290720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Pop used to call me “burro”, which in its native language is an insult meaning “stupid” - but from pop and his metaphorical mind i have to believe it was a term of affection meaning “stubborn.” It took me a lot of years to understand that no single personal trait is universally useful, much less one that renders you intractable - but i got to tell ya’ at this point in history, i’d rather be known for my recalcitrance than my obeisance. I watch the “statesmen and captains of industry” of our time and want to puke - my feelings are more murderous than somatic, but all violence at this time in our possible extinction trajectory shaves off as much green wood from the species’s vulnerable trunk as it does dead wood. Education on how to survive through cooperative loving application of our unusual human history is of the most likely viable paths i can see, but don’t listen to my i am a myopic cyclops feeling my way from one doorway to the next.

Though in too many ways to admit publicly - the “stupid” definition of burro applies too well for comfort. It is one of my closely guarded jealousies that there are so many who see the “ruse” more quickly and have greater restraint about it, after all any one of our species who actually believes the 70’s saw about “he who has the most toys in the end wins” is too dense to really want to spend my any portion of my last few moments on this plush fantasmagoria we describe in places as terra firma, but more accurately treat like “mommy do this.” There is a passage in Henry the V by Shakespeare called the “The St. Crispin Day’s” speech where history and literature crossover in a seamless transition. There was in fact a battle where an inferior force defeated a force 10x its size - and the speech is a martial refrain exhorting any hopeless battle to victory. The digital overlords have robbed us of such subtlety and through sleight if hand somehow proclaimed “1984” ipso facto fait accompli. 

Fuck you and the ponies your rode in on. The only battles you trust-fund babies have ever engaged in are the ones where you cannot lose - if you show up on the field, you get a trophy · if you fuck her without consent, you get a pass. That vain assumption my pitifully lacking character nemeses will be your undoing. There is no doubt in my mind about the extent you pissant, imagination-less specters of people will go to aggrandize your accomplishments such that you can ride past the havoc you wreak convinced in your heart of “what the fuck happened to it, it was here a minute ago” hearts. I am friends, of a sort of with Edward Colver who is progeny to a member of the forest service of the San Gabriel Mountains outside of Pasadena, enough so to have had a mountain peak named Colver Peak. That may be my 15 minutes of fame allotted by Andy Warhol, and the least i can do is own what Edward the son of Mr. Colver did with his portion - famous punk rock photographer that he was was born to be · but prescient mountain poet he is and will be ever more. “When the shit comes down, there will not be walls high enough for them to hide behind.” - Edward Colver, somewhere in Los Angeles, sometime in the late 1980s.

What was witty then is now simply practical - these mooks who establish “social media” and then yank the plug on the most vulnerable to the channel and possess the authority and execute the prerogative to mute the most important voices on that channel, e.g. #ArundhatiRoy, #GretaThunderg, #PemaChodron, #ThichNhatHanh, #DalaiLama is not worth a shit as a utility for the good of all. We are awash in profit for a handful that is doing its level best to convince the remaining 4% what a good idea greed is deserve every slight, oppression and disappointment we discover with our denuded, debilitated capacity for critical thinking and simple stupid adherence to an unworthy authority we submit to, be that beauty, vanity, or riches just over the hill.

Dalai Lama - “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck·” I do not want to die believing the virtual affection i found from people distant from me on a social platform was the closest i could come to love. Nor can i denigrate the genuine kindness that i have found through faint threads of communication coupled with powerful imagery shared with a common purpose of uplifting those that view such content - as much as i must caution the titillating effect of righteous violence suggesting somehow there is victory from overcoming a foe. We are trained seals barking at bouncing balls that enrich a stable of effete managers with pedigrees who deserve much less than the man i found rowing his stomach board with his elbows from An Bang to “old town.” The most you can do for yourself right now is find some way to show yourself a compassion that can be easily shared with the next person you meet - are we having fun yet · ¿? 

jts 29/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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280720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Interesting day - i woke up to find myself banned from fb. Choosing not to live with a phone i had no channel to object to this obviously politically motivated and egotistically questionably scurrilous charge of violating “community standards-“ like i should be surprised that spitting on a well-connected shill for the corporations would not result in some petty annoyance, sort of like having my ticket pulled for outing some hanky-panky in the probate process at the L.A. Superior Court - we all have our cross to bear, and karma is truly a “Yoho” when it comes down to crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s. I would do it again, and to my fb friends who’ve been torn from my loving care by an penis envy and hubris - know that i love you and will continue to care whether we are allowed to communicate in the digital Gulag the snotty-faced billionaires are concocting for our own good.

My digital domain stoneartist.com is being subsumed back into the “information superhighway” and i hope that someone has better luck with the creativity i poured my heart and soul into, but made not one thin dime - because while hyper text was at one time a laudable conceit, once the “haters” got their hooks into it, there was no longer commerce, just gates onto the killing floor. Googol is ruled by a maniac - the chief scientist Kurzwell - is such a coward he cannot defend his notion of singularity - just pitch it at the next corporate cocktail party to effete finger wizards so removed from the suffering and destruction they have wrecked that they sleep well and drive fine vehicles on streets devoid of conflict, controversy, contradiction - or backbone ·

Yet there is hope on every street corner on the planet. My experience with being banned from a social media platform to which i brought good faith and honest content is timely. Early on i would not accept that the CIA was scrutinizing and capitalizing on persons utilizing this ostensibly public thread - and i stand corrected. Just like believing the no one in my home country could accept the lies and buffoonery of an empty suit past his prime doing the bidding of a ruling class which has no longer rule, nor class - just money stolen from the coffers of a population doing its best to raise loving children who will not be killed by senseless violence, but rather contribute to a heritage of human history that cares.

What is more likely is that by digital manipulation of public channels there will be fewer and fewer people who read any of this literary vomit, but those who wade through the pain and rancor of injustice may find formulas for combatting an enemy lacking the gumption to raise his/her head to the threshold of ownership and say straight out to your face “this is me, and this is what i think and why.” More likely you will face manipulation and clickbait supposedly representing your fondest desires to be helped and heard. Know this, that any information you share with the corporations is used only to separate you from what you have worked to earn - and they do it with nothing more than “keystrokes” because they are efficient.

This has been a difficult day in a year full of difficult days - nor do i claim distinction by that. I am saddened to be separated from virtual friends, but knew always this day was coming. So onward i will slog searching for friends who’d been stolen by uncaring servers fulfilling the duties of digital corporate overlords making gazillions as traitors to their species and lacking heart enough to question their own behavior, but damn if i don’t feel better than i have for years for the simple fact of having a fb free existence - see ya’ wouldn’t want to be ya’ ·

jts 28/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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270720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

To my brothers and sisters, real and imagined - i love you · thank you. To my parents ______fill in the blank, for myself and any other child who wasn’t quite sure where the point of correction, coercion or condemnation lie. There is a enough suffering on the planet that can be directly attributed to shitty parenting skills that i am not alone in my reservations about “honoring thy mother and thy father.” I took that shit seriously and in an effort to placate a mother who once through onyx bookends through her bedroom window after she had kicked my father to any curb outside of the home i’d grown up in, while screaming at me, a not quite 15-year old snot-faced kid what a difficult birth i had been; only to find pop suckling the breasts of his 20-year junior Mormon Princess who made clear her door was to be knocked on, not walked through, i concede confusion.

The owner’s husband has arrived and demonstrates fairly clearly the differing male/female roles of the country where i now reside. He will not do anything until he has conferred with her, or is that a blindspot from my “chauvinist” upbringing. I find it charming that they have a close working relationship where he honors her leadership and where he is not threatened by deferring to her. What i am not seeing is his “return” for such an arrangement. The women in the United States who have demanded such a configuration - seemed to think that subservience was part of the bargain. I am not getting that in the limited view i have as yet in the far more “gender neutral” country i now reside. My fond hope is that there will be a woman i meet here who has tolerance enough to look beyond my poor training and help me to help her.

