Broken or of a Creative Bent?

Tea: Chocolate Cinnamon.

Music: Squeeze, "Up the Junction"

Time: Night.

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the links between creativity and some sort of "offness," as it were.

Edward Hopper, one of my favorite painters, once proclaimed, "I guess I'm not very human. All I really want to do is paint light on the side of a house."

I can relate to that, sometimes. It's easy to hide behind a notebook and/or a camera, and not engage the world as anything but material.

I'm doing my best to strike a balance. But isn't imbalance -- the kind of imbalance that fuels creative tension -- what I'm after, too?

Maybe that's the paradox. Creative sorts have to be human, to understand the range of human emotions, strengths and frailties. But we (at least I hope to be listed on that roster) also have to be able to disengage, to switch to a purely observational mode.

Human, more than, less than.

Is it any wonder that we wonder?

I Spy with My Unblocked Eye ...

(Image Copyright 2007 Steve Brisendine)

Tea: Lapsang Souchong

Music: Waterboys, "The Whole of the Moon"

Time: Night.

Okay, let's see if this works.

I mentioned photography and a certain purple leaf a couple of days ago, but I didn't give the backstory on how I came to be out on photo walks in the first place.

Friend/co-writer/undefinable kindred spirit Seánan Forbes gave me a digital camera some time back. I confess, it was a long time before I unlimbered it in earnest. A snap here, a snap there. Nothing serious.

Part of it was that I used to have a fairly decent photographer's eye, back when I had to do a lot of shooting for work. (My hometown newspaper had one fulltime shutterbug, at best.) But I'd lost it over the years, for whatever reasons, and couldn't seem to get it back.

I took photos, but the composition was off. Or the image was just enough out of focus to be annoying but not enough to be "artistic." Everything that couldn't work ... didn't.

Still, I took the camera to New York when I visited last month. And something, pardon the expression, clicked.

And, knock on a whole forest, it's still clicking -- but the eye is seeing things it's never seen before.

Found patterns, curves, lines -- they're everywhere. And so while most sane people walk along the street looking at whole things, I'm the one looking for just the right angle and framing for a smear of easement paint or a rusty manhole cover (one on the other, if I'm really lucky).

I haven't lost sight of entireties entirely, but -- well, the Picture at the Top of This Post (sorry, it just makes me think of "The Monster At the End of This Book") is the sort of thing that's been finding its way onto my hard drive of late.

So I guess this is my first public showing, as it were. Hope you like it. And please don't run over me when I'm standing in the middle of the street (because sometimes, that's where the most interesting tar squiggles are).

The Art of ...

Tea: Cherry Vanilla

Music: "Blackbird," performed by a duo of vocal (female) and guitar

Time: Night.

It's been a long, art-themed day for me, workwise. Deadline in the afternoon, a piece for a local arts magazine, and First Friday tonight in the Crossroads.

I can't complain. I met some interesting people tonight, got several story ideas, saw some pieces that stopped me in my tracks -- and it beats writing about people killing each other or having their houses blown away by tornadoes. It positively thrashes sitting at a desk, rewriting other people's stories about death and disaster.

But a long day doing something you love is still a long day, and long days bring stresses, and stresses bring cracks.

So I'm going to keep this short tonight, and wish you a weekend in which at least one piece of someone else's creativity buckles your knees (in a good way, of course).

Cup XXIX: The Leaves are Turning Charlie Brown

Tea: Lapsang Caramel

Music: Vince Guaraldi Trio, "The Great Pumpkin Waltz"

Time: Late evening

I didn't grow up with Charlie Brown, but I grew up on him. I had all the paperback collections as a kid, wore the Joe Cool T-shirt in high school, wrote Linus and Charlie Brown into a very short story that's out there on the Web under one of my other names.

(And yes, that was me in the yellow shirt with the zigzag on the front a couple of Halloweens ago. So maybe I'm not all the way grown up yet.)

So, obviously, I'll read David Michaelis' biography of Charles Schulz once I get the chance (translation: once I get to borrow a copy, find it used or snag the eventual paperback).

It's already causing a bit of a stir, as evidenced by this review and this article, both from the New York Times. Short version: Michaelis apparently characterizes Schulz as melancholy.

Um ... gee, ya think?

Good art is rarely produced by the entirely well-balanced, in the first place (I will grant that maladjusts produce a lot of crap, by the way. Flaws are no guarantee of creative quality -- but they don't hurt.) I mean, look at David. Had his babymama's husband whacked, wrote the 23rd Psalm and most of the lyrics to U2's "40." Same guy.

Also, so much of professional humor is birthed by tension of some sort. Like a Louisville Slugger, it can be both defense mechanism and weapon. Hang around stand-up comics for more than a few minutes, and you'll see (and hear) what I mean. At its best, Peanuts managed the enviable trifecta of being sweet, funny and sad -- often in the same strip.

So if Schulz really was a moody, oft-inattentive grudge carrier ... he found a transcendent way of dealing with it, didn't he? Let that be his real legacy, whatever led him to produce it.

Speaking of maladjusts and misanthropes, here's tonight's tale of sweet, spooky sadness:

Ambrose Bierce, "The Moonlit Road"