Photos and accompanying thoughts have moved to

hhttp://thoughtgraphy.wordpress.com/

Miscellaneous bits and pieces will eventually migrate.

Come over to the other side.

meeting someone else.

It was as if the expression was such a powerful force of energy. Her happiness was open on her face, and in her nimble hands; fingers working a soft sheet -now rolled, now thin spindles- of tissue. To look at her was to plug in to a common field of shared joy. I was reeled in. Her face was an even fawn canvas as her lips curved slightly in a happy half-smile. It seemed the spirit of wonder and glee had effused through her very body and flitted away, touching very slightly then escaping the solid boundaries of her mouth, lighting the air around her in a soft electric glow. There was no singular way of observing her countenance; what was animated was gently infused, and held steady in her private reverie. Smooth brows, lifted lids, confident nose, and a mouth made to always smile. There was no pout in her posture. Her tan leather bracelets and sandals claimed freedom more than fashion. Her red bag fit a simple sagged form on her lap which sat ordinarily under a skirt of yellow and orange. An old scab on her left knee, the only punctuation on legs that looked used to activity. A thin band around her elfin hair betrayed hippie inclinations. But therein the word 'betrayal' reveals the wonder: she simply was. And to chance upon her unwritten thoughts was to share in the same rapture.

This is different from the delight a young child might find himself in. She had consciousness, and a tumultous age. She was aware of the world, but stayed instead, with the light within. And yes I did wonder, just once, the reason for her joy. A romantic date? But she sat clean and upright, not slumped in the sensual aftermath of romance. A comic moment? But her expression was placidly bright, not mired in the fast tangles of witticisms. It doesn't matter. She'd sat, and was.

the birdwatcher's creed...

there's this online mag with the most motley crue of articles around, from obama power to greener tyres to albanian fashion to being suspicious of happiness (or something specific like those)... i like that UTNE doesn't seek to be higher (or holier) than thou in their pursuit of knowledge; UTNE simply delights in exploring ideas. any one who reads them will find something to engage them, and hardly ever be lost or put off by either language or over-rhetoric. i say that as a happy reader of over 5 years.


here's a curious piece about bird-watching:

I find this fidelity to the truth to be one of the most attractive aspects of bird-watching. We all like to brag about the birds we see and hear, but we are also united in our rueful admissions that this or that bird has escaped us this season, this year, or even all our lives so far.

We look forward to the moment when we can truthfully lay claim to a particular bird, or to a higher tally of birds seen this month or this year, or in this place or that.

And when we finally reach our goal, we will tell our friends and fellow bird-watchers, who will share our gratification, because they will have every reason to believe us.

isn't that such a nice phrase- 'fidelity to the truth'.

inspiration.

[ .from Jessica Naomi [flickr])

in flashes and bright sparks,
they excite, choke-
there seems neither next nor past,
it takes me up in its life.

then gone and spent,
i'm left changed.
there seems no reason nor impetus
to explain the event.

fatvertising.

[ usa, ny. anti-obesity ad]

The ads — which cost about $277,000 to develop over three fiscal years, including money for creative work and focus groups — will run in 1,500 subway cars for three months. (The $90,000 cost of the subway advertisement comes through a private donor, the Fund for Public Health in New York.)


someone asks: but are these images we really need clogging the arteries of our subways every day?
i: yes, i think so. i think we sometimes need a jolt that things aren't sugar, nice, and everything innocent (everything that's put) out there.

it nicely ties in with the other bit we often have in our hands. the burger, otherwise to be known as the bad bits of unhappy cows genetically engineered by the companies.

the golden spruce.