Mixed in with that innocent fantasy is a vibrant relationship to Jack Nicholson’s depiction of an author given everything he wanted only to find _______fill in the blank. I have no excuse, if art was my passion i’d resort to what Matisse did and draw with long sticks in my convalescence · or the haters have won and entirely undermined my confidence in my own creative capacity and rendered me as one more “deer in the headlights.” i d k, what i know is there was a time when i could surf the subways without handrails and draw viable portraits of personages near and far on a lurching train in the flickering light - ignoring those who’d like to know but lacked my own mother’s lack of boundaries and would not peek where she had no compunction about interrupting any creative process just to _____fill in the blank.

I was once a guard at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, CA - and one of the axioms of that duty was that people seem incapable of looking at beautiful objects no matter how ancient or fragile without wanting to touch them somehow for some reason · and the guard’s duty was to see it coming and intervene in the “nicest possible way.” It seems to be a postulate to the axiom or vice-versa that the public must move around to the back of an artist and witness the process. Any longer my once rock-solid confidence to draw anything anywhere at anytime is now reduced to faint scratches of graphite indicating ideas that just remain outside the concrete. I don’t even know when that happened, one minute i’m drawing handlebars of motorbikes in Bali, and the next i’m spending weeks trying to fathom the girth of one of the largest trees on the planet. Please s’plain that to me.

Nor is it any longer of any importance to me that anyone see what i can, or understand how long and how much effort it took to reach that point - anymore i would be content to hear the voice of an 18 month-old telling some negligent fool to pick up the trash s/he just threw to the ground. I know - more pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, but at least it would be an indication that rather than waiting for the rapture, the rebuke of a small child would encourage me more than the re-animation of Mozart the Kurzwell the monster has set his sights, hopes and future of our species using the dubious Artificial Intelligence (AI) the corporations have bet the farm on - your farm, my farm the whole fucking planet’s farm. So in the end, the best i can hope for and what i wish for more and more is the gentle touch of a loving woman looking into my fading sight and asking me to paint what i see.

jts 26/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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260720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

I am now moved from one home to another, and as the loving neighbor lady would say, “the book is closed.” Even though the new house is hotter, has ants and as luck would have it may almost know the sound of demolition adjacent to my old location as clearly - i like it better · This is one of those ineffable realities which do not admit logical reason, but has the “feel” of being right, more than another. I once battled wits with a psychiatrist who nearly convinced me that my “instincts stink” - much like my siblings nearly convinced me they have reason to act superior · neither was accurate and both conditions most certainly defined them as much as it described me. Yet there is good reason for them to be wary, i can be as cruel as i can be kind, and it took me way to long to reach a place of peace with this insight to ignore its intrinsic truth.

The best i can do is to continue mining the caverns of my soul in search of what i once described as the shaggy beast of my soul. But now rather than hunter after an elusive quarry, i wish to find friendship with this unknown creature of whom i still have had only the barest glimpses and rely on the metaphysical sight of the 3rd eye to track its whereabouts but remain rationally skeptical of such an irrational possibility. The happy fact is i remain open to such a possibility regardless of all personal experience to the contrary. My good fortune is to have lived in a time when there were song lyrics stating “reality has always had too many heads.” I have no real conceit that this same wisdom is new to my age, and was simply stated differently through the ages, but i remain grateful that it was reconfigured into a recognizable form while i lived.

The challenge is to find how much more of our species’ history has also been restated differently and to evaluate its worth based on "bitter searching of the heart", and even more importantly apply it in a more useful way for as has been said elsewhere in our history, “time is nigh.” Mahatma Gandhi was a bigoted racist who oppressed a huge portion of his population because of outmoded beliefs, yet on balance he was able to liberate an entire nation from colonial occupation through personal conviction & truths he had discovered within the confines of his prejudice; we, each of us can do the same thing and rather than liberate a nation, possibly liberate an entire planet - if there is time enough left to us. If not, very shortly our DNA strand will be struggling to remain animated in a superheated toxic cesspool created by a handful of humans for apparently no more good reason than greed.

It is not terribly hard for me to imagine this scenario having watched my own “atomic” family blown to bits by no more than proximity to riches beyond the limited understanding of our semi-impoverished roots, though it is not that simple by a long shot. But the conceit of any solidarity with a righteous proletariate is as mythical as its attachment to social standing simply through marriage, or wisdom conferred by education. The key is that my people struggled hard for a better life, and never in agreement about what that meant. Where we have fallen solidly on our faces is allowing division within our actual relationship. These are people i struggled with for space in front of the toilet and more accurately time in front of the mirror - i grew up in the midst of the manufactured importance of “image is not important · it is everything.”

And i am luckier than most for no other reason than my image did not match any identifiable cluster, and from that limitation my demeanor varied even more - lucky me. Now my ambitions follow suit where i once craved recognition for my heroic efforts on behalf of art and humanity, now i welcome quiet and any opportunity to be of service to those who suffer. I am no closer to understanding how that modified ambition can be accomplished, but i keep trying - even sitting here in a worthy bistro in a borrowed nation having moved a 3rd time in year just to get a breath of fresh air and quiet, i am far more okay than anytime in my long history, because as long as i am harming no one and not causing anyone to harm anyone else - my heart is at peace · may yours be as well.

jts 26/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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250720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

It is the last day of my old house and i have already managed to antagonize the new hosts, and i’m not sure exactly how. When i moved into the last house it was stocked with multiples of everything, including the rats in the attic, and here there is no pot, no plate, no toilet paper - so i asked, forgive me if i eschew aluminum. I come from an Alzheimer’s family whether it is an accurate diagnoses or not, we are certainly demented. My friend the carpenter quoted me 1.2 million dong when i asked for 2 shelves; i was only more surprised after taking possession of the first and asking for the 2nd to be modified to 3 equal spaces instead of the original 2 - “how much would that cost”, 1.5 million dong, but when i tried to settle up, it turns out we’d been talking apples and oranges, or “for each” instead of together.

You could almost call that the story of my life if you were a creative person looking to distill these 65 weird years of mine into a paragraph, and you might even be more successful than this quixotic quest for meaning in a meaningless age using nothing more than words and unrelenting ownership of my fuckups as well as my attributes to create focus about a worldwide calamity that can only be resolved by much larger percentage of the population working in concert than the time sucking occupation of creating content for the digital wizards that you didn’t even realize you’d been hired to do - gratis. Anymore, you’re not really considered an employee, rather an eternal intern just outside of the googol/facefuck/apphole campus.

Well i just watched my 1st month deposit evaporate like spit on a hot sidewalk - sort of like your life savings if you contract Covid-19 in the oh-so-much-Gr8r U.S. of Corporate ‘merica. What makes no sense is how much of this havoc is adjustable. We have all the computing power to resolve most every situation on the planet that jeopardizes life or property, so it makes no sense that all these servers are serving nothing more than tracking how to take every last dime from every last person - no sense at all · not even for the rational billionaires, however much of an oxymoron that expression is. And wisdom really does remain a viable alternative, if for no other reason than that the most high holy reasoning i’ve heard yet is to be kind to yourself in order to be kind to others.

I couldn’t secure a skillet in the move so that will probably come out of the last of my deposit - deposit for a property i probably spent out of pocket no less than 2 million dong improving and leaving 500k dong on the table, but the nouveau riche landlord couldn’t see clear to sell me the mismatched skillet and lid because he was so blinded by the fantasy that i kept a mythical extra set of keys, which apparently i had secreted away in order to sneak back in and still the big screen TV that was only utilized when the deeply troubled neighbor nephew took advantage of the one hot night in my tenancy that i left the door adjar, and sort of like “counting coup” left the TV ablazing in the dead of night - that or one of the rat mischief was a refugee from Ben’s herd and turned on the set just to demonstrate to me who’s running the show - i d k ·

