marriages

I'm very suggestible. That latest pose or attitude you're seeing is probably the result of some book I was just reading. Or some movie. And who better to influence your life for the night than Dave Hickey?

"My idea of embarking upon graduate studies was to go some place where the smart people are. Unfortunately, the smart people are no longer in universities, the smart people are writing for The Simpsons, the smart people are writing for LL Cool J. There are exceptions, and that's an exaggeration, but most of all academic culture is just one big handicap, and I live in it with colleagues that I respect, but it ain't where the thoughts are thought. I kind of like teaching—I mean, I enjoy working with artists. But what I do with graduate students now, is exactly what I did with the artists I represented when I was a dealer. I go to their studios, we sit around and talk about the work with the idea of how can we get this shit looking like something. That's it. I like being around people who work. All of my social talk is with people who have done something between the time I talked to them last, and the time I talk to them now. University people really don't do very much, so you have to talk about pets. I am mostly interested in people who are doing things and are busy. I get along with them...

But I am really interested in people who make it up as they go along and there are still some out there. Regardless of what my colleagues say, you have in this place, still, a lot more options, and a lot more freedom than I see in other places. You can really do some weird shit. You can always leave town as well; go to the edge and declare that the center. You can always leave town and start again and then start 'againagain.' It is possible in good times to live on the margin. Like in the '60s and '70s, there was enough money floating around to get by. I have no idea how I supported myself between '68-'78. This kind of money and fluidity is coming around again, so there is enough money that there is a margin that you can survive on. And that privileges improvisation. I think it is going to get better."

I know: it's not perfect. LL Cool J? Plus he admits he's been saying practically the same thing for decades now, and that includes rhapsodizing about the Rolling Stones. And I know, that excerpt is from an interview conducted however many years ago and Dave Hickey is not actually appearing in my life just now (on the virtual eve of 2nd semester) as an omen about my graduate studies. But still. There's a line from his essay "Dealing" (in Air Guitar) about completing his grad school thesis and the prospect of life in academia: "Even then I prided myself in being a gambler, but this was a bad bet. You don't send good money after bad, ever." Three year Master of Landscape Architecture program? Mostly I love it, but big picture, it's a calculated bet, weighed against what was happening in my life Spring/Summer `05.

Last spring, while I was deciding what program to attend, I went to a conference organized around the MOMA exhibit Groundswell. The last item of the day was a panel discussion with some of the leading practioners, people in the show whose work I admire (listening to Jim Corner describe Fresh Kills or the High Line is genuinely moving). At one point, they were talking about landscape architecture's relative obscurity and Michel Desvigne, in his thick French accent, reminded everyone that 90% of new development gets built without any design consultation. Then he went around the table pointing at each speaker, beginning with himself, saying: "I'm nobody...you are nobody...you are nobody...you are a little more than nobody...only a little."

I tell that story a lot. It's the masochism of being in a marginal profession, even as I continue to find out-of-the-way corners of Au Bon Pain so I can sketch the traffic triangle outside the window for a while--the hopeful, daily practice of drawing--knowing that all the monk-like daily practice doesn't add up to much of a life. That's school. So with my unused birthday wish, I wish for myself that I can recognize those things in Hickey's exaggerated portrayal of academia that are true and avoid them; and that I can remember enough of his ideal of making a living (improvising "in advocacy of your particular marriage of desire and esteem") to do just that.

Here's where you can find the best ever definition of an ideal marriage (it's in the last paragraph).