"If there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control
over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having
it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than that.”
Mark Knopfler

The cool thing about songs is that you can cover them.  In visual art, covering someone else's material is a form of vandalism.  Nobody is going to scale the walls of The Sistine Chapel to "cover" Michelangelo, or interpret it in some new and interesting way.  If they did, they'd be arrested. 

Or would they?

"Just Stop Thinking" is a visual-arts cover band founded by Marcel Duchamp in 1917.  They're really more of a collective of mindless drones than a visual cover band, but in spite of a lack of vision, originality, and self-awareness which is apparently total, Just Stop Thinking has itself spawned several derivative sub-groups.  Cover bands of visual cover bands de-populate the neo-retro, post-everything cultural landscape of the West like a vast, incomprehensible intellectual abyss.  No longer content with the standard, prefab visual anthems prescribed by the administrative vandals in "Just Stop Thinking," unimaginative, derivative members of the hateful void have branched off to create their own manufactured, hyper-corporate visual sound.  "Just Block Traffic," "Just Waste Food," and "Stand On The Idyllic Lawns Of Stonehenge On A Beautiful Day To Whine About Roads" are just a few of the transparently-ridiculous visual cover bands of the original facsimile of the thoughtless idea.  Because nothing screams the perils of inhaling the CO2 produced by roads and excessive use of recreational inhalants like an ancient cultural site drenched in sunshine and surrounded by a green, pristine lawn.

What a beautiful day.  Pass the Covid mask and the Whipits, we're going to make the world a better place, one depleted ozone layer of thought at a time.  Don't worry, we only huff organic Whipits, compressed gas sourced from the shouts of malicious glee expelled by the volunteers who dance barefoot on the crushed genitals of Antifa members.  Which is where organic whipped-cream propellants and soymilk-flavored vaping fluid come from.  We scream and shout while dancing barefoot on your balls.  Like witches in a whinepress, we leave carbon footprints up your ass, and dance on the dry, shriveled grapes of our defeated male subjects.

"These whitebread boys nowadays, knowin' all the score
Don't even know how to puke"
Iggy Pop

So, does anybody wanna go to Stonehenge, to complain about pollution?

I dunno....  Can't we just go to Stonehenge?  It's a beautiful day.  Maybe we can learn something.

You and your white, corporate male penchant for reason.  Speaking of environmentally-friendly, recreational inhalants, did you bring the Agent Orange?

Yes I did. 

Shall it please you to hook a comrade up?

It pleases me.

Oh goody. 

Let's get high.

Members of Just Stop Thinking, in all its variations, are like the visual-arts equivalent of air guitar players who think they're Jimi Hendrix because they puked in the middle of "Purple Haze" on Karaoke night.

Hey Beavis!  What's up, it's your old buddy Duchamp.  Did you see me miming the original recording of the Mona Lisa last night?  I drew a mustache on it.  You won't believe what I wrote under it.  "L.H.O.O.Q."  What's that you say?  You don't know what it means?  L.H.O.O.Q. is French for "She's got a hot ass."  Hilarious right?  Jimi Hendrix would have done it, if he hadn't been enslaved to the electric, white guitar.  I know.  So phallic, right?  His amplifiers ran on coal and were serviced by an unpaid army of naked groupies, all of whom were hypnotized by the oppressive, colonial brilliance of his music.  What's that you say?  He was black?  Yeah, I know.  Of course Jimi Hendrix was black.

He's dead, isn't he?

Fortunately, in the world of sound, it is possible to cover another artist's work without desecrating it with cans of pencil soup, or a split-pea bacon moustache.  This is because, as I mentioned in the article "Desertion of the Circus Animals," the lofty cathedral of music is a circus tent.  It isn't made of ideologies or stone.  It isn't even made of paint.  In music, the statues aren't sculpted from marble.  They're sculpted from the invisible waves that crash against the shores of artistic consciousness like a tsunami, or a sparrow.  Flocks of notes slam into the musician like Kamikaze birds on a death trip; the songwriter wades into the deep end of the mud puddle, in search of something shiny.

Sometimes, he finds it.

In March, I wrote a poem inspired by Willie Nelson's version of "The Border," a beautiful song by Rodney Crowell.  Willie rearranged the mannequin flesh of the original, and brought it to another level.

So, if The Sistine Chapel of music is a circus tent, and all the paintings are made of Kamikaze bird mannequins surfing on tsunamis,

Is it possible that we're no longer caged by zeitgeist?

Has the world entered the final stages of time itself?

Do recent albums by Willie Nelson and Mark Knopfler indicate that we're about to enter the zeitgeist of eternity?

When this song and video hit, the zeitgeist was instant.

Like all great art, it speaks for itself.

But that was then, and this is forever.  Or it's about to be.

Is it?

I certainly think so.  Old masters like Willie Nelson and Mark Knopfler have clearly moved beyond the moment.  They have traveled through the singularity of zeitgeist.  The gravitational forces of power, fame, and wealth have not diminished their ability to surf on a tsunami, calmly into shore.  They have proven that the destructive forces controlling the actions of the Just Stop Thinking militants will eventually fail.  Where the militants have attempted to deface the world, all they've really done is create a blank canvas upon which anything can be done, at any time, and it will transcend the moment.  It will have no choice.  Because the institutional moment has been destroyed, it can no longer limit anyone working within its nonexistent confines.  We are no longer limited by genre, or the dominant sound of any given era.  Nirvana is no longer possible, in part because there's no 80s hair metal to overcome.  We are free.  Where you splash soup on Van Gogh, I plant a garden of light.  Where you tear down Stonehenge, I will build a mountain.  Where my kind was once limited to Wembley Stadium and a retro music video, I will now rain fire in 4-part harmony down on you from Heaven.  You've unleashed an army of Banksys, musical and visual alike.  You've dug your own inferno.  Of course you have.  You can't create anything of your own.  You can't even visit Stonehenge for its own sake.  What else are you going to do?

Did you really think you were going to win?

"Lemme tellya, them guys ain't dumb."
Money For Nothing

We're running out of time.  In fact it's already gone.  This year's Willie Nelson and Mark Knopfler albums prove it.  The 80s are over, and all the gilded memories that line the birdcage of our hearts and minds.  It's time to release the sparrows, to unleash tsunamis in the wind.  Why settle for Nirvana, when you can have Heaven?

The zeitgeist of eternity is about to begin.  Get on the Ark while you still can.  The best is yet to come.

Thanks for listening.