The fine print on dreams...

When did evil forces co-opt the part of reality that deals in human dreams? This evil manifests as the fine print in your mortgage. It's the calorie count of your elixir. The toll booth on your underground railway. The contract on your song. The devil is always up in your details.

Falling asleep on a couch in Shelter Island...

"After a while non-stop brilliance has the same effect as non-stop boredom."

- Richard Brautigan from "Sombrero Fallout"

("Newwwww" by Bryan Dalton)

Hold on to the sun...

("After Lithium" by Joseph Rafferty)

Ownership is odd...

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

("Fenced In" by Christopher Brown)

The moon is a big girl...

Why are we going back to the moon? It's like this. Men like to put their independence and their masculinity out there for all to see, but really we're biological suckers for feminine attention, like moths drawn to whatever glowing mommy energy catches our third eye. Just look at the lengths we go to. Of course, we'll deny it, and we may even train ourselves to get over this primal urge, but then you'd have to ask yourself why, and have a really good answer.

Flying dreams realized...

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

To all the shit sandwiches...

One of my blood brothers just got handed a serious shit sandwich in the relationship department. I'd like to remind him that this is the time to be strong, calm, and willing to move on...

Mushroom journeys...

Awoke to strange, tall mushrooms in Sarah's little tomato patch. Quite possibly Conocybe albipes, though it's a little hard to say. I don't think they're poisonous. Lost in mushroom lore now...

Reading about mushrooms will take you places. You will inevitably encounter the Amenita genus which includes the jacksonii species seen above, the classic Amenita muscaria, as well as the infamous Amenita phalloides, or The Death Cap Mushroom, the most toxic mushroom on Earth. The name Amenita triggered a memory of a lyric from an old R.E.M. song, The Flowers of Guatemala, and sure enough, if you believe the Internet, the song uses the Death Cap as a metaphor for the CIA's ruthless covert activities and mass killings that went on in that country to keep our own United Fruit Company in a perpetual business boom.

From there, I discovered that Amenita muscaria is also known for its hallucinogenic properties, though they are very different from the fabled psychoactive blockbuster genus Psilocybe. Amenita muscaria "trips" were frequent in Siberia, and the experience is frequently understood to be a form of wild delirium brought on by the severe illness ingesting these things cause.

It gets odder: The active ingredient in Amenita muscaria is excreted in the urine of those consuming the mushrooms, and it has sometimes been the practice for a shaman to consume the mushrooms, and for others to drink his urine - the shaman, in effect, partially detoxifying the drug (the sweat and twitch-causing chemical, muscarine, is absent in the urine). In Siberia, the poor would consume the urine of the wealthy, who could afford to buy the mushrooms.

And odder: The notion that Nordic Vikings used Amanita muscaria to produce their berserker rages was first suggested by the Swedish professor Samuel Ödman in 1784. Ödman based his theories on reports about the use of fly agaric among Siberian shamans. The notion has become widespread since the 19th century, but no contemporary sources mention this use or anything similar in their description of berserkers. Today, it is generally considered an urban legend or at best speculation that cannot be proven.

BOMBJ...

Aging American men are a peculiar breed. Becoming one, I'm scanning the crowds in search of a respectable roll model (no typo).

Lately, I'm particularly on the lookout for what I'm calling "BOMBJ"s: Bearded Old Men in Bomber Jackets. These thick gray wolves travel alone, they think, but packs of them can be easily spotted at trade shows, free outdoor concerts, and digital photography stores. When that jacket zipper's at half mast, you might just sneak a peak at the corporate logo on their golf shirts. I'm not sure I can pull this look off yet, but by the seams of my Dockers, I'm going to get practicing.

This guy's a little too neat, but you try Googling or Binging "Old Man in a Bomber Jacket" and see what you come up with... Incidentally, Bing - really?

Members only...

"There is so little that is interesting about exclusivity when it is solely determined by wealth rather than experience or knowledge."

- Jason Evans from this month's Aperture

(photo by Anne de Vries)

Roundup...

