2.10.2003
There are things of which I may not speak; / There are dreams that cannot die; / There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, / And bring a pallor into the cheek, / And a mist before the eye. / And the words of that fatal song / Come over me like a chill: / "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." -Longfellow

2.9.2003
She waited until I'd nearly completed my recording sessions because she knew that if she'd left me earlier I'd have never finished. Still, there was one song left undone. But I was devastated and I didn't know what to do with myself. So, I rented a car and took off from Los Angeles, winding up somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I got a hotel room, and I was so exhausted that I fell asleep in the early afternoon. I woke up after what had seemed like a week. I checked out. Consequently, I soon discovered that it was the same day and the sun was going down, not up. Then it hit me: I'll finish that song! I hadn't known how to sing it before, but if I drove straight back to L.A. right then, and if I went straight into the studio, I'd be too wiped out to know what I was doing. Which is exactly what I did. And "Better Days," which I recently rescued all these years later, was the result.

2.6.2003
I have yet to find a work situation that isn't about family, or loyalty, or sex, or guilt, or all four. I'm beginning to think I never will. -Jonathan Franzen

2.5.2003
I am not saying, This is the way it objectively is from any possible point of view. I am saying, This is the way it looks to someone with my beliefs.

1.31.2003
A real influence is an author who communicates a great desire to tell a story. It isn't that you want to write like Dickens, but rather that when you read Dickens, you feel an imaginative energy that you use to your own ends.

1.30.2003
These disasters, these decisions, that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat; it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail.

1.24.2003
Loving is so much truer when sympathy and desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds.

1.22.2003
A little thing is a big thing.

1.21.2003
Watched "The Fabulous Life of Jennifer Lopez" on VH1. Of the many hundreds of people she employs to maintain that natural "Jenny from the 'hood" appearance, one of them actually rubs her nipples so they look pert when she's making her videos. How does one apply for the position of tit tweaker?

1.20.2003
My first car was a '64 Beetle, bought for $400 in 1975 from a corner gas station. It wasn't until a little later when I attempted to pull out of my spot at the DMV that I discovered its reverse gear did not function. Returning to the seller, I was informed I "didn't need no reverse." Apparently, I didn't need no speedometer, gas gauge or radio - none of them worked, either. My VW was powder blue, literally; a powdery blue substance rubbed off on anything it came into contact with. Still, I loved that Bug until I sold it in 1986. For $4,000.

1.17.2003
Sometimes the best you can do is say: "I've gone as far as I can. I'm empty." You might even pick up your journal and write, as Kafka did: "Complete standstill. Incapable in every respect." Or your own version of the above. "I can go no further," perhaps. And then wait.

1.16.2003
The Anti- label thought well enough of my Nick Cave feature to post it on their site.

1.14.2003
After Dad's funeral M offered me a ride back to house. In all these years we'd never been in close enough proximity to bond, and I needed someone to bond with, even if it was only for a few minutes. We got in his car, which was one of those jacked-down Hondas designed to be driven fast - and fast is how he drove. I am not certain why. It didn't seem like he was angry or sad or hurting over the fact that his grandfather had just been buried. It seemed more like M was on autopilot, literally.

1.13.2003
Jonas now had a following. At first he had been surprised, not seeing what anyone could learn from him who still had everything to discover. The artist in him was groping in the darkness; how could he have pointed out the right paths? But he readily realized that a disciple is not necessarily someone who longs to learn something. More often, on the contrary, one became a disciple for the disinterested pleasure of teaching one's master. -Camus, "The Artist at Work"

1.9.2003
When a thing is perfectly made it has no fastenings or seams.

1.8.2003
What we want is what we see. What renunciation is is putting aside what we want for a little bit.

1.7.2003
If there's anything I could take back, it's the good faith I handed over so freely to false friends, or worse. I realize now the mistakes I made. I am to blame. I wanted to be a believer.

1.6.2003
I do feel strongly that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

1.3.2003
The thing that's most tragic about humanity is that we are unwilling to accept the power given to us as the gift of our freedom, the responsibility that goes along with that power and the understanding that the freedom operates because we have the will to do so.

1.2.2003




"These days I seem to occupy a wicked fugue state," she whispers, "my memory behaving like a photograph developing with the details showing up last."

12.31.2002
In the novel "The Fanatic" there's a scene in a concentration camp in which a Talmud scholar is standing in the selection line with his son, who is a cynic. It's dawn, and as the sun begins to rise the old man starts to recite the morning prayers. His son spins his father around and screams at him, "In a place like this where people are being chosen to live and die, how can you pray? Doesn't this place prove to you that there is no God?" And the father, with tears in his eyes, turns to his son and says, "It is precisely in this place that I must pray because what this place proves to me is that man truly has free will."

12.30.2002
Finally, big in Japan! At least one of my photos is. Unbenownst to me, an image I took many years ago now graces the cover of a jazz album by Gil Goldstein. Hey Gil, when do I get paid?

12.27.2002




A slight wind had risen and she heard its light waters flow in the palm grove. It came from the south, where desert and night mingled now under the again unchanging sky, where life stopped, where no one would ever age or die anymore. Then the waters of the wind dried up and she was not even sure of having heard anything except a mute call that she could, after all, silence or notice. But never again would she know its meaning unless she responded to it at once.

