Francis in town with her mother. Her mother is gorgeous and I quickly admitted that she is the first 60 year old woman that I have ever met that I would not only make love to but feel absolutely honored to have the privilege of doing so. Very refined and intelligent French woman. much like Francis herself.

We spent a lot of time discussing this whole new reality TV project idea I have been dipping my feet into. she had many good ideas and suggestions. Feeling very excited about it actually. So I sit here and try to take as many notes as possible while attempting to stay diligent to the transcendence diaries at the same time.

Changing the transcendence diaries now. making them more public as we have kept them in frame sets to keep them off the search engines and rather a private affair just for fans. But the idea now is to not only open them up to the public by allowing search engine robots to see them, but to actually make them more of a forum situation where users can post comments and replies to one another based on the content of the diaries. bloggers are already doing this. its funny. I've been doing the transcendence diaries for years now and to a certain degree, for a short time, it was a quite a novel and fresh and controversial thing, but while I was doing it this whole blog phenom starting hitting so its right in line with what's going on. I was doing it the whole time and here it turns into this whole public phenom. And now it certainly isn't a novel idea. Whether or not it is controversial still remains to be seen since the only people who read the transcendence diaries seem to be die hard fans and they don't really care how far off I go in them. I assume that people who don't like what I write will just stop reading and close their browser window.

Opening them up to the public, putting them more out there, could certainly open up a few cans of worms. But I believe that it may be part of the bigger picture. After all it has been almost a year since last years ski trip when the artisan pleaded with me vehemently to have my own TV show and do whatever it took to expand my horizons and my image beyond just standing on stage and singing. So being here now, I feel very open all of a sudden. You cannot help but feel this sense of infinite possibilities.

I have taken an office on park avenue. Which really made me walk out of there kicking my heals with excitement about how much I will be able to get accomplished now. (never been one to be very adept at working from home myself. Wish I could actually because this fucking office is expensive.) How you might ask? Since I am flat broke? Oh well that is the secret I have been living my life by since I can remember. Some call it living beyond your means. I call it living your dreams. something akin to believing it first and seeing it soon after. I have always lived this way. and whenever I have found myself living through more mainstream belief systems, like being prudent or scared of not having enough money etc I have always popped out of it and realized that I wasn't really living the life as fully as I was meant to or was capable of.

[Take Boo Boo Kitty for instance. She has over four hundred thousand dollars in the bank. Invested. And I ask her today if I can borrow the second volume to pride and prejudice and she tells me that I can only come over the her house to watch it and cannot take it out of her house because it is too valuable. Go on Amazon and you can buy a set for less than twenty bucks. Prob less. So you just have to wonder where that comes from. that kind of lack mentality, where even if someone has that much money in the bank they still feel poor and worry about losing a used videotape.]
Well luckily I have never been this way. Because one must admit that life has been unbelievably thrilling and enjoyable for yours truly. And the only way I have been able to pull that off is by living extravagantly beyond all reason and measure. Defying logic and practicality for the pure and righteous purpose of living life to its absolute fullest above all else. it has worked so far remarkably.

But of course the catch is always that I could fail miserably and be left with nothing and have to start over from scratch, go back to working a day job or even worse go live with my parents or sleeping on peoples couches again or something. I've been there before. a few times. because of my undying commitment to staying true to the mission of the artist, which is and always has been, among a few other things, doing your art. That's the first credo of the mission of the artist. Do your art. That's the toughest one for most artists. Most never even make it that point. Just do your fucking art. No matter what. Do it be it live it. no matter what. At all costs. Just get your art done. I would venture to say that the  second and maybe the only other credo that even exists for the artist, for it is quite possibly the most liberal and liberating of all occupations one could choose for oneself, would be to stay true to yourself. Stay true to yourself and that in and of itself, is living the life of the artist. Make it happen and make it true.

That's why I never balk when encountering criticism of anything I do. I listen. And I learn. But I never shudder or think twice about anything someone says about what I've done in the past, because after all, my only fucking mission is just to keep on doing what I do. that's my belief anyway.

Once you start second guessing yourself, listening to others, well then you're no longer in the realm of the artist. You’ve ventured into being an entertainer or a writer or a singer or a commodity of some kind. More of a product or even a business or a business person. [this is why someone like Michael Jackson for example, and for lack of not wanting to think too much about it, will always be considered more an entertainer, and Lou reed again as merely an example in this moment will go down as more of an artist.] The artist throws caution to the wind and just says fuck all to everything and anything that may interfere with the art of the moment, where as entertainers tend to rely too much on public opinion and the masses reception of their art. Some where down the road it stops becoming art and turns into something else. although the lines may be very subtle.

Since I've never been very successful as an artist, at least not yet anyway, I have never had a problem doing exactly what I've wanted to do exactly how I wanted to do it. so I have been very lucky in that respect. My uncanny, almost overt lack of success over the years has enabled me to stay very true to who I am and what i feel the need to do as an artist. And the little amount of success that I have enjoyed has enabled me to continue to be able to do it. so it’s the best of both worlds. but like all things, this too must change now. I need a bit more success from this now. having moved here to the bit city. my living expenses have skyrocketed and the revenues I generate from what I call my art must now also skyrocket. That is why I am considering this silly idea of having cameras follow me around in my day to day doing more and more interviews with people, and augmenting the singer songwriter performer aspect of what I do. it may be the ticket I have always waited for.

