Do it in Quotes

I was reading this essay about Larry Rivers, the grandfather of pop art, and how New York queered the idea of modern art. The premise was that a lot of pop art was a revolt against the macho attitude of abstract expressionism. The abstract expressionists were the first generation to experience New York as a real player in the art world, but when the second generation came around, they weren't so impressed. They thought the abstract expressionists were to serious, or a phony sort of serious.

The essay went on about how drag shows were sort of these women in quotes, nobody was trying to pass as a woman. They were quoting femininity. Larry Rivers started doing this with famous paintings, he repainted them in quotes. And so pop art was born according to some guy who wrote for a text book, the cliffsnotes of the cliffsnotes.

I really like the idea of in quotes, I'm also very interested in italics and parenthesis... The above image is a second generation of this earlier post. I painted up this objunc before I read the essay, but it now seems so appropriate. There's this sort of former hipster as Mary. Nylon quotes the Bible, and in turn the Bible (faith) sort of follows the fads. Moral Zeitgeist is the new buzz word, the progressive shifting of our moral beliefs. Biblical morality doesn't follow some cosmic tyrant; Biblical morality follows about five steps behind the moral zeitgeist. But.

Moral zeitgeist, moral relativism, moral fashion.

There's this three mile stretch of road that I like to walk at night. I always notice the corpses of dead birds on the sidewalk. I suppose they fall to their death from the power lines when they get to exhausted from the heat. Tonight while I was walking this road, I was also listening to CAKE, I don't know why anyone ever stopped listening to them. I was listening to their debut album, Motorcade of Generosity. These are some of the lyrics.

You see birds fall from the window ledge above mine.
Then they flap their wings at the last second.
I can see their dead weight
Just dropping like stones
For small loaves of bread
Past my window all the time.
But unless I get up,
Walk across the room
And peer down below,
I don't see their last second curves
Toward a horizontal flight.
All these birds just falling from the ledge like stones.

Now due to a construct in my mind
That makes their falling and their flight
Symbolic of my entire existence,
It becomes important for me
To get up and see
Their last second curves toward flight.
It's almost as if my life will fall
Unless I see their ascent.

I counted twelve corpses on my way home. There's also monsoon weather around here every couple of weeks, so half of these former birds are these ratty looking piles that blend in with the debris that's collected around them in the wind. I hope that's not symbolic of my entire existence, but the serendipity of having unsolicited lyrics to match my walk cannot be ignored.