how come you say it like you're right?

"however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation"

-Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

*

If you hate the taste of wine
why do you drink it till you’re blind,
and if you swear that there’s no truth,
and who cares,
how come you say it like you’re right?

Why are you scared to dream of God,
when it’s salvation that you want...
You see stars that clear
have been dead for years
but the idea just lives on.
In our wheels that roll around
as we move over the ground
and all day this seems
with an in between
a past and future town.

We are nowhere
and it’s now;
We are nowhere
and it’s now......

-from "We are Nowhere and It's Now," on the Bright Eyes album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

*

"I'm not a time-space person" said a guy described in my notes as "purple shirt."

No?
So can we assume you're somewhere else, or perhaps here tomorrow, and ignore you? (Purple shirt tended to dominate, even preclude, conversation.)

*

I could listen to this song too much and probably am. I'll be sick of it eventually.

The number of people who declare with certainty that the concept upon which their own position is based is an outdated construct of the unintelligent sometimes seems surprising to me. The rest of the time, I don't even notice.

Are other people nowhere too these days?

The joggers are always rushing from nowhere to nowhere, up and down the hill. They look more compelled than thrilled...
They want to fear that they'll be late or miss out and are secretly suppressing the realization that there's nothing to miss.

*

A few weeks ago, I went to a gallery opening to see a show a friend curated. Another show was opening the same evening, and getting very little attention, so after browsing the room and reading the artist's statement, I spent some time talking with the artist. The artist's statement hinted vaguely at abstractions and seemed largely unrelated to the work or anything the artist said. I asked a few gently probing questions in an attempt to draw some connections between the work and the statement, but the artist seemed baffled by the very concepts to which he referred in his own statement. Did he hire someone else to write it? Perhaps he's simply having trouble thinking in words...We can only think in so many terms at once, I guess. But this artist seems to me to be in trouble. He doesn't seem to be expressing anything in any medium...perhaps that's the point, but I'd be more interested in giving him credit for such unparalleled genius if he admitted having a concept...

*

Last weekend I spend a few hours at a sculpture workshop. I'm a non-practicing artist though half the time I don't feel like an artist and occasionally I make something...
I seem to be spending a good bit of time thinking in shapes these days, and I get it out of my system in clay. Handbuilt ceramic sculpture doesn't seem like much sometimes, and I work small, which means my pieces have to work especially hard to avoid a distinct feeling of insignificance. To see a respected sculptor's small, handbuilt work is a treat. In the course of responding to a question about what motivates her, Mikey says...
You hope someone will see it and respond to it.
Michaelene Walsh images
She had a slide of doll heads, waiting on a warehouse shelf, the optimists hoping for bodies?
The idea of juxtapositions to create/explore tension (nightmare dolls, oversized unnatural ice-cream cones and candy, birds on hearts) speaks to where we are and to us where we are...
It's a good thing I have dishes and laundry and, dare I admit it, truth.