And now writing about it, I just remembered that I first got the idea many years back while watching Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Thinking as a young boy that I could be very good at pulling off something quite similar but in my own unique way. I have been thinking about it this way. what I could do, and easily at times I tend to believe in my most fervent moments of delusional grandeur, is bring science and art and intelligence to the pop culture world which is dying for it truly, and in the same respect bring a bit of good old fashioned bad boy rock and roll grit and grime to the world of the intellectuals. I believe I may be able to tie it all together in a cool way that is uniquely my own. I will certainly never be good at being an intellectual or a writer of any significance. Because I just simply don't have the discipline for it; and chances are, I might never become a great singer songwriter, because I may just not have the talent for it. but I may be able to combine them both and pull it off.

[in an interesting twist of irony, Francis’s mom while we were speaking about this, she was most enthused, suggested as any sixty year old woman would, that I lose the earrings and cut the hair a bit. Now of course I respected and acknowledged her suggestion politely, but realized in that moment that her suggestion was stated in that precise moment in space time for me as a mere memento for me as an artist to sum up entirely what not to do to pull this thing off successfully. We already have bill Maher and Jon stewart and Charlie rose and all these other short hairs. And they all do a great job of what they do. The fact is that I am not that. and yet I am not all rock and roll either. I have always been too nerdy and aristocratic to fit in as a rock singer, and at the same time much too debauched and eccentric to fit in with the mainstream intellectual crowd. More PBS than MTV to be sure. But a lot more MTV than PBS at the same time.

When Francis’ mother asks why I can’t just cut the hair and ditch the whole rock and roll thing, which she assures us would make me instantly more appealing to people as a TV interviewer type, Francis tries delicately to explain to her mother that people her age aren't exactly the demographic that we are targeting with this. “Mom you don't know Fishy. He likes wearing girls clothes and painting his nails and wearing earrings. He's a freak. He doesn’t want to try to become something he's not. That's the great thing about this idea... I think you should do it Fishy.... and he can still take you to see Placido Domingo on your first date. By the way that was still my favorite first date of all time Fishy” Francis smiles at me.

I am listening and kind of thinking about it on the side on my own... and sleeping with whomever I please and staying up for days at a time on drug binges in order to create my next great masterpiece, which has never been a problem in the freedom loving world of rock and roll. I don't want to give that up. remember how cool Dennis miller was at one time? when he was on hbo... and then over time we watched him sort of peter out to this soft little teddy bear with this horrendous show on what is it cnbc or something? he lost his edge. I don't want to go there. I want to keep the grunge. But at the same time I'm still very much an uptown snob who is obsessed with learning and cultivating a knowledge of all things great and small and an education for myself that is entirely unheard of in the world of rock and roll for the most part. I want to maintain that balance. I'm familiar with girls gone wild, but I believe that if it isn't tempered with equal doses Oscar Wilde, then it’s just a bunch of a crap. Something like that. Anyway, I think we’re onto something.]

So the idea would be, no, the idea is, to combine the transcendence diaries, or maybe to expand the diaries, the life of Fishy, the life of me, to more of a video format. A TV format. Not to change images or anything. Not to stop making music or singing in a rock band or stop being me, but just simply to take the idea of transcendent television --- the interviews, which I enjoy doing very much, --- and then combine that with still being the singer songwriter in the band, and then combine that with the diaries, and mix it all together with some kind of a stage thing perhaps. Kind of like a one man show meets a rock singer meets a TV interviewer meets a reality show. All tied into together.

Where do we get the money? God I have no fucking idea at this point. But it is there in consciousness now. so the means will surely show themselves soon enough. I believe that. I must expand the concept to become big enough to where others will see the potential and want to play a part in it.

The hardest part is remembering that in order to pull this off I am going to have to stay in it at all times. not take breaks. Not to get to carried away in social things. fun is fun. and God knows I am a man of pleasure and leisure. but the life’s work is the life’s work and that is what it is going to have to be about for a while.

Tonight we sat in her lavish hotel suite and watched Saturday night live, all of us celebrating my move here and that as we were watching the show on TV that it was being performed and filmed just a few blocks away from where we were sitting all cozied up. So that is New York I guess. That kind of excitement. Of course combine that will all the other crazy not so good things I have been writing about in the last few days. the cold and rain does not add much to the city that is for sure. What is this balance of power that seems to be so necessary in the universe? Why does the most exciting artistic culutural inspiring intellectual fast paced cutting edge city in the known universe have to be so damn cold? And for so many months out of the year? I mean, why couldn’t this millennium’s greatest city in the world have been somewhere down South? Where it’s a bit warmer? Why this little island? Why here? God its fucking cold here and its only October. I am in for one hell of a winter.

Last screening: city of God. really really good Brazilian movie. See it.