No matter how many times i ride the Cua Dai, An Bang, Cua Dai circle i ain’t getting any younger and there ain’t fuck all i can do about it. However vis-a-vis what Leonard Cohen described as the “preliminaries” it pays to get exercise, to stay hydrated, to smoke less and love more. Anger is indeed poison that corrodes any path you walk, while simultaneously good cheer insulates better than styrofoam on a hot day, and doesn’t poison the environment, however much confusion it causes the haters in the audience. The hardest truth to swallow is how much i fit that profile of someone who irrationally holds to a conviction that has no merit and was largely formulated and a time long since past - it dumbfounds me to know i cannot excoriate that part of my being that waged war for so long that peace of heart seems like an affectation of one of those praying to “ET”, but i have to laugh in closing to know that i am in fact “E-something” to some creature somewhere gazing into the ______fill in the blank just like you and me.

jts 25/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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240720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

Well, the deed is done and i no longer live in the house i used to live in, once again. You’d think after this much time changing domiciles i’d have managed to be more unruffled - or at best tolerant of when i am ruffled. I understand, though have never been told that i reside within the autistic spectrum (whatever the fuck the means); i gravitate toward order because that is how i was trained: Pop, “put it back where you found it.” At the same time our neighbor was a lineman for ATT, and one of the features of our garage was a 10 foot high by 14 foot wide x 18 inch deep set of cubbyholes, each with a small riser that contained former naming conventions for what must have been an excess of a 100+ spaces that became our “tool chest” - picture “Thing” in the Addams Family. You could put a screwdriver in space X, a 1,000 times and never find it there again - remembering this was a home with 6 other people and a bizarre imbalance of 3 lefties out of 6.

This training has come in quite handy with Homeland Security gaining access to the ‘merican public’s hard drives in it’s valiant fight against terrorists worldwide, except those found within the border of the “homeland,” having “Sneetch Stars on ‘thar’s” apparently exempting them from the turmoil of a militarized constabulary originating in the repatriation of escaped slaves during the more corrosive and incomplete transitions of  our historical experiment in multiculturalism. When i say “our,” i mean we. The thing about growing up in ‘merica is that there was no homeland; we all shared different homelands and that seemed a miracle, but now it seems there one homeland and only a segment of the public belongs - that my friends is bullshit.

I remember clapping and clapping some more when Bill Murray described us as “mutts” - Heinz 57 was an actual heritage in over-the-line pick up games at Corsica Park; mine own is Scottish, French, (apparently no Czech) that i’d always been rooting for, but two of my grandfathers were orphans, one paternal, on maternal - so to say what my blood is has always been a complicated equation. I grew up as J. Todd Stevens (read silent J), but always had an affinity for my mother’s father, my namesake - Joseph who’d been dead 10 years by the time i was born. I am proud to be the mutt Bill Murray described in the movie  “Stripes” but am dismayed the film did not go further in it’s social critique, almost suggesting that if the military could embrace multi-ethnicity and killing and maiming for profit would magically become legitimate. 

Here we sit counting decades toward our doom, rather than steps away from our past. And no one seems to be ruffled. The leaders - lead; the followers - follow and the oceans are churning up dead fish rather than bounty; there’s an irony for you “Mutiny on the Bounty” does “Extinction” in technicolor - of course there will be subtitles from the DHS deleting expletives, and tailoring the body count from the latest viral infection, but people are no longer able to distinguish - “virtual” from actual · 130,000 million ‘mericans dead: 43.3333333 times more live’s lost than 9/11 and people are quarreling about wearing face masks, because they lack the basic education to parse “epidemiology fundamentals.” I was faced with cautioning a discerning intellect in the country i reside from watching “Deliverance” because, it was just too close to fact, and too far from her reality.

