Money is one of the most mysterious things in the universe. Here's an article from economist Brad Setser's weblog that I found interesting and incomprehensible... how the black markets of the world, and the money-under-the-mattress funds are switching from dollars to euros. This has a huge impact on the US economy, and is sure to be big news on CNBC really really soon. No, just kidding!



Something similar happened to the shekl around 350AD and I still haven't recovered.

I'm finally doing what Dr. Quang told me to do a couple of months ago: take it easy. Being in Florida at Mom's helps with that. I'll be heading back to Pittsfield at the end of the week to find a new studio, and perhaps a flight to New Mexico later int he month.



Found a great book review by Malcolm Gladwell on "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. About another kind of Tipping Point. This via a nice new-to-me blog called 3quarksdaily. Worth a look. And this via the most interesting Preposterous Universe. Nothing like quantum physics to help give one a different perspective. A bit larger. Or a lot smaller.

Greetings to Paul -



things have changed, I'm not heading for NewMex anytime soon. Weather in the midwest changed the plan at first, but then certain obstacles came up for a visit at this time.



I'm in Florida right now, and will be getting back to Pittsfield at the end of the week.



Paul- hope we can visit in the Land of Enchantment sometime - I think you'll love it there.



That school looks interesting. I might be out in Cal in Jan or Feb - I'll let you know.



***



I read an article today - one of those scary true things. Belief in Book of Revelation driving US Politics. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we're outa our tree.



best of all of us humans in the coming year.

Hello! This is Paul Hindt here to wish everyone reading this blog Happy Holidays for whatever you may be celebrating this season (or not celebrating if one so chooses). Also, Douglass, if you are going to be staying in New Mexico for some time I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to come check it out down there and pay you a visit. I have had an interest in exploring the Southwest for some time now and this could be the perfect opportunity for me. Hope you are doing well, Doug. I can't believe I've already finished a year of school at Ex'Pression and only have a year to go.

Went to see Dr. Quang, the vietnamese herbalist (his autobiography was recently published) in North Bennington today, for the last time for a few months. He turned me around but good with his wonderful herbs - they smelled heavenly. And I feel good enough to go to New Mexico for a few months. I'm still looking for a place in Silver City, if you know of anything.



The reason I'm going to Silver City NM is because of a dream I had about the place. I went through there ages ago, in the early 60s in a summer camp, and it made a small impression on me. I remember most the catwalk, a hanging catwalk above a mountain stream that seemed reaaaallly cool to me then. I again passed through in my first big road trip, 1972. then forgot about it till a dream a few months ago. Now it seems like I ought to go there. que sera sera.



The closing of all the libraries in Buffalo NY and Salinas Ca has me much disturbed. The "Twin Towers" of debt and trade imbalance threaten this country and its well-being and security a lot more than most terrorists. Library closings, are, I'm afraid, only the beginning. People simply don't seem to see it (ie we're broke) - or don't want to, which is understandable, seeing how we, as a nation, have had it so sweet for so long. I think maybe our good karma has run out, and there are bills to be paid now. My main concern -seeing as how there's very little any of us can do about this situation (except fight to end the war on drugs, a financial disaster, which we can afford less and less) - is my own mood. I get awfully frightened and depressed about it all, and I know that's no good for anyone. Someone I know said that our work is to raise people's spirits. That's a fine goal, maybe the most important one, at least regarding our human interactions. Other interactions, I don't know much about, but I have my suspicions.

Did you see that "blog" was the number one new word in the English language - according to those who would know, I guess. Well, I agree. Blogs are the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I say that even though I don't mind slicing bread, and even though I worked at a wholesale bakery in Seattle and sliced a lot of bread. Fer instance, I just stumbled on Bob Mould's blog, and from there, a bunch of other interesting things I had no idea about. One of my favorite columnists Robert Dvorak has a blog, about any little thing that catches his eye. It's great. And then there's the science ones. Like Preposterous Universe - the great thing is to hear the voice of all these creative types and heavy duty thinking types in just an ordinary way. Sure, I scan a lot of it, otherwise there's not enough time in the universe to read everything. But I love just stumbling across Bob Mould's blog, and reading about his tour and his drive home yesterday, another life...



I'm reading Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. I'm a bit tapped out from end of year business stuff, and so I tend to nod offf with it, but it's energizing - at least intellectually - to think about what things are like at the Planck scale. Lee Smolin was the writer that turned me on to Julian Barbour's writin. Reading Smolin and Barbour makes me envious of the physicists and their incredible group workings. Their global friendships and partnerships, in an effort that seems more and more to me like building the cathedrals... the edifice of the Grand Theory, hundreds of physicists, members of the most elite clan, working away night and day on things most of us really, and here I mean this literally, really cannot even begin to understand. The secrets of the cathedrals... hey, those builders were the Masons! Wonder if we'll enter a dark age (he said casually) and the physicists will form a secret society to protect the knowledge against, well, yes, I hate to be so blunt about it, but the fundamentalists, who of all stripes are moderately to severely anti-intellectual. But back to physics: I wonder when they're going to tackle the question on Consciousness... and maybe find out that the Buddhists were already there 2500 years ago...



enjoy the holidays. relax when you're driving...

Recently a New Zealand scientist said that he thinks humanity might be extinct by the end of this century due to global warming issues. I think it's pretty obvious that there's no way we could know such a thing. But what if we did know, for certain, that our whole species would be wiped out, totally rubbed-out, in the not-too-distant future? What would we do? As a group, as individuals? What would you do that's different from what you do now? I think the question naturally leads to another meditation: What are humans for (if anything)? Interesting question that presumes some kind of artificer or creator or creative intelligence.



here's a synopsis of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan creation story, because in it the answer to the question is presumed: we are made by the gods to worship the gods. The problem has been, that through 3 or 4 successive tries by the gods at making us humans, none of us has figured out how to worship the gods correctly. So, they (we) are rubbed out, and another, hopefully more sophisticated effort is made. The last such cleansing operation was done with a flood. Ha! Now the question before the Mayans who wrote the Popol Vuh as we see it today, was: Are we worshipping our creators in the correct manner? No idle question.



You have any ideas what we're here for? Or are we just quantum foam with an attitude?



here's more on the Popol Vuh. An entire museum here.

One of my favorite physics books is The End of Time by Julian Barbour. In it, he makes the claim that time does not exist, and that motion and the appearance of change are illusions... I found an interview with him at Science and Spirit:





"But if I am right - that everything is static - then I think the powerful impression we have of motion is evidence for the creativity of nature. Nature is so selective in the experiences that it presents us with, so creative in the process, that we put the wrong interpretation on phenomena which are correctly apprehended. The Copernican revolution is always at hand to show that this is not mad: nothing could be more obvious than that the world doesn’t move, yet Copernicus persuaded us otherwise."



and this:



"I once asked Richard Dawkins about this: where do our sexual urges, or the taste of fruit, or a sense of beauty come from? Of course, you can give mechanical explanations and say they are correlations with hormones and so on. But the whole edifice of Dawkins’s world - of atoms rushing around in space - would work perfectly well without me being aware of beauty or the taste of an apple. So why is there this redundancy, why this extraordinary extravagance on the part of nature, if the secondary qualia don’t play any part? So my pipe dream for the future is to develop a theory where these things would count."

The Set

Interview with originator of the fractals. the Mandelbrot Set. Link Below.



Here's some great fractals.







this from boingboing

Nothing seems to be able to explain to me the over-ripening of all kinds of fundamentalisms as neatly as Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. Link. I mean, a few folks have noticed how interesting it is that the fundamentalisms of the world seem to be fighting it out with each other in Iraq, Afghanistan, places in Africa and Southeast Asia. "Our" fundamentalists seem to agree with "theirs" to such a degree - is it coincidence? If not, then Why? Why now? Shlain sez that it's because we're nearing the end of the age of patriarchy, and that patriarchy co-exists with, if it isn't a causative factor in, literacy, slavery, misogynism, homophobia, militarism; what we now call fundamentalist trends in religion and society. So, as I understand it, what we may be going through right now is a last paroxysm of patriarchy as it fades from the human scene, at least as a controlling factor. Shlain also posits that a matriarchal worlk predated the patriarchal, and that we may now be in the beginning stages of a reconciliation of the two. Wouldn't that be nice!



