A Few Magics

I once worked with middle school students and as such was often asked by a few of the more imaginative ones to critique their artwork. I recall the artistic draftsmanship of one Brittany, a bug eyed dirty blond who made straight 100s and who usually helped me pick up the room after class.
One afternoon, she walked up to my desk during the homework hour and put a manila sheet of paper atop my keyboard and asked me if I thought what she had drawn on the paper “looked right.” What was on the paper was a large cube with arrows emanating from each cardinal direction outside the cube. Captioned next to the northward arrow was “expand-a-wall north,” and from the southern arrow, “expand-a-wall south,” etc continuing for east and west. The blueprint was for “Expand-a-room,” an architectural invention, Brittany elaborated, which promises to “give you more room in your room.” Upon one of the transparent walls of the cube there was a little rectangle, with an arrow pointing to it and a caption that read “power source.” There was also a larger rectangle, a “door.” And there it was, her invention. She had her elbows on my desk and was pivoting on them a bit waiting for my reply. “My dad is an engineer and said that it was a really good idea.” I sat marveled in the sheer lack of irony in her presentation, a simplicity I wanted to eat and have become apart of me. A conflict emerged: what do I say? I could have and wanted to take her comically spare blueprint and Xerox it and give it to all my friends to selfishly feed the pulsing want of irony and all things ironic and hilariously “mal produced” that sometimes seems to replace any kind of “natural” viewing of the world and supplant it with a view favoring incredulous surprise at even the most mundane. But I resisted knowing that a normal person would regard this art in the context of the sweet naïve girl who created it and would smile and simply say, as I did, “Yes, It looks right.”

So now, here, in the shadow of such a preface I present to the world the child-like renderings of Benjamin Jeremiah (see also "Favorite Ever Creation" Sept. 2005), a 25 year old man with a full beard and a penchant for stories about “the stupid things kids do,” whose scribbles and “magics” creations, in there baffling approximation to the “real thing”, allow me the satisfaction of near-Xerox reproduction with out the guilt of exploiting the naive artistic endeavors of an innocent child. Behold: