The Importance of Being Art

 Art. 

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde makes the final statement that "All art is quite useless."

Here's a guy whose greatest gift might be the contradictory epithet writing a piece of art whose primary use is the description of the concept that art is useless. Oxymorons, inverted epigrams, contradictory epithets... these are the soul of Oscar Wilde's art. They are his stock in trade. Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray said he could believe anything provided it is quite incredible. "I can resist anything except temptation," said Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan. Indeed the eyelid half closed, opium-soaked, languid rhetoric of the upper class dandies Wilde obviously admired and worked hard to portray, and from whence most of his clever witticisms are derived, was effortlessness that could only come from a great deal of hard work and study. Hard work disguised as leisure that could only be enjoyed by the upper class since "work is the curse of the drinking class."

We need to consider the source of this preface. At the risk of putting words in the artist's mouth or being Caliban viewing his ugly reflection, I believe Wilde is saying art is useless because it's the most useful thing in the world. Art is life and life's ugliness revealed is a beautiful thing. He said in De Profundis, "I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction... I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram."

So rather than the masturbatory exploration of whether or not art is quite useless, a statement made by an artist who probably felt the irony could therefore be assumed, I think it might be more fruitful to explore whether or not it is the most useful thing in the world.

First things first, it's not easy to just make art. Imagine the struggle of the painter trying to portray life's ugliness in something beautiful. And speaking of masturbatory, how many of us have witnessed to critic or the plebeian trying to convince others that he/she sees the art or the beauty in something most consider inartistic or ugly. If you have a chance watch this. It is art itself!

It's the story of an old lady, a trucker by trade and member of the drinking class, who bought a picture as a joke gift for a friend, its hideousness being the humour, only to find that it might be a genuine Jackson Pollock worth millions. How much did she pay? The saleslady asked for 8 bucks but settled for 5.

If you want some art, go to the 8:40 mark or so and watch the art "expert" view this painting. It is absolutely hilarious! He looks at it upside-down, sideways, plays peek-a-boo with it and comes to the conclusion that it's "superficial and frivolous" and is NOT a Jackson Pollock.

To make that even more hilarious, here's a side-by-side comparison of a Pollock that sold for over 100 million and the one Teri Horton bought for five bucks. Could ANYone, even Jackson Pollock himself, explain 100 million dollars worth of difference? If so, THAT, my friends, THAT would be some art! Are these Pollocks or just bollocks? In my opinion the latter. I think, like Wilde, Pollock was satirizing the world of art. When asked how the layman should look at modern art Pollock said it should be enjoyed like music. Look at the painting and try to receive what it has to offer. After a while you may like it or you may not but it's important to give it a chance. The genius here is the appeal to the vanity of art critics and the subtle insinuation that if you cannot receive the "art," the problem lies with you, not the painting or the music. This is how you get the hilarious theater of rubbish justification. Pollock could literally sell his oversplash catcher or brush cleaning rags for millions. The art here is in the supreme satire that has led to wildly fanciful descriptions of splashing and blobbing identical to kindergarten classes and the outrageous price tags attached to these fraudulent pieces.

Before you object, let's use Pollock's example of music. The irony is that Jackson Pollock HAD talent. He could make a picture that looked like something. But he became famous for making works of "art" that don't use that talent. It's like if Eddy Van Halen went on stage and brushed, swept, tickled, and whacked his electric guitar with a broom then told the audience to try to receive what that music had to offer. Do you think THAT would outsell the other Van Halen albums? I guess it depends on how badly the listening audience wanted to appear like they understood the art of the revolutionary new form of guitar playing called "sweep strumming."

I went to an Indonesian traditional play that was an old folk tale involving magic, dragons, witches, etc. The costumes and acting were great! There was some humour to it as well. But I said to my guide that the music was annoying. He told me that it's just musicians randomly banging on their instruments depending on the gods to make it musical. Well that day the gods were not cooperating. It was just plain noise. To admit that I must be a Philistine, right? An art hater. Well, I'm okay with that. But I'm sure there are people in the traditional art world of Indonesia who make their livings convincing others that they can "hear" the music in that random bashing and blowing. In my opinion, if you pay a thousand bucks for a recording of that noise, or millions for a Jackson Pollock, it is a fitting punishment for your hubris.

