It's What You Do

Greetings to the extended clan,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ciao bella,

b mac

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

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

Thoughts Have You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Control Time

My friends, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce R. MacDonald

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

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

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

We Could be a Sugar Cube

Hi Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks from our little gallery slice of planet earth,

Love. Beauty. Magic.

B Mac

Transmutation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love love love,

b mac

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

Size Matters Not

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

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

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

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

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

Stay in touch,

Fly slowly,

Collect nectar.

The Rules of Surfing, Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

High summer is upon us.

Peace out,

B Mac

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

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

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

Portal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endurance, Pi and the Radiator

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

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

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

"And the sun comes in like a god

Into my room

All perfect light and promises..."

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

Solidarity with the blue and yellow.

love love,

b mac

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

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

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

Perfection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Save the Absolutes!

Atlatls and Aurochs and a Bee on the Moon

Hi Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of Darkness

Howdy dear friends,

Welcome to the reversing of the earth’s magnetic fields. No wait. Not that. The solstice is nigh. That’s it. This is the end of the dying of the light, when the darkness turns to light(ness) and the world is made brighter every day. Ready ready, indubitably. We all are.

As many of you know, I am writing a book based on my Elements Project. I'm nearly done with the exposition of the 118 characters we call the known elements of the universe. The following is an excerpt, pertinent to these times. It's just a slice from essay #64 for the element, Gadolinium.

"This Element's strange magnetic properties could be classified as its superpower. No other on the chart behaves the way this one does and to expand this into the realm of art is actually a small step. When viewing great art there is a change in the perceiver, an elevation that ranges from a small smile, a tug on the heart, to a sense of transcendence -- a witness to the sublime. Great art, whether visual, musical, theatrical, dancers on a stage, improvisational or composed, lines in a book, momentarily perceived or through a lifetime of study and reflection, can vibrate some essence of our humanity. We recognize our miraculous birth or our tragic mortality or our capacity to simply witness the whirling mechanism of the cosmos right here, right now. In that moment, just as Gadolinium, a soft, silvery metal, when exposed to a magnetic field, increases its temperature, real ART touches the soul, individually and collectively, and raises its temperature. This is a personal book so if I am ever to share -- years ago I saw a concert with the Paul Winter Consort in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan on the winter solstice. The night was grim, cold, snow changing to sleet. The show was a magnificent mix of light and sonics, elaborate compositions, delicate, dynamic, flights of soloing musicians, aboriginal driving percussion, with Tuvaan throat singers, recorded whale songs and a full choir. For the encore, as the soaring reached a crescendo, the air reverberating, the space within the stone walls of the world's largest Gothic cathedral throbbing, saturated with frequencies colliding, someone in the seeming bowels of the earth fired up the pipe organ with thunderous chords, bass pedals held to the floor. The mothership landing, the tsunami crashing overhead, the landslide, the collapse of the sky itself, the final tectonic shift... tears flowed.

And that my friends is what this is all about. Haikus and lightning, indoor storms, subtlety and the obvious resolution just there at arm's length. One small glimmer that defies explanation over and over and over... lines on a surface gesturing at eternity..."

Beyond the obvious, why now? Why share these words? Because the sky is falling, sleet bitterly frigid, in darkness, just as then. And yet, there is redemption waiting. The world as we know ends every day. And another day begins. Jane Goodall is 87 years young and I know of no other voice that speaks so powerfully of hope. Look her up. Listen to her words in these moments of darkness all around. Humans are astounding and our capacity to grow, heal, repair, envision and expand are limitless. Whales sing despite the noise. Musicians rattle the rafters. Artists make magic that sits there glimmering, smiling back at us. The sunrise over Stonehenge on the solstice returns, as always. My oldest brother's daughter just had a baby boy. My youngest brother had a son five months ago. These little humans may have answers we need. In the meantime, celebrate with loud music and bright art. Cheers to another year. We have lost much and many, but here we be. Lucky us.

Love is the answer.

Listen to Jane.

She's an earth mother if there ever was one.

And she is filled with confidence and hope and vision.

Happy holidays my friends. So glad we have met.

