Nature or shall we say evolution has played many a mean trick on us whether it was intentional (intelligent design, or in this case unintelligent design) or just random acts that seemed to work at the time but that take a long time to change. Chistos di Destino, jokes of destiny ( that was a good movie by Lena Wertmueller who was a protege of Fellini). Here are a few other bad destiny jokes that I have been thinking about.

1. We have a brain that understands perfection and can never, never even approach it.
2. We have a brain that understands immortality but can't have it either.
3. We have a brain that often mistakes lust for love. Messy bit of business there, wouldn't you say?
4. We have a brain that remembers things we want to forget and forgets things we want to remember.
5. We have a brain that thinks enough is never enough and then we have a brain that makes a rule against thinking like that.
(Thou shall not covet) It is one of the 7 deadly sins so it must be bad.

Back to Lena Wertmueller. She was quite popular in the 1970's. My favorite film of hers was "Swept Away" with Giancarlo Giannini. Just saying his name was such a pleasure, watching him was beyond pleasure (see #3 above). This was an adaption of "The Taming of the Shrew" mixed with the struggle of the working class (him). Not to mention that it was really, really romantic. They are shipped wrecked on a deserted island so naturally any class structure crumbled. This is definitely a date movie (film) but no Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks this. It has raw ribald humor mixed with biting political satire. American movies don't do this. Why? Does this lead us to #6? We are born one place but our brains think like we were born in Italy.

I realize I am blaming all of this on the brain and/or the mind. You know that massive chemistry lab you carry on your shoulders that often makes more problems than it solves. The Lab that is open 24/7 and works overtime at 3am when it releases the most thought disturbing chemicals and then is mad at you because you didn't give it enough sleep. The Garden of Eden was when we didn't have a brain except the one that makes you breath and eat and mate. Eve obviously got the human brain first because she had a brain that thought enough was never enough and life has never been the same and several millennia later I am up at 3am thinking that enough is never enough and then feeling bad about it.

The name of the movie with the 3 scientist on Mont St Michele was "Mindwalk". My friend Ruth Johnson who couldn't figure out how to comment on the blog emailed me and gave me the details. It was based on "Turning Point" by Frithof Capra and was mostly just talk about quantumphysics/metaphysics except it was a little to glib. Physics has to be a little more difficult than that. It was a dialogue between a scientist, Liv Ullman a politician and a poet. Nice setting though. It was the "documentary" version of "What the Bleep......" which was an animation/dramatization/talking head flick about how to make a science movie for the new age. We should have all been given crystals when we left. Neither of these selections are on my list of favorite films but they did move me along a bit in my personal journey of why I am not a scientist but would love to be one.


Any film by Frederico Fellini is top on my list. I will never forget seeing "Juliette of the Spirits" about a middle aged woman going insane. I think. Fellini's films make you think and my mind was just beginning to know that that was a possibility and that there was something else in the world beside boys, cars, cloths. Yes, I will be the first to admit that I was really shallow during certain formative years, but I am glad I was because I learned a great deal about what is important and what isn't. Having fun is important. So is being serious. I like to do both at the same time.

On the first level of Dante's Hell are all the people who risked nothing in life. I would agree with that one as people who believe in nothing don't really have a life but I had a hard time dealing with Paulo and Francesca who are the star-crossed lovers that are doomed to hell because they let passion override reason. I guess I am going to Dante's hell. Think about it though: spend eternity with people filled with passion, like Bill Clinton, and all the artists and writers I can think of or with Saint Bernard and his pantheon. I guess both would be interesting. Actually to Dante, Hell is for people without hope. Purgatory for people with hope but missed the boat on the passion/reason thing but are trying to improve by going through a private hell for a while. That might not be so bad actually. Isn't that life?



Back to movies. I remember now the movies that were so important to me.