I've heard that metal detectors are illegal in Italy. Makes sense, you can just scratch the ground and uncover one of Caesar's gold fillings. I've heard that chickens can turn from female into male on account of them only using their left ovary. Makes sense, if that one ovary goes out, the testosterone in their system takes over. This can make a hen crow at dawn and a peahen grow cock's plumage. I've heard that feral children with animal parents (i.e. Romulus and Remus) exhibit the triumph of nurture over nature, and that the exact opposite is true of children born of human parents who keep them in dark basements apart from all human contact. I've heard that most men lead lives of silent desperation. Makes sense, the world can only accommodate so many dreamers at a time. I've heard that the state parks might shut down this summer on account of the budget crisis in California. Makes sense, people don't want to pay more takes or make any cuts. Somethings gotta give! And finally, I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock didn't have a belly button. Don't believe me? Ask Karen Black.

NIT Theory in action...

Of course, Obama is happy to blast "chosen" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand, and to use them as a diving board into a new global narrative on the other. He knows that the past eight years provided the necessary ugliness that had to occur in order to yield progress. Read my NIT Theory to understand what I'm after here.

Si si amigo, Bush was a wank, but I'm hesitant to knock him for getting us involved over there - despite the cockamamie reasons he and his dufus crew trumped up. Ultimately, Bush's actions gave us, gave Obama, a gift: A tangible, memorably painful history that is ripe for transformation. Behold the shift from war to something closer to peace and prosperity. It is the stuff epic presidents dream of Grasshopper.

Thunder in Los Angeles...

Not nearly as dramatic a visualized here, but rare and beautiful nonetheless.

The Digital Shoebox...

We interrupt our usual naval-gazing with an important announcement...

Sarah's written a book, The Digital Shoebox, and it will be available via Peachpit Press in September. Get your pre-orders in now on Amazon!

The Digital Shoebox is a much needed "how-to" that addresses a rampant (but totally new) challenge faced by our species: Now that everyone and their uncle is a wild shutterbug, what do we do with all of the, yes, kajillions of digital images we're taking? Where should they go? How should they be organized? How do you sort, find, and share them? The book gives us seven simple steps that even your crazy uncle who lives at the laundromat can master.

I'm very proud of her and equally inspired by her stick-to-it-iveness... AND... now I can find those important images I need, when I need them.

(Illustration from the book by Christian Kasperkovitz)

Could this be Toing Toing?

"I had a photograph once of a Mangbetu woman, the Mangbetu deform their heads so they get very cortical crowns, and in the picture she had this big, big hairstyle around it, and lips that were pouted, and her breasts were like...toing! toing!...just beautiful, what a great photo." - Brian Eno

Relax, reach out, remember...

Happy Memorial Day!

("Leonid Brezhnev on the phone at his Crimean Datsja" by unknown)

Supernormal Stumuli...

I'm very interested in triggers. Things that make us react. Apparently everyone's favorite Darwin lookalike, Dan Dennett, has done some research into this area. He gave a lightning fast and slightly awkward talk at TED on the subject recently...

"The term "supernormal stumli" is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did famous experiments with seagulls, where he found that orange spot on the mother gull’s beak drove baby gulls nuts. He found that if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. It was a hyperstimulus for the gulls. Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus that tweaks our design wiring. There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness for example."

I am particularly interested in animal-related triggers, and by that I mean actual and imaginary animals that stimulate our own animal consciousness, the primal part of us that, by nature, highlights and transcends the veil of civilization all around us.

No matter what they say...

...it's what's on the inside that counts!

Real Dots...

Look carefully around the room. Bernard Voita is a master illusionist who deeply understands the play between the eye and the mind, the two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality of photography, and the importance of the viewer's perspective. It's as if he's saying through his work, "hey art viewer, your point of view matters, you exist, and without you art doesn't" Nice.

(Untitled, by Bernard Voita)

Who's pushing it?

An interesting gathering last night where a group of us tried to come up with a list of people who are really pushing the envelope, in any field, in any visionary and (r)evolutionary way. Who's showing us the next level? Who's going beyond? Who refuses to pull back on the reigns when the galloping starts to feel dangerous? Who's at the edge of the galaxy? Who's tearing down veils of illusion like drapes in a motel room?

I won't give you the list of names we came up with so as not to bias your own. However, I will tell you that a flash of genuine horror arose upon considering this simple concept: We might actually be living in the most boring time in human history.

Choose Nothing...

If you leave an answer blank on a fill-in-the-blank test, I say it should be right, since nothingness is always an available option that obliterates all thingness - it is always correct. We choose not to summon nothing since getting back from it can be a bit of a chore. But deep down you know it's there.

