3.10.2

yesterday was another fun day in the 22nd century. my email totally flaked out. i figured i could fix it without to much fuss, but it's still broke today. at the same time i was attempting to install OMS midi driver on another computer and it isn't quite right yet. on the other hand i finally finished a watercolor i don't like (they are the hardest to finish.) worked on camper, getting ready for a trip in a few weeks. pleasant visit by old friend J.R. and best of all talked to my daughter nicole on the phone.

today is another beautiful sunny day which i will probably spend most of making things right on computers.

meanwhile here is some food for thought i stumbled on:

"He [james hillman] writes that the image, although it is a snapshot of a personally inflected archetypal process, is not static. He quotes Ezra Pound: "...the image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy....a vortex, from which and through which and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."

from an article by Cliff Bostock. Towards a Jungian Psychology of Technology ( 1989, p. 264)

3.9.2

reading "only yesterday - an informal history of the 1920's" by frederick lewis allen. it's about the 20's in america, and was published in 1931 so he was there and memories were fresh. amazingly accurate in retrospect and relevant to today. here's a quote:

"...james truslow adams lamented in the atlantic monthly, 'i am wondering, as a personal but practical question, just how and where a man of moderate means who prefers simple living, simple pleasures, and the things of the mind is going to be able to live any longer in his native country.'" interesting question, only today it would probably be phrased "live any longer in this world".

3.8.2

i'm typing this while i watch folks work in space. and listen to their conversation. since i am over 20 years old this amazes me.

i try to post thoughts, observations, and visuals on this daily log, not too much on my daily life, what i ate for lunch and so forth.

but yesterday i got two emails and had a subsequent conversation that seemed to point out that i was a monastic recluse.

this was all light-hearted no doubt but did give me pause for thought. because i am sort of an accidental monastic recluse. it's time to take time to hunker down, lay low, be quiet. i don't know why. and though i value my friends more than almost anything else, i don't see much of them.

now that i know this, what to do? get out of the house more often i guess, excercise my atrophied social instincts. i guess i need a laptop.

3.7.2

"It may seem strange to imagine the blogging community as a force that will shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media. We learn in the history books about Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph but not about the thousands of operators who shaped the circulation of messages."
from an optimistic article in Technology Review - Blog This

3.6.2

man i'm so tired i can't think straight. i hope this is not a permanent situation. i know this weblog is scattered all over the place but hey, that's life (literally).

the war against terrorism is an evolution of the war against drugs. the concept i mean, not a war between nation states but between a nation state and...something else.

afghanistan is a part of the world tom friedman calls "the slow world" that he correctly points out will probably not survive the globalization of post-modern capatilism.

the inhabitants can wait. and wait. american troops on the ground there is a tough proposition, a scary situation for the troops. it seems as if their hi-tech arsenal may be too fast, whiz right by the enemy hunkering down in some of the most rugged terrain in the world where they have been at home since g.khan was finally stopped there.

i really dislike the way mr. bush and cohorts are handling this, making radical changes in the machinery of government that the public does not know about. he really hit the ground running with his dad's country club friends who had had a few years to brood and plot. it's all a big secret. need to know. what they don't understand is we all need to know.

we're following the war via standard neo-republican protocol, a sentence a day, the more cliche the better, repeated ad nauseum. it's not a war: it's a secret government plan. and then 9-11 happens and everything is justified.(excuse me for a minute while i gulp down a pill for paranoia).

the 9-11 attack helped bush justify secrecy and maintain popularity.

there is no doubt that some kind of action is called for, but prehaps a slower, evolving action involving personal values and clear discourse rather than wham-bam you're history (forgotten history at that, if there is such a thing. and there is. the 20th century world pioneered it.)

these guys have become a meta-class. you know them. might even want to be one of them. every now and then they slip up, like on the nixon tapes recently released in which billy graham explains to mr nixon that the jews don't know what he really thinks of them, he talks one way to them but thinks they are ruining the country. and mr graham is not nearly in the class of, say cheyney. you hear this kind of quiet discussion at the golf games where the powerful dress up in wierd garb, pose and bluster, drink, wheel and make deals.

i don't like these guys and if the world comes apart at the seams they are the aristotilian efficient cause. something far deeper than this is the formal cause so these 21st c. rubes are being used to destroy not only my world but my experience of myself.

enough babble. here's a quote:

"however entrancing it is to wonder unchecked through
a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your
mind from another subject of almost equal importance."
ernest bramah 1868-1942.

notice the "almost".

3.5.2

5AM this morning i'm either dreaming or listening to NPR or both. a young lady who seemed to have about 5 years in the corporate world and is currently unemployed was talking about how happy she and her friend's in a similar situation were. walking the dog, spending time in coffee shops, gradually disengaging from the american nightmare. time, in fact, was her main point. she now had time instead of the hysterical go-go-go of almost any professional life. it was encouraging to hear this from a temporary refugee from the adrenalized stage-set we in the 22nd century call "the world".

picture of man wondering what's going on in the office

3.4.2

today i spent in the technical realm. still trying to use earthlink who seem to have a major problem with my logon. worked on image archive - it's gonna take awhile. went to kinko's and printed 2 restored photos of my grandfather's for my mother. one was perfect, i came home and just finished redoing the second. worked on a minute and a half quicktime movie. refreshed watercolor palette for 4 landscapes i'll do next.

i don't have much of a life besides this stuff at present. so as far as the economy, the world we have made (largely invisible to the normal mind: it's like disneyland, all the action is hidden), endrun, pseudo-war, and so on i guess i need to poke my head outdoors and "follow my nose" as mr. dylan recently allowed.

3.3.2

dinner in outer space

3.2a.2

i've added more muzak to the multlimedia section. i need a better name for this section. if i am really lucky a quicktime movie will be up in same section by tomorrow. meanwhile another art object right here:

Mount Athos

2.2.2.

i'm trying to fix a troublesome picture on opening archive page. i think i need to post something, anything, to make it work and this is it.

3.2.2

another older picture included here for later picture archiving:

i'm throwing a bit too much into this blog. someday i may split it into 2 sites: text and porfolio of pictures, multimedia fragments, wierd sounds etc. i do like to break up page with pictures, but i'm stretching it, i don't think blogger is designed to accomodate all of this. however i think it will work. we'll see.

i really want to get back to posting cosmic (or is it cosmetic?) notions. (funny the words both have the same greek root).

i want to get into image and text, their differences, some unintended consequences of them both in the past. also the idea of "image" found in some (not all) writings by jung, hillman, and corbin.

they seem to think that the unconcious has an infinite abitiy to create images, a regular image factory. these inexhaustible images bombard us, and behind each is a larger, more fundimental, inaccessible but universal (eternal?) archtype. we can't experience the archtypes except indirectly, they are not images themselves. {lots more later). [note: i am not orthodox anything, just curious.]

3.1.2

good morning. it's time to keep rollin. very cold here at nights (15 degrees), keeping the curtains closed, door blocked, warm inside, it almost reminds me of some other life i lived and the long silent winters. don't get me wrong: i like these kind of days. i've got a bunch done during this week, mostly slow obscure technical gee-gaws upgrading site and stuff, maybe now i can once again dive into daily postings of vaporous factoids about our present condition.

2.28.2

just put another catagory of stuff up top, Animation". midi, quicktime and shockwave files coming.
a fluid hypomaic state is like a vacation to me.

2.28.2

i was looking for something commenting on the usage of the word "image" by jung or hillman. it's not just a picture, it comes from the word "imagination". i found this recent interview by james hillman who is one of the sanest people around, but there is not a whole lot on "image".
"I think we're miserable partly because we have only one god, and that's economics."

" there is an individual image that belongs to your soul."

i will be making 2 changes soon to this log. a place to go for archived pictures and a place to go for archived music, multimedia, probably quicktime and shockwave.

