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I'm
one of those many people who loved to spend wasted moments drawing
moustaches and shades on famous people in magazines, turning them
into pirates or vampires. I'm the kind of person who in some dazed
moment of half-sleep used to draw on his walls and cover it up
in the morning with posters like some funny little secret rebellion.
I even went so far as to add tiny, (almost invisible unless you
knew where to look, as indeed my friends would, when I proudly
showed them where later) tiny little speech bubbles to kitchen
posters, even hidden to parents. And so now when I see teeth blacked
out on magazine models in London Underground it warms my heart.
Even
with what people might call vandalism I experience a vague…. I want
to say childish but I'm not so sure… anyway a vague [something]
pleasure. Because to me all of this is evidence of people, that
is to say people within their environments as part of it, inter-reacting
and leaving behind some kind of mark or signature that says 'people
live here'… 'I live here'.
When
you're banging your head against the wall you at least want to leave
a bloodstain. The motivations hardly matter: boredom, anger, subversion,
a weird wish to surreally remix social images… how much time do
you have? It's the fact that it puts a smile on a face, that people
have done something to the sterile, would-be-perfect world around
them and shared it (for as long as takes the council cleaners to
return) with the rest of us. But it's also that this kind of behaviour
speaks to something deeper in me--something like a rejection of
passivity, a willingness to do something, even if it is a lame tag
or a piece of chewing gum stuck on the nose of a poster-boy.
There
comes a point when you want to stop absorbing the information around
you. There comes a point, at least for me, when not only am I sick
of ads and the various forms of marketing around us but also when
I've had it with films, music, books, galleries, etc, etc. Because
it's not enough just to keep on mining the wealth of information
and experience that's available to most of us in the media advanced
western world. Because we need to start doing something for ourselves,
creating something of our own.
For
me it's mainly music but it doesn't really matter what it is for
you, suffice it to say that any one song I've written is worth more
to me than the entire collection of CD's, cassettes and vinyl I've
amassed over ten years of buying music. And that's despite the obvious
fact to me that I'd much rather listen to almost anything else in
that collection instead my own atonal twitterings.
I feel
this way because I strongly believe that it's what you do, not what
you own that defines who you are. This is a belief that perhaps
is not always recognised by my peers or even consistently by myself
but is self-evident when I consider what it is that makes me a person.
A collection
of articles and objects are merely circumstantial evidence that
people existed. You might be able to infer certain things like their
buying habits or their social preferences… in fact from this evidence
you could infer a whole wealth of information suitable for marketing
purposes. However, there are only two factors that PROVE I existed.
Firstly there are the things I did, from which come memories people
have or the stories they might recount about me. Secondly there
are the things I made and until I have kids that's going to have
to be my music.
Copyright
© 2000 Andrew Zincke. All Rights Reserved.
Andrew Zincke is a technical copywriter for a medium-sized
UK publisher. He is a closet misanthrope.
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