art and a lube job
So I was taking a lunch hour, spending way too much money on an aging car with more than 100K miles on it, getting its system completely flushed, and getting my nipples frozen off by the air conditioning inside a tiny Jiffy Lube office, feeling pissed off with the state of the world and having to console myself -- I shit you not -- by reading the latest issue of American Woodworker.
I go to pay the massive bill, and the mechanic notices my cartoon T-shirt of Picasso, the ultimate brilliant misogynist, the glowering stormcloud of "women are either goddesses or doormats" fame:
"Pablo Picasso..."
"Yeah."
"You know, I'm into art myself. Picasso's great. I'm just finishing up my degree... in illustration."
"Yeah? He's probably my favorite. Who's yours?"
"Michelangelo... I've always wanted to go to the Sistine Chapel, to Italy..."
"Florence?"
"Yeah, Florence. Don't get me wrong, Picasso's amazing, but Michelangelo... how the hell did he put veins in his sculptures?"
"Wow."
I thought about this for a while. Although I may live in mortal, serious dread about the direction the country is headed in, and although I may live in utter conviction that the United States will transform itself into playgrounds for the super-rich amongst post-industrial environmental wastelands, there's life out there yet, there's something out there that shows that beauty, and the appreciation of it, will always be there.
My tastes in art have always had a grotesque darker side: whether it's a blood-drenched, drug-fueled Ralph Steadman nightmare of the American Dream gone sour, or a recent translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy into American English and idiom, where the gluttons punish themselves with boxes of donuts under ruined Golden Arches and Sizzlers, the Styx is now Venice Beach, and the Celestial Pilot into Purgatory is a MUNI bus.
Brilliant and sardonic, but not exactly life-affirming.
Now, the Sistine Chapel -- I bet that would be something else entirely.