If you're looking for a wonderful short read on the role of non-existence in our lives, try The Mustache by Emmanuel Carrere. They made a movie in France about it a couple years back, and it's ok, but the short story will chew you to your existential bone-zos, bone-zos, bone-zos. I said, the movie's ok, it's a little bourgeois, but the book will chill you to your core.

(End of this post sung to the tune of The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night, just because...)

I grok Spock...

But I didn't grok with this new Star Trek movie at all. Where were the timeless universal ideas explored in ways that resonated after the credits rolled? Where was the lovable bogusness of the tv show that served to remind us that Star Trek isn't about space, it's about being a human, as in - Where shall we boldly go? The new movie is a fun ride, sure, but I thought it could have operated on a few layers rather than its steady stream of noisy action, like a black hole sucking everything along its path at light speed. Where are the quiet moments? Personally, I would have awarded the franchise to Wes Anderson and I would have made damn sure that he didn't get too cute. At least Anderson would have understood what was appealing about the tv show and let the story emerge from the characters.

The comfort of danger...

Have you noticed how we replicate the conditions we are most familiar with, even if those conditions are unfavorable? It comes with the species bub. Take it or leave it. When you were a little person you composed your own theme tune, plucking the melody, the rhythm, and the bass lines from your physical and psychic environs. For some, no matter how they were arranged, the available notes added up to a distinctly minor key. A minor key is tough to play your way out of.

You must know people who live in a danger zone of one form or another, and maybe you ask yourself, why? You can not understand why someone would live in such a way. Could it be that the examples of comfort zones send some of us running in the opposite direction? Or are the danger zones and edge lands simply a better match for certain theme tunes? Difficult to tell which impulses are reactionary and which are instinctual.

Why are you here?

Why are you here? What do you owe, if anything, to the gift of life you are now spending? What value did the universe place upon your birth and how close will you ever get to fulfilling that estimate?

Solar rhythm, we listen...

People call them sunspots but your cellphone calls them ugly. The sunspot cycle is picking up and you will notice it in the form of dropped calls and general electrical discombobulation. AP says, "If a sunstorm as severe as one in 1859 occurred today, it could cause $1 trillion to $2 trillion in damage the first year and take four to 10 years to recover. The 1859 storm shorted out telegraph wires, causing fires in North America and Europe, sent readings of Earth's magnetic field soaring, and produced northern lights so bright that people read newspapers by their light."

(Paul Sano, ‘Lady and inset of solar eclipse’ c. 1910)

Who owns the rhythm?

This bit from Malcolm Gladwell's piece, How David Beats Goliath, in this week's New Yorker resonates with an idea I've been incubating for a while... And in case the title isn't clear enough, the article is about underdogs and why they win when they win.

"'And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened out from the lines toward the Philistine,' the Bible says. 'And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it in his forehead.' The second sentence - the slingshot part - is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up."

I'm always aware when someone asserts a new rhythm, often in conversation, and usually to redirect the energies at hand. But sometimes a new rhythm is as simple as an unexpected posture or positioning that totally screws with Goliath's head.

Contemplating Seriousness...

It has been a while since I've taken this blog "seriously". Mostly just a scratch pad for passing follies. Which is probably exactly what a blog is good for. If I were to take it seriously, what would happen I wonder? For starters, I suspect I would miss the rawness, the jagged thoughts, the sloppiness, the humor that this peculiar vessel holds without judgment.

Is there such a thing as a blog so well-rendered and so relevant that it becomes timeless? Could one wring the contents of one's heart, one's mind, one's soul into these tidy digital boxes to create something of a masterpiece? I say boldly: Maybe! Then again, I'm a person who doesn't own a television who thinks that tv could be the answer to all of our problems. I've alwasy had a deep yen to re-purpose middling media into saviors of humanity.

Emergency Luxury Kit...

When the shit goes down, and I'm not talking swine flu, I'm talking Doom with a capital D, there will likely be people running through the flaming streets looting and marauding and otherwise generally freaking out on a scale we cannot fathom. There will be people who need first aid kits to treat the cuts and scrapes that will arise under such conditions. And there will also be people who will need an immediate injection of high civilization to maintain some desperate illusion of their own privilege. For these people I recommend putting together an emergency luxury kit. You know, an attractive mobile container that stores Hermes scarves, caviar, lobster pate, paintings by abstract expressionists, fine wines and perfumes. The like.

