Music & Movies

Butterfly Dream,

Michael Card is still around, actually. I saw him in concert a couple of years ago. Michael W. Smith is alright; I like him better than Stephen Curtis Chapman. But Michael Card is my favorite because there is so much more depth to his lyrics. As for Amy Grant, I don't have a problem with her producing secular CDs, I just wish she wouldn't try to market them as Christian CDs.

So, in conclusion, Ladydyke, here's what you should say if the question ever arises again:
"Well, the civil war wasn't really started over slavery, it was about the time slot of the Dick Van Dyke show. Sure, we had TV back then, only it was a government secret that they thought we didn't know about. I tuned out during most of the civil war, but I do know this: Abraham Lincoln was a ghetto pimp before he used his connections in his white house to rig the election. What, you didn't know the elections were rigged? Sure, they were and they still are! Anyway, after Cuba nuked lousiana, most of the confederacy broke off and combined with the People's Republic of China to form the Nazis, which was actually a bit like the YMCA when it started out: You could swim with them, they had a song named after them, and they liked taking pictures of naked children. Okay, maybe that last part doesn't have so much to do with the Nazis. So after the war, they moved Massachusetts to the east coast because the damn australians stole all the fish with a giant magnet. I tell you what, those were some crazy days..."

Back to the discussion of art...

That's my point exactly (or I think it was anyway). No one cares if their stuff is any good, as long as they make money from it. People in general are shallow, therefore people who can mass-produce what used to be called art produce shallow illusions of something that might vaguely resemble art if you'd smoked 6 joints and rammed your head into the wall a couple of times. And this shallow "art" becomes so prevalent that the people who didn't see it the first time around become interested in it from sheer lack of anything else to occupy themselves with. And the system perpetuates itself.

This is not to say that I'm into "fine art" as most people would define it. I don't wanna wander around a museum for 3 hours looking at paintings of naked women and people with 6 eyeballs and 2 noses. What I am saying is that regardless of the medium, if the product means nothing to me, how can I be interested in it? I want things that mean a bit more than someone showing off a body that isn't really theirs in the first place. I want to wonder about life, not make money for some shallow "artist" somewhere who doesn't give a damn what he makes as long as he gets rich from it.

And yet I have a strange fascination with songs whose lyrics, even when you can understand them, make no sense whatsoever. You know, those songs that maybe someone wrote about a friend of theirs or an obscure event that no one else could understand unless the whole story was explained, or occasionally those songs that just sound like jumbled ravings of a drug-crazed mind. I think it's interesting that even in a song that makes no sense, sometimes you get caught by a phrase that fits exactly with your perceptions and you wish you'd written it first. I love the interplay between things that sound meaningless but are actually profound, and things that actually do sound profound. And irony. If a song has irony (the more twisted, the better), I generally like it.

lol STRMkirby. As for fine art, like ballets, oprahs, modern art shows, etc. Is incredibly boring and lack luster. Having attended several of each form of art I can honestly say that it put me to sleep. via la shallow movies!

It would be an American sentiment that anything that requires a course in order to appreciate is probably not worth appreciating.

That's what fine art in this country was largely supported by immigrants for some time.

In Australia we have had a similar but different problem. It's not as bad now as it once was, but it was known as the cultural cringe and basically there was a kind of national perception that our own art and culture was inferior. So we would import it or simply take the piss out of anything locally produced.

Well you're pretty much just referring to pop music when it comes to the shallow stuff, and who, other than teenage girls with nothing better to do than sit in their rooms and listen to CDs and talk on the phone, cares about pop anyway?

I think we are more demanding nowadays in regard to entertainment, if old literature and old theatre are any indication.

I do love art museums, and in that case it's usually the older works that are better. Some of what's in those places, you can't even call art.

Corwin--Canadians over a certain age are all going, "know what ya mean!" It's a 'thing' that is always hovering--trapped between the Yanks and the Brits, each of whom thinks we are inferior versions of them. It is less difficult than it used to be to celebrate Canadian talent.

Yeah, like I said, things are getting better, but at the same time the powers that be still feel we need to get in American TV personalities to be guest presenters on our award shows. Last time it was Frankie Muniz from Malcolm in the Middle and (of all people) Ronn Moss from which ever soap he's on. I note the latter has just released a CD. Obviously it was some sort of marketing deal.

Canada is but the product of a deranged imagination.

But they have one killer national anthem.