got up at the crack of dawn, took meds, getting ready to test BG when i discovered it was 3AM.
all in a day's work. or play.
stayed cooped up over the last weekend. worked on a 4th "movie" for DVD which at present contains three. movie is fine, or can be made fine, down to a few fixes. but the soundtrack crackles. i used, among other things, "ixquarks" on mac to make it which may be the culprit. i had no idea of how to use it but liked the results. but when transferred to pc and brought into vegas i got some strange crackles.
i heard some hip-hop artist somewhere talking about why he was changing from sampling to playing instruments. he said arraigning the samples into intricate patterns was way too labor intensive. you must be very obsessive to persevere when writing code, or finishing a painting that is not going well, or generated animation or music on a computer. luckily i am that. before bed last night i looked at an oil that i have been working on for too long, grabbed a tube of color and brush and finished it. looks great this morning.
now on to a new soundtrack.
i finally got a dvd out with menu, three places to go. two short video pieces, one computer generated a long time ago using, if i remember right, infini-d on a mac quadra os9. the third is 6 minutes long plus. it has been a nightmare piecing together some sort of production protocal (take a, conver to be, convert to d, script here and there in languages unknown, burn, learn.
actually it's been great fun.
i slowed way down this week and it was not pleasant. some sort of internal reorganization.
got up to parkway yesterday where i ran into an old friend.
but i probably will not be posting daily for a bit. however maybe the feel and look and content of this blog will continue to blossom too much white space can be creepy. i know i know it's an integral component of a lot of beautiful work. maybe it's just my urge to make a mark. play dough. handprint. quicksand.
gloomy doomy weather. indoors after the ides. i have been engaged for a few days - in this order - recovering (recreating really) source files for dvd i am making; painting 2 oils; recording various instruments on mac, transferring to pc and making soundtrack for flash project, have started finding visuals for it; reinforcing waterproofing on camper; and last but not least cleaning up kitchen. i've also been hauling out various boxes full of cassette tapes, cds of material i backed up at some point, and lots of dust and cobwebs.
but today is a new day so i'll finish these activities one way or another. probably another.
pretty much farted the day away yesterday. that's how i get things done - or not. added this to twinkies animation. this morning i go to DMV to figure out if i renewed my license plate and then a sort drive on the parkway. later i'll figure out something to put up in the right sidebar.
like "arrest the criminal overworld".
really strange. the last few days have been beautiful. i am experiencing this as an order to get out, drive the parkway, walk through the jungle.
but i haven't done that. a scattering of errends is about it. i don't think i'm agoraphobic, just anagoroaphilic. wow, what an ugly word.
i did set up spot in backyard with easel etc and painted for awhile.
i've been up at 6 the last two days which is a good trend. i feel better when i get up early.
beautiful weather. very busy yesterday, onward with digital animations headed for dvd land. puttered w/ painting. ditto with look of this blog, drove out to leicester for pleasant visit with tom. later at house t dropped by. we played a little music and i learned a little. two signs i got: read the "heart sutra" which i did the morning, and zazen practice is a good way to do nothing, which i think is a current need of mine, picture above is a water color, not new, which i fooled w/ a little last night. leaving now to buy a used vacuum cleaner and groceries.
i find the damnest things on computer. i have no idea of when or how i created this image, but i know why.
a post a day keeps the street away. got rid of last whatchamacallit icon. burning a data dvd right now, the begining of clearing an external hard drive on quadra. i want to use it as a voice to text gadget in case i am supposed to write the great post american novelty.
meanwhile jim (happy birthday) points out that this page still has little edit pencils showing. they gotta go.
got rid of little tool icon that was hanging all over the page.
next: colored backgrounds, some anyway, fix font sizes, work some things of interest in right sidebar.
so what if i lost a day getting rid of that line of bloggercode in modified template? it's the same as doing nothing. which seems to be.
hmmm... not sure what blogger will do with this, a late night image i just finished. jane emailed that nate is visiting in az. i've been in a solid hypomania space, worked on camper, a painting, saw dvd on richard's flat screen HD monitor and was pleased. right now i'm burning another, this one i added menu and 3 choices, one an old 3d animation i did with infini-d, one straight footage from camera, and the good one, the one i've been working on forever.
what is it about the human that drives him or her to stay busy? yesterday the electricity went out from 1:30 to 8:30 on a dark and stormy afternoon. so i relocated a canvas near a window and a couple of tubes of paint near a window and puttered. my landlord stopped by for the rent and remarked that i did my best painting in the dark.
