Most of the world’s great religions contain advice about living in the present, or embracing the “now” in order to live a full and rich life.
Eckart Tolle bases a lot of his secular writings on this, drawing advice instead of inspiration from these sources. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, teaches most everything you need to know about cognitive behavior therapy, and Jesus preached about how to live this life, not the next, even describing how the meek truly understand how to embrace this earth.
Of course that’s usually ignored in favor of focusing on texts, then “discovered” and called “spiritual,” when in fact it’s just listening to what some fairly thoughtful people were saying in the first place.
We end up with people telling us they’re spiritual and not religious. I know what they mean—they are looking for a full life, not a strict one—but it’s a nonsensical statement. They’re often following religious advice but simply avoiding the creeds that have been added for hundreds of years in order to keep groups of people in control.
To me they’re religious, just not conformists.
Washington, DC
In today’s strained environment for arts support, the funding wonderland of Norway can incite jealousy. Yes, Norway is an oil-rich country; it also allots a respectable percentage of its oil wealth to pioneering art, making it a model for exactly what well-spent money for the arts can engender.
Especially in jazz. Public support has helped the country’s improvised-music scene expand from a handful of artists in the late ’60s to a thriving network of recording, performing and educational opportunities today. It’s not perfect, of course; I’ll address some chinks in Norway’s funding armor. But the country’s improvised music flourishes largely on public support.
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Michelle Mercer via How Norway Funds A Thriving Jazz Scene (via nprmusic)
I’ve never understood why jazz and classical music are consider fine art, ripe for public funding, while more contemporary expressions are generally not. I’ve thought of this as an American phenomenon in the past, but it isn’t.
Now that shows I recall seeing in the early 1990’s (that video was just a part of the performance, fyi) are being blandly and drudgingly imitated by some of today’s video artists, I wonder if this is simply a result of limited thinking. Unfamiliarity with a genre, especially a rapidly-changing one, leads critics and art communities to dismiss creative and exciting work until it can be categorized and anointed as officially “art.”
[I should add that I would frankly greatly prefer to hear Norwegian jazz than the thriving Norwegian black metal. While the immaturity of most black metal disqualify it from having an “art” label, its relentless literalism and pedantry could potentially overcome that. Perhaps, as a positive outcome, an embrace from the art world could cause its murderous nationalists to flee the popular music and culture scene.]
Still, it is interesting to see an imported genre of American music evolve as official “art” in another country. I can’t help but wonder how or whether the embrace of official art culture can lead, there as here in the US, to innovation instead of embalming.
I finally watched CNN’s full report on the Steubenville verdict, and it really is as horrible as it has been described. “A very serious crime,” Poppy Harlow said, but it’s true that all of the sympathy in this report was clearly directed at the criminals, and not the victim. Both Harlow and Candy Crowley need to watch the video themselves and see how they sound. In fact, it gets worse and worse the longer you listen.
The report didn’t have to be that way.
It’s important to show these two boys and talk about their promising futures. It’s not bad for the news reports to show one of them giving his tearful apology and breaking down. It could be helpful to tell us these boys had everything going for them. In fact, everything about this report could easily have been well-done even while emphasizing the boys’ good grades and bright prospects.
But those boys’ lives were not ruined by the charges or by the verdict, as the report strongly and offensively implies. Their lives were ruined when they decided to humiliate and rape a helpless girl. They did this themselves, not the girl, not the judge, and not the law. They did it, and the verdict can and should be a good lesson for others that may have such arrogance and inhumanity, including those that have yet to be charged.
The CNN report, instead of giving us a lesson about consequences, conveyed the message that these boys are still heroes deserving our sympathy, victims of a youthful mistake fueled by alcohol.
Bullshit. People don’t commit rape unless they are truly disturbed. If you do that, you deserve to go to prison and have it seriously affect your entire life. You deserve to have to register as a sex offender, and the community you live in needs to know you are there. A decent person helps; he does not laugh or join in.
We can be sad that these boys turned out so poorly, we can lament that they wasted a promising life. We should do that. What we should not do, and what CNN needs to apologize for doing, is to lament that they were punished for it.
The extremely high-priced market for living artists exists only because of a general lack of appreciation of art.
That sounds a bit counterintuitive at first. Surely people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a work because they love it, because it speaks to them. But even a brief thought about that statement reveals how ludicrous it is.
Art is personal. Its beauty and its meaning exists for the artist and exists in a different way entirely for a viewer. Viewers are all as different as the artists themselves. An emotional collector buys what they love, if they can be moved by it, and should not need to told by gatekeepers what they are meant to cherish. It simply isn’t logical that we would all hunger for the same things, or find the same limited amount of people to be producing exactly what we want in our lives.
Collectors that buy for investments, banking on increased values, exist in an isolated self-serving side market of their own making, rotating products between themselves & among blue-chip galleries & museums. The love of meaning, craft, beauty & personal emotion is very different here, sterilized and held apart.
True, some artwork will inevitably rise to the top, in its quality & expressiveness, and this is a wonderful thing. Its creators should be recognized. But if a majority of buyers had enough confidence in their own tastes, enough trust in their own emotions, the amount of this appreciated artwork would increase. The number of well-paid artists would be greater and the number of ridiculously-highly-paid would plummet.
This holds similarly true for music and other jackpot professions where most of the extremely talented will labor in relative obscurity and low income while a select few dominate. Again, the public is told what they should love, because the public wants to be told.
Have you ever watched an artist’s booth or small gallery as people consider buying? We don’t trust ourselves and we want our peers to look up to and respect our tastes. And this is quickly clear.