Peace, and

we got this...

hugs all around,

B Mac

The Grasshopper and the Lightning Bug, True Story

Once we were swimming in a quarry in Salisbury, Vermont and I was putting my clothes back on right by the water's edge and a grasshopper from the meadow landed on the sock that I had just slid over my foot. YAAAHH! Giant bug!!. Without thinking, I snatched him by the wings and flicked him into the water not two feet from where I was sitting and SNAP, a fish, like lightning, appeared from the depths, swallowed him whole and was gone. In half a second, a nice, fat grasshopper was flitting along in the summer sun and BAM, swallowed whole, down the gullet and into the depths of an abandoned quarry. La la la, life and then...

We finished changing and wandered back to the car. My buddy John had a VeeDub beetle, which it turns out, had been bumped kind of hard off the little gravel patch where we left it. But, this being Vermont, there was a note on the windshield with an apology and a contact number. Damn, but, ok. Dent's not too bad. John reached out to put the key in the lock and SNAP! He jerked backward and yelped. Electricity! The bug had been banged hard enough to be contacting an electric fence and the key made an audible BZAP on contact. John's arm was tingling and buzzing. What the hell?! Now what?! Can't even touch the car.

We were/are smart idiots, so we started pushing the closest fence post back and forth to create enough slack to free the car. In the process, we were sort of trashing 100 yards of high tension fence line. After a minute or two of yanking, the wire was off the fender and as we started to exit the scene, a large and old pick-up truck pulled up and out climbed a very tanned and scowling farmer and two farm hands, both of them twice the size of us. Great.

We started apologizing and they started laughing and told us not to worry about the stupid fence. No big deal, ferris wheel. Shit happens. All the time. Crazy shit.

What does this have to do with art? Everything. You, and I, are grasshoppers. La La La, summer day. Anything can happen, anytime. So go big. Don't hold back. Be that quick trout. Snatch that snack. And when lightning strikes, laugh about it. Fences need messing up sometimes. Strangers are friends you haven't met yet, especially the big burly dudes. They are often the merriest. Carpe diem team! Come visit the art show. Buzz me back with your stories about the snap crackle and the big fish.

See ya soon,

and love,

it is the answer.

B Mac

Getting There

How do we get from here to there? If it's a commute, a car, usually, maybe a bike, if you are lucky. If it's across the ocean, a plane, or a boat if you have the time. If you want to get to the first exo-planet that seems like a likely spot to have Earth 2.0, you would have to cross around 24.5 trillion miles of space. Proxima Centauri b is orbiting a red dwarf star in a "habitable zone" around 4.2 light years away from your house. Disregarding the solar flares it experiences -- 100 times the UV radiation necessary to kill all life -- and the solar winds 2000 times stronger than the winds we experience on our home planet, just getting there is the challenge. If we could fly 20% the speed of light, the voyage would take 20 years, and so far, our fastest spacecraft is the Parker Solar Probe. It is travelling .05% the speed of light or fast enough to get to the moon in 40 minutes from my favorite coffee shop. Sent to have a look at Pluto, the New Horizons Probe, second speediest out of our fast NASA garage, took nine and a half years to get there. At that rate, it would take 78,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri b.

The piece in these photos is my proposal. It's called "Transverse Projector". It is capable of traveling 70 times the speed of light and is large enough to bring Australia and New Zealand, (Yes, they have to travel in a large bubble but I'm sure they won't mind. Also, the surf will be unusually high. Again, probably not a real issue and potentially a selling feature for crew recruitment). We will have some challenges regarding what to put in their place in the South Pacific, but it's likely doable with bamboo and such. "Transverse Projector" operates using basic warp drive technology that should be ready in a couple years or centuries, give or take. Construction will involve mining the moon, most of it in fact, but no one lives there, so hey, what's the big deal? As captain, Chris Pratt seems to have lots of experience, or maybe Chris Evans, or Chris Prine. I'm sure any of them will be thrilled as this is a big vehicle for star power. In fact, the propulsion is star power. Regarding funding, I'm making some calls.

