Well, at least for nine days. I'll be back on the 30th, one week from Sunday. I hope all of my American readers have a lovely, safe, and filling Thanksgiving; I hope all of my non-American readers have a nice regular week. Feel free to check in here a bit, just to keep the traffic from totally nosediving; I have almost two years' worth of good stuff in the Archives, you know. Newer readers can check out the posts listed under "Notable Dispatches", as well as the ones I listed here, which was the last time I took a break from posting.
(BTW, Blogger's permalinks work, but they are thrown off by graphics. I've noticed that when I load a permalinked post of mine from the archives, it will go to the right spot at first, but then as the various images and whatnot in other posts from that same week load, the thing gets thrown off. So you'll have to scroll around a bit. But that's not a problem to you, is it? Nope, I thought not!)
Also make sure to check out any of the blogs under "Other Journeys" you might not have checked out before. There is a ton of great stuff being produced in Blogistan. I'm not going away or anything, so I'll be checking in here to do my own daily blog-reading and I'll be answering e-mails, if anyone needs to contact me. I should also have a few new reviews showing up on GMR this Sunday (but I'm not sure, it depends on when the editors choose to run them).
Finally, I leave you for now with this item from rock critic Lester Bangs's book Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Writing in 1981, Bangs is talking about Jim Morrison (in response to the book No One Here Gets Out Alive, which I really must read), and there's good food for thought for all artists in this passage.
In a way, Jim Morrison's life and death could be written off as simply one of the more pathetic episodes in the history of the star system, or that offensive myth we all persist in believing which holds that artists are somehow a race apart and thus entitled to piss on my wife, throw you out the window, smash up the joint, and generally do whatever they want. I've seen a lot of this over the years, and what's most ironic is that it always goes under the assumption that to deny them these outbursts would somehow be curbing their creativity, when the reality, as far as I can see, is that it's exactly such insane tolerance of another insanity that also contributes to them drying up as artists. Because how can you finally create anything real or beautiful when you have absolutely zero input from the real world, because everyone around you is catering to and sheltering you? You can't, and this system is I'd submit why we've seen almost all our rock 'n' roll heroes who, unlike Morrison, did manage to survive the Sixties, end up having nothing to say.
Art is about the world. So is blogging. So get out and, you know, see the world once in a while. Your art and blogging will be better for it.
Happy Thanksgiving (or Thursday), and see you in nine days!
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