MultiMedia and the Avant-Gardes

I had to help write an essay about multimedia performances a few years ago, and found a wonderful book by Richard Kostelanetz which gave me a clue to how to shape the piece.

I have just bought it through AbeBooks for a very good price, as the Amazon going rate seemed much higher (£20-30 for the paperback).

Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes.

Mr Kostelanetz has written a myriad of fascinating material, and his website is definitely worth a visit.

Admittedly, I bought the first edition (1993) - the one that inspired me - and he has updated the second edition (2001) - with the cover shown here.
Indeed, he has offered some draft updates, should a third edition ever appear.

What I found, to help me shape the essay/thesis (with a deadline of a week!) was his reference to mixed-means theatre. He analysed the various forms that he covers with that term (Happenings, stage performances, kinetic environments, etc) using what I assume he got from Aristotle's rather rigid 'unities' for theatrical performances:

• The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots.



• The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place.



• The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours.

However, to describe the wider variety of audience, performer, creator interactions of mixed media / multimedia performance (including circus, in my terms) he offered this table:

And that gave me all the structure I needed to help my friend shape his thesis. We simply worked through all the practical projects and shows he had done, and described them as involving:

• open or closed space



• fixed or variable time



• fixed or variable actions.

So I owe Mr Kostelanetz quite a bit (and the library for having a copy of his book available at the time).
On top of all that, I love dictionaries, and this remains a treasure trove of cross-references, eye-openers, and other fun. He doesn't only cover some of my own favourite artists: Duchamp, Cage, Jarry, Joyce; but other perhaps less expected ones like Burroughs, Dylan and Bucky Fuller; and also genres from Performance Art to Punk Rock to Hypertext, and groups like Fluxus and Dada.

Maps and Models and Meta-languages

I just read a quirky and entertaining book about maps and how they affect how we perceive the world around us - by a self-confessed "Map Addict"- Mike Parker.

It's an excellent read, and very stimulating to thought and further exploraration. He has a particular fondness for Ordnance Survey maps of the UK, but also covers local maps, rude street names, etc - and all the way out to world maps.

I felt sorry that in discussing world maps, where he pointed out the limitations of both the Mercator projection (with which we all feel familiar, in spite of its distortions of land size) and the Peters projection (which gets areas right, but appears downright ugly, and distorts the shapes of the landmasses - terribly PC and all that, but horrible). We traditionally draw these with The Atlantic in the middle, which emphasises the apparent importance of Europe and the USA, and with North at the 'top', which also has political implications. The Upside Down map created by someone from OZ certainly exercises the mind.




Of course, it perpetuates the misleading idea of 'up and down' which Bucky so disliked (in Cosmos you only find 'in' (coming in to land on a planet) and 'out' (he suggests you should think of looking out at the stars, not 'up').



Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion map may look very unfamiliar (and seeing things afresh might prove important in itself) but it does not distort landmass area or shape, it does not have any up or down, north, south, east or west, and it can actually be folded to make a good simulation of a globe (unlike any other flat map).

As Bucky disliked the idea of nation states, he preferred that his map of Spaceship Earth not get divided with national or political lines, and so, for all its value, it has not been adopted by the United Nations...or many people, indeed, who still prefer the misleading map they grew up with.

Similar discussions could follow, on how resistant we can all prove to any kind of change to the models and maps we use to simplify and understand the world. Changes in language can perhaps align us better with the world out there, as Bucky suggested (teaching your children about sunrise and sunset continues the incorrect perception of the sun going around the Earth, for instance, so he suggested sunsight and sunclipse...and how about 'going outstairs' and 'instairs'! :-)
Not sure if animated GIFs work in Blogger, so here you will find the link to bring this pic alive!

However weird some of his suggestions, they seem clearer than people in the Northern Hemisphere thinking of Australians as 'being upside down'. But hey, I don't hold my breath waiting for such quirky uses of language to catch on. Not until we have spent some time in space stations, at least.

