LIVICK'S DIARY FROM JANUARY 1, 2000 UP UNTIL MAY 28, 2008, HAS BEEN ARCHIVED.

THIS IS A DIARY THAT SERVES AS MY LITTLE " SOAPBOX " AND ALL ROUND RANT PAGE.

This online diary has not been edited regarding content or style.
It is intended to be open honest and quite revealingly candid.

June 27th , 2010

Yesterday I went to my local library and renewed a book, not just any book however. It's James Hansen's first book, "Storms of my grandchildren" published by Bloomsbury. He is the NASA scientist who first brought global warming to the world's attention, by testifying before the American congress in the early 1980s.

The book reveals in great detail how during the most recent Bush Whitehouse, everything was being done to muzzle and distort the latest findings of American climate scientists, to stop them from revealing to the American public certain damming truths about global warming. This book is James Hansen finally telling you the truth about global warming, and reveals the Republicans in the Bush and Chaney Whitehouse did to prevents the truth from coming out.

Hansen tells you about the incredibly dire situation we are in, as he recounts just how virtually impossible it is to get democratic governments, that are heavily lobbied by coal and oil companies, to instigate decent honorable actions to prevent eventual planetary wide extinction's that are bound to occur.

The reality is, if things don't radically change in how we are living our lives, and soon, then it's the end of everything that we know. I urge you to go to your local library and request this book, "Storms of my grandchildren", by James Hansen. And please don't be put off by the "scientific" nature of the first few chapters, as a scientist it's in his nature too always talk shop, he can't help it. However he very kindly tells you when to skip ahead as things become more scientific in nature and a tad trying to a lay person. Unless of course you happen to be a scientist or scientifically centered yourself. I am not and I was able to make my way through it.

Keep in mind that James Hansen is not a journalist or a hot shot commercial author looking to make a buck on the hot topic of global warming. But the real thing, a caring scientist who knows the global warming facts inside out, and he tells you everything, honestly and candidly. If we allow big coal and oil companies to have their way, by trying to take every last drop of oil or coal out of the ground for the public to burn, then all life on this planet will become extinct in the centuries ahead.

Runaway greenhouse warming is going to be forced into commencing, this planet our earth will proceed inevitably onto the same path as Venus, our sister planet. As we know, the surface temperature there is incredibly hot and it's shrouded in a deadly gas, carbon dioxide. That's the path that we are presently on, if our human perspective on life and how we view this planet, doesn't quickly change it's course.

Those destructive thunder lightening rain wind and tornado events that we are now experiencing, are going to be increasingly ratcheted up, becoming much worse. The devastation they are now causing in scattered parts of the country and around the world, will become more wide spread and extremely catastrophic in nature, in the decades ahead.

If you do happen partake in summer time reading, please try and read this book, to bring yourself up to speed on the topic. Once you do, you will never look at things in quite the same way. Your outlook on life might be changed by what you encounter in this book. I am sure that most of us would want to try and prevent future catastrophic storm damage, from affecting our children, and their children, our grandchildren. Who will in the end, be the ones to bare the brunt of our present day careless commercial actions.

May 23rd , 2010

If it isn't one thing it's another, or so the old saying goes. I am struggling these days adjusting to crippling lower back problems, with nerve pain that's been increasing in intensity lately. My back has always pained me, no doubt from receiving jolts playing that main culprit of internal injuries, football, during my teenage years. I also played soccer in a junior league as well. I appear to have two bulging discs, and something seen on the MRI they are calling spinal stenosis. Which I have been told is quite a common problem, especially as one ages and the spine tends to compress due to the effects of gravity. It is never the less, quite painful and debilitating to deal with, and virtually drains away all of one's energy. I am booked to visit one of the best spine surgeons in these parts, (at least that's what I have been told) in mid September, to see if anything can be done about the nagging problem, hopefully there will be, my fingers are crossed.

In the mean time I am finding a modicum of reasonable relief using a drug called Lyrica. It is helping me sleep through the night, well, seven hours of it, and keeps the pain reasonably, but not quite under control during the day. If I do nothing but lay stretched out in a Lazy boy chair all day, I can have a none pain day. However if I am the least bit active, the truth is, the pain begins gnawing away at me. I can only sit in my computer chair for about an hour, before it gets just too uncomfortable to continue. And I walk usually assisted with a cane.

Between the constant and nagging prostrate problems, even though my PSA reading was excellent according to my doctor, and the lower back problems that are getting worse with time passing. I can't imagine what it is going to be like to be in ones seventies eighties or nineties. Perhaps people are lucky and get handed good bodies, so they feel reasonably okay at that age. I had one specialist, the urinary tract, prostate specialist, look over my MRI report and tell me that I rather unluckily seem to already have the body of a ninety year old. So perhaps that's my problem, although I am no where near ninety years in age, my body is actually feeling like it is ninety years old these days.

I am not sure about my mind however, it seems to me that it appears to have gone into a kind of future reality "funk". No doubt probably caused by being on Lyrica for the past six months, as memory loss and mood swings are listed as side effects, along with thoughts of suicide no less. It seems that I am just not interested in photography or art or even music anymore. They just do not seem to matter anymore, in the grander scheme of things. At one time of day nothing else mattered to me, so I ate slept and breathed photography constantly, none stop, for fifty years. When I wasn't out and about in the world taking pictures. I was up and working in the "dark room" at seven every morning, and usually I quit dead tired by five. And that was my routine every day since the very early nineteen sixties.

However right now, the truth is, none of it seems to matter to me anymore. Perhaps that's because I have come to fully realize something, a epic truth has dawned on me. And that truth is this, civilization as we have known it, is going to come to an end in about half a dozen more decades give or take, it might take up to ten decades, or around one hundred more years. The vast bulk of us are going to be killed off by biosphere parameter revisions that are beginning to form and take shape, even now. It is quite clear to me that we modern humans absolutely are not able to change our ways. As a result we are simply going to be killed off by those profound changes that we, in our carelessness, are causing to occur in this planet's life supporting systems.

Everything in our human world, it appears to me, seems to be carrying on as if nothing is wrong. All of the many warning signs, those signals that are warning us about the impending collapse of our planetary life support. Are simply being ignored, by those who we elect, to hold onto the reigns of societal power for a period of four to five years at a time. So our collective societal thinking only tends to look ahead in those very limiting five year election cycle jumps. Few politicians are thinking properly about the long term.

But the reality is this, our coal mine canary died and rotted many years ago, and few in societal power, including our industry moguls it seems, has even noticed this fact. Even if they have noticed, they are simply ignoring or perhaps skillfully maneuvering their way around the issue, trying their best not to bring the slightest attention to the life ending problem we all face. Or they are down playing the issue by cheekily advertising the fact that they have become a "green" company. One has to ask, how could any oil or coal company ever become green? And yet I have seen the advertisements that claim so.

So the bottom line of how I see it, is this; it's basically over for human civilization. The future is going to be made up of a lot of human and wildlife suffering, we are headed at break neck speed, into a world of constant death and endless adaptation. Those who are fortunate enough to live through it all, are going to have to quickly adapt to a new, much harsher, less life supporting world in the near future.

It's crystal clear and intuitively correct in my mind. I can see those many warning signs and the canary laying there, moldering, still in it's tiny cage. Possibly I am simply deluding myself about the eventual very ugly reality that's going to be playing out. However in the back of my mind there is something that's telling me, that I have intuitively deduced everything quite correctly.

If you have been balanced correctly, by that I mean you have been born with equal parts of emotional intellectual and intuitive awareness. Then your built in senses always warn you instinctively when something is drastically wrong. No doubt many in the population never listen too, nor pay the slightest attention, to their core intuitive warning indicators. The reality is, collectively it's much easier to simply ignore one's senses that are warning you that something is wrong.

Ten to twelve percent of the population here in Canada are aware of the dire problems we face. I know this because that's how many people when questioned, stated they intended to vote for the Green party. But this means that eighty eight to ninety percent of the population are still, unaware of the critical global warming situation we are facing. With a huge percentage of the Canadian population still opting to vote for an unaware very ignorant Conservative party. A political party that believes global warming s really nothing more than a communist plot that's been created to rob Western countries of their wealth.

Please don't laugh, this fact is on the public record, that's exactly how the Conservative leader, our present Prime Minister, no less, actually thinks about things. So you see, there is little to no hope for saving the biosphere, it's basically over for human civilization. North America rather sadly in it's industrially driven politically harming ideology, tends to think just like this.

With Conservative style thinking quite paramount here in Canada, and Liberal style thinking now just temporarily in vogue in America. It's not surprising that both of these political parties are sharing a bed with the modern industrial reality, that we human's have quite ignorantly created. As a result nothing is going to stop the biosphere from reacting to our gross human interference. By changing itself from a life supportive environment, into a more threatening and deadly reality for all organic planetary life to endure.

March 4th , 2010

I am about to return Dianne Dumanoski's great book "The End Of The Long Summer" to my local library. I have renewed it so many times that it is embarrassing. I have managed to reread it three times, literally back to back.

