haiku 26 Feb 2018

Once-hard ground now thaws
Spring is grasping, slick beauty
Life returns with speed

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 13 Nov 2017

Green leaves fall frozen
Arctic winds sweeping southward
Deadly beautiful

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

keeping out friends

Every door in this hunting-shack that leads to the outside has a lock; every night, as I practice my tactile awarenesses by stepping gingerly throughout this hovel with the lights off, in pitch-blackness, I activate these locks one after the other, with a few flicks of my fingers locking out the dark, the cold, and all things unforeseeable. And yet, every night, after basking briefly in the fleeting surety of my false security, I laugh out loud at myself for ever having believed such nonsense in the first place.

Locks only keep out friends and people who might desire to enter one's home but who are too nice to smash in one of its windows. Robbers and thieves are not deterred by locks – they never have been; they never will be; and there is nothing one could ever do, short of encasing one's entire home in a shell of steel-reinforced concrete twenty feet thick and never leaving, that would be able to prevent a dedicated and determined person from gaining access to its dusty interior. (I doubt that even such measures would keep out someone with time, a cutting torch, and a pneumatic jackhammer on his side.) Locking one's doors at night is a good idea, especially where I live out in the sticks where there is really no one else around to watch my door or to keep an eye on things regularly; and few insurance companies are likely to compensate for stolen goods if they discover that exterior doors had been left unlocked; for the most part,however, leaving doors unlocked is a sign of one's abiding faith in the goodness of mankind, a beacon of love to one's neighbors, proof of one's detachment from material goods, and a strong indication of how little value one places on the trappings of the harsh outer world and how greatly one cherishes the tender peace within.

A better writer than I once urged us to invite in anyone who knocks on our doors, to grant entry to any person coming to call – be that person angry or joyful, bearing arms or bringing gifts – into the shadowy recesses of our homes, and, thereby, to allow him to plumb the deepest depths of our buoyant and exuberant souls. I struggle to follow this saying, preferring too often the calm of safety to the excitement of risk, trying too often to erect walls against the messy Great Unknown instead of welcoming it in with open arms. If I have learned anything during the past three-and-a-half decades, however, it is that, no matter how tightly I shut my eyes or stop up my ears, the Universe always finds a way to access those areas I would prefer to keep hidden, and to pierce such veils as my ego tells me I need to keep in place. Slowly, then, and only with considerable effort, am I learning to let go of my fears and to drink as deeply as I can of the horrible beauty of this wonderful thing we call life. Mahalo.

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)

on free time

Today, devices exist in homes across the world that work so that humans do not have to. Among these are dish-washers, vacuum-cleaners, lawnmowers, well-water pumps, washing-machines for clothes, and televisions. Rather than having to wash one's dishes by hand, to sweep furiously at one's carpet, to cut one's grass using muscle power, to maintain water-pressure by hand, to clean one's clothes, or to entertain oneself, these machines – which run either on gasoline burning in their innards or on electricity (that is generated by the burning of coal before it is piped via an enormous network of skeletal electrical towers across vast distances to emerge finally from wall-mounted sockets) – do nearly all of the work that people used to do for themselves. In order to buy these devices, to pay to have them repaired, maintained, and upgraded, ​and to pay for the gasoline and for the electricity required to make them run, their owners must work – depending on their level of skill, influence, luck, and education – at one or more jobs, labor for which they receive financial compensation.

Advertisers market the aforementioned devices as things that will increase the amount of free time available to consumers and as things that are supposed to make life better. In reality, however, these devices do not make life easier for the majority of people who grow accustomed to their use; these devices rob the people of the good, hearty workouts associated with cutting grass using the body's own power, with washing clothes using the body's own power, with washing dishes using the body's own power, and with hauling water using the body's own power; these devices rob the people of the need to maintain the art of storytelling, and of the need to maintain the art of making art. But, aha! I have just had a thought, namely that because these machines exist, and because they reduce the amount of time that people would otherwise have to set aside to take care of their household and garden chores or to come up with clever ways to keep themselves entertained, because of these supposed time-savers, people are able to work longer hours and to work at more than one job in order to maintain their supposedly time-saving devices and to keep buying new ones as the old ones wear out. Therefore, these devices and the oft-repeated lie that they “save time” not only create but also perpetuate the type of wage-slave, consumption-oriented capitalism that, as I type, is being waged against the American people.

