It was more than twenty years ago.

My dear mother, Adele, was excited. We were at the Hollywood Bowl on a cool Los Angeles evening. Leonard Bernstein was giving a concert. The Bowl was nearly packed. People had brought wine and food for a night under the stars, and a few managed to twinkle through the dissipated haze.

The show began. Lots of applause. Adele and I were ready. We were sitting on a blanket high up on the hill. Then, instead of any familiar compositions, Bernstein confronted the audience with a variety of dissonant sounds. Popular scores from Westside Story would not play out this evening. 

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Fine tune your understanding. Unique is not different, for different implies different from something that already exists.

Here are a few words on the subject from my book, An Artist Empowered:

As the master has said: art is unique. But that doesn’t preclude aberrations and posers from finding an audience. Unique isn’t a synonym for different; in the same way, being one of a kind doesn’t imply awareness, only curiosity.

Unique for our purposes means original, which is the inevitable and extraordinary outcome of soul awareness.

The subject of art school came up again.

Art school can teach art history, materials, and technique. Art school cannot instruct you on how to be an artist for one simple reason. No one can teach you to be original.

This is easy to understand yet for many, difficult to believe.

Some years back a master artist put things into concise clarity by telling me that: “Nothing supercedes character.”

There, in one declarative sentence, he had cut through all the nonsense and density of the world. Here was the essence, the code of conduct, of what most people truly respect, even if they cannot yet put it into words. Here, he drew a line in the sand, the bottom line that showed on which side you stood.

Do you stand for something or are you a fence sitter?

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The air is ripe with politicos, promises, and planned futures. In the melee, let us remember to be vigilant concerning our own thoughts, understandings, and conclusions. Let us not repeat slogans that we do not understand or venerate those who have not earned it. True leadership promotes independence.

With deference to our feathered friends, let us not parrot words. As those reading this blog may have noted, I encourage abstinence from such weak filler words as hope and wish, and the dangers of obvious are often not apparent. 

Here is an apt repost from July 3, 2004:

We the People

In the Declaration of Independence, we read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The ink that would soon turn blood red and now flowed black from Thomas Jefferson’s pen did not write: We hope these truths are obvious.

To its credit, there is not a single utterance of hope or any other passive word in this magical document that the Founding Fathers bestowed upon posterity.

Remember what the master from India said: “It is better to live in fulfillment than in hope.”