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than out-of-work artists, after all.

"I just did the simple math," Kieron said. "In comics, I’d be a little fish in a big pond, sure. But I can hit deadlines. At least I’d be a fish. In acting, I’d be… plankton." I told him I understood; that the time comes when you realize that if you really want to do something, you just have to get out of your own way and do it. "But what should I tell these folks who email me, expecting me to do all the hard work for them?" I said to Kieron.

"Tell them to be fish," he said.

People Forget October 12, 2001

It seems more and more, I’m doing all my business correspondence via email. Often, I get into thematic, even philosophic exchanges with folks who ask questions that might only require the most basic response. What can I say? I expound because I like to. The theme for this week’s missives seemed to be responsibility, and all its various permutations. Responsibility of the artist to his art; responsibility of the artist to his audience; responsibility of the audience to art; respon sibility of the collaborative artist to his fellow artists; that sort of thing. Some of these emails were awfully short; the responsibility of the artist to his art is to create it. A guy can sit around all day and claim that he’d be the best Whatever-ist in the history of everyone who’d ever attempted Whatever, if only The Man would give him his Big Break.

That’s not an artist; that’s a belly-ache-er. Not too much to talk about there.

An artist can’t help but create his art.

And, in this, parenthetically, I mean for "art" to be a sort of Platonian ideal of art; an essence of art, not just squiggly lines on paper or heaps of pig ment on stretched canvas. My mom, for example, is an artist of baked goods. Cookies, cakes, pastries, jelly rolls, Easter bread, you name it. But she is the Michaelangelo of pies; the friggin’ Leonardo da Vinci of apple pie. She. Makes. The. Best. Pies. You. Will. Ever. Have. When she dies, her headstone will read: "Shirley Young, Beloved Mother, Beloved Wife. Too Bad She Died; She Made Good Pies."

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