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

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

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

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

but that was back when humans conversed.

Who Will Rule The New Internet? - TIME

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

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

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

lot to do today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yesterday i felt very weird. all day. what can i say? the inner world affected by the outer maybe?

how many worlds are there anyway?

sri auribindo wrote that the mental world we inhabit is external, imposed.

but if i am totally conditioned to "think" that it is the entire kosmos - and if all of us are - then life as we know it is a dream. a notion that pops up from time to time in human history. Plotinus, the vedas, the "Cloud of Unknowing", Ramana Maharshi, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Hafez, not to mention oprah and Eckhart Tolle.

so what about this "dream"? to big to think about, much less to describe.

but currently it has the smell of a world ruled by the ignorant (from the verb "to ignore". specifically frat boys born with some sort of spoons in mouth, shriveled souls bent on endless owning, beyond the pale of justice.

elections to make things right? maybe, maybe not. but as long as we are stuck here might as well push the boulder uphill one more time.

another foto sprinkled with magic dust.

i promised myself that i would post these snappy lines from a song i heard on the AM radio while nosing my truck around the mountains. i don't think i did yet, so here it is. don't know the song's name or the band:

"i am what i am
cause i ain't what i used to be."

lot of existential, metaphysical, and yes "spiritual" implications to muse over.

watercolor from last febuary.

returned from the first memorial-say road trip i can remember taking. there may have been a few others long ago when the road was an adventure instead of a war zone. met a few survivors of my cohort, musicians of all skill leverls including mighty fine, had a great time.

now comes the hundred days of summer. i'll install 2 window air conditioners today. since i don't go out much in the heat i'll invent a couple of long term projects to putter with thru the dog days. video and a series of paintings most likely.

in a hurry. the above is to let you know that despite lack of posts
it's all good.

later====> later====> later====> back monday.

realized yesterday that this coming weekend was labor day. i had it fixed in my head that it was the last day of may. i'll be camping out somewhere near dobson in surry county. a yearly gathering, may have crossed paths w/ some of the folks there, maybe not. tonight i will attend orientation to video editing at urtv. today finish cleaning and emptying living module. grocery shopping. library. change oil in truck. find something that i can't remember at the moment. i'm posting this from new browser "flock" that seems peachy keen so far.

i'm working in spurts on 12 minute video using material that i have for one reason or another created and has been hanging around since. presumably will for "wallpaper project" which i don't know much about except they have been doing half hour video for awhile - 3 yrs? - always a good sign.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

reading spook city by William Gibson. i've read and enjoyed most of his work over the years. even when i feel like i'm reading the same book over and over, "cyber-punk", the intersection of the street and the mind tyranny of the overworld. anyway ran accross this in the wee hours of the morning:

"She remembered Inchmale describing Stockholm syndrome, the fondness and loyalty one could supposedly come to feel for even the most brutal captor. . . Inchmale thought that America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/11."

this is a throwaway line in the book, but one worth pondering.

the best prison is the one you don't know you are in.

another beautiful morning. another image. another photoshop meditation.

wedding last evening was a good one. location the best of western NC. in the rush to get there - of course i was rushed, one of my bad habits or maybe karmic left-over - i forgot camera but i'm not going to spend any time reminiscing about the shots i didn't take. i'm halfway convinced that the sun set over the great smokey park range but halfway dubious. whatever it was they had a shape that resembled and reminded me of the smokeys visible from places on big ridge, another in a long string of worlds i once lived in.

ceremony and folks present were a delight. suzanne and issac got married real good.

today is my day to re-lax. that means clean the fort from top to bottom. and maybe slip over to t.'s or the parkway.

framing a picture while pbs news hour was burbling in the background i heard a little of this and that. here is what i make of it:

the republicans: i used to think the party had been kidnapped, blackmailed, bought, whatever by the bush cabel. so you had the bush mafia and the rest, reagon republicans. nether friends of mine. but now i think it is a spectrum of criminality, from the big man - who is not bush - to the soldiers, ie republican congress and corporations.

today's dustup: talking to the enemy or potential enemy is appeasement.

