mmm...

vote straight democratic ticket.

it will slow down just a tad the draconian oligharchy waiting in the wings. and just a little time might allow some clarity of thought and vision on the part of the human race, without which ain't nothin good gonna happen. and it won't happen quick.

i am a little off kilter lately. wear and tear. more in good time...

let's see. can i post?

oh yes. but is my post displayed?

if you don't see this the answer is no. if you do see it i suppose i should make some observation or string some words together, but hey, one step at a time.

this morning's glyph seems to me to indicate that i should post "06 election manifesto"> so maybe i will. if i can write it.

yesterday morning i did volunteer shift for phone bank of local volunteer this was a stretch for me because i have this funny thing about phones. as far as sampling the ambiance it was pleasant and interesting to be among such well-informed folks, they (we) have it together and good attitudes besides.

i found out that i was included in the footage CNN ran at 5 last tuesday, "broken promises". i think i was one of the extras, wasn't interviewed which is probably just as well.

a piece of watercolor i've been trying to salvage. it is not a metaphore, but if it was i'd be tempted to say a piece of life i've been trying to... etc.

yesterday i voted, shopped for food, ran a few errands, picked up a load of books at library and missed the showing of CNN hour long feature at 8 pm which may have featured some footage taken a few weeks back at Asheville drinking liberally.

one of the books i came home with is
female chauvinist pigs: women and the rise of raunch culture. i never heard of it before, it was published last year. i am hoping it is a clear exposition of a disturbing trend - to me - that i have been trying not to notice.

another glimpse from the parkway last week.

yesterday was a continual bounce from painting a watercolor, bigger than usual, and as usual a landscape i made up as i went. altho i enjoy working this way, there is no doubt that the conventional wisdom that planning and composition is necessary for this medium. maybe next time I'll try it.

now for more of my confused, blurry attempt to describe today's electoral gestalt:

discourse of every kind is changing. icons and signs are replacing conversation, and nowhere is this more apparent than politics. (except entertainment, sports, consumer brands, and the lottery).

so the elections have become soap operas, signs shuffling around in dramatic charades. what is debased, dysfunctional and sad is that any conversation is on hold while the circus is in town. (you remember: "bread and circuses">). my wish is that human discourse of old, as imperfect as it was, could play a part.

i was lucky enough to have dropped in on AM radioland sunday evening to hear matt drudge and ann coulter. drudge in my book is ok, alto - or maybe because - he has a strange sense of trends, ratings, style that modern culture deals in.

however ann colter seems to speak only spin. each question is answered with a cartoonish discription of the situation, not an answer. if i can remember one of these interchanges i will report it here. in the meantime i am spending the rest of the day putting some long delayed errands behind me.

above another from the parkway. must get up there - or somwhere - tomorrow. i need lots of ammunition i mean material to work on these coming cold dark days.

at this point in my life i am talking about the winter, not the political, cultural, technical, corporate landscape. the world of brands and institutions continues to expand and be the only commonality among us humans, and if the dems win it will not change that. but it may be a small crack in the wall of "there's me, and i'm not sure whether they are real or not".

today's picture a day keeps the doctor away. a real waste of time, this one. i spent way too much time doing it. but you never know in this realm. my positioni is do it for reasons that cannot be defined, limited, rationalized or otherwise put in some box. accept doing it. the results always rumble into the passed anyway.

so i've got to cut the 2nd installment of "what is really going on in the coming election".

the points to be made go something like this: in the days when the earth was cold, patent medicine wagons plundered the praries. jump forward 150 years and the "public relations" domain has developed from this to the form we grew up with.

today it has continued to develop into "a whole nother thang". think about the name: "public relations". where did this come from? what does it mean?

"public" has morphed down thru history. start with the classical greek "citizen" right thru john q. public, then the consumer, then the audience. point is each includes a larger more diverse/complex crowd. "relations" of the unprecedented numbers (including communication - speech) changes. we are in a new world. voting makes no sense because in it's present context it becomes an economic spectacle, a charade of dramatic typoi, ghost stories around the fire, the assumed basic "good" that must be experienced by all, the world. like christianity, islam, communism, and every other idiology.

what is the nature of ideology (and how do you spell it)? what does it have to do with our present dire straits?

wait a minute, i have to get out of here.

more.

later.

today's obligatory glimpse. last week on parkway south of aville.

i find myself wanting to write about the election. it, or something like it, is headed our way. but the only way to - almost - make sense of it is to include the larger context. and it's a bit too large for me to tackle.

so here is short version of my vision of our voting:

i assume:

that things have changed and are changing so fast behind the veil of our "news" knowledge that to stick to just that, "news", "current events", would be just like shuffling deck chairs on the titanic, only it would be shuffling manufactured, you might even get away with saying "and imposed", signs of this and that, black hats, white hats, smart, stupid, and arching above all these types, "winners" and "losers".

and we get enough of that kind of noise.

so is there a bigger picture?
of course.
can we see it?
mmmmmaybe not yet.

the context of the election is change. wait a minute, don't stop reading (or in my case writing) because by change i mean to say for every "now" the world is different than it was because "now" is new. so every election takes place on a different world.

changed because the input/output of human consciousness has had to adapt, in order to survive. and the returns are not in yet.

what sri auribindo called "the frontal persona" has become the sole experience of consciousness to an overwhelming degree.

take a political candidate. the institution of the market means communicating with 250 million citizens (i'm guessing at the number). an institution can't do that without the technical profit driven delivery machine - media - in which he or she, the icon, cannot use the "personal" mode, you know, like talking at the kitchen table with humans you have history with.

with the false darwinian of "loser loses", campaigns have become gigantic dramas, charades, like two old men at the public square a hundred years ago playing checkers; you could watch, stroll around sit down. background reality.

not the constant and increasing need for the persona to respond, respond, respond. no down time. no time away from the noise machine to let the deeper but unknown source of our existence to waft its way up.

====>to be continued)<=====

this morning's limbic-graph is as usual a puzzle to me. is it art? is it wallpaper? is it the product of someone with too much time on his hands?

the answer to the last question is no.

how does one express oneself today? who is expressing what? more to the point, to whom?

"today" because the who and the whom are in flux, object and subject have lost their place and are wiggling all over the map. metaconfusion. this is good.

but it will be better when the new kosmos settles down to give conciousness a break. in the meanwhile be as confused as you can be, because that will condense the confusion duration and we can come out on the other side, where we are just plain old confused like our ancestors.

received this in email at jamwave.com. from my son eli who is known as "signal boss" over thataway. if you are interested in music check his site out:
http://jamwave.com/signalboss

i spent the last 24 hours in bed, just a touch of illness. dreams, hallucinations and so forth. the usual. not the first time in my life, probably not the last.

photo taken from parkway yesterday. i learned a lot on the fly, mostly puttering so to speak with white balance. this one is a time exposure taken after i drove off from a spot without tripod, so the camera was on a flat rock.

a very strange day.

a really strange day.

but not really.

like any other day.

finally put rollovers up top.

this morning's meditation. light at the end of the tunnel?

at 1 i'm going to moveon.org gaggle, phone banks and movie iraq for sale.

this must be one of those new lows that i hear about. can you imagine? they flutter like malavolent spirits in and out of our embunkered world. i got this after i got back from parkway, didn't make moveon movie. more in a bit.

