things to be greatfull for

We have to be greatfull and go forth and do things, after watching a video link about killian jornet,

and yes this is a Multimedia Blog .. And yes I think for a while we will need to return to Courier New .. It is Proportional

I digress again, returning to Killian who is an amazing athlete, but he points me int he direction of another book I recently read called Born to run of which the jury is still out on whether or not I enjoyed the book totally. But interestingly Killian a really accomplished ultra trail runner and the aforementioned book have something in common, running is about loving running, Killian says the more meters (yes American, no he is not) we climb the more we see. In my personal quest I have been riding every possible hill I can on the way home, my last being more of a stumble and crawl than a Ride .. But amazing .. only a couple more routes to Go and I would have completed this minor quest. I did Kau Kau on Tuesday.. in the wind and light drizzle .. I did the Metres and enjoyed every last second of the ride, stumble and craw.. Yes this is a little like a very large nested if or case statement....
But to return to Killian, it is all about the love and experience of the run for him, the ride for me. We bind ourselves to what we believe we can achieve.. We can do more, but we dont, WE can bake our own bread but we dont, we chose less and not more..
Back to the book, Born To run is an interesting book, I felt it lost a little bit of steam towards the last third of the book, I would like to read more about it... I suppose i will have to research and see how much of the book is fact, how much is embellishment and how much is fictional? Ok so there is something to the barefoot running debate Zola could do it.. well not sure about Emile, but the other barefoot one..so we will have to try this 100 up technique and get back to you on that ...

Oh yes being greatfull ... that is difficult in this day and age and after #black tuesday.. But there is a lot to be greatfull of, sometimes we dont see what is in front of us, we just see what is behind us, sometimes what is behind us was both good and bad, we need to do the meters and time, then it will tell..

Bla Bla Bla Bla .. yes it is babble, I was browsing the greater inter~blades and found an interview and piece on Die Antwoord, it was intriguing.. It was an interview with an overseas media organization and they asked the question of DA if they are conceptual artists, to which Yolandie Vi$$er asked con what die f septual I dont understand your question and Ninja says.. this interview is over, you do not understand we are in the zone.. It added a new dimension to something seemingly thrashed to death over the last while, I then also had a look at their previous venture Max headroom ... I must admit the Jury is even mroe confused now.. there is significantly more depth than previously imagined? Or maybe not?

On another note, something to wait for will be the mantis dream~time project...

Till later, yes you, we us all have JJ to blame, there will be much more, in the same way we need not ask why did i not have time to eat.. I do have time to Blog.. and remember "Yo snooze you lose, you snor you win"

inspiration and living in 2 parts part 4/2

The piece I wanted to add was to question our sensitivities to multimedia textual experiences. Is it still writing or more so reading when it is required to read something a scene is set using other media like music or the smell of fresh lavender? this is not a new question? Not something I am the first to ask? It is just something I often think about whilst rambling in this electronic paper? Is it even right to post pictures? Or is the skill in actually capturing the mood and event in words and not in multimedia, is that the divergence from writing and move into a form of installation art.

I question that, in the light that our lives are a mosaic of events that merge between the senses and dimensions moving steadily from auditory, tactile and temporal nature of life as we live it.

Is the art in going fishing, tying the fly, casting the fly, hooking the fish, landing the fish, taking the photograph, thinking about it, thinking about doing it or talking about it before or after the event or is it just a momentary lapse in the fabric of time and existence.

We have to question what inspires us, what drives us, what makes us cycle up a hill? What makes us take a photograph, what makes us chose life?

inspiration and living in 2 parts

Ok so this is a re-edit:

This will be a piece in two parts, yes and the first half may be sadder than is required .. but wtf .. I wrote it half way never fisnished it and will just post it as is ..

part 1 inspiration and living


a whole lot of really random things are rushing through my head, it seems !?
this is about us, inside, sadness, happiness and life, fishing, happiness, insects, creativity and expression

and missing friends!!!

and the sources of inspiration...


Do I have to find and befriend the Taniwha  or is it that it has to be conquered?


it is about braveness to live and express  and accept the way we live and experience the world and the universe around us. 

Who knows, but we know we have to face this next step in our lives, we took the leap of the chasm into the dark water. Once again I face the fear of the known unknown.  We have created the opportunity to remodel and start again without planning. I suppose that is how it must be. All I know is that I have learnt more about myself and how people perceived/perceive me in this one past year than in many. It may be due to the way our lives suddenly accelerated to somewhere clsoe to the speed of life only to be suddenly stopped throwing us onto a wet sandy beach without instructions. Somehow when you have the chance to start your life over again, note to self, Again... then we somehow flounder like fish out of the sea and tend to look back and not forwards, I know going back what I have said about looking forward and backwards to ad infinitum. Yes but now we stand and it is relatively simple. Yet it is not that simple to change the smallest things inside our minds, we move many thousand kilometers and the leap inside our minds is more difficult to make. At times it is the slender binds of our past that hold us back, the friends we left behind. On that note I fell down the hoel fo nostalgia and on occassions i watch trashy south african artists on youtube, to get a context of what we have left behind. Not all are trashy, some are.. some are brilliant others just justify. On the last occassion I did however find something that was so sad, I watched some Bok van Blerk .. yes OMG.. But there is something so bizarre about what he says in a lot of his music, he chose to flog the old riding horse. In between the few songs of his I listened to I found a sad and poignant song about leaving friends and family behind when  leave africa and the choices those who stay have made to stay.

But there is nothing that could have prepared us for the emotional turmoil you face as an immigrant. It has highlighted the gradients of happiness and sadness and strife and anguish others have to go through to survive the journey to the promised land/s. I have met people from so many corners of life here in kiwilandia, yet have met very few Kiwi's ;-)

As I sit here the words or wordless moments of emotions churn through my brain. the little bit of connection i have had to this mortal coil slowly drifting away. the longer I stay here the more separated I become with the world around me. Words fall on deaf ears, I sit/stand and call, but nothing  seems to stick. I walk this land alone it seems I walk, cycle and fish alone in a land of beauty and splendor challenging all senses of fear of the unknown. Oh I walk through the green fields and rocky hills, all i have to fear is fear itself and the forces of nature and chance.



Part 2: influence and memories

Today the melancholia filled me with thoughts, my first stop is to return to youtube and watch some Heuwels fantasties videos. Somehow they have a grounding effect. Grounding effect is most probably the wrong word for what i feel. I watched two or three music videos today.

The first being

                Die Heuwels Fantasties - Heel Te Mal (official video)   

the most amazing thing about this being that this mixes the old and the new so well and causes a wave mixed emotions. To clarify more, the video is shot in wellington kiwilandia which now strangely fills me with a sense of home. Seeing palces i recognise and walk past fairly often, but mixed with the old and the "other" immigrants and rugby watchers.. yes I must say am still not a devout Rugby follower one year on in kiwilandia.. But hey some things just wont change all that easily.  But what did sadden me was the fact that they played at the "waterfront" ZA stand, which I very much would have liked to have seen.. But sometimes things are better left un-done :-) I saw images of people and realised it was most probably quite right that i did not go.. WTF .. who knows.. Well I dont know at this stage.

I then watched a few of the older videos that I watched before.. the one that really sticks every time I see it is

Die Heuwels Fantasties - Buitenste Ruim (official musicvideo)

which raises a whole lot of emotions about life as a child and all the other things that they portray in the video, but things deeper than that it portays or evoked within  me are how our memories and actions are driven by our reference to contemporary culture albeit frionge or otherwise, The video above opens with a scene of a bloudraad washing lind dangling in the back of a recognizable house from somewhere in the hinterland, but most striking, the scene opens with barking of dogs with a slow interlude of music it reminds you of what ? .....

no not this track this one  .. Eventhoug the son and sound is different, it evokes a memory of this. Within a larger community it creates a shared response to hearing a song or seeing an image of the wall album cover or similar. where Am i going with this obvious fact you may ask? We take a lot of solace in the common frame of reference, it is what allows us to communicate and relate to those and to events around us. Once we are uprooted and moved to a place where the common frame of reference and relationship to iconic musicians and events is totally different it furthermore creates a gap between us and our new home. BTB I registered as a voter today in my new home, a strange thought voting in another country.... But there is a lot to be said for integration by means of a common frame of reference, there are similarities in the anglo-saxoness of our lives, the internationalization has also gone a long way to reducing the impact on us and those around us.  I see the place for joining an ex-pat organization. But I am not really sure if I am truly south African, I am sure a part of me is, a part of me has pieces from all over? I think to me that is what is half saddening about being here and looking back and wondering am I actually an ex-pat or not, or just on another leg of a part of my journey through life? who knows, well i definitely dont,  you may question why I say that and still actually write things If there is so little that I know and yet I have such opinions on a whole lot of things.  I really don't know.

