As I could not believe it any more, I could not teach it. I thought, I would rather teach them how to no longer believe. This did not settle my mind. At last, I was compelled to the following conclusion: since I no longer believed, teaching anything in particular was no longer the point; so why proselytise non-belief? Satisfied, I did my research, and taught them what I no longer believed.

To be tortured by the illusion of choice, and to bear all the regrets that tumble from that illusion, is the punishment accorded to those who believe in free will.

All he ever wanted was to be important! His life became a campaign to make himself exalted and canonical in the eyes of others. He was therefore able to make himself as ridiculous as a human being can be without actually becoming a professional clown.



Who can possibly tell a saint he is wrong?



Destiny is the shining bauble we use to trap the suckers.



He's a journalist. He's gifted with the capacity to see the social context for music making, and the social causation involved in generating new musical forms. As for what happens before a musical style becomes a mass movement, he has no idea: he's not privy to such turnings.



She used to feel she was the ruler of the town, but now it becomes clear that the ruler has died, and the tower is empty, so who is she? Now she is one of the townspeople, as they gather in the streets, arguing what to do; but she is not sure which one.




He has locked the basement door and plugged his ears so he cannot hear the unearthly sounds. Next, he will go around the world selling his method to the highest bidder. Creatures of the underworld instinctively despise him. How long will he survive?




An epigone sets up a stage in the market. People flock around to praise him. They are reminded of the greatness of the master, and in the delerium of their pleasure, welcome the thief.




A prophet of honour appeared to me in a dream and said, I have gazed without flinching upon all the hells to which the ungrateful are dispatched, but I could not gaze for a second upon that hell which is reserved for the devout.




Driving things to an extreme, you make unique lies.




Not desiring fame in this lifetime, they work hard at their craft and attempt to see it through to completion, dodging bullets. Are they wasting their lives? In the opinion of their peers, yes. The opinion of their successors is harder to estimate. All they really want is the gentle creature pleasure of dying in contemplation of their unvarnished works. They are not so interested in the living hell of being observed and judged throughout their lives by strangers.




She said, ‘Hands-off easygoing tolerance is most effective for handling demons. After that, violence is best.’




She desires to know what's going on in his head. He says, without reevoking anything, 'Nothing of great consequence'. She smiles and says she does not believe him, but he is telling the truth, as by not recalling his thoughts, he has made it true.




When an intellect is too weary to deduce, it thinks in apothegms. A dog under a tree, it raises its head, whines to no-one in particular, then rests its head, thinking of nothing.





To the potential mass murderer, insoluble prolems often appear as challenging opportunities.




Through constant complaint he is able to create a simulacrum of a raft, an illusion of continuity of consciousness, the vanity of which is obvious even to him, thereby creating further grounds for complaint.




'Don't tell me you are well', he says. 'I only want to hear from sick people. How can you, being well, understand my misery?' This is his reasoning. Even now, he is conversing with his sick friends, and they are engrossed with themselves and their unifying misery.





I suppose the mental torment you feel is caused by a recoil from the physicality of your love for this person, which is intense and unnerving.





"I like your stories", I told her, "Because they have no specific meaning and allow me, the reader, to exercise my imagination and understand them in any way I like". "On the contrary", she told me, "My stories have only one meaning. There is no room for your imagination, and only one way they may be understood; also, the meaning is always the same".





If he truly understands the nature of change, he will be out of a job.





The body reaches a precipice and halts. It turns right around. It wanders along the edge, then returns to its original spot. It waits. It squints at the sun. It scratches itself. Suddenly, it jumps.





The cosmos threw him a bouquet: he accepted it gratefully, because he knew that this was his third and final offer.





And now she is invaded by a shadow which eases itself out to her toenails and fingertips, hollowing her out inside, making her body its own, for she is about to die. She digests everything into her particular sensibility, which is simply to make the tussle with life a meaningful and constructive enterprise, with not a little dark channelling activity, and that is why I like her style. So, if she is to die, it will be without a feeling of persecution. Idly, I find myself contemplating another friend who feels persecuted when he loses his keys, and wonder how he will feel when his time comes.





She knows that one day she will climb a mountain, rest her head on a rock, and die without a second thought, and this will confuse her loved ones, whose tears will not move her: she will not understand their tears. She will forget everything she has ever done, and all her attention will be focused on the gathering dark.





Anonymity jealously rules inspiration.





In his dream, she was black, haughty, and stood with her foot on the severed head of a wolf. This is what she told him:
"The trickster works through one person, against another. The mode of action is unmasking. The unmasking creates surprise in those who expect and depend upon solidity and the perseverance of form. They depend on such illusions to preserve their sanity, or so they believe; but it is this belief which actually undermines their sanity.
"The trickster only manifests against a person subject to that delusion. To a person not subject to that delusion, he is a principle of embodied action, not a person or deity. According to that principle, the trickster is simply a facet of reality, the fact of change, applied within the locus of personality and social world. Those who understand this principle have a way of appearing and disappearing, changing shape, and so on, without any apparent regrets.
"The difference between the trickster and the psychopath is not as subtle as it might first appear. The psychopath defends and maintains his pleasure at all costs. The trickster defends nothing: not even the principle of non-defending. For this reason, the psychopath more closely resembles the normal person as defined by our society than does the trickster."





One day during a walk in the woods, a leech attached itself to his ankle and began to suck. Or was it that a troll appeared in his bedroom, and began to follow him around, eating his food, stealing his seat and occluding his view of the world? The leech drank its fill and eventually dropped off; or was it that the troll became bored, found an easy prey, wandered off, lost sight of him in the shadows? Later, she asked him, why did you put up with that leech, or was it a troll? Why did you put up with it for so long? And all he could say was, I did not have it in my heart to remove the leech, or the troll. It needed my blood; or was it that it needed my company, my food, my seat, or my view?





She reflects on the gentle sweetness she feels when dissolving her past; there is something fearsome in it.





'At first, he told her, 'my stories are made up to pass the time. Before too long, the moon appears and they are suddenly recondite with hidden meaning. It is not long, though, before they seem, in a flash, utterly redundant. Later still, they wander back into your life, like sleepwalkers.'





She wakes in the night shouting, 'Whose voice is that?' Then she laughs. She has to explain to me that it is only the punchline of a joke, the point of which she has already forgotten.





I said, at first I liked the way you went hither, but now, on reflection, considering all the relevant facts, in the light of experience, perhaps you should go thither. And you said, aah, you might be right. Then I said, do you think, wouldn't it be best, wouldn't it be the sensible or perhaps the crazy thing to do? And you said, maybe, you could be right about that, I don't know. Then I said, but there's something there that shouldn't be, or maybe it isn't there but should be. Or really, no, it's more that it's too difficult, the project is too big, you will fail, or, no, it's that the project is too small, you are hemmed in, or I am hemmed in by you. And you said, it could be that way, who can tell?





First of all she found herself skim reading books, taking in great chunks of text in one hit, judging in a second whether there was anything there. Later, she found she was also skim reading conversations, allowing her mind to skip over small-talk, bustle, gossip, cant, and shop talk. Now, she is amazed to find herself skim reading reality, passing over almost everything. From time to time, she is galvanised; at other times she is quiescent, mentally somnolent or blurry; for she now considers attention a resource.





All depends on who gets to tell our history.




Malevolent, he is denied space in her world, and has become ruthless, breaking in through the windows of her bedroom while she sleeps, giving her nightmares.





He has often thought that if, in an autocratic state, he were asked to adopt some religious or ideological stance, he would happily do so to avoid persecution; and that such a recanting would be neither consistent with, nor inconsistent with, his world view.





She is accustomed to modelling her own thoughts in the body, even looking in the mirror as she does so, the better to articulate in skin each inner being. One evening, her lover accuses her of being priggish at a party attending by a number of relaxed, young, well-moneyed academics of no great note. This is unexpected, as she always feels tremorously raw and unpretentious, and never shares her humility with anyone, since, logically enough, humility does not parade.
Thinking back, she realises her unconscious modelling has slipped over the borders of her personality. She was modelling, not her own concealed attitudes, but theirs, like a king's fool. She wonders what they thought of her? What did they think of themselves? Unlike them, she gave up teaching years ago, yet cannot stop driving these wicked pins into peoples' hearts, even against her own will.

Their polemics are received each morning in the mail. Each is closely typed, densely argued and presented with great skill, wit and flourish. Each has been sealed and dated, as befits all official correspondence. She takes the scissors to each one. She slices them up into appealing shapes and then reassembles them. She mails them to her friends, and they hang them on their walls as decorations. It is rare that her detractors ever find out, but when they do, this is the stinging cause for further polemic.