[ northwest, united states. from STRIKE ]

i got alot more than i'd bargained for when i picked up the golden spruce. tree, land, wind, sea, air and man, -above all, man- i did not realise the combustable combination they were.

take a long look here: imagine how a tree could have grown through centuries to become so; imagine its place and what it fought, what it strove for, its comrades in the pursuit of life. imagine how man first came upon the giant; imagine how man saw how it could be used, and how he thought up clever ways to harvest it all; ruthless being conquering being-
[march 04, 1906, at rock pile creek, sonoma, california]


i'd turned myself towards rows of page-bound greenery. i was looking for an insight into the inanimate mass we both depend on and plunder. oil, water, air, fuel, crops.. then forests: stoic browns and proud plumes, quiet and relentless, all knowing, still, wilderness, i'd thought. how quaint my ideas were. but the story of a man in the middle of it all is indeed all wilderness, all madness.


from chapter 14, after the tree falls,

al wanderer, hadwin's former colleague from lillooeit, could have been speaking for all woodsman through history when he looked back over his own empty corner of british columbia and said, "good god. i didnt think it was possible to log this much."

"man", (George Perkins Marsh) wrote more than 140 years ago, "who even now finds scarce breathing room on this cast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace...the Eden he has wasted." That year (1864) saw the creation of california's yoesmite state reserve, which included the continent's first federally protected trees.

by 1919, just as a group of wealthy californians was forming the Save the Redwoods League, the first portable chain and circular saws began appearing on the cover of Scientific American.

einarson picked up his train of thought: "another reason i like falling," he said, "is i like walking around in old-growth forests. it's kind of an oxymoron i guess - to like something and then go out and kill it."

joy in a tin can/ get yer fix

[ . www.theflowmarket.com]

anything can be sold.

it doesnt have to be real.

hands.

[ singapore . restaurant(?)]

looking at the chef engaged in his work, precise metal in motion, and hands, his hands moulding and kneading, one felt it was not a job cut out for many. it reminds me:

laborare est orare

(never complicated responsibilities) the essence of it breathes honesty, (not drudgery) its directive simple. and when else do we feel free and simultaneously vital than when we are engaged in that we love; when else do does one feel in harmony with something beyond his lonesome self. we're physical beings in a physical world. shall we not wrestle this and remember how we feel alive when in motion, in tandem with that we enjoy and express, and with that we believe in?

*

Teach me, my God and my King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in any thing,
To do it as for thee:


Not rudely, as a beast,
To runne into an action;
But still to make thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.


A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the haev'n espie.


All may of thee partake:
nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.


A servant with this clause
Makes drudgerie divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and th' action fine.


This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold:
For that which God doth touch and own
Cannot for lesse be told.

the elixir.
-george herbert

(try putting into words/ tell me what you mean)

[ . ein tintendropfen from deinhero2 ]

there was a bird in the kitchen today. i went near, and it was so shocked it flew out and hit the window glass. flapped for a few seconds, almost hovering, trying to go through. then fell.

.....- hc.

make death.

[ uk. from may miles thomas' the devil's plantation]

-that reveals the hidden tracks that cross the city, connecting the old and new. Here May stumbles over the city's myths and stomps on its remains: city of murder, architecture, industry, ill-health, feral violence, petty corruption, neddery, new money, crime and the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Not so much Glasgow as Glasgone:

"Several years ago on a rare trip to London, I struggled to tell an acquaintance about an idea I had for a project based in Glasgow. I had only a loose notion – possibly some kind of film, possibly a piece of writing - about my love/hate relationship with my home city. At that time my Garnethill flat overlooked the middens behind a Hill Street tenement and my thoughts towards the city were dark. It’s about murder and architecture, I told my friend, unaware of my choice of words. Not death, but murder."

the arrogance of fools is a different breed

you remake into dust
what was grown by time itself.

and.

so we do,
but flippantly so? demeaningly so? must the play of life be a mechanical murder of being and principle.


[ .the cove. movie.]

a piece of greeting meat.

[ . from lovecreative ]

there's oh so many things one can read into this. but oh well.

name card design meat and greet meet and greet meat to greet greet meat man of meat man for meat man and meat skin flesh raw power hunt dominance relations earth red blood meet self meat neat suit neat face cold hands killing fields cutting changing using distorting hiding natural

for those who cant do, at least teach well.