Bucky artefacts at Artsy   [updated Oct 2016]

Voodoo Economics

I am all for the various Occupy groups drawing attention to greed and corruption, etc - but I am still waiting to hear what solutions would satisfy them.

OK, taxing the rich, capping the maximum salaries, doing something about unearned bonuses, etc. Fair enough.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, people have also maxed out their own credit, and seem to prefer the model of 'living well' - resisting the idea of frugality, tightening yer belt, rationing - sounds like 'socialism', maybe.

However, I still have confidence in Bucky Fuller's calculations that we already have enough resources for everyone to live comfortably and well, but the resources need redistribution.

 Bill Hicks put it clearly:

I had a vision of a way we could have no enemies ever again, if you're interested in this. Anybody interested in hearing this? It's kind of an interesting theory, and all we have to do is make one decisive act and we can rid the world of all our enemies at once. Here's what we do. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense every year? Trillions of dollars. Instead, if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded ... not one ... we could as one race explore inner and outer space together in peace, forever.

So I guess we need to tackle more than the money men. When I was a kid in the UK I thought it would have seemed like a great and bold move for the UK to unilaterally disarm, and join the small nations who do not spend huge sums on nuclear weapons that no-one was ever going to use. It took a couple of decades for the USSR to collapse. We spent unmentionable amounts of money making arms that would never ever get used - meanwhile dismantling the National Health Service and other great supports for all citizens.

The stupidity of all that still appals me.

I think we need something drastic. If we really did consist of 99% of the people, then the Permanent Universal Rent Strike would work. We all just stop paying mortgages and rent. What can do 'They' do, evict us all?

Then we have the Permanent Universal Tax Strike, until governments begin spending what they collect on the stuff we actually want.

Alternative currencies and LETS schemes, etc - trading skills and materials without them passing through money channels.

We might consider forgiving ourselves our debts, just as we write off Third World Debt. We just all declare ourselves bankrupt, and the debts unreclaimable.

Just riffing, you understand.   I don't really expect 99% of the people to act together, sadly.

'They', the 1%, after all, carry on playing the 'print more money' model (in electronic versions) knowing full well that devalues what remains in circulation. They play at Voodoo Economics and convince us that money 'is' finite, resources are too limited, and all that.

[Update]    Here's food for thought (thanks to Vincent for the alert): Revealed, the capitalist network that runs the world, from the New Scientist.

Staggering through the early stages

If you wonder at lessening blog posts here and there, I have once again joined the fray to write 50,000 words of fiction in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Apparently even more people started this year, it was trending on Twitter (whatever that means), etc.

Family visits, travelling, gigs and various other incidents mean that I have barely kept up the pace as yet, but I have gritted my teeth and staggered on (surely I should feel this way at the end of a marathon?) And although I don't update my word count every day, you can see here that I am making an effort. Some of the shortfall is scribbled in pencil in a notebook, and awaiting typing up...

Heading for 62 times around the sun

I get a 'birthday' next week (and I'll probably be at the 'day job') but what keeps me going (and pretty healthy and happy) are Julie, Dandy the dog, my children: Keili Olsen (Pentaphobe), Yolande Philpott and Matilda (my daughter and grand-daughter 'Tilda'), my daughter Finlay Pearl, my fellow conspirator in creativity Bobby Campbell, my fellow juggling madman Mr Jules, all the NoFit State crew (past and present), all the other Illuminauts, any fellow jugglers and magicians, the Cardiff Library crew (you know who you are), my sisters Julia (and all her children, and new grandchild) and Judith (& her son Luke), and all the people who gave me fun, hope, cheerfulness and optimism over the last few years...

Much thanks to my parents (long gone) and to anyone who touched my life and encouraged me to keep going...you know who you are...



For amusement - in reverse order (what else?)

The Mighty Boosh, Shameless, Skins, Spaced, Black Books, George Carlin, Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, W.C.Fields, Buster Keaton, and so on and so on, back through all the fools in history....

