JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

I’ve been so submerged in creating the just announced books for the Kindle it is like coming up for air. And then you hit the daily blab. I sometimes have to remind myself to listen to music.

If you pay too much attention to the political news it can drive you nuts. It doesn’t matter which side is perpetrating its fraud. It is just so transparent what their motives are and so transparent in tactics. The enablers are worse than the candidates. Sometimes I think the most discouraging thing is that attack politics seems to work. Like ads for products, the selling of a politician is a finely tuned craft which somehow groks the public mind. Think Machiavelli. Both presidential candidates seem more intent on winning than on thinking — of honorably representing a distinct point of view.

It is especially distressing the media hasn’t decided to take an oath of objectivity. I really don’t think the press has any idea what that might mean anymore. You just have to read between the lines and try and expose yourself to a dose of each side that doesn’t kill you. There is no one in the middle. The whole congealed mass of steaming protoplasm: of politicans, of the press, of the commentators, of interest groups, is really one stinky mass, with little difference underneath. Theoretically, this should be a crucial moment, where the definition of the society is clarified, in a debate that offers the real benefits and deficits of each approach. Instead, given we have a celebrity press, we have personality battles, personality attacks.

Under any circumstances there are limited options for any party. We’ve got no bucks. In addition, the country has its own momentum, buffered by a civil service which, in this sense, serves a useful purpose in its slow, bureaucratic reaction time. And we have a blessed system which dampens drastic change with forced introspection.

So with agitation nation ringing in my ears I’ll listen to Alabama 3 or Horowitz playing Scarlatti. It doesn’t matter. Music is better.

And that is what this recent study corroborates:

“These findings provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve ancient reward circuitry in the brain. ..To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that an abstract reward such as music can lead to dopamine release. Abstract rewards are largely cognitive in nature, and this study paves the way for future work to examine non-tangible rewards…”

Three just published books, all exclusively for the Kindle, at the moment:

Grendel, The Demon’s Inner Torment

In this short story, third in the Monsters series, Grendel, the ancient, legendary demon, tells a surprising story — one which we weren’t taught in school.



The Minotaur’s Tale

A short story in which a powerful being, condemned to dwell in infinite caves, gives his personal perspective.



Cerberus, Gatekeeper to the Underworld

In this short story,second in the Monsters series, Cerberus, the legendary gatekeeper, a terrifying creature with three snarling heads, reveals himself to be a bored, wise bureaucrat. Alternately conversational, witty and reflective, we get the scoop, up close and personal.

Stewart Brand has found a worthy project for himself in The Rosetta Project.

“In this century, 50 to 90 percent of the languages will evaporate under the current circumstance.” 

Brand is trying to do for language what E.O. Wilson is doing for the species of the world.

Record them, and by subtext, recognize them, and hope posterity will continue the project. They say in this article that this is reminiscent of Wikipedia — another wonderful implementation of hive mind. The mob can be turned to useful purpose with a valid and clear goal defined. Strange how seldom that clarity is achieved.

This is a noble project. Language is so intertwined with human character, thinking, religion and art — the world, the universe of a particular people at a unique time — that it warrants the honors of a museum, and the tending of a garden.

Alison Rosen, the most excellent cohost of Adam Carolla’s funny online show, wrote a 2001 guilty pleasure article about her affection for Thomas Kinkade’s paintings.

Guilty pleasures are defended against by sarcasm meant to dispel the idea of tastelessness. Guilty pleasures get it, they say, by way of irony and assertion. “So sue me,” the article says. This distanced irony is a species of “not that there is anything wrong with it,” as Seinfeld brilliantly satirized the ambiguities of political correctness in a single phrase. Credit to Alison Rosen for not taking that path completely, but stating her genuine affection for Kinkade’s work, and the effect it had on her.

Kinkade’s work has a warm glow that is reassuring to many. The pleasure is visual. It is the pleasure of color and prettiness. This will not get one applause as a sophisticated or sensitive soul. The thought police are always lurking, waiting to pounce on those not worthy. Not worthy at all. (How can you have taste if you are always on the lookout to deride and cackle? Where’s the taste in that?)

The Impressionists were derided for the pretty shallowness of their work, but soon their work became “banker’s art.” It was esteemed and bankable — high priced.

Liking the wrong thing is an oddity of social life rather than of aesthetics. But Kinkade’s work exists at the wrong end of the pop culture: it is not there to affirm one’s prejudices of correctness, but rather designed to reassure in a treacly way, but nevertheless reassure. I sometimes wonder if critics more despise the motive than its expression in Kinkade’s work.