part of the oligarch's tired strategy during this era of brand wars. don't talk to nation states or groups who threaten us. dialogue, conversation, communication is taboo. in fact even knowing anything about the enemy is in bad taste and slightly suspicious. the language, culture, and complexity of anypeople is a domain the ober-kriminals don't even know they don't know. hubristic bandit warlords who are totally embalmed as far as their consciousness of here and now are concerned and we are concerned.

if obama simply responds to this pseudo-referential move in a straight forward manner, forgets about looking tough behind a lapel pin, and contextualizes ithe whole sorry sound-byte baloon as a stale move in a shabby game and a move premised on the belief that most americans are stupid
he wins. we win.

so obama needs to respond on the basis of all of us knowing what's up.

i don't know a whole lot about youtube. it is such a huge sprawling site and i have not spent much time there. except for some of the keyboard tutorials where i have picked up a clue or two.

so since i have slid into video dvd creation this year (reason: since i keep pumping out electronic gizmo muzak and short animated do-hickeys out of habit i thought why not put them on dvd: halfway successfully) i put one of them up a week or so ago just to see if i could do it.

so today i found a "channel" with the following description of the video:

"like nothing i've ever heard. or played.
visual artist and friends who play unknow instruments for mental prophylaxis and help create the new which will be now but not for long."

now what is weird about this is i didn't write it. and i don't know where it came from but is exactly like something i would write. especially that last part. so what's up? as always, i don't have a clue but apparently i don't need one.

still whittling away at removing files from 5 disk drives. space is slowly manifesting.

the weather lately has been that moody, overcast, shadowless, silent weather i enjoy so much. stillness. the mind ceases burbling almost and yet in the slow steady "now" i find more is accomplished than in the heroic adrenaline driven hyperactivity that passes for normal these days. i like it.

video i uploaded to youtube last week can be viewed here.

why? because it's there.

last night i listened again to "zeke and the wheel" by r.b. morris and was again very impressed by this production. musicians, poet singer, and quality of audio is quite amazing. as a songwriter/performer i have to put this guy up there with dylan. a lot of resonances and references to my experience of life. but subtle. bears repeated listening. don't confuse with the band with the same name as the album.

man what nerve to put a picture like this up. dyspeptic. tomorrow it will be better. but really the picture is not an anagrammatic view of chris's day. or not.

finger painting can be a mess.

cleaning up, a new broom. it takes a lifetime to do. i found the following in a small 2 inch square notepad i vaguely remember always being underfoot. it must have gotten soaked at some point, ink blurred.

i don't know if it's more fun finding or creating. or the difference between them.

if it is a song it might have a name. maybe-->

Someone is Dreaming Right Now

Out along the highway
There’s work that’s being done.
Heavy dancing gases
Playing with the sun.

Another ageless darkness
In the parking lot.
Shadows shouting chrome:
Another evening shot.

Down along the river bend
It’s always Friday night.
When the south wind blows real good
You know there’ll be a fight.

Underneath the boardwalk
Lost lovers contemplate
The missing moon and stars
They thought that they could make.

“Which world?” asked the ticket master
Behind his missing throne
“Any world but this one”
Replied the message on the phone.

The glitter in the window said
“It’s all one way you know.
I guess that you forgot
The one who told you so”

Discourse in hybrid harmony
No longer takes the chance
The open door stands asleep
Dreaming words that dance

The far plateau lies
well placed in all this mess
Must have been the misplaced map
Or just a lucky guess

The clouds they are outrageous
No laughs at all tonight
Relatively pointless
The moon shines it’s delight

As we tiptoed through the forest
Peculiar plants were glowing
Like someone’s smile we know
And couldn’t help enjoying

Every night I end a day
Trapped in amber glow
If I wasn’t in a hurry
I’d be just as slow

Avoid the void they said
Standing tall and straight
When the elevator stopped
They didn’t hesitate

The beast meanwhile was loose
Events were overflowing
Annoying nonreflection
Kept anyone from knowing

“So long” yelled the hobo
Sliding down a trance.
"Without a detached head
You never had a chance".

