Iron Giant

Eighteen years ago, I snipped a paragraph out of a magazine mentioning that a museum in Madrid had lost a sculpture that weighed 38 tons. WHAT? The permanence of art one would think is directly correlated to its size or weight. Or cost. Or who made it. Or its subject matter. Or age. Or... But snap, guys, "Didn't you have it? I thought YOU had it." Well, there goes 200,000 bucks. Probs smuggled out in a backpack...

This week a friend sent me a picture she had just taken of a Richard Serra piece, saying how much she loved his control of space and line. I concurred and rattled off a bunch of his works that I have walked around in LA, Seattle, San Francisco, the Dia Beacon outside of New York and... He is a titan -- the real Iron Giant. Over the years, I have watched a couple interviews with him on Youtube, notably one in which he mentions persistence, that 30 years, at the least, should be devoted to understanding one's craft and vision. Persistence. Like Cor-ten steel over time out in salt air... Like tens of tons of battleship hull plates curved into ludicrous and lucious arcs controlling space with grace and silence... It was a moment -- artists emailing mutual awe and respect. 

Later that day I found out Richard Serra died. Left this plane. That's it. 

For me, the passing of the heavies is like losing another father. Persistence of the vision is a result of showing up, being there, making art. Michael Heizer's persistence with "City" comes to mind, fifty years working on a sculpture. Carmen Herrera painted until she passed at 106.  I won't make a list of the old geniuses who still create masterpieces, but their value to our culture is criminally underappreciated. Serra is one of the last of a generation who expanded the visual vocabulary far enough as to circle back around to petroglyphs and shadows, massive simple objects in a landscape, the movement of the sun, light, just light, and a notion of the primitive as the core of our perception, the basest gesture with paint, the floating smudge of radiance. Space itself can be sculpture. As can light...

And so the eclipse is upon us, well-timed, Richard. The radiance of our star will be briefly extinguished next Monday by our closest dance partner. The universe is taking a moment to show us the sun's corona. The surface is 10,000 degrees while the corona of the sun, a thousand miles above the surface, is between a million and two million degrees Fahrenheit. With the disc completely covered, we will have a moment to witness this dancing firestorm before the blinding inferno returns to being unwatchable. See what can't be seen in the only moment it is revealed. 

Serra's immense sculpture, "Equal Parallel -- Guernica, Benghazi", all 38 tons of it, was not permanent. Being a sport, he made a replica, and it has been on display since 2009. Richard Serra, with all his immensity and power, was not permanent. But he shone and still shines. The sun returns after the eclipse. What these visionaries create and share with us mortals will endure and continue to inform us of our strength and perceptual powers AND our smallness, our sense of awe, tweaked by the soaring apse of a 1,000 year-old cathedral, or by the elliptical path and the arched steel walls of Serra's primeval temples. Persistence. Yes please and thank you. Vulcan and Hepheastus will be happy to share a frosty beverage with you.  

Humans come and go. Even the brilliant ones. Art, well, the good stuff endures. I am making a piece named "Totality". It will be my first round piece in these decades of doing what I do. Circle. Cycles. No corners. It's about time. 

And illumination. 

Pictures will follow. Can't make this til I see it...  Pay attention on Monday, my friends. In some spots the next eclipse won't occur for 800 years. Light sculpture made by itself. And then gone. 

Peace and love and thank you Mr Serra for sharing. I will say my personal thank you when the sun is being devoured. Light and shadow...  

b mac 

Lamb and Lion

Greetings,

Yesterday, as usual, was Pi day -- 3.14. And, as always, it is the birthday of Albert Einstein. The world I inhabit seems often made of convergences or nodes, in which tangential plot lines intersect. I made an art piece a month ago named "Einstein," which I chatted about in the last missive I sent to you folks, that used this name to describe a single shape that could completely cover a plane without a repeating pattern. The singular shape was dubbed "Einstein," which is German for "one stone." I happened to watch the film "Oppenheimer" prior to its winning Best Picture last Sunday night; and there he was in the film, all wild hair and soulful eyes, having furtive conversations with the film's protagonist. A little homework reveals that although the historically accurate and monumental letter sent to Roosevelt by Einstein warning of the Nazis' research into creating an atomic bomb, the man himself had minimal interaction with Oppenheimer's "Gadget" and his army of engineers and physicists in New Mexico. Einstein was a pacifist and did not want to build a bomb. Yet, as a genius, German and a Jew, he was convinced that if the Germans succeeded, they would use it. 

In about three weeks, Vermont will experience a total solar eclipse. Einstein's theories regarding the bending of spacetime by the mass of celestial objects were developed by 1911, but his surge into the public's awareness and out of the academic sphere occurred on May 29th, 1919. A solar eclipse on that day was the experimental proof that his calculations concerning the lensing effect of light caused by the sun's mass were spot on. He was right. Three hundred years of Newtonian physics was replaced by a new model of the universe. Einstein became the first science celebrity, touring China, Japan, India, South America, and the United States. He received the Noble Prize in 1921. He became the face of a genius and his name entered the international lexicon. "Well, he's no Einstein," to this day, is a declarative statement. 

Pi is an irrational number. It's a ratio. Its definition is a function, a precise description of how those numbers relate to these. It is about relationships. Albert Einstein's personal life was a drama of the highest order revealed by his collected letters. He had a child, outside of a marriage, who died young. He was married twice. He had multiple romantic relationships throughout his life. His son Eduard was schizophrenic and institutionalized for decades. He loved the violin and thought an alternate career could have been music. Although one of history's most famous Jewish men, he believed most strongly in the philosophy of Spinoza, a pantheist, and proclaimed he was a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He was mostly a vegetarian on ethical grounds. His closet was filled with nearly identical gray suits to save the fuss of deciding what to wear. 

What does this have to do with the middle of March? Deeply rational and totally irrational. This is the nature of our existence. Perfect and perfectly a mess.  Pi and the greatest mind of the millennium have had fabulous marketing and branding programs. But they are a function in their milieu. Brilliance is seen from particular angles. Sheen is a function of lighting and focus. When an eclipse swings through, darkness reveals the corona, the halo of light around the sun. Perfection revealed. Respect the mind of our greatest scientist, and respect his capacity to do his work amidst the trials of living. Math we didn't invent. We found it. Pi was and ever will be. Us? We are temporary animals. Do good things, my friends. Now is your chance. 

And finally, perspective. That ring around the black circle of the eclipse is sublime, but if one zooms in it is utter havoc in real time, an inferno, a magnetic nuclear cataclysm of plasma unravelling, bursting forth and sucking back to the surface, the absolute definition of chaos. Looks great from here. 

In like a lamb, out like a lion...

Buy art about light. It is the best.

Bruce Mac

Rules of Surfing, Part 2

Greetings occupants of the spaceship, 

Behold the first week of a new year. Freshness. Today, January 2nd, is officially perihelion, the closest the Earth gets to the sun in a year. Didn't expect that on one of the shortest days of the year in the dead of winter... This is our theme.

Roger Penrose is a 92-year-old British physicist and mathematician who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for affirming that the formation of a black hole is consistent with Einstein's theory of general relativity. He wrote a somewhat comprehensive book with Stephen Hawking entitled "The Nature of Space and Time", and more recently a book explaining how the laws of physics cannot explain human consciousness. In his immediate family are a physiologist, a geneticist, an artist, a chess grandmaster, and a computer scientist. In his free time, or what I suppose a polymath considers "free", he is fascinated with spatial relationships and corresponded with M.C. Escher in the early 70s, which inspired a whole range of the Dutch artist's visions on paper. In the news recently, and in the Instagram of a guy who hand makes one-of-a-kind soccer balls, are shapes called Penrose Tilings. Shapes that interlock to cover a plane completely can "tessellate;" the simplest example is to think of squares on a chess board. Escher did this often with birds and fish, guys and lizards. I did it years ago making salt and pepper shakers that I called "Mantas," which used the least amount of metal possible. Efficiency, ya know. Penrose came up with two distinct shapes that interlock precisely and tessellate perfectly AND never create a repeated pattern. Ever. This is the definition of "aperiodicity". These two shapes create an infinite number of the irregular. 

So, things that never repeat. Waves. Ask any surfer. Never the same. How about the weather? Hmm. Dogs? Friends? Your children? Chefs are pretty good at making the same dish. And triangles, those can be the same. Molecules. Atoms. Same same. But humans? Days in your life? I have written these essays and sent them to you cool friends for ten years now, chatting about whales, ostriches, dragonflies, and catamounts, all combos of carbon atoms and other stuff but about as far apart as living things could possibly be. Oh yeah, octopuses, tardigrades and paraceratherium. Didn't expect any of those in your inbox. 

That's the idea for this new year's missive -- what you don't expect is what happens non-stop. Sure, we all have our routines but 911, Chernobyl, the Wright brothers, the Hunga Tonga volcanic explosion in 2022 that was hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, Ukraine, Nvidia, the light bulb, Covid, Taylor Swift, phenomena that no one is expecting. Good things, tragedies. Everyday. Triplets. Mozart showed up. The Sagrada Familia will be completed soon. The Mona Lisa smiles. D-day. Every moment is Penrose tiling. The same basic stuff, daybreak and nightfall, over and over and never repeating...