It is THE most important book that I personally have ever read, which probably if truth be revealed is more a reflection of my quite limited reading list. Books on global warming only, I guess because it is the only thing that really matters to me anymore.

Of all the books that I have read centering on the subject of global warming, it is head and shoulders above the rest. Not because it points out those actual physical failings that are going to be happening in our biosphere as most of the current books on global warming do. It is much more subtle in tone and intonation than that.

More it points out and highlights civilizations own failure to grasp and understand the obvious. That we humans are simply an integral part of this greater cosmic biosphere, we absolutely do not and have never ever stood above it, as much of our current philosophical and religious thinking quite blindly dares to indicate.

I have been rather captivated by this book, essentially because it points out quite eloquently everything that I sense about living my life here on this planet. There is somebody else out there who actually believes just like I do. Ms Dumanoski's great effort through incredible research and in carefully formulating the overall thesis of this timely book cannot be over estimated.

On a personal note, this book is tacit vindication regarding my own highly arrogant thoughts, regarding the incredibly dire situation, that we now find ourselves collectively in.

January 21st, 2010

I have been reading, actually for the second time no less, one of the best books that I have discovered, quite by accident, on the subject of understanding the nature of Global Warming. It's called "The End Of The Long Summer" By Dianne Dumanoski, published by Crown Publishers New York, It's also available as an eBook according to the cover jacket.

Ms. Dumanoski obligingly connects all the relevant dots for you and describes the problem we face in much researched and quite intricate detail, that's clearly written in a journalistic like prose, so that everything about the Global Warming phenomena makes perfect sense, once you have read the book.

Of the two dozen books on the subject of Global Warming that I have read so far, this one in particular stands out as being light years above the rest, particularly in it's overall scope and depth of knowledge. In my mind it should be made mandatory reading in every high school, and in every political organization, absolutely no exceptions, but that's just my opinion.

It's truly a more important book in my mind than those fairy tale stories of the bible, again this is just my opinion. Because it's not just human centric in it's implied conception. It's truly striving to be an Earth centric informational offering in it's intention. It attempts to look behind the evolutionary veil and seeks to understand the nature of the overarching circle of life, this reality that's actually our real "God", in my opinion.

If we are ever going to survive as an organic planetary collective, and quite frankly that's looking extremely doubtful right now. It's probably 98 to 2 against us surviving, this is my honest 002 cents on it. We need to become ever more Earth centric in our religiously based conception, and in our commercial industrial actions as well as our personal daily thinking. If you wish to fully understand the dire threat of mass extinction that we are all under, you really should read this book, because it's all spelled out very clearly.

I actually picked mine up at my local library literally by the sheer fluke of "meant to be" happenstance, and I am truly having rather naughty bad boy thoughts of never returning it. Just kidding of course, however I do intend to renew it and read it carefully and slowly for a third time, because it's so jam packed with information from a research fanatic, "said with great admiration". Ms. Dumanoski methodically connects all the dots on the subject of Global Warming.

North Americans in general have a rather large problem, their complete failure to connect the dots on so many incredibly important things. Except of course for doing business, shopping or making money, they excel incredibly well at those things, much to the detriment of everything else, especially the biosphere that supports us.

This Global Warming catastrophe that's now clearly occurring, is one where all the red flashing dots are simply being ignored by most North Americans, because frankly, it's quite convenient for us to do so. And that failure to connect the dots and realize the eventual consequences is quite prevalent here in North American society, and the truth is, it's going to cost us all of our lives, as this century unfolds. Don't believe it, just wait a few more decades and you will see for yourself.

Here is one very brave incredibly researched book that peers knowingly behind the veil, right into the very construct and nature of "God", our planet, as it nicely sums everything up for you. It does that by describing for you what the real circle of life should be, a complete sentient awareness and a reverence for this fragile reality that bore us.

And does it thoroughly and quite clearly, you just have to read it to understand all of the many problematic dots that are involved in our present life threatening crisis. It will also bring you fully up to speed on exactly why we are most probably going to have to live through a biosphere breakdown, followed by civilizations own cascading collapse during the dozen decades ahead.

We all see the chaos involved in getting aid to the Haitians due to the recent earthquake in their country. However I can't help wondering what's going to happen when a dozen large cities face serious trouble all at the same time, due to the various effects from climate change? Or when one half of the North American continent lacks sufficient water to sustain life in the coming decades? Or when the monsoons fail to arrive for the second year on the Indian subcontinent, and their life sustaining rivers have all dried up because the mountain glaciers have simply evaporated away? And close to billion people have virtually no potable water or even water their crops? Etc. Etc. Etc.

November 27th, 2009

I have been making some head way on the latest mural, I actually have the entire top half finished and have removed the mock up images from the studio wall. I had to obtain the numbers written on the back of each of the prints. I have even begun sticking images from what will end up being the bottom half of the mural onto the wall. It will probably take me four to six months to fully assemble the bottom half of the mural, because I still have a lot of printing and cutting out the hundreds of proof images ahead of me. Eventually I hope to be completely satisfied with it and can proceed onto the next step, the computer assembly stage.

As I work on the bottom half of the mural, I am also working on the top half by computer assembling the murals various panels with the countless images that belong to of all those numbers that were written on the back of the proof prints, which make up the top half of the mural. There are twenty four panels that I have to assemble in the computer. Each panel contains 42 6x9 inch images. It is a mammoth undertaking, however I am working at it slowly actually enjoying the process of bringing all the images together to create a powerful mural, representing the "cosmic vagina" spilling humanity out of it and into the biosphere.

I had my MRI done and interestingly they found a number of minor problems mostly related to aging, but they also discovered the root of my always nagging life draining lower back pain. The nerves at the base of the spine are unfortunately being severely squeezed together right at the point they spread out, to eventually branch off and drop down the legs. The doctor has put me on some nerve pain medication that actually seems to be working, because truth is, I am feeling much better these days. However I am now back in a long queue waiting to see a specialist spine surgeon, not sure if they can help me in this regard, we will eventually see. It is a two year wait because the recommended surgeon is considered to be one of the best in the country, and unfortunately there is a long line up just waiting to see him.

As I wait, I will just have to keep working on the new mural, luckily there is absolutely no pressure for me to finish it. I will work on it in the cold winter months ahead, nice warm and cozy here in the studio, it's actually a nice project to be working on over the winter season. So I will just enjoying the pleasure of having something on the go that in the end, should be quite a spectacular mural, especially once it's finally finished.

October 4th, 2009

I really haven't felt much like writing in my diary lately, things are however going reasonably well on the health front. After waiting for three months I finally got to see the hip and knee surgeon about my nagging painful hip problem. To my surprise and after a thorough examination he told us that it was not the hip that was my problem, but that it was a spine issue, something like a slipped or ruptured disc or some such, that I have been experiencing. And the pain was radiating down to the hip area making it feel like it was the hip that was in trouble, it was not radiating up from the hip to my back as we first thought.

I have had back X rays done already and I am now back into a queue just waiting for an MRI to be performed on my lower back area. That's now booked for the end of October, but in another city that's a two hours drive away. Here where I live in a larger center the MRI queue is a lot longer, so I told my doctor to hunt around and see if things could be speeded up. They managed to cut a four month wait down to just one month. After the MRI is done I simply have to wait for a consult with the spine surgeon, it's someone the hip and knee specialist has recommended to me, from his intimate knowledge of working with other surgeons in our area. Perhaps I will get to see him some time next year. Hopefully it's not too long a wait, I have constant low back pain and so I tend to walk very slowly indeed, aided by a cane. I believe that I feel just like a 90 year old must, slow and doddering. But luckily there are good and bad days, it's not all doom and gloom.

I am still working on the large mural but admittedly it's proceeding rather slowly, as I am in no real hurry to complete it. It's taking it's own sweet time to come out of the creative ethers, and I am not really pushing hard enough to help it arrive either. There is always something that crops up and distracts me from working on it. Or my back is hurting just too much, even after taking serious pain medication. Besides the morphine, which I am really trying not to take, I have also tried something over the counter and recommended by family members called Aleve, and the truth is it works quite well for my pain, giving me 6 to 7 hours of relief and not 12 as the packaging promises. Unfortunately I have broken out with itchy red welts on various parts of my body, accompanied by lots of discomforting stomach gas. So I have to stop taking it, even though it works well.

It's one step forward and two steps back on the pain front. Such are the infirmaries of aging. In spite of all this, I have been playing around with a newly acquired Nikon P6000, this occurring on some of my medicated better feeling days, as I go in and out of good and bad days with the pain level. It's their top of the line point and shoot flagship 13.5 Mega Pixel camera. Already replaced by something else no doubt. I have been able to print out quite stunning 22.5 x 30 inch prints from it that look quite interesting. I have taken a number of close up weed strewn landscape images in my local riverside park, I literally stumbled around it, cane in hand, one beautiful irresistible sunny day. Just for fun and to see just what this camera could do to resolve intense natural jumble. Simply an amazing little thing. Of course I paid heavily that night and the next day for my little adventure, but it was worth all of the subsequent pain. It felt good to be outside photographing again.

