Michael Medved, hot on the trail (all emphasis mine):

But the right way to stop this corporate influence isn’t . . . simply to replace crooked Republicans with righteous, dedicated Democrats: it’s to tame the federal monster that drew the lobbyists in the first place, as government grew under Democrats and Republicans alike. As long as corporations find their success or failure subject to the whim of federal policy, of course they’ll make every effort to influence those policies – and no amount of lobbying regulation can end those efforts.

Consider the U.S. Department of Agriculture – with 106,000 employees and a yearly budget of $94 billion (2006 figures). This monstrous bureaucracy grows only one crop: regulation and favors, for one agri-business interest or another. Can anyone blame farming companies or organizations from attempting to secure favorable treatment from such an idiotically over-grown endeavor?

Then there’s the U.S. Department of Education (established by the worthless Jimmy Carter in 1979), with 5,000 employees and a budget of $69 billion — an operation that doesn’t actually operate a single school (states and localities do that) but exists to send money to favored programs and regions. Is it any surprise that the education lobby (particularly the formidable teachers unions) has become one of the most fearsome forces in Washington?

The Department of Energy (another Carter era innovation) lists 16,100 federal employees and another 100,000 contract employees, with a budget of 23.4 billion – but never pumped a single barrel of oil.

In the thirty years that the Departments of Education and Energy have existed at the cabinet level, does anyone believe that the situation with either education or energy improved in the United States?

McCain shouldn’t call for the elimination of whole federal departments because the Democrats can too easily demagogue and say it shows he’s opposed to “education” and “energy.” But he can call attention to their lavishly wasteful existence, and the flood of money they’ve squandered over the years.

This is the essence of reform—taking on established bureaucracies, shaking things up in Washington, and cleaning out the most corrupt and ineffective programs by closing them down.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only solution to the “lobbyist” problem, and with the federal gov’t swamp in general, is the conservative/libertarian solution. Government more local, more decentralized, more adaptable to the vagaries of particular localities and towns. That is the only kind of “change” any one need bother believing in. The rest is, quite literally, all talk.

Don LaFontaine. RIP.

A father’s view of his family’s decision to home educate. A nice moment (of many):

The secret of home-schooling, however, is that you don’t have to be a master teacher to do it well. Energy, dedication, and good materials are what you need.

All the more true, it seems to me, when the type of education is classical, where the wisdom of 2,500 years of recorded debate and observation by our tradition’s best minds can speak of itself, especially if one learns Latin and Greek.

I’m not going to write more than this post about the speech last night. It is mostly Lefty boilerplate artfully composed. The people you’d expect to like it liked it, and the people you expect to dislike it disliked it. It likely fired up the Democrat party, which for all the pomp and Spinal Tap-esque circumstance is its primary aim.

But there is one section from this speech that requires comment. Here is what Obama said: Read the rest of this entry »

In my unscientific but very engaged survey of political commentary over the last six months (daily, I read news/blogs both Left and Right, even though I rarely link to anything Left), Mickey Kaus is clearly the only honest pro-Obama pundit when it comes to Obama’s associations with Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.

After all, who on the Left is able to say the following, which is oh-so-simple but oh-so-true, and which every one else on the Left, big and small, can’t bring themselves to admit, but most every conservative has recognized from Day One of all these revelations of who Obama has associated with:

Remember, this is all about judgment — whether Obama can demonstrate that he has it, and whether he can explain things like his association with Ayers that is believable and reasonable. Personally, as with his association with the hater Wright, I don’t think Obama can reasonably explain these associations. To me, both are examples of awful judgment — judgment that ought disqualify from the most powerful political position in the world.

I mean, for those who don’t think it is a big deal that the potential next president’s political career started in the home of an unrepentant domestic terrorist, are we then to assume that you too have a friend or two like Ayers? Am I missing out on some big secret that will open doors to fame and fortune down the road? Care to introduce me to your unrepentant domestic terrorists friends some time? Tell me, what should I wear?

Let the truth come out!

When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession.

If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited.

Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master’s degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student– which is to say, more than a million dollars to educate ten kids from K through 12.

