I'll answer yours if you answer mine - but me first:

1. What artist(s) has helped inspire you in your career?

I was in a class with British Columbia artist Gordon Smith, when I was, hrm, probably still pre-kindergarten age, and he was extremely encouraging. I also summered repeatedly at the Island Mountain School of Arts in Wells, BC. Then when I was twelve, I received some casual but invaluable instruction in photography from the head of the Fine Arts department at Mount Allison, Thaddeus Holownia, and from Liam Allen, Michael Copp, Chris Paul, and Jonathan Harpur (who called themselves 'the Photographic Fellows'). Finally, for two years I lived with Ottawa writer/artist Nik Maack and we both studied creative writing with Tom Henighan. Not all of these influences have been good, but they were definitely formative.

Professionally, while I consider Emily Carr's works overrated, I find her determination inspiring. She was broke and directionless, and still forced herself to keep looking for the best way to express herself, and when she found it, she didn't let anything stop her. I have often used her example to steady me when I've felt that I would never figure out the best way to demonstrate my talent. I am also inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Burtynsky, Raymond Chandler, Alfred Bester, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter S. Thompson, Vicente Aleixandre, David Hockney, and a range of modern cultural icons from Jeff Bridges to Deltron 3030. And Donald Rumsfeld, of course. He's adorable.

2. How do you work with difficult people and not get frustrated?

Find what each person is best at doing, tell them the results you require, and so long as the results are good, DON'T TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT. Remember who the expert is - PROBABLY NOT YOU.

Always budget a little extra and discuss individually what small but essential new contribution each person can make to the project. Let them decide what it will be. Don't worry if what they want to do sounds dumb. You will often be wrong. It will often be brilliant because in some ways, everybody in the entire world is smarter than you. Even if it does turn out dumb, it makes the person happy, and they'll work harder on the parts of the project that you care about. If you don't let each person have absolute control over a little bit of the project, they will want absolute control over all of the project. You have to give everybody a vent.

If you find a person that insists on making trouble, and it is at all possible to fire them, FIRE THEM and feel no regret. Even though they may bring a required skill or cachet or financial backing to the project, be aware that they are subtracting as well as adding - and may be a net negative. If they are just there because they're your friend, learn to be professional and to not work with people just because they're your friends. Fire your friend.

3. What pointers could you give to an aspiring artist?

You need to live indoors. Find what you can make money doing, and learn to like doing it, because it gives you the freedom to do what you like doing that doesn't make money. Just like actors. Don't care if people call you a sell out. If you were selling PVC piping and you got a big contract, nobody would call you a sell out. Art is a business. Be professional. Find out what you can stand to compromise on and be willing to do so; find good reasons to argue in favour of what you can't compromise on. Pick up the shooting diary for Steven Soderbergh's 'sex lies and videotape' and you'll see he made all kinds of compromises - but still won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, with it being his first movie. The compromises he made, which enabled the picture to be produced, did not damage it - and in some cases, very obviously improved it.

"Do what you love and the money will follow" is, "like all good lies, half-true". If you build a better mousetrap, you still have to market it. Develop professional skills: proper dress, haircuts, nail-trimmings, good shoes. If you don't make money as an artist, you're not a professional artist. You may not care about being a professional artist, but if you do, be professional. Once money becomes involved, you have have a relationship with money, so figure out what your boundaries are, just as you would in any relationship. If you can't do that, then learn to live a long and difficult life of money celibacy. Shakespeare worked for money. Hemingway worked for money. Hockney works for money. Art schools too often teach students to act like they're above all that - but if it was good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for you. If you don't develop yourself professionally as an artist you'll probably end up being something else.

Experiment constantly, and develop a routine to make sure that you don't get stuck on one particular problem. I find it useful to have a lot of very different projects going on so that if I get bored with one thing, I can switch over, and get the guilty thrill of procrastination while still accomplishing something useful. Then I come back to the first thing refreshed.

Last, and most important, heed the cautionary tale of Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, and did it only to make money to fund his pet project, the White Company. It turns out that the White Company was terrible and Sherlock Holmes immortal. That you love doing something doesn't make it good. We've all loved people that were no good - projects are no different. Love is not reason. Teach yourself to recognize when you are wasting your time and when something is hard but still worthwhile, and teach yourself to cut your losses without feeling guilty.

Regards, AD

One thing I've observed obliquely, but which I'll outright say, is a total pain in the ass for me, is that the more I've worked on getting well, the harder I've found it to actually get support, because, in essence, I am less fun. I'm less interested in killing time just to kill time. I feel like, except for a handful of people that I do truly love (and if you don't know if you are one, come by sometime and see me...) that everybody I know - nearly everybody I've ever known - has either passed from a stage where their time is valueless to one where their time is valuable - but done so within a frame of work or family that I'm concretely excluded from - or still regards their time as valueless - and I can't go along with that anymore. It's a difficult position to be in and it's pretty reasonable for me to be feeling cold and alone even just from that. And being sick full time means that, unlike most people, I don't have a job consuming the vast majority of my attention. The problem is - like most of my problems - just knowing about it doesn't do a damn bit of good. Because like most of my problems, I'm too damn tired to do anything about it... and worse than most of my problems, it's actually made itself worse as I've gone along.