At that speed we should arrive in a few months, assuming the Romulans or Draconians don't catch wind of our plans. In the meantime, (here we are back talking about time), this maquette for "Transverse Projector" is for sale. Please give it a good home, although it needs to be available for engineers regarding dimensions, materials, solar wind tunnel testing, vacuum analytics, hull impermeability, synthetic atmospherics modeling, quantum phase locking asymptotic projections, temporal improbability fractionation, the usual...

Peace and love and hugs and all the best stuff that matters day to day.

Make this place a better home with your efforts, however modest. Make music. Teach kids. Write positivity.

Tell Brisbane it's just a joke. We need koalas and kookaburras and Aussies very much.

Stay in touch. In fact, send me a quick note about the art you need for your space.

I have lots of different sizes made and in process. Space constraints are real and imagined.

B Mac,

Official assistant trainee in-betweener third class

P.S. FYI, that is the closest exoplanet. Stars are very, very, very, very far apart.

Your Actual Age is Today

Greetings and salutations continually new friends,

Are you feeling not yourself lately? There might be a good reason for that. Let's start with the "Ship of Theseus," a thought experiment that dates to 500 BC and was discussed by Plato and Heraclitus and plenty of arguing philosophers since. The Athenians preserved the ship that Theseus sailed home from Crete after winning a great battle and, over the course of a century, replaced all the rotting wood with new planks. Eventually, someone pointed out that most of the wood was new, in fact, pretty much ALL the wood was new. So, is the ship still the ship of Theseus? Or is it no longer his ship since all the original wood is gone? Furthermore, imagine someone saved all the rotten wood, figured out how to refortify the fibers of the decaying boards and then reassembled the pieces. Which is the ship of Theseus?

There is a company in California named Singer Vehicle Design that will accept your Porsche 911, made between 1989 and 1994, into their facility to customize and remanufacture the car. They can, and do, remake nearly every nut, bolt, stitch, glass, fender, switch, computer chip, paint finish, light, plastic bit, door pull, and every tiny, niggly bit of motor metal in the name of "restoration". These cars are resto-mods, modified to be better than the original factory version in every way. They are faster, lighter, grippier, sleeker, lower, shinier, sound better, cost more, are more personal, and are as sexy as bespoke machinery can possibly be. They even smell nicer, with only the finest matched leather hides slathering every interior surface, as well as quilted into the back wall of the engine compartment. Can't have your engine feeling left out. Their motto is "Everything matters," and truly, they will customize to the depth of the client's pocketbook. Want carbon fiber body panels with nickel plated mirrors? Done. Bring a photo of your dog and they will paint the car to match. These are engineers married to artists and their love of the craft and the machine are unparalleled. But is it a Porsche? The badge on the rump says Singer. But crack open their website and right on page one is the statement, "This is a Porsche 911, not a 'Singer 911'". Ship of Theseus, old German sports car, testimonial to the god/devil is in the details?

Speaking of specifics, the founder of the Singer firm, Rob Dickinson, was formerly a rock musician. Come to think of it, some bands such as Yes, Ratt, Thin Lizzy, Blood, Sweat and Tears are all bands containing none of the founding members of the original band. Is Yes still Yes, or No, or Pretty Much, or Maybe, Sort of? But one can see how in the modern litigious universe, the rights of ownership, of identity, can suddenly pivot on an ancient metaphysical conundrum.

Now, back to the original question. All the cells in your body replace themselves continuously. An article I read suggested 7 years as the average age of cells in our bodies and a bit of homework reveals heart cells can live 40 years, skeletal muscle cells live 15 years, liver cells about a year and red blood cells around 100 days. Your body merrily makes a teaspoon of fresh cerebrospinal fluid every 12 minutes to bathe your brain so you can read this. Divide your age by 7 and this is roughly how many times the planks of your ship have been replaced. So, who exactly is you? It's a subtly different question than "Who are you?" Let's assume all your cells have been replaced at least once, are you the person who was you before? Are you the man your wife married? Or vice versa? Nope, not anymore.

