Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Panic

I've officially given up on my motorcycle. It was fun to dream about while I still had enthusiasm about it. It was certainly fun to paint. There are those that would tell you that you can't faux finish a motorcycle, and then there are those that will tell you that you shouldn't. You CAN and SHOULD. But there are also those that would just say that it's about the faggiest thing they've ever heard of... and I'm not really equipped to have a dialog with those people.

I have decided to abandon it after an incident. It was a seemingly benign incident, but it's analogous to all future panic inducing occurrences. I never even got the thing on the road. I was practicing in a parking lot and while down shifting, I let go of the clutch too fast the the bike started jumping about. I panicked and had no idea which hand was supposed to do what at that point. I don't even know if I kept my hands on the bars. For a few brief moments I had no control over what was happening, and on a two wheeled vehicle that means I could have been very close to dragging my face across the ground. As an isolated occurrence I know that I've learned my lesson, and that my next shifting exercise would be much smoother. But there is no way to prepare for the panic itself; you can only prepare to avoid panic. But how can that be done when I'd be sharing the road with all the fuck-twats that are around? By staying the fuck of that suicide machine, that's how!

If I was some half-wit tough guy I might stick with it, everyone needs a way to get their jollies right? But I have fun in more interesting ways. As an artist, I can be provocative and confrontational. Indeed, it's much more exciting to risk your mind than it is to risk your body.

Establish risks, weigh options. Abandon the stuff that destroys you.

Freedom Isn't Free

So say the bumper stickers... but do we really want to take advice from the bumper of some redneck's pickup truck? I think that if we really want to have a conversation about freedom we should look to the east.

With spiritual freedom, it's a no brainer. Our normal concept of freedom is similar to the common Hindu dichotomy of svacchanda, to act by ones own desire, and paracchanda, forced to act by another's desire. But beyond that, the real goal is freedom from desire altogether. It's a broad concept that goes by many names, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the word used is aticchanda. More specifically with this word, it also implies a lack of consciousness of virtue and sin. I think that's such an important aspect. It implies that even if our behavior and efforts are toward the goal of being good, we're someone who's somehow missed something from somewhere. It can sound so hokey, but wouldn't we see past the crimes of others if we weren't using them to define our own virtues?

Also, Yung Ho Chang, the architecture head of MIT, was talking about China in this podcast. He had some really interesting things to say about freedom and the little citizen. I don't want to misquote, I'm only repeating him as I understood him when I heard the interview two weeks ago. He mentions this concept of the little citizen or the everyday citizen, which I think we generally think of as popular culture. So, where the Chinese recognize a noble individual, we recognize an ugly mass. We all know pop culture sucks, it's a whole lot of just because ideas and trends.
China isn't known for political freedoms or free speech, but Chang argues that they have personal free speech that might put us to shame. His example alluded to the "freedom isn't free" mentality. We're free to say whatever we like about politics as loud as we like and generally wherever we like without fear of legal consequences, but social repercussions are altogether different. Although they might not have our Bill O'reilys or Keith Olbermanns, Chang says that in China, fringe political views don't make you a social pariah. People ACTUALLY accept and value a diversity of ideas. Whereas we sort of do this theatrical thing where we invite diversity, then put up fences for even minor differences of opinion.

When I was first listening to this, I figured that was fine by me. After all, I didn't want to be friends with these warmonger, right-wing, bible fanatics anyway. And maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe that's why the music is so loud at bars, we'd be horrified to find out what everyone else really thinks.

Do it in Quotes

I was reading this essay about Larry Rivers, the grandfather of pop art, and how New York queered the idea of modern art. The premise was that a lot of pop art was a revolt against the macho attitude of abstract expressionism. The abstract expressionists were the first generation to experience New York as a real player in the art world, but when the second generation came around, they weren't so impressed. They thought the abstract expressionists were to serious, or a phony sort of serious.

The essay went on about how drag shows were sort of these women in quotes, nobody was trying to pass as a woman. They were quoting femininity. Larry Rivers started doing this with famous paintings, he repainted them in quotes. And so pop art was born according to some guy who wrote for a text book, the cliffsnotes of the cliffsnotes.

I really like the idea of in quotes, I'm also very interested in italics and parenthesis... The above image is a second generation of this earlier post. I painted up this objunc before I read the essay, but it now seems so appropriate. There's this sort of former hipster as Mary. Nylon quotes the Bible, and in turn the Bible (faith) sort of follows the fads. Moral Zeitgeist is the new buzz word, the progressive shifting of our moral beliefs. Biblical morality doesn't follow some cosmic tyrant; Biblical morality follows about five steps behind the moral zeitgeist. But.

Moral zeitgeist, moral relativism, moral fashion.

There's this three mile stretch of road that I like to walk at night. I always notice the corpses of dead birds on the sidewalk. I suppose they fall to their death from the power lines when they get to exhausted from the heat. Tonight while I was walking this road, I was also listening to CAKE, I don't know why anyone ever stopped listening to them. I was listening to their debut album, Motorcade of Generosity. These are some of the lyrics.

You see birds fall from the window ledge above mine.
Then they flap their wings at the last second.
I can see their dead weight
Just dropping like stones
For small loaves of bread
Past my window all the time.
But unless I get up,
Walk across the room
And peer down below,
I don't see their last second curves
Toward a horizontal flight.
All these birds just falling from the ledge like stones.

Now due to a construct in my mind
That makes their falling and their flight
Symbolic of my entire existence,
It becomes important for me
To get up and see
Their last second curves toward flight.
It's almost as if my life will fall
Unless I see their ascent.

I counted twelve corpses on my way home. There's also monsoon weather around here every couple of weeks, so half of these former birds are these ratty looking piles that blend in with the debris that's collected around them in the wind. I hope that's not symbolic of my entire existence, but the serendipity of having unsolicited lyrics to match my walk cannot be ignored.

As If

The movie theatre is still empty, so I get my pick of seats. Of course I choose the row with the rail in front; nobody can sit in front of me and I can put my feet up without transferring theatre floor skank to a place where someone will eventually put their head.

I could have caught an earlier showing, except I was already late for the previews and maybe the first several minutes of the film. As a Hollywood blockbuster, it's important to be there from the beginning. Otherwise you're likely to miss the plot exposition in its entirety, but that could be a moot point. I'm looking to kill two hours on special effects explosions, the plot's going to be vacant anyway. The director hasn't encrypted any secret messages, nothing can be divined from the patterns in the fire bursts. They are just a special kind of fireworks so we can ooh and ahh. They are on the evening news. As if one combustion could be distinguished from another.

I could go peek into the earlier showing, but I don't have anywhere to be. People are starting to show up now. On one side of me, some guys are talking about the new episode of Cops that just aired, as if one episode could be distinguished from another. The drug charges outside of Detroit are the same as the domestic violence in Eugene, OR. I could never sit through one segment of that stuff, it's garbage, but because this other man has taken note, because a human voice is telling it rather than the television, it becomes fascinating. I'm leaning in now, I've plugged my opposite ear in an effort to block out any static noises. These guys don't notice me, but I feel really exposed. I think it must be really obvious to anyone sitting behind me, but so what, it's not criminal, it's probably not even as strange as I'm imagining.

When I finally get a real taste of the conversation that's going on, I realize that it's probably even sillier for me to behaving like this than I thought. To think, I was expending so much effort to hear this guy talk about the things he would do to some prostitute in a wife-beater tank top, "Why's this guy trying to arrest her, he ought to be gettin in that... check her pussy, see if she got a stash."

This doesn't sound right to me at all, that seems like the last place that a prostitute would hide anything of value. When overhearing this I wrote down stash, but maybe I was supposed to write 'stache instead, as some sort of pubic hair slang maybe? I'll never know.

How have I come to sit next to these people? They're vulgar and disgusting to me, and I'm surrounded. How have my life experiences, the path I've traveled, lead me to share this moment in this place amongst these people?

I write that so confrontational. I haven't asked if I'm superior, I've assumed it. But it must be so, I don't watch Cops. And I can forgive myself for anything. And I'm so aware, what with all the fault I can find in anything, I can see it where others wouldn't. And so I can conceal it.

