One Simple Payment

Terri Brooks

2012-01-31T10:48:00.001-08:00

sergej jensen

2012-01-17T03:59:00.001-08:00

joe bradley

2012-01-16T04:59:00.001-08:00

antoni tapies

2012-01-04T07:42:00.001-08:00

2011-12-28T13:54:00.001-08:00

inga dalrymple

2011-12-22T06:49:00.001-08:00

Richard Tuttle

2011-12-13T11:31:00.001-08:00

Paul Pagk

2011-10-31T15:10:00.001-07:00

Thomas Scheibitz

2011-10-18T13:40:00.001-07:00

Jered Sprecher

2011-10-03T06:52:00.001-07:00

Ulrich Wulff

2011-09-16T04:35:00.001-07:00

Hans Hofmann

2011-09-02T09:26:00.001-07:00

sofia leiby

2011-08-22T09:35:00.001-07:00

Inga Dalrymple

2011-08-10T08:07:00.001-07:00

thomas nozkowski

2011-06-17T10:41:00.001-07:00

RH Quaytman

2011-06-11T08:09:00.001-07:00

Charline Von Heyl

2011-06-03T07:49:00.001-07:00

picasso

2011-05-31T10:35:00.001-07:00

Alan Davie

2011-05-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

richard tuttle

2011-04-16T13:08:00.001-07:00

popular people are unsubtle

2011-02-20T14:22:00.001-08:00

dana frankfort

2011-02-17T06:21:00.001-08:00

2011-02-16T06:35:00.001-08:00

2011-02-16T05:38:00.001-08:00

Michael Hunter

2011-02-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

stas volovik

2011-02-11T17:02:00.000-08:00

nicolas chardon

2011-02-07T08:12:00.000-08:00

cordy ryman

2011-01-03T06:22:00.000-08:00

cy twombly

2011-01-01T06:59:00.001-08:00

tautology club

2010-12-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

map

2010-12-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

Cordy Ryman

2010-10-02T12:28:00.001-07:00

Paul Pagk

2010-06-22T08:32:00.001-07:00

Rudolf Schoofs

2010-06-22T08:11:00.001-07:00

greg evason

2010-06-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

blobs from august 2009

2010-05-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

mah jongg

2010-03-04T12:09:00.001-08:00

shrimp plant

2010-03-02T08:52:00.000-08:00

2010-02-25T13:01:00.001-08:00

2010-02-24T11:05:00.000-08:00

obama is three points behind dunstaple and has voted for reagan. get in quick!

2010-02-23T12:09:00.001-08:00

balloooons

2010-02-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

art

2010-02-21T12:40:00.001-08:00

cy twombly

2010-02-20T08:25:00.001-08:00

michiel ceulers

2010-02-19T12:53:00.001-08:00

thomas nozkowski

2010-02-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

imi knoebel

2010-02-13T05:42:00.001-08:00

lady with hat

2010-02-12T11:35:00.001-08:00

some trees

2010-02-12T10:48:00.001-08:00

garth weiser

2010-02-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

jim drain

2010-02-11T06:17:00.000-08:00

a colourful wall!

dan walsh

2010-02-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

andrew masullo

2010-02-10T09:25:00.001-08:00

jessica stockholder

2010-02-10T08:11:00.001-08:00

2010-02-10T06:22:00.001-08:00

lady

2010-02-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

lady

2010-02-08T10:23:00.001-08:00

ian pedigo

2010-02-08T06:48:00.000-08:00

art

2010-02-04T06:30:00.001-08:00

eohi

2010-01-29T00:55:00.001-08:00

art

2010-01-28T03:19:00.000-08:00

art

2010-01-27T22:15:00.000-08:00

2010-01-07T13:05:00.001-08:00

well done, national lottery adverts, on equating the mercenary impulse with wild and crazy abandon and go-getting, instead of with desperation.

poem

2009-12-23T10:59:00.001-08:00

2009-12-21T11:58:00.001-08:00

pyramid person

2009-12-14T11:46:00.000-08:00

2009-12-13T15:16:00.001-08:00

2009-12-06T10:25:00.001-08:00

2009-12-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

it's nice to interact with someone, to give them attention and be paid attention yourself.. one must avail oneself in any company. some people are famous - obama, lady gaga.. what does it take to be a great person? i'd like to find out how quantum mechanics could be deterministic. that would be a great scientific discovery!
i think bohm and hooft have already done it, or had a good go.. but i need to be like a new einstein, even though the quantum jargon is very puzzling to me!

we are all as dummies

2009-12-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

we are all animatronic.
we are machines.

2009-11-30T15:51:00.000-08:00

Someone posted a Mel Brooks quote on the blog 'Tumblr', and I've been thinking about it. It was something to do with being loud instead of quiet. I like quiet stuff like the art of James Bishop, but I also like loud, bright colours and jazzy patterns..

who is stupid and who is clever?

