everyday is a child with teeth #4: origin story
I went to see the Ed Ruscha retrospective at MoMA last week. It was fantastic. Even seeing his schoolwork felt exciting, which I only mention because a few months ago I was complaining (to myself, in my mind) about that same concept after seeing the Ruth Asawa show at the Whitney (it’s not for me!). It was thrilling to see how early on he found that LANGUAGE and WORDS were his “thing,” but the thing that most struck me was the absolute perfect execution of the work, and the insanely bold or is crisp a better word or is vibrant a better word or was it the fact that the colors appear on the canvas as the purest versions of themselves meaning you can’t imagine their creation or their application and can only consider that they’ve simply always been there.
Close up of Pay Nothing Until April. I could live in this place where the blue and the yellow and the white meet.
In a small room hung his paintings with descriptive sentences floating above idyllic countrysides or dark interiors with light shining through windowpanes. A label on the wall reported that Ruscha “denied any deeper meaning” to theese backgrounds, referring to them as “anonymous backdrops for the drama of words.” Immediately my internet-rotted brain thought “Me!”
Anonymous backdrop for the drama of words, I thought walking around looking at THE MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES NEARBY WAS OVERLAID BY THE NOISE OF SPORADIC VIOLENCE painted in white across a peaceful field of wheat. I went back to take a photo of the label so I could remember it for later and as I was taking the photo a man next to me must’ve felt the same way that I did because he said out loud ANONYMOUS BACKDROPS FOR THE DRAMA OF WORDS.
Ruscha is a writer. From the same label I learned that he borrows the words and phrases in the paintings from “memories, dreams, or sometimes from listening to the radio.” Two days later I started reading Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent, where the protagonist is a writer, when I came upon this bit which I immediately texted to my friend Amy Rose. “‘I talk very little,’ I said, which was true, although I listened a lot because I had a novel, my first, in larva.” MY FIRST, IN LARVA.
Back to Ruscha—his next exploration of words after this series of paintings was, perhaps naturally, to censor them. The paintings have the same colorful backgrounds but instead of text, there are rectangles where the text should be. But he can’t resist not letting you in on the drama—the text can be found in the title. One was called Note We Have Already Got Rid of Several Like You—One Was Found in River Just Recently.
It reminded me of the way one of my favorite bands, Liars, used to approach their song names on their first few records. Liars were an early aughts NYC trio who started on that disco punk wave along with the rest of the scene but got increasingly more experimental with each subsequent record. “Everyday Is A Child With Teeth,” is actually the title of a Liars song that I always felt was a bit of a poem. I think they had a minor hit with the song “Mr. You’re On Fire Mr.,” which is basically the This is Fine meme 12 years before. (The song goes “Mister, you’re on fire, mister/ Thanks but I’m ok.”) Their second record was a concept album about witches called They Were Wrong So We Drowned. To record it they moved to the woods in New Jersey and the vibe was you know, very Blair Witch (a movie which I am not ashamed to say I saw three times in the movie theater when it came out).
Liars’ anonymous backdrop for the drama of words.
Like Ruscha, they also did not shy away from a bit of humor. For the cover of There’s Always Room on the Broom, a single from that witch record, they drew a little witch hat and a broom on the hyeroglyph-man on the cover of an Einstürzende Neubaten record, and scratched out their name and wrote LIARS underneath. (Just now I’ve discovered that MoMA has the original EN artwork in their permanent collection—do they have the Liars one? It seems sort of necessary). The songs on They Were Wrong So We Drowned are not very funny at all but are in fact, kind of hardcore (in energy not like hardcore punk), but the song titles were funny (“If You’re a Wizard Then Why Do You Wear Glasses,” and “They Don’t Want Your Corn, They Want Your Kids”), and maybe that’s why it worked. They put out a bunch of great records after that. (I can vouch for them until 2014’s Wixiw. They still put out music but I think it’s just Angus, who was also their lead singer, who does everything now.) With Liars, I love the music and I also love the titles as independent beings from it (in fact, I don’t actually know which name corresponds with what song for the most of them). Their first album is called They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, a phrase I come back to often.
After MoMA we went to have lunch at a nearby diner, and Jack said he wished we’d just left right after we walked through the Ruscha. I understood because when he said it I immediately felt disappointed that the walk through the museum had sort of watered down some of the things I was feeling. But I guess the truth is that once they (the ideas, the work, the magic) gets inside you then it’s in there forever. There’s always this impetus for doing as much as we can at all times, but sometimes one thing is just enough.
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PS. I made a lil playlist with ten good Liars songs, in case you are curious.