2.27.2

ok here's another midi file - this one in fact all ofem are future soundtracks for some assemblage of sounds, words, sense, nonsense and other stuff. maybe it's a soundtrack to old 30's radio program broadcast one late rainy afternoon. can't quite remember. definitely want to add voices and some kind of low tech low bandwidth screen action. it's found here.

i'll get back to the subject of imagination, thought, and world soon with a little meta-politics and liguistic cyberchance soon. in meantime i guess this just shows again that the busy have no church affilliation. i been busy. no friends either.

2.27.2

i'm still unsure what plain vanilla windows folks get when they try to hear these midi files. any comments? mail me. otherwise check here for windows file players:

Harmony Central�: Windows Software: MIDI File Players

2.26.2

working on web midi is pretty weird, i'm still not getting consistant (listenable over web) files. so here is my latest attempt :

hear

i'm not messin with it anymore today. gotta think about everything fading, the government, the war, the logistics, statistics, heuristics, picture of my grandfather.

2.25.2

Yay the midi link below finally works yippee!! so i've got the pipeline figured out. hours n hours n hours of informal figuring, moments of sheer manipulative boredom, instinctual activities taking the wheel, but what the heck i still got a good deal. you know what i mean, you're an artist too.

go here to hear a midi file i made today. it's experimental so let me know how it works.

you need quicktime. if you have a mac you've got it. if you have a PC you probably don't but can get it here.

chris

2.24.2

here come the graphics i'm dragging from the pix section so i can index them all into one new section. i bet i can make everyone of them better. did this one.

2.24.2

Ken Nordine's Word Jazz wordjazz.com is oh so near. incredable 30 minute multisignal radio programs done in the basement between gigs as audio engineer. you must check these out late at while the lights slowly dim. i heard snatches of nordine here and there several worls ago. he set up resonances still dancing today and he was also funny.

2.24.2

Trying out dreamweaver 4, what a breeze. i will embed a quicktime MIDI file here later today. you should be able to double-click it and hear some of the music i got lost in for the last 4 days.

2.23.2

i'll soon be pulling pictures out of pix section and add them interspersed with text to daily posts like i've been doing with other pictures, then yet another total redo where all pix are findable in text archives. i have to do it because a whirlwind scattered my wits to the ridgetops and my animal cohort told me to put it on the front burner. as near as i can tell he is much more dependable than louis rukhyser (phonetic spelling for the alphabet-dismayed like myself).

2.23.2

nother self-indulgent hyper-driven dream day: did a few phoot restorations for my mother, spent the whole day making 2-5 minute midi tunes that play over the net. i'll putem up soon. finished last of 200 poems and began laying out a book. worked on a painting.

the seasons of hypomania are the glassiest smoothest sailing weather, let the wind catch your sail and you're off. sometimes the impersonality of solitary imaginative work seems kind of sad, but i'm happy to have it. focus on it. find treasure in it (even if for just a moment after 10 consequetive hours of fanatic participation in creation).

it really seems sad only if there is an alternative. there's only one. i heard an irish lady writer on npr yesterday who said how rediculous she would feel chasing at her age what she chased in her 20's and 30's. the only alternative at this point is reality, and it might include things swept under the rug today, like obsessive guilt, creative randomness, messages in the sky, and a dylan song now and then:

"stranded in the city that never sleeps
some of these women really give me the creeps."

2.222.2

The Best Of The Beat Generation - Rhino Featured Product - This looks cool - nice small writeup. one of the tracks is by Ken Nordine. if you've never heard "word jazz" you're missing out on something really beautiful.

2.22.2

there is a backlash today against blogging. the phenomena is too big to ignore, and nobody knows what blogs are for. below is a good straight foward down to earth comment on blogs, bloggers, mass communication, TV and the present:

Blogging: Tune Out and Switch On
"Weblogging is changing our view of the world. Mainly because we are now writing about our own views. Instead of watching the editied for tv version we are taking the time to collect, rearrange, codify and publish our own version of what we see."

2.21.2

The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
this is the book mentioned in class yesyerday that set off so many ripples in my mind and probably some others too. i havent't read it. but it concerns my current obsession, the difference between words and images. his thesis seems to be that the influence of the two has alternated, and peace and love happen in the image eras, hunting, wars in text eras. and we are changing from being a test-based culture to an image-based culture. optomistic. interesting to compare with mcluhin.

2.20.2

conversation in watercolor class today: what's with the periodic prohibiton of images down thru history, for instance with the ancient hebrews, islam or the 2 century iconoclastic controversy of the byzantines.

possible answers: the image displaces the reality it is meant to symbolize, and so is an inferior degraded form of reality. we think we need to pay attention to golden calves or lexuses or tennis shoes instead of what is real.

another way to look at it (no pun intended): all psychic process of the human experience are rooted in imagery, including thoughts, emotions, and words, but these cut us off from the image. so we take the former literally. this is the way of carl jung and james hillman.

another: images are created by the imagination, and are inexhaustible. ie they are symbols, not signs. they should not be taken literally. but we do take them literally.

we live in an age where there exist more images than in the rest of history combined. they are beamed into our heads at an excruciating rate. the commercial forces push this ("image is all") ("the sharper image")("image makes you feel better about yourself").

and lastly there is a book, "the goddess and the alphabet" don't know author, who i understand third hand states that in eras of image peace and understanding rule, and in eras of words, rigid and literal, war and destruction occur. i am dubious about this last because 1) words are sprung from images but they are not immediately accessible to us and 2) we live in an unprecedented situation of inundation of images beamed straight to the head by commercial interests and may find that images can have a literal downside just as words have. in your mind's eye can you see the image of the world trade center vaporizing.

2.19.2

i was driving down the street (what else?) today when over the airwaves drifted into my personal space on ad for increasing your vocabulary. can't remember it exactly but it had to do with "impressive" words - why add any other kind to a demented mind? and this system shoots them directly into your mind, no effort, no excercises, no reading.
also a lot of noise was made about how much money these words were worth. true story. meanwhile...

Happy Birthday Saraswati!

"Saintly people and people inclined towards spiritual progress attach great importance to the worship of goddess Saraswati. As a practice, only educated people and men of principle worship goddess Saraswati for spiritual enlightenment. In their opinion, there can be no comparison between the king and the learned or the spiritually advanced. The king is honored within his kingdom, whereas the learned is respected or worshipped throughout the world."
Birthday of the Goddess of Wisdom

on the other hand...

"Asian herbal medicines are currently used by large sections of the population. Because they are not regulated as medicines and are freely available to everyone, serious safety concerns might be associated with these herbal medicines. In this article, evidence suggesting that some Asian herbal medicines contain toxic heavy metals or undeclared prescription drugs is reviewed. In particular, Indian and Chinese preparations have been implicated."
read all about it

2.18.2

last week i spent catching up with long delayed projects. some i started, some i puttered around with. one is a book of art and poems i would like to publish before end of year. so i have been gathering scraps of paper and pages out of various notebboks to transcribe prose snippets. i think i'm finished now (unless i find more), and i have @175 of these things in electronic file. BTW since i am the world's slowest typist i dictated these things using a kludge of software and it worked amazingly well, altho the first rule of digital work applied: the first time you do anything on computer it will take a looooong time. also working on cd-rom photo album of ex-wife sally and children. also working on adding some action to this blog, mutimedia pieces i have scattered about. i'll keep you posted.

doing all this stuff i have discovered various souvenirs of the past. below is an unusal one, part of a paer visa allowing me to visit Mount Athos, the holy mountain, located in greece but like the vatican with it's own government. interesting and instructive 3 weeks:

Athos The Holy Mountain ---- Mount Athos ----- Holy Mountain ----- Agio Oros

2.16.2

LOOSE WIRE -- February 07, 2002:
"Weblogs are where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet."

i pretty much agree with this short optimistic piece.

for some reason i am reminded of the various characterizations of "the crowd" down through the ages:
"the meek", as in "blessed are"
"hoi polloi"
"serfs"
"peasantry"
"bourgeoisie"
"unwashed masses"
"the electorate"
"john q. public" (going strong when i was born)
"the audience"
"the consumer"

i hope that a newer catagory is rising and that it is more fun, healthy, and fufilling to be in it. will something like weblogs be included? or at least a native language for public discourse not owned by the corporations.