If I am slower this time, he thinks to himself, I will avoid the perils of breaking the skin of my anonymity. Perhaps then this thing may expand with the grand, unhurried gait of nature left to its own devices, no longer at the behest of cleverness and other aids to speed and ascendence.

Astonishing, given the cadences of his prose, their gentle intensity, and his love of the human world, the quivering spirit in each of us, that he was never moved to write music. Then again, being able to fire that arrow directly to the heart with words alone, maybe he is in no need of that medium, since after all his prose is almost poetry, a music of words.




She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.




That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.




He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.




Heaven itself is a haven for criminals.




A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.




She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".




"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".




There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.




It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.




'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'




A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?




Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.




It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.




'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.




All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.




A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.

As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.

Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.

This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.







Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.




What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.




Anonymous writes:

Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.




She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.




The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.

Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.




Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.

As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.






"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.




The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.




The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.




First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.





It won't be done until it can't be done.




There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.

In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.



So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.




Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.




By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.




Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.



I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.

This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.

Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.




What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.

That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.




You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.




Why should I be moral?



As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.

In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.




It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.




As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.




Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.

After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?




R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.





Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.

Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.




Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.



It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.




Music should be seen, not heard.




Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.




Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.




Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.




Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?




I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.






Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.




He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.




Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.




The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.



Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.




Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.




Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.




Read for resonance, not reference.




It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.




When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.




A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.




Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.




Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.




When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.




When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.

Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.

This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.




All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.




When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.




Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.

I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.




The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.




Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?




To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.




The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.




Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.




The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.




People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.




The ground is only sporadically interested in details.




Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.




People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.




Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.




Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.




Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.




No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.




Didacticism is exegesis.




Explain at your peril.




There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.




Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.




The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.

When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.



The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.




Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.




Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.

When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.

As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.

If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.




She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.




Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.




It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.




It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.




When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.





I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.

'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.

'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.

Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.






Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.




Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.




Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.




He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.




He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.




So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.




Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.




Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.




It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.




From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.




She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.




You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.




Genius is cack-handed.




Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.




Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.




Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.




The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.




Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.




He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.




There is no cure for happiness.





They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.




Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.




Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.




The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’

I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’

‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.

There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.





Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.





You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.




Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.




Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.




To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.




If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.




This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.

Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...

A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.



The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.



It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.




It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.




She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.




Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.




We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.




The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.




Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.




It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.













It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.




It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.




He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.




They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.





I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.




One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.




Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.




Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.




You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.




Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.




If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.




"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."




So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.




One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.




Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.




One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.




We are masks for each other.




Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.




I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.




When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.




It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.




"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.

"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.

"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.

"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.

"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".




The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.




Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.

A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.

The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.



They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.

Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.

Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.









Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.




Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.




She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.




Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.






This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.






The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.




If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.




By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.




The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.




She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.





Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.





When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.




When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.




Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.




Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.




The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.




Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.







His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.

I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?




They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.




The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.

Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.




You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'





You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.




Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.




Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.




Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.




Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.

When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.




I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.




Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"

On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.




History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.




Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.




When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.




The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.




Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.




Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.




If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.




Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.




No-one is more debauched than an idealist.





Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.






Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?






Those who make toys have no use for them.








Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.




Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.

This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.




I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.




Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.




Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.

Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.

The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.

Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.

If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.





One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.



She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.

But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.

And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.

Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.

Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.


There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.



So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.




Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.





You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.






What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.

Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.






I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.

Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.

As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?

I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.




It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).

Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.

‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.

Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.

Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.

'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.

Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?





Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.

A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.

What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.

So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.


There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.


Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."





Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.

Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.



Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.

The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.

The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.

Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.

So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!

You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.
Astonishing, given the cadences of his prose, their gentle intensity, and his love of the human world, the quivering spirit in each of us, that he was never moved to write music. Then again, being able to fire that arrow directly to the heart with words alone, maybe he is in no need of that medium, since after all his prose is almost poetry, a music of words.




She must have a problem with pride, she thinks to herself, because she seems to be always meeting arrogant, talentless types from her past who are now doing a lot better than her. Or maybe they're being set up for a fall, and her lesson is simply to be patient and forebearing? She doesn't know, but really hates having her nose rubbed in it.




That great sigil, the Cosmos, really makes a mockery of the lesser sigil I will call 'my fate'.




He was a fine chef, and every night he would cook simple, unusual meals with fresh ingredients, but few people ever came, preferring the glossily rich prandium of the suavely urbane eatery across the road. So, every night he would cook, and every night he would eat his own food. ‘Even if no-one else wants my food, excellent though it is’, he would muse, ‘I have the benefit of enjoying it myself.’ And as he ate his own food every night, he became imbued with its benefits, and gradually became simple and unusual in himself.




Heaven itself is a haven for criminals




A man made a wish, and his world promptly fell apart. He thought to himself, 'This is the wish: it is making its presence felt'.




She said, "Institutional Christianity is the religion of flock conformity. Satanism is better, because it at least rejects the mediocrity of social approval. But there's something beyond both".
He said, "It's called nothingism."
She said, "Don't give it a name".




"Such vanity", muttered the Controller of Reputations, "to put his name about when he isn't even famous".




There were seven corridors, each one beholden in a kind of non-sentient trance to the one beneath. The shallowest level opened out to courtyards with gargoyles and fountains; further down they resembled office and hospital corridors, with no people present, until finally the lowest level was a road through a tunnel, with empty cars crashing, one after the other, in slow motion, forever: the sound was a kind of agony of buckling metal, brakes and glass, and was not without a certain horrific beauty.




It is an ingenious machine, a transforming engine, which turns the animus of another into adamantine, transparent light geometry.




'There's a lot of fascinating, delightfully entertaining people out there who really have nothing of substance to offer', L told me. 'They can be detected easily. The trick is that you simply appear to them as if you are not useful to them, yet do not wish to be their follower. You will be brushed off within a few seconds. On the other hand, there are others, far less numerous admittedly, who will instantly recognize you as a status-free person; not that they will do anything about it.'




A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that is why he mixes with people who neither know nor care about such things. As for the experts, he is probably waiting for their knowledge to fragment, shatter, and fly away - but that is unlikely to happen, so why did it happen to him?




Despite his evident genius, he is prickly, and waspish, and therefore one is able to discern from these tendencies toward pomposity that he has further work to do, not that anyone need tell him.




It's miraculous to me that, when others are offensive to her, she is not offended. It may be that they cannot disinter any hate or fear, because she has none, which is, in itself, quite remarkable to me. Also remarkable is that no-one else seems to notice her extraordinary qualities in this regard; and that she does not care that they do not notice.




'Compassion fatigue' is of course an oxymoron. False compassion exists so people don't have to look at true compassion, which is rather more direct and brutal than many people can bear.




All art is a mediation on chanelling the large into the small. If we feel frustration in the morning when we review what we accomplished last night, it may be because we see that, in spite of our best efforts, it remains a fact that the large cannnot be channelled into the small. If the frustration melts into proud fatherhood over time, and we come to see the merits of our little work, it may be due to the realisation that the small already contains the large.




A child fantasizes about all kinds of things - marrying its opposite sex parent, sucking on the teat of the universe forever, making the cosmos bow down before its primal urges, smearing the cosmos with faeces, having mummy bring it whatever it wants when it cries, and other fantasies of omnipotence.

As we grow older, we learn to sublimate these very basic urges into blogs, music, and becoming a person of saocial worth. For example, instead of smearing faeces around, we publish a learned critique of someone's scientific theory - especially if they remind us of one of our parents. We still fantasise about omnipotence and the trailing of clouds of glory, but within a more socially acceptable framework.

Infantile wish fulfillment occurs where an adult actually does consummate one of these basic, id-driven, polymorpheously perverse fantasies. Many gurus are like this. They have been protected from the reality principle by their overindulgent mothers. They grow up and become big babies.

This is connected to the oceanic feeling in this way. The child experience bliss and unity with the cosmos in that whenever a need arises, the mother appears and satisfies it. Sucking on the Good Breast, the child feels warm, blissful and unified with the mother. Later, the Good Breast (or Good Mother) may be idealised as a feminine principle of universal bliss and compassion in which one can be absorbed, cossetted and protected. The feeling of bliss that results is intense and is felt as a profound religious enlightenment. All gurus have oceanic feelings of unity with the universe, which cannot be maintained without devotees. This is how society makes big babies.







Lack of insight has a protective function, and is the chief reason why so few journalists kill themselves.




What he is, he hates to see in others. Moreover, what other have that he does not have, he affects to despise, as he loathes competition. He will therefore associate only with people more powerful than him. What they do is no concern of his.




Anonymous writes:

Maybe I'm perverse, but the notion of a music or even artistic career, seems sillier to me the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be something a serious person would entertain.




She has said goodbye to paranoia, mental torment and the monotony of maintaining her historical borders. However, she has not become any easier to live with.




