A (Mostly) Sentient Pot of Coffee

She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how—the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?

(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)

And we discussed that for a bit—how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.

(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)

But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how—we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film—such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.

It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things—the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.

By that I mean—maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.

And even if that isn’t the case….there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work—because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.

Dr. Mae Jemison was the first African American woman to travel in space. Born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama, and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Jemison’s journey into the stars is a testament to the power of dreams and determination. 🚀

“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”

Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”

It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."

Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.

TJ MIKELOGAN's HALLOWEEN 2024 EVENT ↳ Day 1: Go-To Halloween Movie

Of course, it’s been called ‘science fantasy’ or ‘space opera’, but that doesn’t entirely get at the same thing. Tolkien may be the source of the popularizing of the fantasy genre as we know it today, but much of fantasy is arguably not faerie-stories. (Which is not to say that they are bad! Only that they are doing something different than a faerie-story as Tolkien describes it.)

But Star Wars (the original trilogy) is. It feeds the imagination, the desire for the strange and wonderful and terrible. It gives us not only shining swords and magic, but strange worlds, cities in the clouds, and ogres in forms like Jabba the Hutt. It is concerned with Good and Evil, with the overthrow of a usurping tyrant and the return of the rightful form of government.

And Data saying things like "I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."

And Bashir saying things like “You can't go through life trying to avoid getting a broken heart. If you do, it'll break from loneliness anyway."

And Odo sayings things like "It has been my observation that one of the prices of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice."