Tuesday, November 30, 2004

pay attention:


BostonHerald.com - Business: Economic `Armageddon' predicted


a slow pleasant week coming up i hope. finally got screen door storm window rebuilt and in place. ready for the storm. finished portrait of imago anima i have been fooling with for months. working on resuscitating quadra 650 so i can record to it from G4. got case open but can't remember how to get to motherboard. jim has about talked me into trying OSX in dual boot mode. recorded a guitar piano duet last nite.


just ran garbage out, almost missed truck. not hitting on all cylinders today. again.

Monday, November 29, 2004

this link has some bad news and some good news. i wonder which is which?

Head Transplants

Sunday, November 28, 2004

novn
finished this watercolor this morning. i guess i started it before travis's death. did more than i realized to it when i was sick. i'd pass by, stop, look, grab brush make some very necessary marks. then off to bed and i forgot about it.


what's to say? who's to say it?



anyway i like the picture.

Saturday, November 27, 2004

seem to be mostly recovered from nasty bug. restless, impatient, full of ideas and plans to do this and that. sure sign that my head is buzzing once again with images i want to move into the manifest world, that is, paper, canvas. i've slept enough since tuesday to - maybe - last me thru the holiday blowout.


for some reason during this process i have become interested in the Oedipus complex. what this means i don't know except

1) it is a part of the jigsaw puzzle with no frame that is life; no frame being the infinite extension of the plane a la escher, and

2) i must be back to pseudo-normal, checking out the obscure and meaningless, a habit of mine.


my trusty 17 inch NEC monitor is on the fritz, don't know how much longer it will last. can't complain, i think i have been staring at it over 12 years.

Friday, November 26, 2004

still sick as a - so-to-speak - dog. spent 3 1/2 hours in ER yesterday, x-ray etc., upshot is i have flu. virus, cold, the crud, or something along that line.

fell into deep sleep when i got back. woke up and there was turkey, cranberries, stuffing in the refrigarator. i couldn't even begin to imagine how it got there but it sure was good.

good friend richard phoned me later and said he had dropped by, i was dead to the world - forgive the expression - listening to NPR very loud, something about somebody chasing a chicken.

back to bed.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

straight from my rumpus room: i got back yesterday with a bad cold, sore throat, double-matrix rna virus. strange because i don't get these things most winters.



i feel terrible.

vitamin C by the handful and i'm about to venture out for zinc lozenges. but mostly i'll stay in bed hallucinating.



i've got that strange sensation i can remember from winters past. it's sort of like i'm not quite in my body. you know the sensation? if someone snuck quietly behind me and made a loud noise, i'm sure my psyche would fragment and head for parts unknown. plus i'm fixing and swapping mice and keyboards like crazy because they all seem a little off.

Monday, November 22, 2004

back in aville. last week pretty much devoted to driving to triangle, visiting with the aycocks, really nice service for travis in warrenton, good to talk to so many old friends. got back today. hiding under bed until holidays are over,

Monday, November 15, 2004

travis


Bad news. travis aycock died in an automobile accident sat. evening.


his loss will be felt by many friends and his family. his friendship was a blessing for many of us. quiet, unassuming, he had the most beneficent head and heart of anyone i know. his compassion and feeling were understated but never in doubt by those of us fortunate enough to know him. i would have trusted him with my life and guess i did on more than one occasion.


his wife of what? 30-40 years? ludie and his children gretchen and damien know how special he was. and they are.


a prayer for his soul: God speed travis. we'll meet again down the road.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

mixed up week. some days felt bone-tired all day, some felt great. a crap shoot. a case, i believe, of mixed-up metabolism colliding with the seasons rushing by much too fast.


went to hear john hammond at the gray eagle friday nite. really upbeat evening. it was his 61st or 62nd birthday come midnight, and he really looked great. i was unaware of the tom waits album he put out awhile back. he played some of the cuts from that and, of course, a lot of delta country blues about as well as anyone on the planet. see John Hammond: "Blues doesn't get any better than this, in concept or execution. Stay on the road, John Hammond."


the time i saw john must have been 65 or 66, summer. he was playing in some little joint in raleigh, and i went with a gaggle of the usual suspects from that strange and distant era. there was a party afterwards out in the country. carolina night, cool, moonlit(?), that eternal chorus of the woods critters swirling around in waves.


some evening this week i watched frontline: the persuaders | PBS, which was about commercial persuading. the first 30 minutes were so full of phrases and observations that could be taken as, in my opinion, commentary on the election i grabbed a pencil and scribbled them down as fast as i could.


here are some of them:


"someone once wrote a book called 'advertisements for myself'".


"pseudo-spiritual marketing"


"brand-forged corporate epiphanies"


"brands can create a whole meaning system for people"


"cult brands belong to tribe"


"study cults & apply to brands to see how one becomes a disciple"


"six mammoth holding companies now own all ad agencies, which have become commodities"


"the goal of a brand is to create and maintain loyalty beyond reason"

brands are becoming experiences"

need any other reason to turn off all media?

