Let me take you down
Cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever
Strawberry: symbolizes spring and rebirth, as well as righteousness and love.
Strawberry Fields. “Where nothing is real……”
Nothing becomes Something the minute the artist takes brush to canvas. In the musicians case it is the instrument the lyrics the notes the composition forming a harmonious blend of message and music transporting the listener to another level.
The artist produces from that mystical source where nothing is real, making it real, by producing the form in real time on canvas, stage, paper, or thru instrument.
It’s reality then becomes a shared quantity transcending its original thought. The source idea reigns supreme, as the illustration is witnessed and enjoyed.
John Lennon wrote many songs, and yet Strawberry Fields is one of his most popular. The lyrics, the tune, the magic of the message, cast a spell on listeners everywhere!
Strawberry Fields, is a small tranquil place in Central Park directly across the street from the Dakota , the residence where John & Yoko lived before he was assassinated by a crazy fan in December 1984 Is one of the most popular tourist destinations in NYC, it is a strange combination of the old and the new where musicians strum guitars to the beat of vintage Lennon, kids take photos at the “Imagine” plaque, and old hippies, aka baby boomers, relax on benches, observing the scene, as they reminisce of latter days, where they partied, made love, danced, and dreamed to The Beatles infinite musical repertoire.
It’s a cool place to visit now, yet also a sad place, because it has become a shrine to a man who was killed because of his talent, his fame, his celebrity, which made him loved by many, hated by many, the object of envy, and a target for the crazies. The dark side of fame. And it is. The artist is creating protected, as a lone wolf, obscure and free, until he is discovered. Then everything changes. Fame becomes the enemy, the friend, the desired, the despicable. “Be careful what you wish for.” The artist then becomes a victim of the world, the society out there whose love he craved, whose admiration he dreamed of, can become the vampire draining his life’s blood. How to know?
No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you can’t you know, tune in
But it’s alright
That is I think it’s not too bad
John was way too open and trusting as he and Yoko hung out in Central Park, strolled CPW, treating NYC as their new best friend. Yoko is still a resident at the famed Dakota! They had a love affair with NYC. How could they ever think it would be the city that destroyed his life by the act of a random fan ? They couldn’t. But it wouldn’t have changed a thing. He was still the John of Strawberry Fields Forever, Imagine, Lucy in the Sky, the White Album, and so many more, a cornucopia of music, giving the world new musical vistas for eternity!
Killing John Lennon. The man yes, the music Never!
Art IS forever. The artist is the venue, the tool, the channel. But the Source from where this gift originates is so much more. The inspiration, or as writer Julia Cameron describes it – the “Vein of Gold”. This is why Van Gogh could keep on spilling his paint on undiscovered canvases hidden for many years after his premature death, why Picasso could create while freezing or burning in the squalor of Bateau Lavoir, why “Le Dounier” – Rousseau could paint while being mocked as an object of ridicule while toiling days as a lowly clerk, why Modigliani could paint masterpieces, while wasting away from illness in his Paris Garret studio, that are now being auctioned at Sotheby’s for over 100 Million !
That Vein of Gold is a powerful lifeline to the artists creative source nourishing and providing an infinite abundance of wealth! John was struck down, and yet his Central Park Mecca remains 35 years later a place where he is very alive!
The artist remains eternally alive through the work he leaves behind.
John Lennon. Not a perfect person. Yet a perfect icon for future generations to “Imagine” as they visit one of his favorite places in the world.
Strawberry fields. Good Name. Good Song. Good Place.
Always, no sometimes, think it’s me
But you know I know when it’s a dream
I think I know I mean a yes
But it’s all wrong
That is I think I disagree
Strawberry Fields Forever.
Picasso painting selling for 179 MILLION $$$$$$
Why are these phantom buyers spending like it’s going out of style for random paintings? And they are spending like there is no tomorrow! Oh yes, hype tells us they are spectacular, beautiful, unique priceless, genius, but what does our gut tell us? It screams that these prices are a joke!
“Beautiful, dirty dirty rich rich dirty dirty beautiful dirty rich”
do they love the thrill of the game, the ego blast of ownership, the love of dabbling in the arts, because truth be told, “those that can’t do teach” only substitute teach with BUY. Those That Can’t Do Buy! A kerfuffle indeed.