Have I mentioned that I'm into urgency - i.e. the psychology, aesthetics, and technology of emergencies and disaster scenarios? I'm also very into absurd urgency as an important sidebar. Imagining what might constitute an art emergency for example, can keep me in stitches for a good long while.

("Flamers - The Mall" - by Wayne Coe)

Naming flavors...

It's not uncommon to meet lifeforms with unique biological wiring issues. Some of us are color blind, some can't whistle, others have an extra pinkie. It happens. One of my physi(ologi)cal foibles is that I can't really put names to tastes. Which is to say that if you blindfold me and serve me an unnamed food item, I will have an extraordinarily difficult time identifying flavors. The taste is fascinating and familiar and really I should do this more often because it's such a primal experience, but the name of the flavor or the food won't come to me. Now I must clarify that texture is another element altogether. If I put a piece of steak in my mouth, I can recognize the physical architecture of meat, so I'm cued as to which psychic drawer to riffle through for a label. But if you give me a bowl of ice cream in that dark and don't tell me the flavor, then the anomaly really kicks in. This all was made very real when Sarah plunked a bowl of ice cream beside me in a dark room. Who knew there was even such a thing as key lime pie ice cream?

I'd like to live in a world for a day or two where our consciousnesses could experience things without all the noisy words and labels interfering.

("Hermes" by Monica Stevenson)

When etchings aren't enough...

As you spend time with people you might notice that some have special verbal and non-verbal routines. They might have sentences or word phrases or concepts or gestures that recur for any number of reasons, one of which might be to impress others. Watch someone you know well, who fits this description, meet someone new. You might catch them prancing their "lines and looks" out from the barn, one shiny new pony at a time. Sure it can be annoying, but if there's one thing I've learned it's that annoyance is just a low level reaction. Once you get past it, you see that these behaviors are nice actually. Something that comes with the species: The act of self creation. But, dear reader, when a Frenchman selling chocolates uses one of your own classic "lines" on you, out of the blue, what do you do?

The Swine Flu, and boy are its arms tired...

Well of course the pigs are having their revenge. They've given us thousands of years to treat them well. They give us their smiles and their hearts and still we malign their characters and chew their bodies without a nod of thanks. Well I'm here to tell the all porcine creatures that I admire their spirit and that I'm truly sorry for my occasional prosciutto habit. Perhaps this consumption is my way of embracing their many fine attributes?

Get unlost...

Ode to the Moka...

In honor of the first cup of coffee I've had in many months, I thought I'd dedicate this post to what I've just learned is called the Moka pot. We're all familiar with this little knight in dull armor, even if we had no clue about its name. I was touched that Wikipedia's entry included a picture of the Moka with its ubiquitous melted handle drip - a design flaw that delivers more charm than annoyance. I also learned that you should not use soap when cleaning your Moka as it will remove the coat of oily coffee residue left inside. This thin layer protects the coffee from contact with the aluminum wall, which might otherwise give a slight metallic taste to the coffee.

The Moka was patented by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, the same year my father was born. Both seem to be holding up well and are busier than ever (melts and scratches be damned).

The cost of wisdom...

The true horror of aging is the crystal clarity it brings to one's past fogginess.

Vine Theorist or Master Planner?

Know thyself they say. So then, are you a Viney or a Master P? By my definition a vine theorist moves through life swinging from one vine to the next, quickly, instinctively assessing each new vine and grabbing the one that seems right without too much regard for the path that is being drawn. The Master Planner operates in the inverse. He or she thinks about the arc of a life, studies the entire maze-like terrain and chooses goals and plots destinations that can only be visualized from a bird's-eye view. Swinging through the forest, they know which vines to ignore, even if they look inviting in the moment.

The Viney is "in it," making the most of the present conditions. The Master P is "above it," always rushing to get ahead, thinking ten vines down the line. The Viney can miss opportunities and the cumulative "greatness" that can come from having a broad perspective and charting a destiny. The Master P is in danger of forgetting that the map is not the territory. The vine that looked secure from overhead might be rotten or covered with stinging ants. The Master P might not be in the moment enough to cope with the real and numerous obstacles that come up fast and furious.
And so on...