Isn't it bizarre, really, that gay is the hottest of hot buttons for fundamentalists, of any the Bookish People variations? One can see how it might be on the list of unmentionables for some people, but when it causes such fury I wonder what's really behind it... Shlain says that to the left (patriarchal, verbal) hemisphere of the brain, the right (feminine, graphic, wholistic) is a dark and scary unknown, and must be controlled. "The husband is the head of the household!" Homosexuality poses a threat to the patriarchalists because it represents a mixing, or blending, of the two opposites. Fear of the unknown: I'm reminded of a case in Texas where businesses wanted to forbid their workers from speaking Spanish at the workplace. What might they be saying that is so threatening?



Some shamen of the underworld - some of whom are known as Scientists - have taken us on a tour of the underworld, with all of the marvelous inventions one can find there now at our hands. Now, we find that they cannot take us out - and indeed have forgotten that this is where we are. Hell? How do we get out? Do we have to go crazy?

William S. Burroughs tells the story of a couple of tribes in the Amazon that were always fightin, carrying on, kidnapping each others' women, and so forth. The authorities in Sao Paolo or wherever were concerned and sent some anthropologists in there to study the situation and see what could be done about it. They came back with this opinion: the tribes should be left alone to their ways, because, "they have nothing better to do."



Pictures of fighting today in Fallujah reminded me of this poignant story; it's an addition to the long list of humanity's great triumphs.



I'm sure everyone fighting is convinced of the rectitude and glory of the mission, and many others are watching from the sidelines with great horror, joy, or somehow most applicable to all of us, fascination. We are fascinated with the horror - it's just the way we're built. The galactic anthropologists, looking down from their UFO, sigh and take notes.



We could so easily make the world work for everyone. But we keep on fighting.

Claude Shannon (link below) said that information = unpredictability. and yet, in another context, we say that noise is the opposite of signal. what's that about? I think one of the problems is that information is usually given an independence from context - it just is, in some kind of measurable quantity, apart from context. this may not be so - at least regarding something like a painting, which is, after all, communication. there's a signal there, right? but transactional nature of communication is what I find fascinating. the pitch (as in softball, not sales, but maybe so, eh) in the form of a painting - colored pigments on cloth. this gets hung on a wall. there it sits. Is that information? IMO, not until someone hears that tree fall over. takes the pitch and returns. when the viewer sees that painting, they are seeing no more than pigments on cloth - then they put in an amazing amount of work, of reconstructing a message out of what could be noise to anyone else. Apparent detail is what clued me to this: step away from the painting, see mountains, hills, see the details on the side of the house. step closer, and it's just random brush strokes! Where did the detail, ie information, come from? I didn't put it there - I just put pigment on cloth! The viewer put it there. Looks like I might have to lower my prices, cut some kind of deal with previous buyers of my now-acknowledged-to-be unfinished works!



And we're not even getting the question of meaning, which relies even more heavily on the creative contruction power of the individual's perception.

I was listening to a review of The Incredibles - a new Pixar movie - and after a few moments of dialog, I thought, all you need is the premise for a movie like this, and it writes itself. It's so predictable. And then I remembered the movie I saw a few days ago- I Heart Huckabees - which was the opposite - completely unpredictable. And Stephen Wofram's idea of computational irreducibility came to mind - that's the idea that some scientific models can be reduced to a simple formula, and the outcome is certain. There is another way to get at modeling, and that is simulation. Well, it turns out that there are a lot of simulations that are unpredictable - the only way to get an answer is to run them, and there's no knowing, in at least some cases, whether when the thing is finished, or if indeed it can ever finish. This is really a piss-poor run down of this idea. Go read Wolfram - or visit the link. anyway, I think the point is that some works of art (there I go again using that word) are unpredictable, lead you on a journey that you don't know the end of. Some, like Tolkien, and other tales, you enjoy even though you know where you're going. Others are unpredictable, like Being John Malkovich, but without content. There's something in there I'll try to get at more clearly, but gotta go now.

working on a big sale - postcard coming out soon. keep watching this space!

