The first day of my birthday month began slowly. A bit creaky, waking from a late night to meet a deadline. A quiet beginning.
May day many meanings…
May Day occurs on May 1st and refers to several public holidays. In many countries, May Day is synonymous with International Workers’ Day, or Labour Day, a day of political demonstrations and celebrations organised by unions and other groups. May Day is also a traditional holiday in many cultures. - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I’ve always enjoyed the fact that the first day of my month celebrated labor. BTW, the earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the festival of Flora, the Roman Goddess of flowers.
Life has been a bit complex recently. I’ve always driven into the skid so to speak. But this time it’s different the economic atmosphere has much thinner air these days. It’s difficult to breathe.
I decided to take some time to focus on nothing and breathe deeply. Quiet time reestablishes balance.
Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?
(Only jack Kerouac, that I know of: & me.
The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)
What can I say?
It is better to haved loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?
Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake’s hypnotic gesture of the week?
(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts…
I cannot, like F. J. Sheen, tell you how to get saved & rich!
I cannot even order you to the gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goddy Knight)
& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?
I certainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb.
Saturday mornings we listened to the Red Lantern & his undersea folk.
At 11, Let’s Pretend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do. Thank God!
What was it he used to say (after the transformation when he was safe
& invisible & the unbelievers couldn’t throw stones?) “Heh, heh, heh.
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”
O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.
I imagine a Star Trek episode. The explorers have landed on a barren planet and deep in some bunker is an access point to a database left by a lost civilization. The away-team hits a button in error and a series of images are projected on a huge screen. The images are both exciting and disturbing; they are detached from events. They are a capture of moments past. A street photo of an apartment building, a restaurant, a grocery. The images are from many geographic areas and cultures.
This isn’t science-fiction this is Google, today.
Chances are that you’ve also seen some of these images when you have used google maps. Street View is an enhancement to the service. You can look at the landmark surroundings; make sure you are going to the right place; find out what the neighborhood is like. The camera captures these images without any other intention than a street view. But when one takes the time to look at more than just a couple of these images we can see the unadorned truth about us.
2588 N Hutchinson St. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
10 IJsselmeerdijk, Zeevang, Netherlands
These thoughts came to mind after readying a very interesting piece in Art Fag City written by artist Jon Rafman who lives and works in Montreal Canada. He raises some interesting questions about the cultural texts of the images one can find in this vast ever-expanding library.
I encourage you to give it a read and I would enjoy your comments.
What if every object could tell its own story? Haven’t you wished that you could just google anything? Well if you use RFID you can get information from any object that has an electronic tag. Each object in a way is a smart object.
If you have a reader attached to a device like a smart device, in this case an iPhone. You can come in proximity of the object and tell you the object’s story. It’s pretty interesting technology that can be used say for touring museums. You step up to a painting or sculpture and put your iphone next to the label. It recognizes the painting and allows you to see content about the work. Add links to sources on the net and an expantion of information based on your interests.
Do you usually pay to be a beta tester? Not me. I usually get something free for debugging somone’s product.
Well today Amazon released the bigger dog of their reader and will charge you about $500 bucks for a device that looks like a cardboard prototype of a technology product from the 80′s.
Expectations for electronic devices are considerably more sophisticated than what the Kindle offers. Now of course Amazon is just warming up the market for a smart innovative company like Apple or a smart startup to take over much like Apple did with the iPod. I actually think that Amazon doesn’t care. Amazon is all about the distribution chain. They want to sell you the content not the device. They just created the device to create more interest in reading. Certainly the publishing industry doesn’t understand how to do that. But will this actually reinvigorate the reading market? That remains to be seen.
Instantly I thought of the grocery list I had used for years. It was in a sketchbook that I had ultimately filled. (I don’t fill them all.) I then tore the list gently from the book and used a paperclip to keep it attached to the next book. I did this repeated times. I try to recall which book it may be clipped to now. I haven’t seen it since the last move; that was when I moved my art studio out of the living space.
I was hoping to scan or photograph the list for this post. I thought I could put my hands on it easily. Then I hesitated.
I don’t know where the list is.
I’m trying to recall what it looked like now, comparing it to the images I saw at the link above. But my list wasn’t like these lists at all. My printing is disciplined from many years of design and drafting. I write straight and even on unlined paper. I use a fountain pen which leaves the telltale puddles based upon the speed in which one writes the stroke. It was on a piece of paper which barely showed the wear.
The organization of the items had been typical for me. Dairy together, fruits, vegetables, fish, yummy spices, cheeses, bread. It was ordered by my serpentine route through the isles. Items grouped geographically, creating their own special cartographic experience.
I can see the map in my minds eye now. The small dots next to the objects the corresponded to the items in the cart.
The memories and voices of more than thirty seven years have arrived, been placed, and temporarily captured in this well shaped box. Words have been spoken by and to the inhabitants after being deposited and then removed from this container. The metaphor of give and take expressed in this artifact — history, memory, family.
I followed the link and found the image and this short story.
This is the mailbox that was on the house when I was two in 1974; the year my family moved in. It has been painted many different colors and later it was replaced with a more efficient model. I moved back into the house six years ago, when my parents moved away. I found the old mail box in the basement and promptly put it back up.
The beauty of this object and its stories made their way to me — from the current holder of the vessel who is destined to remember each time a new voice finds itself inside this container.
IT’S game over for the American consumer. Inflation-adjusted personal consumption expenditures are on track for rare back-to-back quarterly declines in the second half of 2008 at a 3.5 percent average annual rate. There are only four other instances since 1950 when real consumer demand has fallen for two quarters in a row. This is the first occasion when declines in both quarters will have exceeded 3 percent. The current consumption plunge is without precedent in the modern era.
