Please sir, can I have some art?

So my new office is finally done. Up until now I’ve been working in my dining room but we found some surprise money and converted the old upstairs kitchen into an office. This is the one space in the house that is truly mine and I plan to make it not just a workspace, but a refuge. That being the case I plan to decorate it in a way that makes me sigh with contentment whenever I look around the room. 

Yesterday we went to the Queen West Art Crawl - an event where hundreds of artists set up booths in a downtown park - in the hopes of finding something to put in my office that would make me smile. Howard took Mae off to the playground while I looked around and I soon found a booth full of beautiful steel sculptures, candle holders, and coat hooks.  I quickly found two items that I liked and settled down to the task of deciding which to get.  I stood there looking back and forth between the two items – a wall sconce for a candle at fifty-five dollars and a tree shaped candlestick at a whopping thirty-five dollars. I stood there in a state of mental paralysis and as I tried to make my decision I noticed that I was getting more and more anxious and miserable. I was feeling sad, angry, guilty, even a little hopeless.  When it came down to it I just couldn’t feel okay about buying something that would be purely ornamental.  More than that, I couldn’t feel okay about buying art.

I love art. I grew up with a deep appreciation for it. My great grandmother and my grandfather were both graduates of the Ontario College of Art and my living room holds four of my great grandmother’s works.  I want my house to be full of art. But the thought of spending money on it fills me with a witch’s brew of negative emotions.

Is it that I don’t think I deserve it? Is that what it comes down to?

When I was growing up we didn’t have much. My clothes were either second hand or hand-me-downs and things like family vacations and Scholastic Books were the stuff of fairy-tales.  I understood that these were things that other kids had that I couldn’t have. But we were okay. We were always fed and my mom even managed to get us into some dance and drama classes. I didn’t feel poor. I’m sure it helped that I had no interest in designer clothes.

When I left home at the age of sixteen I was living on student welfare and after I graduated I lived on welfare for another three years.  My parents would do what they could, giving me groceries here and there so, once again, I never starved.  But I always felt the scrutiny of my caseworker. When I moved in with new roommates she first accused me of lying about the number of roommates I had and then accused me of sleeping with my male roommate. 

The rules for how you were expected to job search were designed not to help you find work, but rather to ensure that you spend your days running around town in the most inefficient way possible. Let me give you an example. I was required to inquire about at least three jobs a day, not on average but each and every day. That meant that if I approached twenty places on Monday, I still had to go out every other day of the week or else I would get in trouble.  Of those three places, each one had to be at a different address. This meant that if you were looking for retail work, as I was, you couldn’t go to several places in the mall in one day and leave it at that without getting a warning letter. So I could approach fifty stores in the mall in one day, and not only would I have to keep looking every other day of the week, I would have to go to at least two other locations in that day in order to meet my requirements for welfare. This is not only inefficient, it is a waste of precious bus tickets and utterly demoralizing.

To add insult to injury, most of the programs designed to help people get back to work or refresh their skills were only available to those on unemployment insurance. 

From welfare I went straight to OSAP (student loans), which was marginally better but I still felt the powers that be breathing down my neck telling me that I was not permitted to have anything more than what they deemed acceptable.  Ten years after graduation we are still paying off that debt.

So after all that time, I am left with the legacy of living on little.  Where I get filled with anxiety at the thought of spending fifty-five dollars - fifty-five dollars that I know I have – on some art for my wall.

Because people like me don’t get to buy art.

This is what so many people don’t understand about living without.  It’s not just about struggling to pay the bills. It’s not just about the immediate hardships. It’s about the deep psychological impact of being under constant scrutiny. From the welfare workers to the student loan officers to the person behind you in the checkout line passing judgment on your food stamp purchases.  People who rely on any kind of social assistance are told that if you’re poor, you’d better be damn poor. 

So here I am. With my own house, new clothes on my back and organic kale in my crisper, still short on funds but with a much-improved standard of living. Money in the bank earmarked for making my office a place of solace, staring at a candlestick and waiting for someone to tell me it’s okay for me to have nice things.

"Han shot first!" (or why I don't heart George Lucas)

Every year H and I volunteer at HotDocs and, as such, we get to take in some first-run documentaries.  The other night I went to see The People vs. George Lucas.  This is a film about first generation Star Wars fans and all the ways in which they have felt betrayed by George Lucas.  Between the changes made for the special edition of “A New Hope” (and the subsequent refusal to make available the original version) and the horror that was “Phantom Menace” (what menace I ask, the only menace I felt was the menacing threat of dull politics and 3 hours of Jar Jar Binks) it’s not hard to understand why these dedicated fans felt like they’d been smacked in the face with C3PO’s dismembered arm. 