The camera was really purchased for my wife as a present, mostly to photograph her family of rescued cats. Yes I live with what can only be described as a cat loving lady. The gift came from our "adopted" Indian son, who came to visit us on the first of September holiday weekend. We first met him in 1994 while working in Calcutta India, he assisted us on that particular trip, by scouting in and around Calcutta for interesting unique Kali Pandels that I might want to visit and photograph. Pandles are like little road side shrines to the Goddess, they can be very large and elaborate community sized ones or small intimate personal ones. They are usually set up all over the city with construction commencing a week to ten days before the yearly occurring, 3 to 7 day long Kali Puja (festival). The dates of which vary in accordance with the lunar calendar.

From there we have kept in close touch, helping him out whenever we could, mainly in regards to funding to try and assist with his scholastic ambitions, and we have followed his achievements, which are by now considerable. In 1997 we brought him over to stay with us for several months and arranged for him to give talks and show his own photographs taken of Goddess Kali's Puja (celebration) at two senior Canadian University art galleries.

We also arranged for him to have library access at our local highly respected University, where he spent most of his time among the stacks day after day. He also spent a lot of his time here in the studio photocopying thousands of book pages to take back with him to India. In the end one of his newly purchased suitcases was chock full of nothing but photocopying, and weighed just over the allowable limit at the time.

After finally graduating in Calcutta with honors and receiving a citation from the governor as one of the brightest students in the state of West Bengal, we have pictures of that lavish ceremony. He then obtained a teaching position on the island of Mauritius where he made some quite important discoveries, serious enough to have that area designated as a world heritage site. This brought him to the attention of a large American University. Where again he received another full five year scholarship, and there after five years he obtained his Ph.D. in world history. He is now an assistant professor at a leading Canadian University. So in the space of fourteen years, from the time we first met him, he went from being a skinny emaciated looking Indian kid who helped me with my work in India, all the way to being a skinny University professor here in Canada, simply amazing.

He told us that he was very smart back in India in 1994, this while we were having a last good by lunch in the coffee shop of the Oberio hotel in Calcutta. He showed us that he had received a full five year scholarship to a top American University, I believe that it was Harvard if I am remembering things correctly, we of course saw all of the paper work involved with the scholarship. However the American Embassy in Calcutta required a $10,000 US funds security deposit just to issue him a travel visa, so that he could take up the scholarship that was being offered. Born into a modest family background they simply could not afford to raise such huge funds at the time. To his family it would have been the equivalent of coming up with three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars, just to put down as a security deposit.

Aghast at that news, we told him that we would back him instead, and try to help him achieve his obviously intended life status, but only if he went back to school in Calcutta and completed his education. You see he really wanted to be a photographer or photo journalist and not an academic, so he had dropped out of school prematurely after the scholarship offer had fallen through. However with a little nudging and financial help from us, he proved just how intelligent he actually was. We are rather proud of his accomplishments, it's just ironic that he ended up here in Canada of all places, several job offers came up and so he applied for each of them from his University base in America a few years ago now, it's rather ironic that he was successful with the one here in Canada. We always imagined that he would return to India with his newly minted Ph.D. and become a highly respected Western trained professor there, but fate it seems had other plans in mind.

August 7th, 2009

I have been working lately, quite steadily as my time permits, constructing the latest mural. It is being made up of literally thousands of images, and it's turning out to be one of the more complex and thus time consuming murals that I have ever attempted. I am presently working the imagery and trying to resolve and refine it on my studio wall using 3x4.5 inch half scale proofs.

There is a lot of image combining and blending them together involved, and I am chancing upon and making adjustments to the mural as I go along, when notions on exactly how to proceed surface and drift into my mind's awareness. The truth is, it would not surprise me if it takes another 6 to 10 months to finally complete this mural, perhaps even longer, especially so if other issues crop up and pull me aside and thus derail me. Such as an impending right hip or possibly left knee replacement surgery, issues which might possibly be occurring this October, November or December.

My left foot, as well as the knee and hip, are definitely suffering under the strain of having to carry the load, this is while I recover and give my replaced right knee the chance to fully heal. And that's a problem as my paining right hip is interfering with that process. There unfortunately is also an enlarged prostrate problem that's also now on my plate. It's appearing to be "collateral damage" from having a urine draining tube pushed up my urethra during the right knee operation, which might, or so the thinking goes, have injured or disturbed it and set it off, the operation itself occurred this past February. Luckily it's not cancer according to my family doctor and the urinary tract specialist whom I have been to see. However there is a battery of tests coming up in the next few weeks, and of course a solution must be found to the underlying persistence and seeming resistance the enlarged prostrate has to months of a specific prostrate antibiotic that I have been taking, where the prostrate enlargement shrinks down but then quickly grows back once I cease taking the drug. We have to solve this nagging problem if we wish to reduce it from a rather painful grapefruit size prostrate, all the way down to it's normal walnut size.

These things are admittedly paining me and yes they are definitely slowing me down, quite considerably I'll admit. Of course as you might imagine they are draining me of my usual endless amounts of drive and energy. It's dealing with all the pain involved that's really the problem. Let's see, there's right hip arthritic pain to deal with, especially so during the night when it throbs incessantly, but now due to the stress being placed upon them, there's also left knee arthritic pain occurring while walking and sleeping, some mild left hip discomfort but the worst is a painful bottom of the left foot "Plantar Fasciitis" hurtfully flaring up that's combined with a very painful bottom of the foot inflammation AKA "tendonitis" occurring in that same foot. "Ouch" it does hurt like a buggar at times. I am using newly made orthodic inserts in my Finn Comfort sandals to help try and deal with it. All of it is more or less the collateral damage result of having my right knee operated on and replaced in the first place.

Of course with all this going on, you can just imagine that I do have tremendous difficulty just trying to sleep, much of it occurring during the middle of day, as I collapse and literally fall over jet lag like brain numb from my nightly sleep deprivation. I am reduced to limping and shuffling my way around the studio when I am awake, just trying to get things accomplished.

At times I feel and look like I am thirty years older than I actually am, or so I have been informed by the now concerned, "you don't look so good" peanut gallery here in the studio. The pain and stress of it all in the last six months has literally turned my hair prematurely silver gray. Not to mention the constant draining away of my personal energy reserves. Either from the actual problem itself, or from the side effects of the bitter tasting anti inflammatory, or the gas and bloat producing antibiotic as well as the heavy pain medication (morphine) that I am gratefully taking to help relieve the nagging knee hip foot and prostrate hurting, that's occurring in my lower half.

And yet despite all of the pain and suffering that's occurring in my life, I am in the middle of working on a major photographic tour de force. A spectacular mural creation that has the underlying theme of "The Vagina Of Biosphere Creation" which shows humanity spilling out of it, only to be surrounded by a multitude of intellectually realized demons that continue haunt and plague our little organic cosmic collective of life.

The overall final scale of this latest work is rather large, 28 x 40 ft or 8.5 x 14.6 meters, and that's made up of 96 large panels which contain all of the 4000 plus images that come together to complete the piece. I'll keep working on it, in between the pain and hurting.

June 12th, 2009

It's been a busy time here at the studio, but the truth is I haven't made much head way working on the latest mural. All my time has been drawn away by other more pressing issues that required my immediate attention. However I did resolve the bed situation and now sleep in the lap of what I think of as luxury, every time I get into bed I am amazed at how welcoming and cloud like it seems.

I also, much to my surprise, purchased an Apple 30 inch Cinema Display and had a custom CPU built to my insistence on the best of everything specs, it's quite the beast, but because of the sound dampening case it's in, it purrs quietly like a kitten. The large display is awesome to behold.

When working on the large murals I usually had to view each individual panel making up any given mural and then an entire assembled mural that had been reduced all the way down to 42x72 inches at only 4.5% scale on my 21 inch Sony Trinitron. This new 30 inch Apple Cinema display lets me view them at 12%, a big improvement for me, because it's so much easier to see things. However I still prefer the over all look of the image on the Trinitron tube much better, because its smoother and much less digital looking.

However I am not quite sure exactly what I am going to do with this set up. I am having glimpses and flashes of large complex murals that I would certainly like to make, strangely however they are and are not photographic in nature. It has been keeping me wide awake these nights, because I am trying to come up with some type of imagery that depicts the murder of God, no less. And exactly how to do that and not make it patiently obvious is what's keeping me awake these night.

The new work will be photographic in nature in so much as the actual process being used to make the murals is definitely all digitally photographic. But this new imagery would definitely not be thought of as being fully photographic in nature. At least not what you typically think of as a traditional style "photograph". These new murals would be more "hand" created art but all of it being finessed and produced using photographic methods. Or so my current thinking goes, which can and often does change on a moments notice.

I find that I am always just a little ahead of myself, many times purchasing equipment and getting ready for something, usually some time before I find the actual need for everything. This has occurred throughout my life, usually it's because of some notion or second sight glimpse that's floating about in the hard to define ethers, ultimately driving me towards my destiny.

May 8th, 2009

I am feeling better than I have been for the last few months, but truthfully it's only by degrees. I am still suffering with lots of stomach gas, endless belching and burping from the twice daily anti-inflammatory drug and those "killer" antibiotics that I am still on until June 5th. With luck I am able to get four or five hours of always restless, always broken sleep at night, and continually wake to nagging unable to get back to sleep nawing draining pains, located in my right hip and from time to time stemming from my newly replaced right knee.

