old as the new new is nothing new. i spent an afternoon with old documents and old receipts, from the 1830s to the 1930s. it is a long-planned project which got derailed in November, but it looks good. it looks something like what i had in mind when i commenced it last summer. lots of old scrawl, dramatic pen and pencil strokes, crayon and boffo colored logos and such. of course it is just ephemera, junk even, and were it modern it would go unnoticed. ephemera is like that. nostalgia kicks in and objects of no merit assume mythic stature. maybe not mythic but the romance of nostalgia projects stature onto non-meritorious things. things which survive sometimes rise to the level of Accidental Art, simply on account of having SURVIVED across a range of eras and epochs.
human beings are granted prestige in similar ways, a cultural fetish i regard with some disdain. i have nothing against the elderly, but i have always regarded the ritual of applauding human beings simply on account of their advanced age to be a tasteless custom, questionable at best. “meet Mable, she’s 102.” [applause from the gathered audience]. why? why applause? is not applauding the elderly tantamount to booing the dead? why not go out to the cemetery and boo the dead, boo those losers who didn’t make it as far as Mable, who didn’t get as lucky with the genes and the environment and the mercurial vagaries of human life that allow some of us to live seemingly forever while others perish on the vine.
at any rate, the old documents project is about art, not so much old things. i feel the same way about my own receipts projects, which focus on volume and quantity in the way that only the infinite column inch of the Internet could accommodate, and on accidental art that arises from said quantity. some of the receipts in my collection are masterpieces, i think, but of course most of them are mundane records of insignificant decision-making processes and ephemeral routines documented for not even the feeblest façade of meaningful posterity.
some of the depression-era documents are interesting. why would anyone save those? a source of pride, or prejudice? these are documents from employment agencies and emergency relief councils which dictate who gets work and who does not.
one document is a membership card for the “Unemployed League of Lower Luzerne County.” It was no joke at the time, I guess, but today the “Unemployed League” sounds like a name for a rock band, or a bar. And Luzerne County evokes the word “Loser”, which might just be a reflection of my mental machinations, but it adds something to the humor of the matter.
anyway, i gotta go. i was writing a piano piece earlier, a seemingly complicated score, and i might want to go home and resume that before i forget what i was doing.
