ANOTHER DAY, another question on Quora begging for an answer from me. (Well, maybe not begging, but looking like it requires my attention.) Hopefully, my answer will be unlike others that will be posted and if it doesn’t inform, will at least entertain.
The question was, “Can you name an artist or musician you had never heard of that people said was good and you discovered those people were right?” My answer can be found indented between the two images below.
Too many to list
The answer that everybody should have to the question, “Can you name an artist or musician you had never heard of that people said was good and you discovered those people were right?” should be “Too many to remember” or “Too many to list.”
Anyone who can’t answer with one of the above or a variation on one of the above is one of the below:
1) A person that already knows and likes every artist and musician who has ever lived.
2) A person that has a very narrow field of appreciation.
3) A person that doesn’t like to admit he was ever wrong about anything.
If it’s the first one, well, that is one amazing human being!
If it’s the second one, there are various ways that a person can learn about the astounding varieties of creativity we human beings are capable of, such as taking classes at local colleges (Understanding French Symbolist Poetry of the 19th Century Appreciation, Captain Beefheart Appreciation 101, Introduction to Modern Art 101, etc.) and reading lots of books.
If it’s the third one, that’s the toughest one to overcome: after a certain age (and it varies from person to person), about the only way most of us learn anything new is to admit we were wrong about something old.
All of us have this problem to some degree; some people having what we probably incorrectly label as a ‘conservative’ make-up have this problem every day with everything.
French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud has nothing to do with this post but I found a great caricature of him so he’s here! Click To TweetFEATURED IMAGE: The image at the top of this page is a caricature of French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud by artist Tullio Pericoli. Here is what the Poetry Foundation says about Rimbaud:
“It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry on subsequent practitioners of the genre. His impact on the Surrealist movement has been widely acknowledged, and a host of poets, from André Breton to André Freynaud, have recognized their indebtedness to Rimbaud’s vision and technique. He was the enfant terrible of French poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century and a major figure in symbolism.”
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
The poet/novelist Kenneth Patchen is another. (Yes, Arthur Rimbaud as well.) I also include the Northwest draftsman/painter of the generation before mine: Bill Cumming. He captured expressive moments of figures in motion—like Daumier, but in Pacific NW light.
Many thought of him as down the rating list for Northwest painters (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Richard Gilkey ranking ahead of him) but he is far and away my favorite of the lot of them. Completely self-taught too.
The list of poets who have absolutely nothing to do with the post above is, for all practical purposes, endless. And then there are all those artists who also have nothing to do with the article. And, oy vey!, don’t get me started on cabbies in New York and the ever-growing number of Uber drivers, all of whom have not a thing to do with any of the above ...
I somehow neglected to mention Samuel Beckett, particular because of his trilogy and the novel leading up to it: Murphy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnameable. (He wrote “Waiting for Godot” to relax while taking a break from writing that four-book masterpiece.)