4.8.5

i was really dragging yesterday. went thru the whole day in a fog, a dense fog. this is very different than in a mist by beiderbeck.

but 13 hours of uninterupted sleep seems to have changed things. i even remember the dream i had which was a visit to something like the exploritorium in san francisco - which i've never visited. this was a handmade non plastic venue where nothing was as it seems. full of rooms vaguly resembling the rooms in the "real" world, but everything was hand made, full of natural textures, almost like fibre art. i spent hours picking things up, like a book, telephone, and realizing that they contained hidden compartments that unfolded to other hidden compartments. it was like living in a soft fabrge easter egg where everything was a soft folding fabrage easter egg. and the place was crawling with parents and their children, all happy to be there.

saw jane fonda last night on the charlie rose show. she has written a memior. i really admired her take on the last third of life. she was right on. she said she has stopped moving laterally, horizontally, and it was time to be concerned with the vertical.

as the infamous baby boomers realize this i believe there may be a cultural shift redefining what old age is for, and it's not going to be living in a gated community hiding out.

now for something about the young: check this out, a sweet downloadable song by a pair of young ladies newly arrived in asheville - the paris of the south.
divineMAGgees : female rock duo : music

i got a real kick out of this. it's a site with short downloadable films, purportedly playable over dial up as well as broadband. the one you want to take a gander at is about an airplane.
IFILM - Short Films: 405

spell checker not working, i'm going to put this up as is.

4.7.5

found this one. pretty cool, huh. i like it. i think the notecards and prints i do for the tourists this summer might all look a little this way.

everywhere i turn, even though i have turned off all media - except for the radio which is on all night, AM land - i'm hearing that our country is no longer a democracy. heard jeremy rifkin say as much touting his new book.

we need words. new ones. we need to create a discourse to get at what the country is, we know what it's not. post-modern oligarchy? fascism with a patina of populux? the biggest banana republic in the world? maybe rube heaven?

whatever it has become, my take is let it roll into oblivion. play with it. don't be afraid. don't not be afraid. be what you are becoming, a real human with a consciousness that is not only your right to be, but your moral responsibility. lose the modern persona that has encapsulated you. suffer. have fun. it's all going to go away, evaporate, because it's just a bad movie made by maniacs. have nothing to do with it.

turn away from the shadows and say hello to the light.

for example, why is this the case? it's wrong, we all know it:
MediaChannel.org - A Global Network of More Than 1,000 Media Issues Groups
"Due to unprecedented media ownership concentration, just five companies own most newspapers, record labels, concert venues, movie studios, cable companies, billboards, book publishers, and radio and TV stations. They control almost everything we see, hear and read. And the most important parts of the media value chain -- artists on the one hand, and communities and consumers on the other -- unnecessarily suffer most from these unholy sleeping arrangements:"

4.6.5

this picture was taken from colorado driver's license circa 1969. i cleaned it up quite a lot.

it was taken in a small basement stone chamber at the then pitkin county courthouse. present were myself, a policeman and dr. hunter h. thompson.

i look different today. so does hunter. but at least he has some plans for the future:

CNN.com - Thompson's ashes to be shot from cannon - Apr 5, 2005
"DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 53-foot-high (16.15 meter-high) sculpture of the journalist's 'gonzo fist' emblem, his wife said Tuesday."

4.5.5

drew this while watching unc win final four.

did not wake up in time for class today. wonder what i missed. something about the brain i suppose.

doug dropped by on his way to yancy county. we talked about the usual from our separate but quirky point of views. for me, living in this time and place is like living in china and not speaking the language.

and maybe knowing too many other languages to attempt to learn a new one with the hope that something meaningful will come of it.

which is why it's always a delight to talk to an old friend from the same world - time & place - no translation required. try to watch television and do that. doesn't work for me.

it's a quarter to four and i'm about to eat breakfast. daylight time changes seem more and more monumental as i grow older. not trivial.

not much in the air today, total transparency equals nothing to see. which is ok, i've seen enough.

4.4.5

sketch i did yesterday at the riley's house during a gathering of Baba folks. julie and rusty from nashville were performing, piano and guitar. ( that's rusty's mike stand you see in the sketch).

really nice folks. a large gathering, a few folks i hadn't seen for awhile. beautiful spring day.

earlier i walked for about 2 hours, went downtown to card shop to see what the local artists were selling in terms of note cards. decided that the ones i had put together here were too small, so i'll be redoing the lot.

when i got home about 8, there was a message from dougie the nail who just blew into town, so i drove to steve and rachel's to visit.
two very different worlds.

couldn't sleep when i got home, so stayed up working on oil pastel and composing a piece of music which i'll listen to in a minute, have no idea what it is.

easy week coming up. at least it seems that way at the moment. i'm set to move on digital camera purchase. it is non-optional for me, must have seen a dozen beautiful shots during walk yesterday.

4.3.5

photo i took at my friend sam's place. not too happy with it's present color etc, but i ran out of time with it.

daylight savings time: what a surprise.

one thing about the pope, may he rest in peace: he was the only head of an early 22nd century institution who was man enough to enter the public domain, as a man. might be the last too if i am right about one of my pet theories, the demise of the institution as a way to motivate and organize people.

here is an example - sort of - of what i am talking about: humans vs the collective humans, ie institutions; corporations, the judiciary, schools, hospitals, etc., all when you get down to it fear driven and anachronistic in today's world:
Wired News: It's Not Graffiti, It's Grafedia
"As Geraci puts it, grafedia is chiefly concerned with the idea that the direction media moves in is preordained, but it's up in the air as to who can control it.

Today, companies with big advertising budgets are the main players in interactive media, engaging in activities like online ad campaigns or billboards encouraging some sort of viewer involvement. Geraci would like to change that.

'Grafedia is the option for the little guy to get involved in that dialogue,' he said."

