Thursday, July 24, 2003

dog day dream

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

lagoon

terrible day. started off great, nice long walk in cool air. when i got back i lost all my zip and it became a lost day, no energy, no focus, no foolin. one of those days when anything you try to do quickly goes haywire. did find the watercolor posted above floating around in a small notebook in my truck.

but a little weather news, tip of the hat to tharpa.

j.g. ballard in the 60's i believe wrote a number of novels about abrupt weather changes, the one i remember best is the wind from nowhere. good read, bad news.

Monday, July 21, 2003

email i got this morning. thanks russel and tucker;
--------------------

as we say in Woolof--"Danka Danka Japa Gaola"--Softly softly catch the monkey" --I didnt see
this weird visit to one of my favorite countries-just everyone saying how compassionate the
speech was!!
Go figure
T


A letter from a Senegalese following Bush's visit that was forwarded to me.

Russell Banks


> >
> > Dearest friends,
> >
> > As you probably know, this week George Bush is
> > visiting Africa.
> > Starting with Senegal, he arrived this morning at 7.20
> > PM and left at 1.30 PM. This visit has been such an
> > ordeal that a petition is being circulated for this
> > Tuesday July 8th be named Dependence Day.
> >
> > Let me share with you what we have been trough since
> > last week.
> >
> > 1- Arrestations: more than 1,500 persons have been
> > arrested and put in jail between Thursday and
> > Monday. Hopefully they will be released now that the
> > Big Man is gone
> > 2- The US Army's planes flying day and nigh over
> > Dakar. The noise they make is so loud that one hardly
> > sleeps at night
> > 3- About 700 security people from the US for Bush's
> > security in Senegal, with their dogs, and their cars.
> > Senegalese security forces were not allowed to come
> > near the US president
> > 4- All trees in places where Bush will pass have been
> > cut. Some of them have more than 100 years
> > 5- All roads going down town (were hospitals,
> > businesses, schools are located) were closed from
> > Monday night to Tuesday at 3 PM. This means that we
> > could not go to our offices or schools. Sick people
> > were also obliged to stay at home.
> > 6- National exams for high schools that started on
> > Monday are post-poned until Wednesday.
> > Bush's visit to the Goree Island is another story. As
> > you may know Goree is a small Island facing Dakar
> > where from the 15th to the 19th century, the African
> > slaves to be shipped to America were parked in special
> > houses called slave houses. One of these houses has
> > become a Museum to remind humanity about this dark
> > period and has been visited by kings, queens,
> > presidents. Bill,
> > Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and before them, Nelson
> > Mandela, the Pope, and many other distinguished guests
> > or ordinary tourists visited it without bothering the
> > islanders. But for "security reasons" this time, the
> > local population was chased out of their houses from 5
> > to 12 AM. They were forced by the American security to
> > leave their houses and leave everything open,
> > including their wardrobes to be searched by special
> > dogs brought from the US. The ferry that links the
> > island to Dakar was stopped and offices and businesses
> > closed for the day.According to an economist who was
> > interviewed by a private radio, Senegal that is a very
> > poor country has lost huge amount of money in this
> > visit, because workers have been prevented from
> > walking out of their homes.In addition to us being
> > prevented to go out, other humiliating things happened
> > also. Not only Bush
> > brought did not want to be with Senegalese but he did
> > not want to use our things. He brought his own
> > arm-chairs, and of course his own cars, and meals and
> > drinks. He came with his own journalists and ours were
> > forbidden inside the airport and in place he was
> > visiting. Our president was not allowed to make a
> > speech. Only Bush spoke when he was in Goree. He
> > spoke about slavery. It seems that he needs the vote
> > of the African American to be elected in the next
> > elections, and wanted to please them. That's why he
> > visited Goree Several protest marches against American
> > politics have been organized yesterday and even when
> > Bush was here, but we think he does not care.
> >
> > We have the feeling that everything has been done to
> > convince us that we are nothing, and that America can
> > behave the way it wants, everywhere, even in our
> > country.
> > Believe me friends, it is a terrible feeling. But
> > according to a Ugandan friend of mine, I should not
> > complain because in Uganda one of the country he is
> > going to visit, Bush does not intend to go out of the
> > airport. He will receive the Ugandan President in the
> > airport lounge.
> > Nevertheless, I think I am lucky, because I have such
> > wonderful American friends. But there are now
> > thousands of Senegalese who believe that for all
> > Americans the world is their territory.
> >
> > ��������������������� Love to you all
> >
> > ��������������������� Codou
> >
> > ______________________________________________________
> > ___________
> > Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.�
> > http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
> >
> >
> > ------- End of forwarded message -------
> >
> >
> >
> Chase Twichell
> Editor, Ausable Press
> www.ausablepress.com