How have I come to share this experience, as if one individual should be distinguished from another.

They Just Sit there on the Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me

I don't know how much I really want to say about this. I know I'm a hypocrite, I buy more books than I actually read. And then I feel guilty about it. Then I get mad at the rest of my generation for not reading as much as they should either. Then I see them spending $30 on fucking tshirts and I say, "Ah Ha! That's why I hate them! Because they're consumer extremists!" Counter culture my ass, you fucking hipster backwash! You muts! You eat whatever they put in your bowl. Then I scratch my leg through my skinny jeans and check my myspace. It's a vicious cycle that ends with me watching Gossip Girl. Fuck.

Aaall Aboard the S.S. Twat!!

I get the bottled water thing, I really do. The people that say bottled water tastes the same as tap water are full of shit, it usually doesn't. It varies by region and city. My current tap water is fine, but when I lived in Phoenix it was undrinkable, and Pinal County was worse. As a child I lived on the outskirts of civilization and my dad had to drive into town with a truck that pulled a giant water tank behind it. Then when he returned to the boonies the water was pumped into a bigger tank that was connected to the house water supply. There was a well, but there's no water underground in deserts. That water was also foul out of the tap.

So buy a filter.

I'm especially annoyed by Fiji bottled water, and really any water that isn't bottled locally. Even if you recycle the bottle it's ridiculous. You understand what's happening right? Someone is putting WATER into storage drums and burning fuel to bring it across thousands of miles of OCEAN so that you can feel exotic. And you're paying for it. You're paying more for WATER than you do for gasoline. Fuck you.

There's oil in that water.

Also: if you need something to do with your used coffee grounds, mix them with crushed red pepper and rub it on chicken breast. Then grill it.

Ftr Cty

i write now as like the computer that within the pocket does the translate of text that is original a language is not of present

Summer school is over and I've been awarded my high marks for an indifferent performance, thanks State U! I think most people go to school for the grades and the degree, but I'm really there for the motivation the instructors are supposed to provide to work hard. Other majors get to look forward to a life of overbearing bosses to keep them busy, but as an artist, everything is self paced. If I can't develop those skills now, I never will.

The Digital Photo class lead me to learn about Dan Eldon, whose own art journal was an influence on this, so that was valuable. My second class was academically shameful, but I couldn't resist it: Film/Media Studies 394, History of Anime. I couldn't believe it either.

My first semester at ASU I worked in the study lab for the athletics department. Turns out that most of ASU's student athletes earn their humanities credits by taking a Hip Hop Music Studies class, so much of my generation-shame developed in that computer lab. Not because of the class, I can recognize the value of popular culture studies, but because these fuckers had to cheat. There's also a survey of American Pop Music class that's especially popular with student athletes. My favorite quote from that semester, "Are the Beatles the same as the B-52's?"

Truthfully the anime class was pretty informative. I learned about Satoshi Kon, who does really great work, and some of the other movers and shakers. I knew before going into it that anime wasn't the same as cartoons, but I didn't realize that it could be more than just entertaining. It's especially compelling to note that much of the apocalyptic/sci-fi genre is directly influenced by Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings; considering that those are the only instances of nuclear warfare, the Japanese have the purest understanding of the repercussions. For instance, Barefoot Gen, the original manga was written by Keiji Nakazawa, a survivor of Hiroshima.

These are a few of my least favorite things...

This are those things that I has few likes for, truth being that I hate it.

"We are a nation of consumers, and that's okay."

Thanks Discover Card commercial, thanks for that timeless tidbit of wisdom. Cunts.

So a few weeks ago some politicians were rescued from Columbia with some fancy sort of switcheroo tactics. One of the family members said it was a miracle, a switcheroo is not a fucking miracle. I thought a miracle was something that can't be understood without a supernatural explanation. Cunts.