4.2.5

another saturday morning. i can almost remember when i would have said "another saturday night", but that is terra incognito for me these days.

or maybe more accurately whatever the latin is for "forgotten" rather than "unknown".

i spent the whole week in a hurry. believe it or not i have just caught up on the household, truck, and other non-optional tasks, all pressing since i returned from toccoa 2 weeks ago.

i guess that is what the picture above is about. did it last night.

the man we can't quite forget:
Daily News Transcript - Arts & Culture News
"Like his literary role models, Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac mythologized the vast land and its hobos, outlaws and cowboys. So he transformed his own life into a national legend that, improbably, sent a restless generation into his own footsteps."

the sufi's are knocking on my door more than ever. various converging events tell me this. here is one item about them:
THE SPEAKING TREE: The Psycho-spiritual Dimension of Islam - The Times of India
"A Sufi can be distinguished from others through his detachment from mate-rial life and his ecstatic devotion to 'The Divine Life', free from pain and sorrow. The Sufis are people who prefer God to everything else and God prefers them to everything else.Sufism or tasawwuf, in Arabic, is the inner mystical or psycho-spiritual dimension of Islam. Today, how-ever, many believe that Sufism is outside the sphere of Islam. Despite its many variations and expressions, the essence of Sufi practice is that the Sufi surrenders to God in love, over and over; which involves embracing with love at each moment the content of one's consciousness as gifts of God or, as manifestations of God."

and this item brings to mind that if i were not such a retrograde techie, i'd be cranking out this sort of DVD flash quicktime statements (or thinking about it anyway):

Disinformation :: Award-Winning Techno-Spiritual Web Epic Comes To DVD
"'Hailed by Wired Magazine as 'Philip K Dick meets the Tibetan Book of the Dead', the mesmerizing 'cinematic literature' style of the Broken Saints series is entirely unique, and the DVD version builds upon the presentation with all-new art, intense visual effects, completely immersive Dolby 5.1 Surround, and acclaimed voice narration from a Vancouver cast that includes William B Davis (Cancer Man from The X-Files)."

go here for a sample:
Broken Saints

4.1.5

i' way ahead of the astrology column this week.

signed up for a month free to integralnaked.org, wilber's site. you get a free month. pretty dense place. much multimedia, definitely broadband only. so far haven't figured out how to hear any of it.

question: what is the "eternal now?"
answer: now.

Frenzy Begins Over Cookie Alternative
"The technology is based on a feature of Flash MX called 'local shared objects' (SOs), which can easily be placed on a user's machine by adding a piece of Javacript to a Web page. SOs are similar to cookies in concept and function. The main difference is Web users don't know what SOs are, and are therefore unlikely to delete them. Additionally, commercial anti-spyware applications do not typically block these files, as they do cookies."

3.31.5

today's icon. another pencil, no it was ink, drawing.

i'm talked out. i guess i'll have to reach out for some interesting words.

like this email (thanks T)
---------------------------
subject: Just a Minute

"Rudolph Steiner (the great German mystic) describes a hierarchy of consciousness, from the lowest pebble to the highest spiritual being. On earth, a person who achieved truly rational consciousness (of course, for Steiner, rationality would include spiritual awareness) would be at the highest level of thought that we can imagine...............According to Steiner, along with the self that we perceive in daily life, the intractable "I," there is another self, a hidden spiritual being, which is the individual's guide and guardian."

Just for a minute, even if a skeptic: Stop, listen: . Do you get just a flash of a Presence? Can you feel it? Even if, through bias or speed, you can't- it's still here. If so, do you think it's your imagination? With practice, you can learn to tell the difference.

T"
-------------------------
or this.

Evolutionist Theories and Whitehead: "'Emergent' evolutionism (a term first popularized by C. Lloyd Morgan) is a special case of the former, in which it is asserted that evolutionary progress is, on occasion, discontinuous -- exhibiting entirely novel features whose appearance on Nature"

what this means to me. the theory about how life evolves - or ideas, societies, cultures, individuals - touts a principle that explains past development but can not predict, based on the same principle - what the next development will be. thus the "creative emergence" of whitehead.

it is always "now". but now is always new, a surprise, unpredictable. humans are not put together to deal with this very well. how to include "thinking" but not be "thinking"?

see what i mean? i just don't have the language to talk about consciousness. so i'll shut up and go for a walk.

3.30.5

"content is king" was the buzzword for the web community awhile back. still may be. but the language of public discourse has deserted me. i can't keep up with the nonsense i hear and see in the noosphere.

the creative emergent is what i'm interested in, and it by definition doesn't exist (yet). (see whitehead and wilber).

so what does a poor boy do? me, i'm going shopping instead.

3.29.5

late in the day i found myself with pencil and paper and started cannodling. two hours later you see the result above. that's moving pretty fast for me, or maybe not. maybe that's just how it goes.

went to brain 101 today. very dense lecture by nurochemist (i think). in one ear and out some other.

i've been glued to the computer for a few days.

i've got to change my way of living.
(old blues refrain)

3.28.5

stayed glued to computer just about all of the rainy day yesterday.

finished layout of poetry book. now to add hi-rez color illustrations. spent awhile updating archive links. this last is a tedious procedure, but when it's finished all archives will be accessible - along with any pictures they contain.

is it worth it to update the archives? probably not, personally for me it is worth it because i run across so many forgotten days and thoughts.

played with a color foto, results above.

paid bills, made another dental appointment. hope it is the last.

ready to drop about 30 new photos into newlife book.

managed a trip to pharmacy for insulin. i went with cards, paperwork, and it went quite well. and stopped at car insurance place to pay them.

so why do i list all this stuff? i guess it is because i wanted to see what yesterday was about.

unplanned: 5 minute recording of guitar, chinese erhu, and keyboards. sounds surprisingly good.

here is something worth reading. it is not overblown,but it will curl your hair. reminiscent of lewis mumford, hillman, and chomsky.
RollingStone.com: The Long Emergency : Politics:
"Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny."

and here is a review of dylan's chronicle v.1. i don't agree with all of it, but it raises some interesting points. one is the same thought i had after finishing it, a great picture of the textures of a world that has disappeared, the america i was born into.
Bob Dylan's "Chronicles" Reviewed by James Howard Kunstler
"The note about Booth is indicative of a keen interest in history that recurs throughout Chronicles."

3.27.5

just finished reducing image of this watercolor to fit notecard. this gives me 13 and i was only aiming for 12.

today was like a celtic easter, damp and raw, gray, just the day to not go outside.



this is the second oil i ever finished, done awhile back. it is dry enough so i could scan it. the story is that i worked and reworked it for months, there are a lot of paintings underneath the surface.This what surfaced. a tad creepy i guess.

as usual i worked with no idea in mind and this is how it ended. it is not a portrait of anyone. i call it the muse who is not amused.

rainy easter here. i attended memorial for liatrice yesterday. she was a most remarkable person. even from a distance and fighting cancer she brought an unmistakable beatific glow into the room with her.

tried to catch up with folks who went later to chinese restaurant, but i must have gone to the wrong one. so i did something i've wanted to do since i have lived in aville, got a hot dog at "the Hot dog king".

got a mystery at north branch library i've been sporadically dipping into, madusa by michael dibdin. i'm going to crank up OCR software and try to grab a few paragraphs from it. you'll see them here soon.

3.26.5

Good day yesterday, finally finding things and organizing. got color printer going, printed a couple of pieces, they look great. worked on an ancient picture for dr. r. i promised it to him awhile back. almost done. wrestled with new photo files for the new life book.

here is the poem i found and lost and found again recently. i may place this at the end of book of poetry i am putting together, "whistling in the dark".