The deficit of Kinkade’s work is the deficit of too much candy. Teeth and stomach hurt. Art of the 1800s created a more durable expression of visual pleasure devoid of depth. The artists of the time, neoclassicists, were able to incorporate an overflow into substance by sheer skill. The relationship here is that Neoclassicism harked back to Rome and not a dreamed of crystal city on the hill of fairy tales. A past that never was. The followup to Neoclassicism, with a few stops along the way, was the Academicism of the 19th century; brilliantly instantiated in the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Cate Blanchett’s appearance on a magazine cover without makeup and without Photohop mods has been getting some notice.

The mere fact it is being noticed says something about how far the acceptable modification of appearance has gone. It has become a default that public figures look like poured out clones of themselves. We have newscasters now that look like Jack Haley as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz: metallic men and women; bronzed out grotesqueries.

It doesn’t look good, it looks odd. Public figures have whitened teeth which would illuminate a book for night reading. I had wondered when HD came along how the media would handle the clarity that had long been seen in photography and was mitigated by Photoshopping. What would TV do with its celebrities now that the picture was so sharp? They airbrushed the performers.

The plastic surgery brigade, an industry which has infiltrated public and and private life, has manipulated the comical distortions of modification into a visual meme of desirable appearance. This is a form of religious indoctrination requiring astonishing denial on the part of the audience.

Vanity is a form of insecurity. The media establish a bizarre aesthetic for beauty and become then the only source of expiation from the horror of ordinary appearance by selling you fixes. The commercial culture is intent on making people feel inadequate and then hawking something, via guru of one sort or another,  to make them feel better.

This natural appearance presentation of the household gods of pop culture has been done, and heralded, before, as noted in the article linked above; but Blanchett’s cover points it out once again: there is something Orwellian about the necessity for people to periodically assert their human appearance. As an attention getter.

Charlie Rose had two curators on today. They had put together a show of Van Gogh’s work. The work shown was all presented at an angle. Unless there was some restriction on photography of the work, it appeared the cameraman was being “creative,” showing the thickness of the paint. The paintings really should have been shown square to the frame of the screen. Neither Rose nor the curators made any mention of the curiously mangled presentation. There would have been no crime in showing well photographed slides to let the work speak.

These shows with convocations of experts have some merit. It is great that a great artist is getting attention. Van Gogh surely was not understood in his own time. Van Gogh’s work has an urgency that often results in an initial impression of crude rendering; but finally you feel a sincerity and energy in his work — it overflows. Van Gogh’s was an individual voice — always difficult in society, where consensus is a glue that is distrurbed at some risk. His work inhabited an obsessive attention, a child’s focus to surface. Vision, the embrace of sight, was a passion expressed in his work. The work reels like the vision of the inebriated.

Now Van Gogh is part of the canon. He was described by the curators in anecdotal and slightly pathological perspective. He was a great artist despite his mental afflictions, not because of…

The curators were a study. The older man spoke quickly, in a manner that was a cross between a Soprano’s character ordering a hit and Buckminster Fuller. He is a character. His colleague/assistant for the show was a young woman who also spoke quickly. This is a form of bonding one sees in couples. I’m afraid there was little insight. Perhaps Rose did not know what to ask. At any rate, the anecdotal and pathological are often draped over works of art — it’s a contemporary addiction. Art is bigger than its explanation, in any case.

The central truth about Van Gogh’s aesthetic is one of a melding of the graphical and painterly. He took the images on Japanese wrappings which were prevalent in Europe at the time from shipments from the Far East and were known widely, and incorporated that flattened, graphical, linear imagery with his driven spirit into his great landscapes and studies and portraits. All Van Gogh’s work was a portrait of himself, his burdened soul and inner turmoil.

Belatedly, the Oscars…in order of appearance…

The red carpet interviews were really embarrassing. No one to blame, just impossible situation. As awkward as the worst party you’ve been to. Clooney should give an award to his girlfriend Stacy Keibler, whose warm and egoless presence has allowed this average guy actor to relax and become an engaging, funny public figure.

They were right to have Billy Crystal as host, who you like even if the material sucks. You had to feel for the actors as Crystal focused on one after the other of the celebrity floats. Crystal wasn’t mean, but even for performers used to the spotlight, it has to be uncomfortable feeling the satirical attention shift to them, especially if the reference to them is not funny. Which was true too often. Celebs, as they listened to Crystal, had a strained, indulgent expression as they tried hard to laugh at the unfunny.

They were right to give the awards for cinematography and set decoration first, because those crafts have become the best the movies have. Fantastic looking movies these days. Movies have settled into what they really are: a craft form.

For true self revelation, you could also point to Hollywood’s contemptuous attitude towards the audience in satirizing focus groups. The satire was supposed to be about the angst of moviemakers, but it was really about their disdain for the public at large, which has the temerity to go to movies less and less. In fact, people like cable shows better than movies now. Like me.