1. Mondo Cane. I went with my sister who was in college. It was at the Valley Art so I knew it was going to be something entirely different and besides college kids went to it. It was really the first film I'd seen that dealt with the human condition. It was shocking. The title might give away the fact that things weren't as good as I had thought as it means something like world gone to the dogs. It was mind expanding. It made me think. It was a film not just a movie. I would love to see it again and see if it holds up. So often things don't. I remember seeing "Easy RIder" and thinking at the time that it was soooooo cool. I tried to watch it as an adult and it was so silly and so trite. About the same time I saw Mondo Cane I read "The Little Prince", which was one of those simple little books that had a very strong message for me about how to live a real life. I read it a lot. I understand they are making a movie out of it.

2. Last Year at Marienbad. I didn't understand this film at all but I knew that I should. It was the first "art film" I had seen that was way over my head. I didn't understand flashbacks at the time and the time sequences are really dominant in this film. I think that is what it was all about. I need to see it again. I learned I had a lot to learn and a very long journey to take if I were going to be the enlightened person that the Little Prince and Mondo Cane had convinced me I should be.

To continue on books for a while.....another book that was very life altering for me was Barbara Kingsolver's "Prodigal Summer". I read it during the first summer after my husband died so I was pretty much like a sponge just soaking up anything that would allow me to feel alive again. It is not Kingsolver's best work, I like "Poisonwood Bible" better and it is a better written book but Prodigal made me start writing and writing made me start feeling and feeling made me start living again.

It is amazing to me that after experiencing chaos in our lives we can self-organize again. One thing one learns from being in chaos is that it is our friend. For example, and I digress here a bit, Hurricane Katrina was probably the result of some butterfly flapping it wings in Brazil and causing all the seemingly unrelated chaotic events that ended up being Katrina. A lot of things that didn't have anything to do with weather, per se, made Katrina happen. The healing of New Orleans will be the same, Chaos and self-organization. Chaos allow us to be reborn into a new human being or a city. I am not the same person I was 10 years ago. I am not even sure I would like the person I was ten years ago. My spiritual and physical "Katrina" reorganized me into someone I like better. Does this mean that horrid things have to happen to us before we can reach some kind of enlightenment? I hate to say it, but I think it is true. Of course there is no guarantee that the horrid thing will bring enlightenment. It could just make you bitter or hateful or a victim and/or catatonic. The question looms though, will New Orleans be better? I sure could be. Then again it could become a plastic disneyesque version of it former self.

Another book, "Into the Forest", by someone I can't remember was so impressive that I am going to go to Amazon right now and buy another copy. It was the first book I read in my book club and everyone else pretty much hated it.

I think it is easier to think of books that have changed my life for some reason. Here is the start of my list. These are the fiction ones.

1. Damien by Herman Hesse
This was the first piece of literature I read without having to for a class. I hadn't been to college yet and high school for me was a totally hateful experience that I don't really want to ever think about it. The only thing I remember from high school was the first page of my French book. J'entre dans la salle de classe. Je pron my place, j'oevere mon livre, je regard la tour Effel. That's it and it's probably wrong. I "met" Hesse when I was traveling in Europe with a friend who had been to college and was by my standards of the day, very intellectual. She was my Virgil, my guide to enlightenment by choice. I was on a train in one of those old style compartments where the seats face each other. Julie is across from me. She had suggested I read Hesse. I was awestruck with the language even though it was a translation from the German, which I didn't speak then just the 4 sentences in french. I ended up reading everything Hesse wrote and pretty much continued that tradition to this day, that is, reading everything from an author until I get completely sated. Anyway, Damien is about a young man who struggles with his identity in a really big way. He is making the break with the traditional/conventional path of his parents and finding that he is quite different than they are. His world is very different from his parents and that is what struck me, how different my world was from the world my parents knew. There was then a tremendous generation gap. He discovers that even the greatest good can be used for horrid evil. It is not the typical coming of age book like so many others we were required to read either by professors or peers. As is so often true, I can't remember all of why it moved me but I do know that somehow it rearranged the chemicals in my brain and changed me forever. I was not the same at all when I was done. I was well on my own path to myself.

