i'm bored - last post (thank god, right?)

blogging is boring

facebook is boring

art museums are boring

art literature is boring

art is boring

making art is boring - that's why everybody's playing games w/ art, just like in a school that can't provide enough stimulation so the kids are always acting up, art and its people and their half wit ideas and the institutions and their half wit support of half wit ideas are boring boring boring boring boring boring boring

looking at art is boring

my job is boring

tech evolution is boring

web 2.0 is boring

the web is boring

traveling is boring

staying home is boring

getting a nicotine or coffee buzz is boring

being sober is boring

being drunk is partway exhilirating

talking about intellectual things is boring

being visually creative is boring (because the ultimate purpose that supposedly serves as a foundation for or a goal of doing visual work is either lost or never was here in the first place and we've evolved far enough intellectually and culturally to realize that, and those who haven't figured it out can waste their time in the visual fields as part of a used up human activity if they want, but visual culture, like all culture, creates itself on its own accord through peoples' perceptions & interactions, and people don't need us anymore to bother them by trying to be their visual brokers; ditto for other aspects of culture)

all culture is boring (the enjoyment of it; as a science it is still interesting)

Art curated spectacles are boring

Art residencies and their manifestations are boring

All art competitions and contests are boring, because art is boring; some grant person that gives all their money to people that usually don't need it and will waste it making more stuff that no one needs to see and won't be remembered after 10 or 20 yrs, please give it to me to go to school to catch up on my bio and statistics and earth sciences so I can study language evolution, I'm smart enough to and have enough energy and I'm tired of wasting my time playing art games in this boring field, and I don't even want to grow up and go back to the right kind of art,intuitive-based, because that's over anyway (that's why boring artists started playing their boring games in the first place), human cultural evolution has moved on, give me money so I can work

rist is boring, everybody loves rist, but rist is boring (i like rist too, but when you imagine a future era looking back at this time as a finished closed system, is this the closest thing to an evolution or innovation or revolution in the art field? the handful of rist-quality artists? she's not innovative, she's not a master of art, she's just 'good', and also kind of boring - every artist is boring because art is boring)

my books are great when i read them, but when I'm done and i think about them, they're boring

pre-web in-depth knowledge is boring

web-age horizontal shallow information-knowledge is not knowledge, and it's boring

information in general is boring

information science is boring

connecting new ideas is boring, because it's easy and cheap, the ideas themselves and their once unanticipated and still uncanny properties are what make them exciting

getting sun and fake-swooning over emerging nice weather is petty domesticated crap, and boring

making gardens and dealing w/ plants is boring

spending time catering to the comfort of individual members of non-human species is narcissistic and boring

going out of your way to avoid doing the previous 2 boring items is boring

Gen-Y generation styled lists (like this one) are boring

Gen-Y and everything they like is boring (Gen X too)

All generations and their sameness of culture, games, intellectual and political interests, comments, are boring

Culture, games, intellectual and political interests, comments are boring, even independent of their bastardization by particular generations

restaurants are boring

cooking is boring

eating is boring

going out in the city is boring

going to the country is boring

being transported in a vehicle is boring

walking is boring

exercise is boring

dynamic exciting jobs are as lame as do-nothing jobs (unless you're changing the world), they're boring boring boring boring, let me out, this is boring, I did this blog because art was boring, now the blog's boring so I did facebook, now that's boring, so I started a new web 2.0 art project, that's boring, i'm so fucking bored I can't stand it, if I could afford it I'd say there's nothing left to do but quit my job and watch porn everyday all day, but even porn would get boring, I'm sure if I gave it a full chance, even drinking would get boring, I'm done with the blog, it's out with me,
it ends now.

lemmy is god of rock, but agnes martin better, patron saint of art

"Any material may be used but the theme is the same and the response is the same for all artwork... we all have the same concern, but the artist must know exactly what the experience is. He must pursue the truth relentlessly.”

“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”

“Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.”

The quotes can go on and on. I don't have any more in front of me right now, but many of my favorites could be considered derivatives, at least in part, of more general quotes, the ones above, or others which I would have to take the time to look up. Martin's life proved that these aren't just musings by an intelligent person; they are comments from experience by an artist who lived like an artist. Much of their content is to be taken literally; "giving up things that you do not like" includes personal acquaintances and relationships, the "not liking" of which can include nothing more than the fact that they cramp your ability to exist and make art wholly, yet restrictively, based on primal urge and personal choice. She even suggested that a pet can be a burden to an artist's freedom, and recommended not having one. In my experiences, the only other fucker wise enough to figure that out was an allergy doctor.

