And more music than ever is being made today. With the advent of YouTube and the rise of distributors like CDBaby, Tunecore, and Bandcamp, it has become easier to skirt around the traditional industry and make your own music– and many people are doing it.

Under this looming avalanche of sound, one needs certain survival skills. It’s not possible to listen to everything out there, or even what any good musical aesthete is “supposed” to listen to, so we’re forced to pick and choose. This is well and good.

Much of the time, at least in my own observations, I find our choices are governed by personal taste, what we “like.” Now, taste certainly has something to do with it. But lately I have wondered whether, in our consumer-driven, individualistic society, taste hasn’t started to get the better of us.

Think of this scenario: have you ever been in the iTunes store, or on YouTube, and said “Naaah” after listening to a new track of music for maybe 30 seconds? An artist’s creative output, judged within a few blinks of an eye. I raise my hand as guilty. Now, sometimes music is just that bad, and deserves an easy dismissal, but I fear that when this becomes a pattern in our listening experience, it is a sign of the tyranny of taste.

In his pop culture analysis, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, Ken Myers observes,

“In an age of egalitarianism and relativism, it is easier than ever to regard matters of taste as wholly private and personal. I like Bach, you like Bon Jovi, praise the Lord anyhow. But is aesthetic judgment purely a subjective and neutral matter? Is ‘beauty’ exclusively in the eye of beholder? Is something ‘beautiful’ just because I like it, or does it have some objective quality rooted in creation that allows me to recognize that it is beautiful?”

Myers raises the question of an objective standard of goodness and beauty in art, and he argues that such aesthetics are spiritually based, “Culture has very much to do with the human spirit. What we find beautiful or entertaining or moving is rooted in our spiritual life.” This is true of any culture that has held to an objective worldview. The problem, Myers points out, is that today’s more subjective ethos arises out of a cultural relativism. With the disappearance of any concept of transcendence, personal preference reigns. The result of relativism and the commodification of music, is that pop culture today is increasingly market driven. We are so awash in it wherever we go, that it is only fitting that individual taste would be the dominant factor in our artistic consumption decisions.

The problem is, when we let our own sense of taste dominate our artistic sensibilities, we can begin to think that music as an art form is our servant, that it is there for our sole benefit, and exists only to satisfy us. A lot of music and music listening today has become a form of emotional masturbation. We tend to like and listen to music that matches our mood or makes us feel good.

But music does not exist solely for us, which is hard to remember in our age of market-crafted pop stars and he-who-gains-the-most-votes-wins talent shows. As the late Francis Schaeffer observed about perspectives on art, “The first is the most important: A work of art has value in itself….If we miss this point, we miss the very essence of art.”

Scott Avett, singer and songwriter of the Avett Brothers, has recently made a similar connection between the value of art and the “success” of art in pop culture terms:

“In all types of art there is a choice. Create what you feel because you believe in it, or create what you think will be ‘successful’. The difference between the two is this: with the latter, that which will be ‘successful’ can only succeed’ for a temporary moment with you and your physical state. But that which is created in sincerity, that which reveals part of your soul without control or plan, will outlive all of us and be generated between men for years to come. Though the work may not succeed in number of viewers, it still bears a life.”

As music listeners, I think it is helpful to remind ourselves of this truth from time to time. What we hear bears a life of its own, sparked by the life that created it. And if it has been made for beauty, that beauty is part of it regardless of our like or dislike.

So what’s the pay dirt? How should understanding this reflect in our music listening experience?

First, I think it should remind us not to devalue the very thing that we enjoy. Treating music as just a means to an emotional end makes listening a utilitarian, rather than artistic, pursuit.

Second, we should be aware of how the dominance of taste can close us off to types of music that we wouldn’t normally listen to, which is to our detriment. Technology has made a wide variety of music more available to listeners,  but it has often also led us into our own own tiny, personally-crafted ghettos.

This leads to my third point: we should actively find ways to expand our own sensibilities. One thing that I have done in recent years is to seek out and listen to older musicians who have been recognized for their musical talent and prowess. I admit, the sometimes dated nature of the sound has occasionally  jarred my personal preferences, but I’ve also been surprised by how much truth and beauty I have found.

