Chatoyant Little Star

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

2008-09-25T17:55:00.001-04:00

Kim & Jessie - M83

2008-09-24T22:12:00.004-04:00

M83 - Kim and Jessie video
Directed by Eva Husson

M83's music makes me shivery, breathless,and gives me a throbbing heartache. I want to wear his brilliant songs tucked into my collar like a secret locket given to me by a forbidden friend. XOXO

Ilove83

SPARKADIA !!!

2008-07-22T15:41:00.004-04:00

If you're like me and your memories play like a dreamy picture postcard slideshow set to a moody pop soundtrack, chances are you'll like Sparkadia

Debut album from Ark Recordings, appropriately named Postcards is out in the UK yesterday...

Sparkadia on FaceSpace and MyBook

Faster Pussycat!

2008-07-02T18:46:00.006-04:00

I cried in front of a cop. I'm so ashamed, but I just couldn't hold it back. I thought that I would be slick today and get to work faster by using a different route than I would normally take. For some reason, the traffic gods( I know them well...I serve them daily and they pay me a decent wage in turn!) decided to foil my plan and throw me into congestion that was 15 times worse than my regular commute! Resigned to the fact that I would be late to work again(2nd day in a row, but yesterday was totally not my fault...I-95 shut down...grrrr!), I called and assured them I wouldn't be but 5 minutes behind. Okay, work alerted, my anxiety level is dropping slightly. I finally get to 202, home stretch...I'll be there in 10 minutes. I'll be there in 10 minutes only if I average 75-80 mph, which isn't unusual for me or the pack of vehicles that I run with daily! FECK! FECK! THRICE FECK!!! Speed trap on NB 202 between milemarkers 10-12! Same place that I was issued a ticket two months ago! How is this possible? How out of a dozen cars doing the same speed do I get the flag and bag?!?! I'm not saying I didn't deserve it. I don't deny that I was speeding. But what exactly makes me a target twice with in 90 days, after never causing an accident and avoiding any moving violations for at least ten years?!?! I just started bawling my eyes out in frustration. The officer was very kind considering the situation and I did somehow avoid points on my license and walk-ahem-drive away with only a considerable fine. Praise be to the wily traffic underlords and sneaky speed demons that helped me wriggle out of this one fairly easily! I'm more than a little paranoid to drive now though...if you someone on an innerstate in the Philadelphia area going 45 in the slow lane, chances are, it's me...don't hate me, I just can't afford to keep paying the state of PA for my need for speed! Be safe..arrive alive...all that good stuff! Grumble...frickafrackamrecka...sigh and good day!

Erik Satie: Gymnopedie #1

2008-03-21T14:44:00.001-04:00

boomp3.com

It's Springing!

2008-03-14T14:17:00.004-04:00

While enjoying coffee on the back step this morning, I listened to our neighborhood woodpecker jackhammer out his lively reveille and watched a conga line of shiny-hiney ants dance past my winter-weary toes! Last night, I heard the first frogs!!! I'm all twitchy and wiggly! Spring is here! Spring is here!

M.A.S.H

2008-02-21T19:24:00.001-05:00

Okay, so this makes me feel like i'm 12, but i can't help myself!

Enjoy

M.A.S.H

Art Deco Blog...Check It

2008-02-19T14:07:00.003-05:00

Stumbled upon this loverly blog...
I heart the 20's and 30's, do you?

The Little Red Schoolhouse Around the Bend

2008-01-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

As of today, I am officially a college student...again. When did school get so expensive and when is the VA going to GIVE ME MY MONEY!?!?! I paid my tuition out of my own pocket, which is now seriously empty, and now I don't have money for books! Arrrgh!!! PANIC PANIC PANIC! This is the reason why I stayed away for so long...I can't handle the pressure....I want my Mommy!

Bukowski is an asshole

2008-01-07T19:16:00.000-05:00

but, he's usually right...

Oh Yes
There are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.

growing pains

2008-01-01T00:08:00.000-05:00

goodbye to the worst year of my life so far. in between jags of crying, chain-smoking, and throwing up, i've spent the past three hours feebly attempting to pack up the past 5 years of my life into scented garbage bags. i've experienced so much trauma in the past month alone, that i can't imagine there is anything i can't survive.

i feel utterly alone though and i'm scared shitless...

yet, there is hope...judging from my past, i know that i only get this frightened when i'm doing something right...

my inside doesn't match my outside anymore...my skin has become too small...how fortunate i am...let's get big!

happy new year, strangers.

