THE MEDIUM

THE ANNUAL 'BET AWARDS SHOW' will be aired in a few days.......for this year's 'trend updates'.   Recalling the last music awards show that i sat through  a few years back, I'll be not likely to stare at a screen.... having tuned in to the Noisy Look At Me Live Show  some  years ago..... just as Little Big Town was standing, country ABBA style, delivering their big hit , almost yawning, having performed it a jillion times before......   as  I watched/listened from the get-go....skipping both the ads for Acne and mood-disorder meds and the mostly attitudinal tongue-stumbling acceptance speeches... .. ZZzzz.. ...Noting that year's prevailing conformacy of Matrix-styled long coats and jackets, bejewelled ladypanties on breast-pumping, crotch-grabbing second tier backup performers, deep-knee-bending, status athletic shoe wearing predictability........just to set the 'tone' for the coming indulgences........This is NOT to imply that I didn't 'get...

Life, through a very, very small window.......what one sees, is what one believes to 'be'........drop the walls, and thus...the windows in the walls.....and Life is something completely different, isn't it? More, on the Relativity of Perspective.....and NOT from the viewpoint of either the nutso Philadelphia Experiment OR Netflix's Stranger Things .......which I've never bothered to watch.....It's always time to haul the Moon Landing sets or video tapes of dead Presidents' funerals out of storage to make way for the lastest hullabaloo....Want to rent my 'hemming machine'?....I've heard that the miniskirt is "In" for next year..... Relax, Jen, the 'juice' hasn't even been turned 'on'....yet....you silly Gelfling....

80 years late.......it's no longer meaningful......on it's dangerous demise in the parking lot of the old Georgia Mental Health parking lot:......up in flames! No time to scoop up the ashes before Parson's Ministry Of Truth's Junior Spies blow their plastic whistles......So the Funeral Urn of the last Mid Century remains empty.......Perhaps I should just fill it with wet paint that will never dry with its 'lid on'......There was the option of rolling it up and smoking it, but there was surely lots of lead and cadmium in the dry pigments.....Don't even think about there having been any other options!...Well, perhaps, some plasticky razor blade-cut flat sculptured glossy latex. My call! The dried paint could be dissolved, somewhat, in paint thinner, then mixed/combined with old, wet cat litter....and be sculpted before it re-hardens.....{Wear a gas mask, however......the cat urine and kerosine combine to produce an odoriferous, vomit-provoking odor.}........

95 years after 1930 changed the random associations of drunken flappers to the structural shoulders of another World conflict and the subsequent drug-showering of American Youth's brain synapses, Tom Wolfe exited with little applause...his fashionability having lost its runway footing as pants legs again narrowed, revealing some big feet, now on the ground.......Tom showed us that Durer, on acid, was Picasso, after all......The Merry Pranksters were On The Road , but Wolfe was not on the bus....he was writing the Story of the Bus Trip, and taking us into a brief orbit, before crashing into the Big Sea; or, have i just butted up the circuituous memory trail from those brain connections to stored Hamilton Morris' PHARMACOPEIA .....to 20th C. novels about drug intoxication and hallucinatory experiations....(yet, still, i know that 'experiation' is a neologistic word....but were not just about every word, at some times in History....just developments from primitive Man...

 

has evolved into an odd space.......the collage/painting, in the corner, by my friend Hill Irving, really bothers many of my friends......it's just "Art" to me, however......and the large, reversible painting by Ellen Grobman takes the otherworldliness even further......and, of course, the Vandersteen speaker that i just couldn't leave in the basement, now partially blocks the doorway.....The oval table, by Von Stuck, used to belong to my friend Mark West, who sold it to me so that he could purchase a Gothic-revival set... the chairs were once stored in Bruce Woodruff's boathouse.......i had them restored and love their scale in this room......I traded a retro-modern ruby and diamond ring for the French crystal chandelier that once belonged to John Allen Davis, the antique dealer for whom i was once a buyer...

Camus's philosophy of absurdism is based on the idea that the universe is incomprehensible and indifferent to our desire for meaning, purpose, and happiness.  He believed that people should not try to create meaning where it doesn't exist, but instead accept the absurdity of life and live in spite of it.

  125 Drafts....to work, toward 'completion'.....This morning, or one of many past mornings, working on a dozen, or a thousand, of these writing/imaging Projects....I fell into slumber, from not having slept the night 'away'......During this brief tourney between awakening consciousness and slumberland 'dreaming' .....it 'seemed', to the 'always awake' part of my brain, that the 'always asleep' part was trying to erase the prestidigitations of Art, and replace these remunerations for creative Thought...with more mundane considerations.......In the Dream, within a dream, contained by the 'freezing' of my body's involvement with sleep-walking and semi-conscious scribbling, by the light of a 2 1/2 watt yellowish light, coming through the galley windows of a childhood metal ship's portholes.....enough interplay between light and shadow passed through my thin upper eyelids to initiate a sequence of 'dream images' and fa...

A 'friend' mentioned "Orlando" . ...I thought of the Sally Potter adaptation of the VIrginia Woolf novel......and, meditating on the 'labyrinth' scene, reached across my bed to remove the old Navaho silver 'bolo' that has the same theme......Later, having 'passed out' from exhaustion...still wearing the silver bolo, I dreamt of elaborate mazes and labyrinths, as my sub-conscious mind peered into locked compartmentalized thinking constructs and confined memories......Awakening, again, before Dawn, when Merlin jumped onto the bed....his foot 'hitting' the 'ON' button to the DVR.......to the eternal conundrum of 'Newspeak' and anxiety-laden 'reports' on 'what's happening'......Then, looking around, by the early light of sunrise, I noticed that I was the only 'alert' thing in the room.....The sculptures seemed.....deep; in slumber, still......I need a cherry danish and a strong cappuccino! It...