The conflicting opinions of others can put you in a spin. If you are pigheaded, however, you hold to your own counsel and steer your way through the storm, working with the wind and the waves, but only insofar as it conserves energy. You need one helmsman only.

Some happily lost souls will always wave to you from the horizon, as they go about their business, catching only the smaller fish.




Nothing is identical to anything else. There must be two situations in order for the identity comparison to be made. As soon as two situations can be defined, they differ in space.

As for the observation that all situations are self-identical, that is no more illuminating than saying, 'It is what it is'. Fortunately, that unilluminating statement turns out to be very illuminating if one really thinks about it.






"I am discerning your system, your approach to life, at last", he said. "I have become obsessed with a thought pattern", I thought.




The tide goes out, revealing rocks, grey coral pieces, shells, seaweed and dead bluebottles. Some of us supplicate before the receding tide, begging for its return. Others sink to their knees, cursing God, or Lady Luck, or the Fates. Many of us call meetings, gathering round, drawing up plans in the yellow sand, arguing heatedly. Few of us rest while we can.




The problem is not evil, or error, or destiny, but why the universe, on waking up, recoils in horror and amazement.




First as a child in the garden, then as the gardener, then as the one who watches the gardener and the child from a window upstairs, then finally as the garden growing unseen.





It won't be done until it can't be done.




There is no soul. This is the problem with the complaint that electronic music is soulless: a virtue is presented as a vice.

In the same way, those who lack the delusion that they have a soul are sometimes seen as uncanny or cold. However, the hot, theatrical vortex of narcissism that is called soulfulness is seldom appreciated for long by those who have to deal with it in an individual. On the other hand, a truly soulless person is always a pleasure to know and be with. But the pleasure is a cool one, easily overlooked.



So, also, it is easier to appreciate someone when we have no stake in their existence. That comes with time spent apart, too.




Of course, Jesus is the most famous recorded example of a Christ complex, but consider Socrates, a man with the most subtle of Christ complexes, and foiled only by his own ugliness, which instilled in him a kind of playful irony antithetical to the serious messianic task of leading lemmings off cliffs, but sufficiently elitist to ensure martyrdom at least.




By his peevish, self-righteous, and above all public response to a friend who asked him for a favour, I deduce he lacks both the humility and the strength of the thousandfold defeated. I can safely assume he has no balls.




Imagine, at an age when you were sufficiently young and uncompromising to think such things were fundamental to an authentic existence, that you struck an internal deal with yourself to sacrifice all commercial success, in exchange for prolonged joy in your muse, which, as per the terms of the deal, was to be a lifetime contract. Now you find myself wondering why you have very little money, yet, miraculously, always enough to continue to pursue your art. Then you must remind myself of your deal, struck long ago. The deal was for life, struck with all the radical romanticism of a teenager, and cannot be revoked. The child is master of the adult.



I avoid deeply spiritual people. The reason is that the substance of my own ephiphany, such as it was, was that there was no spirit. So extraordinary was this experience that I found I was unable to obtain comfort from spiritual people; I could only obtain it from people who had no spiritual beliefs at all, and who only cared about practical matters.

This includes people very busy with their jobs, young artists and other egotistical types, women who rely on their looks, middle aged men whose spirit has been crushed beyond repair and now only want to read and drink tea, ribald old bohemians who paint, sew or make dolls and like their wine and sunshine, Satanists and Buddhists too lazy to read their respective scriptures, let alone practise them, and of course the French.

Hence, a lot of my friends are deeply materialistic, and only care for pleasure in this life, and I find that quite acceptable, so long as they never get any money to splash around.




What makes darkness visible? Mental imagery appears in the darkness, but is fundamentally of the darkness. It articulates the night, colouring it in its own raiment, characterised by soft light, and permeated by fog and steam. There is an opiate, somnambulist comfort to these dark dreams, and no sense of humour to speak of.

That is why some of us are not afraid of the dark. For us, true terror is clear light, bright light, dazzling light. There is comedy, too, and it is almost too intense and vivid for comfort. I find this keyboard and this screen, and these hands, far more unnerving than any demonic archetype - and if that sounds strange to you, you had better take your comfort in the lesser terrors of the night.




You feel like you should apologise for your perplexity. Perhaps you should make a virtue of it. This is what a charismatic leader, the hypnotic centre of a social gathering, would do. But you remain everyone's inferior, unwilling to assert yourself, as if you could even find a self to assert. A little less insight would do you material good.




Why should I be moral?



As some of us get older and start appealing to generation gaps, or preface something with 'I'm an old fogey, I can't get today's music', we are inviting others to approve of a certain mental state of affable, comfortable, mildly pompous smuggery. We are asking you to help us settle down into a self-enclosed, cossetted, snuggly little world in which we can be king or queen. We are asking you to help us pretend that we will not die. We are asking for dignity and respect without really wishing to earn it. We want you to applaud our cognitive stasis and call it wisdom and taste.

In reality, though, unable to cope with the continous shock of change, we have fallen into a waking coma. We are now dreaming of the permanence of our youth and strength. We take our own childish music far too seriously, and fail to see seriousness in yours.




It is immense cowardice that allows me to persevere, lacking as I do the courage to give up.




As for the subject of culture overload: wean yourself off a taste for cleverness and for the compulsive signposting of trends, remove all polish from your purview, and lose interest in the sparkling, brittle world of industry gossip. You'll quickly discover there's less to enjoy than you may once have thought. You may look for years and find no-one of interest. But by all means get on with it and find these people.




Jane said, more or less, ‘Your normal mind is the hardest state in which to deal with not knowing what’s going to happen. But when you’re drunk, or out of it, it’s fine. It’s not a problem. That’s why so many musicians get intoxicated’.

After a couple of drinks though, you feel confident, relaxed, aware, even a little cocky, just right for rock and roll. It’s seductive, isn’t it?




R: I'm a true singer - I can't keep my mouth shut.





Release a record and you announce your own death. The reviews are your obituaries. The CD tray is the casket, the CD the body, the record launch the funeral and wake, the CD rack in the record shop the viewing of your corpse. We come to the record shop to pay our respects, give money as flowers, remembering you in our own way.

Listen to your releases. This person gave birth to you, and died in labour. You, too, will die giving birth.




Every artist should have an extravert and an introvert project. The extravert project, which is naturally collaborative, should lead the way into the public eye in a blaze of confidence and colour. The introvert project, which is always a silent, private meditation, should absorb the backlash, quelling, dissipating, and stilling the return wash, allowing the sand settle at the bottom, the bubbles to rise and disappear, and the weed to extend its eloquent slow motion gestures through the water between.



It's hard to make it in this world as a synaesthetic musician, with no real skills, just the ability to see music. Your musical choices become eccentric, because they are not musical - they are visual. You traverse genres looking for synaesthetes. If you write music, then you are writing for such a small bunch of these people. However, it's nice to see their faces light up.




Music should be seen, not heard.




Music is a twilight language, best understood in a state of manic lucid somnambulism.




Music is full of wounded souls, looking to each other for salvation, and of course none of us can help each other. A little sympathy.




Dark days... they are dissolved not by meditation, but by wine, women and song.




Does he have dark days, like me? If I had his talent, and the results, and yet the lack of success, would I kill myself? What is his secret?




I like a bruised optimism, don't you? Pessimism, when it is complete, removes all causes for concern. The result: bruised optimism. A bruised optimist has fondness for an unbruised optimist. The latter in all innocence thinks the former might just make a good disciple.






Alcohol: the spiritual anthopomorphicist.




He actually forgets the slights against him without even trying, the same way we forget phone numbers - and others call this his virtue. On the other hand, she will invent wrongdoings out of nowhere, grow them with her fury, and present them to you, in rancid triumph, at every opportunity.




Grace falls from heaven. You don't have to be religious to comprehend this.




The universe is a very odd place isn't it? And human beings are quite strange too. You yourself are quite strange. A freak.



Irony is not the problem. It's postmodernism: the multiplication of irony by cowardice.




Chit-chat, reminiscence, novels and diaries, catching up, telling anecdotes, exchanging pleasantries... to get rid of all this is to lose all your friends. On the other hand, you make a new friend.




Sentences do not refer. If there's anything tethering a sentence to a situation, I'd like to see it. Sentences do not refer, but they do direct. Sometimes.




Read for resonance, not reference.




It takes a lot of face to be that mediocre.




When you are constantly thinking 'I can't do this any more', and yet you continue to do it, it becomes clear that inner speech guides the body when there is silent assent from the latter, and only then.




A fertile garden smells of shit, blood and bone, and people hold their noses as they go past. Later on, they come back to admire the flowers. The causal relationship is lost on them.




Your persistence condemns you to a life of futile invention.