A lot of the pain depends on just how active I am during the day, the less active I am, as in reclining in a lazboy chair all day doing virtually nothing, frankly the less pain I have to endure over night. If I am active and try to resume my normal lifestyle, I suffer from sleep depriving pains throughout the night and require pain medication every four hours just to try and deal with it.

I have actually been thinking about my long standing relationship with "photography" lately, I am amazed but it seems that photography and image making which I have always known literally all my life, actually no longer appear to interest me. I seem to have grown tired and weary of it, perhaps I have just been doing it every day for much too long, using it just like a crutch to hide in and continually lean upon, through out my life. If I am allowed to count when I began taking photographs and thinking about becoming a "photographer" at the age of about ten or eleven no less, and also include my photo eager madly in love with a Nikon F camera phase teen age years, it comes to fifty five years of getting my constant daily dose of it. I have done a lot, to be honest this web site shows only about 10% of all the work I have done over the years.

It's come to the point though, that I just do not seem to care about it any more. It doesn't appear to have any further hold over me, just like it once did, especially when I was young and eager. At one time of day I literally ate breathed slept and lived it, literally around the clock constantly, with no real holidays or breaks away from it ever, and it was that way for all those years. But now my imaging drive seems to be diminished, or could it be that it's simply exhausted? Because the truth is, I am always thinking more about other things now, not imagery nor photographic mural creation, like it's always been. Even the hectic pace of getting ready for exhibitions simply no longer interests me. It's as if I have been there and done that, so now what else can I do.

So the truth is, these days I find myself simply not caring about "photography", even slightly, or in fact wanting anything to do with it anymore. Like purchasing and testing out some new equipment, which has always been somewhat of a catalyst and driver for me personally. Nothing like acquiring some new equipment to get the blood going, and help spark the photographing bug. But the truth is I am taking the money that I have available for purchasing a new digital body, about $5K, and I am going to spend it on a new pressure relieving queen size bed and bed frame. If you can believe that, I actually chose that option over acquiring the latest Nikon body. Truth is, I can scarcely believe this turn of events myself.

Perhaps the rapidly and constantly changing digital world is having more of a distinctly negative effect on me than I actually realize. Because I am now seemingly reluctant to spend money on the latest equipment, that I know will be literally digitally outdated and virtually worthless in just a year or two. I even find myself saying "ah, I just don't care" as something crops up regarding photography. Perhaps an invitation arrives from my local museum telling me of an exhibition of someone's work that has come to town. Of course it quickly goes into the dust bin, as I say "puhh not likely".

Or there are documentary programs playing on public television about the works of this or that splashy but in truth commercially inclined magazine cover "celebrity" photographer. I never watch these programs from a sheer prurient lack of interest, it's like watching people make a big thing out of taking obvious creative baby steps or displaying a kindergarten or grade school level of basic "point and click" image making, with contrived in front of the camera, highly artificial commercially driven photographic work. When I gave up the basic "point and shoot" mentality in 1989 and moved onto photographic mural creation some twenty years ago. That's when my long standing ties to the mainstream photographic world were most probably fractured. Curators and the vast majority of photographers were and still are trapped in the mainstream tradition of "point and shoot click" art is being created, mentality.

Or there are those older, same kind of image always taken, repetitive style of photographers, who never fully matured in any true creative sense, of course that's just in my humble opinion. But still amazingly make or push to have films made about their, as I see it, mediocre levels of photographic work. It seems to me the more middling and ordinary a photographer's work is, the more likely they are to have a film made about themselves, this is just my two cents on the issue. Perhaps it's simply an ego driven thing, those with a strong photographic ego, continually connive and push hard to have a documentary film made about themselves, done to basically to push their careers ahead. That's certainly why ten years ago I started my web site, just to let everyone see what I was doing. Because the truth is, by then exhibiting really no longer appealed to me, like it once did. It actually got in the way of having the time for pure unhindered image creation.

And that's what I am saying about not caring about things photographic, my ego it seems has simply vanished, maybe I have simply grown up and don't need the stroking anymore, or perhaps I have simply grown out of it, because the truth is, photographic things no longer matter to me, just like they once did.

I do wonder though, if perhaps I am just plain burned out at this point, or if I have done it too much over the years and I have simply had my personal fill of it. Or possibly it's just been a low ebb physically for me personally, and hopefully I will bounce back into loving photography and get back to creating photographic murals once again, that is just as soon as I am feeling like my old self, if that ever happens.

At any rate, not sure what I am going to do, of course it makes perfect sense to finish the very large 4000 plus image mural that I started back in November 2008. It's just begging to be finished and is literally three quarters of the way there. But after that it's anybody's guess as to what I might do in the future. I am sure I will snap out of it....hopefully.

Strangely this phrase keeps running around my mind and it kinda sums everything up for me at this moment. It's what the fictional character Rhett Butler said to Scarlet O'Hara while standing at the bottom of a long stair case looking up at her, you remember in that famous motion picture Gone With The Wind, when in sheer frustration he said, "frankly my dear, I don't give a dam", and that ironically is exactly how I seem to feel about image making and photography these days.

APRIL 24th, 2009

I have just ended one week of being on a pump fed intravenous drip. I had a VON nurse coming to the studio every day like clock work to change the drained bag of antibiotics, and four times they had to move the needle in the back of my hands, as the vein became "blown out" from the drug and pumping action. Normally you are in the hospital for this procedure I was told, but now a days they keep you at home and send a nurse out too you through a community care program. I am feeling much better as the antibiotics apparently have done their thing.

However the difficult news is this, and I literally cringed when I heard it, I now have to go back onto those same antibiotic pills for six more weeks, they were the ones that made me darn so ill with incredible nausea and vomiting in the first place. The good news if you could call it that, is the dose now is only half of what they started me out with.

So hopefully any nausea and vomiting wont be quite so bad as it was the first time. My body after all has hopefully been conditioned a little to accept the drug by the antibiotic drip. And this time I have been supplied with plenty of liquid Dimenhydrinate (Gravol) and syringes to inject it, if things become so bad in the nausea department that I can't cope.

As all this has been going on I started working on a new essay entitled "Redefining God". During my writings for posting online I have made some personal discoveries and insights regarding the true nature of what we call "God", thoughts that never would have surfaced in me other wise. I can now quite arrogantly say that I now know exactly what we humans think of as "God" is and is not. And that is what I am thinking and writing about these days, as I slowly mend and try to recover from the knee replacement surgery.

I look at the amazing but as of yet half finished mural that I began in the Fall, still sitting waiting on the studio wall, just begging me to finish it, but I simply turn away from it. I am sure the time will soon come when I can turn and face it once again, but the truth is just not right now. It's hard when you are still feeling rough and endlessly burping gas despite measures trying to control it through medication, and the echos of nausea are reminding me of their potential to my still fragile system, from having to take those nasty but life saving antibiotics.

APRIL 15th, 2009

I am still dealing with the fall out from my February 10th full knee replacement. I have been quite ill the last ten days all because of my inability to tolerate taking the prescribed antibiotics orally. I was very sick on the first one and the second one was not much better, and the third one, a sulfa based drug almost "killed" me, well a slight exaggeration but that's how I felt.

Tremendous gas bloating nausea and liquid movements, a hell of a time in my life. Today I am waiting for home hospital care to arrive and start me on an antibiotic intravenous drip. Sadly however it's back to the first antibiotic that made me so sick to begin with, only this time it's to be taken through a vein and not orally. And I understand they plan to inject some Gravol in my butt to try and counter any side effects nausea, at least that's the plan. Next week looks like it's going to be sheer hell from my perspective.

A friend had an interesting suggestion for me, regarding dumping all my Nikon lenses and then going with Sony's 24.6 MP Alpha A900 camera and a small kit of their expensive prime lenses. This is because I balked at paying $10,400 CDN for the new Nikon D3X body. His suggestion was to wait six or eight months and Nikon will no doubt bring out a 24.5 MP (D800 name guess?), no doubt a brother to the excellent 12 MP Nikon D700 body.

Perhaps that's a decent suggestion, in reflecting on the issue.

MARCH 29th, 2009

It is coming up to seven weeks since my right knee was fully replaced, I have had quite a rough time of it and the truth is I still do even now, I have not felt like working at all, in reality it's the furthest thing from my mind these days. The problem is not with the actual knee itself, that's been just fine with very little pain after the operation. The problem has been coming from my right hip. The pain has been quite debilitating and rather difficult to deal with.

According to my family doctor, when the knee was replaced it was also straightened out as well, and that straightening move has put pressure on the hip joint to readjust to the newly realigned knee. But the hip was also a victim of bad arthritis to begin with, however I had it under control using a none steroid anti-inflammatory drug. But they no longer seemed to work after the realignment, thus the level nine and ten pain I have been suffering with.

