Tuesday the 10th

I was admitted to MSK urgent care back in Jan around the 13th.  I was severely dehydrated and felt horrible.  The Dr. had suggested that I check myself in the night before but I wanted to take care of some important paper work, like my Health Care Proxy and Living Will. 

One of the symptoms of my cancer is the narrowing of the esophagus and in my case it completely shut down to a tiny passage, so small and constricted that even taking in liquids, like that pesky thing 'water', became impossible.  Do deal with this problem, it had been predetermined that I would have a 'shunt' put in my esophagus, this is an expandable pipe of sorts to force open the constricted passage and allow the intake of necessary nutrition and liquids.   The only problem, it was scheduled a week and a half ahead of my admittance, I would not live that long if I had to wait.  When I was in urgent care it was decided that installing one would be the first course of business and the following day after entrance I was brought down for surgery at the end of the day.

Not five minutes before I was wheeled into surgery I received a call, my son had just dislocated his right shoulder in a wrestling match.   Nothing like added anxiety and worry.   I was wheeled out of surgery feeling like shite.  I spent nearly the next 24 to 48 hours vomiting blood, I frankly don't remember the total time span.   The shunt was removed, I don't even remember being taken down for that procedure.

A day later a feeding tube was installed, I've been using it ever since.  

Two in the morning

And I am awake.  It's been like this in one way or another it seems for sometime now.  My body clock being off from the waking world.  But then, that is not really surprising as my body has been out of sync for some months now in a most obvious way.

It became self apparent to me when summer vacation had ended, the new school year had start, the weather was just beginning to fall and the weather was a minor tingle on some mornings.  I felt a tightness in my chest, a small hollow and minor burning spot directly beneath my sternum.  Turned out it wasn't GERD or acid reflux disease as I first thought.

No, several months of slowly losing weight and then it getting to the point where I could not swallow food nor drink around Christmas made it apparent that something more serious was amiss. By the high holidays and the results beginning to come in from several tests proving several tumors were obstructing my esophageal pathway and my stomach, cancer was suspected and confirmed.

If you are reading this blog, it is most likely because I have invited you here to keep abreast of my health and situation, as it were.   I have had so many people reach out to me, that the sheer number makes it impossible for me to address each one individually as I would like, more importantly, the fact is, my energy levels are so intermittent during the day that often during daylight hours I have neither the strength nor capacity to carry on a conversation, whereas at 2 in the morning and all asleep save but me.

So, stay tuned.   I will try to catch everyone up in the coming days on the activities since Christmas and up to my current condition ASAP.

In short, I am ok, have gone through my first bout of chemo, am eating (if you call feeding tube nutrition eating), the pain is overall manageable and I feel optimistic.   And, thank you for caring and letting me know your thoughts, prayers, etc., it has meant more to me than you know.

Optics and Perception- introduction

It has been past 6 months since I’ve ‘published’ anything on this blog and for good reason.  I have transitioned completely out of the art services industry in which I was scrapping by and am now conducting scientific research in the relatively new field of Adaptive Optics on the retina.

Adaptive Optics is not a new scientific technique, it’s been used in astronomy for many years but it is new in Retinal Research.  By using an infrared laser we can scan the retina and see the cone density and structure of the eye, my job is to acquire these scans but also to determine how the variety of images I take relate to the other imaging devices currently in use and confer with the Ophthalmologists and the device makers in how to improve and develop this technology in a diagnostic setting and the final interpretive analysis.

As an artist who has a hard science background, having studied biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in university before I took a break and switched to art the transition has actually been incredibly smooth and the job is, well fantastic.

One of the great pleasures has been meeting and talking with some of the top Ophthalmologists, neuro scientists and physicists in the field but more importantly are the exciting conversations that have ensued about perception and reality, language and reality and sometimes and not too infrequently metaphysics.

The perceptual consciousness of vision in hindsight has always been a strong theme in my work and looking back at some of my ‘gestural works’ I can see that the various lines that have come through my paintings are related to the blood vessels and nerve fiber nets in an odd way, although this is really applying a reading or interpretation after the fact, no fuzzy metaphysics here, just happy accident or coincidence. 

More to come- as I have written a few things in relation to Henri Art Magazine that I feel are pertinent counter points and additions.

Occupy This

A trenchant analysis well worth reading for how Occupy failed, from the Baffler and Thomas Frank-

To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice …and drove it absolutely crazy

Carol nails it.

Carol Diehl's Art Vent is one of my regular reads and she nails it on this one.

Gone Fishing

Obvious that I've dropped off the radar.   Things coming to a crashing thud.   More, I just don't care about "art" anymore.   This article that I ran across today encapsulates my feelings of sorts, Occupy Art.

The thing is, I will continue to make things but these things will not go out into the art world or market because frankly, I don't care to participate in a circus that degrades something that I hold as an important personal practice.   Since it will not be seen, it will not participate in a larger dialogue of art, the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear the sound.   

And I am not saddened or upset about this as I once might have been.  Just another stage of life and life is too short to spend chasing dreams that revolve around being accepted and having work collected by people that I have nothing but disgust and contempt for, not that anyone is banging down the door by any means but...

My studio building was flooded by Sandy and closed for over three weeks, during the night of the storm I had a dream of the studio burning down and losing over 20 years of work.  I awoke after the dream and felt a relief to have it gone, done and over and then realized it was nothing but a dream.

There is something liberating and freeing in all of this.  The things I am making having nothing to do with art and the critical, historical values that played a part of my mindset and dialogue are in the dust heap also.  

I cannot explain the feeling that came over me this summer but it was final.  It might upset a few of my closer friends but I cannot and do not want to discuss art ever again.   Art is dead.

That dirty old bastard

 I love Picasso.   Not because he was a celebrity when I was a child, between Warhol and Picasso, the two…

I love Picasso’s late work, its abrasiveness, its brashness, its playfulness and in the end despite everything being so garish, it works, it works for me.   It excites me, it thrills me, it puzzles me, it sits on my mind.  

I am writing this in response to Mark at Henrimag and Paul from Paulcorio and the mysterious Anonymous who some of us know quite well not only because of his pertinent commentary but also because we’ve spent many nights and days talking about art and getting drunk both literally and figuratively.

I have a problem with Modernism and hence Post-Modernism.  To me they are interesting theories of cultural production and arts placement in culture at large.

The problem with Picasso or Miró for that matter is that they don’t fit into convenient categories of modernist art production, nor does Duchamp for that matter.   The American version of Modernism has Clem Greenberg’s shadow still haunting it, at least for someone of my age and generation, because we or I, was over-steeped in it from schooling.   The conceptual and minimal works that came out of it owe more than a passing debt to Clem, even if as reaction.   Not surprising too because painting as an “avant-garde” practice was pretty much exhausted by 1920 and the rest since, mining familiar territories.   

By 1920 cubism had morphed into synthetic cubism, Matisse had gone to Nice and began riffing on Cezanne and his own work, now that I think of it, the proto-Soviets were the ones who radicalized vision along with the Dutch.   By 1920 Malevich and Rodchenko had along with the De Stijl group of Mondrian et al had given the non-objective a face and their work in particular was one of revolutionary import, they were radicals who desired to shape and change culture through their art.  The French and I include Picasso and Miró in this, not so much, I mean what’s wrong with Café culture?

Listen I don’t want to delve into some deeper analysis but my feeling and my head tell me that what is dead, is not so much the avant-garde or modernism or post-modernism because they were never alive to begin with, they are nothing more than anthropomorphic descriptions of historical processes, made by man for man in an attempt to understand and come to grips with the working processes of other people coming to grips with themselves through their work within certain time frames that at once shaped and defined them and then they tried to break through those limitations, limitations put on by the expectations at large and the ones that they had imposed on themselves and of major importance but rarely discussed is the death of god and the poetic, what is dead is what was never alive, a theory or theories.

What the various artists had in common despite the incredible variety of visual expression was each artist was trying to come to grips with the ghost of art and the substrate in which it can be hung within.   The various stories or myths that each artist had, whether it was Duchamp and the fourth dimension and more and the eros that many rarely talk about but he hinted at consistently Rrose Sélavy, Mondrian’s Theosophy, the relationship between Constructivism and Russian Icon painting, Picasso with the history of art and Matisse with the arcadian joie de vivre.

Their art was an art born out of life, not naïve life (maybe at times) but also a love of art. 

Today’s art gymnastics, the kind that fills us with dread is the post-mortem, cynical market place driven drivel.  One, driven by an academy of dead wood and no better than the church in trying to force an ideal or idea of what it is without the love or poetry, two concepts too fuzzy and akin to ‘feeling.’

The problem with theory is that it takes place in words, don’t get me wrong I love words, look ma, I’m using them now but the best wordsmiths and the best painters artists etc know when they are having fun with their media in trying to expand the field of expression not for the accolades but because they or we are trying to find the best way to relay or transmit this weird feeling or idea that we have about the world to someone else.

We don’t make art to fit the academy or the school, October or Artforum, MoMA or the New Museum.   That is where art goes to die, stuffed and on the wall.   This was the point, by the great and greatly misunderstood Marcel Broodthaers.

Oh and Picasso, I’ll try to get back to him shortly as I started writing something but got sidetracked by life.   

Art in the Age of Depression

I find it hard if not impossible to think about art in these difficult economic times.  The need to keep roof overhead and food on the table when one cannot find sustained work is taxing with the psychological and emotional toll being devastating.   

We live in an ever darkening time, one where our politics, our economics, our whole social fabric has fallen apart, where people don’t care to know or if they do, don’t.   Where unbridled greed and avarice rules, where the destruction of hope (is there any left?) is paramount and those in power play games while Rome burns.   A world which in twenty or thirty years will not look the same due to global warming and the resultant changes in food production will leave millions starving.   It’s too late.  Nothing can be done, the impact is imminent and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put it together again.  

I sometimes work near the U.N. and I see during my lunch break all the men and women walking back and forth with their briefs, sometimes in heavy conversation and debate with like other determining the fate or so they think of the world.  Meetings, meetings, meetings and nothing changes.  The world at large is run by sociopaths either in politics or business with but one purpose, to gain more power and we commoners, are nothing but fodder, too often in the way of their grand plans, our sole function is to support their state of affairs while they pay little or no tax and purchase either their goods or propaganda without question or protest.

Besides that physical fact is an art world that is irrelevant and an audience non-existent for what one has to say or more what I have to say.   One might as well wander into the wilderness and wail as the result would be the same.

I am and have always been as long as I can remember, even as a child barely able to put words in mouth been disturbed by these inequities and injustices, inequities and injustices perpetrated by none other than humanities hubris and vanity.  Vanitas Vanitatum.

Such as it is I am sometimes reminded despite such dark clouds of personal misfortune of the purpose and function of art, of late that has not occurred by actually seeing art but more in music and literature.   Solace comes in listening to Bach or in reading recently Maupassant’s “Pierre and Jean”, Jean Giono’s “Blue Boy” or now as I wade into Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz”. 

I find this country intolerable and fantasize about living in Europe, somewhere in the south of France would be nice and I don’t have any fantasy of it being without its own troubles or that the locals would be any different than here, small town minds with there ageless prejudices and distrust are everywhere from the hills of Afghanistan, to Provence to Pennsylvania, New York or the Upper West Side.   But being an outsider in a country where you are not from is somehow in my experience easier than being an outsider in ones own land, the alienation is at least justified there but here in ones own land and native tongue is unbearable.

You're being watched

What good times lie ahead.

Moral Rot

Chris Hedges has two pertinent columns- The Careerists and The Perversion of Scholarship

The New York Media and the NYPD

Having been involved with several of the Occupy Wall Street protests I found that in today's New York Times, an article about the NYPD's over the top tactics in the afternoon, only to find the story when I got home had disappeared from the local New York Region page, you now have to find it buried within the City Room Blog and if you missed it, well tough luck because the NY Times doesn't deem it news worthy that the Police Department is a roque element denying the most basic and fundamental rights of assembly.

However the Guardian UK, finds it of merit and has put it on the front page.

Having been a resident of New York City for over 20 years as an adult and having grown up here as a child I have found the police department to be dangerous and not to be trusted.   What does it say about our society and our political system that allows such wanton disregard for basic civil rights?  

And if you aren't from New York or live here, check out the outstandingly racist profiling which occurs in the  Stop and Frisk program.    The country is lost as long as people stay silent, more importantly, our individual freedom, myth that it is, is being buried by an increasing totalitarian state of spying on our phone and internet communications all for the sake of protecting the few who have so much.   Too much in my opinion.

We are heading into a very dangerous time.   And now back to our regularly scheduled arts programming.

See you at the barricades.

Observations- art, culture? Society

An article in the NYTimes, once the paper of record, has an interesting article today about noise in bars and restaurants here in NYC, “Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar.”  To summarize, the article shows how music is manipulated via volume and beats per minute to control clientele and access the money within their wallets, more importantly though are the responses about the dislocation that some people feel in those settings, the loss of focus due to the noise levels, etc.  

What I find is that our television media works with the same kind of manipulation.  As someone who has given up a TV subscription but ends up seeing TV on rare occasions I am highly aware of how most Americans are frogs in a cooking pot of ever increasing temperature, the volume levels of commercials with the fast flashing of imagery and massive hype creates a subtle sense of anxiety.   Even commercials for shows that are reputedly dramas do this and beyond the commercials the flashing of quick cuts and scenes with fast graphics and special effects manifest a physiological and psychological drain.  If you don’t believe me, turn off your set for a week or two and then watch it.   Maybe it’s just my fifty years showing.   Research in how television works though has shown such, you can google it for yourself or read this article, “Why We Worry- The Psychological Effects of TV News.”    To me this part of the reason our culture has unraveled is that we live in the zombie apocalypse already, too many people are checked out and need the tv-meth to get by and I don’t believe in an over arching conspiracy as it seems to be a feed back loop that one has to make a conscious decision to kick the addiction.

What the result of this barrage is an uninformed and disinterested electorate that doesn’t have the physical or psychic energy to deal or face with ‘reality’ of the system or their manipulations.  More they have been sucked into a concept of America as land of the “I’ve got mine, good luck getting yours” as this anxiety makes it nearly impossible for people to actually communicate about things since they are in the dark, as it were.

This manipulation feeds into the art world at large also.    Is anyone really shocked that Jeffrey Deitch has made the moves he has made at MoCA with the firing of Paul Schimmel?   Deitch has always been about art as entertainment in the most banal and cynical of means.  All flash.  

Locally one cannot but express extreme disappointment of the lack of critical support by our own Brooklyn Museum.  Brooklyn most likely has more artists living and working in it than any other locale in the world and the Brooklyn Museum has such weak concepts as “GO”.    I know financing curatorial muscle is difficult but where there is a will there is a way and the Brooklyn Museum always manages to underwhelm.   Art to these organizations is a second thought.

In Response RETRO from Henrimag

- Full disclosure- Henrimag and its author provocateur is a friend of mine and he has written many nice things about my work and I have written for his blog on occasion too.

Our ancestors in part came to this land looking to start life anew and create a society that didn’t suffer the ills of old Europe, mine date in part to the earliest settlers in New York, Massachusetts and Virginia in the late 17^th Century. How that actually played out was a different story as it always is with too much puritanical fever and the old testament in hand and practice.

I once was walking around dumbo over twenty years ago with an English friend who asked why we Americans destroyed our best architecture, my reply was that we were the stock of peasants who in their desire to create a new world jettisoned the past and did not want to look back and had even forgotten how to look back. The American mythos of this self made man with the chance to make a new fortune lost in translation the previous shared social values and structures that class distinctions forced upon him, the end result being to some extent our current predicament of rapacious greed in the face of societal decay.

Post war America or the United States to be less chauvinistic, came to bask in its glory as the promise of democracy with all the values we were taught in school, of course without being taught about the large bag of dirty laundry that helped create our empire. Finally we began to believe our own hype and press without being critical, less you be considered an enemy of the state for disagreeing, you’re either with us or against us. And like Narcissus we became overly enamored of our own reflection.

Nostalgia is a cultural condition of this lack of proper reflection and criticality, it is a reflection and desire to enter arcadia and our arcadia appears to be the modernist era and musically the 60’s, Amy Winehouse comes to mind. Visual nostalgia takes as its locus the modern era and bad post-modern theorists use criticality in the same pastiche in which they misinterpret or appropriate the image and function of such.

What marks Miró as a great painter is not only was he visually adept at orchestrating works that act like small chamber ensembles but that he was pushing the boundaries of what painting could be and achieve, he had in short, faith in the visual experience as a visceral tangible thing. He was willing to take risks, make bad works and explore his own personal thoughts and expressions. This also takes place within the time of Surrealism, which gave license (as if it were needed) to explore the sub and un conscious inner worlds of our being. This theory provided a framework for the subject matter to be addressed.

As Gerhard Richter has said and I’ve said it before, it isn’t how to paint it is what to paint. An artist has to perform an intricate dance between subject matter or content and then the visual aspects of creating a space that isn’t about the subject but is the embodiment of this.

Our current theory du jour is the leftover grab bag of post modern theory, which originally was not about cynicism but saw the philosophic cul de sac ahead as the previous mythos and theory was imploding in the immediate post war era and came to fore in the sixties. The so called work based on this misreading and misinterpretation of Lyotard et al is in itself a pastiche of the very theory it uses as its armature.

The real irony is that we are surrounded by too much work that is tedious in its cynicism and is based in part on too much reading of words, it accepts without understanding the complexities of what the death of the author means and substitutes ironic distance, it makes obvious pastiche of other forms without understanding the true meaning. It is a knowledge that has been taught but not understood and just a bad form of the very thing it tries to be. In short, it is about but not is. It is the current academy of thought. It is a bunch of illiterates who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk and I’m sure we’ve all had the unfortunate experience of someone incredibly well read but incredibly daft as to what is really going on around them.

Any good painting, maybe great painting is a paradox. I’ve always thought that Picasso’s run in with Velazquez’s Las Meninas were post modern of sorts or De Kooning too for that matter. Picasso does make a pastiche but it is done with, I will say it, a love of what he is seeking to own, destroy, to make new, to possess and to offer anew. What makes a distinction between a great painter and an also-ran is that the great painter loves what he is trying to destroy or possess, the under riding mythos of Picasso as Minotaur was his own and not some schooled lesson. It appears in all of his work from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon onwards. More importantly great art comes from artists who wrestle with themselves and their ambitions, demons, desires and inherent failures, paradoxes, contradictions and the like.

What marks this post modern art, the current art du jour is the fact that the true feelings that the artists have are missing (if they have any to begin with) and are all wrapped up in signs of the signifiers without being significant in and of themselves. This signification is what marks this work as academic and no different that the salon works of the French academy in the 19^th century.

In the end when I go to my studio and wrestle with my own ideas and feelings the art du jour doesn’t even come to mind. It is creating the same experience that the greats have done before, that gets me excited, that makes me want to engage in such a futile exercise and finally to find my own inherent contradictions and complexities and to share them because art is a form of communication about everything and nothing.

Unmasked

50, a number marking time, 50 cycles of the earth rotating around the sun, a half century, half a life time (in theory) my great grandfather who I grew up with lived to 92 and my grandfather 86 on the other hand my fathers father died at the age of 52 before I was born.   50 more likely represents half a lifetime lived as an adult, maybe if one has been an adult at all.

The point of being a doppleganger was to write freely but then I would anyway under my own name.   I once was a dj for a radio station but I always wondered how many people were really listening and on the overnights I think I had at most 3 listeners, I jest, there were more but the point being why hide behind a moniker when the 4 people who read my rambles are friends who know me.