Of course, you are probably a bit of both. The point in pointing out these extremes is to call attention to these opposing policies, and to ask yourself if you are blending them as wisely as possible.

Find the right work...

Diminishing eureka...

Do you have this? Have what Pablo?

The feeling that it is hard to properly enjoy the discovery of something new and interesting and pleasing since you can't help but be simultaneously aware of all the other people who have discovered, are discovering, or will soon discover the same thing? Do you tap into a wave of nausea upon realizing that you are just one of many "triggered" responders, eager to claim this discovery as their own? The internet inspires many of these diminishing "Eureka!" moments. Blogs, travel writing, and college radio stations reek of a specific brand of desperation that wants to bask in the glory and sheen of pointing at cool things.

It's all rigged!

I'm really not a conspiracy theorist, but you might consider the correlation between slowly rising gas prices and the public perception of an improving economy, and come up with your own ideas. (Cut to Dick Cheney laughing as he shoots kittens in a barrel of Saudi crude.)

Creative mixology...

There is often a tendency to doubt one's own work and ideas until they meet with positive reinforcement. In this transaction, countless projects are born. Therefore, it is essential that you reflect deeply and be 100% honest with people when they ask you to consider their creative intentions. What we add to the world, creatively speaking, runs deeper in molding the future of civilization than you might imagine.

Seek Alignment...

I don't believe in magic and I don't believe in the skeptics who spend so much precious energy debunking a magical universe. That seems rooted in fear. So-called magic and paranormal phenomena is simply a problem of perception. In many cases it's an illusion of the mind. In other cases we experience glimpses of things we don't yet understand about the Universe. You don't lose science, you just expand your understanding of it's operating systems.

I do believe in energy. It seems clear that our consciousness comes out of the box wired to perceive and use only a narrow band of all the energy that's available. I have met people who appear to have tapped into mysterious energies that propel them through time and space in special ways that seem to run on a different, adjacent track.

I do believe that all of us are capable of rewiring our system so that we might be able to tap into other energy sources than the sustaining dribble we rely on to get us through the day. Some are born with a capacity for this rewiring, others of us learn how to do it.

One thing I'm sure of is that music plays a role in the process of preparing our bodies and minds for new patterns of energy. Music presents us with a multitude of formulas and templates that can realign our physical and psychic receptors to pick up new wavelengths of the energy spectrum. Music allows us to "shop" for new personal energy.

Therefore, we covet our music outlets as bringers of a kind of (perceived) magic. Is this where the Obamas were going with their WTF?-embarrassing gift to the Queen? Let's hope so.

From whence...

Is it possible that certain political and patriotic beliefs have devolved into diagnosable forms of mental illness?

Therapy (from concentrate)...

You think you can turn down the volume on life and it will be ok. And of course you can. People do it all the time. But "forgetting" that it was your choice to reduce the intensity, to lessen the experience, to deny the present and not take full responsibility for this willful denial is the most disrespectful crime one can commit against the gift of life. After all, all it wants is for us to accept the gift in full.

You've come up with all sorts of mini-experiences and distractions in your shut down world and you've given them all sorts of relevances. But what you refuse to look at is the mirror right in front of you that reflects this truth: You are afraid of life. You have disengaged from it, and protecting yourself from this regrettable fact has made your exhausted. And now you are lazy. And Afraid. And this is the reality you have chosen, even though you can't see your choice. Are fear and laziness the qualities you want to remember on your deathbed? Or are you shamefully strong enough to deny, deny, deny, right until the curtains are pulled?

Deus ex machina...

In general the spirit wants to express itself. It has a will to power. For some, organized religion provides a vessel, many of them beautifully crafted to reinforce higher values and provide shelter from chaos. (Jesus, for one, was a carpenter after all.) But the organized religions aren't for everyone in this modern world. One hears this quite often on the coastal cities: I'm a spiritual person but I'm not religious. For these souls, there can be a pull to the New Age with all it's bendy rules and rainbow sparkles. Personally, I'd skip this dead end. The real wisdom for the non-religious individual comes from acknowledging the lack of a vessel. It is good that our spirit is restless. It rightfully haunts our days, reminding us that economies and to-do lists are false prophets in our short experience of life.

