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A FLY IN THE OINTMENT There is no place on earth, except maybe for zoos, where polar bears and penguins live together. While showering before church this morning I pulled a long brown hair out of my beard. I don't know how it got there—my fiancée is an ocean away and most of my friends here in Canada are men. This hair was as long as my forearm. I stood staring at it for quite a while. How did hair this long get into my beard? How does this happen? I folded my arms in deep contemplation as the shower continued. Eventually I realized the mystery was less important than my father's water bill, and got on with it. I saw a Christmas play about the birth of Jesus Christ. It was acted out by children reading verses from the Bible. Although the kids were cute, they mostly read their lines on paper, in monotone, and off-mic. I remember thinking, "More effort should've been put into this." My computer has no viruses that I know of. Today I visited the U.S. Department of State website and downloaded a large picture of Hillary Clinton. My laptop feels safer, somehow, with her face on it. Sometimes I wonder if Christians have anything relevant to say in the arts. I watched "A Clockwork Orange" by Stanley Kubrick. It was disturbing and I didn't really like it, but it's ten times as good as any film a Christian's ever made. Christians make good music. As novelists they're pretty awful. I saw a Christian video game once; it was ugly, derivative, and only marginally playable. Canada is super cold in the wintertime. Last week I took my dog for a walk and it was so cold outside that the poor thing was hopping on three paws. Her fourth paw was in the air; every ten steps or so she would drop it and rotate to the next paw in line. It was pathetic to watch. My fiancée suggested I buy little boots for the dog to wear, but I'm an animal lover so this is out of the question. In Boynton Beach, Florida last year a woman's house was robbed. Since she'd been robbed once before, she had security cameras in her house. These were special cameras that transmitted their signal, live, to a feed available on the internet. One day this woman was at work. She went online to check the cameras, only to see two young men robbing her house. Scared, she called 9-1-1. Police promptly surrounded the house and the young men were arrested (video here). Perhaps the most distressing thing about this story is the woman's four pets (a cat, a bird, and two dogs) who witnessed the crime taking place and yet did nothing. The cat and the bird can be forgiven—these are selfish animals. But the two dogs? Wagging your tails in obtuse silence as hoodlums plunder the Nintendo Wii! Just what kind of guard dogs are you? When I was a youngster my mother told me not to say anything if I had nothing nice to say. This may be good career advice; from an artistic standpoint it's creative suicide. After 300 years of expression the verdict is in: contemporary art, like laughter, is essentially grief-driven. There are few things as funny as a pratfall, and few songs as beautiful as a cry of human desperation. This poses problems for a sensitive soul in times of good fortune. If misery is at the bottom of the creative enterprise, then how is an artist to deal with happy circumstances? Does he buck the trend and find expression through worship and joy? Or does he saw his own arm off? In general I'm happier these days. This bothers me some. I can thank God for a restful spirit, but it's a struggle to overcome being happy enough to have something meaningful to say. -murrayjames 12/31/09 |