Nevertheless, we continue to take seriously the pretensions of educators who fail to educate, but who put on airs of having “professional” expertise beyond the understanding of mere parents.

The solution is for parents to have the confidence to “get off the grid” and home school their children. For the best primer I know, go here.

I sympathize with people who say they try and try, but just can’t get into orchestral music. It is just too boring, too remote feeling from one’s everyday experience. They respect the music, of course, and when they hear a popular orchestral work featured in a big film (Superman, Indiana Jones, etc.), they dig that. But outside of big flicks, no thanks.

I sympathize because for a very long time I was the same way. And I think it is because the orchestral works of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, while obviously fundamental to the Western tradition of music, get too much play and don’t recognizably evoke emotions common to today. The mistake is thinking their music must be liked before one listens to orchestral music that came after them.

I think the best entrance into symphonic music is to listen to such music that could conceivably have been used to score a film. Film remains the dominant medium today for fine aesthetics. While film has obviously evolved over the last 80 years, people can still relate to very old films, which means people can still relate to the music from those films. This is because this music, generally speaking, is colorful — emotionally, melodically, harmonically, rhythmically.

When you listen to particularly colorful orchestral music by, say, Ravel, you realize that he very well might have crafted the music for a film. He didn’t, but he could have. This means we of today can relate immediately; whereas before the colorist composers, the orchestral music doesn’t really lend well to film underscoring. Music from Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Haydn certainly has been used in film from time to time, but whether because this music is so fully formed and tightly spacious as is, or for some other reason, this music really doesn’t work as film music. Hence, I think, ordinary people don’t often seek these works out all that much. (Classical music is dying, haven’t you heard?)

So here are my recommendations for orchestral music —  colorful, beautiful, diverse, and (the key feature), film-esque. Most of these works can be found at eMusic.com.

Bartok
Concerto for Orchestra
Music for String Instruments, Percussion, and Celeste

Samuel Barber
Second Essay for Orchestra
Adagio for Strings

Leonard Bernstein
Symphonic Dances from West Side Story

Bizet
L’Arlesienne Suites

Copland
The Red Pony
Appalachian Spring
Rodeo

Debussy
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
La Mer
Three Nocturnes
Iberia

Holst
The Planets

Ravel
Mother Goose Suite
Rapsodie Espagnole
Pictures at an Exhibition
Tombeau de Couperin
Daphnis and Chloe
Bolero

Strauss
Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
Don Juan
Death and Transfiguration

Stravinsky
The Firebird
Petruchka
The Rite of Spring

Vaughan Williams
Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Greensleeves

Wagner
The Ring Series

Andrew Klavan, writing in City Journal. Guess which paragraph goes with which way of thought:

. . . this is America, remember: we’re a country of the imagination, a living state of mind. We’re not connected to one another by bloodlines or any depth of native memory. We’re the descendants of an idea that every generation has to learn to hold in its collective consciousness. More than in any other country, it matters in America who we think we are and what we believe we’re doing.

Our academies, the news media that train in the academies, and the entertainment industry that’s informed by the news media have become, to my thinking, a sort of alternative state of the imagination, a kingdom of lies founded in the muck of hysterical guilt, historical distortion, and philosophical solipsism. In their fantastic and labyrinthine narrative, our fascist foes are Nemesis, the emanation of our own sins, and therefore our military can only be the mad or foolish servants of evil.

Obviously, the first paragraph is the Libertarian/Conservative view, and the second the Progressive/Liberal view. I bolded the parts that tell the real differences. I suggest that it is in fact the complicated notion of Liberty we must learn to hold in our consciousness. I would also suggest that a simple way to understand the “fantastic narrative” of the progressives is simply to see this view as primarily and fundamentally based in cosmopolitanism, itself an attractive utopia, the desire for which is part of the human condition, unfortunately.

We want to spread the good news that Small Comforts has recently been accepted into two more festivals!  We have not received exact screening dates/times for either, but will update everyone when we have that information.

The first, Chicago International REEL Shorts Festival will take place the weekend of Sept 12.

And also, The Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival will screen the film the weekend of Oct 4.

Twyla in the sling, and in the stroller, Oona and to her right, Izzi.