saw junior brown at the orange peel last nite. he has a pretty formulaic set he delivers but he is so good at it that it doesn't matter. very relaxing to watch him in action, he doesn't seem to sweat it but delivers texas honkey tonk and blues riffs with aplomb.

at last finished "warlock" by Oakley Hall . an excellent read, and a hard book to describe. such a transparent and clear narrative, no flourishes, straight ahead prose, and yet it resonates with all sorts of implications about human nature, life, death, politics etc.

speaking of oakly hall i stumbled onto the author after i found out that racheal cox, a sweet little girl my children grew up with is in a band of the same name, working hard and doing good:
Oakley Hall – Listen free at Last.fm

i took this image when i was loose on the back roads.

but as they used to say content is king so:

politics:
one of obama's strengths is the timbre of his voice.

he must strengthen his innate ability to communicate thru the noise bubble by talking straight, from the context of transcending but including politicalspeak. ie say what he says as if he was talking to me or you, assuming we all are only too familiar with the constricted media cliches.

culture:
i happened to see on the local access channel a local minister speaking on evolution and creationism, i guess they call it "intelligent design". he was good. what struck me was what he was saying, basically that the manifest world had a point to it rather than being a random result, is not unreasonable. in fact the "non-dual" approach is similar in that existence has a point, a path, and the present population of humans are lost in the middle of that path. or better said, the point where the path can turn back towards the invisible unknowable source of the manifest.
Nondualism - "The term can refer to a belief, condition, theory, practice, or quality.":

life:
was a bowl of cherries, now is cherries rolling around in space along with the shards of a broken bowl.

art:
going to see jr. brown tonight.

respite from the worldly:
see above.

i was thinking today how thinking is not the same as consciousness. like most of us, i am conscious of my thoughts. i think...

feelings to some extent but i accept there are feelings that affect my persona that i am not conscious of. i mean, that's how i feel.

then i got in the truck. 4 stops. only got lost once.

when i got back here did the above image.

'nother doodle. yesterday i voted. did you?

still tweaking format of this thing.

last night attended field gear class at URTV, first of two. the digital video cameras are something else, nothing like the ancient analog equipment i used to schlep around before the earth was cool.

finally managed to produce dvd, but had to drop the menu idea, this one plays 5 separate short pieces one after another. today if the stars are right i will upload one to youtube. because it's there.

rest of the day i have the luxury of no pressing tasks. will shop for small camping stove and maybe head out for a day or two after end of week (rain coming).

small observation: the roman empire devolved when the periphery eg Dalmatian coast, england, syria etc became so remote that the roman "citizens" there had nothing in common with their fellow citizens in rome. function of geography, culture, and distance. the current electoral politics in USA is highlighting a similar phenomenon. groups of citizens with no commonality except for the commercial world of brands.

it's voting day in carolina. i haven't participated in the runup (neologism) but of course will vote. i passed on early voting, mainly to experience the action at the polls. the primary is a possible turning point for the democrats and yes i'll be voting for mr. obama. why?

because he carries less of the stigmata of the ruling class, the movers and shakers who don't have a clue about how you and i live, think, feel. the 2% of citizens who own our world. the democrats have proved themselves to be an integral part of this bunch, not able to stand up and talk like a man or women, exactly like their counterparts the republicans.

it is worth noting that if the obama buzz continues and he is elected president, the bad guys who have screwed our world up will not go away. one point of view is that the republican party, as lame as their specious machinations have been since reagon, was hijacked by plain old white collar criminals. they could walk away with their loot because they are criminals first and republicans second.

so my vote is my attempt to restore something that has been lost, and that goal is always shaky. i am voting for edwards to become attorney general and bring to justice the neo-mafia who have infiltrated the country's institutions and helped turn them into bad jokes. if the law is not used after the new president is in office, then all bets are off and the rat-hole will continue to devour our lives.

foto: last week's walk down the parkway.

today's email, got this link:

A Tribute To Albert Hofmann

good to see this taboo subject discussed in an open, matter of fact manner. be sure to read the comments.

i'm such a tecno-primitive. i do all this stuff without knowing much. i just started playing with depth of field or foocus on camera. what fun. above from a few days ago.

