2.28.2

just put another catagory of stuff up top, Animation". midi, quicktime and shockwave files coming.
a fluid hypomaic state is like a vacation to me.

2.28.2

i was looking for something commenting on the usage of the word "image" by jung or hillman. it's not just a picture, it comes from the word "imagination". i found this recent interview by james hillman who is one of the sanest people around, but there is not a whole lot on "image".
"I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics."

" there is an individual image that belongs to your soul."

i will be making 2 changes soon to this log. a place to go for archived pictures and a place to go for archived music, multimedia, probably quicktime and shockwave.

2.27.2

ok here's another midi file - this one in fact all ofem are future soundtracks for some assemblage of sounds, words, sense, nonsense and other stuff. maybe it's a soundtrack to old 30's radio program broadcast one late rainy afternoon. can't quite remember. definitely want to add voices and some kind of low tech low bandwidth screen action. it's found here.

i'll get back to the subject of imagination, thought, and world soon with a little meta-politics and liguistic cyberchance soon. in meantime i guess this just shows again that the busy have no church affilliation. i been busy. no friends either.

2.27.2

i'm still unsure what plain vanilla windows folks get when they try to hear these midi files. any comments? mail me. otherwise check here for windows file players:

Harmony Central�: Windows Software: MIDI File Players

2.26.2

working on web midi is pretty weird, i'm still not getting consistant (listenable over web) files. so here is my latest attempt :

hear

i'm not messin with it anymore today. gotta think about everything fading, the government, the war, the logistics, statistics, heuristics, picture of my grandfather.

2.25.2

Yay the midi link below finally works yippee!! so i've got the pipeline figured out. hours n hours n hours of informal figuring, moments of sheer manipulative boredom, instinctual activities taking the wheel, but what the heck i still got a good deal. you know what i mean, you're an artist too.

go here to hear a midi file i made today. it's experimental so let me know how it works.

you need quicktime. if you have a mac you've got it. if you have a PC you probably don't but can get it here.

chris

2.24.2

here come the graphics i'm dragging from the pix section so i can index them all into one new section. i bet i can make everyone of them better. did this one.

2.24.2

Ken Nordine's Word Jazz wordjazz.com is oh so near. incredable 30 minute multisignal radio programs done in the basement between gigs as audio engineer. you must check these out late at while the lights slowly dim. i heard snatches of nordine here and there several worls ago. he set up resonances still dancing today and he was also funny.

2.24.2

Trying out dreamweaver 4, what a breeze. i will embed a quicktime MIDI file here later today. you should be able to double-click it and hear some of the music i got lost in for the last 4 days.

2.23.2

i'll soon be pulling pictures out of pix section and add them interspersed with text to daily posts like i've been doing with other pictures, then yet another total redo where all pix are findable in text archives. i have to do it because a whirlwind scattered my wits to the ridgetops and my animal cohort told me to put it on the front burner. as near as i can tell he is much more dependable than louis rukhyser (phonetic spelling for the alphabet-dismayed like myself).

2.23.2

nother self-indulgent hyper-driven dream day: did a few phoot restorations for my mother, spent the whole day making 2-5 minute midi tunes that play over the net. i'll putem up soon. finished last of 200 poems and began laying out a book. worked on a painting.

the seasons of hypomania are the glassiest smoothest sailing weather, let the wind catch your sail and you're off. sometimes the impersonality of solitary imaginative work seems kind of sad, but i'm happy to have it. focus on it. find treasure in it (even if for just a moment after 10 consequetive hours of fanatic participation in creation).

it really seems sad only if there is an alternative. there's only one. i heard an irish lady writer on npr yesterday who said how rediculous she would feel chasing at her age what she chased in her 20's and 30's. the only alternative at this point is reality, and it might include things swept under the rug today, like obsessive guilt, creative randomness, messages in the sky, and a dylan song now and then:

"stranded in the city that never sleeps
some of these women really give me the creeps."

2.222.2

The Best Of The Beat Generation - Rhino Featured Product - This looks cool - nice small writeup. one of the tracks is by Ken Nordine. if you've never heard "word jazz" you're missing out on something really beautiful.

2.22.2

there is a backlash today against blogging. the phenomena is too big to ignore, and nobody knows what blogs are for. below is a good straight foward down to earth comment on blogs, bloggers, mass communication, TV and the present:

Blogging: Tune Out and Switch On
"Weblogging is changing our view of the world. Mainly because we are now writing about our own views. Instead of watching the editied for tv version we are taking the time to collect, rearrange, codify and publish our own version of what we see."

2.21.2

The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
this is the book mentioned in class yesyerday that set off so many ripples in my mind and probably some others too. i havent't read it. but it concerns my current obsession, the difference between words and images. his thesis seems to be that the influence of the two has alternated, and peace and love happen in the image eras, hunting, wars in text eras. and we are changing from being a test-based culture to an image-based culture. optomistic. interesting to compare with mcluhin.

2.20.2

conversation in watercolor class today: what's with the periodic prohibiton of images down thru history, for instance with the ancient hebrews, islam or the 2 century iconoclastic controversy of the byzantines.

possible answers: the image displaces the reality it is meant to symbolize, and so is an inferior degraded form of reality. we think we need to pay attention to golden calves or lexuses or tennis shoes instead of what is real.

another way to look at it (no pun intended): all psychic process of the human experience are rooted in imagery, including thoughts, emotions, and words, but these cut us off from the image. so we take the former literally. this is the way of carl jung and james hillman.

another: images are created by the imagination, and are inexhaustible. ie they are symbols, not signs. they should not be taken literally. but we do take them literally.

we live in an age where there exist more images than in the rest of history combined. they are beamed into our heads at an excruciating rate. the commercial forces push this ("image is all") ("the sharper image")("image makes you feel better about yourself").

and lastly there is a book, "the goddess and the alphabet" don't know author, who i understand third hand states that in eras of image peace and understanding rule, and in eras of words, rigid and literal, war and destruction occur. i am dubious about this last because 1) words are sprung from images but they are not immediately accessible to us and 2) we live in an unprecedented situation of inundation of images beamed straight to the head by commercial interests and may find that images can have a literal downside just as words have. in your mind's eye can you see the image of the world trade center vaporizing.

2.19.2

i was driving down the street (what else?) today when over the airwaves drifted into my personal space on ad for increasing your vocabulary. can't remember it exactly but it had to do with "impressive" words - why add any other kind to a demented mind? and this system shoots them directly into your mind, no effort, no excercises, no reading.
also a lot of noise was made about how much money these words were worth. true story. meanwhile...

Happy Birthday Saraswati!

"Saintly people and people inclined towards spiritual progress attach great importance to the worship of goddess Saraswati. As a practice, only educated people and men of principle worship goddess Saraswati for spiritual enlightenment. In their opinion, there can be no comparison between the king and the learned or the spiritually advanced. The king is honored within his kingdom, whereas the learned is respected or worshipped throughout the world."
Birthday of the Goddess of Wisdom

on the other hand...

"Asian herbal medicines are currently used by large sections of the population. Because they are not regulated as medicines and are freely available to everyone, serious safety concerns might be associated with these herbal medicines. In this article, evidence suggesting that some Asian herbal medicines contain toxic heavy metals or undeclared prescription drugs is reviewed. In particular, Indian and Chinese preparations have been implicated."
read all about it

2.18.2

last week i spent catching up with long delayed projects. some i started, some i puttered around with. one is a book of art and poems i would like to publish before end of year. so i have been gathering scraps of paper and pages out of various notebboks to transcribe prose snippets. i think i'm finished now (unless i find more), and i have @175 of these things in electronic file. BTW since i am the world's slowest typist i dictated these things using a kludge of software and it worked amazingly well, altho the first rule of digital work applied: the first time you do anything on computer it will take a looooong time. also working on cd-rom photo album of ex-wife sally and children. also working on adding some action to this blog, mutimedia pieces i have scattered about. i'll keep you posted.

doing all this stuff i have discovered various souvenirs of the past. below is an unusal one, part of a paer visa allowing me to visit Mount Athos, the holy mountain, located in greece but like the vatican with it's own government. interesting and instructive 3 weeks:

Athos The Holy Mountain ---- Mount Athos ----- Holy Mountain ----- Agio Oros

2.16.2

LOOSE WIRE -- February 07, 2002:
"Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet."

i pretty much agree with this short optimistic piece.

for some reason i am reminded of the various characterizations of "the crowd" down through the ages:
"the meek", as in "blessed are"
"hoi polloi"
"serfs"
"peasantry"
"bourgeoisie"
"unwashed masses"
"the electorate"
"john q. public" (going strong when i was born)
"the audience"
"the consumer"

i hope that a newer catagory is rising and that it is more fun, healthy, and fufilling to be in it. will something like weblogs be included? or at least a native language for public discourse not owned by the corporations.

2.15.2

up very early this AM and wandering what to add to today's "mod pez". i have no idea like always - then i stumble on to
Historical Jesus FAQ
"Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like."

one of my goals this year is to read the bible. i read an awful lot of ancient history, religion, psychology, but never the bible. so i've begun the New International Bible Study Version and it's pretty good. plain english, lots of attention paid to historical narrative structure, about half of each page is footnotes, but interesting footnotes, archeological, linguistic, historic & so on. i'll keep you posted on this project, it's one i'd like to finish.

12.14.2

i've been reading "the lexus and the olive tree" by thomas friedman (see The Washington Monthly review of "The Lexus & the Olive Tree"), a birthday present from my sister (thanks jane). in describing the total victory of the free market system and the varied modes that have sprung up in countries new to it, he states that "lack of transparency" in some of these new markets systems is one of the areas (there are others) that will have to be improved before these systems will work.

