i've been using a new cataloguer to organize picture and audio files. and finding tons of old pictures. above is one. if it was about the size of a small wall i think it might add something to the decor of some bank.

took a tour of some of the blogs my associates in ashevilleboggers.com last night and was amazed at the creative pulse of the writing. kind of tugs me back to the written word which i've been neglecting here. mostly because i don't have much to say or express except thru the image and then i don't know what it means. if anything.

but here's the idea of the hour: i'll put up pages from book i've been fooling around with for awhile. this will serve two purposes: won't have to write anything, and might help me finalize the damn book so i can print it.

all i could come up with this morning. from a photo i took maybe a month ago.

yesterday, yesterday. . . so far away. what did i do? i think i spent the day trying to bring some order to various unfinished muzak files. if i ever complete them there will be more. played with a new way to alter midi voices which is kind of cool.

took a look at poetry book i'm cobbling together. it's got a way to go.

in other words i sat in front of computer all day.

this afternoon ninian the banjo man should drop by on his way back to the piedmont. among my friends he holds the record for trips to the mountains and back.

today's moodogram is from a snapshot taken in st. louis about 1970. yours truly and my oldest son eric. let's call it a work in progress. i seem to recall a pretty neat treatment of this photo i did at some point, but it's gone now.

went to the blogfest last night. the energy level was pretty low, but then blogging is not an easy exercise. a perfect bound paperback was passed around that was a gift, created via lulu.com. i was impressed both by the quality and the price. definitely worth investigating by those of us who have a book or two languishing in our heads.

the other evening i was treated to a meal and conversation by a new friend who brought up an old interest of mine: the iconoclastic controversy of the byzantine empire which i'm not going to bother dating, but i believe was the 8th and 9th century. icons were destroyed and regarded as a mistake, the written word considered more worthy of attention. the neologism "biblioclast" came up. surrounded and bombarded as we are today by images, this is a word that may come into play as folks realize the power of the image, which is driving more and more of the 21st c. worldview.

"the young don't read", etc. my friend sam gray and i used to talk about this. i think he was conflicted by the art of self-expression via the written (published) word. there are too many words bouncing around already and one part of his head felt that by writing he would just be adding to the endless verbiage, which becomes meaningless after a certain point has been reached. ditto with "A"rt.

i guess i feel that self-expression is not optional but a necessary act. the trick is to determine which "self" must express itself. if it is the wholly conditioned secular self we get branding which pretty much is the discourse of the day.

on the other hand i heard on NPR this morning 2 short stories read out loud on whatever the program is called that does this every sat. morning at 7 AM. they were both knockouts.

and i can't read short stories. haven't for longer than i can remember. for some reason i need to hear the words spoken. but i don't get the chance often, the mediated spoken word, ie "news", is gibberish to me. so stylized, like an endless ornate mandarin dance. so what's up?

what a surprise. scanned a pencil drawing from last notebook - still has a few blank pages - and ended up with this picture this morning. moved on to reconstructing 2 CDs i made awhile back to give to mr. syntax this evening at the blogfest, i no longer have the masters, or if i do i can't find them. then off to piano class. oh yes, i also finally sent a pasell of bills off. some bad guy was indicted today, more fodder for the ship of fools, gives the mandarins something to do, you can count on the fact that if anyone does time it won't be "the bosses", whoever they are.

drawing i must have done somewhere on trip to pulpit hill.

i have a giant list of must-do to do today.

unexpected surprise after the last color theory class: i left my survival poke - small bag containing insulin, test strips, pencils, notebook, checkbook and something else i need but don't remember at the moment - and the instructor phoned me to tell me she had it before i knew i didn't. this is the third or fourth time i have done this, not bad over 20 years. turns out she lives near me and i retrieved the gear and was kindly treated to a pleasant meal and conversation.

i've noticed a monolithic turn against the noise machine (about time) even among the most conditioned people. the increasingly hysterical pulse of existence is being ignored as much as possible by everybody. the multiplicity of facts have rendered them all of the same meaningless order. things are toppling off shelves, glitter into dust, the construct we called reality has finally become hightly problematic, and the most recent ancien regime is further in the distance every day.

what does this mean for tomorrow? a big surprise.

yay.