Sunday, July 20, 2003

slowed down day. ninian spent the night last night. he played some pleasant hillbilly trance (that's "old timey") music on the banjo. doing watercolor on clayboard, very interesting possibilities. went to mark and sharri's for baba gathering, really interesting talk by sherri on sufi kawalli music. she got her doctorate in ethnomusicolgy. wish i had.

Saturday, July 19, 2003

good news! check out my astro-gnostic probability-wave for this week:

strology

Friday, July 18, 2003

yesterday was a little strange; worked all day on various things. i think i finished one oil and almost a second. if i'm right i will have finished 3 in this lifetime. decided to wait until end of august to continue upgrade on g3, mostly zif cpu upgrade and cd burner. also got pretty good electronic-trance mix done, now to add vocals (sigh).

also caught the last half of something on pbs about music and musicians in pakistan today. Peshawar, the northwest "wild west" of that country, has outlawed music. playing, listening etc. a la taliban. an articulate member of eclectic pakastani rock group traveled there to check out the feelings of the folks who live there and the students of a moderate madras.

Peshawar and the territories in the northwest are historically an aberration. after WW1 a line was drawn by some general in london or paris - or versailles - dividing afghanistan and pakistan and split this region down the middle. there was actually a short-lived movement to establish the area as a nation-state with a name something like "peshwaristan". i say something like because i can't remember what it was actually meant to be named.

pakistani law does not prohibit music, but the influence of the mullahs and madrasi means that it cannot be performed (or even hummed) in that part of the world.

anyway the conversations were most interesting. if you accept even in a tiny way the position of the fundamentalist muslims who wield power there that the modern mediated culture is exploding with destructive images and sound you can see the problem they are dealing with.

on the other hand, looking at islamic history and especially the sufi thread, one can argue that music has always been an integral part of that tradition - kawali, rumi, etc.

so it is (to fall into ken wilber's world) a clash of the modern market driven world-centric world view and an ethnocentric regressive world view.

the answer of course is to transcend but include the ethnic values. that is acknowledge the downside of the current cultural juggernaut and play good music that reflects the higher states of mind and culture and dismisses the cheap thrill. or to put it another way, the answer is blowin in the wind.

an interesting comparison is with the iconaclastic controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries, when both the islamic and byzantine cultures decleared man made images to be a distraction from the true, the good, and the beautiful. which they can be, if the observer worships the image and not the reality behind it.

so it's all in the eye - or ear - of the beholder.

but which beholder? here again i go along with wilber: the same beholder who is beholding us.

Thursday, July 17, 2003

notmuch2

i changed the picture above and below. they were just not right. something off about both of them. hope they are a little more...interesting now.

i'm in countdown mode for trip to raleigh and on to arizona. the older i get the earlier i have to start organizing and packing. if this trend continues, there will come a time when i don't have the time left to pack and go anywhere.

i'm racing to finish 2 projects before the long hiatus. (no, not that), i mean the coming trip. want to complete a pdf file that will contain old parsons family photos so my scattered extended family can take a look and tell me who is in the photos, where they were taken and so forth.

second is another pdf file, the new life, a book i am typesetting for mr. jeff in south carolina. incorporate changes i have got, insert many picture frames and captions.

the first will be done by today, the second by tomorrow.

yesterday i was planning to drive up to mr. b.'s camping spot in yancey county, but the hot weather stopped me cold so to speak. instead i totally screwed up a water color but came close to finishing 2nd oil painting. ninian arrives sat. for an overnight stay. now i'm going to take a walk.

