A few more words about this show and Summer 2015 as a whole.
Phish is a band that inspires more creative output from their fan base than any other band has come close too and yes Im fully aware of the Deads fanbase and all they've done.
But the Phish faithful are something entirely different. This very website is a special and unique form of artistry. A canvas & a tribute coexisting in the digital sphere, arts newest aesthetic.
Ive already read (and myself contributed to) 100s of thousands of word just on this tour alone! I find that to be one of the most consitently surprising and charming attributes of being a Phish fan.
I know that that sort of creative reaction to art rubs a lot of people the wrong way, talking about fans both new and old here.
And certainly there is as many poorly expressed fan outputs as there are well wrought ones, probably much more if we're being honest.
But I still love each and every one of them.
When people who aren't in the habit of expressing themselves creatively step out on to that ledge and begin to do they take the first step on a path that great thinkers the world over have dubbed the highest achievement in the realm of personality that man can achieve.
For that reason alone even the poorest of expression should be celebrated IMO, not flamed and stunted.
World renowned post-Freudian psychoanalyst Otto Rank said in his career defining work "Art and Artist" that artisitic expression is "subjective transference brought to its absolute and purest conclusion. A total synthesis of human personality, a back and forth told in symbols as only humans can do. To do so or attempt that journey is the highest form of prayer one can wring from the human experience."
Ranks devasting insight holds what may be the closest thing to an Absolute I have ever read.
If you see it as rife with abstraction then take for a moment the words of Ernst Becker on the evolving trend in human culture regarding our nitpicking and short-sightedness when confronted with the lay person who dares to speak in depth on a subject for which he has not achieved "full mastery" - "...the impossibility of making general statements, which has lead to a general imbecility...."
Becker was reacting to his own observations of modern culture in these quotes, in an era when "criticism" had reached self-ascribed sentience. Becker,himself only a mere anthropologist by trade,had played the victim to the intelligentsia of the psychoanalytic structural hierarchy and was especially sensitive to harsh criticism leveled at those would attempt to break free from those restraints of personality and express themselves in waters previously untested.
This brings us to that quote which sent said hierarchy up in arms, screaming for the hills but which also probably sealed the Pulitzer Prize for Becker, a quote that some people on here and at other scattered digital locales would do well to remember the next time they find themselves about to stifle anothers creative expression -
"“The great characteristic of our time is that we know everything important about human nature that there is to know. Yet never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding. The reason is precisely the advance of specialization, the impossibility of making safe general statements, which has led to a general imbecility. What I would like to do in these few pages is to run the risk of simple-mindedness in order to make some dent in the unintended imbecility brought about by specialization and its mountains of fact. Even if I succeed only poorly, it seems like a worthwhile barter. In such a stifling and crushing scientific epoch someone has to be willing to play the fool in order to relieve the general myopia.”

Peace Out, see you freaks in Mexico.
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