Memo from the Department of Aesthetic Justice

A 1:1 scale toy rail road near by, bull dozed trees, undergrowth, and I'm sure many homes of animals. I've heard this was done for aesthetic reasons. As in, “we'll just go ahead and clean up this area“, and by “clean up” they mean demolish any living thing, and if its in the budget, pave it. Somehow trees, shrubs, and all sorts flora that Central (the most intensively used landscape in the world) Illinois is missing from around ninety percent of the landscape, was seen as ugly. Now it will probably be overgrown with ragweed, poison ivy, and exotic invasive species - then mowed down at exactly the wrong time of year for native plants to flourish - then called a beautiful improvement upon this landscape of beans and corn. If only they could of got those noxious species to grow in neat rows.  Why this is seen to be more pleasing to the senses than that remnant of the prairie savanna?  For example, how does an old factory, With some very beautiful details and a design that was well thought out, get regarded as an ugly blight. But an empty lot with a mowed weedy lawn look better. In another place that ruin of an old factory would be quaint, rustic, charming, and a tourist draw.  
 Order over disorder, I think that is the overriding factor. Persons not aesthetically aware mistakenly regard an orderly looking or sounding environment as higher in quality. This is not true.  The chaos of the galaxy is beautiful, the chaos of ocean waves have a wide range of dramatic quality, and the clouds in the sky are always chaotically incline to please the senses. I think that this order over disorder mental pitfall has to be eliminated. How to go about this?  Lets for a moment imagine that there was a United Nations department of aesthetic quality, which in turn handed down a program for each nation to use in its department of aesthetic justice - and the “DAJ” ,as we'll call it, oversees laws that conform with the UN program through a state government, called the department of environmental zoning - which would work with local county and city zoning boards to create a high aesthetic quality to our lives.  And if I were appointed a supreme justice of the court of aesthetics, my first act would be to , ( and I might be going off the deep end at this point) abolish all strip malls and big box style development. My second act would be to bury all lines of transmission, no exceptions. And my third final act of my revolutionary first phase would be to enforce the littering laws with vigor. Oh ya and abolish the use of those silly court robes, maybe we could use clown suits or some form of archaic clothing.  
 As an artist I have been trained and have a natural tendency to not edit out my surroundings.
If it's there I see it, and let me tell ya there are a lot of things people just don't see.  Power lines are a big one, road noise is another, that Christmas sock my wife has left up in the living room for over 9 months, is yet another. The clinical word for this is scatoma and I believe that the engineering profession is full of personnel that demonstrate what a severe scatoma is. Engineering is responsible for nearly all of the material objects in our culture, Heck they even set zoning rules. And if that isn't bad enough, general contractors design whats left. Our culture needs input from the artistic set and as I see it the engineering class is not going to ask or this ugly society of ours would not have developed. We have to push and take crucial quality of life issues away from those who don't care or are impaired.  We have to get out there and do what is right.

Ian

Restarting the Irregular Rant

It may be that I've written of this before. It may be I've just thought of this before. I know I have talked about this with some of my friends. Or at least thought about it in their presence. What I'm think-U-late'n about is the next step in human mental development.  In the not so distant past a great many of us "humans"( I use the word loosely) had the notionthat if they remembered somebody that was dead, saying or doing some thing, that this memory was in in reality a spirit in contact with them. Those distant Humans apparently didn't realize this was a memory lodged in their brains. One day, some of us got it, and made the mental jump that we were actually remembering those instances for ourselves.  My inclination is to believe that we are in the middle of, or at the beginning of the next big mental leap. Oh to be sure, we have had thinkers in the past like Kant, Jung, and Freud that have dusted the darkness off of our mental labyrinth, and there must be some person or people out there right now, out of my limited knowledge of the subject matter, working on this next great leap. This mental Leap, or maybe it should be called the neo-enlightenment or some such thing, is about a self realization of our thinking processes. For instance, I know a great many us humans don't differentiate between a hunger pain and a stub your tow pain. I know pain from your torso is unsettling( believe me I know ) and far different than that stub your tow pain, but when your just a little hungry or even after a day of fasting, it still isn't the same pain as, gall stones. But that won't register with lots of us humans and some portion of us eat even though we really don't need to. Another example, is greed, humanity as a whole seems to thinks that more of anything is equal to pleasure. So buying stuff is what they do to feel good, and to buy stuff you need money and then the acquisition of money is the thing you do to feel good. Any thing beyond fiscal stability, in my judgment, is greed. Again I think this is a false pleasure reading People that fall into this greed cycle are not delineating between buying power and true pleasure.  In the not so distant future I think more people than not will be able to discriminate between those sensations that are true and those that are false. There are many more mental misconceptions to be uncovered. I discover a few every month, in my self. And sometimes to change those thought processes it take an incredible effort, but it most always is for the better I know that there are people that have been communication on those ideas for quite awhile, but I would like to state, ever so cautiously, that humanity is at a tipping point and all you need to do is get out their and nudge it.  Ian

