It Ain't Art Till It Hurts

In my career, I have been a writer, producer, director, actor, designer, sculptor, painter, poet, musician, composer, cinematographer, videographer, photographer, critic, and reviewer.  I have studied art, art history, theater, film, and language.  I have been a patron and collector.  And in every case, I have assiduously avoided glorifying the profane and shocking my audience.

I love art.  I am an artist.  I create provocative things that are pleasant and edify.

I hate contemporary art.

I detest Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.  I would kindle my hearth with Jackson Pollock if I could afford the price of admission.  I find Andy Warhol detestable and pedestrian.  I think much of Edward Albee is disposable.  I find much of Philip Glass' later work to be a parody of his earlier genius.  And pretty much anything produced in any art form since the late 70s is vile and corrupt.

That's the short answer.

At some point in the history of art, beginning around the turn of the 20th century, art took a dark and foreboding turn into the nihilistic and desperate.  With the decay of the education system across the board, artists were forced to do anything to get attention, though once gotten, they had no idea what to do with it.  So they pissed on crucifixes, shat on canvasses, shot spastic out-of-focus rubbish, and pounded their tail ends on keyboards like children unable to express themselves with good diction.

The critics, unable to utter coherent phrases, oohed and ahhed over these sophomoric tantrums as if they were timeless masterpieces.  They convinced the well-heeled to drop obscene amounts of money on these trash heaps, which they did because they, too, were uneducated and slovenly.

Across the aesthetic spectrum, crass practitioners reinforced each other's errors.  The idiots created rubbish, which the critics hailed as genius, which the nouveau riche bought in a craven attempt to look chic.

All the while, the uncultured cretins pressed the concept that art was not objective, that art was "expression", and that art was nearly anything removed from context and well lit with a glass of wine and a few slices of over-ripe cheese.

The fact is, art is a language that has grammar and vocabulary developed over centuries of human experience.  It can be spell-checked and graded just like any high school essay.  Most especially, once you are trained in the language, you recognize slang and poor usage immediately.

When schools (at any level) are stressed financially, without fail the first thing to be jettisoned is the art department.  Not that it matters much, since most art teachers are clueless about the fundamentals, nor how to relate them to the world at large.

Most people anymore are unaware that art has its own grammar, vocabulary and tropes, like any language.  It should be taught as a language and used as a language.  It has genres and traditions, like any literary system, and it has a profound effect on society because it transcends boundaries like no other language can.

The grammar of art includes balance, harmony, rhythm, variety, emphasis, gradation, movement, pattern, and proportion.  These create the syntax of art - the composition of the visual sentence into which meaning is poured.

The vocabulary of art is space, line, shape, form, color, texture, and value.  These are the words that carry meaning and emotion.  They create depth, breadth, heighth, weight, and significance.

On top of these are the tropes, such as myth, legend, history, religion, humanity, and dozens of other tales and emotions.

At best, contemporary art is a jumble of vocabulary without structure or meaning.  In the case of Jackson Pollock and many others, it is literally letters and words completely out of context, highlighting form without function, and entirely devoid of meaning.

By the time the art world had devolved to Andy Warhol, art had become glorification of common objects far beyond any true significance.  At this point, the mundane and profane had triumphed over the aesthetic and beautiful.  It was akin to speaking jibberish interlaced with profanities.  In other words, it was not only meaningless, it was offensive.

The purpose of this devolution of art is horrific in its simplicity.  It is a concerted effort to reduce the human mind to its most base level and remove any possibility of rising above it.  Beethoven has become Snoop Dogg.  Michaelangelo has reduced to Millie Brown.  William Shakespeare has rotted out to Hamilton.

Make no mistake, this has been a planned train wreck.  If humans are unable to understand the great works of the past, much less approach or exceed their artistry, then they will be entirely too stupid to challenge the ruling class.  How gratifying it must be for the Master Class to profit from the swine wallowing in the slime, literally immersing cultural icons in feces and urine and celebrating it as transcendent.

Soon, if now already, humanity will be cut off from its heritage, unable to grasp the basics, much less interpret the message.  It does not matter the medium - whether words or paint, stone or music.  Once divorced of history and culture, the masses become nothing more than malleable objects and playthings of the self-appointed gods.

If you have children or grandchildren, it is vital that they receive proper education in the arts - all arts.  They must be taught the grammar and vocabulary of art, no matter what medium.  They should not be allowed to graduate without having written a story, acted in a play, recited a poem, thrown and fired a pot, painted a canvas, and sung a song.  They should know not only the structure of the language, but at least have spoken a few paragraphs of the great masters.

In fact, when was the last time you went to the museum, enjoyed a play, or attended the symphony?  The best teacher is example.

The Sounds Of Our Lives

Today's soundtrack can be found by clicking here.

OK, I've figured out all the world's problems.  See?  You knew if you stuck around long enough, that I, your faithful correspondent, would eventually figure it all out.

The Problem Is (are you ready?)...

MUSIC

That's right...music.  Go ahead, turn on your radio to something other than talk shows.  See what I mean?

I don't know about your side of the world, but here on the Far Side, K-Pop is all the rage.  If you haven't been subjected this somewhat harmonized caterwauling, it's a bunch of Korean whatevers wearing make-up and flashy costumes sync-dancing to songs that remind me of the innards of a good-sized pimple.  In fact, I've had some pimple guts that were far more creative.

Over on the Near Side, the music scene took a belly-flop at the beginning of the Noughties and the demise of the Grunge Movement.  Lyrics became mantric repetitions of inane "hey babies" and the instrumentation bowed out and let the rhythm sections take over while the rest of the band went out in the alley to smoke a joint and talk about where to go from here.

Think about it...in the 40s, sweet pipes like Sinatra and Cosby crooned us into a stupor with grammatically understandable lyrics.  In the 50s, talents like Chuck, Elvis, Jerry Lee and Buddy brought R&B out of the smoky dens of dark inner cities and into the Rock & Roll revolution.  That movement blended with the wild explosion of creativity of the 60s, where folk met rock met gospel and they had an ecstatic orgy of sound and meaning.

In the 70s, we briefly saw the Disco Monster rear its horrible head, but it was eventually conquered by the Pettys and Springsteens of the world, and their harmonies inspired the Grunge Movement of the late 80s and 90s.

But, then a terrible thing happened.  Little did we realize that the Disco Monster, just before expiring, had thrown out an egg sac that fertilized with with another inner-city movement called "rap."  The offspring that emerged were horrific in their countenance.  The Pop Movement was born, and like any good bowel movement, it landed on the world with a resounding thud and immediately drew flies.

Lyrics have devolved into endlessly repeated catch-phrases - like diamonds in the sky - and the performers are all of the same pasty, limp noodle variety with little more than a well-placed sequin to distinguish them.  In fact, the most interesting product of this insipid movement are the videos, which are anathema to music, since music is intended to be (ahem) heard, not seen.