Pretending to be a genius is an international celebrity pastime, but it's really not a matter of wearing crazy clothes, engaging in expensive and complex projects, and generally acting like a shaman or a trickster. The few people I know who are geniuses are rather odd, friendly but socially maladroit and inclined to suddenly disappear on you. They stick to their thing and don't mix easily with the world, and, consequently, are quite small in the social order of things. Genius is not theirs, but resides in them for a while, or until they become famous, at which point it is very slowly sucked right out of them, a process which takes several years and which is irreversible.




When all potential courses of action clearly lead to disaster, thought is curtailed.




When you are a successful artist, you are busy all the time maintaining success, and, in your youth at least, there will be no such thing as fame and leisure together.

Finally, though, you reach old age. There you may enjoy, if you are no longer driven, a golden age of no more work. You simply accept artistic accolades for your past accomplishments, enjoying your few remaining years in the rich autumnal garden of your senescence.

This must be very pleasant, to cruise gently to one's grave in a glow of reminiscence, admiration, and perhaps, also, the gentle warm haze of a little mild senile dementia.




All music lyrics are fundamentally about the absence of a driver.




When you tell people there are no universal moral rules, they reply that you're offering a license for anarchy, murder and pillaging. You can tell what's really on their minds.




Anyone can dispense common sense wisdom. It's like a chef saying, 'We should use fresher ingredients, we should bake a nicer cake'.

I want to see a philosophy which doesn't provide you with a better way to be. Unfortunately, that philosophy can't be put into words without becoming prescriptive.




The smug fat body of mainstream white Anglo-Celtic mediocrity stretches itself comfortably across this fair nation, bellowing for more entertainment and more food, crushing the bodies of its cultural pups, who slowly and painfully asphyxiate.




Are there only non-moral reasons for conforming to a moral code? And if you have only non-moral reasons for being moral, is that truly a moral stance after all?




To be fated to be a lawyer is so unspeakably awful that the matter must never be broached, not even in a lawyer's own mind.




The more we permit in others, the more we permit in ourselves. A critic who understands this will be unsufferable to other critics, and had better just be an artist instead.




Reality rewards evil with little bits of paper.




The burden isn't knowing what you know. It's abandoning it to be with people who don't.




People worship fictional beings all the time. No-one worships sanity.




The ground is only sporadically interested in details.




Choose a miniscule range of musical possibilities and stick to them with the stolidity of a Flemish weaver. You will forge a whole new genre.




People are always asking how they should be moral, but seldom why they should be moral.




Poverty is the only austerity an artist requires.




Just as not everyone who claims to be virtuous really is virtuous, not everyone who claims to be satanic really is satanic - even if they want to be.




Eugenicists typically don’t understand that, as a rule of thumb, the survival of a species is enhanced by multiplying mutations, not by reducing them. Every dog breeder knows this. But the eugenicists don't: they are sufficiently dull witted to qualify as candidates for their own extermination campaigns.




No, I don't want to learn any more exercises. Enough with exercises. But, the alternatives are exiguous, to say the least, when you scour the shelves.




Didacticism is exegesis.




Explain at your peril.




There's much to be said for leaving the gods to their business.




Evil is fathomless and multi-tiered. How do you know you are going to hell? You will hear strange birdsong; your surroundings will become increasingly ornate and antique; there will be more and more servants.




The sane do not reject delusion but indulge it for fun, so as to make life more interesting. Life is pretty boring if you keep in mind the true nature of existence. On the other hand, sanity is the capacity to dynamically switch between delusion and awareness. Delusion is sought when things are getting boring; awareness is sought when things are getting painful or overheated. Temperatures are lowered primarily by graciously acknowledging the partiality of the viewpoint you have hitherto been pursuing.

When you are sane, admitting fault in everyday life is just the same as admitting fault in a dream. I notice that people who are slow to take offense or pass the buck rapidly acquire power and influence over others. This is called improving the mood in dream world and rising naturally to great influence in La La Land.



The difference between an artist and a con artist is that the latter will not try to con his friends.




Human beings do not have cognitions; cognitions have human beings.




Everyone owns popular music: it's an international treasure. As a result, everyone is an expert. They know what makes a good song. If there's something missing, they know that too. They may not be able to put their finger on it; however, if it's lacking, they can hear the lack.

When you get something off the ground and running, anyone who feels safe to express an opinion in your company will do so. If what you are doing is in some way not mediocre, if it is untried, or exemplary of a new aesthetic, and if they are not themselves talented musicians, they will tell you so, often at length - for they, and not you, are the experts, the listening public.

As to the most effective strategy for dealing with the volley of expert opinions to which you will be exposed, I wish to offer a few general rules of thumb. Listen, argue if you like, but do not take it to heart. Stick to your guns and carry on.

If your music is in some way unprecedented, to that extent the average listener will say it is cold, flat, empty, or contrived. These are projective descriptions unconsciously illustrating the fact that the listener does not feel automatically welcome in your musical world. If the listener finds the music cold rather than warm, it is a sure sign that you are innovating. Your music will warm up when the listeners warm up. Then the same music will be deemed classic - and, in virtue of being classic, it will also be history, by which stage, I hope, you will have moved on to something colder.




She tests them out with nonsense. If they laugh along, she moves closer.




Those who go into battle with regretful resolution nearly always defeat me. I prefer an angry, resentful opponent.




It's not so much that you have opinions: nor is it that you have too many. It is simply that you think your opinions are not partial. This fact alone has turned you into a deeply irritating person.




It's not philosophy or psychology per se that interests me so much as each person's unique delusional pattern.




When I listen to maudlin, lovelorn pop lyrics and assume they are the sentiments of the songwriter, they sound dull, superior, and self absorbed; but when I listen from the point of view that they are a message to the songwriter, from a better or wiser part of her nature, or as a message from the unconscious to the controlling ego, suddenly the lyric is deeply moving to me. This never changes.





I wanted to make my own paper, so I asked an expert: he had written a book.

'Paper', he told me, 'Is not longer the fine thing it once was. Modern paper can hardly be compared to the elegantly textured, pestle-pounded sheets used by the ancients'. He paused to see if any of his traditional rivals had overheard him. He was spoiling for the usual argument.

'I'm not so interested in which paper is the best and finest', I told him. 'I just would like to know what paper is actual composed of, and how it is made'. He replied angily, 'Matters of taste cannot be separated from matters of composition!' And with that I sensed my interview was over.

Regarding the manufacture of my own paper, I was able to come up with something that did the job via a process of trial and error, reading, and asking around. As for questions of taste, I have never paid them much attention.






Stall them, stonewall them, then throw them into the hands of the experts.




Perhaps, in dealing with the narcissist, the best strategy is to roll over and play dead.




Sometimes you retract into a private and cold space, into which I cannot climb to join you. It is as if you are preparing me for your death.




He watches over his crueller impulses like a cat watching over her kittens. He knows them all.




He is burned hollow now and can see right through himself, as if he were made of layers of irridescent glass. When the winds are so disposed to move him, he is compelled to sing the praises of the cosmos like a hand puppet.




So you tell fairy stories, as it's the best you can do. You explain it to children, but they are grown, older than you. You do not have the nerve to patronise them, and anyway, they are comfortable with patronising you. Above all, you don't care that much one way or the other.




Fear is her litmus. When ghouls and goblins no longer terrify, there is one more way to frighten the bejesus out of a human being; and when that no longer works, the story ends.




Who can you tell your secret? You can't tell anyone. I don't envy you.




It's too easy for you, and that is the problem. You surpass us: we hate you.




From the sublime to the ridiculous they go, and back again... you think they are contradicting themselves? Then you're an idiot.




She is no fool, but if you are, she will do her utmost to make herself look foolish, in order to get rid of you.




You must become a statesman of your art. This is achieved by being ignored for approximately forty years. Then, you receive the ultimate accolade: you did not spit the dummy.




Genius is cack-handed.




Our voices our so innocent we dare not speak at all.




Some highly skilled and specialised people in the popular cultural industries have a lot of hubris. They are proud of the silliest things. On the other hand, if you're lucky like me, you've had the pleasure of working with technically skilled people who are also humble. How can you pick them? You do not forget their names, nor do you lose their phone numbers.




Say I want to be famous, have no particular aptitude for the arts, yet possess a moderately competent, dull-normal writing ability. I would write about popular culture, hoping to attact some attention.




The expression 'There is no time to waste' has two meanings.




Then again, there are many people I would like to accuse of wasting their time, but I have two problems. The first is that I don't seem to be able to form any conception of time that isn't self-contradictory. The second is that I do not understand where waste could go in this universe, such that it is no longer useful, somewhere, to some living thing.




He is not doing what I value, and I do not understand what he is doing: he is wasting his time.




There is no cure for happiness.





They show you their confidence, which is strong: but their confidence is constructed out of their own hardened shame.




