Crossroads

this is a particular crossroads. other times each crisis has been met with a sense of constructive hope. sunshine and laughter. aspiration soaring on the promise of an endless future. physical strength translated into prowess and initiative.

the energies that powered my past solutions are not available. the paradigm that has shaped each renaissance has receded into an inoperable and distant arena. it is now only the history of myself.

now i am faced with totally new challenges. if only it were the simple choice of one direction over another. if only it were a matter of the "road not taken"...

instead, at the end of each road is a dead end. perhaps some key unlocks these barriers. perhaps not. this is the dilemma. This is not a typical crossroad. no xanadus and shangri-las. no clear-cut responses based on models of the past.

just myself, poised and listening, like the gigantic radio-telescopes sweeping the universe for a sign of intelligence to displace the apprehension of being totally alone....

Out Of Gas

i feel like i have run out of gas. there's nothing more discouraging than being on empty.

sometimes this dilemma becomes an opportunity as we undertake to do something besides complaining. i remember being on a college tour with my department chair who was a charismatic conductor (we called him "doc"), and running out of gas on a remote road under a bright starry texas sky...

we had performed that evening and left around midnight to head for the next town on the tour. as we ran out of gas, we coasted to a stop and were engulfed in the deep silence, the vast darkness, and the dazzling milky way that was so vivid you felt as though you could reach out and touch the stars...

some stayed with the car while doc and i started to walk to the next town to get some gas. we figured it was about five miles away. doc had been a special mentor to me, always encouraging me and introducimg me to books and artworks that profoundly shaped my ideas. as we walked we talked and formed a bond that would last for decades until he ultimately went to his calling...

i have often thought of the serendiptiy of that moment when running out of gas developed a lifelong commitment more important than all the schedules and timetables that structured most of my college years. a moment of disaster was transformed into a treasured experience that i continue to remember as a turning point, a filling up of the soul with the energy of a lifetime...

Winter's Deceit

today was so spring-like that the squirrels were fooled into opening their wimter cache and birds were happily singing to the sun. people were walking in shirt-sleeves, and i was "as restless as a willow in a windstorm"...no one seemed concerned that the winter seemed too brief...

january in new york can be fickle, offering promises of spring only to hit you between the eyes with worst of winter days. maybe it's global warming, maybe spikes from the sun... but last year we had the same promise of a tepid winter and then were walloped with one of the coldest and snowiest winters ever...

as for me, i welcome the worst/best that winter can bring...let me sit out in the snow storm and catch flakes on my tongue. let the wind rip at all the exposed extremities. let me plow paths through the deep drifts and make angels in the snow...

birds amd squirrels and people beware...winters in new york are deliberately deceptive...and just whe you begin to trust to the promise of an early spring, the full treachery of winter is unleashed. be prepared....

Requiem for the Holidays

the holidays reign no longer. all the excuses that enable us to defer the particular aggravations of our lives dissolve in the harsh light of necessity. i am working on computer problems that should have been solved long ago, but they still linger as impediments to creativity and productivity. now i plunge into the solutions with maniacal energy and precision...

it is sad to witness the demise of the holidays, as they provide a haven for celebration and remembrance, an envelope that serves to connect us in comfortable and challenging ways. the holidays render an avenue for exchanging feelings or replicas of mutual acknowledgment where we briefly restore the filaments of the past, a time machine linking the years so we may resume relationships that flourish for a moment and then disappear until some other celebratory occasion awakens new opportunities to elaborate pretense. but the holidays are the most universal recognition of the life cycle and the struggle between light and darkness...

our interactions are not really pretense. we genuinely are inspired by the magical atmosphere of the holidays. we feel the renewal of ties with friends and family profoundly and resolve to continue them, but we know that we cannot... time and distance, the orbit of the earth around the sun, and the entropy of reality, work against sustaining these connections anywhere but within the confines of our inner reality and lingering emotions... as the holidays fade into the urgent demands of avoiding the dissolution of the world...

Posoon Park Sung: A Spiritual Quest in Art

Posoon Park Sung's exhibition of new paintings, ANAM ĊARA (Celtic for “soul friend"), opened January 6th at the June Kelly Gallery and will be on public display though February 7th. The opening night was exceptionally exciting with many friends and devotees in attendance. Consequently the gallery was buzzing with excitement, marking another milestone and achievement for this extremely thoughtful artist who explores her vision of a highly personal and intimate spiritual journey. Her images are richly imbued with metaphors that focus on the dilemma of existence and choices that confront us in our spiritual quest. Her use of color and figures that blend into a background as a rich textural presence reveal a painter who pursues her art as a means of deep inquiry into the nature of spiritual reality.

As noted, this opening attracted a large following and the energy and excitement ran counter to the works on exhibition. It was difficult to obtain an appropriate perspective on the artworks themselves because of the crowd. Of course, an opening is rarely a time to truly focus on the artworks. Openings are a time for celebration and an opportunity to bond with the artist. These are works that are highly intimate and contemplative. Giving them appropriate attention requires a visit to the exhibition later under less crowded conditions in order to experience the full impact of these expressive works.
A special moment emerged for quiet reflection as a string quartet performed for the occasion with the artist's diptich Anticipation II providing an arresting context for the musical works.

The artist was an extremely gracious hostess, and her special attachment to these works was apparent. One painting, Choice of Mind II, struck me as an artist's self-portrait of a spiritual realm---reflecting the myriad diversions and choices that lurk in the background of our being.

Anam Ċara, is an important artistic statement that commands our attention and thought. Although Park Sung's work clearly posits her in a post modern world, her Korean heritage serves as a poetic presence, disclosing this spiritual connection in subtle, transparent qualities that shimmer from an ancient past.

Create Your Own Music Radio Station: Pandora

create a radio station on the spur of the moment to fit your moods and your whims. the music genome project gives the internet pandora, a website where you create a music radio station by naming artists and songs that you like. pandora puts together an endless concoction of familiar and unfamiliar music to fit your tastes. you can create more than one station, so i started with a bassa nova station, then a beach boys type and then a vocal rock station. the stations learn from you as you tell pandora you like a song or that you don't like a particular selection. pandora learns from its mistakes and serves up many works in the genre or style you've picked that you probably have never heard before... endless... and the best radio i've had for a long time...no commercials...just great music...

even though it's five years old, pandora is in its infancy and continues to learn. if you come up with a music title or an artist that it doesn't know, pandora will respectfully apologize, and intimates that it is always on the lookout for new material and may research your failed request. in the meantime, just continue listening to what pandora unearths for you according to your tastes and instructions...

Must You Go?

once in a very remote past, i had a vocal jazz quartet. singing in such a quartet was a strong focus in my life for almost ten years. we began in junior high school, in high school, and then a more advanced quartet during college years. at the time everyone's heroes were the four freshmen, a jazz quartet that was the first vocal group to play its own instrumental backup. their first single release was it's a blue world which was a phenomenal hit on the radio. no one could believe that all that sound was coming from just four guys.

i wrote songs for our college jazz quartet, the first impressions. my training ground was absorbing the vocal arrangements of the freshmen, which provided the effect of a five-voice brass or sax section with only four voices. the medium was vinyl and i sharpened my ears by writing down their arrangeents to teach to our quartet. i noted all the subtleties such as dynamics, subtle doublings, and quarter-tone inflections. our programs consisted of singing four freshmen favorites and then our own original tunes.

we were a close-knit group and we could get high on just the sheer beauty of sound. i remember one night when i had just finished composing a song i called must you go? for the quartet. it was around 11 p.m. and the lead came into the practice room where i was working and i played through the song. he was knocked out by it and wanted to get the group together to sing it, so we found our top tenor and bass and started singing. we found ourselves mesmerized by the song and kept singing it over and over, finally piling into a car and continuing to sing it as we drove around the city. finally, around 5 a.m. we wound up at the toddle house (a chain of 24/7 diners that started in nashville and stretched west to texas and east to new york). the sound of the song was still resonating in our heads, and as we were eating breakfast each one of us exclaimed about some part of the song that was still grabbing him. quite an experience!

in our final year of being together before graduation split us up, the four freshmen came to town for a concert. needless to say, all of us were in the audience, hanging on every note. after the concert, we went backstage and were graciously received by the guys of the quartet. When we told them that we had learned and sang their arrangements, they laughed and said that they often met groups on their tour who made the same claim, but there were always errors. they asked us to sing a little, and we opened with how can i tell her? They listened all the way without stopping us and then said, "you guys have really done it!" With that, they pulled out their instruments and we stood in a circle singing their arrangements with them. i can still hear that incredible resonance of two voices to a part with those incredible voicings. the moment is dynamically etched in my memory as vivid as any multi-track recording.

we had sung for them our theme song "must you go?" which they liked very much, and even expressed interest in getting the song, but i was too distracted with my own personal ambitions to take advantage of the opportunity.

over the years, the song continues to haunt me, and i understand it not only as the question that a lover asks when a love affair is over, but a song that values the deep relationships we have on every level and the profound regret and pain we experience when people disappear from our lives...

must you go? is always answered by the bitterweet nod that life is always moving us on to new challenges and experiences...

