Musings of JR Simmang

AREN’T WE ALL We never stopped talking. Perhaps it was because we were afraid of what would happen if there was ever a moment of silence between us. Perhaps we just didn’t want to listen to the persistent clinking constantly undercutting our conversations. It was always there. Circuitous. Repetitive. Unavoidable. We spent the better part of the summer of ’09 digging through the attic, ’10 through the basement, ’11 through the bedrooms, and ’12 in the kitchen and bathrooms. The only thing we found was an old pocketwatch, that was no longer running and stuck at 11:10, a stack of old newspapers dated September 12th, 1951 with an article about an exploding rocket, and a stuffed wenge llama with the initials JEH stitched into a tag on the collar. I made the joke that we’d found Jimmy Hoffa’s grave, but his middle name was Riddle, which led to another joke about Voldemort, but I was the only one in the family who’d read the Harry Potter series, so I was the only one who laughed. Af...

Arting. It's a human thing. The Mona Lisa. David. The Chrysler Building and the Goodyear Blimp. They're all works of art, and someone designed, drafted, and built them. I want to art. My wife and I sat down the other night in a crowded room full of trinkets and garbage. We were knee-deep in an event hosted by Austin Creative Reuse  letting our subconscious minds direct our hands as we turned the garbage into found art. In writing, we use a similar approach. Found poetry takes words, sentences, or phrases and turns them into poetry. I draw a lot of similarities. Furiously, I modge-podged bits of plastic, wound pieces of wire, glued down images, and even suspended something in a plastic box! When all was said and done and my fingers were nearly stuck together, I sat back and admired my work. My uneven, awkward, barely standing, confusing mass of... something. I don't know. I wouldn't call it art. My wife, an actual artist, had produced a three-dimensional collag...