September 1st, 2008

The Circus

Okay. Political junkie that I am, I find that I am simply unable to resist commenting on some of the latest events unfolding in the two-ring circus better known as, "American politics".

1. John McCain's selection of veep running mate. Um. . , what the heck? Sarah Palin from up Alaska way immediately struck me as kind of high-pitched and totally non-threatening to any male ego which might hope to tread the halls of government. Compared to the self-realized personal power of Hillary Clinton, the contrast between Republican and Democratic thinking was striking. The whole maneuver made me blink. A kind of, "Yes, that's nice dear," brand of allowed power which fits the old American Pie model of family where the wife stays home to bake cookies and drive the kids to soccer and remains happy to let her protective dominant husband make all the big decisions. --Which will no doubt project an appealing image to many voters, but seemed to me exactly the opposite message Hillary's supporters were generally aiming for. Whatever.

2. Barak Obama is one of the best public orators I've ever seen or heard, and his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention made me think wistfully about how cool it would be to vote for him. I'd have a lot more confidence in his message, however, if his running mate wasn't an avowed Zionist, which essentially means the game of world politics fully intends to stay locked on the path of self-destruction. (I should note that I am firmly of the view that Jews and Zionists are very different things, and that Zionism is stupendously dangerous for Jews and non-Jews alike, which I suspect is the whole idea).

3. I am routinely fatigued whenever I snap out of the siren song to remember that this whole political play is a giant contrivance designed to distract everybody on the planet from the real battle at hand, (that of evolving and incubating personal sovereignty and awareness so that nobody can control you. --So that all of the knee-jerk programs which dominate virtually every aspect of our lives but which so few of us are even aware exist in our own psyches, finally dissolve away so that we can start treating each other and our world with a bit of love and respect). --That, and the division of people into various warring parties is similarly designed to waste everybody's energy.

Paradoxically, one of the foremost engines of social control, (that of taxation), seems with increasing likelihood to be one of the major catalysts which has a chance of cutting through these social barriers and give people the impetus to unite into a mode of thought which has a chance of taking us off the infernal treadmill. (I include oil dependency under the same umbrella as taxation; the money flows exactly the same way, from the pockets of the middle and lower classes into the pockets of the same handful of very wealthy white men). But will enough people actually blink up from that siren song and move to do something about this, or is it just another one of those doomed-to-be-ignored opportunities? I don't know.

sigh.

But then, I've always been a bit of an optimistic dreamer. Here's one of my favorite summations of the American tax story, (produced by the same fellow who was fascinated enough by the American money system to produce that neat Eddie Murphy film, "Trading Places"). I know, "Summation of the American tax story" sounds about as much fun to watch as staying indoors to do math homework, but it's actually a thoroughly riveting film.

So that's where my head is at the moment. Now if you'll excuse me, I am about three days late in drawing the latest episode of Stardrop. (I've been racing to get another project finished for a local newspaper, so my drawing energy has been divided.)

Cheers!

July 2, 2008

I've always been a sucker for a good radio drama. . . There have been a couple of really good productions I can think of; a handful of books-on-tape read by accomplished voice performers. So with this in mind, I decided that I might as well write some scripts and put together my own little radio drama series. . . Only to discover that such projects are rather more complex than one might imagine.

--Not impossible by any means, but I learned that it is very easy to do it poorly, and a poor radio drama is a shockingly disruptive thing to listen to. --If a voice actor cannot pull off an excellent performance then there's nothing, nothing at all to distract the listener. I was hoping to read for one of the parts, and realized that professional speaking is a big deal. --I'd lined up a number of willing voice actors, but I found myself unwilling to advance for fear of not getting it done right. (I know! It's a terrible reason for not trying, but it did make me stress somewhat.) Still, I learned quite a bit in the process and would like very much to make another attempt at some point when I am feeling more certain of myself.

Anyway, I was also left holding some really nifty audio gear. --A very cute and effective digital sound recorder. By way of testing it, I brought it with me to Acadia University for a talk I was asked to give at one of their graduate English courses. Now, due to the fact that I was rather new to using the device, I wound up pointing it in the wrong direction, but you can still hear my voice clearly enough. Future items posted here will be much more clear. Please treat this as the experiment it is.

Cheers!