"this sort of lack of transparency, notes richard medley, who does political risk analysis for financial houses, is what causes some of the worst stampedes...you go from believing everything to believing nothing. in fact, the paranoid illusionist believes more than nothing-he believes that there are hidden debts and off-the-book liabilities all over the place."

"indeed, one of the things that was first revealed by the 1997-98 asian economic crisis was that most of the Big Five American accounting firms had audited the books of the big asian financial houses that had failed in the crisis-audited them without raising any red flags about their troubles..."

in view of Endrun unraveling, it looks like this applies to the first-world free-market system too, does it not?

2.12.2

i've been in one of my semi-angular oops i mean semi-annual fits of organizing images, photos, drawings, graffitti. the picture below is from 1968! cool, huh?

i did gussy it up a bit when i found it yesterday. it's funny, all day long the subject of the past has come up. the past is another world.

2.11.2

watercolor i painted last week and sent today to my mother for her birthday. i had fun doing this one. it came together fast. words are so much more confusing than images. unless they're spokenwords, when the context is personal. two people talking to each other at 3AM in the night when it's too late for lies. otherwise the world of images says more to me.

2.10.2

"ok what else can you show me?" day of rest but it wasn't. got into boxes of old photos. catagorizing, organizing. not my strong suit. found the picture below, a gum-bichromate print from about 25 years ago. otherwise typical sunday, never spoke to another soul, not even on the telephone. finished watercolor for mom's birthday, which needs to be in mail monday. thought about tweedledee and tweedledum. slept for an hour this afternoon. i sleep different now than i used to: on my back, handsknit together on my chest, don't move much. i used to sleep so restlessly that waking up was like coming to in WWii, wreckage everywhere.

garden bells
in the wind
are silent

2.9.2

The Blog Phenomenon
by john dvorak, gadfly.
fairly pedestrian commentary, another try at figuring out what and why these things exist. gives a little flavor of present state of...something. my own view is that blogs are either 1) to save the world (not the what we call the world, the real world) or 2) the digital equivalent of standing on a street corner mumbling and gesticulating in a language noone else speaks.

2.8.2

the deluge of birthday cards has finally slowed down to a trickle. george w.'s was particularly inoffensive, and the one from "the gang down at endrun's" was a good yuck. barbara walter's was extremelyelegent, but i'm pretty sure it's the same one she's been using for years.

one i liked very much featured this quote by george eliot:

it is never too late to be what you might have been

2.7.2

today is my birthday. we all have one sooner or (more commonly) later.
happy birthday.
all i have to say is (with apologies to dylan thomas):

"...all the gardens
of spring and summer
were blooming
in the tall tales
beyond the border
and under the lark full cloud.
there could i marvel
my birthday away
but the weather turned around."

You Are Here (Really!)

2.6.2

everytime i hear (and i hear this several times most days) that a deal has been transacted "worth several zillion dollars", i ask myself "worth several zillion dollars to whom?"

that's the fatal error with money: what you get for it depends on what the entire population of the earth wants, not what you want. supply (ok) and demand (who is demanding what?)

maybe it's a race: to see if you and i can "simplify" before bizland can "downsize".

2.5.2

BBC News | NEWSNIGHT | Great impact of attacks on America

norman mailer interview on america after 9/11:

"The fact is I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes," he says.

2.4.2

gladwell dot com / Running from Ritalin
from Running from Ritalin:

"In "Ritalin Nation" the psychologist Richard DeGrandpre argues that Ritalin and A.D.H.D. are the inevitable by-products of a culture-wide addiction to speed--to cellular phones and beepers and faxes and overnight mail and computers with powerful chips and hard-driving rock music and television shows that splice together images at hundredth-of-a-second intervals, and a thousand other social stimulants that have had the effect of transforming human expectations."

2.2.2

the information explosion is not an imagination explosion. if it were you could probably find an answer to this question: what is the ratio of words (spoken, written, printed, electronic) to population today? is it more or less than the same ratio 1000 years ago? 2000 years ago? 10,000? 30,000?

who cares

words are like icebergs - what they are is 9/10 underwater. words per capita have a profound impact on the experience of being human.

2.1.2

mr moore insists on still making sense in a world full of nonsense. no wonder he's funny too: check this out about bush endrun gate: pulitzer material.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

and for those of you interested in the half-world of the blog, a short and informative article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,641742,00.html

otherwise the day went smoothly for the most part with a minimum of biochemical whattzis. got a haircut in a shop still in the 50's, perry como on the am radio. saw jane fonda on good morning america. she and i both look very good for our age, experience, entropy, periodic flame-outs, and soul working overtime (or sleeping it off).