[ .lee hae seong ]
the only pic of my elusive student.

today, a kid commented this other kid in the passage was probably wasting too much time 'wrapped in her own thoughts, daydreaming'.

"that's not good right? to daydream only"
"mm. to do things without thinking is not good either right? the best is to think well, and then do."
"yes. you're right."

it might have been tough if he'd asked, "like, how?"

.

id started many, if most only in mind,
a thousand teeming ghosts,
- screaming truthward -

i became weary,
found blind comfort in
daily loves and solo hopes.

still, they were.
never quite raised by my hand.
and i, still am.
seeing nothing beyond.

manmade muse: brian dettmer/ books/sculpture

[ . by brian dettmer]

amost like an autopsy, he carves into these paper tomes,
revealing and exposing,
but also building into a final cohesive sculpture.


talking about digging into a good book.

[heres a video: the book doesnt really have an obligation or the monopoly that they used to...]

grace cathedral hill: are you feeling better now

[grace cathedral. san francisco]



[acrylic on wood by bruce docker. ]

many years ago, at least relatively so in my current lifetime, a kindred spirit in the world of art and music, an at times murky, almost always sidelined world, shared a song by the decemberists.

while explanations made now for then are usually imagined and hardly ever true, i suppose i was then too sprightly and energetic with my tastes in indie. used to quick turns and complex riffs, i couldnt settle down long enough to let the melody seep in, or put word and word together to uncover picturesque dreams and morphous meanings.

in other words, i didnt stand still enough for this song; anything that didnt leap out at me was forgotten, or worse, never seen or heard.

one must love the speedy informational transactions of the internet then. for it was on its radio that i heard it again. this time, a curious thing: the very first strains dug deep. spiritual-physicists would make some comment on resonating frequencies or something.. but yes. the strains seemed the tumult in my sluggish self, and the timbre the low echo my dragging feet made. the quiet observing voice was the corner i wanted to retreat into, and let the world's going ons, made artful through a steadied frame, be my muse and my preacher.



grace cathedral hill,
all wrapped in bones of
setting sun,
all dust and stone and moribund.
i paid twenty five cents
to light a little white candle
for a new year's day

i sat and watched it burn away
then turned and weaveed through slow decay
we were both a little hungry
so we went to get a hotdog

down the hyde st. pier
the light was slight and disappeared
the air, it stunk of fish and beer

we heard a superman trumpet play the
national trumpet
and the world be
long for you
but it'll never belong to you

but on a motorbike,
when all the city lights
blind your eyes tonight
are you feeling better now?
are you feeling better now
are you feeling better now.

someway to greet the year
your eyes all bright and brimmed with tears
the pilgrims, pills and tourists here all sing
fifty three bucks to buy a brand new halo

sweet on a green eyed girl
all fiery irish, clip and curl
all brine and piss and vinegar
i paid a twenty cents to
light a little white candle

and the world may be long for you
but the world

but-



the images were lightly intoxicating.

but. away from internalities, to a place we can walk and feel concrete on foot: what is the place that this song revolves around? what is the space that the song, in its melodies and silences, seem to echo?

more-stalgia.

[this is a special post. it is also a rebellious post, because i'd conjured this blog as a pedantic project to understand and explore beyond the initial image (which is sposed to be nicely framed header). the initial image here is only in my head. try to imagine with me.]

