As I sit here, waiting for 4pm, typing, still as a word, my body governed by mid-menstrual paranoia and lower-abdomen agony, I wonder about clouds.
I tell school friends that I don’t have time to walk, study or chat with them. I clammer on with writing. I tell people like Nick Dodd and Keith Serry that I simply don’t have enough time to be their POP Montreal media volunteer this year. I continue motionlessly. I tell myself I don’t have time to rub lotion into my screaming heels. I think about clouds.
And if I think about clouds long enough I will eventually arrive at one cloud in particular. It is a nice cloud.
But it is wrong to call it “a cloud”.
It is “The Cloud".
“Stephan The Cloud,”
to be wordier.
And then I wonder, what if Stephan weren’t a cloud? What if he were a flower?
There is a band—a group, really—called Windom Earle. But they weren’t always that way. The brainchild of Stephan The Cloud is not as brainy as its brainfather.
People talk about postmodernism today and they say that it is the reflection on all previous theories and thoughts. They say that it is a sort of perma-present self-awareness, like I am writing stuff down right now but I am aware of how it will be received and remembered by my readers before I even finish this sentence. See?
Anything that falls under “Postmodern Art” is really just bits and pieces of art by other people that has been cut up and replaced in new and unusual orders, forcing us art-consumers to breath it all in at once, like a plurality of poisons, or a potpourri of beautiful—albeit dead and dried-out—flowers.
Take, for example, disco dancin’ DJ mixes. Today, quite popular. They represent something of a postmodern streak in pop culture, what with their endless sampling and repetitive be-be-beats.
Stephan The Cloud loves literature by Don Delillo.
But that’s not all. At least one of his favourite types of comic reads are those that incorporate any lack of authentic drawings by the author/illustrator. In fact, the fewer the drawings, the better. For images, in comics, Stephan The Cloud truly enjoys cut up heads, legs, eyes, arms and bodies of people in magazines that are then re-assembled in disproportionate and asymmetrical ways to represent the characters in the comics he reads. His eyes devour their cut-up, Frankenstein-Creature bodies like a cannibal.
But let’s relaunch the Windom Earle moment. Yes, it is a group. Some may say they love to parody. Any Kelly Clarkson song that emits from Stephan The Cloud’s lips is hilarity. Windom Earle does covers. And originals. “But covers?” You say, “Aren’t they uncreative?” But in Earle World, as in Postmodernism, it is understood that anything repeated or redone, is never really art unless it is repeated or redone in a different way, at once commenting on the original version of the “thing” and expressing something altogether new and creative by way of form and format. The content of this new expression of an old thing may at first appear the same, but thanks to the clever spinning of it—that is, the new form and format, the new method of delivery, the new packaging—the content, upon digestion, will also be modified into something completely new, maybe even oppositional from its original version.
1) I eat cheese by ripping open the plastic with my teeth and noshing on the bar, utensil-free.
2) I shave the cheese ever so delicately and create a replica of Louis Pasteur’s portrait on my plate, eating his hair, eyes, nose and mouth—in that order—with chopsticks.
The content of activities 1) and 2) is the same: cheese. The form and format, however, are quite different, rendering the entire experience and the emotions attached to it equally if not more different. The difference between 1) and 2) becomes so great that, at least in my mind, the content also becomes different. And though I did not create anything different than the core object of cheese—it is, then, now and always, cheese—I still created something. Therefore, since I created something, that something is art.
And the same goes for Stephan The Cloud and his clever group, The Windom Earles. They are postmodern? Maybe. But as an audience member, as a thinker of clouds, as a fan of Stephan, I can say, first hand, that of all the cut-up, recreated, reused and redone things Windom Earle throws into the air, not one plurality of it is poisonous. For I have breathed it in, and it is all a sweet, sweet potpourri of pleasure.
