BOTTOMFEEDERS

I met Wesley Willis the last time he was in Columbus, and I videotaped his show; I also did a brief interview with him. Actually, he just head-butted me and the camera, but that's beside the point.
He died last Thursday, and I was not too shocked when I found out. The guy looked like hell the last time I saw him. He was walking with a cane, and looked much worse than he did when I saw him in 1999. I talked to one of his caretakers during the show, and thought about the course of medications that he had been given throughout his life to deal with the magnitude of his mental disorder. I could see the impact they had had on his body. The thing is, without that medication he would not have had enough control to become the rock star that he was. Some great irony,.. but such is life. The benefits outweighed the cost, and, as a result, a volume of people are able to experience what he left behind before the physiological strain of his medicine caught up with him.
His work gave people a window into the mind of a chronic paranoid schizophrenic. His music was riddled with portraits of his confrontations with personal demons, but also with the salvation he found in Christ, public transportation, and rock 'n' roll. He gave insight into what goes on in the mind of someone who has lost their shit, and how they deal with things on a day-to-day basis. He shared all of his conscious dealings with the world; something that hardly anyone has the honesty or courage to do. He confronted his dysfunction with music as his weapon. Plus, he was a dedicated artist. It was at that show where I realized that he did his art simply by drawing the world as he saw it.
Recalling a conversation with a friend who studied art, I realized that a lot of other great artists had a common trait in that what they did was an expression of how they saw the world. A good look at his drawings brought me to see Wesley Willis as a modern day Vincent Van Gogh. I bought a picture of a train, and kept thinking about all of the paintings that I see on mass-produced posters sold in boutiques. I wondered if people bought them because they related to the artist's frame of mind, or if they bought them because they would look good on their wall.
One of the people I ran into that night was a former teacher of mine. We conversed about how the Native Americans treated the mentally ill as sacred, and the tragedy of their neglect, abuse, and ridicule in modern society. He was there not only to see Wesley, but also to see what kind of people would come out to such a show, and how they would react. Were they there for a drunken laugh, to rock out, or out of interest and curiosity? The conversation we had led to the conclusion that the mentally ill can serve as a "cultural barometer" to see if true altruism exists in a society, or just to see if someone's an asshole. You can tell a lot about someone's personality by how they treat those less fortunate.
I was pleased to see that a lot of the people there went out of interest, and they didn't have that type of condescending attitude that most people learn to drop after sixth grade. That is, they weren't just there for a laugh. They were there to observe the joy of a man who was liberated whenever he stepped on stage. They were there to see someone who was living his dream.
While I was studying neuroscience and behavior at OSU, I began to form the idea of perceptual plasticity. Perception varies between people, and one's perception is based on the capabilities of their nervous system and sensory organs. Through that I came to believe that the mentally ill have much less control over how their brain creates or processes information, but otherwise they are no less human than you or I. Wesley's work was a catalyst for this train of thought. Listening to him (and watching Harmony Korine's Julian Donkey-Boy) painted a very vivid portrait in my mind of the physical, mental, and spiritual terror that a schizophrenic can experience. It gave me respect for the vigor that Wesley employed in fighting his demons.
Wesley Willis lived his dream. He was a rock star. He was homeless and schizophrenic, and he fought his demons with rock 'n' roll. A lot of people saw him as a freak on stage. But what I saw was a benevolent artist and musician who shared his joys and sorrows with everyone. Now I see him as a free man. Looking at the window into his mind makes me wonder about the perceptual capabilities of "normal" people, and if they are just less able to hear the demons that drive some of them to act like such assholes.