"...and elephant painting is my new favorite hobby."

Midway through my sophomore year of high school I experienced a sudden burst of poetic inspiration. Of course, I was unable to contain myself; I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and although the bulk of my output was channeled through some artsy teenage need to obscure and muddy the subject matter [so as to avoid appearing heart-on-sleeve], one image remains fresh in my mind. The rest? Utterly disposable faux-experimental garbage...but the notion of the elephant painter? Intriguing. The piece itself isn't anything to write home about. It's just as cluttered as anything else produced in that span of five months, so I'll gladly abstain from posting it here. But I would like to briefly sum up its implications.

Whether subconsciously or not, I wrote a sprawling mess of a poem condemning the very act of pretension for art's sake. It all goes back to a childhood visit to the Nashville Zoo. Browsing around the gift shop, I came across a series of abstract paintings, and abstract is a complementary word in this situation. In actuality, the paintings were just wavy horizontal/vertical/diagonal lines of paint complemented by an occasional splatter...and they were selling for outrageous prices, all because some zookeeper had nestled a brush in the grasp of some elephant's trunk. They were selling, too. So I made a parallel between false artists and elephant painters.

Essentially, I want for my blog to function as a source for music reviews/news, for music that is full of verve and vitality, for music that isn't "elephant painted." I spearhead a music column for The University of the South's bi-weekly newspaper, The Sewanee Purple and will occasionally post excerpts/full reviews from the Purple here, but I anticipate for most of what you read here to be entirely "blog-exclusive." Also, [and this is my last comment for the night, I promise] I host a weekly radio show, Zoo Radio, on Thursdays at 9:00 PM central time. Of course, unless you're right here, on my school's campus, you can't hear it through your car stereo; you CAN, however, stream it online by visiting http://www.wuts913.org/ and playing it through iTunes or whatever your music app of choice happens to be.