2.15.2

up very early this AM and wandering what to add to today's "mod pez". i have no idea like always - then i stumble on to
Historical Jesus FAQ
"Maybe Jesus is what peasant Jewish Cynicism looked like."

one of my goals this year is to read the bible. i read an awful lot of ancient history, religion, psychology, but never the bible. so i've begun the New International Bible Study Version and it's pretty good. plain english, lots of attention paid to historical narrative structure, about half of each page is footnotes, but interesting footnotes, archeological, linguistic, historic & so on. i'll keep you posted on this project, it's one i'd like to finish.

12.14.2

i've been reading "the lexus and the olive tree" by thomas friedman (see The Washington Monthly review of "The Lexus & the Olive Tree"), a birthday present from my sister (thanks jane). in describing the total victory of the free market system and the varied modes that have sprung up in countries new to it, he states that "lack of transparency" in some of these new markets systems is one of the areas (there are others) that will have to be improved before these systems will work.

"this sort of lack of transparency, notes richard medley, who does political risk analysis for financial houses, is what causes some of the worst stampedes...you go from believing everything to believing nothing. in fact, the paranoid illusionist believes more than nothing-he believes that there are hidden debts and off-the-book liabilities all over the place."

"indeed, one of the things that was first revealed by the 1997-98 asian economic crisis was that most of the Big Five American accounting firms had audited the books of the big asian financial houses that had failed in the crisis-audited them without raising any red flags about their troubles..."

in view of Endrun unraveling, it looks like this applies to the first-world free-market system too, does it not?

2.12.2

i've been in one of my semi-angular oops i mean semi-annual fits of organizing images, photos, drawings, graffitti. the picture below is from 1968! cool, huh?

i did gussy it up a bit when i found it yesterday. it's funny, all day long the subject of the past has come up. the past is another world.

2.11.2

watercolor i painted last week and sent today to my mother for her birthday. i had fun doing this one. it came together fast. words are so much more confusing than images. unless they're spokenwords, when the context is personal. two people talking to each other at 3AM in the night when it's too late for lies. otherwise the world of images says more to me.

2.10.2

"ok what else can you show me?" day of rest but it wasn't. got into boxes of old photos. catagorizing, organizing. not my strong suit. found the picture below, a gum-bichromate print from about 25 years ago. otherwise typical sunday, never spoke to another soul, not even on the telephone. finished watercolor for mom's birthday, which needs to be in mail monday. thought about tweedledee and tweedledum. slept for an hour this afternoon. i sleep different now than i used to: on my back, handsknit together on my chest, don't move much. i used to sleep so restlessly that waking up was like coming to in WWii, wreckage everywhere.

garden bells
in the wind
are silent

2.9.2

The Blog Phenomenon
by john dvorak, gadfly.
fairly pedestrian commentary, another try at figuring out what and why these things exist. gives a little flavor of present state of...something. my own view is that blogs are either 1) to save the world (not the what we call the world, the real world) or 2) the digital equivalent of standing on a street corner mumbling and gesticulating in a language noone else speaks.

2.8.2

the deluge of birthday cards has finally slowed down to a trickle. george w.'s was particularly inoffensive, and the one from "the gang down at endrun's" was a good yuck. barbara walter's was extremelyelegent, but i'm pretty sure it's the same one she's been using for years.

one i liked very much featured this quote by george eliot:

it is never too late to be what you might have been

2.7.2

today is my birthday. we all have one sooner or (more commonly) later.
happy birthday.
all i have to say is (with apologies to dylan thomas):

"...all the gardens
of spring and summer
were blooming
in the tall tales
beyond the border
and under the lark full cloud.
there could i marvel
my birthday away
but the weather turned around."

You Are Here (Really!)

2.6.2

everytime i hear (and i hear this several times most days) that a deal has been transacted "worth several zillion dollars", i ask myself "worth several zillion dollars to whom?"

that's the fatal error with money: what you get for it depends on what the entire population of the earth wants, not what you want. supply (ok) and demand (who is demanding what?)

maybe it's a race: to see if you and i can "simplify" before bizland can "downsize".

2.5.2

BBC News | NEWSNIGHT | Great impact of attacks on America

norman mailer interview on america after 9/11:

"The fact is I don't trust a man who uses the word evil eighteen times in ten minutes," he says.

2.4.2

gladwell dot com / Running from Ritalin
from Running from Ritalin:

"In "Ritalin Nation" the psychologist Richard DeGrandpre argues that Ritalin and A.D.H.D. are the inevitable by-products of a culture-wide addiction to speed--to cellular phones and beepers and faxes and overnight mail and computers with powerful chips and hard-driving rock music and television shows that splice together images at hundredth-of-a-second intervals, and a thousand other social stimulants that have had the effect of transforming human expectations."

2.2.2

the information explosion is not an imagination explosion. if it were you could probably find an answer to this question: what is the ratio of words (spoken, written, printed, electronic) to population today? is it more or less than the same ratio 1000 years ago? 2000 years ago? 10,000? 30,000?

who cares

words are like icebergs - what they are is 9/10 underwater. words per capita have a profound impact on the experience of being human.

2.1.2

mr moore insists on still making sense in a world full of nonsense. no wonder he's funny too: check this out about bush endrun gate: pulitzer material.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/

and for those of you interested in the half-world of the blog, a short and informative article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,641742,00.html

otherwise the day went smoothly for the most part with a minimum of biochemical whattzis. got a haircut in a shop still in the 50's, perry como on the am radio. saw jane fonda on good morning america. she and i both look very good for our age, experience, entropy, periodic flame-outs, and soul working overtime (or sleeping it off).

1.30.2

ok now they've gone too far. tonight i was relaxing after a long and confusing day, staring at the wall. the TV was off, shut down, not happening, blank. all of a sudden i began to hear as if from another room, the low murmer of peter jennings*.he was quoting trent lott and 2 other members of congress on what a dynamite speech bush delivered last night. then he added that all three released thier comments on the speech before it was delivered. later, on the same eerie "broadcast", one of the reporters said "maybe style and fashion are getting mixed up with medicine(!)". then there was kenneth lay, ex-CEO of ENDRUN, taped giving a speech cum peptalk to the employees last october. what was fascinating was not what he said, but the audience, young, smart, happy to a part of whatever they were a part of, positivily bubbly and giggly at being in such a great time and place. reminded me for some reason of the phrase james joyce used to characterize the pariisians during his miserable stay in paris: "the pleased pleasers". finally the invisible airwaves sagged and i put on mr dylan's latest, high water everywhere.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* not to be confused with the low murmer of high heeled boys, traffic, circa mid70s.

