New Blogs on the Block

There are some new additions to our BlogAsheville blogroll. Surf for yourself to find them all, but here's a snippet from the well-attended Theater Ideas:

"I think artists, as a group, tend to share the mistaken generalization about the middle class that Lerner outlines above. We think that exhaustion symbolizes apathy, and that a seeming unwillingness to be "challenged" is the result of intellectual apathy rather than emotional and spiritual rawness. There is a TV commercial for car insurance with the tag line "Life comes at you fast," and I think this could be the slogan for the last twenty years. We are daily bombarded with more and more information delivered in ever louder and more intense voices; we run from place to place, trying to keep up with everything that is happening; we work longer hours and at higher speeds, and when we come home we are tense and tired and drained. So my question is: just what does such a person need?

My tentative answer is: he needs meaning. He needs an artist to sort through the avalanche, slow down the onslaught, and make sense out of something in his life. Perhaps he needs someone to imagine the world another way, perhaps a world that values something more meaningful, more fulfilling, more human, where contemplation is encouraged and where serenity is a possibility. He might need to see the mystery in life, the holiness of a person or a piece of nature, the grandeur of the human endeavor."