12.23.2002
My father talked about a steamer trunk that contained memorabilia of his late father, who was a vaudeville song and dance man. My dad's dad, I'd been told, was emotionally distant, and after he died all my father had to remember him by were the various playbills, lead sheets, photos and odd bits that were stowed in the trunk, which my father left in the care of his equally emotionally distant mother in Connecticut when he was shipped off to World War II. When Dad returned from overseas, his mother had moved to California and although the trunk had remained, its contents had been emptied. To the day he died, my father never knew just who took his father's stuff - and the mystery remained just that. Now, before I moved to Boston, I left many of my journals, photo artwork, various tape reels of my band's recordings as well as other irreplaceable items in the care of my parents, because I knew I wouldn't have space for them in the tiny apartment I was about to inhabit. It was the first time in my adult life I'd asked my folks such a favor. I placed the stuff in the crawl space under my parents condo, and there it remained until a few years ago when, during a trip to California, I discovered that the boxes had become damp and most everything had been destroyed. A legacy continues.

12.20.2002
Nancy: I remember.

12.18.2002
Love expands: it not only sees more and enfolds more, it causes its object to bloom.

12.17.2002
What separates us from the beasts? Consciousness? Opposable thumbs? For all our supposed intelligence, we have evolved little since we came out of the swamp. Our science leads us nowhere and our beliefs have only allowed us a working system of denial, one that puts idiot presidents, raping priests and building-crashing fanatics in positions of authority. We make up myths (God, country, philosophy, all manner of "isms") to try to explain to ourselves why we are here and where we are going, but they are all merely ego-calming palliatives. We'd like to think we act in the best interest of others, but we are almost never altruistic. Frankly, I'd rather be a cat. A cat has integrity. A cat is what it is.

12.16.2002
And death shall have no dominion. / No more may gulls cry at their ears / Or waves break loud on the seashores; / Where blew a flower may a flower no more / Lift its head to the blows of the rain; / Though they be mad and dead as nails, / Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; / Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, / And death shall have no dominion. -Dylan Thomas

12.13.2002
Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

12.11.2002
When you're halfway there, you stop disbelieving in there.

12.6.2002
On the Western shore of the cutting creek, / a tall, gawky elm tree flares / with a freckled boys blush. / But still, the shameless Eastern Sun / slides up and drips it glorious / pomegranate juice / all through the pillows / of the foggy, January sky. -SS

12.5.2002
Art is not a private nightmare, not even a private dream, it is a shared human connection that traces the possibilities of past and future in the whorl of now. It is a construct, like science, like religion, like the world itself. It is as artificial as you and me and as natural, too. We have never been able to live without it, we have never been able to live with it. We claim it makes no difference while nervously barring it out of our lives. But to what are our efforts directed? What is it we seek to mock and discourage? It is the human free spirit.

12.4.2002
Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping. -Bernard Kornblum

12.1.2002
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing. -Luis Bunuel

11.29.2002
Missing Blake.

11.22.2002
For me, there is nothing more dangerous than to remember. Just as I have remembered a relationship to life, then at that moment the relationship itself is revoked. They say that separation helps to refresh love. That is quite true, but it refreshes it in a purely poetic way. To live in memory is the most complete life that can be imagined - memory statisfies more richly than all reality, and has the security that no reality possesses. A remembered relationship to life already has passed into eternity and no longer has any temporal interest.

11.19.2002
Writers try and get at a metaphor that best explains to themselves the strange paradoxes they experience through the act of writing that is at once the intimate of gestures and that which seems remote, attendant, other.

11.15.2002
The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy, that have found expression in a particular way. The true artist is after the problem.

11.14.2002
Want to hear God laugh? Make a plan.

11.4.2002
Saturday was an amazing day spent in New York City, where I interviewed Nick Cave for the cover story of the next issue of Amplifier. I'd heard that he does not cotton well to journalists, but he turned out to be the perfect gentleman. The image he projects is of someone all dark and gloomy, but he was witty, engaging and utterly urbane in his green velvet jacket and starched white shirt, drinking his English breakfast tea with milk and smoking his roll-your-own "fags." We got caught up in a discussion about life, death and everything in between - so much so, that each time his "handler" came by to curtail our conversation, Nick shooed her away. The evening was spent walking around SoHo and Greenwich Village, drinking, eating, buying CDs (I picked up the new Badly Drawn Boy and David Gray at a cool little store called Rebel Rebel) and hanging around the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal - my version of Hollywood and Vine. Speaking of Tinseltown, we spotted Steven Spielberg walking all by his lonesome down Broome Street. The siting was confirmed when a local merchant popped her head out of her store; we looked at each other and she said, "Yep, that's him." Nice.

10.30.2002
Like and "like" and "like" - but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

10.29.2002
Perhaps forgetfulness is not so much clinical as tactical, a way a mind tells itself, "That's it! I give up! No more information!"

10.28.2002


Yesterday, a year after his passing, my father's crypt was unveiled. Now, instead of a curtain, there's a plaque. I wonder what it says.

10.25.2002
It isn't possible to be enlightened and know it. What you hold yourself superior to is a part of you.

10.24.2002
When one is critical of a third person, often he is not convinced; he says it for the effect it will have on the people he is with - a form of posing or a way to confide.

10.23.2002
All these people passing by, every year another ocean of faces I will never see again. By using my eyes I can connect with a few, but only a few. Or maybe just one. And even that is often misunderstood.

10.21.2002
Love sees things as they are. One feels understood by the person who likes him, misunderstood by the person who doesn't - and those feelings are probably realistic.

10.19.2002
She stood in tears amid the alien corn. -Keats