In an age of fake pop-Buddhism, as entangled as suburban Christianity in substance and the material, "discovered again" by a clueless Generation X and obliviously run amok with by Generation Y, Martin's insistence on using truth to arrive at what's essential, at least when considered among the attempts of artists, celebrities, and other religion-dilettantes, should be remembered and celebrated as one of the recent examples closest to the real thing. She's the best, even better than Lemmy.

Reminder to Artists

***REMINDER***

Although I stated something to this effect in 2004, as of August 2008 any art that gets made and can be seen anywhere in public is STILL, assuming first a context in which a particular artwork is considered good, only good within some dimension on a scale best labeled "Relativity to other art that gets made today." NO current art is good on an absolute scale.

Devotional for Artists

For more about what it is that keeps me in this art game*, here's my "Devotional for Artists" from 2004, an encouraging story of personal decision-making trials and a very amateur attempt at a robust theory of career-choice logic, highlighting my willingness to look at the more positive aspects of being an artist.
*referring to March 30 post, paragraph 2
_______________________________

Devotional for Artists
I used to think I was going to get some linguistics degrees while I’m an artist. I started playing with the literature just to exercise my head, but I got more interested when I found out you can learn about details that are different enough to change your brain & make you have more starting points for ideas. Then I got to thinking & I thought I could get some degrees & then bring the degrees & research back to the art world & say “even though this isn’t art, it’s my art cause it’s where I ended up when I didn’t think too much about things & just followed where I felt like it.” I though I could get some credit for putting a lid on the anti-art deal while I was at it, and maybe make it so nobody wanted to do art anymore. But mostly I was interested cause I was learning about things like ergativity and case marking & I even understood it sometimes when people tried to account for how they happened. But then I found out that:

-There was always more to understand about those things & there will always be somebody that understands them better than me, unless maybe I picked one little phenomenon & learned about it till I'm fuckin 80 years old

-These phenomena always ended up needing more general concepts, like configurational & non-configurational language types & they kept getting harder to understand the more general they got

-so far no linguistic models have come close to explaining all the phenomena that happens in any language, so you can’t help it that the harder sciences like biology & physics, along with the big advances in brain research, will eventually undercut the theoretical foundations of linguistics & change a lot of the analyses’ contexts

I even read some book where a guy proposed some binary concept that is the basis for life, & he even tried to make a theory that maybe binary movements, maybe like a back & forth movement, is what sparked the change in the primordial soup that created matter that ended up becoming life, & he applied the same binary concept to human language phenomena & data. This is a piss-poor account of what the book was saying, but it’s the best I can remember after 5 yrs, & I can’t remember the name of the book to look it up & read it again. Anyway, so at the end he used real math to back up what he was saying in the book. He said the math was made easier so a more regular fucker could understand it, but it was too hard for me to get. So if you want to be a linguist, you’d need to take some things like case-marking patterns & ergativity, and then understand their distributions, causes & effects, etc, & you’d have to know everything that’s ever been said about them, & then you’d have to know at least a little bit about hundreds of other detailed phenomena, & on top of all that you’d have to have one eye on the books like the one I just told about with the binary theory. What a pain in the balls, let the scientists worry about it.

I have a job where:

-I can do whatever the fuck I want

-I get to put cuss words in my artworks

-I can say things about myself that I would never say anywhere else, & most people have to pay for that kind of therapy

-I can make judgments about anybody I want with no basis except for that I think it’s true & that I just wanted to, & it doesn’t ruin my name

-I can learn as much or as little about what’s happened in my field, and I can start working on something without planning if I want

-No work ever goes beyond the inspirational or observational levels of creation, & full observational adequacy isn’t required (& if it ever does happen then your work sucks & you need to loosen up)

-Explanatory adequacy is unthinkable

-I can spend a lot more time than other people pretending there’s no such thing as right or wrong

That’s a good deal, even if you have to spend part of the day eating shit at some job before you crawl off to your place & let yourself touch & feel everything you can imagine in the world & everything that happens everywhere so you can pull it all back in & let it reflect off your soul mirror like some fuckin Taoist Buddhist monk, but get this, you got it better than the monk, cause the monk has to stay in the world where everything is the same as each other & be part of it all without understanding, but you get to drag your ass back to the compartmentalized world where you get your own selfish brain & body all for yourself so you can use them to tell, write, perform or create what you saw just how you understood it to whoever’ll listen. Fuck linguistics.