George Lucas has always said that the original release was not fully true to his vision and he had always wanted to be able to go back and ‘fix’ it.  Here’s what he has to say about the future of said original:

“So what ends up being important in my mind is what the DVD version is going to look like, because that's what everybody is going to remember. The other versions will disappear. Even the 35 million tapes of Star Wars out there won't last more than 30 or 40 years. A hundred years from now, the only version of the movie that anyone will remember will be the DVD version [of the Special Edition], and you'll be able to project it on a 20' by 40' screen with perfect quality. I think it's the director's prerogative, not the studio's to go back and reinvent a movie.”

So the crux of the matter here is this, once an artist has released their work to the public, who owns it?  Does the creator have the unalienable right to revisit, revise and permanently alter the work?  Or does it become the property of the audience/reader/culture?  Lucas argues that there were external limitations such as finance that prevented him from fully realizing his vision but I would argue that any piece of art is a product not only of the artist’s vision but also of how he or she expresses it within the confines within which she or he is forced to work.  There are many examples of published/released works that were made better because of the limitations placed on the creator.  Even Joss Whedon states in this article,

“Basically, the Network and I had different ideas about what the tone of the show would be. . . So back into the writer cave I went, wondering why I put up with this when I can make literally dozens of dollars making internet movies. . . [partly because] They're not wrong. Oh, we don't see eye-to-eye on everything, but wanting the first episodes to be exciting and accessible is not exactly Satanic. . . This kind of back and forth has happened on every show I've done, so if you liked those, chances are that was a part of why.”

So Whedon is basically saying that the diversions from his original version required by the Network have helped him to create the works we all love.  He further goes on to say,

“The show is really coming together now, in a way that I believe excites us and satisfies the Network. Of course, I have no idea if anybody else will like it, but I have the same faith in the staff, the crew and the remarkable cast that I always did. More, in fact. . . The episode we're shooting now I wrote as fast as anything I have before, not because I had to (although, funny side-note: I had to) but because I couldn't stop the words from coming. Because I can feel the show talking to me; delighting, scaring and occasionally even offending me. It's alive. Alive!”

So not only are the shows we love the product of Joss working within the demands of the network, but he finds himself energized by the new directions in which it takes him and loving the final product himself.

Of course when we’re talking about Star Wars, it’s not just that Lucas decided to re-vision the original films, it’s that he refuses to make the original versions available.  This isn’t just embracing the opportunity to do what you couldn’t do the first time (and of course recreate it based on who you are now rather than who you were then which is a whole other issue).  No, it’s telling the fans that they were wrong to love the original and if they want to be able to hold on to these films that formed a major part of their childhood and cultural landscape, well they can fuck themselves because little Georgie can’t stomach anyone preferring the “rough-cut” over the version that better serves his ego.  If he truly respected his fans he would sell the Special Edition along-side the original.  His refusal to do so is pure revisionism.  And with a movie as big as Star Wars, with all of its ensuing cultural impact, it’s more than revisionist film-making, it’s revisionist history.

So now let’s go back to something else Whedon said in the above quote, “I have the same faith in the staff, the crew and the remarkable cast that I always did.”  This brings me to another point.  George Lucas did not make these films alone.  There were hundreds of people working their creative and skilled asses off to create the effects, characters, sound and everything else that goes into making a great sci-fi film.  To just CGI over them and effectively erase all of their work (some of it award winning) is both disrespectful and downright insulting.

Finally, all art is a reflection of both a moment in the creator’s life and a period in history.  Look at any Hollywood remake next to the original on which it is based and you will see what I mean.  Star Wars spoke to a specific generation at a particular point in history and that is what gives it its cultural significance.  If Lucas wanted to be able go back and ‘fix’ his films as he did, he should have kept them in the vault until he thought they were ready.  Or take a page out of Whedon’s book.  When he was displeased with the 1992 Buffy film directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui he accepted the existence of this hokey interpretation of his script and quietly waited until he could give us his own vision in the form of the TV series which picked up more or less where the film left off. 

What it comes down to is this: all creative endeavours are the product of the artist’s inspiration and skill shaped and informed by a million outside influences.  Whether it’s financial constraints, availability of materials or the humidity of an artist’s studio, art is not created or consumed in a vacuum.  While it’s still in your hands you can re-work it ‘til the cows come home (although many artists and writers will tell you that left to their own devices they would over revise their works into an early grave) but once you release it into the wilds of public consumption it is part of the culture and it does, in fact, belong to the public.

And that, my lovelies, is my exceptionally long rant on Star Wars revisionism.

Now tell me, what do you think?
(holy crap did I just write a massive post about Star Wars??? WTF!)