Art

As I write this, I am 61 years old; my father taught high school English and was a poet; my mother taught middle school Art and is an artist. I was alone on a ferry between Amsterdam and London for my 17th birthday; pop had picked up a Volkswagen van on his way to Greece with his new wife and her child where he wrote poetry during a sabbatical year. I was on a vision quest and was guided into sculpting by a kindly pottery teacher who also happened to be a Professor of art at the University in Brighton. Vision quest is shorthand for dissipated youth, or "Do your thing" which at that time was more than a commercial on MTV. That I didn’t die with a needle in my arm is due largely to the kind encouragement of that professor. I share this not in false intimacy with you, or to do 12-step on your dime, but so you may sense the scope of commitment I feel toward an activity which goes back to the dawn of our collective history - Art. The possibility that I may be living amongst the last artist/shamans is an irony that cowers from even my vivid imagination however addlepated with age or blunted by fear that once vivid imagination may have become.

Mark Rothko was a color field painter whose demand became stratospheric after his suicide. He was betrayed by fellow artist, friend and executor of the estate Theodore Stamos an instructor at the Art Students League of NYC where I attended some 5 years after the death of Rothko. His betrayal by a friend for profit was background noise to the saintly influence of my friend and mentor Jose De Creeft - a 90 year old Spaniard. There is a photo of him and our class at a Christmas party at the League; he had placed his hand on my head where I had knelt for the group photo. He was always doing funny shit like that. For example, he showed me a painting of him greated by an admirer depicting herself with an arm around his shoulder; in the version he shared with me; he'd painted over her as an elephant with its trunk around his shoulder; in another fanciful piece he'd modeled a rat upright grasping a nut to its cheeks in a cake pan full of nuts and bolts. I am heir to this irreverence which is all that constitutes my bonafides as artist, more so than the 1,000’s of studio hours; erudite lectures or museum wandering which comprise part of the very real and necessary training required to call oneself “artist,” I have never faired well calling myself an artist; it was decades before I’d whisper that word out loud, so strong was my aversion to the  dilettantes I have watched occupy the high ground of creative commerce.

Lucky me - my training became a battle not much different than the one for the soul of Charlie Sheen in the movie “Platoon.” My soul dangled for decades between the heinous betrayal of Mark Rothko and the sacred - the same conflict between time and product over which Michelangelo and Pope Pious struggled; the Pope, according to Vasari, dispatched the political apparatus of the time to retrieve the renegade Michelangelo from his native Florence over a disagreement about what exactly the artist should turn his hand to next. Nor was it as cut and dry as today’s purely venal criteria of successful industrial artists, (however the fuck that is determined), for Michelangelo was a reverential soul believing deeply in the sanctity of his work - today sacred art is the almighty buck; this sad fact plays out all up and down the line, except that today’s budding “creatives” are used as clickbait fisherman with pre and post consumer filters for targeted demographics creating content that is then pushed and prompted into viral celebrity. "Liked" keystrokes are harvested as trending tastes, making some rich fuck a little richer and better able to leverage whatever the puppeteers of the gladiator "art wars" wish to serve up as top tier culture - talk about your hamster on a treadmill.

Art has been hijacked by the profane precisely at that point in our odd human history when a mystical vision for that successful existential hunt which might guide humanity through the horrific danger we face as a species. Nearly every contemporary artist I know today is fully and completely absorbed by the financial reality and need for celebrity status and commensurate business model which provides excess inventory; outsider cache and/or wall space in the “big house” - papa museum. Many artists are diverted from the sacred to commercial validation by the tempting influence of the corporate media. Hypocrite that i am, i too proffer this content to you, an unknown reader, scrapping for “keystrokes” or other viral bounty that might translate into pennies with with which to continue my quixotic petition into that same marketplace - another traitor in the mix. My alma mater, "The Art Students League of NYC” has been subsumed by a bitter internecine squabble over a proposed overhanging shard of "capital" from the newly adjacent highest skyscraper in NYC. This project was shoehorned into the rapidly gentrifying Manhattan and is a perfect metaphor for struggle of our age - human being vs corporation.

A more perfect example of the rich and their role in art training today could not be written into the annals of history regardless of scholarship or arcane grasp of the classics. For some $25 million the developer for the adjacent skyscraper bought the airspace over the League to hang a cantilevered outcropping of penthouses into perpetuity, or until they collapse onto the studios below.  These penthouses provide a clear view of Central Park making them priceless, but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heritage four story art school in midtown Manhattan; understand that the origins of the Art Students League were purely democratic, wherein much like the origin of universities in the middle ages, students intent on organizing and seizing control of their own education, rejected academy doctrines and formed their own “league.” Students at the league when I attended were expected to be responsible for the nature and direction of their own studies, while instructors were hired to provide insights from actual working artists - a proletariate art school of worker artists. Had the league retained this orientation for training hard charging independent creative souls, rather than negotiating away paltry “airspace” rights for a lousy $25 million, the board of control could have sold the entire existing lot for 100s of times more dollars, then relocated the school to a much larger compound and invested that money toward the original mission of art training rather than vetting art harlequins to dance at the dissolution of the human species - today's modern art "scene."

jts 11/21/2014

http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com 

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved 

∞

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post apocalyptic living

The idea that there will be some demarcation for the collapse of empire is ludicrous, and I’m not referring to the celebrity of the same name. Much of the thinking and emphasis by our wiser counselors today focuses on some timeframe or order of events - this happens before this .  . The reality is we are more like a large ocean going vessel who came at the dock too hard and as a result will cause much damage to the dock and ship, or if your vision is linear, we can listen to our bard Bob Dylan . “ . I think when my back was turned the whole world behind me burned . “ . However you are able to fix in your mind the image of an irretrievable past against an indifferent future you’ll be on your way to preparing your gene pool as possible survivors of the species, if there be any. Dire you say, no actually you say - the disintegration of all human convention into a hollow cutout can be described by the mechanical “thank you” from any harried retail worker; the fake air of authority from that employed bureaucrat declining your loan application or appreciating your time for making the job application. The retail worker is not thanking you anymore than the bureaucrat has any remorse for stepping in front of your ambition. Both are clinging to a portioned out illusion no different than the the stories of heroism in defense of a sacred religion where no congregation on the planet is not without stories of betrayal and excess at the hands of its clerics - not one.