Mirroring the shadow is done unconsciously, as the shadow is not conscious.




Metal techno doesn't exist yet, and we haven't done any, but it might be interesting to try to talk it into existence by pretending it's already here. This is called tactical reification.




The critic was dubious. ‘What is it?’

I said, ‘It’s a new mode of transport that owes a lot to the horse and cart. I call it a car.’

‘Hmmm,’ said the critic, and dubiously rubbed one of the tyres with his shoe. ‘Interesting.’ But he wasn't very interested, and was already looking over my shoulder for someone more important.

There was a pause, while he formulated his thoughts, and I listened to the birds. At last he said, with some irritation, 'But it just doesn’t quite have the feel of a horse-drawn carriage, does it? You can’t beat that good old clippety-clop feel, no matter how well you imitate it. Still, nice try', he lied, and shook my hand. And very quickly, he was gone, as he had seen someone famous who had set up a stall across the road with free drinks and cheese.





Avoiding mass spectacles, going down the side alleys, hoping to catch some precious little event, a private performance just for her.





You describe them in music, and a few months later they walk into your life. Be careful.




Hell is heaven tipping over, and heaven is hell dispersing.




Writers are liars. They fantasize, confabulate, and connive. When you question them, they fly into a rage, knowing they have been found out, unable to accept themselves.




To communicate with the utmost clarity, saying exactly what you mean, so that nothing is in the shade; this is unforgivable.




If they say they are nihilists, this commitment alone proves they are not.




This idea that you exercise creativity solely through what you consume is a corporate invention with obvious utility. Though it is a way of keeping the general public in its place, it may be also one of the key reasons a previously vibrant scene eventually falls stagnant.

Scenes in music are electric when there's a palpable sense that everyone can do it - and that sense is also a reality: everyone is doing it! You look around - my God, your useless mates who can't even microwave their dinner are suddenly cranking out tracks and releasing them around the world! This other friend of yours has started a label or a clothing store, your partner has got the Singer out and is running up crazy looking dress designs and selling them at the local record shop, and getting orders in from all other the place; someone else is making a film or some videoclips, all on a shoestring, and they look great...

A scene eventually dies when money comes into the picture and the free-for-all is formalised by business and legal requirements into a more rigid structure consisting of two camps - the stars, who produce (or who take the role of the producer in the public eye), and the cattle, who consume. This arrangement is dissatisfying to both parties and cannot be maintained for more than a few years. In the end, it kills that particular scene by starving it of exterior inspiration; and the corpses which remain turn into a fertile mulch, providing base nutrition for the next scene.



The perspective that has the dissatisfied customer saying,'feed me something else' is not the one that is going to create a solution.



It's a tragedy that he has seen enough to know the emptiness of masks, but not enough to see the necessity of masks.




It's a circus without clowns, and so we emerge dazzled but none the wiser.




She creates and she listens back, but the creator and the listener are two different people. They exist in a partnership which is grounded in inevitability and a hands-in-the-dirt realism. It is not a contest, nor an uneasy truce any more. One brush with insanity is sufficient for a person to get the joke, if they have a sense of humour.




Our wishes for financial security, recognition, the opportunity to travel, and an exciting and fulfilling love life are sometimes met, sometimes not. If our wish was simply to be killed and brought back to life, we would never be disappointed.




We would rather say something less commonplace. Something wild and a little feverish, likely to cause a sensation. What we are afraid of is what happens after we've attracted idiots to the cause.




The creative impulse is apparently not target focused. Music, cooking, writing, talking, walking, it's all the same. However, within certain more or less contrived social constraints, the quickest route to expression is always favoured.




Upon realisation that your interest has waned, you may also wonder, 'is my life dead or am I tired of it?' This is a strikingly passive stance. There is no thought of getting involved, creating, or altering the process in any way. It is the consummatory attitude of a diner, who, unimpressed with the food, has no aspiration to go to the kitchen and get involved with the cooking.




It's not that time flies when you're having fun. It's that the illusion of time disappears when you don't have time to think about time.













It's there, but you can't see it. So you say nothing's there, and needlessly get into trouble. You should say, "There is something there, but I don't know what it is". It's so simple.




It hasn't happened yet, and they are to blame. Maybe I should be getting on their collective cases. Or maybe they and I are being separated from each other by natural causes, in which case meeting them at all would be an attempt to swim upstream into my past, away from an unknown future.




He has yet to encounter a problem that cannot be solved by inaction, silence, effortlessness, or some artful combination of the three. However, he sometimes finds it sorts things out more quickly to pretend there's some point of issue. Sometimes it even helps for him to pretend to be angry. People think he's taking them seriously, which of course he is, in a way.




They counter her honest but unexplored perspective by sharing an irrelevant joke at her expense. She counters by becoming even more irrelevant, and irreverent, than they are. They have no answer to that trick, which is completely unexpected. They depended upon her embarrassing herself through a sincere and passionate defence, thereby strengthening their group solidarity and marking her as a permanent outsider - it has worked a thousand times before. But she seems uninterested in defending anything, and has apparently forgotten the point of dispute altogether: they are nonplussed. She has not won, but neither has she lost. Characteristically, her technique and the result she seeks via the technique are somehow identical.





I suppose she allows herself to be wounded in order to write with the blood.




One can lay open the situation to others, then hold out a net to catch the return volley. Out the stones, brickbats, grapeshot and shrapnel something can be made.




Revealing aperspectival vision to a body of writers in any field is like teasing a pack of dogs with a stick.




Just as you must kill an animal before you can eat it, you must give new music a name before you can make money out of it.




You do not feel disposed to argue; therefore the boundaries become permeable and you may travel.




Artists do not see movements and genres come and go. They change shape with the changing of shape.




If you are an artist, and you believe that art consists of a succession of movements, that belief alone will turn you into a critic.




"That's another reason I want to be famous", she said, "so I can be in a celebrity car race."




So they revel in cracking and scratching the surface, looking for whatever might be underneath. If there is something there, they are rewarded. If there is nothing, they are accused of vandalism.




One year a beautiful little blue flower grew, but was soon cast into the shade by a large dung heap. “Well”, thought the little flower, “It’s better to be beautiful and ignored than ugly and noticed”. But, on further reflection, she began to realise that what she really wanted was revenge.




Of all the perceptive people on earth, none are more perceptive than those who compliment us on our personalities.




One group fills in the gaps, while another opens the gaps. The latter are afraid to stare too hard, and this preserves them. They feel contempt for the former group, and their contempt is returned with indifference.




We are masks for each other.




Alcohol is a fuel for absurdity.




I had fallen into conversation at the market with him after he had talked and some vegetarian food had been served. I greeted him rather awkwardly with my hands together at my lips, bowing slightly. "No, not like that, but like this, at the heart", he said, lowering my hands to my chest. "It is much more effective that way. Did you hear my talk?" "Only from about ten minutes from before the food was served", I replied. "Ah!", he said, "You heard it all!" Although he looked as if he were Hindu and was Indian, with a silky black beard which I spontaneously began to stroke as he held my hands, we were talking about Buddhism, or more properly, the nature of Buddhahood, the enlightened state. He must have been speaking about the difference between the two, as I was encouraged to say, unconsciously imitating his speech cadences, "Even a person who openly rejects Buddhism, or who has never heard of it, can not be rejected as necessarily not a..." but my speech faltered, as I had constructed my sentence with too many double negatives, and at any rate, he must have already grasped the intended meaning, because he whisked me over to a group of ten nuns on the border, sitting in two rows, and gestured to them, saying, "Did you hear that? Did you hear what he said?". Then he immediately drew me over to a stall next to the nuns, where educational text books, many copies of the one book, were displayed protruding from the carboard boxes in which they had been packed. He gave me one. It was a thick, soft, colour compendium of recommended toys for children. The page fell open at a chapter on mechano, including diagrams of a mechano aircraft. However, the writing was too small to read, and I was already waking up.




When there is nothing exterior to which it can direct attention, inner speech begins to direct attention to itself, creating inner dialogue.




It is dark, dark, dark in this world that spewed out of his fingertips. There is gallows humour. I haven't read one good review for this record. Whenever I listen to it I hear demons dancing inside a mind of stony indifference. He must have mastered the art of controlling demons by exiting from the building.




"Observe how I move from the abstract to the particular!", she announced, not unselfconscious in her appreciation of her own beauty.

"How do you do it?" I asked, because I did not have her faculty with words and simply wanted to get to the point, perhaps for my own advantage.

"I do it by finesse", she replied, and the answer was rather deflating for me, because she had not revealed any secrets.

"What is the nature of your finesse?" I asked, because I was aware she was playing a game, teasing me into asking more questions.

