After tearing a tendon in my wrist I found myself running up the 2,830-step natural stairmaster behind my house called the Grouse Grind. Though I’ve always disliked cardio, there’s something surprisingly pleasant in the hour-long vertical hike — what, between the trees and view and the beer at the end of it. Okay, well, to be honest the hike isn’t pleasant at all, but the beer at the end, that’s worth it. Those post-hike endorphins become a magical ingredient when mixed with the beer, a slow-earned brew that can only be enjoyed the hard way. (I tried taking the gondola once, and the beer was definitely mediocre without the endorphins — but with them, I’d rank their brew higher than the finest hop-houses in Prague, better than the best beerswills in Brussels.)

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One of the very best things that can happen to a thinking person is to have his assumptions flipped. When I met Damien Hirst on Bali’s Brawa Beach, where he was finishing an intense three-month painting session, I expected him to have a bumper sticker on his laptop that said, “Suck my cock vomit.” Which he did. But I didn’t expect him to be extraordinarily down-to-earth, generous, and aware of his own position in a way that is caring rather than cynical.

This interview is the first he’s given since deciding here in Bali to stop all his production pieces in order to focus on making his own paintings. In the process, it touches on everything from the suicide of his close friend to the essence of painting to five-foot wooden giraffes—with a detour on the nature of visual language using Vaseline and a cucumber.

Alexander Boldizar: So you’ve stopped your production?

Damien Hirst: Yeah, I’ve stopped it all.

Continue reading Damien Hirst: New Paintings (Interview)

The desire for security stands against every great and noble enterprise. —Tacitus

In New York City you can get a ticket for sitting on a milk crate or taking up two seats on a subway or putting on a puppet show visible from the street or climbing a tree or driving a taxi while wearing shorts. NYPD officers walk through the stairwells of housing projects where crack gangs once ruled, not with drug dogs but with decibel-meters to hand out tickets to teenagers playing their music too loud. Central Park was once both dangerous and beautiful, but now someone has installed a fence every ten meters and it feels less natural than even the densest maze of Brooklyn concrete.

During my four years in New York, I walked alone at night into five or six of the worst projects in Brownsville, East New York, Harlem and the Bronx (to interview people), and I never experienced a moment of fear—something that only an escapee from a mental institution could have said fifteen years earlier.

Continue reading Fear.

My new novel, The Man Who Saw Seconds, is finished. And my agent turned it down because it’s science fiction, and she doesn’t do science fiction. I feel very grateful to have the agent I have–The Ugly is a difficult book, and finding an agent who cares about literature more than money is rare, unusual, extraordinarily lucky.

And yet I can’t help feeling a bit of frustration at the way we all put ourselves in boxes. Why can’t the same author write both heavy stuff and thrillers? Comments I’ve received from other published writers who’ve been kind enough to give me their time as readers included, “I was irritated whenever I had to put it down,” “It would/will make an amazing film,” and “I’m stunned your agent wasn’t completely hooked. I certainly am.”

Again, I have a great agent. She just doesn’t do sci-fi. She suggested I work with her for my literary fiction, and find another agent for my commercial fiction. So…I’m looking for a sci-fi agent. And perhaps a pseudonym.

Manny Lampnut? Bald Lazier Ox? Roland Lulfromulber? Radix Loblaze? (more…)

I’m afraid of technology. Not of the Terminator, smart machines, genetic engineering or even the self-replicating gray nano goo that Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, famously worried about in a 2000 Wired article, “Why the future doesn’t need us.”

I’m afraid of something much simpler: the personal computer. Specifically, way it interacts with the human brain. There has always been a tendency among children, elementary-school teachers and policemen to think in simple terms of right and wrong, in checklists and keywords and similar boxes. It’s a way of avoiding thinking.

At the end of law school, all of us who came from national schools took a ten-week Bar Bri course to learn the state law that students at state schools had been studying for three years. The one thing the Bar Bri instructors explicitly drilled into our heads was “Don’t think. Memorize and repeat keywords. Whatever you do, do NOT try to think on the test. You will only be punished for it.”

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Or…How I Beat Candida and Incidentally Lost 60 Pounds

As a manly man, it’s a bit shameful to admit you count anything, let alone something as vain as carbs or calories. In reality, a manly man has many layers. On the surface, it’s important to pretend you can’t count anything. You face what comes, whether it’s the next beer or the next opponent, without worrying about long-term issues like being outnumbered or running out of beer. Under that surface, a manly man is highly intelligent, of course, and understands exactly what’s going on — it’s only for honour’s sake that he doesn’t allow himself to access that information.

Still, even a manly man eats. And that eating includes choices. As the author of The Ugly, I tried for a long time to keep my body as close to that of Muzhduk’s as I could. I was unable to reach 300 lbs, but so long as I was over 260, with enough muscle to perform parlour tricks like lifting Honda Civics, I was happy.

Then something happened that dropped me down to 205. I lost most of my body fat while retaining all my lean muscle mass. To my chagrin, I can now count eight individual muscles in my abdomen. The good news is I haven’t lost strength. The bad news is that now I look, well, thin.

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After decades of research, physicists have finally captured a photo of Emptiness.

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As a writer who needs to freelance in order to pay the bills, I’ve developed two distinct (opposite, in fact) modes of working.

One is the “manager” mode that recently got an “out of memory” error on my 4gig laptop–I was running with 50 Adobe documents open, 50 Excel documents, most with multiple sheets, 140 tabs on Firefox, 19 Word documents, one very long Power Point slide show, and a bunch of other stuff open, all with my son running in and out showing me the good guy beating the bad guy, informing me that “Dad, these superheroes saved the day!” and asking the names of odd colours, like fuchsia. I told him to ask his mother, she’s a painter, she paints with colours. He said, “And you’re a writer? So you know what’s right?”

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Reuters is reporting that “Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.”

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If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day—go fishing.
If you want happiness for a month—get married.
If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime—help someone else.

—Chinese proverb

First, lift your cheeks, as though you were winking with them. Then raise the ends of your lips obliquely…

Continue reading Happiness.

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