The Coins of Time & Attention

To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves

2013-01-17T03:10:42Z

no
death needs time. by definition. the need for time arrives when it does.
    i always keep a main notes file, and timestamp every entry. it might as well be a running clock.
    i don't like clocks.

without time, we have it all, as my parents do. as my way late friends do. as our past selves do even, for that matter. when we have it least do we need it most, for that we would spend it most preciously on. like we do that material substitute for it; money. (if time is money, why are most broke when we have all time ahead?) there is poetry there remaining, waiting, meanwhile lost. paintings too. & unmade satoris, that still remain possible...
    i am at home here only in my mind. i never made it home. i chose to live in this world instead.
it's enough to say anything now. even gladly no. ticktock.
    err on the side of love and hold tight to your generosity of spirit, i always said.

'The Mystery Freedom' - of the earth, as she is. of the living fire of each moment... as ever, she gives us further possibilities of further possibilities themselves...
    the cascading curtain of aurora borealis is her skirt...
    the history and evolution of clouds is writ large in her dirt...

the breath of life, in utter inhalation, inspiration -we take her in and consume her -in roaring flames -then expelling silent smoke, spewing ashes, expiring wisps...
    ...& we cover her over, and emtomb her with our proud dominion...
    our mother planet lives on yet, despite us.
    we are but part of her, with little belief.
    little vision. little love. no understanding.

she whispers to us still, cooing wisdom, in her ever innate grace. telling us of the vast good, the great differences, that can be...
she tells us of the things we deny, those things we know not that exist within and without, and of that that can be.
she tells us things we will not hear.
she tells us this is our only opportunity to know, to go, and become among the vastly greater host.
she tells us she is the offer itself, her skirt ever raised high, and so then leaves us with it... the mystery freedom.

we are all her, all her voice, and so commanded to author en masse...

It Was Worth It

2013-01-07T18:58:28Z

The Weeping Of The Skulls
the complaint choir of the night rolled in slow, singing in the background. the stars receded, the darkness darkened even more. stillness grew. we were awake. alone. still.
whispers of the laughter of the crazed echoed dimly. we never knew we were hearing it, each to their own thoughts in the pleroma as the world became what it is...
...and such small freedom of thought that the night gave was all that was left us. the roiling cacaphony of humanity boils even greater, as even the seas themselves rise. what we add, i add to, here, but the coins of time and attention have all been long paid out.

we stare at each other with blank sockets as the choir sings on.

Elegantly Wild Terms Of Estrangement

2013-01-04T09:09:07Z

one has to deal with things on their own terms. why not take it all in wholecloth. why not take it all the way. on one's own terms. why not go to france, back in time, to the moon, to 3am, to the end of the river, to ground. why not go, go, go. be a gone daddy-o, as offbeat as any. a 100% reality channel switch. out. one can. he did, and he did, and she did, and that other guy. an entire roster of heartful good people of quietude and solitude. unratified artists all. unamerican for all that, and nowadays would mean unearthly in a noncultured world as wordless as disney world.
    one must deal with things on their own terms. one must. one must deal with one's self on one's own terms. what are your terms. these are mine.

i left my home in the valley and went up cold mountain. coming down, i went up the other side come the inevitable flood. as gone as any. as dead as if offline. skyrise, skyfall, and the sky bent down to cold mountain. han shan gone, no whisper left. cold mountain has it's own terms. count your blessings. the fish are still clean there and safe to eat, and as plentiful as the snow.
    i went where the old weirdos were. i went where the mad felt right. i went where no children were, or should be. i went where the holy were as quiet as the wind and even more unadorned. i went to that impossible place where all was gentled by it's own very nature.
    tiny statuettes in the ditch. tiny paintings in the branches. the road lined with ancient telegraphs. the sky dotted with zipatone. the rocks lined with mascara. the dirt sifted clean every day. out entirely. this was not america any longer. this was an older earth, a newer earth, a different earth. not earth at all. nothing that the word escape could even ever apply to. the ever undiscoverable itself.

come the earthly scenario, zenith far behind, a time and place for everything as always.

my name is the radiating grin of sheer triphammer heart.

For Two Quarters, Broken Wings

2013-01-03T02:02:14Z

An Unfinished Work
ak! one word says so little, so much more in even all that coherent insufficiency, but there it is.

