SEASON OF THE WITCH : DONOVAN

NOT IN OUR NAME - CEASE FIRE DEMANDED - JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE - GRAND CENTRAL STATION

The largest peaceful protest New York has seen in over two decades.

Destruction and Violence - Just the opposite of Creativity and Peace.

COME DOWN IN TIME : ELTON JOHN

KEEP ON WALKING : GINO VANELLI

THIS PARODY SONG WRITER - MUSICIAN DOES EX-PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HIS DUE : WEIRD AL YANKOVIC WATCH OUT! LOL!

PATRICK FITZGERALD

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA  ( Original song was by Charlie Daniel's Band)

In this STOP THE WORLD I WANT TO GET OFF MOMENT (war in Israel, Ukraine, Genocide....) only the war has the ex-President's fiasco number two in the headlines) I take a moment to have my funny bone tickled. 

HARBOR LIGHTS : BOZ SCAGGS

INTO MY ARMS : NICK CAVE and THE BAD SEEDS

LOUIS ADAMIC : EXCERPT FROM LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE (1932)

LOUIS ADAMIC : LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE

page 52)

...These men are the high priests of the Chamber of Commerce whose religion is Climate and Profits.  They are - some of them - grim, inhuman individuals with a great terrifying singleness of purpose.  They see a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five year ago, and they mean to make the most of it.... And trailing after the big boys is a mob of lesser fellows, whom the former awe with their superior economic advantages and control through the Chamber of Commerce and other pay-triotic organizations: thousands of minor realtors, boomers, promoters, contractors, agents, salesmen, bunko-men, officeholders, lawyers, and preachers - all driven by the same motives of wealth, power, and personal glory, and a greater Los Angeles.  They exploit the "come-ons" and one another, envy the big boys, live deliriously for business, bigger and better business, while their wives gather in womens' clubs, listen to swamis and yogis and English lecturers, join "love cults" and Coue clubs in Hollywood and Pasadena, and their children - boys and girls in their teens: "Beautiful but dumb" -...drink and rush around in roadsters...."

pages 53 -54)

...Most of the people come here to be sun-kissed and made well, and so healing is one of the big industries in town.  Besides thousands of more or less regular doctors, there are in Los Angeles no end of chiropractors, osteopaths, "drugless physicians," faith healers, health lecturers, and manufacturers and salesmen of all sorts pf heath "Stabilizers" and "normalizers," psychoanalysts, hynotists, mesmerists, the flow-of-life mystics, astro-therapists, miracle men and women - in short, quacks and charlatans of all descriptions.

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

Note: Don't you just love it!?

CAN YOU LIVE WITHOUT A CELL PHONE?

Everything I imagined before land lines became obsolete and public phone booths were destroyed.

DAILY MAIL : COULD YOU LIVE WITHOUT YOUR PHONE? Celebrities

This article from Daily Mail on line (Daily Mail UK) about celebrities who go without is of interest.

However, celebrities usually have other people who can and do handle their necessary communications.

The distraction of cell phones,  the pile of work that e-mails can be, that we have more privacy and time for life - and actual encounters with people - when we aren't on the Internet, and the addiction to news and information or constant back and forth - all mentioned, all encountered.

***

THE FATHER OF FLOW? GOOGLE FEATURED MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

I clicked on the artistry on the Google start page a couple mornings ago, a pastel image of a man with a lot of flowing energy depicted and came upon Mihaly Czikszentmihaly a Hungarian-American who died a couple years ago, a psychologist who studied flow. I'd never heard of the man before honestly, but since I talk about writing in flow and staying in flow, I thought it might be interesting to learn more about his work. 

***

I experience flow as a sort of deep concentration and focus and it used to be that I could stay in it for hours. The enemy of flow, as I experience it, is interruption. Your own cell phone going off for instance. Other people's. My local library is not so quiet. Libraries used to be refuge but are now mostly distraction. Finding a bolt-hole is necessary. 

Some people have learned how to tune out all the distractions around them - loud music - conversations - and focus intently on their computer, maybe with earphone or earbuds and some low volume relaxing music. I have some " relaxing music" YouTube videos that I choose to listen to while writing.

Silence and quiet, hearing only the sound one makes from physical activity and that of nature around us, is rare but desirable. In our experience now, we are so used to 'aloneness' with sound, in particular music, movies, films - information (some would say programming) coming in - or bombarding us - that fear can be experienced in silence and quiet.  However, I suggest we go without this bombardment from sound when we are writing, also, because we need the thoughts, insights, and intuitions, coming in to us that may be obscured when our brains are also engaged in processing the audio incoming.

***

What does Mihaly Czikszentmihaly think?

CLAREMONT COLLEGE GRADUATE PROGRAM : PEOPLE : MILALY CZIKSZENTMIHALY

U CHICAGO : MIHALY CZIKSZENTMIHALY FATHER OF FLOW