R.I.P., Helen. Thanks for everything.

So there's nothing wrong with my brain, they say. I know they're hiding something from me. Looking at my complete CAT scan, it seemed impossible that the thing - the brain, that is - could be functioning at all. But the good doctor said that there was no problem there... But headaches, weakness, loss of concentration: what else could it be but a brain tumor?

Anyway, I'm feeling better, and about to move into a new apartment/studio, so I can stay home and work all the time. yeah, baby; no driving, moving the car, etc. this winter.

Looking for progress on Death As A Salesman, and other writing/painting projects like What I Did Today....

Maybe I'll even be up for doing more writing here...

I did some drawings of the old railroad station here in Pittsfield for an Hector on Stilts CD cover, and here's what just arrived:



Those are my lamp poles and if you buy the CD and look closely you'll see Jeb and Clayton standing next to the phone booth near the old station. Legendary Storefront Artist Project (and much more)graphics Master Mark Tomasi did the layout and color - I think it's splendid!

back from california. here's an old friend of mine, menlo mcfarlane with a couple of new friends from Mexico.


We were able to visit. Menlo started the Black Valley Performance gang and art colab in Grass Valley CA. Here's some pix of a few of our old posters.

Storm a comin'. Had to wonder what might be hiding behind that gigantic lense-shaped cloud.

Lotta lightning, buckets of rain, wind so that I had to nail everything down in the semi-outdoors studio. lots of fun!

sitting the epic cafe now, about to start working again on Death As A Salesman - the performance piece I've urged my twin sister dorothy to perform. I'll do the writing and stay home and do phone interviews only.

Here are some titles of songs that will be in the show - Here's what you'll hear!

Words Fail Me
All Too Soon
I Dreamed the Dream of the Death of Iven B.
Hungry For Hell
I'll Take the Lobotomy If I Can Keep the TV

and many many more

It goes without saying that these will not be available in any store!

But it will be continuously performed here

if you can find it. Good Luck!


Been hitting some golf balls here - in Tucson, slightly guilt inducing, since one has to ask of the city in general, where does the water come from? I guess we take modern engineering and such so much for granted that such questions - like where does the water come from? Will it run out? - just don't make any sense to people. All that aside, I have to get ready for heavy duty golf death matches with my lawyer P. Rapp. We're contemplating putting together a Storefront Artists Golf League. Interested?

Via Brad Delong and Billmon is some relevant material - here's Jared Diamond at a recent speech, answering a question:

Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree [on Easter Island] justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide."

Here in tucson with record setting heat. Makes things seem kind of quiet.

I'm painting with oils right now - if I tried to use acrylics here they would dry on the brush before I even got close to the canvas. Acrylics eat up brushes too fast even in the best of circumstances.

Much work on "Why I Paint" - a tribute to Joe Brainard's "I Remember".

If you've got any interest in learning about Buddhism, please look into B. Allan Wallace's "Buddhism with an Attitude". Not a great title, but a wonderful introduction to Buddhism in the form of a study of the Mind Training Points.

Jared Diamond is getting lots of coverage lately. Hope it's in time!

Here's evening at the ranch:



that's my painting light in the background left. Thanks Heather! Hope you enjoy your time in Spain!

I'm in Tucson for a month or so. Nice and warm.

Billmon - worth reading.

Old friend of mine, Frederic Christie, has a blog that isn't a blog. He has one of those minds that makes me glad that I can garden and paint and pound rocks together, because in the thinkin' area, I can't keep up. He lives in Davis, CA, my old hangout, and which little town still appears in my paintings more than you would think, since I last lived there in 1990.

Frederic writes about politics and buddhism. check im out.

Met some great artists at the Artshow in Pittsfield last weekend. I have such mixed feelings about the events, but I'm always so glad to have done it. Standing around talking is a lot of work for me. I'm almost deaf and have trouble comprehending things sometimes, and besides, like a lot of artists, I'd just rather be home working. But part of the work is getting out and talking to people, and seeing them enjoy and understand your work, or seeing them dismiss or dislike it. When they understand your work in ways that you don't, that's even better. When and if they dislike it, it's an opportunity to practice not being so attached to your own opinion of your work, which is very healthy.

Lisa Reinke had some great work, and is also a blogger! Check her site out!

Another Artshow on June 25,26 which I'll be at as well if you missed this one. Also, Art On No - the building where my new studio is - will be having a big open house on Friday June 24 and an Open Studio on June 24, 12-5. 311 North Street!

Watched Crash last weekend on the recommendation of a friend. Note: I give a few things away...

The Buddhists say that anger is the worst emotion - it takes us straightaway and without passing GO to the Hellworld. It is the most destructive to our own well-being (both here and in the hereafter) and the most likely to be passed on to others in an emotional contagion.

This movie shows the contagion, as one person passes their frustration and anger onto another, and on, and on, and then antidote to the contagion, that is, compassion, in ways rarely matched. The acting is superb. Don Cheadle plays a detective who takes it all on himself. There's a Tibetan practice of taking on other's suffering called tonglen, and Cheadle's character does it, doesn't know why, just that it's what he must do.

Crash also goes against the grain by making the characters complex. There are no strictly good characters, nor strictly bad. Y'know, the way life is, tho we're encouraged in so many ways to not know that, and to think of ourselves as good, and others as bad. Crash tricks us, in a way, by setting up some really loathesome characters, and some whom we're likely to think of as good guys. And then we're surprised. And even within the frame of the story, characters are forced to deal with this same situation.

One character experiences what is clearly enlightenment; he tries to murder someone, and when his attempt fails, he sees it all. The madness drove him right out through the top. "It's all OK," he says, over and over. That's what I think we don't realize. "It's all OK."

I'm troubled by thoughts of another kind of crash. But I can see the benefits in this way. We're insane; maybe it will take us right out through the top. One of my favorite Chogyam Trungpa books is Transcending Madness. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Just saw this on Slashdot. Some Japanese scientists are aiming to be the 1st to make a hole through the Earth's crust and get to the mantle. They are hoping to use this research to possibly discover life down there, better understand undersea earthquakes, and uncover records of climate change.

This is a pretty cool prospect to me. I hope that the team gets their "Chikyu" (Japanese for Earth) drill down there. I doubt this will be an adventure of Verneian proportions, but it is nice to see that there is a frontier on Earth that still hasn't been conquered by man.

"Humans have brought back lunar rocks to understand the universe, yet we have never reached the mantle which accounts for most of earth."

In a recent post by Kevin Drum - in which he listed 5 books that he hadn't been able to finish - many of the commenters mentioned Gravity's Rainbow as something they couldn't finish, a doorstop, impossible to read, etc.
I recently ran across a copy of Bookforum that featured a bunch of writers' take on Pynchon, lo these many years after he shook everything up with Gravity's Rainbow. Reading their comments, I was reminded how shattered I was by reading the book. It, more than any other book I ever read with the possible exception of Time Out of Joint by PK Dick, actually changed my brain. I mean, it was like LSD in the sense that "you'd never be the way you were before." You couldn't go back, you were changed forever.

I was so taken by it that I built rockets - here's a bad foto of my 2-stage V2 rocket - painted black - my schwartzraketen - fired over the houses of Anchorage AK in the mid 70s. A thing of beauty. No one else was ever the same, either.

Somewhere along the line I read recently - again - of Stanley Milgram's work on authority and conscience. If you're not familiar with it, please look it up. Briefly, he showed that most people will cause harm to others if they're ordered to by an authority. That's most. Don't know if anyone has used this in connection with torture and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it certainly looks germane. People will do things that their conscience tells them they shouldn't if someone who appears to be an authority tells them to. It really seems to be beyond belief, and yet study after study confirms the results. It says a lot about who we humans are. Or what.

One lesson? Pick your authority wisely, or not at all. Douglass Truth -- the original, I'm just a low-level iteration -- proved to me once and for all that there are no authorities. Something shocking and frightening to almost everyone when they first learn it. If you find yourself in need of an authority, just concentrate your mind on Douglass Truth's sublime equanimity, as shown below. He won't mind - he won't even notice! And you'll learn, eventually, that you can only trust yourself.

Also via The Revealer, a fantastic piece on Sol Star, the Jewish "I've been called worse by better" store-owner on Deadwood, my favorite show.

From The Revealer a good piece by Jeff Sharlet on a NYT puff-piece on Rick Santorum. How can reporting in major media be so bad?

