Reality as an involuting frontier...

Reality for me has been a kind of involuting fluid these past few decades or so. And frankly, I can't say a word without my head spinning sometimes for the shear force of the visual imagery that sometimes accompanies my utterances. Not altogether frightening, but sometimes it hurts that I can't act on them, make art, I mean (I think...). Makes me want to just shut myself up somewhere - if I could - but I can't, which maybe that's good, and maybe that's what distinguishes me, I don't know, as an "Artist." What the heck is that anyway? Damned if I know. Do you? Maybe it's a self-absorbed mind that stops just short of realizing it's a moisture collecting speck in this huge and sagging cloud call animate matter.

Charity... and revolt.

"[Since Lamartine and the enlightened legislation of 1850s England:] A hundred years later people do not feel so tender toward charity. Our ideal is of a more impersonal justice, of an industrial society where each man's place is honored and secure. In those days only the rich were honored and secure, and charity was the only way to plow back surplus wealth into the nation, the first easy lesson in social justice, and a more wholesome one than the June massacre in Paris." Priscilla Robertson, REVOLUTIONS OF 1848: A SOCIAL HISTORY, p406. 1952: New Jersey, Princeton University Press.

I suspect the Gates Foundation and it's contributors and all the recent reportage of commitments to charity could be considered a kind of sounding of the New World Order's Bell. The governing powers would have all to believe they resided in a philanthropic state. With what's happened to the world economy in the past few years and all the fingers pointing toward the banks, and the ultra-rich - it's not surprising that some would toss the hot potato of surplus wealth. But whom is still in the hot seat?

Laborers in too many nations now are still crying out foul! And not enough of them are in a mood to trust the banks or the ultra-rich no matter how large the published charitable donations become.

What becomes of a nation that puts the weight of its ultimate crisis back on the victims of poverty and corruption? You can not ask an unemployed individual to volunteer or demand they pay for health care, can you? America itself is now lacking any easy, sound solution to this economic crisis. How does a citizenry become motivated to give when its own wealthiest few only appear to care after the economy crumbles. We are a nation of myopic reactionaries it seems. We wait till the credit is maxed out, till the muffler falls off, the roof leaks, the porch steps crumble completely, before we even think MAINTAIN your composure.

Perhaps there would be no such thing as charity if it actually existed as a natural condition of daily life. It would never occur to us to revolt, to question the status quo, would it?

Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms - now this is what I'm talking about!

Here's an awesome short video on what's wrong with education in the West today! I've been reading and writing on this very subject too. All the hype about standardization and testing is baloney. America needs innovators, not just cashiers who can count and construction laborers who can read instructions and measure correctly. Enough already about infrastructure... how about putting some exciting content into the curriculum and passion into the presentation!

Fora.tv Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms.

Education in America

Frankly, until the classroom becomes more visually stimulating than the distractions in the home, we will continue to lag behind the 28 other countries... If we can manage to approach visual alertness as a strength, rather than a hindrance, we may have hope. If our children's minds have been compacted by constant visual hype, then let's assume they can think fast visually, and start to teach faster. Give them the hype at school! Make school a more visually stimulating experience. This necessitates teachers learn visual thinking themselves. Basically it's the fast lane of cognitive skill. They need to learn to use the blackboard more, powerpoint effectively, the internet search engines and perhaps even a few applications like Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw. Wide-encompassing computer savviness may be compulsory soon anyway. Perhaps teachers should even be skilled engineers of some sort or artistically armed with a skill that immediately demonstrates the enjoyment that learning can promise. Our teachers should be more than just pedants and verbalizers of information - kids are bored by all the talk! Teachers would get more attentiveness if they were exemplary and made manifest the function of knowledge, and acted out the physical world at times. What I'm saying is: is that projects and hands-on activities, short videos, art classes and field trips are wonderful - but not enough. We as parents too need to be more visually inclined and therefore far more aware of the visual potential of our children. They've been primed for short bytes of stimuli - let's not step over that presumed weakness but develop a more intense curriculum that can take advantage of it!

is that a fact...

If time and space are relative, then "facts" themselves must also be relative. That is they must incorporate relativity: Any fact itself therefore must be in the least a duality - if they exist in fact long enough or slow enough for us to discover them at all - for surely they all do not necessarily have to exist within our perceptible and definable space/time to have relevance. What orbitals or rays of significance sweep or pierce through our small and tentative little reality without our knowing? "And with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king..."

