The spatial distortion is just the first step. I’m not normal, remember. Hell, if this stuff were good enough to draw more people than it does, someone would be interviewing me about the outrageous brilliance of a concealed rainbow in a land that never was. See?

Okay, that isn’t so brilliant except on a small screen. Meanwhile, here’s something with a more highly developed paradox that gives it great power — you have to read the description, however.

Having some fun here, as you can see. I’m not sure if the column scrolling against the fixed background makes me dizzy, or if I’m just not quite over my cold. Sometimes just staring at the screen too long gives me a headache. Anyway, chime in if you want.

Whoa, I think the mix of different depths is what’s giving me a fit! I kinda like it, though.

Now there is an excellent movie! I just took part in the vile, detestable mass culture and found something I really liked. Finally, a movie without swooshes and thuds. A real story. The characters all have inner lives that you can feel. The girl has a glorious spirit and is wildly outspoken — beautiful, too, in an understated way. Her father and stepmother are smart and compassionate. The only part that didn’t quite ring true for me was the girl falling for the doofus who got her pregnant, but it worked in the story line. I was impressed by some very moving surprises in the final scenes as well.

There’s quite a buzz on about this film, and for good reason. Kudos all around.

Okay, you know I gave my wife a poker, but how did I make out? A Web site client of mine designed and sells these. Sterling silver, very cool. That’s a buffalo skull with an Indian pipe across the horns and a medicine circle on its forehead. I feel like I AM somebody, heh.

What she gave me for Christmas

It’s a fine sunny 23 degree afternoon here on the Llano rim. Ich habe jezt viel Spass mit Photoshop, as you can tell. Heh. I think I’ll leave the nuevo fascist romantic chic self-portrait up for a while. (That one’s from today, 12/16/07.) Oddly, I’ve been having serious fun taking pictures of my own bizarrely changing face for quite some time now. Working with this setting or that and certain filters, I can get something dark and terrible. Cool. Talk about making lemonade!

Cute has died: it’s edge or nothing.

I just remembered another song I really dug from last night’s “In the Blood” performance by Robert Mirabal. Whatever it was, this is the chorus:

Life is a MYSTERY
not a problem to be solved
THERE IS NO DESTINATION
THERE IS NO DESTINATION

He also did a kind of dramatic recitation based on this portion of a talk by Sitting Bull: “If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it, and that is what the Indians are doing now when they ask you to give them the things that were promised them in the past. And I do not consider that they should be treated like beasts, and that is the reason I have grown up with the feelings I have. I feel that my country has gotten a bad name, and I want it to have a good name. It used to have a good name, and I sit sometimes and wonder who it is that has given it a bad name.” Only when Robert spoke the words, he punctuated the words by jabbing his hand down in front of him like stabbing a spear into the ground, and he repeated certain phrases, like so:

I feel that my country has gotten a BAD name
a BAD name
a BAD name
a BAD name
I want it to have a GOOD name
I want it to have a GOOD name
a GOOD name
a GOOD name
a GOOD name

And when he said, “I sit sometimes and wonder who it is that has given it a bad name,” it was more slowly called out, and with emphasis, like a hammer on a cast-iron skull.

Excellently done.

Went to another Robert Mirabal concert last night, the “In the Blood” show, and it was fabulous. Bottom line: it’s not the music — great as it is — it’s Robert’s spirit. You just want to be there with him. This is no small thing.

Going to concerts here in Taos is usually pretty painless, too: a 15-minute drive to the Taos Community Auditorium, easy parking across the street, a few minutes wait until the doors are open, and there you go. For some reason, almost nobody heads immediately for the front row, so nine times out of 10, we get to sit right up close. I’ve seen more fine musicians from 15 feet away than I can count, and when it’s all over, the car is two minutes walk away. (When we lived in Maryland, 90 miles from D.C. or Baltimore, going to a concert meant three hours drive and all the pleasures of the urban jungle to negotiate. I’ve easily attended 10 times as many concerts here as I would have back East in the same span of time.)

I don’t know what I could say about the music that would make sense to you if you’ve never heard Robert. There’s a lot of Indian flute and percussion, with the addition of electric guitar and a full range of synthesized sound and additional drums, and the concentration of the musicians onstage is fearsome. Nowhere more so with Robert. Some of his lyrics are delivered in the style of a beat poet against a jazzy background riff, and this time there was plenty of Tewa chanting and singing. I wonder how these “authentic” portions of the show go over with audiences in Japan or Manhattan, but I hope people are at least respectful. The way the Mirabal band wraps this all together is simply striking. It’s the spirit that holds it all together, as I said.

When Robert does it, it isn’t hokey. When he dances and gesticulates fiercely to a pounding beat,

ONE sun,
ONE moon,
ONE Earth,
ONE people!

… you feel it in your heart. You know it’s true and you know it’s right. It’s that simple, and that deep. When he shouts out at the end that he’s doing this “for YOU, Taos!” as well as “for the mountain, for the snow, for the water in the spring,” it’s real. It’s the honest truth.

Trust me on this: Robert Mirabal is onto something BIG. It’s expressed primarily through his own culture but with a very wide bridge to the rest of the world. Catch a live show if you ever have the chance. We sat next to a lady who’d driven down from Cheyenne, Wyoming to see this gig — that’s 330 miles away, in the snow…

The main reason I’ve always gone to political blogs is simply for the news.

However, a more personal reason for hanging around them for so long is undoubtedly the sense of community engendered by exchanging views and comments with like-minded people. This is a fine thing, and I’m a knave for ever dissing it. I know what it feels like to be marginalized, and now most of the nation is. (Imagine that, the Marginalized Majority.) So people are concerned and scared. They need a place to go and schmooze, at least. Flirt, crack jokes, whatever, maybe even raise the general level of awareness. Those of you who don’t spend a lot of time online might not know what this is all about, but don’t feel bad: you’re probably doing just fine talking to real people instead of cutesy usernames.

But I’m an Internet dude who would like to get out more. There have to be other places to visit online where there’s news and views of a different sort. I’ve found a couple of them and put them in the sidebar, but they aren’t enough. Where do people hang out who want to talk about life, art, and consciousness? Where do people go to read stories with a punch in the stomach? Where do crazy musicians, artists, nature mystics, and eco-freaks congregate online? Where do people go who care about cosmology AND punk rock? — heh, a little voice in my head just said “Austin.” Yeah, well. On the Internet, I mean.

I need a new bar. The comments only allow two URLs per, but send me what you have.

As the last few seconds of Dec. 8th tick away, I remember.

Another embedded YouTube experiment. We went to Dixon today and I didn’t have my camera, but I did have the MacBook — so I made a movie with the built-in iSight camera. Great fun, at least.

If this breaks the page for you, please note in the comments.

UPDATE: I’ll bet it’s working now. I found a fix here. Involves leaving out some of the YouTube code.