And all the contemporary manifestations of such, from Crissie Trigger and the Raree Show to Franki Anderson and her Fool projects, Robert Anton Wilson and all the Maybe Logicians, from DJ Fly Agaric to Borsky the 'pataphysician, to anyone who doubts the simple realities they got offered in childhood...

Let's keep going with the 'blessings' of Bucky Fuller, and Bob Wilson, R.D.Laing and Maslow, Korzybski and all the weird Quantum Physicists - the passivist anarchists, the revolutionary pacifists of non-violence and non-resistance... all the crazy optimists and dreamers and futurists...

Peace.

Running on Empty

I realise that I don't post here as regularly as I used to. I meant to take the last couple of months to start drafting my own book, but still find that the day job, followed by doggie walking, followed by Circus Arts Forum work online, tends to leave me only an hour or two to choose between having a bath, watching a bit of tv, drinking a glass or two of wine, and just flaking out.

I haven't yet taken the famous "two week holiday" that most 9-5 people do. The few days leave I took just freed me up to go on a hectic jaunt to Belgium (that was fun, but tiring), and a disappointing gig in London. Hardly a 'rest'.

You'd think that I'd have learned by now, but even coming up to the tenth year of a 'steady job' I still don't understand how it works, or how best to distribute my time. All those years as a freelance gave me so much time (here and there, between hard-working sections) that I now understand why career people seem to have (by my standards) hardly read any books. I'd get through five a week. This came from a combination of plenty of spare time, not driving but using public transport (and so reading instead of concentrating on not killing anyone), etc. Now I hardly even find time to clean the house...

Or have I just got used to having plenty of energy, and failed to notice that I already turned 60? Born twenty years earlier, I'd be dead by now! I really do feel more like a pipe and slippers by the fire would suit me better - a glasss of port, a good book, a velvet smoking jacket, I can see it now! I wish people would stop re-assuring me (someone said the other day that "50 is the new 40". Easy for them to say, as they just reached their 40th birthday. I did that back in 1986!

Hey ho. Julie has grand plans for country living, and early retirement, and I place myself in her capable hands. I remain as glum (when I get up) as ever, and as cheerful (once I have got into gear) as ever. By temperament I feel like a pessimist, but I have adopted the strategy of optimism from a sense of surreal absurdity. If everything seems crazy and pointless, you might as well have a reckless good time...and Bucky and RAW assure me that optimism does at least offer the possibility of positive outcomes - nothing much gets achieved by pessimists!

Credit Crunch

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The overspend of the last few years, the enormous debt of the West living way beyond its means, has finally started to come unravelled in the UK.

Of course, as money is entirely a confidence game (in both meanings of the word) 'they' will continue to talk up the situation (to try to avoid further panic) but it sounds less and less convincing all the time.

I don’t write this merely as a hippie anarchist anti-capitalist (whatever that might mean) but as someone who doesn’t even believe in money (or what Robert Anton Wilson calls bio-survival tickets). That doesn’t mean I can survive long without them, of course, but I don’t have to believe in them. Bucky described wealth in terms of the number of future days it would 'buy' you.

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Chapter VI Bucky Fuller

Just before Bob died we invented a currency for him - called 'Patatows, for various obscure reasons to do with Irishness and Joycean puns - RAW patatows, in fact. The most excellent Bobby designed them, and we put some into circulation. They have any value that his fans might give them. [see the RAW Deal blog posting - for other cash whimsy, from Duchamp to Boggs, from Warhol to Emperor Norton]

Ultimately, the bill is not a dollar at all, at most a representation of it. The bill is real, but the dollar itself is an abstraction… just like God. Indeed, it is remarkable how fundamentally modern monetary systems are grafted onto religion. According to Boggs the invention of both money and God date from the same era, and the traces are still visible in our own days. Just think of the double meaning of words like "redeem," or the root of the word "credit"--it is a direct derivative of the Latin word for believing. The side of Dutch coins reads "God Is With Us," while "In God We Trust" is printed on American bills.

