Corduroy

I like this pic­ture the way I like to hear cliches in pop songs. You may think I hate pop songs because I brand them with the word cliché, but I don’t. Cliches are the air of lan­guage. They are the jeans. We all wear them, we all breathe. Easy, cheap or expen­sive, always ok, never great, (some­times great, actu­ally – like a pair of jeans on the right per­son). i wear jeans almost every day. I try to rail in my head against cliches, and I will tell you that they are banned from my art, but I speak them, write them and make pic­tures about them. Cliches are a com­fort. They are them­selves like the cliché about the many truths which are spo­ken in jest.

We use them because there is some truth to them, and they don’t intrude much. They tell a kind of truth that I don’t have to really com­mit to. It is a truth that is out there for any­one, but maybe it isn’t my truth. I am not telling you much about me when I use a cliché, but i am telling you some­thing. That is the safe, com­fort­ing part. Its like the dif­fer­ence between real choco­late and fla­vor­ing. You might say that you only love the real stuff, but some­one is out there eat­ing all those Twinkies, and I have had my share of them too.

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