...we were strange birds. a greatly dispaced seagull and an alley crow? i don't know. strange birds nonetheless, as estranged to one another as can be, and there it was and there it lay save for the remaining great sky above all.

...having taken to sky, i leave. the nearest beach is in texas and it's gulf, befouled even further nowadays, and of course still of texas as it was. i would be in california if i could, mayhap...

Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else

2012-12-31T09:14:24Z

When One Stops The Inner Dialogue One Is Left With The Inner Monologue
"So, what do we do to entertain ourselves around here?"
"Entertain? You mean like attain, detain, retain, obtain, contain, abstain, attain, detain, retain, obtain, contain?"
"Whatever would pertain, I guess..."
"That would be sustain."
"Okayfine, how do we sustain ourseves around here?"
"With entertainment, of course."
"And how is that done?"
"With great restraint, we simply refrain from boring ourselves to death."
"Oh, live it up for once. Let yourself go..."
"Wait! I know! We could put on a show!"
"Who'll we get to produce it?"
"You can be the producer!"
"Okayfine, I'm the producer. First thing I'm gonna do is fire you."
"Don't you have to hire me first?"
"You're hired. You're the scenery director. Go get us some scenery. Do you know how to do that?"
"Let me guess. Attain it?"
"You're a quick study."
"I have to be. I'm the understudy."
"What we need now is an overstudy..."
"We can let the audience handle that."
"I thought we were the audience."
"Oh no, you're the producer."
"I thought you were the producer?"
"I was but I fired myself. Then I hired you."
"Just what we need, a hired audience..."
"Well sure, how else would we have one?"
"Voluntarily, one would hope."
"Any volunteers?"
"I volunteer! Do I clap now?"
"Oh no, not yet. The show must first go on..."
"So what can I do now?"
"Maintain."
"But that's boring..."
"So is the alternative."
"The alternative is another audience..."
"...Wanna see what's on TV?"

Waste & Glass

2012-12-26T16:05:01Z

Dancing On Gravel
the warehouse is dressed in an expensive shade of gray throughout. diffused minimal light leaks in through the painted panes up high. a scrolling marquee of words, barely discernible, lies just below. the soft orchestra reels out from the leftward darkness, plucking from the opening silence some bare motes of notes and builds upon them as the bay door rises.

one by one, trucks slowly roll in through the big door, crunching the gravel beneath their tires. they line up beside one another and halt and open their doors in unison. dancers disembark slow and graceful as clouds.

the music is smooth as smoke. seamless with the haze. quiet. soft with dim light. gravel crunching beneath their feet, the dancers array themselves slowly into patterns of diamonds, melting into order, and they dance.

it ends ninety minutes later as it began, only darker with the sun completely set. the performance over, the dancers embark and depart much as they arrived, leaving behind them only the patterns in the gravel from the dance.

Photographing The Grain
the next day, or some other nearly as soon, a photographer haunts the warehouse, careful with her footsteps. shooting the patterns in the gravel from the catwalk high above. shooting them on the ground from afar. shooting them up close. shooting many shots, many rolls. she takes lunch in between. she considers her shots carefully, patiently. she meditates on the dim light as the day passes. dust motes hang in the air like microscopic christmas ornaments. she finally departs as evening finally arrives, her volvo trailing dust down the rubble-strewn street.

He Wasn't Just Another Poet Of The Apocalypse But Hers
what fish dare one catch in such times. what nettles, what berries, what rabbits. for all that, he had food prepared that evening. candles were lit.
    he wrote only by pen, and only upon her negatives.
    it was another kind of a literature.
    it was another kind of a dance.

she developed her film in the evening. he sat before their wall, remembering, waiting. pen in pocket.
    looking at her day's work, he saw patterns in the patterns. he saw the footprints, the choreography, the passage of the performnce, the perverse aesthetic of desperate art. the sheer hope of it all. he saw her own desperate hopes in the photography, the angles and lighting, the particular images caught, the very number of shots taken. he took his pen out and wrote upon the negatives, with great calm and confidence, as if the world depended on it. he wrote with no fear, no fury.

For Dr. Memory

2012-12-13T13:46:56Z

is it really so late in the night?
    that the sheer brass of the thing should overtake it's gold?
    ...or is it all pyrite? no. no, no, no...

without too loose a mind to be seduced down lyrical trails, as if how a word sounded held more import than it's meaning, there is first the wordlessly real moment, the very moment before any words at all...
    ...before anything at all.

one is.

