This House has Many Hearts

“I may not know much about art, but I know what I like!”

"High Art"

Art. My introduction to “art,” like most kids, was in kindergarten. Finger painting with that goo was fun and I loved the smell of it. None of those spaghetti doodlings were worth a second comment. Why would they be? I was five.

We had various art teachers come into our classes to teach us a few things and what I remember of it were not the projects created but the fact the entire class sat there, pretty clam while they snipped or glued. It was calming for the whole class...and for the teacher who wasn't yelling at us to shut up or to stay seated.

The only higher powered class I took in art was at RIC, a 101 course probably labeled, “Art 101, For Boobs and Vulgarians.” I remarked while sitting there one time, as I cut construction paper, that, “I hadn't done this since I was 10 years old.”

As for even higher art, I shoved my damn foot in my mouth one night trying to keep up with a few people at an East Side party once. The house was very nice, though you wouldn't know it from the outside. All homes on the East Side look like they were owned by sea captains or slavers from times past. Wait..they were! Anyways, the inside of this one must've had a team of competent decorators appoint it tastefully. My idea of décor is vacuuming once in a while and cleaning the toothpaste splatter off the bathroom mirror.

It was Christmas Eve, my brother and I were invited to this party over by Brown U. and it was attended by the most liberal types you can imagine: commies, gays, lesbians, actors from Trinity Rep, some guy from who worked for Ira Magaziner and a damn cute, spaced-out freshman college girl from RISD who hailed from Skokie, IL. Skokie produces art students?

I didn't know any of them so I had to make the best of a Christmas Eve by schmoozing it up lest I sit in the corner, brooding and sipping rum till I was numb.

I ambled into the kitchen and find some people passionately talking of the aesthetic experience. You've experienced that at one time or another. You see, hear, taste or do something that makes you go “Ahhhhhhh...nailed it!” That's it. You're now an accomplished artist!

Anyways, these people are going on about artists I've never heard about so I better keep up, ya know, or else I'll be branded a dipshit peasant that needs a good scrubbing and comb.

I mouth off this, “Look, if swinging a cat by it's tail give you an aesthetic experience, it's valid.”

Things got quiet then for a few seconds.

But, this smaller, older gentlemen, who I never met before, comes up to me to pull me over to a corner to interrogate me further on my learned opinions. I just repeat what I said, that anything can give you that feeling, not matter how high minded or depraved it seems.

“Really...” he says.

At that moment, my brother comes by and this older guy says, “Ken!” They chat for a few seconds when my brother tells him I am his brother. I had no idea this guy and my brother were friends.

The gentleman looks at me and says, “YOU'RE his brother?”

I then ask who he is.

“I”m Mike Fink, I teach Literature, Film...anything at RISD. I've been doing it for 50 years now. He said he was celebrating tonight's holiday along with the release of his movie, a documentary on Jewish art that was suppose to make the art movie house rounds. 

A circuit breaker in my head flipped. THIS guy spent his life in the arts and I'm trying to argue with him? It was like I had been at CalTech, arguing with astrophysicists about the red shift in the Eta Carinae star system. I was dead meat from the get-go. I immediately stopped myself from expressing any more opinions on art.

The rest of the night went better once I shut the hell up.

But to tell the truth, Mike wasn't a up-snooted dick. He was generally interested in me, my life and whatnot. I came to know him better as he would visit our house. We'd sit around the kitchen table just talking of movies, life...what not. He was great for telling the more gossipy stories of major artists, Hollywood stars he came by in his life. If you wanted to know someone who was fair and very open, he was it. I enjoyed the time when he came by.

He did something odd once. On his first visit to our home, he asked if he could walk around. I had asked why. He said he wanted to get a “feel” for it, our family history, to find a theme to the lives lived there. “I like looking for psychological ghosts in people's homes, the history. The stories lying about.” I was a bit put off because I sensed this guy was good at absorbing the truth around him from just looking. Christ, it felt like having Sigmund Freud look at your family album, your checkbook, going through your garbage...and then pronouncing you certifiably “crazy as bat shit” and even willing to stamp that on your forehead too. Our homes and personal lives aren't meant to be dissected like this. My home can be a deep, personal shelter where I can let it all hang out w/o the world knowing just who.I.really.am.

I followed Mike from room to room. He glanced, picked up things and muttered, “Hmmm” to himself at times. He pulled drawers open and fiddled around in them, picked up books and flipped through them. I felt as if there were a search warrant being executed in a most polite manner.

“I have to see the bedrooms.” he demands.

“Why them? What' so important about them?”

“That's the core” he says..to himself mostly.

When he was done, I had to ask, “Well...?”

“You want the truth?” he says.

Yes. I had to know...

“This home is disjointed, askew, fractured and corroborate. Yet...there are islands of creativity...astuteness...precociousness. There's an enormous amount of free thinking here and there too. Independence...I can tell by the books, music..by the piles of various 'hobbies' lying about”

I thought this: “Jesus H. Christ. He just distilled down the very essence of this family and it's history from one walk through.” I didn't admit to him that his accuracy was pretty close. God forbid! I was just rather surprised he could glean as much as he could from just looking. Most people would see just clutter.

Well, that's what you get from someone whose job it is to discern anything that hits his eye, and teaches it at RISD and makes movies about it. 
It felt sort of like this. Tangia in Poltergeist. Click pic and watch!