Dollar Hegemony



some people say we invaded Iraq for a secret reason: that Saddam Hussein was going to start selling oil denominated in Euros and not dollars. Hmm. Why would that be such a big concern?



check these out:



http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DD11Dj01.html

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA410A.html

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/after/2003/0426hegemony.htm

eye candy open studio day.



c'mon down

back home in pittsfield.







walking to my favorite cafe







moving sale, open studio, paintings to do.

a few more silver city photos:







a row of gallery/studios - if I'm lucky I might get one of those. coffee shop on the left. great sky, eh?







nice little park I came across in my walk. fell asleep. pretty green here - not desert like.







my little hotel room - old style, sink and shower right in the room. nice quiet, luscious sunday afternoon sun



and my room, corner room.







back to Massachusetts in a couple of days. bye bye new mexico!

same pass I stopped at in 1971 in my turquoise dodge pickup, on the way back from tucson to indy in my first big road trip.. truth or consequences in the distance...







new mexico sure is beautiful... cottonwoods turning yellow

On the Age of Corruption story line - I thought of a story in an old magazine - maybe Shambhala Sun from a few years back - about Thomas Merton's last and only trip to Asia, where he died from electrocution - an electric fan or some such thing. On that trip he met the young Chogyam Trungpa, as I remember reading it, and there they discussed the falling-apart of the monastic traditions, both Buddhist and Christian. Their conclusion was that it was, now, "every monk for himself." Not "for himself" in the sense of looking exclusively for his or her own interests, but more on his own, without a monastic structure within which to work. I think this correlates with my feelings about what's going on in the larger world: the institutions which we have relied upon are failing us badly. And now, and to an increasing degree most likely, we're on our own, and will have to form our own institutions and groups and partners from the ground up. Not a bad thing. Not easy, but not bad.

For some reason this morning I remembered a story I read a few years back about computer generated art. An AI program given some different algorithms to work with was connected up to a plotter and the results printed out. I wish I could remember more about it � it had a cute name like Alf � but I remember it in the context of trying to decide what someone means when they say that art is �good.� Or �bad.� This has never made any sense to me. I�m more in agreement with Duke Ellington when he said about music, �If it sounds good, it is good.� It�s all � in my opinion � based on the experiencer�s experience. Ah. But this brings up other thoughts. This morning I was walking � very early � in the nearly deserted morning streets of Tucson. And walking by a thick yellowish green tree, I heard the most beautiful birdsongs I�ve heard in a very long time. Ah, yes: beautiful. Were the birds trying to make art? One thinks not. Was God � or someone working the same line under a different name � trying to make art? Dubious. Waling further on: is that particular portion of that old wall crazed and cracked in such a manner �art� because it looks so beautiful to me? What makes a good sunset, for that matter, as opposed to a bad one? Or a cup of coffee? Difficult to escape the notion that it�s all personal. I oughta re-read that Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, since he covered this ground with regard to the concept of Quality. I don�t recall that he came to any earth-shattering conclusions. Or any conclusion. But it�s all wordplay, I�d say�the world is so much bigger than our linguistic version of it, and so-called paradoxes are bound to occur within the bounds of a linguistic setup. I say so-called, since I�m skeptical that they can exist �in reality.� And that no great conclusions as to what �quality� �is� are possible.



But if truth�s beauty and beauty�s truth, I�m gonna get confused, and misled (taking you along with me, if you�re not careful) into the thickets of semantics and words, which is just a small neighborhood (and not a well-respected one) in the vast city of knowledge and understanding, most of which is, if you hadn�t heard this already, entirely outside the verbal realm.



In this connection I must reveal my Buddhist leanings by remembering what one sage said, to my own and others� dismay: to an awake person, food is the same as shit. Ah. So our seeing this part of the world as good, or beautiful, and that part as bad or ugly, is a result of our not being awake? This is particularly galling to a practicing artist, because if it�s true, then the profession of art is a just a way of keeping otherwise unemployable persons in green and off the street.



In the realm of art, and without even getting near to that Zen stuff, one can confidently assert that at least 50% of the art transaction (the transaction being the creation of the art combined with its appreciation by a viewer) is on the side of the person looking at (or hearing or reading or sipping it). By this I mean, one person�s good cup of coffee is another�s undrinkable dark-roast disaster. So in the case of the computer-generated art, there seems to be, as in the case of a beautifully flattened beer can glittering in the morning sun, the transaction seems to be almost completely in the eyes, in the hands, of the viewer, if we take the programmer out of the equation, which he or she would probably not appreciate. To them, the program itself is a work of art. I actually think �art� is one of those words that we should ruthlessly eliminate.

on the road from Tucson to Silver City. photo doesn't do justice to the vast panorama. you can see forever out here. Open sky. I love the feeling. Now I'm in Silver City, an old mining town about the same size and of the same flavor as Grass Valley CA, where I lived for about 10 years. But Silver City is away... away from most everything. The two closest big cities are in two different states - Texas and Arizona. It's a lovely town, and I'm thinking about spending the winter here and working on Why I Paint. The light here is something else. Especially contrasted with New England..

