Scene too, the last.

春江水暖 Spring

Snow ices are melting ,
River  are flowing ,
Ducks feel warming,
So they are playing.
This is my poem for my painting .
Janney

Dragon Festival

The Dragon Festival, (Longtaitou Festival 龙抬头 ) Happens on the second day of of the second month of the Chinese calendar, or around our first week in March. Its name means “Dragon raising its head” because the dragon was regarded as the deity in charge of rain, an important factor in ancient agriculture.

Dragon Festival paintings by Janney

This is an ancient Chinese festival to welcome the coming of Spring, the warming of the season and the rain for the spring planting.

Alameda Creek

I wonder when I realized my parents were human beings, then again sometimes when I look back on my life I think maybe I never did. At 75 years of age I wonder if the physical ailments I have are the same ones my father felt and do I remember knowing he was undergoing these same experiences?

Can I appreciate that other people around me are human beings? I have no answers to it because I am not sure what it means. If we are all human beings by our biological being than all of this good and bad behaviour which happened in the past is what it means to be a human being and will continue as long as there are people.

I am sot sure what that mean? No end to War and no end to compassion and empathy?

Walking along the Alameda Creek levee you can often see over the fence into the yard,

Its different for those who view that we are what we have been in the past than for those who see what we are is what we could be.

At the question of whether people are “naturally” good or “naturally” bad we get stuck defining the terms good and bad, the same behaviour is good when “we are doing it and “bad” when they are doing it— Zappa had a line:

“We are the other people,
We are the other people,
You are the other people too.”

Rulers usually see their laws as reasonable and necessary for order, while those being ruled see them as lacking justice. and preventing them from getting the same benefits of the order available to the rulers.

But there will be no peace
‘Till men get equal rights
Equal rights and justice
Equal rights
Equal rights and justice
Bob Marley

Japanese TV shows

Autism has had exposure on popular TV shows in Japan. They are not documentaries, but artistic expressions finding a place in popular media for a discussion subject which has been commonly avoided in society.

Walk With The Light is about young parents with a challenging autistic son, the extended family dynamics and finding professional help to seek a workable future path.

Things You Taught Me features a young functioning autistic woman who is finding herself as she follows her dream of becoming a weather reporter, learning to navigate in society as well as about who she is as a person, including feeling love for a man amid normal the family dynamics that develop. This TV series, however shallow the characters, bring to a common front important issues for discussion.

End Matter

A hole formed inside the spout of the kitchen sink, I am 75 years old, never saw it happen before, and for the first3time in my life I hired someone to install a new faucet. I did not want to lay on my side, my ribs pressing onthe edge of the bottom of the cupboard under the sink with my hands held up n the air holding up this and screwing that and wishing I was a Hindu deity with another arm & hand. So I wrapped a sponge around it, secured it with a automobile tube clamp for a day and made this photograph

Trade shows and start ups and for me there were graphics tp be designed, not these in this image though,

School is out in Oakland Chinatown district. A printer I often used was located near the area and between press checks I might walk over and have lunch or just browse and spend some time.

A Japanese gold welcome-for-business-cat sits in the window watching the birds on the street.

My mother had a stroke with substantial memory loss and developed Expressive Aphasia. Sometimes we would look at her albums of photographs. She is stroking the image of my father, high school sweethearts and her husband of 60 years.My parents were nakodo when they lived in Japan.

I don’t know if seeing these photos of her life touched any memories for her, but we did it anyway. I left the books in her room but I never noticed that she looked at them while I was gone. Still, it seemed a good idea to m e and we often did it. Sometimes I would buy “child safe” cute things at the Daiso store and leave them around her room to discover on her own. She was curious person so it seemed like a good idea to create some discovery experiences for her when she was on her own.

Seeing feet realizes they connect me to the ground

and help me keep my head up high

Can you remember how you felt before you were born?
Is that the emptiness in The Heart Sutra’s “emptiness is form and form is emptiness”?

Still if there is another side to cross over to, once you are there will you want to cross over (back) to the other side, the one from where you came.? Buddha, do not leave me with such questions.as there will always be another answer and another question.

from the last few lines of The Heart Sutra brushed by Janney

Them epiphony bones

The Oracle Bones ( 甲骨文) which for many years, perhaps for many, many, many years, were “curious discoveries” farmers sold to be ground up into powder for use as “medicine.” Around 1899 it was understood that the strange marks on these “bones” were similar to Chinese characters and over years learned that these “bones” dated from the Shang Dynasty 1600 -1050 BCE. This effort opened up archeological efforts which uncovered many material remains of the Shang Dynasty including bronze objects with more characters on them from palaces and intact tombs.

Shang Dynasty ranges about 1600 -1046 BCE, the Zhou is from 1046-771 BCE, the Spring and Autumn period (the title of a chronicle of the state of Lu) 772-481 BC and the Qin from 221 to 206 BC. These dates are approximate for a sense of relationship and duration.