You can see the effect in the eyes of the Millennial Generation.  Their hollow haunted looks reflect that complete lack of creativity in their shared culture.  Like some warped Zen koan, they are forced to draw meaning from meaninglessness, and the result is a vacuous mentality that seeks nothing, because that is always the point of a good koan.

While pondering this article, I went and checked my own library.  My collection begins with the Dawn of Time and runs right up to the early 2000s, then abruptly stops.  The collection encompasses nearly every form of music ever recorded, even the sounds of planets and stars (oddly melodic by the way), but from the last 16 years, almost nothing, not even movie soundtracks or show tunes.  Creativity in music just died.

Music is one of those things we all take for granted, but is very important to humans.  Hearing is pretty much the strongest human sense. Our eyes aren't worth a damn, compared to the rest of the animal kingdom.  Our sense of smell is only a fraction of other beasts.  However, nearly half or more of our experience in the Universe comes through our hearing.

Music is vital to culture, can excite vivid memories and can unite radically diverse groups across physical distance and across generations.  Creating music is one of humanity's most primal instincts.  It is a language that all people understand instinctively.  Music, in fact, is embedded in the very nature of all we perceive, and that is not hyperbole.

At its core, music is just harmonious vibrations.  We are sensitive to the harmony, finding some vibrations pleasing, while others irritate or excite us in a wide variety of ways.  Music is the expression of time and mathematics, as music cannot exist without time and its very nature is wavelengths - sine waves of various lengths.

Who among us can listen to Wagner without feeling our pulse quicken?  Is not Beethoven the embodiment of joy?  Even the sounds of the gamelan evokes the endless and serene world of tropical Earth.  From humanity's earliest awakenings, music has been a vital and uniting force behind our civilizations.

Yet, here we are.  We have arrived at the empty and meaningless Age of Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, the vacuous noises of Psy and Lee Ji-Eun, and the violet arrhythmia of Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols.

We have entered an era where art has devolved into something called "self-expression."  It has affected all media and forms, and it has laid waste to the very fabric of society.  It is hard to separate the devolution of music from the increasing courseness of society.  Whether art has followed the increasing destruction of harmonious culture, or led it, is of little consequence, but it is certain that a major change in music - a burst of creative force - would give great power to the restoration of peaceful and harmonious life.

If all life and existence is based on vibrations, then it stands to reason that the most powerful force we can unleash - for good or bad - is vibrations.  Meaningful and harmonious vibrations fill our lives with peace, while empty and vacuous ones cause strife.

We call upon the musicians of the world to return us to peace with your music!

Revolutionary Culture

It is probably safe to say that most people reading this article have never seen Citizen Kane, nor remember Orson Welles for more than his regular stints on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or Dean Martin's Celebrity Roasts.  In fact, few may remember him other than his still-famous though rarely heard Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds on CBS radio in 1940.

In fact, it was the radio broadcast that got him noticed in Hollywood.  Welles and his Mercury Players, already well known on the New York theater scene, had taken a classic novel and dramatized it as a news broadcast, regularly 'interrupting' pre-scheduled shows with updates from reporters and interviews with 'experts.'  Listeners who did not hear the disclaimer at the beginning and end of the broadcast were, in many cases, genuinely terrified, with extreme cases of mass murder/suicides in some parts of the country, though the validity of the reports has been questioned.

Welles was given a three-film deal with RKO Pictures based on the phenomenal success of the radio broadcast.  Welles, being all of 26 years old and never having produced a feature film in his life, received copious amounts of scorn from Hollywood insiders, because he had been given complete creative control over his films, a deal all but unheard of in the studio-dominated industry of the period.

Welles set about co-writing, producing, directing and starring in his first film, Citizen Kane.  The script alone was a marvel of innovation.  Until that point, nearly every film ever released by Hollywood followed a standard narrative style of a beginning, middle and end, with the story progressing in a straightforward timeline of events.

Citizen Kane turned the standard narrative on its head.  The story began with the eponymous character's death and went on to tell the story as a series of news reels and interviews with various supporting characters.  The narrative was held together by a reporter, whom we never meet or see clearly, on the trail trying to discover the meaning of Kane's last word, "Rosebud."  In fact, none of the characters in the story ever understand the significance of the word, but we the audience are clued in by the final shot of the film.  The story jumps back and forth in time, though it loosely progresses chronologically  through Kane's life.

What was even more radical than the story itself was the visual execution.  Even today, some of the visual effects and transitions can draw awed attention, for example the camera flying through a neon sign and then down through a skylight in a virtually seamless transition.

In fact, one of the most remarkable innovations of this film is the camera movements and positions.  Up until Citizen Kane, the camera was primarily a passive recorder of events in front of it.  It stood roughly eye-level and other than a pan or tilt, never moved.  In this film, the camera becomes a character itself, no longer passive, but imparting information and emotion by the choice of angles and movements.  Welles went as far as to jack-hammer holes in the studio floor and design new rigs in order to get never-before-seen angles and movements through scenes.  Greg Toland's cinematography, including lighting, was nothing less that astounding for his choice of lenses for deep depth of field and the shadowy scenes of newsmen gathered to assign the reporter.

But these innovations were still not all.  The film editing by the now-famous Robert Wise (Run Silent Run Deep, Sound of Music and much more) cut the film to reflect the radical change in style that Welles and Toland had delivered.  The pacing is brisk, lingering only enough on wide shots to establish the settings, but in many cases staying in medium and close-up, when the story did not require much in the way of establishing shots.  There's hardly a moment when the viewer feels bored, as the pace is unrelenting, much like the central character.

Part of the editing are the transitions between scenes, and Wise cannot take credit for many of the ones in Citizen Kane, they were obviously pre-planned by Welles.  One famous transition has the camera dolly in on a photo of a rival newspaper's editorial staff, which then seamlessly become a live shot as Kane walks into it.

Mel Berns' make-up effects almost single-handedly launched the prosthetic craze in Hollywood.  The subtle and realistic aging of the characters over time, especially making a 26-year-old Welles into an 80-year-old man with flesh-like texture and movement was major departure from the grease-paint effects that had preceded it.

There was, in fact, a creative fire-storm raging around this film.  From the art direction to the acting, everyone seemed determined to out-do everyone else in their creative efforts.  Even the settings reflected the characters and the narrative, telling entire stories of their own.

One of the most famous scenes in the film is the legendary "breakfast table," where Mr. and Mrs. Kane progress through an entire lifetime of their relationship with as much of the story being told by the actors and make-up, as by the props.  One gloriously subtle detail near the end of the scene is Mrs. Kane reading the newspaper of Kane's largest rival.

The list of firsts in Citizen Kane is a long one and touches on nearly every aspect of film-making.  There is hardly a director today who is not influenced in some way by Welles and his ground-breaking work.  Every time you see a camera fly through a window, you can thank Welles.  From Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Player to the long travelling shots or worm's-eye/fly-on-the-wall views in Kubrick's remarkable filmography (Welles notably called Kubrick the greatest film-maker of all time), the greatest Hollywood directors have all stood on Welles giant shoulders.

