where is my MIND

A great article about the upcoming “Awesomeist Movement” from my former grad school classmate and Mets Blogger Ted Berg

At some point in the middle of the semester in a graduate-level international existentialist film class, I realized that all of the movies on the syllabus were painfully boring. I pointed this out to the professor and argued that, though some of the films featured compelling subject matter, I’d rather watch Peter Jackson’s epic rendition of King Kong any day.

Obviously this type of statement rubs film teachers the wrong way, so he countered that Jackson’s work lacked the subtlety and intricacy of a Jean-Luc Godard or a Michelangelo Antonioni.

That was true, I said, but not a single entrant in the French New Wave or Italian Neo-Realist schools of cinema ever featured a giant ape wrestling dinosaurs.

All Jackson needed to be lifted from the status of successful filmmaker to that of towering artistic genius, I contended — and still contend — was a good art manifesto. So I went home and started writing one, and it sits unfinished on my computer’s desktop today, over three years later.

It is called The Dawn of the Awesome and it details the tenets of the Awesomeist movement in art, an interdisciplinary pursuit of spectacle and monstrosity that’s predicated on the notion that nuance is dead. Its first line says this:

Subtlety is for chumps and suckers.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges recently published a book called Empire of Illusion that covers a lot of the same ground as Awesomeism, except Hedges decries those trends as indicative of our society’s growing self-delusion and ignorance.

With all due respect to Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges can bite me. I have not read his book because reading his book about, basically, how most of society doesn’t read enough books, would be to tacitly agree with him. A more apt critique, I think, would be to destroy Hedges’ book in some sort of hilarious explosion, preferably one prompted by a laser beam from space.

That would be awesome. Not that I’m in favor of destroying books, mind you. I just really like blowing stuff up, especially stuff that specifically argues that my instinct to blow stuff up is somehow wrong or stupid. Sometimes you don’t need a reason to enjoy a massive explosion; that’s the whole point of Awesomeism.

I will not go into the further intricacies of Awesomeism here because I’ve already written too long an introduction and I haven’t gotten to the Mets yet. But yes, there are intricacies of Awesomeism even though there is no room for intricacy in Awesomeism. That’s because irony is awesome, too. Basically, like all movements, Awesomeism has its great practitioners (Jackson, Slash) and its hacks (Michael Bay, most hair metal bands), and its best works need no real explanation, because eruptions and blistering arpeggios and apes wrestling dinosaurs never do.

A photo of the seminal Awesomeist painting, co-conceived by myself and former roommate Mike Carlo and painted by my talented father, is embedded below. It is titled “Vin Diesel and Usher Riding Into Battle on a Chariot Pulled by White Tigers.”

So what does this all have to do with the Mets? Well, it’s been a pretty awesome season for the Flushing Nine so far, and I don’t mean in the vernacular sense of the term, the way that means “cool” or “great” or anything. I mean awe-inspiring. (see link for the rest of the article)