BAPAKYAL

To understand BAPAKYAL, we need to take another brief trip into the WayBack machine here - actually a couple. But let us start by jumping back to the turn of the millennium around 2000. Won't be the favorite chuck of time for me were I ever to write my memoir - tiny chapter. Marriage falling apart, teaching primarily online generating money for the department, but losing face time with students and gaining no recognition from my colleagues who were unaware of the real benefits they were reaping from my distance learning endeavors. Pretty blah all around.

Throughout, I had been talking with a friend over in media services. Those are the people who functioned as sort of a TV station for the university, so with my tech-heavy involvement I had come to know them pretty well. Anyhow this woman seemed pretty well grounded in life in general - her own solid relationship argued for that. So we chatted back and forth, largely online as Media Services was over on another part of campus. Well, one day she signed her email BAPAKYAL. And, no, I had no idea what it meant.  So I wisely responded: "Huh?" She explained that it meant "BeAtPeaceAndKnowYouAreLoved - BAPAKYAL." Well, obviously, So, this was her way of telling me "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are people who care about you. Move on." It was very helpful in my doing just that.

I think about that sig a lot these days when the would seems to be so devoid of love. And here we have to hop back into the WayBack machine. Here we go:

Settings: Fall of 1968.

Location: Kalamazoo College. Dr.Poggi's classroom; Greek 1.

Topic: Love.

So here we have a classroom full of college students and the topic is going to be love. The hormones are cranked on high, until Dr. Poggi begins:

"Today we are going to talk about the two forms of love discussed in the plays you will be translating: Eros and agape. [a few snickers from the class].

Poggi continues: "Eros and Agape are two distinct types of love in Greek philosophy and theology. Eros is passionate, romantic, or sexual love, often characterized by desire and possession. [A few more snickers.] Agape is selfless, unconditional, and sacrificial love, frequently identified as the highest, spiritual form of love and associated with God's love for humanity. 

So let us step outside the WayBack machine and look around at today's reality. I cannot recall a time in my life when THE WORLD is seeming to spiral so out of control. The post on The Decade of Dementia laid out the primary reasons I can no longer look to my country as a voice of reason on the global stage - sadly quite the opposite. "Bombing anyone back to the stone age!" used to be a phrase from sci-fi films coming out of the mouths on maniacal villains, before the hero stepped in to save the world. 

But craziness is not a local issue. The World Population Review lists these countries as being currently at war - the list is a bit dated. [The broken images are the flags of the various countries - sorry about that glitch]

	Iraq	Terrorist Insurgency/Political Unrest
	Nigeria	Terrorist Insurgency
	Bangladesh	Terrorist Insurgency
	DR Congo	Terrorist Insurgency
	Iran	Terrorist Insurgency
	Tanzania	Terrorist Insurgency
	Thailand	Terrorist Insurgency
	Uganda	Terrorist Insurgency
	Algeria	Terrorist Insurgency
	Angola	Terrorist Insurgency
	Morocco	Terrorist Insurgency
	Ivory Coast	Terrorist Insurgency
	Cameroon	Terrorist Insurgency
	Niger	Terrorist Insurgency
	Mali	Terrorist Insurgency
	Burkina Faso	Terrorist Insurgency
	Chad	Terrorist Insurgency
	Benin	Terrorist Insurgency
	Rwanda	Terrorist Insurgency
	Tunisia	Terrorist Insurgency
	Togo	Terrorist Insurgency
	Libya	Terrorist Insurgency
	Russia	Russo-Ukrainian War
	Ukraine	Russo-Ukrainian War
	Israel	Israel-Palestine War
	Palestine	Israel-Palestine War
	South Sudan	Ethnic violence
	Mexico	Drug War
	Afghanistan	Civil War/Terrorist Insurgency
	Haiti	Civil War/Gang War
	Colombia	Civil War/Drug War
	Ecuador	Civil War/Drug War
	Ethiopia	Civil War
	Myanmar	Civil War
	Sudan	Civil War
	Yemen	Civil War
	Mozambique	Civil War
	Somalia	Civil War
	Central African Republic	Civil War
	Pakistan	Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Conflict

You may be as surprised as I to not see the US on that list, but then I remembered that according to President Trump we are not at war , still . . . if it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, swims like a duck ... well, you know the answer to that.