So, what's the plan? Book the trip. Paddle out. Damn the temperature, just go. Adventure and beauty are waiting for you, if you show up. I'm going to keep writing these words in this language, and I guarantee you can't predict what they will address. Take pride in swerving. Surprise your friends. Call someone you love and tell them. Buy art. Go to the concert. Camp. Sail. Sell the house. Live in a van. Ride a bike to Zihuatanejo. Get a new job. Be your own hero. Take a break. Just be sure that on the day the perfect wave rolls in you are out on your board ready for it. This ain't a rehearsal. 

Happy New Year you sublime weirdos who read this. I love you. Be as big as you are. And embrace the unexpected; those bits are the things you will write about when you are ancient.

Peace and hugs, Maybe next time we can cover the Mobius strip. Maybe...
B mac 

P.S. Naturally, the miracle of Roger Penrose's mathematical epiphany was upset by an amateur shape hacker named David Smith who discovered a single shape that tessellates perfectly and creates "a pattern that never repeats." (That phrase is in quotes since it's an oxymoron, but I found it throughout my homework). It's a bizarre, seemingly impossible, surprisingly simple hat shape dubbed the "Einstein," which is German for "one stone." It has 13 sides. Aperiodic my friends. The same and never the same. Also, turned into a soccer ball. Look that guy up. 

P.P.S. For those of you with ears, check out Chris Botti, especially his live recordings, and the band, Sigur Ros. Not what you expect. Like the waves off Mavericks right now...

P.P.S.S. Rules? The rule is go get it. And you chose the it. 

Time to be Ok

Hi friends,

"Dude, Are You OK?"

An hour south of me in Middlebury, Vermont is a crafty brewery, Drop-In Brewing company, that makes a fabulous double IPA with this name. It's a ridiculous name for one of the finest beverages concocted in our tiny state of excellence. And that's saying a lot considering the superlatives: Focal Banger, Lush, Plush, Shush, Sip of Sunshine, Tribute, Madonna and the legendary Heady Topper. But already we are off topic, sort of.

About 15 years ago, I was working on my art, grinding a panel outside in the afternoon wearing my usual isolation gear of safety glasses, a full face respirator and heavy-duty Bose, noise canceling headphones with music blaring. I was listening to a Steve Kimock live concert and utterly focussed on the work. A tree could have fallen in the parking lot and I'm not sure I would have noticed. Someone said right next to me, "Bruce, are you ok?" I whirled around. There was no one there. WTF?! A full five seconds elapsed before I realized that it was on the cd. Rewind. Yep. In the crowd, between songs, caught on the mic, my name and a check-in from above. Am I OK?

There's a blockbuster movie out right now wherein our hero asks this same question probably 30 times. Not addressing me but the damsel in distress, his pals, even the assassin sent to do him in. I'm a movie fiend and if listening closely, one can find the resonant frequencies in our culture in the movie scripts. The repetition throughout breaks the fourth wall at some point and actually is asking us. "Are you OK?" And I think, "A OK, boss. I'm totally A OK," at the moment. Thanks for asking.

These ubiquitous, internationally understood two short syllables come from where exactly? Okay, let's dig in. It's a corral somewhere out West, everyone knows; but according to the interwebs, it is generally accepted as the most commonly spoken word on planet earth. Its meaning is multifaceted. Acceptance, a judgment -- "That will do." Agreement -- "OK, let's go." An acknowledgement -- " OK, I heard you." Acceptability leaning toward mediocrity -- "These fries are just OK." As a verb -- "The flooring choice was OKed." As a noun, "So we have an OK to use that flooring." Adverb -- "She dances OK". The dog that I live with understands this command completely. Then again, he's a border collie with a vocabulary bigger than mine. Pretty sure. The cat, um, no.

That's what it means and how it means. Where it comes from is a total hash depending on what you read. Generally, the tales relate to Boston slang from the 1830s and 40s when the public and journalists started abbreviating everything and often intentionally incorrectly. (People are weird. IMHO). "All Correct" or "Oll Korrect" or "Ole Kurreck". Subsequently, it was borrowed as shorthand for a political campaign for "Old Kinderhook," Martin Van Buren. AND, it is possibly Bantu in origin from West Africa or from the Choctaw indigenous peoples in the Southwest and, my leaning, Scots used to say "och aye" meaning "oh yes". There's even a Greek explanation, "ola kala" meaning "all good". Conclusion, it's part of our lizard brain and should be attributed to Grokk and Dorg's request to take out the carrion bones...

In today's chaos of a world of politics and war, atrocities and pronouncements of doom, let's have a Thanksgiving and holiday season where you look another in the eye and ask, slowly, "Are you OK?" Then wait patiently. Maybe ask again later as human emotions tend to ebb and flow. And shoot no higher for "Great" or "Awesome". Just be ok together. Those that aren't, show them the love they need. In this last year, we have all suffered loss. And had excellent times. As a practice, it's the reaching out that is critical. Once I came to this little splinter of consciousness, I found that question all around me. Look for it. You will see what I mean. And what I really mean is, make this question a practice. It shows you care in four syllables.

"I'm OK. Good to go". Let's go together. Hug everyone you can along the way.

Oh yeah, and buy art. It makes a present that lasts longer than we do. And it is different every time you look at it. And the same. Like the best people I know.

Peace out,

B mac

P.S. The big piece of art shown below is "Gloria Mundi", Latin for "glory of the world". I made it as a reminder.

P.P.S. Being a lover of the biggest numbers, I wanted to share that I recently read that it takes 100,000 years for light to cross our galaxy. Very far and very fast. Ok by me, think I will walk the dog. Maybe have a beer.

P.P.S.S. It also works very nicely as a statement -- "You are okay." Try that too.

X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu

Hi friends,

I am making letters, the Alphabet, as light sculptures two feet square. Let me know which one(s) you would like.They are all one-of-a-kind pieces but I will be doing more than one R, more than one Z, and considering that my mom's initials were MMM, more than one M. And so far, this has been crazy fun. Let's keep this ball rolling!

Next. To the homework. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Alphabet! I have a book started with terms like phonemic, diacritics, allographs and multigraphs. What a bottomless swamp! Letters are graphemes, the smallest functional unit of a writing system. Simple write/right/rite?! Yeah, no. Acrophony refers to a conceptual framework where each letter is associated with a sound. Instantly we are in the weeds. A letter makes a sound? Like in the word "right." What are the g and h doing in there? In Spanish and Finnish, almost all letters make sounds and yet in Spanish "h" exists and is never spoken. My own experience with French feels like most of the letters are not pronounced. In Hawaiian, a written language invented by missionaries in 1822 to expose the "natives" to the Bible, every letter is spoken, but there are only 13 and 5 of those are vowels. The humuhumunukunukuapua'a is the Hawaiian state fish. Quiz later. That's a few syllables. By the way, the world wide web is three. www is nine. Only humans could have invented this mess and cling to it so dearly. 

So let's pause, or paws, for a minute, and expand a bit. When you are thinking, do your thoughts exist completely without letters involved? I have writer friends who would say, "Hell no/know/knows/nose." What if you are bad at spelling and great at painting and think of a pale red? Are you thinking in images or in words? When you are dreaming, do people speak? Is it always your language? When you are dreaming are you ever reading words on a page? Are you able to think without using words? If not, how much of the defining aspects of the thought are a function of the letters that make up those words? In other words, does pink exist to a Hawaiian in 1750 that is different from ākala, or the word in Russian with eight letters with a backwards 3 and a small capital B in the middle? Pink. Pink. The sound, the letters, make you think of a concept that is strong, bright, rosy, pale, sweet, friendly, floral, sensual... One could argue that the letters don't do the heavy lifting, the word does -- it's the selection and the arrangement of the graphemes. 

Egyptians in the 5th century BC had a proto alphabet that was pictorial and highly elaborate, but the real grandad of most global alphabets comes from the Phoenicians who started a cuneiform lettering in the 13th and 12th century BC. They travelled and spread their "abjad" widely in the 9th century BC, democratizing and uplifting the commoners from a status below the wealthy -- the churches and the royal elites whose control of the populace centered around the ability to keep invoices, deeds, taxes and trade records. The "abjad" system had only consonants and the reader had to supply the vowels. Consider PT could mean pet, pit, pate, put, Pete, pot, pat, Pat, peat, pout... Or, I suppose, physical therapy. Eventually, this grew into regional variations like the Mycenaean Greeks with their 87 symbols as their alphabet. 

We tend to think of letters as simply a visual version of speech. Acrophony is a nice idea, but speaking is nuanced and regional and outrageous and hilarious. Say potato. Or pa tate ah. Or taters. I have heard potatoes sound like it starts with a b. AND the same letter makes different sounds in slightly different arrangements -- feet and fête, apt and ape, or same sounds, different letters -- fazes and phases. How about g in the word "gauge?" I realize I am stating the obvious, but my job is to draw focus to the overlooked, the undersung, the shimmering, patterns in the dust. Our language is ridiculous and sublime. Here we say zee for Z and most everyone else says zed. The global economy is run on American English, an absurd oxymoron. There are a few languages who write right to left left. Take note of all the letter forms that are derived from ancient weaponry.

The last missive I sent was Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, the first letters in the naval longhand speech for ABC. Alpha: first, strongest, top dog. Bravo: YAY! Well done chap. Charlie: everybody knows a cool Charlie.  This week it's, XYZ. X-Ray: nobody wants that, ever. Yankee: well, northerners, ball club, guys who saved Europe maybe, sort of. Zulu: the unknown, Africa, tribal, ancient, foreign, mysterious...

