Live Twice

Greetings,

"You only live twice. Once when you're born and once when you face death."                                                   - inscription on a Zippo lighter at the HCMC museum.

 

I see history. Struggles, wars, debris, artifacts, diagrams, maps, tanks, planes, final assault plans, old cars used to haul the dead, dying, wounded, ammunition; statues of men making making pistols, old medical equipment, typewriters for propaganda material, flags, posters, pamphlets, burning monks (1963), photos, villages, corpses, soldiers, politicians, dog tags, gas masks, knives, weapons, tools, radios, helmets, baskets, pots and pans, shoes, shirts and...

Metta.

Means of Production - knife, hoe, scythe, axe, hammer control elephant, stick

 

Thich Quang Duc protesting against the policies of President Ngo Dinh Diem, 1963.

Ink, Brush, Water

Greetings,

I visit the Cholon market savoring smells of garbage, fish, veggies, vibrant life flow, this human flow.

The Thien Hau pagoda. She rides clouds. Our ancestor's spirits eat incense.

Feeling slow and clean in the temple zone.

I found new Chinese ink, stone and brushes. Remembering Mr. Li, my calligraphy teacher in Chengdu, China.

How to stand. How to hold the brush. How to circle the ink stone in water inside the black oval. How to gently caress the brush and black ink along the edge. How to see through the thin paper. How to create simple strokes. How to be the ink, be the brush, be the paper.

Metta.

MK 82

Greetings,

Good evening Vietnam.

Here's Middle Kingdom podcast #82 for your ears. A brief quick precise audio adventure from beautiful downtown Saigon. 

Let the good times roll.

MK 82...

Metta.

 

Maugham the Travel Writer

“The wise man travels only in imagination.” - Maugham

Greetings,

Pico Iyer has published an article entitled The Perfect Traveler about Somerset Maugham in World Hum.

“A novelist must preserve a child-like belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence,” he wrote late in life. “He must never entirely grow up.”

As a young man, Maugham was taught, he says, by an anatomy teacher that “the normal is the rarest thing in the world,” and when he was traveling he spent little time looking at the sights, but went off instead “on the search for emotion,” as he put it in his early book on Spain, collecting “characters,” picking up stories at the bar, using the Alhambra or the temples of Thailand as a launching pad for inquiries into beauty and impermanence and illusion. And what gives his work its particular power is that, you can tell, he remained all his life a stowaway at heart, whose spirit lay with the wastrel and the seeker. 

Delightful.  Read more...

Metta.

 

Your world

Greetings,

A new Leica gallery focusing on Saigon is up for your visual identification.

It contains air, sky, clouds, baggage, Chinese kick boxers practicing for Asian games, a 1932 mosque, monk, zen architecture, various street dreams and my face welcoming night spirit chasers.

Buy a ticket, take the ride. See it here.

Metta.