Is the NFL purposely airing crappy games to force us- the red-meat eating, beer-drinking, football fan- to buy their "Direct Ticket" cable package? I turn on the games this morning and instead of getting Jets/Dolphins or Bears/Saints, we here in SF get Pats/Chiefs (yawn) and Eagles/Cowboys (yeee-awn). The Cowboys fucking suck and the Chiefs are mediocre at best. Meanwhile, we're missing a battle between rivals and the only meeting between two undefeated teams.

Bastards. I love football but hate the NFL.

And yes, I had too much coffee this morning.

Went to one of those DJ/Art Installation parties full of Burning Man types last night. Ahhh, SF boho's, God love ya. The space was pretty nice and had all of these "art installations" all over. Art installations, of course meaning, art that's not really art but more like things thrown together and called art. There was some paintings and some other things that I could only describe as cracker jacks spilled on a platform and glued together and painted various colors. At the start of the artwork, there was, of course, the big huge Artistic Vision essay. Gotta love reading them. Turns out this artist was big into Autism and everything they had done was somehow related to Autism. Fine, whatever.

Now, I'm not an expert in art. I was an English Major and know my literary theory, but don't know my art theory. I do know, however, that if you have to have a placard explaining what exactly the point of the art is, there might be a problem. Is it art if you have to explain why it's art? Shouldn't art be self-evident?

I missed the "Mona Lisa" when I was in Europe, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't a statement attached to it explaining that Da Vinci painted it as a protest of the role of women in Renaissance Italy. I have, however, seen, Michelangelo 's "David." When I saw it, it was just there, sitting out in a big room. Once again, no big statement of artistic vision, no claim of trying to make a statement about society's views on male body image. There was also no big "Statement of Purpose" or placard explaining the meaning behind the Sistene Chapel, Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," Michelangelo 's "Pieta," or Picasso's "Guernica."

I once had this long discussion with a Graphic Designer I worked with. She was big into Modern Art and Modern Art Theory. Her favorite artist apparently had, as her artwork, handcuffed herself to her boyfriend and spent two days walking around in handcuffs. This, of course, represented the state of modern relationships or some such nonsense. She loved it. I yawned. I tried to explain to her why I thought it was nothing but a wank-off. See, I told her, I know a lot of Film Majors, or people who make film, and they all sit around praising Godard and all the French New Wave directors, as well as all those experimental film-makers nobody knows or cares about their movies are boring as hell. To me, that's all fine and dandy, but when it comes down to it, the greatest movie ever made was Casablanca. And it's not even debatable. Because it doesn't take much to see that representing man's alienation from himself in the midst of modern technological society don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

In other words, if it ain't got that swing, it ain't got that thing.