Time and time again I knew what I was doing and

Time and time again I just made things worse

It seems you see the most of what is really true when

You're stepping into your hearse

Only time can write a song that's really really real

The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels

And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals

And when I want to write a song that says it all at once

Like time sublimely silences the whys

I know that if I try I'm going to take a fall at once

And splatter there between my lies

Only time can write a song that's really really real

The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels

And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals

We are made of it and if we give submission

Among our chances there's a chance we can choose

And if we take it, by uncertainty's permission

Then it's impossible to lose

Only time can write a song that's really really real

The most a man can do is say the way its playing feels

And know he only knows as much as time to him reveals

James Magee

For more than a quarter of a century, the American artist, James Magee, has been engaged in a massive, largely secret, almost solitary endeavor in the vast plains of West Texas. A Michigan-born, Ivy League-educated lawyer, Magee’s unusual trajectory through New York taxi driver and off-shore roughneck led him to make his home in El Paso, Texas, a border city made up of equal parts Mexico and the U.S., where, fittingly, he produces a vast body of work both under his own name and under the names of Annabel Livermore and Horace Mayfield, liminal identities in a liminal place. A painter, sculptor, poet, film and video maker, widely featured in museum and gallery exhibitions across the U.S. from the Yale University Art Gallery to the Santa Monica Art Museum, Magee here reveals himself to be an architect, engineer and builder as well.

Janie Jones 34:40

There is no I...

Zen in a Beggar’s Life

Tosui was a well-known Zen teacher of his time. He had lived in several temples and taught in various provinces.
The last temple he visited accumulated so many adherents that Tosui told them he was going to quit the lecture business entirely. He advised them to disperse and to go wherever they desired. After that no one could find any trace of him.
Three years later one of his disciple discovered him living with some beggars under a bridge in Kyoto. He at once implored Tosui to teach him.
‘If you can do as I do for even a couple of days, I might,’ Tosui replied.
So the former disciple dressed as a beggar and spent a day with Tosui. The following day one of the beggars died. Tosui and his pupil carried the body off at midnight and buried it on a mountainside. After that they returned to their shelter under the bridge.
Tosui slept soundly the remainder of the night, but the disciple could not sleep. When morning came Tosui said: ‘We do not have to beg food today. Our dead friend has left some over there.’ But the disciple was unable to eat a single bite of it.

‘I have said you could not do as I.’ concluded Tosui. 
‘Get out of here and do not bother me again.’

ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES
Compiled by Paul Reps

Street art, Montreal 2019

street art, Montreal 2019

What is born will die, what has been gathered will be dispersed, what has been accumulated will be exhausted, what has been built up will collapse and what has been high will be brought low.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sogyal Rinpoche

There is no ‘human individual.’ There is a psyche that is socialized and, in this socialization, in the final result, there is almost nothing individual in the true sense of the term.

Cornelius Castoriadis

I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of man’s knowledge is not to oppose and to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure.

The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker

The Owl's Legacy - Chris Marker

L'individu moderne vit dans une course éperdue pour oublier à la fois qu'il va mourir et que tout ce qu'il fait n'a strictement pas le moindre sens.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Society is dominated  by a  mad race,  defined by  three  terms: technoscience,  bureaucracy,  and  money. If  nothing  stops  it, democracy will increasingly be out of the question. Privatization, indifference,  and  egoism  will  be  all-pervasive,  with  a  few  savage  explosions  of those who are in the excluded minority and are unable to express them- selves politically.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Lincoln Clarkes

Alley, Brandiz Hotel, 122 East Hastings St. 

Vancouver

loud

Every time in recorded history that somebody has invented something that helps to set people free, somebody else will quickly come along and take control of it, and turn it into an instrument of oppression and control.

William S. Burroughs

Nous vivons sur cette planète que nous sommes en train de détruire, et quand je prononce cette phrase je songe aux merveilles, je pense à la mer Égée, je pense aux montagnes enneigées, je pense à la vue du Pacifique depuis un coin d’Australie, je pense à Bali, aux Indes, à la campagne française qu’on est en train de désertifier. Autant de merveilles en voie de démolition. Je pense que nous devrions être les jardiniers de cette planète. Il faudrait la cultiver. La cultiver comme elle est et pour elle-même. Et trouver notre vie, notre place relativement à cela. Voilà une énorme tâche. Et cela pourrait absorber une grande partie des loisirs des gens, libérés d’un travail stupide, productif, répétitif, etc. Or cela est très loin non seulement du système actuel mais de l’imagination dominante actuelle. L’imaginaire de notre époque, c’est celui de l’expansion illimitée, c’est l’accumulation de la camelote — une télé dans chaque chambre, un micro-ordinateur dans chaque chambre -, c’est cela qu’il faut détruire. Le système s’appuie sur cet imaginaire- là.

La liberté, c’est très difficile. Parce qu’il est très facile de se laisser aller. L’homme est un animal paresseux. Il y a une phrase merveilleuse de Thucydide : « Il faut choisir : se reposer ou être libre. » Et Périclès dit aux Athéniens : « Si vous voulez être libres, il faut travailler. » Vous ne pouvez pas vous reposer. Vous ne pouvez pas vous asseoir devant la télé. Vous n’êtes pas libres quand vous êtes devant la télé. Vous croyez être libres en zappant comme un imbécile, vous n’êtes pas libres, c’est une fausse liberté. La liberté, c’est l’activité. Et la liberté, c’est une activité qui en même temps s’autolimite, c’est- à-dire sait qu’elle peut tout faire mais qu’elle ne doit pas tout faire. C’est cela le grand problème de la démocratie et de l’individualisme.

Stopper la montée de l’insignifiance

Cornelius Castoriadis

in the meantime

beds are burning

It is a matter of finding, of opening up, the 'Northwest Passage' towards a new revolution that cannot tolerate masses of executants, a revolution that must surge over that central terrain which has until now been sheltered from revolutionary upheavals: the conquest of everyday life. We shall only organise the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.

GD

Tied in with this idea of subversive art was the myth of the Northwest Passage. A slightly more slippery concept than détournement, the Northwest Passage boiled down to the belief that you can find an instant route to total change; through a mystical blend of imagination and belief in Art (with a capital A), you could destroy the city that existed and create a new city that represented your own desires.

this