I notice, in doing some inbox cleaning, that it has been a month since I first mailed you. It feels like much longer. I've - hell, we both have - gone through a lot. Of my options for people to mail - which I've described as tight, and which is true, but not so much for the reasons I was initially trying to apply - I still think I picked the most appropriate of the lot, though my motives were (and somewhat remain) highly unclear. What I wanted, I think... was someone who wouldn't judge me or push me into action too fast. I do have to be very careful. It's not enough for me to do the right thing. I have to know it's the right thing. Nobody else would just listen to me like you have. Everybody else would start telling me what I should do - everybody else has such expectations of me. Or they would say nothing. You... give perspective. Everybody else... wants me to be what they think I am capable of. Right now I'm capable of damn little and I don't need to be overestimated.

Maybe they don't even know how much pressure they expel. Maybe they act that way toward everybody. But I know that you have expectations of other people that are different from what you have of me, and I know people have expectations of me that they don't have of normal people. It makes me not want to be around people at all. You make me feel like I can just be me. Funny, Kay said that I made him feel like he could just be himself. Apparently himself runs quite a gamut, from delightful to disgusting. Poor Kay. But more on that some other time, when my knives have come back from the whetstoner.

I'm looking like a better bet every day, as the treatments invade, and I become incrementally less sick. A month ago I said to you, if I survived this current black mojo - spent most of the last four days in bed, but feeling abstractly good about that - it was going to turn out to have been the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. Which is not to say that I'm forgiving... I never forgive until I forget and I'm still stippled all over with white burns from the meteor shower of medical outrage I've been inhabiting. But I'm not bitter, either. I'd be happy to get on with life. I just want to get well, in the way that works best for me personally. Just give me one thing from life - the same thing John Self wanted:

I'm understanding. I'm mature. And it isn't much to ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my Selina - or not even alone, damnit, merely close to her, close enough to smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to put in one good, clean punch.

AD

I re-read "Money: A Suicide Note" cover to cover this weekend, for once without any morbid intent... Proof is that I found a shuttle slip in it and I'm still here.

Money is an amazingly well written book and I would kill... not to be able to write that well, because I already do, but I'm missing the key that turns the engine. I think I've figured it out, though. I think it's not actually me as such... it's the same problem plaguing female stand-up comedians. There are just so few role models - and those that are are obsessed with a narrow range of topics. Amis's book, Money, is this super-masculine fantasy of the id - the character, John Self, has barely any restraint or decorum. He interrupts a pitch meeting to go puke because he was on a bender all night. He talks constantly about 'handjobs - say what you will about handjobs, they're deeply democratic'. He cries. He gets into fights. He is horribly lonely but he can't connect to people (despite being around them constantly). He fucks the wrong girl... girls... but can't get it up for the right one. He is amoral but not psychopathic... sympathetic but does not elicit sympathy because every wrong thing he's done has been out of his own foolishness.

What I want is to write about a woman who is comparable, but it seems like the closest we've seen in fifty years is Bridget Jones, and she's... she's okay, she's funny enough, and can be related to on a certain level, but she's not good enough - she's not saturated enough. Bridget is a hyper fantasy of a woman caught in a man's world. I want to write about a woman who is a plausible overstatement of a woman in any world. The problem is... you ask a man, what do men want, and you can come up with all kinds of answers, and they'll all be pretty much true. But women don't know what women want any more than men know what women want. Men know what women can be bought with. Women are being trained to want the same things men want. But what do women _really_ want? (I am not asking you, obviously.) The answer is that women don't know what they want. They've been conditioned to respond - er, we have. Conditioned to ... ho ho ho... I wonder if this is true or if I'm just Freuding. I wonder if women in general end up assuming roles that they - er, we - do not necessarily like, not because we want... because we don't know what we want. So we end up largely doing what we do well, instead. Perhaps this happens a lot to men also, but it's not so mandatory.

I think the princess character is so common because if she is reduced to living in subhuman conditions it's tragic, but if a peasant woman is, it's not just ordinary, but... it's... whatever the reverse of schadenfreude is, where instead of taking joy in the discomfiture of our enemies, we're feeling shame in the discomfiture of one who does not need to be shamed further. The princess starts higher on the meter, so being pushed down a certain amount means she's not going lower than we can stand. Ah, because she started with more opportunities. A peasant woman being crushed probably had no opportunity to not be crushed. There is no sport in that. Nobility derided, however, always has an opportunity for renewal.

I want to write about a woman who is like Flashman in the sense that she is successful in spite of her baser impulses - like John Self in that she is grotesque yet still attractive and sympathetic. But who could one possibly use as a model? Adventuresses like Lola Montez are interesting, but they're basically men in drag. Elizabeth? Hatshepsut? Closer, but they also rose using masculine methods and fighting men. So who?

I am not talking about a feminist, obviously. I am talking about a woman who is monstrous but still appealing. Perhaps I should read up on Livia again... but surely she qualifies as a psychopath. What with all the killing.

AD

Sure, it's nice to know one's fans appreciate one. It's just not enough. There comes a time in every modern artist's life when it's not good enough to give away one's best efforts for free. I experienced it, our contemporary dobbs at VictoryShag experienced it, and you, later than most perhaps because you were making a bit of cash via donations, but still, have finally come around to notice what Dr. Johnson said: no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. Us Canucks are discouraged from taking ourselves seriously as artistes unless we're beautifully styled but functionally flaccid feminists -- or have some grim story about the day the cow froze to death and meant little Omlet couldn't go to college after all, and was thus doomed to an aimless life toiling in the Saskatchewan fields so gray and hard and drear oh my. Wanting acknowledgement is just so ghastly and American, dears.