As I said, this could be a book. Maybe I'll write it after I make a bunch of letters. As a final thought, "alphabetical order"? Who decided that? Think about it. What if it was backwards all along and we never noticed. My friend with the last name Zwiefel was always, always last in line. You want your phone to play something cool. Put Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" in your Apple music list. Defaults to that all the time. Boom.

Thanks for reading this letter about letters. Order one. I'll make it for you. First two orders are half price for all you people who love to read letters all the time. Like you, yes you. 

Piece and luv, 

b mac 

P.S. "I can't seem to find the thing I want to look for," said my friend Gus once upon a time. I love words. 

P.P.S. And now Fall. Or Autumn, sounds better. Cheers!

The Alphabet

Hi friends,

I sat down to smash out this blog about lightning in all its awesome fury. Did you know that during the Tonga volcanic explosion last year there were up to 43 bolts per second!? The most active storm in history! Or that lightning on the surface of Saturn manifests as wavelets disrupting the rings? And... I realize that all this will need to wait for the next missive. Today I am announcing The Alphabet. The Visible Indivisibles project addressing all the Elements on the Periodic Chart is complete and the book is headed to a publisher. Now I am launching The Alphabet, same scale panels at 23" square, to make an image for all of the letterforms we use as the English language. Might even do an ampersand as, apparently, that was once listed along with the usual 26.

I mentioned this casually to some friends and... zoom! I have already completed X and O and B and R and C and have dibs for G and S and M. Every letter will be a distinctive one-of-kind panel with a huge emphasis on diversity. I also recognize that I will need to do more than one of each in all fairness -- in Scrabble there are six R's and twelve E's -- so they will be numbered pieces. If we are considering names, for instance, how many start with J or B? So, let's go folks. Make me super busy. As always, each one will drive homework, and I will commit to compiling them all in a book. Let's see, what is the oldest letter, the least used, the roundest, the one with only straight lines, the simplest might have to be the most complicated? ... Morse code, naval flagging, musical chords, sign language...I'm all in. Join the party. 

I have been doing giant pieces of late, and this will be the opportunity to focus on tight compositions. Each piece will be $1,800. Step right up. Dibs start right now.

Happy late summer, you amazing humans. 

Thanks for all the attention recently at shows.

Naturally, I have some larger works for sale here in the gallery. Check the website. And, as always, for you particular types, I do commissioned work all the time. 

Stay in touch and get outside as much as possible.

Rock steady, Peace and Love and X and O, 

B mac 

Oppenheimer and Barbie, Sort Of

Hi Friends, 

Weirdly, the zeitgeist of this summer's art offerings converges nicely on an essay I wrote for Plutonium in March of 2022 for my soon-to-be published book on the Elements and the universe of Art. (Last week's missive was short; this one makes up for that.  :)

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." is a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, allegedly spoken by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, upon witnessing the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb detonation, January 16th, 1945. A mushroom cloud 7 1/2 miles high, created by splitting atoms in a 13 1/2 pound ball of Plutonium, rose above the team of scientists, some of whom wept, some of whom laughed nervously, most of whom were silent. At 5:29 AM on that day, civilization created the means to annihilate all life on earth.

Plutonium was literally smack in the center of it. This Element is the one supreme freak on the Chart. Where to even start? It is the worst heat conductor of all metals. It's been shrouded in secrecy for 80 years. First identified in 1940, Pu was created by bombarding Uranium 238 in a cyclotron, which created Neptunium (Yay, new Element!), which decayed into Plutonium 238 with a half-life of 88 years. It became the first synthetic Element made in a sufficient quantity to be visible without a microscope. Subsequent study confirms that it is, in fact, naturally occurring. In Uranium ore, pitchblende, there is Plutonium from Uranium decay. It therefore is the highest number on the chart that naturally exists in the earth's crust. It is warm to the touch. In a closed container it will heat itself to red hot. It reacts quickly with Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Silicon and all the halogens. In moist air, a small sample can expand up to 70% and shatter a container and the "rust" flaking off can spontaneously ignite. Its melting point is low at 1,183 degrees Fahrenheit. Its boiling point is very high at 5,849 degrees Fahrenheit. It has 6 different allotropes -- crystallographic phases at normal pressures, as brittle as glass or as squashable as Aluminum, and a seventh when pressurized. It is more than twice as dense as Iron. Plutonium increases in density when it melts. (Think about that for a moment). It's bright silver but turns dull gray rapidly, or slightly green or yellowish, or one of 54 different documented colors. Different isotopes emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation. A 12 pound ball of Pu 239 radioactively decays releasing 9 1/2 watts of power continuously for tens of thousands of years. The batteries powering the Voyager, Cassini, Galileo, and New Horizons space probes, as well as the Mars Rover, use Pu 238 to make up to 500 watts of continuous power from a two pound slug. Some heart pacemakers have been implanted using a tiny version of these power cells, but doctors have discontinued that program. Famously, the activist Ralph Nader claimed that a pound of Pu dust spread properly(?!) could kill 8 billion people. Scientists dispute this statement. They do not dispute the challenges of storing the toxic waste of dismantled nuclear bombs or nuclear plant spent fuel. Programs such as making two ton glass and Plutonium oxide logs encased in stainless steel canisters and dropped into two mile deep bore holes plugged with concrete have never been enacted to protect humanity from the deadly radiation that will endure for tens of thousands of years. The state of Plutonium storage is not public knowledge, although, strangely, laws for flying with it exist. It is the most dangerous element on the chart, both in the many ways it can kill you medically or explosively. I highly recommend the books out there chatting about this super freak. AND look at the photographs of nuclear detonations. They are truly visions from the apocalypse. 

The 98' tower holding the bomb was vaporized and the sand of the ground was fused into a green, radioactive quasicrystal named "trinitite." The artwork shows the tiny tower and expanding fireball, the glow on the ground from the searing light. Pluto was discovered in 1929, and, following Uranium and Neptunium, the Element name was logical. I have to think its namesake god of the underworld was recognized during the naming process. All three of these Elements in my visual universe had to be somewhat spherical, planets ya know. The artwork could be a bee's eye view of a flower, a bubble from the primordial slime of life, an ovum, a molecular cloud captured by the Hubble telescope's vision. Life or annihilation, miniscule to cosmic scale.

The close up immersion in a flower's gravity was one particular artist's superpower. Georgia O'Keeffe lived primarily in New Mexico, not far from Alamogordo where the "Gadget" was detonated. Her work was part of my initial motivation to portray Plutonium, but as I studied her paintings, I discovered her depiction of the natural world was all about the sensuous glowing aspect of our world. Her work is so much about auras, energy pulsing from within. Her use of gradations of hue is the expanding bloom under the sun's warmth. All of her paintings feel like the primordial apprehension of an object. Her depiction of a mesa is its warmth; a bleached skull, its vibrancy of life intact. In O'Keeffe's work, the insistent shape of the yoni that exists throughout art history and in the mind of every human and suffuses the organic universe, is a constant portrayal of the seat of creation. It is a pure form. She shows us, with the strength only a woman could wield, the feminine principle distilled into an idea AND an artistic motif. In her work, the depiction of reality necessarily involves the creation of life -- her vision -- manifested with paint. Yin, as the force of life itself, energy emanating from all things. And the Yang? Male scientists engineer obliteration, creating radioactive glass shards from mother earth, vaporizing reality. From the outset, my depiction of Plutonium had to be the microsecond after detonation, as a blossom frozen, before the cataclysmic destruction. Pore through Georgia O'Keeffe's life's work, and savor a human's capacity for painting love of our place in the universe -- symphonic, yet small and simple and perfect. She sees truth in form and color. Her vision has become life, the creation that is our world."

That's the text written during the pandemic for one of my favorites. This summer, the maestro of a filmmaker, Christopher Nolan is releasing "Oppenheimer." Go see it. He is a genius depicting genius. The humans behind the first nuclear chain reaction live in the realm of gods and one feels their gravity, their sense of potential Armageddon, the end of the world we inhabit. And then, there is Barbie. No, wait. Not Barbie. The Museum of Modern Art in New York city is having a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition until August 12th. She once wrote, "To see takes time," and this is the title of the compendium of works on paper throughout a fifty year span that is now on display. Strange for me personally to have connected these two figures and to have this summer harmonize with my thinking. The contrapuntal forces at work here are the heart of my book. Hard science and the opposite end of the spectrum dancing back and forth, manifestations of the mind's power, machinery and fingertips, slide rules and watercolors, nuclear bombs and the aura around a morning glory. The title of her show rings more true with every passing season. 

Come visit to see my newest large piece "Gloria Mundi" at the Seattle Art Fair, July 27-30th. This 8' x 12' piece is composed of three Mandalas -- "Time," "Space," and "Everything Else." I think it's comprehensive. I would love to know what you think. Love and hugs and summer, big summer...b mac 

Who Has The Best Eyes?

Hi Friends,

You ready for this? What is the greatest predator in the world? While wild dogs, big cats, falcons have a success rate around 20%, these track, intercept, capture and devour with a nearly 95% success rate. Total carnivores. Completely recognizable fossil records date to 320 million years ago, although those were ten times the size of today's version. 80% of its brain is devoted to sight and they can see 360 degrees. Guesses? In my homework, this sentence appeared: "In some species, females have evolved behavioral responses such as feigning death to escape the attention of males." Now that's evolution. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. They have names like Scarce Chaser, Scarlet, Emperor, and Azure Hawker. The Globe Skimmers migrate 4,000 miles across the Indian Ocean. So, OK, they fly. They can fly in six directions and can pull 9Gs like an F-16 fighter jet. They can fly without flapping. Treeline Emeralds, Darters, Skimmers... These critters utilize motion camouflage, which has been studied by the military, wherein they approach a moving target with a trajectory that makes them appear as not actually moving in space -- they simply get larger as they approach. Evolution of these creatures has refined them from being good at what they do, 300 million years ago, into a state of near perfection. 