More on the generation gap. At that time, in the 60's the old world collided with the new. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius, if you will. As hokey as that is it is the social metaphor of the times. My parents were raised by Victorians. I did not live in a Victorian world by any means. I am going to think about why things changed then so much in the world
and, why for people like me, it was such a struggle to become myself and move away from that past. We can discuss it later. Somehow that past failed us. I think Hesse thought the same thing. He made me do this.

Are all movies Films? I went to see the "Constant Gardener" last night and when I left the theater I said, "That is the best Film I have seen in a long, long time. Needless to say I didn't say that when I left the theater after seeing "Bewitched". It wasn't even a good movie. So what is the difference? First off Films are good and they are a delight to watch on so many levels. For example, "Constant Gardener" was was a geo/political polemic. It was also a discourse on ethics and morality not to mention an exploration of courage and of how far one can go for what one believes in. It was a love story, tender and touching and surprise, surprise not illicit or pornographic. It was filled with contrasts. The music was awesome and was used effectively to delineate the different cultures in the film. Color was used in a similar way. Flashbacks artfully gave us the history we needed and not at all confusing. There was with a mixture of intimate handheld camera work and wide expansive shots of landscapes. I could watch this film a hundred times and want to see it again. And more importantly I could learn something from it every time. The narrative was compelling but it was the form of the art that took my breath away. That is a film. A movie is something you rent when you are board and want to be entertained. I don't think you can go away from a movie and be changed on some elemental level, you can't help but be when you see a film you love.

5 favorite films (not in a linear order of best to worst)

1. Constant Gardener
2. Dr. Strangelove
3. Them ( I include this as it was a film that affected my life from childhood on. It is probably a movie, but what did I know)
(It is the one about the ants that mutate because of atomic testing an important issue to me as a kid who lived in the
middle of no where and down wind from Nevada). Ultimately we all live down wind, don't we?
4.
5.
I have to think about the rest. Help me out here.

I figured it out. It doesn't matter if art is analytical or expressionistic. It can be all of the above or non of the above but what it always is is sensual. Think about it. Seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, hearing. It isn't about being beautiful or shocking it is about being aware of being.

Nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse. Sophocles


Some artists are totally analytical, Sol Lewitt comes to mind. I don't see any emotion or intuition there. It is almost pure geometry, very rational (what ever that means). It would be impossible for me to do art like his. I divide the world of artist into at least 2 categories. Analytical and expressionistic, linear and nonlinear, rational and irrational. Notice how mostly we define the opposite with a form of the original word. Is the original word the one that is" not" the other one or is it the one that is i.e. is the word irrational the concept and we subtract the ir to get the opposite. It is like man and woman. Which is it?. Getting back to the 2 types of artists, naturally it is a matter of degree and the amount of linear/non linear influence an artist has at any given time is mutable. I am perfectly balanced as an artist. The rich irony here is that I am not balanced in my non art life and that somehow allows me to be balanced in my art life. Or as Jakob Böhem so elegantly said, "Now mark what I say. The Right Eye looketh forward in thee into Eternity. The Left Eye looketh backward into Time. If thou now sufferest thyself to be always looking into Nature, and the Things of Time, it will be impossible for thee ever to arrive at the Unity which thou wishest for". Works for me.

I like what anonymous 1 said about dreams yesterday. Dreams work. I have been trying to design a new painting that I want to call, "Bi Polar" in celebration of that most noble affliction and I meditated on it before sleeping and sometime during the nightI was "told" how to paint it. It was like a lightening flash of insight.

"April is the cruelest month". T.S. Elliot

September, by far is the cruelest month for me. On the 9th five years ago my husband died in my arms after suffering all the horrors of chemotherapy. Now, of course we have the aftermath of Katrina and the memorials for Sept 11. It is all one big bad memory. I saw a documentary last night on 9/11. Seeing those pictures again brought back so much. The feelings of helplessness and defeat. I remember the sorrow that accompanied the knowledge that the life we had know so far was somehow over and things would never be the same.