I went through six weeks of sheer torment and utter hell not being able to sleep at all, well in just 20 minute snatches here and there, always waking up soon after falling asleep with intense leg and hip pain. The only seeming relief at all from it, was to get up and stumble around the bedroom walking in circles using a four legged walker. Unfortunately my family doctor was off for a month having an operation on one of her own legs, and the substitute doctor balked and had trouble providing me with a prescription for morphine to enable me to deal with the pain. The pain killers my surgeon had provided did not work, they even seemed to make the pain worse, if that's even possible. I might have had some kind of allergic reaction to them, as my wife commented that I was definitely not myself at the time.

My family doctor finally returned to practice last week after recuperating, and I quickly received a prescription for morphine, luckily it did the trick. For five days I had some welcome if dozy relief from all that pain. But you can't just jump into large dose time regulated morphine quickly, without slowly building up to it. While that one pill every fours hours worked like a charm, the time regulated ones, with capsule one taken every twelve hours are nowhere near as effective, or so it seems to me. So I am back to suffering some pain in my hip and radiating down the leg.

I see my doctor again this Friday April 3rd for a follow up morphine "tweaking" secession, and hopefully we can get to the bottom of it on that visit. We also have to deal with severe constipation and lack of prompt and full urination, all side effects of the morphine, no doubt. Update April 4th, well as t turns out I was also suffering from Acute Prostate problems that were caused when they inserted a cather up my "willie" during the operation. It's also very painful and not all together uncommon during such an operation, according to my doctor. A course of a nausea inducing anti biotic drug taken over six weeks should fix that problem.... Hurray!

My Orthopedic Surgeon is going to replace my arthritic hip, unfortunately that's not possible until sometime mid June or July. He is in the middle of leaving town and shifting hospitals no less, including moving to another city which is two hours away by car. So according to him, I have to literally hang in there and try and survive until then, and that's why the time released long term morphine regime has entered the picture. To go back into the system and get into cue and wait for someone else to do the hip could take 12 to 18 months, so I am told. With any luck the hip will slowly become manageable at night and hopefully pain bearable. Don't misunderstand, I can move around on it no problem, but sleeping or sitting down is the problem because it soon throbs and aches like a bugger, especially so at night, even with medication in place to relieve the gnawing pain.

Now while I have been laid up I have been spending all my time looking through the current crop of "equipment centered" photo magazines. My wife, the little sweetie she is, brought them home for me, which was kind of her. It means she took my hinting seriously. Happily I discovered that Nikon has finally brought out a 24.5 MP body, the D3X. I was delighted to read this news because I have been waiting and waiting and waiting for countless years for a large MP Nikon body to enter the photography picture. Canon has had a 21 MP body for many years now, or so it seems to me. But my joy over the news was soon shattered when I discovered that it would cost $10,400 CDN the exchange rate and 13% purchase taxes included. There is no way I am going to pay $10,400 again for another Nikon body, like I did for the very quickly outdated D1X. Hell will freeze over, the mountains of the moon will crumble into dust and the cosmos will implode and begin again before that ever happens.

However much to my great surprise I discovered quite quickly while perusing the various magazines that Sony of all things, has brought out a 24.6 MP body as well. The Alpha A900 and it is only $3000, or $3600 taxes and exchange included. Just about seven thousand dollars less than the Nikon D3X body is, I must be dreaming this, it has to be the morphine doing it's thing, it just has to be. I have been eagerly reading all the reviews about it online and in a number of photo magazines articles as well, and I believe that's what I am going to purchase. None of the "Noise" issues complaints with high ISOs being talked about, and boohooing the camera over that issue will bother me in the slightest. Because I always take my images at the lowest ISO possible, occasionally I will move up to 400 ISO, if I should deem it necessary, but that's only a once in a blue moon happening. In fact the image stabalizer Sony has on the sensor adding 2 to 2.5 stops in hand holding shutter speed, can only help my decision.

I will most probably dump, aka "trade in", all of my Nikon lenses, about a dozen or so and will put together a small pared down kit from what decent lenses Sony has available. I have checked their lens listing over and over and they just about have just what I need. I really want to scale down and try to work with just three or four lenses in future. And Sony has some top quality Zeiss made ones at that. Ideally I would really like only one lens, a 28 to 300mm zoom. But the truth is I am just not sure if such a lens would be good enough to give the 24MP sensor what it needs in the way of sharpness. If I really knew it could, then that's the route I would take, just one body and one lens. After countless years of lugging around large Pelican cases full of equipment, I have finally boiled it all down to just one body and one lens.... I wish!

So after 50 years of being a loyal dedicated go all the way Nikon fan, my allegiances are most probably switching over to Sony, I really can't believe it. I feel that Nikon is just milking the high Mega Pixel market in charging so much for the D3X. So the truth is, because of how I feel I don't want anything to do with it, especially at the higher price range. Besides fully 90% of what they have thrown into the D3X body, I would never ever use to create my large murals.

I like Sony's philosophy, they have made a stripped down uncluttered true photographer's camera, with what appears to be a fantastic 100% very bright viewfinder, that fact alone along with the image stabilizer has won me over. Nikon has made a camera which is meant to appeal to a wide range of photo types, many of them not even "photographers" I suspect, thus the kitchen sink, gadget clutter approach. Everything imaginable thrown in to the mix, reminds me of those fax, copier, scanner, answering machine, coffee maker, you know, those all in one office thingees. OK, Ok I am being too hard, I know.

I will also admit that I have honestly seriously thought about Canon's lately released EOS D5 Mark II body as well, and like the fact that with the BG-E6 battery grip you can get yourself a BGM-E6 battery holder and power it using 6 conventional AA batteries, that aspect REALLY appeals to me. I hate those Li-ion rechargables, they are never quite as good as being claimed by the manufactures, in my experience.

Canon as we all know has a much greater variety of lenses available than Sony does, but those little L Series Fluorite buggers are quite expensive, as indeed the Sony's Zeiss lenses are. They even have an expensive 28mm to 300mm L series zoom lens, which is mighty inciting for me. However I also read one magazine reviewer who reported using the EOS D5 Mark II with four Canon lenses, two L series prime lenses and two L series highly respectable Canon zoom lenses. The zooms he reported always required a tad of unsharp masking to sharpen the images up in post processing, but the prime lenses gave reasonably sharp useable images right out of the camera. So that may mean when using a camera with a large MP sensor, we should only be using prime lenses. Or possibly carefully be testing out any zoom lenses and only use the very best of them.

I intend to test out these three bodies, and that may help to fully make up my mind. I suppose I could always wait another couple of years, which will quickly pass as it always does, and try and pick up a used D3X, when prices have fallen considerably as the D4X is about to arrive on the scene. So that will be my fall back position, especially if I do not like the feel and "aura" of the Sony A900, once I have it in my hands and can feel it's heft and know the reality of holding and looking through it, hope their viewfinder is as good as they say it is. Also if the Canon EOS D5 Mark II bombs out as well, once I get my hands on it and see if I can relate to it on an "emotional" and "intuitive" basis.

The Canon D5 Mark II will be easier to test out for me, as a friend of mine has also debated getting the Nikon D3X the Sony A900 and in the end he went with the Canon D5 Mark II, and actually claims it's the best camera he has ever owned. Sony A900 lost out because of the lack of sufficient choice in lenses and the price of the good prime ones was just too much. Nikon D3X lost out because the body was just too darn expensive to begin with, the Canon D5 body cost just $3000 CDN which he considered to be a fantastic bargain, and decent used Canon lenses are readily available in most camera shops.

Well my hip is now aching like a buggar, so I will close out.

FEBRUARY 27th, 2009

It has been quite a rough first two months of 2009, the first week of January we were forced into having one of our much loved cats put down, because of throat cancer. She was a rescued stray, whom we eventually named Nogie, a name which came from calling her little miss No Go, as in she is not going anywhere. But we called her the "Doll" here in the studio, she was an incredibly sweet little cat that was literally one of the family. Her death was hard because everything else about her was fine, she just couldn't eat anything because of the tumor growing under her tongue.

Then suddenly a few weeks later the end of January we had an immediate family death, the result of a sudden heart attack. This was admittedly quite rough to accept because of who it was. The ambulance service managed revival three times on the way to the hospital, but several weeks later with the heart damaged and slowly bleeding into the lungs the end finally came, despite all of the heroic efforts made to save a life.

No sooner had the funeral occurred when two days later as had been long pre planned on that date, I underwent full knee replacement surgery, I have been limping badly for thirty years now due to severe arthritis in my right knee and hip joint. I blame it on the football and soccar that I played constantly as a teenager, always incessantly kicking the ball with my right foot and no doubt injuring the cartilage in the process. My left knee and hip seemto be just fine. The pain lately had become uncontrollable even while on morphine pills, especially so at night while trying to sleep, so surgery was deemed the only choice to remedy the situation.

I will admit to you that it has been sheer hell these past three weeks after the surgery, not as you might imagine with the brand new knee, but from the nagging pain throbing and aching in my hip joint, spreading down the middle of the leg, which is having to readjust itself to the newly realigned leg and knee joint. Literally no sleep possible at night for the past three weeks. I sense things are finally improving but admittedly it's by minute degrees and very slowly. Will it ever end I keep asking myself.

