SANDSCRAPER

Nathan Petree
→BRDD FAV 2028

You, you in this place. You
like a cast. You,
stuck in the static.

You, look at this. Look at my face, see it there. See the sand in my ear, it's coming out. I've tried to cover it for so long, but it’s leaking now. See the sand, right there it’s falling out of you. It’s yours then.

the drone¹
you form the drone
it forms the rest for you

we are the air pressing on the middle of
we are the closed hands cupped under you

we are shaking,
waiting to hear from you

But you,
You rose out for less.²

You saw the sand spill, you felt relief, you hated how it accumulated,
now you love its color, you love its texture. You built a cage around it,
you took a funnel and you let it spill in. You paraded the cage, you toured it around, you made some money, you capitalized on it. You made it.
No one has seen the sand of such a young artist. Artist. Auteur.
Auteur³—you.

Now you’re the main stage, you’re the one there, you’re the one.
I’m jealous, I have to admit it, but I’m waiting and willing to bet that the sand in me, the sand that is still accumulating that I’ve been fearful to let spill, will be beautiful, I’m refining⁴ it, and from the little leaks that have come out so far, this sand is something else, will be something else entirely.

You rose out for less.⁵

Hell, I want to ask if it was worth it, if I’ve been wasting my time, if I’ve gone against my old god for no reason. But I’m waging it all on the backbone of this statement: you did your job.⁶

Though I know that this might not be enough to supplement my shortcomings here, the thing that guides me is enough of a fearmonger to let me move forward with the ferocity allowed for such a thing.

At least that’s how I’m seeing things.

I formed a fence out of this and didn’t let go.
I built a vacuum because I want this to be true.
Because when I saw the sand for the first time,
I was fearful. I saw the particles falling from my
father’s ear and I knew then that it was there, and so
it was mine too.

Somewhere in the mixture that makes the form
that makes my body is his sand, made into mine.
How I hate those bits of it.

And somewhere, sunken to the bottom of it are the rough pieces
from the part of life I haven’t had the courage to mention.
Somewhere else I sense there’s a gray that I wouldn’t even
be able to form the words possible to describe, so maybe
it’s better to say that I couldn’t even tell you what I don’t
know about it. And somewhere else, I believe I could
easily spot where the pieces that belong to you fall in.

Because somewhere in taking notice of your limbs,
I’ve seen a near-exceptional red between the flowing
of hues under your skin. And somewhere under
mine, it’s gotten in, no it’s never mixed, but there’s
something in yours that has fallen into mine. Now it’s our
sand, and I’m wondering why I can run again, and I’m
wondering why my broken hand can twist again, why
my feet are growing again, why my handwriting
doesn’t look so manufactured again but messy and
incomprehensible, and it’s because your sand, the thing
that forms the blood, is in mine, and mine is in yours, and
so this red that I see in your body and in mine becomes
imperfect but more alluring so.

How I wish you could understand that.

But it’s giving me anxiety because
I think you believe that this sand is all
yours,⁷ that you’ve made it from nothing
and it’s yours to show.

And I wish you could understand how it’s not
yours to show, how those particles
push off light like that because they’ve been trained
to do so by someone else, someone not you, how
your sand is only made of that someone not-named-you,⁸
how sand can never be made, how you adore
how coarse the grains are because you don’t know
how to refine it, how you just mimic that someone
not-named-you, how you haven’t even tried to source
the sand from someone else, how you’re selling something that
isn’t yours to sell, how you don’t know how to do
it any differently,⁹ how you’ve built yourself into a corner
and how you praise it, how you’ve made it a home,
how you rose out for less.¹⁰

I’d give it ten years before you fail. I’d give it
three years before they get bored of you. I’d give
it five years before you run out of sand.¹¹ How
I’d give it everything to let it resonate in your
head that you aren’t doing your job, this sand
wasn’t supposed to spill quite yet, let me be your
guide dog, let me help you find your place, let me
help you take off your cast carefully, let me help
you get out of all of this static, let me help you
see all the frames that you are seeing through.
Let me help you find more frames to see through.¹²
Let me help you take some sand and make it yours.

I want you to do your job

I want you to see how you are the thumb on
the hand of our body and how you’ve tried to
make yourself the foot of it. I want you to see how
our back is bent over trying to accommodate you. I
want you to see how we can hardly walk like this.
But you wanted to do something great and this was
the effect of that. I want you to see how we could
have won the war but we couldn’t hold a gun
because you were busy on the floor.

we want you to do your job

I want to lose my days taking the sand of others.
And that will mean that I have done my job.
Not simply for taking their coarse grains, but for
knowing exactly why it is I’m taking it, and then
distilling it, refining it, so by the time there’s nowhere
left to hold it, it’ll spill out and every grain will be
different, every grain will be atomic, every grain will
get stuck on you and the light will hit it and never cause
it to decay¹³ because it will be mine, and
that is all I can ask of it,
and it will be enough.