Baby Natalie, 4 months on the Planet

a quick 3 day trip to the tropics - chapel hill. right before i left i was looking for a fan for the trip down. hot, sweaty, same as the entire summer has been. the weather in the triangle area was the coolest i've experienced since last winter. very nice, overcast, cool breezes.

visited my son eli, his wife melissa - who i did not yet get a photo of - and their 2 beautiful children lily and natalie. my daughter nicole and husband doug and their beautiful son corbin. the cannon compound, mr haynes the song and dance man, and doug and marsha.

when i got back coats and sweaters were out and it snowed last night closing 441 thru the great smokies park. so today is winterize the house.

i missed my computer while i was gone. not a good sign. in the past it has always been a good break to get away from this thing.

made it back home. in the few days i was gone summer turned to... fall but it seems like winter.

picture i did while in orbit, finished another (small) sketchbook. maybe the 15th or so.

i'll get tomorrow's tomorrow.

absolutely no sleep last night but i did get to hear heather payton at 4AM on BBC. she has the most attractive female radio voice of all time.

i'll be in orbit for the next few days. but even tho i will be high atop the holy mountain in the lotus position i'll have my mega-blueberry cell phone HDTV nanopod with me for the infrequent post to let you know how the levitation clear light is going.

i wonder what the opposite of "levitate' is?

[later] i found out: "to sink", as in "ran into a huge sinker".

had a pleasant visit last evening with ron who is in a couple of my classes at unce old folk's home. he has some beautiful work hanging on his walls. something gurdieff said came up, or maybe somebody else said it. "if you're not having fun you're not learning". i didn't have too much fun doing the above. i'm going to throttle down on the creative bit and be lazy for awhile. take a vacation from it all and wonder around in the forest, let some of the creatures (root word from "create") in my head loose. carry my mind wrapped up in a bag hanging on a stick, carry it over my shoulder, see if there are any hobo glyphs marked on the tree bark.

this blog is turning into a photo album i guess. i'm not sure when or where i took photo, but i learned a new photoshop trick playing with it.

yesterday morning i got sidetracked working with audio. the results are found here, temporarily, until i get a CD or two up on a new site you can see here. you might want to poke around this massive archive host site, it's fascinating. finished prints of sam for his son chall. got a chromatic tuner/metronome for piano class. then took off for the parkway and drove to devil's courthouse. saw a little color, not much. the leaf lookers are in for a surprise.

it was dark when i got back. watched frontline piece on usa torture policy. ghastly. the invisible coup d'etat of 5 years ago at it's worst. the criminal oligarchy at it's ignorant worst. third world peasants being disappeared in the search for "actionable intelligence". there is no "war against terror". there are terrorists out there to be sure, but a nation cannot fight an abstract noun by declaring war against it.

stayed up late tuning instruments and finished an overworked watercolor. the chromatic tuner really helped me figure out scale on chinese fretless er-hu.

i regretfully will skip tai chi class this morning and take care of bizzness: groceries are highest priority.

today's ideogram is a puzzle to me. maybe it means i need to put my dancing shoes on.

reading room full of mirrors, a new - to me - biography of jimi hendrix. the first half of the book is about his childhood in seattle. the picture painted is one of west coast WWII "main stem", i guess you call it the ghetto. zoot suits, sharp dressed man, but not jimi who was much poorer than i realized, errant mom who was a party girl, foster caretakers, cheap hotel rooms. he had no musical background, no lessons, no guitar. the book is pretty matter of fact, minimum of embellishments. he was exposed to the music of that time and place, r&b revues; one of the adults who moved in and out of his life, maybe an aunt who raised him for awhile, maybe someone else i forget, had a collection of 78rpm blues. when he finally did get a guitar it had one string for a long time, he could not afford to buy any. when he did get strings his dad, who was a mean drunk insisted that he play right-handed but he was a leftie. he must have been a natural because he would play left-handed until his dad entered the room when he would flip it over and continue to play. it is a mystery where that kind of gift comes from. altho he scuffled for years he never lost that non-optional magnetic drive to play the guitar. he practiced non-stop, all day every day, even between sets when he played behind some of the "chitlin-circuit" folks, little richard, curtus knight etc., all of whom repeatedly fired and fined him for not staying inside the rigid revue format. he was in NYC for almost 2 years before he left harlem to explore Greenwich village where the 60s was morphing bohemia to the hippie era. naive amongst the sophisticated. an interesting book, a look at young genius, and a life that demonstrates what ken wilber describes as uneven developmental lines.