The End Of The World As We Know It

2012-12-08T07:10:59Z

ubu

2012-11-30T10:23:22Z

In Terms Of An Unfixed Shuffle
they grew up, they made tea, they typed on typewriters, they photographed their meals -once in a while would actually sit still, do nothing. they made lists of lists. and tore them up. the secretary paid the bills. the secretary was never seen. they woke in the morning quiet as mouses and drank their coffee. they woke in the afternoon stoned full of ideas that flowered in evenings that begat unusual results. they feared upheaval lest all come undone in an american scenario. theirs was a continent in miniature. it smelled of print. typography. art for the sake of art. declining officialties. they discovered new things sadly.

they relived the same years over and over unknowingly. the loop breaks at some point and becomes news. the american scenario.

lengths of dialogue unrolled, unraveled into text, became playthings for new bohemians to scatter further. nothing mattered as time continued and with it brought changes like blue filters. there were letters to write, letters to receive, automatically generated by the culture of culturism itself, a spontaneous thing. breasts were bared in formal pomp for it had to be done. the papers arrived. the numbers numbered.

the breathless vista was ignored, accepted as normal.

somewhere someone told a story and another a joke. a song was sung. money was made. some was spent. some was briefly saved. some forgotten in old stored clothes. nothing was explained. ever.

death came and went. that's all there was. the paintings, the photographs and all the miscellaneous papers were never moved. this was what kept the guns and knives away, the violence aside, the american scenario at bay. such crime was kept hidden, secret, detested by authorities. hate like cockroaches and rats and mold crept in and over. every 100 years a day of cleansing disintegrated all that and a random image was shone.

the new intelligence was a simple point that held all. when all is held, the point is as simple as a dot. it knew that and it knew it'd had been known by some that had come before. none of that mattered. neither does this. to some.

there were no candles, but matches aplenty.

please copy all this. print it out however you wish but paste it to the wall. we're home.

X Marks The Spot

2012-11-10T05:40:11Z

Range Of Vision
How big a 'cone of vision' circle to draw within? -From the center of vision point ('CV') upon the horizon to the furthest corner of your drawing times two equals the diameter of the Range Of Vision circle, the 'ROV'.

X-CV
ROV times .866 is the [X-CV] distance from CV straight up to the 'X' point (the camera, or your eyes). From X, one can use a protractor and a long ruler to locate vanishing points upon the horizon, but that is not completely precise, nor entirely convenient. With this utility (click the page's link above), the resultant number is (in inches) that degree's vanishing point's horizontal distance from CV.
In the future I plan to remake this to output a whole range of incremented degrees for a given ROV.
...Win7 precludes me from running my old DOS utility, XCV#4.EXE, any longer. I've missed it muchly.

...many thanks to safalra.com for the prototypes in their javascript number extensions file...

tao machine

2012-10-07T06:43:24Z

midnight
"dirt-tired, greased & wired, but the job's done, hey."

the scattered tools upon the table, all in disarray. the wrenches, sockets, screwdrivers, extensions & adaptors, nuts & bolts & washers scrounged from the floor and about all (mostly) gathered in coffee cans... the piles of parts; case halves, studs, con rods & cranks, camshafts & shims, heads, manifolds, oil radiators, fan housings, distributors, coils, voltage regulators, generators & alternators, carbs & pistons, fuel pumps, filters, trannies, CV joints, axles, brake shoes, fuses, spark plugs, batteries, mufflers, belts, pulleys, flywheels... the cans of mineral spirits, carb cleaner, oil & gas; brake fluid... cleaning a set of wheel bearings w/ an air hose sets it spinning at umpteen hundred RPM. buckets of grease. pressure plates & throw-out bearings. clamps & hoses. breaker bars & torgue wrenches. plastigauge. pedal clusters. cables. shifter plates & bushings. tires, wheels, brake drums clanging, struck by a 5 pound sledge hammer. smoke from the ashtray curls up to the rafters. the coffee pot ticks. we laugh like mad children w/ dirt (like black soot) on our faces & elbows & old worn clothing in the midnight garage.

the eternal engine that moves us. forward.

"i could carve one from a rock..."

crank it over. snick it in gear. let out the clutch. foot on the gas in Wide Open Throttle.

stand on it.

