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Many actors make art as a hobby. As famous people, they could sell shit in a sock. And they do. A lot of their artwork is bad, very bad. The late Martin Mull’s art is good, very good. “The Search for Truth in Advertising”, 2014, by Martin Mull We know him mainly as an actor, starting with “MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN”, and as the unctuous pseudo-talk show host Barth Gimble on “FERNW…

Have you ever had so much fun that you thought your head was going to explode? Yeah, about three times in a lifetime, right? This very dilemma – the thin line between extreme pleasure and profound suffering – was the ice that neo-Freudian French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan skated on. Let’s say you know that your limit of beer that you can enjoy is four a night. Four is good…

Fritz Reiner My favorite resuscitation is of that old bastard Fritz Reiner, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Recordings jolt reanimation. If you had told me that I’d be listening to classical music for enjoyment, I would have suspected brain damage in either you or me. But here we are, intact and listening. A young Reiner As someone who …

photo by Gregg Fedchak

The abstract expressionist artist Robert Motherwell had an intriguing way of imitating nature: by snapping back at the brute. This is a great explanation of his “Beside the Sea” series of paintings: https://dedalusfoundation.org/programs/online-features/view/beside-the-sea/ He had a studio on the sea, and saw the forces of the water as it came in and out, up and down, and barre…

I grabbed Mark C. Henries’ A STUDENT’S GUIDE TO THE CORE CURRICULUM to find out what my life is all about. The liberal arts, the core curriculum, and the humanties are all dying now because education has turned into Learn-A-Practical-Skill. Instead of producing well-rounded citizens who have heads filled with idealistic and deep thoughts even when in comas, we have shallow careerists. …

advertising themes covered by jazz great Benny Golson, 1967 Jazz legend Benny Golson has passed away at 95. He leaves just drummer Roy Haynes and sax star Sonny Rollins still with us from that generation of players, off the top of my head. Speaking of advertising, Golson covered some of the hip advertising songs from the 1960’s in the above album TUNE IN TURN ON. I doubt he’d want to b…

We live in an infantile culture. We do what we’re told, and advertising does all the telling. We do what they want. We adapt to their whims. Take the minivan, for instance. At one time, we were told by a desperate, bankrupt Chrysler Corporation that minivans were the best thing since sliced bread. Thus told, we bought them. They were the perfect car, the Swiss army knife of the …

So I ordered this book from Amazon: and Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence book recommendation machine is suggesting I might want to piggyback purchases of children’s activity books such as LILY’S TEDDYBEAR TEACHES HER TO TIE HER OWN SHOELACES. Amazon, Facebook, etc., are moronic companies and I assume life on earth will end when AI stupidly suggests launching nuclear missiles as a goo…

You’re a big baby. We all are. Our society has made us that way, and we’ve conformed. Keith Hayward’s book, INFANTILISED, is about how it happened, how we let it happen, and why we’re stuck. This won’t do INFANTILISED justice, but adults have been infantilised and children have been adultified by technology and advertising. The 1960’s sold us what looked like painless …