Deriving beauty from the hideousness of even a genuine Pollack takes some artful dodgery, but let's go in the other direction. Teri Horton in the movie says that to her art has to look like something, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Well, here's a classic:

It's Triple Self Portrait and I defy you to find any ugliness in it without going beyond the superficial and the frivolous. He has pictures of his influences tacked to the corner of his painting, Rembrandt, van Gough, Durer, and Picasso (I learned from looking them up). Consider the darkness in the lives of those men. Rembrandt was considered a difficult, arrogant, and litigious man. Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Rembrandt, was described as socially abrasive, exhausting to live with, and mentally unhealthy. Albrecht Durer painted a portrait of his lifelong friend with Greek text along the edge that translated to "With the cock in your asshole." Pablo Picasso was a deeply flawed, manipulative, cruel, and misogynistic individual. As you might expect, even Norman Rockwell's life was far from the idealized vision of America he created in his art.

In Somerset Maugham's The Moon & Sixpence a novel partially inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, the narrator suggests that the subject of the work, Charles Strickland, an artist with few if any redeeming social characteristics was a tortured soul who had something profound that needed to be shared with the world and the price of his struggle to somehow do that was being a misunderstood outcast.

Can artists, for this reason, be forgiven for their abhorrent behaviour and are their works necessarily artistic in direct proportion to the depths of their social depravity? Does biographer and public exegesis - critically deep interpretation of their art - tend to become eisegesis in proportion to their popularity? Do we tend to read our own biases and opinions into artist's work? Let's go back to Oscar Wilde's preface. In it he says that the highest as well as the lowest forms of criticism are modes of autobiography whereas he says that to reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

From this we are to understand (superficially) that it is all in the mind of the critic or the reader if they find any of Oscar Wilde himself in the pages of his literature. This smacks of a court hearing defense rather than a legitimate fact and to anyone familiar with Oscar Wilde, it should read as nothing more. His comment in Dorian Gray that the more insincere the man is the more purely intellectual his ideas will be and completely uncoloured by wants, desires, or prejudices was 0% autobiographical? Was it just Lord Wotton who believed that conscience is merely the trade name of the firm of cowardice? Was it merely an entirely intellectually created character who believed in the Hellenic ideal - the harmony of body and soul - to be a man who lived his life not adhering to blind dogma but completely indulging every feeling, expressing every thought, and making every dream a reality? Was it only a character he created who compared the moral self-deprivation that comes with modern ethics to savage tribal self-mutilation like tattooing or scarring? I think he would have preferred this to be the case at his hearings, but there were some in attendance who knew better.

Yes, Oscar Wilde got in trouble for his art not being completely non-biographical and useless. BIG trouble. I don't know how accurate it is but if you watch the 1960 movie starring Peter Finch as Oscar Wilde called The Trials of Oscar Wilde, go to about 8:30 and you'll hear, "I consider that to conform to the narrow moral standards of this Victorian age the grossest form of immorality." A gutsy thing to say in the rather demure social environment of his times. In fact it is quite well known that Wilde relished the idea of being a martyr and being taken down for standing against what he (and a LOT of his characters) considered to be social, particularly sexual, foppery. Many believe his entire purpose for taking the stand was to create a real time work of art in which he dissected the restrictive laws of English society, cut the attorneys' arguments to ribbons with his razor sharp wit, and in the end got what he eventually ended up getting for the cause of progressive thinking.

I'm torn on the two sides of Oscar Wilde's story. On the one hand his sentence of two year's hard labour broke and eventually killed him. He was 46 when he died of complications related to the hard labour for which decades of leisurely, languid living left him uniquely unprepared. Who knows what masterpieces he might have composed had he been, I dunno, more Hemingwayish? On the other hand, he absolutely WAS the sodomite that he was accused of being so despite the idea that it shouldn't have been against the law, (was in England till 1967 in fact) his whole case was a lie. He even began the trial by lying about his age to give you an idea of how seriously he did not take this trial for his life.

