When The Artist Cries, We All Learn
June 27th, 2008
I spent the last few days listening to Sheryl Crow’s CD Detours.And meeting with a loving friend I haven’t seen for a few long years. I should say a friend I love.But more on that.And visiting a place I used to call home in another country. A place Adolph occupied. How did Hitler cruise the Champs Elysee?But more on that.Sheryl’s album is the best she has ever done. My iPod is fully loaded but I listened only to Detours. It starts off for the first half showing how wonderfully diverse and talented she is and then it nosedives into the real reason she wrote the opus.Lance left her.Pain and hunger are extraordinary drivers of creativity. She sings of having a paper heart thanks to the Lance damage. She sings of the emptiness of life without the guy on the bike. She sings about being drunk at the sight of Mr. Speed and being blind without him.She is deluding herself. But more on that later.
Hemmingway said he used to take a break from his writing to study Monet hanging in Parisian museums. 
But, but, but he would visit before he would eat lunch. He said he would learn so much more from the Impressionist strokes on an empty stomach. A form of Pain.
My dear friend and I hugged and it was like no time had ever passed. She knows joy and pain. And pain has made her more creative because she refused to cave. She chose to sing. Of her birth in Nigeria and her law university in the UK. And her devotion to her friends. A devotion I treasure.When the joy was over Ernest decided to take out a rifle in Idaho and end himself. He knew the heights he had climbed to. Paris was his city before it was the Fuhrer’s. Before I soaked it all in. Many say his last act was one of cowardice. They don’t know what it was to be Papa. He owned life. Why should he be a victim of it? Because the clergy, the frauds who hide behind costumes, say to?I don’t think so.Sheryl sings that she gets drunk with the thought of the speed king. Sentimental junk. We are all best off knowing how to be drunk on ourselves.That is pure. Independent. Liberation.Sheryl says her love hideaway was blown up because she asked for a diamond ring.
Well, dear talented Sheryl, it should have been. You had no need for a ring. You wanted love. And love is great. But demonstrations of love composed only of metals and stones are just that: demonstrations.So much better to take yourself, Sheryl, and all of us, to the Whitney Museum by ourselves, just ourselves, be alone, and be surrounded by the art of life. By ideas. By all the wonders the girl on the subway and the guy on the bike can’t take from us.We are here to achieve. Not to mourn the loss of another paper heart.