When Facebook Becomes Blogging

 We in America take science and/or religion very seriously, whichever side of that divide we fall on. We obviously take politics extremely seriously. But we don't take the humanities seriously because even those of us who hate most things about America are still Americans, and we're taught here that with enough effort and work, we can create the world we long to see. But we can't. Every victory is stolen from the jaws of defeat. And that's a lesson Americans still find unacceptable. With no defeat, there's no reason for art because ultimately, we have no reason to understand why our lives aren't turning out the way we want. And then you look at Bruegel and Bosch, Grunewald and Gentilleschi, Goya and Munch and Bacon, you listen to Bach and Tallis and Gesualdo and Mahler and Shostakovich, and you read Homer and the Bible, or Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, or Blake and Shelley, or you watch Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Mizoguchi and Herzog and Kieslowski and S. Ray, and you realize that people have been exactly here throughout history so many times, but America has not been here since the days of the Civil War and all the atrocities which led up to it, and consequently, we've never had the heartbreak to need consolation that reaches that deep into us yet. The only arguable ones are Emily Dickinson, the genius shutin, William Faulkner or Mark Rothko, who are not exactly artists to be understood by everybody, Coppola, who hasn't made a great movie in 40 years, Melville and Ellison, who both wrote only one great book, and Kubrick, who is Mr. Machine. Frank Miller is a fascist, and it suffuses every frame of his comics. I still have to read Octavia Butler. A lot of the great science fiction writers are very long on foreseeing what comes today, but they're not exactly long on feeling. Maybe Will Eisner is the best choice for this kind of pessimism and whom we can ultimately turn to who had a vision of what was coming... Or maybe it's the great TV shows of the last twenty years: The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. Certainly they're more pessimistic than anything which came before. And I have great hope for Kara Walker, but even the greatest of the great here are generally artists of optimism or cynicism, but not pessimism: Whitman, Frost, Twain, Cather, Bellow, Dylan, O. Redding, H. Williams, W. Guthrie, C. Berry, R. Johnson, J. Darnielle, S. Stevens, (excuse the pretentious way I'm saying their names, I want to show I'm taking them seriously), R Newman (seriously), Coltrane, Davis, Ellington, Armstrong, Parker, Monk, Tatum, Ives, Sondheim, Gershwin, Copland, Cowell, Welles, Scorsese, Spielberg, S. Lee, Hawks, Ford, Keaton, Altman, Lynch, Tarantino, Linklater, PT Anderson, W. Anderson, Ditko, Kirby, Crumb, M. Weiner, Groening, and a host of standup comedians whom it's probably good not to mention these days ... All of them are great, maybe even towering, but hope and cynicism is what suffuses their work. Well, now we're here, and hope is in wickedly short supply. Art this great and this dark has been there for us to observe from other countries the whole time, and the greatest American artists to take their place alongside masters like that now have their chance. It will.probably come from the minority margins of American life, and no one will welcome them more happily than me.