ARTS
6
Thursday, May 7, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
This piece is part of a series on
“Art during COVID,” an explora-
tion of art forms to keep our idle
minds creative during this pan-
demic. With many of us at home,
our minds have ample time to
wander, wonder, and create.
This series highlights accessible
and immersive art forms to both
produce and consume during the
pandemic months and beyond.
My favorite time to be outside
is right before a storm. I watch
the masses of clouds turning
dark gray, the tree branches
dancing, the ground whispering
through the wind and I want to
be right there when the antici-
pation finally spills over. It’s the
first chapter of a story waiting
to unfold. When the thunder
and lighting do come crashing
down, it’s as if the earth is tell-
ing us to pay attention.
On one particular Novem-
ber evening, when I was still in
Ann Arbor, I had a friend come
over for dinner. Toward the end
of our meal, I sensed a storm
coming and urged him to walk
back to his house before it hit.
He said he’d rather wait until it
did come and then walk back in
the torrents of rain, just to feel
the drops hitting his skin. “The
rain is warm when it’s storm-
ing outside,” he said. It seemed
so simple to just let the drops
hit you instead of seeking shel-
ter under hoods and umbrellas.
I wondered why I didn’t try it
more often.
In my eyes, this pandemic is
just another storm, a momen-
tary pause that forces us to
listen and pay attention to our
surroundings. My last days in
Ann Arbor before moving back
home held the same eerie calm
reserved for those moments
before a downpour. And just like
the worst hurricanes, I remind
myself that this storm will also
pass. While we’re stuck in this
intermittent and uncertain time,
the outdoors, already my solace,
has become my everyday refuge.
With it has come the conviction
that our surroundings are more
than just a place to be active or
escape from the indoors. The
spring terrain is overflowing
with life and this pandemic is a
wonderful time to experiment
with environmental art.
As we wallow away in our
homes, the earth appears to
be rebounding. On my walk
through
the
neighborhood
today, I heard a woodpecker
chipping away at an empty tree
hollow, a blue jay perched on the
uppermost branches of an east-
ern white pine and a dashing red
cardinal hidden in a bush. The
fleeting memory of a red winged
blackbird I saw two weeks ago,
swaying on the top of a wetland
reed, still tugs at my conscious-
ness. A robin has made a nest
in my crabapple tree and the
chicks are nearly ready to take
flight, flapping their wings fero-
ciously. The world is oblivious
to the affairs of humans, likely
happy to be undisturbed at last.
Sitting on my driveway, let-
ting the sun warm my feet, has
become my daily routine of
seeing the world in a different
perspective. Try planting your-
self at ground level and sketch-
ing what’s in front of you, big
or small. Sitting close to the
earth is humbling — it reminds
us of our roots and our destina-
tion, our link between life and
death. Remind yourself that
your creation doesn’t have to be
perfect, because your surround-
ings aren’t. There are rarely any
straight lines in trees or sym-
metrical leaves on branches.
If you’re hesitant to sketch
from scratch, collect branches,
flowers and shrubs and use
them as a template to outline
your shapes. I like to become
my own ecologist and create
field guides in this way, creat-
ing entries for different trees
or flowers that I encounter. I
plan to revisit my failed goal of
last summer — to create a book
of Michigan trees using pens
and watercolor. I live in one of
the flattest suburbs of metro-
Detroit, but even my neighbor-
hood lends itself to projects
like these. Local trails, state
and metro parks, many free of
admission during the pandemic,
are wonderful spaces to draw
inspiration from as well.
Creating a time lapse of your
surroundings, through paint or
pencils or photos, can capture
the moments of beauty even in
the midst of a pandemic. My
focus has been the robin nest in
my crabapple tree that I spot-
ted a month ago. Now, the three
siblings have nearly outgrown
their home. During cold spells,
I watch the mother robin sit
on top of her nest, covering the
chicks to protect them from the
rain that shakes the tree. During
the bright daylight, the chicks
crane their necks for food. I’ve
taken to creating miniature
watercolor paintings of the
robin nest at these various stag-
es, trying to capture the brilliant
blue of the eggs and the burnt
orange of the mother’s belly
through paint.