This homeless woman got on the bus today, she was dripping with sweat and clearly exhausted. This happens during rush hour and so the bus is standing room only, also this is in Arizona so it's the sort of heat that can actually kill you. When most places have heat waves it's uncomfortable, in AZ it can actually be dangerous. As I said, this is rush hour and full, so every block the doors are opening for passengers who are exiting, and taking the cool air with them, while the boarding passengers bring in the heat and their own foul stink. This is a middle aged woman that gets on, the posted signs and rider propriety would normally say that if she's not elderly, then you don't have to offer your seat. One of the sitting passengers did offer his seat, twice. She rejected him both times. Ten minutes later she collapsed, some passengers helped her up and she collapsed again. Another passenger offered her water, she rejected it. She got off the bus at the next stop and took a seat on the bench, in the sun. Cunt.

This woman isn't only a danger to herself, she's a danger to human compassion. Here's a full bus, between forty and fifty people, that will store this little scene in their memory banks. Next time there's an opportunity to offer assistance in some form, they're going to wonder whether or not it'll be accepted. It's embarrassing when people reject that sort of base compassion.

St Hubert

St Hubert, before he was a saint, was a wealthy Netherlander and a hunter. He came upon a stag with a crucifix glowing from its forehead, through this Christ spoke and commanded him into a life of asceticism. As a hermit he became the patron saint of hunters. So the legend goes, what else can be said.

Forcheville undermines Swann from Odette's dressing room

This image has nothing to do with this post. Swann In Love was not written for early 20th century French citizens, it was written for all time. I also think it's supposed be adapted into a play and set in our contemporary world. I haven't googled yet to see if this exists, it must. I know there's a period film from the 80's. I'm going to type this out first before I burst my own bubble. It's just some rearranged text converted into dialogue, I don't know anything about how to properly arrange theatrical notes. I hope that, through this, you'll be able to see how fucking fantastic it would be for this story to exist as a contemporary play.

Swann, who has been seeing Odette, had a falling out with the Verdurins and is no longer welcome at their salon, where Odette spends most of her evenings. (the salon may become a bar, and the Verdurins its owners...) Forcheville (whose twat name will have already been addressed) is a new addition to the Verdurin scene, he and Odette have developed a mutual interest in Swann's absence. (Those whom I know personally may recognize why this story currently appeals to me)

Swann sits mumbling to himself in front of his laptop.

Swann: Yet it's not really anger... that I feel when I see how she longs to run away and scratch around in that lair of cacophony. It's disappointment, not of course for myself, but for her; I'm disappointed to find that, after living for more than six months in daily contact with me, she hasn't yet reached the stage of understanding that there are evenings when anyone with the least delicacy of feeling should be willing to forgo a pleasure when asked to do so. She ought to have the sense to say 'I won't go' if only from policy, since it is by her answer that the quality of her heart will be judged once and for all.

Swann begins to type out an email which he reads aloud

I swear to you, that in asking you not to go I should hope for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening and I shall feel trapped myself if, after all, you tell me you're not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you too. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your night out has no bearing on the point. What I must know is...

Forcheville begins to read the rest of the email mockingly, with Swann at first, from Odette's computer in her dressing room.

Forcheville: ...whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing even minor pleasures. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water.

Odette: You shouldn't be reading that.

Forcheville: He shouldn't be writing it! How can you tolerate a message like this?

Odette takes Forcheville's place at the computer and finishes reading the message aloud. Unlike Forcheville, she reads it with sympathy and concern.

Odette: Do you realize that your answer will have the effect-- I won't say of making me cease loving you immediatly, of course, but making you less attractive in my eyes when I realize that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher. Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up this night out in the hope that you would go on none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I consider it more honorable to give you due warning.

Forcheville: You needn't pay any heed to those words that were just written, you have enough familiarity with the ways of men. You can conclude that that wouldn't have been written unless he was in love, and that since he is in love, it's unnecessary to obey it at all, as he'll only be more in love later on. We're late, we should go.

Odette types a quick reply.

Odette: If I go on reading this, I'll never get there in time for the Overture.

No Zen on Mountaintops!

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig spends a lot of pages in, what he calls, intellectual high ground, the mountaintops. It's necessary for him to fully articulate his philosophy of quality, but he eventually admits that while the high ground, above the timberline, is interesting and valuable, it does very little good for those of us living in the valley.

