40 Days, 40 Moments in Art
In approximately forty days, I’ll be hosting an event called “4T.” The original vision was that my artist, actor, musician, and performer friends would meet up, find future collaborators, and share their work with a new audience. The not-so-clever name for the event reveals its other, more sinister purpose, which is, of course, giving the host (aka “me”, aka “this guy”) the opportunity to throw a party for himself and celebrate a personal milestone without actually celebrating it. Given the not-so-clever name for the event and its proximity to said personal “milestone”, I think most of my friends have caught on.
Amazing friends aside, this article is not about me… or at least it’s intended to be more about the art than about me. Rather than rambling on about the increasingly loud sounds that my knees make as I trek over the hill, I’d rather turn the focus towards those things that I can be grateful for. As I approach my cuarentañera (which, is of course, a not-so-clever Spanish-adjacent word that means a “celebration of 40” invented by me, aka “this guy”, aka “este gringo”), I find I have much to be grateful for. As a creative type, I am eternally grateful for art in all its various forms (ooh, okay, that was a rough transition… hopefully the readers will buy it… oh hey, reader, what’s new?).
As I count down the days to this “4T” event, I’d like to share some thoughts on forty moments in art that have influenced me, moved me, and inspired me to create art of my own. This is not intended to be a “best of” list (I’m not a big fan of terms like “best” when it comes to art, especially given the way they can lead to terms like “worst”), nor are the works ranked in any sort of way. I tried to include works from multiple mediums even though the art forms that speak strongest to me tend to be literature, film, and music (and Thai food). Also, I’m using the not-so-clever term “moments” because it gives me some leeway to be ultra-specific in some circumstances (shining light on a particular sequence in a movie, for example) and broad in others (grouping together multiple works into a single entry). Is this the best way to go about this? Probably not, but I hope some manner of method to the madness will become apparent as entries are shared. Perhaps, too, the readers will extend a bit of grace to the author (aka “this guy”, aka “este gringo”) as he tries to shed some light on works that inspire him to do a better job with his own work.
And so, without further ado…
- Ray Bradbury’s Fire
I don’t recall which came first for me, The Veldt or Fahrenheit 451. All I know for certain is that I was introduced to Ray Bradbury’s writing sometime around seventh grade and was immediately a fan. I want to say, we read a short story in class, probably The Veldt. It was a short story about a sort of hologram nursery room that gets transformed into an African savannah complete with semi-real human eating lions. The kids in the story were defiant and reckless, and the science fiction in the story was definitely more fiction than science. In other words, I was in.
I needed more: more of this weirdness, more stories, more Bradbury. What I found shortly thereafter was the first pages of Farenheit 451, and what struck me the most, even more than the premise and the story, was the writing itself.
Gather around, take a look, and see if this warms you up:
“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
When I was six-years-old, my family came home from a family reunion only to find our driveway filled with flashing lights and our house alight in flames. Perhaps you can understand, then, why I never had the same obsession with fire that some of my classmates had. I wasn’t big on playing with magnifying glasses or making jerry-riged explosives. Yet, inspite of all that, when I read Bradbury’s words, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I could almost feel my repressed inner-pyromaniac grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
If the premise of a firefighter that started fires pushed the limits of believability, the language made it real. Bradbury comes at his tale from an almost universal angle by tapping into mankind’s primal obsession with fire. “Man’s red flower” as a singing ape once called it, that dangerous, mysterious force that changes everything it touches, that relentless, burning hunger that dances on the page. The words are poetic, but bold, quickly spreading from one metaphor to the next before the reader can catch a break. There are almost too many comparisons in too tight a space, but each is realized in such compelling words that one can’t help but stare and smile.
One of the things that impresses me the most about Ray Bradbury is that while his descriptions are long and immersive, his stories are concise. Students read his work in class because so much of it comes in the form of short stories. Even books like Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes have a page count that is more “novella” than novel. While most authors tend to work in either bare bones concise language (nod to Ernest Hemingway) or lengthy epic poem-esque rants (nod to countless other authors and wannabe authors, including myself), Bradbury stays within this unique space in the middle, a place where the language is a character in of itself yet it never distracts from the story or lets the characters wander off into tangents that aren’t vital to the main action.
I remember showing the introduction to Fahrenheit 451 to some of my friends and classmates and feeling like they didn’t quite get it. It wasn’t that they didn’t like the idea or appreciate the writing, they just weren’t obsessed with it in the same way I was. I felt like I had stumbled upon some secret that no one understood, no one except maybe my English teacher, but you can only talk to your English teacher so much when you’re in seventh grade. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was one of several times when my nerdy fascination with language was coming into clear, undeniable, focus, a nerdy fascination that would eventually manifest into a nerdy love of nerdy writing. Perhaps its appropriate then that a book about burning books would be the one that sparked my love for them.
I don’t know what moments forged you into the person you are today. Perhaps we’ve all had times in which some sort of love or passion was ignited within wether we knew it or not. All I know is that about twenty-seven years ago, I found myself drawn like a moth to words on a page. Even today I remain fixated like a fireman with “eyes all orange flame” with the thought of what comes next.
