I was rockin’ out (as one does) to Rockin’ Robin. “THIS SONG IS SO GOOD,” I moaned delightedly, doing the Twist in our tiny New York kitchen and accidentally hitting the stove knob with my hip; the clicking of the gas was in time to the music, and I spun it back off with a flourish.
“Is it???” Amy laughed. “Seriously?”
“Yessss,” I moaned. “They tweet! And whistle! And it’s like — All birds sing, but this bird ROCKS, man. This bird knows how to BLOWWW.”
“Okayyy…”
I like songs that are shameless, that don’t take themselves too seriously. I like how self-deprecating “So What” by Pink is, and how glib “Bartender” by Lana Del Rey is, and how joyful “Five Years Time” by Noah and the Whale is and how irreverent “No Children” by The Mountain Goats is. It’s not that these songs don’t deal with significant subject matter — divorce, loneliness and alcoholism, hope and fear in romance, more divorce… But these songs are great because they play around with sometimes dark things, and they joke about them and shrug at them and mostly, don’t take themselves too seriously.
I think this is visible in some of the greats in visual art, too. I took a friend to see a Banksy show recently, which was hilarious! And I just had another conversation with another friend about Matisse’s Haystacks series — which was basically just Matisse saying, “Wow, I wonder what these things look like in all these different lightings and seasons and stuff.” He’s just playing around with something common to tease out its possibilities; I think there’s something good-humored and humble in that.
Making art is, I think, supposed to be playful. It’s very easy to conjure to mind the serious arteest, all black beret and perpetual pout and fingers raised to a furrowed brow. But I haven’t known many artists who actually work that way. I think the myth of the tortured arteest has produced some damaging glamorization of mental health issues. People say to me, with a tone of knowing, when another artist commits suicide: “Ah, well, that’s probably how they made such good art.”
Perhaps. But how do we know that the same artist couldn’t have produced better work in joy? How do we know they couldn’t have grown in the years of life that were lost?
My best stories have come out of playfulness. Don’t get me wrong — I write dark stories, usually more than anyone really expects from me. And I have suffered, and I have faced deep darkness and been the victim of traumatic wrongs. But my best work has come from simply musing on something — “What if…?” And then teasing and toying and playing with the different aspects of my question.
I think art is not practical, and shouldn’t be treated as practical; it is therefore intrinsically playful, is it not? And life gets challenging and serious enough; you don’t need to go seeking it out.
This week, Amy and I faced a slew of stresses. We had a bedbug scare (Don’t fret, not an infestation) that took days of cleaning and killing efforts. We had a window that started to fall open because the things that held it closed broke for no apparent reason. We had a bathtub that wouldn’t drain well, and then after snaking, wouldn’t drain at all. All of these things are normal parts of life, routine problems that come from existing as adults in a space and being in charge of stewarding it. But especially with all three things happening in the span of a few days, oh my GOODNESS was it exhausting!
By last night, Amy and I had sunk hours into the bathtub to find ourselves kneeling with our one remaining drain snake poking very carefully into the puddle of gunky Drano that refused to go down and do its job no matter how we poked at it.
So, what did I do?
I drew a picture of a saint holding a plunger, lined the bathroom with candles and a Bible, put on Gregorian chants, and convinced Amy to dress in all black with me. All so that we could stage a fake exorcism for our other roommate, because I’d joked about “angering the drain demon” in a text earlier.
Maybe it did nothing for the drain. But it gave us lots of giggles and transformed kneeling on the tile from something practical to something playful.
And you know what? It’s unlikely to be in a museum any time soon, but I think our little improv installation was a piece of art I’ll hold in my heart for quite a while.
