think of art as entering a dream

as someone who's always struggled with addictions - sex, love, alcohol, travelling - it's no mystery to me why people love drugs. they take away my cares, i return to childhood when someone else paid my bills and i could live mostly in my imagination. toys, picture books, i could construct my own reality. and, of course, this carries me into museums around the world.

a work of art has to be consistent with itself in order to be a believable world in which i can lose myself. and a piece of fantasy is essentially a re-building of my dreams. i read recently the key to this: ONLY I KNOW, IN MY DREAMS I AM AGELESS. and the last few nights i've examined my experiences. and yes, i can perform feats of motion, transformation and action far beyond what i can in the daylight.

as i know, my body is actually paralyzed when my brain coursing through other worlds. this must be so i don't act out my dreams in my physical life (ie. sleepwalking). and the last time i watched a stage-hypnotist i realized under hypnosis we regain the magic actions of our dreams. the amazing performances of ordinary citizens quite astounding.

people turn into animals, clowns, robots, their movements absolutely fluid. they become creations of their unconscious. and so hypnotherapy can give us a touch of our agelessness. many commentators on humanity say all of our life is within us. a friend years ago said under LSD he re-lived a whole day in incredible detail. i imagine with trillions of brain-cells i must have the capacity to remember everything. 

and so i like to wander amidst other people's creations to recover my own youth . no wonder all art isn't 'nice' and 'comforting .' nightmares are very much a part of my experience, though melatonin has made them a lot less bloody and violent. and i haven't mentioned stories of all kinds, fiction, movies, poems. each takes me on an adventure back to my beginning, if they are skillfully done, no jarring detail to break the flow. 

i live in many trances. bill ball said in A SENSE OF DIRECTION, "during the last twenty minutes of a play, the audience is in a trance. "my mother said i was obsessed with childhood and this perhaps the reason why. i like to be carried into a space where i am ageless. the drug of art focuses my attention in such a way i forget i have to pay the bills, take out the garbage, pet the dog. i enter the Homeric space, voyaging on an ocean of belief. 

i guess i'm not alone, since new, gigantic museums have become considered works of art in themselves. i'd like to go to bilbao, spain just to wander through the edifice frank gehry has created. time is our great tormentor. any relief from it a welcome gift. 

when the terrorists discovered fire...

back on the lookout for my 56th season, i look around me at the half a million acres and see it quite differently. isis has just burned thousands of acres of bumper crops in iraq and syria. they've posted media items advocating the use of fire. last season a fire started on this forest burning down a whole town. true, it was started by an electrical connection. still, one person could have started it with a box of matches. 

my domain seems more vulnerable. two years ago a local arsonist, a mill-worker, nearly burned down the town of quincy. he lit 24 fires before he was caught. had the wind come up, the town would have been toast. and i've seen huge fires take off. with a high wind nothing can stop them. and i can think of many vulnerable places.

take tilden park above berkeley. years ago a fire in the hills burned hundred of houses and i had fetid smoke blowing across my lookout for days. and if you walk down shattuck avenue, you will see a brass plaque on a brick building that says, SUCH AND SUCH A FIRE BURNED TO HERE. and that was years ago. 

or take someone driving through central park in the middle of the night with a fifty mile an hour wind throwing out flares. this would do more damage, burning down to wall street, than flying planes into the twin towers ever did. and would take less preparation.

i hesitate to write about this, not wanting to give anyone ideas. alas, they already have them. when we invaded iraq, thanks to george w. bush, i felt we'd started a war we couldn't win. this spread terrorism like lyme disease, which now covers the world. even without an enemy, fires burned last summer in sweden, the ukraine, towns in greece, countryside in portugal and spain, not to mention our disastrous conflagrations in california.

we simply, i think, cannot guard against this, at least as a democracy. reagan, bush, and now trump elected on platforms of Armageddon, advocated by heaven bound christians, with the rest of us headed below. plenty of people in islam probably believe the same. our president can't see why nuclear weapons can't be used. and we run a risk. 

true, islamic terrorists in the west, the U.S. included, seem to favor shooting people face to face and dying in glory like 'true heroes.' perhaps they'd find setting wildfires too abstract. one can only hope.

words, words, words, lies, lies, lies

                                                                   pre-owned trees

i remember going to a talk years ago where the speaker said, 'human beings have a unique ability to cover things up (lie).' i disagree, as quail parents can fake injury to lure hunters from their young. and there must be many other examples. still, i have to say, we all have to fabricate to survive, to endure our fellow human beings. 

or to get a job. i had a friend who always answered, 'yes i can do that' when he'd never done a task and he would go out and learn, like getting a truck-driver to teach him how to drive a big rig. and a commentator said years ago, 'democratic presidents have to lie a lot to get anything done." now we have a doozy of an example!

what really makes me crazy: how words invented to cover up the actual damage done.

                                ESCALATION: invented during Vietnam, used to hide the fact it meant thousands of more troops and dead. how it meant taking the money for schools, highways, health care, and blowing (literally) it in southeast asia. alas, people simply didn't read books. all the underbelly of the war exposed by writers where the information could be found, but no, a dirty word like escalation taken as an justification  and definition.