Last night, the only solution i could find to my anxiety was to lay sleepless chanting mantras of my own concoction - it helped · far more than searching the virtual reality that is being supplanted into the body politic by unscrupulous “social engineers” so gorged on their digital whimsy as to believe that through the power of numbers which they are able to process with increasing facility - they can control what no person has ever been able to do, everything; all the while losing sight of the simple truth of logic. The zero “O” revolutionized human thinking the same as pulling the right sliver from a log jam will release an inert untold mass into a fluid dynamic. That my friends is not the purview of human beings and it is simply arrogance manifest that we would ever want to control anything more than the human anatomy that we are passing through. 

jts 24/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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230720 - Extinction Chronicles ·

“karma’s bitch, then you die.” - A. Nonymous · it’s as though every fun thing in my life has been sucked dry by conventional wisdom; just using the pejorative (however the fuck you spell it) “bitch” takes all the fun out of using a convenient sleight that goes back 60 years into my sense of humor - and i am willing · once a suitable replacement rises to the occasion, but i don’t see much on the horizon. Too little funny, too much bullshit - so my own admittedly bizarre reaction formation is “radical accountability”. I moved out of my “Charming Homestay” after 3 months acclimating to Viet Nam - there was really no return ticket and where i landed seemed perturbed by my ways. I took a house close enough to where i landed to gauge my fictions from facts - it didn’t work out that way · Madame Viet Nam being more mysterious than my limited experience could perceive. The late stage Villa development catty corner to my new digs should have clued me.

Within a month it was occupied and all seemed peaceful enough with recognizable lilt of French bouncing off the walls of the tight corner. At the time i was trying to sync with the farmer’s early hours and relished the dawn mornings until the Villa mounted a three foot neon bulb i can only imagine was meant to dissuade the lurking presence of locals. In kindly cooperation, its light was relegated to the dangerous hours after midnight. My computer ruptured a screen requiring 2 weeks docking in Da Nang, 2nd time of xptr free existence in my short stay. 3 days into the loss of my translator a crew landed eviscerating the old growth bamboo strand that allowed me privacy from the rice field thoroughfare and cool air for the small cluster of houses i live within - i was dismayed and saddened by the further burning destruction of a “canopy” which had endured so much brutality and survived as a legacy part of Vietnam. 

Once i was back on line and able to inquire with the neighbor farmer family what logic determined the clear cutting of such beautiful growth - i was told it was at the request of the inhabitants of the new Villa. All i could figure was the wanted a better “view of the rice fields” in which they lived in the more “tony” section of a boutique heritage site. I was not amused, nor was i tolerant of such _______fill in the blank. This is where my history of any kind of character quest breaks down and my own cruelty created more pain and suffering than i would have ever imagined possible from “bitter searching” of my heart. I was unrelenting in my unwelcome at almost the same instant that Covid-19 was encroaching the tourist shores of Viet Nam. Within days and a weeks the poor damsel with a child in her household, a mother who likely innocently enough only wanted a better facebook photo had the ire of yours truly.

I have pondered long and hard about how to rectify my error in behavior, and when i had determined the only viable solution was a face-to-face apology to this individual i know not at all nor have any real reason to wish anything but kind passage, and a more developed sense of our planet’s precarious future · she moved out within days of my taking possession of a house catty-corner to what had been her front door. Everything about my move seems fraught with conflict - from an increasingly entrenched landlady who imagined i’d pay six months in advance for the privilege of living with the cigarette scarred sofas of her “foreigner bungalow” to being treated like the virus itself, as though just because i am of the age and nationality which had caused so much havoc in her country 50 years ago, disrespect and hostility would be acceptable. (a paragraph largely forged in fear, fatigue and resistance to change.)

My quandary and why i share - i am okay with reparations for Viet Nam, my country was wrong out of the gate and it pleases me to no end to spend copious amounts money in the country - having said that, i find the open invitation to the bourgeoisie a reckless and limited consideration of what is possible to the demonstrably resourceful and relentlessly enduring workers of Viet Nam, especially with respect to the survival of the species. I have listened to the laughter of free people, which i miss more than i can describe with words. I welcome the insight that that laughter may only be the visible portion of the “iceberg” of authentic human existence, but lacking calm and allies, it is the best i can come up with - find people who are laughing and follow them · therein may be hope. 

jts 23/07/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

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