Credit Default Swaps vis-a-vis Mourning Dove Kootchie

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down

Letting the days go by/water flowing underground

Into the blue again/after the moneys gone

Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground

- The Talking Heads

Whoa, Nelly!  I was reading some of my favorite blog spots and was suddenly struck by the fact that I have not been inspired lately.  Calling all muses, calling all muses, there has been a horrible mistake at the corner of Calliope and Thanatos.  Of course, my more adroit friends tell me that you can induce INSPIRATION by sitting and staring at the computer, or simply start writing and the muse will lightly descend and 'plunk your magic twanger, froggy.'  So I thought I would take a break from the Oyster Shooters down at Rogue's Manor (who, I might add, supplied the Half-Fast Marching Klub these same famous Shooters on St. Paddy's Day) and try to induce my muse to inspire using a different method.  My muse was not amused.  Ah, but then today, she visited disguised as a Mourning Dove.  After a luncheon supporting the Carnegie Public Library in Eureka Springs and discussing some of the events planned for 2010, my wife and I adjourned to a friend's house for wine and conversation.  As sometimes happens, the women and men tend to separate.  I don't understand this particular phenomenon and am not totally satisfied that it sometimes occurs but occur it does.  Usually, guy talk degenerates rapidly into talk about flatulence because someone in the group can fart the Star Spangled Banner in technicolor rivaling an Hawaiian Sunset.  Our group wasn't much different.  When the Mourning Dove started coo-WOO-ooing, we couldn't decide if he caught a whiff of our most gaseous member or if he caught a whiff of a female of his species.  For my money, I'm going with the probability that he caught a whiff of a female, because if he had caught a whiff of what was coming from our vicinity Elvis would most definitely have left the building.

You might ask at this point, what does LeRoi King dancing as Barbie have to do with anything, much less this blog?  Well, the conversation slipped seamlessly from the Ch'i that governs Mourning Dove Kootchie odor into bank leveraging and credit default swaps.  Cable fodder for the week.  More theater of the absurd.  Like life.  Like Larry King dancing as Barbie to Good News Week.  I think there was a consensus, in the Porch Cabinet, that the folks that came up with these money generating schemes that eventually collapsed the world economy, would be back with new schemes no matter how much government intervention or regulation was applied to the problem.  After the money's gone....water flowing underground.  Now, does this mean that we think government intervention or regulation is futile?  Not really.  It just means that none us really expect the government to protect us from everything.  You can't ask the government to take care of problems before they become problems, can you?  I mean, that would mean that the government could have prepared for Hurricane Katrina or prepared like they did for the great Red River flood that never came to pass.  Even though we had to hear about it all damn week.  It's Good News Week...   

I watched John Stewart of the Comedy Channel go after Jim Cramer of the NBC Business Channel. They had this running battle about who said what when.  Basically,  I think John Stewart of the Daily Show was right, CNBC had a responsibility to see the collapse of AIG coming, instead of perpetually talking about how great the stock market was doing.  Even though now, the folks at CNBS are talking about how they took all their money out of the market before the great collapse.  Sure.  It would be nice to think that the Fourth Estate was actually doing its job, investigating the powerful and protecting the weak.  But it just ain't so.

Which brings us to another reason I love Eureka Springs.  Everyone in Eureka is marching to the beat of a different drummer.  Hell, you've never heard so many different tunes.  After you've been here awhile it seems normal.  But in the midst of all this independence is a sense of community that binds people together.  Especially during times of crises.  The late winter ice storm exemplified this sense of community.  No one waited for the government to show up with a one-size-fits-all Sugar tit, everyone was out helping their neighbors.  I'm sure there were some who took advantage of the situation, nature makes sure that anomalies will always exist.

Adddendum#1:  Almost forgot to mention a new blog I'm following, called Wisdom of the Hands by Doug Stowe.  Doug is able to combine his love of wood with a unique philosophy about life which reminds me a lot of Mary over at Jumping Off Cliffs, both of whom are able to make sense out of life's anomalies.