On Discovery and Patience...

"[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his verbal descriptions failed to shine with the same light.... The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually unpunctuated, for twenty-five pages." Dava Sobel, Longitude, p66

"...some modern horologists claim that Harrison's work facilitated England's mastery over the oceans, and thereby led to the creation of the British Empire..." pp152-3.

After reading Longitude I am reminded and convinced even more that we require a great deal more than just visual and lingual competence. John Harrison never did receive official acknowledgement from the Board of Longitude for his monumental achievement. This servers to prove that to prevail against even those forces presumed to ally with us we must nurture the longing and patience that sustains an individual's methodical approach to anything including comprehension of the basic academics, disciplined research or complex engineering; whether there exists a learned past or not. What we have indeed become in contemporary society is impatient and lacking in faith in our own countries citizens. How many geniuses now though could either afford or possibly survive long enough in a garret anywhere in America to develop that which could save our industries from an already nearing ruin.

My latest excursion - Mt. Rainier

The arts and back to reality...

The topics I write about are varied, but include the state of the Arts, how this aesthetic aspiration gets knocked around as it is embedded in a fluctuating and now exasperating cultural environment. Everything from virtual to physical boundaries, the landscape, and even territorial frontiers. I consider the history of the Arts to be fascinating and current events as well are worthy subjects. Native aesthetics or natural artists like Andy Goldsworthy... or others such as those that have expanded the boundary/frame and even enclosed or exploded the supposed installation space such as Michael Heizer, or Christo - these are some of the topics I launch from.

Today I am reading Provenance which is excellent so far, and the true tale therein exposes the unstable nature of authority in the Art world. Finance, investing and greed and even mere sentimentality have added to the ongoing dissemblance of a once admirable path for the talented artist - now this role is caked with distrust and the superficial, affected mystique of it. It is no wonder that many fine artists find themselves drudging away in retail, design or isolating themselves as street or event performers or social critics. It's time to bring to a brighter light the abandonment of honor and cultural nurturing in the west; and rescue the Arts from simplistic "Art Appreciation."

McGraw-Hill owns Standard and Poor! amongst other Hugely influential Institutions...

This is really significant!

I knew long ago that there was a wide-spread predatory nature spoiling every effort to sustain a prosperous nation!

And I have to say it looks like we can call out McGraw-Hill as sitting pretty right in the middle of it.

love and my real heart

This seems to be the theme of Spring Break for me. Firstly, I am asking "what is love?" That's a biggie, right. The second part of this theme is that my real heart is ailing - such that I am advised to get an angiogram to determine if I need a stint to regain the proper amount of blood supply to it. In other words, I may have (coronary or pulmonary) heart disease. Well, this was an unpleasant, however untimely, discovery. You could say I haven't quite processed this dual reality - my nearness to passing now having only just found a possible partner I so deeply desire to share what time I have left with!

"Failing States"(?) or more correctly: hijacked newly independent Democracies.

All this sounds too familiar - eg.: US fruit in Latin-/South America blocking the progress of small independent democracies so they could rob their natural resources, as well as take advantage of social strife to gain a ready made cheap labor force, etc!:

"The deal [Rio Tinto and Chinalco combining to plunder West Africa's Guinea] also covers rail and port infrastructure and could create tens of thousands of jobs in Guinea." www.news.bbc.co.uk; 19 March 2010.

and this (portrait of Guinea from BBC dated 20 February 2010):

"Though Capt Camara declared himself "president of the republic" the day after the coup, he also maintained that he had no intention of clinging to power and would hold elections after a two-year transitional period. In August 2009, he announced that presidential elections would be held on 31 January 2010 and elections for parliament in March. A month later, more than 150 people died when government troops opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators...."

"Radio and TV stations, as well as the country's largest and only daily newspaper, are state-controlled and offer little coverage of the opposition and scant criticism of the government...."

Failed or TROUNCED!

"The Wrong Kind of Green" Johann Hari of the Nation

These kinds of reports ("The Wrong Kind of Green") just get me down.

The groups that are the point men for protecting our environment and the poor are being covertly and overtly attacked.

The Big Murkowski and ACORN's demolition...

un-Real Estate

This is from a Forbes Newsletter "The Housing Crisis isn'tover" (Gary Shilling):

...Dangerous Levels of Government Dependence

High and chronically rising unemployment is clearly unacceptable politically and will spawn massive federal job-creating projects—and many more Americans who are dependent on the government for major parts of their income. They already numbered 58.2% of the population in 2007.

