A brief digression from music and literature into art; I wrote up Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over at Steady Diet of Books, but I thought that it needed something a little extra.
Zen is axiomatic in rejecting the value of writing, and of verbal communication in general, and it lets art fill the gap to a certain extent (communication of feelings through ink and watercolour painting, for example, although haikus perform the same function). In Pirsig's terms, art is the exhibition of dynamic Quality - or what we might call aesthetics.
The Bouncing Soul's Anchors Aweigh is probably their most aesthetic album yet. I called it earlier a punk-pop record which "veered towards comparative 'seriousness', with broad Springsteenesque brushstrokes, and was overall a poignant album with, at times, an unusually overt political message". I can post it up if it's requested, but I already have its immediate predecessor up. What it's got to do with ZMM is, honestly, not much, but it has got these excellent pictures of a motorcycle road trip. More transcontinental transcendence, as it were. And somebody's got to keep the counterculture going these days, too...
Don't forget that you are born free/It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees
('Born Free')
Harvest moon in a desert sky/making good time as we pass it by/where ever this road takes us/it was meant to be
('Highway Kings')
2 comments:
bouncing souls played tulsa around 97 or 98. i interviewed them for my fanzine then we went skating and shot off bottlerockets at buildings downtown. that night they crashed in my tiny apartment and we got wicked trashed listening to old clash records. good times.
ha! men of taste...
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