Radical

Radical

Radical
lies and miracles 
overload your soul.

Find the pull, halfway or in-full, 
in the articles, alive or null.

Everybody’s had their fill 
and you know I've had my fill. 

The river’s full of fine silt. 
Stilted currents of our will.

Radical lies and miracles
find me in the hulls, 
with conned cargo.   

How to pull them over 
in your skull? 
Still, we find them low.

Radical:
Lies and Miracles 

And they overload, into your soul.
All in all, none large, none small, 
all carriage rides are comical. 

Everybody’s had their fill 
and you know I've had my fill. 

Art Corner

When previewing songs that I’m working on, Robin often asks, “What is it about?”

The audacity.

OK, fine, it deserves an answer and any “fine” arts program will make you question the meaning of your work via professors quick to prove your worthlessness.

Art criticism itself is a straw man.

Reflection and relating experiences? Valid.

Ratings from a limited (often singular) point of view? What a joke.

Good riddance, Pitchfork, even if you are technically still out there putting meaningless numbers on things. I mean, I get it, I just made a judgement about the futility of certain types of art criticism and it felt good.

Doing the thing has more utility than talking about the thing.

Dialogue, discourse and digestion of art has all of the room in the world. Judgement, gatekeeping and wild hubris has no ground to stand on.

Except for the only real grounds: $$$.

There’s no reason to blame the confused mean spirits in a confused mean spirited world. Lean into your advantage: persist.

Maybe you are actually good. Perhaps great. Could you be the best? Maybe the originality of your creation is a voice so singularly yours that no one in the world, currently or in the past—or in the future for that matter—could make such a thing.

If so, and if you believe it to be so, how would one make an argument against your work being great? A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, as Dave Eggers would put it.

There has to be some shared perception of quality given the interlacing Venn Diagrams of individual art consumption and experiences. Surely, quality has a place, along with assertions or judgements of quality.

You are completely within your bounds to judge harshly and firmly. My only advice is that you obfuscate or expand on your own knowledge enough to belittle your readers.

This song is as good or better than anything you’ve ever heard.

What does it mean?

You are what I mean.

Your Pal,

RS