Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Dieting Deviations

Dalando's Diet Blog will consume the devastation of tedium, the facing of addictions and the avoidance of avoidance, i.e. becoming physical. All steps can only expand as far as my stride. Stride on ... Stride on.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Self-teaching aides, Video Blog Tutorials

Seek and you'll find.

Been scanning the web for video-podcasting info and have found, finally, the best basics tutorials. Thanks to Video Blog Tutorial @ http://www.freevlog.org... The image of my own video blogging is now coming into focus.

For inspiration and raw fluid info I am now tuned daily into 'XOLO.TV', 'On-being', 'Boom Chicago', 'Rocketboom', 'The New Wrinkle', 'commandN h.264' with my adding and subtracting independent and team vloggers daily.

'The DV show' and also 'Inside Home Recording' (audio programs both for video and audio troubleshooting) are two too long but good examples of pragmatic self-education tools, plus recently inactive, though still downloadable, the very helpful video shooting advice at 'Izzy Video DV Tutorial'...

'PodTech.net' for the tech insider perspective, along with pop 'ABC News Ahead of the Curb', 'Business Week - Tech 101 Video podcast'... 'CNET News.com daily tech news', 'CNN SHOWandTELL', 'MacBreak', 'MacCast', 'Macworld Podcasts' and also 'Macworld Video', 'NPR Technology', 'NYT Tech Talk', plus pro 'Photoshop TV', 'Podcast Academy', 'This WEEK in MEDIA' and also 'This WEEK in TECH', 'TWit Video', and last, but certainly not least, 'Videomaker Presents' the quintessential amateur approach to home video.

I am psyched.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Tears as Witness to Meaning

Glorious moments punctuate my day with tears. I see the haunting perfection of individual triumphs materialized as media moments, and I am moved. Yet there is a divide between my world of inspiration in leisure and the tormenting truth that I have yet found my creative process. A life time of failed events, of non-happenings, and procedures that have come up short... have poisoned my promises.

Next step is camera, point-and-shoot. Upload and revitalize my web presence. Make alive in tune with my time, a coming together of what I have always been plus alpha. I have maintained a blog from long before it existed. Now that blogging has circumnavigated the globe and met my world here on the other side, it is time.

A more power Mac Book Pro, a wide digitalized monitor, ample media storage, and a HD camcorder. And begin; Doctor Mercy (a Ghanian friends Medical journal), Kyoto Philippino (Life here in Japan for Philippine workers and students), Kyoto Streets (walking visions), Kyoto Inside Out (My Kyoto), Pleasure Pain (My love-hate relationship with Movement), Ain't Art Kyoto... A bubbling vanity of overflowing draws waling out for objectification. You saw it here first folks.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Sweet Silence

I religiously over eat, a passionate distraction utilizing the lusty loop of greed to dissipate actual insight. But I did manage to varnish a second coat on the upstairs terrace, in anticipation of Spring. The sweet sweet silence soaks me in a bath of opportunity. My estate now perfected, in this time allotted to lucky academics, between school years here in the Orient. Here in the safety away from a degrading de-evolution of American civil liberties... though safe here in Japan only being a fragile balance of smoke and mirrors. All of us 'in the know' know, when the US allows her wings to be clipped by Neoconservative idiots, we shall all pay.

So I gravitate, in a swirling of confirmations, toward video-blogging... a rekindling of filmmaker yearnings, overcoming the historical pain of incompletion and technological hair-pulling. Perhaps now I can meet again with my tools and negotiate an expression worthy of my world.

Love and leisure, how sacred this moment.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Planning; Art or Obsession?

To what degree does the perpetual mapping of time interfere with spontaneity? Theoretically, one maps in non-linear thinking by including meditation, or some erotic interplay, athletic physical activity, stimulating entertainment, social interaction or other free form of play... But how insipid is the structuring of freedom?

Surely the most effective spiritual practices are a riff of time structures, vigorous routine. Business models, more often than not, offer promise when time management is enhanced. Personal chaos can be remedied simply by stepping into a controlled schedule, requiring full physical and mental attention away from our dizzying mental wanderings.

The mind is both a friend and culprit in determining inevitable success. To be in paradise requires an elastic vigilance. The courage and ability to say yes and no, to demands placed on our time. To choose, or choose not to choose, is a subtle art. Deciphering what to do next requires space for reflection and disciplined action.

Planning done well is art, done poorly life depleting. Yet getting started either way remains key.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The Work of Byron Katie

There was something that caught me, when I stumbled on to Katie's work, and I ordered her 2006-2007 32-CD set. Is her assumption that we are all wise true? Testing her four sentence formula:
1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it's true?
3. How do you react when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

And remember to turn it around.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Coming Closer

The sky in winter Japan is an ongoing window into paradise known. Grandma is here. Everyone should have a Japanese grandmother for their children. I am so close now. This PodTech.net is so in tuned with the motion I find myself, this jog course of energy of mind. English Teaching in Japan... Teaching in Japan (science, math, the best of the best). I am coming close to an understanding of the videocast in my future. The lose of work may meet a compromise of efficiency. I may find a way to slip into the creator's life style, an undivulged projection of my youth. Too much on mind, yet all is relevant to this core of consciousness. Obviously I need to fix my teeth, pay the bills, lose weight, exercise, paint the porch, keep tight with my extended family, reunite with my professional identity. This is a year of potential. I can use it well. Last year was an exploration into body science, and a birth of vegan awareness and self education. Now I reel in this revolutionary gesture and come to a balance. But I am a hunter, I know that now.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Frustration indigenous to Paradise

So many blessings today. Help from an angel, raw cash, sweet kindnesses, absence of pain... Perhaps it is only really hard work which can eliminate my anxiety. That anxiety that I must do so much more. I do Do so much, yet there are those around me with quick silver energy and a work ethic so sharp it can cut through these mental distractions. Am I doing, when I take in my research? Push on, more effectively... find a tool to swing real soon. Revitalize my web presence and terminate my relationship with my server provider.

