a test. i'm trying to spice up my new myspace music site and want to use this picture but so far no go.

http://myspace.com/modernpeasant

on my list of to do today is write congressmen to let them know i am for national health insurance. i'e been putting it off for weeks. some kind of resistance on my part based on i get sucked into the circus of numbers and it is a setup, hoax, con game. but i will do it.

i seem to remember that the beginning of insurance was during the time of pilgrimages c. 1000 ad. pilgrims would contribute to a pool before leaving and if an emergency, accident or whatever took place during the pilgrimage they would take out of the pool what was needed. that was it. too simple? maybe. ignores the concurrent rise of financial institutions concerned with shipping out of italy and Belgium? probably.

took a walk after lunch with ninian who is on his way to swannanoa gathering. and imahined the above picture.

camping monday canceled, eli going to doctor with strep or something like it. i may do a one nighter to hawksbill mnt, in fact that's what i'll do.

also want to place some postcards i drummed up awhile back. maybe to 10 shops.

but i can't remember where i put them.

this morning's creative hiccup.

a little something i put tohether this morning. yu are looking behind the scenes because it isn't quite done. the right side needs tinkering, fatten the white circle, and a little text kerning.

it's a bumper sticker.

i've returned to making audio, electronic noise to you. lot of people don't like electronic moozik and you don't have to like it either.
http://www.myspace.com/modernpeasant

this mornings amusement. lost yesterday.

any of you night owls be sure to listen to coast2coast tonight, guest is charles tart, who you don't hear enough about these days.

mondays madness. feel like i have to stay focused this week. open question.

Lucius Shepard || News
lucius is an old friend who is a little tricky to keep up with. glad he's doing well.

ok you've seen it before but i added audio. not very well i'm afraid, so turn down the volume.

from interview, neil young sometime after weld:

"JO: What are your views on people going to college to learn guitar?

NY: Paints a pretty doomed picture of the future, doesn't it?[Laughs.] First of all, it doesn't matter if you can play a scale. It doesn't matter if your technique is good. If you have feelings that you want to get out through music, that's what matters. If you have the ability to express yourself and you feel good when you do it, then that's why you do it. The technical side of it is a completely boring drag, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I can't play fast. I don't even know the scales. A lot of the notes that I go for are notes that I know aren't there. They're just not there, so you can hit any note. I'm just on another level as far as all that goes."

a bit of last saturday, 4th of july, at tom and erin's. didn't get much of the fireworks which is a shame because they were spread over the hills and dales in a beautiful conversation. but this is what i got so why not.

i have hit such a dry spell that i uploaded the above image that i made in... let's see, it was in arizona on a mac se with macpaint, so it must have been late 80's give or take a lifetime or two. i spent the weekend not using any computers and am convinced i need to take a break from the cyberworld. time to take a deep breath or two.

Noam Chomsky on “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours”

Noam Chomsky on “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours”

no more HDRi which the above is, taken 2 days ago. i don't understand it altho i'm close, and the software i've rounded up to use is slow and flakey. i'll catch up in 6 months.

what you are seeing is examples of me learning yet another way to produce an image. took it yesterday at craggy gardens after a short hike and very timely picnic w/ richard and debbie. i was a little too wobbly but very much enjoyed the opportunity to get out.

my effort for the day. taken at the lagoon of the Meher Spiritual retreat in myrtle beach awhile back.

stayed up until 3 last night reading about Karl Popper and walter bejamin. feel like shit today.

i forget whu said that we humans today think in phrases - jingles, slogans and empty sounds like "socialism". whatever "socialism" means.

socialistic medicine is of course "bad" because of the contagion of meaning in a world too full of mental static. i was raised in it because my dad was in the air force. did i ever see the same doctor twice in a row? probably not. did i have to wait for bureaucrats to approve of a hospital or doctor visit? nope.

what about today when the populace knows that this is a bad way to practice medicine?
have i ever been caught in the snares of endless criminality of the private sector medical-industrial complex calls the invisible hand of the market place? repeatedly.

BTW i was listening to the left wing rantings of ron reagon last night and he used the phrase "medical-industrial complex". i don't know when i first used it but it was a long time ago.

got this in mail today from granddaughter grace. thank you grace. she is a sweetie and talented too. not to mention her mom and dad.

driving to doc today the truck in front of me has a bumper sticker that read

Socialism:
trickle down
poverty

of course my next project took shape right then and there. a bumper sticker that will read:

capitalism:
trickle down
robbery

did it this morning. don't like it very much. maybe i can use it for a video. came from latest notebook i found, pretty sure it is from 5 years ago.