1.29.2

mr. bush is giving his state of the union speech in the other room. i can barely hear a quiet electronic murmer and the static of regimented applause. his people may do some good in the current hostilities, but like all of his class (i prefer the word "ilk"), his logic is almost impeccable, but the facts he begins with are balderdash. he (and his ilk) could walk down any street in the country today and not have a clue. remember when his father could'nt figure out how to buy a quart of milk in the grocery store? but either one could buy a baseball team in a heartbeat, with no cash involved. the country either needs this special monied class to keep the trains (planes, film production, software schedules) running on time or maybe not. nice people, our financial aristocracy, they can't help it, they literally cannot see the world you and i inhabit. at least the olympian gods of yesteryear, many of whom were creeps, could operate in this sphere, answer telephones, drive cars, and go shopping.

past my bedtime i'm outa here.

in the land of the blind the cross-eyed is king

1.28.2

On a whole nother topic, heard a great bluegrass song on slow sunny sunday afternoon which included this line:

"the first step to heaven
is knowin that you're gone"

1.26.2

nice nap today.

now that yasser arafat is within the telescopic sights of isreal, don't you think the mind-world we live in could begin to recognize that, for better or worse, one people unilaterally taking and using another people's land because God told them to is not
acceptable.

the ENRON show will become more central to the inhabitants of the mind-world because it demonstrates in bloody detail how neo-capitalism, or techno-capitalism, or po-mo-capitalism really works. wholly snake oil.

1.25.2

might get some sleep tonight

thought i'd try something new: well, old really. this picture is a scan of a gum-bichromate print i did a very long time ago, or as they say, in another life in another country. mainly wanted to see how something big looks and behaves.

as far as "words of wisdom" for today: isn't that an oxymoron?

1.23.2

today is a dream
about this ENRON thing: for someone like me it represents the reality behind the smoke and mirrors. in the near future we'll probably be seeing similar snippits of the so-called "real world" that will make adam smith spin in his grave. nothing happening in the world of economics today has anything to do with the classic idea of capitalism, which i admit once was useful.

but what to do with ENRON? i have an idea: turn it into a theme park. i'm talking about the mother ship, the tall glossy skyscraper that is the center of houston. nice fountains, plants beautifully displayed, indirect lighting, don't know how many stories but enough, expensive tables in conference rooms, lots of whiteboards.

the themepark could be called "bizland" or something similar. once you're in you will be given a badge, a daytimer, and an attache case. you could then spend 80 hours a week rushing to meetings, doodling on yellow legal pads, filling out forms, and furiously keyboarding email. once in awhile you might meet somebody in the narrow space between cubicles and plot in low voices about something that doesn't really matter.

there are plenty of unemployed high-tech worker bees who could spend time in the theme park to keep their skills intact. (it is surprising how soon after being "downsized" all of this fades into a bad dream.) young people could wonder around with clipboards to get in the swing of things. and once a day, say at 4:30, there could be a company wide meeting in the state of the art auditorium, with lots of dazzling color pie charts and video conferencing, when the fearless leader could give a pep talk and announce the latest numbers, always better than the last set of numbers, and just as bogus.

"bizland" could keep the new economy's smoke and mirrors intact during these unfortunate spells of "the emperor has no clothes!".

12.21.2

precomputer picture; did it in darkroom
(remember them?)
back to recent sketchbooks tommorrow.

1.20.2

sunday night. day of rest. 19 hours of it. dreadful dreams i can't remember.

things are coming together. aspects of myself no longer ignore other aspects, and it's geeting pretty comfortable in here if not cozy. course we don't get out very much. sit around and moon at the wallpaper is more like it.

i walk down the streets in my shabby sheets, usin all my feets and wonder into the arcade of the forgotten glitzes. they always stopped me cold with their frozen metal points.

soon after i ended up camping out one summer near the high west wall, with it's cloudy mornings and wet misty evenings. i stayed there several years through no fault of my own. at night i used to hear the death whistles from the next vally. maybe i was nineteen.

it wasn't long before i settled down with a book, tapping my feet furiously.

1.19.2

Hong Kong Wrong

in the dim stone interior
light leaking from above
the first birds shiver
their morning song of love
it was good to see old friends last night and the food was great too. thanks.

1.18.2

look here gaze there

holy spirits in the room

they come too early

go too soon

puzzled angels

on the moon

1.17.2

i'm talking to whom?
since thanksgiving i've probably been out of the house and on the road more than i have for many years. this series of pictures comes from notebooks i kept with me. sometimes i would only take media that i had never used or not used in a long time. a drawing pencil for example.

but words? if i write a word who reads it? it all gets back to my favorite rubric:"imagination is real; reality is imaginary". so it doesn't matter if audiences confuse me.

1.16.2

"Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me"
song of a man who has come through - d. h. lawrence

1.15.2

life goes on. something goes on. i'm kinda out of words so for awhile i'm just going to post pictures i mostly did over the last 4-6 weeks.

1.14b.2

after an extended jaunt to other places, other times, other events, i am back "home" and wondering what will fall into the future.

since i'm speechless, have a real bone to pick with god (excuse figure of speech) and am moving slow, i find i have little to say about anything. loud excited accelerated speech seems to be the only way i communicate anymore and it doesn't work very well because it scares people. it can keep me occupied for short periods of time but i find it and a lot of other things ultimately doesn't work.

making stuff is what it's what i'm all about: music, pictures, magic tricks, yoyo stunts, impractical jokes, creating "stuff to look at" is my only real link with the great transformer, the oh so elegant presidigitastor of the arsnic hour, the winds that wonder and don't matter.

however i drew a lot of pictures over the last month, most unfinished like myself, but right now i'm gonna cheat and go to bed. bibliomanacy points out to me that you should read this poem and also go to bed:

"to suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;
to forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
to defy power, which seems omnipotent;
to love, and bear, to hope till Hope creates
from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates;
this like thy glory titan, is to be
good, great and joyous, beautiful and free..."

shelly

1.14.2

i'm back in asheville. my former wife sally died tuesday jan. 8th. she died at home, she was cared for by her 4 children, she was comfortable and remarkably at peace.

incredible pieces of the past are reanimated during a process like this, and the intensity of family dynamics was in full force. plus the corners we paint ourselves into. the latter i take as part of the human condition and not a unique personal trajectory.

i am very proud of my children eric, nicole, eli, and nathan. they all demonstrated strengths i had not seen before.

and the hospice movement in our time is much more important than i realized; a real live model of what the medical-industrial complex could become: consultants (but you're the doctor). they need volunteers.

today regrouping for an attractive, productive, active, clean year. wonder what it'll really be like?

1.8.2

God Bless Your Child
Sally K. Parsons
1944-2002
Comfort Her
Guide Her
Allow Her to Know She is Loved

1.2.2

ok finish line finished, slept thru it like always. new starting point already gone. my problem keeping up with "modern peasant" is that words are less and less interesting. the world of 10,000 whatchamacallits is less and less interesting.

but there are interesting things happening nonetheless. it's just that they seem to be in the realm of the unspeakable (unsayable, unwritable). however they still have one foot in the world of the imagination (imagine that).

so it seems like the image will take over this project. imagination sinking slowly solely behind the western horizon sends out one last ray of dazzling insignificance. and it does so day in (at times) and day out (always).

"the soul and it's images, having been alienated so long from our concious culture, [can] be recognized only by the alienist. (or by the artist, for whom imagination and madness have always been kissin' cousins in our culture's anthropology.)...'every psychic process is an image and an imagining.' [jung]"
james hillman, peaks and vales

i wish everyone a new new year and for myself a spell checker included in this webblog process. leaving town tomorrow, back next week.

12.30.1

another finish line ahead, just a few more leaden steps. i know indo-europeon vestigal time units are of secondary importance, but while we're here our number is up so happy number 2002. the stone rolls down the hill again. rattling the dusky sky, the year recedes, sound bleeds, the light withdraws into a black radience. once we would have talked all night. now we fidget.