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this one is a real mess i guess. it was a very active watercolor oil pastel india ink thing. i guess i took a lot of agression out on it. oh well, that is a part of as honest as i can be in this digital domain.

an absolutely gorgeous however you spell it day. i was going up to parkway today but time slipped away so early tomorrow i'll try again.

this morning i got taken by the spirit that has been pushing me into study of watercolor palettes, by that i mean actual pigments used together. it has been eye opening so to speak, the imformation at handprint.com is staggering, and even more importantly, useful to even an intuitive like myself.

another one from nowhere. from a foto i took on yesterday's walk.

a review of my latest (first & last?) book:
Whistling in the Dark: Poems & Pictures -- book review
a word here and there i would have adjusted, but the reviewer and i pretty much agree on what the book is about.

ken nordine's site is working much better than last time i checked. a master of sound and silence. and he's been doing this stuff for years.
Ken Nordine's Word Jazz - "Where Did You Go" Podcast

pencil sketch i did awhile back. i think this is looking out of my dentist's waiting room.

i'm going hitek here. see if clicking here works. if it does you will hear one of the best responses to telemarketeers ever. my nephew jon emailed it to me.[it's not doing anything right now, but maybe the server will catch up so i'm leaving the link.]

i finished a lot of paperwork this morning. i surely resist this, no matter what attitude i try with it. it is like there is a negitive force field around the stack of envelopes that somehow, as i walk towards it ready to deal, spaces me out and i find myself otherwise engaged. i get it done, but it sure takes a long time doing it this way.

my goal is to clean kitchen, truck. today. if i get it done i'nm taking a weeklong retreat that just keeps retreating.

BlogAsheville: "It's Peanut Butter Charlie Time"

i am such a creature of habit. the day just does not start until i post something. above is a small pencil sketch. i think i did it a long time ago in a doctor's office. one of the few sketches i didn't make up but looked at something and tried to draw.

more political stuff & nonsense:

it occurs to me creative novelty is loose in our world. it always is of course. the next minute will be a surprise or else it's the same minute it was and time stops.

but the novelty can be and is at present moment a bad surprise. Institutional world of logos and brands squeezing the life out of "democracy" while usa positions itself as it's source and takes the stance that it is compulsory that the world adapt it. similar to communist era when ussr had obligation to spread it's way of life. similar to christianity when it was obligatory to spread the word.

it is as if the one world must be monolithic, of a kind. whoever has the upper hand, whatever may be in that hand, is compelled to paint the world that color. the entire world.

as far as america's situation, we are under rogue regime just about by definition. remember robber barons? we are now owned by their successors, bandits in $2000 suits. i saw an ad for tv show about lawyers yesterday. they were on the march, facing camera, striding towards it, a bunch of them, methodically and with great determination. it reminded my of the seven samurai, or the renaissance italian mercenaries, determined, smart, movers and shakers. serious.

conditoned bandits i'd say, no idea of where they are or what they are. i heard recently that 5 of the 7 wealthiest counties in usa surround washington. conspicuous consumption has morphed into obligatory style of the powerful. i may be wrong but there is some factoid floating around about the square footage of homes built last year. like everything else in the winner take all (loser take nothing) culture, the preponderance of square footage, (we used to call it living space), is included in huge structures, what is left is spread among the owned wage slaves. and they are the fortunate, the housed as opposed to the houseless. ( i refuse to use the homeless word).

ok ok i changed the quicky i posted below. it was just not me.

of course none of them are. i'm me.

and just because i'm posting this does not mean i'm not in retreat mode. in fact i think it proves it.

beautiful night out. when i was a teen ager i would wonder all over on a night like this. in my 20's too come to think of it. maybe even a night or two in my thirty's.

tonight? ...naaah.

i could say been there done that. but it would not be true because i didn't do it tonight, as me here and now.

saw a thing on PBS last night on death valley. hit you in the head with a sledgehammer beautiful cinamaphotography. the night sky. full blown mutideminsional resonant epiphany holding you at it's exact center at all times, along with entire kosmos. what our ancestor's wore until yesterday.

and the noise machine? (talking about today's snews).

rogue regimes do not go gracefully. if they could do that they probably would have thought it foolish to play john wayne in a part of the world they did not know.

so i predict that whatever happens this will not: polls get closer, election day arrives, the dems take over both houses. and the bandit war generals, the roguest regime of them all, accepts it.

this one zig zagged right out of the old unconcious. a few minutes ago.