Based on this physical reality, one smacks into the concept of "self". If all your brain cells, the stuff you think is you thinking about stuff, are refreshed, then the continuity of your sense of self is physically a total illusion. Ok, fine. Then the self is a construct, literally, of memories (which, it's worth pointing out, are not actually "things") which are continually being recreated on a cellular matrix continually being recreated. Let that sink in for a moment.

How are you feeling now? An unavoidable conclusion, it seems, should be the recognition that who we are is subject to change. ALL THE TIME. We are living chemistry sets. We exist because a supernova blew up billions of years ago releasing the elemental componentry -- carbon, hydrogen, iron, calcium, oxygen, etc. -- that swirled about and magically made bodies with a self-aware noggin on top. What we perpetuate as ME is nowhere written in stone in any conceivable sense. Your past is ancient history, with only the life and meaning you select. Resto-mod, my friends. No reason not to. Get lighter, faster, sleeker... at least in your minds. Rehearse the stories you choose. Pick the greatest hits and make that you. By the way, it's free.

So, not feeling yourself? Of course not. Identity is by its fundamental nature ephemeral, and a counterpoint to the flesh of our arms and the seeming permanence of those freckles...

Where does art enter this discussion? Art is an anchor, nailing down headlong experience into repeatable moments of perception. See this sparkle on the wall? Yeah, that one right THERE. Come back tomorrow and it's still there. Play that funky music again and you feel that funk all over again. Magic. AND, endlessly textured. My light sculpture is different all the time based on the light sailing through the room at 186,000 miles a second. The metal is the constant. The light is the funky dance and your eyes and brains the filter, the lips of the kiss, the neural firings reminding you of the best parts of living. I make and sell anchors made of light waves. Best job ever.

And I am I, and you are you, at least for the moment. Eventually, we go back to the supernova debris... So, we are we together, again.

Rock steady.

Stay in touch.

Buy big art.

B Mac

Normalize

Return to normal. Here in Vermont, we are 81% vaccinated and, in public, one can hardly tell that the last year and a half was a catastrophic piece of history AND still is for a large percentage of the globe. June and 80 degrees with a 18 knot south wind blowing down the lake. Sunshine...

The sense of stepping back from a cliff is almost palpable. The heightened receptor state, hiding out, masks nonstop, constant alcohol scent, flight mode, is gone. Replaced by a comforting flatness...

But normal? What exactly does that mean? Keep your eyes open for the phrase "the new normal". Oxymoron? Climate change manifesting as a heat wave last week brought over 100 degrees to 40 million Americans with temperatures between 15 and 30 degrees above normal. Oregon, 116?! Palm Springs hit 120. Maybe they need a new name for the town. Hell's Parking Lot? Furnace No Creek? Skillet? How can normal be new? It wouldn't be normal if it's new. New is new. 

Closer to home, is it normal for me to hand rub a piece of titanium sheet for an hour, once or twice a week? Is that normal behavior? The finish I'm trying to get can't come from a whirling or vibrating machine. This is the path. It's my "normal," however absurd it may appear to "normal" people. Certainly has an effect on my arms that isn't exactly normal. But the lack of drama, even in the subtle sheen of a metal slab... its literal flatness... feels nice. 

Farther from home, an astrophysicist, a woman, definitely not historically "normal" in that profession, has discovered an anomaly in the structure of the universe. The Giant Arc is a group of galaxies so massive that our standard conceptual framework of the universe, based on a relatively consistent distribution of matter and energy in all directions, is shattered. The Giant Arc is 3.3 billion light years across or one fifteenth the radius of the entire visible universe. It is three times bigger than anything should be out there. The accepted cosmological principle created by decades of observation and calculations requires even distribution and consistent expansion based on precise mathematical models. Lumps or structures of this scale suggest... Spin? Directionality? Organization? Grain? This doesn't seem normal at all. But isn't stuff in deep space sort of the definition of normal? (Wait. What?! Dark matter, quasars, black holes, lightning on Saturn...) It has zero to do with human value judgments...