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T10:16:27Z

ave maria & the host of ninehouse
the days there had been strange & even strangely strange, with each day's weirdness different from the preceding one, up to the last. the marked day. one needn't even be told, it was intuitable; the nausea node so pressed even as it begun, confusingly enough. for all the comfort, all the days had been a travail rather than any respite. last days are always different. differently different.

a stiff and solemn conference decorum laid throughout & all the barest thoughts were treated equally, with respect & given dignity. hospitality taken to art, as if sun groves demeanors enhanced in a highly tutored state, as if produced by some refined ancient culture, contrasting greatly to the furnishings of heavy oaken timbers bound by iron clasps mottled and rough, almost pointedly.
    ultimately, there was something vaguely wrong in all the good.

discordancy. the painted wood of metal rafters. identical clouds in separate windows. the tranquil beauty of a room belying it's thickly intricate technical underskin within the walls & floors. a subtle sense of the thick electric presence of it, subconsciously intuited. still air quietude without, delicately tasteful, with an acute aesthetic. flowers on the table, a pencil, tin cup. tablecloth. discordancy. it sets you on edge. leaves you wondering. subconsciously.
    EMF sanitization leaves a slight tang of ozone in the air...
    we picked up our books & canvas rucksacks & split. no celphones, no tablets or laptops. not even so much as a watch or a radio. radio...

all was in accord.
    looking back i saw the flowers wafting in the dead wind. i saw the light wisps of black ember, the streaks of lightened color, the girls dancing on the roof, their scarlet scarves hovering frozen in the air for the photographer. i saw too the approaching dim plume down the opposite road.

our road turned eventually. we could forget who filled our bellies and replenished our backs. we could try to forget the programs.
    we could only ignore the programming itself. the road seemed innocuous enough -they always do. one can easily take analogs for real. it may well be often the case even.

whatever died back there died the small death of a falling leaf, a burnt out bulb. it was nothing but one node. there's yet a million left to go...

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T10:14:13Z

tin ears to golden silence
discomfited in the khaki. conscious of the shifting weight. attention caught by details; wrinkles in my shirt, how my right boot feels, the pebbles in the road to be likewise sidestepped lest their crushing marks our passage.
    it's all mixed in.

we'd now too long a diet of silence, of beans & franks.
    it had dumbed us down. made dullards of us all, even the sharpest among us.
    head clamor. when all is shattered new, putting much held as knowledge to an early grave in great surprise. when sighs are louder than the rumbling thunder in the seeming constant background one paints down deep unknowingly. when for days we all looked at each other with 'did you hear that?' glances that more truly were did you feel what i felt? when the things that used to be thoughts had long become more like bubbles, and when they began popping were more like soft firecrakers and just as unnerving.
    one becomes familiarized with it unconsciously, if not exactly accustomed or used to it. it's stressful and depressing, like a prolonged freeze inevitably becomes, but if it weren't for winter, there would be no spring.
    rather the chirp of bird than the hush of snow.

we didn't hear the traffic in the wires. we didn't hear the bit trail flow. one may easily always imagine it as static, but in truth it's an ethereal wind -quite lovely if one allows. the sort of thing meant to be easily missed.

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T10:12:40Z

lest there be contact at once (in the wild)
can one still use a cat's whisker? purchase copper wire? hard enough to assemble any transmitter but if receivers elsewhere cannot even possibly be constructed, there's no point.

sidestepping the grid gets trickier every second. the greater thing, the decimation of any wild at all, becomes peripheral.

there's the grid and there's everything en toto. what's within reach will always grasp. the formal structure of industrialized civilization had come full circle, becoming uncivilized. no more gate against the horde. the butterfly effect is the central truth of every being, but rather than any Original Sin, it's the glory of every mutant. imprint. constant update. one needn't even pay attention or bother to analyze. one can be discerning by default.

we went the way forward in that manner. as quietly as the sun rose.

