ok ok i changed the quicky i posted below. it was just not me.

of course none of them are. i'm me.

and just because i'm posting this does not mean i'm not in retreat mode. in fact i think it proves it.

beautiful night out. when i was a teen ager i would wonder all over on a night like this. in my 20's too come to think of it. maybe even a night or two in my thirty's.

tonight? ...naaah.

i could say been there done that. but it would not be true because i didn't do it tonight, as me here and now.

saw a thing on PBS last night on death valley. hit you in the head with a sledgehammer beautiful cinamaphotography. the night sky. full blown mutideminsional resonant epiphany holding you at it's exact center at all times, along with entire kosmos. what our ancestor's wore until yesterday.

and the noise machine? (talking about today's snews).

rogue regimes do not go gracefully. if they could do that they probably would have thought it foolish to play john wayne in a part of the world they did not know.

so i predict that whatever happens this will not: polls get closer, election day arrives, the dems take over both houses. and the bandit war generals, the roguest regime of them all, accepts it.

this one zig zagged right out of the old unconcious. a few minutes ago.

i'm checking out for one week, there will be no posts got to retreat.

so wonder around the site, there is really a lot happening here.

had to show off my new tattoo. i did it myself with a safety pin and ink jet printer.

i see etta baker has passed away. for some reason this news item really hit me hard. she was a graceful, peaceful 93 year old lady who played the real blues her way.
"She could easily be called 'Queen' of the Piedmont blues, because she has a grace and graciousness rarely seen."

water runs downhill. in the western states, they say it runs towards money.

photo was taken at roaring forks waterfall near celo.

natural law: downhill.

the new world we as humans are constructing: money.

i was talking with alex last night about art w/ a lower case "a". he was talking about the market. the market is a basic piece of the above mentioned new world disorder. an artist's survival depends on the markets whims on any given day. the thought of refining one's skills, talent and goal into satisfying the market is a dismal prospect in my opinion. the whole ball of wax in the branded culture means to make a living via art successfully you must: be a smoker; or be so technically proficient you can turn out what the market wants; or (and this is the best situation) be lucky and turn out what you turn out and the market likes it.

another aspect of the new post-post culture is "winner take all". that is, the top 5% of any creative endeavor makes millions, the other 95% cannot survive and the wonderful world of day job comes into play.

i've used this example many times so i'll do it again: i heard kurt vonnegut on tv many years ago say that 300 people in the world, and only 300, could live comfortably doing what he does (write novels). ditto for athletes, musicians, poets, entertainers etc. in the culture of manufactured conditioned desires, there is no incremental path to working on your work and surviving at the same time. as in apprentice, guild, etc. this is much complicated by the correlate to winner take all, which is a public persona recognizable by millions, ie fame. i have heard young people, say 20 years old, reflect this by saying they want to be famous when they grow up. as fatuous as that sounds, it is a reasonable statement given the alternative. Notice that they are not saying i want to be a famous (you fill in the noun). the adjective is what matters, not the noun. in other words to be a brand. in our culture where presentation and style of presentation is key, a public persona, a face that is recognizable to the inhabitants of the culture, is literally worth millions.

and this at he same time that there appears to be a growing, vague, but widespread feeling that the personality, ego, personal identification is coming to be regarded as the core problem of modern life. the paradigm of the personality as developing up to the point (and then stopping) where it shuts the door to recognizing, experiencing sat-chit-ananda, the real Real World.

we live in interesting times; may we see times that are more than that.

i'm back. here. where i'm back from is seen above. two nights sleeping on the ground in the dark. two things of note: as is my habit i took something to draw on, in this case a failed watercolor. i drew on top of it with an "0" technical pen. the two media are contridictory, small precise delicate barely visable ink lines and giant blurs or watercolor. it'll take awhile to finish, and even longer to see if it's worth seeing.

there were some strange spirits in the dark, they kept unrolling my story. the sequence of memories was creative, in other words i have no conviction that my story is true in cold hard fact but know it doesn't matter one twit.

a piece of multicolored glass that has been around my place for a few years now. after a morning of image splashing.

i went to a birthday party last night, kim of kim & t. nice crowd, the frothy 2% i think wilber called this crowd. Interesting interplay, i had no idea who was who but sure enjoyed t's guitar playing and singing.

this image/word thing is affecting my day to day existence.

my social persona has become so diffuse. affecting has become a slight strain, not much, it's all good, i just have noticed a change. and typing words every day on this thing, where i have less and less to say.

there is a creative grace - i think i got that phrase from t's blog - that the image or letting an image develop that makes it all easy, fascinating, helpful to the kosmos (?) and not optional. i do not enjoy the social with the same spirit.

but i am going to try for the next few weeks to actually write about something. the good, the bad, and the real. or does everything contain, among everything else, nothing? or is nothing the absence of everything?

i'm not going to stake out this path; if it happens it will, if not it won't. i mean i don't care, it's just a notion that floated into my existence, so i acknowledge it and will pay attention to it, but it's a long day coming i don't have a shade to stand in.

finished w/ micky mousing around with various pshop filters i haven't used. the end result to me appears to be a poster in slaughterhouse. meat.

philip k. dick, among other things, was right. we exist in the iron castle.

but deep in the interior there is a wide screen hi def plasma screen playing soap opera, football games, and political shenanigans, not to mention virtual reality shows. so maybe it's ok unless you haven't forgotten, or maybe just recollected, boredom.

that might save us.

