Doctor Strange
I'll Lock Up
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- Hudson Valley, NY
Perhaps. I'm no major expert on Pyle - or Wyeth - but I do have a first edition of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.
Perhaps. I'm no major expert on Pyle - or Wyeth - but I do have a first edition of Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates.
Somewhere there's a very funny interview with The Beatles accusing them that their song Day Tripper was about Lesbians & prostitutes and did they have a comment about that, to which John Lennon answered: "What's all the fuss about? We just wrote a simple song about Lesbians & Prostitutes." Seeing no mileage forthcoming, the interviewer waxed lyrical about their latest release, namely Eleanor Rigby, and then asked what it was that inspired the song to which Paul McCartney answered: "Two queers." Not an acceptable term these days, but his reply was straight off the cuff.There are people who make a career of deconstructing Beatles tunes, in attempts to cast light on why so many of those songs have such long legs. One fellow in particular is very good at breaking down into layman's language just what the musical theorist's terms mean and their effects on what we hear. It's interesting, even to one as musically illiterate as I am.
I seriously doubt I'd have the appreciation for various genres of music if it weren't for Carl Stalling's brilliant use of those songs in the Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1930s-1950s. He might have only used a snippet here and there sometimes, but it piqued my curiosity enough to make me seek out original recordings when I got older. Those PBS shows were far too pretentious and boring for my tastes....If Lizzie is right about needing exposure when young, then thank God for the boob tube and local library because that was my only exposure as a kid as my family wasn't listening to classic music, reading Shakespeare or discussing Plato...
Many years ago a good friend became the "commentary" cartoonist for the local junior college's newspaper. Not long after he was given this task we went to see an exhibit of Chester Gould's original "Dick Tracy" comic strip artwork, and afterward my friend commented that it was a revelation to him to see Gould had used white paint (or whatever Gould used) regularly to cover his artistic mistakes so they wouldn't show when the strips were replicated for publication. "Now I don't feel so bad about using White Out."I went to the Guggenheim Museum in NYC to educate myself on modern art and it was interesting. However, I also went to the Cartoon museum in San Francisco and I was blown by an original Bill Watterson panel of a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. And that was fun.
In the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon there's a segment in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono are alerted to the presence of a young homeless man wandering the grounds of their estate, and they have a discussion with him. The young man was convinced Lennon was somehow speaking directly to him through his lyrics, and Lennon's response was essentially, "How could I be thinking of you? I'm thinking about me, or at best Yoko if it's a love song. I'm singing about me and my life, you know? And if it's relevant for other people's lives, that's all right." It's really that simple. Most songwriters are simply writing from their own experience, but others have had similar experiences so those lyrics resonate within them....There is such a thing as overthinking. In most creative endeavors, it's the vibe at work more than the thought. Most of us can return to our better work and see that, yeah, that's why that works so well. But that wasn't where our heads were while we were doing it.
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I studied art in high school and university but at the end of the day I still prefer a Norman Rockwell illustration over a Picasso.
Some years ago I toured the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It's full of his early work - dull, dim gray and brown stuff, nothing at all like the colorful, vivid, almost hallucinatory work of his Arles period.It's can be fun to show people Picasso's early work. Most would never guess its creator.
How many man-hours are wasted each year by people trying to put in micro USB connectors upside down?
The annoying part of this is that the same people who will poo-poo your interests will declare their interest(s) as something that can't be dismissed.
Reminds me of a line for a sci-fi event I was once in, and a sports event line at the same venue was right next to our line. A baseball fan, painted in team colors, actually told a guy dressed as a Star Trek character to 'get a life.'
People in my line were aghast at the hypocrisy of that statement. Nobody in the sports line could see how dumb that comment was.
There's nothing inherently wrong with what gets dismissed as "commercial art." Pretty much everything about which we wax rhapsodic on the Lounge was mass-produced product manufactured by workers-for-hire. The people who made the movies, the music, the fashion, and much of the other stuff that we relish from the Era were, in essence, just grinding it out for the piece rate. That a lot of so-called "commercial art" has endured and a lot of "fine art" has been forgotten has to tell you something.
The distinction isn't nearly so neat as some would attempt to make it. Think Piet Mondrian, and all he "inspired." Think Braniff International and Alexander Calder back in the '60s and '70s.
As a huge fan of commercial art and a keeper of a modest but growing collection of it, I wouldn't take exception with your take on the lasting impact of it vs. "fine art." Fine artists (I'm tempted to put it in quotes) can be like would-be novelists: legends in their own minds. Some of the most creative, clever visual art has been made in service to commerce. Give at least a nod to the marketing department for that. And of course many high-brow arts were once popular entertainments. Shakespeare. Jazz.