Photograph by David Korta.

This week we study the logical fallacy sure to be well-employed now that American politics has entered the convention season — the argumentum ad populum. From The Trivium, by Sister Miriam Joseph, pg. 203:

The argumentum ad populum fallacy arises from substituting an appeal to the passions and prejudices of the people for logical reasoning on the point at issue, for example, the appeal to race hatred by persecutors of the Jews.

Or, an appeal for “universal health care” that uses pictures of sick people.

Heck, one could make this fallacy the basis of a Convention Drinking Game. Although modified in some way, else you’ll be wasted after 15 minutes whether watching Democrats or Republicans.

Five pieces of music, nearly 17 minutes total. Download each free of charge from here (scroll to the bottom, to the Ravel section). These are beautiful, and sound very much as if composed for film cues; the pacing and amount of foreground material have been imitated in many a more contemporary film score. All in all, pieces worth getting to know.

A very long interview of Elfman. Gets very interesting just over halfway through, when he starts talking about working on a ballet with Twyla Tharp.

As I said the week before last, I like Elfman, the more I learn of him and his approach to scoring and composing in general.

I had a little hen, the prettiest ever seen,
She washed me the dishes and kept the house clean;
She went to the mill to fetch me some flour,
She brought it home in less than an hour;
She baked me my bread, she brewed me my ale,
She sat by the fire and told many a fine tale.

Eleven steps for success. A pretty solid 5-pg PDF that I recommend to all musicians, and obviously to those who compose.

At the San Diego International Children’s Film Festival. Saturday, Aug. 23, San Diego Central Library, Downtown: 12:45 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.

Hannah wrote, directed, produced, and overall imaginated. There is a trailer to come, which we’ll make available on the ‘Tube.

What’s it all about? It is about Moira, a nine-year-old whose family has suffered the loss of her father. Working long hours and jumping back in to the dating scene has made Moira’s mom less available. One day, Moira stumbles upon a furniture sale that just might be the answer to her problems.

And let me say biasedly but honestly, this is a beautiful short film.

Here is the Opening Titles cue that starts the film, scored by yours truly:

 

 Small Comforts Opening Titles cue [0:32m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I recently came across this rather arresting passage in my favorite film-scoring book, On The Track, pg 460:

Living in Los Angeles

When John Tempereau considers the possibility of someone breaking into this field who might live, say, in Detroit, he replies, “Don’t bother.” Is that cold or merely a matter of fact? “Well, you don’t want to encourage them to come. You must be really honest with them. I have to tell you, even New York is a dead end for composers. Especially lately, it just hasn’t been a fertile ground like it was years ago. . . . so it is a rought market. You can’t live anywhere but right here. There’s something about being in the town every day, being visible, seeing people at lunch, just being the conversations of the people in town. If you’re not, you’re losing out. If you’re not living in LA as a film composer, you’re not going to be successful. Every body thinks, enough trips out here per year — it never works.

“If you can get to the level of Howard Shore, yes. And living in London is a completely different story, because so much recording is done in London and there are so many great filmmakers that we use from there. But as far as being a television composer, for instance, it’s here or London.”

Well then.

With growing knowledge of Barack Obama’s apparent position on whether to protect born-alive babies who were intended to be aborted, we see again the issue of abortion starting to boil up into the MSMedia, due to its importance in national American politics (since 1973, I should add). After all, the two major political parties can be defined pretty well by the issue; one being pro-abortion and the other being anti-abortion.

It should be noted here that we are talking about over 40,000,000 abortions since Roe v Wade. Which, among other things, means millions less children available for adoption — which explains why it is so hard to adopt in the United States, and why couples must look to foreign countries.

Right now it seems one’s position on the matter bespeaks one’s overall attitude towards the relationship between individual and State (or “centralized government”). People who believe that Roe v Wade was correctly decided are, on average, progressive-Left minded. People who feel Roe v Wade should in fact be addressed by the Supreme Court, but disagree with the outcome, are progressive-Right minded. And people who feel that the Supreme Court had no business deciding this case, are either libertarian-Left (abortion should be legal at the state level) or libertarian-Right (abortion should not be legal at the state level). Those are the four primary political stances in America today, and abortion clearly delineates all four.