Until next time,

I remain,

Just another Zoroastrian Cowboy

Looking for a frequency that will reduce the noise in my life 

As Good as Gold

I can't think for you

You'll have to decide.

- Bob Dylan

In 1965 when I was a young sophomore at Austin College in Sherman, TX, I attended a seminar at TCU in Ft Worth, Tx.  The seminar was a debate about 'What is Art?'  It featured Paul Tillich versus the TCU Art Department.  The TCU Art Department was overmatched.  The betting in Vegas favored the sno-ball's chance in Hell over the TCU Art Department.  It's the story of TCU.  Poor bastards.  They really should stick to football.  So, Paul Tillich said "Art is anything that fills space and has meaning to the one that beholds it."  A professor from TCU responded, "How do you know so much about Art if you are not an artist?"  (Applause, from his students here.)  "Well", said Paul Tillich, " the same way a psychologist knows more about what a chimp is gonna do than the chimp does!"  (Applause, laughter, and giggling from those not in an Art class at TCU).   I have been told by my friend, Steve Schmidt, that if I have a blog about Eureka Springs, I must include Art, because art is the the lifeblood of Eureka.  I told him that I thought there was a lot of hucksterism involved in art.  Steve said, "If by 'hucksterism' you mean that someone is trying to convince you to buy something you do not need then yeah, there is some 'hucksterism involved.  Just like there is at Dillard's or Wal-Marx.  Or", he went on when he should have stopped, "have you been to the Doctor lately?"  Couldn't argue with him there, having recently been referred to a sleep clinic.

Well, is art anything that fills space and has meaning to the beholder?  Duh?  How do you argue with that?  The reason I used the Floating Woman Suffocating Under Saran-wrap picture to introduce this blog was simple.  When I think about art, it is how I feel.  Suffocating.  When someone is explaining the artwork to me I often feel like I'm listening to W.C. Fields selling Dr John's Magic Elixir off the back of his medicine wagon.  Fortunately, for us, the artist is capable of stripping away the facades that we hide our souls behind and appeal to our imaginations in ways we have not thought about.  I was setting here working on this blog and looking around the house and trying to find something that would not be considered art.  I can't find anything that would not be considered art by someone.  The hucksterism involves the buying and selling of art, putting a price on it.  In Joseph Heller's book, Picture This, he points out that in the 1940's there were about 2000 authenticated Rembrandt's floating around but by the 1980's there were only a couple of hundred.  Those people with the 1800 Rembrandt's that are technically Rembrandt's because he signed them, were actually duplicates painted by his students.  Of course, this was before the age of prints or giclees.  

A friend asked me, "Which Van Gogh painting is your favorite?"  I replied, "The Sunflower painting."  "Which one?" my friend asked, "he painted over two hundred of them."  "Uh-h-h. number 97", I responded.  I was genuinely surprised to find out I had been admiring different paintings, thinking they were all the same one.   My friend asked what would I do if I had an original Van Gogh.  I told him I would sell it.  He was disappointed and said I really did not appreciate art.  It's not that I don't appreciate it, I just happen to think that it is highly over-appreciated.  Artists are fond of saying, "Life is like a haunted house and Art is the only stair that doesn't creak."  Yeah?  Well, that's because they keep it so well-oiled.  So why does a Van Gogh fetch such extravagant price at auction?  There are a myriad of economic theories out there used to explain why a Van Gogh is worth more than the painting of Elvis I have on black velevet.  

