Henry Gould points to an article in the NY Times re the therapeutic possibilities of art for Alzheimer patients. art doesn't need to be useful in this way, I suppose, but I can't speak against such usefulness. I do an occasional painting class with elders who suffer from Alzheimers. I've seen quite a bit of re-energizing in the people who participate. this Russian fellow, who spoke little if any English, would make these village pictures, the elements of which (house,tree, people) gives me, at least, in my ignorance, a sense of the iconic. a woman who imitially had zero interest and sullenly left midway thru the class came back another time and made 20 paintings in an hour, chattering happily as she painted. I tried to interest my father in painting. he obligingly tried but, alas, just did not enjoy it. he made a colourful design with his initials in the middle, which looked good, and I would've thought was a pleasure to do, but it was painful for him. which is sad, the kind of losses we can incur. Kenneth Koch has a book about his experiences doing poetry workshops with the elderly (I forget the title). it's a gloomier book than his ones with children, the resistances, sadly, are greater. but the successes, when people find their way into the activity and that connection, are encouraging, and I mean to underline the word courage in that word. sometimes it seems art, all this stuff we do, is so much farking around--I mean Jim Johnson and Kent Behrle in public can go to hell--but sometimes an enrichment exists beyond that sort of plopping sound. I don't mean to pick on those 2 (well, yes I do), just trying to remind myself not to worry about stupid things. it remains fascinating to me how art does connect.