I apologize to the fellowship for an overly wordy and exuberant comment, that was supposed to be in response to Dennis' reply to the first comment, and best relayed off thread. I sense you have forbearance for misteps unless they are habitual. The writing here delivers a powerful charge for which my loins need to be girded, lest the sense of significance spurs me to spew like a garden hose until simmering down.
I'll try to start posting on Substack or find you via email so I don't overload your Comments; but I'm burnt out on learning different, not necessarily better ways, to connect online. It's like having to keep tying shoelaces with different knots, when the basic bow worked well enough. Because I started with computers in 1975, research assistant at SFU with the genius mystic Doug Seeley inventing the user friendly interface, then on through the first Macs etc., imagine how many times my procedural memory had to take on board yet a different set of steps to perform the same operation. Now it just goes Pfft when confronted with new icons.
About DETAIL, slagged as devilish, yes. Such paintings are dismissed as "obsessive", and I was branded "unprofessional", for sound reason when the meaning of "professional" became business-like, under a marriage of marketing+academia, that yes enabled art to survive economic changes, while asphyxiating party art. I could only nod, yes, yes. Exactly. Unprofessional. I have nothing to profess. Flares of free spirited culture here keep getting snuffed by the covetous, wielding gobbledygook perversions of social justice campaigning, that has been subdued somewhat under Trump's hail.
For me, ""detail" was on a resolution gradient, that relates to SCALE, which is interesting when in the course of shifting rules become moot. Yay. All of a sudden, When small enough, classical laws can be violated! As above is not as below. Thank goodness, the overlordship so moribund. Something can be everywhere it possibly can be. Time, if operative at all runs forwards and backwards. Reality turns out to be granular, which comes as a relief, dispelling childhood nightmares about infinity, exacerbated by Disney's Fantasia, those endlessly multiplying mops. SCALE has an impact on data, and what physicists call "blurring" at the limit of our power to detect, measure, and it turns out that everything we are and experience happens in that fuzzy, myopic margin of error, on borrowed time. Our reality is illegitimate! Marginal off grid outsiders are more sane than what safely toes the line.
I tried to quit art as impractical, only for it to not quit me, so discovered, giddily, that the premise that art is moot if unseen outside the hovel is false. Trees falling unwitnessed in the forest don't make a sound; they sing. So I got to carry on without, you know, complicating opinions, rules and regulations.
I'll try to contact you through email. I don't have a phone, refused the first mobile device. What? Be tracked and stalked? Nope nope nope. I found Peggy Thompson. There are plans for a show in Vancouver in the fall, and I wondered if you'd be interested in resurrecting party art, just for a night, a Point Zero Eight occasion, punk geezers drumming up Al Neil's spirit, yes, as you put it, dastardly cursing! I squirrelled away a little cash for venue, tek and nurses. You can rock and I'd do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRanxKB9qA&list=PLaDJmj4dAhNfCocyWdlpr5CB_p-F7OOho
"My Soul to Take" stirred up what without restraint will be a typing avalanche. I am not tightening the reins. You are free to ignore. It's appalling how many ways there are to frighten children into submission.
You are not talking to yourself. I am deeply grateful for your offerings, which is how I felt about your contributions when we brushed shoulders in the late 70s, so I am overjoyed to have found you online. There is a practice in the Buddhist toolkit for mental well being, "the yoga of sleep", that addresses the power of our musings as we nod off, to condition our dreams and state of mind when asleep. I confess that I find all dreams fascinating, even hair raising nightmares, so I am lazy about a yoga of sleep. Bring on the surrealism, even if disturbing.
I get it that Kevin's dreams take him to the Manhattan. Vancouver punk and bands in the late 70s was a surge of the special freedom fighter music spirit in Vancouver that I hope still flickers, even if Al Neil's free range cabin has been leashed.
I didn't like cars. Surely there's a better way to get from a to b than by exploding fossil fuels to pump pistons and fart fumes. Vancouver hills and rain frustrated cycling for everything, so I drove the affordable second hand option, the first 1975 Honda Civic tin can that needed minimal gas and parking space, and kept trucking as long as oil was topped up, thirst quenched and an occasional tune up when it struggled uphill.
The front seat gave out from moving Marshall amps, so we ripped it out, making the car a terrific little van for gear and for camping on the Twilight beach, in the Rockies, and on adventures criss crossing Canada. When I wandered away I left the car parked by the tracks to enjoy the view in Dave Rimmer's Canadian Pacific.