So without anymore mystery and without drum roll, D Richmond is one Dennis Bellone, D for Dennis and sometimes David in certain works of mine where I would provide narration on videos, Richmond for the city I was born in 50 years ago.  It’s that simple, the mask comes off and there you have it and I will continue to bang the drum or at least the occasional pot and pan.

Klaus Kinski

As a tradition I normally don't title my paintings except in private so I can remember what is what but Klaus Kinski is the title for this new work.   I somehow persist in trying to make ... I am not sure what to call it.

klaus kinski, oil on canvas, 6 by 5 feet

fünfzig Jahre Freude

The Grand old age of a half century approaches.  "Fünfzig Jahre Freude" which in German translates to  50 years of joy, a title for a conceived art work that I am approaching that will encapsulate my art making activity to this point for the coming year and in which I hope to tie up various loose ends and ideas that have either occupied me outright or linger in the back of my mind.

From there?  I don't know.  But do stayed tuned as on the 26th of June the "great outing" will take place and the doppelgänger known as D Richmond will be revealed as I see little point in remaining anonymous.

Zeitgeist

Must be something in the air.... Related to my dystopian rant forwarded to me from a friend.

Bollocks

There will be no essay on "Welt am Draht" or "The Perverts Guide to Cinema". Why bother to write when it has been said so well and more importantly I have nothing to add.

See the films and think for yourself.

I see the world as being determined in part by our language systems and games, not outside of us but as an extension of who we are or believe ourselves to be. This countries moral rot and decay is because nearly the entire population buys into a concept of capitalist reality that is morally reprehensible, both right and left from high unto low.

For over 30 years the American public at large has been fed an increasingly unhealthy diet of propaganda about capitalism and a false notion of democracy. This has led to a culture that was already adverse to self-reflection to go even deeper into mediocrity.

Both political parties represent opposite sides of the same corrupt coinage. The sheer number of people from both political spectrums who unwaveringly believe the tripe they are sold that I have met is staggering. More, the lack of inquisitiveness or desire to learn more or actually have their own experience of reality unmediated by the likes of the system, a system that desires this ignorance because it leaves the politic impotent and easily controlled is mind numbing.

Not that I believe I hold the keys to truth but I understand the complex mechanics of language, psychology, ones personal history and the life lived, that is, if one bothers to be in it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates

But this is nothing new, it is touched on in “World on a Wire”, “The Perverts Guide to Cinema”, “The Matrix”, “They Live” a ton of other serious films, trashy movies, literature, art, poetry and philosophy and ultimately the bible, “Let the Dead Bury the Dead (Luke 9:60).”

We live in a society, not culture but a society that privileges self-centered narcissism and ones personal needs or wants over all and you can see it in action every day from the smallest way that people act towards one another to the large social sphere. The greater good, be damned, the planet, be damned, those enslaved around the world, be damned.

If you’re not pissed off about what is happening in the world, you’re not paying attention.

If you’re sitting on your chair and not trying to change it in some way, even a small way that seems insignificant then you’re part of the problem.

I hope the silicon robots win over the carbon zombies, I wonder what kind of art they might make.

1979-1980 London Calling

I was at my friends house, we were two weird outcasts in a large suburban high school in upstate New York, the kind of high school that was a breeding school for future Greek Fraternity hazing of the worst kind, izod shirts with upturned collars and docksider shoes.  I had long hair that was an unruly mess and had, despite my small size a reputation of not to mess with, cause I was completely willing to get into it, or at least it seems in hindsight.  Nothing scares a much larger opponent than staring them in the face without backing down, they’re so use to timidity that to have someone stand up breaks their paradigm, not that I knew what paradigm was back then.

