Art and the Homeless

The playlist of songs in praise of drinking is seemingly infinite. Songs about what happens next are harder to find. Some say don't go there. I understand that the drinkers in the audience don't want to hear it, that it goes against the grain, but as social beings we must compromise. What looks good, sounds good, tastes good, feels good, and smells good will never be unanimous. This is a request for The Dry Blues. Taste may be a matter of opinion, but the effects of drinking alcohol are not. I can still recall a joke I heard as a child about drinking. It made me think to this day. “How's life?” -goes the joke; “Depends on the liver,” is the punchline. As I was but a child, it had to be explained to me by the circle of adults to which I was being admitted. When adults are asked by youth to explain adult subjects the answer is, typically, tortuous. I was no exception. “Whatever it means,” I thought, “it is important.” These early impressions of drinking were reinforced in Hig...

At the Public Library today, where all the educated bums loiter, I found a copy of Tom Waits' 2009 CD-rom "Glitter and Doom (Live)" -and checked it out. His voice is improving. His cirrhosis of the liver act is the best in the business! The raunchy jokes on Disk 2 were a new experience for me (never having been to a Waits show).   Tom Waits is an acquired taste. I first heard of Waits listening to the radio in 1975, after the release of his song, “Eggs and Sausage,” on the album, Nighthawks at the Diner . The song goes like this:   Nighthawks at the Diner Of Emma's 49er... The song was a game changer, for me. It would not be an exaggeration to call it life-changing. I was a voracious pop music listener since 10-transistor, pocket AM radios, were the latest high tech gadget. Does anybody else (still kicking) remember the 1964 song, “King of the Road,” by Rodger Miller? The hobo is generic in American literature. He stands for absolute independence. Other nations do no...

The title is borrowed from the Bulwer-Lytton novel Zanoni . The novel has been ridiculed for its Victorian pretensions. As a novel conceit of my own, it seems to me that the story might be read intertextually, within the global narrative of homelessness. The homeless person reminds me of The Dweller on the Threshold. Despite its mockery, the book was well received among Theosophists, and spiritualists in general, for its allusion to the esoteric doctrine of the past lives of the soul. The object of such belief being the conclusion of the cycle of birth, and rebirth, once the soul has atoned for whatever was causing it to be reborn.  As spiritualism fell into disrepute as being incompatible with the emerging social sciences, the faith-based humanism of Western tradition suffered. The human condition is more than a social problem to be solved. Although it grieves us, to be rational is to admit that the problem of homelessness, meaning the homeless, will never go away. The homeless ar...

It is time, high time, to put Greek art in its place. Greek art is overrated. This might've been said before, by someone, or other -but I am not aware it. And, if it has, not in so many words. It's done (Greek art). Stick a fork in it. It is not necessarily Greek art itself that I find overrated, but rather the adulation, the critical meltdown, that I consider overheated. I merely find it ludicrous that the marble sculpture of a man's genitals is upheld as the epitome of Western Civilization. Granted we are dealing with ancient Greece. Exposure was, then, a protest of sorts, a crude assertion of individual liberty. It was an assertion of innate freedoms by freeborn men to do as they pleased. Freedom was, in ancient Greece, a competition, which leads me to compare it to the contemporary modern cult of bodybuilding. I find the critical bowing and scraping before the statuary of the Greeks unseemly. The deification of man was satirized in antiquity. Just an educated guess, but...