I'm reading about Diego Rivera and his return trip he made to Montparnesse where he meets Picasso, Chagall, Duchamp and Matisse and revels in the "bucolic ease of the cafes", and I think to myself, however joyous and satisfying my sketching excursions seem to be, they are always tinged with the ugliness of the modern world. In fact, I'm convinced that there is a marked cosmic conspiracy to rattle my cage on a daily basis.
If it's not the cigar smokers that repeatedly spew their stink in my direction at what was once my favorite cafe, then it's the little Mexican man on the scooter who continues to rub me the wrong way. Every day, without fail, he drives his Rascal scooter uptown and parks on the other side of the sidewalk, directly across from my favorite table. He never orders food, but he sets out water for the tiny chihuahua that rides in his basket, takes out a book, and chain smokes putrid cigarettes one by one and blows the smoke directly in my face. The wind always seems to be right. Day in and day out he does this...like the universe is in on this grand joke to see how long it will take me to break.
At a Starbucks I sketch at, there's an enormous man with the saddest face I have ever seen on a human being that sits down on the comfy chairs and falls asleep for four or five hours at a time. He sputters and gurgles and snores heavily, but he usually orders a sandwich and a coffee so they never turn him away. He slumps into the chair and his tiny, tiny striped shirt always rides up revealing a bloated, pink stomach with an enormous, bulbous hernia just over his belly button. It's huge, like a baby's head, and it juts out like a lighthouse beacon, commanding the attention of the entire room. There's no escaping it...it's like his second head is watching you. Teenagers giggle and point at it. Small children cry into their mother's arms at the strange mutation. It got to be so depressing that I had to move on.
Oh, and then there's the homeless guy (who might be a veteran) at Borders who brings in his duffel bag filled with war games and plastic army men. He takes armfuls of expensive books on World War II, cracks them open to a double-page spread of some explosive battle and sets up his plastic army soldiers, his movable tanks and helicopters and plays warfare out in the middle of the cafe. He takes up at least two tables to do this, but everyone sensing that the camouflage wearing crazy person just might be a wounded vet, give him a wide berth to carry out the strategic air assaults in his head. He's actually a kind, docile soul who'll ask very politely, very shyly, for money for a cup of soup or a coffee. They treat him kindly there, but when he gets going, he becomes a serious distraction, especially when he starts making airplane noises and dive bombs his coffee with half-chewed pieces of biscotti.
At one time, the cafe used to sponsor art shows...that is until the neighborhood artist colony took over the wall completely. Then it became a series of bad art done by retired grandmas and grandpas...lots of oil paintings of barns and pet cats and fruit baskets. There was one artist in the bunch who was good, but his sole subject matter, month to month, was a lone giant rooster on a four foot by six foot canvas. They were always beautifully rendered, right down to the intricate patterning of the feathers. They were quite nice, except for the fact that they dominated the space and the damned eyes seemed to follow you around, and the fact that someone, at least once a day, would say aloud, "Now that's a giant cock!" and set the entire cafe laughing. Hard to concentrate with that around...
And then it was bad folk singer night. Every night, at 7 or 8 pm, they would clear a makeshift stage for some acoustic musician that would entertain for a stipend of books. Most nights it was frightened kids trying out a list of new songs, or some bad bar singer that wanted to play a new venue...or it was the Strawberry Marshmellow Butterfly Princess. That wasn't her name, but it's what the cynical teenage baristas that had to work the cafe called her. She had to live close by, because she seemed to find a spot every time the cafe entertainment flaked out, which was often, and she became the resident fill in. Oh, she was an obnoxious New Age singer. Imagine the annoying girlfriend from Spinal Tap wearing a diaphanous, draped ensemble with flowing scarves playing an over sized Ovation guitar with inlaid butterflies in the design. She would artistically arrange her CD's on the table next to her, and by the time she was into her set of schmaltzy mysticism and her cloying goddess-theology songs, she would empty out the entire cafe except for the pissed off baristas, who got very little in their tip jars, and the old men who stayed until closing time reading magazines. At those moments, I would rudely tune her out with my headphones and my sketchbooks. And she played and she played the same songs over and over again. On many nights they would start to close down the lights on her...and it was sad to see this stoic, little red-headed folk singer in front of a painting of a giant rooster, singing to lonely old men reading magazines, an artist tuning her out with headphones, and a straggly, bearded, camouflaged homeless vet dive-bombing his plastic platoon with half-chewed Italian cookies.
Sometimes, I wonder if it's just karmic retribution...that we can't have joy come to us so easily in this world, that we are forced to endure the struggle in order to reach Paradise. I feel that it is either God laughing at me, or it is the Devil fucking with me, and I can't tell which it is from moment to moment. Or maybe it's the world at large that is too crowded with craziness to let us enjoy the "bucolic ease" of anything, anymore...
No comments:
Post a Comment