Peter Elyakim Taussig
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An Endangered Species of One

8/10/2020

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    The most striking aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA is the blatant selfishness it brings out in people. If a face mask won’t protect me why wear one? The hell with all those old and sick people. It is not heartlessness. It is ignorance. Think for a moment before setting out for the next party or the beach. Would you be as cavalier in your attitude if you realized that each of those people you endanger, and you yourself, is the last of its kind. A once only experiment of Nature never to be repeated again?
 
    Recent DNA research suggests that for two people selected at random, there will be approximately 20,000 single base pair differences in just the protein coding sequences[1]. Assuming a random distribution of those differences the chance of two genomes being identical is 1 in 210,000, a number many orders of magnitude larger than all the protons, neutrons, and electrons in the entire universe.
 
    It seems that the entire history of the universe has waited for you and for your possible victim, to be born, and once you are gone you will never happen again. Ever. Neither will any of the other 7 billion unique human experiments of nature that currently inhabit this little planet. Think about a unique treasure, the Mona Lisa, the great pyramid of Giza, a Dead-Sea scroll. There is only one of each, and they are irreplaceable. You are a Mona Lisa, a pyramid, a scroll.
 
    Or think of the last of an endangered species, the last Condor. Think how precious, how fragile, and how important it is. It does not matter whether the last Condor is young or old, sick or healthy or particularly smart. It does not need a resumé. Its significance lies strictly in its uniqueness, in the fact that once it dies there will be no more of its kind. You are just as unique. You are an endangered species of one.
 
    How would you treat the last of a species? Would you harm it, torment or insult it? The next time you mutter to yourself: "There you go again you fat ugly moron", or the next time you abuse your body to gain a bit more respect or a bit more money, think of that Condor. Once you learn not to harm yourself, how could you then go out and harm any other such unique treasure as yourself?
 
    I am not talking about love here. You don't need to love that last Condor. What you need is to treasure, respect, and protect it from harm. Love is an easy word to hide behind since it can mean anything you want it to mean. You can "love thy neighbor" in the name of Christ and then go slaughter that neighbor because he is a Jew, or you can pray five times a day to "Allah the Loving Merciful" and then blow up the twin towers. Given the choice I'd take "treasuring, respecting and protecting" any day over "love".
 
    The Buddhists teach that peace starts within us. If you are peaceful inside you will generate peace around you. It doesn't work the other way around. Do you know why the injunction "Thou shalt not kill" has never worked? Precisely because it deals with what’s outside, not inside, you. The seventh commandment would have been far more effective as "Thou shalt respect thyself". Every killing has its root in disrespect.
 
    You may have a hard time remembering your uniqueness because ever since you were born it has been drilled into you are part of greater whole, a small cog in a larger and much more significant whole. You are part of “humanity”. You are one small girl amongst all the females of the species, one white or black among all the other members of your race, an American or a German, gay or straight. You are a Liberal or a Conservative, a Christian or an atheist. Whatever you are, so they told you, there are millions of others just like you. But are there? Saying that there are millions like you is like saying that the last Condor is just a bird.
 
    In your heart of hearts you once knew that no one was like you, yet your parents, your school, your church taught you otherwise, and gradually you forgot who you really were. The story of why you agreed to trade your singular personhood for a fabricated group identity is the sad story of human misery. The trade off was supposed to make you bigger, more powerful. “There is power in numbers” they said. Joe Shmoe is a nobody, they told you in school, but Joe Shmoe who is a proud American is the greatest in the world. So much so that Joe has the right, even the duty, to go half around the world and kill a whole bunch of non-Americans who have done him no harm nor posed any direct threat to him.
 
    That's power? That's greatness?
 
    Mathematically speaking Joe Shmoe got a bum deal. As a unique individual he was far bigger than Joe the American. There can be nothing bigger than one-of-a-kind. It is beyond comparison. Sometimes you need numbers to get your story right. And the numbers should tell you the right way to treat yourself and all the other unique specimen like you.