More on Grants, Out of Touch

A recycle artist who recurrently needs thousands of dollars in art grants is as dubious as an artist who has the leisure of working jobs primarily for connections within the system rather than for survival, and who doesn’t have to choose between an art studio and safe & reasonably comfortable living conditions, yet who constantly needs the space and the free time offered by artist residencies.

Meanwhile I’m spraying my drawings with fixative in my bathroom in my one-bedroom apt where my family lives because I don’t have a separate work space, but due to the modest materials and size of my drawings, and the lack of spectacle, buzz-topic content, or refined qualities of my art projects, I could scarcely expect to receive an art grant. And I could barely go a month without working full time, so I couldn’t possibly ever consider a residency. And although I’ve very often been scrappy and used whatever pieces of board or paper were available for drawing and painting (I’ve even painted over other peoples’ discarded paintings), and I’ve often been content with whatever media in whatever color was left over or given to me by others, and in any case, even when no recycling is involved, I always limit the extravagance to what is necessary, which in the case of my work usually involves nothing that anyone would consider extravagant, I could still hardly expect to get credit for this simplified and frankly economical attitude towards working, since the materials, though modest, are not altogether green (I do use spray fixative), and since my tactics of restraint are survival tactics rather than self-promotional ones.

What a world.

Career Artist II

An art ‘career’ used to be more or less lacking the time-track and the age factor problems found in almost every other career, and one of the reasons was that in many ways it wasn’t like any other career. But now I can remove the sarcastic quotation marks from ‘career’; art is simply a career. No gallery artists today are any different from graphic designers.





The ‘Up the ante’ cause

Just as in society, unlike the old days when the need to display or create the perception of having a certain level of experience with traveling or entertaining, or possession of electronic gadgets, non-functional clothing accessories, etc, used to waste the time of only those belonging to the upper-middle class and upwards, the race to keep face by having the right stuff and lifestyle is now the most time consuming occupation of everyone except for those in the lowest of financial groups, so the current trend of artists to keep making bigger, more refined work (totally refined by time out of grad school, so can be on track for recognition by 30) is now influencing artists of nearly all social classes, backgrounds, and working styles. How many artists have said (maybe to themselves), “I don’t care about quality here, I need recognition, I’ll make better stuff later”? (I actually wonder why they never do make better stuff later). Artists, galleries and buyers are upping the ante by making or encouraging artwork that has certain properties, like refined, big, buzz-topic, and then mistaking these properties for the definition of ‘arrived’ art. These properties are the ones that everyone has to keep up with, unless they want to work in isolation and hope that someone digs them out in the future. The problem is that these properties cost money, and they involve abilities that better fit industrial or graphic designers. Most of those who break this trend and still manage to get recognition in the art world are getting recognition for doing exactly this, and not for the quality of their art, so they are no different, their works are still ‘concept driven’ projects. Though there's an element of rebellion in it, it’s just another style relative to other styles, like when artists deal with environmental themes, not because they’re real environmentalists, but because they found a cheap concept whose topic is so popular and so digestible that they don’t even need complicated projects, and in addition, they know how to work the system to get grants for a ‘buzz topic’ project ; or, for an example outside the art world, like the ‘luddites’ who will make their whole family sweat through 103 degree weather for a week without even turning on a window ac at low power in one room for a few hours a day, while at the same time writing stylish emails to their like-minded friends or creating invites for their next soiree on their 2nd laptop, the home laptop (the 1st laptop is the one that’s for playing with while traveling, which involves a car trip every weekend and plane flights at least 5 times per year outside of work-related trips, a few seconds of which do more damage to us than a month of a window ac running nonstop).

Like almost everything else, the ‘up the ante’ problem is ultimately caused outside of the art world, by things like economic markets and society blocks made up of people dumber that cows. There’s been enough talk already about the market, bad Chelsea galleries showing bad art by young artists or even students, etc, there’s no need to repeat it. The market aside, at least all of the players, artists, critics, dealers, galleries, should try to stop playing ‘up the ante’. But as with everything else, since market and the herd are the ultimate causes, there’s not much that anyone can do about it. It’s just that we should be able to count on art to give us a little relief from a cheap and shallow generation.


