ok well, i don't know if we are supposed to, because we didn't officially have a reading assignment, but i am posting just in case... more about "air guitar" ...

The chapter "Freaks" made me think more about the effect that drugs have on all art forms. When Hickey was talking about how different drugs generated different art movements, he says that "in each of these cases, I would suggest, the artifacts are less products of the subculture than byproducts of its members maintaining their habits, their rushes, and their elite lifestyles." Reading the article did indeed make me wonder (because you know a helluva lot of artists/musicians/writers have been and are drug addicts): how much of an effect do specific drugs have on the art that an artist produces? Is it the drug that creates the art, or the artist? (Or just the artist on drugs?) Could the artist have created the art without the drug? I'm not sure. I mean, could Kerouac have written "On the Road" without Benzedrine? Would "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" ever have been written without LSD? At least in these specific cases, methinks not. However, in my opinion, drugs are just another way to get into that "zone," that creative, open place that is hard to get to sometimes. Drugs can bring things out of artists that were sort of buried in them, but they do not generate creativity themselves. Anyway, that's my take on it.

In other news, I went to Target today and it seriously freaked me the fuck out. That place is terrifying. And it made me start thinking about how you can think of the whole world as a giant art installation, really. Target is so bizarre and awful, it should be an art installation of gigantic proportions. It's pretty much the antithesis of how life should be. They market things so well, I could just feel my brain melting a little bit when I walked in, they know how to get INSIDE YOU! It was terrible. I'm not joking. Ok that's enough of that. I am done with my post, thank you.

Julia McAlee