i'm checking out for one week, there will be no posts got to retreat.

so wonder around the site, there is really a lot happening here.

had to show off my new tattoo. i did it myself with a safety pin and ink jet printer.

i see etta baker has passed away. for some reason this news item really hit me hard. she was a graceful, peaceful 93 year old lady who played the real blues her way.
"She could easily be called 'Queen' of the Piedmont blues, because she has a grace and graciousness rarely seen."

water runs downhill. in the western states, they say it runs towards money.

photo was taken at roaring forks waterfall near celo.

natural law: downhill.

the new world we as humans are constructing: money.

i was talking with alex last night about art w/ a lower case "a". he was talking about the market. the market is a basic piece of the above mentioned new world disorder. an artist's survival depends on the markets whims on any given day. the thought of refining one's skills, talent and goal into satisfying the market is a dismal prospect in my opinion. the whole ball of wax in the branded culture means to make a living via art successfully you must: be a smoker; or be so technically proficient you can turn out what the market wants; or (and this is the best situation) be lucky and turn out what you turn out and the market likes it.

another aspect of the new post-post culture is "winner take all". that is, the top 5% of any creative endeavor makes millions, the other 95% cannot survive and the wonderful world of day job comes into play.

i've used this example many times so i'll do it again: i heard kurt vonnegut on tv many years ago say that 300 people in the world, and only 300, could live comfortably doing what he does (write novels). ditto for athletes, musicians, poets, entertainers etc. in the culture of manufactured conditioned desires, there is no incremental path to working on your work and surviving at the same time. as in apprentice, guild, etc. this is much complicated by the correlate to winner take all, which is a public persona recognizable by millions, ie fame. i have heard young people, say 20 years old, reflect this by saying they want to be famous when they grow up. as fatuous as that sounds, it is a reasonable statement given the alternative. Notice that they are not saying i want to be a famous (you fill in the noun). the adjective is what matters, not the noun. in other words to be a brand. in our culture where presentation and style of presentation is key, a public persona, a face that is recognizable to the inhabitants of the culture, is literally worth millions.

and this at he same time that there appears to be a growing, vague, but widespread feeling that the personality, ego, personal identification is coming to be regarded as the core problem of modern life. the paradigm of the personality as developing up to the point (and then stopping) where it shuts the door to recognizing, experiencing sat-chit-ananda, the real Real World.

we live in interesting times; may we see times that are more than that.

i'm back. here. where i'm back from is seen above. two nights sleeping on the ground in the dark. two things of note: as is my habit i took something to draw on, in this case a failed watercolor. i drew on top of it with an "0" technical pen. the two media are contridictory, small precise delicate barely visable ink lines and giant blurs or watercolor. it'll take awhile to finish, and even longer to see if it's worth seeing.

there were some strange spirits in the dark, they kept unrolling my story. the sequence of memories was creative, in other words i have no conviction that my story is true in cold hard fact but know it doesn't matter one twit.

a piece of multicolored glass that has been around my place for a few years now. after a morning of image splashing.

i went to a birthday party last night, kim of kim & t. nice crowd, the frothy 2% i think wilber called this crowd. Interesting interplay, i had no idea who was who but sure enjoyed t's guitar playing and singing.

this image/word thing is affecting my day to day existence.

my social persona has become so diffuse. affecting has become a slight strain, not much, it's all good, i just have noticed a change. and typing words every day on this thing, where i have less and less to say.

there is a creative grace - i think i got that phrase from t's blog - that the image or letting an image develop that makes it all easy, fascinating, helpful to the kosmos (?) and not optional. i do not enjoy the social with the same spirit.

but i am going to try for the next few weeks to actually write about something. the good, the bad, and the real. or does everything contain, among everything else, nothing? or is nothing the absence of everything?

i'm not going to stake out this path; if it happens it will, if not it won't. i mean i don't care, it's just a notion that floated into my existence, so i acknowledge it and will pay attention to it, but it's a long day coming i don't have a shade to stand in.