short movie demonstrates washing truck on a dark and stormy day.

meanwhile the kriminal king and his horde continue looting and pillaging.

elections as public circus continues.

contractors on the ground in iran preparing the next grab. like the iraqui debacle, any personal knowledge of the area or it's people actively discouraged. worth noting that iranians are probably the most pro-western folks of the islamic world.

the little people continue to be squeezed. from reagon to bush II, the specter of livelihood as economic slavery continues unabated.

the primary domestic result of 9/11 continues to be progressive training of population (wage-slaves) to accept life in a police state.

corporate rulers continue to buy up all the untainted water they can.

the domain of law has already morphed into arbitrary application, reminiscent of chinese mandarin era or hellenic sophists.

as in the mauve decade, robber barons monopolize distribution, only this time the choke point is information delivery. antitrust laws recede into myth.

the commons, ie public space, shrinks: "there's not enough room to be anywhere."

The Randi Rhodes Show - Message Board

The Randi Rhodes Show - Message Board: "And you ask me why I don't trust the corporate media? You ask me why I am increasingly turning toward alternative sources of news? I saw the Addington and Yoo performances on Cspan myself, but most people I know did not and they still don't know about it. That makes me crazy! How can we hope to choose a new leader wisely and reclaim our country, when so many of us don't even know what is going on?

Thanks to Randi for covering this story so well. Because of her, many people now know and have no excuse for turning a blind eye toward the commission of war crimes by our leaders. Shine a light."

"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."
George Carlin -

yesterday a very down day. after a classic night of sleepless worlds made it to courthouse by nine. jury duty. this was to see if everyone's excuse not to participate met state requirements. papers and forms cascading down in ancient patterns.

came back home and been in bed mostly every since. today i'll reset and get back in saddle. maybe with a horse underneath. i dunno. many hours of the low murmur of air america,

randi rhodes. i am getting into her. on the radio from 3-6 around here. she is smart, serious, and neat. today she was obsessing about how at the exact same time hillery and obama were doing their thing in united NH or wherever it was, ceremony of "brand-merger", cspan was showing congressional hearing featuring cheyney's personal lawyer and jon yu, state dept (?) writer of "torture memo". it will either be on you tube or expect a lot of black helicopters to be around, roadblocks on highways. questions like "does the president have the power to order the torture of children in front of parent" were answered by lawyerspeak, incredible word groupings went on for minutes, no answer.

impression of obama fading slightly - " the march to the middle" - current take on mcain: sacrificial, republicans don't particularly want him to win, they'll work the back alleys and be ready when obama presidency fails.

another interesting motif on the socialist AM radio waves: blockades, check points, "papers please..." mention made of populice being trained for police state.

for the last couple of weeks i have experienced a variety of small ailments, assorted aches and pains and minor maladies. i am happy to announce that they are all over except for a little "pain in the neck" not a metaphor. i am fit as a riddle.

finished "cities of the plain" by macartney a week or so ago. i can't remember a book that lingered so long in my mind after i finished it. altho w/ my memory this signifies perhaps nothing, it is unusual for me these days. it is the 3rd book of a trilogy. i read the 2nd earlier (an even better work IMHO). looking forward to running into the first and reading it.

trying to describe the books effect on me i used the word "physical" in a conversation this week. what did i mean? there are places in both these books that were like a blow to the solar plexus is all i can say. like smashing into samsara. too real to be unpleasan or pleasantt. the actual feel and grit of life, death on the ancient earth. arizona, old mexico, turn of the century pre-statehood earth. a run from youth to old age. dilemmas of fate. vast chunks of a lifetime lived and later dimly recalled. like geologic subterranean movements beneath the landscape of "now".

i'm going to find a sentence in the book that may illustrate what i am trying to say.