Never be the same again

2007-12-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

We are both wheat and chaff, and the chaff must be burned away.

I will never be the same again,
I can never return, I've closed the door.

I will follow you into the dark

2007-12-09T05:57:00.001-05:00

Dreaming of Budding Crocuses

2007-12-06T02:57:00.000-05:00

Dear No One In Particular,

Feeling completely uninspired lately. Hating this weather. I don't remember ever liking snow and my loathing of the wet white stuff seems to increase per annum. Want to lay in bed until late March. Currently praying for an upgraded uterus, mine is 'on the fritz'.

With lethargy and anhedonia,
M

It's a Racing Snail

2007-11-30T01:11:00.000-05:00

Baby

2007-11-29T03:17:00.001-05:00

my dog died on Saturday.

Patter for the Floating Lady

2007-11-29T02:22:00.000-05:00

There is a dream inside me and a corona surrounding me. The dream is of a bright star in eclipse, and its corona shimmers magnetically. You saw it. I loved you for seeing it. It drew you to me, into the dream. But I needed time, and you didn't have time. Everything you said and did, every touch at night in bed, every act of kindness, every generosity, every loving comment had this sentence attached: Maybe now she'll love me. And it made you weak. And if I'm not going to love someone strong, why love at all?

You should have seen that to let you in hurt me, because you wanted the part of me you cannot have; you wanted the part that no one should have of another person. And I will have my dreams remain inside me, for me, and if you had let them be, they would have been for you, too. So now I wait for a man who will stand before me at arms length, and I will hand him unimaginable joy, and he will not move forward, or move back. Then I will hand him unimaginable pain. And he will stand, moving neither forward nor moving back. Then and only then, I will slit myself from here to here (she indicates a vertical line from her neck to her abdomen), open my skin, and close him into me.

Angie ~ Patter for the Floating Lady by Steve Martin

Sex Cookies Love Pizza

2007-11-24T02:12:00.000-05:00

an old conversation between me and a friend in need:

FRIEND: apparently the answer is, I cant win
ME: It's not that you can't win, but you can't have all of the cookies
ME: you can have one cookie
ME: you can drool and long and dream over the other cookies
ME: but you can only have one and make it last, b/c when that one cookie is gone there is no more of that particular cookie
FRIEND: lol. nice analogy
FRIEND: compare my love life to oreos
ME: sex cookies love pizza
ME: it's all the same

The person who asks the most questions is often told the most lies

2007-11-17T15:17:00.000-05:00

What a helpful website:

http://www.truthaboutdeception.com/

I love this guy

2007-11-09T02:18:00.000-05:00

Dave Hickey
[ART CRITIC/JOURNALIST/SHORT-STORY WRITER]

“I THINK YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ART BECAUSE YOU HAD AN EXPERIENCE OF SOME SORT— A TOTALLY NON-REDEMPTIVE BUT VAGUELY EXCITING EXPERIENCE, LIKE BRUSHING UP AGAINST A GIRL WITH BIG BOOBS IN THE SUBWAY.”

Las Vegas attracts people who aren’t:
Afraid
Country
Religious
Fucking depressed

“Ya know what I mean?” Dave Hickey likes to ask. His voice is gentle and lyrical, slightly tarnished by smoking, and very Southern. At sixty-seven, he remarks, guffawing about his large proportions, “rap has sort of reasserted my body type.” He’s often in a Lakers cap. As much as he likes talking, he will often interrupt himself to ask a question: “So what sort of music do you like?… What’s your plan in life?… Why in the hell is it called the Believer for?”
It’s hard to gauge the place of art critic Dave Hickey in the world. Though very well known, he’s not yet required reading—but that’ll change. His passions are idiosyncratic, he drives at no major thesis, nor is he seeking a revolution in taste or even acolytes. It seems he wants to construct an edifice of true things—or, at least, the least likely wrong things—that can be said about whatever subjects are most interesting and at hand.

Hickey is the author of a story collection and two books of essays, including the classic Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997). He began his career in the 1960s as a freelance journalist, but in the early ’90s, he moved to Las Vegas and joined the faculty of the University of Nevada in the art department. Now he teaches English. He’s run galleries in New York and Austin, and was executive editor of Art in America. Six years ago, he was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Hickey counts among his “professional acquaintances” Lester Bangs, James Wolcott, and Hunter S. Thompson (“the puritan do-gooder”).

