On Monday night I was watching an episode of American Experience on PBS that was focusing on New Orleans. Interviews with various scholars and artists painted a picture of the cultural history of the city, and included a visual artist named John T. Scott, whose name I recognized but couldn’t place identifiable works to. So I googled and then recognized his brightly colored, “optical jazz” sculptures because of their placement around my alma mater, Michigan State University. Scott is an alumni as well (many years before me), and, to dish out some trivia, studied under Jackson Pollock’s brother, Charles Pollack.

His works and spiritual philosophy behind the creative process are worth looking into, and reflect his contribution to the tv program, pointing out that with the artistic culture of New Orleans, it was, and is, one of the few communities without divisions between folk art and fine art. Instead, its an all encompassing collaboration entwined into the culture of the city, where a population lives and breathes its creative traditions into their daily lives, embracing and feeding off all its levels of refinement. That sort of complete involvement of the arts within the daily life is something found in traditional cultures but has unfortunately been disassembled in the Western and capitalist world. I’m not going to even touch possible blame or list reasons why that is (just point your finger at Bush and his cronies) but instead use my energies to mention that quality found in an artistic style-- music, painting, dance, story, film-- has less to do with content and substance than how it matters. And with that said, I’m out of here for the evening to head down to the brewery and check out a saxophonist in from Chicago named Doug Rosenberg. Going to be fun.