[5 minutes of dead air.]

random sentence:

"when he awoke it was not from this dream but another and the pathway from dream to dream was lost to him."

buying a ticket to colorado this week to visit eric, angela and grace. sign up for obama campaign altho i have to admit i'd rather do what i do best to help which would be to assist richard in creating a site aimed at nc blue collar workers, you know, the good ol' boys who won't vote for him.

i listened to some right wing radio call-in show last night and was impressed by the host and callers consistent contention that he is a marxist, socialist, muslim, and his wife wrote some dissertation at princeton that is more of the same. so the need is there and i think it already has "traction".

another idiotgram signifying not only a wasted youth but busy old age.

i guess i'll type in a song a wrote - or started - while wondering thru craggy gardens the other day:

so it looks like i have something to say.

but i have to find it first.

spent yesterday wondering around in craggy gardens thanks to richard and debbie. rhodo heaven. perfect weather. back home to bed early slept like a... contented human.

reading cities of the plain by macartney. this man is an artist of the top rank. if memory serves me correctly - and that is an open question - the last volume of proust's in search of lost time has the same title.

i plan to stay home today and clean house. it may take me all weekend.

if i ever get around to it i will add a bunch of political commentary to this blog, altho or because i agree with a stranger i met on the mountain yesterday who opines the government may slowly sink below the event horizon. depends on where folks put their attention. mundane day to day survival or the sorry spectacle of cartoon drama.

spent the last few days almost finishing first of 2 12 minute videos and regrouping after last weekends foray. the soundtrack to the video kind of stopped me: it was complete but did not render nicely. so i learned a lot about setting audio levels and fades in a video editor.

my two oldest children's birthday is next week so i turned out a picture for eac which i'll mail in an hour or so. then off to craggy gardens off the parkway with richard and debbie to spend a good long time wondering thru whatever is there; i'm going along with their program of taking a book, sketchbook, pencils etc and let the time and place be.
tomorrow i will purchase a roundtrip ticket to denver to visit oldest son eric and angela and meet grace, newest grandchild who must be maybe 9 months old now.

i had thought to get to arizona this trip but instead am going to keep it real simple.

truck engine light went on suddenly day before yesterday. i found an air hose split ner it's end, cut it and reattached. engine light remained on. and learned something: once the light goes on it stays on even if you have corrected the cause, it has to be reset by the same gadget that gives the service people the code for the cause.

i plan to buy a bicycle soon, or scatter or moped, used of course and if it is a bicycle three gears max. were i younger i'd bite the bullet and get a motorcycle. but not this time around.

another shot from the top of max patch sunday. there were a few groups of picnikers scattered ohere and there and at least 3 kites in the air at times. what a great idea.

the kurrent zeitgeist being a little dim to me, i'm not sure what flavor these kites were. did they include GPS? play dvds? don't know. but they brought back a memory of flying boxkites as a kid in little rock AK which is about as far back as any memory flashes i get go.

top of max patch yesterday.

wordz later.

went to barbque in emma last night w/ al, met a lot of new people and some old friends, as always i was blown away by the creativity of the crowd, everyone into something. got lost on the way back and took the grand tour in the dark, maybe an hour of confusion but i knew truck would find the way. in the meantime enjoyed the back roads, something i used to dream about during my arizona exile.

just in case my mailto:s don't work, my email is:''wyly(dot)chris(at)gmail(dot)com"

so susan drop me a line and put me in touch w. zen etc.

burned a 12 minute dvd video last night, a quick look this morning tells me it will be finished shortly, a few fixes, details, and a couple of larger problems altered and it's done i hope.

next step is a second 12 minutes which is going to be different but quicker to produce. already have soundtrack blocked out, and a vague idea of visuals.

i sent my dad a father's day card which he seemed to like. he asked me how i went about it. i am favorably disposed with starting off with a blank piece of paper, blank mind, blank plan. i let the thing assemble before my eyes and realize what i've produced only when i'm done. aleatory intuitive manifestation produced by puttering. for better or worse that's been my mode for sometime now.

i'm not coupled with this mode forever. i think it has to do w/ the tibetan vajrayana categories of form and formless. a ittle form will most likely creep into my work. it's not my intention or plan, it's just time for this. what fun!

i was once told by v. buddhist surrogate that i should not spend too much time in the formless.

leaving for hot springs in a minute, back tomorrow around noon?