You are going to have to decide if you're going to take yourself seriously, and by that I mean you're going to aggressively seek what your work is worth to you, not what some random group of passersby decide to pitch into your hat. Also, refining and developing and expanding your talents, and exposing (huh) yourself to new challenges. It doesn't mean eliminating fart jokes (huh huh, I said eliminate) or even changing your material significantly. Just your attiude toward it.

So long as you undervalue your work, you'll be vulnerable to attack, because you are providing the attackers with a ready-made porthole of insecurity. This is why such fundamentally pissant and transient little jabs have made you wail and stump around. If you were content with your artiste-ic lot you wouldn't cross the street to piss on their shoes, much allow them to take up residence in your head as rationale to not produce. It's not really about them. You were just expelled from Paradise a little later than most. Take heart though, you've plenty of talented company in Limbo, chum. Meet me. Meet dobbs.

PS: Thanks for bestirring me to write my first public piece in around six months -- even if it was for no money and no fame. This artiste-ic ennui shit is murderous, especially when you're a neurological wasteland to begin with.

Jen wanted to control an audience she didn't gather. She was a coward. I have a love/hate take on cowards because there have been so many days when I was too sick to face anything at all. My undergrad degree started at 13 and still incomplete, and other such things that I think about whenever I'm equilibrious enough to do a little mental strength training, to make sure I'm not crushed by them unaware in a moment of exhaustion. I understand the desire to splice together the parts one wants to show, with the quality of editing — the seamlessness — dictating how successful the eventual screenings will be. One leads to another, since nobody builds a theatre for only one movie. So now you're showing something else on another screen, and another, and another.

The usual problem is, you can't permanently keep the audiences from encountering critics and wanting to see what was reviewed in the theatre next door. Uncle Dynamite's first fiance was atypically good at keeping them apart; she wandered the internet, carefully showing herself in small enough doses to different groups to make sure they always pumped her full of attention and control. Then she overreached; she accused one guy from one group of having raped her, told Uncle Dynamite she was pregnant with their baby and so he proposed, then she suddenly married somebody from theatre 6...

This other woman I knew, involved with one guy who moved from Africa to be with her, while she was having netsex with a friend of mine. She fed a semi-complicated story to her boyfriend but neglected to let me know I was supposed to verify it, so I was caught flat, and very annoyed, because I didn't like her screwing around to begin with and was progressively uninterested in being remotely acquainted... She married the boyfriend, and we don't talk anymore.

I remember the women mostly because I'm not even closely acquainted with that many, and it seems like all the ones I do know are constantly pulling dumb shit and expecting me to jump in after them. I imagine there's less of this, proportionately, on the internet now, because there are now about the same number of women as men. I do recall a guy whose fiance was cheating on him over the internet, and he knew, and married her anyhow, and later cheated on her, online first, then in person.

I think these people would have behaved antisocially no matter what the medium; they just filmed and showed their movies digitally instead. I don't think medium matters that much if you're really interested in understanding people. Some people are perceptive of particular cues and others, like me, get hard to quantify gestalt impressions from anything: phone, written word, physical presence, etc. But I digress... Though I aggressively dislike this behavior, I am often peculiarly oblivious to it, partly from the aforementioned sympathy, and partly because I see things from such an unorthodox angle that sometimes I don't realize what I'm seeing. I'll wander in partway through dubbing, or stumble into the cutting room, or critique the plot to the annoyance of my fellow watchers and end up leaving early.

Even though I'm extremely detached, I'm still susceptible to moviemakers. The motivation for making and showing one is so alien to me that I can get drawn in simply because I'm curious and baffled as to why anyone would possibly do this. I do not like large amounts of sustained attention. I like it to be small and asynchronous and to contain enough useful criticism that I can improve. I do not like getting empty fan mail. I find it distracting. It's distracting — and corrosive — of the moviemakers also, but they like it that way. They made their whole life with clever sliding panels and strategic veils and Chinese finger traps.

Moviemakers are ultimately exhausting to deal with, because I'm most interested in conveying a maximum of reality with a minimum of artifice, and moviemakers are naturally otherwise. I'm constantly having to ask them, what do you mean, how serious is that, what do I hold on to, where are you? I usually end up close enough to them that I'm seeing multiple screenings at once and trying to process N different plots and eventually realizing none of them truly jive. Normally ultra-perceptive about the fundaments of character — the same techniques I use to determine if something is physically acceptable to my health — my snap judgments are usually solid. Moviemakers are tough though, fundamentally manipulative, so they deflect a lot of my normal tactics. They may not lie, but they are liars. When I do catch on, though, I am gone, and you may whistle for me... You know how to whistle don't you, darling? You just put your lips together and blow.

They are probably happier than I am, and my purpose is not to anathematize but anatomize. They probably find my choice in lifestyle equally peculiar — that I would reject conversation — which Emerson says is a game of circles to begin with — with anyone I can't trust. Regardless of how delightful moviemakers might be. In their craving for control and attention, they are usually intensely fascinating and charming — another reason they escape initial rejection, I must grudgingly admit. I gotta go with Gibbon though: conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius, baby.

It is unsurprising that I should have immediately taken to the internet when I first got access over ten years ago. It allows me to research and socialize and publish my art so long as I am well enough to sit up. I need not even be able to speak that day (and easily revert to talking with my hands and facial expressions only).

