culture

Why should Advent be about deprivation?

My Fellow Inebriates,

My mum is so old that she can remember when Advent meant giving up treats, being very quiet, and going to church every day instead of once a week. Back then you didn’t get a chocolate-filled Hello Kitty Advent calendar like Miss V’s…you practically had to wear a hairshirt, or at least endure your kid brother screaming while being yanked out from under the kneeling pad in the St. Jude’s pew, then listen to your mum explain that she couldn’t give him a mint to keep him quiet because it was Advent.

So thank goodness for modern excess and the myriad Advent calendars that demonstrate the season is not about solemnity and patience and sacrifice, but rather about treating yourself every day until the Big Day when you get to be a total drunk/glutton/hedonist. Thank you marketers everywhere for repositioning Advent in the public mind. Here’s the Advent calendar I want:

Art—giving meaning to life when there’s no booze in the house

My Fellow Inebriates,

Life without art—at least while sober—would be absolutely meaningless.

Contemplating the print Dan Lacey kindly sent me

 

I love the idea of lurching around an art gallery with a drink in hand (paw).

LBHQ has turned into a bit of an art gallery over the last few years. You can’t see the walls any more.

“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.”
—George Edward Moore

“All art is but imitation of nature.”
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Every artist was first an amateur.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Art is spirituality in drag.”
—Jennifer Yane

“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts—such is the duty of the artist.”
—Robert Schumann

“Things are beautiful if you love them.”
—Jean Anouilh

“I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.”
—Jodie Foster

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle

“By the work one knows the workman.”
—Jean de la Fontaine

“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”
—Andy Warhol

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are.”
—Oscar Wilde

“The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.”
—Hendrik Willem Van Loon

“The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.”
—Henry Miller

The Alcoholic Hierarchy of Needs

Move aside, Maslow. We inebriates have a different Hierarchy.