BoB (as treasurer) even signed a few rare notes, and auctioned them on eBay (to help pay his rent and medical bills). It doesn’t seem that bizarre to me. I sign photos and trade them for small profit. However, most people seem to believe (even in this day and age when cash hardly comes into most transactions) that money exists in some sense. You might as well try to disillusion them as tell the Judeo-Christian-Muslim lot that not only do they all worship the same book /story, but that God is a concept, by which we measure - pain. My philosophical/religious education (say the word ‘spiritual’ and I reach for my metaphorical revolver) came entirely from teaching tales, folk tales, parables, myths, legends, and all the tools of the storyteller’s trade.

Somewhere in a cave, Ug borrows three rocks…and promises to bring them back later. As Ig has a lot of rocks (and therefore a lot of friends) Ug scratches three slashes in a soft piece of clay, for Ig to keep as a reminder.

Later on, Ig is playing knucklestone with OOg and as he didn’t bring all his rocks with him, trades the little clay tablet for his bet.

And so off it wanders, this little clay promissory note, wandering down the years and across the plains. In the desert it seems high value (no rocks around here, I’ll give you a camel for it!) Eventually, an Eskimo, who needs some rocks to hold down the edge of his tent, tries to cash it in for rocks. No rocks on an iceflow! Ug is long dead, and the rocks have all ground to sand.

So this morning, we see the first ‘run on the bank’ at Northern Rock. People queuing around the block, to be handed yet another piece of paper! It would seem laughable if it didn’t seem so serious…not quite hyperinflation yet...(when burning banknotes to keep warm is easier than trying to buy fuel). Bizarrely, you can see pictures of the queues of desperate people on the front of every daily paper in the UK, but their website stays up calmly offering to lend you vast sums of money, that you can pay back over the next 25 years. heh. Magic, or indeed magick. Those 'economists' and market players (a voodoo 'science' at best) continue to try to shore up the levees, or hold the card castle together, but it sounds more and more vacuous to me.

Of course, most people don’t think pension schemes spend all their money on skyscrapers with smoked glass walls, and then go bankrupt. Most people don’t think Insurance firms could just turn around and refuse to pay (Act of God! Oh, you smoke, that invalidates your claim…) or that banks (having lent out over ten times what they actually ‘own’) could go broke.

And then the good news. When we find ourselves up to our knees in flood water (water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink) some guy has invented a portable bottle with an incredibly fine filter, that even stops viruses passing through. I guess you end up with pure water, with no chemicals like chlorine or iodine. They go on sale next week, (Thanks to Keili for that story). LifeSaver Systems.

No Time to Think

I have stumbled slightly in the last few weeks, and my cheerfulness has lapsed. I have always attempted to cheer people up and cheer people on (including myself) but sometimes the sheer glum gloom of everday life (and what people have made of it) still grinds me down. (sigh)

Escape into watching a great, sporting and skilful game of football does not seem like an option - even with the claim that you see it as a meditation on spheres.

I have spent more time dozing or day-dreaming recently, as I find it pretty therapeutic. One of my greatest role-models (although we hardly work in the same sort of fields) remains Bucky Fuller. Some of that comes from his remarkable cheerfulness and optimism about 'humanity', and some from a hunch play, and a love of the very forms that he claims lie at the root of 'Universe'.

I found this on p122 of Martin Pawley’s lucid little book on Bucky.
The brilliant manner in which Fuller fused the development of a revolutionary structural system, the geodesic dome, out of a combination of many hundreds of paper and cardboard geometrical models that were ostensibly intended to be analogical aids for a system of thought, deserves careful consideration. Perhaps the best explanation of it is offered by his 1989 biographer Lloyd Steven Sieden.

