"Tyger, tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" /
"In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes? . .
"What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? . . ."
I am philhellene /
Rama is one of my favorite sci-fi books, I read it so many times, forget it and read it again, and the sequels /
Male artists have benefited from having great wives /
Because I run my own studio, shop my own groceries and clean up after myself I realized how male artists have benefited from having great wives. Art is very process heavy. Interruptions really mess things up.
Time for food? He sits down on the table. Time for bed? The bed is made and the linen clean. Time to wake up? Breakfast is ready and clothes are pressed. Time to step in the studio? No worries because the house is in order and the groceries and bills are taken care of.
Writing is so much easier than painting /
I am so suspicious of AI writing I stopped fixing my punctuation almost entirely. Living speech /
I was not only surprised by Greece's beauty but also by its great infrastructure and handling of crowds /
I've always been suspicious whenever Greece is bashed in the media as some backward country stealing European money. They're just very shrewd people and have been for several thousand years. The best public library in New York City was funded by a Greek. Thank you very much.
It's astonishing how well public transportation is organized given the massive hordes of tourists descending on the tiny Islands. If you haven't observed how these hordes are being swallowed and transported by the large ferries you haven't seen anything. They employ people in vests and whistles. Whenever the crowd makes a mistake in taking the wrong turn somebody always comes out in a vest and starts whistling and pointing in the right direction. The crowd obliges and keeps rolling their suitcases.
The little ants are being directed by the sugar cubes.
I've always been sad about how bad public transportation infrastructure is in the States. But then the US is enormous. I remember public transportation being awful in San Francisco and I drove everywhere although I should have been taking public transportation because it's a small city. I loved driving however at some point I started resenting it and realized it really isn't necessary. I think driving makes people lonely.
And the car culture sends people to the suburbs, in lonely unwalkable destinations that are not conducive to socialization. Socializing with random people is very important for the maintenance of the social fabric and trust. And fun you know, having fun is a lost art in America. Unless you buy a ticket to some place.
Ok so how did I end up here in my essay? Well I'm still processing my time in Greece. As an artist as a human being, their massive contributions to art. They invented world culture as we know it. Look around every city and there is Greek art everywhere, read any book and there are Plato's talking points everywhere. Public discourse, yeah this is what they invented.
I'm astonished how quickly the world descended into full on totalitarianism during covid /
I remember sitting in a Starbucks across from the Apple store on fifth avenue and they started taking the tables and chairs around me I'm like what the fuck is going on. And literally a day later screens in Chelsea started flashing the symptoms of an illness like some invisible orchestration. Every apocalyptic movie I've ever watched happened in front of my eyes and from walking on the curb because there was no space on the sidewalk I became the only one walking around in Manhattan.
Stunning Meteora /
Memory Replacement World Trade Center /
In this work I designed a self-contained primed canvas wearable and asked people from all walks of life and ages to paint, at the most iconic site in New York city - The World Trade Center 9/11 memorial site, a place of silent worship, remembrance, transcendence, reflection, astonishment, reverie. And now, painting.
Detail
I never imagined, the heart of capital, New York City, would be run by a communist /
Campaign Finance Reform or Else /
Replace Content Creator with Regurgitator /
Vile videos of homeless people on social media /
The next big problem we need to solve in America is the social problem. It has been a bit easier in Europe because of generational wealth, lower property taxes and social ties.
It has been really distressing for me and frankly find despicable when people post videos of distressed humans on social media and point fingers at them - see what the homeless do, see what the addicts do to our cities.
I find it especially distressing when wealthy people post videos of homeless people in various degrees of distress and undress.
If you have resources you are actually the perfect person to start solving the social problem of America because the people who are currently involved in social services are useless.
If you have resources sit down in front of the big AI you're paying for and start figuring out how to solve this.
I admit first I'm a hypocrite myself in this, I don't house distressed in my home and rarely help materially. What I've done personally materially as an artist is create free art projects to benefit strangers on the street. In New York I would occasionally buy groceries for people when I see them sitting next door to a grocery store. Sometimes I buy coffee and sandwiches. I have volunteered occasionally for soup kitchens. Not much.
I read that Neanderthals cared for the injured and the sick. So we need to start doing this before we solve abundance.
We are handful of atoms or just two handfuls of dust, there is absolutely no reason to grandstand on top of this dusty mote in the middle of a super large universe.
We are apparitions of quantum fields, we don't really know where one person ends and somebody else begins, It's possible we're just one big soup.
I'm just saying it's vile and despicable to post videos of homeless people, addicted people, people with wounds and undressed, and obviously distressed, because you're pointing at yourself.
If you're smart and with resources, if you have access to smart AI start figuring out how to solve this instead of posting videos on social media because it's obvious, as New York City is a prime example, government is absolutely useless. And it's not necessarily their job. As a rule and as the greatest philosopher of our time Douglas Adams has determined any person that wants to be a politician shouldn't be one in the first place.
We can't wait for abundance in order to start behaving decent.
If you feel that you environment is polluted by people in distress do something about it, you know, figure it out in a small way in a bigger way however you can just don't be vile about it.