the crooked place

FRIED EGGS ARE IMPORTANT

Reader Sven commented:

“Like any other insignificant person in an audience, I can’t influence the outcome of an artist’s Success vs. Failure death match, but I do wonder what success means beyond satisfying the obvious quartet of human-dignity negatives (not be homeless/not go to bed hungry/not be afraid to walk in my own neighborhood/not have to work for a shithead). Is the overarching goal simply access to more people who really don’t get it? A bigger rack of antlers? More money to finance a more comfortable level of moping?”

FIRST OF ALL: What a G*R*E*A*T Writer you are Sven!! That is just A HELL OF A SENTENCE! I wish I wrote sentences that pithy and exact!

I feel moved to answer, just so that you don’t think I was aiming for a bigger set of antlers: Yeah, that quartet of human dignity negatives, THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS AIMING FOR, and THAT IS WHAT I CALL SUCCESS. I may have gone into this here before, but maybe not, but my “success” goals were as follows:

A 2 bedroom house is South Austin (this is a modest goal for my place and time)

To earn enough money to stay alive (Also, modest. I lived on @$7000 a year most of my  adulthood.)

To live as an artist, making art. Not to have to waste my energy in menial labor, which is what I did. I bussed tables for 20 years, then waited tables for ten more.

I also hoped to earn enough money to be able to have a child. That did not materialize. Of course that would have been EXTRA! But It was part of my unrealized life “plan”, and I always thought of that as part of my SUCCESS!

A CAN OF BEANS

It is funny, the kind of success I have pretty much ALWAYS enjoyed, CRITICAL SUCCESS, I tend to ignore, because, I already had it! But I do appreciate that I had it. I DO! I think, at the TIME, I thought, “Talk (Good reviews) is cheap! Money talks and bullshit walks! PAY ME!!!!!  SOMEBODY PLEASE PAY ME SOME MONEY SO I CAN STOP DOING MENIAL LABOR!!!! AND SEE THE DOCTOR WHEN I NEED TO!!”

Because your name is Sven, I IMAGINE that you live in a civilized country in Scandinavia where artists are allowed to be artists on small government stipends and EVERYONE is allowed to see a doctor when they are sick. It is not like that in Texas. No one is allowed to live as an artist unless they make MONEY (or inherit it) and you can only see a doctor if you have money. So $MONEY$ becomes a big part of the “success” equation, even if you aren’t interested in money for it’s own sake at all. I was never interested in keeping score with money or living a decadent lifestyle.

And of course, all artists want to have enough money to KEEP MAKING ART. Especially with recording artists in the eighties and nineties, when you needed to pay for recording in studios (there weren’t computers at home like now), you needed to have enough money to KEEP MAKING RECORDS.

That is pretty much where every penny of money GLass EYE made playing shows etc went: to keep going. We never ever paid ourselves, EVER. We saved all the money for recording, and financing touring (which was on a shoestring.)

BUT the good news is, I am having success at REDEFINING my SUCCESS!!  SOMEONE sent me a check TODAY for a CD. YAY!! How is this for a success thought:

I AM WELL THOUGHT OF BY THOSE WHO ARE FAMILIAR WITH MY WORK.

Here is an even better one:

I HAVE BEEN CALLED A GENIUS BY CRITICS IN MY FIELD.

A VASE OF FLOWERS

I LOVE BEING AN ARTIST

I am kind of tired, but THANK YOU commentors for commenting!! Commenters? Commetariat?

I have not sent out any presents yet because I had to do my taxes. But guess what I have been doing lately? In the process of doing my TAXES I had to sort of clean out my STUDIO (where my cats had PEED on my DESK and my RECEIPTS!) (YES, you may pity me, it was TERRIBLE!) so now it is about half clean, so I have started painting again.

I am a genius in many ways, one of them is painting masterpieces; I thought since I have completely lost interest in having a job, that a good use of my time would be to practice painting. I figure that if I work at it really hard for a YEAR, then I could probably sell paintings to people. My paintings have always inspired people to break out their wallets, unlike my SONGWRITING (although I have to point out that the only wallets that could have BEEN broken out, other than an 18th century style PATRON, would be a record label’s wallet. Certainly plenty of folks broke out their wallets to pay cover!)

I decided that in order to practice for a year, I would paint on notebook covers and cigar boxes, because they are practically free and if I paint a lousy picture, who cares, I could still use the notebook. (I write in notebooks like Ignacious Reilly).

ANYWAY! Look at this G*R*E*A*T notebook I painted the other day!!

These are the same white Texas poppies that I painted on ADITS

Here is the one I did today that isn’t as good. It looks strangely like magical realism. I will try again with the red poppies (they are in my garden); my G*R*E*A*T*E*S*T masterpiece is a painting called RED POPPIES that I did…uh…in 1990 (?) or so. SO I KNOW I can become awesome at painting them.

You know why this looks so stylized? Because I am L A Z Y

I painted the covers of Dead Dog’s Eyeball and also ANother Day in the Sun:

Here is a fine photo of me changing my clothes by the side of the road, on tour with Glass Eye. I always liked this picture because it is an accurate representation of my total lack of bodily modesty. What IS modesty anyway? Isn't it just Shame? Isn't it just Shame at being Female? What a Crock

I got a new comment today on this blog, which forced me to visit my own blog. Actually, I have THREE blogs, did you know that? OF COURSE NOT, because the reason I have three is to separate the different aspects of my life. I used to have just ONE blog, that integrated all the aspects of my life; but I had to split them up because SOME PEOPLE just don’t want to HEAR ABOUT my PINKO FEMINAZI political views (not you guys!)

My other blog is my “professional” blog that I maintain as a FOOD WRITER. In it I write about FOOD FOOD FOOD and about cadging as much FREE FOOD as possible, which, if you have a history of being a starving artist, as I have, does become second nature. HA HA I must say I think all the other FANCYPANTS, LADYLIKE food writers view me as a low-class beast because, you know, only POOR PEOPLE wax rhapsodic about FREE FOOD.

The name of that blog is Hungersauce, and you can go read it if you want, but it is not as G*R*E*A*T as this blog.

Which is what I was going to write about: HOW GREAT THIS BLOG IS!  I just re-read my two posts (U.T) and (Then What Happened) and even though I have not posted here regularly AT ALL, this is by far the BEST BLOG of MINE. I think I like me and the way I write about my real feelings or perhaps I should call them My Real Feelings™.

So now I will be handing out the prizes for thinking of songs that could be used to torture people with. I was also going to write some more about DEVELOPMENTS. But now all of a sudden I have to go VOTE and its not like I am going to miss out on that, because Pinko Feminazis have got to REPRESENT, amirite?

Hey No really 

I am playing THIS SUNDAY at the Continental Club at 8:30 June 14th !!!!  The  Theme of the show is MORTALITY!!!  I never play anymore, so anytime I DO play I think it is fair to state that: This may be your only chance to ever hear me play music for the rest of your life!!  Because it is true.

I still look JUST LIKE THIS!! Except of course fatter and older

Note the DORK posture. I think DORK posture must be INBORN or something, because it is clear that I am a total geek. Nice legs though!

PS If you red this leave a comment and I will send you a present/

It Will Be Just Like This!!!! Eleventy-one1111!!!

I have been invited to play at the Jon Dee and Friend Show, upstairs at the Continental Club, this Sunday Night !!!