the appeal of dumb, ugly guitarists

Trying to catch up on my Bloglines reading (at which I do only a mediocre job and then just mark the rest of my roll as 'read' so I'm not taunted by the hundreds of maybe interesting things that I actually haven't). Got distracted into an alpha male tutorial which is funny and un-David Byrne-ish (not less, just different) while also catching up on my very David Byrne-ish David Byrne blog reading, and realized I was reading about the same thing.

From Halley's Comment:

So I always think of some early Alpha Male caveman trying to come up with some THING to show his Wilma Flintstone counterpart. He probably tried a lot of things that didn't work, like a tuft of grass -- boring, boring, boring -- or some water. A little more interesting but no great shakes. So then, at his wit's end, he looks over and she's at the door of the cave watching Eohippus gallop by (the dawn horse, of course) and he thinks, "Well, shit! Here I am showing her a handful of water and she wants to look that pathetic Eohippus. How the hell am I supposed to get her over here to stand next me, so I can smell her and she can smell me, and then we can fuck, when all she wants to do is look at that stupid animal?!"

It hits him out of the blue and he grabs some old charcoal from last night's meat roasting fire and draws a pretty lousy picture of a running horse on the cave wall. And then he's got a pointy stick to show her -- now that's a cool thing -- and a picture. Now he's getting somewhere. And she comes over to see the thing he made. And she likes it and likes the fact that he noticed she was watching the horse out the cave door and understood that he could please her by drawing the horse for her. Maybe, she reasons, as cavewomen were rather savvy I must say, maybe he could please me in other ways. Hell, she thinks, maybe he'd show me that other thing of his. So she stops looking at his etching and turns to look at him ... (and get ready kids, since the two of them are about to start history as we know it).. and she smiles at him and one thing leads to another.

From Byrne:

Appropriately enough, just as I head to Miami for the Miami/Basel art fair extravaganza I finish the chapter in Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind on art [links mine, not Byrne's]. It’s sure to be controversial with this art fair crowd, as he posits that art evolved as a kind of display useful for sexual selection. One immediately thinks of the peacock’s tail when one hears display, but the peacock doesn’t make his tail — he’s born with it. Art is a display outside the body, made by the skill of the hand and mind. Miller posits that the ability of our minds to charm, seduce, captivate and enrapture — via artistic work, conversation, language, dance, sport — gives proof to potential mates that not only are we physically appealing, which can be assessed relatively quickly, but that we might have deeper levels of genetic fitness beneath the visible surface. Art, amongst other pursuits, is, according to this idea, one of a number of gauges of deeper fitness, creativity and skill.

Before you get all warm and fuzzy, your blog probably doesn't count as art, and it certainly isn't a demonstration of physical prowess. Buy flowers, or as the guy in the SoBe commercial says, "maybe learn to play the guitar."