Thursday, November 11, 2004

kwik



i seem to be out of words lately, so i'll just post pictures for awhile.


for those that are curious, it took me about 1 1/2 hours to do the above from scratch. starting out with a complete blank. used photoshop 7.


don't get me wrong. i'm not saying that it's worth the time it took in terms of what you're looking at. but in terms of mental health maintenance it is well worth the time it took. maybe it's like meditation. maybe it's the total interest, attraction, fascination that i experience.


all i know is that if i start the day with a little time dedicated to this or similar activity i feel better and get more done during the day.


don't know why.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

sky33



going thru one of those weeks... when it seem's like i'm almost gone.


remember that song by richie havens? i found the picture above on hard drive while on the telephone a few minutes ago.


it might be a return to the paleolithic... got a book of cave art from the library yesterday...


the ice-age every winter, it starts about now.

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

as some of you may or may not know, by the time the election rolled around, i had already voted and wasn't paying too much attention to the daily news - i call it the daily "snooze". i went to bed about 9:30 election night thinking it looked good for kerry.



i left the radio in my bedroom on low the entire night. in fact i've been doing this for a couple of years. BBC all night long.



(i was told years ago by a fellow middle-aged insomniac what a terrible practice this was. god knows where the news goes while i doze (good title for country song?))


anyway when i woke up the next day the news was no surprise. i may have been the least depressed person in town.



or maybe i didn't notice through my normal state of depression.



anyway my feeling is that the bush situation is just more of the same thing that i have been living all of my adult life. "in the homeland we've never seen" (neil young.)



"what can a poor boy do?"(stones).
what can an old man do?



if you have he time - and you do - check out the links below for whatt more of the same is looking like today:




The Optimism of Uncertainty

TomPaine.com - Kerry Won. . .

BBC News | Front pages from 4 November 2003

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

DNC: Election 2004 Feedback

t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster

Times Online - Sunday Times

CNN.com - Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio - Nov 5, 2004

Saturday, November 6, 2004

making the email rounds:


Thomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act:


"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

Friday, November 5, 2004

gking



supposed to get cold tonight, maybe first frost. i totally lost yesterday, either 1) short flu or 2) post-election coma (short-lived) or 3) or maybe it's the weather or something like that...




been making postcard-like planer objects... now if i could only figure out what they're for.


finished the picture above 2 days ago. what it is i dunno but the colors look great in the sunlight.


today i began spring housekleening. my present system is to walk around & pick all objects up, put them in a pile in front room. then - the hard part - i go thru the objects and put them up or put them out.

i continue to get email with links to web pages where the democrats catastrophe is explained or commented on. i'll post them another day (tomorrow).

Thursday, November 4, 2004

the election "might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925..."

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Day the Enlightenment Went Out:

sleepless night last night. it's after one o'clock in the afternoon and i still haven't woken up.



here is arianna's fix on the unfortunate election. i think she is right.



"...those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room"

ARIANNA ONLINE - November 03, 2004 - Anatomy Of A Crushing Political Defeat



but her explanation is not complete; IMHO the corporate brand-name culture that we live in (under?) has hi-jacked language. the resident president is a branded icon, and that's all he needs to be. TV ads have successfully communicated to us via this language for a couple of generations now. when we see a commercial, the categories of truth and falsehood go out the window. the heavy - and expensive - lifting is done by icon, recognition of the brand.



as the marketeers say, "it works".



and here is somebody else who is right:

the election "might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925..."

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Day the Enlightenment Went Out

Wednesday, November 3, 2004

revolting ain't it?

Tuesday, November 2, 2004

the big day:


a site that plans to keep tabs real-time on election results & also any shenanigans.
indymedia.us


TomPaine.com - An Election Spoiled Rotten: "The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that."


Democracy Now! | New Initiative Calls for Mass Protest on Nov. 3 if Election is "Stolen": "That's why this No Stolen Election campaign has been put together, and we encourage all of your listeners to go onto the website which is nov3.us. Take the pledge that you will be out there on the streets with us on November 3, if need be."

and now for the important stuff:

MercuryNews.com | 11/01/2004 | That's incredible: "In short, ``The Incredibles'' goes where no purely computer-animated film has gone before. Through the combination of cutting-edge technology and the subtleties of facial animation, body gestures and caricature, it convinces you that the digital actors are alive. Animated, yes, but alive.

Monday, November 1, 2004

rtree



the noise machine is noisier than ever these last few days. at least i think it is, i've turned my hearing aid off.



and we've got the holidays cranking up already.



i walked back from richard and debbie's in the dark last night. blundered thru the bushes only once. it was oddly reassuring to stroll thru the blackness. reminiscent of the old days when i enjoyed walking thru chatham county forests at night pretty sure footed. my thinking at the time was when you are in the middle of the deep forest sight doesn't help a lot anyway.



check this out: some really nice paintings. taking a second look, they are not that good. but the painter is only 4 years old. there is something going on here, i'm not sure what.

Marla Olmstead