So you see at present there are actually two levels of arguments in involved in abortion — #1, should the Supreme Court decided at all?, and #2, should abortion be legal?

Right now, common society has the mechanism to grapple only with #2. On the other hand, #1 gets little to no play in common society. As a symptom, outside of Fred Thompson, no major presidential candidates (including McCain and Obama) are comfortable speaking about the incredibly unique characteristic of American government, namely the virtues and power of divided government between the levels of individuals, families, local assocations, states, and federal.

Now while it is important to have civil disagreements and discussion about #2, the ability to be civil (if still passionate) is disallowed by the reality of #1. Federal government jurisdiction over this issue means everyday citizens have next to no reason to attempt civil discourse about abortion (#2) with their neighbors and friends. There is simply no political benefit of doing so; only the Supreme Court can change this law. Rather, the only political benefit is to engage in uncivil war about abortion, whether you are yea or nay on it. Because only the rhetoric of uncivil war can play at the MSMedia level. Only uncivil war can influence national political parties, and national political candidates, and the justices they nominate and approve.

So this is why abortion is at present so fundamental to American politics. The largely unacknowledged dimension of the issue (namely, #1) acts as a kind of silent, shadowy, tyrannical driver, psychologically, in our society. Very much like how an unacknowledged feeling in the mind of a person acts like a driver of behavior — i.e., someone who doesn’t not acknowledge their jealousy of a person will act bizarrely and unreasonably towards that person. The bottom line is this: until widespread conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. Supreme Court has no business deciding whether abortion should be legal or not, abortion will continue its strangehold on national political discourse.

In other words, whether it should be legal or not (#2)  should be put into timeout. During timeout, we should have a national debate as to #1 — the appropriate level of government that ought engage the issue. (I don’t see how anyone could look at the issue calmly and decide anything but that the Supreme Court should stay out of it, but we should still have the debate.) Only after that is settled will reasonable heads prevail, and people in disagreement speak in civil terms. To understand the virtues of American government, how it was designed, is our collective task.  And only then will abortion relinquish its place at the head of our country’s table. So let’s be educated citizens, again, okay?

Perusing the free books while at a local coffeeshop a couple weeks ago, I came upon a fantastic title called Hollywood Picks the Classics, by Afton Frasier. The subtitle is “A guide for the beginner and the aficionado”. It could also be called a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood. If you have wanted to dig into these films but didn’t know where to start, or didn’t know where to go after watching Citizen Kane or Gone with the Wind, get this book (a used copy, I suggest).

All the lavish photography will inspire you to check out films you might never have. Suggestions are made in the following categories: “Must See”, “Drama”, “Suspense”, “Film Noir”, “Good Guys & Bad Guys”, “Comedy”, “Romance”, “Tearjerkers”, “Damsels & Dames”, “One of a Kind”, “Musicals”, “Westerns”, “Sci-Fi & Horror”. A total of 80 films are discussed, enough to occupy anyone for quite a while. And, of course, all these films bear countless re-watchings, so really, these films alone could occupy the rest of one’s lifetime.

And studying these films, if you are in the film industry, is obviously essential. Contemporary films make constant allusion to old Hollywood — nothing less than the building blocks of the language of film (along with, of course, non Hollywood classics).

As a tease, here are the book’s ten “Must See” picks:

All About Eve
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Double Indemnity
Gone with the Wind
On the Waterfront
The Philadelphia Story
Some Like It Hot
Sunset Boulevard
The Wizard of Oz

And I’ve only seen five of these! . . .  me gots some watchin’ to do.

Today we study the use of contradictories. One especially powerful sort is noted by Sister Miriam Joseph in her book, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (p. 133):

Shakespeare is especially fond of negative terms, which are the contradictories of the corresponding positive terms. By them he achieves vigor and freshness.