I want you to see how I am a sandscraper,
how they are all sandscrapers.¹⁴ But the difference
being that we haven’t taken any of it without
distilling it, we haven’t stopped at one source
and hoarded it.¹⁵

I want you to see how wealthy you are,
how as a sandscraper, you have inherited so
much wealth—the wealth of capacity, of being
able to hold so much sand, of being able to refine
so much—
and how it is your philanthropic duty to share it.¹⁶

I want you to see how much time you have to do this. That you don’t have to keep wearing this cast of yours for popularity, that you can take it off and let your arm grow finally.¹⁷

YOU ARE A SANDSCRAPER¹⁸ I WANT YOU TO SEE IT.

Nathan Petree wrote his artist statement (manifesto).

Notes

I’ll admit, I was on the train of people waiting for Zack Snyder’s Justice League to come out, but, looking back on it, Zack Snyder is a case-study of someone who found something they liked, and never went any further than that original experiment. For Zack Snyder, this is a generous use of slow-motion, and a dark, brooding aesthetic.
You are everything before.
Most famously, Emerald Fennell's 2023 film Saltburn was wildly popular, essentially for combining enough cinematic buzzwords, strange scenes, and cool actors to make people feel cultured. For instance, the film uses a 4:3 aspect ratio. It’s a signal to those willing to listen to your pretentious rambles, that you, a person of high taste and who thinks great thoughts, spend your time observing a colorful critique of something—probably wealth, maybe sex. Saltburn hardly critiques these things, but instead spends its time simply thinking about critiquing them since it’s too busy saying “hey, this looks pretty cool, right?” The film attempts to use the 4:3 ratio to frame old money in a glamorous light, for its attempts to make some half baked statements on class dynamics. It also uses the ratio to frame erotic scenes in a pretty way for its attempts to also be a psychological erotic thriller. I say “attempt” because Fennell’s ambition to create something that, in theory, could be an incredible social commentary (Imagine this: a beautifully shot, psychological erotic thriller criticizing class dynamics. That alone seems like it could be a generation’s anthem, doesn’t it?) falls flat because it fails to create the structure necessary to hold all of this ambition: the story. The sociopathic protagonist of the film loses out on a well thought out character study. The audience gets to see him do a series of weird, provocative things—moments that could be great if the movie had the meat to support its strangeness. These scenes serve more as a reminder that Fennell thought that at some point in the film, the audience should be uncomfortable, so they inserted these scenes as a quick fix to a flat story. Weirdness can be incredible! But only if the film creates the structure to deserve that weirdness, to earn it, and Saltburn never does that. The film is a messy plate of expensive ingredients: a steak wrapped in gold, surrounded by caviar.
Once a grain of sand has been refined, has been made as small as possible, with all of its roughness removed, once it becomes a perfect sphere, it becomes impervious to time. It is a thing that lasts.
You are everything before.
An obligation.
Because sand is only defined by how large its grains are, anything that meets the size requirement is sand: volcanic rock, quartz, plastic, metal remnants from early wars. Depending on where you find it, the sand shows different histories, but history nonetheless. To be history is to be made of everyone and everything that came before. History is heterogeneous.
I could provide at least 20 different sources saying how Saltburn is an uninspired reimagining of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Functional Fixedness: where one’s experience with a way of doing something prevents them from doing anything novel. Where one finds success, one can easily lose creativity.
You are everything before.
Zack Snyder’s most recent “spectacle” was his Rebel Moon series of films, trying to be his try at a Star Wars-level franchise. The films were received horribly (the first received a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes—when was the last time you saw that?), with criticism painting it a derivative, stale version of the Star Wars movies and overly reliant on visual dramatism. Zack Snyder’s formulaic approach to film caught up to him.
Werner Herzog, legendary filmmaker, has described in many interviews how reading is essential and how every great living filmmaker he knows reads, providing them with greater understandings of concepts, storytelling, dialogue. To make films, a medium heavily based on language, one must be versed in language. Without an extensive amount of tools to pull from when making film, one will hardly get close to the capabilities of the art form, and will instead be regurgitating rather than inventing.
2001: A Space Odyssey remains to this day, the movie. It is the quintessential thing that catalyzed so many directors into action. Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve—directors shaping what mainstream cinema looks like today—have listed 2001 as a major influence. Almost every sci-fi film following 2001 has been reacting to it in one way or another.
Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, directors of films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Her both came from a background of making music videos, taking lessons of this often experimental, surrealist medium into their films. Sophia Coppola, director of Lost in Translation, drew from photography, fashion, and design. RaMell Ross, director of Nickel Boys, studied English and Sociology at Georgetown and Photography at RISD. All taking from other mediums, all distilling it into their practice.
Stanley Kubrick famously has never made the same movie twice. Even though one film might have garnered massive success, he never stood in that spot again, even if it would have seemed like the most financially successful thing to do. He didn’t become a great artist by becoming “the guy that makes ____” but rather being an relentless student and observer of life. Whatever the story he found himself inspired by needed, he gave his all to serve it. With 2001, inspired by the short story The Sentinel, Kubrick worked with writer Arthur C. Clarke to create a story far more expansive than the original story, resulting in an entire book being created alongside the film. Though Kubrick was not without signature moves here and there, the fact remains that everything in his films fell in service of the story he was trying to tell.
Because you are everything before. To do anything less is to disgrace that gift.
To make in service of a style is to force and to force it makes it fake. Whatever formal or artistic decisions are made, one should always know why the choice is being made. Because the question is always being answered, even if not consciously.
An artist.