose story he tells.
Thus the reader must free himself of the narrator as he freed himself of Onegin, for sensitivity and total awareness has led that narrative into the hypnotic trap of permanent reflection, endless indulgence. There is a hero, though. Pushkin allows his two characters to go about their business, and while they bumble forth on equally pointless parallel wavelengths, he listens, reports and quietly occupies a wavelength of his own. His own soul’s answers are relentlessly, secretly notated and embedded between his players’ nakedly inconclusive existences. Like Onegin and the narrator, Pushkin is scribbling privately in the margins of other men’s life stories, but he transcends their problems by choosing a decent notation that serves him and doesn’t weigh him down, one that competes with the lunacy of his reality on its own intricate and evolving terms. The narrator aspires to be insightful, but develops flab and self-satisfaction, inertia in other words, as soon as he can settle in to his discovered moral high ground over Onegin. Pushkin does not get stuck because he will not stop to congratulate or lament his current position, he glimmers and glints instead through fragments of voices, little turns and won conclusions in the verse, those clues to a third character who isn’t an asshole or leading us the wrong way, one who has figured out who he is and what he wants. That third character, Pushkin, will never put the answers of his essence into words—that’s how it is, remember?—but the nimble notation, and the way it has allowed him to outgrow the mantraps of eternal adolescence, has made a hero of him.
THE YOUNG MAN’S GIFT
The internet is the big craze right now, a huge, perhaps the hugest, cultural presence on earth. A few generations now exist who do not remember the world without it. And let me tell you, it is amazing. It can do a lot of your work for you, in a fraction of the time it took you before, and it is a glorious force for the destabilization and demystification of capitalist structures, chipping at arbitrary and needlessly protected ideals of value and bringing equality to the notion of luxury and a powerful, boisterous emerging spirit of what some call piracy, others call sharing. Information can be digested very quickly there, and is often shaped so that it need only be digested once. Information usually exists only as light, saving space, saving the environment. All the internet’s information funnels down to a single hub, and you can get it, privately, any time you want.
Adolescent males are the internet’s most fervent users, and for good reason. On the internet they actually can outpace their mutation by shifting gear and switching lanes when accelerating hormonal threats bully their existence. They make the most of the ethereal landscape’s boundaryless enormity, its speed, its anonymity, its lack of rules and a lack of accountability that can make every adolescent male feel sane and in charge. They can adopt Onegin’s shortcuts, his effortless fluency, quickly becoming a composite figure, one who can move smoothly, coldly, through their most painful adolescent periods. When they do find themselves in the rough, faced with a petrifying new discovery, they can vaporize, zapping elsewhere into the ether, instantly absenting themselves, cleanly avoiding embarrassment or confrontation. They need never find themselves as the running man, the only directionless dope in a landscape with a man killed a snake. The internet is great for this. And if they consider themselves more evolved than the flighty Onegins of the world they can take the high road, choosing the narrator’s path, surrounding themselves with this or that morsel of education or insight, tiling patches of gleaned awareness together to corroborate their moments of occasional lucidity into an approximation of adulthood and sense. It’s another way to dull the agony. The internet is great for this, too.
These are temporary cures for the adolescent condition, subscribed to by millions, but they are not yet useful to young life as it is lived in the actual world, and nowhere close to the true triumph that is noble adolescent notation done right. The only way a young man can survive the actual world is to notate from within it, risking agony by tangling with agony. The internet is painless because it flicks on an off with a switch. Arguments disappear, opinions and allegiances are redacted, all the time. Nothing will last and nothing is at stake.
I thought of writing all of this following the digestion of two young writers’ recent publications, Max G. Morton’s Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard and Matthias ‘Wolfboy’ Connor’s I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore. Morton is an American punk, and his ten-story cycle was accurately described to me as a portal, a journey through increasingly wild encounters with amorality, isolation, life-threatening situations and the spirit world, a totally fantastical and all-true memoir. Connor, a kind man from Northern England, wrote an extremely sarcastic extended dialogue between a group of men appearing in the afterlife only to find it a miserable, shallow place where no one has principles. Two excerpts from each are reproduced throughout our story. I began thinking about zines and the act of publishing untested young men’s writings, for these two men’s stories came into my life, and remain in my life, as a gift. And I learned, through them, of notation’s greatest gift.
Do you have any idea what a gift it is that a young man offer to share his feelings with you? For any man to volunteer his essence to you, however carefully notated, is a miraculous act of generosity. The offering of his voice in a zine or a poem or a song is a brave act because he is giving it to you for keeps. With this gift you can read and listen to him any time you want, and you will absorb his horrible secrets hidden in the words, the shame he thought he might never shake, and he doesn’t mind, because he has offered these secrets to you, unafraid and as best he can. This gift can set him free, finally, fully, and put him on his way to living as a normal, untormented human being, unshackled at last from the chains of his hormonal years. Adolescent notation is of no use until the reader completes it by reading it and by keeping it, legitimizing the filth and insanity that he has worked so hard to contain and understand, canonizing it somewhere, memorializing it somehow. The mutation ends here. The young man’s notated life becomes absorbed into the world, unadorned now, an explosive apotheosis as his sorry former existence becomes gas and light and just another normal part of everything else in the world. Do you have any idea what a gift it is that a young man offer to share his feelings with you? Do you have any idea what a gift it is for him to know that you’ve listened?