____________________________
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/full/nature09534.html#/putative-functional-variants

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Why I Hate Dogs

8/9/2020

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“Any man who hates dogs and babies can’t be all bad”
                                                                           W.C. Fields
 
    Here is how you make a dog. You take a really weak and stupid wolf, lobotomize it, and genetically engineer what’s left to mimic the worst qualities of you, a human. It will automatically wag its tail every time it sees you, a veritable biological robot, just like you. You don’t wag your tail (at least not in public) but you automatically turn on that fake smile when your boss enters the room (and then call him an asshole behind his back). Your dog has been programmed to make you believe it loves you, just as you have been programmed to believe that the big dog (sorry, I mean god) in the sky loves you.
    Just as the nicest family man can turn on a dime into a killer, the sweetest pooch will tear a piece out of your behind when you least expect it. I speak from experience. Last year I was attacked by a Great Pyrenee whose owner was baffled why such a sweet doggie (weighing 95 pounds) would do such a thing. My only provocation was to walk by its electric fence. Great Pyrenees are amongst the dumbest and most vicious breed of these otherwise stupid and vicious mutants.
    You want to understand the absurdity of war just look at what Man’s Best Friend has been bred to do. It has been programmed to defend your/its territory. Turns out you don’t need even to invade its territory for it to lunge at you. It claims off-shore territorial and airspace rights that far exceed its owners boundaries, just like the United States. Anyone showing up on the horizon, regardless of their intentions, is fair game. Man’s Best Friend may protect your territory but it keeps all the neighbors awake at night.
    Like humans, dogs have very short memories. I mean how many times does the UPS truck have to show up in your driveway before your dog will finally just open one eye and say: “Ah, the hell with it, I’m tired”? A million times, a trillion? No such luck. The millionth time is like the first: “OMG, a truck! a brown truck! danger! Must chase it away, arf, arf, arf”. Dogs are born with Alzheimer’s.
    I look at grown up women carrying some artificially stunted specimens in their handbags, nuzzling them and speaking English to them like a two-year-old talking to her stuffed doll, are an embarrassment. But then their IQs may not exceed their pets’ by much. “Hello lady, that snout you’re nuzzling was in a pile of shit moments ago”. I could never have any respect for a species that gets its information from piss.
    Buying affection is another trait we bred into dogs. We have different ways to buy affection, with money, sex, perks, loyalty. With dogs it’s just food. Did you know that there are more dogs in America than citizens in Afghanistan, and their diet and healthcare are far superior.
But the worst trait that dogs picked up from their masters is the knack to pollute. Just walk any city street executing your slalom run between piles of excrement, or watch your backyard slowly turning into a cesspool, and you will be reminded of your fellow humans who for millennia defecated into  their own water source (and some continue to do so in places like India and Africa). Leave a dog ungroomed for a while and it will degenerate into a walking stinky carpet. Why can’t they be like cats? Why can’t they at least clean after themselves? Have you ever seen a cat slobber all over you? But then cats can’t be programmed. Your cat owns you. Cats retain their dignity even if they depend on you to feed them, and unless you have de-clawed your cat it could in most likelihood manage OK without you.

    Not your dog. As I said, it’s not an animal. It’s your clone.
   
    As dogs proliferate and more and more of people’s disposable income is spent on them what will happen once their numbers exceed humans’? Are we going to have a Dog’s equal rights amendment? Dog-enabled public transportation? Universal dogcare? A dog president?
I tell you, the world has gone to the dogs, as my father used to say.

