Ah, the engaging joys of cultural happiness!

Culture slams us with a clever shock to the system. If you are like me you go rolling along with all the errands and the minuscule stuff and then you get up and read some Gustave Flaubert or A. Rimbaud or perhaps Arthur Miller or the crafty Henry Miller. And Whap, Bam, POW!!! Like a wild one in a graphic novel, the old brain of yours is nailed down strong by the slashing energy of a profoundly profane and yes delightful cultural maelstrom. I enjoy the shrewd literary achievement that is so prevalent in all the "furniture" of the works of the French master, Gustave Flaubert. And the bright, perplexing and delicious provocative joy that is inherent in the poetic, virile angst of A. Rimbaud is also a remarkable sense of joyful, heh, heh, brain food. One friend used to kid me when he learned I listened to Mahler to relax. He figured I was way intense. Well, Lord I am intense but that is why I enjoy and so passionately appreciate the intense souls of good culture I have come across in my reading. When you read Henry Miller and his merry 'Tropic' tomes and of course when you read the bright and brash, soulful plays of the wild playwright master, Arthur Miller....Then you know your brain has gone on into a new sphere and you have gained some wondrous nirvana that is so tremendously satisfying to one's appetite much like the incredible films of the great Japanese film maker, Akira Kurosawa. I confess when I first saw the intense, highly complex film of Akira Kurosawa -- 'Rashomon'-- it indeed blew me away with its multi-layered vistas of deep cinematic meaning. Also, when I enjoyed the modern film take of Kurosawa, the one called 'Yojimbo' it got me really going intellectually for it was loaded with so many definitive dimensions of vivid power. I am trying to say that the cumulative impact of multi-dimensional culture is a remarkable ingredient in a soul-driven recipe to energize our lives.

Willem de Kooning: Dynamic Art in Action

I love the kind of art that is startling. For that reason I am particularly interested in the works of the abstract expressionists. One of my favorite people in this category is the Dutch-born American painter, Willem de Kooning. It is unique in the genius of Willem de Kooning that he broke through the rigorous confines of cubism and ventured out into a vivid sphere of the profane and the terrific aura of irony that tends to grab us and turn us into members of his esthetic fan club. The slick delicious aspect of the art of Willem de Kooning is his approach to comprehensive interpretations of the brisk mind-set that is indicative of contemporary anxiety with all of its odd manifestations. His series of paintings of women produced a lot of conversation because of the rather bizarre, violent imagery that he brought to his works. Much like the somewhat sardonic tone of the literary works of Henry Miller, the unusual excitement that is profoundly explosive in Willem de Kooning's works is truly fascinating for its "action painting" clever esthetic interpretation. Henry Miller was so sophisticated in his cleverness. And William de Kooning, also, is a man who has a strong intellectual dynamic that has a tremendous amount of strong appeal in our turbulent American world of the 21st Century.