Southwestern American tribes consider them "snake doctors" that follow snakes underground to help them heal from injuries. In Asian cultures, they are symbols of rebirth, strength and happiness. Their coloration is often metallic or iridescent -- like hummingbirds or scarab beetles -- as they utilize structural coloration, whereby light is refracted by cellular level crystalline structures or through wavelength interference using matrices of nanochannels.  When I was on a month-long canoe trip in northern Quebec, we had a Cree native as a guide. His word for helicopter was the same as his word for dragonflies -- "du whack a du."

Dragonflies are heroic bits of planet Earth. Pretty sure on the next go-round I will be one. Or was one. Their light shifting capability is magical. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote 

"Thro' crofts and pastures wet with dew,

A living flash of light he flew."

Friends, be that. A living flash of light. Dropwings, Groundlings, Forktails, Dashers... Summer is here with so many critters awakening to sparkle and laugh at us wingless folks. Take note. 

AND go see a band named Goose. They are blazing. And check out the James Turrell exhibition at Mass MOCA, and the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at MOMA until August. And, naturally, the lakeshore and the beaver pond and that marshy place where nobody goes and the meadow by the abandoned farm and that standing dead tree where the porcupine sleeps and the top of Mount Hunger where the lichen and moss are doing their thing and sunsets over the water and....

You got it.

Go get it.

b mac 
 

P. S. "du whack a du" watchers unite. 

P. P. S. Just for the record, birds are half as old as dragonflies. 

Zorro’s New Horse

Full Security.  Commander: Code Black. Privileged information: Code Black One. Salvage Report (20th cent. english trans.) submitted Earth Timeline 2167 from salvage Vessel P9947Zed, call sign: Zorro.

Vessel recovered: KC33X-ray cargo vessel, 4X warp drive-tight galactic range 4niner, small freighter, cap. 1000x standard container, no living life forms.

(Note: vessel sweep yields 8 human remains. Long dead, evidence of conflict, interior small blaster damage) (Strangely, engine swaps make this small cargo vessel capable of 9x warp and range expansion well beyond the Milky Way, as well as weapons fitment inconsistent with ship class. Cargo explains this). Cargo: 44x standard container solid domino configuration showing 2% space waste loss. (Note: exceptional density packing)

AI data search of Firmament Transport Ltd. comprehensive manifest listings yields no match in official manifests submitted. (Note: Suggests stolen or smuggled cargo)

Cargo specifics: 99.99999% pure Rhodium ingots STD (standard trading dimensions) for Earth timeline 2051-2151.

Elucidation 1: Frankly, Commander, Holy Nova! Requesting immediate protection from your Guard squadron to Base 987 Proxima. The cargo in this derelict vessel is more valuable than the last 100 years of transport business. We do not remotely have the firepower to protect it in subspace or warp velocity. This transmission is critical and despite the encryption assurances of FB and MS, I fear an intercept. I must let you know what we have in tow, but anyone reading this would assuredly kill my entire crew instantly and take this cargo into the Outer Nebula. This amount of Rhodium in one place... History... Sir, there are entire planets worth less than these containers. Analysis in our lab shows this to be pure mined Rhodium, not that nuclear waste product kind the banks are trading so furiously. This shows no isotopes degrading. It's the real deal. Request immediate escort. And, I must say, sir, I would not trust your fractured board to agree to anything. Pirates sit in that room. Sir, respectfully. Our science officer has added this brief: <Rhodium, identified on Earth in 1803. Noble metal, part of the Platinum group. Silver white, high reflectance, extraordinarily stable. Named for the ancient Greek work "rhodon" meaning "rose" for a pinkish red color of one of its salts. Used in flash plating for anti-corrosion. Employed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in catalytic convertors to reduce emissions from primitive fossil fuel burning. (Little did they know). Does not bond with Oxygen. Does not "rust." Rare in the Earth's crust -- .0002 parts per million. Meteorites, as you know, I'm sure, contain trace amounts. Price in 2020, $12,600 Earth dollars. Price in March 2021, $29,800. And the rest is history. As you know, pure mined Rhodium is the most precious material across the galaxy based on the controllable manipulation of relativistic effects when alloyed with Elements above 124. Warp travel could not happen without Rhodium. Civilizations converging across the reaches of space depend on this Element.>

Elucidation 2: Commander, there is also an artifact on board in a plasma vault -- an art piece, as near as we can tell, dated 2014. Stainless steel alloy 316L, stamped with the circular touchmark of the legendary Bruce Robinson MacDonald and inscribed on the back with a signature. It looks like the real thing. (Computer confirmed). It is for Element 45, sir, Rhodium. There are notes on the back referring to the nature of quantum reality as being made of stripes, directional fields. I have no idea how an early 21st century artist could be prescient regarding warp travel and the quantum physics requiring Rhodium. The art piece has the atomic symbol on the front. It's uncanny, sir. The computer says it's priceless and missing. Obviously, your Guard will get to the bottom of this, but I think we are looking at a getaway vehicle for a theft of unimaginable value. On top of the quantity, the purity of the metal, the sheer engine power of this small ship, these crooks were bringing the original Rh classical art piece in the getaway. Who were these guys? What went wrong? Have to sign out. Alarms blaring in the ship RN. Will contact again, asap. Send reinforcements to get this all to base...

Sir, Mutiny here. Trying to maintain. Tactical. I'll transmit when possible... 

(Location beacon offline).

You know, commander, never did like you... sitting there at your desk. Here's your old salvage boat. Zorro has a faster ride now. Hasta la vista... 

As a coda:

What is the most valuable thing in the universe? Rhodium! Uh, no. Time. That is all. Pause and consider that twenty years from now you would wish to be here today, this body, this health, at this time. Every day is magical. Nothing more precious. (Maybe kids, but that's another missive). 

P. S. However, something like Rhodium, whose hypothetical/fictional powers involve controlling or navigating time and space, would immediately become more valuable than time itself. Time's power is strangely, its irreducibility and its persistence -- it is change itself. Time is defined as change. Before my head warps, let's call it a wrap.  

P. P. S. The above tale is the entry in my Elements book for Rhodium. If you like this one, you are going to love Xenon and Nitrogen. 

It's What You Do

Greetings to the extended clan,

Quick story to set the mood: I was in a bar a long time ago with one of my handsome brothers. A girl asked him for a piece of gum as he was chewing gum. He said sure and handed her a piece. Out of nowhere a goon twice my size, smacked him in the temple with a beer mug. In a complete blur, I did my best Cowboy, (I wrestled in school) and slammed the fool to the ground. Hard. Nanoseconds later the bar keepers were over the bar and dragging us out the door and onto the sidewalk. WHAT are you doing!? "Bruce," said Brad, the bartender who was a friend of mine, "that guy is a frat boy with 15 other of his drunken bros in the bar. I'm saving your life." Oh, huh. Um, thanks, I guess... WTF

Happy Spring! We just passed the equinox and World Water Day last week. Yay yay, but, seems like we have lots of water and more everyday just like the light of Spring. But, I live in Vermont; it's my frame of reference. There's a 90 mile-long lake 300 yards from me and I stuck my feet in it yesterday, accidentally (not recommended), and looked north to Appletree Point. Around the point is South Hero Island and around that is Isle La Motte where one can find the oldest reef in the world. Yep, 480 million years ago, coral was doing what coral does, and now it's a fossilized chunk smashed down by the last Ice Age. Oldest. Almost half a billion years. Right around the corner. 

So what?! Let's talk about time. Edmond Becquerel made the first solar cell in 1839. They became commercially viable in 1956, but no one had one. Since 2010, the cost of solar power has been dropping 10% every year, and everywhere you look there's a bunch. I've biked country roads all afternoon, and little wood sheds in the middle of nowhere have panels on the roof. My neighborhood is full of them. Mr. Becquerel's son discovered radiation with Madame Curie in 1897, and 49 years later we blew up an atomic bomb. In 1919, one could book a trans-Atlantic flight on a zeppelin to Europe. Fifty years later we were standing on the moon.  Cell phones showed up around 1995 and today there are 4.6 billion. Facebook didn't exist in 2003. Today there are 2.4 billion users. Yikes. 

Time moves faster now than in the 1830s and accelerates every day. Good thing? Bad thing? Let's just consider that the crises we face could be resolvable. Pundits once predicted that the size of cities would be limited by the amount of horse manure that would pile up preventing travel. One of my kids is working on an electric airplane being built five miles from here. Beta Technologies is flying "Alia", which can go 180 miles on $20 worth of electricity versus the $600 cost of flying a Cessna the same distance. And, no emissions from the plane. UPS has ordered 150 planes.  Yes, glaciers are melting, Greenland is pouring trillions of gallons into the ocean. Wildfires. Storm intensity is rising. Homes are heading out to sea... But if we can fly to the moon and back. If we can make tiny computers for everyone's back pocket in 25 years. If fission took 50 years how long will the promise of power from fusion take? Can we capture carbon on a global scale to make homes and schools, grow all the food we require, and stop spending a bazillion dollars a year on ways to murder each other? Is there a solution to an impending crisis that seems entirely ridiculous, but will work great?! Sometimes there is and it happens rapidly. Kev and I avoided a hospital visit and these are still my real teeth. 

Back to the beginning. World Water Day is highlighting 2 billion people around the world who lack access to clean water. That's one in four. If one in four of your neighbors needed water, would you help? You would, in a heartbeat. Well, they are. They just don't live close by. This is about our frame of reference. New research suggests we could stop climate change by becoming vegans. Maybe just being vegan part of the week would be a good start. How about an electric bike? Maybe buy less stuff until your current stuff breaks. Maybe recognize that effective altruism is the only way out as a first world nation consuming around eleven thousand watts per person per day. And that doesn't include the energy cost of our food.

The Chazy Reef shares this water with my toes and cares not a whit about me. This is up to us humans. I'm going to do what I can for my kids and their kids. Join me. We will donate 15% of any sale made from this blog piece until May 10th to World Water Day. My artwork will last for generations. It doesn't use power that you don't already use -- lights in your living room or the sunlight streaming through the windows. AND, these are about reflection, literally and metaphorically. We need to care for this planet because... Beauty. And kids. Reflect on that.  

"Frame of reference" is sort of a wooden metaphor for a state of awareness that is super malleable and potentially revolutionary. Avoid fights.

Ciao bella,

b mac

P. S. Would any of you folks like a sticker that says PATHOLOGICAL OPTIMIST  ? I think I need to print a bunch. 

P. S. I sold my big piece called "Lost and Found". I find meaning in that. Who wants the new one called "The Eye"? 

Thoughts Have You

Do you ever think about thinking? You, yes you. I am talking to you. I am asking a question directly to your inner mind. How do you think? Do you think in images or in words? Do you play music and what does your brain do when that is happening? Do you ever consider what this thought in your mind actually is? According to neuroscientists, it is electricity jumping around on a three-dimensional matrix made of pink jelly. But let's not go there. Let's start somewhere simple, like dreaming. Ah, no...

New research using fMRI imaging suggests there are extremes on a spectrum of indeterminate scope; we mostly bang around between verbal, thoughts that exist as actual formed words, and visual, or images as a fluid landscape of remembered sights. To make this as concrete as possible, I'll use myself rather than reference the library of books that theorize about consciousness. Let's see how much of this resonates with your reality. I discovered in high school that if I want to remember something, like for an exam, I write it down. Once usually was enough, usually. But, was I imprinting the fact as a string of words that I could read on the page or was the act of the writing depositing the fact into a hopper of shapes with ideas attached? Words or patterns of marks. Is one more readily accessed? These are two different hoppers in the memory warehouse. 

Let's diverge. Also in high school, I wrote a paper on bats. Some are completely blind. Many use sonar and FM (frequency modulation) to hunt for bugs to eat and live their entire lives "seeing" the world with sound. Some can hunt in a downpour. Sonar is echolocation, mapping the world based on reflected sound. They can hear from 14,000 hertz to well over 100,000 hertz while we simple primates hear from 20 to 20,000 hertz. What do their "thoughts" look like? Consider humpback whales who are able to exchange sound patterns (thoughts?) over thousands of miles of ocean with the inherent time lag of sound traveling through water and then back. Is there ANY overlap with our brains? We are all mammals. Some blind people use tapping to echolocate and have sophisticated capabilities of understanding their unseen space. 

When listening to musicians improvising, it is abundantly clear that we are witnessing thought as sound. Once a certain level of mastery is attained, the instrument somewhat disappears and the mind communicates sonically. So these are obviously not words or visualizations. Or are they? Does the guitarist have a conversation with the keyboardist? Absolutely, but does the conversation involve words or brush strokes and washes of color invisibly flying through the air? Or is it purely communication made of frequencies of sound? Like a whale thought.

When I am making my art, the best times in the process are the times of unconscious or subconscious activity manifesting in a physical way. I'm often asked what this thing is really about, or what made you make these lines RIGHT HERE. Well, I'm not writing any words, usually, and there is no sound coming out of the artwork, ever, but some kind of thought is making itself known. Why I chose to do that thing in that place, I really don't know until it's over and hanging on the wall and I can start to feel how the whole relates to its parts. Yes, I know, this sounds really obtuse, but I am being honest. These thoughts aren't like those other three kinds of thoughts -- verbal, visual, sonic. Maybe they are thoughts that have something in common with the little bat's symphony...

In quantum mechanics, there is an understanding that observing the motion of a particle, changes the nature or the state of that particle. When writing about thoughts, we turn them into words and that changes the nature of the thought. I, at this very moment, have streaming through my head the desire to talk about Covid brain fog, TBI and post-concussive symptoms; or how the best art just breathes emotions; or driving while in deep thought, safely, apparently, yet having no recollection of the past five miles; or of waking from a vivid dream and being totally unable to describe or remember what was going on; or a lifetime-defining fantastical dream of a jungle with brilliant kinetic colors and rain on my face that turned out to be the skylight open and a summer night's shower... But that misty jungle of fluid color. What caused that? So, thoughts arise spontaneously? WE don't think THEM? What is the evolutionary mandate behind dreaming anyway? And how am I dreaming this stuff that has no antecedent in my world?

Ok, back to the rubric. How do you think? Some engineers can hold a 3D drawing in their head and spin it around to see the top view. I can't. I have a brother who has an accurate calendar of life's events in precise order. I don't. I have a friend who writes sitting at a piano and the words and music are a single entity, indissoluble. Yeah, no chance, ever. I love to read about consciousness, but I'm no professor. But, I can do something no one else does. I can make light move around with my pink jelly matrix and my hands. I can show you a pure vision of thinking happening in front of you. Writing words about this changes its nature. If I could, I would just send you all a piece. Even these photographs are pale shadows of the experience of strolling about in front of the multi-dimensional surface... It is holographic in a nicely organic way. Like that jungle...

P.S. Feel free to write back after you think about thinking for a bit. Are there ever voices that are not your own? And when you talk to yourself, who is talking and who is listening? And why is this occurring? 

P.P.S. AND, now that we have an AI capable of writing a law school essay, what is the nature of a thought detached from a string of words assembled in a grammatically correct format? Does that AI think, or just assemble phrases? And, could that be considered actual thinking? 

P.P.S.S. In a future missive, let's talk about thoughts that are purely emotion, thought as a spirit. They have no shape or color or thingness. They can only be expressed with metaphors. Stay tuned. 

How to Control Time

My friends, 

The solstice is nigh once again, a moment in a year of moments when the collective acknowledges LIGHT. It is about to change, to stop retreating south and far and begin the journey back to warm our faces and brighten our afternoons. My job is all about light, and it's nice that something so subtle as a day becoming marginally longer and/or brighter has been accurately traced for at least 7,000 years. A site in southern Egypt called Nabta Playa has standing stones apparently placed by nomadic cattle herders to mark the summer solstice in a spot on the planet exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. These stones on the solstice cast no shadow at all at noon. Scientists are quick to point out that there were likely lots of "calendars" of a sort around the planet. No one "discovered" the solstice. For those early Egyptians the flooding of the Nile was the significant rhythmic event and being able to predict that somewhat must have been helpful. Light, shadow, no shadow, floods. Ah, the simple precarious flow state of agrarian nomads...

My last missive to you all invoked Pat Metheny. He played guitar on one of my all-time favorite albums --"Shadows and Light." (Multiple geniuses on stage, live, improvising. Repeated listenings are mandatory). And, come to think of it, a couple missives ago I wrote about the Talking Heads album, "Remain in LIght." A couple days ago I was making the case to a friend that one of the greatest unsung albums of the last twenty years is "Ray of Light" -- a fantastical production by the gentleman William Orbit guiding Madonna in a tangent of creativity outshining anything else she ever recorded. IMHO. And skipping backwards a few blogs, I referenced an album called "Where the Light Is," a live recording of John Mayer in concert. "Blinded by the Light" I saw played live in New Jersey when I was a freshman. Thanks Bruce. And yesterday when I was working out, "Turn on your Love Light" pushed me through the last bits of selected suffering. Thank you Jerry and the boys. The Grateful Dead has been music for training for over forty years. Well, is there a theme here? Or is it just me? Is noticing light just my curse and blessing? And what is this overlap with music? 

Let's back up a moment. The word solstice comes from the Latin words for "sun" and "standing still." Nothing stands still in regard to time. Nothing. Shepherds 7000 years ago, Neolithic man in Britain, understood this and built clocks based on changing celestial light. Ok, calendars may be more accurate. Stonehenge is a circle of bluestone megaliths dating to around 5000 years ago and had various roles and rituals according to archaeologists, but it is clearly an astronomical calendar. The summer and winter solstices are precisely indicated by the positions of the stones and the rising sun. When I was five, my brothers and I clambered all over these on a grey afternoon. 

And my mum, an amateur artist, painted a large canvas which hangs in my living room today. Stonehenge is a clock that ticks every six months.

Today, the most accurate time keeper is an optical lattice clock, a complex laser-driven mechanism based on wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum. It is accurate to within one second every 15 billion years or just less than a one second deviation since the Big Bang. It is so accurate that moving it a couple inches closer to the floor changes the time based on Einstein's theory of relativity -- earth's mass distorts time. But who cares about that amount of precision? Well, astrophysicists, but that's for another discussion.