sunday. beautiful weather. yesterday was cool, moist and overcast. as was pointed out to me many years ago quite aggressively, the celt in me loves this kind of day. i get resonances and flashes of other places and times. some of them are: playing the shakuhachi by the river in bluff utah, listening to the loons. sitting in a rocking chair in the dark on the front porch at big ridge. talking to the night.

about 3 yesterday i finally said the hell with it and rove up to the parkway. the parkway heading north is barricaded at - i think - mile 254.3 0r 4 cars parked there, i did the same, crossed the barricade on foot and had a most pleasant walk for about a mile or so, strolling down the centerline of the road with occaisional climbs up the west side. lots of pictures of which the above is one.

driving to the barricade and walking beyond it i encountered a lot of bicycles, very few cars. nice to stroll a stretch like that and no traffic.

on another note i did the mall day before yesterday to pick up a badly needed new pair of glasses. in stopped in the bookstore to buy a clip on light for reading (part of my camping out supplies) and noticed a small display of books labled "summer school reading". i was surprised and delighted to find a brief history of everything by ken wilber among the books. amazing.

Ken Wilber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"One of Wilber's main interests is in mapping what he calls the 'neo-perennial philosophy', an integration of some of the views of mysticism typified by Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy with an account of cosmic evolution akin to that of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. He rejects most of the tenets of 'Perennialism' and the associated anti-evolutionary view of history as a regression from past ages or yugas.[9]. Instead, he embraces a more traditionally Western notion of the great chain of being. As in the work of Jean Gebser, this great chain (or 'nest') is ever-present while 'relatively' unfolding throughout this material manifestation, although to Wilber '...the 'Great Nest' is actually just a vast morphogenetic field of potentials'...'."

mrs. obama is speaking tonight at unca. i guess i'll go.

photo i took last week for day in the life of asheville project before i ran out of steam.

Plastic: Burn, Denver, Burn — Rush Reaches Out To Rioters
"and riots in Denver, at the Democratic Convention will see to it we don't elect Democrats. And that's the best damn thing that can happen to this country, as far as I can think."
true statement. as far as he can think.

pretty day. above was a test - video. i must have done this one about ten years ago using infinity-d on mac system 8 (?). if it works expect bigger and better things to come.

or even if it doesn't.

[it appears to work. golly. but i guess it needs a poster frame.]

[the black square was not pleasant as it came up. so i removed it.]

yep it's old. i maybe did it on system 9.
quietly busy today, loved the weather, cool and overcast.

Ken Nordine's Word Jazz Web Site and Podcast - "Wow of Now" Podcast
Ken Nordine's Word Jazz Web Site and Podcast - has found a new drug
tasty reminder from our old friend ken nordeen. shamen, our own william blake. shades of kenneth patchen and a marvel of circuitry in the basement, a distant drone...

another sleepless night. happening a lot just lately. only correlation with anything: taking antibiotics. pretty weird, huh?

plus while i wasn't sleeping got this:

"time set silence into bone." only there was another word after "time".

today i will find my billfold which i lost - here at home - yesterday.

------> found it.

did picture above from drawing c. '66. finally maybe figured out the dvd authoring video and burning miasma, ended up using ,rdf file amongst the processes and it seems to work. lot's of ides of how to use this interactive medium. but the rendering time, what a sink. i vaccuum, do dishes, learn the locrian pentatonic sale on keyboards, forget it, match frames and pictures.

reading auribindo. what a guy.

by some weird cyclic event last night i worked on a dozen projects i may never finish and was very surprised when i noticed it was early morning outside. the last time this happened i don't even remember. but it did.

anyway the above image i found with in a bunch of digital clutter this morning.

one step too many is a dance. i posted the image above which appeared pretty quickly. and the way i should have been doing for awhile. anyway if you click on the image you will see the image full size. i'll fool with centering it some other time. there are so many of them ("other times" i mean).

