I am glad there are people like this in the world. The world needs people who find art in essentially simple engineering. There’s a place for people who find conversations in circles. I’m just glad I’m not that person.
Wheels get me there. Safely. Comfortably. Just get me there.
It makes you wonder how the brain perceives art. Why do you see it farther down this chain of events and activities than the next person? There’s a talent and an art to growing things. There’s a great spirit involved in planting a seed and nurturing what comes next. A different person takes that freshly grown potato and thinks: french fries. Now there’s a culinary art I can salt and get behind.
You can think of any analogy you like and make it apply here. I’ll stick with a simplified explanation. Anything you do with joy can be art — I made pizzas in high school, and that wasn’t art, but there was a guy there who did it with flair. When it becomes rote, then you’ve done it too long. I like to watch the guys at Mellow Mushroom spin out the pretzels. To them this is a crank of wrist and a bend of the elbow, a few hundred times a night. Don’t spill it and don’t back up the kitchen. Just get it there safely and comfortably.
I’m not a very good cyclist — have you heard? — but I do try and make sure there’s a smile on my face. Otherwise, what is the point? You get in the upper 20s and there’s so much wind it always sounds like there’s a car behind you, you better look the part because, eventually, that will be a car and not wind noise. A truck turned right in front of me the other day, almost hitting me, and then behaved rather stupidly in front of me for some time. It is unnerving, but you must remember to smile. That guy could be having a really bad day. There could be a terrifying spider in his lap as far as I know. Also his truck weighs more than my bike, and he cares not for the philosophical or ontological designs behind the wheels’ origin.
Someone will write to say that the absence of appreciation is a lack of depth of thought. True. Usually I’m more concerned with breathing and lactic acid in my legs. And I’ve seen wheels my entire life. Perhaps if I’d been around at the beginning for those first stone wheels I would have made drawings on my wall about them.
We’d talk about it later, but I’d act casually about the wonders of what I’d seen and preserved in plant dye.
“Grog! Look! I have portrayed Grimmel’s wheel. See how it slides down the hill? He should try it on the skinny side. But his flipping regimen is doing wonders for his core.”
At what point, really, do you think people began to look at the wheel as more than a simple tool that made chores remarkably easier? The Renaissance? The Bronze Age? The first kid that had a wheeled toy? Wikipedia says that was perhaps around 1500 BC and — I’m guess from the citation here — in Mexico. Imagine that, a kid who looks at what someone carved him and comes to the realization that he has, as a toy, what someone in the village doesn’t have as a tool.
But he didn’t write sonnets about it.
And now, 100 guitar riffs we should beam to outer space on a universal disc of greetings along with our periodic chart and anatomical cliff notes. Here is something of a history of rock ‘n’ roll, without the obligatory guitar faces:
That really needs Joe Satriani and Alex Lifeson, but you can’t have everything. Artists.
