Digital Works 2004- 2015 HD 1080p

Sunday, April 2

Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

If you open yourself to the Tao,
you are at one with the Tao
and you can embody it completely.
If you open yourself to insight,
you are at one with insight
and you can use it completely.
If you open yourself to loss,
you are at one with loss
and you can accept it completely.

Open yourself to the Tao,
then trust your natural responses;
and everything will fall into place.

---------------------------------------------
Translation by Stephen Mitchell.
Site Copyright (C) 2003-5 Glen Sanford


Finally spring is here. Stretched a new linen canvas last night and started to gesso it. Beautiful portrait grade linen. It will be a pleasure to paint on it. Don't have a title for the new painting yet, but i believe it will be very exciting. My approach will be a little different that to my usual ones. This one is based on a line drawing it did last summer. Very loose, never tightened it up with shading and such. This may wind up having more of a graphic feel. At the moment the color scheme will be in rust, oranges, yellow maybe with accents of blue. But we will see what happens when it starts finding its own voice, I listen and see what it says.

Finished filling up the new flower bed in the front of the house and planting some exotic lilies and tulips in it. In another week or so I will have some annuals in it also.

Laurie has left the gallery in Morristown. That leaves only 3 of us. I wonder if I should stay? I probably will until JM decides to close it. Considering I have $400 of Raku there selling as an investment I would like to get some money back. If not they are beautiful pieces and would make a good addition to our collection.

Need to find and photograph more rusted objects for "Rust", the photo series.
While many of the photos are very good I want a bigger selection to choose from so they will all be exquisite like the photos in "Ice".

Just another day

Life is good. Mostly. You know there are always glitches.
Spent the weekend taking more photos of rusted things then editing the photos. I belive to get the quantity of caliber of photos I want I will need to take more pictures. But so far this book of photos is coming along well.
Next Tuesday I should know if I got in the Agora Gallery show in Chelsea.
I really need to start hitting the NYC galleries that are not vanity or co-op galleries and get some of this work out there in front of folks that have the money and taste to want to buy it.
Finishing up Spin on Thursday almost definately.
In the process now of chosing what to do next. I'm in between doing a 20 x 20 painting of "Madonna of the Big Foot" or one of the newer sketches I did last summer. There is one that keeps calling to me.
Actually maybe I will try something new and work on two at the same time.
The second one will be around the 36 x 48.

The Beatles book that I'm included in from Boxigami books has just hit the stores. I should be getting my copies soon. Hopefully they didn't cut me out at the last minute.
http://home.insightbb.com/~lindaeliz/index.html
I'm wondering how my piece fits in since most of what I'm seeing on the front cover are portraits of the Beatles while mine "Gu gu gjub" is inspired by one of the songs.
We will see.
Finally I'm published in a book.

Wish I had something deep and meanigful to say but not today.

Lessons of Iraq War Start With US History

By Howard Zinn
The Progressive

Tuesday 14 March 2006

On the third anniversary of President Bush's Iraq debacle, it's important to consider why the administration so easily fooled so many people into supporting the war.

I believe there are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture.

One is an absence of historical perspective. The other is an inability to think outside the boundaries of nationalism.

If we don't know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. But if we know some history, if we know how many times presidents have lied to us, we will not be fooled again.

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil" but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that he really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Wilson lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the rising American power.

President Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

And everyone lied about Vietnam - President Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, President Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin and President Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia. They all claimed the war was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanted to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

President Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country. And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 - hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait, rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

There is an even bigger lie: the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If our starting point for evaluating the world around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then we are not likely to question the president when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values - democracy, liberty, and let's not forget free enterprise - to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.

But we must face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which the U.S. government drove millions of Indians off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations.

We must face our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation and racism.

And we must face the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted the belief in the minds of many people that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate the world. Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have embraced this notion.

But what is the idea of our moral superiority based on?

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.

It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from the liars who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join people around the world in the common cause of peace and justice.

--------

Howard Zinn, who served as a bombardier in the Air Force in World War II, is the author of "A People's History of the United States" (HarperCollins, 1995). He is also the co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories Press, 2004)

Photoscore Midi

I've had the program PhotoScore Midi for quite a while but this weekend was the first time I had to try it out. Wow! This will be some help practicing my part for the Choral works. Here's how it works. You scan in sheet music. It goes into the program, then you check it for errors against the original and correct them with the tools supplied. You can delete all the other parts and/or the accompaniment, or if you like just use the accompaniment. (spelling). Then you export it as a midi file and take it into a program like Sibelius or Garage Band and change the instruments. Now if you had the total score to a piece you could reconstruct the entire thing. Very cool. For now I'm just using to get the notes to the Hindemith and Paulus pieces we are doing in the chorus. Very modern pieces, not key signature, and lots of time changes. This will help a bunch.
Also had some time to start the spring cleanup on the backyard.
Daffodils and tulips as well as irises are starting to come up. And other bulbs I planted in fall are also coming up but I don't remember what it was I planted so they will be a surprize. I planned it that way.
Turned the waterfall on for the pond but havent removed the screening yet for the pond.
Also had time to paint, should be finished with "Spin" in another week or so. Then onto the next painting which will either be "Madonna of the Big Foot" or one of the newer sketches i have recently done.
Need to upgrade the website soon.

Getting back to normal

Normal...I suppose that's a relative term for me. It has take all week to recover from the concert on Sunday.
While it was interesting and entertaining and got me out of my comfort zone, it was still weird. Too much of that raising hands and stuff. And then this preacher came on, he was a Calvinist. All hell fire and brimstone.
He was a real, to use a 60's term "downer". He kept talking about everyone being the body of Christ. Well I'm sure he was the asshole. :)
On top over everything else i found the whole thing just to strange. Give me that old time Buddhist stuff. It suits me more.
Working on getting prices from India to see if its feasible to publish the ICE book as well as the Digital works.
Also going to look into having images printed on purses, scarves, yada yada, maybe I can be the next big fashion trend.
Finally will get back into the studio tonight. Haven't been there for two weeks and I'm really missing it tremendously.
Last week we saw The Odd Couple with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Great fun.
Nothing else for now.

A silent scream

Well, today my Mother is undergoing open heart surgery to replace her aortic valve and Jerry my best friend's father just died.
Need I say more.