I have moved around my whole life. One of the big effects of allergy is that you want to get away from whatever's triggering. When you have as many as I do, though, that strategy is pointless without a specific plan. Moving within the same town is useless if the problem is mold growing through the entire countryside -- unless your doctor, who didn't the first time I lived there, knows enough to prescribe the right steroid. My second stint in that town was actually quite nice, where the first was unremittingly horrible. Moving to get away from the mold is no good if you go to a city where air pollution from half the province collects in the downtown. Why didn't I know any better? My doctors were idiots. I have better doctors now, so I am getting better, and when I encounter a fresh idiot, I fire him. This is working extremely well.

The internet allowed me to, for the first time, maintain contact with people while moving around. (The phone is not your first choice when you've lost your voice as oft as I have.) I've had the same email address for eight years (and yes, I get a lot of spam). I've also run a mud at the same address (hypercube.org:9000) for about nine years. Some of my favourite people I know only from my mud and email, which doesn't make them any less remarkable or interesting or make me care any less.

(HEY PIBER IF YOU SEE THIS FUCKING SEND EMAIL STOP YOU LAZY COCK STOP YOU PHONE AT 2AM RAVE ABOUT THAT WANKER NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE ALSO GOOFY BILL JOY AND THEN DISAPPEAR TO SPAIN STOP WHAT THE HELL? STOP LOVE GT STOP)

For five years, ending about five years ago, when I was most sick (the pneumonia lasting eleven months straight this time, despite a sympathetic and relatively intelligent doctor) I wrote every day, on my mud. Purple stuff, and necessarily formulaic, but I have too much talent and cussedness to get stuck in method. I still work on the game when I relapse; I suppose it's no worse than a model train set. Structurally it's is an advanced form of the elaborate dollhouses I built when I was stuck at home from school. I wallpapered them. Sewed dresses and furniture. If I could get my parents to do some tricky bit with, say, lighting, great, if not, I improvised.

I slightly wish I could have worked on more publishable stuff in that time block, but despite a good mentor from CBS, I turned out only a few dozen traditional journo pieces. The mistake was in trying to develop a specific writing bent instead of just writing — like trying to learn how to play only Beethoven. Now, whatever motivates me to write — global politics or someone stuck in meetings or random narcissistic exegesis like this — I'll take it.

There are still friendships through my mud, and there were romances. The romances went as romances go — that is, they failed from incompatibility, dishonesty, character defect, or other usual reasons. I take dating over the internet about as seriously as I take dating in person, experience about the same amount of trouble and daydreaming, have gone out of my way for it to about the same degree, married (and divorced) one of them, and want to date over the internet now about as much as I want to date in person. Yes dear, almost not at all.

Yet...

There are people I've known only online for a decade or so, and sneakily, it's no longer enough. Last year I started asking for pictures. This spring, recommending my actual phone number. This summer, a surprisingly tolerable experiment with now-unborrowed videoconferencing gear, but mostly the idea is, come visit.

(THAT'S A HINT, GUNNAR, FINISH YR PROJECT, GET PI AND BRING BOOZE.)

The more forcefuly I inhabit my more-reliable body the more sensory connection I want to make with everything. More photography, more music, better food, cleaner air, doing weights again — it's logical that I want more physical — tactile — presence too. If I think you're delightful I want to experience your visceral existence, and if it's good, great, and if not, I still prefer regrets of things I did to regrets of things I didn't. I am not saying I want to run off tomorrow with some mountain guy to his distant homeland. I do not. I am talking about market research and calculated risk... Hah!

I will eventually be well, judging from my overall progress, and when I am, I expect to have a pretty good time. Even full of arsenic I've hiked to the highest point in the Gatineau Hills, been proposed to (YES NINO, IN PERSON) about once a year since I was fifteen (and very confusedly hat-tricked proposals in one weekend), worked for the richest department in the Canadian government as well as the poorest, beaten a grown man with my straw hat at a stoplight in a rental car, carried a twenty pound bag of cat food under one arm, listened to at least twenty thousand pieces of music and read god knows how many thousands of books, written half an opera, been an editor, a theatre director, an art smuggler... And cynic I am, I'm honest enough to admit I still believe in happiness. And the possibility of love. Yum, possibility. Let's float possibility.

Either way, if you are focused, you can emerge clean and mostly dry already, because the water's so hot, in about four minutes. If you remembered to evict the cat first. If you don't notice the cat until after you start, you're fucked. Because the cat is claustrophobic. THE CAT WANTS OUT. You can't possibly stop to let the cat out or you'll be blanched. Not letting the cat out means a furious 'MOOOOAAAAAWWW!' every five to ten seconds while you are frolicking intently under burning spray. Means the whole enterprise takes six minutes instead of four, because every time the cat protests, the mind flips into some novel way of persuading him to be calm. None of them work, not even the singing.

The cat is perfectly happy now, sitting on a box, staring out my bedroom door, as the plumber tests his shower repairs. I feel like I've been scrubbed all over with a toothbrush. I'm eating an organic nectarine that's hard as an apple. It's all a little novel and nice. Everything lately is a little novel and nice. I have these amazing air filters, previously mentioned, and the longer I have them, the more amazing they seem. Which is part of a trend: about a dozen long-term problems on the cusp of resolving themselves.

It's not as automatic as I might make it sound. I've worked very persistently to get to a point where everything would tie the room together like a rug. Swam upstream with (or against) my doctors for four solid years now -- couldn't've done it without Puddy and Galahad and my mother -- and Gunnar and Pi and Hermes listening to me gripe -- and even you, Demon, yes -- but now --

Yes, I'm still very sick. It's much more manageable though. For the last six weeks especially, between the filters and the steroids and the nervous system regulators, I'm marginally able to eat banned food if I'm careful. Sleeping more consistently. Much more patient and focused. Much lower percentage of stupid useless days. Less trouble with the joints and the sinuses and so on.

