The Queen Mother and Her Silly Puppies

I wonder if being in the royal family isn’t a prison sentence. Prince Charles spent some time in Canada and there were rumours that he had fallen in love with a Canadian lass. If that is true then he really messed up. Life is too short to become an actor in the charade of pageantry.

The Kid

The Kid is an iconic figure in American culture. I don’t know if there is a paralled in Europe. I think that Charlie Chaplin might have introduced him into our psyches in The Kid. The kid is a mixture of childhood innocence and adolescent moxy. In a way Chaplin has introduced the ‘teenager’ to the 20th century. After that there are the whole Andy Hardy series, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden, or Brando in The Wild One and then from the 50s on we have all the rock’n’roll heroes from Presley to Springsteen.

At Home

Sometimes I think we create art, noise, music, garbage, horror, nightmares and fantasies to dullen the monotany of being alone in the universe.

Jack Mows His Ancestors

Maybe I’m wrong. Everytime someone tries to put the definition of art in a box, it seeps out. Art sometimes does comfort people. What bothers me is that many artists produce work that is easy. Easy to create. Easy to understand. Filled with cliches. In short – boring. Not to say that there isn’t a lot of garbage that is offered as art under the umbrella of challenging us. But all of us can tell when something is special. It excites  us. Morley Callaghan was teaching a creative fiction course at the university of Windsor. (Mr. Callaghan is a well known Canadian author who wrote about the same time in Paris as Hemingway. The two were friends.) He asked his students how many of them wanted to be writers. All of them put up their hands. Then he said, with a kind of cheeky smile, “well get out of this class and start writing.”