the only picture i have of the place we lived on big ridge, jackson county during the 70s. my wife and four children. it was dirt hard and probably the happiest i have ever been. when i dream, i often dream of this place. from the bald at the upper right you could see 360 degrees, into georgia, south carolina, and the great smokey national park.

oh man what a weekend. dealing with $ issues, health issues, bigtime (& costly) dental issues and the creative daemon that i've got to give attention to.

the latter is non-optional. for better or worse i've thrown my lot in with what we call "art" - notice the lower-case "a" - and it is not a question of inspiration but activity every day that makes something where nothing previously existed. there is no reasonable explanation for this.

soon i hope to have a bunch of mp3s up. print portfolio is growing like topsy.

as for the "world", i deeply believe humans land in it to deal with it for reasons not immediately obvious. but i can't get a handle on it. it seems to me that today the backdrop, curtain and set are sagging, floodlights growing dim, roof sagging. the drama of the criminal overworld goes on, but the players i know are silently creeping out of the theater, no role to play.

similar to the byzantine empire, when the hoi polloi was seemingly kept busy keeping score in a world of bread and circuses, but less obviously dealing with the invisible world of the unmanifest. there was a traveler around 1000 AD who visited constantinople and wrote that you could not walk down the street without the hearing the constant murmur of theological and existential debate, but nothing about the empire. the political is no longer personal - if it ever really was - and it seems that even the personal is fast becoming impersonal.

the experience of personhood is today a maze made up of dead ends. as bobby d. said, "there's not enough room to be anywhere".

we are in this world but not of it. i suppose we are from "the homeland we've never seen" (neil young). but we exist within the descended grid (ken wilber). the iron castle (philip k. dick). the kali yuga (everybody).

i heard on NPR this morning a commentary on the use of the military within our own borders which the concept of posse comitatus forbids. but that will change for national emergencies.

we are today experiencing "the long emergency" and it would be perfectly reasonable to use the military and other resources to deal with it.

except for the fact that the criminal oligarchy can not be trusted. not because they have a conspiratorial agenda, but because they are ignorant of the street where we live. it's not on their map.

and to top it off i noticed on television this weekend a lot of ads for plastic toys; it's october, get ready for xmas.

photo i took from ed and barb's deck. it was a pleasant break to visit them, otherwise a pretty flat day.

i stumbled on a yard sell around the corner in the morning and bought 3 large picture frames which i can put to good use.

as some of you may know, i dink around with audio as well as visuals to pass the time. but i have yet to figure out a way to put them on the net without severe quality compromise.

so i was delighted when my son eli turned me on to a site where this sort of 22nd c. folk music can be accessed. check here to hear what he's doing to satisfy his creative daemon: his nom de musique is Omeganon.

as i understand it signed artists cannot use this site, so it is a treasure trove of art with a lower case "a", which as far as i am concerned is the only thing that can save the world. hyperbolic perhaps, but IMHO that is why the kosmos is, and we are of the kosmos.

which is why this blog has morphed over the years from political and cultural observation to sheer play.

anyway i'll be parking some mp3s at the site soon.

while looking for snapshots of my old friend sam to print for his family i found this. he died not long ago. i think this photo could be nobody else but sam.

if confusion, contexts slipping & sliding all over the place and curve balls are a sign of life, my morning has been real lively and probably real as well..

the afternoon went as well... A little ambiguous huh?? but got to piano class where i am so confused because i can't figure out what to during the week.

practice.

got to the doctor's appt. right after class, a lot of yearly bloodwork, i think my chemistry is a little... addled?

visited george and ed on the way back, the windows are open and the air is fresh.

ok ok no picture today. got to get back to writing short, pithy, thought provoking observations if i'm going to enter novel writing contest. maybe even if i'm not. plus i want to crank out color prints for awhile, so i'll be vacating 72DPI land for awhile.