The clearer my head gets, the more reevaluation and decision I end up doing, whether I like it or not. The more I want to take chances -- to get on with life -- to be happy. I'm willing to be patient, but the more I get to know what I want, the more I want to just, click, let's see how it is. Right now. Let's get on with it.

Right now, I'm picking music to send to Iraq. My once-fella from Santa Barbara is over in Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace, so I asked, what do you need, books, chocolate, whatever, and he said, send music, he has no time to read. They're pretty well set up otherwise, with the X-box and the VCR and his laptop that plays DVDs. There's no internet access. Also, they're getting shelled from the hills. He nearly got hit by an RPG round. Aside from that, though...

So, building a little package, Brahms, Ella Fitzgerald, DJ Shadow, bunch of soundtracks, etc. I love picking music. I prefer the agonizing Rob Gordon route of assembling a mix, but delivering entire albums (or masses of albums) is gratifying too. I particularly like providing the right music to people that I particularly like. And receiving music. And prefer receiving the agonizing Rob Gordon mix.

Almost no one, percentagewise, reads bad poetry and gets angry about it. Odds are if they do, it's because they're a writer, and they — and by they I mean me — are angry because of the disrespect, shoddiness and wilful obtuseness the poet showed. It's the same anger a chef shows when served lukewarm soup and lukewarm salad. He is not going to look at a dessert and say 'the cinnamon on top is so nice I'm not going to RIP YOUR FUCKING SPLEEN OUT FOR GIVING ME SOMETHING BURNT FROM ASS TO TEAKETTLE — BECAUSE EVEN THE TEA IS BURNT.'

Poetry, like food, has to achieve a certain level of consumability before anybody will consume it. Most people can recognize a bad poem as easily as bad food — occasionally you'll mistake it for something good and get sick but usually you'll instinctively give it a pass. This is why most bad poetry is in tiny, low-circulation journals (though not all of it is bad — and nothing in this polemic should imply that all modern poetry is bad — just the bad stuff). You'll glaze over, because bad poetry is boring, but you'll be polite probably, like you're polite when Aunt Jones brings out the leftover almond cookies from last time you failed to eat them all. You'll eat a cookie, you'll try not to break your teeth, and you'll go home with your side twitching. Not, you think, a big deal. It's fine for you not to be serious about it. There are all kinds of commodities that I am not serious about because I don't have time, inclination or aptitude, and I don't mind poetry being one of those for you.

It stays not a big deal until Aunt Jones insists on promoting her cookies in public — that is, she insists on acting like she is a professional simply because she is interested. Once she does that, it is comprehensible (if not necessarily sensible) for other professionals, who take a very competitive industry very seriously, to try to destroy her as efficiently as possible, just as a professional programmer wants to destroy bugs in software that he has to live near. Poetry is not an area where you can make up with enthusiasm what you lack in talent — but I am getting needlessly mean spirited when what I really am is angry. I think most of these people do have talent and I think what they're doing with it is appalling. They are writing aggressively incoherent tracts and doing themselves a bad turn with it. I am angry because I care about writing as an art, and what these people are doing to themselves. Read your Shakespeare. "One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones." Then read your Orwell: "Vague and muddled language leads to vague and muddled thinking." I cannot be happy about anybody choosing to be vague and muddled about something he is going to do a lot. It all comes back to love, and response to who and what one loves, because I am, as most cynics are, a high-functioning romantic.

The best balanced writing of any kind will last forever, like honey. The rest, while not decomposing as quickly as oranges, will get a little hard, a little cracked, as time dries out on top of it. Of course, one doesn't want to eat honey all the time; not all writing has to be eternal, just functional. I've recently accepted the value of AOL Instant Messenger, after many years of saying "if you want to talk to me, log into my mud". I still vastly prefer my mud because it allows at least crude body language, which I find an invaluable contextualizer, and the mud provides a common reference point for a social group.

I don't use AIM for that many people, and in virtually all cases, I have enough other communications channels open with the person that we can layer probability and history with present content to make the communications obvious. Without that context it's a bit like being in a wind tunnel — everything's fine and then you fall over. Severity — seriousness — is easiest to corrupt, because IM is naturally casual. It can be extremely difficult to gauge how much, if anything, is behind a given comment. Perhaps that videoconferencing stuff is not such a bad idea — the picture and the thousand words, etc.

It depends on what you want to do — but I think most modern poets do not so much want to do as to not do and say they did. If I can generalize something personal enough to write about it, I will, and that, I think, is the essence of poetry — to be ruthless about motivation in the service of long term communication. Whereas if I am saying it just to you, you, you... you need remember it only as long as you like, and then...

I didn't throw them out because they're not mine, and then the subject came up again in reference to teeshirts. I threw out a lot of junk last May when I found out I had so many allergies -- empty Altoid boxes, business card CDs, about five hundred press releases in those plasticized trade show bags, that sort of thing. I replaced my large white desk with a tiny silver metal one from Ikea, to minimize the clutter and thereby reduce the dust. The stuff I kept was mostly important, like engagement rings and Chanel No. 5.

