today's limbic moodogram turns out to be from a very ancient photo i took and developed, being a darkroom person at the time, of my oldest son eric when he was about 3 years old. we were living in basalt colorado.

yesterday... yesterday... yesterday... spent most of the day avoiding household tasks. instead spent a lot of time totally screwing up a watercolor. you've heard of overworking this medium? i went way past that stage. friday nite thanks to felicity at the bloggerama i picked up my oils pastels, rubbed,scrubbed, scratched, and layed it on.

i have a dim memory of seeing someone's work on the net who - i think - went into oil pastels with a technical pen. how this could be done i don't know, because oils pastels never completely dry. maybe it needs uv coating first.

anyway that is next for this particular graffiti like image. then with a little luck i can put it away and hide it for awhile. meanwhile i've been waiting for a week for a thin glaze on an oil to dry. want to finish it today also.

sunday has become the day i clean the house. sort of happened by itself, but i'll continue the habit, not a bad way to function for a man with my inclinations.

next week is alumni day at christ school, where i graduated so long ago. after looking at the registration form and the activities i decided to finesse it. plus that saturday evening the dylan show, the merle haggard show and an afternoon nap seems like a good idea.

another thing i've been putting off is redoing book. i got proof copy, saw a whole bunch i had to rework. maybe putting off is not quite the right word: in a situation like this i like to give the thing - and me - a rest before i wade back in.

when 3:30 rolls around i'll be at unca to hear carl ernst speak. looking forward to seeing some of my old Baba friends i've not seen in awhile.

guess i did this a couple of months ago. watercolor & gouache?

nice day yesterday. spent it standard mode, a little of this that and the other.

a most pleasant bloggerama in the evening at feliciti's in w. asheville. it was like asheville of old, sort of.

i finished reading hillman's peaks and vales for maybe the 3rd time. it just keeps appearing. tomorrow carl ernst is speaking on sufism - i think - at unc. he has written a very clear overview of the historical sufis that i liked because it was so down to earth.

dentist sent my lower plate back to lab. just from trying it a few times i feel like i've been hit pretty hard in the jaw.

i've been reading wave by walter mosely. his easy rawlins mystery series is a good one, well worth reading, covers a lot of lives and times, going back to depression texas and forward to zoot suit los angeles ghetto. he also has a series (2 books?) about homeless ex-con named "plato" which is innovative structurally. and working on the chain gang, non-fiction, is one of the most cogent exposition of contemporary limbic control i've read.

like all of the artists i have a special respect for, he is continually on the edge of new forms. i think his latest is a kid's book.

beautiful day, think i'll try a walk. soon as i find my walker.

will attend blogasheville bar-be-que tonight. that line by dylan, "feel like talking to someone, but i don't know who". speaking of which i bought last minute ticket to dylan-merle haggart next sat. worst seat in the house. thought i'd try it anyway. i'd been waffling, richard's missive that he is now playing the organ tipped me towards going. bet he's not as good as augie myers - who played on time out of mind i believe and goes back to the sir doug quintet.

otherwise up against time crunch today and i'm moving very slowly. i bet i drop a stitch or two before sunrise tomorrow.

i removed pic that was here yesterday. didn't like it, couldn't make it work. so i spent hours doing this one. from same watercolor.

gotta go to dentist in an hour.

for those of you who wonder about asheville today, the center of some vortex or another and new age theme park, check this out:

fellowsfog's latest photos slideshow on Flickr

from a watercolor i started last night.

chernoble 20th anniversary. at the time i was driving by myself thru moab utah along the colorado. heading back to arizona and intel cubeland.

yesterday i was grocery shopping at my usual place, a hop skip and jump away. it is an off-brand store, old, like the 50's, wide uncrowded aisles, no gourmet organic mi-mash. i've been shopping there for years. i noticed a plain looking blonde on the other side of the store pushing a cart and jabbering into her cell phone.

a bit later i was leaving one aisle, turning to get to the next aisle. it was a tight turn and there was a cart unattended blocking my way. i was pushing my cart to ease the other one back when the blonde suddenly appeared still with cell phone and started to berate me for crashing into her cart. i was stunned, couldn't believe what was happening, thought i was misunderstanding her, but she kept on and i totally lost my temper, got down in the hole she was in, and replied in kind. i haven't been blind-sided like that in awhile.

now the interesting thing was how quick the injustice rose to the top and triggered in my mind a host of replies, possible actions i could take, etc. that continued to reverberate afterwards. using some of the meditative space i've been working on i dampened the anger, let it drift away. but it gave me a new appreciation of road rage and the other ridiculous anomalies that have become part of life in the new millennium.

how close we all are to the edge.

imaginary icon.

this morning the weather is perfect for me. i am attached to cool shadowy mornings, when the air feels like a cool stream, and there is no sound but the distant birds.

got proof copy of book yesterday, what can i say, i am impressed by the technology of one-off color printing of a book. much different than when i was in that line of work. something must have changed... oh yeah, the technology... i think they use xerox docuprint and the color matches monitor proof very well.

