took this pic yesterday at dr. r's place, the pigeon hangs out at pritchard park. most pleasant visit. jim and i are headed for parkway.

later - made it up to the parkway. walked to craggy gardens. beautiful weather. i seem to be coming down with a bug, but enjoyed the air and friendliness of the folks who we met strolling here and there. grabbed a bunch of shots most of which seem usable.

during yesterday's walk thru the paris of the south picked up a book at the library about chaco canyon that i look forward to reading before i visit the place which i'll do hopefully with geoff s. in december. also got new blank notebook for pencil and ink, i finished two of them last week. looking at the floor right now i'd guess i've got maybe 12 or so done over the last couple of years.

coming week: stay in bed, drink chicken soup, get well for trip mid-november. pack. figure out some way to take care of kat while i'm gone. fix front storm window in case it ever gets cold again. try to make it to last piano class. get a little more memory for camera. loop the loop. forget stuff. watch a cloud or two. walk everyday and get nowhere. learn how to play guitar in open "g". get lost. get saved. remember the good old days and forget them.

more chicken soup please.

what does this picture mean? nothing except it happened.

i have a dental appt this morning. my friend jim is due in the afternoon, taking one of his rare foray's out of his compound. my 10 year old 17 inch color monitor has started winking and blinking again. i spent most of yesterday organizing pictures, frames, paints, and way too many papers.

spent an hour or two in the evening trying to figure out what musical productions i have made or almost made. such chaos. did get rid of about one gig of pieces of tunes.

i wish i had something to say about the world, or maybe i don't wish that, in fact now that i've said it i'm sure i don't. did find a whole stash of more scribbles i'll have to deal with. for instance:

"strangers approach
&call out my name
the wind is howling
& nothings the same
the soul is in hiding
& God is asleep
i'm lost in the world
i keep trying to keep."

so i am living with a thousand unfinished images, tunes, songs, and poems. the eternal dilettante.

here are 3 poems from a book i've been working on.

This Wheel is Real

Driving down 40
Clutch going fast
Empty traffic silence
Better get some gas.

Overcast highway
My hands on the wheel
Rest area ready
Just how I feel.

Late afternoon light
Dark water’s in the air
Forget about my map
Its pouring rain somewhere.

Insides bounce around
Front seat full of dust
Past the still horizon
Minutes filled with rust.

No reason to hurry
No place left to go
Highway keeps on humming
"Told you so, told you so".

Roaring static of the road
Seat belts locked and loaded
Remind me of the looks I got
When my head exploded.

Invisible worlds
Pushed by the hood,
I follow the highway
Destination understood.


Come Again?

Your eyes notice value
The thing you are worth
Qualified madman
Get down to earth.

Payment is rendered
You now own the skies
Enjoy it for minutes
Time really flies.

When nobody’s business
Began my demise
I struggled with flowers
And unusual eyes.

While you were gone
I just couldn’t wait
The world moved on
Took me and my fate.


Ready Already?

Seven in the morning
People going to work
I’ve been up all night
Going berserk.

Animals ready
Let’s load up the zoo
You call me
And I’ll call you.


Made for a Wait

Crossing the street
In some dark town
The asphalt hums,
The eyes look down.

Indolent corners
Made for a wait,
Moments stuffed in boxes,
Telegrams too late.

Streets like dramas
Are full of some plot.
A flash of the jungle
And I’m glued to the spot.

He Got Old Quick

Hands of exhaustion,
Glimpses of Hell,
Don’t worry about me,
I’ll never tell!

Harvest injunction,
Demanding defeat
From others about you
Fast on their feet.

Years in the yard,
Feet wet in the snow,
I tried too hard
And couldn’t let go.

What became of us
Now is what we are
A minute too soon
An hour too far.

Coming back home
I stumble and lurch:
A mad man passing
In front of the church.

oh-oh. today's idiotgram seems to indicate travel to a destination. or maybe not. because in my heart of hearts i don't think there is a destination.

but there is a road.

my writer friends are slowly dragging me back to the written word. here's a cryptogram i wrote last evening sitting on the porch in west asheville waiting for some seekers to arrive to deconstruct seeking:

some words are heard both far and wide
same words sung on the other side
twilight syllables gleam like teeth
darkness opens and i fall asleep

in these woods there's only air
empty winds flow everywhere
abandoned footsteps left behind
invent a path: make up a mind.

someone leaves without a thought
cerebral flickers that are bought
and sold by travelers over there
somewhere where there is no where.

transparent shadows pace the night
there is no sleep but that's all right
day and night are both the same
but they both give me different names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what does this mean for tomorrow? a big surprise.

yay.

