Living with Legends

Part III: The Elvis Altar

Out in the hall beside the trash bin, I found a big, white, wooden pedestal, maybe three feet high, like the kind of thing they would set a sculpture on in a museum.  I think it even had a number on it, so you could check the price of the sculpture to see how badly you couldn’t afford it.  I knew I should hold onto this, though I caught a lot of grief from my girlfriend, who accused me, predictably enough, of junking up our already cramped apartment.  Luckily, later that week I found a bunch of those big hurricane candles in the recycling bin, the ones with pictures of religious icons on them.  More junk to pile up on top of the record player—which I haven’t been able to get to in years.  Though I didn’t at once grasp the totality of the piece, I knew they somehow belonged with the pedestal.

It was a good thing I remembered the Elvis Poster.  On one of the lower floors, someone has mounted a framed poster of Elvis, from the Vegas period, doing one of his famous dance moves.  Why this is there, in the midst of all the original paintings, I have no idea.  We seem to have had a slackening of artistic standards at the hotel lately—my own work is ample testament to this truth—and apparently one of our deranged dorm-denizens reverences Elvis to a fanatical degree.  But I guess I can see that: he is the King, after all.  I have an idea who the culprit is: there’s this guy with long black hair who goes around in jeans and a black leather jacket, an old rocker.  I never have spoken with him, as he keeps odd hours, but one time an elderly lady told me he drove her crazy with a 24 hour marathon of Elvis Music on the 20^th anniversary of his—Elvis’s–death.  “Jailhouse Rock”, “I’m All Shook Up”, “I want To Be Your Teddy Bear”, “Blue Suede Shoes”: the nightmare begins to take form.  Though the lady who told me about the infamous “Heartbreak Hotel” music marathon is notoriously prone to exaggeration, I figure anyway it’s got to be him.

I lugged the pedestal down the few flights of stairs and placed it in front of the Elvis poster, then ran back up and got three candles.  These I arranged atop the pedestal, in a fitting memorial to the man who sang “In The Ghetto”.  It was my most ambitious work to date, and I was quite pleased with myself.  Though the effect would certainly have been heightened had I lit the candles, it seemed like it would have been dangerous to go off and leave them burning in the halls.  But after all, perhaps I should have lit them, perhaps that might have warned off the infidels, for my Elvis altar (though not the Elvis poster!) was ripped down and carted away before the night was done, and by the morning not a trace of it remained.  They didn’t even bother to check the price in the catalog.  It was going cheap too, I can assure you of that.  I believe art should be for everyone, and I’m sure that accounts for some of the hostility toward my work.  The snobs and elites in the art world—they who would strangle the soul of true art–are just not ready for this kind of challenge to their illegitimate hegemony.

The Bastards.  Everybody always puts up their art on the walls of the Chelsea—most of it good, but some quite atrocious–so I figured, why shouldn’t I put mine up too?  I expected my medium, garbage art, to be respected here, if nowhere else.  But genius is just not appreciated in this world, even, apparently, in the Chelsea Hotel.  Maybe they think I’m making fun of the vaunted creative spirit of the Chelsea—which I am, but so what?  Pretension should be mocked.  Let’s not take our art, or ourselves, so seriously.  My “art” is an ironic commentary on the art we find throughout the hotel, and perhaps also some sort of critique of our throwaway society.  But let’s not think too hard about it, because actually I think I just drag things out of the trash for the hell of it, because I have nothing better to do.  On the other hand, this may not be that far off from the reason why many people, including probably many great artists, create art.

But now, to get back to the pink ducks: finally, one of my creations is allowed to stand.  At first someone kept knocking them down, but I kept putting them back up.  This went on for more than a week.  Originally I had them turned to face one another atop the transom, but finally I turned them in the same direction, and this apparently satisfied my critic’s aesthetic standards, for the vandalism stopped, and they’ve been up for about a year now.  It feels good to finally have the fruits of my labors recognized—though I’m sure my poor little ducks will be knocked down and stuffed deep into the bowels of the trash from whence they came as soon as anybody from the hotel reads this. (Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006)

(Next Week: No More Garbage Art)