The End Never Ends

End of the Book,
End of the Trail,
Confusion vanished
That I knew so well.

I don't remember
Where it came from.
The songs i forget
But some I can hum.

Autunm slides in
The air settles down.
My thoughts remain lost
I hear winter's sound.

Energies ebbing
It blows me away.
Morning Light dims,
The children they play.

Under slow light
The Garden's a riot,
The Lake is a laugh.
I walk real quiet.

Who said I come
Who said let go
Who said I thought
Who thought they know?

The beach is silent
Dark like the light.
Waves wash my mind
With the blackness of sight.

Time hunkers down
It's all the same day.
Same people same person
With nothing to say.

Some world
Surrounds me,
The scenes that I know
And the scene I don't see.

The difference is nothing
The nothing you know:
Ten thousand things
All in a row.

Who's seeing what
Is what i want to know
But I know nothing.
It might be time to go.

Peace to this morning
And the three AM burlesque.
Twitching shadows dance
The Dharma of the Blessed.

3.25.5

today's signpost. i think it might mean i get to stay home today and putter.

already been out and got 2 new tires for truck front end.

beautiful morning, sunny but still fresh from the night airs. going to walk up the mountain a little.

my place is really trashed. can't find anything. i really do plan on puttering, ie wondering around and rearranging items. all day affair.

found another poem last night completely unexpected. not sure when i wrote it but it sure wasn't now.

... ok i just looked for it, can't find it.

so i"m off to find things..

[later] like knowing what you don't know, finding what is lost when you don't know what is lost goes very slowly.

meanwhile this article made me wonder whether i and my ilk will somday look back on now as the german jews looked back on life in the 20s from treblinka:
The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay(you have to register but it's free.)
"The religio-hucksterism surrounding the Schiavo case makes DeMille's Hollywood crusades look like amateur night. This circus is the latest and most egregious in a series of cultural shocks that have followed Election Day 2004, when a fateful exit poll question on 'moral values' ignited a take-no-prisoners political grab by moral zealots. During the commercial interruptions on 'The Ten Commandments' last weekend, viewers could surf over to the cable news networks and find a Bible-thumping show as only Washington could conceive it. Congress was floating such scenarios as staging a meeting in Ms. Schiavo's hospital room or, alternatively, subpoenaing her, her husband and her doctors to a hearing in Washington. All in the name of faith."

3.24.5

today's psycho-gem. a little on the somber side, don't know why.

yesterday i went to my first outdoor landscape oil painting class. took place in botanical gardens, about 5 minutes from here. the deal was to wonder around and sketch, coming up with something that we would paint on location in the next seven weekly meetings.

with a pencil i usually work fast and loose. this time at the end of two hours i was still only half finished.

i spoke to fellow student on the way out and said "wasn't that the fastest two hours...blah blah blah".

he said "it was too quiet. scared me".

3.23.5

today's picture. nothing special, just another dream. i used some guach which is something new for me.

the word for the day is "feeding tube".

i've been dipping into alfred north whitehead. i thought he was a matemetician, which he was. but after he moved to the usa he wrote some very cogent books about change. couldn't find the quote i was looking for, and no way am i going to type it. found some interesting quotes though:

Unconstrained Quotes:
"The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see." - Huang Po

3.22.5

just went for first class of "exploring consciousness". roughly an overview of last ten years work, research in the world of science, what wilber calls "the descended grid" or upper right hand quadrant. 70 people in class, i'm betting at least 25% will bring up the difference between brain and consciousness. i know i will.

i'm cleaning up old unused links. this i think i thought was a good source of news not snooze:

Global Vision News Network:
"News Not In The News"

i forget why i thought this might be of interest:
Barron's Online - Fighting the Tape
"'Like most cliche's,' I wrote, 'the term 'liberal bias' has a grain of truth, and was probably more valid 20 years ago when conservatives still could plausibly view themselves as a beleaguered minority.

'[But] the idea of an all-powerful liberal media (or establishment media, as the left would call it) that can manipulate public opinion at will is a fantasy.'"

now i remember:
substitute "right" for "liberal" in last para and it is not a fantasy.

something to ponder:
ZNet |Activism | A FAQ: What do you think about suicide bombers?: "why ask about suicide bombers rather than about bombers simpliciter? Is the questioner interested in our view about suicide bombers as distinct from non-suicide ones? Surely, whether a perpetrator of a bombing commits suicide in the act is -- morally speaking -- not the principal issue: what matters most is the bombing."

3.21.5

3.20.5

back from SEG no problem. left new telephone unplugged so any messages not recieved, sorry.

very special time and place.

3.17,5

i will be incommunicado - more than usual - for the next 4 days. why?

well because pluto in retrograde has dislodged my triune scorpio and confused it with the 7th house. the resulting sunspot furor has my bluberry - or is it blackberry - fritzing and i can only pick up boulder colorado. i';; be back when the muons settle down.

3.17.5

offline till sunday.

3.16.5

big storm coming. got oil changed this morning (and bought a coffee brewer), then drove to winnie's and packed up stuff. now that have put up a picture i feel the day can begin. it was a watercolor i finished this morning with oil pastels.

anyway i'll be on hiatus for a few days and have nothing to say about context all the way up and all the way down.

3.15.5

3.14.5

i seem to be putting almost everything in order not to go out and do anything. that must be why they call it "march madness". agoraphobia to the max.

the above illustration is an example. it is one more iteration of a pen and ink i drew in the 70's. i should have been "takin care of bizzness" as they say.

no harm. got most everything rolling. and the picture, she is nice, eh?

3.13.5

took a chance when i woke up this morning and played with this pen and ink. not real pleased with the result but it is what it is. [i changed it later -?]

the picture has a history, it was drawn in the 70's during a long night living in jackson county on big ridge. it was the first i'd drawn in maybe 10 years and i enjoyed it so much it led to a pseudo career as graphic designer.

beautiful day today, i'll walk up the tallest mountain i can find.

if i have the time. scurrying around getting ready for trip to toccoa.

