I got a new computer at last. I’ve been working on an iBook G4 1.3GHz for quite a long while. The little 14″ screen- two of them can fit on this. So big. SO WIDE.

Point is, I got a macbook pro 17″ and it is so beautiful. I found it on Craig’s List (after a first attempt in which the person selling it turned out to be a scammer. so many con artiss out there…) The rest of the day today was spent personalizing- making it all work like I want it to. I like it to be a certain way. Software that is unnecessary is tossed. Stuff like Garage Band, etc… I have reinstalled a few laptops now so the process goes like this: Take cleanly installed laptop then download:

Monolingual
Disk Inventory X

Monolingual will get rid of all the unnecessary languages that OSX is written in (Klingon even) and while having your operating system in Klingon might be a novelty, it would get old fast and I have better things to do with my time… So that all eats up a couple GB of space. Run it! It’s perfectly safe to do it. Next, I open Disk Inventory X which gives me this beautiful visual layout of my hard drive, all color coded and looking like cubist clown puke but totaly logical- everything is sized appropriately and you would be surprised as to what is taking up all that space… like those Garage Band sound effects. If I’m not a musician and, as Violet reminded me earlier, I am not, then what do i need them for? So out they go, along with a bunch of other stuff, effectively freeing up lots of space. After that, there are other useful programs I go for that work great for me:

VLC Media Player – plays almost any sort of video file.
iView Media Pro which kicks iPhotos ass and allows you to save, sort, display your images however you want… alas, now owned by Microsoft…
The Unarchiver – opens any format of compressed file- .zip, .sit and countless others.
Libra- Allows you to use more than one iTunes Library Adium- While iChat allows video conferencing, Adium is better in it’s handing of multiple chat clients Admittedly, there’s lots of other programs that i use but I’ll let you find them yourself…

A little over a month ago, my hard drive died. I had some things backed up (like the o so important music collection) but some things were lost forever (like my mail, my address book, my quickbooks…) Many of the things that are lost I’ve been able to live without. With somethings, they needed a good cleaning out (the Mail folder), and I also needed to reorganize some things like the address book which never really got a good organizational system to begin with. Great, I say to myself… a fresh start. It was a New Year! So I could reboot, reinstall, clean out the useless crap (OS X in Azerbaijanian? Not that useful…)

But in that losing of things, there were some things which were of great value to me. A years worth of photos. Forgot to back them up! Oops! I liked those pictures…

And writings. I have been keeping a journal of my creative process. It started with Ojai and Violet asking me to write down what the paintings were being inspired by because when she would come to see me (we were kind of just starting to see each other at that time) I would give these very lucid commentaries about what I was working on- the off the cuff reasons. However, as the painting gets explained numerous times, the explanation tends to get watered down, contained, edited, etc. until it is a tagline that may as well be placed under the title.

The fact of the matter is that there is all sorts of esoteric, random stuff that comes up while painting and that makes it’s way into the symbols, the curves of the lines and the relationships of color. Sometimes it is spiritual relations, other times it is old childhood memories, or oppositions of color or visual cues that, further in the future, as the moment fades into a memory, become lost in the dusty crevices of my mental hard drive.

The reason she asked me to write these things down was less for myself and more for others, for the future, for whatever kind of intrinsic value they might have or maybe as aid for future self-discoverers. In some cases, it really might be like looking at some grand Mayan pyramid and saying: damn, what if the over zealous Christians hadn’t burned all those books these guys wrote about this behemoth they created? What might we have known about this work other than it’s beauty and harmony? What is it trying to say?

I admit that, while they are eye-catching, enticing and inviting, many of my paintings are not all that easy to decipher. They draw you in with their sensuality, their lines and harmonies the way music draws you in, but what the b flat major means to the musician. The paintings are a dialect of the eternal language, native to myself but, it seems, understood by many. I give them titles in English, using relevant words. I hope for those titles to lead the viewer to a greater understanding of the image and, as well, of themselves. This is good but, admittedly, it is often not enough. They all go beyond their titles… their imagery…

Well, I hope you forgive me for that loss. I’ll have a book out soon. Maybe you can hold onto a copy of it should I delete it or my computer crash…

This is a major issue for those of us who love our apples…. the ipod… the ibook… so many i’s and so much waste! Apple actually rates a 2.7 on Greenpeace’s polluter scale. That is way low. Companies like Dell and HP are taking steps to reduce their toxicity levels (computers are super toxic… sigh…) but NOT Apple! Why not? They market themselves to young people and the young people are the ones who are the most concerned about the environmental issues facing us today. I won’t get into why that is (but for one: so many people like to live by the adage “can’t teach an old dog…” but that is just a way of copping out…) but– here is a site put together by Greenpeace to raise awareness and support on this issue. Use the form on the Greenpeace site to send Apple an email.

http://www.greenpeace.org/apple