In our world we are no longer given the courtesy of being assured you’re fucked. In the olden days a tyrant would flat out say - you’re a slave, and you are not. Today’s leadership is dodgy and covert having discovered people want to believe the best even at the expense of food, air, water and wellbeing. As long as there is a plausible explanation or identifiable culprit for the momentary lapse - we will not be unlike the “Titanic” merrily humming along until the vessel’s momentum slowly crushes the hull of the ship rendering it useless and destroying that part of the landing which gave purpose to the ship. The degree and extent of destruction is all that is being discussed now because the laws of physics don’t care what you think, feel or believe. The process now becomes one of salvage; which in turn becomes an issue of priority. For example, the mother on the dock with her baby in her arms knows in her heart she and the child are not safe where they are standing. Just like that moment on a bicycle when the physics of falling overcome the physics of riding there is no intellectual consideration, one tucks and rolls with bodies and objects broken relative to the instincts of those involved. In the case of the mother, she runs for higher ground or not.

It is this time for our incinerating planet; some, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out disproportionately represented by the indigenous 1st nation people are instinctively preparing for the collision by focusing on where the planet is showing the greatest stress, water, air and food. Whether this leadership and foresight will mitigate enough of the collision to aid in salvaging the contents of our colliding vessel or leave enough of the dock intact to help in the process of building another ship only time will tell. Though as with all catastrophic events or as Bruce Lee describes the proper pace for boxing, time will slow to a crawl and what happens in an instant will seem like forever. Whether this distortion of time will aid in strategies to ameliorate some of the death and suffering we have begun to enjoy as a way of life is anybody’s guess, but there are many steps that can be taken now, up to and after impact. For one, almost as though g_d in her infinite wisdom provides tools for our salvation equivalent to the potential for destruction. For example at the inception of the Industrial Age humans were treated as farm stock to be worked, fed and clothed no more than was necessary for maintenance. However just as communication improvements were an outgrowth of industrialization and improved technology the close proximity which centralized industrial centers fostered, also created strong inter-community bonds and additional exposure to the world’s stockpile of knowledge.

This gave rise to the illusion that was Marxist thinking - the only thing required for a worker’s paradise was to kill off the ruling class - unfortunately this myopic vision of the human animal evolved as George Orwell opined in “Animal Farm” and one tyrant was supplanted for the next over time. Yet that hopefully informed scenario is not dissimilar to our onrushing Ocean Liner, for as certainly as oppression will be vanquished, our ship shall crash into the “Dock of the Bay.” Like the farm animals in Orwell’s story, we have the technical wherewithal to achieve extraordinary change. Regardless of the pig’s narrow vision and subsequent defeat we have between now and impact, both collectively and individually; not only the knowhow to soften the impact but the capability to hit the ground running. Unless we are to repeat the errors of all previous revolutions this massive undertaking cannot be on our own behalf but on behalf of the human unborn 2, 3, 4 or more generations hence, if we are that lucky. If we can take our cues from the more intuitive 1st nation members of the world body, luck has has a place in human history - look at Bill Gates for example, bought Quick and Dirty Disc Operating System (Q-Dos) for a song and then sweated bullets until IBM sold the farm distracted by its manic greed for absolute control over hardware with absolutely no clue what software even meant - now Billy will be the world’s first trillionaire and IBM has become a faded “hasbeen” like the Republican Party and it lilywhite adherents.

Unfortunately the chimera of 0s and 1s that constitute that remarkably ethereal fortune are little different than the hash marks on the first clocks when they could make a second hand sweep - of little import other than a gross approximation for concept of time from which we spring from and back into completely unaffected by war, money, fame or sorrow. The pool of human wisdom as distinguished from the chaff of today’s information gluttons should be ruggedized, standardized and decentralized such that fire, flood and famine in any one location will not impair the ability to immediately redistribute itself. The ecosphere itself must gain legal protections as Bolivia has begun by attributing legal rights to mother earth herself. Communities for self-sufficiency will needs be the standard organization as the empty product of the corporate overlords becomes increasingly desperate in its attempts to retain market share, for once the ruse of the infinite growth paradigm becomes crystal clear for its role in the exhaustion of the world’s resources politically, intellectually and economically, as Edward Colver has said there will not be walls high enough behind which the ruling class may hide. Fury cannot be the barrel of this assault; we do not have that margin. Socrates said,”the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” For those amongst you who’d shrug off Socrates , I say to you “oh well.”

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greed

Courtesy of native-languages.org :

"Wašicun - wašin icu" (the white man, takes all the fat.) Wordplay is common in the Sioux languages.

While growing up, my family had 6: 3 boys and a tough-as-nails sister; both parents were “depression era babies,” so my friend Lyles’ expression “no blood, no foul” could well describe the otherwise genteel mealtime table my mother aspired to. The expression “slow down, nobody’s gonna take it away from you” seems quaint in the days we are living with talking heads formulating remarkable insights about when we can expect the “water wars” to commence and where. Even as I struggle to express how astonished I am that my nation is ranked second to last for childhood poverty in developed nations, my mind falters at how something so utterly unnecessary as poverty could exist in a world capable of repeatedly landing our species on other worlds, but cannot restrain a confused hunger for too much? The scale of grasping sadly now far exceeds any parallel to appetite or really any human image save that of the truly deranged. The blind pursuit of “more” has taken on other worldly aspects which with the resources available to such extreme power, real or perceived is transforming what had once been a largely humane planet into a pustulated reflection of its former self.

