Hitching a ride on Rage Boy’s ragged coat tail and then letting go —
From the end of a very long paper, Ars Brevis, Vita Longa: The Possible Evolutionary Antecedents of Art and Aesthetics by John L. Bradshaw of
Monash University, posted here on the web site of the American Psychological Association’s Division for Psychology and the Arts.
We are left with one final possibility, depressing perhaps to the evolutionary theorist, but maybe somewhat reassuring to the artist who is primarily preoccupied with his or her art; it is that art may indeed be without any evolutionary significance or adaptiveness whatsoever – a mere by product (or “spandrel”, to use the marvelous metaphor of Gould & Lewontin, 1979) of a disengaged brain which enlarged under quite different evolutionary pressures (and see also Aiken, 1998). If so, maybe we should after all just sit back and enjoy it. Indeed, to deliberately misquote Plato:
A life without the arts is just not worth the candle.
Live long and prosper. And voice your art, no matter how fleeting and finite and financially futile.

Every afternoon around 3, my mother falls asleep in my deceased dad’s old ugly green frayed recliner. I let myself into her apartment to throw my laundry into the dryer, and she doesn’t hear me. (My apartment is too small to fit a washer and dryer.) She doesn’t even wake up when the dryer coughs into its grating hum. I stop and take a moment to make sure she’s still breathing. Shallow. But, yes.
I have seen a lot of dead faces in my life. My dad was an undertaker and we lived above the business. (Like in that move, My Girl.) Totally relaxed, my mother’s face is getting that look — that lips-tight-against-teeth, waxy-skin look. I make myself watch her. It’s how she’ll look someday in her coffin.
When my dad was dying from cancer, it was his eyes that I watched as they grew more and more sunken. It wasn’t his mouth; it was his eyes, hungry and despaired and so, so, sad. So much unspoken.
And now it’s my mother’s mouth. Closed.

Chris Locke is riding the bus. Long story. Very long sad cash-depleted, car-re-possessed story. Interesting to me because b!X has always ridden buses. His is also, a very long cash depleted story, but with a much different plot. My birthday present to b!X each year is paying for his monthly bus pass. “…another word for nothing left to lose..”
I’m picking up on Frank Paynter’s email offer of a ticket to ride Chris Locke about being what, to me, is one of the most crafted and consciously engineered blogvoices out there — a fact that, as Frank Paynter points out, blares in contradiction to what Locke purports to admire and advocate.
When he was riding up front on the Cluetrain, Locke make this statement:
“Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.”
Paynter sits hard on that statement, and I’m grabbing the seat next to him.
My voice that speaks through my fingers manipulating the keyboard sounds much different than it does when I open my mouth and manipulate my tongue. This visually arranged voice is carefully (at least usually carefully) contrived. And so it is with just about all of us whose thoughts ride through time and neurons and muscles and fingertips and little square buttons before they boom out into what becomes our blogvoices.
Frank’s piece is a great example, and he’s given us a ticket to ride this horse yet another time.
Giddyap.

There’s a message going around to
WEAR RED ON FRIDAYS IF YOU’RE ANTI-BUSH
Red. Blood. Passion. Defiance. Anger. Challenge. Pay attention!!!!
Wave the red flag. Ol