Friday, April 26, 2013

Expression For Lost Souls

You gotta dig the arts, man. Music, literature, movies, dance, theatre, painting, poetry.

That is where life and truth get lived.

Many people trivialize the importance of the arts. As the economy continues to tank it is widely accepted that it is OK to cut creative programs in schools. Nobody notices that developing humans get harder in the heart because of this. Nobody anticipates the fallout decades down the road.

There is an organization called The Creative Coalition. Writers, actors, producers, directors, agents, designers, and lawyers (?) from the entertainment world. From their website:  "........... we began to discover the areas where we could make a difference, and that indeed still drive us: federal funding for the arts, free speech and education." I love this.

This is one huge problem with this society we call America; condescension towards creativity. Instead of being considered as an important piece of a well rounded perspective, the arts are often looked down upon as an indulgence.

Business does not express what is in your soul, your job does not express what is in your soul; art does.

When you cry over a movie, that is your soul crying. When you lose yourself at a concert or dancing to your iPod in the kitchen, that is your soul dancing. When you stand mesmerized in front of a painting, it is your soul recognizing that there is at least one other person in this world who feels as you do.

Snobbery is part of the problem. The wrong people often control creative outlets. They create a closed world of faux elites who consider themselves a cut above.

These people do not understand the role of art. They destroy it by exploiting it and closing it off from the people who really need it; the people who are truly living life.

I watched, again, last night Lightning In A Bottle. This is a documentary on the blues, shot at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in 2004.

The performers included James Blood Ulmer, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Ruth Brown, Solomon Burke, Honeyboy Edwards, Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Lazy Lester, Mavis Staples, Hubert Sumlin and Kim Wilson. Those are the old school heavyweights.

The supporting cast included Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, Gregg Allman, Natalie Cole, Robert Cray, Dr. John, John Fogerty, Levon Helm, Bonnie Raitt and more.

I know you do not recognize all the names and there is a great deal of pretentiousness in my dropping them. Doesn't matter.

I lost myself in the music last night. Mesmerized. Overjoyed. To see the blues masters celebrated, to hear them perform, to hear their songs covered with love.

I worship the blues. You worship something else. Some other form of music. Some other art form.

Your object of worship transforms you, makes you feel better, makes you forget, brings you up out of the slime into the sublime.

That's what art does.

It is not dispensable. It is indispensable.

Humans have no perspective at all. That's because we are scrapping and fighting. No time for essence.

Then again, when you think about it, the old blues masters suffered immeasurably and created beauty from that. With a voice, a harmonica, a guitar. I have often said those men and women were the toughest imaginable. Think about black people in the early 1900's deciding they could go out on the road and sing for their supper.

Undeniable guts.

Anyway, art is the thing that cuts through the layers of denial and pain. It replaces pain-filled tears with tears of joy.

Creativity speaks for the lost souls of broken people trying to get through one more day.

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