Opportunity Cost

Greetings,

The opportunity of being on location, scouting film destinations is how you become native. You speak in mono-syllables and sleep forever as long as forever is. Be resilent, strong, cunning, exiled in cast off pajama clothing with floral designs and cartoon characters from dead regimes.

Especially on a Sunday near blue flowing rivers wearing tattoos along its arms climbing over sun burned shoulders as a tall Jaguar reveals her skin song. Her French big game hunter takes his time scaling long limbs, drowning inside wild black eyes exploring a thin Apsara dancer neck smelling desire unlike pleasure, a source of suffering, pain and hatred hearing rainbow heartbeat, exploring mountains, clearing brush, lighting a fire as his dogs flush prey.

What you don't see is fascinating.

Orange sun fires trees. 
Six people on a cycle pass. 
A voice asks for help. 
A woman desperate for love/security frames her vision through SLR optic glass. 
Before and now mean the same.
A neglected girl learns how to sew in a safe environment. 
A silver spoon decorates glass with music. 
A young girl draws portraits with poise and serenity. 
A gardener waters yellow and purple orchids at dawn.  
A stranger in a local market.
Cui Weiping, a female Chinese literature professor prevented from attending an international poetry conference as punishment for believing in free speech.

Read more... 

Metta.

Texts without Contexts

Greetings,

You may find the New York Times article linked below worth reading. 

It refers to the ubiquitous Web, capitalized as if it were a capital of a place. It's an artificial state of mind.

I live in Web city where everyone is connected by instant glowing all to brief emotional attention spans. I am too poor to pay attention. Web's impact on personal and social development, reshaping human lives is good, bad and plain ugly.

For example, I'm sitting in a remote sleepy Cambodian town breathing, writing in my Moleskine and typing new human texts because my mind is a computer and the hand is faster than the eye. The electricity goes out, all internet service providers are down. No power. No juice. No internet connections is a profound joy meaning writers get, the joker word in English, writing done.

I've enjoyed many books lately balancing out creativity, sitting in the local market absorbing language and pedaling my black bike. Real paper books like, The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago which won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1998 and now Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, the Kafka of Japan, among others noted in the Amazon side bar.

What's a side bar? Part of a river bank? A side bar according to the International Bar Association is a bar frequented by people on the side, content knowing their direct bar is indistinguishable from, say a bar not on the side.

A quote from the article. "As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” 

So, what did I do while reading the article? Using my handy-dandy gadget phone I traveled by wireless to Amazon Kindle downloading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier and The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. 

As Lanier writes, links and tags may be the most important inventions in the last 50 years. Incredible!

Before closing this entry I upgraded my MotionX-GPS to version 9.4 and added the application Star Walk to find my blind way home in the dark walking along a bridge in a constellation. 

 Texts Without Contexts...read more.

Metta.

An original computer using binary operations.

Away

Greetings,

Turn the page away from morning, away from the scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows. Blacker than faces hiding inside deep dark passages watching the street. Always watching. Staring with hard deep black eyes. 

Their eyes, when they lived in the flat countryside covered in lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water near groves of palm, coconut, banana trees surrounding bamboo thatched homes on stilts and naked children playing with dreams, watched deep shadows.

They watched. They never closed. They watched for enemies, invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam, wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, Apsara dancers. They were always on always ready to see the smallest cosmic movement across horizens, miles of land mined country or inside thick foliage.

Their eyes danced with waiting. Waiting held their eyes as lovers will, close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual information, data, mysteries. They cultivated patience, a necessary food. They comprehended their essential visual priorities. Watching, a national sport, is their universe.

They have a small vital responsibility living in perpetual darkness - seeing far away with telescopic acuity. Their constant vision burned up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% was used for procreation, eating, speaking and laughing. Laughing burns up calories.

Eyes practice the silent art of being silent, watching past another person during a silent conversation watching each other's back being the other. How they face the other watching beyond where everything matters infinitely. For one moment in their short sweet life. 

Metta.

Cultural script

Greetings,

His eye will be like a shooting star,
His spirit like a flash of lightning.
A death dealing blade, 
A life giving sword.
Free to give, free to take, free to kill, free to save.

Metta.

A Host of Mummies, A Forest of Secrets....read more

Mr. Math

Greetings,

Mr. Math took a month off from teaching in Germany. Well traveled. He had much to say.

Austrians have 17 paid government holidays, the most in Europe. By the time you add on extra vacation days they, along with other European countries have almost two months off a year.

I read Marx. It's a fine idea but pure Communism won't work for probably a couple a hundred years. Hitler's longest speech was 23 minutes, he knew the value of propaganda and marketing. Keep it simple and short.

The problem scientists face is trying to find the missing link between Einstein' s General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Other people consider Germans to be too blunt. We like to get to the point. American's say things like, 'This part is good but we need to consider x,' because they don't want to appear too confrontational. It's the politically correct way for them. The Japanese just say, 'We'll consider it. This means no.'

Germans are efficient when it comes to work. This why we have a strong economy. Other countries may not like it, so they find something about the system to criticise. It was like Bush talking about 'Old Europe.'

When Colin Powell addressed the U.N. about weapons of mass destruction our Foreign Minister told him, 'We don't believe you.'

When you think about it, it's amazing what the Spanish and Portuguese explorers did by sheer will alone. It's like the Chinese. They needed an irrigation system deep in the country. What did they do? They carved a mountain in half to divert water south. They did what they needed to do. Sheer will power. 

Once when I was in Australia I talked with an Aborigine chief. He said, 'People only think the English were brutal against the indigenous people here. We had many inter-tribal massacres. We were busy fighting and killing each other. And, had we been in a stronger position we'd have done the same thing to the English.'

Once when I was in America I met a man in St. Paul.  When I told him I was from Germany he asked me, 'Do they have cars there?' He wasn't joking. No, I said. We have donkeys.

And? Be calm. Keep and open mind. See what happens.

Metta.