12.21.1

Modern Peasant Will Be Back After the Holidaze

12.18.1

we live in such positive times - the model for the ideal human being today is enthsiastic, excited, and very positive. you see this model as contestants on �the wheel of fortune� and in various corporate offices & cubicles scattered throughout the land. it is mentioned in the employment classifieds: �enthusiastic, positive team-player�.

you might almost say that it is a contemporary fetish, and that the one-world market culture has pushed aside other human models. the curmudgeon is no longer appreciated nor allowed.

why is this so? if it is more than a fad, on a par with hula hoops and swallowing goldfish, how has it come to dominate personal stylistics today?

one answer might be desparation: the mental and material world that has evolved around us has it�s share of (hidden) negativity, but it is a taboo to see it, certainly to point it out.

every now and then you get a glimpse of it; when the mall parking lot suddenly flips from a picture of shiny chrome and smooth automotive colors, all unblemished, new and shining under a skyblue sky to a sudden quick snapshot of discolored, uneven, cracked and ancient layers of asphalt, sprinkled with the effluvia of consumer culture, candy wrappers, cigerette butts, used condoms, the cars squeezed in and rusted and dinted, windows cracked, fenders hanging by a thread or whatever they hang on by.

it could be that the psychic strain of seeing the world as the consumer culture presents itself as opposed to the junk world (junk food, junk sex) is such a drag on the mind that in the spirit of jungian compensation, we conciously experience only the positive: the more positive the picture (with all due respect to werner erhard), the more destructive clutter we are looking at on some (i have to say it: truer but unconcious) level.

philip k. dick had a word for this subterrainian decay: dottle. the market driven consumer uniworld consists of dottle, product morhing into bits of junk if we only had eyes to see it.

[i feel remiss i�m not putting more pictures up; one a day is a lot of work = a lot of fun: the agony and the fun. anyway her�s another one:]

under which rug and why?
BTW it took me 3 days to upload todays missive. technical troubles at Blogger.com i hope or i may have a stray positron or two trapped in my CPU.

12.17.1

down to the wire with the holiday extravaganza. for years now this last week is when i tend to lose it after tiptoeing thru the cultural christmas clutter with some success.

so i lost it. i'm still losing it.

i've got nothing to say about bin laden, the new "soft" imperial presidency, the disappearence of personal time and space, the disintergration of the hellinic-hebrew-christian personality which was not built in a day, the tacit prohibition of irony, the earth flooded with product which not surprisingly ends up in all hands, stuff like heroin, saturday night specials, anthrax spores, and fissionable materials; everybody gets a shot. the now irrevocable law that says if it can be done technologically it will be done, a sort of 21st century predestination removing the person from the pictue.

and here i am expressing my ass off because it has been revealed to me that that is what i am here for, but i have nothing to express that is intelligible, just flashes, glimpses, and molecular neural recursion backed by what was once curiousity but is now more like... an obsolete habit. "we don't need no stinkin' curiousity."

so i�m going back to notebooks which i find from time to time full of stuff that puports not to mean anything except it keeps me off the streets (thank god), amazing to me because i do not remember doing much of it. probably too busy wondering what the world makes of me and my ilk, if there are any ilk left. any ilk out there?

so here�s a hidden song i found, along with a sketch i did 30,000 feet in the sky. both recent:

woven wonder
delightful heart
simple enough: only start
complex beauty
accelerates pain
the sky jewel
accepts the rain
it is nothing
converse with care
mind images dancing
written in air
*


invisible wind singing a song

12.14.1

i had a hectic day today even tho i never left the house until 4 in the afternoon. finishing up wierd little projects piled in stacks on the floor in every room. i never got around to washing the dishes. listened to memphis slim while i dithered, cut and pasted. licked envelopes. got sudden inspirations and scanned things. sidetracked all over the map.

this was because it has become my personal goal to clear the decks, or at least cover them up with something, by this weekend. after that i want 4 days to sit and doze, dream about daylight, gaze at the sky in the living room, not accept calls, jot down the infrequent synapse-collapse, and in general prepare for the holidaze. by tommorrow i should be out of the woods and into the frying pan.

meanwhile i have this perverse idea of animating donald duck talking to mickey mouse in some alien dim setting, garbling and turning down the audio, and providing crawling subtitles in which they discuss dionysius the aereopagite and the cloud of unknowing, which is fast becoming a cyclone of confusion.

the bright spot of the day was waiting in the pharmacy in the west (old, poor) part of town, no pony tails, no hip people, just a line of mexicans jiving and joking in the western union line and plain folk coming and going for thier medicine. hardwood floors. wide aisles. old stuff in the old part of town. an hour of peace for an old head.

12.13.1

background noise from afar filtering into the little world i live in about the narcissistic element in creating/maintaining a weblog.

from allied:
"I took a liking to this blogging deal (ordeal?).It gave me a chance to be author, not ghost writer. Thinker, not gopher. It gave me a reason to BE. And now I am someone. Like Mike, it's not really "power" that I feel as I push through my google results. I guess it's a feeling notariety. Respect. Acceptance.Fame. These are good feelings--and something that the day job usually doesn't afford the common guy or gal."

notice this is about how a weblog can increase your rating on search engines, like "google." i would humbly suggest that the bitch-goddess success written about by norman mailer 30 years ago (he also called her "the dirty little secret" of the then-literary world) is alive and kicking. but maybe the real point of all this activity is not notariety but a peaceful anomenity, whether you can spell the words or not. like a conversation late at night between two strangers speeding down some road on a Grayhound bus.

in other words, the soul (or whatever you may call the lasting but not so accessible part of the transitory human), has a natural need to express; that need is being stopped cold by the constant automatically produced plethora of imagery that our present world is becoming; the weblog seems like a way around this constraint; unless it is co-opted (remember "co-option"?) and becomes another place to struggle over pecking order that blows away with the wind.

well, after that cool poetic construct i gotta go and check my place on google before i rest.

12.11.1

my friend sam phoned today to tell me he heard the linguist guy on NPR talking about BLOGs and "oversharing", a new but perfectly understandable term for me. it refers to the many adolescent BLOGs that tell about how mom kicked them out of the house so they drove to atlantic city and saw a guy that looked like elvis, etc., with lots of intense feelings sweeping in and out of the day.

it strikes me that at a time when a sound byte is considered communication (i learned today that 9 seconds is the optimum duration for an effective sound byte) that ovewrsharing might be a necessary compliment to what communication has become, that fast talking, quick thinking, power playing posing that passes for the name. oversharing harkens back to oral conversation when a person could blather on (we used to call it thinking out loud when thinking was allowed) and the endless synaptical connections made an impression on the listener (or co-blatherer).

the personal conversational mode ("heart to heart") is disappearing, morphing to the impersonal mode, and i consider it a critical loss, so expect me to resist it and overshare the air even if it's talking nonsense to an orange i'm holding in my hand on some streamlined blurry corner in a dream.

12.10.1

i wondered into the local kinko's today to run off a color file. this outing violated my rule about not going to town during the xmas hysteria, but what the hell. anyway it was chaos and i couldn't get any of the color printers to work, the repairman is on the way. while i was there a young man approached me with the same goal, and decided to drive to greenville i think to output his files. he was a gaphic designer and we chatted about this and that. i don't keep any business cards on me (i'm superstitious) but gave him this website URL. he asked me what "modpeasant" meant and i told him "modern peasant". he laughed and told me how he has a coworker who rants about how anyone that works, especially in a high-tech field, is indeed a modern peasant. so the word is spreading. doesn't matter if it's too late (it is too late), industrial hypnotics has to go, we must revive the lost souls (our own in most cases).

meanwhile here's a watercolor i painted this week while regrouping from travel:

Lost Again in the Cold Mind

12.9.1

well another sunday shot to hell. i�ve been working all day on 2 christmas projects and a my second realbasic application which is proving to be very touchy.

here�s the last picture in latest sketch book i mentioned yesterday:

12.8.1

communicating with the world: today it means talking to crowds of unseen strangers, ie the culture, or the postmodern world. i assume literature and art don't do this well anymore, both having been transposed to product, with all the restraints that implies. so the question is how to do it.

or maybe it's why do it. nourishing a small group of fellow human beings as friends may be the most that can be done. this is what epicurus thought 2,000 years ago. hard enough to do, and how often do you make a new friend? (this question is addressed to those no longer a part of youth demographics).

i took a bunch of drawing materials i haven't used for many years with me on recent trip. graphite pencil, watercolor pencils etc. really had fun trying these things and came back with a new completed book of sketchs, book number 5 or 6. here�s the first picture in the book:

something strange going on can't get pix to display. [later: i fixed it.]