China must stop cursing the Dalai Lama and talk: U.S.

a good idea.

maybe the usa could do the same with hamas, iran, and many others.

politics. yes it is enough to drive us all nuts, and the remedy for it is not to be found in that domain. but anybody that votes for republican criminal cabal because of the messiness of the dems is worse than nuts. if they vote for mccain because they think lapel pins mean anything worth meaning even if they are made in china that is bad enough.

but because the dems haven't mastered the charade? much worse.

do you have a lapel? among the many that don't the manufactured brouhaha is from another planet.

good morning. spent a very quiet weekend too quite.

fpr the first time in a very long time my creative side is in the doldrums. can't summon up the interest to do anything in the once satisfying realm of puttering in the land of making "art". i am accepting this as a probably needed change and look foward to it going away. meanwhile this old blog limps along.

but moments continue during which i continue to streamline my existence by throwing gtuff overboard in my domacile. i am hungry for interior space both in the realm of household and my head.

what does this mean for blog? content is king, the king is dead, long live the king. when the fog blows away something new will be revealed.

a surprise for you and me,

energy at an all time low. mine, not the world's.

words simply fail me. hope my feets don't.

too many words, too many numbers. 21st c. blues. i've noticed many of my peers remarking the proper names go first. anything capitalized. and then there is the thought that the indigo children, a touch of asperger's and raised with desktop computers, cellphone, etc. are the wave of the future because they can deal with it.

watched oprah's book lass lesson 7 - the new book by e. tolle - with some friends. i'm not as sure as some that this phenomenon signifies much except the hunger of the world's modern citizenry for meaning and sense. which is vast.

i am part of "day in the life of asheville", a project starting at 12 noon today and running thru midnight sat. picture taking. haven't come up with any plan for it.

watched a minute or two of debate on abc. that was enough. constricted, cliche ridden game show stuff. democracy has been hijacked by criminals. corporate entities trump justice. do you know who owns you? or what owns you?

myself i'm entranced by images. not bragging, nothing to brag about. just the facts ma'am, and the facts are image-inary. there might be one above.

got back in the santa fe to be of the south yesterday. very glad i was talked out of leaving late the day before, it made for an easy, almost dreamy drive. as happens on getting back to one's own bed if you have one, i opened the door and the living module looked great.

i just scooted in on this trip the last of the time i can travel to myrtle beach and the triangle (where some of my children and grand children left. the temperature and tick situation make it nearly impossible for me to visit. sunday i found a small tick on my person, could not have been there long. removed it cleanly (meaning i extracted the whole critter including head). late yesterday when i got back it and about 5 other spots had deteriorated to open gaping wounds and like many other visits east and south out of the mountains, had to make doctors appointment on my return.

it is a curious thing and something the CDC is way out of line on. i misspent part of my youth in the woods every summer around the research triangle and other places, deep in the woods and ticks did not bother me. sounds kind of tacky, but i set a jar of water on the mantle where they would go when i got back from walking or whatever. these were the "dog ticks" so familiar to the area.

but that was in another country so to speak. since then two things have changed. migration of "foreign" ticks to area - deer ticks from the northeast, starri ticks from texas. the second change i suspect is my metabolic and immune system, due to being beat up on a daily basis by type I diabetes.

so doxycycline here i come.

returned with book i worked on years ago which has been printed in india. heavy hardback, 700 pages plus: the new life by bhau kalchuri. even though or maybe because i was working for - i think - close to a year or two using quark xpress to put the manuscript into publishable form i never read it. but i started it this morning and it's pretty good. a lot of work by a lot of people volunteering their efforts is evident and i especially liked the prose which flows naturally into a good read.

i'll post a photo of my trip above when after i hook up hardware etc.

about to head up the road. fooled around trying to get short quiktime up, but it will be later. really. meanwhile an image: i know a beach where it never ends.

ok something useful. useless. how to post dvd video to... blogger... youtube...

begin:

strqaight uplinnk via blogger post:

spring at the center.

back in chapel hill. visit to center was long overdue and a delight. i'll be here over weekend.

well the post below w/ a video snippet obviously did not work. right now i'm sitting in a wi-fi coffee shop in myrtle beach so unless impulse grabs me i'm not going to try to fix it. when i get home i'll jump into it and a bunch of other technical clap-trap involving video, quicktime, flash, dvds etc.

maybe. maybe i'll take up duck carving for a change. oops i meant duck decoy carving.