Baby Natalie, 4 months on the Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

i'll get tomorrow's tomorrow.

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

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

i wonder what the opposite of "levitate' is?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

got a beauty in spam email this morning:

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

now that's what i call meta-spam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today's hieroglyph. a good day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

got this in email, very stylish spam:

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


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plus many other
Have a good day"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

probably will push chapel hill visit back a bit.

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

something is in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but they are (trying to) run the world.

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

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

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

Bird flu 'could kill 150 million' - Top stories - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au: "current bird flu pandemic"

just in time for lunch i finished today's ideogram. it's going to be a good day, what's left of it.

for those of you with broad mind & broadband, you might want to download mp3 of peter fenner talking about this and that. good stuff.:
Radiant Mind | Buddhi

slept thru the night. what an unusual delight.

haven't gone into it here, but in the recent past, sleepless, i have been turning on bedside radio and listened to the night people. am and shortwave have the damnedest things floating along the radio waves. the other night for a couple of hours i happened onto a long show from the church of the sub-genius. this whatever-it-is has popped up in my life several times in different places. the black and white graphics they - it? - turned out and are probably still turning out were great, complicated charts, clip art looking, real dada. they are doing the same with audio. i'll see if i can't run the audio down for yr listening enjoyment. [later: i couldn't even find the "old" graphics. but i think audio streams are out there somewhere.]

wednesday is the day i have a morning and afternoon course with the center for creative retirement at unca. tai chi in morning and color theory in the afternoon. so it's been a busy day, during which i squeezed in some work on the picture above. but my mouse died. so i've been driving back and forth, rushing into the house and trying different combinations of mice, which is why the picture is unfinished. i just now got things settled on the mouse front and it's 6 in the evening. maybe i'll finish it, if not: it's finished.

watched part 2 of no direction home last night. lot of good stuff but i guess i liked part 1 better. it had a very clear line of bob trying out and developing various timing, breathing, singing, words and was fascinating to watch. and the black and white footage illustrating this was beautiful, the close ups of bob's face were beautiful.

part 2 on the other hand i think leaned too heavily on the electric band performing in the teeth of open hostility. altho it was fascinating to watch. the interviews with al kooper were great, as is his story, going back to "blonde on blond". bob nieuwirth had some very heavy statements about "it". by the way i got a daedulus music catalog in the maik and noticed a release of nieuwirth playing with a cuban that sounds very interesting.

the concert footage was often over the tipping point, and was totally synchrnious out of control. and it was sure good to hear a young mike bloomfield, one of the very best.

on the other hand i wasn't much interested in the hotel footage from the english tour done pennebaker. it blew me away when it first came out but now seems more like watching a bunch of very stoned and drunk 25 year olds trapped in a room. i guess you have to be there. now.

by far the best thing i've seen over the air in many years, and timely too. in the present context of the criminal overworld there was a lot said in this film.

watercolor barely dry. resorted to gouach out of desperation.

yesterday was "D" day, the first half of scorcese's no direction home. i don't know what the buzz is about it but i enjoyed it. straight talk from the old man. he's deconstructing the cultural icon he is perceived as, and doing it right out in front of the world.

of course his efforts resulted in a new construction, face, motif, meme, whatever you want to call it.

i liked the context of the film, the happenings in the culture when we were young. what a way to live.

something he said about "a language he hadn't heard" appealed to me. and concert footage taken from the stage with mr. d. on the keyboards during the move into electricity was brief but. . . well, electric i guess.
Guardian Unlimited | Arts special reports | Last night's TV:
"it's a mesmerising performance, electric. Electric in every way of course, and that's the problem for the die-hard folkies. They boo and shout 'Switch it off'. The fools."

it's 11:40 and this is all i've come up with. beautiful soft rainy morning, subdued light.

i put latest page from ongoing poetry-riff-picture book up here. (.pdf)

this mornings cyberdoodle. i felt like i had to make up for yesterday's.

the Baba folks are heading out for sandy mush this afternoon and i believe i'll go too. part of madison county i've always wondered about.

it's another image day around here. got nothing much to say about nothing much.

a lot of housework to do. still trying to update music and image collections found somewhere around here.

did you know a new meme is lurking around on the nocturnal AM radio waves? has to do with top-secret military project to control the weather.

