The trash aesthetic.

 

Hunter x hunter: Every time I think I have something to say I think I am paraphrasing this manga. Really a lot to do with my whole aesthetic. It is so foundational I have a hard time talking about it… though my whole artistic approach is finding meaning in trash a reference to the spider “we’ll take whatever you give us but don’t ask for anything back.”

kill bill: My favorite genre film even though it has a hard time deciding which one it wants to be the best at.  At least a very impressive pastiche of shot and angles framed by grey and driven by revenge. A selfish act that somehow seems justified. The grey is the nuance between revenge and justice… possibly the overlap of the two?

John Blanche paintings: what happens when punk rock inspired lover of medieval and renascence art is hired to do commercial work for a science fantasy wargame, a whole lot of inspired art that is hard define. From ether his haphazard slapdash quick sketches to his more labored box cover art john Blanche is my favorite painter.

mad max movies: from simple plot boilers and make it epic madness. The mad max are all solid even the weak one (liking at you beyond thunder dome) are surprisingly satisfying movies to watch my two favorites are the macho darkness of the road warrior and psychedelic clusterfuck that is furiosa a mad max saga. There is not much I can except George by taking genre work as a serious art possibly in-spite of other people not agreeing is a major influence.

stone junction: a metaphysical potboiler. Very central to the trash aesthetic is the desire to repurpose the disposable and express the eternal with it. That is a is a direct Influence of this book. Arrogant and cocky in way that is hard to not be impressed by. A work of art is life that give life. A definition I stole from one of his poems and applies double to his magnum opus. 

The Buckaroo Banzai movie novelization. When a parody transcends mockery what do you call it if not a masterpiece? What happened when the novelization is better than the source material? This book. 

 Edward Gorey collected works: silent cinema is something I have a fascination with if I made movie I think they  would be more like kung fu movie mixed with les vampires then anything on this list… except Edward Gorey. Wise and sardonic with nearly every flavor of irony from the tragic to the absurd.

So what is the trash aesthetic? Somewhere between anime and Dadaism. A branch of pulp surrealism that less self consciously political than actual surrealism. Not because the truth isn’t political… but… because the political is reactionary.

I think ultimately What I am trying to get across is that in every situation you are dealing with expectations you ether subvert or pander too. 

The trash whispers to us but what about both? Why limit ourselves to a mode of expression that is valid if only because dignity demands we deny it?

Like finding Beaty in the ugly. By being influenced by the emotional nightmare fuel of pornography rather than the death drive of our physical reaction to it. It is a desire to make pain mean something. To look at our failings and not continue in our fallacy but move forward with a memory of how bad things can get. Letting the nightmare live if only in our memories.

We remember so we don’t repeat. We remember because the potential to eat so much to where we are bed ridden and they have to cut the walls down to get us out of our house is there. Yet that reality does not condemn food itself. Like wise exploitation and genre art feeds on the base sensually expressed by parts of our souls that long for the shadows of our selves long repressed and justifiably so.

The trash aesthetic humanizes all souls possibly most of all the condemned. For every Beatrix kiddo there is a bill waiting to be killed and yet no matter how justified the kiddo’s of the world are what they mourn after they inflict their justice is their very own innocence of being justified.

Likeise Shakespeare does not invalidate the very experience he documents.  Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate tragedy because the tragedy makes it eternal.  If they lived happily forever after, it would be forgotten always being out of reach is the very nature of the sublime. 

Murder is an ambiguity, only the killers of the world the critics of effort. The Assassin’s of the aesthetic limit us. The guardians and curators of the mediocre valley. What is the sublime if not undeniable. Where we dismiss the critic of the art because the life it gives is undeniable.

Life that gives life is inspired because it inspires.

I will take my reasons to live wherever I can find them. If only because, what we want to see is so sterile and painless that that it defends the nightmare. I think i would take the potential violence and grotesque horror of this life because the memory of it allows peace.

The lion will lay down with the lamb and yet, neither sieces  being capable of the potential that lay in their soul. 

Peace and love.

Be safe out there friends.