busy busy busy.

finished all video. have every picture frame i could find stacked in living room. will use for paintings and prints, choosing each carefully or use whatever fits, anticipating a show somewhere some time.

next few days will also include sorting thru three immense piles of paper into trash, excluding that which needs shredding. i will use poor man's shredder, making a paper mache sculpture, sanded and painted. a nice touch would be to document it's creation with video, but we'll see.

camping trip to hawksbill w/ eli and lily is off. i may take a day trip to table rock instead.

following week will pack and drive to chatham county saturday. fly to Denver tuesday for a week long visit.

so i am alive and well.

picture from short but pleasant walk yesterday.

about (really) to finish 2nd video. soundtrack still glitchy but maybe i can get away with it.

figured out poor man's shredder. after i sort thru the biomass of paper i have gathered from every nook, cranny and file cabinet into throw away and guard with my life cause someone might steal what's left of my identity, i'll make a paper mache sculpture with it. cool.

also have in the living room all frames mats to fill and hang.

probably ought to grocery shop too.

A Reporter at Large: Dr. Kush: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:
"Blue’s cell phone rang several times in succession, rousing him. His phone rings, on average, once every two and a half minutes between noon and 2 A.M., and I soon developed a Pavlovian aversion to his ringtone, a swirling, Middle Eastern-inflected electronica tune called “Lebanese Blonde.”"

looking for something to post ran across this short slide show:
A Glimpse Into the Life of Old Crete

there are a few slides of a beach called vai. i spent a month there in 1964. hitchhicked and walked from ierapetra on southeast coast w/ a young - we were all young then - woman from toronto, janet. the deal was speaking my primitive greek i had been told over and over that it was the only place in greece where something called "phoenixades" or similar could be found. they came from lebenon. no idea of what they were.

it was at least a two day journey, the last part on foot up a very windy gap to a monistery which we reached after dark and where we spent the night.

when we reached the village of vai we found it was one old structure divided into four living spaces for four families. about half a mile from that was the beach, whitest sand i've ever seen and totally deserted. the "phoenixades" turned out to be palm trees. we stayed about a week or two, never saw anybody else. a hike to vie provided food, usually potatoes and eggs.

i had one book with me which i read from cover to cover: "Ulysses" by joyce.

but that was in another country, another world.

i just realized that bele chere will be this weekend. a good time to drive to the mountains and hang out for three days. altho if the weather remains anywhere near what it has been lately it won't matter because i will remain sealed up in living module.

second video finished. i'm left with the not unfamiliar feeling of wha-a-a-t? i have no idea but i'm glad it is out of my hands.

i am currently reading 2 books, 3 if you count the mystery i'm pretty sure i've already read.

the 2 both shed a lot of light on the cultural conundrum the world in general and USA in particular are going through.

i'm about halfway thru both so i can't tell you how it will all unfold. (attempt at humor).

the myth of the machine by lewis mumford was written in 1966. it concerns both human and cultural development and attempts to show how building pyramids, the bigger, more costly the better, and coercion and slavery, and war are the attributes of civilization. sounds flaky but he is no lightweight the bush error is not unique.

Amazon.com: Myth of the Machine : Technics and Human Development: Lewis Mumford:
"Lewis Mumford was one of the 20th century's most important philosophers, and the two-volume set Myth of the Machine (Volume 1 is Technics and Human Development; and Volume 2 is The Pentagon of Power) are probably his most important books: the summation of his life's work. In writing as elegant as it is clear, Mumford makes plain the death urge that has always underlain civilization, which Mumford calls 'the machine,' and later 'the megamachine.' This is a social structure organized not around any organic human needs, but around the 'needs' of the machines that have come to characterize and control our lives. These are crucial, incisive, devastating books. I cannot praise them highly enough."

the second book is brasyl by ian mcdonald. sci-fi along the lines of william gibson and john brunner. excellent dip into future mediated memes. not to mention the european take over of the new world.

read some of it here: Brasyl

if you read them both you will have some notion of what the airwaves, print, film etc are doing saturating us with noise.

i've been looking for this picture for at least a year. found it cleaning up hard drives because i have no space left.