Once about 8 months after my husband died I was hiking in Tortilla Canyon with friends. We weren't on a trail, just moving as a group through the canyon. I felt at the time like we were a prehistoric troupe of early wild humans. It was a pleasing sensation of something very ancient. Like this is the way it is supposed to be somehow. We came to a little piece of paper lying on the ground. A couple of the others stepped over it. I picked it up and on it was written, in this scrawling, psycho-like handwriting, "Nothing's the same any more". Like I needed a reminder. Interesting though. I think I did need a reminder. I needed to acknowledge the change and move back into the world of the living. When someone you love dies you die with them and then you wake up and you find out that they left you a passport into a new life. It is almost as if though them you can now live again. What a gift.

" There is no science without fancy and no art without facts", Vladimir Nabokov

Someone said in class the other day that art was emotional and science was rational. Clearly, that is way to simplistic. Nothing is just about one thing. There is no way my art, or anyone else's I know, is only emotional. I don't even know what that word means. All I know is that it is most commonly used in a pejorative sense, as in "you are being emotional", as if that were some crime against humanity. What I deal with as an artist are facts and ideas diverted through a temperament, mine (Emile Zola's said that first). It is a translation, as it were, of a pre-verbal stage. It is about things that don't have a language yet either in my head or in the head of society as a whole. Paintings are like dreams, are dreams emotional? I dreamed last night I sat next to VP Cheney at a cocktail party in Jackson Hole and had a rational conversation with him about playing a game called Doom. I was quite calm in my dream and not at all emotional. So where do we put these "things" that are not rational per se, nor are they emotional? We need a word for the wordless. That is why we have dreams and art and we should just live with it and quit trying to pigeonhole it into something that it is not or something that limits it. Trying to define the totally abstract is a bad idea. It is like trying to define "God". Once you define it, it can no longer be God. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle works here too. That is why I like the theoretical physicists the best as they have a view of the world similar to mine. Ideas like Aristotle's "Everything either is or is not", just doesn't work for me. I also have problem with Descartes" Cognito ergo sum. To me it should be" I am, therefore I think".

Really the best news that has come out of this entire Katrina thing is that Bosnia Hertzagovinia is sending us $6000,00 (yes, that is correct, 3 zeros). It is the moral equivalent of The United Arab Emerits send us $100 million and some free oil. Maybe even more impressive actually when you consider what a mess the entire area was and still is. Why do I keep thinking that the current administration will somehow take all these gestures of solidarity and generosity and make everyone hate us even more. Who will be blamed for this disaster? Who can we invade now to get even? If Cuba, who wanted to send Drs., by the way, hadn't been located where it is the hurricane would not have hit our coast and destroyed our levies. It is there fault and we need to get even. Here is what I think: When people offer gifts one must accept them with all graciousness one can muster. It makes people feel good to do good thing. Apparently there are ship loads of supplies just waiting for the okay of our state department. Apparently, you have to be approved before you can give to us.

One of saddest things for me are all the people who have had to leave there pets behind. People who don't have pets would never understand the bond that is formed and the sense of responsibility one feels for what one has tamed. It is its own world. I wouldn't go without my dog if I had one. When I was a kid I ran away with my dog rather than loose him, which I had to do anyway because I was a kid. Let's face it the entire thing is sad and a black eye for certain people who are supposed to be our leaders. When they fail the most helpless they fail us all.

I have been working all day. Apparently I am supposed to take today off because it is labor day. It should be non-labor day if they don't want me to work. I was talking to my friend Rosemary on the phone while I was painting and said," Well, I have to get back to work" and she said, "You're working? It's a holiday"! What am suppose to do? Sit around and watch TV?. Labor day is a fake holiday to me. I don't even know what it stands for so it essentially means nothing to me. Thanksgiving and Christmas are ok, at least there we are celebrating something and having a feast. Actually when you get down to it I'm not much for any holiday. I used to like Halloween, but it has been ruined by people putting razor blades in the candy. My theory is this: 10% of the population at any time is psychotic so you are bound to get a few razor blades in life. I told this to my drawing class and someone actually raised his hand and said. "I am it. I am the crazy one". It was so nice of him to do that. It made it easier for all of us. It is comforting knowing who the really crazy one is so it doesn't have to be me.