Below shows hǔ, 虎 , representing “tiger” from bronze inscriptions (in green), compared to other script forms in yellow.
Information and graphic from Wikipedia.

Before these Oracle Bones were understood the Shang Dynasty was just a legend, a glint in the eye of some historian except for the record of The Great Historian, Ssu-ma Ch’ien ( 司馬遷, 145 – 86 BC) who centuries earlier had compiled a list of 30 kings identifying 20 generations of the Shang which was supported from the records of the “Bones” —the Shang Dynasty was no longer a legend.

How much do you know about someone by seeing the place where they live?. Imagine starting a relationship, learning about someone and then later you visit their home and now you understand them better—do it in reverse, visit their home and then figure out who they were.

What is write and what people whant are too often

Vidas Minadas by Gervsio Sanchez—I bought this book off the clearance shelf, $3.00, its subject is the “collateral” human toll from the tools we use for war, in this case land mines which we hidingly place in other countries and then without cleaning up after ourselves, leave them as our “gifts” when we go. And one day, they go, off.

One philosopher, when he was a philosopher, was said to respond to another—If you know the truth of human suffering does that not compel you to act on it?
These are brave people to pose for these images. The world did this once to them, why would we not do it again when they told us this truth. Do companies which make landmines have any liability resulting from the misuse of their customers, such as maiming and killing people? Some would say their very use is a misuse, others say is sovereignly legal.

Vidas Minadas by Gervsio Sanchezvods

Alameda Creek

Are humans better off with or without a language? There is no Answer to that question—only those with a language would have an answer—we have nothing else to compare it except what we think it will be; imagine what it will be; fear what it will be; or hope what it will be.

What does it mean to have a written language and what does mean to have “graphic arts”, i.e. the ability to make many “reasonably exact” copies of that written language. Still, even when the copies are the same ink marks on paper, people who read them often express differences in their experiences and interpretations..

Electronic digital information rebalances people’s sensory intake flow, the “printing process’ of digital—right now you are looking at information printed on a screen using light, not ink and with a smart phone you can take this image almost anywhere you would normally go. Its not because sight has been less, but other senses have been extended. Its even stored in someone’s house. There can be as many prints made on demand, anytime requested by browsers around the world unless the server breaks down, i.e. the plug is pulled, the gig is up. Or with print I could put mine in a safer place than you did.

Marshall McLuhan argued that the medium is the message, the medium people used to communicate with each other determines the structure of human relationships, and the difference between the print media and digital media is qualitative, It wasn’t that a viewer learned (experienced) more about something, rather what they learned (experienced) was different.

Some have written that reporting using photography from war increased the anti-war movement by bringing home the realities of war while was happening at the from such as during the Civil War and the influence of Matthew Brady’s (and others) Civil War images.

The photographer and the image of a photograph—Should a person who is an image of a photograph be required to give a contractual ok to any use of that photograph? Or does the person who made/created? the image have proprietary ownership? Is it the same for images made such as a snapshot at a party, a surveillance camera, the Google traveling camera, at a public event, or as someone who walks along the creek and takes photographs of people on the other side.?.

If I make photographs of someone doing something weird and then use them for black mail should Nikon be responsible for enabling me to do that? Should Nikon be responsible for how I use my images?—Maybe they would be satisfied to distance themselves away from me.

Courts have judged producers to be responsible for poor quality in manufacturing such as air bags as well as for the product itself such as cigarettes and lead paint. Then there is always my dog ate the instructions.

Don’t get caught up in the words, they are only there to distract you from having to see how boring is Alameda Creek.

Writing made letters and their words into realities and printing made them into common realities. Probably at the start of printing the public reaction was similar to the public response to the news media, FaceBook, Twitter, etc.

What about the Google traveling camera which randomly makes images, you know by random some of the images will be compromising to someone. Do you think maybe Dr Gachet was not fond of the painting of himself by his friend Vincent? Were the businesses that made the paint and canvas responsible?

Electronic media is different than print. McLuhan argued that traditionally people used more a balance of their five senses to receive information to send to their brain but with the centuries of print the usage of vision became extremely dominant resulting in a reduction in the use of other senses for knowing.

Electronic media alters that balance . . .

Not by reducing the quality of the visual capabilities but increasing the extensions of other senses. Understanding, for McLuhan, means understanding both what it means “to know something” and how knowing through ink is different than knowing through electronic media.

Is there more to know about a thing than the experience of it? or your or my experiences of it ? If there are no people there to have the experience what is there to know about it?—more guessing, fearing, hoping? Janney would see this different than me , so much texture.against the smooth bridge, the calm under the bridge.