Yet, since then, whenever I go to Niagara Falls, I have the urge, translated to intention, but not yet into action, to buy a white plastic fridge magnet with 'NIAGARA FALLS' in thick black italics with a useless red thermometer on the side. I can visualize the magnet, feel the way it feels in my hand, even see the slanting afternoon sunlight, partly blanked by mist, in the plate glass store window. I do not know why I want one of these. It's not for kitsch. It's not lack of other mementoes. I took lots of lovely photos. Somehow, though, the mass-produced plastic -- the corporate money, the commitment it represents -- keeps calling me. I HAVE PROBLEMS WITH COMMITMENT PLEASE SOLVE IT FOR $1.29 PLUS TAX.

How can something machine-made ever mean more than something I made with my own mind? I suppose since I am so much aware of advertising, that when a campaign works on me, as Niagara Falls does, the novelty alone makes it that much harder to resist. I have a Mac. Rockport shoes. Clinique moisturizer. A Zippo lighter -- two, in fact. One was a gift engraved with my initials and various feathers and it leaks so I never use it. I prefer the beatup one from Vietnam. I theorize that all these things are good. However, I know enough to know I can't entirely divorce myself from an appealing brand strategy. I know its purpose is to attract those who want to impress others while confirming their own existence in a world increasingly promulgating projects with no obvious completion or even theoretical product. Those who want to broadcast that they have money and specific taste -- to indulge in visual name dropping. All I want to know is, where do I fit in that clan?

David Kelly wanted to know the same thing, and one way or another, the Iraq marketing campaign killed him. Somebody fingered him as the guy who said the British intel was "sexed up" and (probably) either Kelly couldn't take the pressure or (unlikely but possible) somebody else knocked him off. He became like one of us wandering Comdex shoving Department of Defence stress balls in our 3Com bags, not even looking at what we're picking up, because the dissociation is so great that one memory was splitting into smaller and smaller fractions until eventually, there is not even one complete one. There were not enough NetZero thin mints at a hundred Comdexen to save Kelly.

Stephen Jay Gould dedicated much of his last book to the humanities versus science dichotomy. Given the material nonexistence of what's produced by both sides, it's not surprising that ideological branding should be so deep rooted and damaging to all intellectual cultures. The less demonstrable the benefits, it seems, the more extreme the results -- culminating in the most dangerous daydream of all, organized religion -- which is, of course, the underpinning of what killed Kelly. He got too close to unreality and he became unreal. So perhaps it's not such a bad idea to keep a physical coffee mug. Maybe I should order that magnet over the internet.

I love my Nikon Coolpix 5700, which has eight zoom and a big fat lens, which means it, when I, well I, sometimes I just look at it, fully extended, and I wonder, well, just how sturdy that thing is, because it's so light and sleek and warm in my hands that it, well I, I, I. I showed the thing to Uncle Demon, and he's blind, that's how much I'm into it, but it's not that, it, just look at it, it flips and swivels and folds and extends and right in the palm it, now turn, now like that, press that, yes, I can't possibly stand it. It does exactly what I tell it to, which is wonderful in a machine, if depressing in a man.

My computer, far more complicated, more erratic, hot and cold, what do you want, what am I supposed to do, how much investment can I justify in perpetuating this bondage, you always want more from me! I spend far more time with my computer than my camera, but our relationship is more detached. My computer is a nexus. It's hard to become really intimate with something that effectively exists in more dimensions than you do. If you switch into a given dimension set fully -- the one where you can send instant approval of the Pixies to the guy from Jerkcity, say, or listen to the Pixies yourself -- then you can love the computer in its specific incarnation as purveyor of the Pixies and Pixies related information. As a discrete box it's like trying to love a hydroelectric dam for itself and not for its output to your blender.

During the recent blackout, however, I developed a new appreciation of the humbler machines: freezer, fridge and stove. I have a tremendous number of allergies, so it was actually extremely difficult to find things I could eat that required neither processing nor refridgeration. I ended up throwing up seven times without my air filters regardless, because THEY PAINTED THE HALLWAYS IN MY BUILDING IN FORTY DEGREE HEAT AND NINETY FIVE PERCENT HUMIDITY AND THEN THE POWER WENT OUT. Excuse me. I know enough now to love the fridge, stove and freezer, but it's cousinly and definitely platonic. I do not want to straddle the freezer door handle.

There was no sex during the blackout. There is no sex at all. There is only machinery, that surrounds and lifts and separates. Sex? Take me somewhere calm and blue, with dry air that moves a little, and the ocean, and the mountains, and the forest. The very idea makes me want to take my flat wide-angled screen in my arms and lick all the dust off. But most of it I would leave behind. Then what? Books? Books. Yes, I'm the last machine of all, operated by books, my levers twisted and sunk and jammed in and rotated until my blood turns into ideas and back into words to turn into books. I am only a pen for more books.

July 12, 2003 21:20 PM

I was shooting right up at Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi at the edge of the stage and my Nikon crashed and I rebooted it and shot shot shot and it started to rain and I was soaked and my camera was soaked and I shot until the water was streaming off it and I thought, if I were well, this would be the greatest fucking job in the world. Then that was enough, I was cold, and the speakers made me shake so badly that most of my photos are worthless and they hurt my sinuses, so I got Puddy and we crawled under the stage with the other photographers, who were complaining about being attacked by audience members, as were the security guards (and myself, some idiot was hitting me in the back and calling me a bitch), but "a photographer never moves!" And we saw a woman in soaked white pants with a black thong and listened to the music for a while and then I went home, and my bus driver very efficiently forgot half his route so I didn't get very far into Norman Rush's Mating but what I have read so far was splendid and recommendable if rambling, rambling. And I love you, and I'm so tired now.

