tilting windmills

Its a reality show out there

2010-12-06T05:58:00.000-08:00

In the past there were defined local and regional accents. For that matter there were very defined class accents added into the tier. I saw something recently about the unique accents of British royalty, very small group accents and vocabularies,some possibly limited to the royal family specifically. Overall, local and regional accents are dying out rapidly, due to a variety of circumstances. What seems to be replacing them is a variety of strange parodies of stereotypes, from racial stereotypes like gangstra vocabularies, to social stereotypes like LA mall kid exemplified by all of the Disney stylizations of youth culture and "family" life. In a never never land of tv "personalities" with canadian accents and botoxed surgically enhanced physical personas acting out scripted news and views to spoiled suburban kids becoming unconscious parodies of rappers who are themselves parodies of a subterranean criminal street culture. When reality is all done with mirrors life comes to seem more and more like a carnival funhouse.

the hunter/plunderer

2010-11-30T19:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes people get so needy, so emotionally impoverished that they become spiritual cannibals, catching the unwary and devouring them. They gorge themselves on their victims, and in their drive to fill the huge bottomless hole in their psyche's, to escape the monsters that keep them tossing sleepless at night,they plead, and promise,and weave hopes and dreams into a deceitful fabric that glitters with the shiny broken fragments of shattered truths.Either they are too self absorbed to see the massive collateral damage they are causing, or they are too preoccupied with their own neediness to care as they do what must be done, say what they have to say to achieve immediate gratification.

an inconvenient life

2010-11-25T08:46:00.000-08:00

I had the uneasy feeling when I was little that my existence was a terrible inconvenience.
It certainly seemed to be to my father and my older sister. She and I had to share a room, and at some point she drew a chalk line down the middle, and warned me, under penalty of death, not to cross it. My father took a little longer to find a solution to my continued presence, but by the time I was 4 or 5 he had largely stopped interacting with me, except for the occasional reprimand or cautionary threat. I was a runt so I was picked on--Sometimes I fought fiercely, other times I just cried. When I discovered, really discovered reading at the beginning of the third grade I was totally in thrall. Reading was a huge warm space . It filled the space that might otherwise have been occupied by the emptiness the lack of real friends or family caused. I had a core of friends,fellow pariahs for the most part, and I had family, in the global sense, just not in the up close and personal sense. I had the best dog in the world, a vicious cur who loved me and absolutely hated every other living creature in the world. He treed the neighborhood bully, and kept him treed in our back yard. By the time I restrained my leaping snarling dog the bully had been reduced to a quivering sniveling hulk. My dog bit my father when he attempted to spank me, and bit the next door neighbor, and the railway express man and the postman and he would have been more than happy to bite anybody else that I brought to his attention. He made me feel both loved and powerful. Unfortunately, he "ran away" when I was 6 or 7, or so my parents said. I asked my father on his deathbed fifty some odd years later what had actually happened, but he still wasn't ready to tell me.

living better electronically

2010-11-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

At a distant point in my own past history I got a masters degree in education, with media as the area of specialization. I had an assistantship where I worked with the obsolete sony portapacks which the department used,and all the other bits of a modern media museum. I remember reading about some researchers in some african country working to document the verbal history of a tribe before it was lost. The history had been handed down from generation to generation for a huge streach of time,many generations, but the youth in the villiage were not longer interested in the tales of old men, so their creation legend and many other important pieces of their history were in danger of being lost forever. This was basically a stone aged tribe,newly encroached on by "civilization". Most had never encountered either audio or video recordings. Toward the end of the time with the tribe the researchers set up a Television set one night, and played back some of their roughly edited material. The young men sat transfixed, totally enthalled with the stories.
For me, this seems like the tale of the cell phone,the bluetooth earpiece, the tweets and facebook. People who used to have conversations with one another no longer do. People who were dreadful bores avoided by all but their absolute best friends are on the phone for all of their waking hours,texting, babbling , whatever. Real communication,and real human interaction have totally gone in the toilet, and some sort of trivial superficial virtual reality has largely replaced it.

wierd airports

2010-11-21T06:19:00.000-08:00

One of the last times I had the qualified honor of barefoot traveling through an airport security check I witnessed one of the "airport security" people examining, in sullen incomprehension,an electric toothbrush. I suppose it could have been a bomb--hell,almost anything could have been a bomb. People can find almost unlimited ways to do bad stuff, if they set their minds to it. The problem is that there are an almost unlimited number of stupid easily manipulated people out there in the world. Makes for difficult management decisions. Right now, the sort of people who are trying to block pollution control initiatives and energy conservation measures, and the strengthening of the EPA and nuclear proliferation treaties are a much larger threat to the world population than a handful of "terrorists" wearing explosives filled jock straps.

the spider web

2010-11-16T05:25:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the spider web. The evolution of virtual reality has created a whole new way of communicating, or not communicating. Because most of us had an early beginning where what we saw around us visually was actual we tend to accept what we see as actual. Unfortunately that is not always the case. With almost all visual media now what we are looking at is to larger or lesser degree a trompe l'oeil.
A contrived and manipulated representation is not the same thing as the actual thing, but the distinctions between the two are increasingly subtle and complex.Since the subtle changes are usually applied to make the "thing"more appealing, the virtual,alternative reality is becoming more appealing in many cases than the gnarled thorny actual reality that we are mired in for at least part of every day. Disney channel twitter Facebook is where a lot of this generation lives by choice.
The sort of edited surgically corrected life that we view is becoming in more and more cases the reality that people want to live in. It is taking over the political landscape. Crazies like latter day Charles Manson's rave from their video soapboxes, babbling about second amendment remedies and the threatening march of hordes of illegals across our borders. Cyber stalkers posing as young men troll the public bathrooms of the internet, and are themselves stalked by chubby policemen presenting themselves as available thirteen year old girls. Russians posing as Nigerians try to snare the unwary investor in get rich quick schemes. Those who have access to and live in,on,and through this new marvel of connectivity are dangerously disconnected from a lot of reality. The almost total split that is the price of electronic connectivity alienates participants. It insulated and estranges people.

Debt free living

2010-11-15T05:44:00.000-08:00

Much of the time life is like a spider web, all a net of sticky almost invisible threads connected in seemingly random ways. I remember clearly one moment,maybe the only moment, in my life where I began an important relationship with the feeling that it was a beginning,not just another messy piece in a confused web. I had just bought the first house that I had in my sole name. I had a puppy that I loved dearly, and a serviceable vehicle, and a computer and furniture that were all paid for. I had had a physical, and had no health problems. I was not in a relationship. I was not in debt. I remember, almost at the moment that I met this person that I later built a whole new spider web with, that I was coming to the table with a clean plate, and things to offer, and what a truly springtime feeling that was,how rich I felt.

