…even as Mahler broke all the rules and conventions of his predecessors, he often alluded to his “roots.” His first symphony’s slow movement, “Ziemlich langsam” sounds like a folk song straight out of the ground. It sounds like the world’s roots. You could sing it in Hebrew or German or Czech and it’d be Hebrew or German or Czech. Since the 1 chord and the 4 chord are minor, it could even be Russian. You could make the 1 chord major while keeping the 4 chord minor and it would sound Celtic. Make all three chords major and it becomes a traditional patriotic folk song. Add some finger-picked instruments, and it’s bluegrass. Strum the chords while singing the melody with either 1 or 4 major or minor, and it’s American folk. Slow it down, shuffle the beat and fall into the pocket rhythmically and it’s American blues.
The Artist Formerly Known As Robert LaSalle Wins 2022 High School Superlative: “Most Likely To Drown Beneath Incessant Noise Of Disinformation Age”
None of your favorite writers read about how to write. None of your favorite songwriters required musical lessons. None of your spiritual, ontological or existential teachers required spiritual, ontological or existential teaching. Writers write. Creators create. Seekers seek. Believers believe. And repeaters repeat. Welcome to the age of inauthenticity, The Disinformation Age, the first time in history where everyone's an artist, and there's no art left in artistry, where creativity goes to die under the red carpet where "content” holds it’s daily high school popularity contest, and True Artists are pushed unto the sidelines unacknowledged in the noise of competitive babbling, likes, follows and claps.
A Prophet Is Not Without Honor, Except...
…and only through the most vigilant awareness which misses not a heartbeat in dread or death, becomes a weapon more pointed and more powerful than their hate or the allowance of their hate through apathy and insipidness, awareness becomes a weapon which shreds the rank, foul intentions from their putrified mouths before ever being given the chance to become ideas, slicing their words back into the infinite pieces from which all things arise and all things return…
Hotel Print of a Daisy as Heard on TV
I paint darkness in layers of contemplative texture, shades of no thing from which all things arise. A great, mindless darkness forms the formless backdrop which takes up most of my canvases, and that which those whom live in shadows of unawareness experience as sorrow, un-stimulating, lulling sadness.
The entire purpose of painting all the darkness is to juxtapose and highlight the subject of all my paintings, that which cannot be contained in words is that towards which I’m always pointing.
Look CLOSER.
Instruments of My Enlightenment
They’re mindless cogs, locked doorways, dead ends in the maze of this life, where pain and rejection drastically alter trajectories. My aching unmet desires of the past had shown me my true desire, the true direction of life itself. Oh, the pain has been remarkable, but this stubborn being knows the only way he'd ever learn to fly is by falling
Art Is Not a Skill
Art is not a skill
Playing an instrument is a skill
Writing words is a skill
Painting colors, drawing lines
Learned traits, crafts
Habits, hobbies, tendencies
Art may use a skill
May exercise or enhance a skill
In the same way spirit is not a religion
Art is not a skill
Art is the affirmation of life
Art is affirmation of spirit
Don’t blaspheme it
Pink Noise
If I told myself the story of a lunatic eternally battling the disparate polarities of existential meaning and meaninglessness who could never find peace within or without being beaten, eaten alive, kicked in or kicked out, arrested for noise or bombarded by noise, the story could only be told pathetically and desperately or beautifully and hilariously.
On the Verge of 33
“I was thinking about the biological baggage leftover in our primordial brains and how our sentience has been a curse to every other species on earth, a puff of nonsense blowing easterly in the name of a personified cumulus cloud somewhere right beyond the horizon, naked baby just out of reach of the five senses that humans happen to occupy at any present moment, painted by one of the secretly gay renaissance artists for one of the secretly gay pedophile priests who would publicly burn gay people along with the women and the firewood which was called a faggot, you know, ‘Throw another faggot on the fire, Father. It’s getting quite chilly. Frigid, Father Judas. ’Tis frigid indeed.”
“I was thinking about how much better the world would be without any of that shit.”