yesterday was school day. tai-chi in the morning taught by don pedi. he's very good, manages to impart a lot of unspoken context along with technique.

color theory with gloria gaffney in the afternoon. i very much like her approach, down to earth, basic, extremely useful.

came home, hassled via phone with supply order for insulin pump, happy to say i think all of the kinks in the supply chain are ironed out. then a long talk with my sister in phoenix, clarified a few points concerning trip out west and what to do about teeth.

woke up at 6 and of course instead of a walk sat in front of computer for a couple of hours catching up on "stuff". went through huge box of photos yesterday looking for a picture sam gray's son chall would like. of course it was at the bottom of the pile, but the excercise was a good one, found a bunch of older photos i want to resuscitate. the above mentioned couple of hours in front of computer i spent working on a 35 year old black and white snapshot which it seems to me i reworked years ago but that was then and now is now and i can't find whatever i did with it, so i started it again.

i've put up on "muzak" page some pseudo-streaming music. the files stream good, now i need to up the sound quality. they are samples i snatched at random, will replace with some recent finished work.

got a beauty in spam email this morning:

"endothermic or richardson some it harriet it's on russ not
in drastic a see directrices be a therapeutic may try
bemoan andit's solid and.
Update on site
teetotal try swarthout and the phoenix and and driven ,
see ruination may it's metallic it try call try in
trigonometry !not franco it."

now that's what i call meta-spam.

ran across this item: if you use a digital camera you might want to read it - and weep?
NEWS! - CCD failures: the bigger picture

another day with not much to say except the above picture which i just finished. so why am i blogging?

to get the words out of my head. to get a clue about what my mind is doing besides if anything pacing around and round in ever tightening circles. to keep me off the street.

i'm switching to making color prints for a week or two, have a great backlog. portfolio is starting to look real good.

i just realized that this weekend when i go to chapel hill is not the following weekend when ninian has colloquium on "where did the time go and why." so i guess i will stare at the calendar for awhile.

this morning's hieroglyph indicates a busy day. maybe.

now about this bush thing: i think everyone, our fellow citizens of all flavors, is now implicitly or explicitly in a waiting mode. the stage has been set, the characters have gone too far into their "fate", character, destiny, whatever you want to call it. the dynamics of the dramatic threads are developed so far that any attempt to modify them is all but useless.

result: acceptance of the drama. waiting for the denouement. any day now.

today's hieroglyph. a good day.

i'm due at doc's in 35 minutes. gotta run.

chose photo above at random, worked in photoshop about 2 hours.

went on line to upload it and was i surprised to see current posting august of some other year. then i remembered i've been tweaking the whole blogger setup and must have walked away from it last night.

the 30 day novel extravaganza is about to start. if i could type fast i'd add it to the list of projects i'll never finish.

personal computing in many of it's manifestations sure is a time-sucker. lately i'm attempting to place mp3s that stream. lot of time spent in digital limbo, doing this and signing that. it's noon. i'll be back.

ok i'm back. screwed up blog template big time last night, it's almost back together.

Welcome to the Hackocracy: "In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton warned that, in presenting nominations to the Senate, a president 'would be both ashamed and afraid' to nominate cronies--or, as Hamilton called them, 'obsequious instruments of his pleasure.' Maybe politics was different back in the 1780s, but we have watched Bush appoint many obsequious instruments of his pleasure. It may be his legacy: George W. Bush--he took the shame and fear out of cronyism. "

good piece from gore, and a possible solution for the dismal noise machine:
"It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse ."
Text of Gore Speech at Media Conference | MediaChannel.org

above another 60 minute wonder. think i'll do it over tomorrow.

the raaaains came... woke up to pitter-patter of rain. pretty much wiped out walk on parkway i was going to do with bobby but i'm fine with that, free day, nowhere to go, i can catch up on living maintenance.

my son eli has some mp3s up here.iSOUND.COM
you have to sign up (free) as a listener etc. but the streaming and sound quality are pretty good. navigation at this site is a little frustrating but perserverance furthers. eli's artist accounts are 2, kithira and omigammon.

got this in email, very stylish spam:

"
Hello, Do d less ations? you want to spen On your Meddic


You can do it with us - Get detailed infformation

Vi
Am
Le
Xa
Va
Ci iag
bbi
vvi
ana
ali
ial ra $
en
tra
x
um $
is $ 3.33
3.75
1.21

plus many other
Have a good day"

drew this last night listening to tibetan monk. a little pixie dust this morning.

i had one of those weird energy swings yesterday, worked on this & that until after midnight. this morning high blood sugar keeps me out of tai chi, but i will devote myself instead to cleaning the house.

during the day the noise machine pip[ed up periodically: i heard tell of martial law when the avian flu hits, i heard we are the only country in the developed world that is not stockpiling vaccine, i heard of some prescription medicine that will prevent it if you take it right away, i heard about stephnopolis's statement that one of the many corruption deals floating around involves bush & chaney. bush appointing his mouthpiece to the supreme court, emerging evidence that the government has been working covertly to control the weather and made a few slip ups in the gulf.

that's why it's called "noise".

this morning's graphic talisman. not sure what it bodes. i did make one discovery making it. my friend jim was telling me that he didn't like the way photoshop 7 would not let you see the size of the brush or other tool he was using in 7 so dropped back to an earlier version. i didn't know what he was talking about. i ran into the same problem this morning. working fast like i do i did not have the time to look into it. but i think maybe caps lock engaged is the culprit.

yesterday was a down day, i was not worth a damn. better today i got a lot to do. one thing is to fix leak in ancient toilet. my landladies pathology surfaces on matters of this sort. she wants me to fix it rather than pay $80 to a plumber. then she wants a letter from me to the water people so she can get maybe $20 knocked off her last bill. well $100 is a $100, so that's understandable. but working this way since the 50's she now has such a maintenance nightmare on her hands it's scary even to think about.

darwin shaw, an elderly Meher Baba lover who spent the 30's on with Baba and, in his 90's was the sweetest guy you'd ever want to meet, passed away sunday in the asheville hospice. he had been here a very short while with his daughter and her family. services will be in myrtle beach.

i've expanded the image archive, it now contains twice as many pictures. take a look if you're so inclined.

been listening to the new CD i cobbled together, probably make a few edits before the virtual release party.

dr. jr is back with bev from road trip out west, i'm sure there are some stories about it i'd like to hear.

rest of the day: cleanhousegroceryshopgotopharmacy... can't delay it any longer, but it will be fine, mind over matter, agoraphobia is on the wane.

yesterday was yet another strange day. out of curiosity i began rummaging around audio recordings i had made or half made during the last 12 months and shazam, at 6 in the evening i have a CD of sonic "stuff". now i have to listen to it.

today i got up and the morning quickly dissolved into tangents, blind alleys, and show stoppers. so i hung it up and took a long nap which i don't often do.

probably will push chapel hill visit back a bit.

so now blogger is playing ping-pong with me trying to make this post.

something is in the air.

natalie & lily from a shot their mother sent. i hope to see them next week, sort of gearing up for a visit to see my children & grandchildren.

above, photo from sketchbook. i've decided that these quickies are analogs to "cartoons" in the venacular of 15th-16th c. classical art. ie, wait for the print.

last nite attended the blogger cotillion, for a full account of the evening visit blogasheville. more ideas, anecdotes, and skewed observations per capita - per head - than any table in aville last nite.

what is the link between iraq & katrina? i've heard a lot of justifiable negative commentary on both, but what's the common thread?

bush and the hostage republican party, of course, but i'd like to hear more about why the criminal oligarchy botched both.

my take: the junta and fellow travelers are unaware of the personal experience of living on the planet today. they are isolated. crouched inside their mental fortresses, they are literally - well maybe virtually - cut off from the street. they've never been there. kind of like a marooned population, too much inbreeding.

this would be sad but not critical if they lived far up some isolated cove.

but they are (trying to) run the world.

so they really didn't know that the iraqi man on the street so to speak has a personal history and his or her own way of looking at things. and they really didn't know that there were real people in new orleans. notice that in both examples i use the word "know" as personal experience, not a powerpoint presentation.

if you were to sit down and talk to any of this ilk, it would not be like the conversation some of us enjoy from time to time, when the conundrums of personal life are acknowledged and the difficulties and possibilities of personhood taken for granted.

"...helpless like a rich man's child."