The ‘Anyone can do it’ cause, which, in turn, is also a result

“Anyone can do it’, we all know the cliché that people used because they didn’t understand art. They were normally wrong, and even when there was art whose final product ‘anyone’ could physically and mentally accomplish, finish, etc., then that wasn’t the point. There were series of layers of experience, intuition, or discovery involved, or there was a specific context, so that it was only in theory that ‘anyone could do it’, not in reality. Now those people that say ‘anyone can do it’ would be right. Now anyone can make up the cheap ideas that artists come up with, and anyone could either perform the ideas, or else pay someone else to perform them. Artists are no different from graphic designers, commercial artists, advertisers: concept, plan, materials, execution. Have you noticed artists refusing to talk about their new secret ideas until after they've been shown publicly? Anyone making real art shouldn’t be worried about someone copying their artwork, because you can’t copy real art, you can only copy the ideas. I want to make a show that consists of plans for artworks based on concepts that I will never actually make. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t have the money to make them, it also wouldn’t be worth the effort. The idea itself is the whole artwork. I wish other artists would ‘copy’ this idea from me, and stop cluttering up the world with their industrial design/advertising/half-ass professor projects. Basically, if you could draw up a ‘project concept’, then your work sucks.

As with the ‘up the ante’ problem, the ultimate cause of the 'anyone can do it’ problem also lies outside the art world. It’s a general problem. For some reason, something has happened in this generation or in the last few, where any action, conversation, gathering, almost anything whatsoever, at any quality level, can now be turned into a formal event or process, one of whose effects is to make it easy for people to get credit for ever-smaller parts in life. Self declared altruists who have never had intentions of sacrificing themselves for work or study so that they can do more than pretend to be helpful can now formally display their ‘experience’ via speeches, or events they’ve ‘organized’, or any number of experiences at quality levels that would not have existed, or at least wouldn’t have counted for anything years ago, but which people now use to categorize themselves with labels like ‘scientist’ (the very wealthy are an exception because this trend is not new to them ; they have always created channels to make themselves seem more important than they are, but in their cases it was always primarily they themselves who were instrumental in creating these situations). By today's standards, almost anyone can call themselves an actor or musician. Almost half of all former non-artists with a halfway comfortable income have become an artist, usually a potter. Every artist that gets a little bored can be a scientist, a philosopher, or a practitioner of a foreign religion. Every art critic or art history scholar suddenly has art shows in Chelsea ; it used to be that a PdD in the fine arts or art criticism/history and a studio/gallery art career were nearly mutually exclusive. There's nothing wrong with any of these lifestyle changes, but now they're usually done with a pathetically small amount of effort, and usually for the purpose of getting out of work that isn't fun. People don't seem to understand that artists, religious leaders, scientists, or whoever is on 'the other side', are not always having fun, they work hard, they've sacrificed a lot, and it took decades to get where they are. But people still believe they can get themselves into a fun life where the credit comes quick and cheap. And since you can get credit for anything today, via, for example, a chealea show or a book publication, with no intensive experience and virtually no refereeing involved, then they're often correct. It's easy for these fuckers to be fooled into thinking they're already doing great after their first year of their new endeavor. Only history will prove them wrong, and that's a long ways off in the future, and they might not even be alive by then anyway. Basically, the small corner where quality control has real influence, small because of its own nature, the nature of society, and the honest and now totally unrecognized difficulty in becoming really good at something, is getting smaller ; as standards across the board keep getting lower, the small corner of expertise gets more difficult for most people to recognize. This corner has grown and shrunk over time, but fine arts has often managed to stay there. When art shows that it doesn’t have either the guts, the intuition, or the intelligence to stick there, one can say that it’s over with.

