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...

Gomchen Karma Yogi, a Nepalese friend of mine, reminded me of a kind of quid pro quo that might help the President understand what quid pro quo means and why it is often seen as a type of subterfuge. This is no less pernicious than anything he'd use to pressure foreign powers. In Nepal, Christian organizations and missionaries will rebuild villages, provide education, do solildly good work on infrastructure BUT it comes with a caveat. Typically, there is some amount of evangelizing, if not outright conversion-by-obligation. The numbers vary but in one article, the number of converts might be as high as three million or almost ten percent of the predominantly Hindu population. At issue is that Nepal is a poor country, stuck between a rock and a hard place: a corrupt government and the encroaching influence of Xi Jinping's China. Nepalese are frustrated by the lack of support from the government in almost all areas of polity and if rebuilding from the 2015 earthquake ...

In two days, it will be 60 years to the date that Tibetans rose up en masse against the invasion and occupation of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). The uprising was crushed, the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans fled their homeland and thus began the decades-long repression of a people by an invading power. For sixty years, the Tibetan people in Tibet have endured being patronized and marginalized in their own country by an imperial – despite all the communist rhetoric of liberation and throwing off the chains of the oppression of exploitation – and illegitimate, force. The recurring from China is that Tibet has always been part of China and this is so easily refuted as to be laughable but for one thing: most people don’t know or simply accept that this is the case. To be sure, relations between the two countries has not always been exactly cozy; the Tibetan Empire expanded and invaded China during the Tang dynasty and captured the capital of Cha...

Today is International Mother Language Day, a day cited by UNESCO and one that you would think would be celebrated by all people across the globe. Language is the marker that identifies our commonalities and our diversities in a way that no outward appearance can. Learning a language other than one’s own breaks down barriers and builds an appreciation for and a sense of communion with other humans. Learning another’s language is a true sign of some degree of empathy. Or so I think it should be. Others don’t feel that way It goes without saying that if you can eradicate a language, you have effectively eradicated a culture. The government of the People’s Republic of China has been attempting to do this with the Tibetan language (and by extension, Tibetan culture) for decades. It has stepped up its machinations a good bit in the past couple of years with a measure of success. Across a spectrum of cultural areas (music, language, nomadic traditions, religion, and for that mat...

From "The Demon in the Diagram" by Matthew Ritchie, Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve watched conceptual art become increasingly multivalent and more accomplished, in terms of bring together multiple disciplines. If Duchamp’s “Large Glass” was the initial point of departure for modern/post-modern works, then installations like Matthew Ritchie’s “The Demon in the Diagram” is an example of one of the points of arrival. On view at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts, Ritchie’s installation is an immersive experience of the shifting sands of interpreting, describing, and diagramming existence in the world and how reality will win out over our strategies to encapsulate it in words/images. Each strategy we devise to formulate some structure of reality is altered by successive interpretations. Ritchie begins with Hesiod and the adoption of mythology to construct a meaningful interpretation of human experience and c...