Do you know that after he was accused by the Marquess of Queensberry he was so scared that he went on a lavish, romantic trip to Algiers with his beau (and son of the Marquess) Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas? During the trip they met French author Andre Gide who said that Wilde seemed to be a man aware that his tragic fate was approaching. When people warned him to be careful Wilde's response was that that would be a step back. He had determined to go as far as possible even unto death. The events of the trip included the exploration into the seedy underbelly of Algiers were just useful fodder for the opposing attorneys during his trial.

So in answer to the question of whether art IS the most important thing in the world, it is pretty clear that it was to Oscar Wilde. Contrary to his statements that art should be no reflection of the artist, he was determined to live the life Lord Henry Wotton described to the young Dorian Gray flouting dogma like social convention and laws and devoting body and soul to the indulgence of dreams and desires. He was a devoted aesthete to the end. I can't decide whether this was more heroic or tragic.

There is a kind of mythology that people are wont to create around those who show any aptitude for art. Somerset Maugham writes that the faculty for myth is innate in the huma race. Do we seek out people who have at all distinguished themselves from others in some way, invent legends about them, and attach fanatical beliefs to these legends as they grow? I have to believe this to be true, perhaps more true than for anyone, about Jackson Pollock. It seems there are an awful lot of artists that were secretly horrible people. Could it be then that their gift of artistic talent, their insight into the most important thing in the world, is such a heavy burden that it drives them to become so? And if this is true, should we forgive them their transgressions as the cost of their art?

Whether art is the most important thing in the world or not, am I willing to forgive character flaws in great artists such as Oscar Wilde? Gauguin left his wife and five children to go to Tahiti where he married multiple girls, all under the age of 14. Though Wilde was blowing huge wads of cash in his beautiful Bosie, in the end he neglected his wife and kids. Is their art more important than the lives they destroyed? What about other authors, painters, singers, or other artists?

I'm going to have to land on I don't know. What do you reckon?

Past Peg-Pulling Time?

 I'm going to begin by referring to my previous post and, regrettably, I have to suspend my license to practice medicine for the moment. The one I bestowed upon myself last post. I can re-bestow it if I want. You're not the boss of me. 

I read a bit further on the subject of the little-known SECOND job of the pancreas, the EXOcrine as opposed to the ENDOcrine functions we're all familiar with. Turns out that PERT (pancreatic enzyme replacement therapy) could actually RAISE blood sugar by causing foods to be broken down more rapidly and, uh, turned into glucose. The enzymes help in proper digestion which includes improving the absorption of carbs and starches, or more to the point, the glucose they become. 

However, I have so much stomach acid, which is destroying the limited digestive enzymes my pancreas produces anyway, and this can cause both reflux and malnutrition. I may be eating more than I need to get the nutrients I need. It seems to me that (and again I may be making assumptions here) my stomach acid is working so hard BECAUSE of a lack of pancreatic digestive enzymes. My stomach is trying to do the job they're supposed to be doing. So maybe PERT might still be worth a try. Maybe if I introduce more of the enzymes my pancreas is producing too few of (do we get these from pigs too?) my stomach might go back to producing normal levels of acid and my reflux won't be such a huge problem. I might even get more nutrients and feel healthier. And if we're going to dream big, maybe if the PERT increases my digestive efficiency, maybe I won't feel like I need to eat so much. If this all happens, I'm officially giving myself back my license to practice medicine. I'm still going to suggest it to my diabetes doctor when I visit him next month.

But I still have doubts about convincing him to try it. I find talking to doctors very similar to talking to Trump supporters. It's like they have one foot pegged into the ground like circus elephants and they can only talk, relate, (dare I even say reason?) within the circle to which the peg limits them. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again and again until I'm dead: What we need is for the whole world to collectively realize what our individual pegs are what are preventing us from making this whole world the relatively happy place it should be. The resulting stampede would crush a few rich, greedy asshole plutocrats but it'd be well worth it. 

