no. 17 ...

The other day my friend Lally said some people are just wired differently - which is probably true and extremely benevolent of him ...

Unlike Michael, I haven't yet developed that level of virtue or tolerance regarding the media, popular culture, educational institutions, or politics ...

Unfortunately, I just think a lot of these naysayers about global warming, health care, and social reforms are just plain f'ing stupid - like the tea-party lady that grabbed the headlines yesterday by saying the dems are trying to trick the public by using ten dollar words like 'reconciliation' ...

give me a break - we're responsible for every word in that English dictionary - regardless of the number of syllables or her inability to pronounce it ...

The idiocy infuriates me - from the top down: whether its Vatican policies, political maneuvering, greed, corruption, disintegrating principles among bureaucracies or our educators that proliferate banality ...

Most of the time i can let it slide, but lately there seems to be a shock and awe surge of an unprecedented amount of stupidity every time I tune into the news, or pick up a magazine or newspaper - even the art reviews and essays seem to have withered to a readership of eighth graders that Bush so beneficently advocated by lowering the bar of educational standards ...

So when I hear someone say they're just wired differently, I also remember a Lally poem that states: 'we will no longer accept the unacceptable, or ignore the un-ignorable ...'

It really is time for a "Call to Intelligence" rather than embarrassment from accusations of elitism from the likes of Sarah Palin supporters ... After all, part of the American dream and responsibility of a human being was to strive to better ourselves through education that we might advance our culture - not to reduce everything to its lowest common denominator to benefit the unwilling ...

thanks for letting me share ...

no. 16 ...

no. 15 ...

specificity ...

i heard someone say that privacy is a modern invention - and it probably is, given that survival once depended on close contact with communal living ...

but solitude was also more available in the past ...

today it’s hard to escape the encroachment of civilization or the social expectations of our relationship with it ...

the deeper i’m involved with my work, the more i understand what i need to achieve certain goals and ambitions - a constant state of flux, indeed ...

though i’ve made measurable advancements over the last decade, i’m noticing a lack of specificity regarding explanations of what i do; and the more specific the objectives become, the more i require clarification ...

as an example; nature, improvisation, and expressionism seem to be key components to the pursuit of painting i find aesthetically pleasing; but i’m beginning to see them more as generalities supported by categories of more precise interests ...

nature, for instance, not only includes the environmental conditions of the seasons accompanied by the sensory impact of weather, flora, and fauna - but is also relates to being engulfed by the abundance of something other than human interaction. Where i work, there’s a limited period when the amplitude of distractions are drowned by nature’s dominance; providing longer and more frequent periods of consistent energy, plus sustainable transcendence for suitable concentration - both seem to imply the need for more solitude or a more controlled environment ...

improvisation on the other hand, once represented an expressive freedom from traditional form and tone structures - and though it still does - today i’m less interested in the cacophony of ‘free’ expression than i am with a refined selection of notes occasionally augmented by flurries of apparent chaos or random elements ...

truth is, i’ve always been interested in music sounding the way the mind thinks; a blend of simultaneous events ...

for me, the notion of expressionism has evolved from the early tenants of Greenberg’s treatise and examples through art, literature, and music over the past century to a fundamental component of communication for modern culture ...

once again, it becomes the method by which the mind appropriates the realities of modernity - but it doesn’t represent the simultaneous interaction of data coherently ...

this is why i need to be more specific ...

unseen ...

interesting how perception beyond normal ranges become classified under broad categories of intuition or paranormal; and in the case of the later, become scary because of accompanying myths ...

in the evolution of the species, walking upright must have looked a bit strange too ...

sometimes the simplest and most obvious explanations account for the most extraordinary events ...

gravity, for example, turned out to be a reasonably simple proposition that revolutionized life over the past three hundred years ...

what is it we are not seeing - between ourselves and the things we recognize - that accounts for all the activity that apparently goes on there ...

string theories, Castenada’s non-ordinary realities, auras, magnetic fields, energy flows, chi, solar winds ...

what accounts for the relative ease and speed of flight patterns of insects and birds while we exert so much dynamic thrust to oppose the same forces ...

it can’t all be gravity, unless opposition is the only course we investigate ...

in hindsight, most of history is riddled with examples of having to expend more force and resources than necessary to accomplish the task ...

i wonder if expedience is less effective without struggle ...

seeing, part 2 ...

an excerpt from the sreenplay by Peter Viertel - 

a fictionalized account of John Huston working on 

the "African Queen" in a movie entitled "White Hunter, Black Heart" - 

one of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies ...

"Well, what do you think, John?       

Not bad. But you're trying
to complicate it, Pete.        

Things are always good
if they're left simple.        

No, not always.        

Always. 

That's what creates truly
important art, is simplicity.        

John, there are no rules to art.        

There are hundreds of rules.
Hemingway understood that.        

That's why he always reduced life
to its simplest terms.      

Whether it's courage,
fear, impotence, death.        

People's lives just unfold, and things just
happen to them one thing after another.        

They were never bogged down
with that nonsense of subplot. . .        

. . .that we sweated over in the past.        

Stendhal understood that.
Flaubert. Tolstoy. Melville.        

Simplicity is what made them great." 

seeing ...

necessity is the mother of invention ...

abstraction [as a branch of phenomenology with painting being a by-product], begins to prepare us for understanding perceptual subtleties and changes - in this case vision ...

abstraction prepares us to adapt and delineate between: image identification, scale changes, and object placement in space - the same way perception of perspective was modified between prehistoric and high renaissance art, or even from medieval through renaissance; as understanding of spatial relationships, phenomena, and natural laws governing that consciousness became assimilated into civilization of the period ...

i believe we’re in the continuing process of evolving our visual acuity to distinguish the elements of what we now refer to as our sixth sense - abstract painting, at its best, prepares us for that transition ...

part of the condition during primitive painting and our development of perceptual skills was our inability to understand and articulate the things between things we recognized ...

i believe the problem prevails - who can deny those fleeting moments of seeing things that aren’t really there, or were there - but we lack the acuity to focus upon them, doubt our recollection, then deny seeing them in the first place ...

i doubt there’s as much space as we think there is ...

particulates ...

"One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken."

Leo Tolstoy

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius

apogee ...

there are some days, that just waking up is a thrill - i'm referring to that rush of gratitude and clarity that comes from recognition of that first breath and light as we transition from dreamland to waking reality ... maybe its the onset of spring or the path of Mars or unseen forces, but days like these - this time of the year, initiate this response with more frequency ...

and it's so good ...

most things come as a pleasure - with appreciative indifference colored with a sense of well being - as a witness and just participant ...

i used to spend a lot of money and time chasing what now comes for free ...

but this ain't sainthood because i still have a hair-trigger bite when i feel cornered or played ...

thankfully, it doesn't happen as much as it used to - probably a combination of people recognizing the signs and my unwillingness to play ...

either way, i'm learning a lot about soul-management over the years -

and lucky to have the chance ...