'Thinking is sorting experiences’, writes Sieden at the beginning of his exposition of Fuller’s approach, ‘Separating the huge set of experiences that are irrelevant from the very small set of experiences that are relevant’. But irrelevant material itself falls into two categories, and Fuller believed that imagining thought as a transparent sphere helped him to see a way of distinguishing between them. He visualized a situation in which all irrelevant experiences that were too small and too frequently occurring were inside the imaginary sphere, and all those that were too large and too infrequently occurring could be regarded as outside it.
The way Fuller imaged the thinking process, the surface of the imaginary sphere itself would then only consist of relevant experiences, or thoughts. He then wondered how many relevant experiences it would take to establish the ‘insideness’ and ‘outsideness’ necessary to create a sphere of thoughts. His answer was that while any two experiences could be joined by a line, it too three to fix their relationship – a concept perhaps not dissimilar to the journalistic principle that it takes three events to make a trend. This point Fuller diagramatized by drawing a triangle. But to establish a sphere containing ‘insideness’ and outsideness’ something robust enough to be called a thought, was impossible using flat triangles on paper, because the triangle had no integral space-enclosing depth. Three-dimensional structure, in thought as in geometry, could only be achieved by plotting in a fourth experience. The resulting three-dimensional model, a three-sided pyramid, or tetrahedron, Fuller came to believe, was the true geometrical model of a thought. It consisted of four points, or experiences, which in turn generated six sides, or relationships.

My son contacted me to see if I had ever got through ‘Synergetics’ which I have to admit to not having tackled seriously. You can find it online at that link.

I am reading Roger Bootle's "Money for Nothing" which is excellent. It is an overview of the modern economic world, with several dire warnings, but an overall optimistic intent.

This is a mainstream thinker - not someone too easy to dismiss as a crank, the way Bucky was for years. Still - Bucky appears to have got most of this right - the shift from valuing land and property (thingism) to valuing knowledge and information; doing more with less (ephemeralisation); increasing the flow of resources around the planet; the effect of belief systems (the human factor) which undermine any logical planning at times.

That the rich get richer is hardly a surprise. That it is a rigged game is no surprise. That people handling our money have first of all made sure to boost their own 'take' , without worrying about the losers is no surprise at all. That we (the bulk of humanity) still believe these people is what astounds me. They say you can't criticize or you will shake consumer confidence, and the whole house of cards is just staying up because everyone is holding their breath...Sooner or later you HAVE to let your population know there is no God (OK, OK, sorry - let's say Tooth Fairy, then) and let them work out what to do with the shock of being on our own in the universe, and working out our own fate.

Blogger seems to be acting a bit strangely. Unless it is just when looking at it from work (inside the library I am behind a Council Firewall).

I noticed that the links I put into the last post, about the Bucky Fuller Institute, go to a Page Not Found - and then when I refresh they go back to the home page. They don't do that when I access the site from home.

hmmmm.

So if these links don't work for you, let me know (perhaps through the Guest Book at the bottom of my Home Page, or email).

Thanks.

A bit weary today.

Some friends make Monday night a film night (at home). They have been watching Pasolini, and that sort of 60s/70s European films. I took them Les Enfants du Paradis (one of my top ten EVER films) and we got through it, all 3 hours and 8 minutes of it.

Pretty good going when you have to read sub-titles if you don't speak French well.

The problem was I took a couple of bottles of wine, and my French drinking companion was on antibiotics, so he wasn't drinking, and the others all seemed to be on beer, so I ploughed through them both! Oh dear.

Well, I knew I had a day off yesterday, to let in the chimney sweep, so it was OK. I even lit a fire for the first time this year.

Today I have a half-day (this is new) because I will be working 4 hours on Sunday, when the library will be open (experimentally).

And (for those of you elsewhere on the planet), it has started SERIOUSLY raining now.

Other people throw a Christmas/New Year party to help with the winter blues. It's just unfortunate that I find all that jollity and spending money we haven't yet earned on things we didn't really need contributes to my down mood. Hey ho.

Still. Battle on. I watched RAWs Maybe Logic again yesterday, and it rejuvenates my optimism. And today the Bucky Fuller Institute sent me my Crewmember of Spaceship Earth T-Shirt to go with my map. So it's not all glum, honest!