August 22nd, 2008,

There's a lot of excellent thinking emerging these days. Many threads of awareness which are spotted throughout the vast internet. I've done a lot of reading over the past decade, (both on paper and screen), into many areas, most of them the sorts of things few of the people around me found to be particularly interesting. Studying politics and history on one's own time isn't exactly a typical sport, but it is a source of fascination for me. (My upcoming book, The Seventh Expert, through Annick Press is an example of this fascination, specifically all things medieval.)

Anyway, over the past five or six years, I've noticed that a large number of documentarians have jumped into this same ocean of emerging thought and have grasped hold of some handful of the many threads. The threads are all woven into a whole cloth, but it is a cloth is so large that one finds it difficult to examine with care more than a few parts of it at a time. I have, (being me), tried to look at the whole thing, and so I've spent hundreds of hours reading and pondering, but this results by necessity in a generalist's view. Others, however, those whose energies drive them to make documentaries, are the sorts of people who are so fascinated by a small handful of aspects that they are able to create very precise images to share. --Yet a documentary, while it is a wonderful device, remains simple. A documentary can lay out powerful patterns and fill them with enough researched details to create a succinct picture of the film-maker's mind, but it is only one picture, and often it will contain bits of flawed logic in spots which are hard to catch because once you are visiting the mind of the film-maker, all views within are by nature, internally consistent. And so it is important upon emerging from the world of a documentary to double-check and compare the ideas which have been shared with you. This should be seen as a challenge rather than a problem; it's just the way stories all are. But the stories themselves remain valuable, because while there may be flaws, the larger patterns are often fairly complete or in need only of some adjustment or gaps filled in. They are tools through which one can start to build their own knowledge of the world, and the exploration into the huge realm of human history and the new ideas which have been growing of late is an adventure!

Anyway. . . Every now and again, I'll find a documentary which does a particularly efficient or inspired job of putting together its share of threads into a coherent story. I'd like to share a couple of the ones which stand out in my mind. --Of course, many of the readers who enjoy my work, I have found, tend to be very aware people, and so I recognize that I may be sharing old ideas with them, but still. . . It's not like I'm printing this stuff on expensive paper. The digital medium has wide and plentiful acreage. The following film is the third part of a series called, "Zeitgeist". Very cool stuff. I'll post the first part another time. (The middle part I didn't care for, but that's simply the result of my own explorations. You are of course invited to make your own.)

Cheers, and enjoy!

August 4th, 2008,

Well, here's something new! --Many of you have probably seen plenty of 9-11 stuff, and are also probably quite tired of it. This one is really neat, though. --A group of pilots requested the flight data recorder info for the various planes on that fateful day through the U.S. FIOA, and put it through their own comparative analysis, contrasting it with the findings of the official 9-11 Report. Their work is both very sharp and very revealing. --I've seen a lot of this kind of material and usually there are several mushy spots, so it's nice to see some clean thinking. I do have a couple of reservations with some of their conclusions, but they have nothing to do with the major points offered. See what you think.

For more information on this video and the group which made it, visit, pilotsfor911truth.org

July 15th, 2008,

This is one of my favorite (very) short little animations. Alan Watts is one of those modern day philosophers who I place in the same general category as Joseph Campbell and Ray Bradbury. Enjoy!

July 2nd, 2008

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I've been asked this many times, and while many writers find the question understandably peculiar, I find it peculiar in a way which I really enjoy tackling because the answer is never quite the same. It's sort of an exploration of one's own mind, and I've always found this a fascinating exercise, usually because there always seems to be something new and interesting going on up there. --Often it involves a series of questions I am trying to find answers for, and when not doing that, my mental energy is spent following up on all the other little items in the world which fascinate me. There has always been a great host of them, and when the internet came along, that great host expanded dramatically. While much of what my mind produces is cobbled together from many different areas and thus takes a fair bit of effort to share with the world, every now and then I come across a diamond in the rough which I can simply hold up and say, "Hey! Check it out! A diamond!"

Well, having spent so many years with a website which I felt was sorely under-exploited for all its potential to communicate, I promised myself that when I performed my next massive overhaul, I would find some way to make a platform for those various items which have little or nothing to do with my comics, but everything to do with what fascinates and intrigues me. (--Which I suppose is directly and inextricably linked to everything I do in comics.)

So to start off with, I thought the first post I'd make in this area should be something appropriate to the whole subject of communication. This little gem is all about using the media to its fullest extent for all the right reasons. Ladies and gentlemen, --the gallant Bill Moyers offers a rousing keynote address at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform. . .