Haven't as you might imagine given much thought at all to the latest large mural which is more than half done and taped up onto my studio wall. I am sure I will get back into it once I am feeling better, and of course the Spring weather finally arrives bringing joy and hope back into the studio, as well as our local environment. It has been a very rough winter this year, in fact it's among the worst and longest that I can remember in the thirty years that I have been living in this particular part of the country.

DECEMBER 31st, 2008

It's the last day of 2008, it's been quite a tumultuous year. We have had the most rain and the most snow of any year in my area since records began. Our weather it appears is in turmoil, in December it jumped up to 15C or 60F one day and then plummeted to minus 10C or 15F the next. We have had such wild swings that it's mind boggling, some of these swings have lasted for several days to a week so our trees started budding out thinking Spring had finally arrived, only to get frozen solid a few days later.

I watched some of the large flock of birds that I feed in my neighborhood start mating and begin nest building in December of all times, because there was a week mid December when it was so mild and Spring like. Then we had several raging snow storms with bitterly cold winds that left us under huge amounts of snow, so we all thought finally Winter had arrived. Only a few days later it had all melted away, when surprisingly it rained heavily all day and the temperature rose to unheard of December levels.

Our local river that runs right by the studio quickly crested to the highest levels we have ever seen, in all the time we have been living in the studio, just about twenty years now. We of course have seen some flooding occurring in the flood plain areas in March and April during the normal Spring thaw, but never before in mid December. We are now experiencing lots of toppled over old growth trees accompanied by a fair amount of tree limb wind damage occurring with every storm system that blows in. It is frighteningly obvious that the climate system has become unglued and destabalized, just imagine what the next twenty or thirty years are going to bring. It is not going to be calm and collected like we have known it to be in the past, but increasingly more and more unsettled wildly cantankerous and highly destructive.

We have also witnessed the collapse of the main pillars of Capitalism in 2008, and a stock market implosion occurring in the corruptly mismanaged greedy human world. It appears to be the convergence of a perfect storm, the intersection of the biosphere with the human economy. The biosphere or "Godsphere" as I like to think of it, of course will loose out as everybody focuses solely on fixing and propping up the artificial human economy, thus ignoring and putting off what really needs working on.

Our destiny on this planet is clearly sealed, it appears that we have collectively decided to murder "God". If we look at things sanely rationally and are thinking clearly, "God" it turns out is this living planet. We actually inhabit the cosmic manifestation of "God", a reality that we humans can see feel touch and should be relating too. Not surprisingly our every singular and collective action directly affects "God". The sad truth is this, the reckless industrialized civilizations we have created can only be maintained and survive if they endlessly grow and expand by trashing nature, the end result is the societies we live in are literally murdering "God", just to provide us with the life styles we have become accustomed too. Which will in turn kill everything on the planet.

With no properly functioning life sustaining biosphere, "God" this planet of life will die, and of course there will be no viable life of any substantial sort. Nobody however, is willing to face this nasty mind numbing truth, everybody and I do mean everybody, appears to be denying and hiding from reality.

This brings me to the latest photographic mural, the one that I am currently working. After much thought on the subject it now has the heart stopping title of, "MURDERING GOD". It will be much better to eventually show you than try and describe exactly what it looks like. Let's just say it is a rather large one, 24x40 ft or 7.2 x 12 meters, consisting of over 4000 6"x9" scanned photographic images. I have been working on it for several months now and I'm making good progress, but I expect to be working on it until at least April or May 2009, perhaps even longer, we will see. I am in truth, in no hurry, as I am enjoying the long drawn out act of creation.

I am safely cloistered away in my studio warm and focused, listening to music working on imagery every day. I asked myself, what more could one want in life? Well perhaps knowing that "God" this living planet, is going to survive humanities assault rape and gassing, now that just might be something that's even more satisfying than creating imagery.

Unfortunately I can see and more importantly feel "God's" pain and anguish, virtually every day now. It is hard to live with the realization that "God" this miracle of a planet, is in the process of being murdered by an aggressive ignorant destructive sentience, we foolish humans.

NOVEMBER 18th, 2008

I have begun working on a new photographic mural, a rather large one. The initial scanning stage alone will take a number of months to complete, perhaps as many as three possibly more. I will most probably try to combine 35mm Kodachromes with 6x7, 4"x5" and 8"x10" transparencies. All the large format work of course will be scanned and resized to look like 35mm sections, to end up fitting in with and looking like the majority of the images, which are hundreds of 35mm 25 ISO Kodachromes.

It is going to be a challenge to do because I am going to try and create some of this mural using random images and intuitive creativity. Not exactly sure what will happen but I want to give it a try, it might work out but I won't know exactly until I try putting it all together.

Expect to be pulling my hair out at times, no doubt with many sleep deprived nights, what else is new as I try to come to grips with making it. I am going to be way off the proverbial beaten track on this one, no doubt groping to locate and tap into the visually creative muse. If I don't take the time to post regular updates it just means that I am busy and totally consumed with it.

I am thinking that it just might belong to a new gallery section in the "Artwork" side of the Livick web site, perhaps not in the latest "Epitaph" gallery, but the truth is who knows at this point how it will turn out . However I can tell you that I am searching for a new title at the moment, perhaps something like "Once" as in once upon a time, or possibly "Atonement" or even "Redemption", however I will keep working on finding the right title. I am sure that an interesting title will eventually come to me, naturally when I least expect it, like sitting on the "John" for my morning constitution.

Seems to me that the American style of "gung ho" unfettered capitalism is collapsing around us, or more truthfully it's failing just like the Soviet Communist system did during the early 1990s. American based banks and the North American financial industry have actually required saving by the use of public funding, incredible. It is something that is admittedly viewed as a very black mark against the moral code of free market capitalism. Now unbelievably we see the three supporting pillars of the capitalist system, those three American auto giants in trouble. They are the acknowledged bastion of modern capitalism, yet here they are coming forward holding expensive caps in hand saying they are about to go under, if public funding to bail them out is not quickly forthcoming. What else are we to make of this but the blatant out and out failure of the unfettered free market capitalist system.

Once the public's purse is opened to one industrial sector and the flood gates holding back the cap in hand brigade is raised, it will be pretty hard to stop all of the "waters" from draining out of the public's purse to support and shore up other needy failing industries. I hear the conservative thinking leaders of Canada and America saying please do not impose any controls on the capitalist system, and yet isn't saving these companies using public funding a form of reverse control. We are allowing them to do as they wish under free trade and if they get into any trouble, the public will be there through the auspices of the government to help bail them out. What a very convenient system for the capitalist way of doing things. It is also quite interesting that the automobile companies that are doing well, the Japanese and Korean makers, both have strict controls on the importation of foreign automobiles into their respective countries. They can sell their automobiles here but we here in North America are not allowed to sell there, is this seen as fair free market trading by our governments?

The socialist style of governing system that's in place in much of Europe including Canada might seem more like the way to go, especially under our current modes of industrially driven civilized thinking. However even these Socialist countries are now suffering themselves from tough financial hardships, because they were willingly tied quite closely, safety in numbers, to the American free market capitalist system. Which in it's current seeming death spiral, brought on by blatant corruption greed and fumbling incompetence, is literally pulling everything down with it. I suppose it would be like the cascading collapse which the planet's biosphere is going to eventually go through, one of the planet's failing supporting pillars giving way and literally pulling the others down with it in a complete collapse.

It seems like a colossal economic failure, at least it is to a disinterested observer like myself. However I never ever hear anybody on television news or talk radio discussing the current situation as it exists...truthfully. The obvious implosion of wide open free market capitalism and the incredible damage to the social fabric of up scale western countries that's being inflicted by the capitalist's ideals of a tightly knit global free trade system. Where all Western based jobs can pick up and move to the country with the lowest workers wages and a complete lack of unions.

Personally if I were in charge, how arrogant of me to even think so, however there is absolutely no chance ever of that happening. I would be setting things up completely differently. Not like a capitalist bull raging in a planetary china shop, or more truthfully a dinosaur and Neanderthal's club wielding conception of worldly reality, just like we have now being driven by North American profiteering ideals.

I would be setting up my planetary civilization more along the lines of having humanity initiate an intimate symbiotic bonded relationship with the planet's overriding biosphere. Of course this is a long term sustainable world model and would definitely be far too common sense and respectful in concept, especially for today's industrialized rationalization of planetary life. Having a respectful adult relationship with this planet, of course would literally be unimaginable in today's highly destructive very limited in scope industrialized model. Humanities brute force of a destructive "monkey wrench" is jammed like a stiff male penis without any thought or care, directly into a delicate symbiotic planetary functioning reality.

In my world view the actual material aspects that have currently been artificially induced into being desired by much of human life. Would be focused squarely upon our planetary boisphere and surroundings. Not on the current continual outdating of trivial industry produced material adult toys. Automobiles, computers, cameras, flat screen televisions and the like. Society would be guided to think completely differently about life, a complete 180 degree about face, valuing and cherishing the planet's biosphere and flora and fauna instead of continually brutally destroying it. We would use our evolutionary gifted intelligence to nourish and enhance the well being of our collective planetary Mother. Not our Neanderthal's physical industrial brawn to rape pillage and destroy it, like our profiteering driven industries are presently doing.