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T10:10:38Z

bechtel analogs of perception
setting out, ever setting out, it is all that anything ever really does, for good or ill. offshoots, fractal offspring, even death is seen that way. all things start, but go to spin off in another line. each son and daughter continuing the deathlessness of their parents, but none begets the children of their siblings.
so it is among the regained. without differences, there'd be no word for tribe.
without setting out, there'd be no getting lost, that exquisite mystery: lost from what? are we not here? you can't ask, but are expected to follow one's own way together.

it's hard to check one's attitude about big things. something about relative sizes suggests native rules. one is as singular as one can get, prompting many to simply become a bigger one -but one does begin from one's own singularity. ego so roused to birth says aha, and so itself too sets out accordingly, knowing this: steal a little and they put you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T10:07:19Z

the gordian naught tautly humming
nature doesn't so much assert itself as be. we were as water, helplessly conforming to nature's own accomodation of our relative perverse consequence. is everything helpless to all else? what alternative can be imagined? void universes as much empirical as any grain of sand? we could only flow together if together at all. ever inland from the beach, this is too crudely basic to even say. it's banal to note, on it's own, but comes to mind and so noted. every birth a leave-taking of the amniotic ocean.

we had little sense of ourselves as such, but that we were alive. in the natural sense. -organic nature that is.
    the waterdrop is only seen as such from the outside.

we signal each other, at base. when the methodology is physical, we call it something else, but it always amounts to the same thing; the transmutation of executable code -or it's termination. EOF.
    ...some signals must be sliced, scattered, slaughtered. thrown in the air for the necessary occasional random factor.

we no longer had any input, no news -the cessation of that constant drone felt too good to be questioned -or even spoken of at all. nobody mentioned it as far as it went. or so it seemed -i wasn't as preoccupied with the last dispatch as i perhaps should've been. perhaps deliberately. or characteristically. who knows whom is privy to what? there's no telling any longer and hasn't been in years. it's now a given, a dangerous or foolish given, but some presumptions must necessarily be made.
    ...and then cut, as able.
    the last dispatch suggested a game afoot. others saw it differently, very much so. twas ever thus, and so ever does the idea of separateness among things continue. -and that of the difference of personage. even among those together -or perhaps even especially so. the closer we are, the greater the differences maybe...

some hide their difference. always ineffectually, of course. that which is hidden shall be known to be hidden. it's the tell-tale hump in the rug. another sort of signal to be sliced: the unintended sort.

schemata substrata mutilata

2012-07-16T09:51:42Z

the last dispatch
for each message there are a hundred interpretations.
some well-reasoned, others well-felt, and others quite loopy.
my own categorical rhetoric stops there. for each line there are a hundred interpretations.

no further message. that always draws a crowd. what else is there but time and attention? the stuff of ecstasy, free of crisis -it's own antithesis even perhaps...

over a period of some time we gathered yonder and so it was curious when it somehow became apparent we were all there. curious too in that that was the same notion to each, but there it was.
to be sure, we'd all had enough of fish by then, no matter how good, but still...

wind blew, waves echoed, water sheen glinted sunlight. each day, the birth of earth itself seemed as virgin as ever. a tall woman among us obliquely said, "i know nothing of such things." that caught my mind's attention and sent it to musing upon the difficulty of any real objectivity, of refusing to interpret. it's hard. takes strong spirit.

we are curious beings. being curious beings we accumulate our answers, and being never satisfied, analyze them. endless curiosity has it's life, and it's own fractal arc, curious about even itself. it becomes a knotty situation. reference points become arcane, mystical. like seeks out like, ever looking. given a good trail, we'll go it. to come around full circle is the only regret...

rest in peace, jeffrey catherine jones

2011-05-20T06:12:06Z

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/jeffrey-catherine-jones-dead-110519.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/jeffrey-jones-art-life-110309.html

40 years ago, i spoke with jeffrey catherine jones when i took the photo above at the 1971 Seuling Convention in NYC. i wanted to converse at length but discerned a polite hesitancy and didn't pursue it. the impression i had was that jones was a fairly private individual, and notably polite about it.

jones' influence on my work has always been there but ever greater over time... thank you JCJ, for those few minutes of talk and all your works.

addendum:
...better late than never -i should have added my jones stash url when i originally posted this...
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/jones/

addendum2, from sidebarnation:
Podcast Episode 155: A Discussion on the Life, Art and Recent Passing of JEFFREY CATHERINE JONES (1944 - 2011)

http://traffic.libsyn.com/sidebar/SiDEBAR_Ep_155.mp3

"The artist does not see things as they are, but as he or she is." - Alfred Tonnelle

Since hearing the news that Jeffrey Catherine Jones passed away yesterday (May 19, 2011), I keep coming back to one thing; I'll never again be able to refer to her as "my favorite living painter". That's a change I never thought I'd have to make. A simple one, but still tough.

