To hear him explain his creative process with this album–he got lost. Whether he got tired of the banjo and the kitchen sink shtick, or just wanted to explore something new and different, he started experimenting with electronic sounds. He spent month after fascinating month building sounds and layers, and accomplished absolutely nothing. Having set aside his previous muse (rural americana, which he used to tell stories both simple and poignant in the understated yet iconic language that powered the emergent indie scene) he needed a new one.

He found it in Royal Roberts, a schizophrenic artist and musician whose art features prominently in Sufjan’s visual portrayal of The Age of Adz. That Royal’s art and music spurred the writing and conceptualization of The Age of Adz is not as interesting as that it was in the incoherence of Royal’s work that Sufjan rediscovered his creative will.

As I reflect on my experience with these forays into madness, I can’t help but think in terms of nuance. It starts with this question: What is the difference between madness as muse and madness as hermeneutic?

When I watch Dexter I lose myself. Similarly, as I watched Alice in Wonderland, I got lost in the flows of narrative. Such is the vicarious nature of art. During The Age of Adz, I merely felt lost. Almost taken advantage of in a way. The experience was incoherent enough that I couldn’t enjoy the encore, which consisted of an acoustic set of all his “old” stuff, which his back up singer was so unfamiliar with she had to read the lyrics off a sheet of paper.

Perhaps it was telling that Sufjan closed the show with a half-hearted version of John Wayne Gacy Jr., a song about a serial killer who stuffed the corpses of neighborhood boys under his house. In the end, Sufjan seemed at a loss to convey the nature of his creation. However, the lyrics to the final song, and the fact that it was placed at the end of a show inspired by madness, make me think that, at least to Sufjan, it somehow captures his predicament. Consider the last line:

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floor boards
For the secrets I have hid

Sufjan said several times during the show that he wasn’t mad, and that he didn’t suffer from madness. His words fell flat. No one crafts a show that epic in stature, without having stood transfixed by the muse at its center. Madness was his raison de jouissance. It seems strange to me that he had a hard time admitting that fact. Perhaps, that’s one of the reasons that the show fell flat.

We live in an age of madness. Our symbolic connection to the world is relentlessly stripped away. As Rilke would say it:

“The things we live by are falling away more than ever, replaced by an act without its symbol…”

During The Age of Adz I found myself contemplating Heidegger’s diagnosis of the existential trauma of our current age. I found myself also wondering about his suggested cure. “Such a realm is art,” he tells us. The longer I sit with that answer, the harder it becomes to know what is meant by “art.”

For me, the question remains: What is the difference between madness as muse and madness as hermeneutic? To say it another way: What is the difference between losing ourselves in art, and just plain getting lost because of it?

Jacques Derrida has captivated me most of my adult life.  First, because he was a theoretical bad boy.  According to my hermeneutically-conservative undergrad he was off-limits, as the crazy guy who said, “words don’t mean anything” (a laughable claim).  Second, he spoke and wrote in French.  Half of my family speaks French.  Ooh la la.  Mostly, though, I love Derrida for the way he writes.

Many people claim that deconstruction is a dead end, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that we approach Derrida as scholar and neglect him as artist.   The folks that tend to engage his ideas usually do so on linguistic or philosophical grounds.  This leaves out the poetry.  This leaves out the way he played with words making them, “slide–without mistreating them–to the point of their nonpertinence, their exhaustion, their closure (Positions, 10).”

Part of Derrida’s genius was to blur the imaginary boundaries between disciplines, and for that, I think his work deserves attention as poetry as well as prose.  I do think his “philosophical ideas” have extraordinary merit.  But we have no access to them if we divorce them from his method.

So here’s to you Jacques, thank you for the beautiful mess . . .

How to touch upon the untouchable? Distributed among an indefinite number of forms and figures, this question is precisely the obsession haunting a thinking of touch–or thinking as the haunting of touch.  We can only touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit . . . But by definition, limit, limit itself, seems deprived of a body.  Limit is not to be touched and does not touch itself; it does not let itself be touched, and steals away at a touch, which either never attains it or trespasses it forever (On Touching . . ., 6).

Since the invention of the radio, the television, the computer, the cell phone, information is more accessible than it has been at any time in human history. Television news shows broadcast 24 hour a day. Blogs are updated by the hour. Blackberry’s route breaking news by the minute. RSS feeds disseminate new information at the speed of light. And human beings? We still move at the same speed we always have.

Relative to our technophile culture with its Baudrillardian suicide looming on the fringes of our collective unconscious, human being seems to be moving slower and slower. There are days when we lament the effective deceleration. But for Badiou our slowness isn’t slow enough. Referencing our cultural velocity he says, “this speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency.” In Infinite Thought he argues for a philsophy that insures lugubrious action, a slow appropriation of the impossible number of truths being created. Philosophy becomes for Badiou a truth analyzer rather than a creator of truth.

I wonder if we have entered a similar phase of art in human culture, a phase where the once prescient artist is blinded to an impossible future and turns attention instead to the present, to the past. Which begs the question, is the new art retrospective rather than prophetic?

Cezanne relativized points of view decades before Einstein produced his theories of relativity. Picasso fractured the portrait well before we became aware of the cracks in the foundations of our self image. Rilke spoke ecstatically of the act without its symbol decades before talk of the murder of signs, or the hyperreal, or deconstruction, or the death of meta-narrative.

This is only a guess, but I’ll hazard it anyway. As the technological dissemination of our constructed reality approaches full realization, we are estranged not only from our being (our ontos), but we are removed from any meaningful context of the present. The artist then is constrained to work retrospectively. They cannot look forward, because their senses, their unique sensitivity to the warp and woof of our iteration, are blinded by the infinite having been presented as reality.

Two modern poets come to mind as I close this blog. I’ll leave you with their thoughts.

Bob Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there…”

And I think Thom Yorke may have said it best on In Rainbows: “Has the light gone out for you / cause the light’s gone out for me / this is the twenty-first century / this is the twenty-first century…”

Here’s a time-lapse video of Will, Tim H. and I painting together.  We did this while all the fires were burning and everything smelled like Mordor.  I think it influenced our subconscious.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2709068[/vimeo]

This leads me to a question about art. What kind of art satisfies you? To some people, the most beautiful painting is one that is nature art, or maybe a painted portrait. To others, impressions of the subject are the most satisfying. I like this. I like that we all connect to different avenues of the creative. It’s amazing to me that someone could have a transcendental moment with a nature painting…as it is amazing to that same person that I love Van Gogh.