2024, Eclipse, Syzygy, Solstice, fa la la...

I love birds mostly because of their absurdity. If you haven’t read these missives of mine over the years, here’s a refresher.

The ostrich has one claw on each foot and are known to eviscerate lions, run 43 miles an hour, keep rocks in their stomach, and can weigh up to 300 pounds. Golden crowned kinglets live all winter in Vermont snuggling together at night, eat only bugs and weigh about as much as a nickel. Frigatebirds have 7 1/2 foot wingspans. Their bones weigh around four ounces and they can sleep while flying. Owls have tubular eyes that are fixed in their skulls, poop bones, and can be heard for miles hooting outside my window at night, yet fly in utter silence. The bee hummingbird lays eggs the size of a coffee bean, weighs about two grams, and can “flap” its wings 200 times a second. All birds originated around 60 million years ago and are more closely related to dinosaurs and crocodiles than mammals. 

I found myself at an art show in Miami last week talking to a young woman physicist who worked on the LIGO detector and was clearly delighted to be in conversation with someone who knows it exists. We chatted about gravitational waves — the bend in space time caused by a kilonova collision — and she corrected me when I said the detector observed a change the size of a proton over a seven mile beam of laser light. “It’s actually a thousandth of that number.” 

So, birds are absurd. Scientists on the cutting edge of defining the laws governing the cosmos are brilliant, slightly isolated in their passion, and aware of the ridiculous nature of these aspects of their careers. Humans do crazy things. 

The holidays are upon us where we celebrate rituals based on things that may or may not have occurred, but we love them and teach our kids to love them. The Christmas tree?! Why? That’s not in the holy books. Did the oil light the lamps for eight days? Astronomers centuries ago identified the solstice that is happening today. They were probably considered ridiculous by the faith leaders, or were the faith healers… 

Humans include Sonny Rollins, Stephan Hawking, Taylor Swift, Shakespeare, Ghandi, Aristotle, the Dalai Lama, Brad Pitt, Martin Luther King, Alexander the Great, Churchhill, Nolan Ryan and all those northerners who dreamt up Odin and Thor and all those southerners who invented the digeridoo and Dreamtime painting and believe that land ownership is humorous. The Nazca lines have a 300 foot hummingbird drawing made around 2000 years ago. The pyramids… Notre Dame… strange human creations…

We are all weirdos. Myself especially, but please please please see us as all one group. Two eyes, a nose, a brain, legs… We are way more alike than the critters that surround us. Don’t get me started on the self-aware cephalopods that branched away from us half a billion years ago. They have brains in their arms and can see polarized light. Sharks are older than trees. But humans, all humans, are the same animal. The closest correlate that comes to mind are dogs. Chihuahuas and mastiffs are nearly identical on the dna level. We humans are all the same, with variations that are slight at most.

So, act like it my friends, especially in these fractious times. It’s the holidays, the holy days, where we speak of peace on earth and good will to Man. This is a light, fluffy missive, a holiday card about the longest night of the year yielding to the emerging light. Let’s celebrate our variety and acknowledge our sameness. We believe in different gods and rituals. We make crazy art and monuments. But at the core, we are all just large children trying to make a path through the craziness. Play with the kids. Make great food. Pause and notice. 

Mostly, peace and love.

Let’s go again.

Cheers!

B Mac and Sarah V here at Havoc ground control. Who wants a tee shirt that says HAVOC on the front and Chaos Coordinator on the back? 

P.S. And, as always, buy art. It hangs in your living room and says hey… pay attention. Today. 

P.P.S. Please share this card as we don't have everyone's email. Thanks.

Surf’s Up

"When you come to the place where the road and the sky collide, 

Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide..."

Why is the sky blue? Everyone knows that it's because of blue scattering. The lower end of our visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is deflected more by the air molecules in the atmosphere as blue is shorter wavelengths. It might logically be purple, as violet is even shorter, and still visible to humans; but the sun emits far more energy in the blue wavelengths than purple due to its composition. AND our eyes are more sensitive to blue wavelengths than purple. La la la. We all know this. But, why is the sky blue?