Welles' fatal mistake, other than his notorious penchant for not finishing projects, was that Citizen Kane was widely interpreted as an indictment of William Randolf Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day.  One certainly cannot deny the superficial resemblances of Kane to Hearst, even to the extent that "rosebud" was widely rumored to be Hearst's pet name for his mistress' private parts.  However, those who know Welles' life story can easily pick out the autobiographical elements, and even the eerie way Kane's life mirrored Welles' in later years, especially the character's motivations and flaws.

I highly recommend that even the casual film-goer watch, or re-watch, Citizen Kane.  It is instructive to see the seeds of modern cinema being planted and edifying to know that one man could have such an influence on an art form, in a way that is more readily apparent than, say Claude Monet's impressionist revolution.

It is important to note that it is not just technical developments and technique that set Citizen Kane apart, but the narrative style itself.  Reverse exposition and the use of retrospective storytelling in film can all be traced directly to this landmark film.

It is also noteworthy that Welles' achievements throughout his filmography have often been copied, but rarely equaled.  In many ways, even the modern achievements with CGI and other technologies are little more than perfecting the innovations brought to film by Welles.  Citizen Kane was not a fluke - a one-off burst of creativity - but rather the first shot in an amazing volley of revolutionary visual and narrative techniques.  Even a cursory study of Welles' work will bring one to a much greater appreciation of the value and power of the creative mind is advancing the cultural milieu.

Though we are not all destined to have such public or examined effects on our world, it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort to push our creativity as far as we can in the service of culture.

Who could have predicted that Monet's failing eyesight or Welles' brash and youthful ignorance would have had such profound effects on our world?

Reader Wrights

View from the Writer's hut

You know, sometimes all the effort to sit here in my jungle hut, with monkeys on treadmills generating electricity and four wives hounding me to go pick fruit or something useful, is just worth it.  That's especially true when I get great email from readers that let me know I'm having some effect on the world, that is just a four-day canoe ride through dengue-infested backwaters away.

Ever see African Queen?  That scene where Bogart and Hepburn are swarmed by mosquitoes?

Like that.

Anyway, I digress.  I blame my 20-year-old newest wife who is picking my nits and getting me rather frothed up.

So, reader email.  That's where we were a moment ago.

We received this email from long-time reader and supporter R.F., while he was attending a luau on Malibu beach, I think:

Hello Bernard:

I hope you are well, safe and prosperous. Your blogs are a blessing, and I wouldn't know where to start if I were to comment on them.

When Henry the 8th criminalized the Roman Catholics my Irish ancestors were rounded up and shipped off to the penal colony of Australia as convicted sheep thieves, along with thousands of other young Irish men that were at the time "kicking up their heels" or as they say nowadays, existential threats. So I might have inherited a dissident gene or two as a result, and that might be why I like your blogs so much.

As you did I tossed out the TV decades ago, but I watch movies (and I have several thousand in my library). I love movies and analyze them for the content that influences the feelings. I watch the background as much as the foreground mis-en-scene, listen to the the music, and watch for metaphors, allegories, symbols and other triggers and effects.

Of course this drives any family members crazy because I will lurch for the remote to stop a film at odd moments to replay scenes while they are trying to become immersed in the story. My analytical approach always seems much more entertaining and rewarding to me than what others seem to get out of films. I believe movies are an extension of theater and wayang, and movies, theater and wayang are often used to guide society--in pre-Facebook times of course :-)      Wasn't The "Gospel of John" a perfect model of the Greek 3 act play? The last act has the curtain drawn symbolizing the hereafter. (please comment if that is correct). "The Third Man" takes us around in a full circle just like life does. "Chushingura" seems liken to the Bagavad Gita issue of duty in conflict with honor, (possibly a reflection of your father's inner conflict.) A flood of examples comes. Your message is clear, but I must limit this note. 

As with theater and films, in your "Sorcerer's apprentice" blog you remind me that politics is another of the "glamours" as defined in the Maleus Maleficarum. A spell, an illusion causing people to see things differently from what they are. Hence, to cast a glamer is to cause a visual deception. (--wickisomething or other) 

This can be proven: when the glamour fades that scraping sound we hear in the middle of the night are the neighbors in the confines of their garages scraping off Clinton, or Bush, or Obama bumpers stickers. In the forthcoming reboot they will replace them with the newest glamour of Hillary or Trump or whoever bumper stickers.

Thanks for the blogs.

Sorry for the momentary pause there.  The tears running down our cheeks shorted out the "good" laptop and electrocuted the monkey.  Had to put wife #3 on the job and whip out the antique laptop.

It's letters like this that keep us going.  And we love that our readers are intelligent and well educated.  We even had to use the rotting copy of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 1948 edition to understand half this stuff.

Of course, we knew about Botany Bay from watching Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, but the rest of it, well...

We have a massive movie collection too!  All sorted by genre, writer, director, lead actor, even director of photography and editor.  And yes, the film format is a direct extension of the proscenium, or picture frame stage, which is about 2,300 years old.  The psychological effect is of an invisible "fourth wall" that allows the audience to observe the action without being a part of it.

One of the best theories I've ever found (and am still looking for again) for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, was that the "monolith" represents the picture frame, whether stage or screen.  It's dimensions are almost exactly the same as 65-mm film frames, and the narrow depth represents the bare reality of the third dimension in film.

Thus, by extension, Stanley Kubrick was creating a magical working on the audience, through the picture frame, showing us (and bringing us along) an alchemical transformation of anyone who participates in the process (watches it).

All great works of art are transformative.  In fact, one cannot call something art unless it transforms.  That is the whole point.  And yes, there are dark arts and light arts: people who vomit on canvass, and Leonardo da Vinci.  One crushes the spirit, the other elevates it.

I agree with R.F., analyzing the magic makes for a much richer and enlightening experience, at least for me.  In some way, it is also a protection from the magic.  By understanding how it is done helps me maintain a mental distance from its effect.

I would rather watch Citizen Kane a thousand times, than a thousand lesser movies.  When the craft is performed at its peak of skill and artistry, it is truly magical.  Would you rather have one da Vinci or Rembrandt or a thousand Warhols?  Think with your mind and spirit, not your investment portfolio here.

At any rate, you see what happens now when we get great letters like this.  We start thinking (finally?).

Many thanks to R.F., both for reading and for sending us the occasional brain-bombs.  We save these things and dust them off on rainy days, you know.

And thanks to all the readers.  We had our second-best month ever in July, with an average of 800 hits per day, and this past weekend was the most heavily trafficked ever, with over 3,000 hits in two days.  Somebody out there likes us.

Don't forget to pass on a link to your friends and enemies.  You can hook up with us on half a dozen "social media" outlets to keep up with our doings, the archives date back seven years and over 1,000,000 words, and there's some great stuff coming, including events in which you can participate.  So keep tuned.

