Everyone comes to the Freak Show To laugh at the Freaks and the Geeks Everyone comes to the Freak Show But nobody laughs when they leave.

- The Residents, "Freak Show"

A better way of summing up my life I have not found. Me, a gargantuan intellectual, a punk snob, 'the largest arms in writing' with a 315 bench-press. Too cultured for some, too wild for others. 'Richard Weems: a nice place to visit,' etc. I have a way of scaring people off with my crazed, manic nature. I crave opera one moment, blood sport the other. Chaos and virtue. Sushi and McDonald's. Many people flock to me, but through pity or disappointment or fear they shrink away again. A walking Freak Show. In the end, far from an amusement and a little too intense to take very seriously.

I have right now an obsession with The Residents. I have tapes of their old collections Heaven? And Hell! that have only left my car stereo for each other. I make weekly treks, as regular as salmon migration, to the same circuit of used CD stores to look for more. A big-ass Oompah-Loompah rejected even from the Chocolate Factory. I don't order in advance – what I'm looking for must be there already, waiting, sitting, so that when I come across it I can make funny noises of joy and discovery in the aisle and cause people to look sidelong at me, if they aren't already.

Home alone, I sit on my balcony with a few ice brews and conduct the air to The Third Reich 'n' Roll and Whatever Happened to Vileness Fats? (my favorite album, something like a soundtrack to a gothic-cum-Bauhaus children's show). Their versions of "This is a Man's World" and "Jailhouse Rock" aren't simple parodies of James Brown or Elvis Presley. The songs are more assessments of our deification of these men of music, condemnatory and sympathetic both. More importantly, these songs are so wholly digested into The Residents' style of music that they become songs written by The Residents rather than songs written by someone else.

Great artists steal and make what they steal wholly their own. The Residents' music is proliferate with the ridiculous thumping of bubblegum rock, but the music is more than bubblegum rock, more than bubblegum parody. It has become music wholly unique to The Residents and inseparable from their sound. That fucker Vanilla Ice didn't have the cajones to admit he stole the riff from Queen's "Under Pressure" because there was no art to Vanilla Ice – just sampling. When we hear Queen's bassline, it is still Queen's bassline because it has nothing to do with the Vanilla Ice sound because there is no artistry there, no originality in the Vanilla Ice sound. Jasper Johns made the American flag a stolen object he invented for his art. Forget about it as the national symbol, except in Jasper Johns' America. Ethan Canin shows no art in the fact that he plagiarized Bret Lott, because Ethan's stories are pretty artless to start with. His characters strive to exhibit purity. They don't cheat on their wives. They stay married for decades. They are normal and average, something I have never felt sympathy for (envy, yes). It's not that the art of a story depends on us not believing what is said. Art is not barbed criticism in favor of an alternative agenda. Art depends on us getting a feel that there is more than what we're told. Ethan's characters are too righteously flat for us to engage with them and get a feel of their whole selves beyond their self-characterizing statements.

Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a commonly used example of unreliable narrator (the more he tells us he's crazy, the more we believe he's the opposite), but "The Raven" is a poem of higher art. We believe the fact that there is a raven in the poet's room calling out, "Nevermore," but there is more to this tale than what the poet can tell us. He tortures himself via this raven. He knows what the raven's singular response is going to be, and so he asks it questions that, when answered with a mocked "Nevermore," will hurt him most. The artist does not have us merely accept or distrust what we're told but creates a world deeper than its immediate clues. A world beyond. We find fault and fancy in this world created for us, and we come away with a knowledge of it we may not wholly understand ourselves but that we are cognizant of having experienced.

To create the world beyond the artist must cross a line: the line of love. Love of a subject requires an utter acceptance of its faults and strengths, its heights of intellect and its banal silliness. Love is hard to come by, especially if it is of the self. If you like everything about your subject matter, you have not learned to love it yet, for this is mere infatuation, but the other end is just as bad. How easy is it to admit that your sister-in-law, who makes your mom cry and gets you fantasizing about cruel and unusual punishment, is genuinely fun to play miniature golf with?

The Residents loved the silly pop songs of the ‘60s. That's why they medley them together in The Third Reich 'n' Roll and equate Dick Clark to Adolph Hitler. That is why, despite the dictatorial inference, we can still enjoy the hell out of these silly pop song covers and not know whether it is the cover or the song itself that is silly. Love of subject matter allows that subject matter to breathe its own life, despite what you may want it to do, and what is the ultimate goal of art but to have it subsist on its own without the artist hanging over the audience's shoulder explaining things? Raymond Carver was asked once why he wrote about such sad people. This question surprised him. "I love my characters," he responded. "I love them enough to let them mess up now and then, but in the end I think they're noble."

Actually, Carver never said these exact words. These words are taken from Samuel Beckett and John Cage and Eric Bogosian, any who have also expressed this sentiment. Art does not make fun of its subject matter, nor does it try to sell it to us. In the end, it is the respectable artist who releases control of his work and allows it its own breath.

Which does not mean that the artist takes a blasé attitude toward the work. In fact, release of control comes only through intense rigidity. Beckett was extremely bossy about how Godot had to be informed. He forbade the play to ever see the stage again in Holland when he found out that a performance there cast women in the roles of Didi and Gogo. The Residents were so influenced by N. Senada's "Theory of Obscurity" (that an artist's best work is made when the artist is obscure and has little concern of an audience) that they composed an album that was never to be released (titled, appropriately, Not Available — now available). The Residents maintain such a rigid interpretation of the Theory of Obscurity that they never appear without some kind of disguise (their most popular being the tux and tails with eyeballs for heads), and they never reveal any personal information about themselves. Their music is their only true communication with the world.

But such constriction and discipline ultimately free the artist from the art. Donald Ault said about his interpretations of William Blake that he needed to learn the criticism on William Blake to such an extent that he could then forget about it. If a rigid work ethic intended upon freeing the object of art sounds contradictory to you, welcome aboard! You've taken a good step. Confusion is always a good step. I quote the I Ching: "Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish to the crowd." Start by looking foolish to yourself – the crowd will soon follow.

Which brings me back to The Residents, with William Blake their heaviest influence. I have never seen Blake's name associated with the eyeballed ones, but the similarities are striking. Blake wrote poetry on such a level that twenty years ago no respectable academic program would have considered a study on him worthy of attention. And though The Residents may have a cult following and their eyeball disguise may be known quite universally, very few would consider them 'serious artists.' This is because Blake and The Residents work on a level of very high foolishness. Both have a wonderful gift for inventing beautiful, absurd names. The Residents deal with characters with names like Mortimer Snerd and towns like Vileness Fats, and they write songs with titles like "Whoopy Snorp" (an absolute classic). Wonderful-sounding, cartoonish names. Their music has a Tex Avery soundtrack feel to it, the notes discordant and circus-like. And their mastery of the sound in language is a wonder. Listen to these lines, a refrain in the mini-operatic "Walter Westinghouse":

Eat Exuding Oinks Upon
And Bleed Decrepit Broken Bones
At Caustic Spells of Hell.

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