In October 2006, David Phillips, a nationally recognized sculptor, brought suit against Pembroke Real Estate, Inc. in federal district court of Massachusetts, asserting that Pembroke would violate his rights under VARA (Visual Artists Rights Acts, 1990), and MAPA (Massachusetts Art Preservation Act, 1984) by removing multiple pieces of his sculpture and stonework from the Eastport Park near Boston Harbor. Pembroke owned the land where the park is and hired the artist in 1999 to create 27 sculptures for placement in the park. Soon after the park was completed in 2001, Pembroke decided to redesign the park and remove and relocate the works by Phillips due to conceptual change of the new design of the park. As a result, the artist objected to the revised plan and filed suit seeking for injunctive relief. This case raised an important question about the protection of VARA on site-specific art.

Site-specific art is a subset of integrated art. A work of integrated art is comprised of two or more physical objects that must be presented together as the artist intends for the work to retain its meaning and integrity. In terms of site-specific art, the location of the work is a constituent element of the work. In this case, the artist argued that these sculptures were made specifically for the park and had a marine theme that corresponded to the harborside location of the park. In other words, the marine environment of the park itself could be interpreted as one medium of the artworks. Therefore, removing the sculptures from its original site would lead to an intentional conceptual destruction on the artworks. Pembroke, on the other hand, contends that public presentation exclusion permits it to relocate Plaintiff’s artworks. So what is public presentation exception? This statute was adopted after the case of the artist Richard Serra and his site-specific piece, “Tilted Arc,” in which the court rejected the artist’s argument that the relocation of his site-specific art from the federal plaza violated his rights under federal copyright and trademark law. Public presentation exception permits certain inevitable modifications of artworks if they were moved because the point of VARA is to preserve a work of visual art as it is rather than preserve it where it is.

Convinced that the works were site-specific and moving any or all of these integrated work would cause a physical alteration of the work, the district court first issued a temporary restraining order preventing Pembroke from altering the park. The injunction was later (2004) vacated because the district court held that although VARA applies to site-specific art, the public presentation exception allows Pembroke to relocate these sculptures. In 2006, the artist challenged the district court’s reasoning about public presentation exception and the case entered the first circuit. The result was that the first circuit not only affirmed the district court’s permission for Pembroke to remove Phillips’ artworks, but also held that VARA does not apply to site-specific art at all since VARA says nothing that suggests special protection for site-specific art.

Trial courts have adopted the same reasoning about the exclusion of site-specific art in similar cases following the final decision of Phillips v. Pembroke case. However, the decision was questioned in 2009 in a case between the wildflower artist Chapman Kelley and Chicago Park District. The artist designed Wildflower Works, which was considered as a site-specific painting/sculpture, in Chicago’s Grand Park and the park officials altered it without the permission of the artist. In this case, the court raised the question about whether the Phillips v Pembroke rule would allow any distortion of a site-specific work. The plaintiff argued that site-specific art is not necessarily destroyed if moved; modified, probably, but not utterly destroyed. And the public presentation exception does not eliminate every type of protection VARA grants to artists of site-specific art. For instance, it does nothing to limit the artist’s right of attribution, which prevents the artist’s name from being misappropriated. Also, site-specific art could be defaced or damaged in ways that do not relate to its public display.  In short, the court held that the exception only covers a particular kind of site-specific art and site-specific art should not be categorically excluded from VARA.

I wouldn’t consider myself a proponent of the electronic music scene. It takes a specific time, place, and mood to get me into most of the dubstep and livetronica that’s being tossed across airwaves at bars and parties and, most recently, television commercials. But these platforms take the electronic genre out of its true context in the live show, which is something I’ve been very strongly reminded of in the past couple weeks, having seen Lotus and Big Gigantic play this February. I consider both of these events as life-altering experiences in the way they’ve shaped my relationships with those present as well as my perception of light, sound, and self.

I know it sounds like a stretch, especially for those who’ve never attended one of these shows with all their strobing lights and pulsing baselines. Overwhelming noise and visuals in combination with lurching sweaty crowded bodies is simply not everyone’s cup of tea. But I would argue that it’s nearly pointless to attempt making a real connection with the music, the kind of connection that yanks and strums the heartstrings, ignites flash bulb memories in the mind’s eye, and gives the body no choice but to swerve to the beats and synthy melodies, without having experienced it in proximity with the lights, the performance, and the camaraderie of the crowd. It’s like eating French fries without Sri-Racha (or ketchup), like watching a youtube video of someone sky diving: still pretty good alone, but nothing like the combination of elements that work together to produce a whole that’s impossible on its own.

