Reaction to "The Ecstacy of Influence" by Jonathan Lethem

Saturday night, my boyfriend and I were driving north on 57, attempting to get home for a family celebration. Instead, we found ourselves flung 30 yards off the roadside, with a tree trunk 2 ft into the back of his car. This was by far the closest experience I've had to death. However, during the two full spins and what seemed like hours of sliding, all I remember thinking about was a mix of the muddy car scene in Jurassic Park with the "let go" crash from Fight club. I didn't even realize how frightened I was until stepping out of the car. While reading Lethem's article, I felt a little indignant that I didn't experience that car crash as my own. For god's sake, I was thinking about a movie! Lethem addresses the concept of original source. I often find myself wondering, when writing or sketching, if I read or saw what I am working on somewhere else. There are only so many human experiences to draw from. Re appropriation and remixing is as common as "original" work anymore. I love Lethem's conclusion: "Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chop sticks while listening to reagge and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall--i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar--it's not asurprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for "real" to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world our of disparate streams of flat sights." I often find myself trying to push my experiences, separate myself from media, and record something uniquely mine and completely whole. I think this is a reaction to the impossibility of unmediated experience.