A review of the Art Czar and 'Bakersfield: Life as it should be'... - By N.L. Belardes
I had a dream the other day:
There stood the Getty Museum with every pretentious ghost of the great dead artists of the world hovering around the museum like dying fireflies. Down below the great hill of the museum, a string of pick-ups peeled off the 405 and into the Getty parking lot.
The fireflies flickered and went out.
Inside each pick-up stood great paintings of Ghengis Khan, towering over each truck like Easter Island heads. Driving the trucks were clones of the Bakersfield Art Czar, all madly laughing, cackling in their joyous glee of invading billboard artistry.
The Getty police came swooping out of the very stone building like golems. They ripped themselves from the architecture, rocky hands with uzis, ready to spray the Ghengis billboards with holes the size of human eyeballs.
The mad cackling continued.
A crowd gathered.
Bullhorns whipped into the air in a call to arms from the grinning cloned Czars of the underground art world. They stood at the Great Wall of the Getty, and in a torrent of words, hailed, “Let us in to the big kahuna cow patty in the sky!”
Oh and don’t think the guns didn’t cock with stony fingers on triggers. Many aimed at the angry paintings while a few targeted the bullhorns, and even one on the leading Art Czar, who didn't yell at all but leaned on a truck without a bullhorn, his jaw tightening while he flipped a cigarette bummed from a fanatical UCLA student from the Midwest; Midwest of Hollywood that is.
And then I woke up.
What could such a dream mean?
I had just been to the best art show the Empty Space had yet seen (check out the media blitz before the show). I had slept a few uneasy chest cold ughh nights contemplating the imperfections of Bakersfield city life. No, this show wasn’t necessarily in the Getty-style artwork of the masters, but it was in the drive and ambition of artists as hungry to storm the walls of art show success. And weren't the many buzzing ghosts of masters once hungry? One has to have the desire even before making such a conquering climb, right?
The flames of artistic passion were at an all-time high in the Bakersfield art scene.
Sure I’ve been to other galleries in town. Money flows through those like the Kern River as of late: bubbling up the banks, California gold flowing through the city center like coins rolling downhill. And so expensive to buy just a trickle. Or is it just in a name?
Let me get back to Bakersfield’s underground art movement. The themed movement that emanates from a collective spirit, the art shows that spring up at a local free theatre like strange Alice in Wonderland plants twisting from an ironic landscape of beckoning themes. And this like no other, because just like the ill tapestries of Wonderland’s maniacal scenery, there came a recent mocking of our own very city that in reality is just as confusing, yet as simple in thought as if unraveling Lewis Carroll’s speech through medicated prose between book covers:
Hear the Duchess? She growls: Be what you would seem to be—or, if you'd like it put more simply—Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Oh, you don’t get it?
Neither did Bakersfield’s Chamber of Commerce when they made up “Bakersfield: Life as it should be”.
It’s simple if you can see between the excess verbage to the moral of the Wonderland story.
Our local Art Czar (and other brave souls) showed his mocking understanding through artistic merit in a city which he, like the rest of us love, when he triumphantly skipped around the very crippled movement of the city marketing engine—a thump whump senile footstep no different than an old man with a cane in our own city, hands fumbling for a grip on reality, lost in illusion from fanciful dreams of a perfect youth that just never was.
Ahh, the good old days.
Were they?
The city wants you to think the good old days are now. They’re the old man you know. Do I have to remind you? See the city trip off the curb?
The Art Czar: he rebelled and said, “More cow pies in the sky!” Then hung them.
Lynched!
Notice the proximity between pie in the sky and relief
He exclaimed, “This city is perfect!” Then erected artwork in the form of moths flying to the burning red light district of an illusion-filled Confederate-conservative toolbox city.
Are you drawn to the light, to the light of an elusive gilded truth… oh the gilded age of Bakersfield once again? Kern County once trapped European youth exclaiming, “Rosedale! A Garden of Eden! Tranquil! Noble! Lush!” And those very minstrel youths turned into the first Lords of Bakersfield.
What will the city create now through such illusion and lures?
And the Art Czar said, “I’ll show you roadmaps.” And he hung those too: the illusions of a grand dream that pisses away high crime, valley fever laden, smog-filled reality for a big round sucker licked by those hungry for candy dreams. Do they think they’re in a desert?
This is a golden valley.
Or is it?
When the valley turns gold, it’s fire season.
The water is gold. The oil is gold. The industry is treasure. The people are shit. Unless creamy drippings from the Häagen-Dazs Oaks (one of our ‘life as it should be’ developments for the Bakersield country club rich and famous). Are you?
And so life goes.
I commend the Art Czar and the many of the Damned who braved city storms to stand up in polite mockery of the hellish wheels of the Bakersfield City Marketing engine.
I applaud.
********
More artwork from those artists who are perhaps damned to live life as it should be:
monopoly culture: real life
fighting culture: rough life
|
drug culture: sick life
the damned: our life
Don’t forget to attend “Stories From Dust” at 7PM Wednesday night at Russo’s Books at the Marketplace—for a literary treat. You'll learn about machismo there...
