“In this weekly commentary on the lojong, I am not open to the feed becoming
a debate for people to nitpick Buddhism or my interpretations of Buddhist concepts.
(There are lots of places for debates.)  I am more interested in hearing about
YOUR life or how it affected you or your practice awakening in some manner.”

This is the note I have at the end of my pages on lojong.

I have had some emails about why I say this.

I think I need to be very clear why I say this, for those of you who have never
seen simplistic zennies argue over points endlessly.  There is a long tradition of
debate in Zen circles.  While it is interesting if that is what you are after, I want this lojong offering to be personal.  I find that Buddhist debates are rarely personal.
I find that the greatest…

Another painting in my café series. I have done this before but tried a second version. This time trying to get a feeling of hustle and bustle.

By SERGE F. KOVALESKIAUG. 9, 2014

Above:

Nearly four years ago, Dr. Sue Sisley, a psychiatrist at the University of Arizona, sought federal approval to study marijuana’s effectiveness in treating military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. She had no idea how difficult it would be.

The proposal, which has the support of veterans groups, was hung up at several regulatory stages, requiring the research’s private sponsor to resubmit multiple times. After the proposed study received final approval in March from federal health officials, the lone federal supplier of research marijuana said it did not have the strains the study needed and would have to grow more — potentially delaying the project until at least early next year.

Then, in June, the university fired Dr. Sisley, later citing funding and reorganization issues. But Dr. Sisley is convinced the real reason was her outspoken support for marijuana research.

“They could never…

735/1000 #DrawingAugust
The garden…it’s television for cats!
Pen

Charlie Parker died to play this music. Bud Powell died to play this music. After suffering through the worst holocaust in human history, these brilliant Black artists gave the world a gift. This gift was so potent that not only did it help them leverage some modicum of autonomy, but helped other oppressed peoples of the world find themselves. It even freed the souls of those who uprooted them from their homeland of Africa and enslaved them for centuries in a land not theirs. It is through Black music that White America began the process of healing itself.

I didn’t think back in May of 2005 when I was generously quoted in Stanley Crouch’s piece entitled, “The Colossus,” which extolled the virtues of Master Rollins, that I would have to sit up here today and call out the same publication for attempting to besmirch his character. I hesitate to write…

If you’ve been on the internet at all in the past week, you’ve probably already seen the Women Against Feminism tumblr going around, or at the very least read about it.

I didn’t think too much of it when I saw it, for two reasons. For one, most of the women had a tenuous grasp (at best) on the definition of feminism, one that seemed like it was informed in its entirety by Rush Limbaugh and Jessi Spano, and also the belief that “misandry” jokes are actually serious.

The other reason was that most of the “women” actually looked like teenage girls. Considering that I was super into Ayn Rand when I was a teenage girl, I can’t get too far up on my high horse with regards to the contributors. Let’s just say that if Tumblr was around in the late 1990s, I’m sure there’d be a photo of…

This is so applicable 🙂 I am an artist.

Linking to:
The BIRD D’pot
Weekly Top Shot

Imagine this:

The year is 2014. You are a white Western woman. You wake up in the morning in a comfortably sized house or flat. You have a full or part-time job that enables you to pay your rent or mortgage. You have been to school and maybe even college or university as well. You can read and write and count. You own a car or have a driver’s licence. You have enough money in your own bank account to feed and clothe yourself. You have access to the Internet. You can vote. You have a boyfriend or girlfriend of your choosing, who you can also marry if you want to, and raise a family with. You walk down the street wearing whatever you feel like wearing. You can go to bars and clubs and sleep with whomever you want.

Your world is full of freedom and possibility.

Then you…

In a move that could trump state legislative actions in Pennsylvania and across the nation, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry is on Monday introducing a bill to nationally legalize a marijuana-based oil that has been shown to reduce seizures in children with debilitating epilepsy.

The conservative York County Republican made the announcement Monday morning at a press conference where he was joined by the president of the national Epilepsy Foundation and advocates that included the mother of Colorado girl Charlotte Figi, whose successful treatment with cannabidiol oil has inspired a national movement.

Joel Stanley, one of the creators of the “Charlotte’s Web” strain of marijuana used to treat Figi, was also present for the introduction announcement of Perry’s bill, the “Charlotte’s Web Medical Hemp Act of 2014.”