He writes of his beginnings, “That was the seventies—limos, homos, bimbos, resort communities and cavernous stadiums… the whole culture in a giant, Technicolor Cuisinart, whipping by, and I did love it so.”

This interview took place in two locations: the patio of a breakfast spot in Toronto around noon on a sunny midsummer day, where he ordered eggs and several coffees and waited a long time for a fork. After speaking there for a couple of hours, it continued in a hotel bar, where he could smoke in the courtyard.

His manner is a mixture of courtly and cowboy. It’s easy to imagine him pissed off and unhappy, but he is not the curmudgeon his reputation suggests. For at the root of everything Hickey writes about and speaks about is an advocacy for what he loves—and a kind of regret, not bitterness, at the popularity of what he doesn’t.

At the end of our meeting, he said, with a hint of resigned gallantry, “Please feel free to use whatever I’ve told you, as you wish. It’s not like I’m worried about my, uh, reputation.”

—Sheila Heti

I. “HONESTLY, I NEVER SIT DOWN
TO WRITE ANYTHING WITHOUT
THINKING, THIS IS A WEIRD
THING TO BE DOING! WHY AM
I SITTING HERE WRITING?”
SHEILA HETI: In your experience of knowing artists, do you think there’s a discrepancy between why artists tell themselves they’re making art, and the actual reason you perceive them to be making art?

DAVE HICKEY: In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look. My only justification for the lizard brain thing is that, whatever I’m writing about and whatever I’m writing on, it all comes out the same. If I’m writing about furniture, Dick Cheney, Palladio, or surfing—if I’m writing on coke, speed, acid, smack, booze, panic, sorrow, or just cigarettes, it all comes out Dave writing, so, if altering one’s consciousness doesn’t alter the outcome, maybe it’s not about that.

SH: So if it’s the kind of thing that comes from the lizard brain and is not this gentle, political thing people do at all, then this idea of working hard, which is a very Protestant, American value… I mean, going to the studio from nine in the morning to five at night—it sometimes seems like there’s such a professionalization of art-making. Is it commensurable with this activity that’s—

DH: Well, let me put it like this. I think that if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it. You know what I mean?

SH: If it’s not easy you shouldn’t be doing it?

DH: I mean it’s work, but it’s not labor. You have professional obligations like any adult, but it’s fun to solve problems. It’s fun to sit there by yourself with no one telling you what to do. It’s fun to nuance things that no one will notice except in their lizard brains. I enjoy doing it, and it’s easy for me, but there are a lot of people out there who are working too hard at it. [Big laugh]

SH: Why do you think people are interested in art?

DH: I think they want to touch the source of something, you know? It doesn’t make people better. It doesn’t make them happier. It doesn’t make them smarter, and you can’t teach people to do it or like it. So who knows?

SH: Can you teach people how to see more sensitively?

DH: Danger makes us see more sensitively—anxiety—the prospect of the gallows. But you either see or you don’t. I think you want to learn about art because you had an experience of some sort—a totally nonredemptive but vaguely exciting experience, like brushing up against a girl with big boobs in the subway. It’s about that level of intensity. So you want to find out more about it since its sources are so mysterious, and these sources reside in you as well as in the object. But I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn’t lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It’s a set of propositions about how things should look.

SH: Like an aesthetic proposition?

DH: Yeah. It doesn’t contain any truth. It doesn’t contain any fact. It’s just a proposition to be argued for or against.

SH: There are a number of artists I know who want to make art out of a political impulse, and this impulse seems kind of incompatible with art-making.

DH: The political impulse is fine but moot. Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it. Miles Davis creates a constituency. Andy Warhol creates a constituency, and any object or occasion that organizes people in terms of what they want is a political constituency. The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, “Never forget you’re writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does.”

II. “THE MFA THING IS AN
INVENTION OF THE ’70S.
ITS RAISON D’ÊTRE IS EVAPORATING.”
SH: So what makes you happy and what makes you sad in culture right now?

DH: You know, I’m deeply engaged in culture, but I’m well out of the trenches, which means if I talk, I talk Frank Gehry. I don’t talk younger architects. I talk Ellsworth Kelly. And I’m happy for that, because when you’re a younger critic you can almost never get the chance to write about people who are older than you are—people who really influenced you—and that’s kind of fun. But there are no public venues to write about art anymore, except for three or four permanent jobs that my friends do and I never could. Mostly I write for commercial galleries these days. There are no serious art magazines.

SH: So there’s no place to talk about art?

