MAKING THE TURN PART II

MAKING THE TURN PART II Thank-you for the private thoughts and questions with all of the “what if’s” and “what about’s” in them…all valid questions. Some of them, I must confess, were unjustly omitted from Part I so I will attempt to answer those questions here............ or not. Either way I sit here with my cup of green tea and bowl of soup ready to tackle the issues. Not everything that happened this year has been horrible, many things have simply gotten to the point they can no longer be ignored. As repulsed as I am with “Reality TV” it has illustrated some positive issues this year like the fact that the Arts are a much needed aspect of our lives that needs to be promoted and encouraged more. This needs to be done not only as a society globally but as a species specifically. Shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and, begrudgingly, “Dancing with the Stars” has gotten us to renew our interest in that Art form again. “American Idol”, “X-Factor”, and “The Voice” has re-acquainted us with different musical styles and regardless of whether you went to PS25, Compton Junior High or Julliard, Rap may have finally seen its day and be forced to evolve into something other than angry bad poetry. It has also illustrated the language issues we’ve faced this year. People have lost the ability to speak, read or write without using some form of technological shorthand. Spelling, complete sentences or thoughts are lost on people these days (and God help us if they don’t have Spell check…not that they ever take the time to use it.). It only takes one episode of watching “Jersey Shore” to validate that English has become a lost language and common sense plus social etiquette haven’t been taught or promoted since the sixties. Watch any episode of “The Real Housewives of…” wherever and it sadly illustrates you can buy new body parts for every inch of you except a brain and a personality. As I stop and take a sip of my green tea I can remember when, not all that long ago, we could sit down with a cup of tea or coffee, a good book, have music calmly, quietly play in the background and maybe converse with the people around me and absorb the world at a leisurely pace. Now it’s Mocafrapahalfcaf gobbledygook at five bucks a pop with a Kindle or smart phone and the incessant thumpa-thumpa-buzz-buzz-click-click serenade of the “real world” at an impatiently breakneck speed…really? Literature has become formulaic and/or squealed to death. Nobody seems to know what good literature is this day…but they can smell a movie deal on the horizon as easily as yesterday’s fried fish dinner. It’s no wonder that, as much as I really like and admire the guy on a variety of levels, it appalls me that Stan Lee has become to be revered as some sort of literary and cinematic genius the past couple of years and this year has been no exception. Fine Art and Photography has become somewhat of a mixed bag this year. It was a banner year for auction houses to sell these works at record prices yet galleries have struggled to stay afloat (literally in New York…but that’s another issue). Some exciting things have come out of artists worldwide this year but the “Art World” in general is nervous about what the future brings and where to go next. Museum attendance is down. In an effort to find out why they’ve done survey after survey after survey only to discover they spend too much money doing surveys. New York was “shocked” because the Reality TV show “Gallery Girls” was ignored off the tube so they reacted like typical New Yorkers and renewed the show for another season and insisted we should all watch “this important show” because it’s as important as “Project Runway” (another show only an egotistical New Yorker could love). Speaking of New York…were you as fascinated as I was about the swift disaster response after “Super Storm Sandy”? They were re-building before the storm was actually over and every entertainment bozo with even a remote connection to the area was contributing money and doing “relief fund” shows for the area almost immediately. I found that to be a far cry from how New Orleans was handled during Katrina…and people say money doesn’t talk. Fashion comes and fashion goes but this year they seemed to have accidentally gotten real. You’re always going to find outlandish designs during fashion week, its tradition…much like Congress saying one thing and doing something else. There are always retro styles revisited or “re-interpreted” (another way of saying “I have nothing new to add”) but this year a lot of designers seemed to be creating things for different age brackets. They’re not trying to make a forty year old woman dress like an anorexic eighteen year old and they’re seemingly trying to help men embrace their age…not their shoe size. I hope the trend continues. Food has come to the forefront this year. People are trying to eat healthier and smarter. Some with more success than others but people are trying. I discovered I can’t eat food from certain fast food places no matter how “healthy” they make the food, I still get sick. Because of this, like many