Craig Hancock received his B.F.A and M.A. from The University of California Berkley and his Ph.D from Vassar.  He currently specializes in American and European post-minimalism.  Craig was a Stanley Stetson visiting scholar at Northwestern University in 1992 and has received numerous grants and fellowships for his research, including an award from the J. Paul Getty Foundation.  His book Dan Flavin: Intercontexutalities Suspended was nominated for the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award in 1995 and he co-edited Marcel Duchamp: Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.  He currently teaches at The University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Marie and daughter Devin. 

Craig Hancock was fond of saying “art saved his life.”  It was a personal dramatic flourish he afforded himself on the first day of every Western Art After 1400 or whatever undergraduate bullshit seminar he taught at The University of Michigan.  It was the kind of pithy statement that inspires awe in some 18 year olds, the same ones changing right before our eyes, the same ones who will not recognize themselves by the time they turn 22.  But to be young is very heaven according to Wordsworth.  How exactly art changed Craig Hancock’s life is a bit unclear.  He said it was the first time he saw The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that he knew he had to be an Art Historian.  It helped that he couldn’t draw.  Now, years later the mendacity of the statement was becoming apparent to Craig.  Saying that “art saved his life” was really just a pathetic declamation in hopes of receiving a mild momentary energy return from a handful of students.  It was this energy return, this feedback, this undivided attention, those lightbulbs going off inside heads that gave Craig Hancock the validation he constantly sought and rarely found.  

Marie Hancock was cheating on Craig with one of his doctoral students.  It started innocent enough at the departmental holiday party.  OK, it wasn’t that innocent but that’s what Marie told her friends.  Then came the text messages.  Then meeting up for coffee.  In another time there would have been love letters and gardenias before Marie and Stephen were fucking in the middle of the day on her lunch break in the admissions office.  Craig knew but didn’t say anything.  He recommend Stephen’s dissertation on James Turrell’s Roden Crater passable and found the paper much more fascinating then the affair.  

Often the past appears to us as a distant universe, endless empty black minutes sprinkled with a few bright moments that last for eons.  Craig Hancock’s dad teaching him how to drive always stood out like an iridium satellite on the clear summer night of his youth.  A certain 1971 Ford Pinto circling in stop-starts between first and second gear in the Jefferson High School parking lot.  John trying to explain to Craig how to clutch, brake, shift.  Those first 30 torturous minutes of a steep and necessary learning curve.  John taking the wheel and driving them unexpectedly to Denny’s.  Craig ordering a grilled cheese, John ordering a coffee.  John who had just lost his job.  John who began to cry loudly in front of his teenage son.  Craig who walked out the door leaving his dad scared and shattered. Craig who sliced the tire of the Pinto with his pocket knife and walked home alone. Funny how all sons eventually become their fathers. It was something Devin couldn’t understand. 

(gif(t))

(Slow Club’s Paradise out on Moshi Moshi Records)

I.

After the lake has been frozen for a few months I will on occasion find myself completely unaware that underneath the violent ice there is a rushing, a water - sweet, dark and cold.  I’ll say to Joann or Stacy or Bob, we can walk here now.  Our waking universe has expanded.  Nature only shows deference or remorse anymore.  And I’ll really mean it when I say this.  Then we’ll go inside Henry’s, my bar, our bar, and we’ll each order a round - a pitcher of Shiner Bock –descending into the evening gratefully.  Before long I’ll stare into my beer and remember that the water is still there beneath the ice.  It probably moves in a sweet, dark and cold flow just like a beer.  I forgot about the water under the ice I’ll say. Bob, will raise his glass with a woozy camaraderie as if he forgets these little things too and I will love him.

II.

Back inside the workweek we live in a world of Tuesday mornings and ergonomic office chairs.  On Tuesday, Jason called me when he got home from school to ask if he could use the car that night.  He had a date.  I told him he could pick it up at Henry’s after 6.  He immediately started cursing me out but I hung up quietly before he could say anything too foolish.  It takes time to be a man. I smoked a lot of cigarettes the night before and hit on this woman I went to high school with. I think her name is Debbie.  I called Jason for a ride but his phone was dead.  I don’t remember going back to Debbie’s shitty apartment on the east side but that’s where I woke up.   I got up at 7am and took a cab back to the house. I didn’t have time to shower or shave or make Jason breakfast or just talk and be normal.

III.

Spring comes late.  The trees speak to the sky.  In city park a runner across a field.  Two teenagers slow dance to some Bob Dylan song in a parking lot forever.  The gnawing is gone.  The lake is a lake.  All water now.   I remember.