Onward through the fog!

And yes, the photo at the top is the view out our writer shack deep in the jungles of Borneo.  Ish.

It's A Dog's Life

There are surprising things to be learned everywhere and in everything.  The key to learning is to look at it all from as many different perspectives as you can imagine.  I believe there is a solution to every problem.  If you cannot find a solution, it is because you haven't looked at the problem from the proper angle.  You must throw out assumptions and examine all possible causes.  You must roll a problem over and look at the sides no one else has considered.  And while this sounds easy, even obvious, it's not, or else everyone would be doing it.

Finding a solution is only a fraction of the battle, though.  Once you've found the solution, especially by unconventional means, you have the new and even less enviable task of convincing others to follow you.

We are limited by our languages.  Trying to teach an Indonesian about fine wines is very difficult, because the language has only one word - rasa - for both the act of smelling and the act of tasting.  However, trying to teach an American to completely integrate the two is just as impossible, even though as kids we all know that holding you nose while eating something disagreeable reduces the experience of the flavor.

Even more difficult is teaching someone to roll a problem around in their head and examine it from different angles.  It is quite amazing how few people can do this, even though it is a learnable skill.  It is very difficult for most people to fill in the parts of something that they cannot experience with their senses and create a 3-D model in their heads that they can manipulate.

Here's a really fine example.  Lately, there's been a lot of hew and cry in Western media about the annual Chinese dog meat festival.  Just to be clear, this is NOT meat for dogs, but rather dogs AS meat.

To the average American, this seems abhorrent.  How dare those nasty Chinese eat dogs?  They must be crazy.  Bomb them!

In reality, Americans are prejudiced by the fact that they have vast amounts of range land where huge herds of cows can roam and create a massive industry for cow meat that Americans take for granted. How many folks would freak out if they walked into a grocery store and there was no meat counter stacked with piles of delicious beef waiting for them?

Now, expand your mind a bit.  Take a fraction of the space available in the US, fill it with more than a billion hungry people who also like red meat, but don't have vast ranches full of Angus cows waiting to be eaten?  What animal with red meat is small enough to raise on tiny plots of land, even a porch, provides a number of services, like eating left-overs, and can fill the dinner pot a couple of times over with one carcass?  Hey!  Dogs!

Frankly, dog meat is pretty good.  A bit chewy, but tastes just like chick...er, red meat.

The people hollering about this are culturally isolated and insensitive to the various unique issues of feeding a billion folks with limited land resources.  They haven't looked at the issue from all sides, especially the sides they don't usually see.

And for those who are screaming because dogs are pets?  Well, I grew up on a farm in Texas and I had cows, sheep and horses for pets, and they are still delicious.  So what?  Your dog is a pet.  Other dogs are dinner.  Get over it.

And for the veggie folks who think eating animals is cruel?  That's only because your cultural prejudices make you think plants don't suffer and scream and die like all other life on Earth.  You eat the reproductive organs, lungs, bones and bodies.  Just because plants don't react like you doesn't mean a thing - except that you are insensitive to things you don't understand or consider important.

There is nothing different between the Yulin Dog Meat Festival and the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo chili cook-off, except maybe a bunch of drunk, armed cowboys that would get a tad upset if a bunch of Hollywood numbnuts tried to free their cows.

Life and learning is all about seeing things from other points of view.  That is true tolerance, ture genius and true art.

Try it sometime.  You'll like it.

Quoniam Propter Art Stercore

Today's rant is brought to you by some bozo named Martin Creed and the pretentious and overpriced Park Avenue Armory, both of whom/which seem to have failed miserably in Art History class.

It seems these cretins no only fail to understand what art is, but that hours of video of people puking and dumping constitutes a "retrospective" of anything but people's retro functions.  Yes, that's right, this "artist" and the "gallery" which purports to show his "work" are putting up literal crap as "art."

Somewhere in the past 100 years, society appears to have forgotten that art (the real thing) is supposed to bring order to chaos and to elevate the mundane into something we collectively call 'beauty.'

Now, I set the word beauty apart because I, more than many, understand that beauty is a very subjective thing; however, I guarantee that watching people puke and poop does not, in any sense of the word, conform to anyone's idea of beauty.

I understand "modern" art.  I know why and how it developed.  You see, once the camera was invented, there was no longer a need for artists to represent reality.  Photographs could do that in a way that few artists ever achieved.  Thus, the camera freed artists to explore more abstract aesthetics, even to seek beauty IN chaos, rather than OUT of it.

I have no problem with that.  Picasso did nothing new.  Multi-point perspective (showing something from many points of view at once) was not new, only his style was.  The Roman baths at Pompeii had magnificent murals that used the same technique two thousand years before.  By the time we get to Jackson Pollack, though, art is beginning to derail, such that throwing balloons full of paint from second-story balconies at massive canvases, and stacking progressively smaller US flags on top of each other were now considered "art."  Then came talentless hacks like Warhol, and pretty soon, we have "retrospectives" of people's most base functions in photo-realistic full-color video being called "art."

The only thing worse that this literal crap being foisted on the public as "art" are the idiots who buy it and support such fetishist ding-dongs as Mr. Creed.  And let's not forget such shining lights of creativity as Millie Brown, while we're at it.

Real art is NOT repulsive or sick-making.  Real art elevates the spirit and induces feelings of wonder and amazement.  Real art displays the talent to take base materials like paint and canvass, and create works of great beauty, depth and texture as to move the viewer away from the mundane and profane towards the spiritual and ethereal.

The so-called "artists" who wallow in humanity's waste are not lifting anyone, but rather dragging us down into the sewage which they inhabit.  You can call it "documentation" and I can live with that.  You can even call it "self-expression," and I'll agree to go along.  But to call this rubbish "art" and have a bunch of pretentious jack-dillies with more dollars than sense standing around sipping cheap Merlot and hemming and hawing over it, well time for me to get off that out-of-control bus, folks.

Some people wonder how I can appreciate the works of Matisse and Cornell (see top image), and not understand Pollock and Warhol.  I'll tell you why.  Matisse, for instance in his "Backs" series, extrapolated natural forms into their geometric constituents, while Cornell juxtaposed common objects in a way that completed a visual "thought."  The Pointillists and Impressionists played with light and color.  The Bauhaus experimented with architecture as public art.  The Decoists and Nouveauists used furniture to express geometric and natural forms as functional objects.

But there is no way that anyone in their right minds can call puking and pooing "art."  The "pieces" they create do not elevate the subjects, nor do they show us a hidden underlying truth.  They simple play for shock value, which is a cheap and worthless pursuit.

What we see today is a failure of culture and education.  The repeated cuts in art programs to provide more time for wrapping bananas with condoms in schools is now coming back to haunt us.  I would even venture to say that wrapping bananas in condoms is more artistic if it were presented in the proper forum, because it requires the viewers to impose interpretation and imagination.