when i arrived at the Baba Center and found my room, there was a copy of new life hardback on the bed signed by bhau. it knocked me out. what a beautiful surprise. it seems like a hundred years ago that i slogged thru a lot of heavy lifting typesetting a very fluid manuscript. it is a big book and the job of pilgrims bringing back copies from india is going to be rough. for those that don't know, shipping thru indian customs is apparently not very workable. [note: expense is the primary culprit i have since found out.]

other news: i think my dobro died. the tricone resonator has developed a nasty buzz. i thought i had it fixed a few weeks ago. but it's back.

could not ost this from coffee shop so posting now.

test video, uploaded on the road, don't know what it is or how it will play.

monday, not quite noon. another sleepy day. leaving soon for myrtle beach. made it to raleigh to see stone's movie with jim. concert footage, glad to see sax player - can't remember name - still standing. keith richards well on his way to becoming elderly english eccentric. jagger certainly skinny and probably should be in olympics, in really good physical shape. didn't see a lot of children and grandchildren this visit, will see what happens next weekend when i will be back. quick shower and on to center. i'm operating on wireless pc, sure is a house of cards, hopeful that i can get online a time or two over the next five days. if not, i'll be back.

sunday morning. lost yesterday. layed down for short nap and slept thru grandson corbin and friend upstairs making hell of a racket. visited jim and didn't make it to doug and marcia's for unc final four game which i saw a good bit of with nicole.

today jim and i are going to see stones in 3d imax.

i feel better this morning than the last few days.

who is at the top of the power hierarchy?

who is at the bottom?

you me and everyone we know.

this week has been an exercise in patience.

and i flunked.

i recall being asked a few years back if i were starting blog anew whether i would still use the same domain name, "modern peasant". implicit was the feeling that it was sort of framing myself as a peasant with all of the negative attributes that characterization implies.

my answer was "yes i would".

i have to admit that very few got it. the name appealed to me because, with all of the hubris and arrogance built into the modern idea of how we live, the vast majority of the world's population retain some similarity to the "peasant" stereotype we carry with us.

professional. successful or not, educated, decisive, more knowledgeable than our ancestors etc perhaps, but we are and have been living under threat of of hidden violence if we step out of line. this was all illustrated on the macneil news pbs piece yesterday on the FAA organization. grown men testifying before congress how the world works in their corner. and to my mind not just the FAA but all organizations and institutes. of particular note was the story of one worker bee who described how his boss invaded his cubicle and, fondling the photos of his wife and family he was allowed in his workspace remarked what a shame it would be for him to lose his livelihood if he persisted in trying to do his job for real and not as highly formalized ritual charade.

today as the "system" unravels faster and faster the results of humans being forced to live as cogs is a little more visible.

we live under the domination of crooks, warlords, dictators and bandits. babylon after the mongolian hordes have plundered and retreated but whose presence is not far off. the present cabal in this country has pillaged and looted, not on horseback but in offices and mahogany board rooms. in a nation of law they would be arrested and tried. 10,000 ways they have exploited and robbed.

and this iron grid has descended world wide today. complete with the illusion that gee gaws and toys make it all ok, "the good life".

surrounded by the glossy panoply of greed and instant cliches.

i am really sick of it. there is nothing to do but stand up and and get "out" of line no matter what the consequence. firing squad? internment? fugitive life on the streets? ostracism? mental institution?

sure, why not. it is one thing to have an inkling that all is not right. it is another to collaborate with the overlords and hope we escape their attention.

ok thanks for allowing me to rant.

leaving town today for awhile.

picture above another find in eternal spring cleaning. gum bichromate print. i did a series in this medium in early 80's.

from an email i got this morning from old friend m. that i can't resist sharing:

Q: What did you gain by complete and total enlightenment?
A: Nothing.

Cool! That is the Buddhist take on it. Still. . .still, I'm more sympathetic to the Taoist version of that question:

Q: What did you gain by complete and total enlightenment?
A: Huh?

