Some New Fangled System (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 June 2014.

A lot of these decisions that we're making right now are not unlike the decisions made by translators before they get started on the translation.

It's the question of how we translate the vision from its current, almost-incomprehensible form into something more defined that nonetheless does justice to the original. A.D. Melville chose to render the dactylic hexameter of Ovid into blank verse with occasional rhyming couplets.

"What is painting but the act of embracing
by means of art the surface of the pool?" - Alberti

Any choice is going to lose some of the richness of the original.

So, the question to be asked at this point is whether approaching it in this way--with the real-life Art and Will as the main characters--is preserving something essential about our underlying theme or is it just a "new fangled" attempt to avoid the sheer difficulty of writing something. Regardless of which it is, I think a case can be made for the former.

As we've discussed at length, one of the main motifs in the work is renaming and false identities. It feels a little disingenous to explore our characters' fakery without acknowledging our own--the idea that we, like them, are adopting false identities or avatars in order to achieve our ends in a circuitous way.

And that this inauthenticity or fraudulence is a fundamental characteristic of the age in which we live.

I have no idea what documentary Joe was trying to make, but as I look back about the material he compiled, I think that was the direction he was going. We were the main characters in his documentary. That's another critical theme: that satellite technology makes us behave as if we were famous, as if we are the main characters. That's pitiful if it isn't acknowledged and claimed artistically. But this postmodern approach does take responsibility for that central pretense.

And it opens the door to some pretty pathetic/tragic/comic details, depending on your interpretation. Your experiments in pursuing fame. My writing these songs and then sitting on them until I was pushing 40. Joe starting the documentary and then losing all the footage. If we go with one or more traditional approaches to writing this story, I feel like we are amputating a large percentage of what makes the story so strange and beautiful.

Wow, quite the response...dinner time, so I'm going to close. I do think this is a critical point at which to have this conversation.

And there is always the third option: that the two options are not mutually exclusive.