Inhuman Swill

In his recent New York Times interview, Louis C.K. offers a good reminder of what it takes to build a career, for those who've been toiling away for decades:

NYT: You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

LCK: So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

NYT: At this point you've put in the time.

LCK: There you go. There's no way around that. There's people that say: "It's not fair. You have all that stuff." I wasn't born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you're new at this -- and by "new at it," I mean 15 years in, or even 20 -- you're just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that's in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Read the full interview here: The Joke's on Louis C.K.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

As owners ourselves of a couple of Kevin Swallow, we want to congratulate the owners of this beautiful new painting (which I've had the privilege of seeing up close):



And congratulations to Kevin for completing such an elaborate, detailed, and beautiful commission!


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

Having watched Valkyrie recently, I've been thinking about the intersection of art, commerce and religion. I know, that's probably not the kind of discussion the filmmakers intended to provoke, but here we are. Germany started it.

Every so often a big kerfluffle flares up in the media or the blogosphere about what famous entertainer is or isn't a Scientologist, and why. Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Isaac Hayes, Beck, Chick Corea, Edgar Winter, Chaka Khan, Mark Isham, Greta Van Susteren—we're supposed to avoid giving them money so we don't inadvertently support their reprehensible "church." Leonard Cohen, Paul Haggis, Jerry Seinfeld, Courtney Love, Gloria Gaynor—once were Scientologists, but now they're on the okay list. Neil Gaiman—wait, what's the controversy with him? I'm not supposed to read him because his relatives are Scientologists?

Frankly, keeping score like this is ridiculous.

As much as I dislike Scientology, discriminating against artists because of their private beliefs is a losing game. I hate the fact that there were Crusades, and a Spanish Inquisition, and institutional coverups of child sexual abuse, but that doesn't mean I'm going to deny myself the work of Catholic writers like Graham Greene or Tim Powers, or Catholic filmmakers like Kevin Smith. Will some of the money I pay for their stuff end up in Vatican coffers? Possibly, but I'm not naive enough to think that any of the money I give or receive is pure. We live in a pluralist society. We can't help the fact that our money is going to circulate through parts of the body politic that we don't like. The only judgment we can really make is how we respond to the art, how pure and universal and human it is, how ennobling or demeaning or thrilling or dull, how free from or full of agenda or polemic.

And let's face it, Scientology is no more ridiculous on the face of it than Catholicism or Zoroastrianism or Islam or Greek mythology. The claims of these other religions are just as extraordinary. The only difference is that the origins of the rest are shrouded in antiquity—as if mere age confers some kind of stature or holiness or untouchability. In historical terms, Mormonism is nearly as recent as Scientology, and in cosmological terms makes claims every bit as grand and silly, but how many of you Wheel of Time readers are going to boycott the new volume just because Brandon Sanderson wrote it?

The value of the work is in the work itself. If the work makes your life better or more pleasant, support it. Pay for it. It's that simple. Clint Eastwood's a libertarian who supported McCain? So what. I love his movies. Beck and Chick Corea give money to L. Ron Hubbard's successors? Big deal. I get a lot more pleasure from their records than from most Cruise or Travolta movies—hell, than from most Mel Gibson movies or Orson Scott Card novels these days—so I'm happy to give them my money. I, an atheist, have given money to causes devoted to overturning the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States, but that mere fact hardly makes my fiction superior to or more worthy of support than a Catholic like Gene Wolfe's.

As for Neil Gaiman, I'd be an awful hypocrite to avoid his books just because his father was a big muckity-muck in the Church of Scientology. I myself am a direct descendant of Edward Partridge, the first Mormon bishop. No, I avoid Gaiman's books because I simply don't care for them.

Artists, like most people, are more than just the religions they profess. So get down off your high horse and give the poor Scientologists a chance. The rich ones, too, if they're your thing.

Laura and I are notorious—well, at least at our house, where everything we do is notorious—for procrastinating when there are things we need to have framed. That's why it's a miracle that, a mere month after their purchase, we've taken the prints of our photographs from Bill Wadman's 365 Portraits project [Laura] [Bill] to the framing shop. [Hi, Ken!] [Hi, Derryl!]

Wednesday evening I picked Laura up from work IN OUR NEW USED CAR and we headed north to visit the big famous framing guys. Turns out their master framer is such a master that he only works from about 10:00 to 4:30, which meant we were never going to get there when Laura could come along. So from the recesses of her brain, Laura dredged up a memory of a little art gallery/framing shop near the parking lot where we used to pick up our Zipcar. It was closing in on 8:00 pm by the time we pulled up, and though it was well past the posted hours the front door was open and the proprietor was inside painting. She welcomed us, presented us with some very interesting and attractive options for frames and mattes, and presented us with a total that was less than we'd expected. Altogether a delightful experience.

So then I whipped out the other item of mine that needed framing: a limited edition lithograph (number 1 of 50, in fact!) of a Kenn Brown work that was an incredibly generous gift from the artist himself. (The website for Mondolithic Studios, Kenn's venture with partner Chris Wren, is under construction just now, but you've definitely seen their work.) I'm embarrassed to say that it had taken me nearly four years to get the thing framed, but it's going to look unbelievably cool, and I couldn't be happier.

Actually, when one works, one comes to a solution much more quickly than when one sits and thinks.

I just turned on the TV to discover a documentary on Frank Frazetta on IFC. It's called Frazetta: Painting with Fire, and it will be on again at 6:00 am tomorrow, not to mention several other times this month.