Maybe it's a misunderstanding on my part of Zen, but I'm not sure how much I can agree with the ideals of detachment and existing in the moment. A trans-temporal awareness may be precisely what gives us our personhood. If we were looking for instruction on how to prevent regret, or personal suffering and the like, we'd be better to look to the animals than the Zen monks. I was just watching this goofy news segment about a dog that had it's leg shot off. A week later it's bouncing around on three legs, happy as can be. No nightmares about the fanatic gunman, no concerns that, with this new disability, he'll be unable to live out his goals. The dog will be inconvenienced for the rest of it's life, but it won't suffer.

Maybe all of those things that Buddhism would have you abandon are what make you a person.

The Darkening of the Light

This is a scan of, what was, a very hopeful I'ching reading. It didn't seem to work out, but I'm still very interested in the use of these devices; I don't think they have any supernatural properties, but they have the use of advocating a perspective that you might not have access to otherwise. People ask one another for advice, or alternate interpretations of a situation, all the time, but, unless you're bumping elbows with Confucius, what are the chances of getting a wiser, more timeless perspective? I usually throw the coins for the novelty, but I'd be just as satisfied with a random flutter of the pages to find my fortune.

Specifically with Ming I, the advice was a sort of quiet perseverance. The image is of the superior man, who finds himself surrounded by a darkness with which he cannot compete, is to conceal his remaining light and wait for dawn. As advice goes, that's as good as anyone can hope for, and it didn't make any empty promises like the cookies.

Iscariot and Odette

I'm still on a political kick. I was reading, or listening, somewhere that high school kids are protesting bottled water by satirically selling bottled air. The idea of course is that water is free and the plastic is bad for the environment. It's so interesting to me how fashionable it's become to be green, and of course it's even more prudent than it is fashionable and that's a good thing. But... but, but, but, what if way back in 2000, the election would have gone the other way, and rather than Bush being the object of our dissatisfaction, half the country would have resented Gore. He likely would have shown better leadership following 9/11. However, except for the most creative conspiracy theorists among us, we wouldn't have been able to imagine quite as bleak a conflict as that which we currently face, so he wouldn't have scored any points. He certainly wouldn't have been able to generate the celebrity necessary to get us fired up about the environment. And Nader wasn't going to do it. I think we can say, with confidence, that green wouldn't be part of mainstream fashion if it weren't for, or in revolt of, George W. Bush.

We can imagine a relatively similar scenario surrounding the 2004 election. Had Kerry won, we could still be decades from the first real chance of an American president with a vagina or African heritage. The extreme to which Bush operates paves the way for his alternative.

Whenever I come into contact with an idea from a book or instructor, I sort of feel like I discovered that idea fair and square, I get to reference it all I like without citing anyone other than the maybe the original scientist or researcher, if it's that sort of fact. However, if an idea is introduced to me from an adjacent student, it feels like cheating if I don't include them in the chain of reference. I don't know why that is, it doesn't make any sense. Sometimes I almost feel like I'm supposed to reject the idea all together, but some are just to damned solid, and that is the case of this alternate interpretation of Judas Iscariot. Certainly for the biblical narrative to unfold properly, Judas is necessary; and because his actions were carried out in a universe whose overseer is both omnipotent and omniscient, we couldn't be to far off the mark to suggest that Judas was just the right tool for the job. Furthermore, Judas, who is spending eternity in Hell, made a much more dramatic sacrifice than Christ; if his soul wasn't enough, they got his reputation too. What sacrifice did Jesus really make? People have died worse deaths, and after he finished bleeding out, he beamed up to Heaven; there's an entire movement of people that can't wait for that...

I'm off topic. What's really important is that Bush is bad, but bad things have implications about their opposites. Like Judas, Bush's badness has made things possible. Bush's bad policy has made America (most of us? some of us?) much more aware of how far we can fall. It's like dualism, everything is dualism for me lately, I think I'm on to something, there's dualism in everything, everything.

And, unrelated, Odette is the subject of this block quote that I can't stop reading:

"Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when- in this moment of deprivation- the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of the world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively."