Sadly, I think it is too late to repair the profound damage to culture.  After a century of this rubbish being presented as art, and uneducated buyers snatching it up, thus encouraging these talentless idiots, there can be no turning back.  It must all come crashing down before it can be rebuilt, I'm afraid.

I will grant one thing to Mr. Creed and Ms. Brown: they have brilliantly pointed out all that is wrong with society.

Random Thoughts On Pop Culture

• I hope no one honestly believes the "race" flap at the Oscars this year; all the commotion and threats of antics are nothing more than a cynical attempt to get ratings, which have seriously lagged for all self-aggrandizing "award" shows over the past few years; no one in Hollywood does or says anything without first calling their agents and publicists, who in turn check with CCA;  it's all a show, folks.
• What in the hell has happened to the music "industry?"  It used to be music spoke to the heart and soul, tapped into the zeitgeist, stirred up mental processes; now performers compete solely on how big of a train wreck they produce both on- and off-stage.
• There is a big difference between an actor and a performer; Gary Oldman is an actor, Morgan Freeman is a performer.
• Indonesia doesn't have any public libraries, and the world is quickly following suit; it's a shame that people don't read anymore; now-a-days, writers survive by writing scripts, not novels; I love books; I can do my own casting and set designs, proceed at my own pace, never have to recharge the battery, and when I finish a good book I actually feel like the world has changed a little; only problem is that moving a library is a bitch.
• One of the most thought-provoking episodes of the original Star Trek series was called "A Taste of Armageddon." Two planets conduct war via computer simulations, but "victims" are marched into disintegration machines if they are selected to "die."  Most of the wars I see on the "news" these days reminds me a lot of that episode.
• William Shatner is a performer.
• Gardening is a lost art in most urban areas these days; I have always had plants wherever I've lived, even if it's just potted geraniums; potting, feeding, watering, harvesting, and pruning are all very meditative and rewarding activities; watching plants grow forces you to slow down and contemplate the beauty and genius of Nature; gardening is also a hobby that can be practiced well into old age and is more productive and less wasteful of resources than golf.
• Pro-sports are completely senseless, time-wasting spectacles; the whole idea of sport is to participate to promote healthy activity that's a lot more fun that lifting weights and running on treadmills; if you sum up all the effort put into pro sports, think of how much time, money and resources are wasted on watching someone else's exercise, and think of how much could have been accomplished if all that couch time had been applied to something useful (thousands of collective years).
• It used to be that picture books were for kids, and adults would read books that only contained text, because their minds had grown and expanded enough to be able to maintain complex visualizations based solely on words; now picture books are called "graphic novels" and are the pinnacle of modern creativity with multi-billion dollar industries based on these tree wasters and the movie empires they have spawned.
• On my recent trip back home for the holidays, I was shocked at how many people had never heard of Jakarta, much less knew where it was (or even Indonesia for that matter); I realized why Americans like to bomb foreign countries, because for most folks, those places are just abstract unknowns with no sense of reality to them.
• The modern concept of "diversity" is utter bullshit; diversity has come to mean "forced compliance" rather than "widely different."  As is it currently practiced, "diversity" only fosters resentment and animosity, rather than appreciation and solidarity; it used to be you could travel from place to place and experience how other communities and cultures viewed the world and acted upon it; now it's like porridge - an homogeneous bowl of glop with no real excitement; it also meant that if you didn't like a particular culture, you could get away from it; now it lives next door.
• I miss real art; art was once the perfection of raw materials and the idealization of our cultural goals and aspirations; now art is a woman drinking colored milk and puking on a canvas; glorifying someone's mental illness and hanging their effluvia on the wall is not art, it's a publicity stunt; rather than elevating the mind and soul, modern art drags us down into chaos and ugliness.

L'art Pour L'art

What is art?

Related to that, what is creativity?  Few people stop to think about these things in their daily lives, though we are surrounded by things called art nearly every moment of every day.  Many large cities have public art on display.  Counties maintain museums to display art.  Some people call TeeVee, movies and pop music art.  There is no lack of folks around that call themselves artists.  But what is it?

Can we be objective about art?  People commonly say that art is in the eye of the beholder.  One man's trash is another man's treasure.  Art is a statement that provokes emotion and even fistfights.  But is all that really art?

Robert Mapplethorpe's Pisschrist at one time was the center of tremendous controversy, with pickets and heated public debate over its merits.  It was defended as art on the grounds that it was self-expression.

Andy Warhol became famous for taking pop culture icons and removing them from context to show them in isolation.  Who can forget the Campbell's soup can or the Marilyn Monroe four-panel?  Are they art?

Are the works of Steven Spielberg or The Beatles art?  In fact, are any movies, commonly called a collaborative art form, definable as art?

The central problem here is whether we can measure art objectively.  Everyone has a favorite movie, book, painting, or song.  They can be very moving and meaningful to us and evoke strong memories and emotions when we encounter them.  However, the smell of frying bacon does the same thing for me.  Does that make cooking bacon an art form?

I submit that creativity and art are two very distinct things, and that just because something elicits strong emotions does not make it art, but simply a memory trigger.  Art is not necessarily emotional, though art can bring forth emotions.  Creativity is not art, though art is creative.  How does this work?

Well, one can do something creative that is not art.  Mapplethorpe's Pisschrist is creative.  I juxtaposes two things that no one in the public sphere had done before (mostly out of fear of being burned at the stake).  Placing a crucifix in a jar of urine was a creative act.  It took two objects that had never been combined before and did so in a way that provoked comment and emotion.  Some people thought it was sacrilege, other thought it was poignant.  Some felt compelled to look at it as a challenge to their personal paradigm, others felt compelled to cause damage and injury to prevent folks from looking at it.  But...it was not art.

Art is taking raw materials and, according to certain rigid rules, creating beauty by making the raw material conform to opposing rules.  Now that all sounds fine and dandy, but what does it mean?

Michelangelo's David took raw stone, and by the rules of symmetry, balance, rhythm, and context, converted the stone into flesh.  When one views the statue up close, one can see the ripples of sinew, the veins, the pensive look in the eyes.  The stone was forced to assume an unnatural state for the material.  The assumption was predicated on certain rules of 'beauty' that all people everywhere consider true and verifiable.  The pose of the subject creates the expectation of further motion and emotion, something which stone is not supposed to possess.  For that reason, the statue has endured for centuries as a treasure and work of art because it forces the natural (raw) to appear soft and flexible, while at the same time making flesh appear to be inflexible and eternal.

The artist not only accomplished an unusual juxtaposition in textures, but did so while creating a remarkably beautiful object.  Both in subjective and objective measures, the statue   The figure has perfect symmetry, is visually balanced, and the pose implies forward motion and thus rhythm.  Combined, these elements are the hallmark of true art.

By comparison, Mapplethorpe took two manufactured items - one produced by involuntary processes in his body and other by some manufacturer - and put them together without value added to either object.  The materials do not deny their basic natures and functions.  There is no rhythm, balance or created symmetry.  The crucifix is simple dunked in the urine in a more or less random manner.

