heaven wasn't made for us

or how anton checkov stole christmas.

catchy title, no? no?

alas, ben allen, artistic director of the blue room theatre said, 'i love historical dramas. unfortunately, most people today don't even recognize the name of freud.'

yes, we're a dying generation, and that's not all bad. in california last year most of the people under 35 voted against banning gay marriage. i thought, 'there's a reason people die.' you've heard, of course, that if flies didn't die the earth would be under eight feet of them within six months!

anyway, anton checkov, a russian playwright, established modern drama. and his director constantine stanislavsky used the plays to create modern acting. every movie, every tv show, is a result.

yes, yes, why should you care? i know, if it has nothing to do with you, to hell with it. it won't help me get a job. ah, but there you're wrong. it might. why?

the beauty of checkov plays: his characters respond to the weather, to the time of day, the seasons. in other words, the given circumstances. like most of us they are not movers and shakers. we'd rather draw a salary than start a business. true, this means we'll never get rich, but we can sleep at night.

what i'm saying is, all the good characters in checkov go with the flow. they marry the person next door (or not), they drift into this work or that. they're sensitive but not pro-active. and those who have drive turn out to be cads.

not very american, eh? we need a center of energy, a person or persons to make things happen. at the blue room theatre last night for a reading of

http://www.amazon.com/Her-Naked-Skin-Rebecca-Lenkiewicz/dp/0571241468/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263450114&sr=8-1

at least five people present who make things happen. this is what gives this theater vitality. damn rare, that.

and so, though the checkov characters create a lovely atmosphere (and that's charm of the plays), sensitive to every human and circumstantial shift, they're incredible maddening, letting the given circumstance push them this way and that.

alas, i'm one of those characters, having no idea why or how i've done what i have. here are pictures from jamaica which i scanned this morning as an example. what a strange and inexplicable trip it was.

www.pbase.com/wwp/jam

in two weeks they will be reading checkov's three sisters at the blue room. hopefully, the lovely response to the weather will come through. despite the fact the personae never reach moscow. but i guess i've already said that.

ps. the pic above from checkov's own tiny theater in his moscow apartment.

what's wrong with the news

1. it's all bad. the world falling apart.

2. you can't do anything about it.

3. everything has to be a drama.

4. this leads to it being 90% speculation.

5. and facts boring cause they end the story.

i just watched

http://www.amazon.com/One-Last-Dance-Patrick-Swayze/dp/B0009ML2UG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1263279210&sr=1-1

not realizing swayze died in september 09. even more poignant: the film directed by and acted with his wife.

the character he plays feels he can make anything happen, simply through will. he eventually learns to conquer through surrender.

oddly, i thought, 'now he's beyond profit and loss.' yes, he's no longer subject to the news, the hope it will get better, the feeling it never will.

today i browsed through

http://www4.economist.com/theworldin/

it's embarrassing to realize you know almost nothing of the world's state! that so many countries even exist. no, we're not interested in facts, no, not really. we want passion, death, stolen children, blown up barracks. anything less puts us to sleep. stories rule our existence, and we can't get enough of them.

unfortunately, the end of one means the beginning of another. the media abhors a vacuum. and the news created as fast as it is consumed.

one magazine i find different, though it strikes a rather elitist (rich person's) note:

http://www.monocle.com/

it investigates what's happening in small business and design around the world, as well as what's developing in tiny, almost invisible regions. it's unique in that it somehow stresses the positive, despite dire reports from countries in africa, etc. there's a sense of people actually creating places for human habitation.

the worst: most news makes us feel being alive means being on the edge of extinction. though i know the swayze report will eventually come to me, i'm hoping tomorrow it will be announced: there is a cure for life! and it's here, not on another planet.

i've posted pictures of pre-carnival venice and greece 1992. it's important to realize you have done something, even as the headlines stated it impossible.

www.pbase.com/wwp/gre

www.pbase.com/wwp/venice

a citizen of the world

for better or worse, that's been one of my lifetime goals. the reason for so much past travel, the excuse for resisting a localized patriotism.

for example, i've sat on my mountain-top and felt the world to be very, very small. there's the milky way, after all. and these clouds, they cover just a bit of the sky and from above seem like little children.

and out at sea, during coast guard active duty, i realized the ocean about the size of an ice-cream cone. at least, that's the way it looked with the horizon bending down abruptly. the sea appears much larger from the shore.