Enter a shadowy concert hall with vaulted ceilings. The air is dense with smoke, body odor, and anticipation. There is a pulse in the room, some bodies following its lead more closely than others, but all movement altered by the sound. Even the bartenders shuffle and duck in time. The openers fade into pits at either end of the stage, and the room goes quiet. An eruption of primal cheers signals the headliner’s arrival, preempting the exploding lights, lasers, projections, beats and screes and womp-womps. The baseline becomes the heartbeat of the crowd, everyone sways and dips, arms up, fingers outstretched, bobbing and crashing like an ocean of individual ripples, each swelling with its own kind of life. Everything is a shadow but for the sunbursts that illuminate it all like lightning, and you catch the ecstatic expressions on your neighbors’ faces for seconds at a time. Everyone is touching everyone. Skin on skin, you share the air with every mouth, and it tastes like smoke and sweat but also energy, and everything is shared. There is no self. Communication happens in the eyes and smiles because nothing else is heard but the jams. Hours later, the music stops, the lights flick out. How long has it been? There is a ringing in the ears. Your shirt is soaked. You feel new. You will never hear the same and you don’t want to. The flashing colors and pixels will appear when you close your eyes for days after. You’ve shared yourself with everyone present, and they with you, and everyone is carrying pieces of everyone else out the door.

A day, a week, a month later, one of the songs I heard that night comes up on shuffle. Instantly I’m thrown back into the moment, I feel an intense longing for the flashing faces all open and euphoric, I have visions of pixelated landscapes juxtaposed against cats, I begin to tremble. It isn’t the music itself that makes me feel this way, and although I’m enjoying the sounds, it’s what they trigger that gets me smiling and moving uncontrollably like a shot of adrenaline and serotonin to the heart. And I don’t remember my friend getting sick in the parking lot, or taking an elbow to the cheek, or almost getting lost, and I’m glad I went.

So since my article from last week, I’ve recently joined up to be in the cast of a play called The Great God Pan. For the past week, I’ve been going to script readings and thoroughly examined the characters and plot with an awesome group of people. While these meetings have been wonderfully fun, it was astounding to find that we could examine this 70-some page play for three hours four days out of this past week (only skipping Friday for St. Valentine’s Day). I’m sure that we found some things that didn’t really exist (and weren’t intended by the author–but authorial intent and its insignificance are topics for an article for another day), but we managed to stumble upon some amazing bits of characters in the recesses of the text and our own minds that really made the whole thing come alive.

Our director has a habit of hammering in the idea that we need to form connection, connecting with our characters and the other characters, surely, but also allowing the characters to connect with us! We contribute just as much to our characters as they have to offer on the page, and I think that it’s important to analyze how the characters you create are you unique to your creation of them. No one else could have written Harry Potter the way J.K. Rowling did, or Gandalf the way that Tolkien managed. These characters, as do all characters, have a unique and intimate relationship with the people who write them–even when that person is George R. R. Martin and he’s murdering everyone that you’ve ever loved in a novel.

Why a character does what they do and how they do it is important, but why they’re doing what they’re doing how they’re doing it for you (their writer, player, or actor) is equally significant. Authorial intent might not matter, but it probably does to the author! And for that reason, I think it should matter to you. There’s a lot of debate about whether characters continue on after you finish that last sentence of your short story, defeat the final boss of the campaign, or the red curtain closes–but if they do, if they really experience everything that they’re put through in the writing, wouldn’t you want them to experience a fullness of being? I mean, sure, some characters aren’t going to go out happily or be good people, but as fully-written characters, maybe they can reach that kind of fulfillment that everyone’s always seeming to be searching for, which isn’t to say that it should be handed on a silver platter, but certainly attainable.

Let’s go back in time, where laying down in a comfy chair with a hot cup of tea and hours upon hours were allotted to your favorite pastime. Yes, those were the good days where you had a new novel smelling of refined ink and all the time in the world to get lost in it. But of course, life likes to smack us all in the face a couple times and tell us that our fantasies are over when it comes to reading for fun. All of our obligations come first and foremost, and with the time we have left to enjoy ourselves it should really be spent either eating or sleeping. I am here to impress upon you all of the reasons and ways that will allow the relaxing activity of reading your favorite novel with a cup of tea in a comfy chair, to take place without any feelings of guilt.