I will miss Jeffrey greatly. Her life's work awakened something wonderous in me many years ago, and I owe her a debt of gratitude.

Marvin Gaye said, and I'm paraphrasing the hell out of it, "If one is a true artist, their singular goal is to open the minds of men and women". With Jeff, we've most certainly witnessed the passing of a true artist.

That's all I got for now, I guess. The real stuff is in the show. And trust when I say Dwight's story is the one. Listen for that! I envy him for having that brief, but moving exchange with Jones. And at the same time, since it happened to my man, I get to share in it, too. So really, I'm good.

Bye, Jeff. Sleep peacefully, rest easy...

- SWAiN
The 2004 Sequential Tart interview with Jeffrey Catherine Jones conducted by Laurie J. Anderson.

plus from frequencyclear.tv: 4 pages

2010-12-28T06:18:17Z

This Century, I Promise

2010-11-18T00:02:34Z

yanaklink, barandash, my friend mavinga, yttj(bjorn), & so many others; you all have been doing tremendous work. i miss you all & greet you all. i'm alive & well & busy as hell etc. i haven't posted in over a year, true, & this hardly suffices as a return. but. hi. will be returning soon. this century, i promise.

heart of the flower

2009-11-19T21:39:39Z

What Goes On In The Caves Stays In The Caves

2009-07-10T18:30:01Z

Built in the 1920's from the coral rock quarry left over from the building of Coral Gables' many coral entrances and walls, the Venetian Pool was the very hallmark of 'The City Beautiful' and it's tony high high society aspirations to stand out from Miami proper...
I was born in Coral Gables in 1954 and raised there. It is no longer the same but still, I miss it terribly. If any part of it has remained much the same it is this world renowned city pool. I didn't realize there were so many youtube videos of the Venetian Pool. There's a great many of them, and deservedly so. It's an incredible place. (Recently renovated yet again, I am saddened to see in these videos that what was once an intricate high dive tower with winding steps and pathways has now been converted to another set of falls. They already had one set next to the caves...) I haven't been back to South Florida in 9 years and am terribly homesick. I have shown plenty of stills of The Venetian Pool to my Lisa and talked much of wishing to take her there, but videos far better convey the wonder of the place.

Pen Point

2009-07-07T18:47:07Z

Free Earth Now...I repeat these not just because the context calls for them but also because they strongly bear repeating, as the subject matter itself did in the first place... Anything that inspires creativity, freedom, and the luxury of personal fulfillment threatens Authority. Anything that promotes intelligence, individuality, originality, and subdues easy acceptance of blinding conformity threatens Authority. Any means of propagation of information that cannot be dominated, controlled, or suppressed threatens Authority. Mental and spiritual health, social and personal maturity, and but of course; expanded awareness; anything that promotes these threaten Authority as well -or should I say threaten Power... Nothing or nobody should be allowed to insinuate themselves between anybody and the planet. Our planet is freely for us all. Global Domination is the dream of small and foolish gluttons for Power who believe people should be controlled. ...In comment there, I added this link of Amy Goodman interviewing Chris Hedges on his then debuting book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America... ...Well, it's been war on everything for years now; the dollar, the country, the planet, people, women, reason, civilization, you, me, any future, you name it, they're agin it. Nothing new. Fretting is surely futile, certainly so, however -it's as impossible for any person to ignore as it for any person to immediately address. It's not just the blood of American troops we pump into our gastanks, it is Earth's own... Free Earth Now? Certainly. But still, at this point, it's damage control... The Dark Side of Climate Change: It's Already Too Late By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted July 7, 2009. Father of the Gaia Theory, James Lovelock says we can't stop climate change, but that humanity will continue in some smaller form. related: FN20 / Enjoy it While You Can By shellinaya, on June 27th, 2009 Enjoy your life while you can, because nothing we are doing right now will likely stop climate change in time. That is the terrifying message from Sir James Lovelock, famous UK scientist and inventor. Global heating will proceed. All Congress does is pass a cap and trade bill which won't even cut emissions until about 2040. The bottom line is that climate change is coming and we will have to possibly move and adapt. More on James Lovelock here on Grist. Download here ...At this point, human matters are left in the hands of Earth herself, and the brushes and pens and keyboards of the artists and writers, and why not...