Part 3 of 2:Some new heroes

There are a few that need mentioning for the moment, as always I had never really mentioned soem of them, some had disillusioned me other never, some came out of nowhere.. where to start, most probably Jonathan Jansen (the rector on the UOFS), he has always stood out  as beacon of light in the landscape of political turmoil in South AfriKa, his diffusing of the incidents in the residences at the university. He then said and did a whole lot of inspirational things, A long time LaTer I suddenly found him on twitter, I now follow him avidly. Then one that you will find strange is P Divvy, I am utterly amazed at his comments on twitter, either this is not him, Or this IS the real person and if the second then he is a wholy misunderstood individual who is definitely worth his Moustache, no seriously it appears as if there is some real substance behind the man with the moustache, I will end his piece with "Dear ANC. You can take away my freedom of speech but you cant take away my freedom of snor!"

And the other being as an afterthought almost forgot about him, but koos kombuis, he kinda drifts in and out of consciousness, mine not his.. :-) 

Some new things .. cannot remember them

WTF.. the wind is really blowing today, it feels like I am in boat on the open see.. this building is swaying so much, which brought me to a wondering about "are windmills effective?" and if so why do the Kiwi's hate them? A strange thing I was talking to someone who i was flyfishing with and it appears that there is a great deal of FUD around wind energy in Kiwilandia and its ROI and cost effectiveness and subsidization. Interesting I was rather shocked and thought maybe I misunderstood all of this wind power stuff and that maybe it was not the good that I imagined.. I have been wrong in the past.. so off to google and I could not find the negative sentiment? But I did find out that in kiwilandia there is no subsidization of wind energy generation as there is in other countries ... so I was right for a change .. ;-)

But I suppose all good things must come to an end at some point, I have to finish off for now.. more later.. Iw ill attempt to follow the words of JJ  Letters to my children #98: I love only two things in life- eating and  writing. Nobody has ever asked me where I find the time to eat 10th nov

 and as a last point JJ follows Pdivvy makes you think something must be up?

So whats in a life

So we (I) stand on the brink of a new life every blink of our (my) walking day, I walk forward as if covered with the ash of the burning life I leave behind. The flames burning brighter I hear the screams, but there is nothing I feel I can do but run like a living dog, the proud Lion stands behind burning with no tears in his eyes or regret.

daars niks nuuts onder die son nie
en in die skaduwee
brand Suid-Afrika

am I right am I wrong, I walk away from the life I knew the life I suspect is going to go up in flames.

What can stop it now?

landmyne van skuldgevoelens in 'n eenman-konsentrasiekamp 

Stepping Forward I leave it all behind, after reading the genocidewatch website today I fear I was both right and wrong to leave.

I suppose If one person can break down the wall, another can rebuild it? But it takes so many more people to rebuild what a few are breaking down on daily basis for personal and megalomaniacal purpose.

So where does that leave me.. In a quandary with a life to live elsewhere as a refugee, different to our Zimbabwian, Etheopian, Somalian and other African brethren scattered over the globe by human greed and violence.

So It leaves me standing naked without identity other than having no identity, which is no different from our time in Africa. we never own anything in Africa, everything is transient, life, property, money and time. It will return to nothing and build up again like the phoenix it is.

So us the wandering people of Africa and Europe, we packed our goods in the caravan and took to the road, we move again but not quite as far. Strangely we still have no heritage other than that implied where we come from. But there are so many of us who are neither pillar or post.

Back to reality; After we have now decided to move on and buy this hosue and start a new life again, it makes me think of a lot of things.. yes far to many for one succinct sentence.. Start in the middle..

How lucky we are to arive here with more than the clothes on our backs and more than a $100 like some of the Zimbabwian and other refugees we have met here in Kiwilandia. But most importantly I almost forgot where this was going. a few days ago I was sitting on the train in the morning with my train friends, now there is a strange phenomena to discuss later, and the one person who works for the rail service as a "mechanic"/"repair person" told us that he lives in a boat, it took a few moments to register until I realised he was normal and he lives in a boat at the marina and if he feels like it he just packs up the boat and moves to a new Marina .. insane a real life Boatie .. not to different from the travelers in their caravans and mobile homes.  But nonetheless intriguing...  so the point being is that we all have the ability to start over again and again.. and do things.. I suppose sometimes there is less times than others and it all comes down to how much energy you have to start over again and again ... some of us need more stability than others, some of us need physical things, some of us need location, some of us need a book. But there has to be something to root us.
You have to question then what is it that roots us to a location or an identity, is it the closes we wear, the hair styles, the location, the tattoo/s, the jewelery or silly dark horn rimmed glass or a hat.  we all need some form of tethering to this mortal coil even if it is nothing and the lack of nothing or the transience of our existence.

When we walk along the path of life we walk surrounded by those around us, we are a reflection of them as they are to us or the spaces we leave between them or them us.  We cannot forget, we cannot go forward without the past being there to push us along or act as a Drogue. Sometimes these anchors tend to act like rudders through the voyage of life.

The more things, people and places we see and experience the more radiant our personalities become, the places the people the books the images all reflect, we stand out like lanterns on a dark night. don't tread lightly into the night, shine forth and sprinkle your colour over the world he said.

So after all of this soon i will stand and chase  my chickens, stand and survey my postage stamp of a garden. Ready for the new day, week and year that lies ahead. somehow it seems less desperate in terms of certain thinsg, but in other ways life is far more frenetic here.. in an attempt to achieve things i never had time for before.. 1 down and a few hundred more to be done...

life as a moment

is life the string of moments we believe it to be, or is the moment a life and all we are is an endless continuum of events and lives.

So much changes over time, so much returns and becomes the same thing.

I sat driving and suddenly I felt at home, but the stark reality then hit home, I was at home, but it was not the home that I thought it was.

But we live the life we create or procrastinate for our selves, some things happen because we put them in action, others happen because we did not put them in action.

A day starts, we wake with, before or after the sun. Our life flickers like an image through time, momentarily we pause and cement some of these images and internalize them, at times we live life as a complex sequence of events.

So we sat and watched WOW (world of wearable art) on Sunday evening, now how would i have known that now I had ticked off something on my bucket list that I did not even know i should put there. Yes there is duplicity in this statement, but for different times we have different words and at other times we use the same words. This must rate as one of the most amazing spectacles that I have witnessed. It is a complete visual interplay, that touches on our emotions and senses.

So what does that mean, other than you should add it to your list of items, or shoudl you? who knows.. I must admit this was seen back to back on a "siniging" school where some friends of our's kids go to... what was striking about this event which was as contrasting as possible was that there are people out there with a heck of a lot of courage to attempt to sing the songs inside their heads, and even though the songs in their hearts, heads and ears is not the same as the ones we hear.. man they have conviction and guts and they can say they stood up and sanf don't cry for me argentina in front of an audience and no one wept.. which is in a way a sad thing for any number of reasons :-)

But it made me realize a whole lot of things, amoungst them was that I would have to create moments that add value for me.

But it brought me back to questioning what we do with our time and produce as individuals .. where should our motivation lie..

And how temporal and relative our lives are?

a whole lot of things

so where two now, the world wobbles a little more, the stochasticy increases in leaps and bounds, the lows become lwoer the highs become higher.. and No that is not just the stock markets.

we are entering interesting times...