when i was young i was a member of a small circle of friends in chapel hill NC. this was the post-beat 60's era, now a cultural cartoon.

which is too bad but that's how it goes. a lot of buried stories, lives, intentions, mistakes, epiphanies and wreckage. ben jones, one of the cast of characters of that now discredited time is coming out w/ a book. i hope it does some justice to the long series of changes a lot of us went thru.

this video says it all for me, especially today. (read next paragraph).
(video will be cut off on right side but i'm not about to layout page to accommodate it at the moment.)

been down and out for 2 days, must have pulled muscle or sprained back, very painful. 36 hours flat on back and it seems to be improving. have no idea of how this happened. a couple of days more and i hope to be back to my normal 75% functioning.

nightshot taken at surry county memorial day. no tripod, used hood of truck.

took this yesterday at cousin moriah's. next time i go i'm going to play music, this was a BBQ very relaxed.

wish i had something to say. . . but it's all been said already. now on top of the words spoken thru the distant ages we humans are heaping blips and bleeps on top of the words, faster and faster, burying them under a layer of iconic discourse that does not require a second human personality to perform. a long slow apocalypse displacing the soul.

i remember telling one of my children that if a person stood on a street corner and actually spoke in the personal mode of "i-thou" he or she would quickly become "disappeared", marginalized, categorized, hypnotized, devitalized.

but that was back when humans conversed.

Who Will Rule The New Internet? - TIME

Who Will Rule The New Internet? - TIME: "Every major player in Techland wants to create the next great platform, of course. What's new here is that it's possible for any number of them to succeed. 'Among the things that are different from the old status quo is the idea that one will win,' says Marc Andreessen, who helped write the first widely adopted browser, Mosaic, which popularized the Web. The Internet is a much larger playing field than PC operating systems. 'Trying to decide which will win,' Andreessen adds, 'is kind of like debating whether beef, chicken or lobster is going to win the market for food.'"

amen to that. goodbye monoculture. let a thousand hours bloom.

i used GIMP, linux port to windows, to make the above. monkeyed around a little. very photoshop like but . . . different.

lot to do today.

arabic. a word that means something like "things are as they should be". did this for friend i thought i was meeting this saturday for Bluff Mountain Festival. realized a minute ago that it is the following weekend.

which is too bad in a way because that is the same weekend URTV, the public access station in asheville, is throwing open house to drum up support.

also just realized this is my 2003rd post to this pointless blog. pointless in the best sense of the word of course.

i was fooling around with a tesla coil i rigged up from a spaghetti strainer and blown hair dryer. it was a dim gray afternoon and when the sun came out this plasmoid image manifested. after a couple of days research i determined it's origin was an ancient tintype of mae west singing to the troops somewhere in the Dardanelles during the first world war.

Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson - Books - Review - New York Times

Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson - Books - Review - New York Times: "Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop."

monday. survived the weekend. no i don't mean partying which i vaguely remember surviving, i mean the mundane confusion of getting by. for awhile i felt like the head man of a job i used to work described, not hanging by my fingernails but by fingers in the dike.

reading tree of smoke by denis johnson. recommended by chall, the son of one of my oldest friends no longer with us. johnson wrote jesus son which is the only other book of his that i have read and which blew me away. tree of smoke is a big book about the vietnam war - i think, i've only read a couple of hundred pages. like the earlier book it jumps around from story to story. the atmosphere is the orient circa 60's. this he captures well, almost in a retro way, not the mythical orient of today, but the touch and feel of a generation earlier, hot, sweaty, muddy, incomprehensible, overlain w/ the american machine of that era, rednecks and foreign service aristocrats more lost than they know.

still archiving material from very full hard drives. because of the mixture of operating systems it's slow going.

one of the more entertaining tasks this week i plan to do is hosing down large watercolor on watercolor canvas. maybe i'll film it.

started a new muzakal piece last night, haven't messed much in a couple of months w/ this application. i guess i will institute rss feed from this blog since it is highly doubtful i will be posting daily this summer.

but i'm ok and it's all good.