July 10, 2003 20:56 PM

I was shopping for garlic in a Safeway grocery store in Santa Barbara where they had Joni Mitchell muzak-- but I had to attach the words before I realized what it was. How undignified for me and Joni-- who went to the trouble of writing the damn things! Can't they stick to mashed Vivaldi? The insidiousness-- the corrosive desensitising depravity-- of muzak, is that it summons a pastel shadow of our most darkly burned memories in a commercial context. You're standing by the broccoli and a deliberately sexless synthesis of Ain't No Cure for Love inserts itself partway into your ear and makes you feel so wistful and heartsick over that one person you needed so abjectly that you would have done anything, even yes, bought an entire flat of imported Swiss organic cabbage heads, and suddenly wham, then there you are, in the parking lot, tears running into your socks while you wonder if you can freeze the stuff or if you have to have a vegetarian barbeque. It cuts right-- or left-- down the middle of your brain, disrupting and disconnecting until you're a bundle of seething organs dripping money. Baby, you cannot help yourself, just let me-- Yes, that's better.

Imitation flavour is a ubiquitous sign of the apocalypse but it is usually suffered voluntarily. When did somebody smear you with imitation strawberry pie just for walking in the door? Smell and music are broadcast. Music operates on deep brain structures -- in fact, when we get old and forgetful, music is the last thing to go.

I am not even talking about the deliberate dumbification of mass producted music-- there've always been pop crap soporifics. Where tofu is shaped like a sausage to give a vegetarian a guiltless hot dog experience, muzak is shaped like music to achieve a gutless emotional effect. Even boy bands have actual boys; muzak is untouched by human hands. Sterility is fine when one wants uniformity, but we probably do not want a machine in a supermarket to uniformly be able to draw upon our love of sperm to make us buy bleach. Love, love, love, it's love that's being exploited, love is our most easily exploited emotion, the thing that makes us dumbest and most credulous and relentlessly optimistic-- most vulnerable to a new product.

It is one thing for Mick to sell Bill a song for eight million pounds-- at least Bill used the song directly, in however peculiar and entertaining a fashion. Whatever associations you have are genuine and the problem is how happy you are, as a consumer, about associating Diana Krall or Sting with cars or conversely, thinking of Michael Jackson's shrunken face whenever you (and I mean you, since I don't) drink Pepsi. But there's nowhere to take revenge when Tostitos makes the football team sing "Groovin'"-- what can you to do the Young Rascals that time and gravity haven't already?

I am not human myself, and neither is Auntie, but I'm not a demon, and neither is she. Some would disagree-- but let them get their own columns. Whatever moral incontinence Auntie manifests is not due to lack of a soul. (Aristotle would say it's involuntary, therefore absolvable.) Mine derives from having a soul (despite being inhuman) far too complicated for my infuratingly ill-wired nerves, misshapen and malfunctioning reproductive system, pitted digestive tract, misaligned kneecaps and arsenic frosted liver. Like the universe, if I were constructed with a hair's different hair I would be a spinning lifeless ball of ice-- and perhaps I am.

Don't think, by the way, that because I'm using Judeo-Christian terms like 'soul' and 'demon' that I subscribe to the trinity and a panoply of saints or the cranky micromanaging ubergod. My culture is primarily Judeo-Christian and I am not a feminist, so I use the terminology that's convenient and which pleases me. If I grew up in Egypt I might say ka (of which I have fourteen and all of them are male) instead of soul-- but I didn't, so go fuck yourself-- whatever you thought and whomever you are and even if you love me I just don't care, I don't care, I don't care. It's been too fucking long since I told the collective you to go fuck yourselves and I bet you've done something that merits it. I need to tell you to go fuck yourself so hopelessly many times before I will be again as clean and pure as a drain hot with vinegar and bicarb.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck-- so much loathing, so much hatred, tangled up the hillside covered in drying chaparral all wrapped around my thumping-thumping veins striping too small, too fragile a body. The seal is cracked and I am leaking. I am oozing antisocial steel. It takes two to reason and there are barely two of us reasonable people to rub together! Shut up! I don't care who you are. I hate you. You've got something I don't and I want it so I hate you. Time is rotting all around me. Hate is all that keeps me going-- hate and fucking, and when you're as unfashionably delicate as I am fucking is more an ideal than an event. I don't care if I ever fuck again. Shut up! I don't care who you are. I don't care if I fucked you or not. I never want to fuck you again, or you, or you, and especially not you--

--and I don't want to talk about it! I don't care what you have to say. My ears are full of ideal fucking and there's no room. You can send me letters, postcards, video tapes from the Subtitled Movie Channel, paper airplanes, buffaloes written on the side in their own shit, zeppelins, billboards, diplomats with seals, hit men with my name on their bullets, lawyers in embroidered briefs, guns, money, bombs, dictionaries, plaster casts, bottles with messages in them, clay tablets, or even Leonard Shelby, though he will have forgot why by the time he arrives. Just leave my ears alone. Nobody is fucking my ears today but me.

I had never considered it before, but that episode likely explains why I now only use little, pocket-sized notebooks, write on random pages, and always have several dozen of them. For that matter, why I particularly dislike full-size lined notebooks and usually tear the pages out after I'm done writing in one. How ordinarily tidy.