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
Charles Wadsworth

what a mess, huh? the quickie above, yes, but i'm talking about the state of our lives. how do you say to our politicians that:
the world changed. already. again.
and it isn't over.
the invisible hand of the market
has changed into the hand of form
and is killing what we are meant to become.
"your money or your life"
the current mantra of medicine
replacing "do no harm".
you have been robbed and pillaged and may not know it.
it was a very inside job.

slow today and not even steady. nice image i think. no tripod. used fdrbasic and a lot of curves in photoshop.

i am assuming that the video below plays ok. here at the entropy palace this is not exactly the case; what the case is is:

DSL with older imac Ethernet and wireless celeron sony PC - more specs available on request - and video plays fine on pc, but doesn't on imac, even after the usual tricks eg pausing while it loads. i have 4 videos up on youtube and got curious. the iMac won't play any of them. but it used to. so problem defined and i have put it on my list of things i might get around to fixing.

meanwhile-->

you don't have to shout it
make it real or foggetaboutit
it's just another cloud
raining out loud

i've been fooling around w/ a short movie i posted here yesterday. some glitch has stopped it from playing on some DSL systems. so i removed it. meanwhile i have many distractions to deal w/ so it's gone.

apparently plays ok but right now not on imac. so i left it up. good luck.

found another notebook, so i'll be digging around to see what i can see. pretty sure it's 5 years old.

9:15. time for bed.

today's playdate. has a great time at bluff mnt festival.

pretty much finished a successful week, spent it all in self-imposed deadline fever featuring the usual suspects: house. truck, color prints, a dvd, and the above cyberdoodle. leaving for hot springs this morning for bluff mnt music festival. back tomorrow. i plan to go to my annual movie next week, 3D up:
Movie Review for Up 3D:
"Viewed in 3D-- which you really, really ought to do if you get a chance-- the bright colors of the first half shimmer, while the vertiginous cliffs and flights of the second half send shivers. And for anyone who thinks this is just a goofy story about an old man and a kid and a talking dog, know that this PG-rated children's movie addresses infertility, death, single parenting, loss of childhood illusions, and the necessities of respecting nature."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb::
from the black swan
"We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Francaise, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated."

read this book. a few pages at a time.

last watercolor i did. the next time you see it it should look better, not adequate scan.

[later} better.

all i have to offer today.

another panorama, this one taken at the home of my son eli and famlly in chatham county. no tripod.

what am i doing?

playing with photomerge and fdrbasic demo for hdri.

dvd for father's day: movie and slide show.

and two prints for my two oldest children birthday, twins.

cleaning truck and house. this will take all week.

panorama shot at Meher Center.

tried HDR didn't work.

i'm back from 2 weeks on road. above image from Meher Center in SC.

The Associated Press: Google CEO urges grads: 'Turn off your computer'

a picture a day. that is what this blog is about as of today. more or less what i've been doing for awhile anyway. glyphs, symbols, the stuff that i've been posting for awhile now.

these will be all over the map, variations, alternate takes, works in progress.

from time to time some words may be included.

went to bev's birthday yesterday afternoon. very small gathering, mostly the younger folks.

i really enjoyed playing music w/ these folks. all kinds of instruments, folks picking up whatever thing they could emanate sound with, no point or goal except to echo the now.

my age group with a few notable exceptions seems to have lost this knack and it is such a loss. it was a real lift to me to see that it is still in the air and happening thank god.

yesterday douglas falls.

i couldn't sleep last nite. at all. when i looked p frrom the monitors where i was hoplesly looking for ariadne's thread, it was light outdide. tried laying down but nearly vibrated out of bed. so i showered, took care of some household perpendicular angels, and hit the road. errends. when i got back the day was so loely that i drove and hiked to douglas falls where i osmosised HDR photography, example above.

don't know if you saw charlie rose last night. my all time heroine reporter naomi klein was on along with xx. it as the best rose i have ever seen. te guests calmy and with good humor nailed obama not for being a socialist, but for seemingly restoring the ante-staus quo.

i voted for him to change the stranglehold the finance mirage has on you and me. he seems to be changing it back to the warlords, masters of the universe, the demented and disconnected from life.

boo hiss.

checkout the rose interview it can be found on NPR.

ysterday was the first day this i felt sort of comfortable, caught up on major tasks, just a few details left. so i yawed, stretched, and sort of gloated. then i sat down at computerland, took care of a few long neglected glitches, looked up and saw it was light outside.

picture above is one of the results of this whiplash metabolic staccato limbic world.

got hung up trying to create/upload the above. if you can play it - and see it - you're good. i can't.

so consider it a teaser and i'll get it up tomorrow.

meanwhile i'll take a long walk. i am happy to report that i'm almost caught up on all fronts, and it feels kind of.... strange.