There stood the Getty Museum with every pretentious ghost of the great dead artists of the world hovering around the museum like dying fireflies. Down below the great hill of the museum, a string of pick-ups peeled off the 405 and into the Getty parking lot.
The fireflies flickered and went out.
Inside each pick-up stood great paintings of Ghengis Khan, towering over each truck like Easter Island heads. Driving the trucks were clones of the Bakersfield Art Czar, all madly laughing, cackling in their joyous glee of invading billboard artistry.
The Getty police came swooping out of the very stone building like golems. They ripped themselves from the architecture, rocky hands with uzis, ready to spray the Ghengis billboards with holes the size of human eyeballs.
The mad cackling continued.
A crowd gathered.
Bullhorns whipped into the air in a call to arms from the grinning cloned Czars of the underground art world. They stood at the Great Wall of the Getty, and in a torrent of words, hailed, “Let us in to the big kahuna cow patty in the sky!”
Oh and don’t think the guns didn’t cock with stony fingers on triggers. Many aimed at the angry paintings while a few targeted the bullhorns, and even one on the leading Art Czar, who didn't yell at all but leaned on a truck without a bullhorn, his jaw tightening while he flipped a cigarette bummed from a fanatical UCLA student from the Midwest; Midwest of Hollywood that is.
And then I woke up.
What could such a dream mean?
I had just been to the best art show the Empty Space had yet seen (check out the media blitz before the show). I had slept a few uneasy chest cold ughh nights contemplating the imperfections of Bakersfield city life. No, this show wasn’t necessarily in the Getty-style artwork of the masters, but it was in the drive and ambition of artists as hungry to storm the walls of art show success. And weren't the many buzzing ghosts of masters once hungry? One has to have the desire even before making such a conquering climb, right?
The flames of artistic passion were at an all-time high in the Bakersfield art scene.
Sure I’ve been to other galleries in town. Money flows through those like the Kern River as of late: bubbling up the banks, California gold flowing through the city center like coins rolling downhill. And so expensive to buy just a trickle. Or is it just in a name?
Let me get back to Bakersfield’s underground art movement. The themed movement that emanates from a collective spirit, the art shows that spring up at a local free theatre like strange Alice in Wonderland plants twisting from an ironic landscape of beckoning themes. And this like no other, because just like the ill tapestries of Wonderland’s maniacal scenery, there came a recent mocking of our own very city that in reality is just as confusing, yet as simple in thought as if unraveling Lewis Carroll’s speech through medicated prose between book covers:
Hear the Duchess? She growls: Be what you would seem to be—or, if you'd like it put more simply—Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
Oh, you don’t get it?
Neither did Bakersfield’s Chamber of Commerce when they made up “Bakersfield: Life as it should be”.
It’s simple if you can see between the excess verbage to the moral of the Wonderland story.
Our local Art Czar (and other brave souls) showed his mocking understanding through artistic merit in a city which he, like the rest of us love, when he triumphantly skipped around the very crippled movement of the city marketing engine—a thump whump senile footstep no different than an old man with a cane in our own city, hands fumbling for a grip on reality, lost in illusion from fanciful dreams of a perfect youth that just never was.
Ahh, the good old days.
Were they?
The city wants you to think the good old days are now. They’re the old man you know. Do I have to remind you? See the city trip off the curb?
The Art Czar: he rebelled and said, “More cow pies in the sky!” Then hung them.
Lynched!
Notice the proximity between pie in the sky and relief
He exclaimed, “This city is perfect!” Then erected artwork in the form of moths flying to the burning red light district of an illusion-filled Confederate-conservative toolbox city.
Are you drawn to the light, to the light of an elusive gilded truth… oh the gilded age of Bakersfield once again? Kern County once trapped European youth exclaiming, “Rosedale! A Garden of Eden! Tranquil! Noble! Lush!” And those very minstrel youths turned into the first Lords of Bakersfield.
What will the city create now through such illusion and lures?
And the Art Czar said, “I’ll show you roadmaps.” And he hung those too: the illusions of a grand dream that pisses away high crime, valley fever laden, smog-filled reality for a big round sucker licked by those hungry for candy dreams. Do they think they’re in a desert?
This is a golden valley.
Or is it?
When the valley turns gold, it’s fire season.
The water is gold. The oil is gold. The industry is treasure. The people are shit. Unless creamy drippings from the Häagen-Dazs Oaks (one of our ‘life as it should be’ developments for the Bakersield country club rich and famous). Are you?
And so life goes.
I commend the Art Czar and the many of the Damned who braved city storms to stand up in polite mockery of the hellish wheels of the Bakersfield City Marketing engine.
I applaud.
********
More artwork from those artists who are perhaps damned to live life as it should be:
monopoly culture: real life
fighting culture: rough life
|drug culture: sick life
the damned: our life
Don’t forget to attend “Stories From Dust” at 7PM Wednesday night at Russo’s Books at the Marketplace—for a literary treat. You'll learn about machismo there...
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Tuesday, June 27, 2006.
You can leave your response.
what a great show indeed
that art czar, mr. ashley, is just genius... i wonder if your dream will really come true.
ALL HAIL THE ASH!:)
leave a response