Doreen Gray showed up and told me she and Frank Crass had the car. When she left, there was a note that payment for it was under my bed, where I discovered a suitcase of magick. I marketed enough fairy ring constituents to pay for a Dutch city bike to replace the Honda. I have kept that noble steed glider running to this day. I passed along the suitcase to Randy Pandora, rehearsing in my studio Hillar Liitoja's first PoundForPound performance. Just snorting spore dust in that suitcase engendered hallucinations.
When busy with kids I let my drivers license expire, cycling sufficient. I never again owned a car. The little blue Honda was so infused with wonderful memories of music, bands, ramblings and sleeping by surf and in the rain forest, that driving it became a wish fulfilling recurrent dream, with elaborate machinations about where to park it out of sight, because of the 70s licence plates. The dreams of being behind its wheel were white knuckles because of trepidation that a cop would notice, pull me over and discover I had no current licence or insurance. That thrilling ILLEGITIMACY is the buzz that charged up the music scene in which you played a huge role, and your ongoing contributions.
At the risk of pontificating editorializing instead of letting you all think for yourselves, I'll just add that currently, to create and share culture in a law abiding way, the cost of real estate, rent, regulating licences, fees, taxes and insurance makes indie venues unaffordable unless players are independently wealthy or have bloated government grants that come with censorship. What perplexes me most is artists who I suppose have only known life under the Corporate Regime, so embrace business practices, such as hostile takeovers by tattling on pirates and gentrifying their venues, instead of being inspired by them to create their own grass roots initiative.
If your nightmares express anxiety about alienation and disorientation in a setting of where it's hard to find nourishing food and such, it's a hint that you haven't lost the spark of what Ancient Egyptians called "The Rebel in the Soul".
I should have posted this in my own substack but I never did social media and am burnt out of figuring how to operate this business machinery.
I thank you from my refurbished heart for your kind words, and calls to action. Your paintings inspired me and countless others, with more than the devil in the details. The focusing on microcosm to macrocosm mirrors my joy in the details in writing.
Our youth was a golden time in many ways, certainly never to be repeated. As a writer and musician, I strive to find new ways to shock myself, stir up memories, put words together in ways that others may find amusing and hopefully helpful.
Apparently it is supposed to be a curse to live in interesting times. My wish is that we all get to keep cursing.
Ya I had that same prayer and I was never sure if I was going to wake up. What a nice thing to put on a kid. My nightmares are about being lost and not knowing where my home / car is and the Manhattan features prominently. I can’t seem to get through the mall to find Robson and thurlow then when I reach my building I can’t remember the number , in the building and the apartment seems so empty.. the other one is a line cook who has no idea of the fresh sheet complete anxiety, I wake up sweating. I’m glad I moved, too much pressure in my last job, making dinner for Bill Clinton, Julia child, throwing up in the back alley knowing what I was walking into. Now I work with disadvantaged adults teaching cooking and social skills… never been happier.❤️
When I was of single digit age I said that same prayer, perhaps feeling the need to do so due to the "If I should die before I wake" clause. God's legal team are obviously a clever bunch to work that one in.
Quite some time since I've had a flying dream. Way too often I have naked dreams, I'm doing something somewhere when all of a sudden, no clothes on! And usually I need to get somewhere a distance away and where are the bushes or whatever else to hide behind along the way? Even in Dreamland, the anxiety over that one is real...
The nighttime prayers definitely feel like an older time when that seemed a parenting strategy to keep kids on a good path...I ditched that one as a parent. Dreams incorporating flying to escape bullies or other dangers or purely for recreation is familiar to me too. This all makes me wonder what my grandkids will dream in this very different time. What worries will they take with them into dreamland and what strategies will they muster to cope with in that subconscious time?
I apologize to the fellowship for an overly wordy and exuberant comment, that was supposed to be in response to Dennis' reply to the first comment, and best relayed off thread. I sense you have forbearance for misteps unless they are habitual. The writing here delivers a powerful charge for which my loins need to be girded, lest the sense of significance spurs me to spew like a garden hose until simmering down.