Fourth, we should seek to become more aware of our own spiritual traditions and what they teach us about beauty. What is the place and value of beauty and art in our worldview? This question of aesthetics is an age-old one, and its pursuit is one which will not offer up easy, drive-through-window answers. I’m still wrestling with these questions, with my own culture, and with my place within it. But these questions are worth grappling with and worth pursuing, for they are the pursuit of the eternal over the temporal.

The American in me is more muscular,
talks loud shit with the boys
and drinks beer because he likes it.

The American in me smells right,
like wood chips, cigarettes and sweat
and his wife likes two out of three.

The American in me votes ardently,
carries the political history of his father
and holds country up to family.

The American in me married his high school sweetheart,
said “I love you” through the tears
and has been saying it every morning ever since.

The American in me goes to the coast on vacation,
always says he’ll retire there
but knows he won’t make it that long.

The American in me is a veteran
of everything if you’re asking him
and yes, he is ready for a fight.

The American in me hits hard,
like the first cold wind of winter
freezing brittle bone to break inside out.

The American in me works on the clock,
hates and loves the overtimefor the effort it takes
and the empathy it creates.

The American in me sits at the head of the table,
flanked by loving wife and obedient children
and he loves them when he has time.

The American in me tries to stay healthy,
dilutes his tuna with beer
and wears his gut like a varsity jacket.

The American in me goes by Jon,
spells it without the “H”
and always peers over just to make sure.

The American in me is the American in you,
and the American in you doesn’t recognize the American in me,
nor me in you, nor you in me, nor us in I.

I would like to say that I have been very busy, that my kids keep me running, that my other work overwhelms me, but there are no excuses. I have not put the words to the page, I have not written. It is not writer’s block, it is a drought, a writer’s desert, and I found myself on the fringe of it. Then I sat at the keyboard and noted that I am sick of myself and sick of this age, and with that I wandered from the fringe of the desert to its center, my body becoming like sand.

***

I’ve thought often of Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer:”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I want to sit in front of my window. I want to watch the light shift across my yard until the horizon fills with color, silhouetting the trees. I want to wonder at the moon and not google anything about it at all.

***

I treated the coming winter like I was ocean-bound. Obligations, in these times, feel like stones in the hems of my clothing. I gather so many, and then someone else comes along and needs something. I think, I can’t. I’ll sink. I want to run, or rip out the hems, for fear of drowning.

That’s why I asked someone else to manage the details of my writer’s group. It was a preemptive move; I planned to be absent; I was sharing the weight before the waves broke.

So how was it that I found myself standing before them, unshowered? I confessed. I told them the truth: I need drops of mercy in the form of assignments, assignments in the form of emails, creating an obligation.

What is it about obligation, that it can have the power to both oppress and free us? Maybe it isn’t obligation, maybe that’s not the right word. All I know is that I’m not in the ocean. I’m in the desert, and I need to find water.

I know how I found myself at that meeting. A desert wanderer knows that an area with life can give life.

***

I am blessed with friends. If you met them, you would marvel. One loves football and loves to make her house a beautiful place. When the call comes to hang out with her and learn how to make pretty things, I say yes. I’ve never dreamed of doing this, but in this dry place I have to say yes, I have to embarrass myself. It is time to take that dreaded first step and try something new, be the fool.

The pretty things will be edible. Cakes. We will take classes and decorate cakes. It comes easily to her, mostly, but I stumble along in a cloud of powdered sugar.

She may feel bad for me, but I don’t. I’m happy to do something hard. It’s satisfying to make food, yet food is temporary. A cake will not be my legacy.

It’s good to remember what it’s like to be a learner. I worry about the narrowness of our current culture, the way the internet tries to present me with more, more, more of what I seem to be interested in knowing. It absorbs the bit of me it knows and calculates, offering me days of shoes and sports scores and theatre ads. I will become a micro-market instead of a person, eyes trained by algorithms and SEO, unable to see past what I know.