i never printed out a local copy so i only proofed onscreen, a dubious approach in my experience. so i'll be proofing it soon i wish, want to get the thing on it's way out of here.

spring has sprung. took this picture out of my front door yesterday.

when i was in collage, the classical hellenistic age was always contrasted with the hellenic. the short story went something like this:

the hellenic circa 800 - 330 bce was the flowering of the classical. Apollonian, the beginning of philosophy, perhaps a mystical side we didn't hear much about (Dionysus, eleusis, delphi).

the hellenic followed (circa 300 - 85 bce) and was regarded as a step backwards culturally speaking. Superstitious, oriental, no longer concerned with the invisible ideal.

today the distinguishing between the two eras is still maintained, but the hellenistic is being looked at much closer.

a lot happened during the hellenistic: the invention of the broad avenues with sweeping monumental facades on both sides. the vista or panarama.

the metamopheus of sculpture from the depicting the hellenic ideal, the idea, the platonic into the hellenistic modeling of actual people (the beginning of portraiture), the rise of the monumental, huge statues of the despot.

the dropping of the eternal human spirit from drama and replacement with stylized character types, ie the old miser, the business man. the beginning of soap opera.

in painting the hellenistic went for illusion and was impressed with the techniques used even if there was no content, ie the story of the painter who painted a picture of a wooden wall with grapes hanging from it and fooled the birds.

why am i writing this? today's image deluge is PR. the monumental statues of 20th c. tyrants is a familiar image, the gestalt of identifying people by their occupation > lifestyle, (think bizness man and iski instructor. as for admiration of illusion, think special effects.

so what you ask at the same time i do.

if you see the picture above (blogger being just a little strange lately), it is today's sign or maybe the beginning of one. i took the photo when i was 10 or 11 i guess, with a little "spy camera", 8mm b&w. i recently recovered some small snapshots i took with this thing and think i'll make them into 8X10 color prints. part of my thinking on this is the resolution will be so poor at that size that it will allow me to slop around a bit, which is about all i feel like doing lately.

yesterday was cool and rainy, my favorite kind of day. i got out in the morning to lester road to pick up laundry, i was totally out of clothes. got by the library to turn in the parts of a CD i could find - jewel cases not up to people checking CD in and out - and visited friend Steve.

in the afternoon i paced, brooded, fixed, rearranged oil paint set up. i'm in the middle of a portrait - not my strong suit - and, having painted myself into a corner, have to save it somehow. always a lesson in humility.

this morning i'll drive to the - ugh - new walmart megastore. i'm looking for a fan for the truck. also noticed new big leak in the camper interior, so more fixit.

i've got 5 or 6 CDs i've done; i'm remastering some, figuring out where i may have alternate takes or even repeats of various pieces on them. not the kind of work an ADD addled head is good at. perseverence furthers. also have found a number of photos from harry's reunion circa '85 i want to put up on Harry's site i have been nudging forward. right now it's going nowhere fast, but then that's the way it has been, i suspect, for most of the folks who were there, if not the entire demographic of educated baby boomers.

i don't know, got a few things done this morning but since then have been avoiding the hell with it take a nap.

book is in the mail from lulu.com. they're fast.

take a nap

it's thursday and i'm trying to post one more time. i did get a boilerplate reply from blogger support so maybe can get online again at some point.

-------> finally can post again. offline since saturday. problem seems to be that blogger needed some work on their servers and did this saturday. this seems to have messed with people's settings. site feed, archiving and post pages settings had been changed. i had to post happy flower in recognition of being able to babble online again.

last of two new CDs i'm about done with.

no sleep last night. there has to be a better way.

got another load of trash ready to go tuesday.

started an oil painting. doing it fast with big brushes. i'll do anything for kicks.

front cover, more or less, of one of two new CDs i'm getting together.

yesterday i ran into puzzle of using CSS - cascading style sheets - along with blogger settings trying to insert picture into a blog. zow! picture still not up, and site still not quite back to what it should look like. an afternoon frittered away.

BTW check this out: it's a pretty squared away collection of son eli's very interesting music. he goes by the moniker of omegenon.

man in my lucid moments lately i have been wondering about suffering and the human condition. i've been more or less out of it (for sure it's more - for a day or two. i've got top teeth in now, but still can't go near the bottom set.

finally got to grocery store today, i'm set to hole up until my lower gum heals.

dealing with CSS2 for another blog. never used it before, and it's not new.

and for those of you interested in this type of thing, a parody of charles taylor's web page (WNC congressman) surfaced last week. a lot of work went into this.

long ago and far away... about as faraway as my face. photo of son nathan, halloween in jackson county.

up most of the night, the AM radio burbling and drifting. the word of the night was "messianic".

institutions wear out. history and pre-history is among other things the story of some utilitarian idea of how to organize human effort to solve some problem. the solution becomes an institution it works so well, and then, much later, slippage occurs and the institution no longer works so well. wilber defines this as "inner contradictions" rising to the surface. i characterize the process as the solution changing the problem, or the world,, so the once robust institution that worked so well loses it's effectiveness.