So, attention to the changes of light? That's the music playing here. Light has mattered since prehistory. Pure light. Subtle light. Light itself. The persistence of our collective attention to light for millennia and how it marks time passing and how it is the beauty that we understand with our eyes is nothing less than divine. My obsession is to try and reintroduce humans to that subtlety and its power by hanging objects that control light on the wall of your home. The human animal is spectacularly sensitive to light input. Studies prove that we can perceive the single photon generated when an electron moves up or down a shell in an atom. We can literally see down to an atomic scale. These are aspects of life and being without peer. This sensitivity is truly magical.

The solstice, time, light, the artists and musicians who celebrate these, our headlong pitch of each day from dawn until dusk... What to do? The answer is written above -- Turn on Your Love Light. Dial up that. The solstice is a time to celebrate. The Holiday of Lights. A menorah. The lights on the tree. We are united by our experience of light and time changing relentlessly. The only response that makes any sense is to celebrate these things. To quote Pig Pen, "Turn on your love light and leave it on..."

We are all one people -- us, Brits, sub Saharans -- spinning around on this orb we call home. Hug your family and share your attention with everyone you can reach. This is an invitation for the solstice. A tradition 7000 years old is to see brighter days ahead. 

Peace and love my friends. We are lucky to have met. 

Bruce R. MacDonald

P.S. I want to share with you that all these missives would not happen without the skill and devotion of Sarah Vogelsang-Card. She is the photographer of nearly everything you see. She is a constant in my world of art-making and communication to all of you. She has been a part of this for over sixteen years in the gallery and her support is priceless. Thank you sweet woman for the focus. And a big Hallelujah, please, from all you readers. Sarah with an h. Sarah the fifth. Sarah the co-conspirator. Only she can take these photographs. Bless you. 

P.P.S. Accepting time requires paying respect for those who leave us in the middle of contributing to making a better world. I feel the loss in the last year of Peter Schjeldahl and Roger Angell and George Booth and Lee Bontecou. They are titans. Their art remains. I am comforted in their exit of this plane knowing that their successors are born this year. Time is a relentless cycle. Our bodies, fragile and temporary... 

P.P.S.S. How do we control time? Well, we can move that clock closer to the floor, or we can sing and dance and teach and write and make art to be around when we are not. BEAUTY is timeless. 

We Could be a Sugar Cube

Hi Friends,

Anyone reading much of anything these days saw the news recently that the human body strolling about being you is 90% other microorganisms. Yep, apparently only 10% of your body is composed of cells that contain your individual DNA. The rest is all bacteria, viruses, molds, flora and fauna that populate the planet You. Do you feel special?

Next, consider that humans are about 60% water. Two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen, not exactly personal ingredients, compose most of what you are as an animal. In fact 99% of the human body by mass is just six Elements: Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium, Phosphorus. Of these six, four are the same as the most abundant Elements in the Universe overall. The exceptions being Helium and Neon, which are too gaseous to hang around and be useful and being noble gases they don't want to bond with anything anyway.

Ok, basic, right? We are space stuff. But even more humbling is that we are overwhelmingly space itself. If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a marble, the first electron whirling around it would be a football field away. Atoms are 99.999999999999% empty space.

If we could remove the space and pack all the electrons, neutrons and protons the way matter is packed in a neutron star, (the way you pack your carry-on bag), the entire human race would be the size of a sugar cube. Sweet!

So we are simply chemistry sets and mostly nothingness. Great! The Universe is 13.7 billion years old and I hope to live to be 80. I'm just a temporary fog of almost nothing, literally. Yes, literally. So folks, get busy. Make the most of today. Whatever you do, keep in mind that you are nothing but what you do. That's it. Do good stuff NOW.

And start by being kind. Show love to each other. It's the holidays for us, and darkening days for the northern hemisphere. Share your blessings as best you can. Everyone needs a hug. Consider sending a care package to Ukraine or volunteering to feed your local hungry people. We are the fortunate few and love is the only answer going forward. I know, I sound like a hippie. Takes one to know one.

Thanks from our little gallery slice of planet earth,

Love. Beauty. Magic.

B Mac

Transmutation

Once upon a time there was a bunny that lived under the deck in a nice backyard in Vermont. One night he was torn to shreds and devoured by a coyote that lived somewhere down the ravine. The end.

Forty-two years ago, Pat Metheny made an album in Oslo with some jazz jocks called "80/81". The album opens with a song entitled "Two Folk Songs" and features the ferocious drumming of Jack Dejohnette who plays like a stampede. Nobody sounds like him -- continuous calamity and swerving thunder. He's 80 now. Michael Brecker, on tenor sax, soars the theme over Metheny's strumming. Charlie Haden's bass bounds around the cyclonic drum attack. The insistence of the music is the soul of it. These are the lines of power drawn across the sky above the landscape where mortals wander. And then the sax leaves the planet, consumed as a fireball in the atmosphere, fretting, flickering, then lost. Gone. Only drums remain...

But, the coyote was old and two winters later laid down and froze in a freak November blizzard. His body was eaten after the thaw by crows and a vulture and a ravenous fisher. The buzzard migrated to Costa Rica and was hit by a rusting truck on a blind curve near Nosara while eating a rotting rooster. His corpse was dragged off by a coatimundi into the bushes. Flies ate most of the flesh. Dragonflies ate the flies. Fish ate the dragonflies. Bigger fish did what they do and then die and float, then sink and their proteins and fishy molecules disseminate into the sea columns and currents to be carried far, far away.

Rabbits, like us upright bipeds, are 99% hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen. Hydrogen was made in the Big Bang. The other three are synthesized in the nuclear furnace of a star that only show up in the backyard after a supernova empties its star guts into the heavens. Then, gravity pulls these together and la la la, bunnies. No first Bang, no bunnies. No stellar cataclysm, no death of a sun, no bunnies. Researchers in 2008 found evidence of an early rabbit from 53 million years ago.

...the drums subside with the return of Metheny's acoustic strumming. The bass takes over with a lullaby figure, all wood and firelight, primordial solo notes from within the shelter of night. There is no hurry now. Metheny opens the tent flap. The morning sun. The world begins anew. And finally, the reassurance of the bass folk song takes us out. Dance a little boogie for the morning light...

In Anishinaabe traditional beliefs and other Native American tribal stories Nanabozho, the Great Rabbit, is a deity and part of the creation myth of all things. In cultures around the planet, rabbits, for obvious reasons, represent fertility and continuation. The Three Hares Triskelion circular motif is found throughout Western and Middle Eastern culture, from a Mongol coin in the 13th Century to the stonework of English cathedrals, from Chinese cave drawings to its symbolism of peace and tranquility in Islamic culture. The old German riddle "Three hares sharing three ears, yet every one of them has two", describes the triangle arrangement of the rabbits sharing ears.

Pat Methany made this album when he was 27. He's 68 now. Michael Brecker passed away at 57 in 2007. Jack played with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins and Herbie Hancock and some other giants. Charlie Haden, a colossus of a bassman and composer, died in 2014. I saw all these guys together in a little club called Hunt's not far from the backyard mentioned above. They shared ears. As the best do. Rabbits are tricksters, just like the titans of jazz. Time and space, in their relentless continuum, reconstitute the elements that make us and the hares. However, art can hold back the sinking into the seas of our star stuff. Monuments of creativity abound; I have reveled in this singular song for decades. That's the reason I make these light sculptures and write these short missives to you.

Listen to "Two Folk Songs" from "80/81". But only if you can take 20 minutes to be transported. And pay close attention to musicians improvising. In real time, they are sharing ears on the stage. You share too. Art can make us immortal, or at least feel like it. That's the good stuff. Seek it.

Peace out my friends. Winter is coming. Cheers to firelight and warm smiles and family gatherings...

Love love love,

b mac

P.S. By the way, the bunny is fine. I made that part up. Pretty sure his name is Bugs.

Size Matters Not

Alright, stand up and heels to the wall. Step off around eleven steps, heels to toes, and look at that length. A California condor's wingspan is about nine and a half feet, the largest land-based bird in the Western Hemisphere. (What's bigger than that?! Stay tuned. I will share later). They can fly to 15,000 feet and once ranged from Mexico to British Columbia. A single lead shotgun pellet will kill them and is still the most common cause of mortality accounting for half of all deaths in the wild. They are social -- the young learn from their parents over a span of years. Forty years ago there were only twenty remaining. We have around 500 now. Big and rare.

The smallest of all birds is the bee hummingbird, buzzing around the forests of Cuba. They are also endangered and rare. They weigh less than a dime -- .07 ounces full grown and have a wingspan of 1.5 inches -- essentially half the size of the ruby-throated hummingbirds buzzing around your yard. Think about a flying relative of the dinosaurs with feet and eyes and feathers and bones and all the other necessary accoutrements for a warm blooded critter that weighs less than two grams. Daily requirements include half their weight in nectar and eight times their weight in water to run a heart rate as high as 1,000 beats a minute. Divine machinery.

Let's continue: If the Earth were a grape, Jupiter would be the size of a basketball. The most massive star known is R136a1, coming in at 230 times the weight of our sun. Living in the Tarantula Nebula, it's relatively close at 160,000 light years away. It's young. Humans are born small and get bigger. Stars do the opposite. By the way, the sun is 99.8% of all the mass in our solar system. We are smaller than specks. Relatively.

We operate in a very thick fog regarding big and small, and we operate merrily with misconceptions on a grand scale as well. I ask people all the time how long is a million seconds and the answers are all over the place. (It's eleven days). The follow up question is how long is a billion seconds. NOBODY gets this right. (It's 31 years). I used the phrase "relatively close" a moment ago and nobody blinked. "Relative" is the heart of this little chat. The importance of anything is only what you assign. I may be pegged as a heretic for not recognizing religion or some universal transcendent principles that must be "most important," but the case can be made for anyone's embrace of the tiny or the huge, or the significant and insignificant, as your choice and your business. Transcendence is yours to determine. Your church may be a place or it may be your children. Totally your call.