I'll try to start posting on Substack or find you via email so I don't overload your Comments; but I'm burnt out on learning different, not necessarily better ways, to connect online. It's like having to keep tying shoelaces with different knots, when the basic bow worked well enough. Because I started with computers in 1975, research assistant at SFU with the genius mystic Doug Seeley inventing the user friendly interface, then on through the first Macs etc., imagine how many times my procedural memory had to take on board yet a different set of steps to perform the same operation. Now it just goes Pfft when confronted with new icons.
About DETAIL, slagged as devilish, yes. Such paintings are dismissed as "obsessive", and I was branded "unprofessional", for sound reason when the meaning of "professional" became business-like, under a marriage of marketing+academia, that yes enabled art to survive economic changes, while asphyxiating party art. I could only nod, yes, yes. Exactly. Unprofessional. I have nothing to profess. Flares of free spirited culture here keep getting snuffed by the covetous, wielding gobbledygook perversions of social justice campaigning, that has been subdued somewhat under Trump's hail.
For me, ""detail" was on a resolution gradient, that relates to SCALE, which is interesting when in the course of shifting rules become moot. Yay. All of a sudden, When small enough, classical laws can be violated! As above is not as below. Thank goodness, the overlordship so moribund. Something can be everywhere it possibly can be. Time, if operative at all runs forwards and backwards. Reality turns out to be granular, which comes as a relief, dispelling childhood nightmares about infinity, exacerbated by Disney's Fantasia, those endlessly multiplying mops. SCALE has an impact on data, and what physicists call "blurring" at the limit of our power to detect, measure, and it turns out that everything we are and experience happens in that fuzzy, myopic margin of error, on borrowed time. Our reality is illegitimate! Marginal off grid outsiders are more sane than what safely toes the line.
I tried to quit art as impractical, only for it to not quit me, so discovered, giddily, that the premise that art is moot if unseen outside the hovel is false. Trees falling unwitnessed in the forest don't make a sound; they sing. So I got to carry on without, you know, complicating opinions, rules and regulations.
I'll try to contact you through email. I don't have a phone, refused the first mobile device. What? Be tracked and stalked? Nope nope nope. I found Peggy Thompson. There are plans for a show in Vancouver in the fall, and I wondered if you'd be interested in resurrecting party art, just for a night, a Point Zero Eight occasion, punk geezers drumming up Al Neil's spirit, yes, as you put it, dastardly cursing! I squirrelled away a little cash for venue, tek and nurses. You can rock and I'd do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRanxKB9qA&list=PLaDJmj4dAhNfCocyWdlpr5CB_p-F7OOho
My email is densemilt1@gmail.com
"My Soul to Take" stirred up what without restraint will be a typing avalanche. I am not tightening the reins. You are free to ignore. It's appalling how many ways there are to frighten children into submission.
You are not talking to yourself. I am deeply grateful for your offerings, which is how I felt about your contributions when we brushed shoulders in the late 70s, so I am overjoyed to have found you online. There is a practice in the Buddhist toolkit for mental well being, "the yoga of sleep", that addresses the power of our musings as we nod off, to condition our dreams and state of mind when asleep. I confess that I find all dreams fascinating, even hair raising nightmares, so I am lazy about a yoga of sleep. Bring on the surrealism, even if disturbing.
I get it that Kevin's dreams take him to the Manhattan. Vancouver punk and bands in the late 70s was a surge of the special freedom fighter music spirit in Vancouver that I hope still flickers, even if Al Neil's free range cabin has been leashed.
I didn't like cars. Surely there's a better way to get from a to b than by exploding fossil fuels to pump pistons and fart fumes. Vancouver hills and rain frustrated cycling for everything, so I drove the affordable second hand option, the first 1975 Honda Civic tin can that needed minimal gas and parking space, and kept trucking as long as oil was topped up, thirst quenched and an occasional tune up when it struggled uphill.
The front seat gave out from moving Marshall amps, so we ripped it out, making the car a terrific little van for gear and for camping on the Twilight beach, in the Rockies, and on adventures criss crossing Canada. When I wandered away I left the car parked by the tracks to enjoy the view in Dave Rimmer's Canadian Pacific.
Doreen Gray showed up and told me she and Frank Crass had the car. When she left, there was a note that payment for it was under my bed, where I discovered a suitcase of magick. I marketed enough fairy ring constituents to pay for a Dutch city bike to replace the Honda. I have kept that noble steed glider running to this day. I passed along the suitcase to Randy Pandora, rehearsing in my studio Hillar Liitoja's first PoundForPound performance. Just snorting spore dust in that suitcase engendered hallucinations.
