Lighting fire to the face.

So, this is an experimental blog. I'll keep saying that until it sinks into my head. I come here to write things I wouldn't write elsewhere, so if you have a problem with that...well, you should probably seek your blogosphereing jollies elsewhere, because here I stand (recine, actually) and I can do no other (in point of fact, I can, I just choose to remain here, writing away).
Thoughts on Matisse. The sign is high over the museum entrance: MATISSE in large silver letters, standing out against an eggshell colored wall, with the exhibition dates like touring rock band. YEAH! We're going to the ART MUSEUM! WOOOOO! I don't know about you, but that is exactly how I feel when I step inside the iron and glass threshold of the Art Institute of Chicago, just gets me all warm and fuzzy, art is...art, beautiful, wonderful, uncritical, the paintings rarely judge you, and the sculptures do not ask anything of you, no commitment of blood or soul, just your eyes, your ears, your nose, just those senses you've been born with (barring some accident of genetics or earlier life), and even those only for a little while, you'll have them back eventually, and memories besides, memories of sight, sound, smell, maybe the touch of a brass railing, never touch the artwork, we all think, impulses begging otherwise, wanting desperately to reach out and feel the perfectly tropical breasts of Gauguin's figures, bathe in those cool lagoons, grab a cup of coffee, just hot enough to drink, with the Nighthawks, pass around cigarettes for everyone, feel the bronze of a Rodin, a Manship, maybe even the achingly beautiful curves of a Bernini, of marble lovingly chipped away, revealing a hand clutching at the thigh of Persephone, fingers pressing into that perfect leg, leaving marks exactly the way my fingers do when I run them along my lover's legs, each moment recalling a different type of beauty, one artistic, the other cosmic love. Still, we go into the exhibit, free for the first hour to members, giving us a superior edge of sorts, no plebeian lines for us. First ones in the gallery, greeted by sketches from Marrakesh, beautiful pencil and ink things you'd never see outside of this exhibition hall, the same hall we are in later on that year to see a work by Da Vinci, Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Private Collection), a painting that rarely makes it out of whatever palatial estate owns it. It is beautiful, causing old German ladies to stop and mutter 'Oh, Leonardo.' approvingly to one another, the oldest of them probably met him when she was a child, beating out Jeanne Calment by centuries. A trio of students, two of us scruffy, the third absolutely ravishing, stare in awe at the work, knowing we will probably never see it again, this bringing to mind a sort of fury within my breast, art should be for the people, the Socialist in me rails, give this to a museum, a free museum where people can come and marvel at the total wonder of art, don't just keep it in a high rise penthouse or restored French chateau. Fuck that idea. I shake my head, and travel back in time a year to the Matisse exhibit in the same gallery, it is the special gallery, and I've seen everything from Van Gogh and Manet to Olmec and Aztec statuary in this hall which can be quite cavernous whenever it wants to be. Right now, though, the walls have been shifted around to give it an intimate feeling, a false feeling, of course, canceled out by the alarms and guards everywhere (the alarms having more brainpower than the guards, who all seem to be taken from central casting as either whale or weasel like in build, each with the bitterness of not understanding the beauty in which they work every day. The might as well employ the blind, but even Borges, Milton, and Homer had appreciation for the arts, so perhaps the blind, deaf, mutes, simply broadcasting 'Stay away from the ART, do not look at the walls for too long. NO PICTURES. NO SKETCHING. NO DERIVATION OF PLEASURE.' into the minds of all the people strolling through the gallery--in my mind, blind, deaf, mutes get telepathy to make up for being blind, deaf, and mute--life ain't like that, which is a shame. I'll return to Matisse later on, I have a lot to say about him.