Our Enduring Heartstrings >>

In downtown Lawrenceville, GA is a pizzeria called “Little Italy’s.” And every week I would head down and grab a slice or two of the thin crust (because everyone knows that thin and crispy is the only style anyway). Working at this quaint establishment were two Italians, a husband and wife. The husband’s name was Cosmo, a rail thin caffeine bean approaching his 70’s. Still energetic, you would find him pushing crates or kneading dough when you walked into the chiming door. And whenever my mother mentioned Pizza Hut, he would spit towards the floor and exclaim in his thick, Italian accent “you mean Pizza S***!” Then after the pizza was made, the cherished Italian couple would spend most of their time in back swearing at each other. It would be a shame if something were to happen to the place; the town would never be the same.

Like most mom & pop joints throughout America, I think there is a certain special je ne sais quoi, a spark, something almost completely without utilitarian merit in an efficiency-seeking world. Yet there it is; when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore. Beauty. Wonder. Dreams. Quaintness and poignancy. Where does it come from and where does it go? Tears eventually fall into the sea, but where do dreams go when they are unrequited? Or deferred, rather?

I’m an artist, or rather a man with a dilettante appreciation for what we loosely refer to as “The Arts.” And I fear with each passing decade that our generation is losing a bit of itself. While this may seem trivial, there are certain dangers in becoming men who weigh books before reading them, as historians point out a marked coarsening and collapse of The Arts as a sign of the decline of a civilization. In his book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury prophetically foresaw a future where people were so obsessed with consumer gadgets, entertainment, and cheap thrills that they never bothered to gather the rosebuds, sit on porches and talk, watch sunsets, and had no appreciation for the classics. Montag, the protagonist, is a firefighter whose job it is to burn houses containing books. Only later in the novel does he realize that firemen once extinguished fires, and people read books freely...once upon a time.

But let’s look out the window, ladies and gentlemen. I remember watching TLC as a kid, with programming that included Beakman’s World, Great Historical Navigators, The Vikings, Biblical Mysteries, and Paleoworld (my favorite since I liked dinosaurs and contemplating large swaths of time). Nowadays, you can watch wife-swappers or Jon & Kate Plus 8…on The Learning Channel. MTV used to be the channel of youth rebellion, angst, and resistance to the commercial machine, and while such a business model cannot sustain itself indefinitely by hating commerce, Grunge and American Bohemian satire like Beavis and Butthead and Daria would be the norm, spangled with a few tricked-out animations like Aeon Flux in the later hours. All the rest was rock, metal, and actual music. By the time I was in highschool, Road Rules and The Real World were becoming stale, and the (contestants?) now in their mid-30s were still talking about people “getting up in their grill.” Now MTV is barely recognizable as it features mostly spoiled brats in Malibu who drive around Escalades and prattle meaningless crap on their cell phones. And so a television channel that was once hailed as the decline of America’s youth has itself shed all of its redeeming qualities and become a teenage girl’s QVC. Since then, I have not really seen Carson Daly allow random callers in Topeka to give shoutouts to their homies.

Then there is the issue of controversy. Probably the best example I can dredge up is that of Eminem and his debut under the recording auspices of Dr. Dre. This was also during my High School years. And while I felt that Eminem’s music did in fact contain some valuable social commentary in light of the Columbine Massacre in 1999, and noticed that his lyrics could elicit a guilty chuckle, and that he was paving roads that Vanilla Ice got hung over a balcony for trying to brave a decade prior, his primary linchpin seemed to be his controversial nature. Now controversy is not always a bad element of art, radio, television, and literature, as long as it is employed as a means, and not an end. Trainwrecks for the sake of trainwrecks are not a stroke of genius; they’re pedestrian entertainment and nothing more. People only have a finite keg to be amazed by shock value before they become desensitized.  As an example, I can walk out into the street, pull my drawers down on a highway overpass and post it on youtube, where everyone can be a star. That would be controversial, but it wouldn’t make me Orson Wells. Inserting epithets like Harper Lee and John Steinbeck coalesces a time and place in US History, but flipping verbal birds at millions of listeners whose nerves twitch at the “naughtiness of it all” is the lowest common denominator. I think of Spike Lee’s “25th Hour,” for all the movie’s good acting and parallel themes of last goodbyes. Knocking social mores and taboos (which are static targets anyway) is easy; at most it takes balls, not so much brains.

But thank heaven for little girls, because they can eschew classy role models and blow of sexual frustration while watching Christina Aguilera get finger-jollied in her latest music video. Since Elvis and his pelvis may seem rather tame at this point, what will we do when Victoria has no more secrets to share? I mean, let's face it: we’re almost to the point where the retreating thong has shrunk so much that there isn’t much left to conceal. And we wonder why young women call anonymous sex with unloved partners “liberating” and “empowering.” Consider this foray: Feminist liberation gave women the ability and right to handle their bodies (abortion arguments later please; I’m pro-life), in the same way that the Bill of Rights gave citizens the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. How tragic it is that advertisers have misconstrued this, convincing us to think that bad self-governance is as holy a sacrament as the right to self-govern itself, and that both must necessarily go hand and hand, the former to affirm the latter! Power—true power—is refraining from doing something, even though you know it is within your abilities to do it. Simply being able to do a thing does not always mean that you should. People who don’t understand that precept are reckless, and artists who sell it are pimps.

