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

Diane Cameron, my favorite local columnist, had the following (excerpted) things to say about art in yesterday’s newspaper:
Art concentrates on thoughts and emotions. Artists see underlying truths and reflect them back to us.
Aritsts grab us by the front of our shirts and make us look. Right or wrong, pleasant or disturbing, they make us think. And it is thinking that is at the center of, and the true requirements for, citizenship and democracy.
Artists ask us to see what is and imagine what might be.
Art provides contrast to the dominant messages of our culture so that we can cleary see them.
To grasp the real life signficance of artists as political agents, we have only to remember Camodia, Russia, Chechoslovakia and China. In those countries, as in Latin America, the first citizens sent to the “re-education camp” were the artists.
She quotes Solzhenitsyn: “Art serves to battle lies and preserve the moral history of a society without the transitory and debasing rhetoric of bureaucrats.”
Michael Moore and his Farenheit 9/11 exist in Solszenitsyn’s “artist as social critic – artist as catalyst for change” arena. In Cameron’s words, they “made a point about the role that arts play in protecting our culture and society.”
So, where does that leave so-called artists like Thomas Kinkade, who was featured on 60 Minutes last night.
His fans would say (and did pretty much say on 60 Minutes) that he does concentrate on thoughts and emotions and see underlying truths and reflect them back to the viewer; and he does ask us to see what is and imagine what might be.
It seems to me that there’s no escaping the fact that we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are. Those who collect and admire Kinkade see a much different world than Moore. But it’s the world that Moore sees and reflects back to us that is destroying any chance of idylls such as Kinkade envisions and his fans wish for.
I don’t really have anything against escaping into idyllic fantasies. As matter of fact, I’ve just discovered a whole new genre of “romance” novels that are set in the future and have kick-ass female protagonists. (Check out this one and this one and any of J.D. Robb’s “…. In Death” series. ) And, while I’ve never particularly found typical romance novels at all interesting, these offer a whole new escape hatch.
But I certainly wouldn’t consider them literature, just as I wouldn’t consider Thomas Kinkade an artist or any kind of catalyst for social change. What a world. What a world.

What to do when your gross coughing keeps you from entering the outside world:
— sit at your comuter all morning in your pajamas
— read every email and, except for spam and porno, follow the links
— buy $60 worth of stuff from Avon.com
— blog politics
— put your grandson’s latest photos into a slide show
— avoid cleaning anything
— eat
— blog about being sick

You can call Michael Moore all kinds of things