recursive self similarity

I read Gulliver's three voyages, as a child, and added to my still-unconscious reservoir of information about scale and infinitude....Always intrigued, as a young boy, by the Disney TRUE LIFE ADVENTURES, it was another dozen years before the coalescing ideas surfaced into conscious thinking and virtual manipulation of heretofore incomprehensible mutating mathematical visualizations from the Matma.

Dildano: The password will be: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch OR 0100101011010010100010010001001000010011100010000100101000101, shifting to a new paradigm.



So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bit 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Johnathan Swift 1733

Each sunrise brings another day.....

 


Belatedly, I finally saw the last chapter of Six Feet Under....At 63, I am old enough to feel the chill of death, hovering near my heart.......At first, the effect of the entire series was that of my reaction to the final sequence
of characters ageing and dying......"Life goes on, within you and without you" This morning I awakened to thoughts of
destiny, fate and free-will.....As the sun came up behind the bamboo forest, bringing the white clouds to life in the pale blue sky and the frosty air warming the winter birds to chatter and the squirrels to make their runs to gather acorns, I was lifted from my morose obsessions with death and dying....although we are but puppets of Fate and products of the interactions of our decisions and those of those with whom we share our destinies, we have the power to affect the meaning and significance of our presence in this world that is home.

voyage from a pink camellia

I discovered this old thing behind a cabinet in the garage......It began as a painting by Ellen Gentry....... pink camellias......the painting didn't go anywhere, so she placed it in her "reject" stack......During our tenure as waiters at an artsy restaurant, Sidney's Second Act......our manager Ron Cohen, a non-practicing attorney, decided to hire Cathy Baker, a relatively unknown singer at the time, to appear with pianist Robert Ray, hoping that the nightclubby atmosphere would bring business to the lackluster Hungarian restaurant.....so......Ellen reworked the flower painting, copying an old photo that I had taken of a total stranger who ran a second-hand clothing store in Brookhaven......she didn't look much like Cathy Baker, but, then, we had not yet met Ms. Baker.....When this act didn't really give us gang-busters business, we resorted to singing the menus, dancing in.. attired with colorful costumes, bearing flaming filets and veal paprikash......the entire staff were friends and we all encouraged our other friends to make "costumey" appearances to liven up the place......Ron even employed portions of The Atlanta Boy Choir to sing madrigals as we served our flavorful, flaming fare on rollerskates! A fashionable decorator, Penny Goldwasser, refurbished the odd little restaurant in traditional Hungarian traveling caboose decor, in primary colors; and Ron, always attired in long dashikis, continued to interview artists and hired a socialite, Timmy Silver, as our bartender.......This was all just way too much over the top for the conservative Buckhead clientele at the time, who were more accustomed to dinner at the Cherokee Country Club and, after church services, dining on turkey and dressing at Morrison's cafeteria, however.......This old, tattered painting, a bakelite 'tip tray', and an old ceramic vase are all that remain of this venture............

FORGETTING THE FORGOTTEN AND REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER

 

the abandonment of conscious thought and considerations that had, prior to the thought's manifestation in cortex, been completely out of mind and within the caverns of oblivion, returns one to the reactive behaviors, wired into the old gizzard brain at the center of energy.....the jumping off point, continually forgotten, remembered by imagination and ever changing, vanishing every second and replaced by entire constructs of thought and motivation.....and then, the next second brings a new, and custom modification of the second's past, still cloaked in tomorrow, leaning into tomorrow's tomorrows.........now my hair is long and gray, yet tomorrow is another day, emptying the continuous realization of impermanence and filling with the potentializations both of organized processes and the disorganization of chaos.....

Live At Bliss Gardens by Kourosh Dini

Aus dem Leben des Marionetten

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
Tell a Friend-R. D. Laing,

ON MY 40th BIRTHDAY, EXACTLY......

a gallery director, in Cincinnati, took it upon himself to mount a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition funded, in part, by the NEA....after the commotion, the National Endowment For the Arts was reduced by $80 Million a year..........

"Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls." W.W. Wordsworth

Shepard's Call

This old lithograph hung across from my bed, when i lived at my grandparents as a young child....gazing at it gave me a sense of security and well-being.....I keep a smaller version of it, still; and the effect is the same.....Yet, although i still have the chair in which i was breast-fed, sentimental pictures that reinforce feelings of security and even "little golden records", i still suffer the fears of a child, abandoned by forces that it cannot comprehend.....

Last night I had a very detailed dream, much of which I can still remember, as I have made it a practice to develop the discipline to do so, in hopes that my dreams may facilitate the deciphering of my emotional being in this difficult world....

