Daily Archives: June 30, 2015

What happened?

It’s like our experiences from younger days didn’t really transfer into a similar later pattern. We have no real friend in Blue Mountain now who we hang out with. In contrast, our best friend lives in Middletown. The wife’s family lives in Middletown, although we don’t interact with them in a large way. But it’s *people* we know there. We both like our jobs, but we haven’t made any strong or lasting connections through them. The last person I’ve had a strong creative connection to in Blue Mountain has been who I call Michael Won occasionally on this blog, but our relationship basically ended in 2007 when he left town while his wife attended graduate school in a larger place to the east. I worked with another person closely for 5 years after that, but we made no real connections. Not really. He had… issues as it turned out, and I was not the only one to perceive them by any means. I became increasingly isolated from the rest of my co-workers because of a lack of link. The relationship with my bosses has degenerated from a high in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I have less support for what I would consider the main part of my job. I am on my way out (to retirement). We have made no creative links to the community outside of work either.

But, like I said, on the other hand I’m very pleased how my self generating creativity is turning out: the blog, the collages, the audiovisual synchs which I haven’t talked about yet. Isolation has helped in that respect. For now.

Yes, audiovisual synchs. Actually about any internet friends I’ve gained over the years comes from a community started by the Synchronicity Arkive in the late 90’s devoted to the hobby of audiovisual synching. Many or perhaps most gain entrance to the field through the landmark urban legend “Dark Side of the Rainbow”, and that’s certainly how I became aligned. On the opposite side of this are earlier web communities devoted to more traditional synchronicities, and I here think of the Synchroncity Phenomena yahoo board in particular. A handful of more friends over the years from that wellspring. But all that momentum seems have run its course as well. I have no real communication via email with any “synchers” currently. What’s happened there, at least on the audiovisual synching side, is that I’ve advanced so far beyond the simple one cue synch that I’ve lost touch with my base constituents. But it’s not that — I think *all* those old audivisual synchers and devotees have moved beyond one cue works, but most often into other fields altogether. And admittedly in the last year or 3 my collage producing seems to have become the main creative thrust, overtaking a/v synching.

A/v synching must be seen as a time capsule event for the most part. A/v synching involves copyrighted movies and albums almost exclusively, where rights will be held for many years to come for the most part. Why do them? one might ask. You can’t make any money off of ’em. And the same would go for a considerable chunk of the collages. What *will* be “legal” creativity in my lifetime? Well, the map book I spoke about in the former post. And I think I can bend collages and also related process art (here think extensions of woods happenings in Frank and Herman Parks) toward some kind of quite legal and perhaps sellable art. But it’s not going to be a/v synchs in that category.

I believe I’m in pretty great shape for the rest of my life. Creatively I have a bead on collage making, and I’ll probably keep creating those until I physically or mentally can’t any more. They’re all digital so archiving shouldn’t be a problem. But I should also probably print them out.

I love blogging. I can’t imagine that would cease at any near future point. Blogg’n keeps my collage making going. Blogg’n keeps me writing. I have a special (header) category on this blog/web site called “Hybrids” where I collect what could be called more well rounded or defined “satellites” of writing, such as the “6 Weeks of Shining” document or the “Baker Bloch in England” manuscript. I don’t think you could call them books. They are what they are.

But speaking of books, there’s one I’ve had on the backburner for a long time, since my mid-20’s. I hesitate to talk about it on this blog but you can look under the category of UMapS to get an inkling. If I had to do it over — and I suppose I could correct it easily enough now — I believe I would rename this “GNIRPS”. I see it as a base synchronicity collecting process always running in the background. It’s so pervasive that it’s been very difficult over the years to solidify or crystallize any part of it. Before the beginning of carrcasses and my introduction to audivisual synching in 1997, GNIRPS was my main synchronicity focus, or from about the period of 1986-1997. I’d also created collages before (and other types of art such as geometric painting) but only in small spurts. The new collages are a different thing altogether. I have a certain style — not minimalist really. I lean toward pretty heavy interpretation of my collages in series (older collages didn’t come in series but represented standalone works). And that’s part of the blog as well, witness, for example, the numerous posts devoted to the interpretation of the most recent collage series, “Stonethrow”, in May.

Second Life is just a way to extend storytelling and mythmaking to keep the wave roll’n. It too is directly connected to blogg’n. In fact, blogg’n started parallel with my intitial involvements with Second Life. At the beginning I was entranced. The peak of Second Life involvement probably came during the Jeogeot days, specifically through Pietmond, my first and probably most successful Second Life “community” of sorts — self made. I also reacted during this period to or against the strong *collective* Jeogeot community called Chilbo, which was in its heyday at the time I discovered it in May 2009.

It is important for me to mention that the current blog, now “Sunklands”, is different from the original Baker Blinker Blog, although directly tied to it thematically. Sunklands, when it was just a blog and not a whole web site, was called Frank and Herman, Einstein!, which started in August 2012. Earlier this month everything changed, and I now see Sunklands as at least a stable web presence for the next 6-7 years, bringing me to retirement years when I’ll be age 62-63 or so.

The original idea for switching the old blog — the Baker Blinker Blog as I called it after my initial main Second Life avatar — to the new blog was to take the focus away from Second Life and virtual reality and put it squarely on 2 local parks I’ve dubbed Frank and Herman — thus the name “Frank and Herman, Einstein!”. Well, that focus seemed to have peaked at the very time I created the blog — that focus on the parks. In the last 3 years we, the wife and I, have realized that Blue Mountain, our present location, will in all likelihood *not* be the place we retire, with this burden instead falling on larger Middletown to our southwest about 100 miles. This was against all our former plans. Since returning in my mid 30’s, I believed that Blue Mountain would be my/our final home. I’ve loved the place every since I started college here in the later 70’s. The wife and I met here at that time. We have fond memories of many people and places in the area. And when we returned in the mid 90’s, when we were in our 30’s, the focus quickly became the 2 basically equal sized parks.

What happened?