TRINA PAL
Daily Arts Writer
On environmental art
If you’ve spent any
substantial amount of
time
worrying
about
lofty questions like the
meaning of life, human-
ity’s purpose, or any-
thing else you’d hesitate
to bring up on a first
date, then go watch
“The Midnight Gospel”
right now. This show is
so weird and interesting
that I wouldn’t want to
deprive anyone of the
experience of going into
it blind. Just prepare
some snacks, block out
three hours, load up on
your illicit substance
of choice and enjoy the
ride.
For the more skep-
tical,
“The
Midnight
Gospel” is an animated
TV show created by
Duncan Trussell and
“Adventure Time” cre-
ator Pendleton Ward.
It’s set in a strange
dimension called “The
Chromatic Ribbon” and
follows Clancy (Dun-
can Trussell), as he
uses his universe simu-
lator to travel to other
worlds and interview a
new guest for his space-
cast
(space
podcast)
each episode. Most of
the interview dialogue
is pulled from Trus-
sell’s
actual
podcast,
“The
Duncan
Trus-
sell Family Hour.” This
means that the show is
essentially Trussell as
Clancy interviewing a
real podcast guest as a
made up podcast guest,
but neither Trussell nor
his real guest know that
they’ll
be
portraying
characters at the time
of recording. This puts
the creators in an odd
position: it’s almost like
they’re making a found
footage
film.
Hav-
ing watched the show
without knowing it was
based on a podcast, the
dialogue is integrated
into the story well
enough that I never felt
anything off about it.
Each episode wastes
no time tackling all
sorts of profound exis-
tential questions. The
conversations
hap-
pen while the guest is
absent-mindedly
com-
pleting some bizarre,
action-packed task. The
first
episode
begins
with Clancy traveling
to a version of Earth in
the midst of a zombie
apocalypse.
His
con-
sciousness is shot into
space, landing on Earth
in front of the White
House, where a group of
protesters are advocat-
ing for legalized mari-
juana
as
everything
around them deterio-
rates into a warzone. He
happens to land directly
on the president (Dr.
Drew Pinskey, “Love-
line”) of this version of
the United States, who
agrees to be interviewed
for the spacecast. They
quickly
get
into
an
insightful conversation
about the benefits and
dangers of marijuana
and other drugs, touch-
ing on mental health,
addiction, and philoso-
phy. This, again, all hap-
pens under imminent
threat of an apocalypse.
The President will, for
example, be making a
nuanced point about the
medicinal properties of
marijuana while non-
chalantly shooting at
zombies from the roof of
the White House. Every
episode is structured
similarly, each ending
with the world Clancy
visits being destroyed as
he safely returns home.
The
show
cen-
ters itself around this
irony—the
tension
between abstract phi-
losophizing
and
real
action in a world that’s
fallen into chaos. It
manifests itself not only
in the worlds Clancy
visits, but also his own
life. As the show pro-
gresses, we start to
see Clancy’s tendency
towards escapism. He
devotes all his attention
to his spacecast while
ignoring pressing issues
in his own life. He’ll
routinely discuss with
guests the importance
of
kindness,
forgive-
ness, and living in the
moment,
while
com-
pletely
disregarding
these principles when
he’s back home. The
juxtaposition
between
the
casual
conversa-
tions and the chaotic
environments in which
they take place mirrors
Clancy’s own inner con-
flict, and we see this
play out in increasingly
outlandish ways. “The
Midnight
Gospel”
is
full of irony, but never
mocks the ironic situa-
tion in the way a show
like “South Park” might.
Instead it attempts to
earnestly reconcile the
contradiction in a way
that’s funny and sin-
cere.
The art style of “The
Midnight
Gospel”
takes cues from Ward’s
“Adventure Time.” Each
object in a given scene
looks a bit otherworldly.
Whether it’s a fish with
a human face, a dog-hip-
po hybrid, or a cult-like
crew of feline servants,
strange
images
satu-
rate every scene, form-
ing a captivating and
disorienting composite.
Meanwhile, Clancy and
his guest take part in a
conversation that seems
at first profound, but
pales in comparison to
the wondrousness going
on around them. This
setup invites viewers
to pay attention to the
wonder they might be
ignoring in their own
lives while reinforcing
the ironic tension of the
story.
SEJJAD ALKHALBY
Daily Arts Writer
Surreal sincerity in
‘Midnight Gospel’
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