I just read an article in the New Yorker about meth, internet, sex, and death in the gay community. Not good news. Put it on the shelf, now about to break, with the other tomes about oodles and oodles of unnecessary suffering and death. The article left me wondering why people are so self-destructive, and in this regard gays are no different than anyone else, with the exception of certain style issues, as one might expect. But the article left me feeling something else. Something left out. We talk about everything up to the moment of death, and then the curtain is pulled, and it is no longer polite to talk about it. Unless someone brings up infantile notions of heaven and hell. What happens when we die? Does anyone know? Is it important?

Our culture has this one great blind spot that occludes all others: our unwillingness to face death, and our reluctance to learn about How To Die, or to even know that there might be such knowledge. We joke about it all the time, but when the coffin door slams down, we may wish we'd learned a little more about it when we could have. In the meantime, here on the surface of our beloved little mudball, we're all driven completely crazy by this lack of basic self-knowledge, by this tremendous occlusion, this vast river we call Denial. And it is this, I think, that paradoxically allows us to be so violent, so ready to inflict death upon others.



Who - or what - is this guy; does he, by any chance, look familiar?

I started advertising on America Blog - the ad will show up sometime in the next few days. Some blogs are getting incredible numbers of readers, along with the ad rates that go with it. If I were in the newspaper business I'd be reading Dan Gilmore and trying to figure out a new strategy...

Had a nice conversation with Paul yesterday about seeing buying and selling as a potentially spiritual transaction. Dangerous area, but anything that can be used or viewed in a spiritual context is equally able to be used in a materialistic fashion...
There's a Zen proverb - the teacher exhorting his students to be "as white doves on snow..." that is, fit in, or at least appear to do so.

So how would you hide in a totally commercial society?

nice listening - sort of like Blade Runner crossed with Twin Peaks. Sara Ayers. Reminded me of the space change certain music can make... like the time I walked around Taipei on a Friday night, listening to Mozart's Requiem on a Walkman...

Events of the day remind me too often of Atlas Shrugged. I think a lot of writers are precogs - whether they know it or not - and I think Ayn Rand was definitely channeling a future. She just got a few of the flavors wrong, is all, cause of her background in Russia... But her picture of the United States failing is remarkably similar to what I see going on all around. The most salient thing is the appointment of people based on ideology and not competence and experience. That same cluelessness to how things actually work. One of the bad guys in A.S. is irritated when he can't get grapefruit juice cause the trains don't work cause all the competent people have left... but now things fail not because they decided to go on strike, that's not in their nature, but because they're forced out by ideologues. The so-called reconstruction of Iraq is a perfect example. There's a quote somewhere - I think it's Feith - telling someone he's not qualified for a job in the reconstruction cause he speaks Arabic. uh huh. Sounds like Ellsworth Toohey (tho I think I got the wrong book there) is at work. But here in our world it's not stinkin liberals who've done all this with their looney altruism, it's so-called conservatives (who aren't conservative at all, read Eisenhower, Goldwater, any o those real dudes) of the day who just assume that things will continue to work even with fools running... reliable, ideologically sound fools.

If James Kunstler is right, then we'll be needing all the help we can get, but it might be all gone. But locked out, not on strike.

I hope William Kunstler ain't right - and I'm getting more and more hopeful all the time.

opening and reception last night for me, Paul Graubard, and Robert Andrew Parker at the Outsiders Art Gallery in Cornwall Bridge, CT



here's Paul Graubard with some of his work:



here's one of Robert Andrew Parker's works looking at mine:

I'm working on a new performance/book piece called Death As A Salesman. Our civilization (so-called) is based on business, so Mr. or Mrs. Death will most likely appear to us and work with us in the form of a Salesman. What could be more appropriate?

Civilization is a "business model". And that business model doesn't take into account our own personal deaths. It takes into account death as an insurance issue, or a demographic or military number, but not at all the issues that face each of us in our own personal end time. And that's no accident; if we were more aware of our own mortality and the real - most definitely real, really really real - outcomes that we could modify by our own behavior, we wouldn't act as our business culture needs us to, i.e. thoughtlessly. I think that's not very clear, but that's why I need a performance and/or a book to present it; I can't do a haiku on why facing our death is important. The most important.