Our class makes flowers. Roses, lilies, violets, apple blossoms, daffodils, carnations, poppies, daisies formed of buttercream, royal icing, fondant, gum paste. I’m not always pleased with my work. The teacher says no flower is perfect, not in the way you’re thinking.

***

The assignments come. How did I meet my husband? Have I ever written a haibun? Try it. What do I think about this video game theme song? Write a setting that suits the song “Hurt” as performed by Johnny Cash.

From dry ground, shoots of green. Words.

***

It is better to be in a house of mourning than a house of mirth, the Teacher says in Ecclesiastes. I attend a funeral honoring a man I’ve never met. It is Saturday, the day before Easter.

He lived to be 93 years old, the grandfather of another dear friend. This friend has relationships with her parents and grandparents and sister and extended family that spill over onto all of us. She invests. Because of her, because through her I have learned what love of family and friends looks like, I go to the service.

They tell stories of his good humor and his quiet faith. I learn he was in the Navy during World War II. Underneath the surface of his card playing and travel and love for his family, underneath this ordinary life, he had been a part of bigger things.

We stand and watch the men from the VFW hall fire into the afternoon air. Someone plays Taps. A flag is lifted from the casket, folded, and presented. It gets me every time.

Obligation, I realize, is the wrong word. Relationships don’t have to be like that, work doesn’t have to be like that, as if they’re burdens. Being part of the whole, contributing, sacrificing, grasping hope of a future full of people and promise, these are the things I’ve forgotten.

***

I have two assignments yet to fulfill. One will be about my daughter and an imagined holiday. For the other, I will send this, this story written from an oasis in the desert, the air moist and starlit, the sand quickened. He asked me to write about endings.

Imagine receiving an electric drill to use at school—and the freedom to learn and explore while building things with it. That’s what happens at Brightworks, a year-old nonprofit private alternative school located in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The school is tiny—just 20 students between 6 and 13 years old—but it’s building quite the reputation for its innovative learning philosophy. Brightworks takes its cues from the maker and tinkering movements, which do away with formal classroom instruction in favor of project-based experiential learning.

Students aren’t divided into traditional grade levels, either: The school allows kids to interact naturally across age groups—older students work on more sophisticated projects while younger ones learn primarily through play. And, instead of relying on tests to measure learning, the school’s students create portfolios.

The GOOD video team recently paid a visit to Brightworks and caught up with cofounder and director Gever Tulley. It might seem impossible to scale the Brightworks experience for a public school with hundreds of students. But the focus on giving children authentic, creative experiences that prepare them for the future is something every classroom and school can replicate.

 

Watch the video HERE!

A quote from the talk: “When you can’t smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you’re an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you’re a philosopher.”

Watch it here.

Day Job is a publication for anyone who has ever had a job they’ve loved, a job they’ve hated, a life-long calling or a way to make an easy buck. In short, it’s about work, a celebration of the everyday ways in which we spend our time and energy. As the inimitable Studs Terkel describes working, “It’s about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.”

Day Job is a biannual print publication that explores modern work culture through the personal pursuits and values of people around the world. It is a magazine about good work for its own sake, about earning a living, and about the search for some utility and meaning in the way we spend our day.

At Day Job they are interested in the personal details of everyday working life—the stories, environments, tools, exploits, perks, and pains of doing a job. It’s a publication that tries to investigate not just what we do, but why we do it. It’s about people and the variety of ways in which work brings all of us together.

Each issue will feature a collection of interviews, profiles, personal essays, and stories from people around the world all tied together under a broad theme. Issue #1 is all about process.

You can keep up-to-date with this project via their  kickstarter page. Check out their website, facebook, and twitter feeds for more information about the project and details about our issue #1 launch party:

Or at least such a high-minded thought is heartening when you’re facing an entire greenhouse full of the red baubles alone.

But I like picking tomatoes. I like the pleasant plumpness that softly fills the hand, and I like exploring the jungly vines. I like having my body engaged in meaningful work. And in my solitude I can practice being fully present to my surroundings—to the crickets under the tomato leaves, the geese crossing the sky, the greenhouse heat, my toes in the dirt, the odd orange orbs hiding there and here—and the unfortunate crack of a tomato vine that I’ve just stepped on.

