Like a favorite song, I listen to this address, "Aliens, love -- where are they?," by Yalie John Hodgman '94, on occasion, which certainly inspired today's art. The rhythm and sentiment are just like one of my favorite albums, and it conjures something in me. It has that sense of strange-familiarity that I would get late at night alone in the JE Buttery at Yale, usually past Saturday Night Live and just drifting to sleep on the music channels that played all the weirdo unheard-of bands or the local New Haven community access stations running indie films.
Ordinarily, I was drawing whenever I didn't have to study, but I made a conscious effort to park in front of those public TVs, even during my summer session in Saybrook, primarily to invite these late night episodes of alienation to occur in the hopes I'd find something or someone out there to capture this weird energy with, but in the end I was just seeking that odd emotion of being an alien, a speck in the universe. Maybe I was hoping to use that feeling in art down the road, I didn't know for sure--the goal was just to experience it; I was content to figure out its use later, if ever or at all. I still can feel that decimating energy whenever I watch old SNLs or listen to certain bands late, late at night when everyone around here is asleep.
In my most recent listening of John Hodgman's talk, for the first time toward the end, the speech struck me with such a pang of sorrow. Maybe fear? Regret? Worry? I know I felt an absence. Or at least I did for a brief second.
Back to drawing.
Reuxben
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