Not that the cultural compass of our lauded poets and artists hasn’t at times complicated matters with potent images of riches, power and splendor rewarded for heroic efforts against impossible odds. Nor is the unreasoned grasping characterized by greed restricted to wealth and power; I’m 3 times married and when she once again shows me the error of my ways, it’ll be 4. Does this make me greedy as Leonard Cohen sings of needing “ .  . so much to have nothing to touch, I’ve always been greedy that way . . “ ? As an aging fine artist content to dictate the pace and access of my work, I’m guilty of greed and would have been whither way I turned - japing for the art industrialists or as I do, savoring the deeper recesses of our feeble consciousness while trying to fathom what cave artists knew - who defines what is greedy? In the opening line of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell he wrote “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and we’ll never know what he might have said about Bill Gates’s achieving the remarkable feat of owning $1,000,000,000,000 one trillion dollars; back in the day, think 1980’s, the example for any Rockefeller was if you started saving $1,000 a week from the time of Christ you still wouldn’t be as rich - approximately $104 million. To mimic Mr. Gates you’d have to have started saving $1,000 a week better than 19 million years ago or roughly the beginning of the Miocene Epoch. 

The drive to amass more than you can use is unfortunately the flip side to the poet’s coin; and were a 3 headed coin possible, that added face might reflect the ceaseless shoveling of food, or liquor for the alcoholic, or needles for the addict. The arrogance of appetite that drives a human soul to own a brand new Ferrari while mothers protected by plastic trash bags mop up the Ebola Virus is the same contempt for the human spirit which motivates a violently connected multinational corporation (comprised of breathing humans) to reduce regenerative seeds to a single crop for gain, or find a profitable purpose for owning the Ebola Virus. This behavior is a perversion from the original utility for provisioning that drove our species to harness waterways and cultivate food in communities. That cooperation for the greater good has been twisted into the fallacy that we are incomplete, whether that be from an existential vacuum or financial vulnerability. Lao Tzu says the objective of existence is to defeat want, to know satisfaction with what you have and this confuses me, for he also says the 3 greatest treasures are simplicity, patience and compassion. I read of those three treasures and wonder about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s admonition, “moderation in all things, especially moderation.” From which treasures are we to be free of want, “simplicity, patience and compassion” or the filthy lucre the haters dangle out of reach like a carrot on a stick for our modern day horse and carriages. If for some odd reason Lao Tzu was laughing at posterity and advocating we free ourselves from civil restraint, would we be free to unleash our rancor on the heads of our oppressors raining down but again another human revolution and it’s illusion for change except in this revolution it won’t be workers of the world unite, but “Lord of Flies” meets George Orwell.

Is it greedy to demand justice or attack the ruling class with any leverage possible, even logic? I shun any belief that equates punishment with justice, up to and including the traditional drawing and quartering as punishment for endangering a ship and its crew - we are a ship and they the billionaires have put our vessel in great peril. Some number of the 1,467 billionaires on this planet of 7 billion human beings pose the greatest single threat to our survival. They must be brought up on a short leash, as in given a one room walkup with no more to live on than what is paid the local kindergarten teacher. It is what my uncle Dwayne recommended to me as a young thrasher - “if you are jumped by any number of others, you begin with the biggest of the cowards and work your way down,” but Socrates has said “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but in building the new.” To me this says find a way to supplant the illusion of material wealth with an insatiable desire to “make the world a little better than you found it” - Aunt Jane. I have tried with this essay to better understand greed and so help the world. I am no closer to understanding, so if I can’t help myself, how will I help you? What I am doing is what HH the Dalai Lama advocated which is “if you cannot help, at least do no harm.”

When someone or some entity has demonstrated antagonism to your wellbeing, but then experiences a reversal of fortune; it is still misfortunate, for to take pleasure in suffering of any kind is simply self-righteous greed. Until we are able to disconnect from the desire for payback we will be divided and conquered. The mistaken concept of a balance sheet for violence, but not one for the dignity of life and the welfare of all people is a curiosity. Not so much for the stupidity of eye for an eye, but how easily people are diverted from the problem at hand - justice and adequate resources distributed fairly to the greatest number of people. There is no other overarching demand in the world we live in, not spiritual, economic, or political, not even what happens next on Dr. Who. We as a species are about to perish for the sin of having docilely satisfied the perverse demands of a handful, large handful, of amoral sociopaths who by luck and and circumstance have convinced themselves that having more than they know what to do with at the expense of 7 billion other humans beings is scientific confirmation of survival of the fittest, or some such shit. I’m old, older than you Bill Gates, so whenever you are are up for it I’m challenging you to fisticuffs; name the time and place, Queensberry Rules, or no; as many rounds as it takes . Know this Bill, I am not calling you out because I wish you to suffer at my hand, or because I’m mocking your self-serving incompetence, but because one) I say I got more heart than you; two) I’m willing to prove it, 3) Uncle Dwayne said to start with the biggest and work your way down - Uncle Dwayne was a standup guy and I want to help you learn what it is to be standup; be not afraid - I’ll stop when you fall down or say “uncle.”

p.s. does this essay make me greedy ?

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ignorance

We die; nothing is going to change that fact. A description of the unknown quality of that fact has occupied the greatest minds of our world from Cave Painting to String Theory with a vast array of assertions and guarantees made; the one thing that seems to be clear, we are not very comfortable with our ignorance. The dilemma is that much of our existence depends on us knowing something which impairs the incentive for getting comfortable with our ignorance; further complicated by those believing we are ignorant; those who want to make us ignorant, and those who remain willing to share their ignorance. I search for the latter, for they are more fun to be with when exploring the world; I feel safer when others don’t hide things, which is not to be confused with someone making declarations of self-importance - a good sign of a lack of self-awareness. Why for example does someone drive slow in the fast lane? It is common sense to not interfere, but like leaving a shopping cart in the middle of an isle in the market is common sense which it turns out is not all that common. I find there is a wide spectrum for reasons for most lapses in common sense from deliberate to oblivious. Oblivious obstruction is more akin to the physics of an avalanche - it do or it don’t; where a deliberate obstruction has the overtone of cruelty, meanness or spite. 