Flecktones Message Forums - Chemtrails Anyone?:
"Well I think we can step out from under the realm of conspiricy theories on this now. Our own congress has had bills introduced which openly claim that there are operational weather modification programs out there right now."

i'm a skeptic, i'll stick with mark twain.

not a pretty picture. let's call it a character study?

it's hard for me to believe how long it took to do the above painting. it was like the tarbaby: i couldn't get loose from the thing, returning over and over again to gaze, wonder, and then screw it up all over again.

of course one of the open secrets of creation is knowing when to stop. but another is the occasional frustrating marathon. i still recall one saturday in tempe arizona trying to something with an early DOS system involving vi, a unix text editor. all day lost in the labyrinth of a constellation of glitches. my take is that from time to time these frustrating all consuming times pay off later, but i wasn't prepared for this kind of activity yesterday.

so today i'll do what i was going to do yesterday, as soon as i find my list. when i do, i'll cross off the first item, finding the list. then, with that small success, i'll lose it again.

another early morning image. after using photoshop since version one, i'm still finding vast worlds of things to do with it. each one opens to more worlds. if all software was built so well and deep it would be a better world.

took first tai chi class with don pedi. i really like his approach. also first color theory class which promises much.

going to see the penguin parade (or some such title) with bobby at 1. daylight matinee, what depravity.

i am on some medical lists that i get via email. here is a bit of one i found amusing about some drug trial:
"A surprising effect was linear weight loss in the exenatide-treated group, possibly as a result of nausea."

photo of back yard. i think it may be the only "straight" photo i've ever put up. that is not twinked, twinkled and slightly warped with photoshop. i'm going to enlarge it in grayscale and transfer it to canvas.

why is it so difficult for most of us to have fun?

especially the growing hordes of anhedonists?

is it

a - we're unenlightened.

b - we are of the conditioned mind, or at least feel that way.

c - we're developmentally stunted, a la maslow, piaget, winnicott, freud.

d - we're not individuated.

e - we're borederline personalities

f - there are too many free radicals running amok in the bodymind.

g - cudgled into submissiveness by societies pliers.

h - don't get it.

i - do get it.

j - kali yuga express.

k - doesn't matter.
?

too many of us only laugh when the tv is on.

(not me, i'm right where i'm standing and i get a good laugh out of that at least once a week.)

today i have 2 classes, 9:30-11:30, 2:30-4:30. if i manage to make both for 8 weeks it'll be a new personal best for me.

what does a blogger do when he or she has nothing to say? blog away anyway.

why? i don't know. after a few years it becomes a habit. me, i start my day with this "thaing" and don't really get going until it's out of the way. often i default to the language of images which in some cases means a couple of photoshop hours. more often i let my fingers do the talking.

official take a morning walk starts this morning, it's 7AM, still cool and overdue.

i've been listening to bob dylan for the last week. it amazes me that he is still such a polerizing figure. such a long public productive life is bound to get stuck at some stage in the mind of many. there was a snide piece in mountain xpress a couple of weeks ago comparing him unfavorably to a younger volk singer who was still at the barricades from time to time. i'm glad the new guy is good, but the comparison is meaningless. bob the protest singer went up in smoke decades ago. today's bob has a lot of bobs behind him, most of whom have an eerie grasp on what life on the planet is or was.

he seems to be taking care of the endgame now, scorsese film, the book chronicle. a neat freak, herding his "legacy" into final landing place just like a lame duck president but with dylan i feel that it is important for the evolution of the kosmos that he not be forgotten.

yet another flower photo. these are all taken near my domicile and i guess i should be thankful they are my neighbors.

one of the reasons this blog looks so "antiquated" is because it is antiquated. check this new site out by uptown ruler
Free Radio America to see slick.

my friend Ray Kassray kass has what sounds like a big retrospective show opening in NYC soon.

today's agenda: put garbage out, take a walk whether i feel like it or not, vacuum truck, change oil, buy cd-rom disks and covers, drop by art supply house to get a few things for color theory class that starts tomorrow finish new template for blog, more changeable sidebars and rollovers for links at top, put up about 300 pictures and scrub down watercolor i overworked in a few places.

wash the dishes.

worked most of the weekend on new template for this page. dreamweaver is a dream, but it does have it's quirks. took the above photo on one of my morning walks which i'm trying hard to resuscitate now that the weather is just starting to cool down a little.

beefing up the image archive and animation page, not up yet but i'm in too deep to stop now - the story of my life - so maybe by the end of the week i'll have all of the new goodies uploaded.

start 3 new classes this week, tai-chi, jung and color theory.. hope they hold my interest. one of the things i like about these classes (center for creative retirement, unca) is that if there is too little happening in them, i can just stop going. kind of like school should be.

today i'm going to install an older OCR app and send several dental treatment plans to friends katie and pat (hello katie and pat). change oil in truck. and work on a watercolor that i'm more or less doing just to see if i can. it's been awhile.

i'm still a million miles away from the political, just can't engage. i feel the near future will turn into the personal and mundane while the institutional slowly disappears like the chesire cat. it's that grin that i fret about.

if absolute power corrupts absolutely, and i guess it does, not only humans but institutions are affected, and there is not one today that is not so corrupt in one way or another that it can be helpful to the world's inhabitants. the only thing i see to do is live a life that somehow increases consciousness, or, to put it another way, live a conscious life. and that is more than enough to keep a body busy.

not an unusual day. vacuumed, made the above image from a jpg my son eric sent me, lake tahoe? naaaa. . . sierra navadas maybe.

talked with bobby who was fresh back from a workshop experience with dr. allen combs at southerdharma. b. said it was great.

been fooling around w/ leftover music fragments and think i have enough for 2 CDs. what a surprise.

started a watercolor this morning, a simple one. what a surprise.

i'm moving the tv into the bed/studio room. bad fung-suey in front room. i can watch it at night when i'm not sleeping. sound off of course. maybe a fan. shortwave drifting in and out.

i'd really rather read a good book.

'Gatemouth' Brown dies - Sep 11, 2005

neighbor's giant plant. i don't know what it is but it is big. a sign of things to come in the sub-tropical smokey mountains?

in an hour i take first begining piano lesson. hope my right wrist can take it. hope i can take it. [note: i made the class and it wore me out. as the psuedo-prez says, "it was hard work."]

i was talking to friend geoff the other day and stumbled onto an ancient riff i used to think about, but couldn't quite remember it. i think it went like this:

"all men are created equal." it seems to me that there has been an incremental creep in the meaning of this statement. there is a tendancy today to interpret this as "all men are identical". the women's movement, civil rights, and other issues seem to fall into this semantic double cross from time to time. today, with society's emphasis on defining the human as the ego and nothing more, there seems to be a strong pull towards this mis-interpretation, making the statistical average the norm.

the statistical average height of the human race is a number. but if you lined up all humans living today and measured them, you might find that not one is of average height. each of us is unique. there is no norm, except for abstract thought where it has some use.

the human has always had the task of experiencing his or her's real self, whatever that may be. not including the eccentric, the unique, the far ends of the bell curve, is in my opinion resposible for a mess of problems that plague society today.

2+2=4. but 2+2 is not identical with 4.

another possibly related topic: during my lifetime there has always been a pull away from the megalopolis on the part of myself and many friends. even though worldwide more and more people are moving to the urban beehives and away from the rural. now some folks in silicone valley are wondering about it.

"...the economic opportunities in Silicon Valley still outweigh the social costs.
But for how long?
That is the question raised by a report being issued next week by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. When it comes to quality-of-life issues like housing costs, transportation and education, the report concludes that Silicon Valley ranks dead last compared with the other seven largest high-tech regions."
MercuryNews.com | 09/16/2005 | Industry report ranks region last among eight high-tech areas in quality of life:

today is the birthday of my youngest son nathan. i hope you have a good day nathan, a good year, and a good life. you deserve it.

cyber-graffiti floating around the web. thanks bill.

is it in bad taste? yeah i suppose so. like the bind technology has created when grabbed and used by the powerheads.

why is it amusing? the people of america have not - yet - lost the ability to see the absurd we are surrounded by. "the other gulf war" is another example.

remember: the world is owned. you may own a piece. or you and the bank.

