Cadmus said he was grateful for offending the Navy with his work since the controversy helped make him famous.

  "The Fleet's In!" painted in 1934 as part of the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA and "featuring carousing sailors, women, and a homosexual man, was the subject of a public outcry."

Sometimes you can't help yourself.  You're an artist and they give you a job, hire you to paint a wall, and you give them what they want, or you don't.  You do what you believe in or you don't.  Or maybe no one asks you to paint a wall, or they do and you do and you take the money and run, you cause a stir, you get famous, you fail, you provoke, persuade, recruit, seduce, or you don't. 

The writer James Salter said somewhere that you work a long time perfecting what you think is the best form for your particular talent to take -- a particular kind of writing, maybe a special kind of novel, or essay, or screenplay -- and you hope you picked the right form.  The best form.  You hope you made the right decision, because by the time you get good at whatever you're doing, it's going to be too late to try something else.  In other words, you make choices about what you put on that wall, and you hope you made good choices because it's a little late sometimes to change your mind afterward.



Mural, Los Angeles.  Sometimes the point is to offend, and sometimes it's about something else.  "Enlist and the ladies will want you and that big gun of yours!"

I've been in a mood lately to get rid of everything that won't fit in the back of the truck.  I'm hoping I'm coming from a place of strength about this decision, you understand, and not just caving to that urge to pack up and sneak out of town under cover of darkness.  I don't want to wind up somewhere else with the secret of what went wrong at the last place, obviously.  The idea is to know in your heart you've fought the good fight, you've learned your lesson, you've accomplished what you set out to do, and now you can move on to the next right thing.  As my friend D always reminds me when I get like this, when I'm in this mood, I just need to be really sure when I get rid of all my earthly possessions and shave my head and renounce the world and head off to the ashram, that I'm truly done and not just pissed off because things haven't gone my way; otherwise I'll end up in a couple weeks looking very foolish and still pissed off and possibly more so because now I have none of my stuff.

Years ago, I moved out here with someone who professed a neverending desire to share my life and the cost of the U-Haul; it just so happened that at the time I'd hit a wall in Chicago and the temptation to start fresh some place else with better weather was more than I could resist.  To show my enthusiasm for the plan, I got rid of much of what seemed like excess baggage, tossing my belongings out the back of the wagon to lighten the load as we crossed the Rockies, just like I'd seen pioneer women do in old movies.

Then we got here and that neverending desire petered out.  However, the weather was still better than a Chicago winter so I stayed.  Around this point I started reading a column in the L.A. Weekly entitled "Letters at 3 am" by the writer Michael Ventura, and there was one in particular I cut out and saved and just found again last night (in my getting-ready-to-throw-everything-away state of mind), called The Talent of the Room in which Ventura, as a writer speaking to writers, explains that "writing is something you do alone in a room," and you need to face that, get used to that, surrender to that unavoidable truth.  You're going to have to go in that room, he says, and be there a long time, and it may work out well.  Or not. 

And of course because I'm an enlightened being, I emailed the author last night and said something like, Okay, I followed your advice.  Now what?

And this morning I woke up and realized, oh, wait a minute; I'd better be sure about all this, about what I'm doing, because if I'm not done with the writing, I will just be taking that room with me, wherever I go.  And it'll be an empty room.  Unless I'm really sure I'm done with the writing, and I don't need to be in this room by myself, with my stuff and my thoughts and my memories and my ideas and my opinions and that ambition and yearning I had or thought I had, and that desire to either offend you or recruit you, enlist you, persuade you, delight and charm the pants off you.

How much of that is ego?  How much of that is impatience with the room?  With sitting here typing into a void and it feels like I'm talking to myself? 

Of course, it might not be just the talent of the room.  It might be the talent of the moment, the talent for making choices and decisions.  The talent to know when you're done.  Or not done yet.  Which is also part of the talent of the room.

"I can't go on, I'll go on."  I was reminded of that the other day -- I must have been waiting for something.  Something in the mail, something that was going to happen, something I thought I had to do, something I remembered thinking I needed to tell you.