Poetry Doesn't Protect You Anymore

2009-07-07T06:21:46Z

The Dumbing Down Of America (and the world in general) may be running even with it's rightward slide, and no coincidence. Poor Al Gore, seemingly doomed to torrents of conservative rotten tomatoes for genteely observing our assaults on not only our planet but Reason itself, has suffered not only the theft of his presidency but even political weight for demonstrating that any earnest and consistent leader (such as also, say, Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul) is beyond the pale of any hope of attaining the presidency. Meanwhile, our cultural and political spheres continue to be no less significantly intertwined, to remain supportive of our supra-enterprise; war in perpetua. Arguably, it is perhaps a one-way dynamic else Al's liberal cultural weight would translate back politically...
    Come now our greatest rightward slider and flipflopper of the moment, President Barack Obama, with a brilliance for diametric spin that beggars even the sheerest possibility of common sense or the viability of self-evident truths ever returning. If George Bush witlessly exacerbated and taxed our outrage overload, Barack Obama, with his party's [continuing] overt complicity, viciously mocks our very intelligence. He does so to such degree as to mock intelligence itself, and in so doing undermines any ultimate credibility to his considerable own -seemingly knowingly and willingly. There may be those whom would argue that is his brilliance; a visionary genius who, ostensibly, necessarily presumes the straits we are in to be so dire and our needs so incontrovertibly intertwined (oil and it's pipelines, foreign relations, economic underpinnings, etc.), that to con and lull the Corporacracy and the greater powers that be of the American world into some retreat from the tacit threat of utter self-destruction -or at least some cessation of full wide open throttle charge into it -must be truly appeased (far beyond the merely Chamberlainesque) and given nearly free rein -while contradictorily giving 'Hope' to those desperately opposed to such appeasement. True, it is hard to argue against any -any at all -[presumed] degree of direness at this moment of history. True, it would seem better to err on the side of caution under such seemingly necessary presumption. However, to presumptuously lay the currencies of Civilization and faith in common sense and human intelligence and creativity on such a sacrificial altar -even while patently using such to full degree in their own subjugation and degradation and sacrifice -is as patently self-defeating and at best 'buys' us a few years of such throttling back -these few consequential and pivotal years we cannot afford to spend in any way but Progressively. Obama ultimately amounts to far worse, a reprise of Reaganism, smile and all. Obama ultimately amounts to far worse than Bush for the locking in of the Democratic Party onto the right and the [completely discredited] Republican party further off any sane claim to any degree of the spectrum of thought at all -with no room at all on any Left left for the Libertarian party or who have you. With Barack Obama came doublespeak into full flower. The old simple sly disingenuity of the past Republican party is now the base norm for all. Salvation, like sanity, is off the table, for Obama's concessions are the most destructive for all their depth, for all their centrality, for all their mendacity. There may well come a time when he will defend himself, and say he never claimed to have any or all the answers -as I believe he has already so foreshadowed.
    At this point, America is mostly unhappy, yet still largely complacent, about any seeming loss of intellectual vigor in it's mainstream body. Certainly, there is great concern for the assault on science and it's communities and their importance. There is, however, the changing definition of what mainstream means on any given day in these times, much like journalistic objectivity. Conformity supports what passivity enables.... 'Westernization' too (Google up 'Afghan Star'...) takes it's toll upon the international dialogs on our national questions. We know of the changes to Christianity itself that the pirates have wrought. We know too of our own daily complicity in the piracy (as we pump our sons and daughters blood into our gastanks) and talk endlessly of ways to extricate ourselves or our consciences at least. It does not soothe though, and many are simply left holding their tongues along with their breath. It is left to the Fringe to remark on the rising craziness, the increasing general ennervation, the exponentially converging lines of perspective to the Rapture or Singularity or TimeWaveZero or 2012 presidential campaign or what have you, of some nebulous but no less discerned approaching moment of untenability, of frank ignition. The mainstream, such as it is, largely understands the leveling effect of it's cultural commodities and of the necessarily mediocre (see Kevin Kelly on television's necessary mediocrity), and most of the public is actually soothed by this, ergo their complacency with the comeuppance of the eggheads. If anything, I would assert that Howard Zinn's approach to Progressive views of history are more palatable than Noam Chomsky's, but where really do they differ? Is Zinn's no less an indictment? Or more entertaining, more commoditizable, more 'American'? If this is ever a time for questioning conventions, it is also a time we are hewing ever more to conventionalism itself and thinking outside of the box is not just disdained but shunned in roaring silence.