The In Memorian segment was beautifully, tastefully done. Meryl Streep, the great fire engine of acting, was given yet another award for an impersonation. You watch her in movies, but never see her inhabit her character; all mannerisms. Thus is reputation as self-replicating meme. Worse still, Streep clearly believes her public relations releases.

More than ever the film industtry has to pump its importance because it is — has been for a long time — fading from centrality in the popular culture. They tried hard in these Oscars to look impressive, but there seemed as many TV folk as movie, and it didn’t glam things up one bit.

The above image is the cover of a new book in the iBookstore called “The Crowd”.

It is an enhanced eBook, with both video and a new format; a format currently only provided by Apple.

This is a book of suggestive, mask-like images, which can be thought of as a book of drawings only, but its goal is something more experimental.

These images are built around an ambiguous theme which the reader can choose to embrace, providing a complex landscape of ideas.

Included are 23 images with an introductory video depicting the creation, in sped-up fashion, of one of the images.

From the Foreword:

Our transitional age inspired this series of images.

With a daily overload of amazing and disturbing news from the town square percolating in my subconscious, these flickering images emerged from my regular practice of drawing and painting. They are images of suggestion and feeling rather than illustrations.

At one juncture I thought of these body-less visages as Beings Before Time; masked energy existing before the Big Bang. (It is thought Time was itself born at the moment of this astonishing cosmic paroxysm.)

In this metaphor, spirits inhabiting a timeless realm awaited their moment, entering our universe as sprites which now inhabit our minds, each spirit with its own predispositions; its own grandeur and deviltry. …

We’re about half way through the wonderfully written, The Women, by T.C. Boyle. (This post’s title comes from a New Yorker cartoon. His middle name is great: Coraghessan; his first name is Tom, which is good too.) The Women is the tabloid-like story of Frank Lloyd Wright and his women.

On his site, T.C. Boyle has an essay describing his journey as a writer, which contained this advice given him by John Cheever:

All good fiction is experimental, he was telling me, and don’t get caught up in fads.

This review of a new book by Charles Murray lays out an interesting landscape of sociological speculation.

The takeaway is that the privileged classes are really the hard workers with the good family values and not the white working class:

It is that [… the liberal elites] have lost the confidence to preach what they practice, adopting instead a creed of “ecumenical niceness”.

That is good: ecumenical niceness. Murray is describing that familiar condescending goodness that those calling themselves liberal affect. I’m a nice millionaire — please tax me, Mr. Obama. Very reminiscent, in demeanor, of 19th century English imperialists who viewed the third world with benevolent arrogance. Of course this is the worst of the liberal visage, and ignores the true goodwill that is the heart of classical liberalism: that the government can help its citizens, and should. The sure tip off is the word “preach”; an ugly assertion of a moral superiority that is just too lax and ingratiating to share the truth the elites understand.

The whole arena of sociological thinking has become a minor industry. Theories, laden with meme friendly declaratives, are presented with the authority and aura of science, but are really suggestive studies about very hard to define qualities in human beings. Hard working, IQ, elite status — becomes a sludge of accusation that divides the country. Ad hominem attacks invariably come from such thinking, and is validated by the misuse of such studies as these; just as the imperialist had his and her social Darwinism.

But although these speculations start with studies, their speculative nature is soon lost to commentators, who state the ideas with the Authority of Truth. You can’t argue with numbers. Why not assume there is something other than ill will at the root of every disagreement?; that truth might be a destination which travelers together must parse, requiring a journey of cooperative effort, and a destination which it is understood will never be fully achieved.

The all day commercial with a football game thrown in was exciting even if you weren’t pulling for either team especially. It is no mistake that the commercials get as much attention as the game. The commercials relied more on special effects and coarse sentimentality, or being goofy because goofy is cool, than originality. Three million bucks for a Super Bowl commercial. Good grief.

The narrative of teams that had met before, of a potential record fourth Super Bowl victory for Brady’s Pats, a kid brother Giants’ quarterback who was always in the shadow of his brother, added to the drama.

It was as it should be: Both quarterbacks had a chance at the end, and both had a reputation for comeback drives, but only Manning could pull it off. Both quarterbacks have a shy quality, unlike many of the preening jocks who are stars of their team. They were easy to like. There were few mistakes, few penalties, little distraction from the drama on the field. Great game. If Gronkowski had nabbed that Hail Mary at the end it would have been just as good as the Giants’ winning, from our point of view. It is surprising how little mobility elite quarterbacks seem to have these days — Brady in particular was doing his best to simulate a statue.

The half time show, so hyped because Madonna was the principal, left me wondering what she thought she was doing. The computer voice “enhancement’ usually is a sign a singer has lost their voice. They seemed to throw everything they could think of into the halftime show production but none of it stuck. It was so dead. Tone deaf as well – an 80s celebration of ego and engorged wealth at a time that doesn’t want to hear about such in your face self-involvement.