The Dream, or that which I am conscious of: I am in the old Lyric Theatre, seated with my parents.....a stage show, like the "Asi Nisi Masa" magician's show in "8 1/2", is being enacted before us....I do not understand it at all, for I am a child, however....and begin to squirm about.....Mother asks if I had eaten before we came.....When I murmur that I had not, I am sent out, alone, to find a restaurant......So, I journey into an exact replica of my hometown as it existed at the time depicted in the dream....except...instead of the white, black and chrome Krystal that operated across from the Court House, there is a duplicate of a northern Italian restaurant, Nino's, which exists now.....I enter the restaurant, ask for take-out, and am handed a covered dish of food, which I take to the Lyric, and having misplaced my ticket, fumbling for it in my pant's pocket, discover a peculiar, large postage stamp with a depictment of myself, as an adult, upon it....I present the stamp to the ticket-taker who, not even glancing at it, waves me into the theatre, which has become more like the Fox, in Atlanta....only far more immense and foreboding, yet full of beauty and wondrous sounds and scents of delicate flowers.....after a long "Veristes In Wonderland" type journey, in which the theatre is filled with trees, the carpets becoming mossy knolls and small creatures scramble from behind theatre seats that mysteriously appear.... until I am suddenly at the curtained arches which admit one into the great auditorium, from which thousands of people are exiting.....I see my parents, still seated, waiting for my return....Then I realize that I have misplaced the food! I am an adult, suddenly, as I am now....I see my parents looking about anxiously for me, but cannot recognize me! They leave.....the Theatre begins to de-materialize, and I am overwhelmed with anxiety and fear, awakening with a racing heart and tears in my eyes.....my cat is sleeping, soundly across my immobilized ankles......I think about our Collie, Cindy, gather my senses and make some French toast with bananas and peach preserves.....I awaken, the room is still and dark.....the cat is watching the moon, through the window...........

out of the nutshell

How much exact information can one load into a painting before suggestion takes over from fact? Total reality is unrepresentable, because it is infinite. One can make approximations in expression which produce this or that illusion, but below a certain scale the approximations turn into shorthand; microscopic reality cannot be rendered with a pasty, sloppy, granular substance like powdered minerals mixed in oil or words from the babelhouse of thinking. the poet is but a channel for thoughts unknown before expression and forgotten thereafter....poetry is the leavings on the beaches of infinity from which we extrapolate reality from dreams of it, which exist only in evanescent expressions from the depths of without....

STEFAN, SWIMMING AND FISHING

 

A PHOTOGRAPH  OF STEFAN AT A FALLS NEAR THE CABIN..... AND ONE OF HIM IN HIS LATEST, OF MANY, FISHING VESTS.......I THINK OF HIM SO OFTEN......... STEFAN TOLD ME HOW MUCH HE LOVED ME....THE MORNING OF HIS DEATH, BY MURDER.......THAT MADE THE DISCOVERY OF THIS TRAGEDY, JUST HOURS LATER.....ALL THE MORE DEVASTATING.......

Reisel Reject Photo

a corner of an old photo, discarded by Reis...
I've always liked this self-portrait of him..........

SAN FRANCISCO

snapshots taken with my old Pentax Spotmatic........

REIS AND A RAINBOW

New Zealand....there were rainbows everywhere.......

CUTTING UP

 

A silly pic of Branton with his giant red plastic sissors.....

GARDENING GROUP

another pic of "the group" after gardening my back yard.....Steve and Nancy, front, had just married.......

AFRO'D WITH PETER FONDA GLASSES

 

I never think of myself as ever having been "fashionable", by which i mean in accordance with popular modes and expressive of the current trends.....yet, in this picture, I'm wearing "easy rider" glasses, ala Peter Fonda and sport a Hendrix Afro, which was popular with both black and white's my age......of course, all the processing to my hair caused it to break and fall out!

TIM BROGAN, c. 1974

 

A natural, good-natured guy.....Tim just loved to sleep with everyone...and he was so good-looking that just about everyone wanted to bed him......he was one of the first victims of AIDS....

Helen Glenn

 

 

My lovely step-sister, Helen Glenn James, as a young tap dancer and in her debut photo.

PT n ME

 

My first cat, Petrouchka Petwasette, shared my life for 20 years....her skeletal remains are in an old Liberty casket...
P.T., as she was called by everyone, was discovered under a car, lost and frightened......I think that her life in my world made up for this kittenhood trauma.....she died in my arms....i still miss her.....

PACIFIC VACATION

 

 

Reis, Rebecca and I on vacation in Bora Bora and New Zealand........

DEAN

 

I met Dean many years ago, when he was working for my friend Elaine, framing artwork......We share many eccentricities, one of these being a very individualistic dressing style......many refer to Dean as "Allieoop", for he wears shells and other objects in his henna'd afro.....he has just been diagnosed with Leucemia....sigh.....and he is caught up in resentment for that silent, deadly visitor.......


Out of the Blue by Tilopa

GARDENING DAYS

 

 

until my stepfather died, Mother enjoyed the beautiful flowers that grew in the their yard.....after Tom died, she abandoned all care of the gardens. the pond dried up and the roses died......i think that, having lost her parents, her husband and her beloved sister, Louise, Mother became a very interior person.......

MY PARENTS, 1940

 

Tigerback Riding

 

Another old shoebox photo....mother reassuring me as i pose upon a ratsy bengal tiger....around 1948.....