Titus O.

After Dark: that’s the title and operative premise of Haruki Murakami’s riveting new novel — if you can even really call it that. Written almost more like a film treatment, and no longer than some short stories, it manages to find subtle exploratory permutations in this most tried (tired?) of forms, feeling as contemporary as the latest Apple gadget release. It almost defines a new form – call it “postmodern metaphysical sci-fi horror pop noir.” It’s an unwieldy phrase trying to encapsulate Murakami’s breathtaking ability to cut across genres.

Taking place in the few hours between midnight and dawn during a neon and fluorescent-lit Tokyo night, the story revolves around nerdy 19 year-old Mari Asai’s insomniac adventures away from her suburban home and bed. She unwittingly becomes swept up in the seedier workings of the city’s underground, by morning finding herself with a “love hotel” manager as new friend; an unsettling awareness of lurking violence that rends lives; reconciliation with a mysteriously comatose Sleeping Beauty of a sister; and maybe even a boyfriend, one who’s badly in need of a hair brush.

The peculiar shifting narrator of this alternative night world is us; a collective “we” that includes the reader. Its mise-en-scene is depicted with cinematic clarity, often even describing the motions of an invisible camera, one that chooses its shots as if willed by the author’s keen understanding of what we ourselves would most desire to see, and know. That narrative drive here is understood to be irrevocably shaped by film. David Lynch would love this book, and was maybe an inspiration, as perhaps were the gothic horror “Ring” movies.

Often evoking science fiction, in “After Dark” we confront a 21^st century world that, unembellished, already is sci-fi. A character’s reference to the movie “Blade Runner” comes long after that visual is visceral. But rather than focus his generous gift for precise description on gizmos and cybergear, Murakami concentrates instead on the non-silicon – the menu at Denny’s, crows, trash, pencils, tacky hotel rooms, books, vinyl jazz records, and what seems like the triumph of dairy products in a country that didn’t eat them until relatively recently. Yogurt, eggs, and milk in particular, are oddly embedded in every plot twist, another peculiarity from this master of quirk, grounding us and the story in the familiarly mundane.

Which is helpful, as the story’s real subject feels so expansive, uncanny, and metaphysically enraptured. But where a western author might paint this world in terms of good and evil, Murakami is able to remain seemingly comfortable, serene even, finding beauty and solace in a world described again and again as unpredictable, extreme, and deeply, unfathomably mysterious; a world devoid of black and white, but rather painted in 10,000 shades of gray.

Instead of responding to this apparent tumult with anything resembling existential despair, a deep, one might say almost Buddhistic, sense of compassion and morality emanates from the characters themselves, and from the author, who gives us an interpenetrating, synchronistic world where innocence survives loss and inhumanity; where at least some bad men who do bad things feel the uncomfortable pangs of conscience, and for whom retribution looms; and where creativity, curiosity, love, and a bemused sense of purpose, not technological materialism or fear, are the most indomitable of forces.

“It’s terrible to be a painter.” So says German artist Dirk Skreber in his one-line artist statement in the book, “Art Now.” The sentiment not only nicely sums up the general sense of fatigue and angst that accompanies this most exhausted of media, but I wish would also become the standard length for gallery artist blurbs. In the case of “UNT/NYC #2: Painting, the Semi-Sublime,” it’s an applicable sentiment. Some of the art is a bit tired, plus lengthy artist statements are unfortunately writ large on the wall next to the art, so you can’t help but read them. I usually try not to, as they’re at best tedious; at worst, disastrous. Not many exceptions to that rule here.

The artists are all recent UNT graduates who live in New York, or more likely, Brooklyn or another borough affordably further out. They therefore seem generally apprised of current global trends, with a bazillion galleries at their fingertips. UNT does a good job of that, and of sending their aspiring best off to the Big Apple.Randall Friedman’s sloppy Sharpie marker on “One-Shot” gloss enamel is such run-of-the-mill undergrad art fare I’m baffled by his inclusion. Vanessa Michel’s tightly rendered G.I. portrait-from-photograph is only a notch more interesting – at least its painted well, even if it has no relation to the shows’ “romantic landscape” theme, around which all the other work seem more clearly oriented.

