Bedlam and Healing

Greetings,

The NYT is featuring a blog called Home Fires. It concerns American veterans and their post-war life. I posted a small contribution concerning my adjustment after Vietnam referencing my novel.

Brian Turner,  an Iraq veteran and poet of a book entitled, "Here Bullet," wrote a piece for the Home Fires section and included a prose poem. You may find it worth your time. Since then over 163 posts were made as readers contributed their ideas and perspectives on war, returning veterans, politics and the current situation.

Jeffery M. Hopkins, a veteran and author contacted me and sent along his website to review his book, "Broken Under Interrogation." You can download a free e-book or order a hard copy through Amazon. I was grateful to hear from him.

Here is a short part of Brian's poem. It is about healing.

"Medicine birds break open in orange and red. Medicine birds have eucalyptus leaves for feathers and bandage the air when they fly. Medicine birds fly through the windows in the head, impervious to glass. They are impervious to WAR and hiss and steam and vapor and combat and the circling lost.

"Medicine birds fly through the windows to land in our beds when we’re dreaming our circling dream of Divisadero and Fresno with its lost and circling WAR. Medicine birds have eucalyptus wings and when they fly in our beds they transform themselves into leaves and rain and lovers.

"The lovers in our beds are eucalyptus birds flying medicine through the windows in our heads. The lovers in our medicine beds fly eucalyptus through the circling loss. The lovers in our beds bring medicine to our lips and call it eucalyptus, call it love, call it leaves and rain for our exhausted souls."

Metta.

Pictures of deceased Vietnamese in Ba Da temple, Ha Noi.

A man prays.

iPhone art

Greetings,

I read about David Hockney's new exhibit in London. He mentioned using a painting application on his iPhone. 

"It's all part of the urge toward figuration. You look out at the world and you're called to make gestures in response. And that's a primordial calling: goes all the way back to the cave painters. May even have preceded language. People are always asking me about my ancestors, and I say, Well there must have been a cave painter back there somewhere. Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone's screen. All part of the same passion."

The application he favors is Brushes. I also found another app called Sketchbook by Autodesk. 

I began learning, playing and experimenting with both. Fun. As Hockney said, it's a great little portable tool. In your pocket. No mess. No rags filled with pigment, oils and the usual artistic beauty. When you're finished you turn off the machine. 

Easy to upload, email, and share your art. Here are two examples of playful visual storytelling. A new iPhone gallery is in process.

Metta.

Hockney article in The New York Review of Books...read more.

Yesterday's face.

Autumn has no boundaries.

New Front Page

Greetings,

So, as usual I'm experimenting with the site design and decided to make the "Living on the edge," blog the "Front Page," that opens when you visit.

'It's like this,' said the seer during discussions discussing this eclectic option. 'Why start with Myths and Innuendos when people can immediately access the blog slog?'

'Excellent point,' I said. 'Everyone already knows about myths because they are alive. Most subscribers, visitors and friends have already seen the Myth page, read the book blurb and assorted philosophical insights.

'They are probably bored to tears wondering, why don't those two genius types get their electronic act together and streamline this baby so we don't have to click through to explore new stuff?'

'Clearly,' said the seer. 'Take the ideas and forget the words.'

Enjoy your travels through the Ha Noi neighborhood of reality and dreams. Feel free to drop us a line.

Metta.

On the sidewalk is a feather and a q-tip. Existential awareness.

A broken building at a temple in Ha Noi. Loving lines.

A man hauls out his heavy trash. His destination is the cart. A distant speck, horizon.

Sapa Theatre

Greetings,

 All the tears, rivers of loss. Introspection.

 Now here below mist mountain market. Java. The Vietnamese tourists pulling around their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance with  strangers, and buy cheap Chinese plastic products. 

They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts, and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of the Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore the local girls. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at a H’mong girl’s offerings; a handmade belt, a think colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl.

Once the the woman slows down she is surrounded.

A chorus of voices, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitations, pants, shirts, knickknacks. 

The eyes of youth scanning 6:05 a.m. Elements - elaborate colors and fabrics. Threads. Threads.

Street theatre.

Red tied school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs dogs hump on the street in front of the stoned church where tourists gather for a photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women selling this market are armed with camera bags poke and prod the women, husbands, boys and girls, lost and found into manageable groups for the moment. The moment they will remember forever. The moment framed on their family alternative votive candle flaming, this moment. Caught in time. Frozen alive! 

Here we are, she said to her friends later. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip flops walks past the scene. Her t-shirt says, “Love My Bones.” I wonder if she is a specialist in marrow transplants.

I am smiling at every stranger along life’s magical story time inside the heavy forested, along steep stone trails. Yellow wildflowers fill the fields where water buffalo graze.

So there I was at 6:16 a.m. as the V tourists poured into Sapa. They poured off the bus, wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel. It sprawls across green hills above the church. A fore lorn bunch of exotic creatures. They travel in bunches, like bananas. 

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama and the H’mong were already hard at work - pushing their handicrafts. These ebony, black spinning colors, all the hand made rainbows, skirts, aprons, blue-black tribes, flowering ethnology. Derivations. 

Metta.

Black & White

Greetings,

I began learning and experimenting with black and white photography. It was about varieties of film, Tri-X, and later Ilford. Grain. Film speed or ISO in photog talk.

Then the learning process of working in the darkroom; developing, making contact sheets, selecting negatives to print, grades and quality of paper, using various chemicals. Developer, fixer, stop-bath, water. Emulsion. A negative holder, enlarger, light management, f/stops, and a timer. Expose and process the paper through the chemicals. 

Like magic, an image slowly appears. Looking for the contrast between shadows. Adjust the variables of time and exposure and play. Experiment. 

It's easy to fall into the trap of using color, or does color use us? The eye is easily fooled because it is passive. Cut through the colorful clutter and express yourself through shades of gray.

As Picasso said, "I just want to know one thing. What is color?" A pigment of our retina cone imagination.

After finishing the Sapa galleries I decided to do a project documenting my neighborhood here in Ha Noi using the small brilliant laser-like Leica in the B&W mode. 

No expectations, no logic. Keeping my blind eye open to light, movement and how they play. Do they play well with each other? That's a relationship question.

Some results were straight from the hip, the point-and-shoot-chance-is-all approach. No digital manipulation. Delightful. A dream dance.

A writer is lucky to get words down and try and make sense of them later. Same with making images. Here's to NOT making sense. Our brains have evolved to predict, establish meaning and detect patterns. Disorientation begets creative thinking. 

Here's the gallery.

Metta.