3.12.5

there's nothing less interesting than listening to somebody relate the dream(s) they had the night before. but since i lost the ability to remember my dreams some time ago, and had a humdinger last night, i'll tell you about it anyway:

i was in a work situation which was a large, in fact huge, corporation - intel. i was dressed in coat and tie etc. for some reason. but i was lost in a vast series of rooms, staircases, elevators, cul-de-sacs. there had been many changes, reconstruction was in progress, and i couldn't figure out how to get where i was going.

every room, hallway, office, auditorium or whatever i passed through was packed with people, all going somewhere. like an airport. i was getting roughed up just wiggling through the crowds, shirttail flapping, coat not fitting. every place was ornate, baroque. i kept struggling. the crowds got thicker. cameras and attache cases were stacked everywhere, as if other people were also lost, and lightening their load. every now and then i would tag along with a moving group, but we always ended up nowhere.

at one point i somehow exited past a security point, was outside in some urban nightmare, and could see the complex i had been floundering in miles away, towering over the city like a nuclear plant.

later, back inside, i made a startling discovery: a narrow diagonal hall took me to a vast park-like space as big as many football fields. it was walled and had an impossibly high ceiling. it was then that i realized that it each of the four walls were the structures i had been struggling through. i had to cross the space - which had a few people milling around in the distance - to get to the opposite corner and enter through another narrow diagonal narrow passageway.

somehow i ended up at a VA hospital in washington dc and woke up, feeling like i'd just been through WWIII. or IV.

now for something completly different. this is something i have noticed lately in my own life: many folks eschewing any relationship that might include sex. i think there are 2 reasons for this, one, we're getting older and two, so many people have been burned. after-effects of the sexual revolution?
"'Asexuality: It's not just for amoebas anymore.'"
Asexual Healing (Promo) Laine Bergeson

and here is another tasty little item:

"[T]he dramatic rise in suicides in Andhra Pradesh, which have become a huge scandal....are particularly striking because they are so close to the jewels of the Indian economy, the high tech IT centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which evoke paroxysms of awe from the worshippers of neoliberalism."
India on the Edge of Survival (ZNet Blog)"

and finally this which seems to be a meme, we're hearing more and more about this, in fact it came up in a conversation i had this week:
"Bhutan is pioneering a holistic national agenda based on a tenet of Buddhism called jimba. In the west, jimba is most closely related to public service. Instead of capitalizing on 'production' as in Gross National Product (GNP), Bhutan is introducing the concept of Gross National Happiness (GNH) that capitalizes on the happiness that public service, or jimba, yields."

3.11.5

found this this morning. it's a medal for conduct unbecoming for a human. seven years. i think that is the length of time a shaman in siberia spends gravely ill. pre-shaman time.

rearrainged some appointments next week. i'll start getting house, truck and myself ready for the Southeast Gathering soon.

pleasant day, getting cold, i'll walk up suset mountain after doing this because it's going to get cold later.

wondering what the weather will be like a week from now because i'll be camping out in toccoa ga. for 3 nights next week.

visited george and bruce this morning. gave george back one of his books and lent him a ken wilber. he looked dubious about the latter.

3.10.5

picture i drew at tom's last monday.

moving slow this morning. little snow on the ground.

march in the smokey mountains is the most problematical month. (i didn't want to say "hard").

when i lived at big ridge eons ago with my family, after one particularly brutal winter, in march, one of the 3 old brothers who lived at the base of the ridge - all in their 70's - shot himself. one of the neighbors about half a mile away drank wood alcohol and had to be hauled away, and the mail delivery person's husband chased her around the kitchen with a knife, was sent to mental institution for two weeks.

a little something to wonder about. as if we needed more than we already got:

"'I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced,' Abou Rabeh said."
13WHAM-TV ROCHESTER || NEWS

3.9.5

this is an old one, found this morning.

yesterday was just about a total blank. couldn't get much going until dark. my theory is that sunspot activity is affecting my metabolism in an erratic way so that i've been way too much up and down these last few weeks.

today is an out of the house day, full of doctor's appointments, errands to run and so forth. i'll let you know

test

test

3.8.5

yesterday i spent the morning coming up with 2 medications i was out of. i am a member in good standing of "medicare" as it slowly drifts into "medicare inc."

so far nothing happens. i fillout forms, send them in, and that's it. no reply, no card, no nothin'. what a surprise. anyway all worked and i'm in good shape now. but then i went outside the empty box.

spent the afternoon at tom's out in the country. really pleasant visit & i needed it. he & erin live in a small older home, well maintained, and the atmosphere reminds me of so many places that have been important in my life.

i was a young man in the 60's paying by any measure of today what was an astoudingly low rent for homes from another time, or what was rapidly becoming another time.

i got in one quick sketch, came home and played music.

woke up this morning with no electricity, blowing snow outside. got in the truck and took care of some quick business - including a cup of coffee - came home and got in bed with the Kat and read for three minutes. woke up at noon when the juice came back on.

i have a pretty coherent list of things to do - "i do things therefore i exist" - so here goes.

3.7.5

survived yesterday, a beautiful day but i didn't go out of the house. got blindsided i guess by too much activity of late, i don't think i fully woke up the entire day.

but today was up at 6:30 which is more to my liking. so yesterday was i think what we in the pseudo-medical arena call a "blip". sure hope so.

[and i grabbed old photo to play with later in the day. it's up there.]

friend sam is back home and doing well, going to marion everyday for physical and speech therapy.

heard from richard in the ukraine. i was a little concerned when email no longer seemed to be reaching him.

have to sign off now and do some "real" things in the "real" world. back soon.

3/6/5

carolina and duke are playing right now, i can only pick it up on AM radio where it serves as background noise.

this sunday has been so far a most peculiar day for me. i can't seem to wake up. it's like i imagine a petite mal moment must be but it's been all day: dozing in the park.

realizing that it happening - or might say nothing was happening - i wrote off the day early. today is a blank.

yesterday, on the other hand, i worked steady until 5, doing this, than that, then a little more of this. at 5 i escaped and walked up sunset mountain. very windy, nice sunset. dark when i got back, had 15 minutes to leave for the gray eagle where i had the privilege of hearing greg brown playing to a sold-out house.

his daughter opened. she and her dad were both accompanied by bo ramsey playing an electric guitar who manages to fade into the background with sounds that at time resemble a thermion played on qualuudes, very quiet eerie b spare bottleneck.

greg was everything i expected. a big down to earth prescience with a deep country voice. his songs were impressive. they are rough, redneck, authentic, nostalgic (for the homeland we never knew (neil young - and have a noir sensibility that is never far away. that mix of nostalgia and noir is a killer, i don't know of anyone performing today who conjures up this mixture quite so well.

here is part of a sung he wrote and sang:

"One wrong turn is all it takes
and there ain't many signs - you only get a few breaks.
Some get more. Some get less.
One wrong turn leads to the next.

The days go slow and the years go fast.
The future you look for is soon the past.
You seldom end up where you thought you would.
One wrong turn can change it all for good.