the rest of the day i hope to sort thru paper. cartons of old and not so old papers, bills, documents of varied sorts. after that it's my archaic shredder: scissors. there was a time i would have dumped them into a 50 gallon drum and burned them.

finished i hope w/ part two of video. haven't seen it yet on tv monitor. audio redone many times.

speaking of audio, i can't hear very well out of either ear. ear wax no doubt i hope. been using drops i got at drugstore. and it's worse than when i started. so it's a trip to the doctor, tomorrow i hope.

richard and i went to asheville after 5 on lexington avenue friday night. we got separated in the crowd, ie i wondered off but we connected at the end.

the crowd was monolithic. very few folks over 30. to me they appeared totally homoginous.

it must be 90 plus degrees outside. yesterday i continued insulation, down to duct tape and foam.

plan to drive up to table rock this week. daytrip. can't find pretty good map i used the first time i tried to get there.

Greenspan's Fraud -- Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month

Greenspan's Fraud -- Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month: "The result is that all that money - trillions of dollars - that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax being on your first $30,000 of income to the first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. What are left behind are a special form of IOUs - an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to those the government issues to borrow money from China today to fund George W. Bush's most recent tax cuts for billionaires (George Junior is still also 'borrowing' from the Social Security Trust Fund)."

heard bernie saunders on the radio driving back from grocery shopping.

i can't understand why the uberkriminals have'nt put him away. no not like that, like they've done with just about everyone in what used to be the federal government: blackmail, loot, threat of loss of livelihood, the usual gimmicks.

i'm in a hurry right now or i'd rant a bit. marx diagnosed capitalism correctly, even if his solution was not very workable - not in a nation state anyway, works with a tribe or on a kibbutz.

his diagnosis: big fish eats little fish until there is nothing left but big fish, or maybe one huge fish.

from reagon to dubya, less than one generation, USA has been savaged. the most prisoners of any nation in the world, i believe both in absolute and per capita terms, piss poor health and health care, mickey mouse elections on all levels, biggest national debt in history, people living on the streets, an ignorant despot above the (so called) law, a financial system based on theft, the bigger the better.

throw out your tv, your magazines, your newspapers. take a walk. a dozen cameras will keep track of you.

and the fools that voted for the horde of fools, looters and colossal killers, take a good look at your life today.

granddaughter natalie taken during short visit. she just turned 3 and talks up a storm. she is a beauty. very special.

didn't take any photos on trip, or more accurately not many. grandchildren all fine, natalie who just turned three is talking up a storm, delightful little girl who seems to be retaining the magic of childhood and may, like all of my grandchildren, grow up to be very special. can't wait to visit grace, my 4th, in denver a month from now.

by that time maybe i will be riding a bicycle. and eating greens. and getting out of the front door in the cool of the morning.

if there was a running motif for my visit it was how does the integrated human, or the not totally conditioned, relate to the narrow circumscribed ubiquitous monoculture of today. is there an urge, a pull, in the human, probably that he or she might not even be aware of, towards the unmanifest source of the manifest? and are the two mutually exclusive? is the choice between being a conditioned zombie or a "seeker" on top of a mountain isolated from "the world"?

my take is you cannot step out of "the world" successfully. to try results in a form of avoidance and denial. in this sense a "spiritual" soul is doing what the workaholic or addict does. keep the lid on.

live in the mental ward i mean world but not of it. distance yourself from identification with thought and personal experience. give it some space. the mental buzz will not go away and should you need to use the thought process it will be available. but that buzz is no more "I" than your feet.

each now is new. and the ego construct wants to endure. thought takes the place of the new. forget about the 60's idea of ego death. feel your thinking, but don't feel proud or ashamed of it.

practice awareness of what is. and what is is.

monday. yet another monday. more mondays.

still, another day is a gift, albeit one with a catch. suppose it didn't have a name. suppose it wasn't even yet another day, or even another day. or even "day".

just now.

post post:

9:00 in the evening, i just unpacked and i am back. nice drive heading west into beautiful evening clouds.