Veterans, the draft, and altruism

2010-11-11T08:33:00.000-08:00

I was in the military, in the air force, shortly before the end of the draft. I was there because I got drafted, and didn't want to go to Canada, and didn't want to go to jail. The coast guard had a two year waiting list,the navy a couple of months, and I had six weeks before I ran out of alternatives. I threw away whatever material had failed to keep me from being drafted, checked off all the boxes on the forms-never had mumps/measles/chickenpox--etc.and joined the USAF. I scored in the 98th percentage on the armed forces qualifying tests, was within 1 lb. of ideal weight for height for flying status, had 20 20 vision and my own teeth, so the air force decided that I should become a clerk/typist. Somehow that just didn't happen. I spent a while in a flat hot desert town in Calif. Buffeted by angry waves in a sea of mindless bureaucracy,and got out with an honorable discharge and without the guided tour of Vietnam and the subsequent VA hospitals that many of my compatriots got.It was not, shall we say, the most intellectually invigorating chapter of my life, but I survived more or less intact.
I remember in the time leading up to my getting drafted applying to the peace corps,and being told that my tentative date of acceptance was two years away, and going through a rapidly dwindling list of alternatives to Ft. Jackson and Vietnam. I'd been kicked out of the cub scouts, and military school. I knew that the military was not a "good fit" for me.
On this Veterans Day I saw a rather smug thing in the paper about how much better everything was with an "all volunteer" military. It is my strongly held personal belief that we need to have universal service for all our young people of what was formerly called draft age. Not necessarily military service, but public service, peace corps, americorps,forestry,head start teaching, whatever. The statistics on the number of politicians with military service by party was and still is illuminating.Most of the most extreme conservatives have no record of military service, no record of public service (at this point elected service doesn't count). Their only record of service is a glaring record of self service. We need to reinstate, or redefine, the link between public service and citizenship.

tattoos

2010-11-10T11:11:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many people have gone through an end of life experience plus three years,as a loved one departed leaving a still semi functional body behind. After too much time up close and personal with heroic modern medicine and "assisted living" I came to feel almost fanatical about natural dying, which is all too often withheld even when the walls are plasterd with living wills and DNR papers. I had a flash yesterday. What if I got DNR tattooed on my chest? You know, vaguely gothic illuminated letters about 2 inches tall, right over my heart,maybe with a couple of dog angels, like my dear departed springer mix Michael fluttering near by.I asked a lawyer this morning if a tattooed statement like that would be respected. Unfortunately he said he doubted it.
There doesn't seem to be much way that you can depart with any dignity, given modern medicine. There is too much money in "end of life" care, too much money in pills and pumps and cut and paste surgeries and adult pampers and all the rest.Maybe if I got it done surrounded by flames, like hells inferno It would be noticed and respected?

a Steven King thought

2010-11-09T09:04:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a relationship can be so all consuming that when it ends you are left like some canibal, chewing on the bones. I remember reading somewhere that Steven King had written a story called "the survivor kind" about a man marooned on an island who survived by cutting off and eating pieces of himself. That is kind of how it feels to be stuck in a dead relationship.

we are the sims

2010-11-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of the real wireless revolution I was walking the dog. It was dusk,the light was fading fast,ahead of me I saw somebody looking and acting strange. They were having an animated conversation with their parking meter.It was only as I drew abreast of them that I realized that they had a bluetooth earpiece. At the time I was living in a house on a narrow street near the business district. The house had sliding glass doors and a balcony on the second floor, overlooking the street. At the far end of the street was a private school. Every day about 2:30 the street would fill up with suvs and the occasional volvo wagon, usually driven by little birdlike blond women. I would look out at this stalled bumper to bumper line, and almost everybody was on the cell phone,and seemed to stay on the cell phone. 20 minutes,half an hour, 45 minutes, whatever. I knew some of these people. I knew that some of them hadn't had a coherent thought in years. I kept wondering how they had suddenly blossomed forth as conversationalists.
Cell phones rapidly became the conversational tool of choice. I'd see people walking together, both on the phone. Sometimes I found myself wondering if they were, perhaps, talking to each other.The evolution of "communication" brought twitter and Facebook, where you could breathlessly follow the every move(and the occasional thought) of Hollywood skanks that you had never met, or have as friends people who in a past life, face to face, you would have taken pains to avoid.As news organizations became increasingly ribald parodies of themselves and entertainment became a jumble of extreme inane makeovers, and quasi reality shows of hookers fighting over a shared boyfriend or overage escapees from the world wrestling association playing bounty hunter,much of everyday life began to resemble a really bad comic book. Parodies of conversations replaced real conversation between real people. The glossy superficiality of virtual friendship superceded the sweat equity of reality based friendships. The fact that external reality increasingly sucked for an increasing number of increasingly powerless people made the virtual netherworld increasingly appealing.I think in the longterm we will become like the book people in farenheit 451. We will each adopt 1 human trait, and memorise it, and practice it, so that it is passed on to future generations, an emotional vocabulary to be reassembled in some future better time.

it is all an aberration

2010-11-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

"Reality is a crutch".I don't have an attribution,came from some unknown drunk philosopher.
We are all essentially alone.My now long dead sister in law from a long dead marriage Once did an outward bound course as part of a professional requirement. I remember that the one thing that she feared and felt confronted by was the part where, at least at the outward bound school in Maine, they take you and put you on an island alone for 24 hours with nothing but a journal, some water, and some plastic sheeting. I remember that the part with the island was the only part that interested me. It had been so long since I'd spent 24 hours alone, away from white noise and marital strife that I could hardly imagine what it must be like.

life is a parade

2010-10-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

I was thinking this morning that life is kind of like a parade. At the start the parade is somewhere in the future, and then you get the date, and the application, and you start making plans for your float. You get all excited. You lose yourself in grandiose plans for your float, and you start building it. You get so immersed in the construction that the application deadline passes,and when you go to turn it in they tell you you are too late. You feel kind of pissed off and let down, but you are still excited by the parade,so on the big day you go as a spectator. There are floats, and bands, and you get so caught up in the moment that a swell of emotion brings a tear to your eye. You realize that the parade is winding down.You strain to see if you can see the end, but your eyes have gone to hell, and you have steamed your glasses. Life seems like that.

the thought of the day

2010-10-21T19:00:00.000-07:00

I used to think that I was disillusioned. People accused me of being cynical. Looking back I can't believe how trusting and naive I was. Now,God Damn it I really am thoroughly disillusioned and cynical. The country has gone to hell, bankers are thieves, lawyers are mountebanks,much of the population shows advanced signs of dementia, and life just generally sucks.

there are vampires and werwolves everywhere!

2010-10-02T05:15:00.000-07:00

At those times when I can stomach it I still watch the news. Sometimes it enrages me. Most of the time it just depresses me. I go to the newspaper for the cartoons,which are occasionally funny, and things like car-talk. Today I got a jolt of both anger and depression from two pieces that I see as linked. The first was on the fact that a number of people who listed multi million dollar incomes collected jobless aid. The second was a diatribe in the car section about the effrontery of government fuel efficiency standards, since the public likes big cars and the cost of gas may go down. Somehow, the whole idea of the reasonable use of taxes both to fund necessary public functions and agencies, and the use of taxes to provide incentives (or dis-incentives)to help shape public behavior seems to have gotten lost.
We are living in a hurricane prone area where it has been shown that natural overgrowth on barrier islands helps to reduce storm surge and erosion,yet we have outrage expressed by a tiny handful or beach property owners about not being allowed to cut the growth on public beach land that blocks their ocean view. They would absolutely howl if they had to cover the full burden of the tax on that property with a view, but somehow insurance for at risk property is tax subsidized,not by those who can afford resort property, but by joe schmuck, the average taxpayer.
We should have a national energy policy that works like the policies of civilized nations, and taxes fuel at realistic levels. That would raise revenues and guarantee that there would be a market for energy efficient vehicles(like there is in most of the civilized world).
We seem to be inhabiting a country that increasingly believes that the poor should subsidize the rich.Reasonable taxes are not viewed as an obligation and unreasonable subsidies are not viewed as theft. Government is viewed as the antichrist, and private morality is the preoccupation of zealots and political hacks who represent the worst sort of rabble rousing mob leaders. We need to get a grip, before we sink into the sort of banana republic ooze that theological autocracies provide.