DH: No, and my particular age of the critic is just over. There are no influential midcareer critics today. I think part of that is circumstance, in the sense that a whole generation of critics died of AIDS in the ’80s. It was like the plague that wiped out two generations of Neapolitan painters in the sixteenth century. They’re just gone, and those dead guys from the ’80s should be writing most of what I’m writing now, and I should be left to play blackjack.

SH: OK, so what are the supposed art magazines interested in hearing about, if not about art?

DH: They want touting. In twenty years we’ve gone from a totally academicized art world to a totally commercialized art world, and in neither case is criticism a function. We’re all supposed to be positive about art. Nobody plays defense! I mean, my job, to a certain extent, is to be in the net. My job is to mow stuff down.

SH: So in what kind of structure would there be a place for criticism?

DH: Well, I came into an art world of volunteers—six thousand heavily medicated, mysteriously employed human beings who were there because they wanted to be, you know? And all they wanted was to be right—not safe, not rich, not fair, but right! Now we have this vast bureaucratic structure of support. Everybody’s a poll watcher. Nobody’s a voter. We’ve got millions of people devoted to the whole idea that art’s supposed to be fair and good for you. But art’s not too fair, you know? Why should you be publishing books and not your friends? Because it’s not fair, that’s why.

SH: Yeah, whatever.

DH: Anyway, the art world is way too big right now. The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

SH: Sure, it was for yourself. You were happy.

DH: Right, you were happy to be there, and if the art world today shrunk down to the size and scale of the jazz world, I would be happier now. Things would be freer and a lot less tedious.

SH: I suppose the schools have something to do with the change—the craziness that you have to get an MFA to be an artist.

DH: Thirty-five thousand MFAs a semester, 90 percent of whom never make another work of art.

SH: And do you think that that kind of system produces—

DH: Almost no one. Idiots with low-grade depression. When I opened my gallery in the late ’60s, Peter Plagens—who’s now the critic for Newsweek and still shows his paintings—was the only artist I represented who had been to graduate school. The MFA thing is an invention of the ’70s. Its raison d’être is evaporating.

SH: Which is?

DH: Training sissies for teaching jobs. Well, the official raison d’être was to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture, so you go back and read things from the past. It’s the traditional Renaissance desire that artists should be taken seriously, and that art not be a practical but a liberal art. But I tend to think it’s a practice, like law or like medicine.

SH: Right, and nobody wants to be a clown! No artists want to be clowns. That’s a shame.

DH: You have to check out my friend Scott Grieger, who’s a high culture clown, if only because Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner rescued him from the streets of L.A. and paid for his art education.

SH: Do you think humor’s a very important element of art?

DH: It would be if anybody could take a joke! Alec Waugh proposes “seriousness” as a form of infectious stupidity. I agree. Actually, Bruce Nauman is pretty funny. Everybody pretends that he’s not, but clown torture is pretty funny! You know? And, uh, I think Peter Saul is funny, he’s very witty, and I think Ellsworth Kelly is not funny but he’s witty, and Ed Ruscha is extremely funny and extremely witty, you know?

SH: I love Serra but he’s not funny.

DH: No, well, but Richard’s smart. And he’s an artist. He can’t talk without drawing. He’s the real fucking thing. Not nice.

SH: Not nice. No, he doesn’t seem so nice. [Laughs]

DH: But Richard’s really fun to go look at art with, because he will look at anything, and he likes to look at art, and when you see him you don’t sit around. He says, “Let’s go look at art,” so that’s what he does. He’s kinda corny because he’s not hip at all. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t know who got AIDS, he doesn’t know who got fired. But he’s a real artist to me anyway.

SH: Well, and that idea of taking sculpture off the pedestal—I love that, and I think the whole culture’s off the pedestal.

DH: And Tony Caro did that—he put it on the ground. But in a sense what he did was make the pedestal the art. Caro and Serra, Sol LeWitt, and Don Judd—they made the pedestal the art. It’s like DJs transforming the turntable into an instrument.

III. “GOSSIP IS THE CURRENCY OF
THE DISCOURSE, SO YOU SHOULD
SHUT UP ABOUT YOURSELF.”
SH: Do you see anybody doing anything that—let’s say radical—right now?

DH: First of all, let me say if I did, I probably wouldn’t recognize it.

SH: You wouldn’t recognize it?