or even in the twenty-nine mile view of lake tahoe from my north shore lookout i watched the earth curve. you don't have to go to the moon to see we're a tiny dot in space.

of course, being a citizen of the planet you may feel at home nowhere on its surface. despite almost thirty years in the same town i'm a stranger, almost invisible. and when i walk out the door, it doesn't necessarily feel bounded and secure. we moved thirty times by the end of my high school career and that alone may make it impossible to feel completely grounded.

i remember one move, leaving hamilton, montana, when i'd turned nine, in the third grade, and we headed to california, mid-winter, in a model A ford. as we drove out of town, the trees seem to die and the streets became strange. each time i've moved the last place loses its manna, its aura. santa cruz, california now as distant as the roman empire.

all that said, a life is more than a sum of its parts. i just scanned and posted pictures of my trip to new zealand in 1987.

www.pbase.com/wwp/zea

and at first they depressed me. a diary tells so much more than pictures. and as you know, when you come back from a journey, the photographs pale beside the actual experience. gradually, however, they supplant it. perhaps my memories of thailand, sri lanka, india, and nepal so vivid because i did not carry a camera. there's only one reason to take pictures, to bring back the faces of people you've met. oh, and you get to see yourself next to the taj mahal. even if this can be created in photoshop, you know you were there.

i love the internet. it's done what we needed: put us in touch with each other. i hope it never becomes controlled by any one authority. that very chaos allows us all to experience the world as a whole.

a sidelight. took pics at the local theater of a new year's review. for some reason they came out looking like a german cabaret. guess i didn't spend five years in europe for nothing (including a berlin basement in the sixties).

www.pbase.com/wwp/sink

any paradigm can be proven true

i know this is a painful fact. we want our vision of reality to be true for everyone. otherwise, we feel alone.

hey, wake up. you are alone!

so it's a matter of constructing (choosing) the world in which you wish to live. this can be the dream world, the religious world, the artistic. or the scientific. if you haven't read heisenberg's autobiography, i heartily recommend it. why shouldn't he believe in the 'uncertainty principle' after everything he'd been through.

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Beyond-Conversations-Werner-Heisenberg/dp/0061316229/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_5

the sparticist uprising in munich, the rise of the nazi party, the making of rockets (to avoid making atomic weapons for the hitler). if we knew history, we wouldn't be surprised by the everyday news.

yes, you can prove there is a god, that there is no god, that we vanish without a trace or inhabit a tavern forever after.

the consequence is: you can believe whatever you want, as long as you don't force it on other people (be happy only you live in your universe), and because anything can be proven true, we live in a world of mystery. if you can learn to live without answers, you'll mine a rich life.

and speaking of the mysterious, just watched this documentary on the composer phillip glass:

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Portrait-Philip-Twelve-Parts/dp/B001PCNZGI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1262673149&sr=8-1

i find his music mesmerizing. of course, it's not for everyone. his mind somehow inhabits the same space as mine, yet in my own case i'd rather create preparations and climaxes, rather traditional, classical stuff.

okay, new year's resolutions. find a way to physically exercise and learn to love it. secondly, not worry about creating new stuff, but working with the mountain of inspirations i've already had.

sounds easy, doesn't it? alas, we usually have to be scared to death to make a real change.

here are photos from a delightful review, 'everything but the kitchen sink' put together by allison rich.

www.pbase.com/wwp/sink

a question of anonymity

new year's in berkeley full of emotion. guess we have to get out of town to loosen up and face new challenges. afterwards, chico felt like heaven.

it's the trees. the feeling of things being on a manageable scale. also, just the right amount of invisibility. freedom: the balance between being irresponsible and in demand.

my landlord/retired therapist says, 'at least three satisfaction-with-life studies (for parents) say the curve drops lower as kids age, the bottom at their children's puberty.' i'm so bewildered why people have children. i just don't understand it. am i missing the parent gene?

of course, i've always thought evolution expands us in different ways. the unmarried serve as an example of independence. they teach. they take care of orphans, the nuns and priests. the intermediaries.

you see, not everyone born ordinary. often the oddballs go gay or into poetry, into wandering and philosophy rather than parenting. it's as if the whole human gene-pool requires many different characters and abilities. we're we pure and all one, we'd die out in an instant.