I imagine those free market capitalists would be screaming at me "do you mean that we have to respect and take care of the planet's environment, only over my cold dead body, no dam way....period". Those Socialist style countries would politely comment "we take good care of our people and that is what's most important in life". Of course I would have to respond with, "now, now people we have always formed every type of governance known to mankind with the implicit idea of only ruling over the growing populace. We have ignored and dismissed the single most important element in planetary existence, in our zeal to achieve civilized power and societal wealth, we have ignored and overlooked the obvious".

This planet which bore each of us is a finely balanced symbiotic functioning cosmic object. It was, before modern man arrived on the scene, as carefully evolved and finely tuned as a Swiss hand made pocket watch. Amongst a trillion other planets in this present cosmos it beat the odds and came up with just the right combinations to actually manifest life. Imagine a trillion monkeys banging away on computer keyboards, eventually one of them would type out some words that had meaning, and that in essence is exactly what our little planet has done. By completely ignoring it and allowing it's fundamental workings to be pillaged and raped in our drive for mere commercial profits, literally amounts to committing civilized and planetary suicide. We really don't want to be supporting our societies and propping up our ill formed highly destructive life styles by chopping down burning and gutting the only biosphere house we will ever have, and in truth all of us live in, now do we?

That's why our current industrial models for realizing and propagating planetary life are quite clearly dooming the biosphere to impending collapse and failure. Unfortunately there is going to be no back up public "funding" in store to save the planet's flora and fauna ecology. Nobody is going to be there waiting to bail out collective humanity or the planet's only life supporting system, just like collapsing free market capitalism is currently being "bailed out" around the world. Even now it appears that capitalist's advocates of the three main North American automobile companies, are making appearances demanding money from the politicians in charge. They showed up like brazen well dressed robbers fully unmasked and in broad daylight. They are trying to pull off a capitalist's smash and grab then fleeing in private jets, hoping to have some of the general public's collective purse well in hand as they leave management town.

As long as our conniving governments continue to use this economic meltdown as a convenient rouse to redirect our collective focus more tightly on this economic incident. In truth it is an oft repeated same old, same old aspect of our industrial age lives, as we collectively allow the major lethal aspect of planetary biosphere meltdown to proceed unheeded and untended.

It appears to be a giant shell game where the governments actually wish to divert our attentions away from the real life jeopardizing problem, a reality that we all face and which even now is very quickly closing in on us. Just as an example; yesterday 1500 truck drivers and motorists were stranded in a snow blizzard, stuck on a snow bound highway for 15 hours overnight. The snow storm wasn't even seen or predicted by the local government weather office, so in truth nobody saw it coming. Luckily everybody survived this time, perhaps next time it might not turn out to be so lucky. Especially if temperatures were to quickly plummet well below zero accompanied by biting howling winds arriving from a rapidly moving Arctic low pressure system.

The recent Canadian election that occurred in October, 2008 was actually won by diversionary tactics exactly like this, the right wing conservative leader reading the prevailing winds seeing the economic meltdown coming and craftily selecting and pushing for the specific hurried timing of Canada's recent election. It was done to make use of a kind of economic chaos voter redirection away from more pressing environmental issues. The public in my opinion needlessly panicked and voted in these irresponsible industry hucksters goons and thugs. The Canadian public literally spit on a decent honorable highly intelligent Liberal leader, literally throwing him out and trashing him.

He was somebody who would have actually done something substantial through the introduction of a modest carbon tax, instead of implementing a useless cap and trade system which can easily be industry fudged and manipulated. He was trying to mitigate Canada's over the top green house gas emissions. By 2020 fully 60% of Canada's criminal carbon emissions will be coming from the Alberta incredibly environmentally dirty tar sands industry, which is only in business to serve America's fossil fuel requirements.

In the end Canada is a highly irresponsible banana republic style of country, with an old fashion outdated highly undemocratic electoral system. Canada the country will no doubt be on the receiving end of very hostile climate rewards. Something that it genuinely deserves for the careless reckless planetary behavior it's elected ineffectual governments continually foster. They allow and promote the automotive mining and forestry clear cutting biosphere trashing resource based economy, to rip and hack illegitimate profits right out of the planet's living symbiotic web of life. The sad thing is just about everybody seems to think this is the right thing to do.

Here is a direct link over to the the most recent mural work that I have completed..... "Epitaph" Gallery.

NOVEMBER 5th, 2008

Yesterday I noticed something that literally shocked me, no not that way over the top, show business like American election. But something much more profound and truly frightening in my mind. It's November and we are heading into the dormant Winter season, however our weather today is 21C or 70F outside, when it should really be around 8C or 40F. What I noticed was this, the birds in my area are in the process of nest building, I know this because they are dropping bits and pieces of their feverish nest building on the engine hood of my car. As they go in and out of a convenient missing brick nesting cavity in my studio's commercial building, just like they have done every Spring for years now. They think that Spring has arrived because it's so mild out, so in their minds it's time to begin procreation.

The local trees in my area that have actually managed to drop their leaves in September and October are now out in Spring bud. However many trees still have their leaves hanging on and quite a few of them are still green. This tells me the biosphere's flora and fauna literally does not know if it is coming or going, it merely responds to temperature signals and those signals because of global warming are now out of alignment and quite badly skewed.

Sadly as most people are still rejoicing over this latest American election, many seemingly with great hope for the future. I know that the newly elected American president's hands are literally tied behind his back. Held fast by all powerful demanding American commercial industry, tied incredibly tightly by the military industrial complex, tied cement tightly by the past administrations enormous debt load, tied impossibly by current fiscal greed mismanagement and the economic collapse.

So in truth the "change" being talked about is really just that, the change of political campaign words alone. The young among us and those wanting some kind, any sort of "change" have fallen for the flair of purposely crafted and carefully staged rhetoric. But the truth of the matter is the American system and it's politicians are held fast by stifling convention, political and societal constraints and are virtually immovable. Sure the parties can tilt a little one way or the other but the main system is designed with the intention of allowing that left or right leaning movement.

The bottom line is this, this new American president alone isn't going to be able to do anything of true significance about the mass extinction provoked by a rapidly faltering biosphere. He will of course instigate a completely useless carbon "Cap and Trade" scheme to much American hoopla and great fanfare, but in the end our green house gasses will continue to rise. Just as they have done in Europe under this type of a carbon sieve like scheme.

The population and their ineffectual administrations still do not get it, and most likely never will. To save our civilized future everything that we as a civilization are, "EVERYTHING" must be radically changed. And the truth is that is never going to happen, certainly not in our life times. Imagine for a moment giving up work providing biosphere polluting industries, biosphere polluting air travel, biosphere polluting gasoline or diesel powered automobiles and trucks, biosphere polluting ocean going container shipping, and unnecessary cruise ships, even fossil fuel heating our houses. What about giving up electricity that's being made by burning coal, which currently powers about half of America's electricity needs. How about all of our gasoline powered machines, lawnmowers, weed trimmers, chain saws, all terrain vehicles, the list as you know is endless.

The population at large has not yet realized that it's literally too late, because of us, human beings that view ourself's as being divinely inspired, and therefore godly detached from this planet workings, the biosphere has entered into a forced long drawn out death spiral. Because of the size of the planet these present death throws might last 50 to 75 years, perhaps if we are lucky even longer. But the time is fast approaching for civilization when the biosphere will metaphorically shutter and enter into very violent human induced biosphere convulsions, suddenly it will be forced into an unstoppable cascading collapse, one thing causing another to fail in rapid succession. At that point it will lay back completely spent, finished to all intent and purposes. Killed, dead at the hands of humanity, it's sentient off spring.

I personally do not have much doubt about this happening, when you pay attention and look closely it's already occurring, but imperceptibly to most unaware uninformed planetary illiterate human beings. Those "canaries" in our planetary "coal mine" are even now rapidly dying off. We are witnessing a great decline in the Arboreal forests and it's song birds, the dying off of our honey bees, the disappearance of wetland frogs including most of the ocean species that we humans have mercilessly prayed upon. Or these ocean dwellers are being negatively affected by the sea's increasing acidification, because it acts like a sponge and soaks up our human produced green house gasses. Many sea species all ready in a steep and rapid decline and headed directly towards extinction, this human induced biosphere collapse it seems is well under way. Too bad we humans only react to fires, instead of taking the proper measures to prevent them.

We humans are the cause of the sixth mass extinction, perhaps greatest most deadly Holocene event in this planet's history. We human beings are the pushers and junkies of mass death, our blighted battle scarred history clearly tells us that. Sadly we are an unworthy cosmically illiterate sentience that has evolved quite naturally, here on this Mother Planet we know as Earth. It's rather depressing that we are killing it.