Here’s a story that ties in the ‘anyone can do it’ theme with the ‘up the ante’ theme. Unlike, for example, artists or altruists (I mean non-trained ones, ie, non-useful ones ; I admire more than anyone else altruists who work and sacrifice for altruistic ends) who think they are, for example, scientists, I was forced to play scientist due to a former full time job. I had to write research articles to stay in my job (I eventually didn’t make it). It wasn’t real heavy science, but since I am NOT a scientist, it was difficult for me, and I learned a new way of thinking and working, and would like to do more if I had time. And I’m still NOT a scientist. But, one of the methods I was studying, co-citational analysis and mapping, included a visual product that gave me one of those cheap art ideas I was talking about up above. I tossed ideas around, but the ‘concept’ to me was too weak to justify a big production. Then this year, I go to the MoMa, and I see work there by an artist, who, I believe (I could be wrong) really never was an artist (now he is I guess, he’s in the fuckin MoMa). He made one of these word-analysis maps that I though of. He’s a computer science guy and a teacher at some place like Columbia, and he basically took an idea (project concept), and got a big education grant (not art grant, education grant), and then made this slick sleek Panasonic-looking modern-age thing with pretty lights (totally necessary, right? Otherwise people might not grasp the word analysis concept?). The topper: he’s in the MoMa. I can hardly get a fuckin’ a museum show, and there are good artists than can hardly get in a good gallery, and a teacher and computer science guy is in the fuckin MoMa. I’m a fan of cross-discipline work, I think there’s no other way to work towards describing reality or making new discoveries. And I know this guy’s smart, I think he made the program himself that runs his word analysis. But the fuckin MoMA? He’s got his own forums (published scientific literature, the software market, etc), but instead he gets a state grant to make his idea pretty and expensive, and gets in the fuckin MoMa. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to quit, but it’s also exactly the kind of thing that me and other artists deserve. That’s what we get for falling for the game, and making art that is practically done as soon as the idea (project concept) is finalized. We get proof that you don't need to be an artist to get recognition in the art world anymore. We suck, and I’m sure that the future will scoop us up like shit and throw us in the sheep-herd-, consumer-, forgettable-, social-fashion-garbage-bin in the history of society, while people that no one knows now will be in the art history books.

These artworks based on ideas often clump themselves into thematic categories. My favorite one is the one that my recent work belongs to: making self-referential comments and comments about art and the art world. It’s like when David Letterman used to make fun of the company that owned the tv station he was on. Kids though it was brave, but it was just an institutionalized fake rebel tactic. As Jerry Saltz said, the idea of making art that’s all about being in public with your art has gone mainstream, and, I would add, it has now also been mentioned in the mainstream art press, which suggests that it went mainstream a long time ago.

I’m doing it too, but…

I know that every other artist that does this theme thinks they’re doing the same thing as me. But just like I really, really was different from the other people who claimed they were watching ‘sarcastically’ when they watched the first Monica Lewinsky interview, because I was the only one that was honestly watching purely sarcastically, and not trying to grasp something about the presidency, politics, sex, adultery, or abuse of power like everyone else was even though they didn't admit it, so I am the only artist that is really doing this art-about-the-art-world art, cheap-idea art, etc, just because I really can’t stand it. I’m not doing projects because I like them (though I’ll admit I am limiting myself somewhat to projects that I can actually live with, and adding some fun elements if I can ; and of course I’m limiting the costs, I’m not rich, and no matter how sarcastic you want to be, you can’t do anything about lack of money), I really have nowhere else to turn, I don't have funds, I don't know how to apply for grants, I'd be a horrible graphic designer or project manager, and I don’t do well with buzz topics without really studying or working at them in depth in an honest way, so I can’t stay in the gallery world unless I do something that I'm not really fit to do. Oh sure, that’s what all the art- and self-referential artists say, I’m doing this cause I hate the art world, but look at their projects. They are good at projects, they want to do it, you can tell. Or else they’re doing it as an intentional offshoot or flaunt of themselves, like the intuitive or the senses-driven artist (which is in large part what artists should be) that also has an intellecually complex side and needs to show us now and then. Or else hating the art world is something big they just thought of, like the problem hit them in their own special way, like some fuckin 25 yr old artist or a grad school kid. One hint that I, on the other hand, am the real deal in the middle of this art deluge that I myself am catering to, is that I am still making some good art, good enough that this art-about-art concept often appears merely as a theme that serves my artworks, or as an original springboard for them. The themes and the works are intuitively woven together, and I end up with art which really is decent and creative and original. Not all the time, but sometimes. No one else in this ironically mindless game (ironic because it's mindless when it's trying to be intellectual) is making anything that's good. But regardless of the reason, and whether or not you believe my own intentions or the quality of my art, I’m the artist that deals with this problem, I'm doing it right, and I need everyone else to stop now, and stop paying attention to and buying from artists that deal with art-referential crap, stop immediately. My work isn’t just "aware-of-self-as-artist" art, or "aware-of-art-world" art, it’s also "aware-of-aware-of-self-as-artist" art, and "aware-of-aware-of-art-world" art; ie, it goes out one more level, you have to add one more 'aware-of'. I'm doing it right, and I get the last word. I will stop doing it too, and go back to real art, once all of the problems mentioned here are over with in the art world.

Out of Touch

"Artist Chris Burden assembles a nearly seven-story building out of one million toy parts."