As a young squire these nuances were lost on me and duly believed sharing logic would remake the world. I modeled behavior as one does coming from a family of teachers - opening doors for ladies, making way for others in a hurry. Not extraordinary gestures, more gallantries made quaint by ruling class doctrine and demands that correlate clocks with time. Still the plan seemed manageable and cost little, but my ignorance did not prepare me for the intransigence of the vulgar nor the subconscious demand for cruelty prompted by the media rainbow maker and its illusion that caboose of the “income inequity train” can actually be caught. At that tender age I was still trying to reconcile the noble fictions of youth with the hypocrisy of the “greatest generation” and its ham fisted assault on the sovereign nation of Viet Nam - a nation the size of Delaware. It seems now in retrospect that the armistice of WWII included surrender by America’s bankers to the Fuhrer’s Chancellors in exchange for instruction manuals for the capture of a democracy - but that’s another essay. We’re trying to find a better understanding of ignorance for the danger it represents to our collective future. Today there are extremely powerful well financed individuals/entities spending great amounts of money cultivating adjustable levels of ignorance for the entire world population. Though it has always been thus, it is much easier to accomplish using the internet and people’s natural inclination to want to know, or believe what they know - still a monkey see monkey do world - plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.

Great sages from Socrates to Lao Tzu have stated knowledge is not external but an internal awareness, not a set of laws to be codified and memorized as with “no child left behind” and its reliance on rote memorization or the outcome based model of “teaching to the test.” Yet if the sages were accurate and it is what we each know to be true in our hearts that is important, what of the deadly consequences of our information/secrecy based economy? We have children mathematicians/metadata analysts claiming the capacity to define the deeper recesses of the human heart based on that person’s keystrokes. And we are putting the noose around our necks with many people taking and  believing the results of the ubiquitous internet personality tests proliferating on interactive but not media screen? People wouldn’t be taking the tests if they had been trained to hear their own hearts; the same truism which says the world may only be understood except by observation and that tentatively - “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” How then to merge the perceptions from the senses with the only knowledge we have any control over - our own hearts and minds. I see monster armies bombing families into submission using my tax dollar. I object strenuously to what I see while begging to be corrected with logic - it changes little, but I feel better. I require greater discipline to manage the feeling of futility which result from leaning into such misery. Like the young swain modeling behavior, I want to believe such havoc can be arrested through concerted open discussion, but I am still ignorant if only more so save one lesson that was tattooed on the inside of my skull after not one but many drunken escapades - the only control I have is over myself, and that not at all when allowed in the company of beautiful women - a clue, they are all beautiful. 

Ignorance is hard to explain and impossible to obscure. In my travels I’ve met those who believe their power is baed on knowledge they have and you don’t, which to my thinking makes them ignorant. There are those who seek knowledge by sharing what they don’t know, Michel Montaigne for example developed the concept of essay, which means to attempt or aim. It may be that our world’s current destructive balance is suspended between these two states knowing and not knowing. Lao Tzu said in effect: if you want to enlighten the world, awaken all the parts of yourself, and if you want to eliminate suffering in the world, eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself; the greatest gift you can give the world is self transformation. Using the logic of Lao Tzu someone wishing to hide the truth can only hide what they believe to be knowledge or information - the con (We can’t tell you what we do with what we know about you from our database, because then you would understand how little we know about what we are doing.) - and I know this is gonna piss off some seekers of truth, but (we can’t make graffiti clear, because then you’d know how lazy we are about learning the long history of human-crafted, universe-provided beauty and the real struggle formulate a finer form.) The seeker of knowledge can be recognized by what s/he doesn’t know, not much different than I feel trying to make this aspect of the process for thinking clear; but it boils done to an engineering argument 30 years ago: Russell P____ who was made physically ill by my to-this-day belief that knowledge is infinite rather than finite.

In the final analysis it may be useful to cogitate on a statement by HH the Dalai Lama: “when you believe everything is someone else’s fault you will suffer a lot.” We all know in our hearts, at least those those blessed with empathy ( 99% of the world’s population ) how important love and nurturing are. The havoc of our world can only be attributed to the sad truth we have not loved enough, and I place myself at the top of that list. Writing 5 essays on the Four Riders of the Apocalypse seems a peculiar way to love or transform oneself for the better, yet like deep a consideration of dying will never alter the inexorable decay life, just the act of staring into the abyss is preferable to any nagging suspicion that maybe 70 virgins is like all the other bribes from the hated Mullah, or where the vindictive Vicar threatened you with Hell being same as when he threatened the secretary her paycheck in exchange for sex. My sense is the abyss and terror of death will be like Leonard Cohen’s “something old, but always new,” or even Bob Dylan’s “greasy trail;” whatever form it takes I feel better for having sought some light of knowledge from my own inside as to why there is suffering in a world with so many human beings that know what it is to love and be loved but aren’t. I am as okay as I can be with that choice; unless you are not loving because you have abdicated your heart to a doctrine or abandoned it to the will of another - be that romantic or religious, for anyone that would demand sovereign over the only gage we as humans have for discerning fact from fiction is suspect, and conversely anyone that asks me to looks as deeply into my heart to know the truth of existence is someone or something I will stand by even give up my life to for no other reason than to be safe for just that instant in the continuum.

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hate

I have wasted more time than i am comfortable admitting immersed in the corrosive vacuum of hate, and i’m not a hater. Why would anybody, given the vast array of choices in this human experience, waste time or focus on hate? I maintain that if we don’t find a way to transmute this venomous emotion into constructive heartfelt hard work we’re fucked - some people will hate me for saying that; not the content of the stated idea, but the use of the word “fuck.” I hate that we can be so easily distracted by inflammatory language, and still people will be more offended that I swore than any expression of hatred I’ve made. Anger, rage, ire come upon you like the ocean slamming to shore or trickled like death from a thousand cuts, but it still arises and dissipates like ebb & flow of tidal waters - hate is different because it must be tended with attention, strategy, and justification. Anger is something one can quiet with patience and kindness - hatred has legs and will travel miles or centuries to satisfy its blood lust, for what . ? At least with anger one can enjoy the visceral primeval gut feeling in a world gone numb, however necessary it may be to overcome, transmute, tame, cajole or abandon: whereas hate is a choice you make to preserve it, cart it, dilute, or assign it. Hatred has no substance of its own. It relies on the good offices of its host to share and propagate otherwise it withers and fades unable to attract the life force which anger is an intrinsic part of.