The Age of Corruption. We're in it, eh?



Church, state, business, even, for God's sake, sports! Always been here, of course, but I'd say we're in a particularly acute effloressence of it right now.



Ah, but maybe we might be able to get back to a certain kind of golden age of yore - even if it just means not being terrified all the time, and that corruption isn't quite SO BAD. Sorry - I don't think it works that way. Where we're going no one's been before. I'm talking about system breakdown. Even in the mundane sense of running out of money, which our social systems are certainly going to do, similarly to Argentina, most likely, even in that sense things will breakdown, and what are we going to do about it? What we will do if the breakdown is even worse?



Of course, this might be all wrong and nothing bad will happen. Bet on it? Hmm.



But what if it's right - might as well think about it, and what to do. Prudent, not alarmist.



I heard old Bucky Fuller give a talk once, he said that if the ERA didn't pass it would be a signal to Galactic Intelligence that Earth didn't deserve to survive, and probably wouldn't. Further on in a litany of corruption (and how innocent we were back in the eighties...) someone asked plaintively, "What can we do?"



Fuller's answer was short: "Live with integrity. That is all that 's necessary and sufficient."



There's also that Golden Rule thing. And that story about a king asking a crowd of religious types if they could explain their religion while standing on one foot. That smart ass Rabbi did so, and said, "Don't treat others the way you don't want to be treated. All else is commentary." I'm sure he said it with more grace than I just did, but he did it succinctly and fast, cause his balance wasn't that great. But in a way, if you live like that, it might almost guarantee integrity.



That might help, but it's important to find a reason to do something even if it's not going to help.



I heard on the radio a couple of days ago an author talking about his book. In it he recounts the story of a judge at the Hague who goes to the Vermeer museum after a hard day dealing with war crimes and psychopaths. The author then mentions that when Vermeer was painting, Europe was in the last part of the Thirty-Years War, a time when much of Europe was reduced to cannabilism, and was totally ravaged. I think the weather was bad, too. But even in a time like that, Vermeer was able to see and reproduce things of such beauty. And it was important to do so. So I guess for starters we could say Don't Do Bad to Others, and Appreciate the Beauty that's all Around.

Cats as follows:

Josephine is a Russian Princess kitty who escaped the terrors of the revolution and all that followed. Sharkie - the black one sleeping�foolishly!� next to the back door, and she came together as best friends at the Turtle House, that green thing I've painted so very many times. Josephine got a weed thing in her eye and it got infected and she lost the eye. She's not wearing her patch in this picture. She and Sharkie had to split up. Sharkie moved on to a house where he's allowed to sit by the fire, inside, and Josephine lives in a nice apartment in Sacramento now. Oh the lives we see!!







I got an MRI of the orbits yesterday. Fell asleep in the tube they stick you in while all the machinery bangs away like Flann O'Brien's mad Professor DeSelby next door. One of my eyes is sticking out too far, so they gotta see what the deal is. I love the MRI images - they act as a way to get a different picture of the bodies we inhabit. That is, we have a self-image of our bodies, but it has very little to do with the actual physical dimensions, much less the biochemical micro realities going on all the time. By that I mean, we don't really have any sense of the oxygen transfer going on in our blood and lungs all the time, but it's as real as a beesting - we don't really have a good sense of these bodies, so the MRI is just a reminder of what these things REALLY look like. I'll post it if I get a chance to scan the film.

Comments are now activated. also, I gotta pic.

I'm doing the 6-month web site redo - putting up a lot of new stuff, and even more older work that may never have seen the light of day. It'll take a few more days, with photography and layout.



more soon!

doug truth featured in this week's valley advocate: Valley Advocate: Chiplifters Suck

Another fan of Truth.

Hello Rex!

hello world