I have nothing really against free time, only the way that free time is used. Americans and persons living in industrialized nations similar to ours use their free time to sit around eating highly processed and chemical-laden foodstuffs, watching television, playing video games, and generally getting fatter and unhealthier by the day; if, however these free-time-rich people were to work in community gardens, paint pictures, tell each other stories, go on hikes, or exercise their bodies and minds and make themselves into better and more interesting people instead of poking at touch-screen-equipped tablet computers while turning up the volume on the TV in order to drown out the sound pollution generated by the dishwasher and the washing-machine running at the same time, if these people were to be active and creative and all chip in to make this nation and this planet a greener and quieter place for all then we might slowly redeem ourselves in the opinions and estimations of a candid world. As it stands however, with our federal government owned and operated by the very persons who gain the most – financially – from our brand of wage-slave style capitalism, there is a greater incentive to keep the people fat, stupid, and sold on the idea that there are devices for sale that will make their lives easier or better rather than to encourage them to be self-sufficient, self-reliant, and self-respecting. How much farther down this stinking rabbit-hole of convenience-driven consumerism can we possibly allow ourselves to fall? America delenda est.

agitate – challenge – debunk – restore

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

on the use of eyes in street art

(reasons, questions, and motives)

Stroll through downtown Los Angeles, up New York's Broadway, or along the avenues of Philadelphia's Center City, and look in the forgotten, in the grimy, and in the underused places. With a keen glance and a bit of luck, you will witness the riotous beauty known as street art. Oh, what a profusion of style and color, of shape and size, of message and image, all blending into a whole that, if viewed from afar, resembles little more than visual clutter; but get in good and close, and follow the guidance of your peripheral vision, and your most tender of sphincters will drink invariably of the intoxicating power of street art.

But why do we look? Why are we powerless against the urge to sweep our gazes into worn and sticky places and up onto soot-covered utility poles? Eyes, my friends, we look at graffiti because it is full of eyes (and not just any type of eyes, but human eyes). Perhaps they stumbled upon the technique accidentally, perhaps they copied it from advertisers, or maybe they just plain Knew to tap into one of mankind's most primal and deep-seated fears, but, however it occurred, street artists employ one of the most basic methods for getting people to look at something – to give it eyes.

Since our time as forest-creeping, prairie-running, skull-bashing troglodytes, the species homo sapiens has developed the uncanny ability to recognize the shape of the eye even if it should be obscured by layers of seemingly random patterns. While experts may argue whether this ability is restricted merely to recognizing the human eye, or if it applies to the eyes of all of our former predators (think bear, cougar, coyote), few persons dispute the fact that our brains are really good at figuring out if someone, or something, is looking at us. Advertisers exploit this evolutionary adaptation to our status as Top Predator Of One Another by blanketing the phaltscape with pictures of pretty people who nearly all happened to have been staring directly at the camera's shutter when it opened. (Now, however, instead of our powers giving us the upper hand in a fight-or-flight situation, they allow us to be convinced that we need that new and re-formulated cucumber body scrub; woe be unto mankind.)

All quasi-scientific, pseudo-evolutionary nonsense aside (I am not a scientist, nor am I particularly intelligent or well-versed) – why do graffiti-writers use so many eyes in their designs? Why in the name of Beelzebub do they wish for people to look at their works of art, and to what purpose do they make use of our aforementioned ability to pick eyes out of the ether? As the SDUBS (self directed urban beautification specialist) is wily and suspicious by nature, and since she maintains a level of honor, decorum, and discipline so profound as to make inquiry into her personal matters a life-threatening endeavor, these questions shall likely go unanswered for many generations to come. For now, however, please enjoy the street-side galleries of free-to-the-consumer art wherever you may be, and rest easily in the knowledge that, by looking back at eyes that look at you, you are merely executing a deeply-ingrained survival reflex that is as natural to humans as is laughter. Never forget, however, to keep an eye out for your fellow man, he who has been hunting you for longer than you shall likely ever know.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit