Art, what is it good for?

You know all those poor people with government certified valuable masterpieces, maybe they couldn’t all cash in on them and be rich, but they would have a nice painting to hang in their wretched paint peeling front rooms. Maybe they would have nothing but beans to eat out of the can, but they would have a magnificent work of art to inspire their spirits. Isn’t that even more important than a full belly? Would it not elevate them, raise them to a higher plane to where they could see the destructive habits that had led them into a life of poverty, and set their feet on the clean path to good behavior, which naturally leads to riches?

What do you say about that? I suppose it would have to be the right kind of artwork. I imagine Elvis on black velvet which lead to people wanting to eat those peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and listen to those trashy Las Vegas songs he sang in those last sad fat days of his. He was making plenty of money then. Surely more money than if he had stayed true to his early music, and pleased all those purist fans who like to listen to old wax and wax ecstatic, but can be kind of cheap when it comes to buying the product.

Probably what they should have hanging in their dingy dens is something like those Hudson River School paintings. Those magnificent landscapes of hilly New England that were painted in the early 1800s when our country was yet young, still fired up with revolutionary ideals, uncynical, proud to be Americans, hearts swelling to a patriotic song. Sadly I expect that they had by then abandoned their unfashionable tricorner hats, packed them up in old steamer trunks where they would be retrieved and proudly worn by their descendants 200 years later when the scourge of socialism and gay rights and gun control would run roughshod over the country by, well, by folks like me.

But anyway as yet, back then, no strip malls dotted the rocky hills of New England and the paintings are full of drama and graceful trees and soaring mountains in the background and topped by God’s own cloud bedecked heavens. Very nice paintings really, but after you have seen four or five in a row, you are inclined to think enough with the trees already.

Well what good is art? What if our best artists were guys like Peter Max, our best writers guys like Stephen King, our greatest musicians, Elvis in his fat phase? Myself I guess I wouldn’t like it because how would I entertain myself, but not many like me I think. Otherwise the rich would still be just as rich, the poor just as poor, I imagine we would still have those miracle phones and all those things of that ilk. Remember when you just had a phone, and then you had to specify that it was a landline phone, and now when you specify that it is a landline phone you have to make some little joke about being old and backward, and still the whippersnapper asking the question rolls his beady little ironic eyes.

But do we really need good art, literature, music? Think of all the effort that people put into making that stuff, all that study, all those discussions, all that creative agony, all those balled up papers crashing into the wastebasket. Wouldn’t we all be better off watching Stallone or Sandra Bullock movies, shoving fists of popcorn into our greedy mouths?

You know all these action movies, all these romcoms, they are all the same. From the first time the couple meet and instantly hate each other, or the villain pisses off the hero, you know everything that is going to happen. They are built like houses, they follow the blueprints, put the boards here, the plaster there and they’re done and there is a perfectly good house or romcom or thriller.

But never a movie clever lads like ourselves like. We want something more, something extra, something, well you can’t say what it is beforehand, that is what keeps me in my tower in the morning swiping the brushes and trying to go somewhere but never sure exactly where, just like I imagine Beagles is doing with that keyboard. Kind of what I want to talk about after this meandering, where does art come from where it is going?

On other matters, I am pretty sure the house has nothing like a filibuster. Well they have that thing where they don’t bring up an issue unless the majority of the ruling party is for it, but that is a relatively recent thing and is an instrument of the party in power and not the party out of power.

As for Iran, everybody trades with their enemies. I don’t think we buy any Iranian oil, but even when we buy Canadian oil, that is so much oil that China can’t buy from Canada so they have to go to Iran, so we might as well be buying off Iran. It’s not like the world is composed of only friends or enemies of the US. Even our best friends don’t have our best interests at heart, and we have common interests even with our worst enemies.