Tuesday, October 28

do you hear me, talking to you.

occasionally, the inverse occurs, and mere words string together to invoke disparate thoughts, melding together and calling forth ideas, then teasing out the past -or suggesting a future, finally tumbling into a blossom of images.

a reverse photo-thought like that seems all the more potent, a final birth from vague concepts to concrete reality,

except that that reality only exists in a poignant 2D etch.

and invariably almost, thoughts of individuals, disparate through time and space, conjure up ideas of the bonds among, and in between.



[germany. berlin]
and a favourite appears again. an unassuming stranger who whips out those love-glasses at the last moment, and rather gleefully agrees to having his picture taken.

interesting ad in the back ground.




[germany. berlin]

/ lucky I'm in love with my best friend
/ lucky to have been where I have been


[thailand. nongkhai]
looking across to laos, and people since then.


/ lucky we're in love every way

/ lucky to have stayed where we have stayed
/ lucky to be coming home someday
-jason mraz

Wednesday, October 22

fight with faith (continued).


[thailand. chiang mai]

what happen when faith turns into a fallible object;
the all-knowing one becomes a scrap of a bygone moment.

or, what happens when it leaves you,
an apparent turn of favour,
an incomprehensible breakdown, abandonment, leaving you bereft.

What happens, whether dumper or dumpee, when we lose faith?

Is
(man + faith) > (man - faith) ?

then,
man - faith = ?

and even more that,
faith = hope + ?
faith -> man?

Assuming,
faith > man

Is it?
faith > man ?
....(?)... ~> faith

says cultural historian Paul S Boyer, author of When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture:

"It is deeply appealing at a psychological level because the idea of meaninglessness is deeply threatening. Human societies have always tried to create some kind of framework of meaning to give history and our own personal lives some kind of significance."

Sunday, October 19

ross.


[ . all photos from Striderv ]


striderv:
"It was not identified but I would guess it was in the Montreal Quebec area where Ross grew up and sometime during, or just after, the war years."


ross mcnee:








the ago is an interesting place;
wondering; caught up in; endlessly seductive; then left spinning off in other concocted directions; perhaps never properly addressed-

Saturday, October 18

lace of leaves.




[singapore. chinese gardens]

every once in a while comes the thought, we tend to forget- to look up, as do we neglect to shift, even if just for a breath of fresh air, the perspectives we hold, which form entrenched sediments over a lifetime.

almost by chance i turned upwards.

and then tried to frame off the rest of the mundane earthly world, to peel former associations and understandings, to take away taken-for-grantedness. leaves of a tree obscuring sky became dark patterns across a blue-white patch. and it seems i could appreciate them anew.


... and by the way, for skies further than current latitudes and longitudes,


[ . from http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/ ]

october's cloud is the contrail. man-made, but still a cloud.

before this was the no-idea-how-or-why-it-is-formed clouds,
...............the mamma;

Tuesday, October 14

retro > brotherhood

10+ 1 photos from ago:

these spoke of camaderie,
joy, certainty, bonds;
of comradeship,
companionship.

and really, at the risk of sounding overwrought-
oh! to have a shoulder to put an arm around!







[ . uploaded by Striderv]



[ .by VARONES!]


[ .by aimeedars]


[ .by signs and wonders]



and then this, spoke loudest of all.
they stand apart, fists clasped protectively in front.
another behind, languid.
who were they to each other before fate threw both into a path of combat.

(brothers.)


[. uploaded by Striderv ]

captioned: "Ross and his Brother in Uniform"

Friday, October 10

many, many


[ china, wulian, east shandong province. -the bbc]

gone past ten trillion debt dollars-

US debt clock runs out of digits

For the time being, the Times Square counter's electronic dollar sign has been replaced with the extra digit required.

... debt shade of green.

Wednesday, October 8

the ultimate sandman.


[ nevada. all images from. getwonder.com ]

one man.
one dry lake bed.
8 days of walking,
100miles.

no measuring aids.

....the world's largest freehand drawing.




[ nevada. all images from. getwonder.com ]

130,000 ft above, the last photo in july 2008 shows the artist, jim denevan, as a mere speck. circumvented by his own work, lost in the expanse of nature.

so.. if the introduction sounds a lil epic, that's because this really is!

and the question is, why.
The drawing was transient, as all of Jim's work is: "It was completely erased in a rainstorm the next week... It felt strange to work so hard and not see tide come in. But rains did come which is sort of the same thing."

... in transforming all around him, in his labours and toils, and exertions upon the internal, man only transforms himself. all is washed away by the tide, and all remains is within himself.

Tuesday, October 7

as without, so within.


[Malling Hansen's Writing Ball c.1870. from officemuseum.com ]

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

[cut] Is Google Making Us Stupid?
// [paste]

.. Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable.
Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into " 'pancake people'—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”