Four years ago, I was quoted in the local paper as saying "Ornithology crosses into poetry at some point," by a journalist from a conversation I don't recall having, but I'm happy to recognize that is how my brain worked back then too. "Relatively close" is shorthand for knowing far from near, then from now; we function well not knowing precision scales of things as they don't much matter in the day to day. But sneaking around in our perception is an infinite depth, if we pause and notice. I highly recommend spending time in that pause, whether it be marvelling at birds or sailing or singing or hiking with your kids or helping neighbors or whatever connects you the individual with the universal. Late summer is especially good for this... And poetry is underrated. As are those flying dinosaur things. Hello! Flying animals?! (Um yeah, bats? Definitely going to chat about those).

Stay in touch,

Fly slowly,

Collect nectar.

The Rules of Surfing, Part 1

The James Webb Space Telescope is fully operational and is sending us imagery from the literal dawn of time. And by "dawn," I mean that before Hydrogen and Helium atoms created in the Big Bang coalesced into spheres with adequate density to ignite as the nuclear infernos we call stars, there was no light. Nothing to see. No seeing. I could start a large book about this engineering miracle but instead consider just one single element: an image arrived a couple days ago showing a sprinkling of galaxies -- not stars, star systems -- a photo of a piece of the cosmos filled with billions of suns seething. Now consider the image is the size of a single grain of sand held at arms' length. That's it. One teeny tiny peephole looking out thataway. Feel small yet? If this is a single grain of sand-size view, where next? What do we look at? What do we study? What information is important?

This strikes me as the perfect analog of the internet. And daily life. There is an infinite amount of information: a movie, a track meet, a youtube about camping stoves or Kurt Cobain or chocolate in MesoAmerica or how a scallop sees or is there lightning on Saturn or life after death or magnetic navigation in birds or the poetic immediacy of William Finnegan's prose or is Tavarua the best wave ever? ... A tsunami comes to mind. Drinking from a firehose. Counting molecules.

Where to place one's attention can be a perilous choice -- FOMO vs wasting the finite precious time we are gifted everyday. So, the solution: let go. Follow your bones, your nose, your simplest impulse. Be an expert on the local mushrooms like John Cage, foraging and documenting his global travels based on edible fungi, or play that track you love on Spotify for the 400th time. When choice is infinite, there can be no judgement regarding value. "Do What You LIke" is a song by the band Blind Faith and blind faith is exactly the point. Surf, cook, nap, write, drink a beer, make beer, draw, stack firewood, plant flowers, cut back, coach, ride, boogie or just stroll around and be confident that this is the correct course of action. For those of you who know Sam Harris, he has a pretty watertight case for there being no such thing as free will. Therefore, whatever you are doing is the "right" thing. This is the way.

And now, the rule. (Here we go, messing with the freedom...) Be kind. Treat everyone gently. The world can be ornery. This headlong pitch through the chaos can be fraught with challenges, heartbreak and turmoil, and while you venture on your merry way, take care of everyone you possibly can. Shit happens, and even those who don't apparently need a handful of grace, may.

The JWST has already shown us an exoplanet with water and clouds, imperatives for life as we know it. If Life is there looking at us, what would you like them to witness? Be that today. Catch your wave but take turns. Get after it at just your own tempo, but teach others to surf. Infinity is big enough to be chilly. Share your long sleevers. Warm hugs matter. Stay close while you explore.

And as always, buy art. You need it, your friends need it. Strangers need it. It reminds us of the next wave you can't see yet, and that ride will be ....

High summer is upon us.

Peace out,

B Mac

P. S. Stay tuned. We are planning a "This" and a "That".

P. P. S. And this is just Part 1.

P. P. S. S. Social media less and socialize more. Put down your phone and pick up your phone.

Portal

In one of the Avengers movies, Peter Parker, Spiderman, is on a school bus and the hair on his arm rises. He spins around to see a colossal spaceship shaped like a ring parting the clouds over the city. The Bad Guy is here. Great. Thanos. But, really cool ship, super cool. Maybe I should put that in a panel. Giant circular flying vessel...

When I was a senior in college I had a "gut" class, a filler to fulfill requirements that was supposed to be a breeze requiring scant attention, called Visvoc -- Analysis of the Visual Vocabulary. One assignment was to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum and sketch and produce a visual project. No big deal, ferris wheel. Monet, Rodin, Louise Nevelson, all blew me away, but I became obsessed with Ukiyo-E, "pictures of the floating world," Japanese art during the Edo Period from 1670 till around 1870. These were primarily woodblock prints and paintings in a strongly stylized vision, with techniques and a graphic complexity/simplicity unlike anything I had experienced being dragged through museums in Europe as a little punk with my brothers. Western art had nothing like this. My project took a couple of overnighters and some long afternoons ignoring the stuff for which I was actually getting graded, and copying and analyzing, and parsing and staring, trying to understand the codes, the tropes, the composition, the pure lines and colors that made these small pieces so compelling and iconic. I still have the little bound booklet I made on vellum and heavy paper with inks and colored pens sorting out the power that Hiroshige and Hokusai printed by hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

In 2012 in the Chinese city of Funshun, the local town leaders needed some tourist mojo to revitalize the waterfront. They built the "Ring of Life," a 515 foot tall circular skyscraper that looks just like my ring in "Portal." It's a slimmed down version of the spacecraft from the movie, but landed, with doors and elevators. Picture the St. Louis Arch as a circle. Circle of life on a grand scale.

You want to understand my vision, as in, what the hell is "Portal" all about, study Ukiyo-E. The bold flat line, yep. (My book "Random Order" is a collection of these panels with the "beam" anchoring everything, the power of the horizon). The gradient horizontals of dark to light, check. Rain, wind, radiant lines of a sunset, the organic and architecture, yep. Hokusai's most famous print from his series "36 Views of Mt Fuji", called "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" is a perfect example of monkeying with scale. Mt Fuji, the massive volcano, is tiny, much smaller than the boats or the waves. In my panel, a pyramid, which we know is enormous, is tiny. Want a sense of big? Put tiny elements in -- people, flying leaves, snow falling, an itty bitty house. One of my favorite pieces has a miniscule kite out of the frame of the print on a spiderweb-scale kite string. Nature and architecture, hats blown off, simple small bits, huge landscapes. Yep, I'm more abstract than those heroes but someone has to depict time travel, the warping of space, the portal to another dimension, or seven...

"Portal" is the mechanism of transport. It is the escape route, the coming home, the dreaded change, the moment of release. It is round, whole, complete AND a gate. This panel is meant to be science fiction and emotional fact. The Western art canon embraced Ukiyo-E in the late 19th and early 20th century. One can find blatant thefts or loving homage depending on your temperament in Degas, Manet, Cassat, Monet, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. And, apparently, in the Marvel Universe. In high school I had a "Great Pacific Ironworks" t-shirt with Hokusai's "Wave" on the front, selling climbing gear to school kids continents away from the Himalaya. What did I know? It was cool. I wanted to be cool. High school, college, now... the circle of life. Pictures of the floating world...

Thanks for the patience my friends. I don't often explain what you are looking at. I barely understand it myself. Also, by the by, when I was 17 I bought a book of kimono patterns. Who knows why. They show up in my work all the time. I'm Scottish. Better look for tartans too.

And finally, we stand in chaotic times. Look for and embrace the order. "Random Order" is the name of the book. It's an oxymoron. It's where we live everyday. Wake up in the morning and there is the portal. Keep smiling. Love each other.

P.S. AND, look at Louis Nevelson's sculpture. It is what I make. Blatant ripoff, loving homage...

Endurance, Pi and the Radiator

Yep, it's that day you look forward to all year. It's Pi Day, March 14th, Einstein's birthday. 3.14159265... which some brilliant fool has extrapolated out past 22 trillion digits. Pi never repeats, has no pattern (although there is always someone in the room suggesting no pattern is itself a pattern) and it goes on forever, kind of like some of my sentences.

A week ago images surfaced of a shipwreck on the bottom of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton's polar expedition vessel that was crushed in pack ice and sank in 1915 has been found and photographed under 10,000 feet of the frigid ocean. If, dear friend, you don't know this epic tale, order the book today and read it tomorrow, or next week, or the following, considering the state of the post office. Amazon Prime, right? Two days... What didn't governmental chaos plus a couple impeachments plus a plague plus an insurrection plus Brexit plus the Tonga explosion plus act one of World War Three not upend? Did I mention the lockdown plus not seeing peoples' faces for two years plus inflation plus that ship wedged in the canal plus wildfires plus Ragnarok...

What these have in common can be summed up by watching Alan Watts' "Chinese Farmer" story on Youtube. We are living Pi everyday. It is always different. It never repeats. It goes on infinitely. Our human condition includes tragedy and birth, accident and blessings every single time we get out of bed. You have no idea what tomorrow brings. No one does. There is only one thing that can be done. Do what Shackleton did. Get up and go again. Sail to the end of the earth in a ship that looks like it was built in the 1600s, get trapped in ice for a year, ship sinks, hike over pack ice, eat your sled dogs, split up, sail 800 miles in a wooden life boat in the worst weather on earth to an island, climb... Just read the book folks. My point is, yep, this is it. Go again. BUT, smile at the person you are passing on the stairs. Right now. We are all living those passing digits. Show some love every chance you possibly can as this is the only thing that makes us not just math, just animals circulating, just shouting callousness on a TV screen... Love is the answer and you know it. Ghandi said, "Be the change you want in the world."