(photo by Nick Veasey)

Appreciator's loss...

How many of the great appreciators forsake participation in the thing they appreciate? Howard Cosell did not box. Peggy Guggenheim did not paint. Charlotte Cotton doesn't own a camera. What exactly is gained from abstaining I wonder? What does doing do to observation? Are you in it or are you around it?

How come?

How can it be that I find myself humiliated and saddened every six months or so by spending moments in public spaces where Michel Gondry is talking and holding court? How come he gets to live that life? How didn't I learn to interface my apparatus with the world in such a way? Do you envy others because they are your non-blood brothers? At any rate Tokyo! is pretty damn good.

Is my vacuum cleaner gay?

Sarah: Herbert Hoover was gay.
Paul: The 31st President of the United States?
Sarah: Yes.
Paul: Are you sure you don't mean the FBI guy?
Sarah: RADM Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, USN?
Paul: No, J. Edgar.
Sarah: The cross-dresser?
Paul: Yes, J. Edgar Hoover the cross-dresser...
Sarah: was gay?
Paul: Well, possibly more gay than Herbert Hoover.
Sarah: His brother?
Paul: No. The vacuum cleaner magnate.
Sarah: Was the 31st President?
Paul: Correct. The 31st president of the United States was a gay, cross-dressing vacuum cleaner salesman.

Figured it out...

The natural fulfillment of any human civilization hinges on two phases. Phase 1, to evolve far enough in order to create weapons and other toxic systems that can destroy all life. Phase 2, to evolve further so that the civilization may discover very good reasons not to use these phase 1 creations.

The time in between the completion of phase 1 and the start of phase 2 is generally regarded as a golden age by those who have lived through them and come out the other side. Funny thing, you can't tell that to the people living in this transformational era. They generally just don't see it.

(The City by Lori Nix)

The stuff of swimming...

Most of us are familiar with the practice of swimming in water. What I wonder is how we might fare as swimmers in other liquids. For example, could we do the Australian Crawl through a swimming pool filled with olive oil? Could we doggy paddle our way across a lake of honey? Could we backstroke through pancake batter? Could we dive beneath the surface of an ocean of liquid mercury and pluck pearls from their shells?

Rainbows are relative...

For those of you who were driving East on the 10 freeway at approximately 4:20 on Wednesday, you saw it. The biggest, brightest, gay as a daisy rainbow shamelessly straddling the motorway with one end anchored on a gleaming white tower in Century City and the other settling somewhere in Compton or thereabouts. The dark emptying clouds provided a perfect backdrop and amplified the colors tenfold. I've never seen anything so amazingly fake-looking in my life. Spielberg would have rejected it as kitsch.

I called Sarah and told her to go outside for a viewing (she's on Wilshire). But then I wondered - are rainbows fixed physical entities or are they strictly viewer centric?

Oh Wikipedia, what did we do without you?

A rainbow does not actually exist at a particular location in the sky. Its apparent position depends on the observer's location and the position of the sun. All raindrops refract and reflect the sunlight in the same way, but only the light from some raindrops reaches the observer's eye. This light is what constitutes the rainbow for that observer. The position of a rainbow in the sky is always in the opposite direction of the Sun with respect to the observer, and the interior is always slightly brighter than the exterior.

Incidentally, Chris Burden's pot of gold at Gagosian was canceled. Did you hear?


("The City" by Liz Hickok)

Thanks Eve...

(MM by Andre de Dienes)

Thanks Adam...

Honesty is the best pornography...

Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash.

Lost and Found...

One of my primary interests in life is lost souls who become found. Not so much in the Amazing Grace, spiritual sense (though that can be a beautiful thing too), but more in the self creation sense. We all pass through valleys of doubt, bewildered by the world, and blown by the wind. I am drawn to people who willfully get lost and experience the brink with no safety net and then slingshot themselves back into a reality that is no longer threatening or uninteresting. These people often find a gusto and a joy that escapes so many of us who cling to the workaday world. They know that reality is both created and experienced and that a command of the former brings rewards in the latter.

It would be easy to label this interest as "Romantic" I suppose, but I think that would say more about the labeler's perspective than it would about my interest.

("Dunes" by Jim Stipovich)

Death of an Herbalist...

Master herbalist Michael Moore is dead.

Please see his short herbal films here.