So I began to think about that old email sig: BAPAKYAL, and how it might help one cope with the current depressing view of a world in ashes. And that of course made me think of Willie Nelson, and his version of the song "Just Breathe" by Pearl Jam, written by Eddie Vedder. Part of the lyric goes like this:

Oh, I'm a lucky man

To count on both hands

The ones I love.

Also sort of reminded me of "Stop feeling sorry for yourself. There are people who care about you. Move on." 

Which prompted me to sort of narrow my focus, pull away from the news and the wars of the world and realize that "I'm a lucky man." They are not legion, but I can count them on both hands - adding in a few toes depending on your definition.

And having lowered my blood pressure a bit with that reflection, I let my focus expand a bit.  I thought of my dear, sadly departed, Uncle Calvin, who taught philosophy at Purdue University into his 90s. A quick internet search reveals that he authored 21 books. I particularly remember Existence and Freedom - which he gave to me on my 13th birthday. I put off actually reading it for a number of years.

But I more strongly remember a conversation we had a year or two before his death. In that talk - I'm not sure where - maybe a family reunion? - he shared that he had reached the conclusion that of all human reflections, beliefs, and emotions, love was paramount.

It is a conclusion that places him among the great philosophers and theologians of history. I can only hope that those in positions of power in the world today can finally stumble upon that conclusion and realize that war is not the answer.

In the meantime - BAPAKYAL

ARTificial Intelligence

 Unless you have been hunkering down in a remote cabin in Idaho, or maybe in the rain forests of Southeast Asia you have been hearing about the coming tsunami of AI - aka - artificial intelligence - and how it is going to change the world while unfortunately eliminating millions of blue collar and entry level  jobs. Could be. Who knows? But I thought we were all supposed to have flying cars and teleportation pods by now. I guess we will all just have to wait and see.

My concern is with the supposed impact on the creativity sector, you know, "the arts." Perfect prose, perfect sculpture with 3D printing, perfect images with filters and CG. Everything we now struggle through with tools, and physical processes, and physical effort will all be handled with AI. Al-lelujah!

I don't think so. 

There is this wonderful book; Almost Lost Arts: Traditional Crafts and the Artisans Keeping Them Alive by Emily Freidenrich and Margaret Shepard that chronicles the activities of a variety of artisans from potters to weavers, to folks making world globes - all without the "help" of AI.

I cannot speak to those crafts, I have no experience with them, but I will share some thoughts on image creation - an area that I do spend a significant amount of time with. It is a bit more nuanced. 

First let us consider the value of "the hand of the master." Right now here in Chicago there is a bubbling controversy as to whether the Rembrandt painting Man with a Golden Chain on display at the Art Institute of Chicago is an original Rembrandt or a copy - or perhaps even a copy that was also painted by Rembrandt. And each version would make a huge difference. Bottom line, in the world of fine art a work created directly by "the hand of the master" can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, while a copy - perhaps even an exact replica created by AI - would be worth maybe a few hundred. So for the marketplace anyhow, AI would have a hard time replacing, in terms of value, works from "the hand of the master."

In that creation of images I need to fall back on my own experiences. I spent much of my career exposing students to the creative potential of various tools, film cameras, still cameras and video, so naturally when the current spate of digital tools came on the scene I played with therm as well.

For me the result has been three categories of works:

Pure drawing. These are works that are basic "hand to paper" pieces. No tech involved at all. A good example is a series of images I did back during the first round of covid when nobody really knew much about the disease. So I drew these images to "put a face on it." The first is one of the faces. The second is the virus itself.