but the whole globe is possessed... by what? the illuminati? the carlton group? the bohemian club?

or is it the pathological spirit of possession, domination and control?

the answer, of course, is blowing in the wind.

for the detail-oriented check this very interesting interview out (thanks tharpa):
911Truth.org ::::: The 9/11 Truth Movement:
"...all those stories drawn from mainstream sources that contradicted the official account, I decided I needed to look into it more carefully, and the more I looked, the worse it got."

two hours at dentist this morning, came home and lay down. slept. still sleeping. there is not going to be a hell of a lot happening at this site until i feel like mice elf (thanks sly), or any elf for that matter, again.

photo i took at tom and cathy's friday night potluck for the muhlig's who were up from hillsboro looking to move here. their house burned to the ground a few weeks ago. photo was taken in low light, no tripod, and of course i had to tweak it.

what it is really is an ongoing thing i've fallen into: take pictures while i learn digital camera. load onto computer anything i might be able to work with. and see what is possible and what is not. the above photo for instance was almost totally dark, black, very little information, and i got the above out of it which is not entirely successful but the process was enlightening, so to speak.

sending files for book this morning, and then jump into all of the things i have been putting off while i was in deadline fever.

i feel good this morning, wide awake and fresh. i think a good night's sleep did it and am thankful because i was sinking lower and lower this weekend.

talked to old friend geoff in santa fe yesterday, putting together trip to chaco canyon while i am in arizona late november. i very much look forward to this for too many reasons to list here.

have an appointment with dentist tuesday. i may be headed towards false teeth city.

i'll finish off today's post with another aphorism picked at random from a collection i've been reading. a commentary on my intellectual stamina that it's about all i can read for pleasure these days. anyway here it is:

"machinery is aggressive. the weaver becomes a web,, the machinist a machine. if you do not use the tools, they use you."
emerson, 'works and days', society and solitude, 1870

my morning's icon. i'm not totally happy with the results but i have no shame so you see it above.

got this included in an email from friend jerry:

"It is good that the desire for enlightenment seems far away, because
the desire for enlightenment is the greatest barrier in attaining it.

It is one of the eternal questions for the seekers of truth. On the one hand the masters go on saying, "Attain enlightenment," and on the other hand they go on saying, "Don't desire it." And it has been a great puzzle for the poor disciple. The master is saying both things: desire it, and don't desire it. Desire it because it is the only thing desirable; don't desire it because desire becomes a barrier.

Not to create that puzzle for you, my way of working has been
different. Just being with you, talking or not talking, just giving my whole heart to you and creating a situation in which you can taste something of enlightenment... even that small taste of enlightenment will be enough for you to stop here and now in this moment. You will forget all desires, enlightenment included.

If a situation can be created in which you are so blissful, so
contented, that just for a moment there is no desire in your mind, you have learned a great lesson – that if this state of no-desire can continue every moment, you need not bother about enlightenment: it will come to you. You have not to go to it. It is not an object sitting somewhere that you have to desire and find and work hard and go to it. It is simply your own state when there is no desire.

This desirelessness is the most blissful state possible, and
enlightenment is another name for it. Knowing it even for one moment is enough, because you are never given by life two moments together; it is always one moment. And if you know the secret, the alchemy of
transforming this moment, you know the whole secret of transforming
life, because the next moment will also be the same. You can do to it what you have done before; you can continue in desirelessness.
Being in my presence... I am using it as a device to avoid any confusion and puzzle in your mind.

I can give you the taste, and then the taste will take care of you.
First, the desire for enlightenment will look so far away, and by and by you will forget all about it because you will be in it; it will be within you. And certainly in the beginning it looks like a beautiful dream, because we are accustomed to reality and its ugliness. We know beauty only in dreams.

So whenever something like this happens to you even while you are fully awake, it feels as if it is a dream. Reality cannot be so nourishing, so tremendously beautiful, so magnificent: reality cannot have this magic. But I tell you, reality is more magical than any dream. It is more beautiful than any dream; it is more poetic than the greatest poetries of the world.

Te reality that we know is not the true reality; it is the reality
seen through an ugly mind which projects itself on reality. We don't
see the real; we always see it colored with our own prejudices, ideas, our whole mind. And even that we see only while running. We never relax. We are always constantly on the run, knowing not where we are going. It is just that something seems to be missing, and we are trying to find it everywhere, in all directions. And we will not find it anywhere, because this mind will always be between you and the real, distorting the real.