Cut clean in final preparation for my emerging image. Teaching English in Japan. Artfully pragmatic, focused, and nurturing, community based, and profitable.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Self Inflicted Frustrations

I was empowered on awakening but, as the entanglement of sunlight activity settles in, I again lose my thread. The delight of poetic play can spin me into a Sufi shuffle, setting me back hours, even in the sweet silences of my cozy room.

I was pleased that my chat could bring some solace to a friend facing depression. And in this simple interaction, hope that I may serve some greater purpose... even in the bumbling normalcy of chaotic living. We help each other, and there is a bit of a rush in this.

Friday, March 9, 2007

Reticence, Anxious, and Fear

The palatability of procrastination enables me to evade for just so long. In the morning though, the aftertaste of indecisiveness lingers, from a tormented night of lock-jaw anxiety. A list of what I put-off reads Ike a psychosomatic cook book, or a book dealer's inventory of used 'Self-Help' books.

I still struggle with calling the US trying to eliminate my dead wife's name from our savings plan. How I hate the inner city drawl of middle management do-nothings, who have me perform like a circus bear yet provide nothing, but a promise to send further forms to fill.

How I hate to deal with the automated web-forms on my overseas domain server. I allow myself to be victimized by their self-concerned sales team, and absentee tech support. Instead of carrying my revenging angel out into the open, so that he may spread his wings and bring wrath upon my enemies, I linger in altered states of denial... perennial procrastination.

Only when the pain gets unbearable does the dental work get done.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Vulnerable Paradise

My room is softly silent. Listening, the layers of biology, body functions, from digestion to cyclical desire for procreation, make their presence known. The first step for civilization is to fulfill these body needs, health, nutrition, and sexual satisfaction. But next is the vacuums void that creates intellectual hunger, a need to create.

But create what?

When we are hungry we end up in the kitchen and our palette screams out descriptors, mapping a plan for which foods to prepare. Drawing from pantry and fridge we create our transient pleasure palace, mounds of our favorite food gobbled down to satiety. Sex, mapped by social ritual of phone calls and rendezvous or some automated variation involving the internet, too is fulfilled via proactive pursuit.

But art, and our need to create it, is far more allusive. The intellectual whore house of television, printed media, and on-line consumption does not ever fully deter the desire to make something special. Of course one can damper and self-delude by massive doses of intellectual stimulation and experiential entertainment. Yet, in the end, only creation, full-fledge materialization of a vision, can stop the angst of an artist.

And for better or worse, I have always been, more often than not, an artless artisan... a needy man staring through the picture window of a world rich in expression. I must reenergize that self-definition of artist that once was hard-wired into my psyche. Yet I keep dissipating my fiery creative-juices by down time in the pursuits of pleasure. Vision must include decadence and deprivation in the final work, or I must streamline out distractions with a monk-like dedication. Whatever the methodology, a functioning studio and a stone chiseled conviction is as utilitarian as kitchen cutlery and boudoir bravado.

Initiate the creative process, and hope that art will come of it.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Working the Weather

Rain, cold and wet, draws me in, drowns me in dreary dreams and drizzly distractions. I am the weather. Where is the will? What does it take to join inspiration with actualization... these seeds of despondence... Decay in the floor boards, dry rot decaying my foundation. I smell a project. I feel so close near a way of being busy 'creating'... yet there is such a strong air of disbelief. Ain't no money in it, no immediate wellspring of love. Need a handle, umbrella to the weather of lost confidence. A Merry Weather to hold my hand through this storm of indecisiveness.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Experiential Spirtuality (Click to see Mushin)

To understand a bit of the Wild Goose community experience... here is a video tape of the work of Mushin, a Berlin spiritual teacher, now with a community in both Germany and Czech Republic. Mushin is the long time disciple of Michael Barnett. Though Michael and Mushin have recently separated their disciple-master relationship, the influence is apparent. Michael was in turn the student of Osho. I have invited both Mushin and Varuni, two long time disciples of Michael, here to Japan to perform workshops in their own unique brand of Energy Work. All three are still very active in Europe.

Recent Mushin Video documentary
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=2130241432103744511&hl=de

Michael Barnett and One Life (with links to Varuni's work)
http://www.wildgoose.net/

Mushin's English blog
http://www.mushin.eu/en/blog/

Living In Paradise (Click for Lov-e.com)

I am blessed with a university teaching career which allows periodical breaks... a time where I can reflect, clean house, and set things straight. There is an ironic anxiety that comes with such an advantage. I truly want to accomplish great things, while in fact I am often just treading water. A compassionate reflection will understand the challenges of a single father of two teens and allow myself the luxury of a social life along with the busy-ness of parenting. On my back burner, beyond pending dental care and on-going domestic chores for two households (two separate homes separated by a two hour one-way comute) is a desire always to be a better teacher, to some how get back into shape, all the while making time for a healthy social and intellectual balance. I get tired just trying to describe the matrix I have created for myself. Living in Paradise can be at times a formidable challenge.