Talking About Art

I have this desire to blog all the time or at least on some sort of consistent schedule but two weeks into this restart I'm already reminded that I don't consistently have anything to talk about. I don't want to turn this into a public diary so I can't talk about the horrors of family holidays without getting too personal about my Thanksgiving and I do have a half written draft about 40s era musicals, Glee and how I'm trying to balance culture that I enjoy while being mindful of the messages in some of it that bother me. But I'm still trying to find the right words that say what I need to without saying something I don't. 

Working off of that I can talk about how as much as I consume art in all its form I find it hard to talk about because so much of it just is what it is to me. I very rarely have some sort of deep, theoretical explanation for why I enjoy something. Art is all emotional expression and response to me.

I love Modern Art but I'm not good at defending it against its detractors who see nothing but splatters of paint on a  canvas because I can't put into intellectual, debatable terms the emotions some pieces of art provoke in me. There are books I love because they were written by an author who knows how to use words and loves language and writes something that evokes a strong response from me whether or not I got into the story at all and there are books that I love because no matter how simply written the book consumes me with a need to know what happens.

I have my music to dance to, my music to work to, my music to drive to and my music that crawls under my skin, becomes a part of me and/or says something that I need to say but can't. Sometimes there's a song or an artist that fill more than one box.  I love Bruce Springsteen because he writes good songs. They're well composed, well sung, well written, meaningful, etc. But I also love Bruce because I'm from Jersey, went down the Shore every summer, have driven Route 9, the Parkway, the Turnpike, etc hundreds of times and can see and hear and smell (no jokes on that one) home in all of his early work.

There's a recording out there of a live performance of Thunder Road from 1975 that's just Bruce, Roy Bittan, a piano and a harmonica and I'd love to write a thesis paper on why its the best thing ever but it all really just boils down to everything I feel when I listen to it and all the places and moments it takes me back to. I think that's why I love social networking sites like Tumblr and Blip because I can just throw a photo or a song or a quote up with the intended purpose of simply stating "I like this." or "I'm inspired." or "This is how I feel right now but playing you this song will be better than me trying to talk about it."