But, like this poor elephant in the picture who would probably let people spray her with water, throw rocks at her, take her baby, starve her, and possibly kill her before she just plucks that peg out and attacks, what are the lengths we are willing to endure before we pull pegs and attack? I am daily affronted with new examples of these seemingly limitless lengths in news stories and most of them are from just one country. I'll give you a few. See if you know what country they're from.

A woman strangled her kids (5 years old, 3 years old, and 8 months old) then jumped out a window. It's okay though, her husband forgave her. I say if a guy is a murderer when he drinks too much then kills someone in a car accident, YOU are a murderer if you have a mental condition, don't take your meds and then kill someone. But then in even a halfway normal world would we even be here? How many times a day do YOU ask that question?

The supreme court of that same country recently ruled that since AI-generated child porn does not depict real persons, (even though it's generated using real pics of real kids) it's okay. 

Any guesses yet? What "civilized" country is this? In case you think the protection of kids in the country you've guessed is the only problem there, the country in question is quite international in its neglect of the vulnerable who are in need of adult protection. A rapper got kicked off the tour of an even MORE famous entertainer recently for declaring that kids in Gaza shouldn't be slaughtered. I had to use a link from reddit because Facebook has blocked this video of Gaza kids telling the artist to stay strong and thanking him for doing the grown-up thing that is outside of other's circles who have Israel as the spikes in their feet. Israeli attacks in Sept of 2026 included an 11-year-old boy in a "safe" zone in Gaza. But the country is not Israel if that was your guess. Just spiked to them ironically through a religion that spiked its saviour to a cross. Ostensibly. 

I better be careful or I'M gonna get blocked like the above rapper. The CIA might send one of their beastial, beastly, beastiality agents after my ass. I might be labelled a terrorist for condemning terrorism.

And if they don't get me, tech experts from this country say that AI will end ALL of humanity within a decade anyway. 

Pssst... it's the U.S. If you haven't followed any of the links above. The United States. You've heard I'm sure how the US is sometimes called the greatest social experiment the world has ever known. Here's an article that shows how the successes of capitalism are the very reasons that the social experiment that is America has failed. And while reading it, remember it's over a year old and think of all that's happened just in the past year in the U. S. of A. and adjust every statistic to make it worse accordingly. It's time to pull the peg, or the plug, on that experiment. Long past. And given the effect America has on the other countries of the world, I'd say it's long past peg-pulling time all over.

It's fall. While death is not always nice, I could add to my favourite smell list the pleasant aroma of dead leaves I get while strolling through my new neighbourhood. I passed this house just yesterday.

Yeah, I think that'd be a case of premature e-Jack-o-lantern. But it's getting close to the glorious month of October, isn't it? In October here in Canada we have Thanksgiving and then in November we honour our fallen war heroes on Remembrance Day. This is the time of year when I think we should give the greatest consideration to what we've done with our countries (or allowed to be done TO them) and whether or not our "Greatest Generation" foreparents would be happy or tell us to pull our pegs out and stomp the shit out of the people who've made things the way they are. 

You know what I think. What do YOU reckon?

Dr. Dave's Self-diagnosis

 I feel like this post has been percolating inside me smelling up the room and now it's time to pour it out. Percolating. Anyone remember those old coffee pots with the glass part at the top you could see the coffee bubbling up into? And the smell of it? 

Coffee wasn't a thing in my house growing up. My Mom never drank it and while we were young we only experienced that major part of Canadian culture when we went out. I recall one thing more than any other about my Mom's best friend when I was a kid - Verna Fletcher - and that was the smell of coffee that hit you like a bean bag (full of Columbian coffee beans) the second you entered the Fletcher home. I think the Fletchers had some of these 

Or some of these

to drink the coffee from. I actually don't remember seeing her without a coffee actually. I wonder if she had a problem... Things you just don't think of when you're a kid... 

Anyway, I think it might be the infrequency of that smell for so many years as a young kid that makes it so special to me now. I just brewed a cup in my Keurig and can smell it a little in my apartment. It's one of the better smells in life IMO. Popcorn, grass, bacon, old timey gasoline with no additives, lavender on the right person, KFC in the winter, Vick's Vapo Rub, freshly baked white bread in a paper bag, A535 on the rugby bus, cigarette smoke - but not just a burning cig - I mean the kind that has been inhaled then exhaled, campfire smoke on clothes days after the campfire... I could go on and on.

But that wasn't what I'd planned to blog about. I gotta try to avoid words like "percolate" or I might go off on a trundle like that again. I wonder if I've done this before. Off on a tangent and I haven't even started with the main topic. Maybe it's age. Tell me THAT wasn't revealed the second I talked about the percolator coffee pots! ha ha ha. I wonder if I could even buy one nowadays.

Nevertheless, the doctors, pharmacies, and general medicine supply chain in Ontario sure have a sweet thing going for themselves! Segue? What's that? I gotta believe it's the same in every province but since I'm here in Ontario I'll concentrate my stream of vituperation. 

I was living in Cheonan teaching at Gongju University there. I believe it was 2020. The Fam had come from Pyeongtaek to have a Sam Gyup Sal feast with me at a restaurant near my apartment in The Love House on the campus of Gongju U. Heather had been testing her blood sugar because it was low and she said we should use her equipment to test mine just for fun. My blood sugar level was 542 or something outrageous like that. So began my days as a conscious diabetic. I don't mean that I've ever been an UNconscious diabetic although I have since thought about a blackout or two that I blamed on alcohol which might have been attributed more accurately, or at least equally, to the diabetes. I mean that I was a diabetic for many years before I was aware of it. How many years, I couldn't say. 

Being employed in Korea while diabetic was a definite plus since basic health coverage made the cost negligible. Virtually everything was covered. YES all you misinformed people, it's MUCH cheaper to be a diabetic in Korea than in Canada - a country that has long been resting on free health care laurels that it no longer deserves. As a point of fact, I visited The Fam for 6 months in 2024 and I paid less for insulin other diabetic supplies in the USA than I do in Canada! THAT'S how bad things have gotten and THAT (finescally) is to be the meat of this post.

I've been getting my drugs and stuff since around April of this year from the pharmacy attached to the walk-in clinic where my doctor is here in Sarnia. I've been to that office a half dozen times or so and only seen this doctor of mine once. He doesn't work at his office I guess. I saw a young male intern, a rude, inattentive, obtuse doctor a few times, and most recently a young female intern. They all want to give me the meds I was on in Korea, or their Canadian versions, which is fine, but in the 6 years I've been treating my disease, I haven't made much progress. A few things have been tweaked, for example, I was on Metformin and it just made my guts go super garburator and give me emergency toilet sessions that I thought endangered the structural integrity of the porcelain fixtures upon which I was blasting out the said guts. I got a substitute that is better called Sitaglipton. It's much more expensive than Metformin. I thought maybe this is why it was readily substituted, but then the doctor (my new diabetes doctor Dr. Shetty) did the opposite. After 6 years of injecting insulin and juggling different meds, some of which I never needed such as the blood pressure medicine I got prescribed because of a flawed BP testing machine in Korea, which I finally put a stop to just a few days ago, I was prescribed this wonder drug called Taro-Gliclazide. 

To give you an idea (now using the western scale for blood sugar) I have been hovering around 10 for years. When my blood sugar goes over 10, like to 12, it's high. When it goes below 10, like to 9, it's good. I have never been in the 8's or 7's regularly. Since starting this Gliclazide I'm in the 7's and 6's! NORMAL blood sugar is 5.5 and 7.8 two hours after eating. I'm practically at a normal blood sugar level! Where was this drug for the last 6 years?

When I took the prescription to the pharmacist, you should have seen him! He asked if I was positive this is what Dr. Shetty prescribed. I said yeah why? He said it's strong stuff. I said so what does that mean, I've been on weak stuff all this time? He chuckled but I wasn't joking. 

As you know, I have the time that most folks don't to research things. I got online and found out a little bit of the history of this drug. First of all, we know who Banting and Best are, don't we? I'm sure it's not just because they're Canadian that I know they're the two dudes who isolated the hormone insulin. They knew the discovery was too valuable NOT to give to the world so they sold it to the University of Toronto for a buck if I remember correctly. Somehow it's now $120 for a box of 5 pens here in Ontario - the same province where it was GIVEN away! Again I am trying not to Google everything so I can maintain a little memory so I think it's pig insulin we get in those pens. 1921 the discovery was made and since then diabetics have been squirting pig hormone into our bodies. Nothing better has happened in science since then? 