That's the news headline. There's the picture above. I didn't bother adding the article or the link, what's the point? Do you really need to see it?

What: Building (practically like a real one!!)
Material: Toys (erector set)
Figures: 7 stories tall ; million toys.

I get it: Impressive size ; interesting relation between materials and product ; nostalgia theme (erector set) ; lot of work (ie, lot of money).

As I mentioned on an earlier post, I wish this unstoppable trend of making artwork based almost completely on a concept, a good idea (that used to primarily be advertisers' and designers' jobs), so that one of the main elements of an artwork is the carrying out of a project, would end, preferably by killing itself off through a particular self-referential offshoot or sub-trend I’ve envisioned, attractive to me for its uncooperative nature, where artists will just state their ideas and leave it at that, suggesting that their work is done once they've formulated their concept. Anyone can think of ideas of this type, and money aside, anyone can implement these ideas. The problem is that this sub-trend idea, as I am now stating, is yet another idea, and therefore a paradox. In order to be effective, it must be recognized, so it must somehow be physically implemented, in which case it kills its purpose. But I still think it is (would be - I haven't decided to do it yet) worthwhile as an intentional, self-aware, sarcastically disobedient criticism of an ugly trend.

In any case, this "wow, guess what I thought of"' trend is as boring as every other public-spectacle trend, and the trend is being made worse by a tendency for these ideas and projects to be so fucking big and so fucking expensive. The more of this crap that artists continue to make (cars, real ones! hanging from ropes, In-Doors in a Museum!!), and the more attention it continues to receive, then the more unattainable a chance for recognition becomes for the rest of us. These ‘bold’ artists are stretching the limits of the proverbial playing field, without correspondingly increasing the sizes of the lots that most of us are restricted to through limits in means or modesty.

Maybe I'm missing the point by trying to clarify or formulate for myself, or justify before others, a set of beliefs that might refer more or less accurately to a respectable concept, but nonetheless one that is deeply buried within and maybe not highly representative of the whole of reality, and likely heavily intertwined with other concepts that exist at different levels of reality, without whose consideration an analysis is not practical, much like the opinions of voters with good, or at least self-interested, intentions, who rarely understand the placement, causes, or effects, relative to total economic reality, of the economic issues they claim to be interested in or the proposed solutions they swallow, usually one among approximately 2 available concepts pre-packaged for them, like alcoholics swallow a drink not because it's their favorite, but because it's available.

As an example of a less intertwined and maybe more general reality, last year I read an article about an artist in Omaha who makes gigantic ceramic artworks. Apparently they’re so big that he has to travel quite a distance to find facilities sufficient for making them. In what seemed to be unplanned musing, he made a comment that justifies making oversized (and he forgot to add extremely expensive) art, saying something to the effect that it is his best bet for recognition not only now, but after he’s dead and gone. He’s got something there. That’s one of the main reasons we make art; we see it as our contribution to human memory. Maybe I spend too much time thinking of the art world as a refereed game where, due to fairness, physical reality (I mean physical in its maximum all-encompassing sense) should be held back so that everyone has the same chance to make what they ‘could make in theory’, if they had the means. Actually, that’s not how it is, and maybe not how it should be. Why should art’s progression be interfered with? It’s a natural process, it involves the real, physical, and whole world, including means and lack of means. The world will see results more quickly if those people who can will continue to make what they want when they want to (unlike the beginning of this post, this section concerning fairness/equality vs. reality is completely disregarding the factor of quality).

All that being said, and although the following analogy is far from being a parallel or parsimonious comparison of concepts, the latter of which also contains a gravity possibly out of place here, which I don’t intend to, nor do I consider the following to make light of, the concept with which I began this post inevitably reminds me of a criticism (by?) of a comment made by Tom Friedman in his “feel good about America” book (title?) published shortly after Sept. 11, where he compared our freedom and well-being to that of a typical Al Qaeda member with the note that, while the latter is somewhere living in a cave, he, for example, as a representative of the former group, recently hopped on a train in DC to go to New York for the afternoon, had lunch with his daughter, took in a [play?] (something like that, I don’t remember the details, and don’t care to look them up). And the critical reply was something to the effect that the average state of living conditions in the world is probably better represented by those living in caves than by Friedman’s ‘ordinary everyday’ lunch-trip from DC to NY. In the sphere of politics, the phrase “out of touch” has become a buzz phrase, and for good reason, but I think it deserves recognition well beyond the limits of the political world.