BTW, Dorothy will be doing the actual performance. I am much too shy.

watermelon art - via boingboing

I saw Orson Welles's F Is for Fake last night. Can't recommend it highly enough. Nothing like it out there. Welles's voice is like really good booze. Trickery, trickery. Kind of highbrow take on what Philip K. Dick spent his whole life exploring: what is real, and how do we know? In Dick's Man in the High Castle, an antique forger ponders: what makes an antique real and collectible? Subtle wa or is it in our imagination? It's a special case version of the entire question of communication, really: how much of what is communicated out there and real, and how much do we construct? Anyway, watch the movie. Great fun. Netflix has it.

The original version of I Am A Dog is being published by Boleaf Books - should be back from printer this week. Update: is back from printer. click the link to buy.

Thanks to Lance Mannion for the nice mention in his blog. I got connected to Lance via James Wolcott who is the most mellifluously wonderful writer since, well, Flann O'Brien, whose name I mention probably because I was reading a bit of The Third Policeman this morning while having my forbidden coffee at the Lenox Coffee shop where I go because I'm less likely to be seen there by someone I know... but being spotted there is happening more and more, and the staff is increasingly insolent (what did I ever do to them?) so who knows? But the coffee is good, so I'll probably continue to put up with yakking with friends and impertinent staff...

Back to Lance - he writes about movies sometimes, and I love movies, so there you go.

I haven't been writing much due to health problems - but they've gotten better and I'm getting used to them - one or the other or both - so I want to get back to it.

And thanks to Paul for the items. I read a piece in the New Yorker yesterday about global warming. Combine that with thoughts from Jared Diamond's new book, and you get a nice pic of our so-called civilization whistling along to its own destruction. I get wrought up by such thoughts - anxiety is my middle name - and I try to get the big picture to calm down: many lives, many worlds. It's all happened before and will without end. We'll always be here. We hope getting it better each time. For the sake of the Absolute. Please buy one of my paintings before it's too late.

Hello folks, interesting things going on in Antarctica-related news...
The oldest ice ever sampled has been taken by Heinz Miller and crew, of Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Oceanographic Rearch AWI. The ice, which is about 900,000 years old will be used to map out the history of the world's climate. Drilling was ceased soon after as the drill was approaching a slush-zone, generated by heat from the Earth's mantle.

70 South Antartic News post on this topic.

Rad. I want to go to Antarctica.
More Antarctica news in the following days.
-Paul

This sounds pretty interesting...a garden is opening up in the UK featuring poisonous and psychotropic plants from around the world. It seems like the goal is to educate people about the fact that plants are so powerful, and that many of the worlds drugs and chemicals come from the plant kingdom. Wish we could have something like this in the U.S.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tyne/4303661.stm

here's the poorman at his best



and it's Richard Linklater, not Art.

two great links from boingboing:



young girl prevented from sketching in a museum because the matisse and picassos and what not are COPYRIGHTED.



we've forgotten that the term copyright originally meant "the right to copy" a work. anyway, for how long has it been a practice of artists young and old to copy works in a museum? this is insane. THEY (you know who I mean) want to control everything!



and... another movie based on a Philip K. Dick work - A Scanner Darkly, directed by Art Linklater (Waking Life):



blog on the new movie



images from the movie



PKD is one of my favorite authors. I remember the feeling I had when I read my first (Time Out of Joint) - I ran around in circles in the kitchen at Las Tusas... quoting... !

Hello



back on North Street... plans for New Mexico just didn't work out, for reasons, if there are any, that aren't clear to me now. My Eight Ball is still in storage, so I'm flying blind.



I've got a new studio, at 311 North Street, #25 - still in fixup phase, but will be workable soon.



I'm getting excited about doing some animation, starting with the I am a dog story line and cast of characters. then perhaps doing What I Did Today, Why I Paint, and other projects.



Please read the poorman. He's got it right. We've got to stop the torture. It feels like we're spiraling down into the Hell Realms. Our Prison Nation (we've got the highest incarceration rate of any society anywhere anytime) is now the nation that seems to think torture is not so bad, or at least not as interesting as whatever is on TV right now...



snow on the ground, and I can't help thinking about those saguaro cacti