* Make Art, Not War : The Enshrining Instinct

Every time you see a bottle of  Adolph's Meat Tenderizer, thank your cultural lucky stars that one of its founders, Lloyd E. Rigler, donated his fortune to create Classic Arts Showcase, the  24-hour-a-day FREE televised performances of great  music, opera, ballet and art  provided to any public access station in America that requests it, funded without advertising for the next twenty years


I have just watched  on CAS a tour of  Beethoven's Vienna, for example, with Fidelio playing in the background by the Slovak Philharmonia Orchestra.


Classic Arts Showcase  has taken me inside all of the great concert halls of the world; flown me in a helicopter over 20 chateaux  in France with music of Haydn playing in the background; provided me first-hand film performances of Maria Callas, Igor Stravinksy, Leopold Stokowski, Marlene Dietrich, Marian Anderson, Artur Rubinstein, George Gershwin, Vladimir Horowitz ----You get the picture (literally and metaphorically).


What impresses me most is the spectacular architecture human beings have created for centuries to house their art and artistic performances. Perhaps the enshrining of aesthetics and aesthetes in such amazing architectural beauty somehow offsets the enshrining of violence in war.


For forty years I have had the impulse to enshrine moments and people in history against the vicissitudes of fad and fashion: the Kent State Collection, Macintosh at Yale, The Wilder Commemorative, Doctor Bainton, Miss Vivien Kellems, the Mayor of Camel's Hump, Irene O'Malley, Mother, The Disappearance of Sam Todd, Jay Whitehair, and The Maestro.


Blogger has allowed me to do so (links above) in a more permanent way.


Although, one spectacular attack by malware on Google and all of my blogs could become digital dust (or meat tenderizer)  in the wind.