So I apologize to myself and those few who read this, about not spending time on this aspect of my persona, it is not that i have not been thinking about this a lot?
I have put my effort to one side to start on my other Blog  365 , most if not all of you would be aware of it in some sense or another..

It is all about that picture and so much more, and most probably relates to a couple fo things I am thinking and were thinking about over time. It has to do with visually observing the things around us, we expect to have a status Quo, we expect a static life and world and surrounds, us as afriKans (yes I went to a justice of the peace yesterday, boy this is a long sub-thread so bear-with me, to have copy of my ID DoCument certified for FICA in South AfriKA, and the JOP asked me to fill in a questionaire and one of the questions was, o yes BTW this was ata free Law clinic which explains some of it, what my race or ethnic type was.. and to be honest i chose African other, Does that make me a lier and a traitor leaving the roots of my should behind me) are now part of one of the worlds great SPora's cant really say Diaspora, think that has more specific meanings.  ?Dam that was a long train of thought and had to put down with one breath and should be read as such? This is becoming a little absurdish or abserdist, but to get back to my point. We walk we look we see, sometimes we see, which brings on another point -- go look at this dudes pics, one would imagine he altered the way i look at things a long time ago. But that is a story for another time. To get back to the stream, we carry on with our lives with a lack of urgency, No i am not saying we need to suffer the perils of over anxiety and rushing, urgency is something else. Urgency to live and see and experience within the bounds and confines of our minds and bodies and spirit and cicumstance, there are no limits within those bounds even though that seems oxymoron~ic.  It may seem like I am Digressing, but I am not.. The point being you wlak down the roads, or drive or whatever there in your city and along the streets are trees with the most amazing colours and hue's that tomorrow we may not see,,,,
No this is not a doom and gloom, for tomorrow you may Die.. no that could happen to anyone, that is not the thread or intent, but rather that appreciate things within the constraints of the life you lead and have chosen, but appreciate them tot he fullest, mine happens to be a tapestry of rich colours and hues and shades and textures and shapes and the most amazing inane yet interesting things that walk buy on a daily basis. The little things, the mosaic on a floor the shape of a building, tomorrow you may never walk that way again, enjoy, experience and see them..
The images are a celebration of  the route i travel through on a daily basis, oft they may seem totally arbitrary, but there is always a reason behind a posting, it is also an attempt at being forced to take more pictures to increase photographic fitness and to allow better expression and develop a clearer identity and style... Something which through the whole uprooting and Spora has tended to be the most unsettling for us.. the apparent lack of identity that we have as immigrants, other than being immigrants and Saffers .. which by nature we are not, by origin we are.. man it is a complicated scenario :-/
That was a silly side rant..
but back to where we are and what we do ..

expect more changes through time, things are moving faster than we can prepare ourselves for, all we know that the event window is moving closer and closer to us. Quicker and quicker and wilder and wilder swings ...

Here i moved from a situation of clear and present danger to one  of clear and present other danger? Go figure, but at least it is pretty here and the danger is on a very different way..  Strangely the longer we stay the more we like, the more we miss things, well people more than things. It comes to the fact that we do not realize how much of us is merely a reflection of those who surround us, even those who stand alone, still stand alone from all those that are familiar and are either the reflection of what others are not or are the spaces between the people, filling the gaps, here that disfigured self has no reference or relevance..

So what does  this all mean? not sure, I look at somethings i see on the web, some by people I  know and some by others I don't know and I am amazed and moved
at times by how others see and express them selves in the simplest ways ..

So my aim for the near future is to express more .. the 365 is a simple and humble start

koos, the ipad, and a whole ot of things and something else

Like memories


this is unfortunately a bit of a mix of pieces, yes i have been slack and have not really got to this.. But I will endeavor to be more committed over the course of the next couple of weeks, no I will not try and get committed, the other word..  It has been a trying and busy and challenging time. Not for any reason other than it has been a time to adjust to our new status. 


part 1: 25 june

where do i begin with regards the damn ipad, other than I wrote the last blog in a airport, a good one, a long one full of meaning, joy, mirth, wisdom and a whole lot of other things, only to have it taken away from me ..

Technology, our saviour and failure ..

a small bit about the ipad.. a clever piece of technology, and no this is not mine.. it is the works and i need it to do some demo's of software..

would I buy one? not unless I could get it for a steal..
it is nice to type on, you can play angry birds, you can play shark attack you can browse the interWeb.
you can view you tube  and all of this on the train .. BUT
it is still Steves evil spawn..

Yes it is a I-device which actually is not an I-device .. it is a sheep device, all those individuals who follow form before function, image is everything view of life, constrained by the shackles of the eVil SteVe.

Ok so now is it at airport once again with the spawn of evil Steve, having lost all train of thought .. I will have to start again.. But this time I am trying to type directly onto the website and rather not on the tying app wherein I lost all the work that I was busy with ..

So where does this lead me down the garden path, a million thoughts mowing through my brain, each one carrying over and destroying the previous ones ..

As a complete side issue I wanted to tell you all about a most amazing book, no not the same one again, which by the way I managed to procure for my self over the Internet .. Yes the black swan one , bout. No this is another book, this is a cooking thesaurus, or should I rather say food thesaurus, it is not s massive book, but a very interesting concept int hat it does not actually have recipes but rather documents possible and proven combinations of foods, like for example broccoli and anchovies, butternut and rosemary and the list continues on and on..

It is something worthwhile poking out for ..

So this brings me back to a question about religion and spirituality.. I must admit ihave gone through a large number of really contradictory thought processes about the validity, necessity or even benefit of religion or I should rather say in the plural. I do think we sometimes contest things that are an inherent flaw in our makeup, like a lisp, ip do believe that many will disagree with the frankness of my approach, but I do believe us as humans require some form of divine belief system or religion. I think we require this as part of our makeup, we require a belief in something that is not real and does not exist, albeit sea monsters, dragons, I have to ask if you dream of dragons
And if you do is it a bad thing, I do believe in faeries, because if ip don't they will die, every time I say or think bad thoughts they die .. Rather pi believe in garden gnomes, I have a belief that we should have at least one in the garden, if not more, and I do think it is mandatory for al of us to carry pocket gnome with us wherever we go .. You may ask what the frig for, has he now seriously lost his marbles, is he leaching marbles through his nostrils. No I must interject, there is a reason, albeit selfish. No that is not shellfish,
They are good and taste good.

Part 2: 11 july

in between losing this blog a handful of times and just being to pre-occupied ...

Where to return to, a lot has happened in the last while (about a month and a little), we have eventually got the point where our PR (permanent residence) has been approved.. Which is a strange thing, coupled with the fact that our house has almost been sold.. what a weird experience ..

It gives this whole journey and adventure more of a finality, we have now landed, things have panned out strangely in some ways, the house has been a cauldron of emotions around things and people we miss. Lucky for us we have all been out of synch. 

On other things,

So many thoughts have been rushing through my brain, but i suppose the PR has been in the back of my mind and has really been occupied with that and the house. But it opens so many doors, yet on the other hand it closes some others. It is a strange thing..

It drives us to wonder about the importance of everything in our lives.. In terms of maslo's hierarchy of needs where do friends, family, support and history compared to safety and general peace.. There are things that are brilliant here, but there are things that are missing and sometimes our hearts are torn into a thousand pieces when we miss the things we miss, for everyone there are different things..

Enough of that.. melancholy, I was going to use melodrama, but am reminded internally that i was reminded that this is the incorrect word.

Part 3:

On art, creation of art, appreciation of art and where we stand in this milieu ;-) I now follow danGerousMinDs.. It is a very interesting blog/media/information portal. The point isn't actually about this website, but rather a conclusion that myself and a friend both made..  which was, how is that people can come up with magnificent mental gymnastics. In some terms we can call it art, in other terms we may call it an iSm, But the key being that we don't all seem to have the same ability or propensity to create acts of visual, intellectual or artistic gymnastics, this does, however, in no way say that we do not have the propensity or even ability to judge, appreciate or even pick it out of a line up? How is it that our brains are wired differently in this way?