-

Let the air of monotony have no place in this greenhouse! When you’re not remarking the varieties of tomato contour, or enjoying the satisfaction of filling box after box, your imagination can roam free—to theories of epistemology and entomology, to the cultural ramifications of landing on the moon and the Russian ballet on American culture, to the velocity of an unladen cricket—or you may turn your thoughts toward ripe red tomato slices sprinkled with salt, homemade sauces and salsa, steaming tomato soup, tomato-tossed salad, and succulent BLTs.

You may also turn toward the noble history of tomato picking, this time picturing an Italian peasant amongst the vines with his two black-haired daughters, enumerating the ways a good husband is like a good tomato—firm but mature, neither too hard nor soft; or perhaps a French chef, who makes his sauce from tomatoes plucked ripe from the garden behind his Paris restaurant; or an old Spanish widow filling her baskets with fruit that she will sell in the village square.

-

"It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato." -- Lewis Grizzard

My dad’s side of the family are old hands at tomato picking. My great-grandfather made the front page of the local Michigan newspaper for pioneering a method of greenhouse growing that yielded better and earlier tomatoes. My grandfather took over the tomato growing, and now my uncle has received the torch.

Tomatoes are an honored part of our family tradition; the planting and picking and sorting and selling and eating of tomatoes is a crucial part of relational and culinary enrichment. However, a small scandal threatened to break out when a cousin of mine admitted that he really didn’t like tomatoes.

That’s okay, cousin. As long as you like picking them.

-

It is difficult to hide that you’ve been picking tomatoes. Your hands are brown and green and yellow, your bare feet are filthy, and you may have a few leaves lingering on your clothes. When you wash your hands afterward, you must be fully armed with a bristle brush, grease soap, and—if you really want to eliminate all signs of activity—a rotten tomato. Sometimes you must fight fire with fire, or in this case, tomato with tomato.

I think my family would agree that picking tomatoes is good therapy after eating at a restaurant that serves anemic pink tomatoes shipped from across the country. When my family goes out to eat in the summer at local restaurants, someone usually gets something with a tomato—a burger, a salad, a garnish. And when we see what the tomatoes look like, each knows what the other is thinking:

Why?

-

A friend recently asked me for an inexpensive but classy dinner idea. As we’re both college students, I understood his predicament. So I suggested tomatoes, basil, and melted mozzarella on baguette slices—simple bruschetta. He told me he couldn’t do the tomatoes. You see, he had been to our farm—handled our tomatoes, tasted their sweet flesh—and the grocery tomatoes paled in comparison (literally). I understood: once you have tasted ambrosia and nectar, it is difficult to go back to the fare of mortals.

This reveals both the upside and downside to seasonal eating. On the one hand, you get only the best of the harvest: fruits and vegetables that are bursting with flavor and nutrients—you don’t settle for less-than. On the other hand, what about all those months going without fresh berries, cucumbers, snap peas—not to mention tomatoes?

-

At long last, the final row is ended, and the remaining tomato boxes are hauled away. After scouring my hands with gritty soap I enter the farmhouse kitchen to assemble some lunch. On the counter is a ripe tomato that I slice onto my plate. As I bite into its lush redness, I experience a delectable revelation.

Life is good. And so is tomato picking.

This is not the answer I am seeking just at the moment, as I’m looking for my copy of Sorina Higgins’s poetry book—the one with the blue sky and Hermes, set against a white cover.

My fourteen-year-old goes on, interrupted at intervals by my twelve-year-old.

Caduceus is the staff. It’s held by Hermes. He’s the messenger to the gods. The girls talk over one another with all manner of information, save the information I need at the moment: the location of the book.

No matter. It’s a fertile conversation, and I’m set to wondering how many people know their mythology like these kids do. Raised on Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, they’re walking encyclopedias of facts about the gods—from heel-wings to mischief-doings.