people these days, I’ve become very particular about what, where and how I eat. In some ways it has spawned a sort of culinary snobbery I hope doesn’t last long. It hasn’t gone to the extreme some have gone to but it has come close at times. What I have learned this year is “Be healthy, but be smart”. I refuse to spend twelve dollars for a wedge of cheese because it says “Imported” on it when I can buy the same thing for about four dollars. They both still smell like an old gym shoe so why pay extra for the privilege. I know someone who pays an obscene amount of money for olives with the pits still in them from a specialty store when the can go to the local store and buy “pitted” olives of equal (or better and fresher) quality for half the price at the “olive bar” there. Diet and exercise have found a purpose this year and I hope it continues from now on. It’s become more than embarrassing to be the fattest and dumbest society in the world. Some things didn’t change this year. Julian Assange is still alive and under house arrest in England. He wants the world to feel sorry for him now because he may have some terminal medical issue or another. I seldom, if ever, say things like this but…it couldn’t happen to a better person and I hope he goes quickly. We found out (once again) that the people we entrust to protect our interests around the world and gather information to do so are incompetent at it and can’t keep their dicks I their pants or their hands out of the cookie jars. This year people have grown tired of hearing denials, half truths, misquotes, accusations, false promises and backstabbing…around the dinner table. It got worse this year because it was an election year. That’s behind us now and we must get back to finding honest answers to our questions and solve our problems…not just talk about them. It’s time to take a step back and seek the truth in everything, maybe make a concession or two and figure out how to get along with each other again. An early Happy New Year from me to and yours.

MAKING THE TURN

About this time every year I find myself reflecting on what, if anything, has transpired in my life over the past twelve months that may be worth noting. It almost always is a mixed bag of good and bad with a little bit of delusional thrown in just to see if anyone was really paying attention. Depending on how long it takes me to collect my thoughts and write all of this down there will still be six to eight weeks left (or less) before the end of the year to seriously screw everything up more than it already might be yet…so have no fear, there’s still a chance it could get even stranger than what I’ve already observed. Life is a personal issue for me on many levels (I know that sounds like a ridiculous statement but bear with me…It’ll get even more ridiculous before it makes sense) so what affects me isn’t always what seemingly affects you but… January has been a problematic month for me. Since 2004 or 5 it’s always been like Jacob Marley making a late arrival to tell me a couple of those Christmas ghosts that came to visit me got part of the story wrong. “What they really meant to tell you was…” as my health became the colorful train wreck it is today. From 2006 on January seemed to ring in the beginning for the first of several visits to the hospital for the remainder of that year. 2012 got an early jump on the process and landed me there on the 1st barely after the clock struck twelve on NYE. (In preparation I’ve created a series of cute clown paintings to decorate my private room with for the upcoming year.) Because of all this my Holiday card list has grown exponentially…mostly to people with initials behind their last names with heartfelt notes inside like “Thanks for keeping me alive for another year. Nobody seems to know why you do that…but thanks anyway”. With all of this time recovering from whatever “malady of the day” I’m recovering from at that moment I’ve become something of a media expert and can confidently report…not much has changed this year. In fact, very little has changed in the past several decades. The Big 3 is now the Big4 and none of the networks have done anything innovative. Medical shows are still medical shows that magically find the cure (most of the time) for whatever disease nobody’s ever heard of within the last seven minutes of each episode. Cop shows are still cop shows. It’s still Dragnet but with better acting and cooler technology to help them obtain “the facts” and they all have some acronym attached to their title to make them sound somewhat “original”. Speaking of “original” everything has become “Reality TV” and everyone has become obsessed with watching other people’s dysfunctional lives as they fight, crawl through garbage, prepare for Armageddon, treat each other rudely and cruelly or publicly embarrass ourselves so everyone else can all feel better about their own fucked up lives. Soap operas…sadly; still exist because of this too. Game shows have become a strong indicator as to how badly our education system has decayed over the last half century. Sitcoms are still sitcoms and just as stupid as they’ve always been. They’re still slightly above reality shows but not by much. They use smashed up caricatures of what we all have become instead of the “real” thing…(Sorry Honey Boo-Boo, you’re not real and I hope your idiot parents use some of that money to set up a trust fund for your therapy later in life). The hottest “new” sitcom is a regurgitation of the “Honeymooners” with the new twist being the male lead is a cop instead of a bus driver. Cable networks are the big winners as far as creativity goes, part of that has to do with their ability to minimize interference from advertisers and censors but it’s far from a perfect world too yet it’s still closer. The down side is there’s only so many channels available on hospital TV’s. The movie industry has become a joke…especially this year. Very few really good, creative movies come out these days. There aren’t that many good writers out there anymore. The few that do are quickly marginalized if they don’t turn big numbers on the first weekend they’re out, marketed very little and budgeted even less. If they made less than fifty million on the first weekend you’ll probably be able to find them at your local Red Box on Tuesday and, probably, the $5 bin at Wal-Mart the following weekend. The money and marketing go to recycled ideas that weren’t that good thirty years ago and aren’t any better now or big screen comic books for people who stopped actually reading when they were ten and became full time video gamers’. All it takes to get “green lighted” these days is to know some thumb sucker with arthritic thumbs and a freshly inked diploma who owes you a favor from school. The very same people who create “eco-war” themed movies with a D&D feel that “everyone” understands. Yep…those people. They can’t seem to get their Red Bull/ Rockstar/Monster cans to the trash bin (much less a “recycle” one.) but it’s fun to pretend life would be better because they’re “above it all” so they don’t recycle and they would survive a post-apocalyptic world without electricity or batteries to let them Tweet OMG to their “BFF’s” from their newest generation smart phone because they can wield a sword (in their minds). Maybe that’s why what little hair I have left on my body began to stand up when I recently read they’re talking about making a sequel to “Casablanca” after all of these years. This brings me back to society in general this year. Society…now there’s an antiquated, over-used word if I’ve ever heard one. We have no society anymore. We have no common goal or purpose. We HAVE NO COMMUNITY anymore! It’s me against you, I’m right and you’re not! And it affects every aspect of our lives and has corrupted every fiber of it. Our politicians, financial institutions and religious leaders have consistently betrayed us and we’ve passively accepted it hoping things would get better soon. They don’t. Then we get a moment of false anger so we began to demand “transparency” about everything yet are not as willing to be forthcoming about our own agenda’s and beliefs in return. Greed is good…lying is even better! It’s become “normal” for us to blame someone or something else for our sorry lot in life rather than accept responsibility for our own actions and do something about it. It’s someone else’s job to do it for me. This year I have tried very hard not to fall into that trap. I’ve succeeded better at it this year than others…but perfection still eludes me. Café Society is rapidly disappearing around the world. Leisurely meals with fresh ingredients are being replaced by stuffing a fast food something or another in our faces on our way to the next destination and then chastise the establishments for making us fat and not being “healthy” enough. No one has any concept of what healthy really is anymore. Unless it comes from a specialty store of some kind and costs twice as much as a comparable product…it can’t possibly be healthy… is the world’s way of thinking these days. The only saving grace, lately, is the word “local” has taken on a new importance as has the word “seasonal”. This is largely due to the number of people these days that are paid to hang out in those places and write about them or talk about them on TV. Café’s, Coffee Shops, Wine Bars and Restaurants…all of which once used to be convivial gathering places filled with lively conversations and open exchanges of ideas are little more than “libraries” with over priced food and drink suffocating in silence while their patrons “communicate” through “Social Media” on some form of electronic device. Where else can you observe fifteen people sitting at a table saying nothing to each other, frantically “texting”, Tweeting or otherwise making zero human contact of any kind other than the occasional chuckle and nudge out of several of them? I’ve grown weary of going to theaters, movies or other social outlets because it’s not worth my time and money to be forced to have my experience compete with people’s rude smart phone activities. I get enough of that aggravation at home for free. Most of us all wear cookie cutter clothes, drive cookie cutter cars, live in cookie cutter houses so why not think, act and communicate in a cookie cutter way right? The Government hasn’t helped society this year either (not that they ever really have). In efforts to “balance the budget” the first thing they all do is attempt to eliminate anything that references to or has the word “social” in it. If they can’t succeed in eliminating something all together they float the idea of “privatization” around which is political shorthand for saying “OK…we’ve fucked it up about as much as we can so we’re going to give it back to you and let you deal with it. When it all goes down the toilet we’ll look like hero’s and say it was all your fault to begin with, but we still expect you to keep on paying taxes.” And to add insult to injury “We’re also going to make you get health insurance you can’t afford and won’t cover anything and also going to fine you if you don’t.” If they don’t get the deal they want they threaten to stop Social Security and “entitlement” payments until they get it. They NEVER threaten to not pay themselves…hmmm. They’re too afraid to look for the monster in their own closets; they want us to pay them not to. As an example: I’ve had a long standing battle with the IRS. They have insisted I owe them an extremely nominal sum of money I don’t owe them (somewhere, barely, in the very low four figure area). Since they NEVER make a mistake the burden of proof is on me and I’m considered guilty until proven otherwise which runs contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights but that’s not my issue here. To date they have spent 163% more money trying to get me to pay what I don’t owe (and I have proven I don’t owe several times) during this whole process than I presumably owed them. It isn’t just $600.00 hammers and $28.00 boxes of paperclips that have broken our economy and our society… It’s gross mismanagement across the board. The Government bemoans our loss of educational superiority on one hand and dismantles the education system on the other. They reduce the National Endowment for the Arts to token contributions while eliminating ALL arts programs in the schools in favor of teaching kids how to text faster. Little Johnnie and Suzie can’t read, write or think…but they can push buttons really fast and build bombs out of common household products while exhibiting “anti-social” behavior. The Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei is still a prisoner in his own home and his own country for speaking out against his government and we as a “society” do nothing. The Dalai Lama is still in exile and we as a “society” continue to do nothing… but we’re starting to learn Chinese. Imelda Marcos was caught trying to sell a Monet (one of a hundred and fifty master paintings she and her hubby purchased with our money and claimed not to have any idea what happened to them) because she needs a new pair of shoes. We probably won’t do much there either. It gets in the way of our own self absorbed greediness. Maybe we should eliminate Kindergarten and save a few bucks. Ask anyone who barely went beyond high school, they know more than anyone else on the planet (even though they haven’t opened a book since the sixth grade). They’ll be only too happy to tell you why the Universe hangs on their every word. They’re cute or good looking and can ask “Do you want fries with that?” in three languages. So education clearly isn’t necessary to begin with. There’s not going to be much of a country to run pretty soon anyways. The Lifestyle I live in took a, much needed, hit this year too. On every forum of every site out there self-serving postings asking “Is swinging dying?” or some other atrocious title began to appear on a daily basis. The simple answer was “NO”. It just got tired of its own self-possessed foolishness. In past year or so the vast majority of new people succeeded in regulating the “fun” right out of it and it finally came back to bite them in the ass. It used to be you’d meet people in some fashion or another, have a lovely conversation and then if everyone clicked…you’d take things to another level or two. Then, somehow, it became a job interview. Questionnaires would be exchanged via e-mail followed, in some cases, by a FEDEX package containing a forty-two page booklet spelling out their likes, dislikes, when, where and how they will or won’t do something, food allergies, musical tastes and so on along with a pre-paid lab form for blood tests before the appointed meeting…and then they’d sit there and wonder why it didn’t feel “spontaneous”. Add to this so many getting into this as more a potential income stream hosting parties and events etc. than actually wanting to simply be part of it all…things have changed considerably. This too, one hopes, shall pass…yet again. I’m making the turn and heading towards home to the New Year. I can see it on the horizon. Many great people have been lost this year and, in all probability, more will be gone next year. My plans are to paint more paintings, write more books, piss more people off on blogs and not be one of those that are “no longer with us” and try to actually fix something this time. What might be your plans?