I Dreamed a Dream
I woke up today thinking about my delusions of grandeur. For a few months, I’ve daydreamed about a series of large-scale sculptures and installations that describe my childhood dreams never realized.
ITTET, the only advice that’s a buzz in the real world is ‘to be realistic’. As an artist, I find myself caught between being absolutely grounded and facing the ‘facts’, while at the same time feeling a responsibility to think out of the box. I think we’ve all got to think out of the box now in order to deal with some of these new changes in our lives.
So with these realizations, I think about the dreams and the delusions of grandeur we had as kids, and how we choose to put them in a box as we grow older and tuck that box under our beds. At a young age, my generation was taught to dream big because anything was possible. As we get older, our generation is criticized for living in the moment and testing out all our options before settling on one job, if we even get to that point.
(My favorite ‘in the moment’ example of our generation is that we no longer feel the need to write drafts for essays or papers. Once upon a time, people hand wrote drafts with black pens and corrected them with red ones. After several handwritten drafts were complete, they carefully typed the final version onto a typewriter because ink was scarce and paper was precious. Now, we ‘keyboard’ away into Word, backspace like crazy, and count the number of words in the document with the click of a button. Then we print like mad because paper is as fluid as the ink.)
These dreams and delusions span a lifetime, but for me, they also drive my life. This past weekend, I channel surfed onto Superstar, the 1999 movie about Molly Shannon’s hysterical SNL character Mary Katherine Gallagher. In a nutshell, I couldn’t relate more to her ideas of stardom. I mean, look at this blog’s title!
Below is the key moment of the movie where I just lost control and thought, “omg, I am Mary Katherine Gallagher”.
Sure, its fun, we all daydream and giggle. However, this girl (and I) clearly has a heightened detailed experience with a fictitious reality. I think one cause of this celebrity delusion is a flood of exposure to popular culture through media like television and magazines.
The most important point I wanted to touch upon was the clear shift in persona that you see at the end of the clip when she returns to reality. Throughout the movie, Mary Katherine obtains this surge of self-confidence and normality when she’s knee deep in her disassociation with our reality. But when she exists as ‘herself’, she’s shy and scared and perceived as a weirdo.
Moral of the story? I’m confident when I’m not myself, I think. Ask Gus about it, I’m sure he’s got a Great Answer. So be prepared for something big to come. I had grandiose dreams once, and I’d like to share them with you.