                              PRE-OWNED. o god, this phrase a slumlord's paradise. 'this car was owned by someone who never drove it. a blind lady who just like to sit in the front seat and smell the leather!' what a crock. what used to say used car for sale, telling the honest truth now goes for 'i've only gotten you a little bit pregnant' or 'the cancer you have is actually good for you. it will inoculate you when the real thing comes along'. i propose we advertise houses saying, 'this dump has been very slightly partly trashed."

                           FAKE NEWS:   Even if a president has to lie - a democratic country very reluctant to go into into a WWII - we have a president who's lies, pre-fabricates, covers-up already  ten thousand times while in office. he invented the term 'fake news' and continues to create it. the term confuses everything, and these days, for example, christians? who want us all dead (Armageddon) so they can go to heaven read only church bulletins, and those who should know better get everything from talk radio.

                            CLEAR-CUTTING. yes, the forest service did invent this. 'clear' implies good, healthy, clean. it's a term devised from american history. it meant progress, crops, the railroad. and what has it done, at least in california? created scabs in the sierras which can't hold ground water and thus can't be re-planted. of course, the original plan left standing trees along roadways where drivers couldn't see what had been done. unfortunately, thousands of people fly over these mountains every day, the truth clear for all to see. 

why do i always accept a lie as truth? so i can tread water, go to work, read fiction which is truer than what i read in the paper. the problems seem so big, yet perhaps not as big as our imagination. i don't know anything but loss that stirs me to action. am i alone?

A little lesson on China

the older i get and the more i know about some things, the more i realize how much i don't know. i'm quoting a lot of philosophers, including socrates. i've studied theater, art, photography, the art of travel, and so on, but lately i've discovered topics of which i was totally ignorant.

take the transgender transformation, men turning themselves into women and vice-versa, the whole process laid out on youtube, many individuals outlining their experience along the way, doctors describing what to do and how. i even watched a film of male genitals changed into female, vagina and clitoris   included. it was fascinating and i didn't wince once. obviously own equipment has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years. 

really, though, i want to talk about china. of course, i read the headlines, the trade war with china and so on. i simply assumed our government paranoid, as it is about everything else. then i stumbled onto many videos of life in china, the taming of the population since Tiananmen Square (1989), the extreme measures of surveillance taken, the development of technology, the thriving sex trade, and so on 

it really i BRAVE NEW WORLD as the population happy with the chance to make money and send it back to the village. owning cars and tv sets they don't seem to care about censorship, no social media from the west tolerated, everything substituted by the government, little news of any account distributed. the education must make everyone react to the same signals. in a day all foreigners enemies, another day all friends. 

i recommend this site first: https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza/videos  done by a south african with a chinese wife who's lived in china for ten years. he talks very quietly about almost all aspects of the life there. i'm amazed he's been allowed to operate. he wears a formal suit and maybe that's why. 

other videos show the manufacturing developments, especially shenzen. i was blown away by the wealth and progress of technology. with government sponsorship and control the system is working to put them way out in front, especially in robotics. some commentators tell us not to worry, as we can take the new knowledge from them and apply it in exciting ways. here's the video to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taZJblMAuko&t=1275s  if you don't know any of this, you may be as blown away as i was.

the picture of chinese people, themselves, basically shows a bright and happy population. and i don't think we're so different from them, except in certain instances. for example, they run from people who need help. if they do help, they may be arrested!! and if you want a real expose of china, look at this  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eViswN602_k&t=1324s

i've always loved ancient chinese poetry and art. alas, as in japan, the good old days are not like today. i feel wiser, but not consoled. is understanding an action? 

O the joys of a feral childhood!

i feel sorry for kids today who rarely have a taste of freedom. when i was a boy 70 years ago, i was unchained. it wasn't that my parents didn't worry, didn't care, but in the summer i could say goodbye in the morning and be missing all day. i'd be out with my buddies, shooting rubber guns, smoking stolen cigarettes, running through the woods, and killing rattlesnakes. i didn't have a cell-phone in my pocket to track me everywhere. nor did i have to call every hour and say i was hale and hearty.

as the population has grown and the cities swelled, milk-carton pictures of lost children invaded every home. sexual predators were announced in every neighborhood. and parents became more possessive, not always for good reasons. every parent wants children they can brag about. 'o she's a doctor in ohio, o he's a lawyer in san francisco. last year they passed the five million   dollar mark.' 

i remember going to a class reunion at UC Santa Cruz. they had sign-in sheets, stapled together into books. all of the former students except one claimed so be successful and happy. yes, that isolated fellow said, 'i'm a drug-addict, served five years in prison, fathered five children and deserted them.' not everybody responded to the questionnaires and i suspect there were a lot of losers among the silent ones. 

there are  real dangers, of course,  especially from cars and stress. six girls i've known in town have been killed, four by cars, one by suicide, one by cancer. having kids is a risky business, parents bound to feel them as extensions of their own nervous system. as the years go on there are fewer feral parents. most have been raised on a tether, too much alone in the fantasy of virtual reality, cell-phones have grown out of the palm of hands.

yes, the kids constantly looking at screens, looking for friends, more communal than ever, at a distance. and i feel it is a search for a safety they've never been allowed to cultivate on their own. the herd instinct has them imitating each other more than ever. this doesn't mean they aren't bright and well-spoken. it may mean they may simply repeat the words others speak. and live with a certain fear.