Mountains of My Mind

12.6.1

I'm still not my old self. Travel beats me up. So I don't have a lot to say about anything right now.

Except for one observation. While I was traveling and visiting folks, I heard one topic brought up over and over again. It was not 9/11 or why do they hate us so much. guess what it was. Give up? Medical horror stories. Lots of them. It's seems that the medical-industrial complex is crashing around us at exactly the same time as we (the usual suspects: baby boomers) are being shoved into the system. This problem is rampant, and growing like, well, like an epidemic.

A second observation that I have been wondering about is constructive negativity, for lack of a better word. In other words, can 80% of Americans be mistaken, and if so how does one communicate this? The personal is not political anymore if it ever was; how do you converse with a crowd? especially if literature and art have been, to use the word of the day, "hijacked"?

12.5.1

i'm still in recovery from travel. don't get around much any more. two observations:

on my recent trip everywhere i went people were talking about the same thing. guess what it was? it was not 9/11. give up?

it was hospital/medical horror stories. lot's of them. leads me to believe that it is especially unfortunate that the medical-industrial complex is crashing right when so many of us (the usual suspects) (b. boomers etc) are being pushed into the system.

the second observation is an old one: how do you express less than positive, enthusiastic feelings about something, for example a car wreck, in our culture? you can't be understood to be complaining because that makes you inaudible.

12.4.1

got back to Aville my current home yesterday after a long and varied 2 week trip. lots of dangling projects to clean-up, phone calls to make, places to go. i see that on my monitor the right hand panel of this page is black - stray sub-newtonian particles must have passed through while i was gone. i will fix or change and while i am at it, put up some old and not so old animations that twinkle and glow (or do something) and archive onto one page the pictures i have been putting up now and then. and do something about those damn book titles that hang out in right column. over and very much out.

11.13.1

Modern Peasant on vacation till the end of the month

�we were sitting over a beer at Shorty�s one evening in the time of the year when the end of the workday and the start of the evening push in on each other, when everything feels like it�s already too late.�

No Colder Place by s.j. rozan. page 1. very noire. i'll tell you more when I finish the book, but i think it lists another reason I don�t do the season, malls lit like airports notwithstanding.

this passage sheds a little light on why I dislike the holiday season so much. in addition to the fact that I don�t like being used abused & confused by the economic juggernaut dangling Christmas bells. yeah, I admit it, I don�t like it. the holidays are like a game show where nobody wins and half the contestants have minor breakdowns.

the best ad I�ve seen so far this season (already??) is the one where you can get a cliff notes version of the "night before xmas" along with a coca-cola Santa Claus.

anyway i'll be away for awhile, I�m plunging into the holiday maelstrom, driving to chapel hill NC and visit son eli, his wife melissa, their daughter my granddaughter lily, son Nathan, daughter Nicole and her son my grandson Corbin, and my former wife Sally, whoa, last minute flash, also a. woolf who is delayed getting back to NYC and wants to say hello to b.crane and hopes to visit soon.

sally is currently battling lung cancer. this disease is a killer and real underfunded. kind of interesting that the repugnance against tobacco has spilled over into a stigma against those suffering from this disease. more women are killed yearly by lung cancer by far than any thing else including breast cancer, yet lung cancer is way underfunded compared to breast cancer. just shows you the power of words: "she smoked, she did it to herself", and other nonsense while we are all like a slowly sinking ship, the captain running amuck on deck protesting innocence.

anyway next i fly to phoenix on the 19th, the land where everything is new, clean, and shiny, recreational shopping is a must, the cathedral ceiling homes are two feet from each other, and it�s a dry heat, like the moon is a dry cold.

there i'll see sister Jane, Jane�s husband Fred who wouldn�t be caught dead in a crazed web site like this, their children Jonathan and Anne, my mom and dad, and my oldest son Eric.

I�ll be back in business pointing out the delights and paradoxes of semi-conscious life in the 21rst c. western hemisphere late November, when i plan to collect the pictures scattered throught these pages in one place.

and remember, don�t believe everything you think.

i'm not the forest
i'm a tree;
i'm not a you
and you're not a me

11.11.1

"A basic law of psychological understanding is the mercurial one of keeping images in motion, letting them generate each other. This leads to a depth of vision, not in a logical, linear kind of reasoning but in the richness of texture that a emerges from such a process.

...Its is important to keep changing the subject. The subject changes before our very eyes. It is important to keep changing our mind -

The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its resemblance find.

The mind, or the imagination, the original shape-shifter : Thrice Greatest Hermes."

The Planets Within: the Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino
by
Thomas Moore

Change Your Mind. It's About Time

11.10.2

woke up from a nap today that i had been putting off for several days - the radio was on low and playing "it's all over now baby blue" by bobby d. if he'd never made another record...er, CD... his dent in my life and yours would remain. then the same radio speaks of "the former writer ken kesey".

i came back from greece in 64 or 65 and was visiting my mom and dad and noticed a paperback laying around, "cuckoo's nest", and read it. i could not believe it, much less that it was in my parents home. i guess i remember thinking everything was going to be better now. i know i did later.

anyway to hell with cultural histories and milestones to nowhere, unelevate the artists everywhere, free art from the capital "A", and a little respect for those who did. who am we? we are a creature of our time, and our time is a creature of the beyond.

11.7.1

a nod towards the world of islam:

"And here, no doubt, is one of the the characteristic implications of Gnostic anthropology. By arousing the human being to the vocation of a potential angel , it causes him to move in this world as a Stranger, a "Prince of the other world" on his way back to his native home. Hence this extreme gentleness, this appreciation of the derisory character of any exercise of the will to power, of any appetite for kingship, or for conversion tending to bring about a monolithic Unity. The Gnostic lessons of the apocryphal Gospel texts which recur in the writings of our Ismailians have given us this teaching: the form of your vision and of your worship bear witness to what you are, you answer for the vision you have of your God. And what God becomes is revealed in the mode of relation attested in man's mode of understanding Him."

Henri Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis

that was fun. now this:

inside my cave

11.6.1

you can�t have your question and answer it too. i knew i went too far when i knew it was you. three am madness weathers the storm. already gladness is finding a form. i walk without magic without a care. because if i�m here you must be there.

diamond graffiti

3.7.5

it�s hard to know what to do. while the last strands of personality dissolves into celebrations of the predictable. how can we live like we used to? we can�t. who gets to remain in the newly minted mode? the guy who looks like a carny tele-evangalist and has a penchant for jolt-cola? the womwan who lost her pearls in a south of the border gas station and would rather not talk about it? how about the young kid who walks the pier every morning when the sun rises and never says hello? the old man with the rock who doesn�t own a tv? the young woman with the delicate touch who slowly waves her hands in mind-stopping mudras while time stutters around her?

the old dies and the new is born: we know that. changes without end. if the personality we walk and talk is eroding because it has outlasted its usefullness and reason for existing, what comes next? the bothersome thing is that from this tiny point in space and time it appears that a diminuation is coming, not just a subtraction, or a destruction - we always knew it would involve some of that; but a wholesale substitution of the old and ragged by the vacuum. the artiface and manners arriving any day now seem backward, an idiot wind,, signifying bits of this and bytes of that, all simulcra of a world we have forgotten, but has it forgotten us? maybe it has, and if so we wink out like dying stars staring into space, golden days gone and nights trembling with moonlight twisting in the dust.

but wait, there�s more...

only the wrong survive

11.4.1

have you noticed it's getting harder to express the inexpressable? or maybe it's getting easier to notice it's getting harder. in the last 10,000 years the human being has managed to lose the invisible. almost.

the invisible still creates some of the turns the visible takes, like "why would somebody paint his hand on the wall of a cave? in the dark?"

some of the turns: maybe less and less. maybe evolution is moving "us" along to the point where bright light, ductile texture, calm lobotomized semi-thought and smooth talk will be the measure of all things. clouds and shadows will be a dim memory. human beings will no longer wonder in the small hours of the morning, "why did i do that?". they won't even wonder "now who just thought that thought?"

there won't be any inexpressible left to inexpress. everything will be clear as they say water used to be. the only thing left to do will be, like they already say on tee-vee, "wealth-creation".

there goes the neighborhood

11.2.1

the personality (which may be obsolete in the near future) & History
from �Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present�
1967
James Hillmen

"...As we individuals are fastened to the facts of our personal case histories by what we remember of our personal lives, so is our history addicted to the history of profane time. An addiction demands more and more, faster and faster,. Much of our inventiveness serves merely making, gathering, and reproducing events."