**i'll get used to it. the movie plays fine on a fast machine.

vague huh?

i'm back from 5 day home bound retreet. what you see is what you get. or is it vice versa?

i'm taking a break until this coming sunday. no posts no radio no tv no news. if you need anything before sunday talk to my manager in the sky.

picture of a rock i took the other day during a long walk on the parkway. unfortunately it didn't offer an opinion about how to sneeze or how long it takes for the inhabitants of this planet to wake up from the consumer dream that is nothing but a detour, a diversion from any future that might be.

"The problem of Web 2.0 music culture, which often gets overlooked in the hype concerning DIY music culture and digital empowerment, as I see it anyway, is how the internet overexposes music culture, breeding and intensifying a kind of fiendish hunger in everyone -- corporate marketing experts, brand consultants, journalists, bloggers and musicians -- to attempt to pre-empt sonic innovation, to get ahead of the curve, so that anything new that happens can be viewed retrospectively, and therefore its shock absorbed. What happens as a consequence is that the time gap between real invention and mass marketing approaches zero, or even inverts. That's why older notions of futurism are so highly problematic in the age of Web 2.0. I think the shadow of the internet will become an increasingly small but interesting place."
eMusic Q&A: Kode9 - eMusic Spotlight
i guess i am relieved.

what a day.

i got nothin to say

where there's a hill there's a way

tho she feels like she's in a play

she is anyway

ok?

been
singing
playing piano with radio
getting camper ready to be ready
got interested in hdr photography and hopelessly lost, result above.

shindig 1966. remember?

got up to craggy gardens. walked past the barricade about 5 miles. the air was very still and heavy. thunderclouds building but never made it. lots of fotos.

check the raves about bobby d.'s latest.
Bob Dylan | Bob Dylan Together Through Life Album Quotes

or this about upcoming baseball stadium concert. he will be playing durham baseball stadium (a really pleasant venue) july 28. tickets can be preordered may 4th.
Bob Dylan hitting the road with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp - Monsters and Critics

get a preview of together through life here:
Bob Dylan | Paste Presents: The Dylan Takeover

i think it was friday nite (?) or thereabouts. when i went to bed i turned on the radio and heard the first news of swine flu in mexico. as the night progressed i would wake up briefly and hear more news. now california, etc. by morning the word "pandemic" was being used and it was reported that here were cases in charlotte NC, about 2 hours away from where i live.

i remain astonished by the speed and progression of the news. not talking about the disease but the conventional world view we all live in. what a difference one night made. coupled with the economic meltdown last fall that seemed to explode in a week or so, this phenomena seems to corroborate the feeling that so many have that the idea that lived experienced time has speeded up and continues to speed up.

meaning that "tomorrow" will bring the new that used to take lifetimes?

this blog is in penultimate phase. i had so much fun on retreat i'm going back to it.

ok that"s fiction. i worked my ass off pulling "stuff" from dwelling because i was feeling. . . claustrophobic. i've got loads for goodwill, landfill, wherever it belongs. and i'm not finished so i'll be back next week.

besides, after years of a daily word i'm done w/ it.

i got involved during the week w/ twitter to find out what was happening w/ the fire in myrtle beach. i could not handle it. yesterday i was describing what i could figure out about how it works. a Buddhist practitioner, he opined that receiving a fast and furious endless real-time string of short disparate posts from the entire world reminded him of the endless noise of discursive thinking one can become aware of during meditation.

me too.

Back next week

for the last few weeks i've been fooling around w/ yupo paper. above is an example. for some reason i like working with it but folks don't seem to respond to it well. cold and formless, it reminds me a little of marbled paper only not as graceful. probably will use it as a texture, incorporating it into something or another.

i'm taking next week off: i've worn myself out trying to clear out some living space. i'm exhausted and going to retreat into zeroland for awhile. back next week.