(photo source)

(The Chills’ Kaleidoscope World was released in 1986 and is still fantastic)

I am sitting in the St. John’s Medical Center cafeteria with my sister Amy.  Another Thursday just evaporating.

A man walks in.  He wears his gown hunched and heavily adorned with IV lines as two of his family members walk slowly behind, one at each side.  He looks like a retired general in his new uniform, regal and depressed.  He carries with him a great and dignified loss, nearly broken over some battle that is being replayed in his mind every second of every day.  It’s the kind of thing you can’t share with people because it might mean too much if they actually got it.  Still, we somehow immediately know where he has been and we know where he is going and we know that it is good and we know very, very little else.  He puts a small bowl of banana pudding on his tray and it’s all really quite a spectacle to watch if you watch it from far enough away.  I swear I could sell tickets to this thing. 

My sister is texting. 

She’s 33 years old.

This look is not becoming on Amy.  I don’t dare tell her, I’m not sure I could watch her cry again today and I’m not sure she has any tears left and more than anything I really don’t want to find out. I decide to quietly go back to eating my banana pudding which has suddenly, but not inexplicably, taken on new significance underneath the noxious fluorescent lightening which has rendered us all slow and still.  Some of us gods, some monsters, and some beautifully both. 

(photo source)

(St. Vincent’s new album Strange Mercy is out September 13th on 4AD)

I was never really awake until I felt the first clean crunch of 12 ounce leather landing into the left front orbital.  Usually someone’s glove and my face.  I mean a lot of times I got the first punches in but being clocked was certainly alarming.  That’s just the way it works.  It’s strange, compounded velocity that moves everything.  Physics alarm clocks. 

I was really attracted to Euclidean Vectors and feedback loops back then.  I wrote a paper in AP U.S. History about how American foreign policy relations from the 1980s-present could be described using mechanical and electrical engineering conceptual applications.  But it all really stemmed from me snapping into life every morning amid the cavernous drone of Schott’s Boxing Club.   Suddenly, I was there.  I was real.  I existed in the absolute present for a moment, divorced from natural sequence and therefore completely impossible to measure in time.  This is how I woke up every day for six years. 

I never remembered much about the actual daily trek to the gym.  I must have taken third avenue, I don’t know how else I would have gotten there.  Then it happened.   One day I was walking really early in the morning and as I was about to cross president street I saw a car barreling down the hill in reverse.  It must have been going 50 miles per hour.  1989 Volvo 240. One driver, no passengers.  It slammed into the Lyceum with a violence straight out of world war whatever.  I read later in the paper the man behind the wheel had an epileptic seizure and lost control of the vehicle.  It was the first time I ever witnessed anyone die.  I pretended to ignore the scene and kept walking straight towards the gym.  I remember being delivered unwilling into wired consciousness.  I remember being completely paralyzed by all stimuli.  I remember just sitting on the bench in the empty locker room. I remember spinning, shaking.  I remember taking my still unzipped bag and quietly walking out of the building.  I remember taking a cab even though I couldn’t afford it.  I remember that was the last time I was really awake. 

 (art source)

(John Maus’ We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves out on Upset The Rhythm)

So much depends on

a few drops of rain above Crawford county

clouds as big as houses explode into being

maliciously circling around the midday sun

while we sit fast awake on another blank Saturday

a picnic in purgatory

you point to some rare bird floating upwards on the wind

as if it means anything at all

.

So much depends on

how we will entertain the breach of our isolation

and suddenly I’m very dizzy

as you laugh into the soft sky

about providence, rhode island

and friends left behind like national monuments

neo-classical and treasured

I listen as the rain falls into our champagne  

we should probably gather our things and go now

instead of refusing to acknowledge where we are

and the very uncertain prospect

of the longing

and the longing itself long gone

(photo source)

(The Soft Boys Underwater Moonlight) 

I never saw someone cry like that.  Really amazing, hard, profound tears that glittered against your soft skin the way diamonds dance under light.  The face streaked all burning and wet.  I didn’t know what to do next so I pulled you down close and we sat on the hardwood kitchen floor in alternate universes of sob and silence. 

I am living inside weird springtime weather cycles. Mend, break, mend, break, mend, break.  Later we make breakfast and put on a record.  You call your mother.  I do the dishes. You smoke a cigarette, I go to the store. I don’t know where you’re living anymore.  

(photo source)

(The Parenthetical Girls Privilege Part III: Mend & Make Do EP out on Slender Means Society)