HERCULANEUM

LOVE this. In France, where artists and writers are highly respected, they're never asked anything cynical about how one makes a living - they're not really interested in salaries. They're interested in ideas and concepts. They're interested in depth.

Here in North America, with a bitter tongue, and a narrow-minded intellect focused on $$$ (as though that ever made anyone "happy"), when people meet artists here, they immediately ask the question of how one makes a living, or "Oh yeah? What restaurant do you work at?"

Beyond the crass, hopelessness of making an obscene amount of money, beyond those wild and frantic shores, there's poetry. And music. And theatre and literature and dance and art... This desperate, pathetic capitalist society doesn't appreciate it or value it. Because currently, this society IS so desperate and delusional... Grasping at ghosts. And it's starving and malnourished because of it. But to me, what feeds the spirit and the mind, is art. What makes the unbearable, bearable is art in and of itself. It's what lifts us up off our knuckles into something divine. It's what sets us apart...

And really, let's be honest, any rodent can hoard food.

********************** * Photographed over three years from all over the world... A self portrait. (Thank you for this video contribution, Don. It sounds a bit familiar...) ***********************************