And then there is portraiture in "pure drawing":

Untitled

Significantly augmented images. These are works that made significant use of image technology - primarily Photoshop. A couple of examples. In this image that I call The Ghost of Anne Boleyn, the background is painted completely in Photoshop, while Anne's head is clipped from a "pure drawing" piece called Girl on My Shoulder, [below the larger image of Anne] and feathered in Photoshop. The bottles are from a separate "pure drawing" created specifically as a "framing" image for this piece and saved as a separate layer. Then the three layers, background, head and bottles were all merged into a single image and printed commercially, a print that I then framed.

Images with Augmented Elements. These are images in which elements from my photographs or "pure drawings" are placed in a digital "page" that I then have commercially printed on heavy grade white paper. From that point on the process is pure drawings. The most recent examples are the Venice Grand Canal image [just below] in Not Crazy After All these Years post from December of last year and the Carriage Ride [below Canal] post from February 18th. The Grand Canal image was based on a photograph from our hotel window, while carriage ride comes from a photograph of a model carriage that lives in our living room. The photo based images are visually important, yet, everything else in those images is "hand to paper", and equally important.

Gently Touched Images. This is a flexible category since the image I will discuss in the rest of the post could actually fit in Images with Augmented Elements just as Carriage Ride could possibly fit here. I think it is a question of degree. In both Carriage Ride and this current image, which I am tentatively calling Lighting the Loggias, creating the augmented elements and getting them printed onto the drawing paper was the work of an hour or two. Drawing the additional elements in Carriage Ride literally took a couple of months. I am a few weeks into Loggias. [To clarify, I don't draw for more than a couple of hours a day. My hands begin to give out after that. I have discovered tho' as we are puppy sitting without the normal distractions of home, that I can get two sessions in during a day! :-)]

I'm going to show you Loggias in process so I can touch the AI issue with you. Here it is:

Let's first talk about the loggias and the lampposts first. Those are "cut and pastes" from two photographs. The lampposts are from a photograph I took on the bridge that separates old Buda and old Pest in Budapest. The loggias are photographs, as I believe I have already mentioned, of a maybe 15x8x6 inch architectural model. I duplicated and flipped image horizontally to create the central focus of the image. Then drew and colored the designs within the loggias and the lampposts.

Now about the black squares and circles and other little unfinished elements. Yes, I draw each one, and yes, they are taking a long time. And yes, there is an easier way to do it. Back it the 0-somethings I did a drawing called Through Every Window. I'll stick it in here if I can find it. The image featured brick walls, and rather than drawing each brick I created a cluster of four bricks, copied them, and then created a new layer copied the bricks into the new layer and dragged them into the appropriate place on the wall. A new layer for each cluster of four bricks and then merged them all.  Ah, here is Through Every Window. I've already mentioned the bricks. The strange flowers in the foreground windows are "pure drawings" drawn separately and pasted in the windows. The windows in the background buildings are filled with my photographs.

Back to Loggias, I'm sure that AI would allow me "insert squares in designated space, adapt as necessary. Mimic style of provided sample." And there it would be, neat, clean, but definitively not from "the hand of the master," or my hand for that matter. But getting a slew of clean precise design elements isn't the point.

You see, I like drawing those elements. I can shift direction on a whim. I can shoot out a line of blocks to wherever I feel the light from the moon might go. Heck, I even decided to add another little moon. Same with the lampposts. And there is something very zen about drawing the little boxes while listening to a whole variety of music - again, faces and places accompany me. 

There is an acronym - HUMINT. For those of us not actually involved in international espionage we encounter it mostly in novels and video, though I have learned it is actually used out there in the "real world." It stands for "human intelligence." We usually hear it dialogue:

Head protagonist: "Dammit! We're sending people in blind! We need HUMINT, boots on the ground. Don't we have anyone in there?!" 

Other person: "I'll check on it!"