"My finesse", she declared proudly, and at that moment she seemed to me like Joan of Arc, holding a shield, ascended to mythology, "my finesse lies only in my capacity to confound by solving".




The sound began as a howl, which before too long splayed out into the horizon as great, long tendrils of thought. Warmed and fattened by the sun, it became poetry. Soon the elegant sentences became joyfully aware of their own importance, and began to blush, colour and fatten into eulogies, laments and prayers; each of which developed its own sprays and branches, bearing fruit that turned golden, hardened and became metallic, solid, smooth, unbreakable, unyielding, magnetic, attractive and repulsive, disputational in nature. The silver and golden cords began to overlap and overtake one another, tying knots, unravelling, pushing through, defining spaces, invading, twisting, rejecting, supporting, undermining. Finally they all locked together, and there was no more room to move. Then, because the force of the howl that began all this was unabated, the knots and coils began to heat, glow, vibrate, sizzle and liquefy until they sprang apart, molten and potentiated. Freed, they were propelled again, singing, humming, beating and so on as dictated by their shape, size, density and composition, forming dizzying sonic terraces like a swarm of insects, generating musical patterns, each of which folded under the mass of sound and was instantly superseded. Shooting up higher into the sky, they lost their density and began to dance, converging, dividing and exploding into astonishing shapes and textures and filligrees, mutating, revolving as brilliant atoms of violet, indigo, blue, green yellow and red, arching, resonating as electrical fields, far, far beyond language, in the realm of pure play, where philosophy ends, and music prevails.




Some people think a fool is someone who doesn't know some fact; or who is so open-hearted and trusting he doesn't know he is being ridiculed; or who doesn't know how to defend herself; or who subscribes to an unfashionable viewpoint.

A fool, though, is really someone who takes the moral highground.

The latter kind of fool not only deserves our ridicule; such ridicule is our social obligation. These fools steal the happiness and the lives of others. To ridicule her, though, is a fine art, and a profession, and a dangerous job, suitable only for those with great courage, subtlety and genius. Not everybody who is merely wise can lay claim to being a natural comedian. To kill a fool, you must be a fool - for the purposes of killing only.



They came here for a reason, or, at least, with a certain feeling of excitement, but when they had arrived, there was silence and inactivity, all of them having forgotten what the reason was - or perhaps the idea had flown, or had hidden like a fox, or maybe, some were already saying, there never had been any idea after all.

Some of them left at once in search of dinner and a show. Others raged and fulminated, unable to find the idea anywhere, and resorted to kicking things and storming out, loudly slamming doors behind them. Silence descended at once.

Only a few were left. They started to work, hardly knowing what they were doing, their confidence and pleasure growing as the thing began to take form.









Ethics are simple rules for those who are too thick to act morally.




Snakelike, he has squeezed himself through many changes over fifteen years to keep himself in the public eye. He is a pathological diplomat, a mystery to himself. Always, he names the right names, going no deeper than required, for he does not want to cause unease. As he brings forth the shibboleths and codes, his audience visibly relaxes. He is one of them, and will remain so, until their fortune wanes. One of them may hence discover him, miles away, in a new place, a new town, wearing new clothes, speaking a new language to a new coterie of endowed young princes, basking with great dignity in what they truly believe will be an eternal good fortune.




She is neither meretricious nor duplicitous, but she reminds me of a writer, in that when she says ‘he’, she may mean ‘me’, ‘she’, ‘you’, ‘they’ or even ‘it’. She seems to use these terms interchangeably, or perhaps for their poetry, as the mood takes her, ratcheting up from her personal experience - if they are grounded there, because it is hard to say – to the general, the abstract, and the performative. Moreover, it is clear that the view she describes may not be hers. However, it is equally clear that she never lies.




Her indecision is so charming and irresistible that we all play up on it, encourage it, and ultimately reinforce it. We're not doing her any favours.






This country is a good breeding ground for talent, because it is hostile to talent. What survives here, survives there.






The first friend you meet when you enter the creative world is boredom. He wants to share some quality time with you.




If they live in Melbourne, and you live in Brisbane, they say you are Japanese, because you're closer to Tokyo than anyone else they know.




By imagining their urges have lives outside of themselves, as exterior demons and so on, by attempting to contrive a distance between themselves and their instincts, they hope to sup with a longer spoon.




The occultist is a stolidly unrepentant romantic who has disowned and projected all his nasty urges.




She's a pseudo-intellectual, parading the breadth of her reading for its own sake.





Some of them notice every colour and name. Some of them can’t even remember their own name. Steeped in the liminal, they have forgotten how to excogitate, and move through the world like solid ghosts, living in the still space just behind intent.





When things get nightmarish, the nightmare itself may be sufficient to wake you up. When things get too dull, you may drift asleep again. Perhaps we cannot dream properly unless we are thoroughly deluded.




When dealing with humourless people who only want to get ahead at your expense, intimidate them by being extremely, unforgivingly precise and clear.




Eventually, I came to see no value in a permanent state of wakefulness. It was spoiling my fun. So now I prefer to dream on oblivious, though I still wake up from time to time, disturbed from my slumber by the indigestion of insight.




Many musicians prefer dull, mechanical jobs even if they take up most of the working week. The reason is that if the job is sufficiently dull, the brain begins to hum a little tune.




The creation of the discipline of psychology depended on thought becoming an insomniac.




Studying the mind is like making a fist out of thought.







His web diary is full of lamentations about the purposeless of his life. Sometimes he talks knowledgeably about this or that cultural artifact or tradition. Sometimes he pines for a purpose, a task, or a life's work he feels sure must be waiting for him at some time in the future. His yearning is so intense it becomes a prayer which keens into the ether, unrecorded by any angel or master being.

I think that the web diary itself is his masterpiece. Although I want to tell him, I prefer it that he doesn't know, or maybe I'm afraid he already knows it. If the former, why make him self-conscious? If the latter, why show a magician the mechanics behind his own trick?




They are agamic, much the same as they were ten years ago. Hard as nails in the beginning, they had nowhere to go but tighter, harder, faster and more complicated. They were surprising at first, but now they never surprise anyone. That is why, in spite of feigning outsider status, they appeal only to the ossified in mind and spirit, the mentally prematurely aged, the subliminally fearful, the ones who do not want to be surprised any more.




The moon is desolate. If you were to be king of the moon, you would have total power over a dead world.

Nevertheless, there are those who aspire to be king of the moon. Vanquishing their enemies, they compete for the honour of ruling over a barren wasteland.




You work between two poles, at the exact point at which there is no gravitational pull to either extreme. People shout from each pole, saying, 'What are you doing? Come to my end, where everything has already been worked out.'





You catch yourself knowing too much, and think, 'that can only lead to trouble'.




Your choices becomes less governed by taste, and more situational, more instrumental. Music, in particular, is a powerful thing. It is an active ingredient. You add the appropriate music at the appropriate time, without holding any of it close to your heart.




Persuasion is completely beside the point. Even those who say they understand usually don't - especially those who say they understand.




Religion is a cavalcade of con artists and their dupes.




Authoritarianism: the authority dispenses what she believes is wisdom, and expects only devotion in return. Thoughts or views not emanating from, or reflecting, the her views are not permitted to flow back up the tree. The authoritarian is fueled only by unconditional love.

When you meet someone like this on the net, you can make your excuses and leave. They will not follow you as you are of no use.




I don't think that much of value to anyone can be achieved by posing yourself, and looking at your own life as others would. I think you have to work from the inside out. You examine, develop and refine your materials and your methods, not your self-image. The reason is that you wish to avoid becoming a trope or a type. There must always be surprise and change, or the result is not true. Truth in life is not in accurate representation, but in the implicit acknowledgement of change.




Some people think that being an artist is a matter of showing us their lives. "Look, here I am having sex, here I am taking a dump - I'm an artist!"

On the other hand, there is an art to both these activities.




History alters to accommodate the hypocrite.




Being a pyromaniac, I launch outrageous propositions for the pleasure of watching them burn.




When considering creative partners, it can be helpful to distinguish, not between egotists and non-egotists, but between those who are willing to keep going and those who are determined to stay put.




The greatest curse is not to know how to sell out.




Following the dictum, 'the mistake is the hidden intention', seize upon your weaknesses and explore their permutations relentlessly, to the exclusion of all else, loudly and firmly proclaiming your genius.




Any pyromaniac with real ambition is going to move into explosives sooner or later.




If you want to live in the modern world without coffee, sugar, and alcohol, well, good luck pal. One day without at least one representative of the unholy trinity is sufficient to bring forth the realisation that we are all mad.




Avoid befriending authors, less you become immortal.




No-one is more debauched than an idealist.





Just because it's obvious, doesn't mean it's not worth saying over and over.