"And the sun comes in like a god

Into my room

All perfect light and promises..."

sings that pop song from the 80s sounding like scripture and hope. And it's highly danceable. Today's Pi Day challenge: love each other until you can't keep your eyes open. And then go again, like Ernest. Make a difference, like Albert. Be like that Ghandi chap. 1% better every week adds up...

Solidarity with the blue and yellow.

love love,

b mac

P.S. And buy art. Art keeps you centered more than TV. And the outdoors. And maybe exercise. And sunshine. And the dog. Good food... but mostly ART.

P.P.S. BTW, Ghandi didn't say that exactly. Those eight words are a paraphrase but a nice distillation of a pithy paragraph. 3.14 works better sometimes...

P.P.S.S. Alan Watts is reminding us of silver linings. We have no idea where today's turmoil will lead. "Aren't you worried?!" demanded Tom Hanks in that spy movie. "Would it help?" was the repeated reply. For years I have reminded friends that "Worrying is using your life force to focus on the thing you don't want to happen." Disaster?! Maybe. Meanwhile, affirm hope. Radiate warmth.

Perfection

Do you know of anything that is perfect? Are you having a perfect day? Ah, yeah, no? Probably not. Let's unravel that right now. The notion of perfection bubbled up this week when I was having a conversation with an engineer who is 3-D printing lenses that my son designed for me to help light clients' art pieces. Since my work is light sculpture, dialing in precise illumination has been a priority for years, and this new addition to the quiver is fabulous. This company is using tools capable of machining to within four millionths of an inch; they have measuring capability to "see" discrepancies down to a millionth of an inch. Pretty much perfect, right? Well, that is not a thing. "Pretty much perfect;" "Really unique;" "almost always" or "almost never" are what my dad explained as "modifying an absolute." And that can't be done, grammatically speaking. Humans say these things constantly and we know what they mean. But, " pretty much perfect" is watering down something that we need to hang on to tightly. Perfection is an absolute.

Operating at nearly absolute zero, the James Webb Space Telescope is a tool approaching perfection and made by the brightest minds in math, physics and engineering. It is parked and cooling a million miles away and preparing to look back to what the physicists like to call First Light, the Cosmic Dawn, when stars ignited, streaming photons into a universe barely 300 million years old. Once fully tuned, we will see light created over 13 billion years ago. To comprehend the "tuning" we are talking about, think of the 18 mirrors that comprise the light collector as being the size of the United States. Each mirror is the size of Texas. Their edge alignment has to be accurate to within an inch and a half. This is nanometer scale, billionths of a meter. As a reminder, a million seconds is a week and a half; a billion is 31 and a half years. Near perfection...

Can you think of anything that is truly perfect? I can. Everything around us has glitches, niggles, pauses, flats in the curve, a missed note, a mumble, a rattly part, squeaks, exceptions to the rule, unexplained outcomes... All things we create have this evidence of our animal being, our flawed, yet beautiful, bodies, our minds and hands. But, MATH. Mathematics has perfection all over the place from Pi to Phi to the Fibonacci sequence to equations defining numerical truths. Boom! But, this is not about that stuff. We didn't create math. We found it. Math is like a polished marble sphere or a cube of machined platinum. It's cool, but distant. I like a tesseract.

The only perfect things are memories. I remember snapdragons in the front yard in Kennington when I was five, little colored mouths you could squeeze open and shut. Walks at dawn by the Thames with my dad, just us, mist, goose poops in the damp grass, the smell of oldness and newness all at once. Music blasting, guitars screaming on a cross-country drive with my brother Andrew, hanging my arm out the window west of Las Vegas into the oven heat of the desert. Tippy top of a sticky tallest tree in the pine yard. Bad coffee on the S. I. ferry with Carl. The green flash in San Diego. These could fill books. Maybe pause here and recall some bright moments of your own. So many. And they shine. Perfectly. If you are reading this right, you are smiling now.

The photographer Galen Rowell used a phrase that has stuck for years -- "the golden sieve of memory." Most people are blessed with minds that retain the goodness of their history and permit the painful parts to filter out and recede. If you are not in this group, consider steps to join the club. The sieve also functions as a burnisher, a selective polisher, to make memories attain a sheen that keeps them sparkling and resonant and easier to find in the files upstairs. If the moment wasn't perfect, the event itself was flawed, your memory of it can be subconsciously rehearsed until the occluded parts are understood. The memory is perfect when the thing itself wasn't. The sieve saves the valuable.

It's hard being a human. Dark and light. Darkness and lightness. But perfection is real and accessible even if you aren't a math weenie. Put adventures in the bank behind your eyes. Sharing those is what this Art thing is about. See? Look at what I know. Look what I see and have seen and share how they shine. I can't make something perfect. But I can show you perfection, if I'm having a good day at the studio and the muse is caffeinated.

The images in this missive are meant to be diverse. A recent personal challenge is expansion of vision, mining old veins for new gems, digging through the visual files, finding the fresh, and making them shine on the wall.

Rock steady, my perfect friends, you know who you are. Take time to share.

Save the Absolutes!

Atlatls and Aurochs and a Bee on the Moon

Hi Friends,

"How did I get here?" asks a song released in 1981. On Groundhog's Day.

It's from the song "Once in a LIfetime" by the band Talking Heads.

The James Webb Space Telescope finally launched and is cruising at three quarters of a mile per second to L2, an earth orbital point that is nicely stable. It should stay where we put it. By the way, the International Space Station is 220 miles above the earth. L2 is a million miles away. "Where does that highway go to?"

An atlatl, besides being one of the best words ever (talk about rhythm, just look at it), is a throwing device, generally made of wood, used to throw a spear with more force and accuracy. Think arm leverage multiplier. It was the best technology of its day -- one exists made of reindeer horn found in France dated to 17,500 years ago, but researchers suggest it was used throughout the Paleolithic Era, the Old Stone Age, by hominids dating back 3.3 million years, or, put another way, 99% of the time some version of man has existed. It was a tool to feed the roaming band of families whose survival depended on its skilled use. (Listen to "Houses in Motion" on the same album by the Talking Heads). The word "atlatl" comes from the Aztecs. The "woomera" is roughly the same tool used by Australian aboriginals. "You may ask yourself, how do I work this?"

Aurochs are extinct. The last one died in 1627 in Poland. They were one of the largest herbivores of the Holocene or the geologic period that contains the proliferation of humanity, all written history and the rise of civilizations. They were hunted throughout Eurasia and ultimately domesticated as the ur-cattle, the densest source of protein humankind could manage. Standing around six feet at the shoulder, the largest weighed up to 3,000 pounds. "Where is that large automobile?"

Friends, we have a helicopter on Mars. It's just under four pounds and flies in air less than 1% the density of our atmosphere. We have a telescope that will park in space, cool down for five months to achieve an operating temperature of -364 degrees, and look back in time over 13 billion years with an instrument capable of detecting the heat of a bee on the moon. "You may ask yourself, how did I get here?"

Paul Simon sings "these are the days of lasers in the jungle," and the "staccato signals of constant information." Listen to the song by the Police "Driven to Tears." Sting (there's that bee again) sings about "...too many cameras and not enough food." The voices here are the art of awareness, that technology exists willy nilly flinging us somewhere and is it somewhere we want to be? "Am I right? Am I wrong?" "Here comes the twister..."

"Letting the days go by..." I'm not a big fan of David Byrne's voice; never really loved his band Talking Heads, but this album is a monument. Brian Eno was the producer and he had the band listen to Fela Kuti, a west African multi-instrumentalist band leader and political activist whose entire work centered on polyrhythms, music that circled and phased and expanded and hovered, the sonic machinery of time and percussion. The sound of time without a downbeat. "Time isn't holding up, time isn't after us." Listen to the Talking Heads song, "Once in a LIfetime" where all these lyric snippets come from. Notice that the first note in the bassline is missing. Eno had a band that didn't jam, jam, and recorded it all to pick through and make this album. It's a bunch of American art school post punkers playing polyrhythms, speeded up and stumbling, tribal trance dance smashed through electronic looping and tweaking and spit out as a rock album. The band had to learn how to play what was on the album in real time. NPR named it one of the 100 most important musical works of the 20th century. Over it all is the quasi poetry of Byrne sounding like a preacher: "And you may find yourself in another part of the world..."

"These are the days of miracle and wonder" sings Paul Simon. The Heads sing "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was..." The tempo is breakneck these days, but "same as it ever was." Not spears, not bison, but genotyping what's in a zoo by sampling the breeze by the fence. It's today. We are miraculous. Paul closes his song saying "Don't cry baby, don't cry," four times. That's the message. The Heads album is titled "Remain in Light." I will indeed. You too. (How superlative that this album has that specific title). It's bright; stay in it.

Art, my friends, requires eyes and ears. Thanks for the focus and go rock the above loud. Poetry and paintings, drums and reflected light. The James Webb has hexagons of beryllium covered in gold to look through time -- that's what I'm talking about.

P.S. You want to hear hope? Crank up Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man". Play it LOUD. There it is. Three minutes that sound like HOPE.

P.S.S. "Same as it ever was..." is the chorus that we have always been here. Different tools. Different toys. Different tribes. And we continue. "Into the blue again..."