No Time

no time for new credos. no time for regrets. i am mystified by the immense eruption of the private realm once so guarded that we kept secrets from ourselves. now we toss our thoughts to remote readers with such wreckless abandonment. we are chided for such public intimacy. yet there is an authentic presence that intrigues me and i am detained by the intensity of this open source...

Needing New Paradigms

during the late 60s early 70s, there was such a fresh energy among artists. the miasma of the vietnam war was countered by a revolution in relationships, a collapse of the establishment pop culture, four long-haired lads from liverpool, the creation of a counter culture that eventually became the new establishment, so that by the 80s and 90s, the arts were back to a ho-hum, hum-drum existence, although there were derivative revolutions that diffused any ideas of mainstream artistic energy and ideas. this dispersion was further enhanced by the development of a new kind of network, an internet, which effectively decentralised publishing of text and images...

the major development as we turned to a new century was to give the internet the technology to eliminate the need for central distribution of music and video. now artistic and media consumption has become a mania, a fixation. many of the advances in technology have focused on increasing bandwidth and storage, key factors for making consumption of media practical and desireable. everything seems to move toward instant gratification, and digital technology has made it possible for us to focus more on process than product, a paradox, since the new dictatorships of artistic distribution and development have shifted from the publishing houses, network television and the established arts centers to the corporate world (i.e. microsoft, apple, adobe, etc.) that controls these new instruments for creation...

this seduction of the arts by digital technology has distorted the meaning of multimedia and created a digital replica of media that has an inherent sameness as long as our artistic expressions remained confined to the dimensions of audio speakers and high definition screens. in a sense, digital technology has bottled up artistic expression so that it is poured through hi tech resonators that can achieve an enormous sense of scale... overwhelming an audience, consumers of this new media-induced art...

these new media must draw upon energy, electrical energy generated by every possible source, and we are at the mercy of this energy. it is the supreme translator of binary code into something we can comprehend and recognize. without this reader of the code, all the ideas and artifacts are more remote and inaccessible than the most obscure hieroglyphics...

control the source of energy and you control the world. we are ready for a new revolution in technology, one that succeeds in decentralizing the source and flow of energy, just as exclusive central control for the creation and distribution of the arts was shattered near the end of the twentieth century. the solution will astonish us. energy is the underlying substance of the universe. we are on the verge of a new paradigm because our current framework is too fragile to accommodate the emergence of ground-breaking creative awareness and achievement...

Kingdoms of the Mind

how many things have I forgotten? writimg can bring the past from the depths of forgetfulness to a new place. i am not always certain if it is remembering or returning. i see the dead end street where our house sat on the the west side of the street, facing east. at the end of the street was the prairie, the wide open spaces where the vast night sky was so bright that stars surrounded me on all sides like a dome. the prairie stretched endlessly toward the horizons like a still and silent sea.

at the end of the street were drain pipes that funnelled the overflow of rain into a ravine. way to the west toward the horizon was a windmill and a waterhole fed by the windmill bringing up the water through the desert-like terrain. we made sail boats for that pond, and our skills grew so that each generation of model sail boats boasted new features and new designs. We made rafts and explored the waterhole which mysteriously had cement pillars and walls sticking up out of the water as though this might have been the foundations of a building that never was... someone's failed dream on an empty, desolate prairie...

going to the end of our street was like going to the edge of the world. open adventure awaited us. grass that grew as high as six feet could be shaped into rooms by trampling the grass flat...we stomped hallways and rooms...palaces amidst the tall grass...with magnificent skies for ceilings...

and we had time... time to think, time to grow, time to discover, time to notice all the details without the clutter of so much modern media. our media were our ideas, the prairie, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the creatures of the prairie. no electricity, no computers. only the wind across the prairie which we rode with our imaginations to the kingdoms of the mind...

Confronting New Enigmas

a quiet start to the year, dspite the usual attendant noise. time for reflection, for establishing the context of the coming days. a shimmering, glowing sheen shields the outskirts of advancing moments, a reminder that the face of time can be mesmerizingly exquisite.

no resolutions are permitted. we can only find the markers to urgent paths. to music making as renewal. unpack the trunk of songs so silent and elusive. find the magic of musicing through the moment. synthesize the texture of life as the authentic rendering of feeling and emotion.

yet, how do i face the enigma of myself? past visions were so dependent on you, the infinite you hiding behind the words, the music, lurking in the images as though your identity was secure. now existence sleeps in a virtual world. i long for sunlight on beaches, and real moonlight flooding the night with mystifying clarity. you are everywhere and nowhere, this contradiction stalks my awareness of you. now i know you are not what i thought, and the mystery lingers like echoes multiplied on walls of ancient caverns.