Is the player piano roll digital or analogue?






Those who make toys have no use for them.








Edit down to the bones; or, if you wish to attract leeches, flesh everything out.




Overplaying the diplomat persona, you show yourself to be untrustworthy to everyone. Underplaying the same persona, you show the world that you cannot see a situation from any other angle but your own.

This it is done as method acting. It is interpersonal systems analysis, applied and embodied as behaviour. It is also a form of shapeshifting, if you are comfortable with that word.




I think I enjoyed reading Weininger for the same reason I enjoy a cheesy horror movie - grotesquery is horribly fascinating. Weininger is really a gothic writer: he combines the commonplace, and the keenly observed, with the bizarre and the incredible. Everything is lashed forcibly together with hooks and wires that dig into the skin. He constructs monsters that almost walk.




Abstraction is the most effective form of revenge.




Let’s say for the sake of argument that there is a laughing competition, and on the board to judge this competition are the cream of our cultural laughing stock. Respected and envied by their peers, they loom large on the face of joke culture, and have been laughing all their lives. They know talent when they hear it.

Sorting though the hopefuls, they select carefully, on the basis of learned discussion, argument, and who they know. One by one the young jokers perform for the judges; one by one they meet their fate: joy or tears.

The technique behind laughter is well understood by the judges. Then, also, each has his or her speciality: the guffaw, the sneer, the chuckle, the giggle, the heehaw. Where appropriate, they defer to each other on matters of specialist expertise: such matters as tuning, rhythm, melodic progression, intonation, dynamic range and so on are understood to be at the heart of a good laugh. The technique of many of the contestants is razor sharp, prodigious, precocious. The most skilled jokers effortlessly traverse 1/32 and 1/64 notes. They employ pleasing portamentos and vibratos; they invest strong and moving emotional touches to their phrasing, to create an agreeable complexity; and they make pretty melodies.

Where technique is lacking, this is pointed out; where it is present, the judges are effusive and encouraging.

If it should happen that the judges encounter genuine laughter, they are embarassed - for themselves, or for the performer, they are not sufficiently awake to tell. The technique of such a one is frequently lacking, for she is not thinking of perfecting technique. Rather, she laughs because she is amused. The judges may even laugh back, -a different kind of laugh - a laugh of ridicule betraying, possibly, a subterranean fear of humiliation. Perhaps they feel, around the borders of their tunnel consciousness, that they might have been exposed, made fun of. Do they sneer at the performer? Or is the homunculus who sails imperiously over the surface of their waters, the one who is playing master, sneering at the depths? Even a puppet master can, for his own amusement or the amusement of others, have the puppet ridicule the puppet master’s technique. As for the genuine laughter artist, there are no glittering prizes for her. However, she is not too dismayed. It is a comedy.





One can be non-mediocre, brilliant even, but still a fool. Conversely, one can be an ordinary person with no particular aspirations over and above doing a simple job well, and become wise. I've known a few up-themselves people in my time - but not recently. I evicted all fools, mediocre or talented, from my life almost a decade ago. I still encounter them occasionally of course. I treat these bores with the utmost civility.



She doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But I do. Why should we feel contempt for the mediocre, I ask her? It’s bad manners to despise someone for lacking good looks, or money, or education - so why not talent, insight, or wisdom as well? The foolish man knows in his bones he lacks all three, that his security is highly specialised and dependent on ready public access to certain facts, facts he has at his disposal and will not share unless forced to do so. But he feels the lack of something overarching, and is angry in an ill-defined, restless way. He will pick on you, because you are torturing him. He senses your freedom, you are not dragging chains of quite the same weight, nor moving through such dense air.

But, she says, you suffer a fool to make foolish decisions on your behalf. And I think, you know, maybe she’s right not to suffer fools gladly. My life may have been different if I had been less patient with fools.

And I think about it further, and realise, well, if you become exasperated with a fool, the fool is using you up. To treat the foolish with respect must involve something else, something skillful and self-protective, some kind of nuance or subtlety that saves energy so one can concentrate on one's larger purpose or interest without unnecessary distraction.

Here's what I think it means to suffer fools gladly. One keeps one's distance and does not rouse the nest. One's manners remain impeccable. One excuses the fool from one's life, and with great decorum and ceremony, shows her out of the house. Isn't this how an experienced bouncer removes a drunk from a club? When we see a bouncer gently, and with great respect, leading a troublemaker from the room, it's as if he's showing the fool to his limousine. His expression remains courteous and detached, and he neither tugs nor pushes. He takes his time and never embarasses his guest. He is the very model of good etiquette. This is what it means to suffer a fool gladly.

Now, this woman I know does not suffer fools, and rarely evicts one with much grace. She likes to give them a kick in the behind as they leave, even. But then again, I rarely evict a fool at all until the damage is done. She is missing the mark, but so am I. Dealing patiently with a fool is not simply a matter of patiently putting up with him as he messes up your program. Rather, it is an elaborately polite ceremony of respectful eviction of the fool from the domains of one's life in which his aggressive promulgation of his own agenda or skill at any cost to you is neither required nor welcomed.


There’s that bird again, the one that always sings at this hour, the one you only ever hear when you’re aware in the early morning hours. It is a cool, smooth, damp, eerily dipping sound, irresistibly tied in your imagination to this hour and this place.



So when the situation starts to unfold rapidly, you also unfold rapidly - no effort required.




Many of us read blogs backwards through time, delving further and further back into the archives. I don't know if this is an unusual practice. Blog reading becomes archaelogical when one reads back from the present to the past. Running themes appear out of the blue. It's disorienting but you get used to it: mysteries appear, and then are resolved, as you read further and further back and get a retrospective handle on the causation. You uncover the conditions of change in the writer's life much as you do in real life: first you see the face of a stranger, then, as you come to know them, you begin to understand why their faces are lined and scarred.





You become a famous psychoanalyst, an explosives expert, or a world authority on the I Ching. You have all this knowledge, and ultimately this is all you learn. Every skill you acquire leads you back to the kernel. This is why, even though neither of us know anything much about botany, or particle physics, or pottery, or cordon bleu cooking, we have enough in common with you to spend a pleasant evening together talking about what matters most. Drifting away from our institutes of learning, we become curious about this: the way that a self-possessed individual finally finds a wellspring of courage and strays from the path.






What’s the difference between an artist and a critic? There are a thousand answers to this question, some with more merit than others. However if we compress out minds into the shape of a professional critic’s mind, several things immediately become apparent on introspection. One, we are in the theoretical domain of a battle of wills. Two, we have strategies at our disposal to defend, attack, advance, retreat, observe and unify. All this is done through thought and linguistic concepts. The critic’s eye is acute and peers through holes in the battlements, or scans from a hill or the sky like a general.

Now, when we relax our mind to think like a true artist (false artists are much more common of course; they are people who profess to be artists but actually the ground troops paid by critics in fame and money to fight their wars), we see lines of battle which may be freely traversed. The critics appear to be at war over scarce resources. There is territory to defend, territory to scorch, territory to overwhelm. True artists feel like scavengers, moving freely where they choose, dodging the draft. Occasionally they may bump into a critic who will wonder what they are doing getting in the way. Happily, no critic fires at a true artist, because, in the game of battlefield strategy, they are neither much of an asset nor much of a liability. Such an artist is little better than a rather irritating presence, like a bird looping across the field of a dramatic struggle for survival played out between lions and hyenas. The true artist is free to go about her business without attracting undue attention; and her business is to roam free, investigating interesting situations.






I think it's necessary, really, for the weirdo to come out of the closet and not be a shrinking violet about his or her strangeness - even if such strangeness is only sporadic rather than chronic. There seems to be no doubt that many people love and treasure harmless but interesting weirdos. I know I certainly do.

Never apologise for being a weirdo. Many of my friends are quite eccentric, and I would be horrified if any one of them became apologetic about their uniqueness. I would rather normal people apologised for not being weird enough.

As for people laying strangeness trips on us for our weird behaviour the question becomes this: how do we protect ouselves from losing confidence in such a situation?

I would like to know your answers to this very important question, as every weirdo could use the tools and techniques to avoid being undermined simply for not following minor social rules. I think the answer has to do with systematically ridding yourself of all forms of self-monitoring. Self monitoring is the process by which one says 'what am I doing?', 'is this appropriate?', 'did I just come over as an idiot?' and so on. That inner voice might be attenuated, or even disappear completely - making one that most envied of souls, the completely unselfconscious weirdo.




It's been said here and there that creativity is aligned with mental illness. The evidence cited is usually correlative, which is to say, there is plenty of evidence that mental illness is more prevalent in the artistic community than in the general community (incidentally, what a Victorian curio is that phrase, ‘mental illness’ – a sickness in the mind).

