I've been thinking a lot about Steve Earle lately.

He's been one of my favorite musicians from the get go. Actually got to meet him a couple of times back when I worked at WNCW. He was always a real nice guy.

Anyway, Steve has been part of the Nashville music scene since 1975. He was 19 when he first got there and it took about eleven years for him to break through with Guitar Town in 1986. It's a fun record that kicks off with the following words:

Hey pretty baby are you ready for me
It's your good rockin' daddy down from Tennessee

Check it out.

Fast forward 21 years. A lot can happen to a good rockin' Nashville guy in that time: wives, kids, drugs, politics, more wives, jail time.

The upshot is that throughout all the drama Steve has made the most honest and well-received music of his career. Classics, I'd say: Copperhead Road, El Corazón, I Feel Alright, Train A Comin', and Jerusalem -- just to name a few.

Then in 2007 Steve made a record called Washington Street Serenade. Having lived in New York City with his seventh wife, singer Allison Moorer, for a couple of years had an intense effect on him.

The first song on the record, "Tennessee Blues," begins as such:

Sunset in my mirror, pedal on the floor
Bound for New York City and I won’t be back no more
Won’t be back no more, boys, won’t see me around
Goodbye guitar town

And then the kicker:

Fare thee well I’m bound to roam
This ain’t never been my home

Have a listen.

This ain't never been my home. Wow, man. Strong words.

I gotta say that I know how the guys feels. Life can change you profoundly. It can make a man whose life and music were synonymous with Nashville kiss the town goodbye and realize that it had never really been the place for him.

Sometimes you figure that out quickly, other times you go to hell and back several times before you do. But when you do figure it out and you take action you end up happier than you've ever been. Steve is living proof.

Goodbye guitar town, indeed.

Patti Smith, from the book Just Kids, after having visited the Museum of Art in Philadelphia for the first time at the age of 12:

I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

Just Kids is the story of Patti Smith, one of the greatest performers in music, and Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most significant and controversial photographers of our time.

This book, however, chronicles their lives before the fame and recognition. Patti and Robert are two fledgling kids living in New York City and full of a longing to live a creative life full of unconditional love and support.

   I was particularly moved by the drawing he had done on Memorial Day. I had never seen anything like it. What also struck me was the date: Joan of Arc's feast day. The same day I had promised to make something of myself before her statue.
   I told him this, and he responded that the drawing was symbolic of his own commitment to art, made on the same day. He gave it to me with out hesitation and I understood in this small space of time we had mutually surrended our loneliness and replaced it with trust.

My friend Dani Burns recently interviewed me for her video conversation series, The Green Room. Dani is super smart, super cool, and a great person to spend an hour or two with talking about anything and everything. So it was a pleasure being her first victim -- er, I mean, guest -- for The Green Room.

Thanks, D.

Remember what you were like when you first started doing what you do?

You're raw, still taking shape, and probably not very good, but you damn sure have the desire, talent, and cojones to do it.

That's what I think about when I watch this video of Talking Heads from December of 1975: raw, still taking shape, kinda okay. Pretty rough version of "Psycho Killer," almost a year or so before it appeared on their debut record.

Nine years, several albums, and many shows later, I give you the opening tune from the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense.

Just look at David Byrne -- entertaining, confident, creative, and full of the cojones it takes to prance around the stage by himself performing a song he's been singing for 10 years.

It's so hard to picture that success when you're at the beginning -- not getting the gigs, still refining your style, getting the word out about your talent to anyone who'll listen.

Watching these videos puts it in perspective for me. It takes time, whether you want to be a world famous artist or just well-known and maybe liked enough to live comfortably.

These days that's hard to swallow. Things happen so quickly and "stars" are made with one You Tube video, a snarky blog, or reality teevee show. But that's not the kind of fleeting notoriety you want to be known for anyway. You want distinction and respect, regardless of what you do.

Like it or not, that stuff takes years (and maybe a tiny bit of luck, right-place-right-time, and meeting a few good people along the way).

You may not become one of the most popular musicians ever, but stick with it and you'll damn sure make whatever you want to happen happen. Just look at David Byrne.

Now if I would just relax, be patient, and take my own advice.

This is an iconic image: a photograph of Patti Smith created by Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of her debut album Horses. It and the album are classics.

I'm finishing up Patti's book, Just Kids. In it she writes about the creation of this image. It's too good to not share.

There was never any question that Robert would take the portrait for the cover of Horses, my aural sword sheathed with Robert's image. I had no sense of how it would look, just that it should be true.

We never talked about what we would do, or what it would look like. He would shoot it. I would be shot.
   I had my look in mind. He had his light in mind. That is all.