For those who remember me when I was clowning - I am 'hell for leather crazy' ever since I realised that most people on the planet were living within strange little belief systems (and I knew I had my own - the British have lots of nonsense from when they - briefly - ruled most of the planet).

I knew that I just couldn't see the narrow viewpoint that had trapped me because anyone's local culture and first language always seems like 'normal' or 'natural' or 'real life'. Worse for the English, in a way, because it has by chance become the world language, so there is little reason to learn a second language and so discover that the world isn't 'labelled' with the words that you happen to use to describe it.

I will come back and try to write this for people who are using English as their second language - I always do - or who are dyslexic, or five years old, or whatever. I love to communicate, and if you meet me you know that...I'll use anything to get through.

Sometimes it might be mime, sometimes magic tricks, sometimes alcohol - WHATEVER it takes to get through to people and let them know we are all so similar, and all want and need the same things.

I am ashamed (in a way) that my Spanish is limited, my French so clumsy, and from then on all I have is a phrase or two of other languages to get through. But humans can get through to each other easily enough if they want to. We've been doing it for thousands of years (in our nomadic way) and we can do it so much more easily now - if only we would use all our intelligence and resources for LIFE-ENHANCING STUFF rather than greed and violence, and selfishness, and narrow-mindedness and fear.

I have just joined the Bucky Fuller Institute (they are certainly going the right way); I have just taken a domain name with Tokelau.

I had my youthful enthusiasm almost squashed by a British upbringing of inhibition, state religion, and snobbery but I have been 'fighting back' ever since. Although 'fighting' isn't the model I want to promote. I am not a fight promoter.

Just Resist.

Be obstinate.

Lay low when you have to, even if it is for years.

As James Joyce recommended: "Silence, Exile and Cunning".

Hooray for our side!

Who was Bucky Fuller?

Fuller was a practical philosopher who demonstrated his ideas as inventions that he called “artifacts.” Some were built as prototypes; others exist only on paper; all he felt were technically viable. He was a dogged individualist whose genius was felt throughout the world for nearly half a century. Even Albert Einstein was prompted to say to him, “Young man, you amaze me!”

In 1927, at the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller stood on the shores of Lake Michigan, prepared to throw himself into the freezing waters. His first child had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless, and he had a wife and new-born daughter. On the verge of suicide, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged, not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity.” Over the next fifty-four years, he proved, time and again, that his most controversial ideas were practical and workable.

Check out the Bucky Fuller Institute and Spaceship Earth.

I just joined and went for the map and crew shirt.

Oh, and talking of money (as I was before - or BELOW, in this context) don't forget to put Buy Nothing Day in your diary for November 28th.

Of course, I know I can't really change any people, not even close friends, who have accepted the whole idea of getting through lives they don't really enjoy by giving themselves 'treats' the whole time...

But I have a soft spot for alternatives which may (still) carry us into the future.

The Sixties was only a seedbed, just a mere glimpse - and a lot of forces have worked on trashing the dreams that started back there - they have worked on making them unfashionable, or silly, they have done character assassination on individuals and groups - but they can't keep the dream away.

As Bucky Fuller pointed out, you can't rush the acceptance of new ideas, but you can't stop them when their time has come, either. So at least go and have a look at some of the ideas on the Adbusters site - LETS schemes, alternative economies for local communities, etc.

Enjoy! And don't take offence, don't take it too personally - we are all walking wounded under State Capitalism...

I came across a bunch of old papers today, on alternative money systems. They were notes for a briefing sheet I was going to write for The London Ecology Centre (back in 1994) after I did the one on Cars. Hey ho, I was forced to go out and get a proper job, so there was no time to continue being a volunteer writer, and that year then just went downhill all the way.

I'd like to piece all that stuff together again, although I have as little hope that we will ever change our money ideas, as that we will ever attain a lasting world peace, or that people will stop exploiting the environment and settle for something sustainable, or abandon religions and adopt a god-free morality.