The Shear of a New Page

the new year is sweeping the globe... already passing though our friends in japan, korea, beijing, australia, taiwan, hong kong, singapore... about seven hours from new york...

the new year is such a great metaphor, a dance of renewal, a cleansing... our Singapore poet provides a striking glimpse into our emerging from the jumble of the past into a newness:

whatever pop culture. whatever loose impressions and unshackled listlessness. contrition and what's worth it. but. faye wong and rain. afternoon stills of grey. the shear of a new page, and it's whiteness that stings or cleanses.

Ismene, Saturday, December 31, 2005

it has been a day of unshackled listlessness, and now the shear of a new page, torn from the advancing momentum of our relentless plummeting through the milky way... the future weaving in and out of galaxies and constellations that still glimmer even though they vanished eons ago...

New Year's, Black-Eye Peas, & Corned Beef

As New Year's Eve approaches, we gear up for what has been a tradition in our family: black-eyed peas and pork, along with corned beef and all the trimmings. This appears to be a mixture of southern celebrations and Irish traditions, and it is so special that we don't have this combination any other time of the year.

The trick is in the timing, as the food needs to be prepared very slowly so that it is ready to eat precisely at midnight. Having the black-eyed peas as the year turns insures good luck throughout the new year.

The black-eyed peas are soaked overnight. Pieces of pork with pork bone are added. The peas and pork are bought to a boil and then the heat is immediately reduced to the lowest flame possible. After about 45 minutes sliced onions are added and the dish is cooked vey slowly. It is usually ready in about two hours.

The corned beef is started at the same time, and is also cooked on a very low flame after first bringing the stew pot with water covering the corned beef to a boil. After about an hour, whole red potatoes, and whole carrots are added, and after about one-half hour, half a head of cabbage is placed on top of the corned beef. The pot is covered, brought to a boil, and then cooked on as low a flame as possible until the cabbage is tender.

This is not a stew. All the ingredients are removed and served on separate dishes. Serve with corn bread, plenty of butter, and mustard, of course. The combination of the cabbage and vegetables slowly cooked with the corned beef creates a wonderful taste.

This is how Dad prepared our New Year's Eve/New Year's celebration for decades, and we have kept the tradition alive. "Scuse me, I've gotta run to the store. I forgot the cabbage!

Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime

i am haunted by Beck's cover of "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime"/ the defining theme of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/ keeps playing over and over in my head/ i am so obsessed i am trying to reconstruct it with garageband to import to logic pro/ tricky/ jon brion is brilliant/ yet it is all so simple/ distortion is the essence of Eternal Sunshine/ forget the narrative device of erasing memory/ just a metaphor for how the mind works/ music flows in and out of distortions/ gives an older tintype feeling/ borrowing a photoshop type of filter converted to soundfiles/ a magical, surreal touch that places the visual narrative deep imside our spotless mind...

i've watched the film over and over and always find something new/ jim carrey & kate winslet create authentic characters that capture every nook and cranny of a relationship/ i first misheard the lyrics as "everybody's gotta love sometime"/ the music carried through the lyric, but if that had been correct, it would have been out of place and exceptionally pedestrian/ given the metaphor of the mind/ our ongoing extinction of memories/ the use of learn is a brilliant inspiration/ we are perpetually learning/ struggling and yearning/ and everybody's gotta learn sometime/ no matter what/ but through it all comes some awareness that Hemingway called "A Clean Well-lighted Room"/ that sanctuary, that eternal sunshine/ enduring unblemished at the center of our knowing...

An Elusive Illusion?

even when there's nothing, there's something/ spent most of the day reading, thinking, procrastinating/ some things must be done/ i purposely glide by without a glance/ the internet is a great diversion/ a bottomless pit/ google anything/ more than a million hits/ follow them all until your eyes begin to tear/ in my outer world the disarray asserts itself/ but there's order in following the links/ in reading the text/ in seeing the images/ in hearing the music/ in commentimg, selecting, learning, growing...

this new medium acquaints us beyond the usual dimensions/ we are merging with, creating a new reality/ extending beyond boundaries and restraints/ dangerous pursuits/ too much freedom/ awesome power/ fresh eloquence is called for/ an expressive elegance may seek an undisclosed ecology of media/ discovery is ripening in the gathering energy/ an elusive illusion to disillusion...