Part 4:

On looking at piles of Kelp on beach it made me think of a number of things:

1. an irish movie about a farmer who packs kelp into wheelbarrow everyday and then puts it onto his land to fertilize it .. a very depressing movie where the old father lands up killing his sons to protect his pocket of farm.
2. the weird crap that gets washed up from the sea? I saw a bird house being washed up in the kelp, pieces of plastic, glass, bottles and any number of things ...

part 4 will continue down the line..

Is this part of natures way of showing us count zero


 Part 5:


a Thought on adversity and innovation, is it a driver or does it inhibit, that I would suppose is pending the eye of the person who is being adversetized .. yes i KnoW that is not a word .. but it fits into what I am trying to say here. When we look at life through the pale glass of an immigrant, their are shades of rose, red and blue. It is all about perspective. How do we measure our success. Can we....

but what is evident, or should i say became evident, was there is inherent values we carry with us like a lunch box brought from a home a long time ago, almost like  the elven bread frodo carried with himself through his journey to the ends of the earth to get rid of the ring.... something that feeds us from within.

How important is the cocoon of individuality we wrap ourselves with? At times it is a burden at others a crutch and sometimes it tends to distinguish us from the rest...

we sat last night and realized that we are different, but not in the obvious ways we thought

It is strange,  we wont ever know where our next piece of inspiration comes from, somehow it seems better that way..


Part 6: Why do we comodify mystique



A moon hangs in an amber sky slowly burgeoning the new day in, but it is with sadness i realize we have forsaken the mystery of life, yes this is nothing new, there is nothing new in what i say. But, there are times it saddens me ...
There are slivers of hope, breaking through, I sat on the train today saw a guy with a beanie on with "stark enterprises" on the front of it. Event he comics have lost their mystique, baring a few, the bulk have been transformed, albeit sometimes brilliantly, into celluloid replicas of the imaginations of others and ours, removing the mystery and magnificence and replacing them with a cheap celluloid replica. Granted this is inspiration from something I saw on the interWeb recently that spurned this on. the thing that stabbed me straight between the eyes was when i picked up the book i was reading again on the train this morning, I am fighting my way through a Neil Gamon book,  not because it is hard to read, but because life has been rushing past me a little over the last few weeks.

I Digress onCe again from the essence of the topic i was hoping to shed some light on.. I should rather not say topic, but rather fleeting moment of inspiration that somehow gets lost somewhere between thought and electronic transferal ....

Why is it through technological advancement we are losing our essence as humans, I cannot say..

But thing we are destroying more rapidly is our mystery. There is little joy in the celluloid and mass media recreations of unique creativity, yet peeking through this milieu and noise generation somehow humanity shines through in the strangest of places..

what they dont tell you

there is so much they don't tell you about the things you should know..


Yet a new days dawns, I will not be afraid ..

and i survived the rapture

To rapturous dismay to some nothing happened and to others with happiness and still to others laughter and then there are those who did not even know.

How insignificant we are as humans, and thought, in a flash we are here and soon will be gone. Well if all goes according to the way we are throwing this planet away, eventually like a bowl of bacteria in a petri-dish we will use up all the resources and will either escape the confines of our dish of life or it will all end, a rather uns acrimonious (yes to those lexophiles, maybe not a real word, but it portrays my thought).

And where does this take me? No where actually, the rap-ture is just a side thought to our existence.

I must admit the mornings are no longer so Christian now that the Christians no longer pray at the station, every morning I peer around the corner and they are gone. One wonders how fickle life is, especially my perception fo them. They are most probably sitting in the McDonalds drinking hot chocolate and huddling around the table. It is only I who is in the belief that true enlightenment comes through personal self flagellation, well I suppose that is being catholic for you ;-). No seriously I always imagined that through hardship and self imposed struggle comes a form of enlightenment. But I am most probably wrong with regards all of this. It is true, this is a strange land and without a grain of doubt a complete stranger. This does not in any way denigrate the experience, but it is a strange place. Yet at this juncture I stand facing the distinct possibility of an imminent spora (one wonders what the singular of a word like diaspora is?) that our family could face if either my medical or the Pumkie's Medical is not acceptable to the immigration authorities. So where does that leave us? Not happy in any way, even though I am in the strange land, note not the promised land, I stand and await the future with baited breath.

So I sat wondering a day or so ago how to best describe our lives and the paths they take. It is somewhat of a case like trying to juggle glass balls, it looks absolutely amazing, the light reflecting and casting amazing colours all over the place, yet if a ball falls down it crashes and makes a huge sound and splinters into a thousand pieces, but all we do it sweep it up and toss it in the bin and start again.. Strange thought that.

I saw an interesting short movie a week or so back, It was called the butterfly circus. It is a preview for a movie. This movie was a winner of a number of short movie festivals. It is worthwhile watching, albeit schmultzy it is heartwarming, but the key to me is that the visual quality is just great.  So you decide for yourself ;-)

On third and fourth thoughts after I have progressed a little further through the Black swan book, I must admit it is losing a little of its shine, not because it is bad or because the writing is specifically bad, but because he does not really get to a point, somewhat like a Blog a number of you may read on the odd occasion. What is the most striking about it at this stage is how he highlights our general  lack of understanding of statistics and the impacts it has and does not have on our lives.  Strangely we do live our lives not always on the direct impacts of stats or probability, but more often on the perceived impacts and outcomes. Nasem goes into a lot detail about gambling and luck and probability and why you cannot win because it is not only about probability, but also about the casino's which monitor trends against trends and you pop up as an outlier if you deviate from the current trends. He also goes through a whole lot of other really confusing statements, which i have resulted in me saying once again that I will have to reread this book a number of times, which do not give us specific answers rather more questions.  He falls back on a very familiar, to me, argument of not actually committing all that much and falling back on the randomness of it all. In some sentences he flouts that it is better to be an outlier, because if you are not an outlier you will not win, but in the same breath he says being an outlier also gives you a greater chance of failure, which when stated like that sounds a lot more obvious, but this is done through a milieu of arguments and paragraphs that rapidly bleed into one argument and back to the original. So at this point i am not convinced, but I am not unconvinced.

Not being unconvinced, could that be any less commital ;-)

So another day, more clouds and rain ..  and at this point I am not convinced if it is as bad as it is or not? It rains, it winds, it suns, it tains, the wind blows, first from the North then the South...

the view from my soggy standing point on the train this morning, oh how i hate soggy socks.. I am sure dr Zeuss could have done something with that...

when faced with one own mortality

Yes this is stereotyped, but is not a treatise to having a MLC...

I got a thinking sometime back, it could have been days, minutes or hours ago, but it recurs. We often make statements like, if i was going to, if that happened, and many others (*&* and the comma makes sense here ). But the point being we tend to live our lives based on riders and axioms about conditional activities, granted it does make sense in most cases. But you have to question if the world is not divided into those who take the pictures of the amazing things and the others who live their lives vicariously through the images transposed through either the printed or electronic media. Yes there is a grey or is that gray, could never figure that one out, view on all of this? Yes there is and is not, and there is a distinct randomness about a lot of this, to which we have no answer to.

To get off that point and onto another, Btw an Awesome book to read (NOTE: I have taken this out of the Bibliothecke.. and will never finish it in the mandatory 3 renewals, it is a book that needs to be bought and ruminated over), but I must warn is in the same vane as Malcom gladwell's books, but requires a whole lot more commitment and rumination as it is in my mind the thinking mans version of MG's books. Oh yes the book, I mentioned it before, is the black swans by Naseem N Taleb.

.....wikilink to Taleb's book.


As a phrase "Pictures from the end of the world." could mean so much, could it mean the literal end of life as we know it, does it mean the end of society as we know it, does it mean the figurative ends of the earth?


But what do we do when we get faced with our mortality? I don't know as I am not there, in the real short term? Well in a way we are, we have to redo our medicals for our damned PR. But there are others who have more concrete implications, but we do live our lives in a perpetual hedge. We always have a predefined event window of living. We don't seem to be able to escape the continual re-evaluation and hedging of life against the external constraints that in most cases we put there, but sometimes are put there by situation.

