There are weeks, it must be said, when the world's collective confusion appears to achieve a near overwhelming point, a final seam-bursting moment when the planet will pop and shoot off through space sagging like a deflating, farty balloon. Lately the tempo feels higher than usual as far as bombs and disease and sly genocides careening about an earth pelted with the carcasses of helicopters and airplanes and Space Shuttle detritus and heavy weather amid the deep scars of a mad, human scramble to find purpose and power.
The lead paragraph to an Associated Press article published locally last week read, "Corpses lay aban-doned in street medians, fights and fires broke out, cops turned in their badges and the governor declared war on looters who have made the city a menacing landscape of disorder and fear." And that, of course, was in reference to New Orleans. Dramatic stuff, iffy reporting; looters obviously actually haven't made the landscape of disorder and fear-that was caused by a natural disaster, by partisan budget-slashing leading to unpreparedness, by good old-fashioned American hubris. The looters are simply part of the landscape of disaster, but we don't know how to fight a disaster, we require a human-type enemy, generally as dark and poor as possible because, once we've identified them, dehumanization is part of our battle strategy and racism (and the mainstream media's willingness to play it up) is a key tactic in achieving that goal. Thus the vilification of mostly black, mostly poor people stealing to 1) survive, 2) escape or 3) catch a break. Which is not to say that some people haven't turned mean, criminal and violent-but rather to suggest we are so fragmented, distracted and demoralized that we should not be surprised when some of us reach a breaking point that we've all been applying pressure to. It feels as though we simply don't know each other anymore. We are not a community as a nation; we are not, apparently, a community in a city of less than 500,000. I wonder if we are in a city of 70,000?
The magazine Vanity Fair is currently running its second annual essay contest-notable because the first such contest, where the challenge was to describe the "character of the American people," was intelligently and capably won by a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, convincing in her assessment of American largesse by virtue of writing in from Togo, West Africa. But now this. And now the second essay contest which asks contestants to answer this question: "What is on the minds of America's youth today?" By means of instigation, a page in the magazine offers an image of Vietnam-era war protestors juxtaposed against Iraq-era spring break revelers. Also, perhaps a starting point for considering this disparity of images, the magazine cleverly features the actress and recent divorcée Jennifer Aniston on its cover and several pages of sexy photos and saccharine sentiment addressing just how she's getting through her personal disaster, a category 4 marital tumult.
In light of a magazine simultaneously asking and telling me what is on the minds of America's youth today, I had a thousand sudden ideas about unholy paradox, about privilege, about a myth of immortality, about the rise of advertising as the prime cultural medium-and then I realized each idea was bullshit. I realized that my sense of what's on the mind of youth is really just what's on my own mind and that me thinking I had insight into the high and low tides of today's young would be as ridiculous as television media showing New Orleans flood victims who are white "finding" food and those who are black "stealing" it. I realized that I can't magically fix the problems that I perceive and that I can't suddenly know the people I feel disconnected from. But if I were going to have any chance of knowing anyone, I'd need to do better than reading about Jennifer Aniston; I'd need to know, to whatever extent possible, myself. If I sit and watch the news, I think, "Who are these aliens I'm trapped on this planet with?" If I walk the streets and travel the roads and express myself, I find that others do the same; the more I have a unique sense of identity to express and the less I attempt to communicate through established channels-the front page of the Times, Larry King, Jay Leno, the Red Sox, NASCAR-the deeper my connection with strangers and the more urgent my need to remember ideas generated from within rather than from without.
Which is how I came to feel inspired by a curious and self-conscious little book, Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art (edited by Jennifer New, Princeton Architectural Press, $25). In the world of the blogosphere, the podcast and the online photo-hosting emporium, a physical notebook can feel devolutionary; scribbling with a pen in the corner while laptops and Sidekicks and iPods whisper waves of broadband and malleable content to each other can feel dorkily Luddite. Yet, until maintaining a blog is as liquid and unconstrained, as open to the whim of a pencil, the tear of page, a dollop of glue-which may eventually happen if we don't all kill, burn and eat each other first-it is tough to compete with the immediacy, intimacy, versatility and electricity-free operation of a journal to record thoughts, ideas, sketches and whimsies.
With excerpts form the journals of the famous (Lynda Barry, David Byrne, Mike Figgis, Steven Holl, Robert ParkeHarrison) and the interesting (electrical engineer Erwin R Boer, geologist Rick Hoblitt, science illustrator Jenny Keller, writer Tucker Shaw) the book, more than positioning "the journal as art," simply refreshes the power, beauty and possibility of knowing ourselves through daily chronicle and tactile sensation. Things mundane, genius and soulful are captured with equal regularity and Drawing From Life urges a dozen innovative ways to think about the story of one's own life-and thus life in a grander, more cooperative sense-whether times be good or very, very bad indeed.