From 1950 to 1980, those with their feet planted firmly in the government feeding trough swelled from 28.7% of the population to 61.2% as state and local aid programs brought on tens of millions of new food stamp recipients.

By 2018, 67.3% of the population will be financially dependent on government...

So, in this virtual world of personal profiles and professional websites couldn't we say that we've all become kind of anonymous or at least that the facade of who we are is jellied and contorted by our own efforts to leave out the vice, the defect or ill intent?! And, really - even in the real-time world of day to day, don't you think we kind of edit who we are for our acquaintences and friends. Don't we project different faces for each encounter?

My point now then is why the heck shouldn't an individual be able to drape a cloth over their face and not even participate in the sharade!? We're all wearing masks anyway, so what gives.

What it is, is that we in the west in particular see robbers in ambush when we see a masked visage. We see criminals, gangsters and now terrorists. So what about all those pedestrians and bus-riders with hospital masks on?! Should we take their masks off too? Say, if bank robbers were to start wearing those we'd really be confused, wouldn't we.

Globally rail-roaded and snake bitten communities...

Ghost Towns
Sounds surreal to say it... but this is the vacuum left behind the new world orders global economy. Run-away factories, out sourced labor, migrant labor force. All the efforts to improve our Nation really amounted to a sell out of American communities. Just the same, it was consumer short sightedness, too, that came back and bit us in the ass - and brought us low-prices at the cost of our own jobs.

moral deluge

I forget the original conversation, how I came to with this phrase. But it had something to do with the lowering of some plane, of some conceptual standard - akin to the flattening of the world economy, but more the intermixing of world cultures. Through the internet, the media and socio-economic development in general, terre-social mores become less isolated and therefore we could say totemic rituals become less pure, and taboos more likely to corrupt a given society - thus morphing it in such a way as to make culture globally more homogeneous.

This might appear to be advantageous for those of us too quick to judge others by our own success at acquiring, hording and consuming...

Thus we might say something like we've "climbed to higher moral ground"; or "that's beneath me." The deluge I speak of then is my reference to the mass of humanity that could be said to have been swept out and dragged under by this and ensuing turpitude and self-righteousness. The villages along the dammed Yellow river in China are especially symbolic of the shameful nature of this traumatized connection to our varied cultural pasts.

What is divine inspiration?

It occurs to me that when I speak or write it is a man speaking. But when I attempt a visual expression as in my art it is not me reaching out to other men and therefore not really any kind of communique or colloquialism. It is me attempting to recall what could have been known had we not begun to confound ourselves with words. Words will never infuse us with wisdom - not that images will; but I do believe they can get me closer to feeling what true paradise is - recognizing, of course it can only be found through God, release of most human distractions and temporarily death.

"f'real"

"f'real" (for real) Used to hear this contraction a lot. Not so much anymore. Maybe that's because there's just so little belief or sincerity, I don't know. Or maybe there are just no sound words to describe the disbelief or dissatisfaction with the real. Kind of like when "Mark Twain" suddenly becomes "Abandon ship", ... and after that just a mayday, a specialized signal hovering over anonymous cries for help in the darkness. Reality become an excuse for dehumanization.

But we haven't visibly hit bottom yet have we? or have we! I still find it difficult to believe much of what I hear in the media. It's all fog and echoes. "Reality" has become just as fiat as the Fed, the waters shallow as the pond you might have dug in your yard had the savings not recently been depleted by unemployment or a mismanaged portfolio.

I guess it's time to "spell it out" for each other and "get real"!

fresh air

Examining the design of my little space it occurrs to me these windows weren't really designed with this in mind. The need for fresh air is critical for this otherwise closed space. The singular pane though is very large, heavy and there are no screens for this building.

And so I make due with poorly filtered downtown air. I bought a little fan made in china, and found a relative match for a screen. Altogether it takes about fifteen minutes to "open" my window. I suppose that saves me minutes of life in the end for having some air exchanged, I don't know. Or maybe the air isn't as fresh as it would seem - being chillier than indoor air there is the illusion that it is crisp and clean. But even snow can be tainted with pollutants. Cold air merely wakens the senses. And I am awakened further today to wonder what shall become of the city dweller who resigns himself to stagnant air. And the rebel who opens his window for an exchange of perhaps an even fouler breath.