Love ain't a hug. Love ain't a kiss.
Love is every day doing this, that, this.
We put in our time and we put in our heart.
One wrong turn can tear it all apart."

i met the sister of an old friend of mine and talk turned to cullowhee. i had just started a sketch while waiting for the show to start. in the dim light it was hard for me to tell what i was doing, but eventually i realized that it was whiteside cove in jackson county. the whole evening was pulling me back to another time and place, big ridge, cullowhee, jackson county.

leaving the show i talked to a couple, my age or more, who had heard greg at the cat's cradle in carrboro the night before. they were from kinston and knew the maddox family one of whom is my daughter in law melissa. they had nothing but praise for her father clyde's dobro playing.

i came home and spent hours in bed, legs kicking and twitching, waiting for sleep.

woke

woke up at 7, thought about getting ready for hike.

i think i was still thinking about it when i lay down and woke back up at 10. so no sycamore cove trek for me today. the place i inhabit is an ADD disaster so i'll clean and organize. who knows what i'll find.

this is what i found, an old & forgotten doodle.

tried to email richard and debbie in the ukraine last night, it bounced back this morning. richard and debbie, if you're out there, email home.

loaded up on CD's and mysteries from the library yesterday. got an 87th precinct book by Ed McBain. that's good because i'm experiencing difficulty getting into any book these days, and this series i've always been able to read no matter what the state of my psyche.

greg brown tonight. i worked with a friend years ago who tried to get me to give a listen to him, but was stopped cold at the time by some sort of preconception that he was a member of the lake wobegone crew, which even back then i couldn't tolerate.

but recently i have heard a few CDs and get the idea that he is a rough and tumble redneck with a definite streak of noir, right up my alley. so we'll see.

[...later] the usual obscure run-arounds to get this posted.

now that (some) of archives are (sort of) accesable, i've been browsing through them. found a number of poems i think i will add to the book i'm working on. here's one:

someday maybe i'll feel new
but these days those days are mighty few
the sky leaves clouds like a clue
hangs question marks in the blue

atmospheric ice-crystals are cold
artificial memories i've been told
pathways lost in wars so old
storms of life bought and sold

3.4.5

blip.

currently to post i have to start out with a short first line. should be easy(?)

the neo-kons my be right, somebodies in control want to slip drrogs into the straight culture via the medical back door. personally i think it's about time:

"In the past couple of years their efforts have begun to pay off. Doblin is optimistic that psychedelic research is back for good, and this time it will do things right. 'This gives us the chance to show that we have learned our lessons,' he says. Halpern, too, is anxious to lay to rest the ghost of Leary. 'That man screwed it up for so many people,' he says."
New Scientist Psychedelic medicine: Mind bending, health giving - Features:

3.4b.5

flip.

for a change of pace i did the above before i was awake. the challange was that green keeps cutting out on my monitor. maybe if i sprinkle a little magic dust on it i can see what you see. or maybe i need to buy (gulp) a new one.

i think i'm over the hump with recovering archives. i spent a little while last night browsing thru some of them. to me it was fascinating looking at pages and weeks i have long since forgot. they display with no paragraph breaks, which is very bloggish looking. and the archive page doesn't do much as far as telling you what week they are from. i'll smooth it out as i go. go where?

forward.

the amount of copy i churned out is astounding to me. at present text is receding, visuals taking more of my time.

just heard another old thought of mine leaking out of NPR: terror is an emotion, not a country. might as well declare war against ennui.

seems to me i tried that and it didn't work.

today i go grocery shopping, the library, and - aargh - the mall matrix for vitamins and a paper cutter that - i hope - will score as well as cut various printer substrates. this for the fabulous note card project. so far i've sized and printed 4 out of 12. and the rest are about ready too.

did a preliminary edit of whistling in the dark, my entreeinto the world of self publishing.

tomorrow i'll go on hike to sycamore branch, probably get rained on. and right now i'm walking the mile to charlotte street bakery for some provisions.

now

still thrashing thru getting post archives up. whether the world needs this or not is not a question. whether i need to complete this one-off code change so it works is. ne of those things that by dfinition once you start you can't stop.

i'm squeezing in a simple water color during this troublesome activity.

...[evenings empire has returned] i'm calling it a day.

blog archive is working, sort of. very ugly, but 4 years of posts are accessible.

i have no idea why.

something to do with permalinks and page titles, settings, <$kode$>. all kinds of gremlins appearing and disappearing. (check the browser window title, at he top of the window.)

today has been kind of fun. wondering thru philip k. dick territory, form becoming formless. this is a familiar place.

so kindly forgive the twitchs, technical and other wise while i change things and things change.

3.25

just can't seem to get my mind together today. everything is start and stop.

frustrating not being able to fix archives. too many things half started. but i did get the picture below up - i think. depends on if you can see it or not.

got email from mr kass the scrim king. he has gallery opening in blacksberg va. put link here.

it's almost 2. the only way to rescue the day is go out and play. back after.

3.1.5

ummmm.... modernpeasant is down right now. something to do with bits and pieces - i mean bytes - and i'll fix it.

this day is a little on the wobbly side. i've learned to fall as gracefully as i can.

recent pencil drawing. someone i must have met in a dream.

i guess i'll spend the rest of the day fixing - arrgh - this site so the archives work.

how an intuitive like me ever ended up tweaking any kind of code, much less than making it up, just goes to show me that life is a funny deal.

[later] i disassembled the code and got to the point where nothing worked, then did my best to get all the toothpaste back in the tube.

if you can read this, i did.

archives still lost in cyberspace, i'll fool with it tomorrow.

2.28.5

today's thought:


there is no wasted time

because there's no time to waste.

2.27.5

pencil drawing i did yesterday at men's meeting. did a lousy job of scanning, will redo later today.

[later today]

i like it better now.


speaking of lousy, it has recently bubbled up in my mind that monitor calibration is so out of whack i don't have any idea of how my pictures look on your monitor. when i was in arizona january i noticed that on my sister's PC they were all washed out. i'll be looking into this. another glitch that raised it's ugly head is archives have disappeared.


so i suppose i'll be spending a few days in front of the monitor lost in snarls of code and scripts. but not today.


interesting men's meeting yesterday. i like these things, but then i like to talk with people about things more real than the weather.


speaking of which big blow expected here but i don't expect it to be much.


had amost pleasant interlude with new friend - i hope - today. thank you.

this will be a pleasant surprise for a lot of folks. thanks tuck.


The Last Page of the Internet

pencil sketch.

i must have done it God knows when but i'm doing it again.


promises to be a fine day. yesterday i got into one of those endless marathons, multiplexing all over the place. painting, scripting, printing, and figuring out chords for a piano blues. what fun!


of course it reminded me of the old days when i would find myself thinking "i didn't ask to be lashed to this cross".


broke out of it at 6pm and busted out the front door for a walk up sunset mountain, and it did set. walked back in the dark and was late to the miller's birthday party for Meher Baba, which as usual was warm and a real treat.


various folks entertained, and it made me think that there might have been a time when a social gathering included entertainment performed by the people present, not a dvd.


this morning i'm going to make a birthday card for my nephew jonathon using flash, which should be an interesting exercise because I don't have much time and am still figuring out how to use it.


interesting bit of comment on what and how we read:
"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."
Library Journal - Revenge of the Blog People!


other thoughts: once you come to the end of your rope, it's an opportunity (and a necessity) to let go of it.