[profane time; current events; factoid of the day; disneyland; the new york times]

11.1.1

interesting piece on anthrax scare, but more about previous climate of under-the-table fear embedded in our culture for the last, oh say, 30 years.

"I have sometimes felt that living in America now must be a little like what it was to live in a medieval village on the edge of the Black Forest in the 12th century. Daily life flourished with belief in hobgoblins and other unseen threats--all brought to life by word of mouth and rumor."

-OpinionJournal - Wonder Land

10.30.1

Happy Birthday
to My Granddaughter Lily

i watched the news tonight - oooooooh boy.

rumsfield was saying that al-queada was lobbing explosive projectiles thru the air in afghanistan along with us and the taliban.

is this really true?

a military type on PBS was saying we are doing well militarily, getting our high tech death traps finely tuned in a new situation.

does this sound like germany in spain 1939 testing toys for the big one on one of the poorest countries in europe?

a military type last week allowed as how the taliban were tougher than he thought.

tougher than he thought maybe but the rest of us recognize that one of the poorest peoples in the world with one of the shortest lifespans in one of the most hostile topographies on the planet who defeated the english empire, the soviet empire, have never lost a war to the outside, including against genghis khan and the mongols, probably have the edge in how to win militarily on their home ground.

a nation-state like ours needs to retaliate aginst an attack such as sept.11. but adding one more layer of devestation to the afghan people is not retaliation. it is fantasy, although i'm sure it plays well in the boardrooms of the powerful. the source of the attack is various rivers of big oil money. if we want to bomb the source we should bomb saudi arabia and pakistan. see America Strikes Back - The Dumb War: It's time to bomb Pakistan.

another interesting statement by rumsfield was to the effect that terrists living in this country will be expelled if their visa is even one day out of date.

isn't that like announcing that any murderers living here better watch out, we'll throw them in the jug for jaywalking?

the ossified, hierarchical bureaucracy that our government has evolved into, run by the best and the brightest (= richest) cannot see beyond their world. they are provencials in an international setting. they don't speak the language. i say again put them all on the street with no resources for a week and we'd have a better chance of dealing with a very dangerous and nasty situation. the people running the war don't (usually) lie, they just don't know any better.

tomorrow i think i'll skip the news.

#

the other day in a frenzy of misdirection i went through all of the books in the house: i found lots of surprises. one was "the city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects" by lewis mumford. so now i have to do what i set out to do when i put up the list of books you see on the right: review them, comment on them, say something about them. a self imposed bit of "fun". i couldn't do it without the book because i can't remember what it says.

here is something i picked out at random from the book, in an early chapter on the agricultural revolution:

"...the specialized worker, a magnified hand, or arm, or eye, achieved excellence and efficiency in the part, to a degree impossible to reach except by such specialization; but he lost his grip on life as a whole. this sacrifice was one of the chronic miscarriages of civilization: so universal that it has become 'second nature' to urban man."

pretty cool, huh?

todays pic

heard an articulate young pakistani man on the radio today. member of a band, forget the name, sufi rock. he spoke of a poem by 15th c. poet. a striking line goes something like this:

"when you come to the place of five rivers, choose one. then live it."

the penultimate word is probably the key. altho "choose" is necessary to live i guess.

we all have our bad days...some of us have worse

what a beautiful fall day. spent most of the morning with book cover project, realbasic project, archiving information about this new to me programming language, then drove to pick up laundry. in between all this i was trying to finish one so-so watercolor and rescue another in deep trouble. after lunch i took a walk and it was great. the weather of the year, brisk, windy, leaves blowing all over the place, deep blue sky absolutely transparent air and dark dappled shadows flitting about. and the whole time that deep high lonesome sound above and all around my head, like i'm suddenly home in 3 diminsional deep space after too long in two. i love fall.

it's 10:45 in the evening, i'm still archiving. ready for bed. and the funny thing about the day is i never spoke to a soul except mavis at the laundramat and she didn't have a lot to say.

email from friend barbara:

"Having checked your blog recently, I feel I should say, don't worry about the war - the future will unroll as you walk and you can only affect the parts you step on as you go."

i guess my concern about the war is not about the war. it is about what the war is a symptom of, what the consensual reality is, and what it portends for the future. and what i might be stepping in tomorrow. if i don't trip over my self first.

Thought for the Day

nice essay on weblogs and why they might be a way to balance overwhelming incoming corporate data. includes some nice touches about what it does for the doers. weblogs: a history and perspective: by rebecca blood. "We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from "audience" to "public" and from "consumer" to "creator." Weblogs are no panacea for the crippling effects of a media-saturated culture, but I believe they are one antidote."

Not Much Left at the End of the Day

just when i was running out of things to write i found this tucked away on my hard drive. can you spell "doggeral"?

In the tower of hunger the mice buy. the cats dream of fur. tails twitch with each foreign heartbeat. nothing is lost. eyes like lightning hand over the cheese. as twilight lands, a large cloud shaped like my brother pauses at the gate. the cadillacs are dead, the motherboards conspire. mornings are a vague notion in the land of mice. cats just say no. i leave the rest to you, whoever you may be on top of the hidden mountain, fiddling with the remote control of life and zoning out when it rains.

i was awakened last night around 4am, about an hour before i fall out of bed anyway, by my old friend curly who seemed to be lost in oak creek colorado. these type of inibriated calls are rare in my present life, but i woke up, coffee was happening, my head was hummin, the birds were asleep, so we sat (at least i did) and talked.

curly was disturbed by a number of things, but the main message he delivered was "it's time to say the unsayable." (since the sayable seems a little used and abused at this point). so here is his list of the unsayable which if said (and heard) might give us a little breathing space. (have you ever tried breathing in a little breathing space?)

1) shooting missles into children's bedrooms is a no-no. likewise workplaces, playgrounds, and bluegrass festivals.

2) taking land from a people because God said it was yours is to be discouraged. north americans got away with it from the indians, and the israilis got away with it from the palestinians. each transgressor needs to apologize. curly said give it all back but as a rwealist of sorts, he amended this to give them a lnd, aroof over their heads, aviable way to eat, sleep, and dream.

3) the nation-state is not the only viable organization of a people, even though it is the current style. a people that have not evolved a nation state from, say, an obscure ottoman back-water province like palastine have a right to their homes and farms which their ancestors lived in and which their children would like to continue continue living in. a home.

4) islam is made up of about a billion people, or, if you're like me, a billion souls. it is more than a religion it is a non-monolithic culture with it's own values (which incidentally are more about peace than ramming airplanes into cities). the atlantic pennensula that extends from asia contains technologically advanced peoples who do not have a clue about this culture. muslims do have a clue about our culture. they speak our languages, attend our schools, live in our cities. we do not return the favor.