And now, from within, normal, apparently, is flexible and personal and therefore can't be considered an absolute, like unique, every, the best, perfection, etc. Is it normal to go out on a lake with three to four foot waves and surf downwind for an hour and a half? Yep. That's a normal I am heading out to do right now. I strongly recommend making such behaviors normal. Making art, for instance, is far from a normal job. But it is mine. Then again, I am far from being normal. Cursed and blessed. But, I will say, some evenness, lack of an imposed, external system of edges, feels, mellow. Dancing with gravity on my board is personal and perilous, but I'm very unlikely to die... Controlled peril, losing a point, losing a set, is so very different from losing the whole match. Normal feels nice, like we know its parameters and are comfortable with them. Welcome back.

Cheers to high summer and long days. Obviously, we don't know all the bits in the universe, cell sized or galactic. Best savor these warm breezes. The Tour is on. Walk the dog. Hug your everyones. Kick back on the deck after the sweating and weigh the universal questions with your peeps. These are blessings taken a smidge less for granted, I do believe. 

Normal people buy art, but my favorites are the extraordinary people who buy extraordinary art. Let's normalize that. 

Peace out, 

And in, 

B Mac

P.S. Check out Sam Harris, Julie Mehretu, and consider the Tralfamadorians' perspective. Pry open new neural pathways, today. Can't hurt. Normalize extraordinary, even though you can't. 

Finite Bandwidth

Do you remember the time you needed your phone and remembered it was in the kitchen and when you went there you forgot what you were doing in that room? So, you went back to where you started and remembered, "Phone." You remember that. But not the phone while you were in the kitchen. What is the nature of the mind that makes it work this way? Why would evolution bring us to this place? Why are some file folders not accessible at a particular time and other times, no problemo? What was the name of Monica's older boyfriend in "Friends"? Um, he was in a show about Hawaii, and had that car... What is that guy's name? You know who he is...

On average, a thousand containers a year fall off ships and sink into the ocean. 1,382 were lost in 2020. These are forty feet long, weigh almost 30 tons when loaded. Steel. Large. Is this how the brain works? Chunks sunk randomly? Big items. Like your wife's birthday, your keys, your husband's middle name or where he went to college... Later, you can remember them. Just not right this second. They sank.

Brain scientists are utilizing fMRI scanning to see how the wiring in the head operates in real time and drawing a compelling new atlas of pathways AND confounding lots of accepted science regarding the architecture of thinking. For all the strides recently made in apportioning classes of brain function to areas within the skull, the latest research shows many of these are myths. Left brain and right brain, rational thought vs. creative thought, speech centers, visual processing... I'm not a doctor, and the latest neuroscience can't be summarized in this paragraph... And the mind is 100 billion neurons, give or take, with trillions of  connections. That we can ever find our phones is statistically unlikely. But we do, usually... 

But, I lost my train of thought... Remember the Lost Boys? Have you lost your mind? Sorry, I lost my cool... Have you lost a family member or good friend this past year? Hello, hello, I'm losing you. This notion of "unknown location" is pervasive in our language and, I believe, tied to the way our brains function. Scientists are quick to affirm the normalcy of forgetting, primarily blaming it on attention. Yet the anxiety associated with trying to remember is real. We "try to remember" as though we are lifting a dumbell. This isn't muscular. Nor is it location based. Youngsters don't obsess over "spacing" information. They calmly whip out a phone and find out. Too many of us stress over the ongoing forgetfulness that is a normal part of reality, petrified of losing our minds or our sharpness, of aging and the host of neurological maladies that may occur. But worrying will take your attention away, and attention is the key to smoothing the natural processing of being present and focused. It's normal, my friends, to forget. Remembering anything is miraculous. Make peace with uncertainty. 

The latest theories regard memory as not a host of file folders but an ongoing assemblage of sparks, a constant activity of reassembling. This redefines perception as well. The thing you "see" is 20% visual input and 80% mental processing, but we will have to chat about that next time. Today is the time to accept the containers overboard in our heads. We have these computers in our skulls of staggering complexity and plasticity. Try to stay out of their way with our anxious, fearful selves. Let go. Being lost is normal. Fits and starts are somewhat factory settings. Syncopation is the proper rhythm of our funky selves. Maybe janky brain function is the locus of innovation. Imperfect memory is the space for creativity. 