I am a pessimist, not an activist. But I love the ideas - and I think we have to keep our possibilities in front us, just in case. I'd really like to join Bucky in believing that changes will come when people see the advantages... Enlightened self-interest, they call it don't they?

Anyway - have a look at this Money site, while I put my thoughts in order....

Chatted with Habidabad online, and also HR, I am beginning to enjoy Instant messaging. I'm real ambiguous. I love computers and Internet - yet I have quite a strong dislike for cars (ex-Londoner and Green) and telephones. It's funny that. Some technologies for communication, travel or information storage I really like and some I dislike.

I don't know. I am a gizmo lover (conjuror as a child) and at the same time hate the way capitalism sells us all more and more techno-trivia. I can ravel this (sorry, unravel this) when I am thinking, and sometimes (only sometimes) when I am talking. It often makes no sense - dragging in Fuzzy Logic, and Quantum Uncertainty, Pantheism, Mysticism, technophiles and technphobes, futurists and back-to-nature buffs. Grey areas. Thresholds. Hierarchies. Networks. Spectra. You can see why people often don't understand. I often don't understand it myself (not in words, anyway).

No time to write about Bucky. It's late, and I just watched the end of The Sting. Great research....

Anyone who has wandered in the back streets of my website will have come across links to Bucky Fuller. I am fascinated by him for a multitude of reasons, which I can't cover in a brief paragraph. The links are to encourage your curiosity.

The aspect I want to note today, though, is his faith in the world and the future. It's funny how religious people think that if you DON'T BELIEVE in their god, then you have no faith in anything at all. Atheist almost sounds like 'inhuman'. [Alien] Non-believer (note how all the definitions become negative). Read Bucky, and realise you can thrive on the simple belief that Universe is smarter than you, and means well by you, and will support and encourage you if you are contributing to 'moves in the right direction'.

In my own modest way I have tested this, and it has so far proved true. I have no religion (wasn't given one in the first place - nothing to give up). I have immense faith that I will always have 'enough' . Not because I am an educated, white, middle-class boy - we are not talking smug, here. My dad had no money, no love for money, no ability with money (take your pick). My mum skrimped along as a single parent, but eventually got some kind of fun and reward towards the end of her life. I have always had to live without much visible means of support (no assets, no credit, no savings, no inheritance, etc) - hence my love of zen lunatics, dropouts, romantics, Gypsies, and all sorts of travellers, poets and vagabonds...'singing in the mountains...' (and my obsessive counting on bad days!)

If I was going in the right direction - things turned up. I didn't plan to be in movies. Currently I am poorly paid, and unable to go on a decent holiday, and getting grumpy, but Star Wars conventions have started offering to fly me around and put me up in hotels. See? No real cash involved, but I get what I need. Enough.

[tea break over] 'Back on Yer Heads!'

PS: There's a really great site 'bucky for kids' - check out the 14 concepts and 40 questions - and (maybe) think about them.

Bucky took an inventory of his life and realised he was only successful when he wasn't making money. "You can make money or you can make sense. Each is mutually exclusive." He had nothing against money (or inches, come to that - they're just tools for measuring things) but didn't think it was a useful thing to focus on.

"If I am to believe in myself and the validity of my own ideas,
I must stop thinking as other people told me to
and rely on my own experience."

One more good Bucky Link - Guinea Pig B

or for the fuller flavour (sic), try here

(follow link to source of text) Bucky lost his business and a lot of his friend's money and was so upset he considered killing himself and wondered if he was more valuable to his family dead. He realized that he was valuable to Humanity and decided to live his life in a way to benefit mankind. He took an inventory of his life and realised he was only successful when he wasn't making money. "You can make money or you can make sense. Each is mutually exclusive." "If I am to believe in myself and the validity of my own ideas, I must stop thinking as other people told me to and rely on my own experience." He changed his approach to life, determined to reform man's environment, rather than people themselves. He decided to embark on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." He called this experiment Guinea Pig B. He set out to study principles and "Proof of Concept" artifacts which proved that you could do "More with Less."