Plankton, the original green stuff. The earth had mostly a methane atmosphere until two billion years of plankton, hard at work, made the air 21% oxygen. Lucky for us. Air is mostly nitrogen (78%), because the primordial rocks of the planet itself are chock full of the gas. Cracks in the crust and volcanoes top it up constantly. Also, the nitrogen cycle of plants and bacteria and algae are "fixating" nitrogen into usable compounds for the ongoing abundance of life. This ratio has been generally stable for 100 million years. There is a whole other topic here about fertilizers to feed the planet that involves bird shit, bat guano, cow manure... but we have heard enough in this arena of late. So thank you plankton. Full stop. 

But let's not confuse causation with correlation. Climate scientists are nearly unanimous in blaming the global temperature rise on the trillions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted since humans started burning things -- wood, then coal, then oil. And today, wildfires and deforestation, both intentional and incidental, make it worse. Greenland is melting, exposing more rock and dust which is not as reflective as white snow and so the temperature rise is accelerating. Should the ice dome of Greenland melt completely, global sea level will rise twenty feet. Weirdly, carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere accounting for only .04 percent along with its pals, methane, ozone and nitrous oxide (laughing gas), and a handful of others. Scientists are also quick to point out that in the 450,000 centuries that the earth has been here, there have been massive fluctuations in its temperature and surface biology.  The last ice age that buried North America began around 120,000 years ago and peaked only 18,000 years ago. The planet warmed. The ice melted rapidly between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago. 

Moving on. Have you noticed all the old birds flying around of late? No?! Why not? You have to figure a lot of those birds are really old. They don't get grey hair. They don't stumble through the sky. They might hang out and grumble a ton with their friends on the shoreline, but that seems normal. 

Recently in the news there have been "bomb cyclones". Out West there was a "snowpocalypse" in the Sierras. Looking back was acid rain, sinkholes, red tides and the polar vortex. We had "killer bees" and now "murder hornets". "Supercells" are becoming common. "Fire tornados" are a thing, as are "snownadoes." "Derecho" flew by me recently and I looked it up to find that it is a "widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm known as a mesoscale convective system." Look up the periodic disaster called "zud." 

Not for a second is anyone to read this as an essay downplaying the emotional rollercoaster we have experienced. The ongoing ramifications of what is taking place in the government are widespread and potentially catastrophic for the culture we have come to know as our "home."  Or not. We can't know the outcomes. We can only operate as we should with love and kindness for every person we are in contact with in this little blip of time that is our lot in the galaxy. The media is LOUD. Enemies exist everywhere, according to them. Inanity and insanity abound. 

Play with the kids. Grow your garden. Ski. Sled ride. Coach hockey. Make art. Sing. Dance. Chef up a feast. The sky has been falling since I was told about Chicken Little. Send clothes to Ukraine. Support anyone or anything that is trying to feed and clothe those that need the help. 

I am supposed to be writing about art and I will next time. But all these words come from a three pound pink jello that is behind my eyes and a heart that is in the waning half of beating two and a half billion times. I feel fortunate every morning to awaken. We have a chance daily to lighten, to laugh, to care. Do it. 

Jackson Browne sang the above lines decades ago and followed with the lyric, "I could be just around the corner from heaven or a mile from hell." So today, " let my spirit glide". 
Like every bird you ever see. 

Got that out. 

Peace. And for real, hugs.

Bruce mac 

P.S. AND, as I was writing this missive after singing the above lines to myself for a couple days, I thought it best to check my memory of the lyrics and BOOM. This song, on Jackson Browne's album "Late For The Sky," was written by Danny O'Keefe, a dear friend of mine my entire adult life. In fact, Danny, a truly brilliant human, songwriter and guitarist extraordinaire, with a soulful singing voice that can bring tears, borrowed an image of one of my pieces for his last album. "Circular Turns" is available on Amazon.

P.P.S. The artwork above is named "Nazaré" for the surf spot in Portugal, home to the biggest waves ever ridden. Have a wander through the Youtube universe of the brave and crazy on hundred foot waves on a surfboard. My friends, this is the metaphor for the moment. Momento mori. Only thing to do is surf, whatever the wave height. 

P.P.S.S. Come see us at the Scope show in Miami Beach, Dec. 3rd through the 8th, Booth #B029. We can toast plankton and old birds. Keep on flying. And thanks Danny, for the poetry. 

P.P.S.S.S. Blue, violet, green, red, white, Browne...

The Thing that is not a Thing

In my sketchbook is a page from some time ago that I don't remember and all it says is: 

"There is no universe without us to see it. There is no us without the exploding star. It is us. We are it."

The next page is empty. 

Clearly there was some transition going on there enough to break down to first principles -- what does one know? Only that one is aware and thinking and ...  

Remembering my old homework: Immanuel Kant, Issac Newton and the Age of Reason -- space and time are distinct; the world is physical and knowable. That was the 18th century. The 19th century and William Blake state time and space are one and the same. The philosopher as authority switches to the poet. The Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, stated that the world is half-perceived and half-created. (I'm paraphrasing, criminally, "Tintern Abbey"). Lots of opium use in England at the time, predescessing our counterculture by more than a century. Along came Einstein and Niels Bohr and the equation tying mass and light together and the notion that light is a wave AND a particle, both a thing and not a thing, but a movement. AND Shroedinger pointed out that just looking at a thing makes the thing different. And now 21st Century and Frank Wilzek, the Nobel prize winning physicist explaining in his fabulous book "Fundamentals" that there really aren't any "things" on a quantum level -- it's all just spin, spin direction, and velocity and charges. Feeling better now? 

And so, surfing... I just lost the lease on my studio and gallery where I have been making magic for thirteen years. Do you remember learning how to walk and how that felt? I don't either, but that was a big deal. Is reality solid and linear? Nope. Is every day a something that is a miracle but you likely won't remember after a while? Yep. Am I forced to change? Yep, and initially pretty angry about it, but hey, waves. Wind and waves.. This is a wicked fun ride with speed and falling and constant motion. And on some level, I was expecting this. The Russian philosopher P. D. Ospensky wrote, 

"Only the fine apparatus, which is called 'the soul of an artist' can understand and feel the reflection of the noumenon in the phenomenon. In art it is necessary to study the hidden side of life. The artist must be clairvoyant: he must see what others do not see; he must be a magician, must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which he does see." 

Art is precognitive. Moving on a wave is precognitive. Snowboarding at tempo through trees in steep snowy pitches REQUIRES not thinking, only responding. Adapting to life's challenges is, when done well, like surfing. Ride the wave whatever size appears, crumbly, wind blown, too fast... (I highly recommend "Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan). I'm on to a new break, a new swell, new mates in the water, different beach, depths unknown, different slant of the light... I was angry that I was forced to change and now I'm thrilled. Let's go. 

Many years ago at an art show I was next to a huckster type dude who just seemed overly friendly with everyone. Eavesdropping, I heard an older couple shuffle in and explain that they haven't been reordering from him as their store had burned down. The guy, Sergio, said, "That's great! You can start fresh. Build everything perfect from scratch." I will never forget the moment. He was beaming and earnest and the couple visibly brightened. 

So. Buy art right now so I don't move twice what's in the gallery today. This will assist my move and lighten the truck. As I type on this miraculous device we call a laptop, dragonflies are grabbing sips on the fly from the humongous puddle that is the driveway. Dragonflies are revered in Japan as symbols of rebirth, courage, and strength. Of course they are here right now.  

In closing, my lease ending is real and a metaphor. We all face much more dire challenges than packing and moving. This life is temporary, finite. But dragonflies have been around for 300 million years. Keep going; remember to hydrate. Hugs on a 90 degree summer day, smack in the middle of the constant of change...

b mac 

P.S. We operate in a world of illusion. Bob Dylan sang, "What looks large from a distance, close up, ain't never that big." He and William and Frank won Pulitzer prizes for explorations of this intangible something we experience every day.

P.P.S. Personally, my operating principle could be swiped from the Grateful Dead, "Wake up to find out, you are the eyes of the world."

The Fifth State

As usual, buckle up. There is so much to cover. Maybe I should write a book...