But that evolutionary issue is curious. Maybe as we age, we, as elders of the village, need conceptualization more than specifics, context more than data. Maybe we are just living too long. Maybe I actually know the answer and have forgotten the words to communicate it. I'll just make metaphors till you get it or I disappear.

I often think of working creatively as remembering stuff that was put in and processed by forces we don't control, forgotten until the fermentation is complete and then dredged from past time and inexorable daily tides of perception. Buried treasure. Brought to light. Now. Pretty sure. 

Buy art. It's fixed to the wall. It leverages that 20% to control your brain. In a good way... Thank me later. 

Rock steady,  B Mac  

Star Destroyers and Invisible Cats

Hang on, this is a dense one. Fair warning.

Big news right now is the marketing of NFTs, nonfungible tokens. We all know that fungible means, in lawyer speak, "the ability to replace or be replaced by an identical item; mutual interchangeability." Therefore, nonfungible means unique, one-of-a-kind, like you, or that tree by my door, or the snowflake on my glove. The "token" part means that it's a thing, an actual object, like a ticket that gets you into the ball game. There's only one for that one seat, (but just to be clear, it's not the seat itself). People are investing in NFTs, purchasing online for actual money, a slice of a program, a bit of code that exists in the blockchain universe, which we cannot see or touch or taste or smell. In fact, most of the purchases are paid for with cryptocurrency. I don't see too many problems with this. Do you? Maybe. Wanna buy a bridge in North Korea? I can hook you up.

Nihonium is element #113 on the Periodic Chart. It is accepted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry as a member of the known universe of atoms, the actual stuff that makes up everything there is. After seven years of pursuit, scientists in a lab in Japan created one atom that instantly disappeared because it is super unstable, radioactive to the point of immediate self annihilation. Three more atoms have been made in total, just to confirm the experiment's results. Estimates suggest it is the most expensive thing on earth; a single atom is at least 7.5 million dollars. A gram of the stuff would run about 45 octillion dollars or more than the value of the entire earth at current market prices. I know a guy who knows a guy... just saying.

Speaking of elemental coolness, or hotness, Neodymium and Yttrium and Aluminum in a garnet crystalline matrix is the finest laser producing stuff we have found. Well, not me personally, but the royal "we". I'm trapped in Vermont in my studio because of a global pandemic, but in Magurele, Romania, a project called ELI, the Extreme Light Infrastructure, is hard at work. In October of last year, they created a laser beam convergence with ten petawatts of power. Ten petawatts is the equivalent of one tenth of all the sunlight currently hitting the earth, easily more juice than the entire power grid in this country. The duration of the event was 23 femtoseconds. A femtosecond, as I'm sure you all know, is one millionth of a billionth of a second, or, more familiarly, one quadrillionth of a second. Woo hoo, high fives all around. Awesome!

Yesterday, I found myself in the gallery with a friend discussing what I do. The gist of the conversation was me describing my work as a duality. The art itself is the experience of the way light moves when you, the perceiver, move around in front of the slab of metal in the present light conditions. That is what I make. That is what I sell. The piece of stainless steel on the wall is necessary, as are some photons wandering about the room (at the speed of light) and your eyeballs and brain having the experience of those photons. The piece of metal is not the art, although it is required, as are you, as is light. So, my artwork is about making a tangible thing to create an intangible moment in your life's experience. It's ephemeral, like the ELI event. But it can be replicated, continuously, if you like, unlike Nihonium. By duality, I mean that I make an object, a thing that you can touch, but the essence of the art is that it is not a thing. It's more like an NFT, or a wonderful memory, or the way certain songs make you feel. Unlike an NFT, it's always a little different. Wear a different shirt, light the candles, open the shades, dim the lights... And unlike an NFT, no hacking will ever occur. I promise. There is only one possible iteration of every piece that I have ever made, and there it is, hanging on the wall, reflecting and refracting light. Unless you believe in parallel universe theories. We will take that up another time.

