The

REDyellowBLUEgreen..dream!
Cochin, India, April 2012 Written by Gerd Fehlbaum

This essay is in the making, getting longer every couple of days, with more and more pictures added. Thanks for YOUR opinion! Leave comments! Tell me, I am WRONG!

Why is our (western) world so fucked up?

Because we oversee the obvious!

Part 1 The trap_______________________

What annoys me the most in this so called modern times, is the lack of tangible new ideas, which in my opinion should surround our daily lives like water the fish, but which seem to be held captivated in the least tangible way, in our computers, the internet, the cloud. What has REALLY changed in our 3-D world, in the products we buy, in the houses we dwell, in the cities we live and work? Nothing! Yes, NOTHING!

The internet grows in an explosive speed. You know why? Because it seems to be a mirror cabinet, one of this labyrinths people went to on county fairs to get lost in them not long ago. They paid money and when they didnt find the outlet by the end of the day, they were guided out for free. This is not the case with the internet, it does never close its doors and besides, it is free. It only costs time It is a self-referring system, supposedly open, but only within itself. You can enter easily by pushing some buttons, but you cannot leave, since it does not offer any exits. It only seems to offer exits in the form of hyperlinks, but they are nothing than further facets of the same, good old net. We use this net as a mirror of our selfs, which we define as our interests. On the other hand, we hope others see us in the mirrors we hold into the World Wide Web, and then we feel happy about. Alternatively, we peek at mirrors of others, friends, the ones we feel close to, despite separation by often-vast distances.

However, we keep on living in a rather stiffly set way, our parents decided to be right for us. Respectively the way the economical structures see fit for us, in totality, the way, things have evolved over the past thousand years, before the advent of the allchanging internet. Which is, I again dare to say, absolutely and entirely BORING! At least to curious, intelligent, playful beings like us, the generation of NOW! And because it is so boring, because nothing REALLY changed in our 3 Dimensional world, besides the design of everything, the symbolical aspects, but not the core, not the background, we feel all the more drawn to a net, where so much COULD come out of and so little does

The problem with the internet is the lack of exits, real exits where ideas form to things, not other ideas. Things, material facts, where the supposedly so important knowledge is actually applied. Not applied in the old fashion way, which means with a superior looking over your shoulder, while you work, or like a judge, judging the rightfulness of your own application, of what seems to be right to YOU! Something based on your own knowledge, but in an act of three-dimensional freedoms, created and done by yourself. Everything we can pack, wrap up, throw away or make with our hands, not just the fingertips. Everything we cannot just delete or copy and paste. Everything REAL, so to speak.

I observe that we live in a thing world more than ever in human history, yet give these things less importance than ever We know nothing about their whereabouts, neither about the techniques involved, nor the materials and substances involved. We eat food; we have no idea about the diverse ingredients. We wear fashion made by people so distanced from us, that we even consider them as nonexistent. We drive cars we would never be able to repair, kept mobile with substances involved, for the exploitation of which battles are needed on a daily basis, most of them we never heard about. Some against humans, some against nature, most of them both.

It is the saddest fact of our modern times, that each one of us has given away the applications of what is possible in the out forming of our concrete reality, including our private spheres, into the hands of a few, mostly unknown people. In an undemocratic change towards full-scale modernity, best represented by global corporations, science, fashion, and media we have lost our very ability to create! Create anything tangible.

We submitted ourselves to a general thought that OTHERS will take care of our things. This is the bitter end of an evolution towards the specialized production of goods, which in some fields is understandable. In others not. The tinkerer, the crafts men and women, have been the ancestors of our modernity, but if you listen good, they CRY! It might be true, that their wisdom does not count much in producing I-pods, but what is about the shoes we walk in, the bed, we sleep in? There are no big differences over the times in the way beds have to be. Nevertheless, how beds nowadays are produced, there are important differences. Tangible differences. Modern beds are typically made in big parts out of deadly poisonous substances, acquired from distant places, assembled by badly protected workers and sold for prices, where any halfway sane carpenter would not even start looking for wood in his shed. So it became as fucking unloved, unpreloved, your bedstead, as it can possibly be!