NOVEMBER 2nd, 2008

I have been very busy working on a number of "Epitaph" murals, the latest one is taped up on my studio wall, it's comprised of 672 images. It looks great to me at this mid stage of production, but it's taken me the last two months of working on it, on and off, as my inclination dictated, until I was satisfied with it. I will live with it for the next week or so before taking it down to get at the print numbers on the back of the proof prints. This is so I can finally assemble the twelve 42x72 inch panels that will make up the mural in my computer. Hopefully I can post it in the "Epitaph" section in about two to three more weeks, give or take on the timing.

I was saddened by the results of the recent Canadian election, in my mind the population voted for death and have rejected the potential for life that was being offered by the Liberal party's "Green Shift" plan. They voted for a Conservative government who does not really believe in Global Warming, the ultra right wing agenda driven leader is actually on record stating that the Kyoto Protocol is nothing more than a Socialist plot that's out to destroy Capitalism. These are backwards motivated knuckle dragging Neanderthal thinkers who will ultimately completely destroy this planet's only biosphere, if given the chance to do so.

The Liberal Party leader who would have made a very GREEN Prime Minister, actually wanted to instigate a "Green Shift" policy, something which literally got the party shafted in the recent election. They wanted to begin taxing carbon pollution but at the same time reducing income taxes with the proceeds of that carbon taxation. A good idea, and one which many European countries are already doing, having found that the cap and trade system they had in place for years now was basically useless, because in the end it did not mitigate green house gasses. Sadly however Canadians truly do not seem to have the faintest idea of what they are going to be facing regarding Global Warming. If they knew the truth they would have voted for the "Green Shift". Unfortunately the Liberal party did not attempt to convey the urgency of the situation we are facing nor the dire consequences we Canadians are going to endure in the coming decades.

To put it another way, imagine this metaphor for a moment, that we are on the deck of the Titanic steaming directly towards that fateful iceberg. The Conservative leader says he does not see or even believe in icebergs, in fact the reality of icebergs is all a myth, because as he puts it, they really don't exist. The Liberal leader on the other hand is saying "I have a plan to help avoid hitting those icebergs, put me in charge and I will put that plan in motion". In the end the population sided with the Conservative leader who thinks that icebergs are just another left wing plot to try and slow the ship down. As we all know the Titanic hits the iceberg, two thirds of the population on board succumb to the icy cold North Atlantic waters. The Conservative leader and his entourage of costly body guards ironically survives, because of privilege they are never questioned as they take up coveted positions in one of the too few life boats that are availaable.

In a way it's all academic, because the truth is the dye has already been cast, nothing we do now is going to help save the environment from complete collapse. It has obviously become destabilized and it will get progressively worse until it simply will not support life any more. Let me tell you what is happening in my "neck of the woods" so you understand my thinking and drift on this matter, so to speak. It's November and usually in past years all of the trees have lost their leaves by now, well out my studio window I can see that most of the trees still have their leaves, and many are still green even now in November, no kidding.

Last week we had a surprise fall of wet snow, it amounted to a six inches fall and did a lot of damage to the trees in my local area, I saw it, there was a lot of damage. The trees with their leaves still hanging on couldn't withstand the weight of the wet snow and many buckled, thousands of large branches broke off and some trees even split in two under the immense weight of wet snow. Just a day later the snow quickly melted because it rose to 60F degrees. We literally went from Summer weather to Winter weather then back to Summer weather in the space of three or four days.

I was out for a purposeful walk to get some fresh air and feed some stray cats that we take care of by feeding every day. I was surprised to see that those trees which did loose their leaves in mid October are now out in Spring bud, of course thinking that Spring has arrived because of the very mild weather we are having. The biosphere has become destabilized, unfortunately organic life requires a very stable environment in which to survive. I know that it's going to get very much worse, because this is only the tip of that looming global warming iceberg.

It is just a matter of time now, certainly only decades before a more wide spread biosphere collapse begins occurring. Scientists have been literally dumfounded and are in virtual shock at the pace of the melting Northern ice sheet. Nobody it seems is even mentioning or thinking about the obviously destabilized unstable environment, in relation to the close knit symbiotic reality which drives organic life here on this planet, something which is clearly apparent to me. Tomorrow I am hearing it is supposed to get up to 65F, surely a record warmth for November, and even more confusion for the living enviorment.

So I was surprised just and a little dismayed that my fellow irrational Canadians, quite insanely voted to permit the civilized killing and death of civilization to occur by opting for the Conservative mind set and their industrial only agenda. It will be interesting to see if the Americans are just as insane and completely out of touch with planetary reality as Canadians clearly are.

Canadians claim the environment is close to a number one priority to a majority of the population, but when the leader of the Liberal party offers some genuine ways to tackle and deal with it, he is quickly turned out of office. I wonder if the Americans will also vote for the incredibly destructive highly wasteful Conservative mind set, which is directed towards the speedy killing off and death of planetary life. We the public are in control of that, either we blindly vote for an always self serving, industrial agenda driven, highly biosphere destructive, plainly Neanderthal thinking, Conservative government. Or we can vote for people who are intelligent and know the reality of what's ahead and will try to do something about it, and that ironically is not the Liberal's or in America the Democrats.

As I said it's all academic now, because the truth is the Conservative's business agenda will help to speed up the biosphere collapse considerably. While the Liberal's less aggressive agenda will only slow it down ever so slightly. The Americans under a newly elected Democratically led government are going to adopt the Cap and Trade system, which we know already from years of European experience does not work. That is why our favorite saying in the studio these days is...."We're Going Down, We're Doomed". Because the writing is already on the wall, it's there to see for anyone who can read.

August 24th, 2008

Now percolating away in my mind as I am scanning the second of the Epitaph murals, is the third "Epitaph" mural, but this third one would be the Mother of all "Epitaph" photographic murals. Because it is going to contain over 5500 4x6 inch images and end up being made of 42 42x72 inch panels. The final scale would be 24 x 36ft or 7.3 x 10.8 meters. I think that it might just be doable but would in the end take about a full year to complete, or possibly more time. I intend to start working on it just as soon as the one I am presently working on, and half way through the scanning stage at the moment, is finished.

The transparency scanning stage on the third mural might take me 6 to 8 months alone, and that's if I am lucky. I see it as a grand metaphor for human life here on this planet, a photographic creation that will in some ways be my own "Epitaph" and of course that of the humanities as well. It's now taking shape in my mind and literally keeping me awake most nights with eager anticipation. My mind is running in circles all over the mural's surface that my fervent imagination dreams up. But I also dread the thought of the work involved to complete it.

I honestly fear this particular birthing process, however I do want this photographic child to be born alive and kicking, so I am willing to put up with those sleepless mind racing nights. That flood my mind with mental glimpses of what I think the finished mural should look like. Not to mention that nagging fear of willfully biting off far too much, perhaps more than I can presently chew on, having it turn out to be just too big and grandiose to eventually fit through the mental and physical birth canal. I suppose there is always a cesarean section, (AKA down scaling) that could always be performed to try and save it, especially if I encounter unforeseen difficulties during mural labour or in the delivery.

August 2nd, 2008

After three months of continually working on it, I have just posted the first of four Epitaph murals, the project I am currently working on. If you are interested this link will take you directly there...... Epitaph

July 19, 2008

I have just about finished the digital revision of my 1994 Mural 566, and it is amazingly greatly improved. The large scale mock up containing 896 half scale 3x4.5 inch images, looks stunning under the skylight on my studio wall.

I will live with it up for the next week just to make sure there are no more changes to be made, doubtless I might yet tweak an image or two here or there. My clue that its finally finished, is when I view it over several days and can see no obvious glaring visual hot spots that jump out and which require some attention.

The next step in a week or so will be to remove it from the wall image by image, working panel by panel, carefully removing eight images across and seven lines down which makes up one panel, eventually removing all 16 mock up panels of them. This being done basically to get at the numbers which are written on the backs of the numerous images.

Once I have those image numbers in hand, I can begin the computer assembly stage of the 16 panels. A small but important "peanut" gallery here in the studio, is campaigning hard for me not to blend all of the images together. Each image I am being told should stand on it's own merit, as a testament to the many hours involved in the image capture struggle that I went through in order too birth and bring this mural into visual life.

This particular aspect would make my work so much faster and easier, as no doubt having to blend all 896 images together would take a great deal of patience and a lot of computer time to accomplish. So the truth is I am at the crossroads of six of one and half a dozen of the other regarding blending, at this stage in the mural creation proceedings.

I most probably will not be blending them, which will greatly speed things up for me in the image creation process. That being the case my plan is to post it by mid August in a newly created section on the "Artwork" side of my website. Under a new heading that I am going to entitle "Epitaph". It is my visual tribute and the Epitaph for humanity, now that I am fully aware of the fateful negative reality that's directly ahead of us. With literally no hope remaining for human long term survival here on this planet, or in this cosmos.

July 1, 2008

I have finally finished scanning all of the 864 Kodachrome images from mural 566, phew what a nightmare of a job! I have even managed to print out an 84"x144" large scale mock up image, the many sections of which are now taped up on my studio wall. It was a lot of time consuming boring work which took me every day of the last month to accomplish.

I will now happily spend the Summer months of July and August working on this piece virtually every day. It will be taxing for me to say the least. Juggling close to 900 images trying to improve on the mural's image, it should be challenging as well as being down right visually stimulating.