2.25.5

the light
is strange this morning, bright, brilliant. it reminds me of when i was a child, early spring, an icy brilliance.



tried to see a play wed. nite, but fell asleep and met friend janice too late to go, blood sugar bottoming out. pleasant interlude anyway.



finishing an oil on top of oil pastel, which is a no-no. we'll see what happens.



it's one of those mornings i have little to say. i've reached the end of language.



even so i talked to sam's youngest son whose name i cannot spell. he told me sam is making good progress with physical and speech therapy.



me, i feel like staying in bed today and watching the light crawl across the ceiling.

2.24.5

hours and hours trying to fix blog archive. insanity.

fascist journalism

"With the Bushies, if you're their friend, anything goes. If you're their critic, nothing goes. They're waging a jihad against journalists - buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers."

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Barberini Faun


is there something not quite "right" about the desktop revolution?

The New Republic Online: The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized


i'm making some changes to this site, so be patient with any surprises. thanks

[edit made much later: what a can of worms i opened.]

corporate pathology

sometimes it's a waste of time to use time. i've been fooling with this watercolor on and off for a long time & now here i am typing. it's late in the day and i've got to get out and take a walk.


on my last trip to the library, i grabbed a few books that looked like they might be worth reading. an old habit.



one has turned out to be a must-read,the corporation: the pathological pursuit of power.

The Corporation - A film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan (also been made into a film.)


(i just remebered that i had discussed this book and moviie awhile back: see
*[ Modern Peasant ]*)


have you ever read a book that corroborated things you have been mumbling about for years? that's what this book is like for me. it's all there, and when i get time tomorrow i'll pull some quotes from it. it sheds more light on the world we inhabit than anything i've read in a long time.


scattered quotes from book:



"for in a world where anything can be owned, manipulated, and exploited, everything and everybody will eventually be."



"...the corporation is an institution - a unique structure and set of imperatives that direct the actions of people within it.


...the corporations legally defined mandate is to pusue, relentlessly and without exception, it's own self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others."


"there is, however, one instance when social responsibility can be tolerated, according to [milton] friedman - when it is insincere."
"today, corporations use 'branding' to create unique and attractive personalities for themselves."


some of you may remember when this blog had as it's credo "in a world where you can own anything, you can be owned."


it is also interesting that alfred bester's sci-fi classic the stars my distinction was set in a future where warring dynasties, such as the house of at&t, the house of chrysler, the house of RCA, ran things and squabbled for power.

2.21.5

blip.
biz card i've been puttering with. pretty garish, huh? maybe i'll tone it down. right now i'm taking 86 mazda truck in to replace belt i lost friday. more later.


it's later right now. i got lucky with the truck, took about 20 minutes and $35. it was pouring rain, and while it was being worked on i crossed a busy street to do a little quick shopping at the drug store.


a nice thing happened while i was waiting for the lights to change. car pulled up, late model, kid in the special thing they sit in nowadays in the back seat. guy sitting in shotgun said "need an umbrella?" and handed me one. it all took about two seconds, and the traffic took the car away.


i was sorry to hear about dr. thompson's death. i knew him briefly when i worked for the aspen illustrated news around 69-70. the paper used local talent for writing and photography and whenever he dropped an article off i would immediately take it down the street to a lawyer who would leaf thru it, marking up in red phrases like "nazi greedhead" which would be edited out.


i have to say that he was always level headed, calm, cool, and very lucid. in many ways a real southern gentleman. the item below gives some sense of him - and the culture - during that time and place:


"In 1970 Thompson ran for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado, losing by a handful of votes after campaigning for drugs to be decriminalised and Aspen to be renamed Fat City. Since his Republican opponent had a crew cut, Thompson shaved his head entirely and peppered his speeches with the phrase 'my long-haired opponent'."

Times Online - World


it will be interesting to see how the news of his death plays out. probably the usual nonsense, but there is a small chance that a meme (see Meme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) will spread throughout the culture with some substance and a touch of what we used to call "reality" before the junta locked up everyone's mind.

2.20.5

retouched picture of my daughter nicole. original was partly torn and beat up. must have been taken around around '78.

friday night driving backs from town my truck threw a belt, fortunately only 2 miles to drive, made it through the dark crowded streets of aville with engine roaring and lights going dim.


so i spent yesterday at home, very pleasant day working on postcard and notecard sets i hope to have out around here by summer.


stumbled on a chromatic tuner that is part of band in the box v.8 that works like a charm so tuned guitar in open d, like ways 2 lap steels. but best of all was chinese erhu which after maybe a year i finally found the scale of d finger stops (no fret board on this baby).


spent a lot of overdue time cleaning and archiving material on hard drives. need to continue this until i have a little more breathing space.


refused to throw away water color disaster i've been working on: hosed it down and brought it back to a point where maybe i can complete it.


just walked into the kitchen for one more cup of coffee and flipped the tv on while i was at it. sunday talk show, the koreans have nuclear weapons etc. brings to mind 2 statements:

"if it can be done technologically it will be done." somebody's law, i forget whose.

"if you build it they will come." translation: if saturday night specials and nuclear devices are manufactured by anyone, they will be manufactured by everyone.


Chronicles v.1 by Bob Dylan

Review


Just finished reading this book, and I was mightily impressed.



Among the many divisions the people in this world are divided into are: those who remember Dylan as an icon of the 60's and those who have kept up with his work the last few years and think his present work is as meaningful as ever, maybe more so. he's no nostalgia act, that's for sure.



The book is a surprise in many ways. For one thing I think it is impossible to have an accurate preconception of it. It's another creative surprise from the man.



The tone is down to earth, matter of fact. Startling clarity of moments lived. The texture and mood of odd times and places comes through with a sharp clear cut immediacy. Maybe it is because the massive noise machine of the mediated culture seems incapable of touching these things, and he uses his weight to slip these moments through to us.



In many ways the voice used in the book reminds me of Jack London, Damon Runyon, even rex stout, but with a twist. The 30's and 40's are implicit, not because of some fake agenda but because that's the world he was born into. (Me too).



Read this thing, it is a healthy antidote to the franchised brand name culture that blasts away at us 24/7.