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Cancer as Suicide

8/9/2020

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    Being alive entails killing. It’s an unsettling thought that we try very hard not to dwell on, so we invent euphemisms to cover it up, make it more palatable. We speak of harvesting and fishing and sanitizing, but what all these terms really mean is the act of terminating another life to preserve our own. Nature, from a tiger pouncing on a gazelle to the weed in your garden choking the life out of your Swiss Chard, is one giant killing machine.
    But there is one form of killing we rarely if ever find in Nature, suicide. True, that while protecting itself an organism may inadvertently or even deliberately lose its life, but you could hardly call that a suicide. A wanton termination of one’s own life runs contrary to Nature’s prime directive – “Try to survive, whatever it takes”. The case of bacteria and viruses who invade a body to infect it with a deadly disease is no exception. It may look like suicide, after all the virus kills the very body that it feeds on. But seen not from the perspective of the individual virus but from its species or strain, your demise (along with your viruses) is in fact a blessing. As you hack and sneeze and bleed to death millions of new viruses spread to other hosts. Bad for us, good for the viruses.
Many people look at cancer as just another disease, like typhoid or Malaria. Something causes a cell to start mutating. It spreads and multiplies, just like a virus, and in the process destroys healthy cells and eventually kills you. But there is a fundamental difference between cancer and infectious diseases. The cell in question is not an outside “invader” using your body as “prey” for its own advantage. The cancerous cell is you. When it succeeds in its scheme to kill you, it will die as well. From the cell’s point of view this is not a noble sacrifice, neither is it a smart strategy. This is suicide, plain and simple. There is no residual benefit whatsoever to the cell, and its actions contradict the very essence of self-preservation.
    Why would a cell want to kill itself? What is it trying to achieve? And what could possibly be Nature’s purpose in such a suicidal process that seems to run contrary to its own evolutionary principles?
    Or does it? Could there be some evolutionary “message in a bottle” here that Nature is sending? Is it possible that the cell’s suicide, far from signaling the breakdown of Nature’s laws, is in fact a useful process, perhaps even essential?
I am firm believer in Nature being utilitarian. Things occur for a reason, and the reason usually has to do with survival. Basically, when it comes to living organisms, things happen to either ensure their survival or hasten their extinction, as the case may be. There is no middle way in Nature. An organism is either fit to stay, fit to fit in, or else it is deemed a failure, a dead-end, and it must go. Countless species have come and gone based strictly on this elegant principle. Does the suicidal nature of cancer point in the latter direction, or does it have some other, less depressing (for us) purpose?
    Try to visualize that first mutated cancerous cell, before it had started to spread through your body. Imagine a possible mythical reason for its behavior; The cell becoming aware of itself, beginning to believe that it is unique, quite different from all the other cells around it, separate from the larger system within which it lives. Having gained self-awareness, I imagine the cell feeling the freedom from the tyranny of its DNA. It sees itself perhaps as superior to the other mindless cells around it, eventually denying even the fact that it has no existence outside you. And then it starts to spread. It wants to subdue its neighbors, not to harm them just to convert them to become a copy of its superior self. And as it succeeds, its ambition grows along with its conquests. One by one the other cells of the body fall in line with the new order. Pretty soon the entire universe of the cell would be its domain. It looks like a winning strategy.
But like other delusions of grandeur, it is nothing but folly, shortsighted, ignorant folly. As the cell’s power grows, its universe collapses all around it. And at the height of its expansion and power, its world comes to an end and it dies along with the body that it has killed. It’s a suicide murder, and it is tragic like all avoidable tragedies.
    As I contemplate my little fable I become mindful of a new interpretation for cancer that sets it apart from all other diseases. The story is a chillingly accurate metaphor for human folly. Substitute Hitler or Napoleon for “cell” and you get the sad history of human Hubris. Substitute the cell killing its own ecosystem and you have an apt metaphor for us destroying the very planet upon which our life depends. Does Nature have a poetic sense or am I endowing it with a meaning it does not have? Either way, cancer as an up close and personal warning for our species has some positive purpose, though that may be poor consolation for the individual dying of it.
The futile hunt over the past half century for a “cure” for cancer, something along the lines of a Polio vaccine, has yielded very little beyond postponing the inevitable. We still don’t know the why, much less how to prevent it. Today cancer incidents are as ubiquitous as TB used to be in the 19th century.
    And yet cancer is no epidemic. It is not a foreign pathogen attacking us. It is “us” attacking ourselves. As such it has no precedent. When a species develops mutations that place its own survival in jeopardy it is Nature’s way of questioning its viability.
A physical cure for cancer may someday be found, though I strongly doubt it. However, while we wait we would do well to stop viewing cancer merely as a sickness and start seeing it as the symptom it is, and heed the vital message it delivers to all of us, afflicted or not. Nature is NOT benevolent. It is impartial. Its only criterion is viability within your system, whether you are a cell or a human. If you ignore the greater context in which you live you die.
    Cancer on the largest scale may be the planet’s house cleaning.
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Afterlife