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.

watercolor i painted at my dad's house landscape i made up.

or maybe it made me up.

well i'm clear. signed up for urtv yesterday, orientation next wednesday. this should allow me the use of real video camera and editing facilities. i don't know where it will take me.

picture i received yesterday of granddaughter grace. beautiful print, the jpg hardly does it justice. it was taken when she was 3 months old. what presence.

finally have cobbled together a method to create video DVDs. i caught on tv last night while i was roaming from room to room a short interview with a lady who is producing or has produced on a low budget some sort of animated version of, i think, peter and the wolf. she is five years into it and stated that it was all she did. it was as she put it, an obsession.

without being obsessed i would never have beat my way thru the jungle of creating first dvd. i guess for some of us obsession is necessary. i'm obsessed. every day i paint, record music, work on soundtracks, animation, video. why? obsessed with the creative.

downside: everything else pales into insignificance. a price i will gladly continue to pay. it keeps meaningless at bay.

i was going to post a detailed and clear exposition of where the world culture is at, why, and why cultural evolution can result in (and has at present) a retrogressive situation peopled by warlords, pathological power addicts, cheaters and six pound users. the shrinking owner class spinning downwards into insanity.

and the other 99%: us modern peasants.

instead i posted the above picture. done with repidograph technical pen which i used for years. dates from @ 1966-67. found the other day in the endless cleanup.

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.

still kicking.
passport dissappeared
vision demands
nothing can be feared

wish i could make spellchecker work.

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.

weekend: great progress in emptying domicile of"things". unburied all sorts of stuff, some of which, of course, i kept. the above ink drawing is one of these; i would guess i drew it sometime around '77.

what does it say about me? nothing much except i must have been throwing images into the sea of multiplicity longer than i remember.

and i blew away source files for a little movie i have been working on since last memorial day. seven minutes of of high quality video and audio all from my still camera. typical project. began with little audio eventually six minutes plus sound track. then i decided it needed to be a movie with visuals and jumped into various editing packages. then this and that. then deleted whole package by mistake, cleaning up disks.

maybe i can rustle up an older version and if i do, you'll see it here.

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.

deep slumber.

wake up.

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.

think this will be a prize vacation someday on wheel of eff?

electricity off yesterday from about 1:30 t0 8:30. very stormy lots of rain. first chance i've had since summer to check out truck camper for leaks, there were a few small ones. first sunny day a little fixin' to do.

i drove up to richard and debbie's to try out some video DVDs i've made. electricity went out as i was driving up driveway.

so as always back to drawing board.

just got a call from eric. he and nathan are in laramie wyo. where they spent the night. they are driving large u-haul towing car from san jose to denver. many wrecks between salt lake and laramie. they are on schedule and will be in denver this afternoon.

photo from delightful sunset mountain yesterday. still messing with 2 cyber marathons: dvd that plays on tv; the appearance of this blog; and unloading a very crowded hard drive to dvds. and ordering epson printer supplies.

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.

Oakland trade school teaches people how to grow pot | LIVING | Asheville CITIZEN-TIMES.com:
"OAKLAND, Calif. – You know you're in a different kind of college when a teaching assistant sets five marijuana plants down in the middle of a lab and no one blinks a bloodshot eye."

news snooze.

ah yes... an oldy but a goody. redid it for image archive and print from 72 dpi.

meanwhile on a moody day struggling with how to make a dvd movie.

meanwhile on political front i think my intuition was right when it told me action is required: post-political and post-partisan action.

watercolor i've been moping around with since i came back.

saw u23d again last night, this time sans imax. glasses were not red and black as at imax, and you got to keep them. to my eye it was less bright, lower contrast, and lower rez. then there was the reformatting from square to rectangular. more intimate if such a word can be used here, less deep and wide and all inclusive.

sunday. pundit cavalcades. morphing meta platitudes in the air. meme's positioned to create meaningless discourse replacing personal experience. the hum of canned thought.

to some meaning is found today in world's other than the mental life, and the fact that these worlds are unnameable in the mental world, which is considered to be the "only" reality makes us idiots, marginalized 21st c. pilgrims. so i don't have much to say except tv is going.

finished a little movie yesterday. if you see it above i manged to upload it. actually finished two, the second a little thing i have been working on for months. it will go to DVD today with a little luck.

