ManicDDaily

Zeus Giving Birth to Athena, as Elephant (Ouch!)

The late, sometimes brilliant, extremely troubled, Jerzy Kosinski spoke of his worries about the human fascination with electronic/video screens in an interview with David Sohn after a 1974 convention of the National Conference of Teachers of English:  “For me, imagining groups of solitary individuals watching their private, remote-controlled TV sets is the ultimate future terror:  a nation of videots.”   This was around the time that Kosinski published Being There, a satiric novel featuring Chance, the Gardener, a simple-minded soul who has grown up  literally in front of a TV, remote control as security blanket, navigating the non-video world.

Kosinski was concerned about obsession with video screens in a B.C. (“Before Computer”) age, before the years of A.D. (“All Digital”),  or should I call it A.D.D.  (“All hold a Digital Device”).

I am one of those people who is stuck in front of a screen much of the time.  And, even as my digits punch keys and tap  icons, I definitely worry about it.   I assuage these worries by telling myself that much of what I am doing is good old-fashioned communication–that email are just letters; that social networks, in our geographically dispersed world, are a personalized town square; that the glow of the screen itself (like the glow of ash on the cigarettes lonely people sometimes smoke, or used to smoke) is an imaginary friend.

Yes, I know it’s not exactly the same.  (Or healthy.)

As followers of this blog know, I have recently received an iPhone and become engrossed in the “Brushes App,” which allows one to make paintings on the iPhone’s screen, and even to insert iPhone digital photographs into the paintings.

Yes, working in such a small space, with your fingers, is a real pain in the itinerant.

And yet….

And yet…

Above is my Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus’s forehead, hand-drawn.

Below is my Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus’s forehead done on Brushes App.

You will notice that in the “Brushes” iPhone version, Zeus is not even Zeus, but Hercules.  (See the lion cape.)   (Meaning that the true title of this piece should be “Athena, as elephant, being born from Zeus, as Hercules.”)

And yet… and yet…

I’m not saying that I didn’t enjoy drawing the Zeus on paper.  With a pencil.

But. well….

Hercules as Zeus (see cape) Bearing Athena as Elephant