Tepid skin

Despite all the controversy surrounding the veil, the woman behind it remains obscured. The debate has fixed our attention on her body or her face instead of herself, her freedom or her subjugation, her rights or their denial -- instead of who lives behind this portable wall and the moderating role she has often played in the Islamic world.

Farzaneh Melani, professor of Persian literature and women's studies at the University of Virginia

Troll the MySpace nation if you want to see the masses clothed in veils. Digital reality fixates our attention on selected features and ignores the rest. Avatars in busty-babe or handsome-hunk regalia never quite reveal what needs revealing. Why should they in this voyeuristic scape?

Walk the streets of Cleveland, Lakewood, Shaker Heights -- again you see the veil. America the beautiful is thickening the distance from the plexus to the epiderm. Our bowls of jelly jiggle when we laugh. What's more daunting to the human form, this roly-poly camouflage or yards of flowing burqa cloth?

Have you seen a live show lately? Tell me there is freedom in the land when audiences stoical and mute behold a panoply of artistry on stage, malaise ensconced in tepid praise for stunning feats of physical expression.

I'd love to see us slip outside our shadows. The concept of 'the veil' as something only worn by Muslim women blinds us to our formidable walls.

Wonder be

My brain homes in on words and music like the swarm of germinator bees returning to the hive. Sweet buzz of creation -- my lustful predilection for the muse. No two honeys taste the same. Unique as the composer's dream.

What is the role of music genres? Quell the chaos -- satisfy the need to know -- squelch the innuendo? Hard. But true.

Radio promoters, says a friend from California ("he should know") distill your style into a coded text the gurus scan to cull the honey hopeful sent by fools who drink the madness of the rose.

Entourage

Man, haunted by the world, acts. ...The works of the arist... must be interpreted as modifications of the world.
-- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (Sartre's Saint Genet)

Sometime in my youth I read the Goethes and the Kants, played the Kabalevskys, trembled in the shadows of Monet -- and lost my nerve. Great Art had come to call and Cinderella's nasty sisters told the prince to try another hovel -- this one held no candle to his flame.

There is great art -- a world class museum here is spending millions to house it more comfortably -- and there is the endless tide of ornaments the experts' hall of genius has no use for. If you're no Rembrandt, if the muse who taps your sholder is a char maid and the art you make has all been done before -- why bother?

Because you are haunted, says Ms. Sontag, by a world that can't forget you. The incompleteness of existence asks you to make love the only way you can -- body, mind and soul. You may decline, treasures buried, will intert. Or, you can modify the world.

Who will rule your love life? The tastemaker? The genius meter? The millionaires who fund museums? Or you, the country bumpkin with your sleek bewhiskered coachmen driving Cindi to the ball?