 

Follow the Curve.....it is likely to take one full circle, because the perceived horizon is the fixation of attention. Those that maneuver beneath the Surface of 'Things' have a greater challenge, for most of what is and has been or will be lies beneath the observation of senses, in the Cosmos of Incomprehension...to which we apply 'tags' and labels...in the delusional expectations of categorical inclusion and shared mutually substantiated beliefs about what we imagine is Real.......Dive in, with the realization that one's point of entry is a moving target, not a fixed, unchanging objective......Hesitate too long....and you will enter yet another World......that of another Perspective.....

  This life caravan is a strange course, begun with strapped camels, bearing the affectations of Living; then at rest, deplete of provisions, viewing the evening desert of dreams, empty through the glass of abundance, which does not approach again in tomorrow's morning, when time unfolds with calm and ease, when winds that blew are merely breeze...... Learn from Nature, from birds and bees and live your life in love and peace... for Love is what one gives away to please.... Veristes

  I discovered an old, scratchy contact strip with an image of Lottie Belinda Gibbs Dearmoun, and deciding to clean up the tiny image, pixel-by-pixel, for some OCD channelling.....and noticed that the oval area over Belinda's left breast was immune to 'retouching'......hmmmm....I thought about how, decades after I made this photo, she died from metastatic breast cancer that had been diagnosed, originally, in her left breast!......How Twilight Zoneish is that!

  I've seen so many demonstrations of Oppositional Defiance Disorder in the past few days........at every conceivable level of human interactions.......Perhaps this is De Rerum Natura.....Thousands of years ago, Thinkers and Philosophers, and what would later be designated "Psychologists", pondered the seemingly timeless condition of "things that 'live'"......why humans are contentious, the assumption that 'might makes right', our reluctance to accept ethical responsibility, logical and sensible morality... even questionings about "whether or not we really 'exist'", rather than our presumptive dealing with the problematic scenarios within which we certainly do.....We struggle, because we don't know who we are, or are willing to reveal, and thus 'cloak', the 'id-ness' that lurks, thinly disguised beneath our Superego's need to be loved, coddled, reinforced, 'believed' and admired......locking ...

     THIS AFTERNOON, I SPENT ABOUT A HALF HOUR DISINFECTING, THEN CLEANING IT OF BLACK MOLD, VARIOUS FUNGI AND MILDEW.....AND DRYING THE WARPED LINEN CANVAS WITH A HAIR DRYER....JUST TO SEE WHAT THE HELL IT WAS 'ALL ABOUT'......THEN, SUDDENLY, 'IT ALL CAME BACK':  "WHAT IT WAS ALL ABOUT' ......FEELING A BIT OF NOSTALGIA, I PHOTOGRAPHED IT, SURROUNDED IT WITH A VIRTUAL FRAMING JOB....AND....HERE...IT IS, UNBUCKLED AND 'RESTORED...DIGITALLY'.....AT THE TIME OF ITS CREATION.....1966, WHILE I WAS IN ONE OF PURYEAR MIMS' ART CLASSES AT VANDERBILT.....I WAS THINKING:  "SOON, I WILL BE A GREAT ARTIST....AND MY WORKS WILL HANG IN GALLERIES, ALL OVER THE WORLD!".....     WELL.......THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN, DID IT?   I GAVE UP  "PAINTING" SHORTLY THEREAFTER......CRESTFALLEN,  THAT I WAS NOT 'THE NEXT BIG DEAL' AND HAD BECOME CYNICAL ABOUT THE 'ART WORLD', IN GENERAL....AFTER A TOUR OF "ART" GALLERIES IN NEW YORK,...

 

  I dreamt, last night, that I was in an incense-smoke filled room....filled with 'burners' with bronze dragons atop them....From childhood 'fairy tails' about fire-breathing dragons, I suppose, these images inundated my dreamscape....Awakening, I left my bed, half-sleeping, and decided to floss my teeth to remove a chunk of black walnut that was wedged in the open space, between a pair of back molars, awaiting a dental implant, and ventured by the light of the moon through a window, falling over a rolled-up oriental rug, stumbling into the harpsichord, from which fell a heavy Chinese censer with a dragon atop its lid.....some kind of synchronicity, happenstance and coincidence conjured abstract considerations of Cosmic forces at play with my imagination....then, turning a lamp 'on'....the room was just a room, with blue, powered incense spilling onto the sound board.....Sneezing from having inhaled some of the blue crystalline powder, I glanced at the carved...

  a 'subliminal message'? I captured a frame that appeared, very briefly, during the 'end credits' of a 'Show' that was ending just before a program that I was recording........It was, I discovered....with a bit of research.....one of many "Chuck Lorre Productions 'VANITY CARDS'", editorial observations that are shown for a second or so, after a program and before the production credits......Interesting, and amusing enough, although I've never seen any of 'Chuck Lorre"'s productions.....'Chuck' even has a blog and a website that features these 'numbered' witticisms.....

  "The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them." [Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la Vie Communs, 1878-1879] Divergent trajectories of parallel systems may lead to entropy, or ultimately....to mathematical systems that seem to reflect order at an incomprehensible level....the illusions of dogma and of science....