ChristianMcLean

It occured to me that i need to make “trash” art. Art that references american culture and the way we use things. and by things i mean anything – concumption of anything.

What do all these people have in common?? Well quite a lot. I got to thinking about their similar predicaments after reading an article in the NY Times today called Dark, Perhaps Forever. So these days physicists are looking for what makes up the extra 74 percent of the cosmos, 4 percent being atoms and 22 percent being “dark matter”. 

Paragraph after paragraph seems to rattle on about the same problem – They have no idea what they are looking for – but in true Derrida form they can rule out what it isn’t. It is not Einstein’s cosmological constant. I often find myself, an artist, wandering down a path that I’m not sure where it’s going but i stay along for the ride because it’s the only way to get there.

I tend to get flack for working this way, starting off with something and playing until it takes me somewhere. Professors don’t like this a whole lot most of the time. I don’t know is a perfectly acceptable answer for me, because if i am attentive to what I am doing and how things are unfolding the eventually I might know. 

So, what do an Artist, a Physicist, and a Mathematician have in common?? They are all comfortable with not knowing at that moment, and having trust in the fact that if they continue their journeys they might end up finding out what they were searching for.

Now after reading this. An opinion of Obama’s speech to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. about how Obama left out serving your country by joining the military. Well yes that is a public service. Here is a good mark of a political candidate – he knew his audience. He knew that that is something that they don’t want to hear that. He knows about time and place, one thing our current president doesn’t know about; him being a good ‘ol boy and all. 

Back to public service though, it is far more important to serve your community on a local level, than try to change things globally. That is what my generation doesn’t understand, that and anything outside of themselves. Helping in an organization that isn’t centered about them is what they need to do, to understand how communities evolve and operate, so that they are better adjusted to fitting into one, and not being isolated in their own world.

Reading an article on the opinion page on nytimes.com about the Rockefeller laws in New York. These laws are for drug use and distribution, mostly just putting more people behind bars. These types of things are symptoms of a continued attitude in the United States. Instead of fixing the cause we are trying to fix the effect. For example, if a company is dumping chemicals up stream, instead of finding a way to stop the company from dumping the chemicals we just filter the water down the stream. This is not fixing a problem at all. Lipstick on a Pig.

As for the drug laws, all they are there for is to vilify a certain class of people in order to make it ok to jail them up. I don’t necessarily agree with the culture, but they are just people trying to get by in the ever more desperate country we live in. Maybe if we stop trying to jail everyone up for things and focused on what is actually causing people to turn to certain things we would be able to have a free-er society.

Maybe instead of locking up delinquent child support people, we have them get jobs and pay them a decent wage so they can afford to live and pay. Yeah some of them still won’t pay, but that is the choice we humans are given. Maybe at that point a punishment should be imposed. I guess bottom line is i see so much money wasted on prisons and keeping people locked up for mundane offenses. Maybe just maybe if we devoted some of that money to investing in an infrastructure like, Education, Rehabilitation, Health Care we wouldn’t have such a hopeless gap between the haves and the havenots. In turn, creating a more collective society.