2.025: IT IS FORM AND CONTENT (L.W. Like!)

By now it's a tired cliché to talk about the waning of our collective attention span. To state that electronic gadgets and devices have infantilized us into driveling philistines is not a particularly original observation. 

 My beloved France is currently awash in mindless high tech applications promoting greater efficiency and wiser time management. The fact that they produce the exact opposite result has escaped no one. But if France is crazy about technology then the U.S. is a raving psychopath at a dopamine festival.  I'm no de Tocqueville but on my last trip to the U.S. I found the change in the American character quite breathtaking, especially among its many gifted visual artists.

Which brings me to my distracted colleague David Schoffman. He is a profoundly changed man. 

This former serious and high-minded artist has become an indentured servant to the tiny screens and chirping ear buds that have come to dominate our imaginative landscape.

It's not his over-saturated Instagram close-ups of hummingbirds and azaleas that bother me so much nor is it his obsessive consultation of the Twitter feed of someone who goes by the name "shelonglegs." I know plenty of well-meaning, reasonable and intelligent people who do the same sort of thing. Even his unflappable devotion to Facebook with all its panegyric flatteries and trivial encomiums doesn't bother me all that much.  

I suppose what I find most galling and exasperating is the slow gradual dissolution of the vital character of David's once formidable intellect. 

Right before I left Los Angeles I caught my dear friend giddy and transfixed as he watched a short video of zoo lions masturbating to Mozart.

I suppose anything is better than adorable kittens.