Clash of the Natures...

Los Angeles is so interesting. There are some parts you never consider, you go there and feel like you forgot your passport. Today I was around Santa Clarita, which is a staunchly conservative outpost of ranches and McMansions nested in some of the more otherworldly terrains one could hope for. The weather was spectacular and in fact the 5 Freeway was shut due to snow, right after I exited on Route 14. Torrential rain falls from fat black clouds you could bump your head into, they part, sunshine streams through like a bad painting, violent hail falls as double rainbows arch over the mountains, dry river washes gush with rolling water, rain, repeat.

I was visiting a freshly ordered McMansion to finish up a photography job, and I couldn't help but notice that the identical McMansion next door was boarded up and covered with the telltale black scorch-marks of a fire. What happened I asked? Arson came the reply from my employer. Torched it for the insurance. You see the swastikas painted on the driveway? Made to look like a hate crime...

The clouds parted and a partial rainbow sprouted. I thought I was going to vomit. The notion that someone would fake an elaborate hate crime for insurance money seemed to drive home some of the key underlying problems with our species. Yeah I'll probably get some work when they remodel it, echoed a voice I could barely hear as I stared out at the charred walls and the millions of white hailstones pelting the macadam driveways.

("Wolken III" by Christian Schmidt)

So much to give!

I've been really tryin', baby
Tryin' to hold back this feelin' for so long
And if you feel like I feel, baby
Then come on, oh, come on...

We're all sensitive people
With so much to give!

Let's Get It On - Marvin Gaye

Arcadias and Guantanamos of technology...

I like the iPhone. It's user-made applications are great. Still in the cutesy phase, but I see tremendous potential. This is a piece of technology that can evolve and we can teach it to do many things. Getting back to my beef with the Facebook, this is just a dead white box that provides a rigid system of rules and cues as to how one should behave in a public space. It's so conservative!! Here's your little text box. Write something cute and clever. Ding! People like you! It has huge ramifications on our collective notion of social space. Facebook is such a small unimaginative place to gather. It reduces us to the banal details of our days, and leaves us only with our futile attempts to punch our way out of its monotony. It sets the bars low and we look out from behind them, unwilling to own up to the cage around us.

("Golden Cage" by Adrienne M Finnerty)

Drinking outside of the box...

Don't drink, don't smoke, what do I do? Reality is the ultimate high dear brothers and sisters. But I wanted to pass along a bit of information to my oenophile pals out there. I've learned that red wine that has an alcohol content of more than 13%, such as many of the California wines, is impossible to make with natural yeast. The vintners must use something called superfood or super-superfood to achieve these stronger brews. Bottom line, superfood is chemicals. Especially if you're prone to headaches from wine, keep the alcohol content below 13% and you'll skip the nasty chemistry. Also, better to drink wines that are at least six years old. Studies have shown that the impurities and toxins that run rampant in young wines become dormant after the sixth year. Drink to enjoy not to escape.

("Drinking Bacchus" by Guido Reni, c.1623)

Why Facebook Sucks...

Facebook is just about my worst nightmare. What a shallow vortex. Yes, sure, the tingly thrill, the thrill of people! All that attention from the past and present. All the faces, all the old crushes and curiosities. The drug of memory, the afrodisiac of the past, the cartoon concepts of important people who want y-o-u, without all that stench and awkwardness of actual human life. So this is it - the future!

So what? We're staining our social fabric with this?

I simply don't buy these bullshit "connections." As far as I can tell, two weeks into this experiment, there's no substance. It's dumb dogs sniffing each other's butts, comparing fecal bacteria. It's an extended high school popularity contest for people who can't let those glory days go. It plays/preys on people's desperation to be included. Really what gets me though is the brazen insult it heaves at technology's potential to offer amazing new forms of communication.

Am I missing something? Please enlighten me. Getting all nauseated by modern trends in human behavior. It's one of my specialties.

That said, will you please please please become "a fan" of something important? Just enter "Focus on AIDS 13" in the Facebook search box. My ego needs you there. Here ends the hypocrisy.

Unless you want more Facebook bashing, here.

glorious meetings...

I hear you talking, and I'm certain that your words are important, but all I can really think about is clinging macaques falling endlessly through atmospheres of electric urine. Please pardon my disappearance.

(artist unknown)