But to get the actual point of my thought process, well there are two, the first being; we are now faced with the distinct, albeit slim, possibility that we could be forced to return to the Z of A,  which in a way is very confusing, in some senses it is the familiar, in other senses it is scary. The second being the way we do not live our lives. We spend an inordinate amount of effort and bind our selves to the way we live our lives and not nearly as much to how we do not live our lives. We ponder and ponder but often, granted there are those who do, but don't. This at best sounds entirely ambivalent, at worst it is a reality, the event window of reality is pure ambivalence. So where does that leave us?

What can we be clear about, in general there is not a lot that we can be sure of, especially in the light of Black Swan events. Somehow according to Taleb they are outside of our current frame of reference and thinking. So what do we do in these cases, die, survive, live, rebuild, rise like a phoenix. Soemthing we cannot be sure of is what is next, we stand on the brink of a rapture,  a swarm of earthquakes where there should be none, a massive earthquake where there should be one, all we can be sure of is change and at a magnitude that we cannot be prepared for. But Naseem does remind us that being aware of random events does not mean we must eb afraid of them, i am paraphrasing significantly here ...

So where does this take us or put is in the light of swarms of great black swans which currently circle this small insignificant 3rd stone from the Star we call SuN.  I must admit that we have to continue on as best as possible within reason one would assume...

But I do suppose we cannot really change who we are and how we live without the fear of being ridiculous, but it does seem like a good idea to at least challenge some of the levee's we have put in place around our lives. I suspect keeping levees around us is not a bad thing, the question being when is the fear of the black swan realistic and when is it paranoia and is there value in protecting against the cygnet or not?

On a different note it has come to my attention that the Christians have once again deserted me in my morning solace, the rain and cold has limited if not totally removed their presence from the position of their prayers. Like the seasons causes the leaves to fall off the trees the people no longer gather in the bus shelters to do their early morning prayers, but rather they have been blown away, it may not be the wet, the cold or the wind... It could just be the dark.


But All I say ToDay is go forth, gather the sand bags but not to protect you lively hood, but rather the boat you are storing to go forth and explore the unknown ...

nostalgia and the things we love

seems like this did not save it self...??? bizarre here it is reposted

I got a thinking the other day. That is sounding a little contrived, it seems like i think to much ..
And I wonder if random thoughts going through my consciousness actually count as thinking ;)

But to indulge myself I will continue, that is what this is all about, self indulgence and expression of the nothing between one ear and the other.  To get to the point I was wondering about why we look at square images and immediately fill with nostalgia and admiration for retroviews on the current. When did Kitch become cool, when is it still Kitch! Why is lomographics cooler than realism and HDR, which both to an extent bleed into the unreal, is lomographics the edge of the new impressionism? Or has that been covered a few times, I am sure it has?

I was walking ...

just to interrupt, I watched something on youtube, then something else and another and another, slowly moving myself into a spiral of nostalgia and melancholy, as i view our lives as shadows on a wall, the translation cannot compare. The specific version by van Coke Kartel drives home like a huge wooden stake through my AfriKan heart.  Rapidly spiraling me into deep nostalgia about times long past and memories flashing past like an 8 mm film reel, holding back the tears as the soundtrack of my life plays quietly in the background.  It makes me think of things unrelated, Tretchikoff paintings hanging in the wind under the African sky, dust, rain, the smell of pipe tobacco and standing ankle deep in powder dust.

It is not a bad thing to capture this all in a square image on screen alone on an island a far way away from everything that I remember and have notions to have called my home. Like a gypsy the wheels on my bicycle carry me from day to day. I question if I have returned to my root or am I on the route to discovery? Yes a silly rhyme, but it holds true. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts is it the phylogenetic or social intertia or meme that drives us forward, is it the present, the past we know or the past we are unaware of that drives us along the dream  tracks in the sands of time.. Bla bla bla, But I sit here isolated with thsi question inside my brain?

Dust stained faces track the tears as I remember a past, yet knowing full well It was I who went looking down the rabbit hole.As I mentioned before I was deliberating what effect it has on us when we look at square format image and how that relates to the inner kitch we all have. "the other day I had a genuine illumination" .. A very cool line from a preview of a move that is not out yet. I go on, one day after the other waiting for the flash of inspiration, tempting inspiration all day long, exposing my mind and eyes to all that I can in the time that is available, yet I stand and glance into the emptiness at times, other times I stare down a psychedelic rabbit hole of insanity, at other times the pastels and hues flow like the patterns in carefully poured coffee. Where does it start where does it end, why the resistance against social crutches I ask myself daily? Each step is a step closer, other days it feels like every step is in the wrong direction.

Kitch neo-african art is not the word or phrase that i thought it might be, based on the cover of a book that I saw in the borders closing down sale. Then again neither is neo-kitch african art either? Is aw a book cover on sociology that showed the most amazing picture. words would destroy what i saw and the images and thoughts it put forward into my grey space. It illicited a thousand ships, many little sub images and conflicting thoughts burrowing through my brain all searching for an answer? The question it raised, not answered as one of the millions of side shoots was; why do i get more hits on my Flickr profile when I post photo's taken on my mobile phone than when I put my better pictures on there? Is it all perspective? Do i have the wrong perspective is it skewed?  Where else did this flight of fantasy take me, it took me to the singularity that we will face as a human race within the next 20 years. Sometimes I am amazed at how far technology has gone and is going, flexible paper mobile phones, a burgeoning and ever present sentience surrounding us in the cloud of computers, do we harness them or are they harnessing us? Is this the Terminator effect? Is this skynet.. who knows?


More or less later we will know, what we will know, only we will know. A line gets drawn in the mud, my finger caked with sticky brown earth. I have traded the dust bowls of afriKa for the wet and mud.

Enough self indulgence for the moment.

there are things on heaven and earth that move me

what are these things that move me,
trace bundy
kevin O,

they are new or in the general scope of humanity very small ..

have a look, things of beauty, moments in time, more so than before they suddenly move me. It must be the golden syrup of nostalgia and memories seeping into my ever existence. I realize my life has become fragmented through the motions of my thoughts, slowly slicing and dicing and placing memories and future dreams and current events, binding them like a broken mosaic.

Strange when we look back and across we somehow see different things and the pieces somehow don't really line up.  I look back in time, well not really i stare at fleeting images in my mind, I get starkly reminded by images I see around me; printed ones, electronic ones. Something inside me wells up, something unbeknownst to me. I see images of a past that is vaguely reminiscent of my own life, I see images of a life I do not recognize, I see faces and places filled with memories, some mine, some others and some belonging to a social consciousness that I am only a small part of, all these fragments are floating slowly together and others are drifting into the haze. The purple glazes our existence, our consciousness taking shorter or longer dips into the un-reality of this state.

I wonder if the path we choose is it the yellow brick road? Sometimes our mind wants us to believe we have taken the wrong route, other times we know we have, sometimes we know ti is the right path, but most times we wonder around in abject confusion, into the grey mists of our human existence we go, slowly unraveling the past and origins. I apologize, but I do have to return to a previous point where we do have to consider what is it that builds the fabric of our existence? Can this be likened to the nature or nurture debate in evolution? I suspect for some of us the threads used to weave our existence and grubby with the lives of people who are long gone, at other times the tapestry of our lives is woven with new threads.

And the internal welling of emotion never  ceases to amaze me, is this something that was locked deeply inside behind a stone wall. How i have slowly chipped away at that mortar, only to find tightly wound packages, each day, each week, each month
I open a new piece of my life, why did I lock this off, or did life lock me within the confines of these walls.
I stare at photographs, strange memories come welling back. I know full well we are the object of our own actions, but sometimes we feel bound by the cords of life, these long sinewy threads that run through our lives. At times they are broken at other times they stop us failing, yet on the same hand they confine us and give us that most fancifully stated  inertia. How is it that we can start living once again? Do we live in tranches of year bundles. Is it wise to move in 10 year bundles to make changes in our existence. Is it time for a new career if possible, somehow we stand on a knife edge of responsibility and adventure in life, I suppose we have to start with the small steps towards the door, without that inertia we will never leave the room let alone the house.

