Why is all the crazy shit happening in Florida now? This kind of suff used to be within the purview of California. About this link: I can't think of a worse time to go to court (in Florida!) over your religious right to wear a veil.

I wasn't feeling so great last week, so I asked this homeless guy in the park to do my portrait. They say that most artists really only do themselves, but I think he captured something of my mood.

He charged me $1.

The question of the week is: Have you seen me?

Of course, maybe the solution to this fat flying problem is to simply build bigger airplanes. After over 30 years, it really is time we had something bigger than the 747, after all.

Of course, I think anorexics should fly for half price.

I've been silent for a few days on this, but the time has finally come to speak out. I think Nick's new blog is hilarious. It really catches Mr. Adams at his best: clumsy, beligerent, a little dangerous, and very, very funny. If he keeps it up, he may some day become a writer for this week's #1 favorite Web site, which currently features a story about a movie that could have been based on Nick's life.

Is poetry a dead art? I don't think so. Maybe it's just been hijacked by elitists. That's what this article about poetry.com leads one to believe. I love the fact that this site awards poetry awards randomly, based on the time you submitted the poem, rather than arbitrarily basing them on the whims of editors. Education is a fine thing, but I really don't believe that one person's artistic response is more important than another's, and I believe that we value art witht he same kind of herd mentality that we apply to movies and music. In that sense, poetry is one of the few pure arts -- practiced by many, but celebretized by few.

Academic Stan Liebowitz says he thinks online file sharing will eventually have an impact on the recording industry... or does he? In this Salon interview, he says that there really aren't any signs of the recording industry being affected, despite massive online file sharing. Why not?

"It may be the cost of putting these collections of songs together. Even though it seems low, it's more effort than the typical person is willing to go through. That may be what the salvation of the record industry is -- that it's simply too hard to do on your own what they do for you."

I had forgotten that when videotapes first came out, they charged $100 per copy. Liebowitz says that it wasn't until someone released ET at $25/pop that the industry realized they could actually make money selling videotapes. Now they make more money from videos than from theatrical release.

Two blogs are probably too many, but my buddies at Linux Magazine just set me up with this blog for reasons that remain a mystery. It was kind of fun to play with a new blogging interface, but I've grown accustomed to the bare bones Blogger that manages all of this.

Blogger is interesting because it represents the kind of application that seven years ago everyone was saying would destroy Microsoft. I don't know if you remember, but back then the idea was that people would simply create applications that would be run through browsers and Netscape, not the operating system, would be the thing that mattered. Well, many of the most interesting new applications today involve browsers... just not Netscape.

Everytime I use Blogger I have to ask myself, "what's in it for them?" I mean, they're not even bothering with online ads, for goodness sake, and users like me were a great thing three years ago, but in today's climate there's got to be some money coming in. Blogger has some sort of "premium" service that hopefully will make enough money to keep things free for the rest of us plebs, but to me it seems intevitable that at some point these guys are going to have to start charging everyone for this service. My prediction: At that point, I'll switch to Yahoo! My Blogger.

I guess the question is this: How much fraud is necessary to a healthy economy? Why do we have these notions of fairness? Why do we glorify honesty? It reminds me of Richard Dawkins' hawk versus dove survival strategy in "The Selfish Gene." He says that a combination of the two types (Hawks fight to the death; Doves posture, but don't fight) is actually required to ensure a stable population. A population made up only of hawks would destroy itself; a population where doves predominated would be easy pickings for any one hawk.

So maybe it's foolish to look to Washington to change things. Perhaps the story of Enron is enough to effect change. It reminds us of two words: caveat emptor.

Though I haven't really listened to any of his music from the last 20 years, I've always had a soft spot for David Bowie, who was my idol as a teenager. It's interesting to see him transform himself into a corporate innovateor and intellectual property visionary. I guess that's the natural thing to do when you're too old to be taken seriously as a rock star. Rolling Stones take note!

From this interview with the New York Times: "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity."

Photos from Thursday June 6, 2002. Mount Tamalpais Cemetery Chapel, San Rafael, CA.


Anna paints a duck



Trish sketches out a portrait of Kathlyn, based on an original sketch by Kathlyn's husband, Art Grant.

Sophie just sent me this link about how Berkeley is going to be teaching blogging as part of its Journalism curriculum . I know a lot of people see this kind of antagonism between blogging and the journalistic establishment, but that seems naive to me. They're really two different kinds of fish, and when they share the same pond, one will swallow the other.

Samuel Johnson very aptly put it, "no man but a blockhead wrote but for money." And the journalistic establishment will always have that one thing going for it: money. If any underground blogger becomes too popular, overtures will come from the mainstream media and -- odds are -- she will sell out.

Sure it's cool that blogging allows schmucks like me to publish to an international audience for next to nothing, but the fact of the matter is that popularity comes at a cost. You can only serve up so many pages for free, and then you have to start paying for bandwidth. And when bandwith costs become significant, you need to start looking for ways to bring in revenue and, suddenly, your a small publishing company. And what do small publishing companies do? They sell out to larger ones.