2009-11-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

I feel stupid. Strong, positive people do that to me. You would think they'd have the courtesy to make you feel better about yourself.

Strength and positivity in a male person mean a square jaw, with the hairs cut off. Strength and positivity in a female person mean eyelids heavy from the overall copulating of the body.

Life seems to be about the idea of learning to like stuff that you despise.

Strong, positive people make the weak and negative feel bad about any happiness the weak and negative person gets, however small.

A triumph for the strong, positive person is when they can pressure someone weak and negative into becoming strong and positive themselves. Then they cheer and laugh with each other, the newcomer to strength and positivity still reeling from the drastic and unpleasant metamorphosis.

But such a change can never happen, it is too distressing. It would count as a passing away, and that is quite undesired.

robert motherwell

2009-11-28T09:24:00.000-08:00

alexander calder

2009-11-27T15:13:00.001-08:00

2009-11-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

there is no agency

2009-11-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Agency is an illusion because there is no subject separate from the world.
Agency is illusory because we are completely regulated by the law of cause and effect.
To argue that there is agency *within* these two provisos is to misunderstand their fundamentality.
Nobody can fail at life. Nobody can somehow 'choose' to feel uncomfortable in their body.
Breeding and copulating are not the enscribed purposes of life.
It is however indeed a miserable fate to be isolated from life, never to feel pleased.
The pleasureful are envied. When one has nothing, the world can seem cruel and heartless.
Nightmares constitute the bedtime experience.
Darwinism, the repulsive competitiveness of all living things, is despised.
To succeed is to breed and copulate. The losers are damned.
Alpha members of the species beat off the lesser members, who become mentally crazy and suffer intensely.
Life is hell. No-one wants to live with me.
I hate living on my own.

2009-11-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

"we each exercise free will", "we each choose our lives" - words from souls with little connection to or understanding of the world.
Souls with a sense of 'responsibility', 'freedom' and 'agency' rather than a sense of willlessness; that is, the sense that we are but instruments of big god or a wider universe, like a seed coursing down a stream.
We're made of world and world is willless.
Belief in free will is like watching the wind rustle the leaves in a tree, and imagining this effect to be decided by oneself.
Is it some kind of human superiority complex that leads to this conviction that we are not as the atoms that we have claimed possess no free will, pinging about in time-space through no intention of their own, automatically?

life is not an improvisation

2009-11-23T07:26:00.001-08:00

There is a widespread belief on this planet, 2009, that life itself is an improvisation. That one may choose one way or another at any point in time, and that there are realities created or withheld from creation, out of some kind of faculty of choice or decision-making.
Belief in this faculty is an expression of the vindictiveness and selfishness prevalent here.
The accusation 'you chose..' serves as a method of virtually damning those that these humans are displeased with.
Similarly 'i chose' serves as a method of buttressing oneself in the face of what appears to be a hostile world.
These humans appear to live for a sense of vengeance ('you chose..') and for a sense of self-inflation ('i chose..').
Is such baseness warranted? Well, yes, in the sense that it happens; no, in the sense that it is the bane of the lives of the few humans who embody good taste, dignity and refinement.
No matter what weighing up, deliberation, or 'choice-anxiety' is practiced in the illusory experience of choice, the final outcome is in fact predetermined - life is not improvised.
There is no choice involved in life. However, the mirage of 'forking paths' does impress a strong hold upon the majority of humans at this time.
It appeals to the primitive sense of exploration and risk-taking. It is a remnant from when wildness held the upper hand over civilisation.
As we become yet more civilised, it is to be predicted that the belief in freedom of choice will fade away, like the memory of an appalling stench.
Nothing is improvised because we are a product of the past. Belief in forking paths requires that there be a possibility that either path be taken.
And if assigning a will to a single person is absurd, so too is assigning a will to the universe. In no sense is any choice made in the world, ever.
Believers in choice imagine a momentousness of 'events' - either spaced apart or bubbling continually.
It is their guilty pleasure, a way to achieve sovereignty over others in their dreamworld.
If you will, life is a script rather than a manifestation of radical choice. The paradigmatic 'choice' is that of loving or hating. This is the choice that has consequences, dire or pleasant.
This choice allows for notions of good and evil, and superiority and inferiority. There is resort to talk of 'essences' in order to curtail relinquishment of grudges and pride.
Belief in both choices and essences requires belief in the 'causa sui' (self-caused cause) and in rejection of the priniciple 'ex nihilo nihil fit' (nothing can come from nothing).
There is no sense that things could be different to how they are now. There are no 'events' which could have taken a different course.
In philosophical terms, this is 'hard determinism'. It is the strongest awareness of fairness and order rather than incompleteness and selectivity.
It is not a matter that scriptedness allows us to 'love' more than a hypothetical improvisatoriness - there is the potentiality of experiencing warm and fuzzy chemicals in our brain no matter whether you believe in either position.
If we are compelled by anything, it is not love but 'rightness'. Any purported freedom can only in fact be pursuant of a deficit of love, but not of rightness.