If you are receptive in my presence, if you are loving, your mind
leaves you for a moment – it has to leave you. Something more important than your mind is happening. That's what love means. You can even sacrifice yourself – in trust you sacrifice the mind, and the moment the mind is put aside and you see eye to eye with reality, it is so beautiful, indescribably beautiful. And certainly in those moments you will feel that you don't even want to be enlightened. If this rality can go on and on forever, then what more can enlightenment give you?

And you are right, because this is the beginning of enlightenment. You have got just a glimpse, and even the glimpse makes you drop the desire for enlightenment – and dropping the desire makes enlightenment easily possible. It simply happens. One day suddenly you wake up in the morning and you are not the same person, and with your change the whole existence has changed. And then it is not a question of doing something to keep it; it remains with you.

In fact, even if you want to drop it, you cannot drop it. You cannot go back; you can only go forward.

And one day, that day also comes in your life when enlightenment
becomes so natural to you – just like breathing, just like the
heartbeat, just like the blood running through your veins – that you
don't even feel it. And the blood is going really fast, round and round from feet to head, but we don't feel it; we are born with it, we are accustomed to it.

When enlightenment becomes just a natural phenomenon, then the last
mystery opens its door: one goes even beyond enlightenment. Going
beyond enlightenment means one becomes just ordinary, part of this vast universe – without any claim, without any superiority, without any ego. One simply dissolves in the ocean of reality, just like a dewdrop in the morning sun slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. That is the last... Then there is nothing else left to happen; you have become the ocean.

Enlightenment still keeps something of you... very fragile, but there is still some idea of "I." And because of enlightenment, not knowingly, you are superior and you feel superior. That's why the last step, when even that smallest part of "I" also dissolves... now you are neither superior nor inferior: you are not.

Existence is.

Buddha calls it nirvana. He has chosen the best word for it."

Osho, taken from The Path of the Mystic, Chapter #2, © Osho.com

another pic i rescued from the "lost archives". this one dates back a few years to when i first started combining watercolor with anything electronic or otherwise i could get my hands on.

worked all day yesterday on cleaning up and collecting new life files to send to myrtle beach. i was aiming for 12 today, the last UPS pick up time. i'm not going to make it, so they will leave monday morning.

i've been missing the wonderful weather and think i'll get up to the parkway next week.

first class at unca center for creative retirement begins friday, i'm taking 4 classes: beginning piano, color theory, tai chi, and jung.

my attention span seems to have been used up - temporarily i hope - and i got totally lost driving to tom & cathy's night before last. it was an eerie sensation. but a beautiful aliatory cruise. luckily a get a retry tonight.

caught the leher news on pbs last night and was interested in what dave brooks had to say. i rarely agree with him on anything, but he talked about across the board institutional failure re katrina. this is my current meta theory about the hurricane reaction debacle. the institution as a method of organizing people to get things done has, like everything else in our lifetime, evolved and now IMHO become a cartoon. the organizing principle of institutions is self aggrandizement. another way to say it is survival, profit, based on not pretending to be, but actually becoming ignorant of the human domain. which includes doing something meaningful for reasons other than profit.

since i don't have much else to say today, a random sample of latest book i'm reading, the oxford book of aphorisms chosen by john gross:

"heaven knows what would become of our sociality if we never visited people we speak ill of: we should live, like egyptian hermits, in crowded solitude."
george eliot, scenes of clerical life, 1858

among other things i have been going thru past posts and collecting images that were posted. i plan to enlarge image archives to include some of these, many of which i'd forgotten about. above is a good example. there are a lot of them and they're not on image archive page yet. i'll let you know when they are up.

working on new life book again, this time to deliver workable files jeff and susan can continue to work in myrtle beach and india. afraid it will be mon or tuesday before i can ship disks but we'll see how today goes.

vox populi: everyone is upset finally with bush. and his far flung cohorts: the ownership class. by that i do not mean people that own something, but folks who own the media, business, all institutions, and most of all, you.

it will be interesting to see how the noise machine deals with this. personally i do not think if bush physically disappeared today it would make much difference. he has his own owners, and they would just replace him with the junta's latest model. the problem is systemic, historical and not personal. it is the loss of a common language for the both the oligarchy and the rest of us.

