It's A Jungle Out There Sometimes

Seans and Lennons
I've finally found a way to express an important concept that I've been working on for some time, the manner of expressing it that is, though it certainly seems quite possible that someone already arrived at this ahead of me. Nevertheless, I'll plant my flag on it until I learn for certain that my discovery is unoriginal:

When one encounters a forest within a forest within a forest within a forest within a forest, one may take one step back to avoid not seeing a forest for the trees, but whether or not this accomplishes the intended purpose is not self-evident.

I will immediately put this encapsulating of a crystallization to good use, by using it as an excuse for not formulating an immediate opinion regarding an experience I had yesterday: I went to see a performance by Sean Ono Lennon at The Anthology in San Diego.

The moment I walked through the door of this small though important dinner and show venue, Sean was standing but several feet from me. I was powerfully prepared for this historic moment in both of our lives, if not the lives of millions: I took out a pen and asked him if he could autograph my green Post-It (more of an olive green than one can see here):

One thing this brought to my mind was the time, back in 1987, when I had a leftover ticket from the World Trade Center in my pocket (they failed to collect it from me during a visit there several weeks before), and an opportunity to use it towards a similar historic moment in relation to Sean's mother. This difference in the specific objects upon which these autographs were signed may actually be something worth noting, but I expect that to be a thought more stimulating to the spiritual and cosmic among us (as I sometimes consider myself to be) than for the meat and potatoes crowd, who only know the value of a signature when it's on a legal document.

I don't believe I expect Sean to ever be the musical genius I regard his father to have been (a blatantly unfair comparison, and I myself happen to be one who personally loathes the thought of my creative work being compared - attempts at apples to apples comparisons in matters pertaining to the human soul are ultimately absurd, however interesting they may be). Yet the exuberance and sense of personal accessibility that emanated from Sean Lennon onstage between songs did unmistakably bring one particular other person to mind.

I did not realize until I got home that a most peculiar "coincidence" had occurred during the show: In my blog of the previous day, August 13th, I referred to Sean Lennon in relation to Sean Daniel, including a description of a silkscreened T-shirt that I related to both. By the way, this time around I am able to offer a clearer version of the specific image on Sean Lennon's T-shirt (thusly making it easier to see why I compared it to the image of a griffin - nor am I the first to compare a chimera to a griffin).

Yet I digress from the "coincidence": One of the main things I created in Sean Daniel's silk screen shop during that summer at Buck's Rock Camp (again, please see my blog of August 13th) was the artistic lettering of the words, "Static Electricity," which I printed onto all the T-shirts I owned (I may have spared one T-shirt from this "tattoo"). So what was the running theme of the banter between Sean Lennon and his girlfriend/musical collaborator throughout their time onstage? Static electricity. An electric shock when they kissed was described, and an electric shock dramatically encountered by Sean Lennon whenever he touched his microphone, as he demonstrated through his reaction and remarks each time he touched his microphone. One might see how I am perhaps the only person who was there who is now wondering whether this static electricity might in fact not have been genuine static electricity, but rather, something we who make static electricity T-shirts refer to as, "make-believe static electricity". I am not sure whether or not Benjamin Franklin knew of this "make-believe static electricity", however, thus far no Benjamin Franklin writings on this particular subject have yet been discovered.

Monk
This brings me to the TV character who tends to respond to all human touch with a handi-wipe, Monk, and my weekly Monk/Steinhoff videoclip:



I will only add to this videoclip by stating that, once again, I might have edited it differently, that again there were other things that could have been included (such as a correlation between the flower baskets lying ominously unattended on the ground in "Gosk" after the girls had seemed so involved with collecting the flowers; as compared with the ominous image in "Monk" of the just-purchased groceries lying scattered on the street after we are given to understand that the owner of the groceries has been struck by a vehicle). Instead I was again somewhat selective in what I chose to include, and hope that those who went to the trouble of offering up other things do not feel that I was being too random.