yesterday was about right. painted, worked on books, recorded music, installed software. took a walk. life is sweet. and maybe too insular?

April 16, 2003 - Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right

"The powerful role that shame and humiliation have played in shaping world history is considerable, but something the Bush team seems utterly clueless about. Which is why the anti-war movement must be stalwart in its refusal to be silenced or browbeaten by the gloating "I told you so" chorus on the right. On the contrary, it needs to make sure that the doctrine of preemptive invasion is forever buried in the sands of Iraq."

yesterday spent a pleasant low key afternoon with bill o. we knew each other in the days before the earth cooled, late 70s early 80s.

trying to work on ken wilber's quadrent chart, now have 2 week deadline. i don't think i'll finish it but when i get to a certain unfinished point i think i'll put it online and incorporate any feed back i get. might be more fun. the final chart will i believe be done in flash so i can somehow condense meaning into the visuals with zooms, jumps, links.

errand day this morning. meanwhile finish current watercolor which i'm trying to do with masking and pouring. so far it is looking very amateurish, a difficult technique to learn.

upcoming: camp in truck camper at mt. pisgah one night soon, spend the day taking early spring photos - landscape - for painting reference.

realized that with summer coming i need to get some work out. i think i'll take 6 landscapes and have them printed giclee about a foot square max, see if i can place them around town as limited edition prints, no mat, maybe shrink wrapped. another endless task, eternal basket weaving. puttering in the true sense of the word. it never ends. that's why it's fun.

kind of an interesting oldie, done god knows when but i'm doin it again. that is, i found it and posted it. i'll reduce it's size sometime today because it currently comes in at 70k and i like to keep jpgs under 40k.

had a nice gentle day yesterday until nightfall when i fell apart. came undone. dizzy and confused. started 2 new paintings, both outside my current capabilities. should be fun. think and hope on the practical side i finally fixed vacuum cleaner. on and off activity of the last week.

hope to see old friend tom m. sometime today.

very distant from war news. TV has been quiet. off.

but on the new world that is emerging, it occurred to me the other night when it was on and i was in front of it, that the "reality" shows that live in TV land are the exact electronic equivalent of the byzantine "bread and circuses" that kept the inhabitants of that world distracted.

in the city of constantinople during it's hegonomy the city's inhabitants were divided into "reds" and "greens", each group sort of like team fans, and who lost or won at the hippodrome was a big deal, spilling over from time to time into political riots.

watching tv to find out who voted for who to get married, or be the woman of the year, could in the very near future be the hallmark of 21st c. democracy, especially since the political vote doesn't seem to matter today to most of us.

did it [the walk]. finished fooling with 2 oils, starting a real one, and a watercolor landscape method i want to try. avoided sunday news... then realized it was monday. oh well, it's the thought that counts, or in this case it's abscence.

woke up about 4 AM, spent some time reading over new wilber material for meeting tuesday evening. went back to sleep and rewoke about seven i'm glad to say.

george foned me at noon yesterday so i rode up to his yancey county hide-away, nice place, nice ride, nice day.

pushed back trip to Meher Center to april 28th. this should give me time to recalibrate meatabolic sandtraps that seem to constantly pop up these days. today i'm going to come close to finishing my book, work another few chapters on jeffs book, finish scanning fotos for parsons book, work on oil #2 which has been thru so many iterations.

and no matter what or how or when, take a long walk.

first day of spring yesterday, at least that's how it felt. great morning, spent time scanning fotos for family book, polishing poetry book, a few chapters of jeff's book, and trying to rescue an oil painting i've been fooling with. visited steve in the afternoon, plans were made to play music around 6 or 7.

went home and ate and crashed. my metabolism is swinging unpredictably in many unpredicatable directions. beginning to be a major personal problem, gotta fix - or at least adapt.

another beautiful day today, i'm gonna shut down computer, throw away the keys, and get out somewhere and walk. maybe take some pictures, everything is budding out in early lacy configuration.

Yesterday i woke up to hear a heavy, steady rain outside.

a little later i was standing by the window, coffee cup in hand, and the raindrops seemed to get a little fatter, slightly slower, still very steady. as i watched, they got even fatter, slower, and in 15 minutes it was snowing, which it did most of the day. late afternoon my truck was stacked with as much snow as i had seen all winter. the warm ground turned it slowly to semi-slush.

it's still dark out today so i don't know what's out there yet.

i had a good day. finished a watercolor, worked on laying out 2 books, one for print and 1 (mine) that will soon i hope be a pdf file.

the only frustration was trying to fix a vacuum cleaner which i've been working on all week. i think a trip to (yikes!) sears is in order today to get the right bag. the last time i was there was more than 20 years ago when my family and i drove from big ridge, jackson county, to pick up a washing machine and dryer.

alexander cockburn touchs on the subject of the common language, what used to be the language of political discourse in this country. it has been hijacked and is long gone i'm afraid.