one possible solution, not the best but a distinct dark horse, is for the republican base (not the politicians) to feel more like humans than numbers and cut him loose and take back their party.

or, if the trend continues, the power machine, well-oiled of course, might just decide to hell with it and spring a surprise that i'm sure is well-planned out and hidden somewhere: dispense with the elections. maybe have a fixed game show instead.

far out, huh?

katrina - i may have the hurricane's name spelled wrong - has understandably kicked up a firestorm about bush's invisible coup d'etat and the manner it which it functions. the airwaves are full of the consequent buzz-words from all direction: "blame-game" goes a long way to invalidating any criticism of response to the catastrophe.

reasonable people are upset, but in the face of bush's noise machine may find that it is impossible to discuss the post-catastrophic response catastrophe.

points to ponder:

1 - the response was not an aberration caused by mother nature. it was and is perfectly congruent with everything else "bushy". cronyism, deafness to the outside world which includes the entire globe with the exception of the "yes men" who huddle in the white house. it is another example of the unamerican take over of the republican party by the criminal overworld, and the real world chaos that results.

2 - the response by "the people", some of whom are well-trained and well-experienced disaster relief teams, has been stopped cold. last night on the radio i heard story after story of fully loaded expeditions headed south who were turned back by the guv'mnt. while it is understandable that a modicum of control is desirable in all efforts to help, the exclusion of "we the people" is worse than unfortunate, it is situation normal for the oligarchs. remember during the last election if you were not a credentialed and well behaved and rehearsed republican, you could not attend an election speech by the bush team.

3 - "the race card" is another troubling development. middle america got a peek into the invisible - in bush's world - 3rd world that has become deligitimized but exists in this country. there are thugs, bandits, and politicians and police on the take in N.O., always have been. but the "looting" is small potatoes compared to the corporate looting that is taking place all over the world, ie iraq.

4 - the bedrock discrepancy between the populace and all of the institutions including government is highlighted by this fiasco and has much to reveal about the core problem of our present gum'nt.

it is my belief that institutions, all of them, have devolved into sitcom land. the current mode of meetings, memos, power-point presentations and the like are regarded by the members of any institution as the right way to go about things. but the sitcom attributes of this mode are well known among the just plain folks. turf battles, sycophants, cover your ass and all of the bureaucratic spaghetti we know so well. these folks are scared of ordinary people because they don't know any. the resulting isolation from the human domain can only cause bad uninformed decisions.

9/11, the attack, was carried out by small flexible groups. the response was yet another institutional reorganization into homeland defense. anyone who has survived in this closed world knows that a vast reorganization of formerly separate institutions doesn't work. while we have meetings, the enemy sits back and patiently lets us fall on our face.

the fact that for the first time in our history we have declared war against a noun, not a nation-state, comes from the same hubris and ignorance of the owners of our nation-state. the fully conditioned institutionalized - CEOs, presidents, the super-enabled rich - are ignorant in the most basic sense of the word of the domain of just-plain folks, whether here or in iraq. we are in the middle of that ignorance's result.

folks who inhabit the day to day mundane world know how to navigate within it. folks who have walled themselves off from it don't have a clue.

my point is that as long as this absolute split between the ownership world and the folks on the ground persists, naive misjudgements and consequent critical mistakes will continue.

the solution, it seems to me, is for the republican establishment, the "base", many of whom are scared to death of the bush machine, stand up and retake their party. all power-mongers should be dropped by parachute into the darkness of the great american night. more or less like normal people have been. the reality of suffering and displacement would no longer be excluded from that class, nothing but waking up would result. and the junta would be history.

totally sleepless night. and i feel it. some kind of astrological malaise. i must be in retrograde again. picked a digital photo at random and you see it above. something wierd was going on in front yard.

reading an interesting book:the eden project: a jungian perspective on relationship by James Hollis . it's for a class i'll be taking soon at unca. nothing i would have chosen to read.

but it's very good, and not so much man-woman "relationship" but more like object relations, the manifest world of duality. especially good on organizations, a timely subject, and the difference between society and community.

tried something a little too wierd on this photo. oh well. one of the oddities of this site is that i post works in progress, and don't forget it's only a 17k file.