it's true.
then today opened up wide, dry and beautiful so i did about 10 things simultaneously, still am for that matter.
ok i'm fishing my archives back. a long slow round the marlberry-bush sort of process. what you are looking at now is the beginning of this process.
gotem. now all i have to do is rebuild page using layout features. maybe i was the last person in the world using the old classic blogger with a hand rolled template.
i guess it is time i got serious about existing for the kosmos. after all, "it" does the same for me.
so i'll change my bumper sticker.
had a dream last night, something that i very rarely have anymore, or don't know that i do if i do. a lady and i were dancing, some kind of slow square dance, side by side and facing differant directions, rotating and slowly rising above the surface of the ground,one arm around each other's waist. don't remeber any music or others dancing. we were in a field checking out a complicated rube goldberg homemade mechanism whose purpose was to irrigate a pea patch. must have been early spring, plants had just broken ground. the mecanism to push water was powered by pedeling it as if it were a bicycle.
does the dream mean anything? i doubt it. does experiencing the dream mean anything? probably. but i not only don't know what, i don't know what by definition. intersection of the human and something not knowable by the human. clues and signs, broken symbols and bones, a vast dark - of course - plain littered with confusion, an unknown topography criss-crossed with impossible purpose or lack of purpose.
another day.
[gremlin note: just lost the most recent 4 weeks of posts; trying to get them back.]
a little more time and i'll filp new version of this blog out there. that means here.
but until i do i'm stuck w/ daily early morning posts. (it's how i wake up every morning - type while still asleep.
this morning i have something to say, about the word/idea of "change".
change means something new. unless it is a "change back", and even then it is new.
a change can be better or worse than what exists before the change. like the word "progress" it has acquired an implicit tone of better. ("progress" originally meant a musical harmonic progression.)
it seems to me that things will change because they always do. but what kind of change is key.
so the political brand of change doesn't mean much. what will be changed, how it will be changed can be meaningful.
to further tangle the meme "change", it has been entangled with the idea of constancy. one of the presidential debates recently had everyone involved saying that they were change agent and opponents had in the past changed their positions on this that or the other. for the last four years this has been called "flip-flopping".
so we the voters are presented with miasma of meaning which translates into any change of mind in the past is a negative but the idea of change is a positive. i won't even get into the false dichotomy of "experience' being the antonym of "change".
all of this is no more than this week's infomercial designed to entertain and divert attention from rational discourse.
it was a quick winter. snow is melting, warm weather on the way.
no picture today. in my spare time i have been working with editing a 6 minute movie and it might get finished today. i jumped in am and still splashing around.
going to join the local access station WUAR and get my hands on some hardware to do another one. someday.
am almost finished reading the border by maccartney. the second book of all the pretty horses trilogy (haven't read the first and last). this book belongs up there with the oddessy and dante's inferno IMHO.
now for what i have been dreading: a task given to me by my spiritual adviser, the hole in the wall, a list of the ten things i learned during 2007.
don't buy a camper shell one half i9nch shorter than truck bed.
every world is new by definition.
the last ten years of life are meant for experiencing a sort of happiness. there is nothing else left.
primary injunction is to know yourself.
this means becoming yourself.
this is ongoing, there is no terminating point.
once the word "idiot" meant a person who was not in a relationship with the community, sangha. now it means the opposite.
the mental world is not lost when it has become a train wreck.
reality cannot be measured, seen, or understood.
it can be accepted as mystery.
i made it back, a trip filled with surprise. had a little time to spend with 3 children and 3 grandchildren and the time spent was such a relief. like our ancestor's they can handle it whatever "it" is. good thing too.
battery developed some weirdness. the big wheel tilted and the local spirits called the shot as i was about to fill the gas tank and head west. out of nowhere truck wouldn't start. had this happened, say, between mocksville and statesville on a very raw and rainy afternoon the story would not be this story. this story is about finding and losing things. got truck to good mechanic and spent some time at dr. j's atrium counting the leaves on the ground.
i feel the need to make some statement, some summing up, i guess because year digits will increment soon. i'm not going to think about it so it may happen.