For this reason hatred has never held a place high in my imagination or given much credence in the world I seek. Its adherents tend to be weak-minded and lazy rarely demonstrating much initiative for ameliorating those pockets of pus which hatred holds close to its cankerous heart. However, hatred is also a covert coward knowing it can only take form as a reflection of the life force available to its close companion anger and is often difficult to tell one from the other. Hatred is the more insidious of the two for the simple reason it must be preserved and passed on to be of any use. I cannot fathom how that might be accomplished given the toxic nature of this emotion. It has taken an act of will for me to write on the subject and that only for its destruction or neutering. Which is not to say I’ve lived free of destructive and quite dark fantasies. Someone once advocated that to have any thought is “okay,” the danger is in acting on that thought. For a time it was liberating to be sanctioned for animal thinking, as much a relief from guilt for contemplating the destruction or harm of/to another. There is zero value and great cost to conduct violence of any kind, which should only be resorted to as Lao Tzu has said “with great sadness“ when faced with no other choice - there’s always another choice .  .  

Lao Tzu formulated his ideas when it was not possible to sit at a console in Nevada and blow up a car and family anywhere in the world. Physical violence today is merely an extension of the shrill hateful demands on what you should feel or think which replaced conversations we used to have. I prefer dialogue but in lieu of that social pleasure I resort to the internet or what’s left of it to advocate love. There is a duality to our predicament, and though the choice to love may seem “lofty,” it is more practical. There are cataclysms cascading into our future needlessly for, from and to hateful ends. The level of violence that sits at the end of a joystick is only an expression of our culture’s immersion in hate, and should not be confused with either strength or power. Never in the history of our planet has war, what is now “chronic war” achieved anything except a path to the next war. The talking heads only seem to disagree whether we should be walking in single file, pell mell or scurrying hurly burly. When a creature attacks, you fight or run; but even the destructive capacity of empire is useless against the onslaught of love, for love describes contentment and satisfaction which are anathema to the consumer pimps and their cloying media whimper about how you need to achieve what they have - with my apologies to pimps everywhere.

Yet even in the instance of a sustained attack or grievous injury you are a dead man if you succumb to hate or believe there is any reason for destruction other than to encourage growth. Socrates had said “the secret to change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old but on building the new.” I used an example of a necrotizing spider bite for provocation in an essay on ire, for fear rage and anger are all close cousins. When I understood this creature, or creatures were able to inflict a wound which would cause my flesh to feed on itself it was not hatred for this or any other thing which compelled me to heal, it was love, of life, the power of healing even love for the poor creature bringing me the lesson likely at the cost of its own life. However, there is no lock on fighting hate: “It is not possible to eradicate evil for every solution breeds a new problem” Sheldon B Kopp’s “Eschatological Laundry List.” For example, statistically the mosquito is the most deadly of all creatures to the human race, a fact about to be reversed once Monsanto and Bedbug Inc agree to terms for its hosting the Ebola Virus. The a steep rise in cost for fresh water has created market demand for a more efficient method to cull the herd.

Yes it is true - hatred, my own. Having hosted a bedbug hive, I struggle to excoriate the pernicious venom of hate infecting my heart; monsatan - well, any entity that would interrupt the regeneration of seeds for profit is lower than a bedbug, and you know how I feel about them. Hate traipses through the landscape in camouflage, dressed up as reason and adhered to through coercion but remains no more than an exclamation mark to Bertrand Russell’s irrefutable point - “love is wise - hatred is foolish.“ Buddha said of hate “a poison one drinks expecting someone else to die. Love is not just the antidote to rancor; love is all we have left to echo any frequency of value into the ether. Our ability to become aware of not just our own mortality but also our role in the potential destruction of our species will only gain “legs” through a determination to care for unborn generations whom we have by sins of commission or omission thus far consigned to lives of depravation and torment unknown to the human experience; besides everyone knows the prettiest girls don’t do haters .  .  

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anger

le réfugié - stolen from a Sacramento porch 1994 - please pray for the souls of those who would so such a thing .  .  

My gift, lesson, treasure .  . here on this material plane seems to be an easy familiarity with the pernicious distraction of anger in all of its guises - fear, aggression, disdain .  . what’s not always clear is whose is whose. For example, when I say “all billionaires are putzes” which dynamic is fulfilled: “the human barometer” as my friend Winston describes me, or the anger magnet I feel like - using a different expression, which came first; the chicken or the egg? It has become achingly clear that expecting “noblesse oblige” from the Porcine Billionaire's Club feasting on today’s world is a recipe for planetary suicide and everybody knows suicidal ideation is dead. Nearly as painful is the certain knowledge that anger in any form is not only futile, but costly, distracting, regressive, etc. So where the fuck is all this rage coming from? Could there be a correlation between excess carbon and excess anger, as though the death throes of animals dying for eons is released as carbon emissions wafting a seething ever-present anger into all levels of our personal and public lives, ? I don’t know . . . 

In a "Wartime Prayer," Paul Simon has sung of his want to "cleanse my soul of rage before I'm through. ." Renouncing rage is a good place to begin, yet by accepting the principle of pacifism as an eternal truth, what then of the legitimate outrage sparked by matters of deadly serious neglect to an exploding human population - climate destruction, fresh water contamination or ocean marine life collapse: all debacles increasingly “managed” with the public relations flick of a wrist, or worse martial law? My blood boils just contemplating the scope of stupidity which has brought us to this point in history, and I am an old lion - not the firebrand of my youth. At the beginning of the month I was bitten by an insect which became a necrotizing wound. The 10 day-old welt is beginning to close with the aid of mesquite honey; my 2 year-old-expired-warranty dryer doesn’t dry because it blew an “overheat” diode (my own fault) - the repairman received $60 for the diagnosis (again deficiency in my own knowledge base). It is difficult to know whether i’m angry, frightened or frustrated; or whether my consternation has currency compared to the misery of any war-ravaged child in Gaza or the world; or any African-American living in Ferguson, MO. Herein lies the rub - if I am not able to find a way to be at peace with my own tribulations - it is a certainty, I will have nothing to contribute to Gaza, Ferguson or the world.

According to one of sensai Lao Tzu’s observations, “Mastering others is strength, mastering yourself is true power.” By this definition, we are awash in strong people who regardless of station or wherewithal have no real real power. It is all i can do to stifle my own petty irritations much less be of service to others or find stable footing when anger - cultural or domestic - is the Lingua Franca used today for quashing fear. My heroes have always been militant pacifists, and the extremity of what is about to befall our species makes the choice of one’s heroes more vital possibly affecting the survival of our species. Deep inside of myself I weep to know how sad that is, yet am warmed to my core by knowing how deep in our species’ is the historical struggle to provide compassion to each other in times of need. Jesus overturned the capitalist’s carts in the market place and also declared “vengeance is mine” according to lore. He is a hero of mine because his ideas could not be bought - people know chicanery whether it is Mohammadian, Christian, or Church of the Holy Grufyti. What always rings true is what brings you back to what you seek - simple kindness, for with the exception of our planet’s uniquely murderous socio-paths (the “1%” - 3% of the population consigned to the darkest regions of human existence - a life without feeling) the 7 billion others of us are seeking mostly some small kindness - that or get laid, which may be the same thing - I don’t know .  . “get laid” (third-person singular simple present gets laid, present participle “getting laid”, simple past got laid, past participle gotten laid) - now we’re all unsure. 

War is no longer an option and how to staunch the hemorrhaging of the human spirit at a time when our specie’s very breath is imperiled is more than a nostalgic counter-cultural “mirroring” exercise; I mean to applaud you and your undiscovered capacity for “rising” to the occasion. Dr. M.L.King has said “those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war; but weren’t we talking about ire (sounds like tire) anger, rage, fury, righteous indignation - an unfunny subject, prevalent, but not that funny? Nor is “fighting fire with fire” a good option - not when so many faucets today provide water that burns? Retaliation has always been weak from what I’ve seen - a process which included separating broadcast fictions of “manly” exploits by knights, cowboys and GI Joes from the rough and tumble business of day-to-day give-and-take that has characterized human interaction throughout the nearly 25,000 years of recorded history. Today’s media narrative cannot allow you to know this incongruous fact about human relations, and dredges up repeatedly the foundation of whys and wherefores for how we are doomed to kill or be killed; that same media apparatus is so much in control of what you hear or see, it is not inconceivable some corporate flunky or his/her NSA stooge may be deciding whether this essay will be shown to you or not.

Give and take requires a camaraderie that is being broken up into smaller and smaller clusters, gangs, or as they say in Mother Russia, soviets. We, our nation, our planet, our species have been divided and are conquered. The rage this battlefield reality invokes in me is complete and will endure as an existential flavor long after my decomposition into the elements or newly formed molecules for some future/passed purpose in this not-void of our shared emptiness. What I will not cede is the valence of that rage which I believe is a function of what humor, love and compassion I can attract to my anatomy through the food, activity or thought I’m privileged to consume or engage in by design or circumstance. While this discussion may sound like bullshit or gibberish, and it may be, it gives me pleasure which I prefer to anger, any surplus of which I’ve been unable to purge through will or wisdom will be hunted like the dirty dog it is by my lesser self so that my greater self may transmute that vile bile into a path toward kindness which I need and know you seek as well. 

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i was born today - the sonnet

i was born today many years ago . .
i am told it was difficult for ma ;
it may be easier if she let go.
i'm a fine one to talk .  .  i still miss pa.

life's a mystery which deepens in time
- a scent of she who'd give paper to thee
for her portrait so sad it seems a crime
yet whose commission helps one become free.

We are not all liars cheats thieves and swindlers ,
some of us work for a living ; not me -
i play with words, colors, stones and jugglers,
keeping my jugular where you can't see.

where i'm from love's so hard sometimes it hurts;
better that than fakes whose worth clocks in hertz.

jts 17 september 2014

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life before the computer

Regardless of what may be reasonably inferred from the title, I do not completely predate computers making my expertise, like my self, suspect. Aside from the fact that people have been fashioning widgets for purposes of calculation since before cuneiform and the abacus; ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer) made it “online” some 8 years ahead of me - 1946. In one second this contraption could perform one of the following: 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions (not simultaneously and not until the necessary keypunch cards had been properly prepared, collated and mechanically fed into its analog structure). The ENIAC weighed 25 tons and had a footprint of 680 sf feet. Its original task to generate artillery trajectory tables for WWII could have have become the proverbial “beating of swords into plowshares” when after the war ENIAC was harnessed to calculate solar ignition and weather analysis; but along came money and the math requirement for the hydrogen bomb - Go Team National Security by 'anonymous incineration' . ! - the same lame “national security“ argument Armament Inc. uses today to maintain it’s place at head of the line for the public dole.  

note: the original vacuum tube diodes used for logic gates short-circuited when cockroaches crossed at just the right instant giving birth to the expression “debug” to describe repairing a computer "glitch" - more recognized today as (OE) operator error

Barely out of adolescence the inexorable massing of 0’s and 1’s officially penetrated my analog consciousness in a conversation with John H____, father of my Indian Guide boyhood chum Mark; H_____ when consulted with the elder Mr. H____, who at that time was an unemployed aerospace engineer, turned potter, turned Apple distributor while Steven Jobs might still answer the phone: “so Mr. H____, tell me about these computer things.” John H____ fixed me with his ice cube blue eyes; ruddy cheeks; impish grin and chortled in a WC Fields-esque drawl, “Computers will become as important to we puny humans somewhere between the invention of the wheel, and a change of life form for our species from carbon-based to silicon-based.” Take a minute to suss that statement completely . · . Picture being able to get cash at 1:00 am in the morning no longer yoked to bank hours for cash transactions, yet a public library on the other side of the country could now automatically post a notice of delinquency and levy $50 fine for a book you haven’t seem since high school. The first practical cell phone I can remember was with a young couple - neighbors from my 2nd marriage. He busted a hump delivering bottled water and she drove their 280Z. The only thing I could see the phone did for their marriage was to make him that much crazier when she left him and their two girls while she sallied forth to Vegas for a “self-esteem” junket.