How Republicans Party

2010-09-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

How Republicans Party

fresh views

2010-08-21T14:16:00.000-07:00

Innovation and elegance and connections are somewhat intangible,somewhat intuitive, like really good cooking. An article from the "New Yorker" about Allen Ginsberg,the beat generation and Bob Dylan that I stumbled on a couple of days ago brought that into sharp focus for me. In the process of laying out its basic story line,AAron Copland's shift to composing movie music scores, the repurposing of the beat generation coffee houses, labor movement politics from the 1930's,all sorts of stuff all got woven together into a pretty concise narrative that had Bob Dylan and Alan Ginsberg at its center and all the swirling smoky tentacles of the subtext appearing and disappearing around the fringes.
The other night my daughter and I were reading bits of poetry,sharing things we liked. I have a lot of City lights Press poetry books, Ferlinghetti and Kerouac and all the beat generation poets, many of which were unfamiliar to her. I have a lot of Dylan on dvd, much of which is. She likes words, and she likes music, and she likes thinking, which is nice. Coming on the heels of our digging around in my somewhat dusty bookshelves this article, and all its connections, this tidy package of recent social/literary/musical/history, (which should be taught with at least as much emphasis as "civics" but sadly won't) was such a startling thing. I don't know whether I should print it out and give it to her, or ad lib it, or just internalize it. I do know that I found it startling and fresh and important, despite having lived with and known the individual pieces.

Does history repeat itself?

2010-07-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

There's an article in this week's New Yorker about the practice in the Mediterranean of shooting, and sometimes eating, songbirds and whatever flying creatures come within range, and trapping, netting,snaring lots more. Increasingly I find myself hoping that nature kills man before man kills nature. I have a deep feeling of distress about the state of the world. I can remember when I was little, the sense of permanence and order and place that I felt. I can remember my grandfather, when I was six or maybe a little older or younger, taking me and showing me the house that He had been born in, and pointing out an oak tree that grew beside it, and pointing out a low hanging limb, and telling me that he had sat in the crook of that limb and read and dabbled his feet in the water, which at that time came up beside the house. By the time he was telling me this the land had been filled in so that the water was a block or more from the house. Now the house is pretty much surrounded by parking lots, the oak tree has been cut down, and the water is three or more blocks away.In much of my growing up there was a sense of timelessness and continuity about the life I observed around me.The present linked the past and the "promise" of the future, and there really was the sense that the future held promise.I find myself looking now toward the future, both my personal future and the larger one, with a sense of dread. The future seems to hold the promise of more bad shit. I wonder whether its really always been the way that it is, or whether life sucks more now?

history

2010-07-10T16:35:00.000-07:00

I've been having an email dialog with somebody in Houston Texas who was given a piece of my pottery, which was acquired from a Houston antique dealer who had had it for some years. It was strange and interesting to have that part of my life surface now. I found myself answering or trying to answer a range of penetrating questions about the influences and stylistic aspects of the piece. It was done in the mid 1970s, which is, I suppose, a long time ago.Funny how time flies when you are leaping like a mountain goat from crisis to crisis.I remember when I first started my studio thinking that in a few hundred years somebody would probably come on my kiln site with its litter of little clay buttons and draw trial rings and the shards of work I smashed, and give insanely wrong interpretations to the whole mess. I kind of enjoyed attempting to provide a context for the piece she got, though how it ended up where it did I haven't a clue.

Boom boom, happy 4th

2010-07-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

It's the 4th of July,independence day,time to eat hot dogs and have parades, or, if you're with the nra to go out in the desert or the middle of the street and fire your kalashnikov's off-oh wait, that is some other culture's custom.It is a date when in many states you can shoot off fireworks without coming to the attention of the department of homeland security.In short, it is a day to celebrate our national schizophrenia in all its glory.
I wish that we could somehow rise above the self serving venal games that seem to govern all of our political decisions and most of our personal ones. Politicians are just like everybody else-some are just rock stupid, some are greedy, avaricious, and self serving, some are well informed and public spirited-there are a range of motivations.In recent years, certainly over the last year or so, the senate of the united states has become completely dysfunctional.
Using the block vote and the filibuster to completely obstruct majority legislation is a perversion of democratic process. Using tax incentives to reward companies like the oil companies or the banks when they act counter to the public good is a perversion of the intent.Using patriotic fervor or public fear and paranoia to advance ill thought out colonial adventures in other countries is a waste of national strength and an insult to our professed democratic principles.
It is probably not going to happen, but it would be wonderful if we could do a massive overhaul on our electoral process,removing the electoral college and instituting a direct vote count, and public financing or massive finance reform measures that free the electoral process from the grip of special interest financing. Strict laws on the revolving door from "public service" to lobbyist. Better, simpler tax laws to replace our Byzantine tax system really have to be put in place.Strong Uniform environmental laws need to be put in place to protect the environment, not just selected locales, but the environment as a whole. Federal watchdog agencies need to be empowered to monitor and protect the public health.
I really hope that some of the things that I see as basic concerns will be addressed by our leaders and our political system. Buying lottery tickets,or guns or waiting for the second coming just doesn't cut it. We need a little pragmatism.

on lifestyles

2010-07-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

Advertise on NYTimes.com

July 1, 2010, 9:30 PM
When Less Was More
By JAYNE MERKEL
Living Rooms explores the past, present and future of domestic life.

TAGS:

ARCHITECTURE, BAUHAUS, HOUSING, LEVITT, MIES VAN DER ROHE, MODERNISM

We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of exuberance and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G.I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.

But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less truly could be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

As we find ourselves in an era of diminishing resources, could “less” become “more” again? If so, the mid-20th-century building boom might provide some inspiration.

William Zbaren
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed these towers on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive in the 1940s. They were recently renovated.
Economic austerity was only one of the catalysts for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase “less is more” was actually first uttered by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States before World War II and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so than Mies.

Mies’ signature phrase means that less decoration, properly deployed, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood — materials that we take for granted today but that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies’ sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty.

The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller — two-bedroom units under 1,000 square feet — than those in their older neighbors along the city’s Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings’ details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.

the thought of the day

2010-06-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

What we need is a little more craft in our lives. Just saw an ad for a workshop where you can build your own AR 15, and you get to take it home at the end of the workshop. Guest appearances by Sarah P. and Dick C., who will give in inspirational talk on shooting your friends. Still think it makes more sense operationally to outlaw guns and legalize drugs, than the reverse---
Oh well-----

lets all fiddle

2010-06-29T06:51:00.000-07:00

I AM BACKING AWAY FROM THE NEWS, OR FROM WATCHING OR FOLLOWING THE NEWS---As we rolled into the new century I found that watching the news got increasingly painful and left me feeling increasingly angry and depressed. After the most recent election I reverted to watching the news, kind of a social/political ground hog day. I am getting back to where I feel like my 3d glasses are out of adjustment. I don't know which war I am watching, and it seems like which ever it is it will just be replaced by another, like a terrible lethal reality show. What is the disaster special of the week? Is it financial or ethical or technical? There is uncontrolled (and seemingly uncontrollable) violence along the Mexican border due to the uncontrolled flow of money and drugs and guns, but we want uncontrolled access to guns, and are getting pretty much uncontrolled access to drugs, and the cartels and corrupt officials and broken systems are awash in billions of dollars in profits. Drug cartels are financing whole shadow governments, and arms dealers are constructing new classes of cargo submarines and transportation systems.
After the Haitian earthquake, juxtaposed among the pictures of wholesale destruction and death, there were occasionally pictures and descriptions of the villas in the hills, intact, generators running, gated entrances still being opened by guards to let the well insulated owners in or out as they ran necessary errands in their suvs. It feels like that is the America we are moving toward, where the courts uphold the sanctity of gun sales and people stand, metaphorically speaking, in oil sludge and the corpses of rotting wildlife , arguing about the rights of corporations or the threat of "illegal" emigrants.
Fiddle on, fools, Rome is burning an I don't need to watch the news to know it. I do check occasionally to see about hurricane updates and look to see what new Apple products are in the pipeline.

