Powerlessness. Helplessness. What can you do? I’ve been writing about the feeling and how people respond to it lately, trying to get at the root of what people don’t really talk about when they dance their way around the issues of the day. Little did I realize that events would conspire to make me feel terrible for even bringing it up.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Act of Destruction
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
– Pablo Picasso
Long ago, artists were called on to, more or less, represent the world around them in some form that ennobled the subject at hand. In the Baroque Era, paintings usually depicted either the ruling class or the saints in ways that made mythologies of power real. Music was used to provide dignity to a setting or to magnify the glory of God himself to every heart that pounded along with the moment. Not today.
An artist today is supposed to be someone who pushes the boundaries of our world by creating a new understanding of what it means to be human. The mythology is something otherwise dormant within us. That makes the statement by Picasso, a creator and master practitioner of this view of art, even more troublesome.
The Great Vowel Shift
How did spelling in English get so messed up? If you have a child who is learning to spell, you may have taken the approach that I have – there’s no rhyme or reason to how it happened so you simply have to memorize it. It turns out that there is a reason, if a bit convoluted, that is often hidden in the rhyme. It’s a small comfort for the many people around the world, young and old alike, that have to learn how to write the most popular language, but it’s at least a great story.
Happier Time
Perhaps it was nothing more than a good way to avoid work on the first few daze back after vacation, but the idea of Popular Doom caught the attention of a lot of people. Last night, however, we had this wonderful essay by John Oliver at the Daily Show that I have to bring into the discussion, if for no other reason than to ride his coattails:
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Popular Doom
For the second time in 10 years, a major wave of doom prophesy has become very popular. Like the Y2K predictions of disaster, the Mayan Endgame is based on the idea that the end of human-devised cycle is the end of everything – which is to say that we are the center of the universe. What’s different this time is that the proposed failures that make up general doom and/or panic are more mystical. Nevermind that not a single Mayan ever said that the end of their cycle is the end of time – they would have simply gone to the Cozumel Hallmark store and purchased a new calendar. The end of the 5,125 year cycle proposed by a group most people never heard of is as good an excuse as any to end it all. The question is – why is Doom so popular?
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 