People will stare at a $30 work for ages, come back and look again, wondering how it will make them look. “I love it,” they’ll say, but they’ll want to be sure they live the rest as well. “What if this isn’t good art? What if other work is bad and I don’t like it?”
It doesn’t matter—I want to say, just take it home. You know you’ll spend more than that on a decorative piece from Ikea without much thought at all. Trust your own taste; you can always put it away or move it to a different wall later. You even spent more on iTunes this morning (after checking the reviews for approval of course.)
Look around you. There are most likely talented people nearby, singing & playing in pubs, painting, making pottery. Become a fan, a collector, a supporter, a friend. Don’t wait for approval, just embrace what you discover that you love. Revel in their successes and encourage them in their struggles. Our world will be more beautiful & diverse for your efforts.
There is enough art—real, personal, meaningful art—for everyone.
Even when she was sad.
12x24, rusted sheet steel
J Ron Crawford 2011
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—Mychal Denzel Smith, “White People Have to Give Up Racism” (via thenationmagazine)
I wrote about this at the Good Men Project awhile back—how I reap the rewards of prejudice and had needed to consciously make myself aware of this. It was written as a single essay on how being white & male gives me benefits in both regards, and because things still aren’t easy men like me need to work at being conscious of it.
At their request I rewrote it into two essays: one on gender, one on race. What I found interesting was the much stronger negative reaction to the first essay posted, the gender argument. Perhaps my points weren’t made as well in that one, or maybe weren’t in the other, I’m not sure. But I clearly touched a nerve and became much more aware of the resentments of “men’s rights” advocates than I had been before.
I’m not used to writing for an audience that large, so the response surprised me a bit (even though I’ve gotten a decent number of insults on this tumblr from a post about guns). Honestly, when my second essay—the one on race—was posted, I expected the same level of dialogue but it never came. I’m not sure if I was relieved or disappointed. I still had a few call me names in the comment section, but I think most got the gist of it.
Maybe it’s a sign that we’re more aware of this racial bias already, or maybe white men simply tune it out. I do wonder which, if either is true.
(via silas216)
It was in the building that once stood on this spot, decades ago, that a couple drunk rednecks dumped a pitcher of ice water on my head as they left. It was in response to one of my dinner companions’ obnoxiousness. He probably deserved it, but I didn’t.
The police officer at the adjacent table was finishing dinner & asked what happened. Oh they’re just drunk, we said, gee I hope they’re safe behind the wheel.
He followed in his squad car as they pulled away and drove up West Peachtree.
When I get off the train on my way home, it usually smells wonderful. Tonight I just stood right next to the tracks and took in as much of the scent as I could before I headed up the steps and across the street to home.
Sometimes the smell takes over the whole neighborhood, sometimes I just catch it briefly from our porch. Sweet, homey, a hint of cinnamon, a strong pastry flavor. I usually end up craving a steaming hot cinnamon roll, or something else that’s required to be distinctly absent from my low-sugar diet.
A few weeks ago, just before Christmas, a man hopped out of a delivery van and stopped me on the sidewalk. He asked me simply, “What IS it? It’s amazing.”
“It’s a pie factory,” I told him. I’ve never seen this reported factory, but it definitely must be there, across the commuter line, across the freight tracks, and past some loading yards. I drove around to find it once, but only came up to chain link fences and gates. To be honest, I didn’t try very hard, even though I had some vision of finding a little brick store hanging off the side of a massive and low corrugated steel box. There’s no such store. It’s just a factory.
But on days when the aroma is strong, like it was tonight, it’s hard not to imagine a quaint little shop with a plump southern woman in a white apron and a hairnet standing behind the counter. She greets the customers with a “hey there sweetie,” and shows off the rows of identical pies available, a selection of whatever is being made behind her that day, whether apple, strawberry, blueberry, pumpkin, or perhaps even lemon may taste good there. She slips one, still steaming, into a flat box, and hands it across the worn Formica, finally sharing the flavor of our neighborhoods.
It just occurred to me that this sticker would be good for gift packages, but only to mess with everybody.
Last night I took a later train home from work. A lot of people knew each other on the platform, seemingly from having ridden together for some time, greeting and saying hello, complaining about others at work, asking about life. In general it’s a louder and more jovial group than I see just after rush hour.
As is often the case, I was one of the only white guys on the train. It’s sometimes interesting to be in the minority, to get a small sense of what it’s like to be in that situation, but I rarely feel threatened.
I only feel nervous when there’s a clearly unstable person in the car, because I stand out as being alone, and therefore, a target. Perhaps a group of extremely loud young men that want to poke fun at others in the car will make me tense up, but again that usually comes from looking alone.
Last night some men in their 30’s or 40’s were sitting behind me laughing extremely hard at someone else. “Remember that guy from Starsky & Hutch?! That’s him, that’s him!”
I don’t remember the show well enough to call up the characters in my head, but my first thought was paranoid. Ok, I’m the target here because I stand out, I thought, but then I couldn’t think of what they could be laughing about. So I just sat there and read.
When I left the train, I immediately saw who they found so funny. A young black man with perfectly clipped hair, a tightly-tailored sharp-looking suit in a dark purple, and coordinated shirt, socks and pocket square stared stoically ahead as he walked to his connection.
Wow, I do have it easy, I realized, vaguely making the tv show connection in my head with the young man’s purple suit.
He was the biggest target because he looked possibly effeminate. He evoked howls of derisive laughter from older men because of his style. No one noticed me. I doubt anyone even remembers me being in the car.
The amateur anthropologist in me couldn’t help but observe the situation. My societal privilege as visibly straight may have just outweighed the ones I’m more accustomed to as white, or male.
I guess you’d have to be told they’re Abominable Snowmonster teeth, but at least they look Christmas-y. And I only burned about a third of them.
