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Away We Go

(or: LET US BE UNDERGROUND AND SUBVERSIV(sic) !!!!)

My friend Alexa and I were invited by a mutual friend to go to BRUSSELS this coming weekend. We're both pretty stoked seeing as how neither of us have ever been and also because we will be "roughing it." Elsa, the friend who invited us, used to be our cool conversation assistant during the summer; she would take us to places by the Canal Saint Martin like Le Comptoir General (only for the hippest: a giant two-storied space housing a bar, a mini museum, and a thrift store), and her life generally occupies a place between grungy and Bohemian--working at the concert venue Olympia and throwing huge parties in her slightly dilapidated apartment off of Strasbourg Saint-Denis that get shut down by her ornery, older neighbors. 

She had mentioned to me a couple weeks ago that she had friends in Brussels who lived in a giant, what-used-to-be perfume factory that is now used to house "cute, nice musicians" who throw huge rager parties of 200 plus people during the weekend. But then she sent an email to Alexa and me inviting us for real to check this place out, and we couldn't really say no.

As a disclaimer I should say that I''m really, really not the type of person who would usually do this kind of thing. I get so freaked out by dirtiness that I will never wear my shoes inside my 2 foot by 2 foot room and sometimes I hold my breath while I'm making a transfer inside Chatelet because I feel my body slowly being eaten apart by all that mold and narstiness and what looks to be like asbestos (can't actually confirm). And while I harbor great dreams of being a groupie for Broken Social Scene (though they're all like thirty so maybe they're the go-to-sleep-by-11 o'clock type now?--not to bring the thirty-year olds down) or being a model in one of Ryan McGinley's photo shoots in the desert during which beautiful, lithe boys and girls sleep naked all 5 of them to one little cot and then smoke cigarettes and sustain themselves on Pop Tarts and travel around in a van with no seats, I am really not that type of person. 

This impending trip coincides really nicely with a TEDtalk I just watched of Amanda Palmer. I am not too familiar with her music (my friend Yunyi gave me What Ever Happened to Amanda Palmer sometime in high school, but I am a really sensitive person so I listened to about thirty seconds of AP's creepy, masculine singing voice and just kinda wigged out and never listened to her again), but this TEDtalk was really neat because Palmer put her couch-surfing, punk rockin' lifestyle into perspective. What I mean is: obviously, Amanda Palmer is a pretty different person than I am--I am prone to get grossed out by even the idea of sleeping on random people's couches (you don't know what's been there) or even more so crowd-surfing in random people's arms (you don't know what they'll do to you), but during the talk Palmer made a really great statement about trust and connection. About how during her entire career she has encountered so many incredible, gracious people just by opening up to them--by asking them for help and by giving them back music. A seriously beautiful exchange if you think about it. 

I think this whole idea of trust--of letting go of that deeply distrustful and paranoid part of oneself--is something I admire a lot in people and is also what draws me towards the photos of the afore-mentioned photographer Ryan McGinley, or even to a certain type of casual, care-free aesthetic. It's the type of look that I attach to different identities: the adventurous, surfing, I'm-okay-with-never-showering identity or the adventurous, camping, I'm-okay-with-insects identity. Both identities exploited in any case by ad campaigns like Levi's "Go Forth" (for which Ryan McGinley provided the print and outdoor campaign photographs and Walt Whitman unwittingly provided the text).

Dakota Hair, 2004. Ryan McGinley

Levi's 2009 "Go Forth" ad campaign that feeds into this very same aesthetic

These are photos I snapped of the special edition "the journey is the destination" by Ryan McGinley for Purple magazine (no 19). Every issue the magazine dedicates a new booklet to a different artist, and the one I happened to pick up a month ago featured McGinley. After the hand-written introduction from McGinley the rest of the pages are spreads of behind-the-scene photos of many of the shoots he's had throughout the years. I particularly liked these two paragraphs as a summary of what the adventure was like for him, which also shows that McGinely is way, way more down than I will ever be. There's also something I admire in this type of lifestyle being the means for an end--McGinley was on a super tight budget before he achieved the fame he has today (youngest artist to ever be shown at the Whitney) and his photographs don't exist in some kind of vacuum; his most beautiful photos of naked youth running around in fireworks and leaping off of waterfalls really are the documentation of his unconventional life.

We called ourselves road warriors. Sleeping on garage floors, driving for hours on end. Navigating by GPS, our best friend and worst enemy. We ate over campfires, hand-rolling cigarettes. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches each morning for everyone. We gave each other home made tattoos to commemorate each trip.

I've learned the art of shopping at Walmart for fifteen people on a tight budget. How to fit three people in a double bed at a Super 8 motel. How to identify poison ivy (I'm still not so good at that). 

It's only Monday so who's to say what will happen on my weekend trip to Brussels. In the meantime I'll have Amanda Palmer's words and Ryan McGinley's images reminding me of the magic that occurs when you learn to be open and gracious and trusting. I sign off with the same words Elsa used in her last email to me and Alexa about the trip, "LET US BE UNDERGROUND AND SUBVERSIV!!!" So let us.