While this might be considered a creative juxtaposition, it is not art.  It does not bear any of the hallmarks of subjective or objective measurements.  There is no beauty.  There is no modification of raw materials.  In fact, the only real labor involved was an involuntary body function requiring no conscious effort at all.

We can say this about much of pop culture.  Music is little more than organized chaos.  Most movies do not rise above being cuss fests and car crashes.  Even much of painting and sculpture can not be considered art.

One key factor of art is the hardest to judge because it takes a lot of time, and that is that art must withstand the test of time.  True art rises above contemporary fashions and trends.  It is as fresh at this moment as it was 400 years ago.

Art also exists above culture and, in fact, creates culture.  A work of art from any place and time can be appreciated in any other place and time.  The works of da Vinci, Mozart or the creators of King Tut's funerary pieces have fascinated and enthralled audiences across time and space.  You do not need to be Egyptian, nor even know anything about Tut's culture to marvel at the incredible workmanship and beauty of the art.

I find it hard to believe that the works of Jackson Pollock or Roy Lichtenstein will survive this century as anything but curiosities.  Some of The Beatles' music has withstood a half century and is greatly enjoyed on every continent.  It may well be that we could apply the term 'art' to some of their work, particularly that of John Lennon and George Harrison.

As for Steven Spielberg, the only thing artful about his work is the amazing way he has risen to the top of the movie world.   In 20 years, I would be surprised if anyone remembers who he was or what he did.  For that matter, after nearly a century of Academy Awards, how many Best Pictures can you name?  If you can think of two or three then there's a job as a film historian waiting for you.

Art never causes revulsion.  Things done for shock value can not be art.  Art does not shock.  It is elevating and inspiring.  It is timeless and exists outside the culture in which it is created.  Real art has no need to be anything but itself.

And can we please stop calling those brainless, clueless bucketheads in the recording industry "artists"?  At least in the movie and TeeVee industry, they call the actors "talent" and not "artists".

When it comes to art, at least there is one thing we can all agree on: Life on the Far Side is high art!

Into The Great Wide Open

Tyranny holds within itself the seed of its own destruction.  At some point, the tyrant steals so much from those it would subjugate that they no longer have anything left to lose.  For that reason, the subjugated masses will always rise up and destroy the tyrant when they have lost everything of value in their lives.

The uprising, at least in western history, typically gels when a technology comes along that undermines the tyrant's ability to control information.  The control of information is crucial to a tyrant's rule.  If the masses become privy to the same amount and quality of information, they no longer have a need for the tyrant.

The last time this happened in western history was the invention of the printing press, which led to the Protestant Revolution on the religious side, and the Renaissance on the the cultural side.

Gutenberg's mass printing of the Bible wrenched control of the central literature that had been used to subjugate people for centuries.  Imagine living in a world where your whole life is controlled by a priviledged few who demand that you live according to the precepts of a book, yet that book can only be obtained by the priviledged few who are initiated into a secret cult called the priesthood.  They enter a rarified realm where only they know what's actually in the book, and they only quote to us masses what they find applicable to maintaining the control of their positions.

Then along comes this German guy who applies information brought back from China by Marco Polo about the use of carved blocks in a rack to print multiple copies of documents in a very short amount of time.  Before this point, information was controlled by economics.  Making copies required paying literate people good money to sit around writing the same text over and over again.  Suddenly, one man can arrange a rack of blocks with letters on them to form a written page.  He put it into a modified wine press, and BLAMMO!  He can crank out dozens of copies in a day, that would take scriveners weeks, if not months, to duplicate.

Under the prime law of economics, having enough of something for everyone to own one makes the price fall precipitously.  So, Gutenberg spins out piles of Bibles, where rooms full of scribes used to produce one or two a month.  The price falls and us normal people can afford to buy our own copy of the Bible and see for ourselves what was only hear-say before.

POOF!  Instant revolution, because half the stuff the priests were telling us from the pulpit can't be found anywhere in the Bible.  They just made it up and took a few out-of-context quotes to back them up.

On the cultural side, science and art exploded for the same reasons.  In the old order of things, information and knowledge were only available to those who went up to university, and thus only the very rich had access it it.  Being part of the elite, it was in their self-interest to keep that information to themselves.

Movable type suddenly burst on the scene bringing Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, and all the rest of it to the common man.  This, in turn, caused a huge explosion of art, literature and science.  People could read the classics for themselves and didn't need the expense of university educations to do it.  Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, and da Vinci could publish their treatises for distribution directly to the masses.  Art went from two-dimensional, hierarchical cartoons to three-dimentional realistic representations.  Geometry, physics and philosophy were democratized, and that information expanded the mass' minds into new realms of thinking.

Ultimately, this explosion of thought and science led to the Enlightenment and the downfall of the European monarchies and seminal events like the American Revolution.  A key factor in the latter event was pamphleteering, in which allowed people to organize across vast spaces.  Benjamin Franklin's postal service delivered the information at unheard of speed and efficiency.  The Pony Express pushed that ability into the wilderness of the frontier areas.

Now 500 years later, we stand at a very similar precipice.  Three key and related technologies have emerged in our time that have further democratized information and sped up its dissemination to unimaginable speeds.

First, there was photography.  This single invention had a profound affect on life.  Folks no longer needed artists to render portraits or scenes, taking months to produce single copies.  Now a camera could capture the actual photons from a subject and copies could easily be made.

Suddenly, art was freed from the need to render realistic subjects and could explore all the myriad forms that it has taken in the past 150 years.  One didn't need to print a book, one could photograph the page and make hundreds of copies in the time it took the press to make dozens.

Cameras captured events that happened so fast that the human eye could not discern discreet  processes within the event.  Things like horses running and men doing things as simple as sneezing or throwing something were recorded.  Science exploded again with new information and knowledge that led to vast new discoveries and technologies.

Then came the telephone.  Now people didn't have to write and send things by post.  They could actually hear the voice of the other person in real time, with all the emotion and reality of being present in the same room.  And they could do it at increasing distances, until this moment when someone on the far side of the Earth can instantly communicate by text or voice with any other person on the opposite side of the planet!  We have become blase about it, but if you are old enough, you remember having to use long-distance operators and telegraph offices and so on.

Finally, all of these technologies came together, including the printing press, in something called the internet.  When you stop and think about it, this is a truly mind-blowing technology.  Entire libraries and museums can now be delivered to your bedroom or office.  You can examine the collected works of Monet from four museums in Paris, while chatting in real time with an art historian.  You can customize your news feeds to offer stories that interest you, and you can get the news when you want without waiting for someone to deliver it to you at a pre-defined time.  And you can go as deep into any story as you choose, and find independent commentary on it.