2.19.5

trying a little something new here. click here to see if it works.

yesterday i attended digital photography SIG at UNCA center for creative retirement. as you might expect - i mean how many people today get to retire creatively? - most of the group seemed to be well off retired folks with loads of expensive equipment.


everybody seemed interested in straight photos, and some were impressive indeed.


i talked to one guru who recommended sony or canon.


in the evening i attended informal performance of "the divine magees", two young ladies, no sound equipment, guitar and viola, good harmonies, at malaprop's book shop.

2.18.5

Can Terrorists Build the Bomb? - Popular Science: "But of more than a dozen nuclear-arms experts I interviewed, almost all agreed that assembling a crude nuclear bomb, though extremely difficult, is by no means impossible. "

2.18.5

"true creativity often starts where language ends."

author koestler (1905 - 1983)


i'm not saying a word.


but you might want to try this:



Quizzes


politics, blogs, and jail?


"Number one lesson is that what happens on the internet can and will bite you on the ass in real life. We've seen it time and time again with internet affairs and sordid emails - now, you'd better watch where you put your political commentating toes."

Blogger gets night visit from US Secret Service

2.17.5

"Last fall, intruders used stolen identities to open several dozen accounts at ChoicePoint to purchase data such as Social Security numbers and credit reports about thousands of consumers, some of whom have since become victims of identity theft."
Wired News: The Fight Over Cyber Oversight

2.17.5

"'Companies are not charities,' Schneier said. 'They don't do this stuff out of the goodness of their heart. They do it because the marketplace demands it, they do it because liability demands it, they do it because regulation demands it, they do it because competition demands it. Something has to demand it.'


Along those lines, he said, 'The marketplace will only go so far.'"


Clarke rips Microsoft over security

2.17.5

"A company that sells personal data on consumers said Wednesday that it's alerting 145,000 Americans -- including 35,000 Californians -- that they might be vulnerable to identity theft after a crime ring paid for their credit reports, Social Security numbers and other sensitive information.

MercuryNews.com | 02/16/2005 | 145,000 Americans' identity data stolen:

it's going to hell anyway. read these links below.



one step forward, hunker down, think about childhood, play



"people are strange" on cross harp, crawl on the floor towards the refrigerator, take a nap, imagine that, and then go to work. if you do all of this in the digital domain, you may end up as a cyberless person, in which case i would recommend whittling voodoo sticks out of rubylith.



heard a new phrase today: "celibate couples". if it's a meme, look for it soon on at halftime shows around the globe. maybe disneyland where it belongs.


now i am going to lay down for several hours and pretend i'm asleep.

today's picture definitely got lost on it's way to somewhere.



i realize that i've been on a run lately. hours, days, weeks non-stop on marginal projects. guess i'll enjoy it while it lasts.



"corruption is even corrupt."



a thought written down in chronicle by dylan.




today is (starting now, about 3:30) for stepping away from work and cleaning the house, paying the bills, grocery shopping. yeah, i do that stuff too.

the darkness is like solitude.



"sol", the sun.



"why is it this way?" is often asked.



i read an article in old Time magizine in the doctor's office today. it was about a minor movement in the scientific world that asks what are the chances that the kosmos evolved to sustain life, ie conciousness.



i thought it was not a question. because we are always here now, or is it now here?



anyway, now is prior to all "was's". so any kosmos - including the one we call "the kosmos" - was once our beginning, but only because now it is Now.

didn't have much to say when i posted this yesterday. still don't.


glad everyone else does.


here is an item that reminds me of philip k. dick and some of his motifs:,br>
"But for Dr Nelson, talk of such psychic machines - with the potential to detect global catastrophes or terrorist outrages - is of far less importance than the implications of his work in terms of the human race."

RedNova News - Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

can't sleep. one of those - thankfully - now rare nights tapping keys. picture above is about all that has manifested during this unusual but not forgotten phase.

i gotta get regular.

supposed to be a pencil sketch above, if you don't see it neither do i. i'll fix it later.





went to the game night at NPR - that's no pairs required - i think - i always want to pronounce it no repairs required.



played something i never quite got but it was fun.



today folks are hiking 7 miles, i passed. as soon as i finish this routine i will take a walk up sunset mountain. from the light in here it looks like cold and bright out.



i've got a large watercolor ready to go, stretched and taped. i am curious how new lighting arrangement might change things.


How To Start Your Very Own Blog In Fifty-One Easy Steps! || kuro5hin.org

"Interested in the blogging scene? Confused how to go about setting up your very own blog? Follow these fifty-one easy steps and you'll be a l33t blogger in no time!"

and just wait till microsoff gets ahold of this stuff:


Magnet Therapy, Depression, Alternative therapies, mind-body medicine, integrative therapies
"Electromagnetic brain stimulation of varying types has been used with success in the treatment of depression"


magnetic stimulation therapy for depression in place of electro shock
"An experimental therapy that uses magnetic stimulation to treat severe depression could prove to be a viable option for patients who otherwise would resort to electric shock therapy, University of Florida researchers report."

this is what i've been fooling with last couple of days. i did it to fit in old frame i still have constructed out of reminants of booths in harry's delicatessen, chapel hill, another world. am not real happy with result, but there it is.



spent yesterday out and about, nonoptional errands. got a full spectrum light that makes all the difference in the world painting. and a telephone that will throw me into 2005. no it's not a cell phone. also 50 feet of twisted pair phone cord which will work a lot better than old one which was shredded.



this morning another run to town, then think i'll work on poetry book which i'll self publish. gotta make a statement.
and kleen the kitchen.



latest from house of cards:


Trojan Targets Microsoft's AntiSpyware Beta:
"Malicious programmers are already sharpening their claws on Microsoft Corp.'s anti-spyware software, even before the application's official release."

picture is from watercolor i did for christmas card.



yesterday's post continued:

in every society there is an ownership class who run things. this class is usually so overwhelmingly embedded in the culture that they are invisible. it is like the fish in water who can detect other manifest objects but are unaware of the water. for instance the european middle classes was largely unaware of the church when the church was running their life. how could be? the church was equivalent to reality at that point. and reality is considered unquestionable by the inhabitants.



just as today, reality includes the need to work. a job to survive. in order to survive, it is unquestionable that you need a "job".



in the middle ages, only when the nation-states evolved to become the ownership class did the church become "visible" to the culture as an institution that could be seen and criticized, and the political nation-state became unquestioned "reality". in the same way, with the rise of "wage slavery" as the dominant reality, the former dominant, the nation state, is slipping into the visible realm, with much scrutiny paid to them, while the commercial interests own us, dictate what we do, smell like, look like, where we are and when we are there. this is perceived as "reality", "a man has to eat and sweat to eat".



so what i am saying is that today we are morphing into a society where our livlihood is dictated by jobs, which includes character qualities like what you do when you are not "at work". emotional fascism.


the sooner the culture lives this, the sooner it will go away.

sam has been moved to thom's rehab, good sign. hope to see him there tomorrow.