DH: Let me put it this way. When I was a bright young thing, my relationship to my elders was, uh, problematic. It was like—[makes a gesture of waving from across a chasm]. And I thought they were wrong and I was right. And they were wrong, but I’m probably as wrong today. As I always say, the next great art movement may be dust bunnies, you know what I mean? And I wouldn’t recognize it. It’s like, whoa! What dust bunnies did you get from out of your bag!?

SH: How much is the performance important? I think of somebody like Warhol or Pollock, and they had such strong public personas. Who they are communicates their art as well, and, in Warhol’s case, his image is part of the work’s meaning.

DH: Well, the thing is, the work is not really sufficient. Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they’re smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail. And you must want to win. I don’t want to be rich, but I want to win. I want my enemies to fall in shambles. I do not want to be fair. I want the art I hate to go away. If you want your art to stay around, and I hate it, get your own fucking critic! So I am not in favor of art—I’m in favor of the art I like.

SH: Yeah, totally. But so do you think an artist has to be part of the discourse? Has to talk? To give interviews?

DH: It’s a social discourse. There ain’t no Frank Stellas at Montana State. But you’ve got to be there, and you’ve got to be interested in other people so you can talk about them. Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain. But you got to be there. The missing are presumed dead.

SH: OK, you say that art needs talent and courage to be great or interesting, and—it’s a weird generalization to make—but I wonder if you’ve noticed in artists that there’s certain types of ambition that lead to great works of art, and if there’s certain kinds of ambition that lead to shitty work.

DH: Let’s put it this way. If one artist likes another artist, it’s never quite the work, it’s the quality of the ambition they respect. Ed Ruscha said to me once—he was talking about some artist he didn’t like, and I said, “Well, the quality of the work…” And Ed says, “It’s not the quality of the work, it’s the quality of the job.”

SH: Quality of the job?

DH: I mean, are you doing something worth doing? That’s a reasonable question. When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

[His cell phone rings. He talks to his wife, the art historian Libby Lumpkin. They have a brief, confused discussion about whether or not she’s having two lunches today. He hangs up. I ask him how long he’s been married; about fifteen years, he replies. Has he been married before? He’s had relationships with four women, he tells me—a serial monogamist, he says.]

What I do is I find beautiful, intelligent women, and invest them with enough confidence to leave me.

SH: And do they all leave for the same reason?

DH: I guess. That’s the chance you take if you like bitches, if you prefer women who have their own agendas and their own destinations. I like singers, writers, dancers, social climbers, and divas. So eventually, you’re passed over. Part of this is selfish, though. Writing for one is hard. Writing for two is impossible. And sitting at home writing about cowboys with cancer while Betsy Sue teaches fifth-grade music casts a pall and poses a question mark over every word you write. Living off the work of others makes you a slut or a shit. I’ve tried not to. Anyway, I get along with all my exes. We’re actually pretty close.

IV. “PEOPLE DON’T MAKE
LITERATURE, ARCHITECTURE,
AND ART—THE CULTURE
MAKES THOSE THINGS.”
DH: So what do you write about? Do you write about real people?

SH: Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just—I can’t do it.

DH: I understand.

SH: It doesn’t make sense to me. And the complicated thing is, I like life so much. I love being among people, I love being in the world, and writing is the opposite of that.

DH: That’s why I became a cultural journalist. I wanted to write, but I wanted to have adventures—I wanted to sit on the beach with Keith Richards and some dude playing the trombone. I wanted to be where it was, and I sacrificed a great deal of literary value for that, but I had a hell of a lot of fun. Back in the ’70s and ’60s, if you could do this, to length and on time—and not many people could, nor can they now—then you could go anywhere you wanted to, and look at whatever you wanted to. But it makes me happy that I set out to make a living out of the writing life and I have done it. Not a great life, of course, or a famous one, but a really cool one. The culture afforded me that, and I am sad that that life is disappearing.

SH: OK, so you can make a living as an artist by selling your work in the marketplace, or by government grants, and they’re both sort of problematic, but which makes the better art, or which is the lesser evil?

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity—like me—will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere—

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art—the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

V. “YOU HAVE ALL THE WAY
TILL YOU’RE FORTY TO
TOTALLY FUCK UP YOUR LIFE.”
SH: Yesterday you said you find yourself in the midst of a generation of young artists with more temperamental affinities than you’ve had with young artists in many years. What’s the nature of those affinities?