On something more material, why does brown flour bread really struggle so much? I suppose it is obvious, but it just gets me every time I bake the damned brown bread ;-) So where does the adventure take us next, firstly within the mind, the recesses of the mind, the ants go marching one by one huraa..  don't stop, don't fall, It could be that we have to live within fragments of the life we have created and called our own. How do we achieve these small and fantastical things without embarking on the voyage of our lives, what si it that binds some of us to the material, the ethical, emotional and does not free us from the chains we have bound ourselves with. Yea though i wonder down the road of uncertainty give me the strength to take the next step, to not be scared of the dark corners and ghouls, their chains rattle in the corners of our minds. I walk towards the end of the road, not knowing or seeing the path nor the destination.
I just have to remember the words of marshal m^3 .. I'm not afraid to take a stand, its been a ride I guess i had to go that place to get this place .. yes it is cliched, but I would at least want to keep a common thread throughout this journey of my life.

In general the fantastic still amazes me, the unreal, the existence of an alternative reality that does not really exist other than in our minds.  But all we know is onwards and upwards.

We stand once again at a cusp of decisions, now not later, more not less, live not cower in the shadows we fear so much, hold onto the the light.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear



"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is."
---- German Proverb

We get drawn down the rabbit hole of fear, at times we revolt, other times we cower and hide, paralyzed like a dear in headlights.  It is difficult to determine why we are bound to this primal and debilitating emotion. I will walk along this path I fear and go forth into the unknown world.

and of all of them Banksy always moves me most :-)

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step

So it does,

to paraphrase, this has taken more than one sitting so it will be disjunct and confusing, more so than normal ;-), sorry i should say post-pre-phrase

I walk, I cycle the kilometers

Every morning as I open the garage door, the characteristic crunching of my battered steel cleats on the cement floor makes me cringe in anticipation for the cold and crisp air that hits my face. Some days the multitude of small splashes hitting my face as I exit the driveway into the road, wondering why I have not sorted out the shower cap for my helmet yet? This morning not unlike any other, the air was crisper, hardly a breath of wind in the air, no rain. Yesterday a howling southerly met me outside the door, lashing me with pelting rain drops. All I know is that every day will be different, that is something I can be sure of. I digress, I fear from what I had set out to discuss on this day that is so different. The day started simply like every other, except it was different.

and then i stopped writing ... for days and days, and now the words come back.

But like always the words are milling around, less so the words, but more so the concepts the thoughts, concerns and questions.

I keep coming back to one starting point, finding it difficult to make a departure on something that has been plaguing me for days,  or should I rather say weeks and months. Something that will just not go to rest. Due to my self created exile I expend a more than normal time alone, or at least in the company of my own thoughts. What, I, (yes) and most probably a million others around the world, have been pondering relates the reality of human constructs, however weird that sounds. I sometimes sit and wonder if something like the Harley riders, the weekend warriors, is more or less authentic than any other phenomena. You may ask what the Crap Am I talking about? But in reality why would an artificially created reality that is subscribed to by a large number of people be any different from any other realities. Is it real? I know we often look and laugh at the instant nature of this sub culture and many other similar cultures. But the question that still stands, is whether or not it holds any validity or not. Yes it exists, and has little or no erudite or even philosophical basis, well there is debate around some of it? It is real, it exists even though it is as made up as Foucault pendulum by umberto eco. The additional realities then get created on this dubious starting point and the eventual interactions and manifestations are subsequently then real. Does this invalidate or validate the existence and reality of something. Where is the truth? What is  the truth in this situation, it is a self referencing and fulfilling construct. How much of what we experience and exist within is made up of the same fabric? Where the reality and artificial nature of our existence collide, we are thrown into a large grey mess.

At this point I doubt there is a lot of clarity where the truth starts or stops with regards most things in our daily lives.

So where does this leave us? Do we rely on classical representations or even historical truths or manifestations or can we live within the reality we create for ourselves? Which is better or worse.


Well that is enough of that for now,  following on this path is bound to lead your thoughts astray.
ashtrays, buckets and the sound of tinkling Zamaleck bottles.

the relativity of sound, they things sound now and then and how we remembered them and how they sound when we feel different and the same.  If this sounds like gobildeegoop. Yes it is, i was thinking about something i had thought about to many times before but always disregard as nothing?  Have you ever noticed how different music can sound on different music systems and locations, yes this is obvious we know there are differences, we can be sure of that, but somehow our preconception and bias tends to, in my case, alter the sound and experience tremendously of the sounds i experience. Thsi could change something from beign amazing to poor to brilliant and bakc and forwards again.

I saw something yesterday, it made me sad, it related to friendships.

I stand here in a quagmire of thoughts, ruminating and running through my brain and veins at the speed of a radioactive isotope.  I sit here a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by the endless unknown, I saw this in a book the other day, someone standing peering into the unknown. Yes it was visually portrayed.  To continue, I listen to Gogol Bordello transcontinental, it fills me with happiness and sadness and a longing to a past that is not mine and is only the past and drives me forward into an unknown future.   A few days hither I was watching LOR, the third movie and it was so absolutely amazing, but it saddened me a lot, when i looked at the wonder and awe that had been created by the media and the story, but it only pointed to me how we have taken away the splendour awe and mystery out of our lives. The Western society has removed the underlying mystery that surrounds our humanity. In no way do i suggest we should all abandon rationality and immerse ourselves into a form of romantic non-reality or a dream realm, what I do however lament is that the mystery of our existence has been removed, we no longer dream of dragons, i cannot dream fo the long line of green ants marching along the ridge of the red sand dunes, the Lion roars in Africa has become literal, the chameleon is no longer a spiritual animal, nor is the praying mantis.  I am not saying we have to depart from the rational and san, what i lament is the loss we have. Our reality is created on top of countless memes that contain these half truths and images bound to the human race. These memes are surgically been removed from us before we have had time to replace them with reasonable facsimiles or new incarnations thereof. We have replaced the mystery of symbols and hedgerows with WWW , you have to question how we can let that happen, we have replaced bread the source of our origin with Big Mac. We cannot go back, time is fleeting it passes on, but I can lament the loss of this reality.  In a way I am not taking a step backwards tempting the salt pillar, rather taking a breath a long the journey of life, search new yesterdays in the unending sea of possibilities. Sometimes the weight of the self imposed yolk bears me down, the added weight of the past soemtimes slows our ability to plough the lands to plant the new crop. Without the Yolk we would be nothing, without the memes which have become plaited into my veins it would not be me, those plaits sometimes strangle, sometimes allow new pathways for the blood to flow through my veins. These are things in my past that are not of me, but are as a result of things I had no part in and that happened on another continent that I have never seen, slowly the sands of time mingle with the sands of my past creating solid ground at times creating a sinkhole a quicksand trap i set for myself. Other times, I run across the hot sand, through the pine forests past the Amanita through the dark glades search for the line of lost green ants. The paua shell giving me the illusion of a silver lining on the long white and grey clouds, I search for Ganesha, the tarrot cards lay open on the plaid tablecloth laid open int he glade, splinters of sunlight highlighting the cards that have been drawn for me. I know not what they mean, but I do know that eventhough I chose a new deck a number of the old cards are still represented.

Just remember we need to break the daily bread, drink life and imbibe the suns rays when they shine on us, appreciate the moisture and rain. We remember the jade coloured light that is thrown over everything here carries a tinge of darkness with it eternally. The sun shinning from without, sometimes strongly from within, but the cloak of darkness hangs like a shadow across the view. Lucky we are that the winds of change blow strongly removing the boughs causing the shade, yet at times when the wind fails to blow and the sun hides behind it blanket of greyness to create dark recesses we have to slowly search for those inner lights. Somethings we are prepared for, others not.

To conclude the discussion, read this like the wrapper of a bright yellow chappie, sometimes silly, nostalgic. hard on the outside, slowly softening with a taste that lingers.

the things you never thought you would miss and other strange beasts int he night

Damn that was a long title, but it needed to be said. I may be re-iterating something I have said in the past, go shoot me.. allow me a senior moment.

oh the first word of the day is Tableau..