This is how I see it . Because artists paint, sculpt, do their thing out of love, passion, or some natural genetic attraction, whatever their calling or motivation they just DO IT. Few are raking in big bucks, and yet they pursue. Picasso met dealers repeatedly, often making them beg him for a price on a painting they already had a buyer for. He was on a mission and it wasn’t to gratify greedy art dealers or satisfy a customers need to pretty up her dining room with a floral still life. On the other hand, Warhol was the ultimate consumer junkie. He loved the dollar and was not ashamed to profit whenever he could. He craved the wealthy socialites attention, the celebrity sycophants, flaunting their abundant bank accounts, ready to spend on the hot new fad which of course was Andy Warhol in the sixties. Didn’t a recent painting of his recently go for mega millions????? He sold a painting of a soup can and made people love it. Was it really about the can, the soup, the painting, or the Warhol persona?
Impressions are everything!!!!!! EVERYTHING!!!!!!. If something is perceived to be cool, then chances are it IS cool, and then everyone wants it. Warhol was freezing. He made Cool look Warm. There are no midpoints also known as average in the world of impressions. It is either Cool bordering on cold, ultimately freezing, OR hot, heading towards burning ! burn it up, or melt it down!! Warhol took it to sub zero and he took the people with him. They say thatafter he died, when discovered, his townhouse revealed a five floor hoarding zone, full of his Manhattan flea market pillargies, his Madison Avenue scavenger hunts, and a massive collection of pure junk. But who cared? The point is that he is Warhol, and he made his impression in the concrete of NYC much like a handprint blazoned into wet cement leaving that permanent imprint for eternity . And YES his painting of “Elvis” at Christies auction sold for 69.6 Million my friends!
Jargon is always floating around to artist types about “just do it, don’t resist, follow your dream, passion is the thing”, I could go on and on , but you get the idea. Steve Pressfield, the artists guru of persistence vs. resistance, vows that the “enemy of creativity is resistance”, and then he lists his top ten Greatest Hits of the true artists play book, and they all are in direct and aggressive opposition to today’s Wild West of art commercialism and the rampant status symbol stepping stones to success! Pressfield makes a statement in his very COOL book, “The War of Art”, ” the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe it, ask Van Gogh, who, produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his lifetime.” He goes on to say “to labor in the arts for any reason other than life is prostitution.” Yet……
TODAY, how does one live on such a dreamy fantastique philosophy, when the cost of living is f’ing obscene? Dylan could hang in greenwich Village on 20$ a week playing for pennies in the GV coffeehouses like the legendary GasLight on Macdougal Street, Basquiet could roam the barren alleys of SoHo, do graffiti, and be discovered in the clubs on the Bowery, and Blondie and Patti Smith could sing at CBGB for broke, and be discovered as superstars, while Jackson Pollack was networking in his drunken rages at the Cedar Tavern with the other New York School painters slumming it in Greenwich Village back when that was possible!
But hey, NYC isn’t what it used to be Dorothy! That’s over, and anyone trying to survive being an artist, today in the NYC State of Mind, will wake up real quick, when the rose colored glasses come off and reality sets in. The days of the Belle Epoch, the Greenwich Village sixties, the Punk Bowery days eighties, the dirty, freaky seventies, are long gone. Replaced by technology, social greed, excess of materialism, and the computer. It’s called progress baby! Deal with it!
To Live is to Love is to Hate. Have you ever stood in front of a painting, turned the pages of the latest hot novel, or sat in an audience at Carnegie Hall, experiencing a conflicting mix of feelings, where both love and hate, create a toxic mix of ambivalent emotions as you looked, read, listened?
That’s the way it’s supposed to be. You are Not supposed to be 100% clear while engaging in any artistic experience because that would be kind of boring? Right? Nobody wants it 100%. Yes or No. Easy to figure out. Mystery is key. A mixture of things to both love AND hate make it interesting, fun, edgy, create a story, spark our curiosity, essentially involving us like nothing else does. The yin and the yang forces necessary to life’s evolvement. And that is not a simple thing. It’s a bit of black and white, yes and no, up and down, that forces us to really get into it and feel the love/hate dichotomy that riles people up, makes them sweat, and sends them running to their therapists! Otherwise, what have you? Flat – lining into oblivion. “Dead Man Walking.” And who wants that?!??! We need to have that duality when engaging in whatever our art crush happens to be. Otherwise it’s easy to take it for granted, get bored, and loose interest. Not Cool!