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

2 links to good newspaper series on voting machine, procedures story (hugely under reported).

story

more

not much

not a whole lot to say this AM. ran out of insulin in pump woke up with blood sugar reading of 530. this essentially blows my day and means taking it easy while i bring it down.

interesting discussion last nite at ken wilber group. one of the many things i like about wilber is that he dismisses the solitary holy man up on the mountain as not the way to go today, or not the way to spend one's life. or better yet, not the way to go exclusively.

when i was younger i pondered this question; i usually felt more than a twinge of guilt at any glimpses of the spirit i might have from time to time, because i couldn't relate them to the world. i believe martin luther dealt with this knotty problem when talking about the "quietists".

if i have any "faith" it is that beyond the visible world there is something attributeless without which the visible and manifest would not be. but this is the result of experiences i have had and what memory has left me, not "faith".

any faith i have is faith that for reasons far beyond my understanding i am in the world. like all of us my life seems to necessary, as it unfolds, to capital-R Reality. my existence and experience matter.

now that i've got that settled, what do i do with it?

Monday, July 14, 2003

just to be on the safe-side i checked out the white-house list of suspicious reading. so should you. thanks, tuck.

j44

A PICTURE

Sunday, July 13, 2003

jump5

A DAY

Saturday, July 12, 2003

jump3

KEEPS

Friday, July 11, 2003

doc


THE DOCTOR

Thursday, July 10, 2003

jump


AWAY



head

had a brain scan the other day. above is the result. doc said don't worry, it's going around.

i put it up because i don't have much to say today. except that the current interest in whether bush and company lie or not i think is entirely misplaced.

in my humble opinion nobody believed him in the first place. did you? so any revelations about what he knew when he said whatever doesn't matter and is beside the point.

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

here's an interesting thought: gen. wesley clark for democratic presidential nominee.

Tuesday, July 8, 2003

don't know if the google WMD thing below still works. maybe it was a temporary hack done for the "hacking" contest of a few days ago. hope it is still there.

it's dark and cool - but humid - outside this morning so i'll head out for a walk in a minute. this is easier said than done for me, since i have to check blood sugar when i wake up and if it is too high correct it with insulin pump and wait for it to come down while the sun comes up, which quite often means no walk until it's too hot. speaking of type I diabetes today is the day for my yearly retnothopy - sp? - check with eye doc. used to dread it, as blindness is such a bugaboo. nowdays i just go, thankful that somehow they will deal with me, even tho i don't fit into any socio-economic pigeon hole. in a culture that defines identity by role, marginalized pioneers sometimes pay a heavy price.

which reminds me of a sci-fi book by harry harrison i read a lifetime ago, bill the galactic hero, in which there were people called the "de-planned", who had lost thier way in the cutural matrix. can you say "marginalized"?

ken wilber, along with a lot of other folks, think that the outer edges of culture is where the action is, where the values and worldview of the future emerge. in a discussion i had with friends the other day it was observed that maybe some of us, because of this, might consider this group the true "elite". i don't. i think the "dispossesed" might be more accurate. i don't think any mature person would voluntarily put himself or herself in this catagory. but i think more and more folks will find themselves there. has to do with values, experience, intuition, and perspective, none of which are wholey self selected.

speaking of wilber, i am just about finished with sex, ecology, and spirituality, reading the footnotes at the end of the book, where i found this:

"for a particular chilling account of this retribalization and it's growing influence in the immediate future, see robert kaplin's 'the coming anarchy' in the february 1994 issue of the atlantic. kaplan also sees the world heading towards globalization, but with an extended period of retribalization: 'whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than our similarities.'

"kaplan ties his thesis to the work of van creveld's transformation of war, homer-dixon's environmental studies, and huntington's thoughts on culture clash: under various intense environmental and demographic stresses, numerous state mechanisms of governance will fragment into ethnic tribal bands. and, kaplan points out (quoting van creveld), future 'armed conflicts will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war' (i.e., regression to tribal warfare prior to state warfare about which van clausewitz theorized).

"...and thus, kaplan points out... 'in places where the western enlightment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence.'

"...as tribalized warfare increases: 'because the radius of trust within tribal societies is narrowed to one's immediate family and guerilla comrades [largely preconventioal and egocentric] , then truces arranged with one commander may be broken immediately by another.' likewise, 'when cultures [ethnicities], rather than states, fight, then cultural and religious monuments are weapons of war, making them fair game.' "

Monday, July 7, 2003

do this:

go to google and in search field type in "weapons of mass destruction", probably need to include quotes. then click "i'm feeling lucky". thanks, richard, for this gem.

