Monday, July 30, 2001

went to see jr brown yesterday afternoon. casual unplanned outing. outdoor concert at annual summer thing in asheville, "bele cher" which i avoid as a rule (the rule is that anymore than 8 people at one time in the same place is more than i can handle). it was raining, hot, small crowd. he totally blew me away. experience. i got that old feeling like i was watching a master bull fighter playing with the bull. absolute grace. what authority. was so good he could mess with your mind and never lose a beat. in a funny way the composition of the band reminded me of led zep: wooden, workmanlike, just supply the beat and let mr brown wail away. all this only 15 minutes away from front door. if this is last concert i go to, and it may be, it was a great send off. thanks jr.

Sunday, July 29, 2001

things are happenin! worked on hard disks and netscape (which frequently crashes) from 5 until 10 this morning. then ninian dropped by out of the blue and is coming back at 3:30 so we can make jr. brown at 4:30. he's one of the few musicians that could get me out of the house nowdays. plus heard buddy guy on the radio this morning, talkin bout gettin old (it's going round)..

maybe what i'll do today esp. if it keeps raining is what i have been putting off: put new art up on this site, presently it's all almost 2 years old. i also intend to use the right hand white space for a number of things. might be a good day to hack my way thru the code jungle.

another early morning, still dark outside, i hear steady rain thru the open windows. yesterday i got up at a quarter to five, and felt like a zombie for the rest of the day. i'm going to lay off some of my meds for a few days, i think i've gotten too tolerant to some. i do this about every 2 months. netscape keeps crashing. randomly. i keep thinking i have it fixed and it keeps breaking. jr. brown is playing downtown outside today at 4:30. i'm really tempted to go. a hillbilly jimi hendrix might be worth a foray. but any crowd over 8 people is too much for me (tip of the hat to sam).

Saturday, July 28, 2001

the sane thing to do is just not tell anyone about this site & then when i don't have anything to say i can say it. but that is sort of silly, i could do the same with a word processor. i check out other BLOGs and so many are done by kids as a sort of diary: "mom got mad today and threw a waffle across the room". but not much i can describe in words, that is events, happens in my current perhaps penultimate phase. like right now: it's 6 in the morning, i've been up for an hour and a half, the cat is asleep on the scanner, i'm going to try and draw a picture of myself on a birthday card to grandson corbin, and i've got dishes to wash.

Friday, July 27, 2001

silence still the rule but there is one thing...the advertisments for Total (the cereal). commercial genius. "it would take this many bowls of blah blah to equal the vitamins and minerals in a bowl of Total". because the bowl of Total supplies 100% of what you need in a day. it would be good if a bowl of cereal gave you 100% of daily vitamins and minerals if it was the only food you ate all day. otherwise it is a waste and unecessary expense. this logic has been selling the cereal for i estimate 30 years.

well it's happened. run out of things to say. can't do compulsary verbal thought output. just flickers here and there of possible connections.

like why in the world do so many towns (based on greek square grid, or roman camp, same grid) have streets where block after block you see no street address/number? entire concept is premised on locatability on rational grid (later descartes/liebnez(?) algebraic grid), but no visible numbers to make it useful in "real life".

Thursday, July 26, 2001

more about living space for humans vs commercial space: lewis mumford in "the city in history" points out that since the babylonians the tallest structure in a city has always belonged to the top dog: acropolis, collosus of rhodes, the lighthouse of alexandria, romenesque and gothic cathedrals, mesoamerican pyramids, capital buildings, banks, and finally today temples of commerce. and the thing about the top dog is that the inhabitants never think of it as an institution but "reality". ie during the high middle ages of europe nobody conceptualized the church as the most powerful institution but "reality". i think today another standard could be used besides height, and that is percentage of earth's space used. according to this principle, commerce is king and we think buying and selling encompasses what is real.

Wednesday, July 25, 2001

here's the deal with human living space vs commercial space. it comes in several flavors:
1) homeless person NYC walks thru drizzle at night. passes a bank, large plate glass windows, illuminated and heated, clean, comfortable. compared to dark street.
2) i used to visit coworkers in phoenix az, a town where nothing old is allowed. i was always struck by the antiseptic sameness of homes, absolutely spotless thick carpet, cathedral ceiling. looked like it was not a place for humans to live and one that was cleaned by janitors.
3) and what's with this thing of houses now including "offices"? this has happened during my lifetime. incursion of personal space by commercial space. more later.

driving east on I40 for 3 1/2 hours yesterday i had time ask the air questions that the hypothetical net could answer. this is one of them:

go back in time say 2000 years (hard number to forget) and calculate all of the square footage of human living space: caves, condominiums, and cardboard boxes; then calculate all of the square footage devoted to human activities ie stores, forts, museums, hospitals, pentagons, amusement parks, 7-11s, malls, banks. what is the ratio between the two? now do the same for 2001.

granted there are more people today, but wouldn't the results show a mad bigtime swing towards commercial nondomestic institutional space today? power uses more earth than people.

Tuesday, July 24, 2001

ok ok at least i'm learning to type. and deal with the old question of conciousness, that is, who is the narrater and who is the protagonist? or to put it another way, who am i addressing right now this moment. i read a mystery recently whose details i forget, but one motif was the statement "we are why we are." and that's why i'm talking to my selves in this less than focused manner. nuff said.

just got back from a four day trip to chapel hill. it's amazing how much four days takes out of me. i had a dental appointment at a technical school 40 minutes after i arrived here and i guess it went ok. have to print barbara's book cover tomorrow and some kind of birthday card for my grandson corbin. buy a present for eli's birthday (not gonna say what it is but i have something in mind). stop by doctors office...but why am i typing all this stuff? the first thing i did on the computer when i got back was make a list of stuff to do. the second thing i did was the same list. i'm not kidding. my brain cells are fatigued and stuck in a groove..."don't forget to buy olive oil and check oil in truck after trip"...endless echos of tiny future scenarios while the biggest universe in the world dreams away. i'll be more verbal tomorrow and maybe even have something to say.

Tuesday, July 17, 2001

fine print and fast talk. have you noticed? the first has been around since gutenburg, the second since TV (the first mass audiovisual medium). fine print is found on the back of an airline ticket or credit card bill. fast talk is the voiceover on a medical ad when the voice suddenly speeds into incomprehensibility. i don't think an ad would be giving you good news via fast talk or fine print. what both have in common is that they resemble normal print and normal speech, and claim to perform the same function, communication. so a lawyer could say you had been informed. but any real communication is avoided by tiny point size or electronically speeded up sound.

my question: are there other forms of discourse that pretend to communicate but don't? telemarketer? politician? civil servent? doctor? fully conditioned acquaintence?

Saturday, July 14, 2001

ever had one of those days? of course you have, you're a human. i woke up this morning feeling heavy, stumbled around like a zombie, and then sat down and tried to fix netscape, system, some sort of hidden anomoly that is bringing my (computer) system to it's knees. (it's not human, it has no knees, i know.) i'm still trying. this is the sort of thing that led to my recent 10 month or so hiatus from doing anything much with the computer. discrimination, balance, and most important of all, the ability to STOP are once again called for. "faustina lente" i think is the latin for "make haste slowly" or in our century's jargon, stop twitchin, stop itchin, take a load of your feet and your mind. poarch swing would help.

Friday, July 13, 2001

up at 5AM changing ISP. also looked at a lot of weblogs and collective art/literature sites. the feeling seems to be that the demise of the internet bubble and it's hi tech rubes clears the air of the rank commercialism that is infecting everything else, including most of our children. on the other hand a whole lot of creative non-profit sites are ceasing publication. what's left?

maybe some of the latter if they can be made less code intense. if the browsers become WWW3 compliant; and maybe a lot of blogs like this one which as i go along begins more and more to seem like a personal update to a small group of friends and like minded folks. the opposite of mass communications. good.

Thursday, July 12, 2001

well i'm finally giving up on my ISP, i haven't even phoned them, just too many cumlutive glitches. i'll change to new ISP tomorrow. run both concurrently and see if new one works better and faster and establish it's not the telephone lines. we are a wired society, but to what?

(still wish a had a spell checker on this damn thing.)

speaking of words, i just talked to my old high school english (and history) teacher from too long ago to count. this man taught me to write (altho he's certainly not responsible for this cyber stream of whatever that i'm doing here). he mentioned that several national syndicated columnists and a music critic no longer appear in the local newspaper because managemnt thought they were alienating readers by using too many mutiple syllabic unknown words. people would stop buying the paper. the sad part is that i think they're right. remember: nowadays if it won't fit on a bumper sticker or a powerpoint bullet, it doesn't exist.

Wednesday, July 11, 2001

just came back from a 45 minute walk thru the heavy fragrant southern night. too hot, too humid. think from now on it's a 6AM thing. met a guy looking into a hole in the ground next to the sidewalk. "do you know anything about water mains?" he asked. water was rolling down his driveway. like two middle class american males we got down on our knees and peered, scratching our heads like, as my friend sam used to say in similar situations, two aborigines with a broken leaf-blower. i continued on my walk, around the block, and came to the same place again, water still flowing. a little girl stood there, excited about the stream. i asked her if it was going to be fixed. she said "when the workers that mama phoned get here."

Another night with no sleep. up checking blood glucose level at 4AM. have i mentioned i'm an insulin-dependent diabetic? probably not since so far the readers of this log exist only in someone's imagination. (this means YOU!). anyway moving slow today.