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this mornings cryptogram. hard to decipher. i think it either means use the telephone or find my spot on the mountain.

mmmm. nice picture. took it while paying a long overdue visit to friend tom 2 days ago.

working on developing new palette for watercolors, then use similar for oils at a later date. i am really having fun getting into this. why? because it's something i don't know. and it has a certain pull to it, i guess by that it has a meaning, or potential meaning, it is important to me.

those are the qualifications that kick me into high gear. if what my sister was telling me awhile back about old people learning (she saw a special on pbs on this), then i am in good shape. altho my social skills at conversation seem to have hit a new low, i realized the other day that being techie-artist-savant keeps me on a perpetual learning curve. i never thought much about it. but at present i am working and learning everyday flash, dreamweaver, been using photoshop every since version 1 and use it almost everyday still learning how to do the impossible, studying the piano in what is for me an unusually methodical way - but one that might appear to be learning how to play dylan riffs, keeping antique hardware trans-functional that is to say doing what it's meant to do and way more to boot (so to speak), substrates, media, wish i could just relax and read a good mystery tho.

last minute addition. today i fooled around with a watercolor, worked on a sort of video, did email, and studied a bunch of new (to me) takes on the color wheel, why it doesn't work, how to correct it, on and on. i got so tangled up in this stuff when i left the house it was almost 6. i thought it was maybe 2 in the afternoon. i'm not complaining, mind you. are there many like me, hyperfocus or no-focus?

after the equinox"
not to be confused with "after the garden is gone" by neil young.

i am realizing that narrative is essential in order to blog. i watched a bit of PBS feature on andy warhol, experts and philosophers talking, explaining why he is the 20th century's most important artist. i disagree, but that's beside the point. at one point someone mentioned that he had no feel for "narrative". over the last ten years or so it has dawned on me that i don't either. not anymore.

reasons why i think this is the case:

i've never been big on theatrical events, a play leaves me totally bereft of any knowledge of the story i've just seen. Instead the experience unfolds for me as a series of moments or worlds, each with mood, tension, light, dark, and very real. but i don't experience the moment as having come from a prior moment. my attempts at musical production the same in that there is no curve or shape to the piece, no build up and climax. noisy minimalist. novels, the few i read nowadays, the same. texture, sense of place, enigmatic flash i get, but who is doing what and why usually escapes me.

i do fine i think with this mode, but there is another sense in which narrative might be essential, and that is telling (or living) your "story". Inhabiting your narrative, knowing it is a "story" something is telling the world.

so, with the arc of the tale demolished, what is my "story"? i've lost track.

but that's another story.

ooh whee blogger is fast this morning. i'm not. above from the doctor's spread on reems creek.

right now i am going to walk about a mile to the bakery, buy a lof of bread, walk back.

if it's the last thing i do.

even if it isn't.

this morning's moodoglyph. as usual it doesn't tell me a thing.

yesterday i worked on watercolor till 1 then drove to kim's. we had agreed to spend some time teaching her watercolor. but the equinox threw her timing off, so i spent some time on the deck with the dogs drawing a pencil sketch. then i hurried home, worked some more, and set out for reems creek where i had told jim that i would drop by. couldn't find his driveway. so i continued on for an unannounced visit to dr. r. when i got far enough up the driveway i came upon a padlocked gate. so i got out and walked, taking my camera with me. and leaving my truck blocking the gate. click click click, and then heard a horn honk. i walked back to the gate where i was blocking john and bev, and we continued up to the house. very pleasant interlude, a little talk, a little this, a little that, walked around. i won't go into details here but the good doctor is switching identity again. should be a good one.

i got 2 new mp3s up during this time, they can be found here:
modernpeasant - JamWave Artist Page

after 4 months of more or less creative isolation i finally got out of the house yesterday and drove south on the parkway. it was rainy, gloomy, foggy, i loved it. above is one of many pictures i took.

i have made a lot of progress on piano. and the guitar, 5 string tuned open g. i was so energized after drive yesterday that i stayed up till 1:30 - waaay past my bedtime - putting together a new piece of music.