We will untread the steps of damned flight. (The Life and Death of King John, 5.4.52)

Though you would seek t’unsphere the stars with oaths (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.48)

Here’s such ado to make no stain a stain . . . (The Winter’s Tale, 2.2.19)

lest her . . . beauty unprovide my mind again (Othello, 4.1.217)

As if some planet had unwittted men (Othello, 2.3.182)

No! First shall war unpeople this my realm (The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, 1.1.126)

He is unqualified with very shame (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11.44)

Unshout the noise that banish’d Marcius (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, 5.5.4)

will he not . . . Untent his person and share the air with us? (The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.177)

have you any way to unfool me again? (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 4.2.119)

Unscissor’d shall this hair of mine remain (Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 3.3.29)

I do beseech You, . . . to unthink your speaking (The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth, 2.4.103)

in his meed he’s unfellowed (The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 5.2.150)

a little to disquantity your train (The Tragedy of King Lear, 1.4.270)

but by the displanting of Cassio (Othello, 2.1.284)

Dispropertied their freedoms (The Tragedy of Coriolanus, 2.1.264)

like a star disorb’d (The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.46)

POLYSEMY, for obvious reasons, is all about this:

As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.

Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.

This call, by Grayson Perry, is three years old. Fitting that it would be slow to take (I just came upon the article yesterday). But it most certainly will take hold here, at POLYSEMY, because Slow Art and what we do here are in complete simpatico. From our mission statement:

POLYSEMY is an journal for champions of the fine arts who are also fine art practitioners, ranging from beginners to masters. The journal is crafted for tradition-minded fine artists who desire intelligent investigation into issues at the heart of the various disciplines of fine art based upon the premise that commonality lies at the roots of all creative endeavor — a commonality that can be articulated. POLYSEMY also features discussions of inspiration practices, media studies and techniques, social and political commentary, exhortations to classical education, aesthetic philosophy, and more.

. . . POLYSEMY is dedicated to the proposition that the fine arts are living traditions of imagination requiring constant renewal by artists. These traditions are based upon resonance, beauty, wisdom, awe, mystery; traditions that defy categories of time, and are the result of both verbal and nonverbal conversations between the works of imaginative people across the ages. POLYSEMY’s project is to frame practical innovation, insight, and intuition to be applied towards the bringing forth of contemporary fine artistry. POLYSEMY, thus, seeks to be a useful companion to working fine artists.

Classical Education is Slow. Developing one’s idiolect is Slow. Honing disciplinary, then interdisciplinary, and finally transdisciplinary study (a.k.a. Great Artistry) is Slow. Great Ideas, Great Themes, Great Forms are Slow. Living with classic works of fine art in such a way that profundity unfolds is Slow. Wisdom is Slow. There is, in fact, nothing not Slow that is discussed at any length in any of the POLYSEMY articles or Blogs. I see no reason why Slow Art (really just another name for Fine Art; works that provide a “full meal” of perception) shouldn’t be a way to frame one of our driving forces at POLYSEMY, and POLYSEMY its main advocate in the world, or one of them. But it takes a community, not just a journal staff, to make that happen.

Consider this the Slow Art clarion call.

Today, we study the value of sturdy language. From The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr:

12. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

A period of unfavorable weather set in.
vs.
It rained every day for a week.

Or:

He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward.
vs.
He grinned as he pocketed the coin.

Or:

There is a general agreement among those who have enjoyed the experience that surf-riding is productive of great exhilaration.
vs.
All who have tried surf-riding agree that it is most exhilarating.

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this, that the surest method of arousing and holding the attention of the reader is by being specifric, definite, and concrete. Critics have pointed out how much of the effectiveness of the greatest writers, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, results from their constant definiteness and concreteness.

Pretty open conversation about how his scoring and music composition in general.

One moment near the end that I’d like to comment on. Asked what advice he gives to aspiring film composers (hey, that’s me!), Elfman says his advice is two-fold. On one hand, be able to imitate others’ work, because so often before he finds a composer, the director will install temporary music (or “temp music”) and often gets attached to the temp music even as the film composer is asked to come up with something original, thus it is important for the film composer to be able to imitate and/or work within the musical confines of the temp tracks. And on the other hand, Elfman stresses the importance of having your own voice as a film composer, because as he says, so many if not all of the great have developed their own voice (their own “idiolect“), because without one, directors and producers won’t think the prospective composer mature enough.

