The Gentle Art of Art Smash
Two things are great. Making two things into one thing can sometimes be even better.
I made a choo-choo. It goes chugga-chugga. It runs on standard gauge tracks with a non-standard schedule and pulls like a cracker on Christmas. Watch me don my sweaty tunic to shovel my metaphorical coal into its fiery maw. Stand back to admire the loud and confident music it produces—a throaty and emphatic chorus of combustion that needs no ovation. Rattle your jewelry if you’d like, but this train needs no encouragement from distant balconies. It vibes to the sound of its own voice, arms chugging, chimney belching as it shimmies on the horizon of my mind. An ancient vapor of cultural import, it is beautifully earnest and tear-jerkingly sublime. It is a fully-realized marvel of my rapidly receding mind.
Look! I made another choo-choo! This one goes chika-chika. It lurks on the rail with eyes shifty and wild, like some rabid raccoon in a street drain at noon. A nervous, cheeky mischief-maker, it sweats at the edges of your vision with a devious giggle. The chika-chika is a midnight service with daytime dreams, slithering and wiggling and pulling on the horn. There is none more brazen, more salacious, more impishly bold. It is a magnificent piece of engineering at the curb of my station. A wonder of my brain ages. This train, this train—it is my ambition on full throttle.
Two trains leave the station.
What if…?
What if…?
What if I smashed chika-chika into chugga-chugga? What kind of mess would that make? What kind of glory would that create? There once was a guy called Head-on-Joe1, famous for his staged train crashes, there’s probably some appetite for Head-on-Janeen? God knows I have the taste for the spectacle. The curiosity. The destructive gene in my constructive DNA. What if, what if, what if!?
My God Complex really isn’t that complex. Two trains of thought enter and one mangled masterpiece leaves (in theory). By holding chugga in one hand and chika in another, I hold the potential for complete and utter chaos. For ruination, for unmitigated beautiful disaster. It is the what-if-ication of the process that is the magic of the create-if-ication of the thing. The blending, the hybridization, the mix-and-match menu-ing of creation. It’s how we ended up with pugs.
We are the engineers and our furnaces are blazing. Let’s smash some stuff! Notice how I just pulled you into this? You want to watch—you’re fascinated. “Is she really going to crash chugga-chugga into chika-chika? She seemed so smitten with both?”
Yes. This is how it works.
You make stuff.
You break stuff.
You show stuff.
The end.
Silence. Shhhh. OK. Now here goes. Chugga starts chugging, chika starts chiking. Choof-choof, chuff-chuff. My eyes dart from one to the other as the speed begins to rise and the air crackles with a sense of the impending orchestral doom-times. Don’t worry—there will be no last-minute squealing of brakes. There is no damsel in distress tied to these tracks to squeal for. There will be no nick-of-time line switch to divert the impact. It’s dead-on-head-on and there will be no cut to black or blurring of distressing images to protect the sensitive.
This is really happening.
There is an eagle scream of steel merging with manifest destiny—or manifest destruction, we’ll see. Sparks of incandescent glory and fiery contemplation fill my vision board. The marriage is consummated with the cataclysmic sigh of chugga and chika into something new, something pure, something, well…look at it. It’s twisted. An amalgam. A mashup. Viciously damaged yet newborn and innocent. What is it what is it what is it? Is it good? Is it true? Is it a phoenix stretching to rise, or a dud being super-duddy?
Wouldn’t you like to know? Wouldn’t you like to know about my nooga-chooga?
I’ll bet you would, but Grasshopper, it’s time you learned to smash your own trains. Eyes offa chooga! Don’t go looking for YOUR magic in MY debris field.
You are the station master and engineer of all your trains, I am the station master and engineer of mine. Stage the crashes. Do it on purpose. Try not to lose an eye—or your life—from wayward smash shrapnel. Sift through the wreckage or resulting fusion and put into commission what works, send what doesn’t to the scrap heap of creation, or keep on Hulk-smashing things into other things.
Repeat until you reach the end of the line.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
Via Jerry Saltz reply to his own tweet
On Rotation: “The Night Bell With Lightning” by David Lynch and from the album Crazy Clown Time. If you’re looking for a David Lynch feel in your home for exactly one hour and eight minutes, play this album.
I think my favorite part of this video is the set she’s interviewed in matches Mila. Also, I love this movie.
“Maybe I should put this hard science stuff aside and work on something fun like a water gun?”
Enter the Super Soaker. And there was much (soaked) rejoicing.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
From this article: Joe Connolly staged more than 70 wrecks and destroyed at least 146 locomotives between 1896 and 1932. He even earned the nickname “Head-On Joe.”