The beautiful lady and I have taken a grand nest in the Silverlake hillside.

It’s a spanish hut with white walls and wood floors. Birds live here.

The walks are on a slope and the sun can touch the ground in some places. The trees do in most others.

I’ve been shuffling between hard and soft images a lot lately.

Opening the fridge, I can find an equal share of celluloid and fresh greens.

This hill is a new canvas. Every walk is a new picture…painting…thought…expression.

Building shoe racks and buying time.

Strange dreams are comfortable, but only when lucid.

I’ll be on the resting drive.

*

Would you like to see?

You gave us Rock & Roll

RIP

Dear little Six – Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won’t be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?Oddly – as if six billion of us weren’t enough to be going on with – it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being “somewhere up there”, an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand.That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.This sky god, it’s said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces – junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic “ancestors” whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it’s only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in “your” stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it’s true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods. In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker’s dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here’s something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn’t lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race’s numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.
(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don’t believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam’s present day “political arm”. The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There’s very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their “sphere of influence.” They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless – American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country’s Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city’s increasingly fearful Muslims.
The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don’t look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it’s the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.
The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, “It’s easy if you try.”

As for mortality, the second great question – how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.To my mind, religion – even at its most sophisticated – essentially infantilizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things – female circumcision, to name just one – can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?(This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph,UK.)

Well, no, it isn’t, but the reasons for saying so aren’t clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.
This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it’s also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there’s no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky’s the limit.

• Extract from Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam.

(//This is also context fit for today’s struggles in the socio-political and tyrannical sphere. Take a look around…Iran is crumbling…N. Korea is pushing buttons…Iraq and Afghanistan are wasting away…And so many other nations are beginning to reach closer into the possibility that it allcould be for nothing. Nothing but a system of control and fear that keeps the dying machine from shutting down. Ah, Renaissance…//)

Thank you dredg for resurfacing this article for your art and our eyes//ears.

ME ME ME ME ME

It’s my birthday, and I’m gonna drink scotch.

What better than one that shares the same age as yours truly?

The Double L bar is definitely a place to visit. Cheap booze and funny people. The locals were so inviting for how freakish we were. Those city-folk. One special feller wanted my splatter jam pants right off my back for $10. The owners are lurchy people with kind hearts. They respected my taste for drinking scotch neat, while the other city-folk stuck with vodkas and beer. We brought the music with Devastating Karate.

Lone pine consists of a main street that holds about 30 shops and restaurants. They love fishing gear and Minnetonka Moccasins. There is a film commission and museum located on the main street. There have been hundreds of films made in Lone Pine, from wild western classics to Iron Man. There is no Starbucks here. A blessing for the conservation of pure Americana.

Don’t ever go to the High Sierra Cafe. It’s the most disgusting thing ever. Moldy toast (I found out a few bites too late), dirty silverware, and undercooked food (my eggs were sent back and came back with burnt edges and unsafely runny insides).

I’d suggest going to the Alabama Hard Rock Cafe. One of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had away from home.

We stayed at the Mt. Whitney Motel. Owned and operated by a sweet family from India. $49 per night with maid and room service. The bed was stiff as a board and the shower was a little quirky, but all and all for the price…good stuff.

The mountains and desert flats around the area are some of the most beautiful sights I’ve yet to see in California. Going in the winter is perfect because there is enough snow to make your teeth chatter and your eyes glisten, yet not enough to make the fingers and toes sting against the cracked concrete trails.

Lone Pine…I’ll see you again.

So many thoughts on so many things and I’m hiccuping inside my eye sockets

Writer’s block, lover’s block, home songs and still clocks…tick/tock

Lingering pedestals and empty pews are aligned in my veins

Old words feeding on my capilaries

I’m collecting secrets to put under the lake-bed rocks that align the front of my home. some hold keys, others hold locks.

Decode these braille dots but don’t mind the mess

Think like a child and paint the rest with your fingers

A mess only for those that are too old to understand how clean it really is

All the lord’s work they take in stride.

…”One step at a time,” said the fortune cookie.

I was a child when I read that. Look at how it all still makes sense.

After 1 hour, I had it set and ready. I wish I could write like Daniel Rossen does. Playing that song, and singing it later on record was a treat, and it just felt completely together. I commend this song… Maybe I’ll upload it here. Maybe not. Just listen to the original, it’s not too different, other than being a lot better than my attempt.

“Oh boy. When you’re gone, you are gone…”

“One after the other, after the other… Just like herringbone.”

(L-R) Writer Clay Frohman, actor Liev Schreiber, actress Mia Wasikowska, writer/director Edward Zwick, actor Jamie Bell, actress Alexa Davalos, actor Mark Feuerstein and producer Pieter Jan Brugge arrive at the 2008 AFI FEST Closing Night Gala Screening of “Defiance” held at ArcLight Hollywood on November 9, 2008 in Hollywood, California.