2009-11-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

What there is, could be no other way.

Belief in the concept of forking paths requires at least some degree of belief in the concept of the 'agent' as 'blank slate', or 'tabula rasa'.

How else could there be radical choice?

Otherwise, the path taken is the only path that could have been taken.

Belief in choice could boil down to belief in heaven and hell. Say the path to the left is strewn with decaying rabbits and flaming yetis. The other path is strewn with lilies and lavender, and contains Jesus and Buddha.

Believers in choice will contend that they are morally upright on all occasions. The idea of a convicted wrongdoer claiming he chose to be bad is comical. He's using the terms of those who believe in choice - 'good' and 'bad', instead of his own terms.

Hard choicists will contend that there is full knowledge of implications-to-be whenever a choice is committed to. The man who destroyed a scarecrow knew full well that it would lead to his own misery at the hands of the farmer, and yet he chose that fate out of perversity and masochistic vagaries.

Soft choicists might claim that although the subject did in fact choose to massacre the scarecrow, there was a degree of choice-pool ignorance involved - he had no clear and present idea that he would be caught and covered in boiling mustard.

To kindly dismantle the premise of the hard choicist is to automatically dismantle that of the soft choicist.

Hard choicists are more spiritual than soft choicists. There is less leeway for them in the separation of beings into righteous and wicked.

To hard choicists, life is something like a bad action film. One 'decides' either to play the hero, or to play the villain, yet the choice is willing either way. This is a colourful picture that pleases the ego.

The phrase 'I chose to be miserable' could only be uttered by The Choicist Who Had An Epiphany and from that moment changed his ways. Nobody who suffers choicists will believe that they, the sufferer, in fact desired such pains.

'I choose to be miserable' is a rich phrase, and almost compassionate, in an insincere way. One who is truly miserable would be unable to speak anything at all.

Similarly, 'I choose to be happy' is intended to confound rather than inspire. One needs a reason to be happy in order to feel that emotion. This eliminates the need for choice.

The consciousness of 'I am a winner' is a consciousness that has not extended much further than the inaugural race of sperm to the egg.

A winner requires 'losers', and he soon finds that the trophy of his new life is but one of many that seem to have also been won by strange new people around him, and it becomes harder to identify as the winner.

Belief in choice betrays incredulity. The need for a scapegoat in times of grievance is perhaps primal.

What is referred to in the accusation of 'free will' is the emotion of the subject who feels he has been wronged. When 'free will' is a term of praise (usually for one's self), it also refers to one's sense of separateness from what is seen as the outside world, though the emotion involved is a similar shade of self-righteousness.

'I chose to be a happy person' is a form of wishful thinking. It is a prayer, with some amusing sleight of hand - a proactive play with the force of the retroactive.

'We all have free will; deal' is another common assertion. What else could free will be but the exercising of one's true nature? isn't everyone either good or evil? this presumes that 'choice' is moral.

When there is a sense of separation between oneself and the world, there seems to emerge some degree of self-generated judgement.

This leads to the indifference which many seem to exhibit with regards to the plights of other living non-choicists.

'Free will is god's gift to us. Don't throw it away, man' - from a theological perspective, it seems more credible that a loving god would assert his own sovereign will at all times. To withhold it from humans seems implausible, as though he could in fact ever 'give up' on one of his beloved children and subject them to complete isolation (the factor required in order for free will to remain logically consistent).

One of the greatest clarifications of the free will illusion is the assertion that as humans we are not in a kind of bubble in limbo - if there is any choice at all in the world, the world at large makes the choice rather than the individual.

But 'choice' is still a rather crude label that the spiritually youthful are pleased to apply to the unfolding aspect of the world.

For every 'choice-action' there must be a perceived 'choice-pool' of possible outcomes. But from whence is this choice-pool generated? If the choice is between an apple and a pear, what is there in an agent to will for one or the other?

What is called the will is simply the expression of the perception of event-ness. Yet there is never any event in absolute terms. An event divides time and space where they remain indivisible.

