in response; a lifted comment

It's good to be barking mad in philosophy, I feel. That's the stuff I favour in Wittgenstein, too. I know I should be reading the tough stuff, and I know that it all has to be scientific, open to refutation like Popper said, but fuck it. Yes, The Post Card is very emtional; it has that impetus, and Derrida uses it well, methodologically well, in fact. I read it many times whilst studying long-distance communication. It's lack of technical regard for that subject was a perfect respite from the dry stuff I had to read. It's literature, of course. But like other art-forms, one can get ideas from it, which one cannot find in formal theory. Smiths albums have ideas - as one example; and the emotional and entertaining way in which those ideas are delivered adds to their force and aids reception. Similar thing with comedy, I think: Chris Morris, Bill Hicks, Spike Milligan, Barry Cryer... Film, too, of course. It goes on. We - artists - need to loosen up and to detatch, I feel. For myself, I'm no scientist and I'm not trying to cure cancer. For better or for worse, I like art. I know it's flawed. But it is my thing. I've spent too long trying to justify my own meanderings as if they had to be useful and auditable, like a job, instead of rarefied and pipe-dreamy! People like artists to drop key performance indicators: fancy gigs, album deals, exhibitions, etc.; things they can understand and quantify. I've done such things as a matter of fact. But it wasn't those that made me happy or made me feel like an artist. I have no interest at all in the mainstream. I know that now - as a politics; known it for the last 5 or so years, but always known it. It's all so much better now. There is no simplistic explanation: art, like the best of everything I think, should be a bit barking mad. So long as it is authentic, explorative, and moral - and not all that Turner Prize guff, which plays with a trickle-down Duchamp aesthetic, whilst keeping an eye on stocks and shares. I hate all that street-wise moddish irony. They are so afraid of looking like they care. This is somewhat pithy and flawed, but, by way of illustration, I'd rather be Syd Barrett than Roger Waters. That corporate hippie might have - as our 10 year old says - 50 fafillion £s. But his leftist social realism is merely a veneer-thick cartoon-prose for other similarly over-rich champaign socialists to test their Bang and Olufsens with. It's not Kes; its that landlord and turncoat Micheal fucking Meacher. I'd rather be able to look at myself in the mirror and lie straight in bed.