I wonder vaguely how Sorina Higgins was raised. While some of us were sleeping through the Odyssey, had she already begun to wear the wings of either the caduceus or its bearer?

The staff, often mistakenly interchanged with the medical symbol of a single snake with no wings, has two snakes intertwined, crested with wings. Hermes himself also wears wings near the ankles. Has anyone ever wondered how all these inadequate feathers did the job? Neither the span on the staff nor the span on Hermes’ winged heels seem fit to bear a being of that weight. It is a miracle that Hermes ever rises.

Higgins will face the same issue, and she recognizes it from the outset…

My little heel-wings are not made of feathers:
they are made of tongues…

They whisper I am, I say, making me
play all the characters this writer writes…

and in the end, their clamor just might run me mad.

Maybe she will never get off the ground and will simply be a writer run mad, all the while holding that staff with its dual realities, entwined, entwining. The pressure, suggests the poet in a hike poem called “Croagh Patrick,” can be overwhelming:

The enormous pressure of empty space behind
nearly broke my little mind. I panted to hold the panic back.

Making her way towards the sky, or trying to, she is all too conscious of her groundedness. Says Higgins, “Between annihilation and me/a crumble of granite, pebbles stacked by a laughing titan/sloping up into exclusion, complete and indifferent.” We sense the tension, the terror of the question, even as she seems impossibly grounded: what if levitation was eventually possible? Would the wings hold? Would we find inclusion, a joining with the divine or something larger than ourselves? Maybe, maybe not. And so “the soul takes each step and knows each strain.”

Higgins, like those two snakes on the staff, will demonstrate a duality throughout her collection. Entwining themes and images of fate/not-fate, space/bridging or filling, eternity/finiteness, the form of her poetry itself is a statement about these opposites that somehow co-exist in our experience and consciousness. She works with classic forms like the sestina and the sonnet on the one hand; yet, on the other hand, she breaks form, thus bringing to light the struggle of opposites through the very structure of her work.

An accessible example is found in the sestina “The Curse of Co-Inherence,” where Higgins pushes the teleutons (repeating end words) to both inhabit and trespass coherence. Vanity becomes veins becomes vain becomes veined. Similarly, in the sonnet “Idol-Making,” she breaks form at the end of the poem by cutting the thirteenth line in half and shifting it downward, creating space and the illusion/reality of a fifteen line poem which is technically still fourteen lines.

Ultimately, it is this kind of form- and mind-play that a potential reader must enjoy in order to appreciate this complex collection, where Higgins’ “kitchen [is] a game of chess,” as is her approach to poetry and to some very deep questions about existence and our place in it.

Even so, I’m fairly confident that my sestina and sonnet writing older daughter, raised on Riordan’s gods, will find something to love here again and again (a collection like this will benefit from many readings); but then, she also likes the Odyssey, so if you slept through it, just don’t mention it to her, or to Higgins.

Early this year, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of the crowd-sourced funding site Kickstarter, made a big claim. In an interview repeated across the internet, Strickler said Kickstarter expects to distribute more money in 2012 than the National Endowment for the Arts’ entire fiscal budget for the year. The comparison drew ire from critics who pointed out the NEA’s larger function to make art accessible, as well as the many successful Kickstarter projects that aren’t about art so much as commerce. But nuances didn’t detract from the drama of a 4-year-old startup calling into question the relevance of a 47-year-old government agency. When the NEA slashed funding last month to two entities historically dependent on it, public television and public radio, the question of its effectiveness became impossible to avoid.

We here at HuffPost Culture would like to examine what is undoubtedly an inflection point in the evolution of arts funding. In the face of headlines gleefully crowning lighter, faster online models as inevitable successors, is federal funding worth protecting? Is it the best way to fund the arts? The worst? Is there some other model — already in existence somewhere in the world, or yet to be discovered — worth exploring? Should we even be funding the arts?

These are the questions at the heart of HuffPost Culture’s first installment in the site-wide series “Change My Mind.” We’ve asked two experts on opposing sides to argue their case. Read their opinions below, and let us know your take in the comments. Did you change your mind?

Be a part of the poll HERE!