The unreality of how much computers have conquered our existence is much like its binary origin - on or off; yes or no; +5v/-5v. In 1994, I sent an email to a brand new website with a funny name - Google; like googol - “a number that is equal to one followed by 100 zeroes.” In my email I said it made more sense for the cursor to default in the Graphic User Interface (GUI) - the next day the window opened with the cursor in the GUI (pronounced gooey), and their email access disappeared from the home screen. The seeming miracle of efficiency for the computer age is nothing compared to what it might have been; not even in the same galaxy. The scientists of Computer Languages pursued an esoteric ideal of a “4th Generation Computer Programming Language" - the ability to program a computer with a spoken language syntax. Google could have made that leap with its search engine, except that as Bob Dylan has described other terrain in our cultural landscape “greed got in the way.” - In 1999 there were a 457 (IPOs) Initial Public Offerings, mostly internet and tech companies; 117 of those companies on their first day of trading doubled their opening value  - an ROI of 100%: return on investment (%) = (Net profit / Investment) x 100

In the BBC’s “Century of Self” the origins and strategies of 20 century business advertising are explained such that Google’s venal orientation is clearly recognizable amidst its “bells, whistles and surging portfolio” however much a pale echo of the dot.com Boom!. The simple venal equation remains the same “how little can you spend and how much profit can you take". The Harvard School of Business model may have been dethroned by the sheer mass of today’s data stream, subverting but not forsaking the value hierarchy Mark Twain once described comprised of “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” One of my favorite numerical accelerations has been the spiral of CEO pay to Worker pay; today that ratio is clocking in around 900% - for each $1 an average a US worker earns, an average US CEO will earn $900. Computer advocates have confused ratios with value or worth; the domain masters believe increased value is derived from Ad traffic, missing the colossal power of what might have been with 7 billion other similarly dynamic, hard-charging entrepreneurial human spirits each making command decisions on behalf of the greater good by providing 4th generation programming power to mankind rather than hoarding the bits and bandwidth like misers of old.

The obtuse narrowness of vision for those designing and effectuating algorithms, so weighted by ROI contamination, the business edifices of today resemble the great pyramids of Giza except for being completely inverted and lacking completely 'brick and mortar' substance - resting on the pinnacles just as leadership presses the apex of its excess into the back of humankind - ‘ole French proverb, “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” The greatest delusion of any sycophant-surrounded domain master is whether the personal expression of the 7 billion other humans on this planet will ever be mute regardless of the filters, or whether a handful of people are even capable of database management on today’s scale no matter how many different ways they slice the barcodes. Leadership mirrors the media fantasy of a more and more homogenous human community, as though the flawed relations of an increasingly hostile world are rendered manageable by a few pretty pictures and some oft-repeated homilies - PowerPoint writ large. The capacity to conjure the virtual, is something out of a bad Gothic Novel. We now have dual sets of etiquette - one for person-to-person and the one in which facebook shares your personal data with human resources, The NSA, IRS, DMV and your ex-wife, but rather than providing a more clear sense of that person each successive data handler snips off what applies to whatever application being used to compile whichever version of your data and in so doing distort completely the answer for any question which may have been answered in simple open human interaction - questions which ought to have been put to the putzes and their AI (Artificial Intelligence) thugs who've created a cascading climate catastrophe using joysticks instead of phalluses, or fallopian Tubes whichever the case may be.

jts 12/9/2014

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9/11 - who'd want this birthday . ? . - the sonnet

How'd it be to have your birthday hi-jacked?
My birthdays for me are sanctuaries . .
So in time, there're fewer to be attacked- 
9/11 - we were all made quary.

I will not give this day over to hate;
To do so, desecrates every sad death.
We ought to consecrate those born this date-
That they be known by their love from each breath.

Your odds are one in three hundred sixty-five 
today is your birthday . Hapy Birtday!
Do not deny this conceit to feel alive,
You, more than many may know a new way .

.  . so for the three thousand and some odd souls
perished, with time - i pray for our new roles.

jts 11 September 2014

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living in a world without love is not an option - the sonnet

What kind of world would this be without love . ? .

friends? yes; hard but doable; without scratch ? .

too fucking many do , . . without a shove . ? .

i've taken wives with whom i was no match . .

.  . that world sure don't work without love in it.

this kind of dark ain't found in a brutha .

where the love vibe "ain't" is not just unlit,

it is the void renounced by the Buddha . .

.  . now sold as "new" hate - the "only" option . ,

or is it . ? reality being "all" that - 

hard on the shores of a rising ocean,

or those looking for rabbits from this hat.

"Dark Matter" may define dimensional

extent, our hearts limit our reach of will.

jts 9 September 2014

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The Four Horseman Of The Apocalypse - Be Careful About Who's Riding What ·

Conquest, War, Famine and Death - I’ve had neighbors more fearsome; especially those who had underestimated death and its exigent reality - breath. However, pound for pound I’m going with HH the Dalai Lama’s Big Four picks for riders of the Apocalypse - Anger, Hatred, Ignorance and Greed. I’m siding with His Holiness over Christian dogma for practical reasons; the big four of the Christian Apocalypse are all employees of the Ruling Class, whereas Anger, Hatred, Ignorance and Greed are all accessible to the human heart - our control of which remains the only real freedom left to our species; besides I work better with things I can get my hands on. I'm weary from the predictable outcome of Conquest, War, Famine and Death which WorldEconomy Inc continues to flog as the last word in Apocalypses - still without much result; it just feels too much like some seedy Wall Street shell game. All the while we've been betting on Conquest, War, Famine and Death as the gospel apocalyptic scenario, we’ve only lost ground in the existential struggle toward the light - of course that could all change once WorldEconomy Inc uploads the latest version via their lackeys on Capitol Hill.  Meanwhile smart money is on HH the Dalai Lama’s picks which are surging; industries sprouting daily to rid the world of Anger, Hatred Ignorance and Greed and just in the nick of time, for Jesus Christ may have been the last human being free of such defects; then again, I may be thinking of the Prophet Muhammad - I get the two of them confused along with Buddha and Lao Tzu.

