Kids These Days

Once upon a time I stood in line at the grocery store to buy cat food, and heard this time honored phrase: "I just don't get it: what is it with kids these days anyway?" I thought about the answer: MTV, Reality TV, Tevo, (i.e. television, television, Dante, The Karate Kid, kids these days, etc...my mind wandered). Then I looked over to see a newspaper with the image of a Muslim woman holding a baby. The message being: "Look they have little babies just like the rest of us."

Walking home, my backpack full of ground up animal byproduct I would feed the large black cat sleeping on my porch, I thought about kids and Muslims. I soon came to the thought that kids are like Muslims. They get a bad rap because of the loud obnoxious ones, or the ones who can't write a decent short story so they turn to the gun, but all in all the majority of them are quietly masturbating with their mother's lotion, or scribbling obsenities on the pages of Vogue. They are an oppressed people sure, but most aren't nearly as irksome or truculent as the bad ones make them out to be. Most can even spell, and actually want to be part of the larger world of responsibilities. They want to vote, travel, and have decent paying jobs with good health care benefits. So the next time you see a kid, don't cower in fear or think about what he really wants to do if he were only given the resources, but remember that you were like that once --you too were once not allowed to vote, walk the city during a school day, or purchase a bottle of wine for your loved ones.

The Critics

most critics know almost nothing about art because they constantly use the criteria of the past
when art is obviously an experimental thing that happens only in the present
so that the critic is always necessarily at best one step behind

the argument would be that there are laws
and archetypes
that are the critics heuristic bag

well that is true
and in this way innovation can be measured
but still when something truly new and important comes along

the critics are almost always at a loss
but of course
just because the critics are at a loss doesn't mean something interesting is happening