DH: Well, it’s very strange, and I think it had to do with Vegas, because Vegas attracts people who are not afraid, not religious, not country, and OK with themselves—people who like to have fun and like to work, people who aren’t fucking depressed, who don’t have issues. For instance, I was having dinner at Spago the other night with Tim Bavington, who used to be my student and is now a very successful painter, and Wolfram Putz, who was one of my students at Sci-Arc [the Southern California Institute of Architecture] and is presently an ultrachic international architect. Tim and Wolf are doing very well now, much better than I, in fact, so I thought to myself, Why them? First, I decided, it helps that they are both cosmopolitan creatures. Tim is a displaced Brit; Wolf is a displaced German; but what else? And the answer was easy: I had never seen either one of them in a bad mood.

SH: Wow.

DH: Never. They both have this steady level of equanimity, and when I look at my ex-students who’ve done well, the common factor is always their good humor. The ups are not too up. The downs are not too down. They’re having a good time by not compromising at what they love to do, and my students and I are alike in this. I’ve always had a good time, sometimes with bad consequences, of course. I mean, I’ve blown up my life three or four times—burned bridges while I was still on them. But that just comes from rash decision-making, that doesn’t come from not making decisions! [Laughs]

SH: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right. At least you can say you’ve made decisions, goddamnit.

DH: I may have fucked up, but it was decisive! [Laughs, hits the table] And I have a pretty high level of equanimity day in and day out, and probably you do too, listening to you talk. Sometimes I get desperately depressed because I’m not cute anymore, or because I haven’t done what I said I would, but otherwise I’m OK. If I can get up, make coffee, look at the sunshine on the wall—hey. I don’t need a blow job before noon. I’m OK. And I think that most artists and writers—most of the ones that I know—are o-kay. They like to go into their studios, they like to see their friends, they like to chase girls or boys or whatever they chase. They were OK when they were a nobody, and now they’re OK when they’re somebody.

SH: I wonder: what kind of teacher are you?

DH: With the artists, I don’t teach, I coach. I can’t tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That’s all I wanted in a professor.

So how old are you, anyway?

SH: Thirty.

DH: Great! You’re a bright young thing. You have all the way till you’re forty to totally fuck up your life. It takes that long, if you’re really talented, to really fuck everything up. You just go up and up and up and up, and all of a sudden you’ve got three ex-husbands, a broken-down Porsche, a bunch of leather clothes, some haute-couture accessories, and no prospects at all. [Chuckles]

SH: [Laughs] Yeah, I keep thinking the fifth husband will be the one. That’s my new goal.

DH: That’s right. Exactly. Hm. It must be hard to find boyfriends in Canada.

SH: How come?

DH: Because it’s such a healthy place! I never have been able to put a name on it, but I really do love the darkness, I really do love the edge.

SH: Wait. I want to ask you a question about America, ’cause you said—it is the superpower—and is there any work that you think has been able to represent the nature of America’s empire?

DH: I think Don Judd, Dan Flavin, and Andy Warhol were trying to. I think they conceived of themselves as the Augustan artists of the American empire. The Vietnam War ruined the moment, but they did it. They created this steady-state, history-less, past-less, future-less moment in art with no precedent and really no consequences—it’s just this stuff—purely American stuff, totally abstract and totally bland. And I like that. I don’t like too much blood or too many explosions. I like bland. I like blank.

----Sheila Heti is the author of Ticknor and The Middle Stories. She lives in Toronto, and is currently collaborating on a reality show with the painter Margaux Williamson.

Holy Opera Cow!

2007-11-03T04:43:00.000-04:00

Again, I cried...I'm not ashamed.

light bulb head

2007-11-01T07:06:00.000-04:00

So...I'm feeling like a light bulb head. Not because of any bright ideas, but because my short hair, the little that I have with a pixie cut, likes to puff up sometimes and with my weird clefted chin, create a silhouette that resembles, to me, a light bulb.

Your clothes may be "Beau Brumelly"...