Tip 1: Take the time out of your day to do it, trust me it’s worth it. If it’s twenty minutes, or an hour, there is always some chunk of time that could be put to your entertainment. Suppress the Netflix, or the quick nap, and utilize your me-time with a favorite book.

Tip 2: Find a place that gets you excited to read. Whether it be a coffee shop, a library, a museum, or a restaurant, grab something that you’ve been itching to read and do it in a calm and comfy setting.

Tip 3: Let your reading be your reward for the day. If you’ve put in a lot of work all day long, let your reading be the time where you can unwind and relax, you deserve it!

I was lucky enough to be raised by literature loving parents – that is to say, to grow up in a house populated by numerous bookcases full of books, and to be guided towards them by mentors who wanted me to value the worlds they contained. For bedtime stories my parents would serialize books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Great Expectations, with my mom often putting on southern or British accents to voice the different characters. I loved story time, and learned quickly that books and novels with daunting titles or famous authors didn’t have to be inaccessible. After all, some of the scariest sounding great novels were actually adventure stories, or had narrators who were kids just like me!

But because I was sure I could tackle any literary challenge – and was, incidentally, a sad kid, sometimes misguidedly/desperately looking for answers – I ended up accessing certain authors before my time. For instance, I remember reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway at the age of twelve and wondering why Jake and Brett couldn’t just be together. If they love each other so much, I thought, then why so much angst? It wasn’t until I reread the book for a class in high school that I realized I had completely missed the implication that Jake’s war injury had left him impotent. As I grew up I struggled similarly through heavy tomes on artistic photography, Sam Shepard plays and Ken Kesey novels, only more doggedly determined to finish the works that most befuddled me. Although I had the resolve to understand the vocabulary, the metaphors and some of the references, sometimes I was simply hindered in understanding by a lack of real life experience.

I was fourteen when I began to read some of the works of E.E. Cummings, and I remember liking them in a simple, confused kind of way. His funny grammar and odd line breaks were pleasant, if perplexing, and I liked how he would sometimes arrange the words on the page in weird patterns. That was pretty much the extent of my appreciation for his work, and anyways at that age I was more interested in probing the delightfully dark, squelching lusts of Charles Bukowski than following Cumming’s grasshoppers around a page. I hadn’t revisited Cummings in ages, and had pretty much written him off (except for a brief incident at Interlochen arts camp, when an emphatically free spirited cabin mate read me a bizarre poem she had written about having some kind of graphic but metaphoric sex with the famous poet).

But the other day someone quoted part of a line from one of my favorite e.e. Cummings poems – ‘for life’s not a paragraph, (and death I think is no parenthesis).’ I couldn’t remember the rest of the poem, so I looked it up to reread it.

I had specifically remembered liking this poem for its self-conscious syntax and punctuation, and I mostly remembered that the word paragraph ended a paragraph, and that there was a funny and clever use of an actual parenthesis in the last line.

Well, it turns out the poem isn’t about syntax at all. It’s about love.

 

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you.

 

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

 

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

 

and death I think is no parenthesis

 

There’s no parenthesis encasing the last line – “and death I think is no parenthesis.” That would be silly. Whoever would put that parenthesis there would never wholly kiss you.

The website where I found this poem had two more untitled love poems by Cummings. The last one characterized the intimacy between lovers as motion, the give and take of understanding and tenderness as movements of opening and closing. I didn’t remember this poem as potently as the other, but something in the last stanza was familiar:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I suddenly remembered reading this poem as a ninth grader, because I remembered how I unsettled I had been by that last line: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. The imagery that preceded this line had been the straightforward metaphor of the blooming flower, of spring and in contrast snow snow, of opening and then again closing. But the last line, this collusion of parts, had been so unsettlingly enigmatic.

Now, having been in love and having been touched in some way by the ‘most frail gesture’ of some very small hands, I understand.

Growing older has mostly been a relief for me. I’m realizing that potency of feeling may dwindle with age, but I’m mostly reassured that much of the pain and power of simple emotions can be tempered by something so natural as the complexity that comes with experience and age.

I don’t think that I wasted my time on the poems, books and movies that I didn’t understand.  After all, I understood important parts of things. Maybe I didn’t grasp the love story in Jack London’s Martin Eden, but I could understand Martin’s love of reading, and his depression. Maybe I didn’t quite get Franny’s nervous breakdown in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, but I understood the deep love between siblings. And I’ll revisit these books, now after I’ve been in love, someday after I’ve truly lost, with different eyes and different experiences. Maybe I’ll find an entirely different story. Even if the syntax of things remains the same.