monday hardly happened. i camped out again last night. inside sleepinbag all is well. warm and comfy. but a problem is fluid shifting bags and supplies. can't reach out in dark and locate this that and the other. some stable shelving and storage next step. last night i skipped a med that i couldn't locate, misjudged some insulin requirement and pretty much stayed in bed all day while grandkids were at school and children at work. not well.
so i'm leaving tomorrow and regroup in asheville.
right now watching the fox news channel, bill o'reilly. circuses and clowns. claptrap. noise as form. kill your TV. really.
there is a man on a white horse loping across the dark beach at morning light. he is in a race with the guy who drove coast to coast in 36 hours. we will forget the outcome and stare at the mystery dust hanging in the air after they pass.
went from t-shirt mode to raw wintery phase when i got to peidmont. slept in camper last two nights. sleeping bag etc very warm and comfy. jim gave me termorest which combined with mine makes good sleeping. one slight leak discovered (it hasn't stopped raining since i got here). reading at night ok but needs adjustment. listened to mystery cd driving down, i think it is by r.l.burnside. excellent, up there with personal messages from the clash.
[i eliminated the video - don't like the way it slows down load time - dec.7]
stumbled across this video this morning. the godz were a lower east side band that played the durham civic auditorium in the 60's. the event was to introduce Meher Baba to the crowd, which was done at intermission by rick chapman fresh from india with marching orders from Baba. more than a few boos and hisses were heard. and looking at the video one can understand, the crowd wanted to rock. but it was the beginning of a very robust and still growing group of Baba-lovers.
the apparent contradiction between the avataric injunction and the sex drugs and rock and roll mode is perhaps the reason for the line in the video "god's rock and roll machine".
they left behind a reel-to-reel tape at my house which was 15 minutes of a very slowly rising sine wave as well as a strobe light which i ran during the light show.
i spent yesterday doing what i do, digging myself out of a hole i can't see. rounded up every frame and canvas in the house and had the added bonus of finding a few forgotten works. squaring away piles of stuff, now i have piles of piles. today kitchen and rumpus room and i'll be ready to hide under bed for the holidays.
richard and i went to see dave olney last night. dave is an old aquaintance from before the earth was cool. he played with a guy whose name i wish i could remember. just the two of them. some of the best music i have heard in aville. dave with rock solid rhythm guitar and beautiful vocal delivery, the guy on the telecaster complimenting him perfectly with impossible low moans, quiet feedback, transparant fluid lines of startling vertuosity. basic stripped down r&r and a hell of a lot of understated but clear passion.
and the songs: olney is indeed a master song writer, playing off the great american songbook with lyrics that seemed to beam themselves into the center of my head. seemless. all with a subtext of a lifetime on the planet, a wide awake observer of and participant in modern times, a member of the lost tribe of poets with roots going back to the now transfigured heavy duty era we were once lost in.
"if it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger."
in our lifetimes it has done both.
i am back. had a pleasant time visiting, altho as always it was a hurry up and wait situation. children and grandchildren doing great as far as i could tell, colliding with the world of one million things 9updated verbal description of maya; things have changed in the last few millenia,
my departure from aville was a classic, between rounding up stuff and stowing it in camper for first time and a slight swereve in medication which delayed and confused me, the one night i slept in camper i discovered, after dark, that i had forgotten sleeping bag and lantern. did without and spent a confortable night anyway. drive back, like drive down, was a new experience in 2001 dodge ram, great highway ride. when i got back after daer i realized sleeping bag rtc had not been forgotten but lifted from truck during the days here i was figuring out where to put things. no lock on camper which didn't seem very important. i only hope whoever got my stuff needs it and is using it, andwas not some kid acting out the outlaw.
so i decided to unload truck on arrival here and did so. couldn't find medicine and spent some time locating it. the last touch was to lose my keys so i went to bed and found then in the morning.
then yesterday my landlord pointed out that the camper door handle was covered by a plastic cover, under which was a ... keyhole. so it's off to the locksmith today, a few months late.
drove to outfitters discount w/ richard to replace missing stuff. we got totally turned around and did a grand tour of highway system, missed outfitters altho we must have passed right by it.
i mention all this as an example of the difficulty of keeping up with the world of "stuff". we are surounded, and can't circle the wagons because the wagons are what is surrounding us.
got back in town last nite. pleasant trip to visit children and grandchildren. at some point during sojourn, or maybe before, a lantern and sleeping bag and a day pack containing small cook stove and a bunch of batteries were lifted from the camper. of course with my scattered wits i figured i had left them home.
