What is going on in this painting? This stunning goddess-girl is walking in a river and is approached by a flying dove with olive branch. She is not looking at the dove, but, the person who sent the dove winging its way to her – with a message of love?

Could this beauty be a young Mary Magdalene? Is she looking at a young Jesus, his apparition come to her in luminous rays of sunlight breaking through the forest? Is this love at first sight?

In the 60s we hippies felt like, and looked like Jesus of India. When Rena left Nebraska with her boyfriend, they came to California to impress the natives. I think they were into dark magic which might account for the Hell Ride they had, and the fiendish luck they encountered in the Land of Lost Angels. Rena thought her luck was going to change when she approached me at Venice pier. But, when I opened my mouth and said I was expecting her because I made a wish to the Ocean Goddess that she send me the most beautiful woman in the world, she was disgusted beyond belief to know there were Beautiful People like me in the world who walked around like gods, getting everything they damn well please. Not only was there a gold aura about me, I now had – HER – just like that!

“Piece of cake!”

Rena was in a jealous rage for the next fifty days – and then some. When I told her I was coming to Nebraska to see her, she made a plan to destroy me with pure jealousy! Never in the anal of Musedom has this ever been attempted. Rena would ruin me for other muses – for starters!

I suspect Rena and I began this genre, this Holy Beauty Pageant and hunt for a suitable wife for Jesus. But, what if he rejected a candidate – after he had premarital sex with her?

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

Genre (/ˈʒɒnrə/ or /ˈdʒɒnrə/; from French, genre French pronunciation: ​[ʒɑ̃ʁ], “kind” or “sort”, from Latin: genus (stem gener-), Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or entertainment, e.g. music, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones are discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Genre theory is a branch of critical theory.

Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry, prose and performance had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. In later periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings. In fact as far back as ancient Greece, new art forms were emerging that called for the evolution of genre, for example the “tragicomedy”.

Genre suffers from the same ills of any classification system. Genre is useful as long as it is remembered that it is a helpful tool, to be reassessed and scrutinized, and to weigh works on their unique merit as well as their place within the genre. It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the shorthand communication, as well as the tendency of genres to shift with public mores and to reflect the zeitgeist. While the genre of storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes.