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nolongermichael-workbymichaelyoung.com
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Information Page |
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Site.Notes:
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The cover image, "Several Songs", is something I drew when I was laid up with a bad hand. _I had been playing guitar. _It was focusing to me in a way that music can be. _Did I have dreams?_ I'm certain I did._ Outsized. _But the important thing was following them, the momentum, hence stability that progress gave me, when my mind was . . . needed direction. _In a stupid accident, I speared my left index finger with a pocket knife. _Guitar was over. Instead, I would sit and listen to music, and draw what the pen would produce._ "The crippled hand series" took perhaps a month. _It showed me things about myself -- it was like having a mirror. _Only this mirror reflected inside. _"Several songs" -- ( A tear passing slowly away from the eyes of what's lost and what's saved ) -- came very near the end. _It may have been the last image, I don't know. _It redeemed. _I was satisfied, with this, was enough. I once thought to mail it to someone. __I folded it to put in an envelope, sent it. __The party was not there. __The image returned. - - Do I have any relevance? That's the question I think a lot of people ask themselves. . They may not put it exactly that way, but I did, and I Googled it. . At the time, the search came up empty: "Your search -- did not match any documents." .a wonderfully impersonal way of saying, "Dude, you ain't there." . So I printed it. (I still have the page somewhere.) . And next I snuck that text string into this page, so that it wouldn't be visible --- except of course to Google. . Gaming God... . But it was still on my mind when I was redrawing the home page, so there I said it twice. . Google now has four matches for this string. . Please, post your own. asdf asdf Colored Line Abstractions: _My life has been one of rotating through habits, obsessions. _They crest and fall. >I love best that point on the curve where I am learning rapidly. >Too much facility is boring to me; I lose respect for the medium. >Then again, sometimes it is injury, (RMI), that stops me. >But most of all, what I dread is the corrosion, when acidity and dissonance have crowded out what was sweet. >Increasingly, I drew staring faces, reaching hands; didn't want to look at it, and put it down for years. When I returned, and conscious of the slope I was on, I resolved not to draw faces or figures; simply to lay a few spontaneous lines on the paper with one color, and then react carefully, compositionally, to what was there._ Often my next move was to draw lines that directly contradicted, if not attacked, the first._ But I made sure to do it with respect. _The second color could not cross over the first, nor the third the second, etc., unless the effect was one of shading. This was "safe art". _Formalized, patient. _Yet art it soon became._ Immediately. _The tools were ballpoint pens, the old style with the thick ink. There was no music. _Theirs are the music of silence. asdf asdf The "watercolor paintings" are reproductions of images I saw in dreams, or on my eyelids, often with crystal clarity. _The limits of memory and skill, however, combine to make the paintings stories twice told. _One tries to get the characters and the plot right, but as to the lines themselves -- there's a lot of improvisation._ Each piece has two titles. _The first being simply descriptive. _The second interprets the piece. _But, my interpretation is not absolute, these came untitled. asf asdf "Lyric Poetry": .For eleven years and eleven months I held a job in a chain-supermarket. .I was Mike the friendly clerk. .There is little I want to say about a system where rank is the only lasting accomplishment; where pride is illusionary, often a target for others; and the fruits of one's labors are fed into the machine. .I met good people. .I haven't always shown it in the right way at the right time. .But I needed them. .And I think about them often. I got that job hoping to build this dream. .I sold myself short getting it -- it was clearly intended to be a means to an end -- but then you get tied up by those means. .Building the site, and publishing the work, (much of which was pre-existing) -- being an artist -- didn't seem to be getting any closer. ._ I had a parallel dream, to be a street musician in the city. .I acted on it: going into New York in a costume I slowly developed; likewise my musical skills.....Perhaps you've seen me. .I'm still at it, for while it lasts. .What quite I'm accomplishing, is too subtle for me to understand. . I value it.. I smoked marijuana at first, quite a bit. .It made me feel like things were possible. .It lifted me out of the sense of ennui and futility I felt from work, __ (I never smoked at work); and in a hometown where my contemporaries had left to pursue their own paths. .I contrived a way to get stoned and play in the city. .High as a satellite, I would play above my abilities -- for a while -- or at least feel that way. .It made it easy, perhaps too, to be positive about where I was, how I was, and whom I met; .and in that way I experienced remarkably little trouble. Slowly the dream took root. .I found I could write poetry. .Lyrics for songs about hope and meaning, but also despair and alienation -- things I felt. .. . I would write the lyrics stoned, then refine them at work; in the back of my mind while serving people. .It was a remarkable double life, and the two really leveraged off one-another. .I don't know if it would have been possible without my marijuana. But after a while, when it became clear that this marijuana had helped me as far as it was going to -- and was now holding me back -- I put it down. ._ I had reached the point of decision -- whether I loved best what I was doing, or what I did.__ And there was never a drug made by nature or man, that didn't give with one hand, before taking with the other. _.Still, on balance, I believe marijuana should be legal. ._I say this drug-free. I could call myself a loser, but that's self-pitying. .It would be closer to the truth to say I'm a quitter. .None-the-less, with a clear mind, I viewed the job with increasing dread. .Something bad seemed to be getting ready to happen. .I had bad dreams. .(I still have bad dreams.) .I don't feel any better about leaving than I do about having been there. .But I was starting to crack, and I didn't want to break there. But quitting involves its own trade-offs. .Since I stopped marijuana, I have begun few new songs, and none are posted here. .Under Winterdale was started high as a kite, but completed over that period of months where I put the drug behind. .Its tone gathers in an off the anti-depressant darkness. .(There is an adjustment period.) Since leaving work, although I still edit the songs, there are no new ones. .This creative avenue has emptied. .I can't sing the songs the way I used to. . There was a time when I needed them and believed them. .That can be harder to find now....passing slowly away from the eyes of what's lost and what's saved. .I leave the drug, and the stressfull circumstances I wrote against -- I get smaller. .But this site's gone up almost entirely without drug. . Most of the work -- and the best work -- was done after I left my supermarket job. _ asdf Notes on Self, Religion and Philosophy: .This branch of the site some people will want to block. .Others may be interested. I have an alt-religion, (as far as I know I'm the only follower). .It's based on my view of the world, some existential experiences I believe I've had, and amateur mathematics. .Basically it sees the Devil and God, and the Material and Spiritual, as complementary pairs of equal value. .Time and I would think, math are shared by all. .It may be disappointing to think of the spirit-world in mathematical terms, but as far as we know, nature is math and it can be beautiful, complex and unpredictable. .The ideas are presented as a work in progress. .And sometimes they will seem contradictory. This section also contains An Argument Against Christianity. .I was a Christian, and now, having "recovered", I disassemble it as an apostate can. Two things in this seem ironic to me: .that in street performance, I am told, I resemble Jesus; .and that because of search engines, it has seen more traffic than my home page. .It was not written out of any hatred of Christians. .It is my view that the devout are the devout, and their religions are usually a matter of circumstance. .It takes no great courage to adopt the faith of a region, and there are many paths to the extreme:. including an ambition to climb within the order; .an enjoyment of power and its expressions, (including victory); .obsession with a simple set of rules, (in a complex world); .a yearning for perfection -- and salvation; .the need to humanize the heavens. . . .leading to desperation, as the promised God fails to materialize, and the adherant clings tighter to smaller signs, seeing greater failures and blasphemies in themselves and the world as the cause. Clicking on the phrase and design "No longer Michael" takes you to a page which provides some explaination of why I left Christianity. In short, I had a dream in which I was told: "Your name is no longer Michael", which I took as excommunication pronounced by none less than God himself. . .but then the damned need not pray! _ That I still to use the unname is in part an attempt to balance myself between the practical life one is given, and the spirit life one desires. asdf asfd The Merlin Wheel Pages: .I get a strange sense when seeing a stone stand on end. .It's as though something inanimate -- or asleep -- woke up and is now aware. .Perhaps the ancients felt the same way. .I'm really not into Stonehenge, and it wasn't until I picked up a book called "Circles of Stone - the Prehistoric Rings of Britain and Ireland", that I realized the scope of circle building at the time; and saw the lyric quality of many of them. Where I live, there are stones about; rounded glacial droppings from various places. .At one point I was moving them. .Some you could pick up, and others were rolled, end-over-end style. .It occurred to me to build a circle -- to celebrate my heritage, and to have such a special place at hand. .But there would be some stones I could not budge; and I began to wonder how to move and set them. .I've worked in a wire factory, where spools of wire weighing as much as a thousand pounds could be rolled easily around the floor. .A spool! -- that was the solution that was required, (in my mind), and The Pages show three designs which could fit in the stone age. .I have no evidence of this -- indeed, archaeologists have no evidence for wheels being there at the time. .The Pages offer some possible reasons why not. .By the way, I still haven't built that circle. asfd asdf The Shape of Mathematics: ..I did not do well in school. .And I'm not really interested in "assignment math". My first computer was a Packard-Bell 8088, which came bundled with a TurboC compiler. .I had time on my hands, and programming seemed much simpler. .I taught it to do little things: factor numbers, search for primes, plot functions -- they would come up one pixel at a time -- and I found out something about math. .On the whole it was a lot of fun. .There's a rationality to it -- in that with an answer, comes a principle behind the answer. Math starts to appear seamless, and its study becomes one of perfection. .Can I ask a question so that the answer is clear? .And can I accept the answer once I have it? .It really is an exercise in faith, saying: "I know there's a reason, how can I tease it out?". My view of mathematics is religious, and religion, mathematical. .This became clear to me in the handling of the circle/hyperbola family of functions, which are closed on one plane and open on another -- having intimations of the duality of matter and spirit. .And in the dual concept of zero and infinity -- which imply the existence of Satan and God, both of which I believe in. .I feel that in mathematics is the basis of a new, and god help us, 'true' religion. .Where we do not have to believe in a perfect man, walking on water; perfect scripture, recited to The Prophet; nor in a perfect alphabet, having mystical powers. .The crazy thing is that the world just may be perfect, but it's far from ideal; and when we confuse the two, people get hurt. .And not only in obvious ways, (assault, pogrom and battle), for when a person gets drawn into one of the old religions, and accepts that ancients and their book(s) were closer to God than we can be today, they sacrifice their freedom of mind, and turn their talents and energies to spreading a dogma to whose core they are allowed neither to contribute, nor subtract. .This is no way to save souls. You may have seen me handing out math cards in New York. .I got started with this when my mother was sick with cancer, and being treated at Sloan-Kettering. .She has since died, please see www.portraitofelisabethyoung.com. asdf |
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Technical Notes:
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This website was created in GoLive on a Windows machine with a 19'' monitor. It works better under Internet Explorer than Netscape.asdfControl Panel | Display Properties | Settings | Screen resolution, is set to "1280 by 1024 pixels".
Control Panel | Display Properties | Settings | Color Quality, is set to "Highest (32 bit)".
(This is probably well within the capabilities of most recently made monitors and cards.) Will Robinson Control Panel | Display Properties | Settings | Advanced | General | DPI Setting, is "Normal size (96DPI)". Control Panel | Display Properties | Appearance | Font Size, is set to "large".Control Panel | Display Properties | Appearance | Effects | Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts, is set to "Clear Type".Internet Explorer | Tools | Internet Options | Advanced | Browsing | Underline Links, is set to "Hover".asdf |
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End.Piece:
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This website is available as is, on disk, for $10. Please contact me via e-mail or post to place an order. Prints will also be made available for sale.
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Website content and layout by Michael Young, who's pseudonym is and has been: "No longer Michael", (it's a balancing act).
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Please read the Copyright Statement before duplicating, distributing, or adapting any part of it. |
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The host for this site is blacknightsolutions.ie
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Do I have any relevance? ;-)
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