'Just this once...
...could you talk about your relationship issues without the guitar?' (see the Bizarro comic here)
The cartoonist begs the question: how does self-expression migrate from self-indulgence to something we might call art?
My guess is that some combination of awareness, perseverance and genius is involved - but I'm not sure about the genius. Maybe just the first two, plus luck, will shine the light on the next Bruce Springsteen or Edna St. Vincent Millay. With genius, you get what you get - but awareness and perseverance take work.
Lack of awareness lets the singer-songwriter foist her relationship issues on the hapless listener. And don't be too quick to let the activist folksinger off the self-indulgence hook. Songs about union rights and West Bengali tea workers do not ipso facto extract the ego from the brew.
Age old wisdom
People get old. Egregiously. Bad bones and breached brains and more storm in on the elderly. Knowing this, pre-seniors weigh options, sandbagging the levees against the hurry canes and torn egos. Keenly attuned to fitness and diet, the far-from-old talk talk talk about everything from too tiny print to stiff knees that leak old age into dreams of youth eternal. Scary stuff.
Shlomit, visiting from Israeli, notices the boomer aversion to aging. She says, 'when you live in constant fear of the enemy, the terrorists have already won.'
Enter the '80 year old lady' with fire in her belly (see the video... to the end please). Her art reveals her priorities, with a word to the wise, and Salsa lovers everywhere.
Art wheels on the autobahn
Last night's Autobahn at the Playhouse: 8 cast members with 14 separate roles pair up in 7 cars moving at unknown velocities... sound like an Algebra II word problem?
Words were often the problem in the seven conversations, with some players mute while others did verbal cartwheels, spinning wild or falling flat. Words escaped the puncture wounds that crucified relationships, self-respect and denial in turn. Crimes of commission - stalking, debauchery, child abuse, theft - vied with abandonment and smug neglect for sin of all sins in the minds of the audience. But we never actually got our bearings: so much to take in and sort out at once.
Discomfiture was, after all, the playwright's intent:
Capture
When you capture my imagination, you liberate my soggy brain. Like sheets alive on the line outside, my mind is scrubbed with wind and sun.
Not so with other kinds of capture. Last year, Obama and McCain swung through the swing states touting 'clean' coal to supply half the electricity of the nation. Superhero technology to clean up coal-fired plants involves carbon capture. In theory, dirty CO2 emissions get pumped 2 miles underground where they do no harm. Unless a seismic shift creates fissures leading up up and away into your basement, to kill you with odorless, poisonous fumes.
It’s never been tested here. Florida and other states refuse to indemnify coal companies against potential law suits. So ‘clean’ coal technology lies dormant, a futuristic maybe that power plants and politicians use to their advantage.
- Susan Weber's blog
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Inner peace stuff
It’s Saturday afternoon. We're off to stimulate Ohio’s economy, darting through the red hot fluorescence of Target. We hear one lady grazer say to another, ‘oh, this is that inner peace stuff.’ Not one to gawk at those in the throws of self-actualization, I’m left to imagine the peace inducements crowding the big box shelves - candles, perhaps, patchouli oil, incense wands and a yoga primer.
But our feet stop not until we zero in on what we came for: angel cake cutter, PJ pants, fitted sheets, dark chocolate and a toaster oven - heaven to hell, honey, with sweet dreams inbetween.
At the toaster oven display, we encounter a philosopher couple, pondering the wares. They want to find a small oven for baking two potatoes at a time. The male fancies baked potatoes with crispy skins. 'We don't really need triple trays and room for a twelve inch pizza,' confides his partner with a calm Dutch accent. As we discuss the pros and cons of all the shiny multi-featured models made in China, which is all the models, it feels oddly sublime to machinate potato bakery with a pair of shoppers in the kitchen isle.
- Susan Weber's blog
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Trickle treat - imaginativity
The Obama budget bars no holds in its plan to reverse the flow of goodies:
"The past eight years have discredited once and for all the philosophy of trickle-down economics, that tax breaks, income gains and wealth creation among the wealthy eventually will work their way down to the middle class. In its place, we need economic opportunity to trickle up."
Steven Thomma and David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers
His critics are not sold on the proposal:
Republicans and other critics argue that Obama's plan would punish success and stifle the very kind of spending that would foster investment and economic growth.
Lori Montgomery, The Washington Post
But neither argument credits the power of imagination to foster growth, and the lack thereof to squelch it. NPR's David Folkenflik links the financial meltdown to
- Susan Weber's blog
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Love and taxes
I thought I’d call this posting ‘Love and art,’ until Schedule C reared its lovely head this week. Now that I’ve squandered the better part of valor on spreadsheets and gov-speak, I feel the flush of fait accompli. Very swank.
Let me first assure you the collage you see here is neither a figment of your overtaxed mindset nor a sacrilege of the artist’s work. At Water Color Visions resides a view of the pristine original by Walt Campbell, who also happens to love doing taxes.
Now for my true confession: halfway through the Tax 08 marathon, I realized I was in some kind of familiar flow that felt like - no! - art. Honest. Since then I’ve been thinking about the strange bedfellows of taxes, art, and love.