Sunday, July 6, 2003

sunday morning. for some reason having to do with with when i grew up, i am always reminded of the lines from an old charly musselwhite song:

"sunday morning
everybody's in bed
i'm on the street
talking out of my head"

course i'm not.

i talked to son eli yesterday. he visited damien friday. damien is now in rehab at wake med, was ambulanced there thursday. the good news: nurses told him that in the short time he has been there, he has gone up two levels on some scale they use. get well damien, we all love you.

i'm struggling with how personal i can get with these posts. the "confessional" mode does not appeal to me. plus the personal mode is one i seem to be able to fall into face to face, but the written word does not seem able to carry my story. the words just are'nt there.

so here is an update on the gulf war, strictly my own opinion. the political machine that got us into this for whatever reason has no idea of where they are. the class of corporate oligarchs that spearheaded the effort is incapable, seemingly, of appreciating world views other than thier own severly constricted outlook. "helpless like a rich man's child" (dylan). they should all be forced to spend a month on the street with a few bucks in their pocket. whether the changing storylines that led the public were lies or ignorance does not matter. in real world terms it was and is nonsense. what is happening around the world, esp. iraq, is entirely predictable from the point of view of the man on the street. which is why i argued during the ramp-up to the war that if we won on the first day and saddam's head was fed-exed to bush, our troubles would be just beginning. any number of saner methods could have produced the demise of saddam's power.

i believe the sequence of moves leading to the war were based on the same "logic" that the tv commercials for "total" cereal use. that product touts that it contains 100% of the daily vitamins needed to sustain life, so buy it. but common sense (remember it?) tells us the only way this could be an advantage is if this were all you were going to eat during the whole day. and then you would die from lack of calories. this line has been used for at least 20 years, so the people respond to it. just as they (we) are buying into the daily sound bites justifying the coup d'etat that has happened in washington dc. enough.

Saturday, July 5, 2003

didn't sleep thru the fireworks like i usually do, my daily rhythms are in such a metabolic flux i more or less came to about 9 pm and painted for a few hours. two days before i woke up at 4:45 am, fresh, full of energy and enthusiasm and got a lot done - by a lot i mean work on my nebulous creative projects. lately i have to catch each wave of energy and ride it, but i never know when one will come.

yesterday i got a lot of phone calls from my daughter, cousin linda in idaho who i haven't seen since we were children, sister jane on her cell-phone while out walking in the summer heat of phoenix. tuned up G3 which seems to have settled down, i was experiencing a little of the inevitable system wackiness which manifests from time to time. i always attribute these things to stray muons blasting thru the electronics. not sure what they are doing to my head.

got an email from these folks who stumbled onto my site:

commonwheel journal

extremely pertinant site, great links, one of which jumped out at me:

ivan illych on what we need and what we don't.

Friday, July 4, 2003

last nite i finally managed to hook up good mike to G3, records well with no noise. i used to do this routinely about a year ago, but couldn't remember how i did it. played around for a week, and then stumbled on the answer which had been staring me in the face.

so i immediately recorded a short piece, 3 guitars, hammond b3 and percussion, and went to bed.

when i got up this morning computer would not boot up. i went thru the usual drill, and then gave up.

which was good, because it fixed itself.

happy fourth.

Thursday, July 3, 2003

thurday evening. sam dropped by. i think he's right: next step for me is periodic, routine, but very minor hubbub. reflection is a funny word. but, like my sister always tells me, i probably could use a little more structure in my life.

so i'm going to walk each morning before it's daylight.

Tuesday, July 1, 2003

rainy tuesday morning. bad night last night, couldn't sleep. listened to alex gray on shortwave for a long time. this guy's operation fascinates me. (info-wars.com) if 1% of what he is talking about is anywhere near true, we're in philip. k. dick land bigtime.

i haven't studied his documentation, but am thinking i 'll take a look at it. as i understand what he is saying:

9-11 was a setup. the FAA or defese dept was conducting an in the air test of crashing airplanes into buildings that very day.

the "mainstream" media has stated that troops were in afghanistan up to 6 months before 9-11.

iran invaision plans already in place.

prison labor ("slave-camps") already a profitable operation, the bush's own stock in one of the companies spearheading this.

terrorist threat is generated by us govt. to produce docile public. this operation goes back a long way.

pretty strong stuff, huh?