Tuesday, July 10, 2001

Lot about stem cells today, lot about the sanctitiy of life, lot about Big Science. yesterday on ABC primetime news a story about people selling their kidneys for (what else) money. a doc in this story said that selling parts of yourself should be made legal because then real docs could control the traffic and safety for all concerned. commercial use of human beings is ok but only if you're all (more or less) there.

tuesday morning is put-out-the-garbage day around here. it's surprising how quickly it comes around. and around. remember when wavy gravy said in some sort of 60's manifesto for everyone to come out of their urban caves and live in the sunshine? well about the only time we come out these days is to put the garbage out. way out.

Monday, July 9, 2001

the current cultural impasse can only be solved in the realm of the personal. not the political, the legal, the fashion statement, not even the semiotic. but the problem is that the personal as evolved over 30,000 years is disappearing.

some think it's metamorphising like always, but that's hard to hold to when you're walking along the highway having abandoned 5,000 pounds of a once high-styled ride now immovable cold steel, and the lights blaze by and you know you don't belong on that highway without at least a little machinery and electronics. just a cell phone for god's sake.

pome for the day:

like shadows on the foam
like killers in the grass
like sunshine far from home
we wait for time to pass

early monday morning, the start of the "work week". will future civilizations (for lack of a better word: "civilization" comes from the word for "city", and today's market-driven cities where "your money or your life" is the watchword may not be examples of what the word "civilized" was meant to mean), anyway will the concept of the "work week" someday be studied as we study the "saturnalia" of the romans, and other special periodic times when things happened that we no longer understand? i don't know.

Sunday, July 8, 2001

Thunderstorms today. i opened every old and new tube of watercolor and painted labeled stripes on three sheets of watercolor paper. downloaded & archived old web site which is so stale it needs to go.

is gone.

ain't time a blast.

just reinstalled netscape which was choking way too often. but lost my last post! then it happened again. using software as a way of life is like treading water with sandbags attached to your legs. a national or better international holiday with no computer use is a good idea, right?

Saturday, July 7, 2001

man talk about a quiet saturday. i was out of the house once, for my a.m. walk which i try never to miss (health reasons). i live in a beautiful walking place, lots of flowers and plants and trees, sidewalks, streets not busy. until my recent and awful depression lifted (it hung out for three plus years) i never got out there at all. so the walk was a pleasure.

but since then it's been quiet as a tomb here all day. did a little software maintenance, thought about starting a watercolor, and instead began reading 2 good mysteries, hitman series by lawrence block and something new by the detroit guy, he's good, i can never remember his name... amos walker is the character and estelman is the author, one of the best of the current hard-boiled crowd. and of course a nap.

and we wonder where the time goes.

Friday, July 6, 2001

i have a friend who writes to make money. he frets that there are too many words today. i wonder if the number of words out there per capita is the same as it was say 2000 years ago. i don't think so. i think the number of words is WAY more per capita today.

so where does that leave those of us blogging away like i'm doing now? we are adding to the too critical mass of words. not a good thing. but maybe it's like homeopathy, and spitting out a few verbal squiggles is an immune defense against word ennui.

medication meditation, whatever it takes to get a break from this hyped up trumped up hyper adrenalized world is worth it. for some of us it is a matter of survival. to others it probably will be in the near future. there have been many cultures where this mode of behavior would have been considered insane. in the market driven logo branded world of today it is considered necessary.

Thursday, July 5, 2001

just got an email informing me of the suicide of an old friend of mine, going back about 35 years like most of my old friends do. maybe something cought up with him. this is the second suicide of this ancient (now) group of friends this year. plus a death from hepatitus C a couple of years ago, a type 2 diabetic heart attack one year ago. many new mysteries, and the old mysteries are still hanging around. the final glide path is bumpy; the invisible becomes much more important, and the important blows away in the wind.

tried to reduce font size. guess i reduced my mind instead.

a quiet day, nothing to say. electricity went off this am and computer crashed, been trying to tuck things back in their box ever since. ok post this thang! you can tell i'm getting a little weary of software today.

Wednesday, July 4, 2001

ok it's 4th of july pm and i'm sitting in my apt in the paris of the south. if you don't know where that is i don't blame you. i expect any minute a gigantic mega fireworks extravaganza to take place down the street at a major resort. course on the other hand maybe it already happened last saturday nite when on one of my few forays out i ate dinner with an old friend (circa 68) and we got to talk like we used to without anyone's eyes glazing or rolling about. it was also funny being two funny old men stranded in an age we never made.

i think i'm starting to get the hang of this BLOG process. now if i could just get the spell check to work.

Monday, July 2, 2001

In the corporate comfort of a dimly lit airconditioned airbrushed conference room cell or on the street talkin outa my head or especially in Walmart there has to be more to it then we see. concensus reality makes me feel uneasy. maybe it's biochemical. maybe it the gnostic maze. whatever it is i wish they'd turn it off quick.