Falling in love with a painting, a song, a poem, a story, a film, a dance, can feel like a powerful emotional rush, driving the need to engage in an extreme relationship with the object of your infatuation! The reason someone will pay 20 million$ for a painting, or develop a cultish obsession for a writer, I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, for example, not to mention the obsessive crushes people get on rock stars and actors, creating fan clubs, on-line sites, stalkers, venting their obsessive emotions, that are indulged and stoked by the Technicolor images on stage and screen. The passions that the Beatles, the Stones, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Nirvana ,inspired in the past, certainly looked like love! Swooning teenagers screaming in the audiences, universally tells the story. The Love Story. But then, flip the switch, and you get Hate. The fine line, tightrope walk where Love & Hate get uncomfortably close in their emotional energy and feeling. Especially when it comes to art.
Bukowsky’s poem, “Nothing Subtle”, read twice will either break the stoniest wall, or add another brick to it. “There is nothing subtle about dying or dumping garbage, or the spider and this fist full of nickels…..”. Or E.E. Cummings’, “LVIII”, a quintessential love poem, a possible answer to telling your girlfriend how you Really feel. “Is there a flower (whom i meet anywhere)
The large crowd always clustered around Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” masterpiece at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, can’t stop staring, at the mesmeric swirls of color as they click click click on their iPhone cameras trying to preserve the memory of this work of art that is so hard to walk away from. The agony depicted in Munch’s “Scream” is paltable, it is cringe worthy at best. Hate or Love? I call hate on this one. It’s definitely not a pretty warm and fuzzy moment. “Scream” makes you want to cry and run away. But that’s great. It’s emotion. And that is a good thing when delving into arts’ caverns of love and hate. You will find both, living side by side, in harmony conflict. A duo of opposites. Revealing the dichotomy of life forces as experience teaches the individual as he grows. Pop art will inspire a lot of hate, as Jeff Koons did with me at his latest exhibit at the Whitney in Nyc. People Love to Hate Pop. They often don’t get it so it’s easy to hate. They link the hate 
often with ridicule and laughter. That’s fine. At least they are feeling something and that’s the point. Warhol’s art was ridiculed and mocked all, over town. That Campbell Soup can was absurd! After all it was just a soup can. Sure. On the surface. Of course ironically, it became the trademark that helped turn Warhol into a pop icon legend, while the haters watched him laugh his way to the bank! So you never know. Hating an art work can be a good thing. When Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, was published, people didn’t know what to think! A salesman, his protagonist, turning into a giant insect, with no real explanation, it was so bizarre, so hated, so dark, that of course it became his major work, the novel he is known for, the book on high school reading lists worldwide! The story, brought to the surface dark feelings, and confusing messages, all symptomatic of Kafka’s own personal life story.
“A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us” so said Kafka. He finished none of his novels and burned 90% of his work. “Metamorphosis” regarded as his seminal work inspire those conflicting love – hate feelings in any reader. His themes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, quest, and transformation are the substance of his writings, fascinating readers for over 70 years. One can either love, hate, or a combination of both, Kafka’s take on life, and it’s effect on his literary work. But one cannot remain unaffected. One cannot ignore!
The actor Robert Mitchum, in “Night of the Hunter”, tattooed his knuckles with the words Love and Hate, in the 1955 film. Pulp. Dark. Cool. Unforgettable!
Art can have this kind of power. The viewer, the reader, the listener gets pulled in, on the emotional level that exposes feelings, good and bad, through the magic and mystery of the sublime presence and power that art evokes! Emotional Q or “EQ” dominates and supplements us with an energy like no other! We experience our own version of a “Magical Mystery Tour”, as we visit unexplored artistic regions! Our EQ provides us with the perfect guide, helping expose and enhance our artistic feelings on the journey.