The Twisted Language of War That is Used to Justify the Unjustifiable

"Then there's the famous "war in Iraq" slogan which the British and American media like to promote. But this is an invasion, not a mere war."

molly ivins on the usual suspects who may try to sack and pillage what's left of iraq:

Bush Offers Crooks and Warmongers to Lead Iraq

"This gets better. Chalabi has been in exile for four decades and, in 1992, he was convicted on multiple counts of embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars in Jordan after the failure of his bank there. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. He escaped from Jordan, reportedly in the trunk of a car, and wound up in London. Dick Cheney is also a Chalabi fan.

from A Letter to America: nothing new, but short and to the point.

"You're torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system?"

watercolor i finished last week. if i can paint during the doldrums i'm home free. if i can't i won't.

no tv today. did i miss something about a statue? don't they come and go?

still gloomy outside - expecting more rain and, up the mountain, a little snow. after a long & good night's sleep, i'm back to rising early and scurrying around puttering with various obscure projects. up to chapter 6 in jeff's book layout, creating a pdf file of some sort of poetry that i've caught running thru my brain. lots of music, i'll put up a new mp3 today - to hear it click in the box on upper right.

meanwhile thanks to tucker here is part of an update from the infamous micheal moore:

"What I am most concerned about right now is that all of you -- the majority of Americans who did not support this war in the first place -- not go silent or be intimidated by what will be touted as some great military victory.

...Some are afraid of retaliation at work or at school or in their neighborhoods
because they have been vocal proponents of peace. They have been told over and over that it is not "appropriate" to protest once the country is at war, and that your only duty now is to "support the troops."

a timely and much more upbeat message than the above would indicate. read the whole thing at:

www.michaelmoore.com

monday was blank. gloomy, flat, dim. the stars, biorhythms, metametabolism and so forth all seriously skewed. did manage to do a few errands, grocery shopping being the least optional.

i really dislike these kind of days. i'm talking about internal weather here. nothing to do but wait it out.

[much later] i think it is daylight savings time that has me twisted sideways. or maybe it's the massive morphogenetic fields resonating such destruction, or even worse, frozen silence.

interesting and very enjoyable weekend. i'll tell you about it next time i feel human.

just kidding, fingers doing the talking. an assymetric assemblage of psuedo-projects and detailed insignificance has really been rolling uphill the last two weeks, break-through city. later.

had a lot of fun last night at steve and rachael's house, got into a little music. speaking of which i was 4th in line early this morning for bobby dylan tickets. hoping to play a little music this afternoon, but this can a hard group to corral.

From the March 2003 issue of The Sun:


Stop thinking that this is all there is....Realize that for every ongoing war and religious outrage and
environmental devastation and bogus Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counterbalancing acts of
staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world, right now, on a
breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral....Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake
your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel....Realize that this is the perfect moment to
change the energy of the work, to step right up and crank your personal volume; right now when it all
seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious...there's your opening. Remember magic. And, finally, believe you are part of a groundswell, a resistance, a
but actually very, very large impending karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something
���������������������������
Mark Morford

"Speed ... is a function of effective power and in turn becomes one of the chief means of ostentatiously displaying it....Royal commands, like urgent commands in the Army, must be performed 'on the double'. The current commitment tosupersonic locomotion as a status symbol, already comically exposed in the intercontinental oscillations of the 'jet set'in business and government, has its beginnings here."

Lewis Mumford

here's the latest watercolor:

so is it too many thimblewhistles? the lost still losing sparks in the dying - but supringly spry - natural twilight bluz:::

4.1.03. beggers opera: the future of the blooz

another fine whatchamacallumm from what's his name.

i don't remember why i posted this? must investigate.
--*-----Www.kRackDowN.Com-----*-----

nice day, 5AM roll, 2 painings [Ed note: oops, believe he means paintings: must investigate], an instrumental, some life maintainance. nice afternoon drive to max patch, where the wind did blow and the spirits stirred.

remember sitting around in the old days and talking about this?:

*spark-online.com >> version 34.0, JULY.2002 >> MAX PODSTOLSKI

"In my view, art history, the art world, the art market - in other words art with a capital "A" - is less important than the art which is part of all of us, which we participate in by virtue of being human."