i've got stuff to do all over town so it promises to be a hustle day in the paris of the south.



finished a ho-hummer today, watercolor, guach, colored pencil and oil pastel. it sounds like what it looks like.



funny things happened today. first i heard about bloggers being fired from their jobs. a new dilemma? need to express vs need to survive?



reminded me of the incident in clark's book where he hears one general tell another who is going to talk with rumsfield "if you want to be heard, be ready to hand in your stars".



considering the mortgage, the children, the cost of middle-class day to day, isn't this the same dilemma? express or survive.



then tonight on PBS leher news an interview with russian who just wrote a book on democracy and why it is good. he was talking about living under stalin. you could survive or express yourself but not both.



the conversation i had when i was shown the difference between the word "artist" (expression) and "addict" (etymologically from "does not talk, express").



so my prediction. more and more folks are going to lose their foothold in the work world because of something they said. or sang. or painted. or wrote.

this is sort of a ... watercolor that i messed with this morning.i had - still have - too much on my list of "things" to do. but today is a karmically ritualistic sort of time, so i decided to let things go like i do every other day. so i've been at the watercolors and computer all day.


click here to see why it's Be Day for me.

nice evening at the reilly's last night, good to see and hear old friends, new friends.

pencil drawing started in arizona.


hike yesterday was good, no apparent ware and tear apparent.


finishing von franze's psyche & matter. random sample:


"we have a direct consciousness of ourselves consisting of a certain amount of direct information. this is not our body, but our "i". but if we look at another being or object we can in fact not see it because we see only it's body., it's outer appearance, which we call matter, and not it's "inwardness" which is it's true nature. the corporeal existence is only an illusion, or a by-product of our sense-perception. we have two modes of acquiring information: by observation and by participation. "


too much to type. but brings wilbers left side and right side quadrants into the picture for sure. sunny day. i'm going for a walk.

remember this guy? me neither.


saw ray last night. very jarring movie. i hadn't expected 50's noir. extreme moments.


went for 7? mile hike with old folks this morning. nice crowd, nice weather. just about the right number of steps - 1299? - for me.

check this review out to see how misinformed a review can be. it reads like a parady, the author obviously doesn't know squat about macs. everything in the review is inaccurate. he or she seems to think that a mac is a PC:
Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:
"To see how much industry support the Mac platform has these days, I did a google to see if there were Mac versions of any of my favorite applications; unfortunately I ended up disappointed every time. There are very few first-person shooters for OSX. There is no Mac version of WeatherBug to check the temperature anywhere in the world. Nor is there a Mac version of helpful web and email enhancers like Hotbar. Or any equivalent of the DealHelper software I use to keep track of my passwords. My Office 2003 CD would not install, despite claims I had heard from Mac fanboys that OS X is compatible with Office. "

lucius has resurfaced, thanks jim c.

Lucius Shepard interviewed - infinity plus non-fiction: "Lowlife Baroque
An Interview with Lucius Shepard
by Nick Gevers"

fresh egg, just done this morning in an effort to WAKE UP.


sun is out and so am i, going to be out and about today, the first time since re-entery to carolina mountains.


meanwhile here is a statement we all should ponder:


*spark-online.com >> version 34.0, JULY.2002 >> MAX PODSTOLSKI
"It is only a limitation in thinking, a fixed idea, to presume that art must either be socially visible or not exist at all."


and here is an item that indicates maybe there is a dab of sanity left in this world


Study: Internet Explorer continues to lose market share - Computerworld
"Microsoft Corp.'s share of the browser market has continued to slip, according to a new study, indicating continued momentum for users switching to Internet Explorer alternatives."

had to squeeze in the image above because this blog has come to support the "image a day" school.

supposed to be a snow and ice day in aville but i don't think it will amount to much - famous last words.


yesterday evening i finally brought out crock pot and pans and cooked stew and beans. made a hell of a mess but it's never too late to start. right?


set up oils and attempted to finish painting i was fooling with before trip to arizona. it's pretty much a failure so i'm just applying paint to see what works and doesn't.


slowly researching digital cameras, looking for a good buy. 5MB seems the minimum, since i'd like to print large at 300ppi.


inadvertently watched most of state of the union speech. the long shots were most discouraging: a millionaire's club, no doubt about it. like a kid's birthday party, an omnipresent air of self-congratulation. i say lock the doors and keep them all inside, hobnobing and hornswaggling, and forget about them.


i noticed that bush spoke twice, i think, about "renewing institutions". i agree with him that the institutions no longer work, but instead of renewing they need discarding and replacing with something else besides institutions. some way to organize folks based on anything but profit and self gain. doing things because they benefit others might be a good start.


i ate lunch years ago with ayn rand. i guess she was at the top of her game then. she considered altruism, compassion, obsolete. i considered her obsolete. the winner-take-all ethos needs to become a bad memory. as soon as we all do things because 1) they are fun and 2) help others is the only way to go. i think most people who have lived most of their life already would agree. utopian? sure, why not; it beats dystopia.

back from trip to arizona. i left right when the balmy weather we had since the holidays went away, and got to the west when the floods and rains were going away. i can't help it if i'm lucky.

stayed mostly at my dad's in prescott, and a little time with sister jane and family in phoenix. the pencil drawing above was done on the shuttle that runs back and forth between the two cities.


son eric and angela flew in for short break, it was delightful to see them both, they seemed so calm & competent. dad was 86 or 87 and doing quite well. like me he may shortchange the social world in favor of being by himself, but makes the effort to get out and about.


i made up my mind about which projects to pursue this year. must make my statement.


one of them is a redo of this blog. among other things i found out that the color pictures really look bad on PC monitor, so while i'm fooling with the gamma settings i'll rip the whole thing up and rearrange.


things i noticed while out of my cage:


the word "pessimistic" is getting a very bad rap. comes with living within the cult of optimism.


this "leading edge of the baby boom" is going to be stranger than people think. we may revert to the fine old roman institution of voluntary departure from this world. wait and see.


the world of brand-names not only has us surrounded, it prohibits the existence of any other world.


and finally, this from the savage god by alvarez which i just finished:


"when norman mailer calls the modern, statistical democracies of the west "totalitarian'" he is not implying that the artist is bound and muzzled and circumscribed as he would be in a dictatorship - a vision not even the most strenuous paranoia could justify. but he is implying that mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. he pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self. add to that the ubiquitous sense of violence erupting at the edges of his perception: local wars, riots, demonstrations and political assassinations, each seen, as it were, out of the corner of his eye as just another news feature on the television screen. add, finally, the submerged but never quite avoidable knowledge of the possibility of ultimate violence, known hopefully as the balance of terror. the result is totalitarianism not as a political phenomenon but as a state of mind."