Answer the Question: What Good is Art?

What good is art? I would love to see your insightful and original responses to this question? Please send your answers to karamonterey@hotmail.com with the subject line "What good is art?" by October 28th. I will post my favorite answers on the blog next week! Please share this with anyone you think may be interested in participating. I can't wait to see your thoughts!

6 Brilliant Songs with Fire/Burning Analogies

1) Ashes and Wine-A Fine Frenzy

"Is there a chance?
A fragment of light at the end of the tunnel?
A reason to fight?
Is there a chance you may change your mind?
Or are we ashes and wine?"

2) A Lifetime Burning-One Less Reason

"‘Cause I don’t believe I failed you
Are your lies still coming true?
Do you still think the better days are gone?
‘Cause after all the things we’ve been through
Years so hard to lose
Give me a life of half love, half hope, half true
Or a lifetime burning with you"

3) Come Wake Me Up-Rascal Flatts

"Tonight your memory burns like a fire
With every one it grows higher and higher
And I can't get over it, I just can't put out this love
I just sit in these flames and pray that you'll come back
Close my eyes tightly, hold on and hope that I'm dreaming
 Come wake me up"

4) Stars-Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

"I lit a fire with the love you left behind
And it burned wild and crept up the mountainside
I followed your ashes into outer space
I can’t look out the window, I can’t look at this place.
I can’t look at the stars
They make me wonder where you are
Stars, up on heaven’s boulevard
And if I know you at all, I know you’ve gone too far
So I, I can’t look at the stars."

5) Slow Dancing in a Burning Room-John Mayer

"We're going down
And you can see it too
We're going down
And you know that we're doomed
My dear, we're slow dancing in a burning room"

6) Set Fire to the Rain-Adele

"But there's a side to you that I never knew, never knew
All the things you'd say, they were never true, never true
And the games you play, you would always win, always win
But I set fire to the rain
Watched it pour as I touched your face
Let it burn while I cry
'Cause I heard it screaming out your name, your name"

My Favorite Quotations from the book "We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse" by James Hillman and Michael Ventura

Ventura: "We have these idealizations that make us feel crazy, even though we don't see any of these ideals in life. I feel crazy that I can't be in one relationship all my life, even though I look around and where do I see anybody in one relationship all their lives."
 Hillman: "I know people who've been married fifty years and more."
 Ventura: "So do I, and one partner's an alcoholic, or one's played around a lot or been away a lot, they haven't made love in decades (literally), or one is a closet gay. These aren't abstract examples, these are people I know. Most fifty year wedding anniversaries would look very different if you knew what everybody's covering up. Yet we keep measuring ourselves against these ideals."

"Anytime you're gonna grow, you're gonna lose something. You're losing what you're hanging onto to keep safe. You're losing habits you're comfortable with, you're losing familiarity."

"Memory is a form of fiction, and we can't help that. So we are very much the creation of the stories we tell ourselves. And we don't know we're telling stories."

"Rilke said about therapy, "I don't want the demons taken away because they're going to take away my angels too." Wounds and scars are the stuff of character."

"That's why one needs to read the biographies of artists, because biographers show what they did with their traumas; they show what can be done-not what they did-but what can be done by the imagination with hatred, with resentment, with bitterness, with feelings of being useless and inferior and worthless."

"Yes, if you're artist you know that stuff is your ore-you know that, and that's why so many artists steer clear of therapy. They don't want that ore processed in the wrong way."

"You know, there's a feeling about a good day-it's slow, and very much like being with a lover. Having a good moment at breafast, tasting something-it has to do with beauty, this matter of love. And I think all the "work" at personal relationships fucks that up. That "work" is not aesthetic and sensuous, which is really what love, for me, is about. Aesthetic and sensuous, and a kind of joy. Love doesn't result from working at something. So the therapeutic approach to love, of clearing up the relationship, may clear up communication disorders, expression inhibitions, insensitive habits; may even improve sex, but I don't think it releases love; I don't think love can be worked at."

"That's what love is about-aesthetic and sensuous. And when that aspect isn't functioning, the other person because a little bit of a camel, carrying so much weight through the desert of the relationship-your baggage, the other person's baggage. No wonder camels spit."

"Dizzy Gillespie said, 'All the music is out there in the first place, all of it. From the beginning of time, the music was there. All you have to do is try to get a little piece of it. I don't care how great you are, you only get a little piece of it.'"

