Art is Useless, WTF

I hung out at Hungarian last night with Tyler and his friend Ron.  He met Ron at the coffee shop and the two of them are scientists, Ron is an out of work physics who has a two year old child.  I think her name was Sylvie and she slept the whole time we talked.  Ron is an incredibly informed person with a great memory, focus, and ability to organize his thoughts.  However he had such a strong personal sequencing to his logic that he would skip over, rather than submerge himself in, the structures of comments that Tyler and I made.  It was a minor character flaw next to his immensity and I felt embarrassed that I had to monitor my frustration at him being a hit or miss listener.  He was a huge person, inspiringly driven and, above all, crafted by years and layers of education.  He didn’t seem to have a lot of respect for the humanities, preferring to ground himself in the objective truth (mapping) of science. The experience really shook me, and caused me to call into question my devotion to the arts.  I half listened, head downturned in prayer to the writing of Robert Smithson.  Smithson’s personal narrative of time and space collapsing into points, aesthetic science.  I would drift into the conversation of Ron and Tyler, the function of neutrinos, back to Smithon, mirrors are masterpieces, voids delivering perfect form.  Walking through to other side, to look back from a new perspective, displaced. 

The Talking Heads movie title ‘Stop Making Sense’ was pulled from a song about losing sight while growing old, but it's also a a catchphrase for the liberating gateway of all art.  Loving art is loving storytellers, without facts.  It makes me feel frustrated to tears.   I am devoting myself to things that are ends in themselves, a toolbox of instruments that function for a physical or mental transformation without the need to be correct.  All art is partially pretty, decorative.  Frivolous like a flower, transmitters, mystic, secreting energy, but without practicality, perhaps a devotion to being useless.  I want to read all the time, have conversations through spacetime with authors and thinkers, public friends.  I want to care only about the best path of my thinking.  Life is wonderfully frustrating and nauseating.  I would like to go back to school and still make videos.  Where do I place my focus to serve myself best?  Where can I walk with the least amount of compromise?  How do I make money to live but respect myself and the devotion of my hours?  First I have to get out of debt.  Above all I want to read better, and I feel a requirement to publish necessary statements that stimulate others.  So I will continue to craft videos, to live between confidence and doubt, and do it, always, better.  I have friends in LA.  I want everything to be polished but ripe with intention.  More intention than material.  Give me money and technology, make me professional, so I can say things that should reach the eyes of others.  The church of public attention.  The symbols of mass devotion.  Guide in a useful way.  The flute master leading the rats from the sewer to god only knows where, a delusion that is constructive?  A death of their rationality, an escape?