It’s not The COVID-19 New World Order, The Trumpian Epoch, or the Time of I-Thing— “Random” is the word of the decade for a reason.
The reckless, impassioned romanticism of Canadian rocker Neil Young’s line It’s better to burn out than fade away is irresistible to a certain type of person. The line appears in two versions of a song on the 1979 album RUST NEVER SLEEPS — itself a title for the ages, a metaphor rich and complete and profound, yet no more than a plumbing company’s slogan, read by Young on a hand-painted sign during a mid-1970s road trip through rust-belt America. The 19th century Romantic Poets — Keats, Shelly, and Lord Byron — burned out within three years of one another; Jim…
Polar peoples have 58 words for snow. English has 200+ words for intoxication, and we’re getting close to that in describing mendacity — the art of lying. A reworked rumination on truth and a fitting farewell to our mendacious president, whose last mendacity has surely been his most audacious.
Theatrics and Hidden Truths
‘Ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the the odor of mendacity,’ Big Daddy drawls in Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the word lingering in the still air that passes for an oxygen supply to the three desperate characters gathered in Big Daddy’s Mississippi plantation home on this 1950s summer night.
All three want something, and their hunger is evident, if what would satisfy it isn’t: Big Daddy, just given what he thinks is a new lease on life from his doctors, demands to live impulsively and recklessly, letting everyone know just what he thinks…
‘Something Like The Truth’, Vol. 1 #2: The world is a strange and wondrous place, and here are small insights meant to capture some of its abstract mystery — to be followed up soon.
Some look out to the world and see themselves; others look inside to see the world.
POLITICS IS WHAT’S LEFT AFTER EVERYTHING REAL IS STRIPPED AWAY.
Something Like the Truth, Special Edition: Volume 2, Issue 1
The original seven define medieval Christian morality: “gateway sins” that led to grave violations of the divine directives. Now 1500 years old, a review seemed in order.
PRIDE — ENVY — GREED — GLUTTONY — WRATH — SLOTH — LUST
THIS SEPTET OF SINS is best known these days as part of the manga cartoon world, the taking off point for a cohort of Japanese superheroes appropriating the name, The Seven Deadly Sins. The concept originated with Christian morality thinkers in the early part of the Middle Ages; by 500 A.D. the list of fundamental flaws that would lead to actual sins was set, and for 1500 years these seven sinful dispositions have been a part of Western religious and popular culture and have appeared in numerous works of art.
Today, recent events and personages on the world stage raise…
Amy, you really pulled it off. The story had pluck, sassiness, an interesting character in Sue, and a lot of irony with just the right amount of detachment. From a literary perspective, nicely done.
It was inevitable: the attacks will come from all angles and could find their way to anyone, and they can be about anything or nothing. Everyone talks shit about everyone else all the time anyway, so what’s the big deal?
There is a story I try to tell to make a point, a tale of people who ridiculed an adversary for years about her background as an uneducated pretender, who were unable to process the information regarding the eventual award of a Masters Degree to the woman. Their previous idea and this new info did not compute, and years into the future they found ways to ensure their myth persisted: there was no college degree, no Masters.
Their spokesperson began with: There must have been a communication glitch in the press when her degree was announced, but when the news…
The Corona Virus Era
I got here the way, as a child, my hand guided a Ouija Board piece to the letters that spelled out a reality I couldn’t have possibly known —
………. but I did know it, and so I guided myself into position on the track, where now I await the footsteps of my past, and the handing off of the baton, poised for the final leg of the relay.
Beware the Ides of March, we have been warned; as a child I confused that with the March of Dimes, the little coin containers at the supermarket check-out with a small photo of a child in some kind of trouble. Either way, beware. …
I'm a big fan of Jessica Wildfire and appreciate her choice of subjects and unique insights, but I think she's off on this one. That HR rep who told her friend motherhood was a liability is not America, he's an individual who needs to be called on that. I know many who go out of their way to accommodate family needs; I once hired a woman who was pregnant and went on family leave the day we hired her. The reason families struggle today is not an undervaluing but a miscalculation of economic factors that results in wildly fluctuating revenues…
The word is on everyone’s tongue these days, and it makes sense in a complex world that a little bit of risk-taking on-the-spot bravado has some value. But how do schools fit that in with their bell schedule and detention halls?
‘Creativity is a guy in a bandana spouting incomprehensible sounds he calls poetry,’ one non-believer told me . . . yet creativity is now public education’s newest direction, and we take as gospel that on LinkedIn the number one quality wanted in employees is creativity.
Creativity in K-12 public education is a confusing morass of rhetoric, occasional brilliance, resistance from multiple sources and complete misrepresentation.
It is also a civil rights issue: Who’s getting to be creative and who’s left behind? Students are not caught up on basic skills yet? Fine, keep the remediation going. But they get to read…
Money is tight, and we all know the drill in education. But weren’t we telling the world we had learned something about creativity that really mattered? How do we retract what we just said yesterday? Hard times in the land of Innovation and Hi Tech.
The Odd Disconnect Between Action and Rhetoric
Ages ago, in 2015, we passed a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, and there had been a resurgence of interest in one of the casualties of the prior law, No Child Left Behind — arts education. Much of that creative energy has died down in 2021, with budget woes a big part of the drop-off. As usual, the arts are bearing a disproportionate burden when the economy lags and school revenues are down. Individual Districts have to make hard choices. It’s no way to run the education of our children, but this is how it’s done.
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Donn K. Harris
CA Arts Council Chair 2015-18; led Ruth Asawa and Oakland Schools of the Arts, 2001–16; USAF vet; father of 2; PARADIGM SHIFTER, TRUTH SEEKER; tracesart.org
