Diary Of An Artist In A New World

Computer Purgatory

Finally I can make posts on the Internet. It has been 2 days without a functional computer. It feels like I have been through the valley of death and while I am not entirely free of troubles yet, at least I can see the sun again finally.

I have a new computer. It is beautiful to use, but for a month it has been like setting up home in a new house. After what seemed like forever I was getting back to real work again making some pages for the web about my Sketch Club when disaster struck.

Suddenly I could no longer open Mail because I couldn't enter a password. Working out what was going on I soon discovered it was much worse than that. I had lost the use of my keyboard in my administrator account. It wasn't a hardware issue as I could log out and the keyboard worked fine in other accounts and I could log in by entering my password. Without the ability to enter a password one is cut off from life and work. It is a terrible feeling. I couldn't sleep through it all until I could see the solution in sight.

My Boys And Mothers Day

Saturday night I have my 5 boys in the studio for dinner. That is often hamburgers. Last Saturday I made spaghetti, Sicilian style, with mushrooms. Gian wasn't there for the food, he was working at MacDonalds but arrived after work to participate in the project for the night, which was a large Mothers Day Card.

Root Canal Therapy

Toothache

To have it out or not? that is the question --
Whether 'tis better for the jaws to suffer
The pangs and torments of an aching tooth,
Or to take steel against a host of troubles,
And, by extracting, end them? To pull, to tug!
No more: and by a tug to say we end
The tooth-ache, and a thousand natural ills
The jaw is heir to.

- W.

For me it was not to have it out but to save the tooth with root canal therapy and braving the anxious spasms of fear and surprise as this or that makes a noise. In the dentists surgery even the smallest noise becomes the snap of the twig that the soldier, all alone in the woods, hears magnified, and fears more than anything.

Ralph Dayman is a superb dentist with an unusual ability to instill calm in the over imaginative artist. It is a pleasure in some perverse way to, at such a vulnerable moment, be in the hands of a patron of the arts. In that spirit here are a few poems about dentists and teeth.

What I Am Reading At This Time

When asked "What are you reading now" people seem to get disappointed by "The news" as an answer, yet the unexciting truth is that the majority of my reading is the news. I always start with Google News, although I have to admit to configuring it so that science and tech news is the main part of it, then there is arts news, world news, and after that I have had enough.

I also find myself in encyclopedias and dictionaries every day, far more than I am reading books, I like to "look things up". I put it down to rampant curiosity. Other people, being polite say "inquisitive" when they and I both know they mean "a bit mad". It is okay, artists carry the cloak of madness with honor. Where the hint of insanity is problematic for most other professions, artists enjoy the notoriety.

Next come podcasts. Podcasts are my magazines, how I get the light forms of reading that are more about pleasure than anything else. My favorites are the scientific American podcast and This Week In Tech, usually called TWIT.

Last comes books, although I use the term loosely as all my "reading these days is done either in my computer, or in audible form on my iPod. My current book is on the iPod, it is called Cultural Amnesia by Clive James.