In any case, what worthier ambition is there than enlightenment as Leonard Cohen points out . .

We were locked in this kitchen
I took to religion
And I wondered how long she would stay
I needed so much to have nothing to touch
I've always been greedy that way

. . I am Greedy, though not for the filthy lucre; untold wealth has achieved nothing close to what might have happened had that same obscene amount of money now sitting in offshore computer servers been thrown into the civil mechanism. Am I Ignorant? I am if I believe what I say or write could persuade you about greed or result in change within your heart. Everybody knows one can only change oneself, right? My personal weakness - Hate; I confess to hating cruelty, oppression, dishonesty, cowardice, etc, I hate any scourge to the human soul and will battle the best way I know how as sensei Bruce Lee advocated - “burrow into the heart of your opponent” and use its own weakness to destroy itself. So in this the second paragraph of a plan to overthrow great weaknesses in our species or at best pick some new winners, I find myself full with greed, ignorance and hatred - 3 major impediments for growth of my own heart. If you place stock in the wisdom of HH the Dalai Lama, as I do, you may also find his objectives nearly impossible to master .  . enough to piss off any g_d fearing human .  .

.  .  . oh fuck I possess all four defects in under three paragraphs. Too often I have been betrayed by my own Anger which I understand accomplishes little but to create greater space for itself. So if I spend time with something which apparently exists solely for the sake of its own existence - like anger, money, or the ubiquitous internet is that also greedy. The sad truth is we live immersed in a technology which can play and replay any given problem like the “sky is falling” repeatedly - chopping it up into unrecognizable portions to be parsed again and again through so many channels and platforms it becomes unrecognizable except as a dull hum demanding you be afraid of the falling sky or afraid of something . . then as though for emphasis, reissued or rehabilitated like a bad penny or radioactive politician. Consider the pustulating planetary tragedy of Fukushima - only the tip of an iceberg, or what used to be called icebergs but now the melted seawater of a radioactive maw of encroaching shoreline inexorably swallowing great swaths of historical human habitation. The ruling class zealots won’t tell you about Fukushima, but will say that the shoreline is shrinking; WorldEconomy Inc will then call for higher rent due to austerity and charge you more for less right through to the end. That and/or we the human race will again descend back into the ocean having desecrated the once holy realm of the "Great Spirit" on our way to fully appreciating the physics of disrespect and/or truly rueing our collective lack of spine.

To conclude a 5 Paragraph essay in three may be a useful skill when horsemen of any stripe are bearing down. I'm a geezer and am winded and wheezing, but if the spoon-fed inertia of social media is not enough to alert you that the time is nigh for dismounting from the impending apocalypse, whatever its form - try this fact; no war has ever stopped any war - ever. It is for this reason my target will always be something "other" than you; I will battle Anger, Hatred, Ignorance and Greed or Conquest, War, Famine and Death; it really doesn’t matter which exacta one picks, for however efficient I become in my argument; persuasive with my language or lethal with my drone - until I am able to vanquish the four horseman of my own heart, I’ll be neither conquerer nor conquered - just another serving of Soylent Green for those who can afford what WorldEconomy Inc is shoving down people’s throats as nutrition at the time. In this process of updating the apocalypse, we may have more enemies, and fewer weapons; it's hard to see dawn in this darkness when all we have for illumination is what can be found in the darkness of our own hearts.

We are a dying species - at each other’s throats - be it with family, neighborhood or nation; you can hear the wail from every meaningful call for harmony or peace within earshot. We are about to confront our mortality in ways which have never been known by our kind, up to and including the "anonymous incineration" suffered by those murdered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 70 years ago. However, rapture will not be part of the carnage we are about to face, for by her very nature mother earth will recover. She will - over time - stabilize, and like the magnificent starship she be, proffer new shoots of growth to whatever strands of DNA or RNA able to thrive in our dying embers just as she nurtured life in the molten cataclysm of our inception. What will likely be missing are we puny humans who unwilling, unable or just too plain stupid to stop hurting each other. There will have been no agent of misery more responsible for our exit than the engine of our own human heart. Conversely the human heart may be the last echo of our species heard by whatever heir survives - hopefully riding that sole sacred noble steed we have managed to recognize - love.

jts 30/8/2014

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soixante bingo - the sonnet

 soixante bingo - like who is Ringo Starr
matters most to those who dig bongo.
Pop's ukelele was never too far;
writing - it doesn't seem so long ago .  .

.  . unless you're old, harder seeing it funny 
or, funnier depending how it's seen.
irony suggests laughter is the key . .
one knows better having dug a latrine.

By this time in life one hears hissing steam
cacophony don't stop - never a note.
Work is the best way to be in that dream;
because - a jingo ain't lingo, it's rote.

.  . but to the honey of my heart - i thank you ,
without whose bee i'd be nothing but blue .

jts 20 august 2014

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assume - the sonnet

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So important Don Miguel said not to -
assume; he only had three other rules.
i have assumed when i should just ask you
no matter if you're wise or with the fools

Do you assume? if so, why, what reason?
Mostly i assume when not feeling strong, 
for giving up choice is like self-treason.
Bullshit true, but feelings aren't right or wrong.

The key may be to revere the question -
"may i sit down?" , "would you like to visit?"
leaving room for another's decision . . 
"yes" or "no" without me to inhibit. ?

I will not speak for you; that much i've learned,
but do now seek those things for which i've yearned.

jts 14 August 2014