Where to start?

Somehow our lives are judged, or should I say we judge our lives and or any combination thereof.  The things we miss, the things we do, the things we wished we had done, the places we want to go, the places we have been. These are all choices, fleeting through our lives. I was going to metaphor-ze that statement, but in flight realized that would be overkill. I read a book recently. I think I may even have mentioned this, BUT interestingly i read a blog of a random person yesterday and they were discussing the same book. Oh yes the book. It is outliers by Malcom Gladwell. I found it terribly illuminating for a number of reasons, but one of the interesting points was the 10000 hour scenario where it is implied that to master anything we need to practice or do or action something for more than 10000 hours. Without this magical number of repetitions or skills development it appears that no one can excel at anything. It is a strange thing.. but the book appears to be well researched, or at least it gives that impression. Albeit that it is rather soft-science-ish and all social science and the n! efficient strategies to do x and y the best. I enjoyed it. But my point being? The blog i read actually pointed to this article and related this to the "art" or process of writing and most specifically blogging. It is sad, the blog is nice and natural, the author could actually have carried on, but has not for the last few years. You may ask or even intimate, what the FRIG is my point. Eventually this blog may actually become readable. I suspect there are only about 100 hours into this blog so we are a couple of orders off the mark. So be patient, is all i ask. One day this may or may not actually sprout some value and wisdom. I may also fall into the category of the room full of monkeys and typewriters. Apparently this anecdote is actually called the infinite monkey theorem . 

Given enough time, a hypothetical monkey typing at random would, as part of its output, almost surely produce all of Shakespeare's plays. In this image a chimpanzee is giving it a try. (from wikipedia)

 

 

The last note on the monkey is that through this I have learnt a fantastic new word, namely dactylographic. But I do see that the person who tabled the infinite monkey theorem was a definite strong anti-creationist.

Oh yes and here is the other monkey:

To get back to the original train of thought, or rather the actual human condition that I wanted to raise. This point being the process of being through the expression of our existence through travel, discovery, production, art and general social condition.
We measure ourselves via the external representation or even internalization of these factors and the consequent diatribe and verbosity or lack thereof that we exhibit. Have mind will travel, have fears we are held back. We have a physical manifestation, we have a physical form and space we inhabit, whereas our minds travel backwards and forwards in time and across space, physical space.

What is it that inhibits our travel in all these manifestations; physically, emotionally, temporal-y and intercontinental? Is it the amount of gadjo within in me that attempts to find roots like a strangling fig? Sometimes the roots break loose, I fall into a dream state, I watch the line of green ants. The wind blows from whence I cannot say, it is not a foul wind, it is a wind driving us forward into the unknown. Is this what I dreamt of in my youth. I hope not, but if it is then it is.

 one of the many sights I saw today on my short traveling through the streets of wellington. Is it a UFO, not sure but it was pretty Wired

 some more sights in an around wellington, and for all those doubters .. look the sky is Blue ;-)

  My favorite urban decay, well actually not really this is a building site, where an old building has been pulled down to make space for something new.












So where does that take us or leave us? There is no absolute or even grey answer to this. But I do still pose the question around how our ability to move and travel reflects on us as beings on this planet. I look and ponder when I view the various photos of people I know and don't know on the interWeb. How much are we constrained by our inability to let ourselves go and experience the flows of life through the interactions of others and our physical location and in contradiction how little others are bound by their inability to be constrained to one thought or the other. In the eventual stream of global consciousness are we better or worse than those who do or don't?  Is it the vague reference to me having eastern european blood or even vaguely germanic with  blue eyes could point to some Viking or even possibly Gypsy blood, but not enough to put me a wandering, I wonder a lot about wandering though! But i suppose being an immigrant makes me part of the global mixing of society, is this our last ditch internalized effort to maximize our survival on this planet?

Have we as humans reached the eventual end of the rope?

Yes things are falling apart faster and quicker than we would ever imagine. But where does that leave us? In a state of anarchy, or does it require something else? at this stage I am without thoughts on this.

todays words

In no particular order other than they appeared to me in conscious thought

Kapow,Steve from iSys ,RAP and CEP,That darn Cat 1965, Tron Evolution 2010,Arthur - 2010, Source Code,Christopher Brookmyre

There were no fossils in New Zealand till a while back. That is there were no Vertebrate Fossils. But they found them. They found arrow heads in North America, that changes everything. Japan has to little Electricity and have been plunged into a dark age.


It is still shaking here, but not so often near us, but Charl did say it shakes to much in CC .

No not in this pic, but this is a picture of me running nowhere in particular.

this is in its rawest form CZ 3, there will be more, particularly this was untouched by my hands, baring the piece of pua shell that I flipped to show the sheen. It is amazing, that the Maori made Lures out of these shells hundred of years ago and caught a wide variety of carnivorous and bight-y fish. They even trawled behind their canoe's.


and here is Ronnie... just because I  miss my chikins..

FYI relative sunshine hours from wikipedia
Wellington            2065 hours
London               1461 hours
Basel                   1599 hours
Johannesburg       3130 hours
Edinburgh            1405 hours
Cape town           2993 hours
Sydney                2480 hours


enough randomness for now.. more tomorrow

Random things

I was browsing flickr (me on flickr )the other day.. well yesterday and the day before and many others, I always look at the new and "explored" pictures and came accross this picture (this link):

No not one of mine.. but it got me to think about a book I had read a long time ago, something I think i remember, but will have to go and re-read again. The book is called count zero written by William Gibson, I am not sure if this technically still fits in the cyber-punk Genre or not, as this was after the inital neuromancer and other books that brought this into common cutlure. But I do digress, the aspect of the novel which fascinated me was nto the hacking and all the other intricate dealings in a virtual reality, but rather a couple of scenes in the book where there is an "installation" of objects that is in space, in a random orbiting collection. My memory is most probably clouded.. but I still would like to re-read the book just for this piece. My reasoning, strange, as it may be, is an internal fascination with collages. More than collages though, Collages tend to be one dimensional and at best 3 dimensional when the artist attempts some dimensionality. Here is a postcard from an exhibition i went to recently in Wellington.

 It was at best disappointing, why you may ask? It jsut was, it showed little dimensionality, it had some temporal distortion, some lapses in generation and mixed media and days, but it was childish and he was trying to sell it as ART. But that is neither here nor there.

I think it relates more to these random collections of objects that we as humans gather over time and place on our desks and mantlepieces and all over our existence. Yes this does sound a lot like the social Cairns concept, which i see has now been superseded and destroyed with Geocaching. but there are elements of insane originality and amazing conceptual art. For example the drop boxes, the USB devices that are mounted in places all over the world.

Ok so after a quick reccie over the googleweb if find this artbasedoncountzero 1 2 , not what i had expected. notquite  ... alotcloser  

Gets me a thinking about the media that would best represent the images inside my head, most probably at the end of the day the written word is all that can represent the thoughts in our minds, the more we try to abstract them into physical or visual representations the more we fail, or do we? Can we ever do any justice to what we envisage, or is that part of the challenge to cement our multidimensional thoughts into a single digit dimensional representation, be it an electronic image a 2 dimensional canvas, a sculptural representation of an aspect of something we visualize.

I look i see, I think I am lucky because I have not seen this before, I can see everything with young eyes, it is simple because I am not of this land.

Slowly the sun sets on the past, the silhouette of a life past fades into the dusty red sunset....

a new dawn, a crisp dawn I keep expecting my beard to ice up on the way to work, somehow unlikely but it is starting to feel that way. Every day  heralds a crisp dawn.

well enough of that for now..

time to go and enjoy the weekend

vunerability

So where to restart again,
(and once again this is fictional and not relevant to anything in particular,
for email recipients you need to actually look at the website)

things return to a semblance of normality, the Christians are back at the station. The sun rises the sun sets, the earth shakes a lot, the sun rises it shakes some more, the waves pummel, the tears flow down our cheeks.