This is revolutionary stuff.  Think how much power has been yanked out of the hands of the elite  Though they are deperately trying to put the genie back in the bottle, they are finding it virtually impossible.  The voice of dissent finds a way around the road blocks.  Researchers and philosophers can get their ideas directly to a mass audience without gatekeepers.  Home businesses can completely circumvent the massive chain stores and reach a global marketplace with minimal effort.

This is decentralized power the likes of which have never existed in our history.  The social, educational and spiritual upheaval represented by this technology is incredibly profound.  And it has the elite scared to death.

For centuries, the elite have enjoyed a complete monopoly on information.  Even the printing press could be controlled to one extent or another, but in any case, change moved slow enough that they could prepare for it and seal the leaks.

With the internet, though, as fast as they build a dam, there are three channels going around it.  How do you fight the flow of information when any individual with desire and patience can get the same information once only available to the select few?  This has implications for nearly every stratum of society, and certainly every institution.

How do you control libraries when they are obsolete?  How do you swindle money out of people for higher education, when all the materials are available free online?

Amateur astonomers are photographing exoplanets and posting online before the stuffy professional system can get around to it.  Writers can self-publish their work without going to the publishing houses that can make or break careers at a whim.  Independent researchers can link up in self-organized collectives.  In fact, people of any stripe with common interests can come together from any part of the world and trade their ideas.

This completely destroys the entire framework of careful review and vetting that the elite have spent centuries installing to prevent us regular folks from accessing information.  It blows away universities, peer review, publishing, libraries, museaums, institutions...literally everything.  This kind of change is creating a social-political-spiritual upheaval the likes of which have never before been seen.

Life has already radically changed, and there is more to come.  The old paradigm, mistakenly called the New World Order, is coming completely unraveled at break-neck speed.  And what's even worse, at least for the elite, is that they have no where (literally) left to run or hide.  If they fail this time, as it is becoming increasingly clear that they are, they can not regroup and rebuild.  They are completely without dark corners in which to hide.

In all of human history, at least far as we have been allowed to know it, nothing like this has ever happened before.  Those of us alive now are literally treading on new ground.  There are no rules for this realm.  We are without precedent.  Literally everything that has come before is being swept away.  We are truly standing at the threshold to the unknown.

We no loner have to fight the NWO or the elite.  They are already doomed.  The last few kicks and flops are just St. Vitus' dance for those institutions.  Our job now is to figure out where we go from here.  It is up to us to set a course for the future.  It's a mighty big task, too.  For good or ill, we can not rely on anything that has gone before.  This is the time for visionaries or demagogues.  Either we formulate and emulate true leaders and people with vision, or we devolve into a state of existence so vile and so demeaning that none of us can imagine such a thing.  We really have a choice now.  We own the future.  The only question remaining is whether we will seize the opportunity to create, or squander it on destruction.

Hidupan, Alam Semesta dan Semuanya

One reason I write a blog is to exchange ideas with other minds out there, whether they see things the same as I do, or not. The mail I get is often inspirational and thanks to my blog, I have made new contacts in various parts of the world. A big note of tanks goes to George Ure, at UrbanSurvival, for giving me a wider audience!

Because of my eyesight (or lack thereof), I am a bit slow on reading and responding to email, but this morning I received an email that really inspired me, to whit:

"My daughter has enrolled her son and daughter in cyberschool. What a difference it makes. It gives them a lot of room for self expression. You are right about doing the same old thing over and over again.My daughter is an artist in mosaics, but when she was in school, if she dared to step out of the teachers way, she got into hot water, never allowed for self expression. It is a different mode now and if more parents did it, there would be more free thinkers. If the USA goes the way it looks like it is going, the schools won't be able to affort to run busses anyway.And I despise the fact that every school has a cop in it. What is wrong with these people. I always say it was created by the "puckerbutt Mamas" who had nothing better to do than go to PTA meetings and harp about a teacher touching their children. Lets face it "we have been had by the PTB and it is up to the free thinkers to change things."

In addition to giving me a wonderful new adjective, 'puckerbutt,' this letter also inspired me. I therefore replied in my usual brief and concise manner:

Please pardon my delay in replying, but WOW what a great letter to receive!

It's gratifying to hear that there are folks out there who are opting out of the system. Freedom of self begins with freedom of thought, and we can't think clearly nor freely if we are sent to cookie cutter schools.

I'm an artist, as well. I spent 40 years of my 50 total (so far) working in theater, film and TV. I had some brilliant, real teachers, beginning with my mother, who not only encouraged free-thinking, but demanded it.

Your letter reached me at an opportune time. I am currently developing a system for teaching English online so that it can reach students in Indonesia who are very remote and don't have access to the resourses available in Jakarta. You see, English is a way for people to move up here. They can use it to get good jobs and expand outside their villages and borders. They can access a much larger world of ideas by learning a single skill. However, when I teach English, I use ten different languages to do it. I show the students that language is simply a way to encode and decode information, just like math, computers and art. I come at the problem from a different angle than the standard rote memory curricula available on the market. Language is an organic, living thing and cannot be taught in a cold, rigid manner, just as plants cannot be raised without water and sunshine and exposure to the environment.

Anyway, I could wax philosophical for hours, as you can see from my blog. I am verygrateful to you for writing me. You inspired me with your ideas. Tha is one rreason I write, so that I can exchange ideas with a wider audience, and not only be inspired, but translate that into inspiration for the next generation.

I wish the best for you and yours. I am overjoyed that someone out there is seeking something different from the same ole same ole. We can win this Thing one mind at a time. It's daunting, but not impossible.

Thank you kindly for your letter, I know that to inspire someone to write back, there must be some ideas in my writings that move and motivate, and that is gratifying. Best of luck to you all, and blessings on you and yours.

Best regards,
Bernard

Education.

That's the key. That's how we defeat the PTB. One mind at a time. It took generations of indoctrination to get to where we are as a civilization, and it will take the same to get out. We just have to have the same resolve to be truly free that the bastards have to enslave.

Great books, such as Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, show us where we are heading now. But books such as, Shang-gri La and Stranger In A Strange Land and 2001: A Space Odyssea, show us where we could go.

People such as Richard Hoagland and David Icke, even if they are wrong, show us that thinking bigger can free us of so many constraints. People such as the reader who wrote me above show us that something as simple as art can elevate us above the mundane and propel us to new thoughts, new heights and New Frontiers of Humanity.

And it all begins with Education.

I was a threat to the United States. They castigated me and persecuted me because I did such radical things as forbid vaccinations for my children, filtered their water of things like flouride and chlorine, and homeschooled. I refused to follow the proscribed path and for that, my wife was killed and my children were used as weapons by the State.

the danger of free thought is very real. Trust me.

Ask Galileo. Ask anyone who presents to true and credible challenge to the status quo. If you push against the GAP (Generally Accepted Paradigm), you will be punished severely. People don't like their apple carts upset, especially those who profit from building the carts and growing the apples. They only profit when the apples are neatly stacked in a controlled area. If the apples are rolling down the street, then anybody can pick them up.