Pogo was right

2010-06-25T05:57:00.000-07:00

The greedy are struggling to maneuver their personal lifeboats through a sea of crude oil. The exposure of the bank's systematic exploitation of the most vulnerable consumers, and the dialog about the ethics, or lack of ethics, of the medical community brought on by discussions of universal medical care, and the use of themed patriotic fervor by republican political operatives like Carl Rove(who from all visual indications would have been 4f were the draft still in effect) to support wildly undemocratic ultra nationalist stances all ended up in a big basket with the unraveling BP oil spill. Its is all part of the same gnarly twisted ethical septic tank. When you can no longer trust business ethics, or medical ethics, or personal integrity society descends to a sort of lord of the flies level. Lord of the Flies, or Animal farm (everyone was created equal, but some were created more equal than others),and the thugs and the criminals become the de facto ruling class.We have developed a new commerce, "for profit" war fighting, where companies like the company formerly known as Blackwater,and other specialist companies that perform interrogation or electronic surveillance receive patronage in the form of contracts because they offer a further level of deniability and help to obscure the true cost and sometimes the true motives of policy.
Art, and artizans, and all the traditions of craftsmanship are the costume jewelry of the new elite. I remember reading that at the end of WW2 the Russians took an unfinished German aircraft carrier as war reparations, and that it left under tow so overloaded with bootie,grand pianos and toilets and all manner of looted stuff, that it took on a 15 degree list and sank soon after leaving port.Our ship of state is like that aircraft carrier. In one sense the republican ( can you use republican as an epithet, the way the republicans use "democrat?) charges against "big government" are correct. The only problem is that, as Pogo famously said"we have met the enemy and he is us". The inefficiency and corruption and cronyism in government agencies charged with regulating all the major industries can be laid at the feet of Republican policies and appointees,but this obese whore of a government that we have been left with is not about to be trimmed and straightened out by the same simpering hypocrites who created it in the first place.

Peter Pan and artful living

2010-06-19T10:06:00.000-07:00

Art, the pastoral lifestyle,gentle creative endeavor.I think many people cherish a vision of little fairies like tinker-bell all flitting about being magically "creative".It is a nice counterpoint to most people's everyday sweat and toil,the sometimes mind numbing grind of getting by,getting through the day,feeding the dog, paying the bills.People need more than the promise of another sweaty stupid day.The "American Dream",that there are rewards to living a life of sweat and toil, that there is a vine covered cottage with a porch and a rocking chair where you can live out your old age watching kittens and puppies and the grandchildren play, has been superseded by the disconnected family and the "assisted living" facility and the crushing care bills that eat through any savings.
The illusion of ownership when connected to the illusion of wealth can be really cruel.As we have seen recently, the thing, the property, is perceived to have absolute value by the buyer, when it is really just a marker at the gambling table. For the working man who has labored for most of his life to pay for basic staples and a "family" house, the system has gone out of whack. Maybe it was always out of whack but the young and innocent bought into the illusion and nobody listened to the old and cynical who saw the thorns on the rose. We refer with haughty superiority to "slash and burn" agriculture, but the "civilized" countries have been engaging in slash and burn banking and finance and industrial practices.It has become increasingly apparent that practices like agra business are not no cost all benefit endeavors. When the rivers are converted to a toxic trickle before they meet the sea due to irrigation and toxic farm runoff, and the real cost of production is hidden by subsidies while the profits are plowed back into a system that depends on environmentally hostile conduct, who profits? Certainly not the factory worker busy producing luxury cars he will never be able to afford to drive.
We need,as a culture, to learn to live more artfully. We need to appreciate less more fully,and to share better, and to work to be stewards of the earth instead of ravaging anything we can't own and exclude others from.We are a society of gated communities,strip mines, and prisons. We need to offer inclusion, instead of trying to sell it or withhold it.

Me Too

2010-06-18T07:28:00.000-07:00

I want congressman Joe Barton to apologize to me too. Not for anything in particular, I just like to see porcine texans grovel and make stupid nonsensical statements, and since he seems to like to toss around apologies he might as well toss one my way. He should apologize to the drug cartels and the japanese whaling fleet too. I think there should be a public website where we can submit requests.

Hail Mary

2010-06-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

So,BP expresses contrition. I am sure that the dead creatures and dead ocean and all the out of work watermen will be made better by knowing that there is a contrite Englishman out there somewhere. All the contrition in the world will not buy a cup of coffee. Man has come to seem like a plague of locusts. We kill the environment, we kill each other,lie, cheat, steal, practice the most craven venal conduct imaginable. At the end of it does it really matter if we are contrite?
Acts of contrition sound like something that the Catholic church might suggest. Having the pope be contrite about priests buggering young boys doesn't really make it alright, and having BP management be contrite about lousy choices rooted in cost cutting measures causing a huge catastrophe doesn't really make it better. Better controls might have avoided the catastrophe, and
better controls might reduce the chance of future catastrophes.It should be abundantly apparent that trusting the free market to be self policing in banking or industry is a path fraught with danger, based on recent past events. Somehow all the "the free market is self regulating" voices are muted in the wake of recent events. What is needed now is legislation, not contrition.

Reading the news

2010-06-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

There are a couple of crossover threads in the news that I feel like need to be connected. One is the just released (but, it seems, long known) existence of huge deposits of strategically important raw materials in Afghanistan. The other is the BP management style. As regards the first, all of what can be lumped as the Bush wars, Iraq and Afghanistan,were started behind the veil of a holy battle against the infidel. It would seem that both were actually grounded in a Bush/Cheney era colonialism that had more to do with profit motive than principle. Here we come to the link connector,management style. Documents seem to show that BP was driven to cut corners and take risks during the drilling of the well that led to the disaster unfolding in the gulf. A series of choices seem to have favored the gamble for short term savings and higher profit over any thought of long term environmental or health safety, or even, pragmatically over long term cost, whether that cost was environmental or directly legal/financial.It is unfortunate that all the recent rolls of the dice in this high stakes crap game have left the general population with a huge bill that threatens to bankrupt, not one or another bank or one or another developer, but the society as a whole.
I noticed in browsing the news earlier that a six story statue of Christ was struck by lightning and burned to the ground in Ohio last night. I don't know if this is significant or not.

Don't tax, and squander?

2010-06-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

We need to make a budget that works. Decriminalize drugs, and tax em. Tax the rich,and collect the fees and taxes and tariffs that apply to industries like the oil industry and the mining industry.We can balance the budget by balancing the costs more equitably. Unless we really look at who and what we are subsidizing through our present totally unbalanced system, and change it so that it is more equitable there is no baseline for discussion.