Perhaps we should take heed of that admonition. When it comes to art we can really do well without turning the creative process over to artificial intelligence. There is still something valuable, unique and fulfilling about HUMINT, not so much boots on the ground as hands on the brushes putting color on the paper, the canvas, tools and fingers in the clay, pressing on the frets, chisels to stone, tickling the ivories, breath through the reeds, all of it - human intelligence.

A Decade of Dementia

 It's not like I'm taking pot shots at old guys, tho' Biden and Trump 2 were both a year older than I am now when they were sworn in, and both could claim to be the oldest president in history at their swearing in. Rather, I'm thinking about the mental clarity of both these men who held, or are holding, arguably the most powerful office on the globe.

Wikipedia tells us that:

Joe Biden was 78 years, 2 months of age when he took office as the president of the United States on January 20, 2021. At the time, he became both the oldest person to be inaugurated as U.S. president and the oldest sitting president in U.S. history.

and:

Donald Trump was 70 years old when he was first inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017. At the time, he was the oldest person to assume the presidency. Upon his return to office on January 20, 2025, at age 78, he became the oldest president to be inaugurated.

In dog years, these guys were 546 years old when they took office. And partisans in each party would argue they were both dogs. But that is not really my concern. As I said my concern is mental clarity.

I am not proposing membership in Mensa for either. Both were elected, as is sadly the unifying criterion in American politics, because of fealty to the party line. But I am concerned about how my fellow septuagenarians handled or are handling the pressures and responsibilities of the job.

President Biden focused on economic recovery, infrastructure investment, and climate action. All consistent issues of focus for the Democratic party. His public persona was often called into question by his detractors as slow and unfocused. And there is some video evidence that could be used to support that contention. However, another perspective is that he is better seen as a favorite uncle or a gentlemanly grandfather. Not as quick or as sharp as he once was, but still a gentle man, kindly and soft spoken.

President Trump, in his current persona - which makes for a legitimate comparison chronologically - cannot be seen as gentle, soft-spoken or kind. He is aggressive, combative, and given to confrontational language. And there are those who see that as appropriate. Obviously, I am not among them. But these are not the characteristics that most concern me. Rather, I am most concerned with his seeming lack of consistency and mental clarity.

He has demonstrated an unsettling ability to shift focus. He spoke often about his legacy as a peace-maker, and his belief that he was deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet apparently sees no contradiction between that stance and his military adventures in Iran and what he prefers to call the Gulf of America. This perspective is more indicative of the attitude that prompted him to rename the Department of Defense the Department of War. Yet he is loathe to define the current conflict in the Middle East a war, instead asking for 200 billion dollars to fund a “major conflict operation” or “excursion;” an incredible boondoggle that exacerbates raising gas and aviation fuel costs, crippling everyday driving and air travel for millions. All this seems to prolong a pointless military adventure for which he provides varying motivations and an indefinite termination date.

He remains firmly opposed to those who dare to stray from his worldview, instructing the department - still known as the Department of Justice - to file a variety of suits against individuals and organizations he sees as antagonists. He seems to appoint people to positions of power in his administration who have no professional credentials. The recent case of Robert F Kennedy, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is germane: A federal judge temporarily blocked federal health officials from advising cutting the number of vaccines recommended for every child, and said Kennedy, who does not have a medical degree (MD), nor is he a doctor, physician, or formally trained scientist, likely violated federal procedures in revamping a key vaccine advisory committee. More recently the President has pushed to make the former owner of a plumbing business and home maintenance talk show host, head of the Department of Homeland Security.

He has also recently instructed the DOJ to investigate ActBlue a Democratic fund raising organization, and continues to file suits contesting his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The President also seemingly spends hours at night texting on his personal online platform, Truth Social, railing against these and other supposed antagonists. Equally concerning are his televised appearances - from the longest ramblingState of the Union Address in history, to spontaneous interactions with the press in hallways or on Air Force One - where any question can result in a verbal attack on the questioner or a diatribe against the "fake news" of mainstream media. All while commissioning a couple of gold commemorative coins depicting himself. Similar baubles cost between $1500 and $11,000.

