Dimensionally Barrett

My friend Ann Hall put me onto an article published by the CBC called “McMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness” which recaps an interview (that you can listen to on the article page ) with Ronald Purser, author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality . The interviewer leads with a quote from a review about Purser's book and it's loaded with meaning: "None of us dreamed that mindfulness would become so popular or even lucrative, much less that it would be used as a way to keep millions of us sleeping soundly through some of the worst cultural excesses in human history, all while fooling us into thinking we were awake and quiet." At the very least, what "mindfulness" is supposed to do is wake us up, not put us to sleep. It is this that is at the crux of the issue. What “mindfulness” seems to be is a watered-down approach to vipassana meditation. I know that the pedagogy focus...

http://houston.astros.mlb.com/hou/images/wallpaper/y2017/1920x1080_earnit.jpg ; Words of wisdom - maybe do it right next time? “…I think that this concentration on such topics as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do. I'm sure they are using their common sense and intellectual skills, but in an area which has no meaning and probably thrives because it has no meaning, as a displacement from the serious problems which one cannot influence and affect because the power happens to lie elsewhere.” -        Noam Chomsky The following has grown out of reflections on the recent accusations of cheating by the Houston Astros baseball team. My sister and I have followed the team closely thi...

Source:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation I’m resigned to and actually, happily accepting of, the fact that no one reads these babblings. There’s part of me that feels that taking this blog down is the right thing to do, but there’s another part of me that is of the mind that I can still use is as an exercise in “public” composition. I mean by this that continuing to push out content to the ether is still publishing and as such, requires a degree of thought and reflection before haphazardly tossing off random drivel. I usually work with “bare minimums” in art; what are the materials immediately available and how can they be used? Can they be extended and used more than once? This isn’t a matter of economics, it is actually a challenge to see if what’s at hand can be repurposed for something else. Spray paint, the remaining acrylics, graph paper, construction paper, tape, whatever is around that can be brought together to produce a thing without havi...