Bloc

Abandoned and boarded up: Socialist Realism was to Art what Socialist Politics was to Freedom

Social expectations are such that absurdity in conversation is a relief; stay scattered and out of focus, ignore all but the most pressing current events, find the common color of conformity and camouflage your thoughts and being accordingly. Play the game. Talk about shoes and cars, parrot political opinions.

As an artist, one participates and observes. It is a phenomenon of consciousness, this relentless desire to experience more than the world of objects and subjective emotions, perhaps a driving instinct of a mind and spirit skeptical of the idea that man is the measure of all things.

And it's impossible to pretend not to notice that commercial culture is as totalitarian and conformist and bland as Sozialistischer Realismus, and the moreso when it purports to reflect "freedom" .

Press to play DEMO: Looking Back (Fire In The Hills)

Budapest hour glass-- Dominik Panzió , rooms haunted by Dominican monks, water pitcher cooling on the windowsill, spotless, spartan, a poet's cell

Rain on Heroes' Square, Hősök tere at the end of Andrássy Avenue, automobiles rattling down cobblestones, Communists overthrown, birds chattering out French windows like machine gun fire, evening sky opening to sweet rain again

Long walk past Churchill and Reagan, soccer kicks, children, dogs, lovers at play down the ancient carriage trail-- everywhere graffiti echoes individual identity, fading now after the fall of proletarian rule

Have I any reason to oblige you with gratuitous, predictable obscenity?

What a grand gesture. Let it then be V, for victorious dreams.

The Old and New Worlds are not so distant as history suggests, drawing breath, casting away chains and dread of failed Marxist Empire.

Love songs, pop songs, flicker in and out of earshot through the window of Room 100 and down the alley. Green leaves and a sky of electric blue darken to scorched blackness of wrought iron with night's cooling approach. Morning brings a train.

Recollections in tranquility, dreams of Beat Burroughs, Kerouac, Cassady, Ginsberg in the monk's cell-- birdsongs, first light with ambient trills, pigeons cooing harmonies, staccato burst of mockingbird rhythm, crow calls drifting in mossy courtyards

--bread, meat, butter, coffee, wallpaper "kiss me" europopsong train station 1884, flights of birds under vaulted roof... landscape rolls past filled with white windmills... conversation Australian son, a writer who won't work or graduate college, writing stories quote about self-absorbtion unquote-- the narratives deny all but subjective truth, black is white because I say "postmodern", now he has American agent

Imperial palace, room full of mirrors where prodigy Mozart played, candles lit in St. Stephan's Cathedral, stacks of bone in the catacombs exiting into the doorway where the prodigy was given last rites

Eyes cut our way-- football finals progressing, the President is in Slovenia, No One Is Innocent Kunsthalle Wien retrospective PUNK
-- Beatles retrospective musical subway poster group Rain, clash of
dim echoes in juxtaposition of cultures ancient and cultures modern.

Quiet restaurant, boulevard, streets of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith
for summer nights-- so rock music and poetry still hold meaning for someone--

Meaning.

A greater power and purpose, anything beyond mere ego, egotism, egocentric self-absorbtion-- the idea exists before the object, has value beyond the spit and drivel of physicality and science without mystery--

Rock music does not have to be disposable and worthless; it can be about a greater power and purpose. Rock music can, indeed, be an art form. At its best we hear and see those possibilities. Most often, we take for granted it offers little more than mindless machismo and the facile angst of the ignorant, that it plays to the most common and base

instincts of its fans; these are spoon-fed malign nihilistic images and existentially absurd political ideologies. They are given what they want.

Sooner or later they want more. Aesthetic senses programmed, the choice of a more satisfying music diminished, they regress into mere nostalgia and the vague, unfocused sensation of generic sounds, speaking aloud to robot radios, "Play genre Rock". No Exit. Huis Clos.

The limited audience, being replaced as often as they can be labeled a "generation", supports the fast money and the "star making machinery", and therein lies the conundrum for the artist.

For some, repelled by idle fantasy, the choice is art, transcendence, and the support of an audiences who know they deserve more than that
to which they are accustomed. It is an audience larger than the small minds of record company A&R jockeys can comprehend, while the recording industry is in a state of free-fall.