There's footage of Charles Eames voicing his reluctance to characterize himself an artist. He thought it akin to calling oneself a genius -- immodest at best. But many wouldn't hesitate to call him both. If you've watched TV today, or entered an airport or an office building, chances are excellent you've seen examples of his work, some of which dates to the late 1940s.
A common gripe among the post-secondary educators I know is that the public higher education system is being increasingly regarded by many of those ultimately holding the purse strings (the elected representatives in the federal and state legislatures) as trade and professional schools and that funding shortages ought first sacrifice the humanities. Apparently a well-rounded liberal arts education isn't so highly valued.
It's darned nigh impossible to get people excited about things they've never been exposed to. Maybe that's the point.
The thing is, people can blame the Education System all they want -- but the best way to get kids interested in The Pleasures Of The Mind is to expose them to those pleasures when they *are* kids. If you want kids to be interested in serious reading, have serious books around the house. If you want kids to appreciate music, expose them to it. If you want kids to think, show them that you, yourself, think.
And don't be snobby about media -- there's a lot of good media out there. I didn't learn to enjoy opera, modern dance, and jazz because I took courses on them in college. I learned that they were enjoyable when I was five from watching "Mister Rogers."
I don't dismiss the possibility that my views on the matter aren't commonly held. Still, a sort of know-nothing pride has descended upon the land. "Elites" is a common put-down of the educated (formally or not) and appreciators of "the arts." It's a sort of snobbery in itself. I mean really, just who is looking down on whom?
But wotthehell, there's a place for cotton candy. But if that's all a person knows, a high quality chocolate would be a revelation. Or so I would hope.
As the story goes Buster Keaton once sat impassively on a stage as some goateed, pipe-smoking cineaste declaimed on the hidden meanings of his work, and then turned to him and asked him to explain a particular scene. Buster replied "Well in that scene, I was trying to be funny."
Somewhere there's a very funny interview with The Beatles accusing them that their song Day Tripper was about Lesbians & prostitutes and did they have a comment about that, to which John Lennon answered: "What's all the fuss about? We just wrote a simple song about Lesbians & Prostitutes." Seeing no mileage forthcoming, the interviewer waxed lyrical about their latest release, namely Eleanor Rigby, and then asked what it was that inspired the song to which Paul McCartney answered: "Two queers." Not an acceptable term these days, but his reply was straight off the cuff.
...Here in the UK there's an increasingly heavy push towards what they call STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) as more "worthy" than other fields of academic endeavour. This, of course, is in the context of a culture that values a university education solely in terms of its capacity to enhance employment and salary prospects. The people behind this are best described by Wilde's definition of a cynic - "one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."...
...Depends on how open-minded they are. I well remember going on a school trip with a bunch of kids who were from much lower income families. Given a steak for dinner one night in the hotel, they complained that it was 'gross', and wanted a burger instead. A lot of people are only comfortable with what they know, even when presented with "better".....
...The aspirations of my greatest generation parents to partake of the "high culture" bounty and imbue their kids with appreciation for the arts seems to have largely fallen by the wayside nowadays. And today's insane media oversaturation and Borg-like reliance on mobile devices for everything hasn't helped. Ironically, with undreamed of instant access to the entire world's art, music, and knowledge... the majority of people seem dumber and less interested in intellectual/cultural self-improvement than ever.
I think the best way to introduce kids to art is not tell them it's art, and don't, under any circumstances, try to tell them it's "good for them." Just expose them to it as casually as you'd put a bowl of corn flakes in front of them, and see if they take to it.
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They were good comedians, the Beatles. If they'd stuck at it, they could have been almost as entertaining all-round as The Monkees. They were certainly nearly as musically important.
I think the best way to introduce kids to art is not tell them it's art, and don't, under any circumstances, try to tell them it's "good for them." Just expose them to it as casually as you'd put a bowl of corn flakes in front of them, and see if they take to it.
I'm not a particular fan of the Beatles' music, but "A Hard Day's Night" is a fine piece of film comedy, especially when you consider that the mid-sixties were the absolute rock-bottom nadir of movie comedy in the US. Compared to the constipated, poorly-conceived Hollywood comedies of the time, the Beatles come across as the Marx Brothers. They could have had the same impact on film audiences as Woody Allen had if they'd wanted to really focus on moviemaking.