3.28
So, the weekend before last I went upstate to visit Todd and Rowan, who had just returned from Poland. Lousy timing, because it meant that I missed the No Fun Fest, a 3 day marathon of noise bands that played at the Hook, a club which is a stone’s throw from my apartment. I was really looking forward to going to it, too. Oh, bitter disappointment.
So when I got back to work I spent most of the day looking up the bands online and getting mp3s to listen to. Stuff from Whitehouse, Lee Ranoldo, Wolf Eyes, all sorts of cool stuff. But the band which I was really after was this group called the Hair Police. Brilliant name, right? I’d heard good stuff about them so I commenced a web search and up came a site for the Hair Police. So far so good.
Well, the site was laid out like a typical band site: you navigated by links like Home, History, Biography, Contact, etc. There was a lot of photos of people with funny haircuts. The bio section said that the two people who made up the Hair Police met and started cutting hair in 1996, and it was so clever that I was laughing out loud. To think that a noise band would keep talking about hair! There was a link that said “make an appointment with the Hair Police,” and I started laughing harder, figuring that that was how you contacted their booking agent. I must have spent twenty minutes going around the site, marvelling how fucking clever they were, presenting their site as if they were stylists.
Well, it finally sunk in that the site was actually for a team of stylists called the “Hair Police,” and the link to the noise band “Hair Police” was the second one that Google came up with. Christ, I’m such a fucking idiot. You know that you’ve seen too much conceptual art when you can somehow mistake two hairdressers with a sick, primal noise band.
I was always afraid that this was going to happen to me. I’ve known people, some of them college professors, many of them ex-hippies, most of them past forty, who had accepted so much wacky art shit that the barriers between what was art and what wasn’t was forever obliterated. The approach they took towards the creative process was much like the approach a Buddhist monk or Indian yogi might take towards life and death or existance and non-existance. These were the people who, when teaching a drawing class, would enthuse over a dead bee you’d bring into the classroom for them in lieu of a pile of sketches.
“I just love the way that you’ve chose to deliniate the concept of “line” and do away with “sketch.” It’s just fabulous, the way that the eye is free to rome over your piece’s fragile pose and actually manipulate it. The emotions are of course affected by the fact that it is impermanent, and will dry up and fall apart or rot, and the queer sensation that even in death it may still be able to sting you. Very poignant.”
You know the type, the terminally art damaged. The kind of creeps who will spend half an hour looking at a giant pyramid of Cheer laundry detergent in K-Mart.
I have to protect my neck. From now on I will be completely objective at all times, lest I mistake a pile of dogshit for an Andy Goldworthy sculpture or something. Jesus!