When busy with kids I let my drivers license expire, cycling sufficient. I never again owned a car. The little blue Honda was so infused with wonderful memories of music, bands, ramblings and sleeping by surf and in the rain forest, that driving it became a wish fulfilling recurrent dream, with elaborate machinations about where to park it out of sight, because of the 70s licence plates. The dreams of being behind its wheel were white knuckles because of trepidation that a cop would notice, pull me over and discover I had no current licence or insurance. That thrilling ILLEGITIMACY is the buzz that charged up the music scene in which you played a huge role, and your ongoing contributions.
At the risk of pontificating editorializing instead of letting you all think for yourselves, I'll just add that currently, to create and share culture in a law abiding way, the cost of real estate, rent, regulating licences, fees, taxes and insurance makes indie venues unaffordable unless players are independently wealthy or have bloated government grants that come with censorship. What perplexes me most is artists who I suppose have only known life under the Corporate Regime, so embrace business practices, such as hostile takeovers by tattling on pirates and gentrifying their venues, instead of being inspired by them to create their own grass roots initiative.
If your nightmares express anxiety about alienation and disorientation in a setting of where it's hard to find nourishing food and such, it's a hint that you haven't lost the spark of what Ancient Egyptians called "The Rebel in the Soul".
I should have posted this in my own substack but I never did social media and am burnt out of figuring how to operate this business machinery.
I thank you from my refurbished heart for your kind words, and calls to action. Your paintings inspired me and countless others, with more than the devil in the details. The focusing on microcosm to macrocosm mirrors my joy in the details in writing.
Our youth was a golden time in many ways, certainly never to be repeated. As a writer and musician, I strive to find new ways to shock myself, stir up memories, put words together in ways that others may find amusing and hopefully helpful.
Apparently it is supposed to be a curse to live in interesting times. My wish is that we all get to keep cursing.
Love
D
I went to Sunday School a few times when I was a kiddo.
I think my Mom sent me so she could sleep in as we just
lived half a block away from the Church. Anyways, I had a
lot of questions about God and stuff. Prayers were great
because I thought they were meant to be wishes until I
figured out there were strings attached called Religion.
It never created fear in me of dying though. It was more
that childhood song," Found a Peanut " that made me
fear dying anytime soon and surely I had questions if I
had about that place called Heaven. I appreciate your
historic experiences from your own childhood, Dennis.
As for the dream, those ladder rungs reaching further
apart seem to represent you not feeling like you can
get ahead or move up from something you hope for?
Being with your daughter when she was younger is a
time travel trick if you ask me.You even gave the man
a two dollar bill.lol I have no answers just commenting.
I am going to go get caught up on your last post too -
you are never talking to yourself when you write but I
get what you mean about that when you're sharing here.
I have always liked your writing as you know I just do
not get on Substack much right now.I'll work on that :)
Ya I had that same prayer and I was never sure if I was going to wake up. What a nice thing to put on a kid. My nightmares are about being lost and not knowing where my home / car is and the Manhattan features prominently. I can’t seem to get through the mall to find Robson and thurlow then when I reach my building I can’t remember the number , in the building and the apartment seems so empty.. the other one is a line cook who has no idea of the fresh sheet complete anxiety, I wake up sweating. I’m glad I moved, too much pressure in my last job, making dinner for Bill Clinton, Julia child, throwing up in the back alley knowing what I was walking into. Now I work with disadvantaged adults teaching cooking and social skills… never been happier.❤️
When I was of single digit age I said that same prayer, perhaps feeling the need to do so due to the "If I should die before I wake" clause. God's legal team are obviously a clever bunch to work that one in.
Quite some time since I've had a flying dream. Way too often I have naked dreams, I'm doing something somewhere when all of a sudden, no clothes on! And usually I need to get somewhere a distance away and where are the bushes or whatever else to hide behind along the way? Even in Dreamland, the anxiety over that one is real...
The nighttime prayers definitely feel like an older time when that seemed a parenting strategy to keep kids on a good path...I ditched that one as a parent. Dreams incorporating flying to escape bullies or other dangers or purely for recreation is familiar to me too. This all makes me wonder what my grandkids will dream in this very different time. What worries will they take with them into dreamland and what strategies will they muster to cope with in that subconscious time?