2007-10-19T01:32:00.000-04:00

I have a torrid love affair with clothing and fashion. I always have and imagine that I always will. As a young girl, countless hours of play time were spent in front of my mirror playing dress up and if I wasn't dressing myself then I was obsessing over Barbie's next outfit. If I didn't like her clothes anymore and I couldn't whine a new overpriced store purchased outfit out of some grownup, I'd pull out my notebook, sketch some fabulous new-wave design and beg my Grandmom to take me to the fabric store to pick out some outrageous, yet inexpensive fabric so I could 'make it work'. (I remember favoring electric blue and magenta leopard prints...Truly Outrageous, fer sure!) I had the most awesomely and originally outfitted Barbie dolls and, for the record, I designed the first Tankini!! Nothing much has changed...If you know me well, you know that my closets 'overfloweth'! Understand, I appreciate fine quality and beautifully made things, but I am not a designer hound and I have no interest in the latest 'it bag'. Sure, I'll drool over some things in the fat September Vogue, but, frankly, the idea of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on one piece of flammable woven fiber, that's sole purpose is to make me not nude in public, makes me want to vomit! I'm practical, frugal, stingy even...I want as much as I can get for as little as I'm required to spend. It's my mother's fault. She raised me on yard sales, thrift stores, and handmade clothing. Thanks to her, I feel like a queen with my Old Navy outfits and the occasional H&M spree! I will splurge from time to time on fantastic vintage pieces or super unique items(like 6 pairs of cowboy boots on Ebay...so I'm a little compulsive), but it's not often that I'll find something that is worth the spending. I think I may have just found the exception. My love of fashion is born of my affinity for design and art and what better way to satisfy both loves then by wearing these clothes...

I am moved, inspired and totally coveting the Blue Fish Clothing Collection 64: Decorata. I nearly cried when I saw them...they're breathtaking. I only wish I had been the one to design them...time to save my pennies...I'm going Art Deco Bag Lady...

This is not going to go over well...

2007-10-10T02:53:00.000-04:00

The Misogynist ~ A Warner Bros Picture. Coming soon to a theatre and a courtroom near you!

What's Horoscope spelled backwards? Never Wrong...Thanks Rusty!

2007-10-10T01:47:00.000-04:00

When I received my weekly LotusTarot card in my inbox on Friday and then read my Freewill Astrology Horoscope, I should have known that something powerful was coming...I should have prepared for the fallout...

Cancer ~ The week of October 4 ~ Freewill Astrology

Amputees sometimes experience agonizing sensations that seem to originate in the part of their bodies that has been severed. Called phantom pain, it's a very real feeling, although it does not actually come from the missing arm or leg. Those of us who have possession of all our limbs sometimes experience the psychic version of phantom pain. We suffer terribly despite the fact that the source of our suffering is long gone from our lives. The good news, Cancerian, is that now is an opportune time for you to heal your phantom psychic pain. You will receive unexpected help from the universe if you formulate a strong intention to relieve the mysterious ache.

THIS WEEK'S CARD: JUDGEMENT

There are times in our lives when we must accept inevitable
change and allow things to come to a natural end.

The Judgment card is often referred to as a time of
resurrection and awakening, a time when a phase or period
of our life comes to an absolute end making way for dynamic
new beginnings.

It may be that a long-term relationship or marriage has had
its time and whilst it may feel painful to accept this
finality, the Judgment card is saying try and accept that
this is a time of fast-moving, positive change and action
for you.

Whether it’s the end of a career, a time when your children
have flown the nest, or a turn of events that make you wish
your life was different, this card represents karmic change
and it indicates that bigger and better things are yet to
come into your life.

Quite often, fantastic events and opportunities follow sad
and difficult challenges and this card can represent any
events that may feel like ‘Judgment Day’ has come. Changes
that may be indicated upon the appearance of this card can
be significant, so this would not be a time for regret and
fear but a time for courage and rejoicing in what you have
achieved and what you are yet to achieve.

Your life may well pick up a pace when this card appears,
so whatever future possibilities are indicated in your
reading, these events may happen quite quickly.

If the Judgment card comes up in a reading about legal
issues, it is a positive sign that any ruling will be in
your favor. However, if this card is surrounded by negative
cards, it may indicate legal battles ahead and the
possibility of having a ruling made against you

In general readings, if this card is surrounded by negative
cards, it could be that the swift conclusions foretold by
the positive aspect of this card may be delayed. This can
mean that you are fearful of such significant change and
may be ignoring opportunities that may well promise a
brighter future.

I also feel that when this card comes up, it’s important to
use your own judgment wisely and not to judge yourself too
harshly. It is a signal for you to open your heart and mind
to accept that all things come to an end and nothing lasts
forever, yet for each ending there is always a new
beginning.

Embrace such significant and inevitable change and a whole
new world of opportunity can unfold for you – the Judgment
card is a calling for you to be all that you can be.

SO NOW, GET ON WITH IT, M!!!

Don't Let The Door Hit You....

2007-10-09T03:56:00.000-04:00

You may have vast knowledge and experience, but it means absolutely nothing to me if you have a bad attitude...Good Riddance!

