Sometimes, my demons tell me, “You’ll never write again. You’ll never paint again. Remember when you wanted to be an actor, you’ll never do THAT again. And forget about learning to dance. Or playing the guitar. Or singing. Or whatever…” They’ll tell me I’m too old, too fat, too weak, too tired, too busy, too poor, too lonely, just plain too much of a loser. It is a big ol’ ugly lie. Of course I can’t do everything. Not even Mozart or Picasso could do everything. They too, ended their work unfinished.

A tried and true technique for dealing with this kind of self doubt is to look back on what has been accomplished. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some hours this week browsing Fields Book Store on Polk. Founded in 1932 by George Fields, a devotee of Gurdjieff, the store for many years now has specialized in the field of metaphysics and the occult. It has one of the widest (and weirdest) collections in this area you will ever find.

I love this stuff. Scientists report that when we think about religious and occult matters, it stimulates certain parts of our brain that can induce mystical experiences, perhaps something like getting high on marijuana. Read the rest of this entry »

(Evan Karp)

I made it to City Arts & Lectures for the first time this past week to see Miranda July in conversation with her longtime friend Julia Bryan-Wilson, and I’d like to share some of the things I heard. For those of you who don’t know (you probably know), Miranda is one of my favorite artists; if you don’t know why you should click here, here, here, here, and it’s not too late to go here.

“Yes, I wanted the solution to my script,” she said, “but also sort of to life in general, and it seemed better to talk with strangers than to just keep spinning in my own head and my sort of fictional world.” Read the rest of this entry »

As The Storming Bohemian I have written a fair amount over the last couple of years about creative consciousness lost and found.

No one gets into The Garden of Making for free. No one is guaranteed safe passage. And often we find ourselves outside the gate. It feels sometimes like the childhood game of chutes and ladders. One misstep and down we slide. Then we have to find another ladder and on we go, up and down through the long afternoon until the final descent into the undiscovered twilight from which no traveler returns alive. Read the rest of this entry »