These are not the behaviors of a man in tight control of his faculties. They reflect, rather, patterns of behavior that, were we to observe them in our own family members, would prompt us to seek advice from mental health professionals as to how we might best deal with these obvious signs of dementia.

Checking in From Dreamland

I continue to be fascinated by dreams, their capricious nature and the tantalizing possibilities of what we might discern from their engaging theater.

A recent one has remained with me in part for it's seeming deviation from what I have come to expect from these nocturnal visitations. In a way it mirrored a common dramatic disappointment. You may have experienced it. You have scraped together the current absurd cost of a big name performance - parallel to say, what, a live version of Burton and Taylor's in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whatever that might be. You arrive at the theater, scurry inside, find your seats and open the playbill only to find the dreaded little slip of paper saying; "Tonight tonight Martha will be played by Beatrice Whosit and George will be played by Bartholomew Whatsome. You know the feeling. The understudies, striving mightily, are competent but you sense that they too feel the disappointment of the audience.

This dream was sort of like that. It was a narrative of no great import, but the casting was bizarre. I, naturally, played myself - well, my 30-40ish self, untroubled by the current twinges and lapses of memory that are my current companions. I am married, somewhat strangely, to a woman I had dated semi-seriously my freshman year of college. We had met at one of those "freshman mixers" that small liberal arts colleges were wont to provide. Apparently things had moved on from there. She had avoided multiple decades and still looked like her freshman self.

The story continued in that strange vein. We were debating the advisability of her parents - played by the parents of my oldest friend; who I had just visited in DC - adopting "our" dog, played by the Cockapoo mix I had while teaching in Wisconsin in the late 1970s. I do not recall the resolution, if there was one. Rather I simply awoke saying "Whoa! That was very, very, strange!"

So from where do these mysterious entr'actes arise, slipping between our waking realities? I suppose there are at least thousands of Ph.D dissertations, articles and books presenting their various experiments, explanations and theories. And were I still toiling in the halls of the academy, I would feel obligated to address the most compelling of them before advancing my interpretation. However, having left tenure behind me decades ago, I can cut directly to the chase - i.e. what I choose to believe.

As I have mentioned before I am particularly taken with the quantum mechanics notion of "many worlds." Or as I think about it - branching realities. Briefly, whenever we make a choice in our lives - where we go to school, what career we choose, with whom we fall in love, marry, have kids with, where we choose to live - those are all the path taken. The "many worlds" are created by all the paths not taken - and alternate versions of ourselves move on along those paths, into those many worlds.

I further choose to believe that those many worlds may not be as completely separate as the theoretical physicists might have us believe. That they may occasionally leak into each other. Things like deja vu, the feeling that you have been somewhere before, did something before, met someone before - maybe those are little bit of evidence of "worlds leaking." Huh? Maybe?

And dreams! Ah, there could be the mother lode. Perhaps dreams are like a sort of "many worlds blender." Those little leaks get whirled together in a strange psychic cake mix, and, when asleep, we cook it up into a dream that seems a single experience but is in, sort of reality, a hybrid, tri-bred, multi-bred blend of all the roads - both taken and not.

And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Sleep well!

 

One Step at a Time

 Wikipedia tells us that: "A loggia is a covered, open-air gallery featuring columns or arches - typically featuring columns or arches." My better half knows I love architectural models so she gifted me this one a few Christmases ago:

And so I made it the center focus of the image I am currently working on called Lighting the Loggias. I have finished the loggias portion of the image:

And I am pretty much OK with it.  However I now need to deal with the rest of the image:

A lot of white space there, and I don't intend to leave any. I'm thinking something with a moon and clouds. Has to be at least dusk if not night. Otherwise why have the lamp posts, right? 

Anyhow, I'll keep you posted 😅