We are the experience of the Universe watching itself when the subject and the object do not know which is which. When humans are killing each other, is the Universe banging its head against the wall because it feels so good when it stops or is just culling the herd or maybe the heardless.

So much of world wealth comes from taking a piece of the earth, transporting it somewhere else, doing something to it and selling it to someone else who takes it home. Matter is neither created or destroyed, but it can break apart and join other matter.Or it ends up in the junkyard, or recycle yard. Good things in the universe collect in gravity bound groups, which keep most them in place—order— as we journey through the universe and still the small particles are never settled, entropy happens.

Japanese TV

Both of these Japanese TV shows feature a young girl, both are sentimental and full of stereo typed characters/scenes with stories which at their concept are worth watching. An Okinawn Island, most young people having left, the school has been scheduled to close down and with no births in sight one couple and the village “adopts” a skeptical expressive Tokyo “foster child.” The drama is churned by a young man seeking peace over the death of a friend who comes to love the island and what it means to be a family.

In God, Give me more time there is a star-struck young girl wants to see a singer/songwriter pop star perform, she loses her money and in order to get money to buy the ticket she has sex with a man who, as it turns out, is HIV positive. She goes to the performance, moved on by drama a relationship develops. Later she learns her HIV status is positive and again and again moved on by drama, the relationship winds through conflicts in his business, his artistic ego and their personal lives. It was an opportunity, using popular media without moralizing, to present information to a mass audience about HIV and AIDS.

We “know scientifically” there was a big bang, we have an estimate when, science cannot agree on a date which is precise enough to have a precise calendar from the beginning of time. If we started a calendar “from the beginning,” we would not know where to start it. Its easier with a mid point which enables one, conceptually, to be where ever you want to be, and while it is considered rude to ask why, people still do.

Shariputra,
Form does not differ from emptiness,
Emptiness does not differ from form.
That which is form is emptiness,
That which is emptiness form.

Left unlong rightwo shortodie

Knowear is just beingyond

Along the Alameda Creek  levee somewhere between  Decoto Rd and Isherwood, actually  much closer to Decoto,  an over-the-fence glimpse at the tops of  someone’s  place,

In Japan mountains and mountain villages are very  common  as is the water that runs down the mountains

A country  home in Japan

Some villages are in need of  repair, a poster announcing a town event for concerned citizens

A first floor business  with living quarters above, not unusual in the city of Tokyo

Akihabara  and some ad agency’s notion of kawaii

Not much difference between the fake and real  kawaii . . .

If you drive out I40  west from Albuquerque  about an hour you may  see a sign for Acoma, its  a very old village, perhaps the oldest known continuing town in the United States. The pueblo is built on a mesa, you can see it below . . . we were out driving nowhere the first time, you had to walk up, now there is paved road,  a bus, formal tours . .

Some Acoma residents make wonderful pots

Some of the wooden things in my house.

And I went to San Francisco last Saturday, it was a beautiful day,  Next year the Sales Force building will open the observation floor, located  somewhere on the top, to the public.

So if you got this far,  Personal Enlightenment or Bodhisattva? or  perhaps Bodhisattvas are just self righteous cowards, Daruma was clear on this, “Buddhas don’t do good, Buddhas don’t do bad.”

 

 

 

 

 

Knot in mynd

My mother had a stroke,  it messed up her memory,  she suffered from expressive aphasia and  lived in a memory care facility near me, either I or my wife would see her every day for over 3.5 years. During her last year after lunch she might want to return to her room to sleep, or maybe just escape.

In the memory care facility I met people who had accomplishments inter life  and did not remember,

Mom  had an operation for  a hip problem and was in rehab for eight  weeks  “relearning to walk.”

My parents lived a good life, Dad  had a good job, they lived in Japan for 14 years, Mom established herself professionally  in Ikebana, upon Dad’s retirement  she had an Ikebana  =school, they lived comfortably  still  in her last years, she was unable to “function” in society, this was in rehab, the lunch room,  it feels so bare  and prison-like but  for the eight weeks in rehab I was there for lunch, dinner and physical therapy.

I could not understand what it meant to her, losing everything  it must have been very hard to find herself.

She had her own room, and we brought some of her things,  furniture, her comfortable chair, flowers,

What was like for her when I was not there, which was much of the day,

Still the moments I was there

And the winner!!, the biggest award is to see someone so happy to see you,

What I like about Tokyo  is the graphic shapes ,

the lines and shapes

the colors and proportions, just walk down a street, go around a corner, see what is just waiting  there to be scene…

 

People come in all kinds of packages, and you have to admit, life is strange enough all  by itself without all the crap people do to make it even stranger.

But I cannot wear polyester, it does not breath and makes me sweat and itch, even 15%, I guess I cannot look forward to doing this kind of job in my retirement, and maybe I  don’t get this kind of happiness  either.