From the back halls of congress to the mean streets of america

2010-06-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

Maybe we are not doing something right. By we I mean us, humanity, the people wearing the american suit.We are hearing increasingly scary things about the federal budget, and state budgets, and debt, and taxes and jobs. Maybe we need to look at all the money that is in circulation and figure out how much of it we need to spend on "physical plant maintenance",roads, bridges, energy grids, transportation systems--all that stuff-on inspectors and agents and police--figure out how much and then call that the total tax load and scoop it out of the money that's in circulation. Over the last couple of decades fewer and fewer people have been gathering up more and more of the total wealth in circulation, so obviously they need to contribute more. Some programs that don't really work for the common good, like aspects of our prison system and our "criminal Justice " system are punitive in socially and economically unproductive ways and need to be changed. Drugs need to be legalized and taxed. The government should thoroughly overhaul its ecological policies so that they recognize more realistically the real cost of pollution and waste, and use the reward and punishment system of taxes and subsidies to better reflect the larger public good.Maybe if we're gonna get into political battles we should get into real major battles instead of letting all the hacks and toadies do some sort of dog and pony show in congress while policy is bought and paid for in back rooms (and board rooms, bathrooms, and brothels).

a musing

2010-06-09T14:16:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a southern coastal city in the mid 20th century. I think my view of the world was formed in great part by a youth spent poor,with a love of reading, and a view of the ocean and ships. The ocean was filled with secrets, with ships that had disappeared "without a trace," with unreachable depths and huge little traveled expanses. The English Channel, all 20 or so miles of it, saved England from the German advance. The Titanic, the Bismarck, sailing ships and pirate ships and all manner of little ships disappeared into the depths never to be seen again. People on small boats navigated using dead reckoning and celestial navigation,sometimes successfully, sometimes not. There was no sat nav or small boat radar or satellite phone. Under water photography and high definition sonar and all the wealth of robotics were all in their infancy, so even what was known or was discovered was seldom seen by more than a handful of adventurers.
Ah, how the world has changed in sixty years. Now we can trash great swaths of the deep ocean we could hardly imagine reaching sixty years ago. We have heightened our power to rape and pillage as a species to a level unimaginable at any time in recorded history. We can achieve things out of sullen short sighted greed that would have been attributed to the anti-christ or the diabolical deities of the aztecs in times past. Amazing!!

2010-06-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

So far nobody has come out and said that fishing,shrimping ,oystering along the gulf coast is dead for years,decades, a generation, but looking at the pictures and extrapolating from the visible damage what the final damage to the Mississippi delta ecosystem it is hard to hold out any hope for any of it in the near term, or much of it in the longer term. Watermen along the atlantic seaboard have been slowly marching toward extinction for forty years or more,but it has been slowly. This instant vision of ecological hell brought on by the BP spill is too sudden, and too graphic. It's not about a way of life slowly disappearing under the pressure of diminished catches and increased coastal land taxes and development. Its about a hurricane that isn't going to stop until everything is dead and rotting and wasted away.
There are a lot of people who have made their livelihood and lived their lives on the water along the gulf coast and the Florida coast and the atlantic coast. Short sightedness and greed and pollution had doomed their way of life before this gulf oil spill. I hope that somewhere in our huge government bureaucracy there is a little visionary pocket of creativity,of people who will see in all this misery a little chance for a more balanced and ecologically sound future. Talk of wind farms offshore have been met with totally fallacious arguments about potential bird kills and the aesthetic sensibilities of those with an unblemished water view. Now that one oil well has shown that it can bring whole species of sea birds(and god knows what else) to the brink of extinction, or to actual extinction,a more real relativity has been laid bare. The watermen along the gulf coast are not likely to take up their lives where the left off once oil stops actively spewing. Passing out checks isn't going to make it all better. It has become apparent that we do not know how to control the effects of ecological disasters like hurricanes and huge oil spills, and overfishing, and water pollution. We should be planning and laying the groundwork for building wind energy manufacturing plants and water purification equipment plants, and for training watermen to build and maintain the equipment that will be needed to make offshore wind farms a reality. Special curricula should be developed to train and certify salvage specialists and ecological disaster mitigation specialists. Money from BP should be used to implement these programs.

2010-06-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

Art seems like such a slender reed to hold onto in these troubled times. In terms of barter, how much creativity does one need to exchange to acquire a fuel efficient vehicle? How many paintings or pieces of hand made furniture or one of a kind window treatments equal one open heart surgery or one ski trip to the swiss alps? Creativity is the most diaphanous sort of "intellectual property,"until it is tied to a thing which can stand as a marker. A painting or sculpture or hand made whatsit is a sort of intellectual property IOU in a highly volatile marketplace. I doubt if title loan companies would fork out serious money.

something is gaining on us

2010-06-02T20:10:00.000-07:00

We built bridges across the Rhine in hours(Or days, whatever) in W.W.II, we built airstrips on desolate islands under savage conditions in days(or weeks, whatever). We were the can do nation; so what's changed? Seems like about all we've done recently as a nation is try to keep the minimum wage down and bank and oil company profits up. Approximately half of our "elected" officials in congress are more concerned with what people do with their genitalia in the privacy of their homes than they are with responsible legislation or governance, and most of our products and much or our produce is imported. We have one of the highest rates of incarceration of any of the "civilized " nations, and a rising rate of obesity that creates medical problems that are dragging down our public health. Our national hunger for illegal drugs has created a ghost world economy that finances terrorism and challenges to national order in many countries across the globe,threatening stability and world peace.
Futility is a real downer. The secret that makes the american dream dreamy is that dreams are available to anyone. We can all share the american dream,but we dream the american nightmare alone.It is time to give everybody back their dream. The psycho babble about "take back our country" suggests a "they" some other, that doesn't exist. We have met the enemy, and they are us. We need to find a wide range anti psychotic for the nation to get addicted to, and a native american to follow who will guide us toward "leaving no footprint" while we still have choices.We need to find some creative alternative to wherever it is that we seem to be going.

crime and stuff

2010-05-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

I knew a kid once who had a super sound system in his car. Most of the components, unfortunately, came from other people's cars. Because he knew how vulnerable to theft a good sound system was he became increasingly paranoid. It got so bad that he had trouble sleeping at night. Finally, he broke into a business and stole their surveillance system. He installed the camera outside his second floor window facing the apartment complex parking lot, so that he could keep an eye on his car.I saw a certain elegance in the whole logic loop--a thief becoming so paranoid about theft that he steals a surveillance system to protect his stolen goods.I see this as being somewhat analogous to the law and order gun lobby who need their guns to protect themselves and their families from armed criminals, or the bloatedly successful who live in gated communities with guards to protect them from the common criminals who live everywhere else.Unlike law abiding people, many criminals steal their guns from among all the legally owned guns that are lying around. We'd be in bad shape if the constitution guaranteed people's right to stockpile explosives.

a chicken, not a gun, in every pot

2010-05-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

The cautionary statements about the gulf oil spill seem to center on rules for preventing future spills in future domestic offshore drilling. I find it sad, and selfish, and telling that the domestic part is in there. Most oil exploration is done by big multi national companies, even if their "multinationalism" is simply a bookkeeping expedient to keep them from having to pay taxes in this country. We should be addressing safety standards, and environmental standards on a world level, as a leading consumer and polluter of the world's resources. It would also seem like this might be a time when a fresh look at environmental protection and environmental damage abatement might be in order. As world populations have grown and the pressure on the worlds resources has increased we have simply shifted our environmental abuses from one area to the next, degrading the air quality or water quality of third world countries by sending out our toxic wastes or damaging processes rather than keeping them here at home. Just as the oil from the spill in the gulf will impact the livelihoods of a huge cross-section of people in the gulf region for years to come, the impacts of our financial practices and our agricultural practices have impacted and will continue to impact not only our domestic population but the world population. It occurred to me last night that one explanation for the rise in popularity of gun ownership in this country is the sub conscious realization that we are in danger of becoming a nation of gangsters, of outlaws, and that the traditional protections offered by an ordered law abiding society do not apply in a society where money lenders can practice usury and the strong prey on the weak with impunity.Rather than a gun in every hand and may the strongest gang win, it might be time to try having everybody steal a little less so that we reduce the level of both consumption and hostile defensiveness.

He's not coming

2010-05-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

"James Watt, the first Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan administration, testified before the US Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back," Watt said.1"
One can only assume that Christ will be coming to the gulf coast sometime soon if James Watts was correct in his assumptions. For the agnostics and cynics among us this is a wakeup call that is hard to ignore. It applies to more than what we choose to drive tomorrow and the next day. It applies, or should apply, to water use, and energy use, and materials use, and recycling, and I think in the final analysis to birth control and diet and sustainable agriculture. For much of recorded history the "advanced" cultures have wantonly consumed, destroyed, befouled, without regard to toe results of our activities. When man was a relatively small tribe on a relatively resilient and relatively large planet the effect of man's ecologically vicious behavior healed itself. As we have bred into great swarms, like a plague of locusts or the rustling of roaches underfoot, the damage we are inflicting on the planet festers, the open wounds getting increasingly infected and gangrenous. We need to stop. We need to change direction. We need to stop trashing the earth while we still can.

making messes

2010-05-26T08:44:00.000-07:00

Seems like bankers and oil companies make messes. Huge profits for the few, and toxic wastelands for the many. I love playing "this much equals that much" games. Unfortunately I am lousy when it comes to the mechanics of math so I never bring it down to absolute numbers. I do know though that my local bank is being bought by a canadian bank, because my local bank doesn't have enough cash reserves.A lot of "little" local banks have found themselves in this position over the last year or so. For many of them it continues to be a problem. How much pressure on the local banks could be relieved by the judicious application of the billions that Wall Street continues to pay out in huge bonuses to the few?I see that BP has released a statement that the "recent unpleasantness" in the gulf should not impact shareholders profits, at the same time data is being released that suggests that penny pinching caused all the structural issues that led to the oil spill.
I want to live in a well crafted country where the water is safe to drink or swim in, where the streets are safe for children and people go to college, or a good job, not jail.I do not want to live in a feudal society where a few live in baronial estates or collect properties like costume jewelry while most live " out back" or go to jail. I wish I knew what the hell was going on in this place. Its full of law and order freaks and gun toting crazies looking to pick a fight, and junkies looking to do what they have to to get a fix, and fat old gay guys and philanderers raving about morality and right to life issues while opportunists and draft dodgers wrap themselves in the flag. I want my government to stay out of my pants, my (or your) church to stay out of my government, and, I suppose, everybody to live happily ever after.

a dog's life

2010-05-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

I look at my dog Penny, lying content,half asleep,her tattered remnants of slippers close at hand,pink tennis ball by her side.I am touched, and envious. I can't find my tattered slippers or my tennis ball. I can't find my bliss. I know that there must have been some time when I felt complete and at peace, but I'm just damned if i can remember when it was, or where it went.

culture, cut flowers, and consumers

2010-05-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

So, Saks is moving out. Downtown Charleston has restored tattoo parlors to the mix of available services, and gained regular cruise line sailings, but it is sort of one hand giveth and the other taketh away.Cruise line passengers tend to buy trinkets in the market, not designer clothes.
Take a room, put a vase of cut flowers on the center of the table, looks good. Put six more vases of cut flowers and it starts to look like an Irish wake. Amenities can become like cut flowers. Maybe Charleston is becoming a cultural Myrtle Beach.
I have a friend had a restaurant in the Northeast.Nine years of sweat equity. Had to lay off workers starting las year. Business was still good enough. Suppliers stopped extending 30 day terms,went from 2 weeks, to one week. Bank regulators took over the local bank, and it cut his line of credit. Reviewed his mortgage, said it was underwater, threatened foreclosure. So, he closed down, walked away with nothing but the sweat from the sweat equity.Seems we bailed the banks out, but they are not returning the favor. They are out of the traditional banking business. The money is not in servicing small businesses, its in high return gambles, payday loans, usury, money laundering, whatever.
Years back, I was in LA. At a stop light I looked over at the car next to me. Kid driver, teenager. I suddenly realized that there were bullet holes in the side of his car, shiny new ones, and he was totally relaxed, waiting for the light to change. It seemed a very west coast urban thing. I suppose chivalry and good manners are relative. Here in Charleston we seldom have drive by shootings. Feels to me sometimes like people are rude as hell, but its all relative, like the bullet holes, or how many vases of cut flowers is too many.

a view of crime and punishment

2010-05-16T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've always thought that the difference between Democrats and Republicans was that democrats thought that everybody should have the opportunity to steal a little, while republicans thought that they had the right to steal it all.I realize that this might be a slight oversimplification.
It is also possible that it is a highly personal interpretation. It does seem like for a democratic country we have an awful lot of poor people in prisons. Lobbyists are the lawyers of the rich.

Whats it all mean?

2010-05-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

When I got out of the Air Force in 1968 I went to college and got a degree in art. Many in my generation were raised in an America that saw itself as a democracy where hard work was rewarded,where there was a ladder that allowed people to climb from the bottom of society to the top. As I moved through the seventies trying to make my way as a simple country craftsman I started to suspect that some of the rungs were missing in the ladder. Over time, I realized, along with many of my peers, that if there was a ladder it was an extension ladder, and we had only gotten one section of it. Reaganomics kind of finished off the myth of the middle class.For more and more people, there was a kind of "you can't get there from here," with fewer and fewer rewards at the end of the sweat equity rainbow. It took money to make money, so larceny or inheritance became increasingly important. The "I've got mine" generation, the people like Dick Cheney who were too busy or important or self serving to serve in the military in the sixties became captains of industry in the eighties and industry became more and more the owner of wage slaves who were disconnected from the core system. The people who had learned to game the system in the sixties and seventies came to own the system in the eighties and nineties. Artists worked for art dealers, businessmen worked for bankers, and the government worked for tips. We are seeing the results of all that in sharp focus now. It is not pleasant to live in a society shaped by barbarians.Nearly everybody is working for the ostentatious few who live in the big house at the top of the hill. The majority are living in vinyl sided houses in gated communities built on top of garbage dumps.

Sounds like the GOP

2010-05-12T05:28:00.000-07:00

"This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen."

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/john.html#ixzz0niaC5gvc

2010-05-07T06:56:00.000-07:00

The post courier this morning had an article entitled"holy city captures former con artist" about a new resident who had Charleston "catch his eye". If he were the first or most noteworthy con artist to settle into a life of opulence in the downtown it would be a different matter, but at this point much of the downtown is populated by con artists,from retired wall street brokers to the retired ex. trophy wives of the promiscuous rich, to whoever. Charleston has always had an attraction to con artists. So much or what Charleston is about is grounded in myth or legend or fantasy that it is completely understandable that it would exert a strong appeal to the theatrical and the self created. A society built on a foundation of liars,knaves, and fools has a great deal to offer visiting narcissists and poseurs.

Self serving venality and its old testament effect

2010-05-04T05:40:00.000-07:00

There is this huge thing happening,this “oil spill”,in the gulf of mexico. Exactly the scale of its hugeness is yet to be defined. Somehow, like a lot of other recent huge things effecting this country, the root of this seems to be connected with decisions made a decade or more ago. More specifically, this oil spill seems to be connected to the lack of redundant automatic shutoffs at the well head, a decision that can be traced back to 2001, and newly empowered vice president Dick Cheney’s task force on energy, one of whose decisions seems to have been that the five hundred thousand dollar cost of installing well head safety shutoffs was an unnecessary expense.The company, Halliburton,which the now former vice president was the president of prior to his appointment as vice president of the united states has itself been shown to have a problematic connection with well head safety with offshore deep well drilling, and with the present huge oil catastrophe. I hope that the investigation of what has happened will include an investigation into what decisions impacted this environmental disaster, and who made them. In the light of this mammoth oil spill an impartial examination into our national energy policies and their effect on coal mining, oil drilling, and environmental health and safety would seem to be past due.
It is sad to think that short term self serving decisions can have really outlandishly large impacts. I would like to believe that a foreign billionaire’s media holdings in this country, or the totally sociopathic choices of an energy company executive, are not shaping the lives of a nation. As I look at the disaster unfolding all along our eastern coast I cannot help but feel that more “fair and balanced” decision making and investigative reporting and governance might have led away from where we are.The chain of evidence, the link between choices and consequences, needs to be spelled out so that as a nation we are better able to avoid the tragic consequences of bad choices in future.

2010-04-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

Do you feel sometimes like life is holding you at arms length?

2010-04-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

The connection that exists between the Somali “pirates” and the watermen, the inshore fishermen in most of the rest of the world,really should be explored. Their problems are shared, though the difference is one of degree, and the solution of the somali watermen, though born out of desperation, is really quite creative and responsible. Somalia has existed in a state of anarchy for a decade or more. There has been no effective government for even longer. As a result, the Coastal fishermen have seen the intrusion of foreign fishing fleets and the pollution from passing ship traffic wipe out their potential to sustain themselves through fishing. Rather than joining militias, or becoming terrorists, the Somali watermen found a new/old solution to survival,a new business model that draws on their traditional strengths as boatmen. They have become pirates,hijacking passing ships and holding them for ransom. It is really creative adaptation of their traditional skills. It is actually kind of surprising that more countries with watermen facing similar problems don’t see their coastal fishing being repurposed in much the same way, though I suppose that it can be argued that smuggling and the drug trade share a similar basis, in some ways.
We have developed a strange convoluted elastic standard of “lawfulness”. Payday loans somehow escape being called loansharking, and our lax gun laws allow south american drug cartels to arm themselves,using some small bit of the profit created by our national addiction to the consumption of drugs. Despite this, we hear a rising clamor of voices urging the arrest of “illegal foreigners”, many of whom are here in an attempt to escape from the violence we help to foster in their home countries. We are now starting to see some states reconsider some of their criminal statutes as they confront the actual cost of warehousing “criminals” many of whom are sentenced to jail terms of five to ten years at a cost to the state of thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, for non violent crimes involving five or ten thousand dollars.Many rail against social safety net programs, making incarceration the best available way of gaining access to things like medical or dental care for the poor or the unemployed
To this observer the rewards of many types of white collar crime seem to far outweigh the risks, where the reverse is true for most petty crimes. We seem to have become a bloodthirsty nation hiding behind the skirts of the statue of liberty. We demand that justice have a liberal (pun intended) dash of vengeance. We want countries to eradicate drug crops while we place high tariffs on the flowers their farmers would willingly grow instead. We seem more willing as policy to place people behind bars than to fund education and training programs. We talk about building a fence along our southern border, though we all know that the only way it would get built is with illegal labor.

2010-04-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

"The Carpenter his musty box
of rusted,moldy tools unlocks
as wheels and cogs all whirr
and the eerie flame of progress sears his soul"

I wrote the above a long time ago--thirty years, forty years something like that. I have found myself every decade or so since pulling out my tool box and opening it and smelling the now familiar musty smell.I suppose that there are people who live lives without drama, trauma, cataclysm,but I am not one of them. I don't know how many more major hurricanes I am preordained to weather. I just know that I am tired of finding myself every decade or so living in the spiritual equivalent of a tent.My dog is very sweet, and very supportive,and relatively intellectual, but she is not much of a conversationalist. I am bored,and lonesome.

self therapy and craftsmanship

2010-04-23T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've done a bunch of stuff over the decades that I've been tilting windmills. It has always involved making or breaking or fixing things. A therapy that I discovered when I was first in Boston was a lesson both in self awareness and personal craftsmanship. At some point, in frustration at finding myself locked out of my apt. I kicked the door down. This, of course, necessitated my repairing it after I gained entry. After I glued, and screwed, and clamped and sanded it was as good as new, and I was filled with a sense of accomplishment. After that when I found myself feeling angry and estrangedI would kick the door down, then gather up the shattered remains and painstakingly repair it. It never failed to calm me and bring me a feeling of accomplishment.

Golf, anyone?

2010-04-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

I keep being struck by quality of life issues that seem recent, traffic congestion, and lousy storm drainage, and parking and all the trivial small things that become a big quality of life issue when lumped together. I keep realizing that the problems didn't exist fifty or sixty years ago. Eventually it all comes around to the fact that there are just too damn many people, and they keep breeding and consuming and trashing the environment, keep building new colonies, like fire ants or termites or locusts--gated fire ant communities stretching from golf course to golf course, all the way to Myrtle beach and beyond. I don't know that there is a solution. No flock of seagulls is gonna come and eat em like the seagulls that ate the locusts and saved the mormons at great salt lake--they will just keep rutting mindlessly and multiplying, and throwing together high end fenced guettos and strip malls till it looks like downtown LA for as far as the eye can see. What was the quote?" In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is King."

2010-04-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to note that in the culture section of the local paper Cristo is making an appearance at the Gibbes Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in NY is hosting an exhibition of 6 decades of Black and white photos,"prints" by Henri Cartier-Bresson. All that is old will be new again, and visa versa. At the museum of obsolete technologies you can watch craft as it metamorphoses and becomes art, cloaked in a mantle of new found purity as it sheds its old skin. Someday our old crt monitors, disk drives and corded power tools will be as valuable as a first edition rubber man comic book is now. Maybe if we are lucky the lunatic fringe will turn, and like the monster from the black lagoon, trudge back down the bank and disappear into the primal ooze from whence it came.

Whole body piercing

2010-04-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

I've never fully understood why "art" needs to be precious,or whether it actually needs to be precious to be art.I know that it needs to be precious to be luxury merchandise--thats a whole different thing. One of the things that convergence is bringing up is the place of precious. I'm so old that I remember when color reproduction was a luxury. Lush color photography in magazines, Color reproductions in coffee table books and high end catalogs--all precious, all luxury.Counterfeiters used to need to be highly skilled engravers. Now all they need is a consumer grade scanner and an ink jet printer,maybe some understanding of photoshop. Photographers seldom spend their lives locked in a recycled bathroom bathed in eerie red light, playing with toxic chemicals till they get contact dermatitis.
At the height of the craft resurgence in the 1970s there was a lot of hype about "handmade" as though hands were an intrinsically better sort of machine. I had an art teacher who proposed that the definition of art was "anything without function". I countered with the suggestion that it was anything that went BEYOND function.So, when cad programs can take a 3 d image and render it into a 3 d object using laser hardened polymer, the distance between concept and reality gets shorter. The same can be said for large format archival printing, or digital photography,or electronic music. So, where is art? Is it inside, or outside? When outsider art comes in from the cold to the (sometimes still chilly) gallery wall does it become insider art? When it starts to sell does it become product? When a production process becomes obsolete does the process become "fine" like in black and white film and chemical print photography, or wood fired pottery or furniture made with nothing but hand tools? My personal view is that there is always an "elegant third option", and that anything that incorporates that no cost value added elegance that takes it beyond simply functioning it becomes art.

some thoughts on springtime(not the song from the producers)