An event is a human imposition that confuses just as it clarifies. The illusion of event-ness creates a kind of adventure game world that appeals to every Chosen One throughout the universe. And weren't we all once this golden god?

there is no choice; there is no chooser

2009-11-19T11:15:00.000-08:00

positing 'choice' is a symptom of youthful pride and vanity.

such claims may be identified to substitute a single ego for what is the domain of the whole universe, or that which might also be described as 'God'.

belief in free will betrays a limited scope. it is a simpleness, an undevelopedness and ignorance of the world.

belief in choice resembles the case of a football goalkeeper who claims for his own the goal scored by his team's striker, because he is small as a daisy and snuffling for puff points.

do not curse the believer in free will or the believer in choice. they are like helpless newborns, floundering on their backs and crying for milk. they are just getting started in life - they are not to be damned.

to these greenhorns, the idea and life-relevance of choice seems self-evident. they perceive themselves to rove the world as discrete units - they feel like agents, islands, self-generated and independent of all that is around them in time and space.

cherish these people for what they are, and you will not wish to change them or brand them shameless promoters of falsehood. their time to untangle the truth will surely come.

their arguments may centre around the perceived threat to 'moral responsibility' or to the spice and tang of what sentience should, in their daze, in fact be.

it may serve to remember that this is not deceit, but nascence - what an ego needs to feel comfortable.

imagine yourself repeating something like, 'i choose not to murder or rape'. see how basic this sentiment is. the ego grasps for what will consolidate it.

'only robots and animals have no free will - i'm a human' - this confusion is sweetness itself, rather than an incendiary bomb. it is the self-aggrandizement of the child prodigy, a compensation for the slightness of his stature and of his exposure to the world.

"there's no whiz-dumb without dumb." - a wise man

'what logic is there to choicelessness?' one may cite the sovereignty of genetic and environmental factors and the role of destiny in our lives, but even these are but weak pointers.

free will is an illusion, even an unthinkingness, because the yearning for freedom in spiritual childhood gives way to a yearning for belonging and interconnection.

'no man is an island' said donne. let that be the rally cry of those who would conceive only of choicelessness.

'even electrons have free will. what kind of a life would it be if they didn't.' - a life with hope, perhaps. belief in choice implies that one 'agent's' choice might be inherently better than that of another, even if only in the mind of the 'agent'. this delusion is just part of the ego's fabled striving for pleasure and aversion from bad stuff.

when one lives the belief in free will and choice, life is a competition, a rat race. the righteous prosper and the wicked fail. this predicament is the blinkeredness of the naif, though let not the enlightened pity this mindset - surely it is the history of us all.

when one is a little worm or maggot, or to be nice, say, a ladybird or butterfly, one imagines oneself as pretender to the kingly throne of the world, and continually scrabbles and toils for promotion of this self to the promised position, by default at the expense of others.

when one grows to become a cheetah or lion, or mandrill, say, (any noble beast), one disdains the preeminence given to lax daydreams of choice, and begins to foster thoughts, instead, of interrelation, fate, oneness, and the infallibility of infinite cause and effect, (which amounts to causelessness), or of the sense that 'things just happen'.

without the foreboding sense of consequence and repercussion, one is almost liberated.

it is best not to wander muddleheaded about this state of affairs. belief in choice is buttress for the finite and localised, whilst awareness of choicelessness is an embrace of infinity and interdependence.

charlotte von stein

2009-11-11T09:55:00.001-08:00

2009-11-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

All is a gift from the Big God to you - he knows what you need!

2009-11-01T11:45:00.001-08:00

2009-10-29T11:59:00.001-07:00

2009-10-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

There's something religious or spiritual about yoinking the contrast up on a random picture until it's just: white, cyan, black, yellow, magenta, red, green, and blue.

2009-10-24T12:20:00.001-07:00

From 2007

2009-10-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

2009-10-14T09:03:00.001-07:00

A marshmallow is thrown at the Prince of Persia.

2009-10-09T06:52:00.001-07:00

A disco ball is kicked into the gutter.

Excerpt from my current writing project

2009-09-24T09:28:00.001-07:00

The Native American on board the Titanic as it went down later gave each survivor a single plucked booby feather to wear on their heads, to show how they were each in their own way a brave like in his tribe. The 'families of the sinking string quartet' were delivered a bag of fine titmouse feathers to share among themselves.

Everton win 1-0

2009-09-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

2009-09-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

Chelsea scored with three seconds to go - home time!

Dean Sturridge hit the overhead winner.

Boris Johnston passed to an offside net - it was a goal for Rangers.

Arsenal winger Pingu hit the ball to outfield where Somerby winger Neils Partrare was waiting, a cutlass in his hand.

Everton scored a mini-goal past Boris Johnston.

Port Vale are top of the league following an eight-nil hammering of Everton.

Port Vale hit back at reports they were allowing defender Tony Feher to score goals.

Yellow Blobs

2009-08-17T10:24:00.000-07:00

Colour Shapes

2009-08-11T08:40:00.001-07:00

Checkerboard

2009-08-10T10:04:00.001-07:00

I didn't make this, but I may as well Duchamp it.

Characters

2009-08-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

2009-08-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

Noise Inventive

2009-08-05T10:35:00.001-07:00

Noise Shapes

2009-08-04T12:37:00.001-07:00

RGB Trousers

2009-08-02T11:25:00.000-07:00