successful exit from the vortex capital. nice drive, no excitement. got to the flatland center around noon. visited, hobnobbed, made mistake of laying down around 3 and slept. grilled ribs last night at eli and melissa's, took corbin. latest video was rendering all the while. will burn to DVD this morning. had trouble getting clean audio but think it's done.

up at 6 doing this - and that. more later.

ok it is sat. morning and i'm leaving right now for chapel hill,

Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report - Green on The Huffington Post:
"The plan would shatter America's long-standing legal doctrine of the presumption of innocence, and enable the FBI to operate 'by assuming that everyone's a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent,' said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union."

photo i took high up on parkway 2 days ago. this gentleman is headed north, anticipating the way a lot of us will be traveling before we know it.
up at 6. been hacking away on 2nd video and it is now 9:30. everything in and out of life as we know it is a mixed bag. working on non-linear video (or flash or complex photoshop print) requires hyper-focus, neuromuscular "thinking" (can't expect my head to keep track of how to do this stuff), and on the possible down side, obsession.

the latter of course can become a problem.

but without it i would walk away from it. which might happen some day.

my dad won in some raffle a 2 cd set of bill monroe. one of those boxed sets full of alternate takes and a booklet like an encyclopedia. he sent it to me and i got it yesterday. skimming the notes i ran across an interesting observation of new art genres which, if one develops into a familiar genre, takes time.

but until then, the artist is working in the dark, no recognition by the culture. why woul anyone do this?

IMHO because he or she is obsessed by the creative "new".

in a nutshell that's where i'm at.

leave today for chapel hill. for too many reasons to go into here my self-imposed rule is not to do this during the heat. but i can't ignore the signs and portents that i've been receiving that tell me to do it so off i go.

been going to bed earlier and earlier, getting up in morning earlier and earlier. a good trend. volunteering for hospice i think. got a guided tour of discount organic foods this morning, bought groceries for $27, the least expensive shopping trip i've made in a long time. yesterday tried to find the big slide on the parkway, too much rain to do any good but a good trip nonetheless. headed for chapel hill tomorrow.

i have 2 rabbit friends that hang around. took this early this morning.

got a good night's sleep. what a relief. i can't figure it out but about every 10 days i can't sleep which is not all that bad but the following day is a nightmare.

been fooling around a little with the layout of this waste of bandwidth this morning. got a few more things i want to do to it.
tomorrow.

amazing. no sleep at all last night. good thing it's all good or it wouldn't be.

in the sidebar to the right the first link is to the abolition of work by bob black. i first read this years ago in a tempe arizona bookstore. it was included in an issue of a computer (unix)  magazine. lately i have run into other writings by whomever "bob black" is. here is a sample:

Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder--Bob Black: 

"If patriotism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the last refuge of a scoundrel, scientism is by now the first. It's the only ideology which, restated in cyberbabble, projects the look-and-feel of futurity even as it conserves attitudes and values essential to keeping things just as they are. Keep on zapping!

The abstract affirmation of 'change' is conservative, not progressive. It privileges all change, apparent or real, stylistic or substantive, reactionary or revolutionary. The more things change -- the more things that change -- the more they stay the same. Faster, faster, Speed Racer! -- (but keep going in circles)."

Authoritarian and Democratic Technics--Lewis Mumford

Authoritarian and Democratic Technics--Lewis Mumford: 

"In this new systems-centered collective, this Pentagon of power, there is no visible presence who issues commands: unlike job's God, the new deities cannot be confronted, still less defied. Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated."

got this link in email this morning:

Modern World Has Robbed Us of the Simple Joys in Life
Do we really have no choice but to become prisoners of a culture that robs us of the simple joys of life?:

the answer to the question today is yes. we are being held hostage by bad dreams. let's change this: wake up.

there was a question about watercolor on canvas included. i used fredrix watercolor canvas. used it twice so far. very different from paper.

detail from last watercolor i did. on canvas.

just got back from renapothist visit. i got four gold stars out of five.

lots of folks looking for a short pithy statement from mr. obama that might insulate him from the cascade of noise and misdirection we are about to experience. personally i feel each step he takes towards an "official" gravatas, the "look and feel" of corporate approved mediated heavy weight in the "real" world of 24/7 image, brand, and yes, thought manipulation

the less chance he has of winning.