Able to copy others yet in possession of a distinct voice — Elfman acknowledges the seeming paradox of his advice. Eflman doesn’t say how he reconciles the paradox (obviously, he’s been able to, as he is one of Hollywood’s most successful film composers). So let me offer my own take.

The example, par excellence, is seminal jazz drummer Tony Williams. As a teenager, he was asked by Miles Davis to be in his quartet (along with Hancock, Shorter, Carter). This happened because the young Williams had fantastic chops, and blew everyone away with an approach to drums that was unique and powerful. Asked at one point how he was able to arrive at his own voice, he said that he learned the essential styles of the famous jazz drummers before him — imitated their sound, in other words; drummers the likes of Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones. And then for his own voice/style/sound, it was a matter of simply playing like none of his elders did. He copied other people, and in doing so, he learned their aesthetic choices; for his own voice, he simply chose differently. A finding of a niche that only deep education reveals.

Yes this is a form of “learn the rules before you break them”, but far more granular and concrete.

Thus, Elfman’s seeming paradox is not one at all. Rather, he alludes to a continuum on which the aspects of his advice are on different points, and flow from one to the other. Certainly, one starts by imitating other film composers, which means close study of their works, in order to understand their choices, and then using their works as modeled basis for imitative works by the student. After a while of doing that, with the experience of modelling several film composers’ works imitatively (i.e., making works that copy that which is studied), the student starts to see (intuit, more likely) choices that his elders have not made, and that he can, given the demands of a particular film and the psychological effect sought of music in order that the film is complete and imaginatively full.

This is the primary way for contemporary fine artists to work within inherited traditions, and still make something “new”. That is also requires significant hard work and commitment comes with the territory.

The pics probably explain themselves. I’ll point out that for Hannah’s birthday cake (she turned 30), I made her a cherry pie (via farmer’s market cherries and my own crust), at her request. Twyla (now 3) asked for, and received, birthday cupcakes that were chocolate with hot pink frosting. Izzi and Oona (about to turn 1) kept their requests to themselves, so Hannah volunteered a lemon cake for Oona, and a ginger/peach cake for Izzi. The game being played by the kids was “pin the pedals on the sunflower”, rather than the more traditional tail/donkey version. Another activity was painting birdhouses. Fun by all was had! Not the least of which was had by Twyla, given her sugar hangover the next day.

Milton Friedman, from his book Capitalism and Freedom, reprinted in the William F Buckley-edited Keeping The Tablets:

The preservation of freedom is the protective reasons for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances in civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of a parliament, though he was partly financed by an absolute monarch. Newton and Leibnitz, Einstein and Bohr, Shakespeare, Milton, Pasternak, Whitney, McCormick, Edison and Ford, Jane Addams, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Schweitzer — no one of these opened new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives. Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity.

The irony is that I think a great many fine artists are libertarian when it comes to themselves, but the opposite when it comes to their view of the proper role of government (i.e., for other people), on matters such as Food policy, Medical Care policy, and Education policy (the three disciplines that cooperate with Nature, rather than operate upon it). And this derives, I think, from the traditional relationship of artist and patron. Because the number of actual patrons has not increased, whereas the number of artists has dramatically, artists who don’t bootstrap it have had to look elsewhere. Most every road, in that case, leads to a centralized government. If you can’t get money directly for your art, getting it indirectly in the form of “universal health care”, “universal public education”, and “(artificially) cheap food” suffices as a form of patronage, allowing fine artists to devote time to their craft that would otherwise have to go towards earning the bread to pay for those services that (they fear) would be more expensive with a less centralized (i.e., more American) form of government.

The overall point, though, is that fundamentally, there is no reason “artistic liberty” is any less of a good thing than the “liberty” that is supposed to come from the American form of government, midwifed by the Founders — the primary characteristic of which is a limited centralized government on one end, a flourishingly funky civil society of individuals, families, and associations on the other, and City and State governments in between. And, thus, I see no reason, as a fine artist, to have political views other than libertarian/conservative. Centralized government off of my back means centralized government ought be off every one’s backs.

More power to him.