The bill would give children and adults with epilepsy and other seizure disorders access to the oil (called CBD) for treatment by removing CBD…

Flipping through the pictures on my phone, I see it.

My first reaction is shock. Who took this hideous picture of me?

Self-loathing and disgust swell up and threaten to bring me to tears.

Just as I am about to hit delete, my boy walks in the room.

“Do you know anything about this picture?” I ask him.

I turn the screen so he can see it. He smiles huge.

“I took that of you in Tahoe,” he says. “You looked so beautiful laying there. I couldn’t help it mom.”

“You need to ask me before using my phone to take pictures,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “But mom, seriously, look how pretty you look?”

I look at the picture again and try to see what he sees.

My daughter walks over and takes a look.

“That could be a postcard mom,” she says smiling. “Your so beautiful. I…

“Mais, yall come see my new tricycle, cher!”

I must have been 17 years old before I ever uttered the phrase “come here.” And I did so only to make myself understood to what I thought was a somewhat dense Northerner, a Long Islander who couldn’t understand basic English.

In my part of the world, in South Louisiana, for some reason or other, we never said, “come here.” Instead, we said, “come see.” Always and forever, with no confusions or misunderstanding.

Yet the very first time I said “come see” in Southampton, New York, in the fall of 1991, the response was — well, I don’t have to tell anyone who wasn’t raised in Louisiana what the response was.

Me: “Come see.”
Friend: “See what?”
Me: “What?”
Friend: “Come see what?”
Me: Pause. Thinking. “Uh. Come here?”

And thus I switched from “come see” to “come here.”

My Movie News blog over at the Syracuse New Times site this week takes a minute or two to discuss a topic that’s without a doubt a sore point.

The long movie trailer. Too much. Much much too much.

I found two stories about a trailer that runs 72 minutes.

It’s for a movie titled “Ambiance,” an artsy thing, if you will, a blockbuster, the whole darn block, a city, a country …

Anyway, this movie, due to come out in 2020, will be 720 hours long. Which I suppose makes the trailer kind of, well, puny.

Also coming up in this week’s installment of the blog over there, is my take on the word that Disney is going to take Dumbo into the realm of their animation to real-life.

And they’ve hired Ehren Kruger, who wrote the “Transformer” franchise, to take the elephant from 1941 to today. I say…

I learned about goauche resist, first, from Art Pearl’s site about a year ago. I have done several. It is a lengthy procedure but well worth the time spent due to the interesting images that can be created with it.  I took the time to outline the procedure in the event that someone would like to try this.

The above is the drawing  from a photo of two gorillas I found on wet canvas.  I thought it would lend itself well to this technique.  I have used Arches 140lb coldpress paper for these but see no reason why rough or hot press could not be used. I do think it demands 140lb paper because it takes a beating in the process and lighter papers may not hold up.

In the second step I ” LIGHTLY!” wash in some color. This aids in the application of gouache to the surface because it helps…

I’ve got to always
post at 4:20. I just
have to, because, well..

No Longer Home

And I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost.

Another Woman, film by Woody Allen

A loaded feature of vacation, no matter how brief, is that slowing down of time and expansion of space for pausing and pondering.  This first day of mini-vacation has brought that immeasurable gift to me.  As I write this, I am listening to Aaran Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and memories are so thick I have to brush them away like swarming gnats to the face.  

After hours of leisure spent over the pages of Melville’s Moby Dick, I felt visited by so many ideas from so many walks of life, and my emotions could not be quelled.  I walked away from the book and settled onto a comfortable sofa to stare at the TV for awhile.  I am not sure why I inserted an old VHS tape…

Medium: Watercolor Crayon.

Finley Fish. Too be used in a larger piece at a later date.

Tree in my Backyard

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.

William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

This morning when I read these words from Faulkner, I felt his nod of affirmation toward anyone who tries to create.  The moment class ended today, I bolted for my studio so I could give this plein air sketch begun yesterday afternoon one more push.  As I worked over the details, I thought of all artists, musicians and writers–those who try and seize those impulses in their consciousness, mull over them, and then give them some kind of recognizable form for others to see and feel.

Marcy

Regret.  I will miss
so much, I am missing so
much in time not mine.