- exploring nostalgia -

RC: What are some artefacts or aspects of your childhood days that you feel nostalgic for and why? (it could be some food that you used to eat as a child but no longer do, games, personal items...)

bring proper playgrounds back!!! i want real swings that actually can swing; i want high tall metal slides. i want scary see-saws that do not have the pathetic small axis of pivot that today's short springy stump pass off as see-saws. i want sand.

playgrounds built after 2000 (?) are pathetic. the plastic sponge mat they use stink in the heat. its painful to fall on. the sets are creepy cupcake versions: small, and completely unfun, totally unthrilling.

when i was younger, i'd visit the old-school playground at my aunts place. it (still) has an amazing network of monkey-bar-things. i could actually admire my cousin who'd negotiate it, and wonder about the day when i'd be big(ger) and brave(r) to monkey my way up so high. when he banged his head against a bar, the entire structure 'khlonngged'. it also had two slides - the taller was properly seven metres up; if your shorts slide up, youd have butt burn sliding down. it had two swings, on monster chains that my 20year old cousin could sit on without me fearing it would break. i'd scream at my cousin cos he'd see-saw me too high, too rough.

my own neighbourhood playground had a huge chain bridge, which i'd fallen off while clambering along the outside. my tailbone hurt like shite, but ive yet to hear stories of people who'd died while on those playgrounds. it was torn down during some en-bloc upgrading thing.

even better, i actually sweated and panted playing all those things. seriously, today's playgrounds are more coloured up, but are reduced to a third of the size, and even less of the fun. everything's scaled down, sanitised, and made 'more manageable'. they're like some little artist's daydream of multi-coloured la la land, who'd forgotten that kids like, and need, proper play, not prissy play. growing bones, you know?



i also liked those pigs-in-a-basket biscuits. they used to be only 40 cents each. and found everywhere.


[ . from http://eatzybitzy.blogspot.com ]
.. except, those are the more fancily packaged ones. they actually look like this:


[ zhu zai bing. from lemonshortbread ]

underdogs.

[ . from Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women]

the group moniker is highly clever. i could already imagine the trouble my friends would have if i joined it. what hypocrisy, claiming to be a pub-goer. but i thought the pink chaddi (basically, underpants) was a brilliant fling in the face(s) of the sri ram sena.

plus, enemy credentials cant be too disputable for lack of fulfilling one adjective. if one is loose and forward, then she (men, you understand this only applies to the fairer and weaker sex) most probably visits pubs, the bastions of dank sinfulness. the converse is more true, for 'to do' or 'participate' is stronger than merely 'to think' or 'be so'. if one is found in a pub, whether or not that place actually meets the criteria for being a propah pub, then she is most definitely very loose and so forward she'll without a doubt fall flat on her face sometime later in life (bringing down the entire name of her family and forebears) unless we rein her in and slap her down.

hitting nightspots, wearing flatteringly clothes (ironic how the tighter your attire, the looser you're sposed to be) and speaking a lil too loud, too much is probably a triple heart attack to a real sri ram-er. i imagine they'd be ready to raze g-strings off if they see such 'happening, loose and forward' women on a mass scale, in stranger permutations. i'd like an interview with one of them. i'd like to fly one of them over. or fly with them to hollywood-la-la-land (where i spose most degrading cultures originate). of course, to get on his (could there be 'hers' in the sri ram sena?) good side, i'd be wearing my best loosest sari (to show how uptight i am).

Pramod Mutalik, the SRS leader, said at the time that his followers were “custodians of Indian culture” who had prevented the women at the pub from going astray. He has vowed to force unmarried couples found together on Valentine’s Day to either get married or to tie rakhis – string bracelets – on their wrists signifying that they are brother and sister.

Other officials have voiced support for the idea that is “unIndian” for women to visit pubs – or even to hold hands with men in public. “We definitely condemn the incident where women were attacked but the pub culture must stop,” Anbumani Ramadoss, the Health Minister, said last month.

back to the pants. i wonder how many piles of these pink chaddis have winged (eheh, wing) their way to Pramod Muthalik. Does he seethe in anger at the pink hordes? And given that he finds it distasteful and very "unindian" for (indian?) women to traipse around town, would he be turned on or off by the sight of so many female intimates?

Also, does he have facebook? His PR assistant should hook him up, and have him read the wall posts in the group. This would allow him a better view of the challenges he faces in reel in loose women and unmarried couples on valentines day, even if only in Karnataka.

