Aspirations of outlying

I've found a new thing to aspire to in my work. Or maybe it's an old thing. Or maybe it's what I've always wanted.

So much art happens because that sort of art is happening now. That isn't to say that it's necessarily bad--the last decade's wave of superhero movies produced a few with actual artistic merit; some of the young adult fantasy literature flooding the market right now is actually worth reading; there are even some Dutch oil paintings of historically insignificant aristocrats that are enriching to look at, in their own way--and I'm certainly not saying that I hope never to cash in on a convenient industry trend.

What I mean to say is that a lot of art that is produced seems inevitable. Ideas floating around the culture collide randomly like molecules and react in ways that are random and original, but predictable. (This happens in more practical spheres like science and politics as well.) When zombies became a "thing" they spread, zombie-like, across the culture and combined with everything. It produced some interesting combinations such as zombie romantic comedies, zombie adaptations of classic literature, and zombie Shakespeare kung fu musical theater*, but that says more about the zombie image's penetration than anything else. The question isn't whether or not something will happen, but who will do it.

On Friday night I took the time out to go see The World's End with Girlfriend, and when the credits rolled I said to her that it was nice to see a movie that, if these specific people hadn't decided to do exactly what they did, would not have happened. I don't think the stars were aligned to produce a movie about a bittersweet, nostalgic midlife pub crawl in a town that's been taken over by robots. Edgar Wright and company made that happen.

That's what I'd like to do. Maybe not exclusively, but I would like to add at least one thing to the culture that wasn't just going to happen anyway. I don't think I'm just talking about "creativity" either. Or "originality" for that matter. There is plenty of both at work in the main stream of culture. And tasting the zeitgeist and knowing what art will speak perfectly to the moment is another ability I would like to have. But it's a special thing to find a combination of ideas that works that lies outside of the main currents. Something like that may not be imitated--and perhaps shouldn't--and may only be remembered as an intriguing footnote at most.

If God had delegated the creation of life, and I had been involved, I would be proud to have created the platypus, perhaps as much as the redwood or the tyrannosaurus.

* My thesis aside, I admit that if Qui Nguyen didn't write Living Dead in Denmark it probably wouldn't have happened.