examples abound: hunter-gatherer bands, theocracies, commercial empires, all flourished then flopped.

now today's institutions are fading: think schools, health, hospitals, communism, democracy, electoral politics, adam smith's capitalism where one man's greed could benefit the many, academics, the nation-state, war, and a big etc.

why are they failing now? one reason is sheer numbers. in my lifetime the world population has doubled - i think. languages have disappeared. animal populations never in contact with one another are being thrown willy-nilly together.

so the idea of nations at war is obsolete. the idea of small groups using the pollution of the mercantile system (oil, guns, bombs, toxic chemicals) to harm the enemy is taking it's place.

and the confusion between these two worldviews is rampant. after the USA wins the war against terror, who signs the surrender papers? where are the POWs? the declaration of war? how do the participants of the war surrender?

the answers to these questions are not clear because the "official" institution of war on our side is not relevant. bush's war is a war in the world of brands and pseudo-events. read the image by daniel boorstein and the land of desire by william leach to glimpse the present day context. reality tv. infomercials. repositioning product (the war is being fought for what purpose?). the speeded up voiceover in ads that is not understandable, verbal equivalent of "small print".

the real world, as usual, is not that real.

==========> Later

it's so improbable that words broadcast to the world or your neighbor mean what you think they might mean, so much so that i had to get a picture up. and the strange thing is that to me the words and the image have about the same amount of meaning: not enough. enough.

spent yesterday moving slow, jaw and gums really swollen. i'll move slow today also. sometime this week i may be able to slip in lower dental plate. or not. don't you love these medical updates?

as the state of the union unravels i have been reluctant to write anything about it. it's hard to do justice to the hallucinatory newz cycle with words.

but i'll try.

the two most confusing concepts boggling everyone's consciousness today are "nation" and "war". whenever the worldview changes bigtime confusion reigns. and it is changing. the old world evaporates and something else takes it's place. the european enlightment was the last time we had to go thru this.

"nation" still has a dictionary meaning, and plays a huge part in the human experience. next to gender, it is probably how most of us identify ourselves today.

it was a useful concept that is playing itself out right in the middle of our lives. as ridiculous as it may seem, there is a trend towards identification with what i call "affinity groups". more and more people respond when asked what they are with something that they are involved with, which is not their nationality. it might be "poet", "musician", "artist", "bank-robber", "homeless", "insurgent", "lawyer" and so on. vocations and avocations.

"war" is closely connected to this metamorphose of meaning. when i was young it was pretty clear: we lived in a worldview in which one nation might declare war on another. uniforms identified which army was which, and conventions of the last 300 years held: if a soldier was captured by the enemy he was incarcerated in a stalag. the redcross knew his or her name and where he was imprisoned. he might receive a box of candy from home.

those that fought the war were defined differently than those that didn't. for example during the battle of waterloo, the nearby fields were being worked by the peasants just as they did every year.

technology and the moving hand of change put a stop to this distinction. the historical trend of war has always been to involve more and more civilians, for example the siege of tyre by alexander.

but during the last 200 years the change became complete. i don't want to go into the story here, but think WWI when the front stretched from the baltic to the Mediterranean. as it slowly moved back and forth any village or town in the way was erased. WWII air marshall tedder was quite explicit in targeting civilian populations and not factories of war. hilter did the same.

recently enemies are blowing up selected and random groups of civilians. if you think back about 150 years, the sterotypical european anarchist ran around with a beard and a bomb.

but he alsways threw it at somebody, a target, and not into a crowd of humans.

so "nations" at "war" is a whole differant thing now: you might say because profit on weapons of "minimum-to-maximum mass destruction" have been so high that the world is now flooded with everything from saturday night specials to atomic bombs. at the same time the non-military humans of the world are now on the front lines.

i'll be in recoup mode for a few days for sure. feel like i did when a sledge hammer connected with my face.

oh, wait a minute, i don't think that happened. but that's how i feel. finished the high window by chandler, all the time trying to spot what he does that makes his books so great.

no, i did not figure it out. attitude and metaphors i guess.

had lower teeth extracted this morning, ain't science wonderful. problem is upper and lowers don't mesh so go back tomorrow.

"missing" refers to my presence, not teeth. i'm swollen, distorted, in pain, drugged so i'll probably be hiding under the bed for a few days.
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saw dentist at 4:00, and now i can at least use both upper and lower teef at the same time. but put them together --- ie chew > zow instant pain. about a week with some return visits and i'll have a feel for them. both negative and positive of course.

picture from sunday walk.

35mm slides, photos, and computer hardware gone. a real hassle sorting thru these things but perseverance furthers.

tomorrow morning i get lower teeth extracted etc etc. i may be scarce for awhile.

today's icon from watercolor i just completed.

spring cleaning is what i've been doing. at first i couldn't give it a name. but i am lightening up. finished with photographs today, all slides will have been sorted by dark. i'll have quite a few pieces of hardware sitting on the street before tuesday.

picture is from a scanned gum bichromate i did early 80s.

this morning's before breakfast offering.