The Marble Veneer of the Roman Empire

Part of the objunc process is, by the use of scans and printing, to allow the images to evolve and develop over multiple generations. This gives them the opportunity to retain aspects I like, and abandon those I'm no longer interested in. This is a second generation, birthed of this earlier post.

I expect that I will continue to complain about politics and other Americans, I suppose that, as soon as possible, I should acknowledge that I am completely aware that political art is played out, cliche, and so five years ago.

Remember the first anti-Bush art piece you saw and how dangerous it seemed at the time. Now things are so bad that it's obvious and cliche to bitch about it on the page. The art establishment censored itself. LOL

Any time I see red, white and blue used in a composition, it makes me cringe. Thank you artist, I get it, Bush sucks, Americans dropped the ball. I'm not entirely sure what that means; to be so aware of the problems that we've created and, still, be so impotent to find solutions, it's really very frightening to me.

I'm listening to the first hour of the Diane Rehm Show's, Friday News Roundup for July 4th. It's even more bleak than I thought. There was concern about the attention span of young people, the inability of the public to penetrate the surface of issues in an analytic or substantive way, the difference between access to information and actual possession of information with regard to the internet, and general civic awareness. I'll go into it later, it was a lot to digest.

They did sort of mention the Roman practice of building with this revolutionary new material, concrete. It was a quick mention for them, but I think it's a really interesting analogy. They built in a way that was similar to the monumental buildings and temples of the Greeks, except the marble was only a veneer. For instance, The Pantheon, is all surface; the internal structure is concrete and cheap brick. The marble is a disguise, an attractive surface hiding the vulgar guts of the place. Why do things as well as the Greeks, when we can pretend with half the effort?

I don't know if the guests realized how apt an analogy it was.

Independence, Indie-pendence, and Interdependence

In addition to Independence Day, the 4th of July is a day when I'm reminded of my inability to reconnect with those whom I've lost touch, either by accident or revolt. It's not just an inability, it's by no means a deficiency; it feels more deliberate, but maybe the result of an imbalance between my enthusiasm and my anxiety.

I think independence has an additional sinister side that's rarely recognized. Independence, freedom, asserts itself as being out of bounds to another's will, this must also imply a rejection of consequences, or at least the option. By declaring independence, rather than interdependence, we may be a benevolent philanthropist, throwing checks and change in whichever direction we see fit, or we may be a violent criminal who rejects his sentence because he can, thus never being afforded the solitary opportunity to reflect on those crimes.

What have we become in our nations independence? We're a wandering giant who defines the bad guy as whoever makes us angry at the moment, and we refuse to be compromised with consequences because we don't have to. In our independence we've only grown to be hated the world over. "Hulk smash Nagasaki! Hulk smash Baghdad!"

Declare Indie-pendence! Don't let them do that to you! I'm tired of young people and hipster style. Style is not just empty, it's worse than that. Style is designed and manufactured to conceal people's emptiness. Style is how lazy people feign quality, and they're so great in number that it perverts the culture. Why bother to play an instrument or learn about music when you can just look like you're in a band? Why read the book, why go to class? Fucking people. And they do this thing where they don't discriminate between fashion and social conscience; if you look in their closets, you'll see recycling and liberal politics hung up between their skinny jeans and American Apparel deep V-neck. I suppose it's probably just the case of the subculture from a half decade ago becoming the main stream of today, so, declare your indie-pendence.

Interdependence. Specifically between the scientist and the poet. Several days ago, while I was wandering the sidewalks, I came upon a fireworks display. I guess they were testing for today, it was such a serendipitous event. I had mostly just been walking with my head down when I heard the crashing, I was happy to find that my path would be within view of the cannons. Just as I was approaching they began the grand finale, and I got to stand and watch, through a fence, as the cannoneers danced around with their flares.

All the while, I had been thinking about the same things that have been ruining my walks for months, these heated arguments between my scientist and my poet, each of them trying to convince me that their explanation for all my troubles contained the lesson to be learned- since their individual arguments are so drastically in contrast to one another, to accept one is to reject the other.

