Have I mentioned lately how much I love XTC? Especially since they got happy in the early 90s.

I think, sometimes, that I was English in a recent past life or something. As a kid, I’d stay up late to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and sometimes even made it all the way through a Dr. Who episode on Sunday afternoon. I cultivated a British accent (I was quite the mimic), read Tolkein, and joy of joys, when I was 12 my dad’s work took him to London for three months, and he took the whole family.

Thinking back on it, I have a lot of small, disjointed memories. One of the most vivid, though, was finding a WWII pillbox in the forest. I’d been to the WWII bunker in Galveston, TX (which has been turned into a motel, eerily enough), and neither it nor this pillbox had seen any action. But we weren’t that far from London, where the bombs had dropped.

The forest was greener than any place I’d been. The light filtered down through a canopy of broad leaves, maybe maple. That green-hued light hit the ground and, where no fallen leaves bounced it back, was sucked away by the damp black forest floor.

The forest threatened to grow over the pillbox, but it was obvious that someone was taking care of it. It was trimmed just enough to be fun for a kid to discover, but not too much to seem as if it were in use. Approaching, I had this image of a pair of soldiers waiting there, day in and out, months, years. They’d pace, play cards, drink coffee with a little something extra in it, clean their guns. No Jerrys came and tried to shoot them, but they were ready.

Anyway. XTC. English band. This blog was originally going to be about how English I could be, and instead it’s about a pillbox in the forest.

The dog at our house, Cocoa, tends to bark at anything. A leaf could fall outside, and she’d bark at it, duly warning us of impending disaster.

She’s in the back yard right now. When she’s back there, she’ll start barking at whoever walks by, and today is no exception; she started barking at some folks out for a stroll with a baby in a carriage. The baby started crying, mostly because the adults were startled. So Cocoa barked some more, and then other dogs in the neighborhood started barking.

It was a regular chorus outside, of barking dogs and crying babies. One of those sounds you can sort of half-way enjoy as a bystander, but only because you saw it develop.

I imagine a wolf wandering into town from the forest, hearing this, and thinking, “Stupid inbred city-slicker dogs…”

From http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=295905:

“Dan Rather, one of the most respected and well-known broadcasters in the United States said last night that the mood of extreme patriotism engulfing the country since 11 September had stopped the media asking difficult questions of America’s leaders. He said he was personally guilty of self-censorship.”

We could have used these words a few months earlier, Dan! But thanks for stating the obvious in public (in England) anyway.

There are a couple of things on my mind about this story of the Bush administration knowing of the hijack threat before 9-11.

1) When Condoleeza Rice says that before 9-11 the word ‘hijack’ meant something different than it does now, she’s right. And you know what else? The shift in definition happened because THEY SCREWED UP. If the administration hadn’t been so busy lining the pockets of its corporate constituency, and had been doing the work of government instead, things might be very very different right now. I want to say it again:

‘Hijack’ means something different now because the administration failed us!

2) Bush is going down. There’s no escape. No more tax cuts for the rich, no more drilling into pristine wilderness. The honeymoon’s way over, and the centrists in the US (that is, everyone who isn’t a Republican) are ready to kick ass. Bush’s easy glide into dictatorship on the skids of public apprehension ends here.

Ok, so I finished watching ‘Waking Life’ again a little while ago. And I’ve got this to say about it:

Once upon a time, I used to say the kind of philosophical bullshit that would make your hair stand on end. I mean, really. I had some insight, and I’m a bright kid, but did I really have to say all that?

Well, of course I did, if for no other reason than to be embarrassed about it later. And for better reasons, too, which are aptly encompassed in the metaphor of the compost pile.

The compost pile is where you put things so they can simultaneously return to their constituent form and be transformed into something useful to whoever put it there. Part of the process of composting involves turning the pile so that it can rot evenly. Just so, dear friends, is the place where all previously-held convictions go after they leave your mouth and before you can be ashamed you went out on that philosophical limb.

And this is part of what’s so charming about ‘Waking Life.’ It’s ostensibly the dream of a character in the movie, but it’s also the dream of the filmmaker, and even you, the viewer. It’s subjective and non-linear and abstract and beautiful. It’s all dialog and color and motion; there’s nothing really to tie it together except the desire of the dreamer to wake up.

All of this serves as an environment in which to say lots of deep philosophical stuff. Each of the diatribes we hear is different, and many are contradictory. Not only are we asked to deal with the surreality of the animation, but we also have to process what amounts to 90 minutes of non-stop lecturing by ten thousand philosophy professors who have been told that the more words they use, the better. At least, that’s how it seems sometimes.

But it’s charming. It’s like watching a father take his ten year old daughter out to the back yard to teach her how to turn the compost. “Nothing is wasted,” the father says, “because everything is, in some way, connected to your life. Even the earthworm down there digging through the soil.” She asks, “Do people compost when we bury their bodies?” Dad says, “Good question.”

Soundtrack: Live In A Tree (and imagine he’s singing ‘blog in a tree.’) Yes, it’s an apple tree, and yes, I’m using a Macintosh.

A Few Hours Later

I thought I’d update this entry to reflect the amount of technology required to sit in a tree and use the internet as if it were a portable radio.

Firstly, the AT&T broadband internet connection. Substitute a phone-line modem if you want. This connection gives an IP address to a Siemens SpeedStream firewall/router/switch, so I can share the connection with my housemates. The router in turn gives an IP address to an Apple AirPort base station. The base station communicates with a little card called AirPort inside my Apple iBook, which is running Mac OS X 10.1.4. The AirPort card/base combo allows my iBook to stay hooked to the network within a few hundred feet of the base, with no wires at all. I’ve opted to use OmniWeb instead of that web browser from another famous Seattle-area company, because it’s just plain better.

So, in order for me to sit in a tree, there’s somewhere close to $2200 in hardware alone, and countless man-hours of effort on the part of everyone who made all the hardware and software. Those people, the designers, the manufacturers, the coders, the laborers… they’re all over the globe. Some live in poverty while others are extremely wealthy. They’re fighting a war over globalization (for or against), they’re trying to organize, they’re trying to keep costs down, they’re trying to take the market.

All so I can sit in a tree.

And that doesn’t include the pruning saw.

The worst part about having tripped-out and wonderful dreams is that the pressure’s on for the next night. Will that night’s dream be cooler than the one before?

Today on NPR there was an author talking about the creative experience in terms of possession and transcendence. The actual word he used was ‘duende,’ which is a Spanish word with a loose translation to possession. The example he gave was this: Billie Holiday had duende. There was something more, inside her, that was speaking through her. I was listening in the car, and I got to where I was going and missed the part about transcendence.

I was thinking about today’s performers and artists and writers and poets; who’s got the duende? I’m far enough away from pop culture now that I can see the amazing lack of any standouts. Certainly electronica is an idiom devoid of duende. Can’t program a computer to be possessed by spirits.

I think the direction the guy was going with transcendence is that in the act of genuine creation, some miracle occurs and you create something you were incapable of creating before. That is, you had an idea about what you were starting out to do, and you ended up doing something far more challenging because something inside you guided you to it and enabled you to do it.

I’ve experienced this with writing. When that kind of thing is flowing, the real work is to keep up with it, and take notes. In case you ever wondered what it feels like to be a telephone, rather than the one talking, that’s your chance.

It’s the same with the dreams. Sometimes they flow, and sometimes they don’t make it to consciousness. I have to wonder, though, if making it to consciousness is a sign of success for a dream, or a sign of failure. Could it be that the dreams we remember are the useless ones, while the ones that don’t make it to that point are the ones doing the real work?

Judy

For those of you who are new to my ‘blog and my dreams, here’s a recap: I have dreams that I feel are co-created, like jazz. A number of dreamers dreaming at the same time in the same dream, just having fun making bizarre stuff happen.

Today I took a nap, and had this one:

This dream is the setup to a haunted house movie. I don’t know why that’s an important part of the description, but it is.

I’m at an old motel, only it’s like it’s a house, only the rooms are only slightly bigger than toilet stalls. Maybe the rooms aren’t really rooms at all and are more like a ward at a hospital, with toilet stall-type dividers between them. The light is murky and filtered through green draperies. In fact, everything’s green; the old synthetic pile carpet, the faded gray-mint wallpaper. The place is like an old, old house in a depressed tiny town.

Anyway, I’m at this motel to attend a conference. I’m making sense of my toilet stall sized room, which isn’t really a room. A young woman comes to my door and hands me a handful of pills and an empty glass. She’s smiling, because she seems to know me even though I don’t know her. She tells me the pills are vitamins. She leaves and goes to the next stall where someone is sleeping. I look at my hand; it’s full of pills, some whole, some cut up to precise dosages.

I go to get some water. I walk past the ‘room’ where the man is sleeping, and I can hear the young woman doing something in there. I find the water dispenser, but I realize that I need a different glass to fill, so I look for that.

There’s a sudden noise from where the man was sleeping, and riotous laughter. The woman has played a prank on the sleeping man, and they’re laughing about it. I crane my neck and try to see what happened, but I’m not in on it.

The woman comes back out, and stands behind a cashier’s stand near the door. It’s like a restaurant. We talk about some stuff, I can’t recall what. She still has that sly smile, that says she knows who I am.

We both go into another room, this one a little darker, though just as weirdly green. I’m carrying a tiny radio, a cell phone, other assorted electronic gear. She tells me that she’s schizophrenic, and that we all create our own reality based on our mental and emotional state. Whenever I try to discuss this with her, I somehow manage to accidentally turn one of my many electronic gizmos on or off. I start to realize that the objects in the room aren’t what they are; my radio, for instance, is a living creature, and a pillow on the couch is a sleeping cat. The pillow cat turns around disdainfully and looks at me, as if to say, ‘What, you’re an idiot and you mistake cats for pillows?’ Then goes back to sleep and becomes a pillow again. Each of the things in the room reacts to my mental and emotional state in a way I wouldn’t expect.

She continues to look at me with that look. I start to recognize her a little, and the guy who had been asleep shows up. He exchanges words with the woman, and goes to the back door and does something. The woman tells me more about consentual reality and the nature of perception, and why she has to take meds. My phone rings and she says, ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ and then continues talking metaphysics.

I answer the phone and say, “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Who is this?”

“Judy.”

“I don’t know any Judys.”

“Ahh… But if you were two years old, and your name was Tommy, you’d know. Duh!”

So the woman is talking to me. And the man who was asleep has re-entered the room and is talking to me now, too. And I’m trying to figure out what Judy means by that talk of being two years old… So finally I look at the two people in the room with me, and say, for all three to hear, “I’d really like to find out what this is all about, but I’M FEELING A LITTLE OVERWHELMED AT THE MOMENT…”

And woke up, horribly confused. A housemate was knocking on the door to tell me that the house meeting was about to start, and did I want to attend. I had to sit there for what seemed like hours, readjusting my mind to waking life before I could answer.

In retrospect, I recognize the schizophrenic woman from other dreams. She once made a bouquet of brightly colored paper flowers, each of which bloomed from the center of another bloom. She’d wave her hand and a bloom would ‘grow’ towards it, looking a bit like a Chinese yo-yo as its stalk grew. (My contribution to that dream was the setting: An octagonal library, straight out of Borges.)

I think I’ve been dream jamming with this woman for a while. So if you know her, please put us in touch.

I’m currently redisovering a CD I’ve had for a few years: Adrian Belew’s ‘Op Zop Too Wah.’

I like Belew better when he’s in a band, as with King Crimson or The Bears, or when he goes way, way, WAY out there, as with ‘Desire Caught By The Tail,’ or ‘Guitar As Orchestra,’ but he’s still got some good stuff going on when he’s in his basement studio plugging away.

(Note that the quality of that mp3 file is intentionally crappy, on my part. So that a) people with slow connections will be able to enjoy it, and b) you’ll buy the CD instead of listening to my copy.)

Here’s a Quicktime movie of some photos I took on a drive through North Cascades National Park. It’s a special mother’s day remix. My mom liked it (as did the other moms who got the abbreviated version…). Yes, that’s the kind of son I am. I leverage existing resources to multiple vertical mother markets.