Twins

Namaste, 

In the street life of Bhaktapur is Pottery Square. 250 people from immediate families make clay, create pots, piggy banks, animals, bowls, living art, dolls, bells, oil lamp bases, and cooking containers. They dry them in the sun. They slow fire them using straw fuel in large kilns. 

"We live here as a family," said a girl, 12 with her twin sister. "My father makes piggy banks. My mother moves them into the sunlight." A potter uses a heavy staff to get his wheel turning, rotating faster and faster until it is a blur. He shapes a pot. 

Finished products are sold locally, throughout the Kathmandu valley and exported faster than light.

Metta.

The Ministry of Fear

Greetings,

My job is to control the flow of disinformation here in Egypt. Let's be as clear as the day is long. In Egypt GROUND ZERO is a square. Mathematically this is impossible. A zero is a circle, a complete and comprehensive series of events colliding to express totality and unity and harmony in a community.

For 3,000 years give or take a pharaoh, our ministry developed highly scientific methods to restrict, control and in 99% of the cases eliminate people from expressing their opinion, views, frustrations, repressed anger, poverty and related daily abuses to their dignity and self respect. 

Using paid government thugs we harassed, intimatidated, threatened, imprisoned, tortured and often killed the traitors, running capitalistic dogs

(to borrow a phrase from 1.6 billion oppressed Chinese people who have no idea what's happening here because their government restricts media coverage fearing blowback and social unrest, can you imagine)

and devious illiterate yet courageous freedom loving Egyptian people to suit our purposes. We were in past tense very efficient. Everyone was afraid, even Winston Smith.

What was our purpose? To stay in control. To manipulate the system, create chaos, divide and conquer. To get rich. To redeem insurance policies against revolutionary poor marginalized common people for valuable prizes on game shows.

The emperor has no clothes. Now the shoe is not on the other foot. It is in the collective hands of the common people and they are waving it at the dictator, his cronies, his lackeys like me, yelling, Enough, Give us liberty or give us death.

The red emergency light in my steel reinforced bunker is flashing. I've gotta run, run, run. 

 

Who cares?

Greetings,

Here's an article on literature and how novels come to the internet by Laura Miller in The Guardian. She writes for Salon.

..."Do the people who constantly pester us for our opinions care what each and every one of us really thinks? Sort of and not really. What they require are opinions in bulk, so many of them that they can be analysed and averaged out and processed into useful data. Only then can they be sold, and then used to encourage us to buy more stuff. Our judgments matter, but primarily in aggregate, which makes us not so different from the faceless mass of television's audience as we are sometimes led to believe. The main distinction is that the crowdsourced are active collaborators in the commodification of their opinions, while TV viewers just get to sit on their duffs."

The Guardian...

Metta.

Bubble Life

Greetings from a sleepy little town down south along the mighty Mekong,

After finding a pillow and delicious local cold java swimming in a glass you get a hair cut and your ears cleaned.

It's essential, as we've said previously, from China, Vietnam, Cambodia and now Laos to relax.

Sit back close your eyes hearing the whirling overhead fan rotating like helicopter rotor blades over rapid cobalt rivers inside deep forested green jungles, skimming granite mountains, swooping toward rice valleys allowing a thin man with shiny silver tools to clean, vibrate, scrape, identify, probe, assess, magnify, illustrate and remove old historical debris, leaves, brooms, the click-clack of shuttles, blue and yellow butterflies, children's laughter, language acquisition cycles, tonal frequencies, vibrational shifts and so forth.

A new marveLaos gallery is live.

http://tmleonard.squarespace.com/marvelaos/

It contains clouds, art, design, black & white, wats, paper making, rice threshing, weavers, kids and big serious humans.

The Luang Prabang airport has one simple concrete runway. The control tower needs a coat of paint.

There are two gates. A French tourist is worried because their boarding pass has a big number approaching infinity. "We only have two gates," said the serene and helpful girl behind a desk.

"Oh, my goodness," said the tourist holding a can of white paint and a brown sable hair brush. "I was so worried I wouldn't get home for Christmas. I mean I was feeling so anxious and neurotic and lost and dazed and confused and sullen and tired and suddenly I felt comfortable in a calm way knowing I will realize my vacation dream and paint a control tower at a small airport in Asia." 

"Be a work of art or wear a work of art," said the smiling girl, or, as Picasso asked, "what is color?"

Metta.

Paper is an essential part of Lao life. The art of paper is in the making, using, honoring paper in the community and burning paper to honor ancestors. Artists use white fibers from plant stems to make paper. To soften it they mix it with ash and soak it in wood fired 55 gallon drums. They pound it to a pulp. The woman spreads fibers over a screen. It is dried in the sun and used to create tactile textured paper books, umbrellas, bags, cards, lanterns, envelopes and airport control towers.

River Music

Greetings,

Three days and 400 kilometers north on the Nam Ou river into Pongsali province between China and Vietnam were magical and marveLaos.

Serene, wild, majestic rapids and calm zones. Pure nature. Rough, steep, verdant. The river is life's highway providing food, electricity, water for crops, bathing and transport. Images are being processed.

One clear mind-at-large image is of six young naked girls sitting on a sand bank in afternoon sun waving, yelling, dancing, running into the river...Hi! Hi!

Here are a three links to web sites to enjoy.

Elaine Ling is a professional photographer based in Toronto. We met here. She does amazing work and it's well worth a look. She uses a large format. Her recent book is Land of the Deer Stone. Mongolia, Cuba, Baobab trees, Tibet, Chile.

Legend and meaning in Lao textile motifs. Fibre2Fabric Gallery.

Literacy is an ongoing need in Laos. When I lived in Indonesia I met a teacher on Gili Air island off Lombok. She'd travelled by train from England across Russia, Mongolia and down to Laos. She mentioned Big Brother Mouse in Luang Prabang. 

It's a well established essential Lao center for local kids and literacy programs in remote villages. 

Metta.