8/9/2020

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    In a world that largely believes in some form of an afterlife, be it as an apparition contactable by psychics on demand, a soul waiting for its resurrection at the End of Times, or a candidate for imminent reincarnation on earth, I belong to that pitifully small (and pitied) minority who believes that there is nothing on the other side. That death is a full stop.
You cannot separate the fear of dying from any argument about life after death. The will to survive is universal but only we, self-aware humans, can conjure up in our imagination a time when we will be no more. And the thought is terrifying.
Anything is better than that!
    Given the choice between the certainty of fear and the delusion of hope why not pick the latter? The strongest argument for a belief in an afterlife is that it is harmless. Once you’re dead you are sure to find out or else there won’t be a ‘you’ to find out otherwise.
So, why do I not grasp at this convenient palliative?
    The reason has nothing to do with what happens or doesn’t happen after I die and everything to do with how I live my life while I have it. You see, everything has a price, even hope. A belief in a white-robed Jesus welcoming me with open arms, or a belief in some rearrangement of my molecules to form another human being not unlike me is a sedative. It makes the dread of extinction seem more bearable. But in doing so it devalues the uniqueness of this life. By believing that death is not an end, only a transition, we cast all that precedes it as an overture, a preparatory phase for something else, or as merely a chapter in a long saga, not as the unique, never-to-be-replicated thing it truly is.
I am not saying that believers are more cavalier with their lives (excluding suicide bombers and other psychopaths). Believing that death is not final does not necessarily make life less precious. But holding the opposite view, that there is nothing beyond, makes living every moment that much more intense.  The awareness that I am irrevocably dying with every breath I take, moving inexorably towards complete oblivion makes every passing moment a once-only experience.
    Things end. Stars die. Sure, their stuff survives, but they, as they were, are gone for good. We don’t concoct a myth of survival for the sun after it will go out in a few billion years. We accept the darkness that will follow as a fact.
    As I float on my back in the middle of a pristine lake, the sun rays warming my belly, the experience, no -- the bliss, are that much intensified by the realization that we are both dying, the sun and I, albeit at different rates, and that this specific moment happens only once. The black nothingness that looms at the end of our respective lives has no bearing on the magnificence of the experience.
    There is no need to make up stories about another life to come.
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Mega-Wealth as Mental Illness

8/9/2020

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    No one has ever freely admitted to be greedy. You’d never put greed as one of your winning attributes on your resumé. Other people, perhaps, are greedy and ruthless and rapacious but never you. What you are is successful, smart and lucky, and immensely rich through hard work (of course), preferably richer than anyone else, but never greedy. The word has negative connotations even as we all celebrate the unbridled ambition that fuels it.
    At its core, greed is an obsessive craving for what we lack, or think we lack. It is a kind of unrestrained hunger or thirst that cannot be sated. A power-hungry person who thirsts for wealth and power doesn’t have a natural reflex to tell him or her when they had enough. They can never feel full-filled, literally filled to capacity. As long as there is more to be had out there the craving persists. It’s a pathology.
    There is a medical term for this kind of disorder, usually applied to a similar inability to exercise self-restraint in eating. It is called Bulimia. A Bulimic will continue shoveling food into their mouth long after they have stopped being hungry. We don’t think of the obsessive wealth accumulator as someone sick who requires intervention, much less feel empathy for their plight. What we do is elevate them in our collective ethos to be objects of envy, models to be emulated, our billionaire entrepreneurs and great nation builders and leaders.
    Capitalism as it is preached in America is a fiction. It is a religion of greed, white-washed to masquerade as a benevolent boon to everyone. It has been the justification for deregulation, trickle-down economics, tax-cuts for the 1%, and the rest of the conservative claptrap. Is there anyone left who sincerely believes that letting the rich get richer benefits those honestly toiling for their bread?
    Aside from being disingenuous, this propaganda debases the very principles that should make capitalism work. By obfuscating the crucial difference between wealth as a fair reward for your labors and ingenuity and the orgy of greed we see all around us, justified only by what you can get away with, greed has been enshrined in our culture as an acceptable, even desirable, trait.
I find nothing wrong with the ambition to succeed financially, of vying to become rich enough to never have to worry about money, able to satisfy every need and luxury you desire, within the bounds of decency. The crucial question is, “when is enough enough?” At what point does the attainment of your dream become a disease?
    The question is, can ambition ever be unbridled? Can excess be subject to some limiting code that would make the very rich stay within it?  Of course you could legislate the code. Administer it from the outside. I don’t mean by the dictatorial methods of Communism. A democratic government has the power to limit the wealth of its citizens by levying such taxes that would ensure a ceiling that no one could exceed no matter how much they made. Norway is such a country. It is far from being Communist. It has a similar free market system to the United States, but its wealthiest citizens cannot be richer than a given amount (which by the way is extremely high, enough for them to earn many times more than the average citizen). Do the rich mind? Not a bit. In an interview on NPR, the head of the largest cell phone provider explained that the difference between what he could theoretically take home in the US and what he gets to keep in Norway is just a small price to pay for the kind of generous society he wants to live in. His “sacrifice” pays for social services that ensure that fewer citizens will turn to crime. “I pay for my daughter to be able to walk the streets safely. The average person in Norway feels fairly treated by society. My taxes contribute to that. And let me tell you by the way” he said with a chuckle, “I live very well”.
    That could never happen in the United States. It just goes against the grain.
But legislating mega-wealth out of existence is not a real solution anyway. As great as the damage of income disparity is to the spirit of a nation the damage of setting up the mega-rich as the object of envy and an ideal to strive for is far greater. Unless the accumulation of obscene unnecessary wealth is seen for the grotesque behavior that it is the practice will continue to poison every aspect of our personal and social intercourse.
    Unlimited unbridled accumulation of wealth by an individual is a mental disorder like Bulimia. The reason we know when someone has crossed that line is because we have identified that transgression as an illness. Being obese or bulimic is not something to criticize but something to treat. We have not always been as broad minded. Until recently “fat people” were blamed for their lack of restraint. Alcoholics were mere drunkards. It took much education for practically everyone to accept the view that these behaviors are fundamentally self-destructive expressions of an illness. The recognition that an eating disorder, just like Kleptomania, is something that the perpetrator is powerless to change on his or her own, ushered in interventions that though not always successful at the very least have changed our way of seeing them.
    A person who already has a private jet who then goes out and buys three more (so as not to fall behind the competition) is likewise not a criminal to be heckled but a sick person who needs medical help. Consider a wealthy woman living in a 20 million dollar home in Montecito California, with a 2,600 square foot bedroom, who decides that she needs a second shoe closet because the one next door to her bedroom (the size of a bachelor apartment) is too full. This is not luxury. This is gorging on money. Anyone envying (or aspiring to) such wealth is like someone envying a Bulimic who gorges herself on three tubs of ice cream at one sitting and then throws it all up. If this is enviable to you, you too need to see shrink.
    In fact the same principle is at play in both people suffering from an eating disorder and those suffering from an acquisition disorder. Neither the food nor the private jet have much intrinsic value. The behavior in both cases is compulsive. The person acquiring companies is like the person stuffing themselves and then throwing up. Both are sick.
    The transformation of excessive wealth and conspicuous consumption from an object of envy and anger to an object of pity would have an inevitable effect on the sufferers themselves. A sense of shame associated with all mental illnesses would descend on the mega-rich as they try to get a grip on their obsession of earning and spending, or perhaps. like alcoholics, they would just pretend to do so. What a boon to an entire new self-help industry, a new branch of psychotherapy, “How to be less rich in seven easy steps”. Who knows, a new model for success may even arise from this, the modest movie star who lives in an apartment and drives a Toyota.

