... on the way to another week here in the UK.  Some random thoughts, no order...

"The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off," incidentally, is the name of an actual documentary airing on Virgin Atlantic flights right now.  The description includes the following phrase: "contains scenes that some passengers may find disturbing."

I would like to confirm this.  Some passengers may.  Yes indeedy.

Nothing against the skinless, mind you.  Honest.  I have nothing but admiration and respect, I swear.  I was uplifted and inspired.  Also, disturbed.

Other disturbing things: the dollar is dropping like a Democratic overvote.  I wouldn't be all that surprised to see £1 = $2 by year-end.  Watching the potential fall right now is breathtaking in a morbid today-Wallenda-might-lose-it way.

After my praise of LA, let me also share one of its downsides: the people who aspire to move up into the more glittery parts.  Ran into one of these today, a lovely woman I used to know pretty well back when I did stand-up, who just happened to be on the same flight.  I considered her a good friend once, until I noticed that she only actively sought me out when she needed something.  And slowly realized it was never otherwise.  When I stopped forking over, the friendship ended.  Sure enough, today's encounter was more of the same: pleasant surprise, brief actual interest during the instant assessment of whether I could provide her some useful advantage, and when I chose to disregard this subtext, speaking instead as an interested friend, instant rude disinterest.

This was also disturbing.  But not as much as the thought that a hell of a lot of the people who make our popular culture are terribly similar.

That thought might explain way more than I want it to.

Here's another one, which may or may not be valid, but on which I now seek your feedback, rooted as it is in London and disturbingness.  Last time around, I squeezed in a visit to the Tate, London's warehouse-sized modern art gallery.  I'm not a big one for some modern art, but the Tate seems extremely well-curated (if that's a word), and I think I learned more about 20th century art in one day than I had in the previous several years. 

One piece in particular moved me: "Spiral Jetty," a silly, enormous inward-curving loop of moved earth which the late Robert Smithson stuck into one end of the Great Salt Lake.  (It's now mostly underwater, unfortunately.)  What got me wasn't the joyous lunacy of the idea, but the accidental poignance of the film Smithson made of his creation.  Shot from a helicopter, the footage tracks the artist from behind as he gallops and stumbles along an uneven, leftward-curving path through channels of water.  The artist runs and runs, exhausting himself, almost falling several times, until finally reaching (revealed as the helicopter pulls back to widen the angle)... the center of his own spiral.

The artist... just stops.  A bit confused.  Genuinely not sure what to do next, since the film is ostensibly over.  All the frantic, vibrant, I-am-alive chasing, however pointless, had been exciting.  We're filled with expectations.  Suddenly, abruptly, it all ends.

Robert Smithson died not long after at the age of 35.  I think I find the film so moving because the artist accidentally created a metaphor for his own life.  And when he turns around, confused, proud, out of breath, still searching... he truly doesn't know. 

But aside from that...

I was struck by the degree to which much of the last 100+ years of what this culture calls "great art" is focused on deep alienation from that very same culture.  And I don't just mean Andy Warhol comments-on-commercialism, although that's what I was staring at when it dawned on me.  I mean, even big chunks of mainstream pop culture are all about alienation from... yes, everything the character or their ruling culture holds dear, with this alienation the defining attribute of the character's growth.  How many heroes have learn to break the rules?  How many outcasts have to reach the summit of a transformed world?  How many boys with no skin have to suddenly develop magic armor?

This could easily be ignorance, but I just don't see anything much like this in the art of other cultures.  I'm hard-pressed to find this level of constant self-alienation across multiple media in any culture in history I can think of.  Maybe this is because less developed societies create fewer works of art, or require them to be integral to survival for the works even to exist, or maybe a modern society just creates and preserves more of its own fringes.

Or... and here's what I'm wondering... it looks like (from my uninformed, sophomoric reading of things, I say with no false modesty) this meme kicks in bigtime shortly after the industrial revolution, which brought such dehumanization into everyday life.  Maybe the souls of our artists are collectively onto something we all already know...?

I don't know what I think, honestly.  Curious what you do.