So then, what is the theme here? Magic? Science? Absurdity? Art? All of the above? You can buy a screenshot of a flying cat with a pop tart body trailing rainbows for some amount of money, or something like money, that somebody somewhere decided was the correct value. Making the assumption, naturally, that only you have the only one, and that assigned value is not arbitrary. Seems like a great deal of assuming to me, AND you are buying something with all the soul of a QR code. Personally, I would recommend an actual thing -- real art that you hang in a real room in your home, that dynamically feeds you freshness moment to moment until you pass it along to your kids. Good art becomes a good friend. As an investment? Maybe the pop tart cat. As life experiences? I recommend museums and concerts and trips outside and really, really strong art to share with your family and friends...

Well, you get the drift, I think. Conceptually, the whole NFT thing is crazy. Yet cool in a virtual reality, what-will-they-think-of-next sort of a way. Giant laser beams, wicked cool. Blasting atoms into matter at speeds approaching warp? Super cool. Pushing light around to mess with your experience of right now? Best thing ever.

Hope is radiating down from that bright ball in the sky, dear friends.

More hugs every day. Real hugs, not "air" gestures masquerading as human warmth.

Springtime is renewal. This one in particular.

Peace out. And inner peace too.

B Mac

The Sun Cut Flat

To quote the soulful Greg Allman, "...two, three, fo..."

"We are our choices," said the actor Ethan Hawke in a recent article, and that short phrase has been swimming around with me for a month or so. Choices. Like deciding in the moment to go on that side of the tree on my snowboard - not really able to see where I was heading exactly - and pop out at the top of a small, tilted meadow of untouched snow, soft as down, bottomless... Swoop, flick, swoop and then repeat... swoop... Or stay late at the studio working on a piece that looks like nothing I have ever made before… having really no clue what was happening with this pattern thing of triangles. And it sold in one day to a friend I just happened to text it to. Less than 24 hours from mystery to sold. Choices. Like the guys on Reddit banding together to drive up a stock price 1,700%. I hope they chose to sell already. Or Tom Moore in England deciding to walk 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday and then proceeding to raise 32 million pounds sterling for national healthcare during the pandemic. The Queen chose to knight him. He says he didn't choose to be a hero. He just wanted to help out.

Well, Ethan Hawke's words resonated until I realized they took me back to a philosophy class a thousand years ago. Those words are Jean-Paul Sartre's basis for the whole school of existentialism. You are what you do, not what you say you are. Your existence is based on your actions, not on your notion of your personal "essence." "I am a product of my decisions, not my conditions," said Jeff Bezos at a commencement address a few years ago. "Freedom is what you do with what has been done to you," Monsieur Sartre again. 

However, a friend told me long ago, "What you believe is true, either is true or will become true, within certain physical limitations." I always took the last phrase to mean I probably won't grow wings from my shoulders if I thought I should fly. But, thanks Laurie Hare, my dear friend who has known me since birth, for giving me a precept for living that I have held for years as Truth. And yet, how do these fit together? What I believe? The choices I make? Three things:

"Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat

And covering the crossroads I'm standing at,

Or maybe it's like the weather or something like that,

But, mama, you been on my mind."  

Bob Dylan is owning, in his perfectly Dylanesque way, the concept of not really understanding the nature of the moment or which path is the right path but knowing that the power is the gist of the thing, the feeling right then, being present, being mindful. Is it the light or the color or the weather or "something like that...?" Choices. Crossroads.

And then there was Bryan Cranston's moment of going from a bit player doing random commercials in Hollywood to cult hero and actor of peerless reputation. He changed from focusing on outcome to focusing on the process of acting. He devoted himself to being the best possible version of the character he was presenting. He left Bryan behind. Luck is the residue of passion and steady work. Being on the field at the right moment... Being ready, for luck to occur...

And thirdly, Andy Warhol said, "If there's ever a problem, I film it and it's no longer a problem. It's a film." Reframe. Choose the other door. Problems don't have to be problems. They could be art. Choices.

