Daffy Gladhafi

Omar the clown was getting a close shave with a bloody sword by his naked Ukrainian nurse in his underwater bunker.

Son #1 came in, O big Daddy of the 41 year glorious dictatorship, we have a small problem.

Tempered steel caressed his neck, What pray tell have the savages wrought? 

They are marching toward the capital. We've lost the East.

1.5 million destitute workers from China, Turkey, Italy, Mali, Bali and inner Mongolia ran away. 

So what. We have 2% of the world's oil under burning sand castles. Oil for guns. Thanks to our Italian and British friends we possess trillions of dollars in high tech weapons and killing machines. We have seeing eye dogs of war.

He turned a blind eye to his son. Ok, here's what I command you to do. Give everyone $400 and a free apartment. Give them a car. Give them empty promises filled with hypocrisy. Give them anti-aircraft guns, nuclear and biological weapons, isotopes, radiation microscopes, saline solution, sunglasses, my Green Book and swords. I will destroy Earth.

Son, historical unpleasant genocide facts and cemeteries will remember me. My idiotic legacy is complete. 

Blood will flow faster than an Austrian named Adolf wheeling his luggage filled with orphans down an endless dirt road in Cambodia. Hunt down the greasy dogs. Kill all the cockroaches. I am the greatest.

apsara

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don't smile. They dance. They are slave dancers.

They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He has resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. They wear diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

One dances to escape the tyranny. She's danced all her short, sweet life.

The hall of dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green moss stones. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots crawl toward dancers. They dance through roots, past Shiva and Vishnu. The preserver and destroyer of life. 

Dance movement is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. The freedom of creation. A playful approach to meaning. Dance allows the viewer to interpret. 

 

dance

A young woman with delicate hands, perfect posture, a five pointed gold star painted on her forehead and scuffed white ballet slippers waiting for the train turned to me.

Did you hear Mercy Cunningham, the dancer died?

No. What have you heard?

I study dance, that’s how I know. He was amazing. Dance is all about ambiguity, poetry, and acceptance. He had independent detachment. He had creative imagination. He said dance was isolated yet cooperating and independent. And, he said, because he believed in the magic of dance, that when you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

What do you see? I asked. I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space. It’s more than that, said a one legged amputee leaning against the wall, There are five rhythms in dance.

You start with a circle, it’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.

Really? said the woman. Yes, then you have a line, from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.

I see. And then, after chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. And the last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

  

Silk road

Greetings,

The Secrets of the Silk Road...NYT...read more...

2,000 years ago. 4,000 miles connecting China and the West. Raw materials, goods, inventions, religions, languages, cultures, ideas.

The Penn Museum has a fine exhibit with maps, stories and images. Explore. Penn Museum...

Metta.

Affected

"Keep your hand moving," whispered the writing teacher to 80 robots. 

The foreign teacher wearing Tang Dynasty clothing filled with dragons, yin-yang balance, a Phoenix rising, a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains while emperors danced with concubines inside Forbidden Cities' red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams dove into silence beside abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss was a manifestation of phenomenal superior detective analysis and forty questions of the soul marking marketing examinations at 7:00 p.m. followed by utter exhaustion.

We escaped the sterile Chinese university on mountain bikes, singing, “We know so much and understand so little.”  

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” bright star Leo said. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’”

We sharpened sticks on stones carving paleo-Leo-lithic cave paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name backwards for future historians and archeologists to get the gist or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, “English On Line.”

Being hunters-gathers we salvaged assorted garbage mired in mud. We created a semi-permanent temporary recycled art project on the canyon bottom. 

We assembled statues using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, lost feathers, sharp needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, dried condoms, fractured leaves, bird calls and worn and torn useful Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa, Tibet.

In nature they drilled for cauliflower.