Strange

Strange is the new normal.

Love?

Is love impotent?
Is love sustainable?
Is love passé?
Can small love lead to big love?
Can easy love lead to hard love?
Does anyone really know what love is?
Does love usually die young?
Does love ever grow up?
Is love a delusion?

Dilemma

We are either huddled in our little caves or out there trying to figure life out.

We are either listening to the Golden Oldies or surfing through the sounds of new generations.

We are either listening to the voices that confirm what we believe or listening to all of it and sorting it out for ourselves.

We are either dead wood or living tissue.

But, in truth, these oppositions are not reality. They are the dilemma.

The artist

Let’s stop saying that an artist is someone who makes art. Nowadays, who knows what that means anyway. The truth is, the world needs beauty to push against its blandness, ugliness and chaos. The world needs to be held in awe. The world needs its eyes open to new ways of seeing. The world needs to be led to deeper humanity and to awareness of its responsibilities to itself. The world needs to see the light.

Who better to take on this task than the artist? This is what the artist has always done.

Men

When it comes to sex, lots of men are assholes. Maybe all of them at one time or another in their lives. The rush of testosterone, the long thrust of evolution and the workings of the human nervous system make for a formidable combination against the vulnerable rational and moral brain.

Men who’ve succumbed, but probably shouldn’t have, to this pleasure drive have made history, both big history and little history. Consider the bastards through no fault of their own and the bastard gifts, like Leonardo da Vinci. The lives created and abandoned. The acts of false masculinity. 

Consider the unpredictable mix of the extraordinary and ordinary thrown into the gene pool, never knowing which is which. Pure lines and mutt lines, lines at the sperm bank in all the myriad forms and circumstances of the biological drive to propagate. All after those exploding moments of pleasure that can make a man a lover or an asshole.

Who?

Who cleans the soot off Mary in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris?
Who dusts “The Raft of the Medusa”?
Who scrubs the bird droppings off the Henry Moore sculpture?
Who finds the lost masterpiece in the thrift store?
Who shoos the pigeons off the statue of Lincoln?
Who catalogues the works of art in museum basements?
Who comforts the works of art in the empty galleries?
Who laments the art that has already seen its day?

Beginning to end

I am a product of the Big Bang and the relentless and whimsical evolution of life on Earth. I am the consequence of countless improbable acts of sex and love. I am formed by the genes, experiences, ideas, dreams, relationships, encounters with others, failures and thoughts that turn me from a being into a human being. I use these to build a view of the world I use to care for myself and others. Then, statistically unlikely thing that I am, I die and rot away.

Coincidentally, I think the same thing is true of you.

Beauty

Don't demean beauty by equating it with luxury. Luxury is just a mask.

A serious artist

A serious artist is always art-horny.

Hands

Did you ever think about how much your hands know? Where they were, what they touched, what they remember, what they can do, what tools were made just for them? 

Take a moment and just look carefully at them. What experiences and memories are resurrected? What history in their scars and blemishes and veins and bony landscape?

What they’ve touched and felt is recorded in the sensory memory and can be pulled up with a word. The hands become in many ways the historians of the body.

Art is not going away

Art is not going away. Get used to it. It’s not going to abandon its search for beauty, self-expression or its engagement with the wonder and absurdity of the world. Take away its monetary support. Question its meaning and integrity. It won’t go away. Turn your back on it. Dismiss its relevance. It won’t go away.

Why? It’s us speaking to us about who we are as humans, how we can do a better job at that and how we can make sense of and celebrate the world in all its glory and misery.

Disgust with Trump

Can there ever be enough disgust for the Trump family? America first, but let the taxpayer foot the bill for family foreign travel, regular visits to Mar-al-Lago and separate quarters in New York for Melania and Barron. No sacrifices too big for the arrogance and privilege of the Trumps.

Add to that the ability to dance along the edges of ethical behavior powered by swagger and expensive lawyers, and the cheesy use of the Presidency to make even more money selling people what they want but don’t really need.

Integrity be damned. Full speed ahead. There can never be enough money to fill the moral emptiness of the Trumps.

Three

If you could put he busts of 3 people on your mantel, who would they be?
If you could invite any 3 people over for dinner and conversation, who would they be?
If you could dance with any 3 people, who would the be?
If you could seek wisdom from any there people, who would they be?
If you could confess your failures to any 3 people, who would the be?

Guns

If there is one area where America is definitely number one it’s in weapons. We produce the most weapons, sell the most weapons and stockpile the most weapons.

Americans own the most guns and use the most guns to kill the most people. Americans kill one another at rates much higher than terrorists kill Americans.

Americans love to watch violence on TV, in movies and in video games, the more graphic and bloody the better. In America, five-year-olds kill with guns.

We’re #1.

The Easter bunny

The Easter bunny and the risen Christ have come on the heels of Santa Claus and baby Jesus. Does this sound odd? Actually, it’s not. We live in a world of contradictions and layered meanings. Life presents us with many examples of the sacred and profane going hand in hand. And, of course, we have to squeeze every economic opportunity out of every cultural celebration.

And this is fine as long as we don’t believe that Jesus left a basket of chocolate eggs as he left the tomb or that the three wise men looked up in the sky and saw Santa’s sleigh instead of the guiding star.

Happy Easter. Enjoy biting the ears off that chocolate bunny.

Is it fundamental?

How much time, effort, money and lost human life and potential go into fighting wars, fighting terrorism, fighting sectarian violence, security of all kinds, and building and selling armaments?

How much money and time goes into accumulating and protecting excess material wealth? Into lobbying, corruption and manipulation of the law to protect this wealth?

From the beginning of written history, it’s been the power of the few ignoring the needs of the many, the accumulation of personal power and wealth at the expense of the many.  Is this fundamental to human nature?

Universal equity will never be achieved, but right now we are just homo sapiens still figuring out how to be human beings. The goal of a comfortable and secure life for all would be a signal that we truly desire to be full human beings.

Changing this goal from pie-in-the-sky to an essential effort backed by money and will may seem far away, but at every turn the world is crying for it.

Life

What part of life happened while you were not paying attention?

Naked

One of the problems of contemporary American life, is that we don’t spend enough quality time naked.

When you are naked, you are not just close to nature. You are nature.

When you are naked, your body can go beyond its role as container and machine.

Art originates from the naked body.

When you are naked, you understand how you have used the only body you will ever have.

Truth and honesty can come easier when you are naked.

What evolution has made you becomes clearer when you are naked.

When you are naked, you get the best sense of what material adornments really mean.

When you are naked, you can fully enjoy your sensory and sexual self.

When you are naked, housework is more fun.

When you are swimming naked, water is elemental.

When you are naked, you own your body and giving it can become a gift.

Sleeping naked can bring you back to memories of the womb.   

The governor of Alabama

The governor of Alabama is the latest in a long string of celebrities and politicians whose extra-marital affairs have ended in disaster. Such men need help. How about a national campaign aimed at education and prevention?

Let me help by suggesting some campaign slogans.

Zip your pants before you dance.

It’s not love, it’s just testosterone.

Erections can kill.

Forget it. You’ll never be 17 again.

Real men aren’t dickheads.

Be careful where it goes ‘cause everybody knows.