Art is sold in packages. . . . . often unrealistically.

You had a sweep of a PBS children's cartoon of a young girl with red, clock-spring curls glibly painting "The Mona Lisa" with a palate in her left hand with a splash of color and inane theme music, not seeming "to get across" to the spoiled children of the bohemian bourgeois watching at home all the hard work that it takes to rise to the level of a Leonardo d'Vinci. It was the flashier jewels of the liberal arts zeitgeist "that took a lot for granted".

I never quite understood the uncanny world of artistic expression, quite in the conventional way-- just how painters and sculptors can generate their work with a profound off-handedness. . . . . . even if it was on the level of unholy amateurism that was made to look "absolutely ridiculous" next to "THE MASTER". One would have the image of an overly earnest, gnarled stump of an Italian painter holding up his thumb "to gauge the line" and then working selflessly on a painting for years like a chiseler of the human spirit. Finally, when he's done, he's a stooped-over husk of a faded elderly walking with a cane as children play in the street. When asked about his craft by a pompous art documentary film-maker, he takes a sharp breath with one leg-crossed, and then goes on gravely about World War II "and shattered Europe".

Yeah, right Grandpa. Have you ever been jacked-up on Mountain Dew with a fist-full of quarters at a video arcade at 10 'o clock in the evening? Until you have, you've never lived. . . . . hunkered down over there in your "studio" with old paint cans and bristly paint brushes that anyone with sense would be out "doing something else", like making money or fucking.

(-- Or playing Nintendo, for that matter-- with "Blossom" coming on in 7 minutes)

I could never particularly succeed at art because of a fine motor-control problem that would make all my stuff look like whacked-out work made by a Gonzo-fied 1st grader on drugs. Where I shined was taking images "that already existed" and rearranging them with captions or text or collage in order to get them "to tell a story". As a cartoonist "who can't draw", a writer whose actual scratching's on the the page are all but "unreadable" to all but even himself on his best days, he has to do it all on a computer as "the primeval postmodernist".

To the extent that one soaks up "essences" and "perfumes" from various bottles, and has a profound sense of appreciation for such things-- like flipping through "a deck of cards". It's about playfulness and the manipulation of forms and is a profound art so long as you keep it "based on something". But it wasn't always so. . . . .

There were the days when he was young, watching the "Indiana Jones" movies over and over again and "studying them closely", in case he should ever need to crack a whip and swing over a bottomless pit or outrun a boulder that was eight-feet in circumference. Hearing vaguely that the twin film gods of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had teamed up and shout part of it in North Africa, it seemed like "the most cosmopolitan thing in the world" at the time, an image of two hairy film geeks in sweaters. He dreamed that he would get to work on the set of an "Alien" film one day with British production managers clapping their hands together with an air of ultra-class, ultra-efficiency. . . . . like moving "The Queen's luggage" at Buckingham Palace. Then you had Japanese comic art of dragons and manga and wide-eyed pretty girls that looked like a kung-fu Winona and you know it was great to be privy to the substraum of information "right below the surface" that swirled around with rumor and hearsay in our pre-internet era.

Why, if you just put "all the hard-work on the back-burner" and somehow "sang in the right key" before the right people, then doors would swing open. One did not particularly understand that the reason why Steven Spielberg turned into who he became was because from the age of 9 he was "a walking movie camera" who filmed everything and was absolutely obsessed with making movies. George Lucas wrote all the time and tinkered with special effects as "a tech geek".

And they never stopped moving. . . . .

I remember being in the netherworld of junior high school, or "the devil's island" of 9th grade and hanging out with losers, who, on the Paleolithic slab of things, weren't really any less wretched than I was. But to the extent that they used me as "a stepping stone" to get ahead, taking advantage of my quirkiness and naivetè about people "in order to feel normal", what I would tell them is that as slimy wretches they were graced with some natural advantages-- the ability "to scuzz" through those places while I fell where I stood. . . . . alone, unwanted, and abandoned like a junked hulk.

You're going to have "to make your own way" just like I had to make mine. Life is full of cruel, near-deadly logic that was as true for me as it shall be for you. If someone is clearly "struggling", then why do you make their life actively "worse"? There is a difference between "a sin of omission" and "a sin of commission". And I am committing "no wrong", if I'm telling you what the stakes are up front, right now. I am not your "buddy". You were never mine. And the system is not your "parent". . . . . it couldn't do much for me, either back in that socialist sump of a classroom.

Earn your way, then we'll talk.