2010-04-08T09:36:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of stuff all swirling around. Apple stock is just roaring,and culture wars are catching up with our other wars, and nobody wants to admit that all the anti government rhetoric is shot through with nasty undercurrents of racism and anti intellectualism that play on the innate fear of inferiority that lurks not far below the surface of the mob.
All of this actually has a lot to do with art and culture( or a lack of same). In a past life I was asked if I worried that people copied my work. I tried to explain that creative people that got off on my work might use an idea as a launching point,which was a good thing, and that bad craftsmen might do bad copies of my work, which was no threat to me. Creativity isn't really about "stuff", though stuff is kind of the scratchpad of creativity. A while back, when Apple drew back from the precipice and started to dust itself off as a company and do some business I remember reading a really nasty whiny diatribe in one of the tech columns about the cost of Apple products, as though Apple, being a creative company, should give it away, sort of like NPR, or a street musician. Apple spends a disproportionate percentage relative to many other companies on design. Over time it has become apparent that that translates into more pleasing product that lasts longer and wears better-----its not fast food product. Apple has resisted being a one trick pony, and has become an example of what can be accomplished if you think, not outside the box, but beyond the box. It is a lesson that I would love to see applied more broadly. Say, in Art or politics or "criminal justice" or the banking industry.

lil bits of utube

2010-03-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

the mashup that the link below is for is well worth giving a look to---Great example of creative reuse-----

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/03/24/boehners-hell-no-you-cant-the-remix/?blog_id=24&post_id=17643

2010-03-03T12:56:00.000-08:00

Little actually changes over time. Cleaning house recently I came across bits of correspondence from my early teen years, notes from my first midlife crisis,( yes, it is possible to have more than one), and recent memos to self and journal entries, and all of this spiritual detritus covered the same rutted muddy ground. Depressing, but true. For me at least the same old nightmares crop up again and again,repainted, repurposed, wearing new masks, they have proven to be capable of mutating very successfully, keeping me traumatized from adolescence to what seems increasingly like incipient old age.

2010-02-26T19:00:00.000-08:00

If over the 8 years of the Bush presidency we went from budget surplus to huge budget deficit it ought to be possible to calculate at least some of the actions that caused that reversal, and simply cancel the offending actions. that isn't new legislation, that is just correcting an accounting error, say for instance, correcting the loss of the revenue stream caused by canceling taxes on the wealthy or large estates or the oil and gas industry---that wouldn't be a new tax, just the corrective reinstatement of an old tax.If the republican minority plans to block any new legislation that creates a budget shortfall they aught to be more than happy to reinstate old taxes that would alleviate much of the budget deficit.Its time for the democratic majority to put an end to the horribly cynical games that the cabal of dried up old Fascists and and their simpering entourage in the senate seem intent on playing.

2010-02-18T10:49:00.000-08:00

I wonder why Dick Cheney is now wandering around from disclosed location to disclosed location, running his mouth? For most or the eight years that he was relatively relevant he seemed to be skulking around "undisclosed" locations, afraid that the man from BoraBora would get him. Now that he has ceased to have any real relevance, and says that we are at increased risk from terrorists, he seems to be working to remain in the public eye.If nothing else it will make it easier for the spanish to serve him with an arrest warrant as a war criminal. A man who shoots his friends is not someone I would like to rub elbows with.

2010-02-16T18:22:00.000-08:00

in the sequel to dawn of the living dead there was a shot where the zombies were milling around in the shopping mall and shuffling onto the escalator and falling over the rail mid way up, and it seems like the perfect visual metaphor for the present Congress.The distain that much of congress seems to feel for the wellbeing of most of the american public makes Marie Antoinette seem like a socialist.The gaggle of turkey necked geriatric former clan members, posturing thugs, and simpering teletubbies that comprise the republican party have more in common with Saddam's republican guard than they do with the party of Lincoln. Quick, quick, lets run out and corner the market on brown shirts!

2010-02-15T14:03:00.000-08:00

I cannot believe the discussions about the potential for Sarah Palin to run as a "mainstream" presidential candidate in 2012. How that can even be voiced with a straight face is incredible. American political theater as brought to you by the daily show, or Homer Simpson, or the Onion. Certainly, if anyone wanted a cause that would get liberals to join in the vote to disband government entirely Sarah and the cyborg X. VP speaking to you from an undisclosed mental health institution, and the band of foam at the mouth crazies that they so effectively represent, would be about enough to do it. I am slowly returning to not watching any of the "news", which was the only way that I maintained my sanity during the Carl Rove presidency. We are ruled increasingly by the whims of a congress filled with geriatric mobsters and incoherent thugs with bad hair.

2010-01-26T05:55:00.000-08:00

We seem to have become a nation of incompetents or thieves, kind of evenly divided between elected officials and the private sector. Looking at the international relief effort in Haiti, where the headline says something about 15,000 meals distributed, I flash back on basic training, on serving 1200 people at a clip. These were not people who had been without water for three days, or without food for a week, just hungry troops.I find it hard to believe that we can't somehow distribute enough food and water, or enough medical supplies, to alleviate the suffering. It's ridiculous to talk about people who haven't had water for days, to describe people who are tearing out pipes to suck the last drops of moisture out of them, as looters. If we can drive to them to take pictures, to do interviews, then we should be able to distribute water, and food, and bandages.The parade was yesterday, and we are still planning crowd control.

In the local paper this morning, there was a letter to the editor from someone angry and defiant because people who denied evolution were ridiculed. I would be within my rights to start insisting that the world is flat, but it would be unreasonable of me to expect to be taken seriously.

When bankers can put the world economy at risk and take billions of dollars in "bonuses" for doing so the definition of who is a criminal, what is a criminal,becomes really important. It is hard to understand why people who steal food or beer or cigarettes from the local mini mart spend five or ten years behind bars when someone who is a principal in a criminal enterprise that steals billions from the public can claim hundreds of millions in bonus, and survey the peasants at a distance from the deck of his yacht or the porch of his protected weekend retreat in the safety of his gated community without being punished for his actions.

2010-01-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

There is a difference between making money and transferring wealth. When I look at the news about bank “bonuses” because of “profits” and “earnings” and I see what seems to be a direct link between the amount being paid in huge bonuses to a few and the amount being lost by many it doesn’t seem like anybody is actually making anything. It seems like the few have simply found a way to transfer my money and your money into their account. They haven’t “made” anything, in the new product sense, like making a house or an irrigation system or a shovel. They have simply changed the rules so that the Public “I” has increasing risk and loss. When the amount in the public loss column and the amount in the profit or bonus column balance what you have is not wealth creation but wealth transfer, which in bad faith cases like this is little more than theft, a sort of new age unarmed robbery by a new class of super criminal. The road to success in america is increasingly toll road, and the successes seem to accrue increasingly to the toll house keepers who appear to be unrestrained and unregulated.

2008-12-02T10:57:00.000-08:00

This is really random! I want a keyboard--the case on my phone screws up the edge of the screen for thumb typing so all my energy goes into making all the letters instead of composing anything.

2008-11-29T12:31:00.000-08:00

The initial learning curve seems steeper than I expected it to be--blogging using google tools and an iPhone. I've gotten spoiled by the improvements in technology, and with my eyesight and my coordination and my mind all showing increasing wear and tear stuff like thumb typing on my ipone isn't fun and easy like it probably would have been ten or fifteen years ago.

2008-11-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

We are marching toward poverty, after eight years of mindless consumption. Our reputation as a nation, as a culture, is shot to hell. We've been part of a "slash and burn" economy that has finally consumed itself. Its the morning after. Here we sit in the fraternity house called America, floors sticky with spilled beer and ground in grime, ants and roaches darting about,all the furniture broken in the front yard, hurled through the windows at some point in the night. It's going to be a while before we have another party like the one that has finally wound down. We used up our credit. We're done. Nothing for it but to either wallow in our own crapulence or take the mop, and the broom, and clean up the mess. We never should have allowed a frat boy to become president.