But that still leaves the medium-popularity sites -- the ones that have an audience, but not a large enough one to get the attention of larger media companies. There is this cool way that they can morph into these little publishing cabals that cater to an audience that may be completely ignored by print publishers (e.g. the Mike Gregory -- Bob McMillan readers). These common interest cabals aren't going to bring down AOL Time Warner, but they may make the world a little more interesting for some of us.

George W. Bush: International statesman.

Trish spent last nigh priming a coffin. Today they're going to have a closed-casket viewing (huh?) where people will be encouraged to paint on Kathlyn's coffin. From the Chronicle: Kathlyn Ketcham Free -- Mill Valley sculptor, painter

Well it took Mike & Melissa two months to pay back the $100 they owed us, but at least they did it in style.

I read this article about three years ago, but since the new Star Wars is out now, it seems topical -- especially when you consider that the act of blowing up the Death Star in the first Star Wars was no doubt seen as a terrorist plot by Darth Vader & company. The guy who wrote this says that letting Darth Vader be redeemed at the end of the third episode is kind of like cutting Hitler some slack (worse than Hitler, Vader destroyed entire planets). I particularly liked the comparison between Star Wars (elitist -- the Force is strong only in certain pre-ordained people) and Star Trek (We're all just trying to get along, whether we're man woman, black or green, alien or AI).

When I was a child my sisters and I played in, quite possibly, the most treacherous and ill-conceived tree house in human history. Imagine a five year old nailing a piece of plywood and a few other abandoned bits of wood to a shaky crabapple tree on the Canadian prairie and you'll get the picture. In Australia, we graduated to a full-fledged homemade structure -- a little shed made of scrap metal and wood that collapsed one day in the Outback sun. Trish and I, like battling Titans, both insisted on sitting on top of it at the same time. She got lucky and sustained a nasty gash from the fall. I was uninjured and, blubbering all the way, had to clean things up.

Twenty-five years later, Trish is now living in a tree house in Marin. The first time I saw it, she was visiting her Marin artist friends, Art Grant and Kathlyn Free. Art was a conceptual artist who had lived in Mill Valley since the 1950s, and he was something of a Bay Area institution. He would make giant eyes out of potatoes, maps of Wisconsin out of huge blocks of cheese, hearts out of rose bushes in these kind of dramatic performance arty spectacles. And it seemed that he spent his every waking moment either sculpting or sketching. The tree house -- really a funky, enhanced cabin built around a big redwood -- was filled with hundreds of these strange primitive sculptures he'd made over the years (his favorite medium appeared to be yellow trash), and I remember looking over the panorama of Mill Valley from this place and feeling like I was somehow at a gateway to an insanely creative mind.

Art was dying of cancer in the bedroom, and he was near the end, so we didn't really meet, but Trish and I spent the afternoon talking to Kathlyn. About Mill Valley, Art's career, how they had met Trish at a studio on Vancouver Island, and about lower-case "a" art. It was an inspiring afternoon, and by the end of it Kathlyn had decided to do a chain letter amongst her friends. Each person would paint a crow and send it on to the next. I came up with the name: Murder by Mail.

We also talked about how important it was for Trish to get the hell out of British Columbia and come down to the Bay Area. Kathlyn very graciously offered her downstairs studio to Trish should she ever decide to move.

And now Trish has lived here for nearly three years, walking Kathlyn's groceries up the 80 stairs to the treehouse, looking after her ducks and dogs, co-hosting her soirees, being a roommate and a friend. It's been a wonderful relationship. When Trish first moved here, she had been beaten down a bit. In Vancouver, she was an accountant for a construction equipment company, trudging to work on those grey drizzly days, and then home to an absent boyfriend and a psychotic dog. But she's really come into her own in the Bay Area. Despite long hours, psychotic bosses, immigration hassles and an uncooperative vehicle, she has reinvented herself and found a community of like minded dog nuts. She seems happier and more focused than ever before, and when you're around here, you have this sense that she's a woman in her genius, as they say. Doing what she's good at and what she wants most in the world to do.

Last Tuesday Kathlyn began chemotherapy for a cancer that had been spreading and restricting her ability to breathe. The chemo sent her into anaphylactic shock and after a few days of babbling and strange hallucinations she became quiet, and then died last night.

Nobody expected it to happen so quickly. Kathlyn was 72 and not a well woman, but she had been battling a variety of illnesses for so long and with such tenacity that we all were convinced that she was far from the end. Well, apparently fate trumps personality. And no matter how many times it repeats itself, fate surprises and disturbs us.

I'll miss Kathlyn. I don't know any other 70 year olds who bought shotguns and 100 pounds of rice for the millenium. She tried on ideas like hats and was vain and full of life and different and strange. And she was very good to my sister, who is now, along with her four dogs, going to have to find a new place to live.

Daredevils: Because we need them now, more than ever. He's going to break so many bones!

You Don’t Know Me

This teapot accusation
A familiar ritual
Measured out in lumps and sluices
Of memory
And doubt

This itchy time
Pricking up new angers
Ten thousand chained and shuffling shoes
That new and improved
That cloying smell

This man – hated
Screams beyond all caring
Clumped -- it's almost a joke --
Rhubarb raw in misery
Beyond this or any house

This point of sleep
Beneath the family bed
Breathing generous dusty foundations
Inventing a world outside
Alive, at peace, and steeping