This morning while munching a sliced green Granny apple and sipping a strong black java, the clever people at Apple Music lured me into a selection under their Listen Now category called New Music Mix. I am listening to it now, piped into my Bose Micro SoundLink to which my MacBook Pro is connected by Bluetooth. What a marvellous abbreviation of domestic technology! Often I proclaim to anyone in sight that Apple Music is one of the best things to happen! Before Apple Music I confined my musical research to retail music stores which displayed their CDs in the manner of files in a cabinet through which one sorted by flipping plastic covers.
This morning’s adventurous choice of music is itself another sign of novelty as engaging as a notification I coincidentally received from Microscope Gallery in New York City.
Microscope is very pleased to welcome Ayanna Dozier back to the gallery for her first solo exhibition titled “This Country Makes it Hard to Fuck.”
The title of the series alludes to the artist’s activities as a small time teenage-age arsonist, which she views as a response to a restrictive household.
Off-beat material such as this is not my normal medium of recreational pursuit. It nonetheless tickles me to hear, read and see these unfamiliar and uniquely personal expressions (whether dignified or not by the label artistic). To be clear I wouldn’t fashion myself as characteristically modern. In fact I tend more to the traditional in everything, literature, music, clothing, jewelry, furniture, rugs and cars. I do however have what I assume is a telling penchant for colour, brilliance and the sea (including everything related thereto).
What I believe may have stimulated my artistic and overall curiosity about life is no more flattering than the recognition that time is running out. Never before have I felt this urgency other than as a prosaic acknowledgment of inevitability. Lately however I find myself pondering – almost with an element of intrigue – the dreadful (or should I say peracute) subject of death. It is at once a bracing subject and an energizing topic, not unlike a cool dip in a pool when recovering from a hangover. It shocks one’s system while liberating it from ritual confinement. It may be nothing more than something new; but at ¾ a century of age something new is more than a little distracting.
The kinetic feature of the burgeoning discovery is the frank admission of what we all are in line for. Given the well-known speed of time, the apprehension is no more than a signal that it’s your turn to go through the door to the other side. Certainly the putative beliefs of native Indians in the so-called afterlife is somewhat enabling but I am more attached to the immediacy of the venture; namely, what can I do to profit by every moment that remains? And with shamelessly unqualified sport?