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.