Yes, love and hate dictate the emotional overlap in the art world to the outer world. People being who they are, relationships get messy, and so it is with our relationships with art. Messy. There is rarely a clear definitive response, but when there is, it’s either one or the other. But both are related as the pendulum swings back and forth, like our reactions when faced with the Basquiet, the Lautrec, the monster insect of Kafka’s masterpiece, or the grotesque eviscerations of Francis Bacon’s men, Diane Arbus and her freaks, or Anais Nin’s narcissistic journals, Tennessee William’s anguished characters, Kurt Cobain’s angst ridden songs, Or John Water’s underground film personalities, the list goes on and on and on…….
So word on the Street is that people today would rather be electrocuted than spend 15 minutes alone with their own thoughts! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this bizarre yet clearly Orwellian statement. Ok. So for many people today, thoughts, represent pain. Pain that is so excruciating, that jolts of electricity, pulsating through one’s body, would be preferable. WOW! and WOW!
That even the mere idea, of alone time with that thing called “thoughts” is a weird concept, like out of a fairy tale from the 1970’s and before, you know when people actually HAD to think or they were really screwed! Thinking and doing were synonymous with producing anything of value. The empty-headed non – thinker was perceived to be either stupid or mentally deficient. Well, that’s all over.
Blaise Pascal. Don’t you just LOVE his name??? I do. No one has a name as retro-cool as that! But more than his uber cool name are his uber cool thoughts. Yea, because Blaise not only had no fear about thinking, or being alone, or creating, or sitting in his room with his thoughts, he blatantly advertised it, and said all kinds of stuff like:
one of those Oldie Goldie freakazoids who walks around gloating over the fact that they are computer illiterate like some kind of insane claim to fame, while people are thinking oh right you are really just either stupid or senile but Mostly you are freaking OLD! So, it’s called ” get with the program.” Get hooked up. Don’t have to like it. Don’t have to want it. Just do it, because. It’s a fact, that we are all living in an age of Assange melodrama, hookups, wired, electronically programmed and media mesmerized psyches.
Like why is everyone all worked up over Kanye’s rants? Is this really disturbing to you that he actually has an opinion, takes the stage and let’s loose? I mean, I am no fan of his music, really, not my speed, but ok, he clearly is on a venting mission, saturating the public with his thoughts while engaging the media simultaneously. Oh WOW, he thinks? He thinks in surround sound, Bose Sound Amped. It’s Verrry spectacular in its negative attention, creating dual intention, both of which he achieves. Game On! Mission Accomplished!
Everything is sooo fake today. The fake is real,the real is fake. Duh. Ray Bradbury, the author of one of the most famous books alive, Fahrenheit 451′ said that “people would rather watch TV, and that means the demise of books”, when literature goes straight to hell, and the screen rules, thinking tanks. Orwell prophesied this concept of the real/fake dichotomy when he describes Doublethink. ” Doublethink”, “when thought corrupts language, and language corrupts thought”
It’s an ultimate buzz kill because guess what?, dependence on electronics can be like being locked in the ShawShank prison,of technological dependence, with the main concern being, can I pay that Verizon, or Time Warner, Optimum, Vios, because you know all this stuff adds up! Or you take the chance of getting turned off, shut down, and subjected to the pain your intruding and excruciating thought will inevitably cause. The torture chamber of the mind. Your mind.
Ever heard of a painter who sat in front of his canvas with an audience cheering him on? Or a writer at work surrounded by crowds of adoring fans, waiting desperately for him to come up with his next clever phrase, or for the poet to deliver that perfect symbiotic one liner? hahaha. It’s absurd. It doesn’t happen. It’s a myth. It’s not real, Ginsberg wrote his classic HOWL from the depths of soulful angst, past misery, futuristic visions, and present fantastic dreams. An I phone, a computer, a tv, wasn’t involved. Just Ginsberg and his wild creative, original thoughts!
Look, Orwell, said it redundantly in his epic, 1984. The source of creative ideas, thoughts, not the distraction of things, and definitely not when technology monopolizes the individual, to the extent that sitting alone and thinking feels like punishment.
So, the next time you are in a gallery, or have a work of art before you, or pick up a book, or start arguing with your buddy about the words of that Ginsberg poem that makes no sense, ask yourself is this coming from ME? Or is these merely messages superimposed unto my mind through my constant hookup to the machines that I am communicating with all day, everyday? Am I hooked up to the distraction traction of Orwell’s fantasy? Is this the media or me?