The Arts. Go to Google news or Reuters and try select that department -it's not there, or at least not upfront. Look for it under 'Entertainment'. Who are our predominant painters, poets, playwrights, authors? Yes, the economic collapse changed all that and journalism too, in any commercial way on the national level. This is what we pay for the commercialization, the commoditization, of our culture in the first place. Old news, yes, but again, the reality is changed by this internet, and there are indeed a great many writers and artists online, doing their thing. They're simply not covered, and again, this is a place without borders. Look at what the Russian people do in Livejournal; there are far more Russian artists than American ones for all I can see. Are they more cultured? Some have said so, as a result of the old Soviet-era repressions which left them hewing strongly to the classics. -As we are beginning to do ourselves, ever referring more and more to our past masters, and so too as age-old debates have taken on regained contemporariness. George Orwell and H.G. Wells' dialog has regained pertinence. New World Order, 1984, etc. indeed. These are the books being referenced and at times reprinted.
    If ever a time called for 'protest' songs, is this not it? What market? What point? Save it for the cinema? Or the documentarians? Or online? Or is this an unprecedented time, too dangerous and unready for primetime save for appointed pointpeople, artists in their right, like Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, And Keith Olbermann? Are we this removed from roots music, folk music, that 'protest songs' are now an anachronism? Or we are this 'post-modernist' that we are too hip for such Kumbaya-esque communing? Or are we simply too politically engrossed to venture away from politics long enough to regain our humanity, confidence, or perspective? Or... all of the above..?
    And what of poetry?

     There once was the good 'ol U. S. of A.,
     And now no one really can say
     If it's still as terrific
     Or become just too horrific
     To put into poetry today...

Loitering in the Wrong Places

The book, with its halting, unbeautiful, disjointed lines, proves her awareness of the difficulty of writing poetry about war, trade, immigration, Hurricane Katrina, and George Bush. These are intensely politicized issues, claimed by a blunt, politicized language.

In 1915, during the first World War, Britain was battening down the hatches, tightening its borders, and sternly discouraging travel by canceling trains and plastering placards inside the cars of those that remained on their routes -"Unnecessary traveling uses coal required to heat your homes." Rationing was strictly observed, movement curtailed, but England's greater loss, as Paul Fussell notes in his study of early twentieth century travel writing, Abroad, was "a loss of amplitude, a decay of imaginative and intellectual possibility... The very theater of thought and feeling contracted; the horizons closed in." Literature, then, was not in the forefront of the minds of the populace. Still, Augustine Birrell, England's Chief Secretary for Ireland, was riled enough by its pesky persistence to proclaim that he, for one, "would forbid the use, during the war, of poetry."

The statement feels remarkably familiar today, in another wartime era. Poetry stands, as usual, on the outer margin of the national discussion. The public sentiment may be that poetry doesn't matter, but, of course, in its not mattering lies its freedom to hop trains, to transcend borders, to speak from behind enemy lines. Poetry's trickery is interpreted in two simultaneous ways: one, it is difficult, and two, it is unreliable, questioning the way things are -and therefore it is possibly dangerous.

In her thirteenth book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, published in the final months of the Bush Administration, C. D. Wright commits just such an offense as her title suggests -she loiters in all the wrong places. The book, with its halting, unbeautiful, disjointed lines, proves her awareness of the difficulty of writing poetry about war, trade, immigration, Hurricane Katrina, and George Bush. These are intensely politicized issues, claimed by a blunt, politicized language. And so a book on these subjects is a constant tugging between poetry and prose statement, between lyric and document. She levels accusations at herself for her own project: "Poetry/ Doesn't/ Protect/ You/ Anymore," making clear the increasing psychological weight of the decision simply to write poems when one is aware of the magnitude of the problems surrounding her in the world.

"Nothing is good save the new... If anything of moment results -so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it."
-William Carlos Williams

10 years later

2009-06-01T07:00:16Z

Cushion (10 years later) 10 years ago, Cushion fell out of my fingers through a casio keyboard and into my computer. i'd initialized a 6 minute file and turned my brain off and let her rip. it's like holding your breath. i'd been working in the [now obsolete] realaudio format of the time and that's still how it sounds best. Fourth Time dropped by my apartment (then in Miami, Fl) and listened to it. i drew him. now, june 1 sticks in my memory for more than matt howarth's June 1 parties. happy june, everybody.