Au contraire mes amis, in 1942 (in France) a guy named Marcel Janbon was researching typhoid fever and by accident discovered that a medicine he was using lowered patients' blood sugar dramatically. It was discovered a few years later that this medicine stimulated the pancreas to MAKE MORE INSULIN. Well DUH! This is exactly the drug we need for diabetes, isn't it? But we don't know Marcel Janbon, do we? Do you know what a sulphonylurea is? No. I think this might be because they're dirt cheap. Remember what I said a month's worth of insulin cost me? That's what a YEAR'S worth of this wonder drug costs. 

It doesn't work on type 1 diabetes because it requires a functioning pancreas, but instead of just squirting expensive pig hormone into my body, wouldn't it have been a good idea to see if Gliclazide or some other sulphonylurea worked? I wonder now if I had known about this drug and asked for it, maybe I could have been taking it all this time. And maybe I could have been paying less all this time. But since it's so cheap I guess the doctors hang on to those pills like manhole covers. Just a theory.

OOOORRRRR... since for 6 years I have also been complaining to my doctors about extreme reflux and stomach acid problems, you'd think that maybe one of them might have clued in to the connection between pancreatic digestive enzymes being destroyed by stomach acid and high blood sugar? There's a treatment called PERT Pancreatic Enzyme Replacement Therapy during which replacement enzymes are given through meds like Creon, and proton pump inhibitors like omeprazole or Prevacid (lansoprazole), which I plan to request from Shetty next time I see him next month, are used to make sure the stomach acid doesn't destroy the replacement enzymes. Now, Creon can be a couple thousand bucks a month so this makes me think that none of my doctors even thought about it as an option. Perhaps Shetty HAS thought about it and since he is the one who gave me the cheap pancreas stimulator, maybe he is leery of prescribing Creon because he knows I'm paying out of pocket. BUT, there are alternatives like Pancreaze or Pertzye that can cost... $154 a month. About the same as insulin. 

I requested a medicine for my reflux and Shetty prescribed rabeprazole, which just makes me shit 5 times a day, but I've heard from a few people who have found good reflux meds that they went through a few "prazoles" before they found the right one for THEM as well. 

So I'm thinking Pancreaze + Prevacid PERT treatment would be perfect for me. Or it might be worth a try. By the way, a month's worth of Prevacid is about 20 bux. Would I pay $174 a month to have normal blood sugar and be able to sleep lying down and go through a day without coughing 1500 times? Hell yes! Are Pancreaze and Prevacid pills that pharmacists hold on to like manhole covers? I guess we'll see when I go to see Dr. Shetty next month. And I wonder how the pharmacist will react if I manage to get the cheap drugs prescribed. Just as an aside, the same pharmacist who hesitated to give me the wonderdrug Gliclazide put my prescriptions together again for this month. I checked the bag of pills after paying and, what do you know, no Gliclazide. I asked him and he acted like he didn't know what it was. I told him to check what he'd given me last time. I didn't know the name of it at the time but I said if he showed me and I could smell it I'd recognize it. He showed me some that had no smell and then the right stuff and immediately I recognized it. Why hadn't he just given it to me? Why had he been reluctant the first time? Probably because it's so cheap. So I can just imagine what he'll be like if I end up doing the PERT. I may not even NEED the other drugs! What if I can stop using the Metformin replacement drug and the insulin? I hope to find out someday.

Should I be the one diagnosing my own health problems here? Especially now that I'm back in Canada where we are practically synonymous with stupendous healthcare? No! It's shameful that I am doing this. But that's the new Canada. If there's a way to do something cheaply you just can't expect the experts to tell you what that is. You gotta figure it out on yer own. 

Now, I fully expect Dr. Shetty to shoot down this idea when I suggest it to him. But if he doesn't and if it works, what does that say about doctors, pharmacists, and the whole medical profession here? This is going to be interesting folks...