We are not men.
Salvador Dali, Tom Waits, Seth - Men of the future, or not men?
This post is a follow-up to my last post, Are We Not Men? about fakery taking over our lives. I wanted to add some photos then but didn’t have time, so here they are, unburdened with further musings, except to say that I realize these “artist personas” are different from the phenomena of politicians pretending (to be Presidential, for example) or average people becoming gasbags of therapeutic symptomology.
Then again, maybe personas are not that far afield either. Maybe we should be demanding that politicians and online everybody become even more cartoon-like than they already are, adopting full-blown artificial personas like artists?
Salvador Dali perfectly embodied the outsider artist - part mad professor, part advanced being, possibly from another planet. (Elsewhere, I’ve said surrealism might be the art form of our time and I’m sticking to that idea for now.)
"I guess I've always lived upside down when I want things I can't have. My wife actually thinks I have a syndrome called Reality Distortion Field. It's kind of like drugs, only you can't come back from it. Reality Distortion is almost a permanent condition. Things come in and they go out: Presto, chango! To a certain extent, I did that with myself. As a kid, I did want to be an old-timer, since they were the ones with the big stories and the cool clothes. I wanted to go there. Now, I guess I want to bring that with me and go back in time." (quote from interview at link above)
I also did not, but wanted to, mention in my last post the Canadian graphic artist Seth, whose auto-biographical graphic novel, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken is a highly layered (ironic?) portrait of an aspiring cartoonist (himself) searching for his cartoonist-hero (also possibly himself) named Kalo. The (fictional) hunt produces examples of Kalo’s cartoons, drawn by Seth of course, as he imagined they would appear in actual magazines (also drawn by Seth).
Giving the general fictionalization of everthing, I don’t think it would be too much to ask New York City’s mayoral candidates to come up with their best costumed impressions of the kind of Mayor they think they would be. For models, they could look at characters like Gotham’s Mayor Hady.
I’m pretty sure I’m putting too many links in my posts. I like digging around as I write, so it seems like the honest thing to do. But it can be exhausting, some of you have said. So I’m going to try to curb that impulse. Next time.
This website has examples and even tips about how to develop your very own fake self. It talks about Beyoncé, e.g.: “Singer and actor Beyoncé Knowles used the persona Sasha Fierce early in her career to overcome her performance anxiety. ‘I have someone else that takes over when it's time for me to work and when I'm onstage, this alter-ego that I've created kind of protects me and who I really am.’”
Also Weird Al Yankovic. Does he ever get to be not weird?
Ciao for niao mia amici!
I feel like writers could really benefit from having stronger personas (benefit both themselves and their audiences). One time I saw Chuck Palahniuk do a reading at a nigh club in San Francisco and it was insane. Drunken, loud, hilarious, unexpected. I've been to a lot of readings but have never seen anything come even close to that. Palahniuk's performance made me realize something that should be so obvious but that I'd never thought about before: writers, at some basic level, are entertainers.
I would imagine that Weird Al must be weird constantly. It's probably in his contract. I love that picture of Dali. He was a true artist in every sense and did not care what anyone thought about him, which is always admirable. Thank you for sharing, Robert.