When I was a kid, there was a tv show called "Johnny Quest" that featured science and adventure guys fighting villains. The Professor and Race Bannon, (how's that for an adventure guy name?) and the youngster dudes Johnny, his pal Haiji, and their trusty mutt Bandit, rode around in hovercrafts defeating the evil Dr Whatever and his plan to destroy all good things. My brothers and I were sure by the time we were getting licenses, we would be driving hovercrafts. Delusional brothers rule! The coolest of all the gadgets though were laser beams -- weapons that shot red beams of light that could vaporize anything. Lasers! Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Einstein actually predicted these conceptually in 1917. (What didn't he foresee)? A patent was filed the year I was born. MUCH MUCH later. Today, one can buy a three pack of laser beam cat toys for $10 online! Laser tag, laser hair removal, level, printer, pointer, tape measure... Lasers check you out at the grocery store. A laser was bounced off a mirror left on the moon so, knowing the speed of light, we can calculate precisely how far away the big dusty rock is. I have a laser level in a drawer here in the shop. No hovercrafts around but lasers!! The coherent light of a laser beam has been used in a lab in Michigan to pulse in a few quintillionths of a second creating a peak power of three petawatts or a thousand times the electrical consumption of the whole world. 

Ok. So. I make light sculpture. I use photons and stainless steel to make art that shimmers as the viewer strolls around. It's metal, a solid state of matter, that reflects photons in a group of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum that are wavelengths detectable by the backs of our eyeballs. For the piece you are looking at in this missive, the round shape of metal was cut using hydrogen and argon, both gases, with a computer controlled plasma cutter. Plasma is a fourth state of matter extremely uncommon on earth but making up over 99% of all matter in the universe. (I warned you to buckle up). Plasma is when an atom is energized, primarily through heat, until its electrons lose their attachment to the nucleus. Stars are balls of plasma. Superheated, massive. Lightning is plasma. 

All the art pieces that hang on the wall that I have made for 25 years are squares and rectangles, pieces of metal cut with a shear, like a beefy paper cutter. This piece, "Corona", is cut from stainless plate with a plasma cutter. The shape is made by vaporizing the metal with superheated gas. This could also be done with a laser. 

Part of the reason for making rectilinear art pieces has to do with hanging them on the wall easily. But, how can I make a circular frame? By calling a good friend who has a computer-controlled laser capable of vaporizing 1/2" thick wood with utter precision. Laminating these arcs and gluing and screwing generates the ideal frame and la la la, my first round art pieces. 

The corona, as I mentioned in my last blog, (here's a link to the one called "The Iron Giant": https://www.havocgallery.com/blog) is not visible to the naked eye except during the totality phase of a solar eclipse. For about three minutes in April, I, and all my pals on the scene in Vermont, could stare directly at the sun and see this magical circular veil. It's white, pure, perfect. People around me were yelling, crying, a small mob of humans united by light, witnessing a celestial event on the lakeshore. I tell people all the time that "It's all about light." Here was light in its perfect glory, beaming into our innermost selves. Magic. Sublimity. A moment in life of smallness as a speck in the cosmos and yet a union with the solar orb that makes all this possible.  

And so, for me, art follows. Here is a piece titled "Corona". It's four feet in diameter. I am doing another this size and doing two panels that are five feet in diameter. A little suite about awe. There's metal, liquid, gas and plasma. These pieces are about the fifth state -- the state of awe. If you have seen totality first hand, you know what I'm talking about. 

And here we are, thanks to computer-controlled lasers, machine-made lightning, a bit of wood and paint, some gases, some heat, some input from this little human, and, at the core, light. OK. You can unbuckle. Back to your regularly scheduled daily awesomeness. 

love and hugs, 

buy art right now,

give it as gifts,

B Mac 

P.S. Oh, and that book thing. It's on the way. Stay tuned. Soon. Very soon. 

C Sharp and Violet

Hi friends, 

Most of the time these writings focus on everything but what I really do everyday. Just to review, we recently touched on relativity, ostriches, the ship of Theseus, border collies, atomic bombs, hummingbirds, space telescope thermal regulation, beer, Pi, bunnies, Stonehenge, atlatls, laser beams and birefringence. Weirdly, there is no mention of coffee. Need to rectify that. But, this go-round, let's talk about art. Time to focus. 

