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…”

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.

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.

A number of great thoughts pop up in Adam Kirsch’s review of a book by William Gass, Life Sentences.

Gass insists that “neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work.
…
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” …

… “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.…It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

I’m quoting this because I agree with it. Not quite in the way Kirsch describes it in summary, but close enough; I spot on agree as far as the way Gass says it and would expand the idea to all the arts.

Art is about consciousness. Art is an expression of the cloud of identity which is what an individual really is, expressed at a moment in time. It is not a lecture, nor affirmation, nor negation of concept, nor political statement, nor craft decoration to impress, but an opening up of the spirit, mind and heart. Those elements of Being coalesce hopefully, and return the work, which the viewer can better sense than describe.

Art becomes something other than a single person, as the process affects the outcome, like a quantum experiment. That is what persists in art; art which succeeds. A unique voice, not of the ego, as the pop culture often portrays it, but of the sense of living; of a single life, speaking to others at the most fundamental, and trusting (because that is what civilization is) the audience to engage — sharing a brief portal of time.

I once asked an old man in art school what he regretted. He said he wished he had traveled more.

This piece, recorded at tumblr by Kelly Oxford, was written by a nurse who cared for those in the last stages of life — in palliative care — and records the caregiver’s conclusions.

Common themes from those who had gone home to die:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Sometimes we don’t allow ourselves to remember the full context — the reasons we made the choices we did, and are wishing rather that life were different. Whether facing death really does clear the fog from our eyes, or is yet another delusion of clarity in our lives, is not for us to know, I suppose.

It was immensely fascinating listening to David Brooks on Charlie Rose the other night. Brooks instantiates the standards he espouses. You don’t feel he is thrusting his ego at you when he talks about ideas. He isn’t trying to prove he is smart and has all the answers. He sorts things out and provides some nuance. “Nuance,” there’s a quality that long ago evaporated into the ether.

It was a wide ranging discussion that seemed to be generated by a roundtable Obama has yearly as Obama sorts out what direction he wants to take. Brooks gave his own take, presumably what he told Obama:

He feels that Obama sees himself as an FDR progressive; that the Democrats tend toward parsing policy to install that agenda. Brooks feels the times are too different to apply the FDR model. The vaunted “vision thing,” as they used to say about Bush, or Bush said about himself, is not Obama’s strength. Brooks felt it should be.

Brooks feels that the country needs to feel hope which comes from a clearly defined destination for the society. He feels the sense of motivation has been lost as the sense of unfairness has grown. Whether on the Right, who despise entitlements as vitiating motivation, or the Left, who despise Wall Street, it amounts to the same thing finally. The country is enraged. It’s a Howard Beale world these days. People are mad as hell and they won’t take it anymore. More plainly: people who play by the rules don’t see the results of their hard work pay off fairly; or see others get the same or better without effort, or with unfair connections to power.

Along the way he touched on the toxic effect of the popular culture (although he didn’t feel it had any decisive effect — I disagree — it is primary). He mentioned an idea Mickey Kaus had some time ago, — that the status, or respectability as Brooks calls it, of middle class attainment is the real goal for many rather than great wealth, as junk culture would suggest.

Brooks also engaged in some goofy theorizing: he felt “creativity comes from networks”— his examples were Steve Jobs and Picasso. I won’t go into the Steve Jobs reference, but as to art: Brooks thinks Picasso brought the defaults of African Art into the mainstream of western art. By this estimate Picasso networked African Art. Hmmm.

Cultural issues are more complex than politics. Picasso’s work could as easily, in its cubist manifestation, be thought of as an absorption of scientific ideas of the time, as a Newtonian, logical universe, became the probabilistic chaos of quantum physics. Such scientific and philosophical ideas do enter art, even if artists don’t realize it themselves. The surface absorption of African Art, and it was a shallow, undigested inclusion, is a surface manifestation of the groundbreaking work of Picasso. But even with the drifting analysis of creativity, Brooks said many insightful things.

The takeaway: Brooks feels that entitlements, tax reform, and the culture of the family (family values — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s emphasis) are the principal issues in reviving America. He didn’t say it with any cogency, but he clearly doesn’t think Obama has the chops to deliver on either a vision for the future of America, or an insight into the essential issues facing the country. In other words, Obama would be a disaster if re-elected. This has been plain for a long time.

Brooks never did address his complete failure to see Obama as the media construction he is; Brooks’ failure to identify early on Obama’s dissociated self-absorption, his dubious affiliations, and cynical center, are discrediting for a commentator. Brooks said Obama is more liberal than he understood. But what he still doesn’t understand is that Obama is just going with the flow —just another cynical politician who wants to be elected but has no idea what he wants to do, and is liberal when he wants hoots of approval from the crowd. No core values, just career. This is probably just as true of Romney.

Brooks’ ideas could be summarized as a renewal of Isaiah Berlin, where the emphasis is on having many ideas, with flexibility being the primary value, rather than a single “feel-good” delusion that will inevitably fall apart or turn dangerously sour. And has.

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, an organization which advocates more taxes on those earning a million bucks or more, had its advocate on the Newshour today. It is a fascinating subject. I’ll meander a bit…

The individual doing the advocacy on the Newshour had started many businesses in California. He seemed an admirable man. Not like that ingratiating rich guy who in a public meeting with Obama said, “Please raise my taxes.” Obama himself seemed slightly disgusted by this deferential showboating.

But the Newshour millionaire had more substance. It’s difficult to disagree. Since at least Clinton, America has been drifting into a banana republic. It is hard to have a political democracy and such a level of economic inequality. (But to be clear, the tax raise on the rich is purely symbolic, a cup of money in an ocean of debt. Symbolism though, has its value here.)

This is pretty much what the Tea Party and the Occupy movements are protesting. Lawrence Lessig said that the mistake these movements made was letting themselves be co-opted by the political parties, because those parties are both vitiated with advocacy for privilege. At the beginning, the Tea Party said it was not allied with any party, but the media made sure that was suppressed until partisanship tainted the point the Tea Party was making: we are spending more than we have.

And then there is the exacerbation of the current system: the rich can afford advocates, and those advocates install themselves as counselors and advisors and politicians. And politics is money. So the balance gets further tilted to the advantage of the rich, and of large corporate entities. (Obama’s principal issue in Congress was campaign finance law, which he eschewed as he went off to raise close to a billion bucks. He is doing it again right now. So much for principle.)

The media is all for the tax the millionaire slogans. And, of course, Brian Williams and crew, as a particularly annoying example, are enormously wealthy. But it makes them look good…until you look at their own behavior:

Chelsea Clinton is now at NBC News, playing journalist. NBC is giving her a feel-good role; so it doesn’t seem they have hired someone on the basis of wealth and fame and connections. That’s democracy at NBC, with Brian Williams, Rockstar NewsReader @Rock Center.

Noblesse oblige — the responsibilities of inherited privilege — does not exist as a value for the wealthy anymore. Anonymously given good works have morphed into high visibility public work for charities and photo-ops — more publicity than substance. That is, the very same advantages given to the very very wealthy in the tax codes, is also installed in the popular culture.

Walter Russell Mead:

… the increasing sense that this country is run by a hereditary celebrity class is one of the most corrosive and dangerous forces eating away at our common life.

It is a sorry picture: self-anointed journalist mandarins, bringing us self-replicating privilege rather than rewarding ability or having any discernible set of objective standards; in some cases, joining the very movement they are charged with covering.

My own take: tax the millionaires. Japan, at least at one time, was at a salary comparative of about a 3X ratio of CEO to factory worker. America needs to move toward a psychologically balanced approach to wealth, without destroying incentive. The millionaire on Newshour seemed to indicate such balance would cause no decline in motivation.

But there should be more: inherited wealth should be taxed substantially. Obama, and this organization of rich “folk,” should say, most honorably, my money does not go to my children. My money goes to an organization helping children. Isn’t that what Warren Buffet is doing in his stated intention about the dispensation of his wealth? Wouldn’t that get Americans out of the starting gate at least on the same racetrack? Didn’t Bill Gates state such an intention himself?

…and don’t forget campaign finance laws to keep the system about more than money.