Art Versus Words

I am very verbose.  I talk way too much, I use 20 words when 5 would do just fine.  In my writing, I could probably cut a few paragraphs out of every post or email.  Pretty much the only negative marks on my report cards from school were “talks too much, distracts other students, is super annoying.”  In true blabbermouth form, I just took five sentences to tell you that I talk too much.  I’ll take another to apologize.  Now it’s six.  Shit.  Sorry, closing in on a dozen now.  I really don’t know when to quit.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dearly departed Grandma Ruthie lately.  In true blabbermouth form, let me tell you a bit about her.  She was married to my Grandpa Bob for over 60 years.  They raised 7 children together.  She earned Masters degrees while raising those 7 children.  She owned a bookstore.  She was a school librarian.  They traveled the world together, amassing a stunning collection of antiques and unique art and she didn’t give one hot shit if her 20 grandchildren flew threw her house full of priceless treasures like drunk howler monkeys.  She was a woman of passion, and a woman of few words, and when it came to art – she didn’t know when to quit.

When she and my Grandpa passed last year, I acquired a few things that were special to me from their expansive collection.  I was telling my coworker about her art and what I had gotten, and he said, “Wow, how much are you going to sell them for?”  I was a bit taken aback.  It hadn’t really occurred to me that they had monetary value.

I’ve never really been materialistic except for that one time when I was 20 and I spent an entire paycheck on a Coach wallet (I still use that wallet every single day more than ten years later, for the record), but now I live in a huge consumer culture.  Most every train station is also a mall twice as big as the mall I grew up going to.  There are shopping centers multiple stories high everywhere you turn.  Their electronic stores are like 10 Best Buys and 8 Targets and a couple Dollar Trees had a torrid polyamorous orgy that resulted in a giant litter full of everything from pencils to puzzles to $8000 televisions to blenders to robots to anime figurines. 

Initially eschewing that madness, this weekend we decided to check out a self-described hipster neighborhood of Tokyo called Shimokitazawa.  It felt a bit like our home of Portland – tons of espresso bars and vintage shops, low-key but quietly bustling at the same time.  We saw so many quirky things that my Grandma would have loved.  I couldn’t quite justify the price so I passed them all by, but I couldn’t help but mentally place them somewhere in what was the ever-shrinking artistic canvas of their home.  We walked past tons of awesome, bright street artwork and graffiti.  It was so cool and weird.  It was so Grandma.

From Shimokitazawa, we decided to hoof it a few miles to Shinjuku, which made up for all of the quaintness and slow-pace of our original destination by… well, being Shinjuku.  A major economic powerhouse also including some well-known red-light areas, it is exactly where I would take anyone who comes to visit us who wants to “see Tokyo”.  It reminds me, on a more aggressive scale, of my Grandma’s house.  So full of so much crazy weird stuff that you can’t focus on anything in particular.  It all just becomes a mass of stimulation.  And, much like my Grandma’s house, you can run through it like a drunk howler monkey.  It’s quite fun and I highly recommend it. 

After meeting up with friends for some drinks and then heading back home, I went through the few hundred pictures I took.  I noticed a strange dichotomy between Shimokitzawa and Shinjuku – the former was quieter, subtler, definitely more low-key.  The latter was in-your-face, unapologetic, and pretty much futuristic in its overall vibe.  What could possibly tie these two together, other than both happening to be in Tokyo?

For most people, probably nothing.  Their differences are stark.  But to me, I thought about how my Grandma had filled her house.  There were neon signs and antique dolls and naked ladies with crocheted pubic hair and beautiful glass ornaments hanging from the rafters and cast-iron motorcycles and pretty much anything else you could imagine.  Some pieces were glitzy and immediately caught your eye – the giant “DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS” neon sign above the dining room table being a clear winner – and some were tucked away in the corners, and you wouldn’t know they were even there unless you were a drunk howler monkey who had careened through the house for your entire life like someone I know (hint: it’s me).

I mentioned before that I am a blabbermouth, which if you have made it this far you begrudgingly know.  I also mentioned my Grandma was a woman of few words.  She was the matriarch of a family of 7 men and 2 women, herself included.  These men, bless their souls, are my dad, uncles, and grandfather and they love to hear themselves talk about as much as I do (it’s genetic, I blame all of them for the length of this and any future posts).  Politics, history, a game of Risk – countless nights their house was filled not only with crazy amounts of cool art and bottomless Oregon wine but a storm of conversation, sometimes heated.  Grandma wouldn’t often chime in, but when she did – goddamn, she shut up all of those uppity sons of hers (sorry, uncles).  She chose her words wisely.  For how much she filled her walls with any and every damn thing, when she made herself heard with her voice – she was not as verbose as her art collection might suggest… but just as powerful.

I remember one time, a few cousins and myself were playing hide and seek.  I’m especially close with a couple cousins, and we had kind of teamed up to win.  Grandma stopped us while we were flying through the kitchen and said, sternly, “You are not mean girls.  Don’t act like mean girls.  Be fair.”  I will never forget that because it put a chill up my spine that still hits me sometimes on those nights that I can’t fall asleep and like to torture myself with everything I’ve ever done wrong from spending too much on that stupid wallet to getting on that motorcycle that one time.

Grandma Ruthie was loud, but not with her voice.  She was quiet, but not with her art.  All things said, she was HEARD.  In one way or another, she was heard. 

I wish so much that I could share this journey with her, but I hope that wherever she is in the universe her energy gets pinged by my energy and she gets a little jolt of what she instilled in me all those years ago.  I hope she also knows that her insane, human-sized cat-bat hybrid statue with a feathered tutu got shipped to Japan and continues to terrify my cat to this very day.  And it doesn’t even have to say a word.

Dichotomy is a beautiful thing.