   The clouds kept moving back and forth. Something happened with his light meter and he became slightly agitated. He took a few shots. He abandoned the light meter. A cloud went by and the triangle disappeared. He said, "You know, I really like the whiteness of the shirt. Can you take the jacket off?"
   I flung my jacket over my shoulder, Frank Sinatra style. I was full of references. He was full of light and shadow.
   "It's back," he said.
   He took a few more shots.
   "I got it."
   "How do you know?"
   "I just know."
   He took twelve pictures that day.
   Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said.
   When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

Philip Roth's American Pastoral is a fascinatingly dense story of appearances and the realities that are hidden behind them.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

Then Roth delivers the kicker:

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

It took me longer than usual to read American Pastoral. It's layer after layer of dense detail that unravels with each page. The attention was worth it, though. The reward is having read one of the finest, most eloquent works of fiction ever.

Found this art review in The New York Times archive for a 2004 show called ''Mark Rothko -- A Painter's Progress: The Year 1949'' at PaceWildenstein in New York City.

From the review:

[1949] is the year that [Mark Rothko] finally broke free of the obligation to make interestingly varied compositions and discovered the power of large, simple, symmetrically ordered blocks of color. He began to make the paintings that we now view as classic Rothkos.

I love this next line.

So part of the excitement is seeing the moment when an artist dares to become fully himself.

Take a look through Rothko's work from 1949 for yourself. It's truly exciting to see him come into his own.

Some of my favorite artwork, ever.

Epileptic is a graphic novel by comic book artist and writer David B.

The story is autobiographical and focuses on the life of David's family as they struggle to deal with the effects of his big brother's epilepsy. It's a marvelous and insightful book.

The thing that really got me was how David B. used his gift as an illustrator to depict the trials he, his parents, and especially his brother, were going through.

For instance, throughout the novel his brother's epilepsy is depicted as a dragon-like creature that haunts the family. The dragon constantly suffocates David's brother as it envelops his mind and body, especially during a seizure.

It's intense imagery.

Miguel Piñero was a Puerto Rican poet, playwright, actor, ex-con, ex-addict, and co-founder of the Nuyorican poetry movement.

Piñero's most well-known poem -- A Lower East Side Poem -- is an elegy to the gritty and depraved Lower East Side of Manhattan in the '70s and '80s. The first stanza:

Just once before I die
I want to climb up on a tenement sky
to dream my lungs out till I cry
then scatter my ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

And the last stanza:

I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico
I don't wanna rest in long island cemetery
I wanna be near the stabbing shooting
gambling fighting & unnatural dying & new birth crying
so please when I die
don't take me far away
keep me near by
take my ashes and scatter them thru out
the Lower East Side.

That's just what his friend and fellow Nuyorican poetry movement co-founder Miguel Albarín did when Piñero died in 1988. Here is the story of that procession.

Another of Piñero's great poems is Seekin' The Cause.

he never gave his love to children
he never gave his heart to old people
& never did he ever give his soul to his people
he never gave his soul to his people
because he was busy seekin' a cause
busy
busy perfectin' his voice to harmonize the national anthem with spiro t agnew
busy perfectin' his jive talk so that his flunkiness wouldn't show
busy perfectin' his viva-la-policia speech
downtown, uptown, midtown, crosstown
his body was found all over town
seekin' a cause
seekin' the cause

Check out Piñero himself reading part of Seekin' The Cause in this video.

It's pretty powerful stuff.

From Wallace Shawn's dazzling and disturbing dystopian play Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009):

You see, the reality is -- and those of you who are younger may find this terribly hard to believe, but it happens to be true -- the reality is that in the old, old days when I was growing up, people simply didn't think very much about their genitals. And they never talked about them. So you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing -- I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines and newspapers -- I can't get over it. Ha ha ha!

Further reading on Wallace Shawn's Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

As someone who stops time and movement in fractions of a second, I revel in just the opposite: watching time and movement progress beyond the fractions.

Oh, to move like Trisha Brown.

My friend and author Jami Attenberg wrote a wonderful novel called The Melting Season and asked if I would read it and create something inspired by it.

Here's what I came up with.

I love these images.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jami.

What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

Twyla Tharp

This is the first book of 52 books I will read this year. One book a week.

I thought this passage about how Twyla Tharp began The Fugue captures my endeavor well.

There's a difference between a work's beginning and starting to work.

I learned this with one of my earliest dances, The Fugue. Being a novice choreographer I didn't know where to begin. So I stood up in the center of the room, took a deep breath, stamped my foot, and shouted "Begin!"

To this day that's how The Fugue starts out -- with a stomp that rings in my mind "Begin!"

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.