Sharing the same space, Richard Tinkler’s commanding abstraction “II 48C” simply eats up the other two artists’ work, and is hard to stop staring at. A crazy palette dominated by complementary crimsons and greens churns out from a centralized cross-like mandala, the four computer-patterned quadrants dizzyingly mirroring each other. It’s like a psychedelic quilt, with weird resemblance to early American abstraction, giving it a timeless quality. I couldn’t even decide if it was any good. It kind of bugged me. A good omen, I find – art should resist taste.

Colin O’Con includes one medium-sized and four modest little nighttime landscapes. Maybe they’d work as watercolors. I was rooting for them, with their mysterious glowing horizons and night-light effects, but the opacity and deadness of the alla prima acrylic paint just leaves them sadly inert. C. Sean Horton nods to Andy Warhol with the only work here tending toward the conceptual,  “Untitled(Christ in the Clouds)” (this wall panel being the exception to the rule, I would still have rather walked to the desk for the information.) I couldn’t see Jesus, but I appreciated the casual, repeated Xerox approach to poetic information transfer.

Justin Aidan seems to know just what he’s about, as demonstrated in an expansive installation of his small shaped canvass, inspired by living in New York while dreaming of west Texas desert skies. I went back again and again to his intuitive, Tuttle-esque, chunky little paintings – punctuated by one big landscape, adding a nice balance. They defied an easy read or categories (that welcome resistance again,) and if they maybe suffer from being a little too discreetly pretty, they succeed overall with a winning sense of seriousness, individuality, and playful awkwardness.  

Words are things of overlooked power, and substance more concrete than we often realize. We swim in them as fish in water, oblivious to their moisture, our very psyches and sense of self inseparable from the language we use to shape them. I’ve said about my favorite novelist, Jim Harrison, that I love his prose because it feels built, like masonry.  Funny then to discover that Harrison is referenced in a drawing by sculptor Joseph Havel, who builds physical constructions that are quite literally composed of words.

Havel also cites John Berryman as inspiration, and he bends the poet’s texts into cursive-twisted wire that he then maniacally wraps in cloth and thread, the subsequent sculptures fancifully reeling out through the gallery, suspended in space. I ask little more from art, finally, than that it be the obvious product of fixated affection (as opposed to affectation), and Havel’s program couldn’t be faked in this sense. He literally makes these texts he loves palpable, physical, and while they becomes so much non-sense as language, they accrue novel meanings in their transformation into new mediums. Words remain readable, but slip in and out of focus, becoming just a touchstone in a symphonic dance of elements. This is text you can walk around, under, and into, your body another dancer in the work.

Sharing (a little uneasily) the neighboring gallery, El Paso native Gaspar Enriquez’ very different work imports his barrio to Arlington, with a dozen beautifully rendered ambassadors of the Chicano universe. “Mi Querida Madre”  and “Un Veterano Chignon” photo-realistically depicts two powerful male archetypes, tattooed, scarred, bearded, and proud. The series “Color Harmony en la Esquina”, sweetly depicts youthful urban couples increasingly color blind to respective shades of pink or brown. They all look so serious, real modern day Romeos y Julietas, daring you to dis their love.

My favorite is Enriquez’ effective installation, “La Patsy, Los Homeboys y los Cuartos.” It’s a neighborhood corner moment frozen, a gang of life-size, two-dimensional, cut-out homies, each with an actual 40 oz. wrapped in brown paper bag, resting on the ground. You can almost smell the fresh tortillas wafting on the summer breeze. This work depicts one America’s dominant social constituencies from the inside, with affection, respect, and intimate observation, humanizing and elevating faces that too often are only depicted as a dangerous “other” in the prevailing media. Kudos to the UT Arlington gallery for consistently displaying good work by artists of great aesthetic, cultural, and racial diversity.