According to Elliot W. Eisner and W. Dwaine Greer, contributors to Phi Delta Kappa International, American children spend just a few hours a week studying the arts, while the Nation of Japan dedicates 33% of its students’ time to doing just that. Arts and humanities curricula reach students that might otherwise fall through the cracks and they improve cognition and test-scoring in Math and Science. Some may say “So what?” But beyond the heightened aptitude it affords, America was founded on dreams, visions, and glory. The drive-in theaters, the jukebox diners, blue jeans, the classic Ford, leather jackets, the Western genre, jazz, blues, and rock, the gallant men of the silver screen, the Beatnik and Biker movements of the Lost Generation and Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, all flourished before we imported the eastern mysticisms of the hippie fad. And all of this was uniquely American. Norman Rockwell encapsulated America in each painting, and Edward Hopper brought realism into the forefront. The art deco of the Progressive Era paved in our minds the brave new world of zeppelins and skyscrapers, and DC and Marvel Comics disseminated this to millions of grown-up children who lived a double life in Gotham City. This generation grew to build wonders of concrete and steel, and launch them into space, wore fedoras, and kept revolvers and bourbon in their office desks. We didn’t go to the moon to prospect minerals! To paraphrase Charles Krauthammer: we went to the moon because it was glorious!

Today we have inspired works like the gay cowboys of “Bareback Mountain” and “Piss Christ.” Go ahead, IFC: be controversial! By the way, Andres Serrano (the demiurge freak who created this “Piss Christ” that he alleges to be art) was awarded a $15,000 NEA grant for his talentless degeneracy, all while I can get my brother Kyle to whizz in a jar at the cost of a Sam Adams. Ya know what? I should become an art dealer! Sadly, you worked 3-4 months out the year to see Our Lord and Savior dowsed in pee. I wonder if there will be a “Piss Buddha” or “Piss Mohammed.” Don’t hold your breath…you’ll just have to pee.
 
Then there is the final question of conservatives and art, and what all of this means for you. It is no small secret that, from Nazi Germany’s Leni Riefenstahl to the New Deal posters of the last century, and even the web-savvy gimmicks of Hope and Change, progressives have always sought to dominate the debate by sensationalizing their ideas into unrelated but irresistibly lovely works of patriotica. Liberals understand how to pictorialize glory, and believe in beautiful things even if they are demonstrable lies proven to fail by history. You have seen this in their staunch defense of PBS and NPR as unbiased, all the while making teeth at Conservative Talk Radio…you know, the one that isn’t taxpayer funded? Recent conversations between the Whitehouse and the National Endowment for the Arts have also dredged up fears of an executive powergrab akin to FDR’s (which helped him win reelection four consecutive times). Performance art in some schools has even set Obama’s praises to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a song so radical that it would never be sung on the public dole with its illicit lyrics praising Jesus Christ and Liberty. We gaped in disbelief as children danced and paraded while chanting specific DNC talking points, such as “equal work means equal pay.” So is it any coincidence that Pelosi’s Congress has upped the NEA’s budget to the tune of 12 million + 50 million in stimulus dollars this year?

Due to the leftist propaganda we faced thoughout the years, many conservatives have errantly written off The Arts altogether as “pinko” or “queer.”  Well I’m here to tell you that it’s not, and that doing so is a mistake. Liberals believe, based on UC Berkley psych studies and a subsidized creative class, that introspection, reflection, and imagination, are the exclusive domain of the Left and that we just don’t think very profoundly. While I think that most conservatives believe that artwork has little to do with policy (which is true) and that truth should stand on its own merit, totally bereft of dazzling imagery and melodies, we need a means by which to convey our soundbytes. That’s partly why I started this site, and why I laud the work of Zo Rachel, Steven Crowder, ex-liberal playwrite David Mamet, and others like them who aver that progressives don’t have a trademark on basic humanity.

How did our culture fall from John Wayne to Vin Diesel? How did we slouch from a gorgeous UNICEF flag bearer like Audrey Hepburn, studded in her signature pearls and svelte, black dresses to Britney Spears, clad like a streetcorner whore as an alleged musician and role model? Our luminaries have gone back to Heaven, and I wish on them every night for the spirit of our people in the way that a Dark Age monk must have dreamt of Virgil and Ovid. When did we trade the baseball stadium for the stripclub, or High Art for Internet porn? And how were the two intermixed by perverts of the avant-garde? How did we slay our best fantasies and then, with our alchemy, turn gold back into lead? Have our children seen beauty, and will they remember the classics? Will they perpetuate the American Culture?

When all is said and done, an artless society implies a troubling character of a people who cannot discriminate, happily eating whatever gruel is slopped in front of them. These people then fall prey to gladiatorial arenas, they can rattle off baseball stats, and yet cannot name a single Congressional Representative. Replete with the filth that some call “art” and “cinema” today, millions of teens will screw ‘till they are blue in the face, while never wooing; they’ll grow up to be workaholics that routinely copulate like a chore, and yet, for the life of them, cannot make love. Lastly, these artless ogres are duped by agitprop, living in a world where beauty is so rare that any emergence of it lends a holy credence, regardless of its political motives.

The last time I went to Little Italy for a slice, I heard some dreadful news. Lovable little Cosmo was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  I would imagine that it hit him like a ton of bricks more than it did me, but I still reeled throughout my lunch and couldn’t really enjoy my pizza… as good as it was. I later learned that the Town of Lawrenceville graciously ran a fundraiser to allow Cosmo to fly back to Italy and bid farewell to his family.

Part of me likes to think that Cosmo was aptly named. I know for a fact that the strip won’t be the same without him. So I fancy the thought of him in the great beyond on a Friday night, serving up a slice of thin crust to John Coltrane or Aaron Copland. Free toppings will include Verum, Pulchrum, and Bonum with the cheese. Mmmm…mmmm…mmmm…

Somebody lemme out of this Plastic Age. >>