must mention something i have been boring friends with, the movie U2 3D: The First Live-Action 3D Concert Movie, Featuring U2 -- National Geographic. a must see. it is a new technology that blows away anything you may have seen. filmed during one concert in south america, a startling good one, the 3d editing and light, shimmers and glows are perfect. the performance of all including the audience falls into the shamanistic, and the symbolism is right on. a peek into a world that is coming at us fast.

it seems to be showing now in NC. let's go. in asheville it is showing at the carmike 10, i guess w/out the IMAX screen.

couldn't help myself: i spent half of yesterday doing image above. i did it to print but thought you might like to take a look. some new methods were used, can't quite remember them at the moment. going shopping for groceries and drugstore today if it kills me.

my new attention payed to "form" insists that i organize, reorganize, post-organize, then throw every thing away.

i'll do it tomorrow.

i have an inkling how i can resusscitate archives: involves using blogspot, rediection, renaming blog and a buunch of kludges. if it works which assumes that i actually take the time to jump thru the hoops, my site shoud remain with blog tucked away and pictures up front.

foto taken i think on drive from chapel hill home on monday. or maybe on sabbatical in bali when i was coordinating the dance of the fauna.
damnest spighetti tangle trying to retrieve archives. also prioritizing tasks. or maybe i should say doing them after prioritizing. so far i have spent three solid days - with a little time for a ride up the moutain - working on the first two which naturally involve sitting with computers doing this and that.

and tv has to go. three channels is 3 too many.

but i sure will miss NASCAR,

pleasant day today. all snug and ready for the sleet hail snow rain or breezes coming tomorrow night. got more pictures today on ride with richard.

what interests me at present is form formless dichotomy. i feel intuitive need to pay attention to form - why? i don't know but could make a couple of guesses. this would include painting, imagry, dress, manners, structure, practice.

ran into marginalized ex-biz exec and took his picture you see above.

back from month away from home, first time in a very long time. other than having to take a storm window off to crawl thru window, arrival was quiet, nothing changed. busy unpacking and pluging in hardware. i have that feeling you sometinmes get after a trip of clarity and intent. actually it's fading a bit.

i posted this in a "pseudoblog" until i can get blogger to publish my "real" archives you do of course recognize the quotes.

i have it sort of fixed almost maybe so i'll continue here.

trip was good, 4 weeks plus away from my bed. longest in longer than i can remember.

visited everyone from my aunt rosy who is 95 to my second cousin once removed - or something along those lines - 6 month old nickolas, new son of sister's son jon.

stayed with my dad most of the time in prescott - mountains - and saw snow, flash flood, and sunny skies.

read a few books which is something i've not been doing at home. i mean i actually sat down in a chair with the intention of reading instead of a few paragrphs on the run. finally finished Martin Buber's i and thou which i've been attempting for 20 years. pretty good. lends itself to the non-dual tradition very nicely with a few twists thrown in. also was very impressed with earthly possessions byAnne Tyler. (the title may not be entirely correct.) this is one of a few author's of today whose books keep being given to me and i have never read. great observations of the real world we live in, mundane in a fascinating way that communicates the non-spectacular non-branded world that is replacing our personal experience with flashing lights and lasers,

i spent the day reverting to old habits, an effort to get the blog section up and running. it's 1:30 AM and i am overdue in the sack. at leas i got a picture up.

well i screwed up and seem to have lost 2 weeks of recent posts.

no harm done: i can't remember them myself.

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.]

i thought i'd have new spiffy site up by now but realised yesterday there was no way. as pseudo-prez bush says "it's hard work". i am so anxious to retire this site i may get new version up anyway up anyway, leaving in about a week for the west so i am jammed up.

on reflection i realize this is not a new condition.

so i'll try posting for a few weeks more. maybe i can come up with something to say.

been working on a 6 minute video that is starting to come together.

a paradox: the longer you live the shorter life life is. all the pain, joy, suffering, confusion, good times, bad times: blip.

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.

it snowed last night. very cold today and colder tonight.

last night, no flash no tripod. easy evening with tom erin richard debbie. back in bed asleep when the ball dropped. i wonder if it bounced. and i'm glad the balloon didn't go up. yet.