One theory is that there are not very many Van Gogh's and there is a very high demand for them that creates their value.  For example, everyone has a wrist watch today but if you had owned a wrist watch in 1898, you would have been one of the wealthiest people in the United States.  A more recent phenomenon has been watching the price of computers continue to diminish.  As an entity becomes more plentiful its value decreases.  In the 1930's about 25% of high school students graduated.  If you had a high school diploma during that period, it was a valuable commodity.  Today, about 75% percent of all high school students receive a diploma and it has lost much of its value because everybody has one.  Now, you have to have a college degree to be in that valuable 25%, but the percent of students receiving college degrees is starting to creep up, which will require having a master's degree in the very near future in order for your degree to have the same value as a high school education in  1930.  I hear all the time about how many engineers there are in India and China.  Like, duh, how valuable is that?  I remember when the NASA program downsized back in the early '80s, there were engineers serving up Big Macs at the local MacDonald's all over the country.  I think the medical profession in this country has figured this out.  The AMA controls how many doctors will graduate every year, they make their profession valuable.  Let's hope teachers, police, fire fighters, and other service professions do not figure this out!

So far, I have been focused on extrinsic value, or the value that others place on art.  The artist will tell you it has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of their work.  They like the appreciation shown by the fact that someone is willing to pay for their art, but would continue to create even if there were no buyers.  So, I guess, we've come full circle at this point.  If you you like it, if it moves you in some way, if it has some special meaning for you, whether it's a movie, a painting, a song, or a book then it's art and it's okay for us to appreciate it.  

Art is anything you can

get away with.

- Andy Warhol

Until next time, 
I remain,
Just another Zoroastrian Cowboy
Trying to understand why Gottfried Helnwein made the Baby Jesus look like Adolf Hitler

Opera for the End of the World

A WORK IN PROGRESS!

I was sitting here listening to a CD (remember when that meant Certificate of Deposit?) of my daughter singing 'Lo hear the Gentle Lark' at her junior recital in Indiana.  It's a beautiful piece when you can close your eyes and have difficulty distinguishing between flute and voice.  Even though she is a Music major in Vocal Performance she has this problem singing for her mother and me.  She doesn't mind performing on stage in front of others, but she just has a problem singing for family.  Go figure.  Hell, I'll sing in the shower or car (usually, not at the same time), even though I can't carry a note in a number 10 washtub with a chorus of Alabama bullfrogs singing 'The Hallelujah Chorus" as backup.  But even if I had my daughter's pipes, I seriously doubt that I would be singing for others.  I would still keep it to myself.  My friend over at Jumping Off Cliffs wrote about some common feelings that most of us share, like when you think others might be watching you, you forget, they think you are watching them.  What a paranoid world we inhabit.  

I suppose one of the underlying causes of our paranoia might be our innate fear of rejection. Our fear of rejection keeps us from sharing our gifts with others.  Of course, this is not a new concept, I mean Cain whacked Able because he just thought God had rejected him.  If the first poignant story in the Bible is about the power of the rejection, then I figure the ancient Hebrews were on to a meaningful way for us to live our lives in harmony.  Of course, they were not the only culture or religion to understand the power of rejection.  The worst recorded punishment in many cultures was ostracism, being separated from those you admire, respect, and love.  And it is still a strong part of culture.  I remember one of my favorite scenes in Catcher in the Rye was when Holden Caulfield was listening to a piano player in a bar.  Holden reflects that if could play a piano like that he would go home and only play only for himself.   

What gives people that courage to overcome their fear of rejection?  To be able to perform their best, knowing that they will always fall short of perfection?  Is that why we create these facades we present to the rest of the world?  One of the beautiful things about Opera is the ability of the performers to express any emotion in a musical language that is universally understood.  Emotions that human beings rarely express to each other openly, even though we can all relate to them.  I took Dr Atomix as my user name for this blog from the Opera Dr Atomic, about the founder of the Atom Bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.  The night before the Atom Bomb is tested in Los Alamos, 'Oppy' is singing to Gen Groves about how difficult it is for him to lose weight.  Here is a man who will eventually be rejected by his country, worried more about his appearance than he is about the means of destruction  he is about to deliver to the world.  I mean it sounds like a skit from SNL's 'Ricardo's Hideaway', where Billy Crystal says, "You know, Dahlings, it is better to look good, than to be good."  

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye."

- Miss Piggy

Until next time,

I remain,

Just another paranoid Zoroastrian Cowboy,

Wondering why that guy over there is staring at me...