5) this results in a perochial, provencial view of islam by the west that does little justice to that culture, it�s history, it�s advances, and it�s values.

6) the few experts we have in islam, those who have lived there and speak the language and know a jihad is not a holy war but an individual struggle of the human being to find and foster his higher self (a "struggle) have been decimated and driven from positions where their experience could help our culture. the reasons for htis are manifold but all settle nicely around the fact they are not great admirers of john wayne. the same thing happened pre-viet nam when those familiar with that turf were driven from the state department by McCarthy and the �who lost china� hysteria of the 50�s.

7) in the bumper sticker mentality we have grown used to (McDonalds and the repupublicans (oh what the heck, democrats too) are all hugely proud of them selves when they can "stay on message.") doesn't matter what the message is as long as it's short, snappy, and repeated ad nausium for at least one news cycle.

8) our allies in the middle east include some of the most degenerate and corrupt money grubbing powers the world has ever seen. the suadis. the pakistanis. the sultan of brunei. the united arab emerites. we backed the taliban. we back anyone who will allow us to not be completely cuttoff from oil and mony.

9) the people who have to scuffle in those places do not like it, nor do they like the american government backing and supporting these powers. (kinda like we do isreal).

10) Dissent does not equal anti americnaism. dissent does not equal �i don�t like their methods but thier goals are legitimate. dissent = we�re walking into another debacle becuase we don�t know the territory.

Curly hung upright before his cell phone staticed out. he was heading for the canadian rockies to stay he said.

i'm tired and grumpy and going to draw on my imagination and create an image: here it is: i call it "dazed and confused one more time".

then i got anemail from old friend geoff commenting on "A British View of the US/Bin Laden affair" by Andrew Sullivan in the London Times, a piece that more or less said the rage of america has been awakened and is gonna KICK ASS: no more mr.nice guy. and that this justifies our existence. letter follows:

"The notion we must die for our beliefs has two (at least) aspects: One, offensively committing suicide to inflict damage to the other side, and two, defensively submitting to murder to first, end the cycles and second, if there is no relief from principled example, to escape this horrible world. Religion teaches we are wrong to kill. I am unaware of any spiritual systems that condemn a person for being killed. Our west point friend and the British view (which I must say, was not anything I
feel in retrospect that I had to read, as pitched in the forwarding message) astonish me without ringing any tone of truth. Are we not all in agreement that we are embarked on the wrong path? Will we not lose a great deal and gain really nothing even if our government (first court appointed in history) entirely succeeds in its plans? Is it not much more likely that embittered, lunatic terrorism will end if we pursue some other, more promising road?"

i might add that the monoculture this age has been veering towards is now in full flower, and that any questions regarding what we can and are doing to prevent explosives going off in peoples homes and workplaces quickly are shoved into the catagories of "liberal", "pacifist", not to mention "traitor". one thing all the peoples of the world seem agreed on: "they" are evil and we're not.

i'm tired of this shit: we don't need to bomb one of the poorest peoples in the world who have never lost a war, including against the mongols. our high tech fantasies probably work better in watts. our weapon of choice against the 3rd world should be our strength: money. let's buy'em and turn the country into a theme park.

for all the deluge of mediased news (if that's not redundant), there's a whole lot going on today that the public is unaware of. read this interview: AlterNet -- Susan Sontag, "The Traitor," Fires Back for a refreshing view on how difficult it is to think today. from a woman i have greatly admired every since i read "illness as metaphor". one of the great observers of out time.

back to politics i can't help it, the fuse is lit. check out semour hersh in this week's New Yorker:"a slow degradation of the system due to political correctness". the system he's talking about is the system we are using to keep the saudis our allies. they are more corrupt than batista, marcos, and allende's killers. and the arab on the street knows it.

the reality behind reality is what i find interesting. that's why it's so hard for me to make sense out of "politics". i'm not even sure how it's spelled. F. Breudel wrote a book with the intriguing title "the structure of everyday life". that's what interests me. the structure is changing. an example is the phrase

Shop Till You Drop
last year it meant go crazy with credit cards, buy stuff recreationally, go to the mall and surround yourself with the commercial.

today it means do your patriotic duty until you lose your gasmask.

i give up, here's some stuff about the new realpolitik of the day. the fact that being a member of the american middle-class, not to mention a plutocrat, means maintaining a certain kind of blindness has caused and continues to cause a lot of this stuff. kind of like when we walk by a homeless person without registering that the operative word is �person�.

Our Friends Are Killers, Crooks and Torturers
"Almost four weeks after the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington, we are playing politics on the hoof and allying ourselves to some of the nastiest butchers around." remember trujillo, batista, chang kaishek, marcos? well the new bunch is more powerful, richer, more vicious, and we�re still supporting the bad guys to oppose the worse guys. we made the taleban.

Tariq Ali: The Pakistan Maelstrom
pakistan, more guns per person than even america. screwed up by 30 years of looting and exploitation. our ally?

SupplySideInvestor.Com
�straight talk to your readers, many of whom I gather have been in denial about any connection between U.S. support of Israel and Osama bin Laden's declared holy war against the United States.�

another place another time
"anthrax...smokem out...they don't like freedom...more of our troops lost 9-11 than in the entire gulf "war"...they are cowards...why do they hate us..."

stay tuned for some answers. they won't make any sense. it has to do with language.

Do the Homeless Live in the Homeland?

well had a visit from old friend john r. this evening. we calculated that we had known each other about 40 years on and off. someone who knows me as a snapshot of my present persona doesn't know much. can we stretch the context of talking to a stranger to conversing with a being who has had multiple lives, experiences, forgotten loves, immaculate frustrations, many lifetimes since last birth? maybe.

it's happened to me about 3 times. each time was on a transcontinintal bus plowing thru the dark american night (many years ago there was a dark american night, not sure about the present). don't remember what was said.

the man who thought his head was a picture

i dunno, bloggerland is awfully slow today. so i am unable to truncate bad vibe message of a week or so ago.

today i�m scattered, and so are my thought-crumbs. shattered. nothin but a blue vacuum looking at me like i�m a blue vacuum too.

current events aren't current and they're not events. the only events today are the little metaphoric electrons and their ilk doin the dance of the flashing glimmers. humans don�t do this dance. well maybe they might do it once but that�s the last dance.

current events are a product. a brand name. a logo. gang colors. revolt into style. in the land of the bored meaning is ignored.

�Not always was the soul identical with the brain. When the body becomes a cave of fantasy pocked with the glowing eyes of myriad animal images, biography might then repeat collective history and my angry soul would be today in my stomach and tommorrow in my skin. the soul could stay in motion.� (puer�s wounded wing by randolph severson).

if that doesn�t make any sense how about this:

the idea of young american men stumbling about in the harshest landscape darn near in the world in the dark lugging enough high tech equipment (all miniturized of course) to feed an afghan village for a year (i�m sure it could be sold at the local back street) and not having the least glimmer of what the humans whose land and way of life is up for grabs are about is catastrophic. you ain�t seen nothing yet. wait till the glitches, software bugs, the higher ups covering their asses, the endless meetings in expensively paneled board rooms where the truth is not allowed all pile up in a collision in a land where the empty evening breezes say more than a thousand MTVs.

americans are temporal provincials. rubes. they have no idea of what it means to live as a human in another place and time. sure PTA meetings are a force for the good, but in other places and times there are other pieces of the Good (probably needs to be capitalized) at work. the watchword for the next few years might be:

It's differant

but it doesn't matter

ignore previous message. so much vitriol and anger. didn't know i had it in me.

message is so stale because i've been in chapel hill where eric my oldest son landed with little advance warning. so spending time with family.everything is as ok as it seems. meanwhile, with no reference to the personal, just the plain old world out there, the word of the day is:

Give War A Chance