so, here we are, one of the crowd yet not too invisible. i remember the boarding-house in new zealand where men seemed to be disappearing without ever existing. how do you make your mark? or is it necessary?

i'm vanishing into my past. how do you hold on? this weekend visited

http://www.amazon.com/Avatar-Theatrical-Release/dp/B002VPE1AM/ref=sr_tr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1262503753&sr=1-1

and

http://www.amazon.com/Chris-Don-Story-Leslie-Caron/dp/B001KZOUXW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1262503814&sr=1-1


whether our lives epic or purely personal, they make a contribution, if only to those close to us. as james joyce wrote, 'history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake."

house-sat for laurie this new year's:

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/laurie

continuity becomes precious.

enlightenment, the red herring

you can chase it as much as you want, but the moment of glory comes and goes. the brilliant sunset transforms into night, and you have to accept the milky way. the unifying sun divides into a thousand thousand stars. your choices become harder, given the potentials. the poet william everson says americans driven crazy by the endless possibilities.

once i compared studies of zen and therapy. they led to the same conclusion. once you've accepted your own authority, you've a freedom you haven't known before. you bowed at the zen master's (the therapist's feet) until you say, 'fuck you, i'm seeing things for myself and going my own way.'

of course, this can lead to terrible misadventures and mistakes. so be it. the flute teacher made the disciple play the same tune over and over again, until he really got disgusted. so he escaped into the world, accumulated a fortune and lost it, found love and destroyed it, decayed in his body. when he returned to the village and played the tune the master had taught him, people said, 'we have never heard anything so beautiful,' and they wept.

let's face if, enlightenment comes and goes.

suddenly, i'm bored with photography. i can't bear this particular relationship to the world, being the fly on the wall. yet i recognize it has been a way to ecstasy: 'everyone is enlightened but me.'

i look back and think, 'i've been so lucky, never to stay in one state so long.'

i've always loved utopias, fairs and festivals. leaving them, a great shock. do we only grow through loss?

the county fair: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/county_fair&page=all

think for yourself

now, i have to admit it. in general i avoid social gatherings. i used to get a fist-like tightness in the stomach. that has disappeared (much like the fear and visions i had in the early days at the lookout: crazy people throwing rocks through the windows). now i merely regret afterwards all the stupid things i said!

yes, i can be very competitive and forceful. yes, i try to fight it. no luck. and so, at the xmas dinner in the co-housing common-house, i shot off my mouth.

today the conversation turned to heidegger (nazi or not?), the holocaust, civil war in sri lanka, the philosophies of josiah royce and wittgenstein. everything someone else said made me think of something. alas, all-too-often i was eager to say it and cut in.

this reminds me. i took a night class in dramatic literature when i lived in oxford uk. most of the people in class were americans from the air force base. since drama my passion and study, i knew a lot and did an enormous amount of talking. suddenly, i realized i wasn't learning anything. i fell pretty much silent. and you know what, eventually almost every point i would have made would be made by someone else.

well, there it is, i've defeated myself! and perhaps that's the answer. a friend wrote that i seemed tortured. at first i thought, 'that's ridiculous. i'm enjoying all this. i believe in the present.' but of course, i'm always arguing with myself. joyce cary said, 'to be a fiction writer you must express the opposite of what you believe as strongly as what you do.' or as i once so famously said to myself, 'put your drama into your work and not into your life.'

unfortunately, i'm reading http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Secrets-Steve-Jobs-Insanely/dp/0071636080/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261796653&sr=8-1

the number one point is you must have a passion about your project, idea, whatever it is you believe other people need. ach, no wonder i've never been a good salesman for myself. i want you to be like you and not me. what a dilemma. maybe all these blogs mean 'whatever this guy's done, it's the last thing i want to do.' and yet...i thought i was setting an example.

anyway, reading the jobs book, i've been asking myself, 'what's your messianic mission?' and all i can say is what i was saying at dinner, 'think for yourself.' with the proviso you must study the history of everything. 'nothing can come from nothing,' said king lear.

the psychologist c.g. jung said, 'everything important in culture created by the individual.' i couldn't put it any better.

just posted scanned bali slides: www.pbase.com/wwp/bali yes, live your own life, not the one other people want you to.

boy, that pint of celebration ale from sierra nevada brewery makes me feel like a genius. could everything i've said here be wrong?

MERRY XMAS!