I can see where artists, very sensitive people, can get to a point where they give up. Like a lot of them, some my favorites, like Ernest Hemingway and Doctor Hunter S. Thompson decided to blow the tops of their heads off. I had a nephew do that, too; and a distant poet cousin who jumped off the highest building in my hometown. Aside from my nephew (and he had tried to commit suicide once before but it was so stupid no one in his family took him serious), however, I’ve never known a suicide potential closely, like as a friend (though I have had friends commit suicide but it was long after I was out of their lives).
But I can see where an artist could be frustrated to the bone by such pain as that attributed to unsuccess, not a pain of failure as much as a pain of total dead-end-type confusion. Why aren’t I successful? That’s a hard question for anybody to answer but totally unanswerable by an artist. Why you aren’t successful could be as simple as just not having the right friends, though an artist seldom has very close friends who are helpful in terms of success or no success and when he or she does have close artists friends they are usually competing artist friends and unable to answer the question themselves much less answer it for you or other friends.
Friends artists need are sometimes artists who aren't really artists, like Kerouac’s Neal Cassady or Hemingway’s host of hangers on, mostly sportsmen and military types, or Henry Miller’s gaggle of antiart friends, including a fop fortuneteller and one of the most sexually inclined women of the 20th Century, Anais Nin. The women are always wrong for the male artists—and men can’t replace women in most female artists’s lives. [Armchair psychology yes but, hell, I'm not a psychologist but as a writer I am an armchair psychologist--spoken just like a social scientist, which I think writers and other artists are.]
I sometimes have no friends. And as an artist that frustrates the hell out of me.
I can’t reconstruct the way I think. I can and have had to retool the way I do my art. No more pencil stubs with worn down erasers that left black marks when you tried to use them to erase something brilliant you’d written but which just didn’t read right and so you worked on it and you reworked on it and maybe, ironically, you ended up reworking it to where it comes back to the original way you wrote it. Now, I just let Microsoft Word do the spellchecking and stop me when I've used a bad sentence or wrong verb tense. No more pencils. No more Exacto correction papers. No more trying to make corrections using a Selectronic electric typewriter. Or, Jesus X, remember the early DOS writing and editing programs? I loved WordPerfect at one time.
In writing music, I no longer need a pencil either--we have Finale now, a music notation writing program--so simply even a rapper can use it--you can play the keyboard right into Finale, then quantize it, and then print it out--and you got a piece of your own published sheet music. Needs some tweaking, yes, but here we go editing again.
Editing! Little Bill Faulkner bragged that he’d never been edited, going on to say he’d rather have his wife banged by his stable boys than to be edited [thanks to l hat
( www.languagehat.com ) for this one!].
I know how that feels. I’ve been on both sides of that coin; I’ve been both a published writer and a successful editor. I know the writer in me hates the editor in me but when the editor in me reads over what the writer in me has written sometimes, the editor screams—“Holy crap, I thought you said this was masterpiece writing?—read this BS—it makes no sense, it's too wordy, too uncrafted—your verbal sense doesn’t agree with the nouns in your subjects and look you don’t spell ocasionaly that way." The editor knows really how dumb the writer really is; and the writer knows how dumb the editor is, too. One dumb writer and editor. But sometimes when I write something that is totally brilliant, ohhhhh the feeling! and then I edit it and make it even better and ohhh somemore good feeling!—sometimes the feeling is so good that I break out in tears as I reread the best of my writing or hear a test recording of one of my new songs--and then it hits me, dammit, I am a writer--and dammit, I am a songwriter.
As a musician, and a serious one, not in terms that I play “serious” music but that the music I write and perform comes from deep studying, deep experimenting, deep uses of musical notes the same way I use certain words and phrases (vernaculars; idiomatic shit) when I'm writing, but deep music only to me. Measured by my depths.