Sidenote. If Paris Hilton turned Indian, can you imagine how many millions the global (because you know, one individual here does affect the economy there) economy would lose if she weren't allowed to booze and shop her way through many nights and days. "It's really scary about the economy right now. So the way I'm playing my part in helping is doing a lot of shopping wherever I go."

toddering paths

[cameron highlands. malaysia]





not knowing is fine sometimes, especially when it's simply a crisis, a period, a hiatus, whatever we term it.

not lost, - no- but certainly no longer flag-waving and blustering with epithets.

clear the tumbleweeds, and air the mothballs, go with the flow, and surely you'll collect some solid truths by the end of the walk. i think.

and let down, let loose, the stuff you've been holding on so tight.

i've been slow to blog, if only to take a meandering walk and look and observe and take in. all out of decision making and opinion forcing. excuse the haphazardness of posts, and in posts.

time for a walk.

stuff
noun
1.	the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object; "coal is a hard black material"; "wheat is the stuff they use to make bread" [syn: material]
2.	miscellaneous unspecified objects; "the trunk was full of stuff"
3.	informal terms for personal possessions; "did you take all your clobber?"
4.	senseless talk; "don't give me that stuff"
5.	unspecified qualities required to do or be something; "the stuff of heros"; "you don't have the stuff to be a United States Marine"
6.	information in some unspecified form; "it was stuff I had heard before"; "there's good stuff in that book"
7.	a critically important or characteristic component; "suspense is the very stuff of narrative"
verb
1.	cram into a cavity; "The child stuffed candy into his pockets"
2.	press or force; "Stuff money into an envelope"; "She thrust the letter into his hand" [syn: thrust]
3.	obstruct; "My nose is all stuffed"; "Her arteries are blocked"
4.	overeat or eat immodestly; make a pig of oneself; "She stuffed herself at the dinner"; "The kids binged on ice cream" [syn: gorge]
5.	treat with grease, fill, and prepare for mounting; "stuff a bearskin"
6.	fill tightly with a material; "stuff a pillow with feathers"
7.	fill with a stuffing while cooking; "Have you stuffed the turkey yet?" [syn: farce]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

or, explained, described and explored charmingly by george carlin:

stuff
(george carlin)

winter escape.

[. from landscape ]

thats a suitably bleak picture. and many will find it romantic and lush, full of insinuated meanings and vague, blurry, triple-layered nuances.

sometimes you wake up feeling like that picture; a sharp, uncoloured awareness of yourself, and all around you. and of course, itll never feel abundant or happy or gay. you'll realise you are you, and there wasn't much to you. and that it was your own unintended fault.

or you'll feel coldly alone. except, as those who've lived homeless for long become 'used to', you'll see again the bonds that tie us all. there's the obligations and the indebtedness; the love and familiar.

there's those you held above change, above time, above physical movements and friction. those are the ones you start to wonder about in the wintry time of your soul. you muse if you let open your hand just a little, will it lift and be away, gone, to its own cadence and purpose, and/or lured away by the persistant sweets of other trains.

another feature of this wintry awakening is the incredible distance. things once held near seem far, or missing. or maybe, for the sake of longterm sanity, discovered unreal or misconceived. all directions from you, you see the lapses.

in judgement and in perception, you realise perhaps you have not failed, but oh what a distance to make up for.

of course. the landscape around you is not empty. it shouldn't be, for you are never alone in your context, but inevitably tangled in engagements, in relationships - all markers of your position in time and space. ...to see not even the physical blots is a whiteout of the soul. you're blind and dead for a time, a worse kind of winter, for you lose even perspective of your perspective.

these winter times are when the winds around me howl the greatest, and my senses demanded to be painfully acute.

as without, so within.

[Malling Hansen's Writing Ball c.1870. from officemuseum.com ]

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

[cut] Is Google Making Us Stupid?
// [paste]

.. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into " 'pancake people'—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”