The Little Girl Giant

2007-09-30T12:40:00.000-04:00

On the morning of Sunday, 7th May(my special day) the little girl giant woke up at Horseguards Parade in London, took a shower from the time-traveling elephant and wandered off to play in the park...

The World Spins

2007-09-22T20:15:00.000-04:00

Aches, pains, cuts and bruises...generally we tend to ignore our bodies when they need healing and rest. Who has the time or the money to spend taking care of themselves, right? Inevitably, there will be days when our bodies will no longer politely request our attention, they will demand it!

I'm going on day five of experiencing some serious spells of vertigo. It started Friday morning while I was trying to get out of bed. As quickly as I stood up, I was back down again! "What a rude awakening!", I harrumphed. It took me a full two minutes splayed out on my bed muttering silly little prayers to get the ceiling to stop its undulating pitch and roll! In those two dizzy minutes, I tried to deduce the most probable cause for my current malady. Naturally, I thought it must be because my sugar is low and I need something to eat or maybe I stood too quickly and my habitually low blood pressure dropped a little too much. Perhaps, it could be the return of my chronic sinus infections. Who knows for sure? A doctor would know, but there would be no need for medical intervention today, no ma'am, no sir! I was positive that it would go away within the hour.

Come with me to the shower...My morning shower determines my mood for the day, so it's imperative that it is a positive sensory experience. Like most people, I have a particular shower ritual. The water is turned on first and adjusted to an acceptable temperature before I step into the stall. I don't understand the people that turn the water on after they have stepped into the empty and cold stall...What kind of person does this?!?! How can they be sure that when the water comes out of the showerhead that it will be the same temperature as it was coming out of the faucet, as if they even bothered to check the temperature in the first place? And when it does finally come out of the showerhead, it does this spastic, stuttered-sputter blast that reminds me too much of the powerful garden hose stream that was turned on me every summer by familial tormentors, despite my wincing, tears, and sometimes visible welts...but I digress. Once in the shower, I readjust the temperature, usually to a degree as hot as I can bear. If my skin is not taught and hot pink when I'm through, I just don't feel clean! I wet down and proceed with the bathing. Shampoo:Rinse. Wash face:Rinse. Condition:Do Not Rinse Yet! Wash bits:Rinse. Shave: Underarms, then legs. Rinse body and conditioner from earlier. Turn off water, wait for my precious man/boy to bring me a clean towel, and then step out and into the second phase of grooming, including the joyous and holy act of swabbing my ears, which will be detailed in another War and Peace length blog entry. My ordered shower-time actions comfort me and falsely ensure that my day will be successful and if my pattern is interrupted, I may as well just climb back into bed. All was well that morning, until I closed my eyes to wash my face. I was building a lovely lather with my black facial soap, Coalface, taking in the kicky aroma of licorice and charcoal with lowered lids when the world tipped and I kissed the sweaty tile with my whole face!

Dammit!

What fresh hell is this?

Since that morning, the dizzies have become a regular part of my day. I'm overcome while sitting, standing, eating, shopping...whenever, wherever..just like Shakira.

I have this to say to my body: I don't understand what you're saying, but I hear you very clearly. You've become suddenly bold and annoyingly persistent. I'm sorry for neglecting you, but must you act out this way? I don't want to go to the doctor, I really don't want to submit to a blood test, and I certainly don't want to take medication, but your behavior has become a nuisance and a potentially dangerous one at that. Reluctantly, I will pull out the brand new health insurance card and haul my crooked-walking self to the nurse practitioner. I hear you...I'm listening..now please, please, please give me my equilibrium back...Please?

Why, Lush, Why?

2007-09-21T09:25:00.000-04:00

Lush has posted the 2007 Cut List. I apologize for my lack of eloquence, but I AM PISSED!!! First Ginger went, now they're taking away Reincarnate, Black Pearl, Flying Fox, It's a Pleasure Treasure, and Gratuitous Violets!!!!!! Everything I love is being taken from me!!! Why, LUSH, why?!?! LUSH is supposed to make me happy and I am soooo far from happy right now! I guess this is what happens when you like things that don't appeal to the 'masses'...maybe I should start using the ever-popular and stinky on me, Karma or Sex Bomb and smell like every other person that walks out of LUSH?!?! LUSH, with this cut list, you've broken my heart...I'm afraid that this may be the end of the road for us...you are on my cut list and it's a dark, dark day...

A blog is born...

2007-09-20T03:39:00.000-04:00

The first step in the birth of a star is to wait...