Prince and the encounter with art

I realized about halfway through Michaelangelo Matos's Sign 'o' the Times that it wasn't quite for me. I am, after all, a Prince fan, not a PRINCE FAN. Don't get me wrong: I love Prince. The purchase of the book followed hot on the heels of a stretch of about three weeks where I didn't really listen to anything but Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Sly Stone. But I don't own Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. I don't have the special edition three-disc Crystal Ball. I have never decoupaged a coffee table with pictures of Prince, as a girl I knew in college did. Sure, there's always a risk that I could wake up one day and find that the dozen or so Prince albums I have suddenly become thirty--Prince is, after all, his own gateway drug--but for now I'm not quite there.

Matos's book, though not uncritical, is ultimately for the full-blown Prince worshipper. For the rest of us, the blizzard of details about discarded plans for the album--and which later Prince album each leftover ended up on--gets to be a bit much. But if you quickly flip past that part (like skipping the bits about whaling in Moby-Dick, for you odd people out there who hate that book), Sign 'o' the Times does provide rewards. Some are simple throwaway lines:

All of which ignores the real question behind "U Got the Look": What the hell is Sheena Easton doing here, and why does she sound so good?

Or this one, which comes in the course of a complaint about the New Power Generation, Prince's band on Diamonds and Pearls (about which I disagree with Matos--I like the album, despite a couple of really bad tracks):

Tony M, the group's rapper, sounded like something Prince won at an arcade.

Far more interesting, though, is Matos's characterization of his first encounter with Sign 'o' the Times as a middle school student in 1987:

It's starting to occur to me that my long-faked cosmopolitanism is doing me no good with this new album. I can pretend I know more than the people in my classes because I have a firmer grasp on what great music, great art is (because that's what incipient snobs do), but I really haven't encountered this sort of thing before. It's easy to assimilate the Beatles' experiments because they're twenty years old and have been celebrated to death, explained until (you'd think) the life has been drained from them. The miracle there is that they really haven't been--that life is still there for the finding if you want to look closely enough. Sign, though--Sign is strange. And beguiling. Which are qualities that as an incipient snob I always pretend to like but am actually flustered by when I encounter them.

That experience will surely ring true for those of us who remember the hard work of imitation and exploration that went into our first conscious forming of tastes--and of ourselves as people who would make ourselves stand out from the mass of teenagers by those very tastes.

For those of us who consider art to be an important part of our lives, that fight against the toxic mixture of complacency about received opinions and posturing about our own continues even into adulthood, requiring constant alertness--and the repetition to ourselves of some perennial questions: Am I making myself open to this work of art? Am I truly seeing it, or am I just seeing what I expect to see? Am I bothered because it's no good, or am I bothered because it's not what I was expecting? And the only real response, as Matos notes, is to keep looking:

So naturally, I keep playing the thing. And as I do, I keep adjusting.

Keep looking, keep reading, keep learning, keep adjusting. If I can manage to do that into old age, I'll be happy.

Two of the people in this photo are celebrating their wedding anniversary.

If you surprise your wife on a Friday morning by announcing that you've spent four months secretly planning a trip to New York to celebrate your seventh wedding anniversary, and that you're leaving that night, it's even more fun, when she asks what you're going to be doing in New York, to be able to tell her, "We'll be going to International Pickle Day!"

We ate a lot of regular pickles, some pickled beans and radishes, some kimchi, some more pickles. And here, I suppose, is this post's tenuous connection to this blog's ostensible purpose: in reading the International Pickle Day materials, I learned two new terms for cucumbers: curvey describes a type of cucumber that is destined for pickling (56% of the nearly 3 billion grown annually in the United States), while slicer refers to a cucumber that is to be shipped to groceries and sold as is. I also learned the Dutch phrase in de pickel zitten, which means "to sit in the pickle"--the rough equivalent of our "to be in a pickle."

It was a great trip. We saw friends, had good food and drink, talked about books and music, heard stories of bad workplaces. Which leads me to think, once again, that there really isn't enough fiction about office life, relative to the amount of time and emotion we spend there. Though maybe Bartleby the Scrivener is enough?

Bartleby reminds me that there were of course books on the trip, too. We met our friend Bernice at the Brooklyn Book Festival, where I couldn't resist picking up some of the beautifully designed novellas published by Melville House. And my current Prince fixation led me to pick up a book on his album Sign 'o' the Times by my friend Maura's sometimes co-blogger Michaelangelo Matos, who won me over with this line:

The only music from 1987 to match it for sheer libido isn't an R&B record-it's Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, cock-rock metal with a disco rhythm section.

At the Book Festival, we also saw a panel featuring Ed from the Dizzies, along with Rob Sheffield and Chuck Klosterman--the last of whom came out with an unforgettable (if possible untrue?) line:

Even with something you absolutely love, if you think about it long enough, you can make it seem horrible.

Oh, and we wandered the Strand, where I picked up Mary Ann Caws's impressionistic, digressive volume on Proust in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series, from which I gleaned this anecdote:

At the moment when [Proust's brother] Robert was about to marry Marthe in the nearby church of St. Augustin, Proust, panicked as usual over the notion that he might be cold, stuffed his tuxedo with a great mass of thermal wadding, placed several mufflers around his neck, and three overcoats over the tux, and so attired, was too massive to get down the aisle and had to stand aside. "To each row in turn he announced in a loud voice that he had been ill for months, that he would be still more ill that evening, that it was not his fault."

Proust as Monty Python character--now that's a side of the man I would never have expected to see.

All in all, a lovely whirlwind trip. Now back home, and back to regularly scheduled blogging. And, you know, work and all that stuff, too.