"Or suppose a person conceives of her childhood illness (that kept her and out of touch during crucial socializing years) to have been early practice at the work she does now, like writing in solitude or inventing electric devices or becoming a therapist. She had to be isolated for those years in order to follow her seed."

"How rare is it to speak well about ourselves. Write well we can do. Poems, short stories of childhood, biographical excursions, even descriptions of intense emotions-these all are the very stuff of writing. But the soul seems reluctant to speak eloquently of itself. When I try to tell you directly what I feel and what's going on inside, personally, there comes a jumble of circumlocutions, coagulated phrases, interrupted qualifiactions, "Undisciplined squads of emotion!" as T.S. Eliot said.

"As Eric Hoffer said, 'You can never get enough of what you don't really want.'"

"I need to be forgiven so bad that I'll do this so you can forgive me for it, and I'll keep hitting you so you can keep on forgiving me, because I need forgiveness over and over-"

"It Was A Kindness You Done" A Brilliant Movie Clip!

In memory of actor Michael Clarke Duncan, who recently died, I wanted to post a clip of a brilliant scene he was in from the movie "Green Mile." This is not only my favorite scene in the movie, but in my opinion, one of the greatest movie scenes of all time. If you've never seen this brilliant and heartbreaking movie, I highly suggest you do!

10 Great Quotes From the Poetry of W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden was an Anglo-American poet often regarded by critics as one of the great writers of the 21st century. Below are ten of my favorites lines from his poetry. What is your favorite?

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever:

I was wrong.”

“All the clocks in the city

Began to whir and chime:

'O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.'"

“These are enough

Leftovers to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week--

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--

To love all our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.”

"How should we like it were stars to burn 

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me."

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,

Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,

Suffering too little or too long,

Too careful even in our selfish loves:

The decorative manias we obey

Die in grimaces round us every day,

Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice

Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice. ”

“For the error bred in the bone

Of each woman and each man

Craves what it cannot have,

Not universal love

But to be loved alone”

“Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,

Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,

Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh

There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.”

“The nightingales are sobbing in

The orchards of our mothers,

And hearts that we broke long ago

Have long been breaking others.”

"Admirer as I think I am 

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day."

Great Morrissey Song Lyrics

“Disappointment came to me,
and booted me,
and bruised and hurt me,
but that's how people grow up.”

“Now this might disturb you, but I find I'm OK by myself;
and I don't need you or your benevolence to make sense.”

“I can chase you, and I can catch you,
but there is nothing I can do to make you mine.”

“Don't leave it all unsaid,
somewhere in the wasteland of your head.”

“When I'm lying in my bed I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me.”

“I don't mind if you forget me.
Having learned my lesson,
I never left an impression on anyone.”

“I was wasting my time, praying for love.
For a love that never comes, from someone who does not exist.”

“I am hated for loving.
I am haunted for wanting.”

“So the life I have made
May seem wrong to you
But, I've never been surer
It's my life to ruin
My own way...”

“There are more than enough
to fight and oppose;
why waste good time
fighting the people you like?”

“You say: 'Oh, please forgive'
You say: 'Oh, live and let live.'
But sorry doesn't help us.
Sorry will not save us.
Sorry is just a word you find so easy to say (so you say it anyway).
Sorry doesn't help us.
Sorry won't protect us.
Sorry won't undo all the good gone wrong.”

“Age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life! You're either marvelous or you're boring, regardless of your age.”

“A sad fact widely known
The most impassionate song
To a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown..."

"And when you're dancing and laughing
And finally living
Hear my voice in your head
And think of me kindly”

Favorite Quotations From the Movie "Closer"

Dan: And you left him, just like that?

Alice: It's the only way to leave. "I don't love you anymore. Goodbye."

Dan: Supposing you do still love them?

Alice: You don't leave.

Dan: You've never left someone you still love?

Alice: Nope.

Dan: I fell in love with her, Alice.

Alice: Oh, as if you had no choice? There's a moment, there's always a moment, "I can do this, I can give into this, or I can resist it", and I don't know when your moment was, but I bet you there was one.

Dan: Deception is brutal, I'm not pretending otherwise.

Alice: How? How does it work? How do you do this to someone?

 [Dan is silent]

Alice: Not good enough!

Dan: It's not safe out there.

Alice: Oh, and it's safe in here?

Alice: I don't want to lie. I can't tell the truth. So it's over.

Alice: How can one man be so endlessly disappointing?

Dan: That's my charm.

Larry: She doesn't want to be happy.

Dan: Everybody wants to be happy.

Larry: Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing.

Alice: Where is this love? I can't see it, I can't touch it. I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.