Music has the capacity to alter time, fire emotions, put a listener in another state, literally; it stands apart from "normal" existence. It is an experience that occurs as much in the head as in the world in front of the listener. I recently saw Chris Thile and before that, Pat Metheny. The band plays and yet the experience you have standing beside me is different from the experience I have, even though we are listening to the same notes. One band I hardly knew. The solo guitarist I have listened to for forty years, from a dorm room in Philadelphia to the plains of Wyoming in a German car going 140 with a brother at the wheel and the stereo on eleven. My mind is not the same as yours. (Lucky you). And your neural firings generated by the guitar chord are entirely different. Same song. Different evocative waves of memory and emotion. Each time you hear a familiar song, it's different. Every time you listen to that same song in the car, there's a different landscape tearing by. Even in your living room, that familiar tune goes into your ear to a different brain from the last time you listened. These are nuances. And they matter.

A painting hangs on a wall. Soundless. Walk around the room. Same painting. I'm in love with "Vir Heroicus Sublimis" by Barnett Newman, painted in 1951. It's huge and RED and spectacular --  an international treasure in MOMA. It's emotional. Part of its majesty is its simplicity and solidity. It stands as a monument in art history. It's always the same to behold. 

But, a sculpture outdoors is dynamic. It changes from moment to moment while being the same object. How does that work? Light. Light is always changing outside of the box we know as a museum. Visit "Cloud Gate" in Chicago. It is different every time you see it and changes throughout the day. This is the conceptual framework that ties what I do more closely to music than to painting. I believe my work is best in a home filled with changing light than in a gallery. Early morning, lunch time, night time, blue skies, Spring, snow on the ground, November grey skies, Florida light is different from LA light, shimmering light off the ocean, the glow of a sunset over the lake. A client sent me photos of his piece of mine on a sunset evening last summer lit with the red-orange fierceness caused by Canadian wildfires. 

I don't make stand-alone outdoor sculptures outdoors (much). I make sculptures that play with the light in your space. AND, the intention is to enhance your experience of visible electromagnetic radiation, to make you more aware of how your eyes and mind perceive this world. When our eyes are open, vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity in the brain. Forty percent of all nerve fibers connected to the brain are linked to the retina in the back of your eye, and fifty percent of the cortex is dedicated to processing visual stimuli. This is my leverage. I want you to spend enough time with my artwork to tune up your sensibilities regarding the light reaching your mind. I want the subtleties to matter. When we are standing in front of my art, we are seeing different things -- parallax is working, light is refracting and reflecting at different angles. And relax, take in the nuance, and then step two feet to the right and relax again. New. Fresh. Sit on the sofa. Different. Turn on a lamp. And on and on. The more time spent, the more one finds -- old friend glimmers, new separations of background and foreground, lines connecting that you never noticed before.  And, as with any repeated experience, you will see more and better. 

This mission aligns with music as a way to make our time on the planet more magical. If we listen a lot we hear more. Ask any birdwatcher. Or music teacher. Or DJ. My efforts are to make you more aware of this superpower that we all are gifted. If you spend time with my brushwork, my vocabulary, my energy fields and scribbles and geometries and shapes and smudges and vectors and arcs and... It's like ear training for your eyes, yoga for perception, dancing to learn how the body moves. 

When I write to you, I want you, dear reader, to come away with something fresh. These are words to do what my visual art does in a more primitive way. Fire the visuals again and again and you will apprehend the experience of sight with just a smidgeon of more notice, a little more awareness of the subtleties and the loud wavelengths. Your memories of artworks and the zoo and weather and architecture and twilight and the shimmering afternoon light from a boat and that eclipse! and movies and morning fog through the trees will be different from mine, but I hope the experience of spending time with my arrangements of wavelengths will elevate your joy in all of these. It's a weird, didactic mission that organically evolved. Thank the gods it's fun. Not done yet. 

Rock steady, Buy art. Hang it. And then email me what you see and feel. I'm a piano tuner; my art is the song; you are the piano. 

Happy Spring!

Refresh!

Love and big hugs,

B mac

P.S. We have been slow changing seasons in Vermont. Two days ago I read that paleontologists can identify a point in Earth's history when it rained for a million years. Ok. I'm good now. 

P.P.S. Crank the stereo. 

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.