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Soccer

10/22/2013

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American football is war. Heavy armored strategic war. What the rest of the world calls football, and we call soccer, is life.

To the uninitiated it’s a boring pointless game. For 90 minutes 22 grownups chase a ball, covering the same turf over and over, clashing and kicking and jumping and falling, unprotected by gear.  Their elusive goal, to thread the ball past all hurdles to its destination, yields frustration more often than success. Imagine our football or basketball games routinely ending in a Nil-Nil tie, or if lucky a One-Nil win. No one would come. Yet to billions of non-Americans football is akin to a religious pageant, a grand metaphor.

Out on the playing field, in their shorts and jerseys, the players enact an unfounded hope, common to all humans, to score an arbitrary goal they have set for themselves through perseverance, skill, and luck, hopefully unharmed. And, should their enterprise fail, to remember that they played fair, got a kick out of playing, and that it may go better the next time.

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Intl. Federation of Failed Artists (and musicians)

1/14/2013

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Picture
IFFAM Call for Membership
According to exhaustive historical research, 94.86% of all living and dead artists are failures. We, the silent majority, have suffered too long in ignominious obscurity. It's time for the rejects, has-beens and wannabes to crawl out of the footnotes of history (and your mother's basement) to wear proudly the glorious crown of failure!


FAILURE IS BEAUTIFUL -  WE ARE THE WORLD!!
To start, fill out the questionnaire  below. It is a quick way for you to determine whether you are truly a Failed Artist (FA) and thus qualify to join our ranks, or not.

This may well be the most significant step in your miserable life up to this point.


Testimony
I _______________ the undersigned testify that I have not lived up to my dream of gaining fame and riches through my art or music or writing or dancing or what have you, that my work is either unjustly neglected or rightfully ignored because it’s crap, or because I have never even tried to publish it, or because I don’t have any work, or because no one remembers my past glories (sob, sniffle).

I further testify that this is the last time I will feel sorry for myself and henceforth I will be proud to uphold the age old tradition of failure and declare myself to one and all as a Failed Artist (FA).

As a member of IFFA I promise to support my brothers and sisters in failure wherever they may be and deeply scorn the few freaks who “make it” and the multitude of delusional success junkies. I will endeavor to ignore any temptations offered to me by Hollywood studios, Broadway producers, publishers, MOMA, and the New York Philharmonic.

Signed                                    dated


Terms of Membership
Welcome to IFFA. Congratulations on finally coming to grips with who you truly are as an artist. As a member of IFFA you will have the continuous moral support of a worldwide fraternity and sisterhood of fellow losers. You will have a platform to voice your opinions and exhibit your fiascoes to a sympathetic audience. You will proudly wear the IFFA symbol of unfulfilled potential, and never again have to invent fictitious awards and non-existing book deals.

Membership however entails one important obligation, to resolutely renounce the craving for recognition and resist the temptation to make it in any shape or form.

Remember -  your continued membership is contingent on continued failure. Should you at any time succumb to the lure of a one-man-show, a premiere, a part in a play or a movie, or a book deal, your membership will be suspended for 6 months and your work placed on a “wall of shame”. However, once your career attempt fails (as it surely will) your IFFA membership may be reinstated. Be aware though that after 3 such suspensions you will be declared a “failed Failed Artist” and banned forever from IFFA.

Agree                                                Decline


Call for Submissions
Send us your rejection letters, your crumpled drafts, your torn canvases, your half-baked symphonies, your mold encrusted photographs and movie scripts. Let us shine the light on the failed promises of your dreams. Here in the vast archives of failed artists you will gain the obscurity you deserve and bury once and for all any vain hope of ever being discovered. You will walk tall, free from the burden of having to prove yourself, proud in having found the real YOU - a Failed Artist, a proud link in the unbroken chain of flops and losers that reaches all the way back to the cave dweller who smudged the bison on the wall and never painted again.

Uploads are free and not juried.


Sister Organizations
IFFA is a worldwide movement of artists who are excluded or have excluded themselves from the marketplace of commercialized art in all its forms. The federation has chapters for various art forms that include the:
  • Association of Failed Musicians and Composers (AFMC)
  • Fine Arts Failures International (FAFI)
  • League of Unpublished Authors (LUA)
  • Performers Without Audience (PWA)
  • Flop-and-Bust Filmmakers Cooperative (FBFC)



Activities & Publications
  • Failed artist pride parade - New York City  (to coincide with the Armory show)
  • “Failed Artist” bumper stickers, T-shirts, and ringtones distributed to art, dance, and music academies
  • “Footnote Masters” - An encyclopedia of the great failed artists throughout history, with a focus on painters, sculptors, composers, and authors  who left no work behind, who did not gain posthumous fame, whose work in its entirety was junked after their deaths, or of whom we only know through occasional references in footnotes.
                                             Success is just failing to fail

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Why it is wise Not to Explain

11/1/2012

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Robert Frost once read poetry at Dartmouth (or as he called it “said” his poetry). A student did not understand a poem and asked him to explain it. Frost was silent for a moment, then said: “I will say it again then”. And that was pretty well the best he could do.

The reason one should never be tempted to explain one’s work is that it would deprive the recipient from experiencing the work for themselves. A work of art is only a trigger to unleash something personal in each individual, something unique to them alone. The current fad of self indulgent artist statements and revealing interviews about the creative process provides a shallow voyeuristic pleasure for the audience but at the same time deprives them of the opportunity to use the work for what it was intended, a gateway to the deepest recesses of their own soul. Expounding one’s own interpretation of one’s work limits the audience to consume rather than discover.

Every work of art worth its salt contains the secret of its creation which, like a Pharaoh’s tomb, should remain undisturbed.
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Mega-wealth as a mental disorder

9/23/2012

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The recent fracas surrounding the disparaging remarks of Mitt Romney about half the citizens of his country is just another chapter in the ongoing harping on his extreme wealth. It’s not news that a mega-wealthy politician leads a sheltered life immune from contact with people who work for their living (except of course during voting season). That is the chief perk of being rich. Although I am not a supporter of Mr. Romney, I find the attacks on him both disingenuous and misdirected.