It comes down to this: who controls the mids of our children?

I've had some great teachers in my life. They were not famous nor did they want to be. They had one goal, to make me think.

There's Mrs. James and Mrs. Speck. There's Mr. Z and Stan. There's Swilley and my trig tutor, whose name I don't even remember, but who taught me that math can be understood.

But, at the core of it all, after years of education that has yet to stop, there's my mother. She taught me language and art and the most important thing of all: to read.

It's all there in a book somewhere. The collected knowledge of the ages is written down and waiting for discovery. To read is to be free. Because of reading, my teachers include: Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, Benedict, Lao Tsu, Sun Tsu, Gengis Khan, and scores of others.

Because I learned art, I was trained by Monet, van Gogh, Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Rodan, Orson Welles, and so many more it would take an encyclopaedia.

There were my language teachers for Spanish, Latin and German. There were the incredible cast of characters I have met traveling. There were monks at Christ in the Desert.

All the great thinkers, artisits, writers, and philosophers of all time came to me through one simple skill: reading. Thanks Mom!

So, if you want to teach your children to think, not parrot, you have one job, and only one job...get them to read. Open the doors to the Universe by turning off the TV and the video games, and turn on the books, essays, manifestos, and papers. Give them inspiration, and the rest follows. Stop trying to be you kid's best friend and start thinking for the long term, far beyond your lifetime.

What can you do now that will affect generations?

I don't teach to get rich or even to make a living. I teach because I have a burning desire to open the mind of fresh, young thinkers who can change the world I will never live in. And in the end, that's the thing that must change: what is it that benefits us? Is it what car we drive or what house we live in or the luxuries in our lives? Or is it the world we can build through our children and their children, and the faces we will never know and the world we will never inhabit?

To paraphrase another great thinker, 'Ask not what the world can do for you, but what you can do for the world.'

And for God's sake, stop being a consumer. The real economy is not what we buy, but what we offer. Change your mind and change the world is the simplistic slogan that came out in the 80s. Though the intention was to sign folks up to comsume something, it is never-the-less true.

The difference between freedom and slavery, between wealth and poverty, is nothing more than a point of view.

It's that simple.

Readin', Ritin' n Cypherin'

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known.

But something is happening here
And you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?
-Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

What is education?

Looks like the current, near-global paradigm is stuffing kids into a room and filling full of the exact same information, sprinkled liberally with propaganda. At some point, they are encouraged to 'specialize' into so field or another and then spend the remained of their matriculation focusing on one thing.

Seems to me this is completely bass-ackwards.

Once upon a time, there were different schools of thought. There were platonics, aristotelians, nihilists, religionists, and scientists. There were weltanschauungs and competing viewpoints. That model produced legendary thinkers who drew upon multiple disciplines to gain insight and inspiration.

Somewhere along the line, we got derailed into this conformist model, where everyone must learn the same mountain of 'facts' and the same interpretation of those facts, and then, to the exclusion of all other information, begin a career building walls to protect just certain 'facts,' to the exclusion of all other 'facts.'

From where I sit, this seems to have produced legendary morons.

During my college days, the most memorable moments were when I tied some historical event to a scientific break-through or social change. One really good writer to this kind of thinking is Daniel Boorstein, who could effortlessly connect the invention of sewing machines to the development of credit cards, or so it seemed.

Things like transcepts and flying buttresses led to explosions in architecture and grand works such as the Hajia Sofia and Chartres cathedral.

The concept of the photon led to pointilism and ultimately to digital photography. Photography freed paitners to explore impressionism, cubism and geometrics.

Knowing little things can be fun also, like knowing that 'terrific' comes from 'terror,' which comes from the Latin, which equals the Greek 'deimos,' which is the root of 'demon' and a moon of Mars. The moons of Mars are called Phobos and Deimos, which can be translated as 'fear' and 'loathing,' which was a popular title for Hunter S. Thompson stories. Not to mention that the names were suggested by Johnathan Swift in 'Gulliver's Travels,' 200 years before the discovery of the moons.

Swift also wrote a famous essay called "A Modest Proposal," in which he advocates eating the children of Ireland as a means of alleviating poverty and unemployment in 17th century Ireland, which oddly sounds like the EU's current proposal to fix Ireland's current economic crisis. Thus, the 'war on terror' is a 'war of the worlds,' and a war on the children of Ireland, and everyone seems to think that just terrific. Reductio ad absurdum ipso facto annuit coeptis.

See how much fun it is?

One can successfully argue that thinkers such as Einstein, who was mired in his focus on calculations, has done more damage to physics than the Newtonian/Keplerian schools ever did. But what's worse is that schools teach Einsteinian space/time as gospel, when in fact nearly every observation of the Universe dispels the theory. Yet, competing schools of thought, such as Eletric Universe are roundly dismissed because the people who conceived of it weren't physicists.

Modern banking and economics, the core and root of the global money mess, are the product of a man called Keynes, whose mental masturbations have become dogma, thus trapping economists into thought boxes from which they can not escape. The Austrian school, on the other hand, is derided and ignored, though its paradigm makes far more sense and is historically sound.

And so the Box Paradigm is perpetuated across time. Schools pound one viewpoint into a child's head, and then for life they are trapped in an artificial construct of someone else's making. If they dare think outside the box, they are failed and relegated to ditch-digging for the rest of their lives.

Finally, not only do we force children to constrain their thoughts within narrow boxes of perception, but we do so by stuffing them in boxes 8 hours a day. No wonder we can't seem to produce great thinkers any more. The most exciting thought exercises in a modern school occur when globalist change agents come and pretend to have think-tank like sessions, but where conclusions are masterfully steered towards pre-ordained 'facts.' Case in point: Al Gore.

With the judicious application of multi-media and internet, combined with platonic dialogues and true investigative thinking, we could be producing Leonardo da Vincis by the hundreds. We could realize a tremendous New Age of Wisdom by teaching children to really think, to investigate multiple lines of inquiry, to open themselves to new connections and conclusions.

Instead, we close their minds, lock them in Schroedenger's Box and throw away the key. We continue to bus them into boxes and stuff them full of 'that's the way we've always done it' and hope for a better future. No wonder we are mired in one pile of stupidity after another.

Given the modern tools available, and simple discussions that cost nothing, children could be taught to really think. They would be encouraged to make connections where none existed before. They would stretch their minds to apply a 'fact' from one discipline to solving a 'puzzle' in another. The most prized degree would become a PhD in Everything, rather than some increasingly narrow line of thinking that leads ultimately to a cul-de-sac. Children would join dots rather than separate them, thus causing an explosion in true understanding of the Universe!

But, alas, perhaps that's the point: we can't have people thinking now can we? They might devise some way to extract energy from the ether for eternal free power. They might devise modes of transportation that are cheap, private and don't require vast infrastructures to operate.

They might become free individuals, sovereign and whole, answerable to their own God and unhindered in their exploration of our vast and wonderous Universe.

We can't have that, now can we?