As I stood there beneath the fireworks display I could see the poet jumping and pointing, he could hardly contain himself, crying out, "See! See!" And admittedly, if I didn't have qualms about the use of language referring to supernatural phenomenon, I might describe it as having the qualities of something magic. No sooner had I began to see the poet in a new light, but the wind changed, and I caught the scent of the black powder used to launch these lights into the sky. Then I began to notice all around me, there were remnants of cardboard casings that the fireworks would have originally been contained in. The poet had deceived me. It might be magic, if it weren't so clearly rational. Every spark, every combustion, every radiant color, each and every aspect of a fireworks display is absolute in its rationality and scientific explanation. My poet was trying to steal my scientist's thunder. What a dick.

I don't know, but I will in a while.

The owls in this image have been with me for close to two years, patiently waiting on a hard drive for their eventual day in the light. The owls are part of a friends collection, and only represent a small fraction of what she has. Although I've become intensely suspect of all things charming or kitschy in recent months, I can still appreciate these owls.

I only chose to include them in this composition as a snap judgment and because they were convenient, but that's the point. Part of the goal of objuncs is that they remain open for interpretations. I'm interested in those snap judgment decisions as a physical result of my subconscious at work. There's a pre-intellectual process that's always in action, always filtering the massive amount of static stimulus in the world from whatever it is you're actually looking for, or should be.

After printing out those patient owls, for whatever reason, it reminded me of Shen Zhou's Poet On A Mountaintop, which I included in a more graphic version. And, so there it is: patience is wisdom, and that's where Zen comes from.

Deer in the headlights

Oh, you know. Everyone is moaning about gas prices, it's terrible, America sucks. Call the waambulence. I've had arguments about the moral responsibility of the oil companies, and whether we should expect them to self-regulate. My answer is no. I think that to even ask that question is to misunderstand the nature of business, which I admittedly have not studied in any form, we can call it armchair economics. As far as I know, the goal of business is to bring in the greatest possible income, by spending as little as possible. There's no room for morals in that definition. The various people-turned-cogs in the corporate machines get their pats on the back for cutting costs. Which individuals should we ask to sacrifice their employee review in our favor? I know of very few people who would choose the stick over the carrot out of social decency alone, and, of course, none of them would ever be caught working a job that could offer that choice. There's no morals in a business machine just as there's no morals to be found in the mechanisms of an automobile.

The oil company is a lion, whose cage has been left unlocked by an irresponsible administration. We could blame the beast, but I think it's the zookeeper we should be after.

IfI bothered to take a business ethics class I guess I would either feel very sheepish or spend the semester rolling my eyes.

American Authenticy and an Artist

Week4-ish, originally uploaded by aozers.

I'm really into old trucks. For me, they're a representation of American authenticity, with rust and chipped windows and midwestern character. They're directly opposed to the suburban SUV that's come to take it's place as an American staple. But my attraction to them could also be attributed to the nostalgia that young people often have for the good old days of their naive childhood, or, even more likely, the days before they were ever born, and whose only awareness thereof is gifted to them by grandparents, who, by kindness and likely some self denial, conceal from us the harsh truths.

The figure in the image was originally Marc Jacobs from his Andy/Edie shoot in Interview magazine. After several generations of my objunctifying process, he's left as a silhouette, that for the process of this composition, represents the artist. An additional element is the text, scanned out of Swann's Way, spoken by the character, Bloch. So far in my reading, he has unfortunately played an unsubstantial part, at least in terms of textual presence. It wouldn't ruin it for me in any way if I were told that he is recurring in later volumes. In fact, it would accelerate my reading more than any other motivational force. The scanned text in this image is Bloch's response to a comment about the weather.

"Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them."

He goes on to say

"I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as time. I would willingly reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the Malayan kris, but I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those infinitely more pernicious and moreover quite bleakly bourgeois implements, the umbrella and the watch."

I'm so jealous of the portrayed ability this character has to focus. Sure, I'll happily wander the streets in this terrible summer heat, but I know it. On the up side, I am perpetually late, even if I plan not to be.