Sartre was awarded the Nobel prize and he refused to accept it. He thought it might affect how people addressed his writings. Dylan also did not accept his Nobel prize saying he had other engagements, although he sent his lifelong friend Patti Smith as a stand in. He defined his sense of freedom. Choices. This side of the tree or that. That tool on the surface or this. Buy. Sell. Walk to and fro. Luck. Knighthood. Or a Nobel. Or an Oscar. Or a lovely four syllables... "The sun cut flat..."

"We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us." This is a quote from Andrew Ryan, who, I discovered, is a fictional dictator in the video game BioShock.  Probably not going to get a Nobel. But, he is right. You are what you believe you are, and you are the actions that make that the truth.

I believe that you, my friends, need visionary art. I believe this is the moment you have waited for. I believe that you have not lost my email. (It's right down there).

And I believe in how lucky we both are to be surrounded by all this, all this sun cut flat...

As always, love each other as much as you can possibly stand.

Stay in touch,

B Mac

P.S. The following is light cut flat and still poking out. It's my job after all. Take some home.

P.P.S. The stuff up there about love, I really mean that.

Time Pirouette Time

Howdy howdy,

Thoughts for this moment:

Just like the solstice, we pivot from darkness to light. We sleep, perchance dream and then...

In Vermont, there is a rare plant called the Fen Grass of Parnassus that is around ten inches tall and makes small white flowers that bloom for about a month from mid-August until mid-September. A tiny bee the size of my pinky fingernail feeds on this flower exclusively. All bees are vegetarians and most, like this one, live in the ground. It's considered a "mining bee" and is so rare that it doesn't have a common name. Those in the know call it Andrena parnassiae. They emerge in August when the flowers bloom; mate; the males die. The mother bee deposits an egg and a packet of pollen in small chambers underground. She dies within a week or so. The egg and then grub grow and emerge as an adult bee ten months later. That's it. Life story. Long night and then daytime...

Do they dream? Warm, late summer dreams of nectar and sunshine... Ten months underground in Vermont's fierce winter. Time to muse...

"Methuselah" is the name given to a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine whose location in Eastern California is a secret for her protection. This small, gnarled tree is 4,852 years young, perched on the same rock outcrop for millennia, witness to the entire written history of humankind. Does she smile? Laugh at our foolishness, or curse our degradation of her air supply? In 66 years, we managed to invent a plane and then walk on the moon. She lived 1.3602% of her life during that span. When she dreams is it slower than a bee's? Or a longer dream? Seasons pass. Time as meditation...

The oldest star that we know about is labelled HD 140283 and the science community discusses it as the Methuselah Star. The namesake, according to Genesis, was a man who lived 969 years. Not a whole lot of science there, but the smarties who run the Hubble telescope will confirm this star to be a "metals poor, blue-shifted, high-velocity, Population II, sub-giant." It's only 200 light years away. Data analysis confirms that this star is 14.46 billion years old, plus or minus .8 billion years. (Now, that's a margin of error.) Since the universe is 13.799 billion years old, plus or minus .021 billion years, we have a very, very old and close neighbor. This ball of nuclear fire was around within a few million years of the Big Bang and over nine billion years old before our sun ignited. A year, five millennia, unfathomable eons...

Time. It's relative, and if you consider our friend Einstein's rules, tricky. Time in 2020, I can personally affirm, was whack. "Hey, it's Monday again. Boom. Friday. Hey, it's ..." From the Chinese year of the Rat - last year - to this year's Ox. OX. A hug and a kiss. The Ox symbolizes hard work, positivity and honesty. One year to the next...

But, we are in the midst. Just as the bee sleeps, the tree endures and the star seethes, we sleep, dream, persevere. Hyperbolics all. Us and them. How can we pack life into these days we are blessed? One by one. Reflect. Re-emerge. Persist. Time flies, but we are the pilots. Compared to the bee, we have limitless time. Compared to the pine, we are a blink.

And so we pirouette from history to the future each morning. Our personal time is unknowable. Get busy or wander. It's your time after all. This last year has been proof of the flexibility of its apprehension. So, consider the ancient fireball, but spend some time with the nectar and reverie, maybe go visit those pines, maybe stop looking at your watch...

All best,

B Mac