I like to work on my paintings. One reason I like it is that it gives me an excuse never to clean my house. The idea is if I work all the time, then I can be excused from housework which I loath. People are so understanding. Since I turned my entire house into my studio I can have stuff everywhere, except in the kitchen which I try to keep tidy. And well the bathroom too.

I just got back for seeing "March of the Penguins". Why do I go to these animal films. They always break my heart. What brave sacrifices they made without question. Somewhere along the line of our rush to be evolved we started questioning everything. We challenge everything too, at least that is what we are taught to do. I can't imagine anyone I know living under those conditions just to bring in a new generation. No domestic abuse there. No running home to mother. No whining. We could all learn a lesson here. Skepticism is important, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to nurturing the next generation I think we should try and keep our mouths shut for a while.

I can't tell you how disappointed I am in Plato. Here I thought he was this great philosopher but in his Republic where he explores the idea of the ideal, utopian society, he totally puts down artists. Pretty much according to him, artists mainly poets, as he calls them, shouldn't be allowed in a civil and just society because they pollute the minds of the citizens. If you have them at all, they should be heavily censored and allowed to create only things that ennoble the gods and man. For example, fear of death is a bad thing so it is a taboo subject as is tragedy and or comedy. Boy, I bet the Athenian play-writes really liked him. Artists must never entertain anyone, just bore them to death. No fear there. It's a good thing no one ever really took him seriously because just about everything we know about ancient Greek culture is through the arts. Imagine, all we would have left is Plato and a totally wrong view of what they were like. He even thought Homer's Iliad should be censored because, (1) He made Zeus look petty and belligerent(which he was) and (2) He made the hero Achilles look non- heroic and whinny. Gods and heros must always look good because whatever you read you will become. I think he gives artists way too much credit.

Another thing that bugs me is that he thought that artists spoke the lowest level of the language. Excuse me! Artists speak the highest form of the language. Good grief. Imagine being married to this guy. Okay, one good thing he did was say that women should be educated the same as men. In that system of no beautiful or inspiring things to read or see, who would would care if they got educated. Ignorance is bliss, in this case anyway. How ironic, we finally find a guy who wants to give us equal rights and this is what we get.

I really didn't mean to insult my sister. She is really, really smart. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The thing I naturally do in life is try to find connections. Art, science and religion all come out of the human mind and experience but it is more than that, isn't it? They reflect our hightest asperations. They don't always achieve that status but seek to. Do all cultures have all three? I don't know. I am pretty sure they all have art and they all have religion. Religion and Art were the early science, but naturally there weren't "Science" as in using the scientific method, etc. But they did have systematic ways of trying to observe and explain things. Science evolved it didn't just happen one day. At one point Alchemy was what science was (wasn't). We learned from its failures. We all moved on.

I think Art, Science and Religion all come from the same source so they are all related. Almost nobody else agrees with me. I actually had a friend lecture me for 10 minutes about how ridiculous I was for even thinking that. Obviously, they use different methods. Duh! I know that but the search is for the same thing. "WHY", HOW, and "WHAT FOR". Don't we all want some sort of answer to those questions? Why else would we invent art, science and religion, not to mention politics. Scientist are often the most ardent in their denial of any relationship what so ever. And of course, I understand why what with the Bible Literalist wanting to include the Creation stories in science class. What are they thinking? There is science and their is faith. There is fact (science) and truth (art and religion). They use completely different languages to communicate. Logos for facts and mythos for art, etc. One explains the world the other embellishes it. Personally, I wouldn't want a world without both. They are equally valid and necessary although more often than not both sides diminish the other.
All I know is that I want answers and I search a lot of places for them. If you don't care about the essential QUESTIONS (root word QUEST!) then you live a truly unexamined life and I would love to hear from you because I have no idea what that would be like.

Something else I learned today is that the only truly monogamous creature on earth that we know of is a a tape worm that lives in the intestines of fish. It is possibly monogamous only because it is physically connected like a conjoined twin. I guess that would work. Not in humans though. We would figure out a way to get around that little problem, i am sure.