How Zen Meditation is Causing Global Climate Change

All right, could be that title is a bit much. It may be that zen meditation isn't the biggest factor in global climate change, but I am sure it's contributing to it. How did I arrive at that conclusion-well: people like to mow their lawns. Here in the Midwest I would say it's a major fixation of some individuals, and if they complain loudly, it usually will become the "major fixation" of the city or town they live in.
I don't think it's the lawn they like to mow or any thing about grass cutting, the majority of the population could do with-out it just fine. The Aesthetic perspective that is looks better just isn't true. In fact long grass has grace in the way the ends taper off to a point, or the way it waves in the wind. Some folks say it's for the physical activity, I can think of many other ways a body could get active with out mowing. It could be for the fact that it is uncomfortable to walk in when it's high, or attracts the bugs, in fact I would say those two would be the best excuse, but what accounts for the person who mows a lawn nobody will use.
It all comes down to one thing and that's zen meditation. The mowing pattern, the mower hum, and the steady slow pace it takes to cut grass properly is a formula to induce meditation. It's the good feeling they get from the effects of meditation that they associate with a clean cut lawn. So when they see an uncut area they have an uncomfortable agitated feeling and instead of realizing that the uncut lawn is upsetting their zen conditioning, they think of it as a civic aesthetic violation, and they want it cut. So if we could attain our meditative frame of mind in other ways we wouldn't have everybody and there cat, out using an gas engine mower. That, I've heard, will put out more polluting exhaust than a car, and at the same time the extra flora would fix carbon and output oxygen.
I must say, or state or impress upon you that I am a hypocrite. I have cut grass for all of the above reasons and more. That's not to say I don't loath mowing, I do, it's just that I have to live in a social frame work that I'm uncomfortable with. In time the lawn I mow will be converted to very low maintenance gardens, and the only mowing will be for hay.

Ian

The Qin the the U.S.

I've been reading about the Qin and the Han dynastic periods in Chinese History.
The Qin culture was based on mobilization of a large civilian military force (like a militia)
and Agriculture, all else was considered unnecessary and unwanted.
This was all fine as long as they had wars to fight with other centralized societies,
for about 300 years (I think?).
The whole thing collapsed in about 10 years for lack of those two things.
We ( the U.S.) have been slowly sliding, and some times not so slowly,
to this kind of cultural model through out our rather short history.
Their is another large component to our culture other than agriculture and military,
and that's Merchant class. The Qin would have thought all this frivolous
and I think even outlawed it or excessively taxed it. May be that is our savior, any how,
I think this will be the next topic I'll paint. With the way my mind works this could turnout to be an abstract worm, or God heads flying box kites made of body parts (nothing sick please) on a grassy plane, and or maybe A dark thingy surrounding an even darker whachmacallit.

Why no Sequitur?

Man is it cold,
I took a walk down an old RR line this morning and the frost heave had moved the ground up about 6 inches, well 6 inches in some places,
it was like walking on top of pointy spikes.
Imagine what is was like for my dog, she was hopping from point to point, very funny in a cruel sort'a way.
My ankles arn't doing so well either, I slipped and jolted from point to point. Not to mention all those newly formed points were a strange sight, and as soon as I got in, I just had to worked up this image.
Why?