Correlations... they are the very devil. They invite us to draw causal relations where none have been established. Poverty is higher in the artistic community than the general community too? Are we going to conclude that poverty is congenial to art? Are you an artist? Do you find it really helps not to be able to afford to repair your equipment, buy your paints and canvas, pay the rent? Do you get the album finished more quickly because you break a guitar string and can’t afford to replace it? Because you can’t afford a studio, a rehearsal room, a CD burner to run off demos? Or does it hinder your creativity? It's the latter, isn't it? Poverty and being creative are correlated, they go hand-in-hand, but the former does not cause the latter. Maybe being creative causes poverty though! However, even though this seems more plausible, the correlation itself is no evidence. We can’t conclude anything causal from a correlation.

‘Oh, but poverty makes you resourceful’. No it doesn’t. Being aware of resources make you resourceful. Poverty just limits your resources. A good thing? How is that a good thing? It's an imposition to have limited resources: an imposition which we accept and work around, because we have no choice.

Insanity might be the demon that destroys creativity. It might just be the searing delusion of personal grandeur, resplendant in hallucinatory visions of self-reference and destiny, with all the attendant paranoia, that undoes an artist. Now, that might be worth considering.

Plenty of great art has been made by people who went through periods of mental instability. However, we are not entitled to assume that what we admire in the likes of Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Brian Wilson and others was created from their insanity. It seems more plausible that it was created from their sanity, since their productive years were also their sane years. When they lost their sanity, they were unable to create comprehensible art.

'Oh, but they were really, really inspired on the run-up to the full-blown psychosis'. Isn't that tantamount to saying they were at their most creative when they were sane yet full of energy? Is that conclusion too obvious and commonsensical to be exciting to our romantic sensibilities? Or would we be equally comfortable saying that the acceleration of a car is caused by the crash that results from accelerating too much? The form of the argument which claims that insanity assists with creativity is the same, and equally absurd.

Sanity is definitely underrated, as it does not fit in with our rather romantic artistic schema. However, if an artist can give to his or her audience a dose of genuine sanity, what more is required?





Barrow's paradox holds wherever some piece of advice cannot be given without the giver of the advice contradicting herself. For example, 'human beings should never follow general principles of behaviour' falls prey to Barrow's paradox. Such statements may well be true: however, to make them is always self-contradictory. So, to avoid Barrow's paradox, one should lead by example, rather than by giving advice. And I see I am now falling prey to Barrow's paradox myself.

A special case of Barrow's paradox very relevant to web discussion groups is the principle that some disputes are best resolved by not getting involved - and yet, one cannot point this out to the disputants without getting involved. The canonical example is the response of list members to a troll in the forum. The troller gets various members' backs up; they react by naming the poster as a troll and an attention-seeker; and, before too long, the temperature rises to flaming point, people firing off all kinds of posts which they may later regret. Now, the best way to deal with a troller is to disregard the post. Eventually the trolling will extinguish due to lack of positive reinforcement.

What's reinforcing about becoming notorious, and why does a troller seek negative or hostile attention? Perhaps it's just that having negative attention is more reinforcing than having no attention at all. If this were true, then negative attention, up to a point at least, would be preferable to being shunned by all and sundry. This is the troller's predicament. No-one likes him. Everybody hates him. He has no friends. He has little experience with positive attention and praise. What's a lonely guy to do? Stir up some trouble! Off he goes! In fairness, haven't we all felt the thrill of notoriety from time to time? Isn't it just a little bit of a rush to have complete strangers arguing with each other about you, even if much of it's negative stuff? Does Marilyn Manson get a kick out of being blacklisted by fundamentalist Christian groups? Does he seek to provoke them? Do you cheer him on? We can relate to the troller, I think.

So, when dealing with the persistent troll (who should be distinguished from the penitent troll) it's understood that the way to get rid of a troll is to let his incendiary posts fall by the wayside. However, not everyone on a typical forum understands this principle to the extent of allowing it to guide their behaviour. Those who post to the effect that 'this is a sad person, ignore him' are just feeding the troll! Those who post to the thread saying, 'let's let this thread die' are keeping the thread alive! How to teach someone to allow a disputation to pass unstoked, without contributing to the stoking? There is no way. Those who understand the troll dynamic post nothing, and thereby demonstrate their understanding. Those who try to contribute to an understanding of the troll dynamic by posting advice thereby demonstrate their failure to understand it. I'm not the first person to point this out. But I am the first person to realise that, in so doing, I am falling prey to Barrow's paradox.


There's also the obvious point to be made that the most complex machine in a modern studio is a human brain. However, many electronic artists seem to use their gear as prosthetic devices, or brain-substitutes. It's as if they are afraid of themselves. Or, more accurately perhaps, the intellectual/planning part of their brain is afraid of their deep, instinctual brain. This affliction, too, is not limited to music or to the arts, but is a problem of life. I don't want to know who's using what piece of advanced gear or what new techniques are being developed, whether they're playing this or that piece of gear etc etc. I want to know what kind of person they are.


Almost all Kraftwerk's songs were about some kind of new fangled technological innovation or other. Do people really get very excited about technological innovation per se any more? I wonder if the very idea of Kraftwerk is a thing of the past. In about 500 years, Kraftwerk lyrics will be like Chan poetry, because the innovation factor will have evaporated entirely from everyone's perception of the lyrics. "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" will sound like "I carry water and chop wood". People will go, "wow, they found mystery in their commonplace, rustic daily activities."





Wandering off the beaten track, we are drawn, some of us, to abandoned follies. Abandoned websites by the million, some of them still with active chat lists, which echo occasionally with solitary voices: “Hello? Is anybody there?”

I love to fetch up in areas where a great deal of thought and time has been put into an operation, installation, or structure to no avail. I hesitate to speculate on my motives. What is driving this fascination with architectural failure? Schadenfreude? Identification? Or – and this is the motive I wish you to believe, because I am vain – is it that I recognise the essential beauty of futility, and its concordance with the predicament of the lonely universe? For God is alone, and divides Himself up to maintain the illusion of company. However, He is endlessly drawn back by that frisson of cosmic fear to His true nature: the Only Being, the Lonely Being. The Atheist.

Not just lonely enclosures; but also, lonely little things. A little orchid growing just behind my neighbour's back fence. A tape left in a cupboard from a decade ago which unconsciously records a conversation between several friends at a barbecue – because someone hit record when they should’ve hit play. I want to gather these things, and gather myself, collect my thoughts. It was here, but no-one came.



Bandwagon jumping skills are essential to musical survival, unless you want to play the equally valid but rather less exciting game of keeper of the flame and update records, gather unreleased material, correct other scholars, and generally camp it up as a stroppy but necessary figure in the dusty libraries of musical history.

The bandwagon jumper is a different fish. The adept bandwagon jumper rarely jumps from the ground; rather, she jumps, catlike, from one wagon to another. Some wagons move slowly; some move quickly. The swifter wagons are only jumped by the adept, the gymnastic, the highly courageous. Then, as well, there are many intellectual and planning factors to digest before one dares a jump: there is the speed of one’s own bandwagon; the moods, tempers and attitudes of the bandwagon to which you wish to jump (sometimes the groups is welcoming, sometimes hostile); and so on.

The adept jump on bandwagons that are only about a quarter full of very hard working artists playing the we-are-visionary game. They take over through the magnetic force of their personalities and their business sense.

Never jump on a bandwagon that is already full. There is no room for you unless you jump on top of their heads. They will get annoyed; they will probably kick you off. You may end up under the wheels, or rolled over by the next bandwagon that comes along. Also, a full bandwagon is uncomfortable for everyone aboard. There is so little room that no-one can move or do any work. They travel more slowly as they are heavier, and there is a risk that the wheel axles will break under the combined load. Everyone falls in a heap, and some are squashed. It is, as best, embarassing and undignified; and it is not always easy to catch a fast moving bandwagon from a standing position on the road.

So when is the best time to jump on a bandwagon? If, like us, you are not a charismatic, adept gymnast, but a slow moving, perplexed little tortoise, by far the best time to jump a wagon is when the genre it represents is beginning to smell. It is beginning to be uncool: so uncool that even the uncool people are jumping ship, even though this time last year they were sticky with it like Pooh in a honeypot! See the suckers run and jump!

You don’t need to be travelling at any great speed to jump a bandwagon like this: it’s already coming to a slow halt. Run up alongside it. Ease yourself on. Take a walk around, familiarise yourself. Pick up the bits and pieces people have left behind. Turn them over, examine them in the light. Scrub the decks until they no longer smell of money. Get to know the engine and the steering wheel; the sleeping quarters; the kitchen. It’s yours now. Take your little wagon wherever you like.