My friend pulled out this album with incredible excitement, “you have to listen to this.”  He drops it on the turntable and starts playing “London Calling”, the crashing guitars, the sheer aggression of the sound in comparison to the standard fare of our FM diet was…honestly, hard to grab onto.  I had a difficult time with music at that time, Fleetwood Mac, Bread, Rush, Journey and a ton of real dreck that I couldn’t identify with but I could understand the music saccharine as it was but here, hear was this noise.   But that noise seeped into me, that afternoon my friend laid down The Specials first album and then I understood.  This was music that was addressing my alienation and then in its unfolding filled me with a sense of direction, that direction, growing up in a conservative town with kids my same age so willingly desiring to fill their parents shoes, to follow without question what was given to them, given what felt, smelled and tasted like some horrible corruption of the self, a denial of the self and in its replacement was a self full of hollow aspirations.  Ideals that led to the Reagan era and hence to the shit we live in now.   I spent my high school years in a town that wasn’t that much different in values than Columbine, my saving grace was that my parents gave me when I was younger access to art, music and literature that I didn’t understand at the time but it was there, it was on the bookshelf, it was there if I wanted to seek it, questions were ok, my family life was hell but that, that other access that they gave me, made up for it in the long run, even in the short, in hindsight.

I appreciate that Painters Table and other blogs sometimes link to me but art is not made in a vacuum.  My approach to art, to life to everything, goes back to those days.  Those days wandering around NYC with my mom and sister in tow going here and there, there in ways not unlike De Kooning’s “Gotham News” as I said earlier in this blog, growing up after leaving the city on a farm with no indoor plumbing with my Grandfather who road his motorcycle at the age of 63 out to Mexico, a Grandfather with long white hair who always held court at dinner about politics, culture, more politics, science, art and architecture on that freezing farm house while his father, a former auto and aircraft engineer scowled in rage at the injustices he experienced in his life.

I wonder where this resistance to the status quo comes from, for me it may not appear so oblique (my sister however is of the 1%), my son, now 11, my son, who is bi-racial told me over a year ago that he felt Obama was elected to make sure black people wouldn’t protest over his policies, policies that have been detrimental to our democracy.  A man who made many promises of hope but then has amped up the national security state, has gone after whistle blowers with a vengeance not seen in any other administration and and and and I keep my politics to myself, his mother is very conservative despite the fact her father was one of the last socialists from the Caribbean.  My son comes out with that nugget.

Is it genetic and culture?  I think so.   In reading Paul Corio’s blog tonight after having dinner with him and Mr. Stone from HenriMag and with my background in animal behavior and science come to this conclusion, most human endeavors are based on a human need to be accepted, social recognition and sexual recognition from the opposite sex are of so much importance, more importance than we even acknowledge.   The Industrial Arts Complex doesn’t know where to turn but they want something “real” because they know they live in a world of navel gazing lies.   And then, then they have to have the nerve to say, you need to be an “outsider” to succeed, succeed at what?   They wouldn’t recognize an outsider if it were to slap them in the face because the complexity of the dialogue is beyond them.  Duchamp might have said the artist in the future will be underground, he or she would have to be as this artworld doesn’t have the nerve or gumption to look out beyond their narrow world view, it is not surprising, they’ve received everything from books and not from both books (I don’t want to devalue books and learning for truthiness) and the real world lived, they’ve never looked into the mirror and saw fear, the feelings of being a fraud, death and meaninglessness.  Only on that reflection of the true nature of ones meaning and being can there ever be a gasp and perhaps, perhaps if ones ego is strong enough to say No, does one struggle and say, I will make meaning.

And Jesus said, the meek shall inherit the earth, he failed to mention, that it would be six feet under.

And mea culpa for this nostalgia and rant, the year 50 beckons shortly, 50 that I wasn’t sure many years ago that I would make, 50 that makes me wonder for the future of my son, 50 that makes me wonder where are we going, 50 that makes me wonder, who the hell am I and have I done any good works worthy of my ambitions, hopes and aspirations.

Coming soon, Welt am Draht et al.  Perverts of the world unite.

Coming soon...

.. I hope. Have been struggling with an essay regarding digital this and that, in the interim... some viewing recommendations as I will be writing about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Welt am Draht" known as "World on a Wire" and also the brilliant The Pervert's Guide to Cinema with the funny and illuminating Slavoj Zizek. I highly recommend you watch the Zizek clip to the end as you will have an enjoy a hearty laugh. You can find the full version of Welt am Draht on Youtube and hit the CC button for the english subtitles and bits and pieces of The Pervert's Guide