Dizzy O'Brian

What is a Blue Meanie? I want to say right off the bat that a ‘Blue Meanie’ is not a mushroom. Someone who would name a mushroom ‘Blue Meanie’ is just another example of somebody connected to a movement or culture who doesn’t have a clue, or worse, as I hope to make a credible case for with this blog post. ‘Blue Meanies’ are characters from the animated feature ‘Yellow Submarine,’ featuring The Beatles and the art of Peter Max. The story is about Pepperland, a colorful place where children have colorful balloons and whirligigs. The ‘Blue Meanies’ include the leader, a character with crab-like cutter hands, a giant glove and a host of others. The ‘Blue Meanies’ spend their time cutting up the balloons and whirligigs and Glove points/accuses people and also pounds them into the ground. The actions of the ‘Blue Meanies’ drive Pepperland into a state of apathy and grief. This is pure fantasy, right? Well, let’s take another look at how psychedelic and surrealist art can function....

Can You Imagine? Imagination gets short shrift in this real world we live in. And what is reality but what people agree upon. If you look up the definition of real, one that comes up is ‘not imaginary.’ Evidently ‘imaginary’ is just in the mind and ‘real’ is something else. But haven’t they established that all perception is processed in the mind? In other words we look at a mass of light waves and our brain tells us it’s a table. I’m not saying real is a bad thing, necessarily. It can be handy and very workable to have some sort of agreement when working and living with others. But, let’s face it. It begins to stretch out beyond objects ‘out there,’ to concepts that do entirely exist in someone else’s mind. Things pass for reality that are never fact checked. They come from an authority such as the Internet or a paper or a talking head. They come from teachers and elders, parents and ancestors. They come from scientists who even know that, if you do research with a specific...

Who Are You? A song by The Who and a question asked of Alice by the caterpillar; ‘who are you?’  Most people answer by saying, well I’m Joe Blow or whatever name was given to them at birth. So we are given an identity in the form of a name. We are more or less given a body with genetics that supposedly determine our physical characteristics. Beyond this, we are informed, educated as we grow up that we are human, we belong to a particular race and have a nationality. Our race and nationality have many more defining parameters that are added to our identity. We can be informed that we are like different other people; family members, friends and other miscellaneous individuals in society. We are educated to have certain traits or behaviors acceptable in our society. We can be given a purpose from our parents, usually or sometimes other older individuals and it can even go so far as to giving us a spouse not of our choosing. It is the more rare individual...

The Emperor's New Clothes For those who have never heard of it, Hans Christian Anderson wrote a short tale called ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ It’s the story of a vain emperor who gets ‘taken in’ (no pun intended,) by a pair of charlatans, posing as tailors. These charlatans tell the emperor that they are making a very special suite of clothes for him that anyone who is unfit for their position or “hopelessly stupid,” will not be able to see. The trick is there are no clothes and the emperor, of course, parades around before his subjects unclothed and no one will say so because they are all afraid of being labeled unfit or stupid. Finally a young boy shouts out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. This is a bit of an allegory, naturally, of situations which arise when someone keeps himself or herself surrounded by ‘yes men’ who are afraid to speak the truth for fear of losing their job status. It goes on in politics and it goes on in music and the arts. When I was in...

Traditionally Speaking Leopold Auer was a great violin teacher in the late eighteen hundreds who trained such stellar artists on the instrument as Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, so he must have known a little something about music. He wrote a small book called ‘Violin Playing As I Teach It.’ This little book contains a wealth of useful information about violin technique and music in general. As to the subject of tradition, he had the following to say; “Tradition in reality weighs down the living spirit of the present with the dead formalism of the past…. Beauty we must have, tradition we can dispense with. How is a violinist to conceive the meaning of an older work which he may be studying if his own musical instinct, his freedom of conception, are obfuscated by the dictum: ‘This must be played in such and such a manner, because so and so played it that way two hundred years ago?’ “ He is talking about interpretation here and he makes it clear that any att...