I wonder do we have an internal compass guiding us back to a past known or unbeknown to ourselves?  Is there a part inside us which holds a direction to true home? When we are separated from our home, albeit if generations pass. Is there still an internal song line inside us caucasians taking us back to the route of our origins? Is there a song drawn across the globe calling me back to my roots, is the route back to my home? Does my spirit have a home or will it drift endlessly in this mortal existence that i call my life?

I find my self being pulled and pushed and drawn all over my surrounds searching for a glimpse of a  petrosomatoglyph, could it be that this which i had seen as social cairns could not maybe be the afore mentioned?
The only consistency is the change and time fleeting like wind blowing through my hair, I stand atop a large hill viewing the landscape of my existence.  I listen closely but the songs are confusing, pulling me back to a home (s) that I do not recognize and a home(s) that is not the one that my physical form has ever visited. My dreams and spirits flows through time and space being pulled towards a land on another continent.
Would it be a path it should follow, a journey along the path of my forefathers, to see what?

I stand with the brisk wind howling through my short hair, wind so cold and strong it brings tears to my eyes . The waves of wind creating visual poetry in motion as the boughs of the grasses sway and weave intricate patterns apon the side of the hill. I walk slowly through the forest and with little more than a sense of fascination and awe of the splendour, but I cannot yet call this my home, it happens to be the location that my physical form enhabits. Strangely at peace I walk faster and faster looking to get to the top of the hill, to break out of the forest and seek the air and the space and see the sea in the distance.

what will tomorrow hold for me and you?
I do not think we need to worry, the world continues with or without us,

I stand with my eyes affixed to the north staring to a location at this point unbeknownst to me. All i know is that this is where the roots of my current seedling made roots.  For the time being this is where is call home. More like a bough visciously ripped during a storm, only to be washed a shor ein an unknown land, sprouting and trooting to give a new home to its vicariously transported thoughts and tenants. All I know is that there is an internal song calling me to the origins of it all. Time will tell where the song takes me, what beacons of home I shall find on my journey forwards. There is no knowing what language that song is sung in, all I have to hope is that the internal rhythms guide me along the path that the dreaming totemic animals call me on my path forwards.

To say this is anything but true, is to say anything else is not. Irrespective of the truthfulness or validity of  this outlook.

So where does this take us, through a winding route through the dreams and thoughts of my mind on roads paved with good intentions and loaves of bread. I stand hoping to leave a trail behind for someone to follow as i seek the path or route back to my origins.

The words fall through the spaces in my thoughts rapidly falling swirling and mixing to create strings of meaning about the past future and present. What is the truth of the dreams we dream? even if they are not our own dreams  or words, does that make them any less fantastical. In this day and age of rationality and absolute truth is there any space left for the dreaming of our lives within the confines of our minds, knowing full well that the stark reality of life lies outside, the soft and melodic story that is woven inside my mind, in certain cases I could say my soul. My soul is transported to a land of memories, mingling with words of others, mixing with the tears flowing from the corner of my eyes, running down my angled and aging cheeks into the corners of my mouth illiciting a salty reality which momentarily returns me back to the present. 

where does this fictional story start? Does it start in the dust or the forests under an Acacia tree, an Albizzia an Artocarpus or whichever one and in a really absurd notion that the future is before the past it could even be a Podocarpus totara. There is no knowing where the dream of the lion and multitudes of beetles will take me.  As I walk down the wondrous pathway with Alan on my side, the call of the Tui rings shrill in my ears, carefully i make sure not to break the line of  green ants dreaming of red rocks and beetle fruit and jack fruit and my mind slowly but surely enters the dream plane. Slowly the rhythms combine to push me forwards on this journey we call dream time traveling. Long lines of green ants are silhouetted against the dusty red sky.

For the answer to this you will have to wait and dream the dream with me.

Yes in retro and even introspect the cheese slowly cakes against the side of my mouth, but it is not a reality, neither the words I write nor the experience illicited by them. The life as beautiful as a a tretchikoff stands before us ;-)

On mortality and living

How our mortal coil unwinds
like a tightly coiled clock spring it sits and unwinds slowly
sometimes jumping of its carefully mounted ridges, exploding
we run, we think we can hide
another day presents itself
from one peril we run into another
all we know is that this is finite

suffering is not relative, but it is seen that way
media sees and sensationalizes
flooding, quakes and global climate change

the plight of the 3rd world
carrying the burden of the 1st world on its fragile shoulders
no one sheds a tear unless it is you
standing a moment we gaze forward into nothingness
tomorrow is here
we stand
we look
we know not what now holds

into the darkness

"exit light,
enter night
take my hand
we are off to never never land"

"Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

I shall not tread lightly as i enter into the darkness of life, i shall enter into the dark spaces with a spectrum of bright colours blindingly i move forward, nay i say shall fear no dark space, nay i shall not fear injustice, nay i shall not fear the unknown.

Go forth he said, search for the flicker of light in the darkness that abounds, find the truth, find the happiness, find the colour, even it it means a 30 second exposure.  


Something had changed, he stood there staring at the wall, it was different today, the same yellow sandstone wall covered by lichens and moss. It just seemed so different, he felt the inner connection he wondered about it, how come the patterns looked that way. He had to come back and take a picture, a picture of the pattern, no one would believe him. The butterfly had flapped its wings in Malaysia, more specifically KL. Everything would be different tomorrow, the weather, the patterns the sunshine everything would change. All for a little Carbon Dioxide he imagined, the weather was changing, it made him think about the Bob Dylan song that he had heard and loved and hated and all of the above at the same time. 


Slowly he took another step up the worn pathway, glimpsing thought he fine rain drops gathering on the hood of his raincoat sending large globules of rain down his cheek. would it ever be the same again, he kepot pondering over and over, there had to be something he could do, almost instinctively he dodged the lady with the pink hair, he was wearing an emerald green dress today. The water slowly started seeping through the seams of his shoes, he felt the ever present squelch, first on his left foot then on his right. He had always been limping, he could never understand why. There was no reason for him to limp, but he did, waiting for the traffic light, he knelt to tie his shoe lace, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the on coming traffic, how he had wished he had bought a car instead of spending his money on that book, or he should rather have thought books. Slowly, yet deliberately he stood up and sidled closer to the traffic lights insidious beeping, he knew it was for the blind people, but it irritated him so. from a distance he got his first aroma of the coffee filtering through the wet blanket covering them all. something to look forward to he thought, life is full of small joys he kept telling himself. Suddenly his dream state was shaken by the loud buzzing of the traffic lights, the frentic bustle of people around him, rushing to cross to the other side, it flet like he was standing at the Styx, crossing this, imbibing the city it would change everything, unlike the Styx it would not last for years, or would it. He paused a moment longer, irritating a rather large lady behind him, buslting through she mumbled angrily under her breath. Without waiting he jumped forward as if he had been awoken from his dream state, something inside, a song a dream was pulling him forward towards his fate for the day, or was it just the flapping of a very small grey butterfly with lightly coloured blue flecks on a remote hill called the heads that pushed him forwards? Unto this day he will never know, i doubt he will ever know why he walked that way, on that morning, why he stopped to buy coffee, why he lingered a minute longer than before, but he did and that is what formed his life going forwards.


And the train trips become more familiar, the faces are becoming more and more familiar. I recognize the lady with the pink hair and thee green dress, the members of parliament, the political analysts. the computer programmers, the testers (yes!.) and all the others. Yes there is a comfort int he familiarity of it all. At times there is comfort in new things, at others there is despair. Oh we are an enigmatic and chrono-dis-synchronous anachronistic beings. Or maybe some are and others are not. But there are things that make us happy at times and not at others, frigin weird. Maybe when I come back as the supreme ruler and master of the universe i will re-engineer humans into something a little more predictable or at least less predictable.. but this mix and match is wholly confusing.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel and yes that is the train and somedays it is the sunlight streaming through.

Life is like a stained glass window, multi coloured , multifaceted and surrounded by heavy lead boundaries.. :-)

next maybe something on the sensory experience of food... either that or a potjiekos recipe ... maybe if we record these blogs and play them backwards we might just get soemthing LOL