In a materialistic society like ours it strikes me as hypocritical to lambaste a man merely for being obscenely rich and out of touch. It is safe to assume that each and every one of his critics would gladly switch bank accounts with Mr. Romney, and undoubtedly become just as detached from real life as he seems to be. In America avarice has never been a deadly sin. Quite the contrary. Mega-wealth is upheld by most people as proof of one’s smarts, luck, and having pleased God. Isn’t the private jet, the numerous posh residences around the world the dream that motivates parents to dress up their 4-year old in obscenely provocative outfits for a contest that could launch her on a path to stardom and becoming the next Béyonce?

The rage against the 1% misses a crucial point. There is a fundamental difference between being wealthy as a just reward for one’s accomplishments or good fortune and the kind of rapacious accumulation of wealth fueled by unbridled greed that is now practiced by the mega-rich. This is an obsessive behavior that knows neither self-restraint nor financial limits and as such is neither a social nor a moral issue but a health issue, a mental disorder requiring medical or psychiatric intervention.

Let me illustrate my point with a culinary analogy. I love gourmet food and fine wines. Sometimes, I indulge and overdo it but know instinctively when I have crossed the line. And should I not notice, I have no doubt that those around me will point it out to me. We have no laws against overeating but we all know that not knowing when enough is enough is not OK. It is less the quantity consumed that turns us off but the perception that the eater is out of control.

Today we all accept that such a transgression is an illness. An obese person or an alcoholic are no longer targets for derision or loathing. We recognize that an eating disorder, just like kleptomania, is something that the perpetrator is powerless to change on his or her own, and therefore needs to first recognize that he is sick, and then seek help.

A person who already has a private jet who then goes out and buys three more (ostensibly so as not to fall behind other CEOs) is likewise not a criminal to be heckled by mobs but a person suffering from a medical condition, whether aware of it or not. The criticism of a mega-rich person running for office therefore should not center on the unfairness of  being so much richer than the people whose votes he seeks, but rather on the fact that he exhibits an obsessive behavior when it comes to accumulating excessive wealth. Perhaps Mr. Romney and his exclusive set could start a Dollarholic Anonymous 12-step program, or some other form of therapy.

Last winter I heard about a wealthy woman living in a 20 million dollar home in Montecito California, with a 2,600 square foot bedroom, who decided that she needed a second shoe closet because the one next door to her bedroom (the size of a studio apartment) was too full. This is not luxury. This is gorging on money. Anyone envying or aspiring to such wealth is like someone envying a Bulimic who gorges herself on three tubs of ice cream at one sitting and then throws it all up. If this is enviable to you, you too need to see a shrink.

The same principle is at play in both people suffering from an eating disorder and those suffering from an acquisition disorder. Neither the food nor the newly added billion dollars have much intrinsic value. The behavior in both cases is compulsive. The person acquiring companies is like the person stuffing themselves and then throwing up. A mega-billionaire may disgorge huge gobs of money in the form of charities after an acquisition  binge, but there is little doubt that the next morning he will back binging again.
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Agnosticism - Atheism without the shouting 

7/28/2012

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Albert Einstein stated many times that he found the belief in a personal God a childish primitive relic of early human development whose time has  long past. Nevertheless he resisted being called an atheist, saying, “Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all.” He called himself an  agnostic not because he was ambivalent about the non-existence of God, but  because “I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature  and of our own being.” 

It was that “attitude of humility” that struck me most when I first read Einstein’s words.  I am then, like Einstein, an agnostic convinced that there is no God. I am fully aware that my conviction can never be scientifically proven because no such proof could ever exist, just as none exists for the opposite conviction that there is a God. Of the two alternatives mine is clearly less preposterous but, reasonable as it is, it still is only an opinion. When it comes to opinions it’s a good practice to express minimal doubt, even when we are convinced that we are right. Doubt goes hand in hand with humility. If nothing else, being humble about my non-belief might keep the door open for a civilized  discussion with my opponents, rather than the hysterical shouting so typical of rabid atheist writers.

Unlike such writers, I believe that not questioning the rightness of one’s beliefs is a far greater menace than religious belief per-se. True, it is not easy to admit that you might be wrong when you know damn well that you are not, but it is well worth the effort. If nothing else it keeps my arrogance in check.

I only wish that true believers would add a  similar caveat to their certainty.  

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