as far as recent notions go, and they do come and go, i feel like the work is to not only know yourself (including, but not limited to what auribindo calls "the frontal personality", the social persona), but to be your self. problems, politics, catastrophe will remain, and from all accounts you will be more engaged with them than if you were not yourself. the true self is engaged with maya. a paradox. but aren't they all.

finished this watercolor last night. it is a copy of a painting in a book. last week i tried the same image in oils, didn't work too well - but i am going to see if oil pastels might help it.

you can see that the drawing i did the day before (below) is reminiscent of this composition even tho i did it with from imagination.

so what's new? remember that scene from star wars, the first go round, one of the 3 movies i can't remember which, when the heros are trapped in a room full of garbage and then the walls begin to move inward?

that's new, at least a new feeling that is widespread. the walls lurch inward, a bump here and there, but mostly silent, while the noise machine sends out a non-stop babble of consumer dialect, a miasma of trance, and the polished image of clean well appointed tv homes that look like sets because they are becomes the background of existence.

my friend george raised an interesting point the other day. what if the democrats win and don't impeach mr. bush? remember, impeachment is a process, not a declaration of guilt. if the process is skipped, can we say representative govt. is out to lunch?

as things unravel, one trend seems to be the breakup of populations into affinity groups that have very little to do with nationality or the nation-state. the romans supposedly presided over an empire that outstripped it's means of communication, and played into their demise. we are in a similar position i think, with the difference being technology fools fools into thinking we are "virtually" everywhere. and we are, so long as the "virtual" is accepted as real but it isn't.

hmmm... this is what i drew waiting for doc yesterday. eyes were ultra dilated, i guess it doesn't matter.

probably won't get out of town until tomorrow.

the first "cold" day. has more to do with air transparency, crispness than temperature. i'm still in tshirt and shorts.

damn i wish i had something to say. well i do have somethings to say but don't exactly know how to say them. comes from talking to the void i guess.

by the time i finish this post the picture above should show up. scanned a drawing and mokeyed around this morning. there's words in it. can you see them?

almost finished organizing living pod. today i even found two insurance cards i've been looking for for a couple of months.

tomorrow i'm driving up to yancey county and camp out a day or two. i'm looking for a certain waterfall near the nail's spread.

had a doc's appt. today at 3:10. an excercise in non-attachment, i didn't get in to see him until after 5. this was with retnapathist (?), everything looked good so to speak. the non-dual attitude helped me with the long wait, but i did draw a pencil landscape, dilated eyes and all. i'll have to check it out in the morning.

slung another ditty over the transom to jamwave.com.

oh yeah i found a notebook with a lot of writing in it: i'll grab a few samples:

i had a lady once,
her name was spring.
when she got in trouble
i could always hear her sing.

a melody with spirit
a morning without end.
if i kenw more about it,
i'd know what to send."

and..... so....... on.........

the woods, the woods...

good for folks because you can't find your way until you are lost. getting lost in the woods is such a relief. the eyes and the mind remain active, but take a back seat to touch. feet find the way. and in the meantime there is nothing to do but wonder (if you are one of those that have to be doing something).

wonder in both senses of the word.

above is an image that began as a watercolor on fredrix watercolor canvas, maybe the 2nd or 3rd i've done on that surface.. messed it up pretty good. so i got out my emergency oils pastels and went into it. then this morning i scanned it and spent some time with color balance and a lot more.

that's kind of how i work. if one thing doesn't, another does. all i have to do is give them a chance.

probably it is unfinished. i have a slight urge to put some marks or embossing inside the bubble that the guy is inside of. but probably not. it is far more cartoonish than anything i have done in a long time.

don't know why picture is not appearing above. hope you can see it, i can't.

i am by now fully convinced that the mess the manifest world is in now has Kosmic implications and causes. a case of spiritual evolution. as we often forget, when something evolves, there is no guarantee of the result. a good analogy might be the developmental evolution of the individual. thinking in terms of freud, jung, maslow, piaget, winnicott et al, if a person is at a certain point in development, say around 2 1/2 years old, there is a next point which a healthy person to-be goes thru. as wilber notes, each development can be successfully navigated or not. if not, problems will later develop, neuroses, pathologies etc.

cultural evolution is similar. one difference is that the development of a person has been studied and variously classified into stages. cultures have been looked at also in this way, but the data is very thin. toynbee, vico, mumford.

today the culture is surely at an inflection point. a new context and landscape requires a new evolutionary stage. the new context is among other things, the development of chardin's noossphere. the inhabitants of the planet are now more or less aware of all the cultures on the globe. style, memes, flash crowds, a whole new raft of signs (dress, language, attitudes, slogans, branding) affect the inhabitants far more than the institutions (nation-state, rule of law) that some of us grew up with.

we either grow into awareness of what these things are or pathology sets in. "he who is not busy being born is dying".