There's a wonderful Peter Falk movie called Tune in Tomorrow where he plays a charmingly deranged writer of radio soap operas. In it, there's a scene where he's sitting with Keanu Reeves (and, in my opinion, this movie may be the only justification for Keanu's existence) drinking tea made from "eucalyptus and uncured tobacco". Keanu mentions he'd "kinda sorta like to be a writer". Peter Falk becomes gravely incensed, saying one becomes a writer because one is "compelled. Yuh got no choice." Keanu says yeah, yeah, he does feel like that. Sure, kid. Well, go on, give it a shot.

Some days I feel like Peter and some, well. I don't know that I ever really want to write; I want audience and I want to communicate. But I often hate writing, where I don't hate any of the other art things I do (painting, photo, music). When I was a kid I hated music. I think I hated it mostly because it was unreasonably hard for me to read the sheets. I dropped math for similar reasons -- obvious, again, in retrospect -- though before I loved math, and excelled at it to the point where I'd be at least Feynman now, maybe an Einstein. I imagine I resist and fear specialization because every speciality has been taken from me -- just as I manipulate love because every love has either died or been severed.

Painting, photo and music are clear cut. I can choose to manipulate a photograph if it suggests something, or I can leave it plain. I can choose to paint something real or I can choose to fool around until something emerges. I can choose what piece of music to play. In all cases there's a set of circumscribed options -- what colours of paint I have or what brushes I have; what I see and can manipulate into the camera's field; what sheet music I have available. I'm not creating, really. I'm filtering -- just as I do with Moon Farmer, or on Google. I'm a superb filter, no doubt. But it's a... it's not good enough. It's unsatisfying. One might ask why, with so few good filters and so many mediocre creators, I would want to be one of them and not what I am. The answer is that it is insufficient to be a destroyer.

I dreamed about it that night; I dreamed of him in a sexual context, which I had rarely done when we were together. The dream was, forgive me, anticlimactic. He brought a cheap black hard-shelled suitcase of commonplace and gaudy sex toys and wore a flimsy bathrobe. He lounged exorbitantly on my blanket-heavy tarnished brass bed. My hands got under his robe; I don't remember what I wore but his hands were under it too. It was ordinary. I might as well have been made of soaked straw. Then someone tried to come in to the room and I couldn't hide him. He's tall, you know! Then I became aware we would be heard and I tried to box up all his gadgets that were sequin strewn on the curling wooden floor. We would teleport somewhere else, I suggested. But it wasn't what I wanted. Sex was waterlogging me with its absence; the sex was so heavy in the air that it was choking everything else. Without dispelling it there couldn't be anything else.

Sitting in the sun I am possessed by enormous, sur-wakeful benevolence-- a benevolence which impels me, compels me even, to lecture you on your abominable taste in music.

The difference, my incestuous cousin, between classical and jazz was a subject of mortal debate at the turn of the last century. The reason is that jazz is about feeling ("now I'm blue / and the trouble with me is you") and classical music is about thinking-- how else could one be induced to accept eighteen hours of dwarves fucking giants and vengeful women made out of water in a language half the audience didn't know? Yet my examples highlight the ridiculous of overgeneralizing that jazz is virile and classical sterile: Nat King Cole clearly knew some math ("the/trou/ble/with/me/is/you"), and Wagner-- great with the notes-- was fecundly inattentive to what Socrates said about building a good story.

Beethoven and Mozart clearly knew some things about passion so it's probably no coincidence that they're the commonest known composers in the world. Then we detour left to Shakespeare, who mostly wrote for money and didn't think his stuff worth saving, but who knew the value of humour in the middle of pathos ("the bawdy hand of the dial is upon the prick of noon")-- more importantly, though forgive the juxtaposition, the value of timeless humour. Shakespeare was lucky enough to live at a time when any in-jokes should be confined Zeus fucking a cow-- not a hanging chad in the bunch.

Now it becomes apparent that jazz is not so much about feeling as about individuality-- democracy even-- whereas classical music is about structure and tradition. The airiest classical is solid ("Joy, fair spark of the gods, / Daughter of Elysium, / Drunk with fiery rapture, Goddess, / We approach thy shrine!") compared to the liquidity of the grimmest jazz ("you took a heart / tore it apart / you took a dream / tore out the seams").

If we indulge a little in modern namedropping and compare the feuds on constitutes pure jazz to George Dubya stealing the presidential election in Florida, and the stultification of classical music to the corruption of the Christian church, the metaphors, I think, do take on some substance.

If one accepts, as I do, that rock music is as much an offshoot of jazz as is standup comedy, then one might surmise that I consider all rock music irredeemably liquid. This is true! However, rock is so demandingly fluid that it mixes easily-- one might even say it pollutes easily. My favourite music of any genre is so passionate that it has turned to steam. Yours-- and here's the lecture-- is so cold that it has become mud. People like Roger Waters and Alanis Morissette are loaded with Teutonic angst, but too superficial, stupid or ignorant to develop proper discipline. This makes me very angry, because people who are otherwise intelligent are easily distracted into mistaking passionately cold mud for either water or ground ("There is no disappearing of the true Dhamma until a false Dhamma arises in the world. When the false Dhamma arises, he makes the true Dhamma to disappear").

I am profoundly mistrustful of people who are old enough to have outgrown cold mud music but haven't. It suggests that they feel a great loss in their lives, looming and significant, but have transmuted it into something casual and tolerable. They've rechanneled sorrow-- which can be surmounted-- into melancholy-- which is only romantic. Someone who has permanently done that to themselves will probably do the same to others.

Melancholy is so teenage, ICIE. Grow up.

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