10 points from Agnes Martin that art critic Jerry Saltz posted yesterday on his Facebook page.

1. Don’t be so hard on yourself and be ruthless too.
2. Don’t make excuses.
3. Don’t explain.
4. Don’t justify.
5.Do what you need to do.
6.Ordinary Happiness is the kind of happiness I’m talking to you about. The wild kind of happiness comes and goes. It rolls in and out like a storm. Ordinary Happiness has staying power.
7.What matters is that you write. What matters is that you show up and wait to see what shows up to meet you.
8.I once sat still every day for three months waiting for an inspiration to arrive. Three months. Every day I waited. Still. Silent. I didn’t know if it would come or not. I didn’t have faith that it would come or not. It was my job to sit and wait. It came and I painted again. But I might not have. And that’s not the point – whether I ended up painting again or not – the point is that I knew what my job was. So: I did it.
9.Spend more time in silence.
10.Walk more. While you can.

I like the picture that I copied from the Alice Neel catalogue with her and Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlavsky. I contrast that with the headline that I read today of protesters angry about that Swedish cartoonists depiction of Muhammad as a dog. He got head butted in the face at a lecture he was giving. I imagine crowds of inflamed gnashing burning bored souls funneling their own deep fear and disappointments about life at this man. This man made an image that could make palpable, and recognizable, a reason to be angry. “My God” they would be screaming, “how dare you insult my God. Burn in hell you savage” as they rip and tear at other human beings to get a chance to rip and tear at this man, until one gets through and gets the chance to damage him.

The Neel and Ginsberg image, to me, is of a certain kind of innocence that comes of those seeking purity, beauty, humanity, and insight into our existence (even if it’s mixed with some good ol’ fashioned ego).

I guess I draw no conclusion except that I know God does not want us fierce and damaging and so set in our ways that at any cost we ravage in his name. Those question marks are what brings us beyond ourselves and if we have our eyes looking towards what is good, what is good will draw us nearer. Well, okay, there's one more conclusion, we humans can all be really disappointing at times.

So to summarize:

Making fun of who people think God is via cartoons=disrespectful and not loving

Head butting someone=downright wrong

Making good poems and fantastic portraits=good for the world

Hello blog...

It has been a while since I have blogosphered.  So I am reading Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrell today which is a collection of short stories published in the early '50's.  I found the book at Acres of Books last year and bought it based on the cover but after hearing "A Summer's Reading" which is one of the included stories, read on the New Yorker fiction podcast, I was all "word, I gotta read this".  So today, as I sit bored at work, I have read it and I have been enchanted, laughed out loud, and had magical, visual head play as Malamud describes mid century New Yorkers, mostly Jewish refugees, and fully human characters, live out simple, sometime agonizing, lives.  Really amazing and powerful.  Word, you gotta read this.