BY THESE HUMAN HANDS!!! 01
A COLLECTION OF NOVELTIES AND EMANATIONS
I wanted to get this next phase of NGBMO started on the right foot so this first installment of BY THESE HUMAN HANDS!!! is going to be a bit hefty.
I’ve been possessed by an urge to chase down a personal sense of novelty in my art these past few weeks, bringing my focus away from thinking about the final products to instead shine a light on embracing unusual modes of creation.
It’s hard not to see it as a kind of homecoming. Back when I was doing the books for Outlet Press I would tell people that they were graphic novelties and not graphic novels. They were about trying new things and eschewing the constraints of the medium of comics.
My biggest issue back then was that I felt that I had to “stay in my lane” by sticking to comics and other forms of narrative that emphasized art over writing. I’ve recently began to look at that choosing of a lane as a kind of shackle we use to bind the creative endeavors that might dilute our brands or embarrass us in some way. It’s about commerce and pride over the pursuit of artistic joy and I’m so thoroughly tired of how constraining that mindset is.
I believe that the only way to find to find novelty is to do novel things. The road to new avenues of thought do not come from well mapped territories. They come from places that have been left underexplored or forgotten.
It’s unusual for me to explore so many different mediums in the span of six weeks but in that time I’ve written a short meditation on a movie, made a short piece of music using only what I had available in my house, and started a series of short comic vignettes that utilizes sculpture and model making instead of pen and ink.
None of these things will reward me with financial success or critical accolades but they have all brought me to a level of creative satisfaction that I haven’t felt in YEARS.
I created this track for the upcoming Green Mushroom Project/We the Hallowed audio mixtape called Fuck Around and Find Out 2, which is still taking submission here for those who are inclined toward audio shenanigans of a particular sort.
I’m calling it Thought Infestation and I used things like my son’s keyboard, my kitchen table, and different layers of manipulated voice samples to create it. The process brought me back to a time when I made an entire album of experimental songs for an EP that was meant to be released by a netlabel that disappeared before it was able to materialize.
I like to listen to podcasts at work and one of my recent favorites is Weird Studies. Episode 132 came up in my podcatcher a few weeks back. The topic of discussion was Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave paintings and ideas of permanence and the passage of time.
This episode sent me into a strange whirlpool of my memories of the movie from when it was first released mixing with other feelings that have been nagging at me recently.
What follows is a short bit of writing that it inspired, called NO STARBUCKS ON MARS. I named it after a sci-fi story I never got around to writing but always wanted to, which feels apt to the subject matter.
Ours is a legacy of dissipated ferromagnetic materia in bricks of glass and obsolescence. Our labors of culture will be forever locked away from the future through a procession of storage mediums that devour and decimate previous iterations on the way to an inevitable fission.
What does the future inherit from us as we pass on from this cycle?
Kaleidoscopic islands of plastic left adrift at sea?
Styrofoam clamshells decorated with enigmatic corporate hieroglyphs, whose pearl of the past was nothing more than grease and garbage?
The kings and lords of our time have written their history in the whirlwind and will be forgotten.
Even our buildings, our parking lots, our homes will eventually be rejected by the world and shed like scabs, leaving only scars of construction untested for entropy.
We leave no caves filled with riches for future archeologists to discover. No wall paintings to set imaginations to wonder what came before. In a thousand years this era will be entirely forgotten, relegated to our archives of temporality. Even if our planet is to survive, our legacy will not.
There will be no Starbucks on Mars.
No department stores.
No sprawl.
Our temples of consumerism will die along with our prolonged residency on this Earth and leave the impression of a mistake best left unrepeated in the fossil record. All these things are mere sandcastles on the shores of entropy and high tide is inevitable.
Our only chance to evade blowing away with the scattering ashes of this combustible civilization would be to find a new start on an unscorched alien hill but we will never reach escape velocity no matter how much is spent in the trying. Money might make it into orbit but it will never get us to the stars. We aren't meant to leave this place, this mess, this living catacomb.
We live in truly ahistorical times. We are not creating for tomorrow because tomorrow is a fiction we don’t know how to write anymore. Instead we focus on a spasmodic present in microcosm, allowing culture and art and the landscape of reality to shuffle and shift in the moments before being forgotten, leaving past landmarks unmapped as if they were nothing more than a passing dream or an unswatted fly.
A poem, a song, a story, a piece of brilliant art is a muttered whisper drowned out by this miasmic flow state.
Those are the spent and fleeting breaths of an artist, invisible and unnoticed but of absolute importance to those who draw them.
May we mourn memory, legacy, and the long arm of history but we cannot stop breathing, no matter how much we choke and suffocate in the heavy winds of time's velocity. We must breathe even in the vacuum of space, into orbit and beyond. We must forget the aspirations of cultural panspermia and just breathe.
Just breathe and be alive, here and now.
Breath.
The last thing I want to include in this already bloated installment is the first of six short comic stories starring characters inspired by my dear friend Keats Ross, the work of Vaughn Bode, Viewmaster reels from the 80’s, and public access storyteller shows.
That’s it for the inaugural installment of BY THESE HUMAN HANDS!!! Next time I’ll be focusing on The Feck-Up Manifusto and feature the next part of the Ramblin and Toof saga.
I want to thank you all for sticking around and hope you enjoy this chaotic and weird path I’m taking you on.
Until next time,
EJM