Then I listen to current music. The flow of it. Flowing faster than the oil is being depleted from under the earth’s poor old sagging crust. And the current music flow flows to the strumming of a million guitars and I’ve never been a true lover of the guitar, though it has meant a hell of a lot to blues and then to r and b and finally to white rock—but in jazz, it is still simply a miscellaneous instrument. The great jazz forbears went for the heavy instruments like saxes and pianos, like trumpets and trombones, like basses and drum sets—guitars? Yeah, there was always a guy strumming on a guitar in all the old bands but until they got electricity they were pretty modest when it came to solos—like I say, when they electrified the guitar back in the 30s, then the guitar became a horn and yep it started showing up as a solo instrument in the blues, in r and b, and in white rock—so much so it now totally dominates those musics, which have led us to pop music and in pop music either you play a bad guitar or you play a really bad guitar—and you strum and you sing your little naive songs…oh but I am so damn jealous of guitar players, though I was once told by an old jazz bassman tolearn to play the bass and then I'd always have a gig, man. The dude was forking over the truth. Bass players do work. Put a band together and look for a good bass player to nail down for it—yeah sure? You might as well get your daddy’s checkbook out—a good bass player never works free—not even rehearsals.
This was all brought on by my watching Channel 25 here in NYC, a city-owned station, owned by the Board of Education, I think, but they have a lot of far-out pop music shows on sometimes all night long (rap, white rock, leftover punk, and new world music (African dudes playing guitars)—and it all sucks to me) and interviews and this morning some older black dude was interviewing two nouveau-computer-age indy band producers—I mean, it’s an indy recording company, two young Long Island boys it looks like, hustling their favorite music through auditioning these thousands of guitar-core bands with wildass punky white boys who sing way off key (that’s the trend), whose lyrics are tinged with teen tragedy—as if a teenager knows all about life and love and shit like that. They are soapy at their worst and slightly poetic at their best. Their music has no purpose the same as their lives. At best it’s noise; at least it’s cacophony—all within the confines of the guitar strum—the upstrum or the downstrum. All the same; Amurican? Yes. White rock seems to be all guitars—two guitars, a bass, and a wildass beating-everything drummer. Drummers haven’t changed much in a century—but then, neither have guitar players.
Another frustrating thing about being an artist nowadays is who the hell is your audience and how do you find your audience?
I’ve been putting my writing on this blog now for 300 exclusively me times. Say five pages per post: YIKES! That’s 1500 pages of thegrowlingwolf's growlings. A tome in anybody’s language. But oh the editing it would take to make a book out of my growlings! Too much for this editor who hates editing but who loves a well-edited piece of writing.
thegrowlingwolffor The Daily Growler
From www.woodslot.com : More on Our Canadian Psychiatrist Who 40 Years Ago Took an LSD Trip and Who 40 Years Later Had to Pay for Such a Dastardly Sin Due to Google
U.S. Border Patrol Bars Canadian Psychotherapist With Drug Research Far In His Past Linda Solomon"I didn't heed the ancient Alchemists' dictum, 'Do, dare, and be silent,'" Feldmar says. "And yet, the experience of being treated as undesirable was shocking. The helplessness, the utter uselessness of trying to be seen as I know myself and as I am known generally by those I care about and who care about me, the reduction of me to an undesirable offender, was truly frightening. I became aware of the fragility of my identity, the brittleness of a way of life.
While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.Entheogens and PsychotherapyWhen Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path" to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry." Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.
Andrew Feldmar2
Janus Head Special Issue: The Legacy of R. D. Laing
Spring 2001
Thirty-two years, however, turned out to be but an instant in the long, unrelenting U.S. war on drugs. Last summer, in an incident that has just come to light, Mr. Feldmar, now 66, was banned from entering the United States because of his long-ago use of LSD.New US Border Check Tool: Google
Because Mr. Feldmar had never been charged with possession of the once-popular illegal drug, privacy advocates are even more alarmed by the way U.S. border guards at the busy Peace Arch crossing near Vancouver found out about it.
The guards simply looked up Mr. Feldmar on the Internet and discovered his own article about using LSD, written for the scholarly, peer-reviewed journal Janus Head.
Eugene Oscapella, an Ottawa lawyer involved in privacy issues for 20 years, said the incident sends a frightening message to Internet users, particularly those who bare their souls online.