As democratic as our networking abilities seem to be nowadays, including theoretically politics, as undemocratic are our concrete, tangible surroundings. From waking up in the morning to going to sleep we live in alienated spaces, which neither we could ever have done ourselves, nor would ever be allowed to comment on by leaving our own traces. Saying your opinion on the net is highly fashionable, while the last bumper stickers have disappeared from the last cars, because it is the banks, who own them, and we bow to their wishes Drastically speaking, we are fed, clothed and surrounded by an economy which stuffs down our throats the newest food, fashion, cars and houses. Almost alien forces have decided what is right for us! This is nothing new, but first, it is not very old neither, and second - and far more important - it is not an unchangeable situation! Quite contrary, it is the looming economy of the future

Yes, right, we have to roll up our sleeves not just roll the next one Or scroll down a couple pages, or go another hyperlink further. No, we have to WALK the extra mile. Talk is still cheap; internet has not changed that, I suppose.

Me, who writes this daring account on the state of where we are (in so called Western countries, but in fact more and more countries) has walked a couple good extra miles, lives from what his hands are creating very well indeed and travels the world in a sailing ship. I write on a computer run with solar power, I travel with the wind, since many years.

Yes, I am disappointed with what I can see on land, when I come from the unchanged ocean, the last true statement of natural forces and laws. Right now, I am in India, but that matters little. The tendency seems clearer than ever: wherever I go, I see once upon a time creative people with lots of three-dimensional freedoms turn into shoppers. They are shoppers of lame copies of what they used to do themselves, or within the framework of their peers, their regions or cultures. Often with less effort involved, not speaking about environmental impact, compared to when you just shop.

They fell asleep; it seems, at one point in recent history. Not the people themselves of course, since they lead less sleepy, more exhausting lives than ever before! Not on a physical, but on a mental level, so they did not feel, how their hands fell asleep, and their legs too. All life has become, is being driven by external forces. Forces nobody understands, moving us in a direction everybody talks, but nobody knows about, but with unprecedented speed, the only sure thing in modern live. Or is the speed just an illusion, a trap caged by monitors, modernity standing still in reality, just pretending to be on the move by emitting lots of noises? And the only thing which REALLY moves fast, is the destruction of forests, the melting of the poles, the disappearance of species. Is the only swiftness in progress the waning of human abilities to create his own world? In his own four walls at least. And the outside maybe as well. Are this little

freedoms taken away from us with the speed of light, so we dont even remember them?

If we obviously, and following the advice of my parent generation, cannot CHANGE the world, can we at least paint this world? The world of ours, in specific. I mean, legally, without been thrown in jail? No, but we CAN!

From street art to graffiti, from night markets to days working in the sun, on products, we decide are necessary, to give this sad

and somehow retro looking modernity a better look all this is the world of tomorrow! The economy of tomorrow! Full-blown capitalism has created a vast array of tools, artists dreamed about for a million years, artisans hoped for, for thousand and more years. Thanks for THAT, dear capitalism! However, it would be a betrayal of a million years of art, a cheating of countless generations of crafts people, not to USE this tools! In addition, in bringing into existence new materials, capitalism was great! Thanks a lot! So many metals waiting to be recycled, every blacksmith of old would get fire in his eyes! So much simply made wooden furniture, waiting to be painted in red. Or green. Or yellow. Or blue. Or blue/yellow?

Here we reach a new world. It is the world of US! How can talk about individualism, if we have not even tried out the idea of being ourselves, reflected in what we have, as reflections of our wishes, as reflections of our deepest desires? How? By putting our profile on facebook? You must be kidding, my son! Sure, you can, but the frame in which you have to express yourself is so narrow, so predigested already, that the word remote controlled is not far from the truth. We all know that! You, me, everybody! But we have no alternative, we are told. So the houses stay grey on the outside, but every citizen of Babylon would have instantly the thought, how great of a hanging garden this ugly house might be. Them, and lots of other ancestral cultures would have done similar. Get the tomatoes on the porches and let the vines take care of the beauty, the insulation and the booze of the inhabitants. Easy live a couple seeds away, millions of super ugly apartment blocks, either heated or cooled down by huge amounts of fossil fuel. And probably not more than ten with overgrown walls, which is as easy to achieve, as planting a tree. This of course would be another involvement into the three-dimensional look of our environment, which would be fined and prosecuted, if done repeatedly on public land. Public land Who is the public? Well, its not ME, so far that I know it, but who ELSE is the public, in a republic? What means voice of the public (Republic), if each one of us is subjected to a state of sheer passivism, when it comes to the LOOK of our cities, our houses, our shops? Is it the outcome of democratic processes as we know them how our - by naked eye observable and tangible environments look like? We can choose between a Trillion screensavers, but the bus station always looks the same. If you tag, you are already with one leg in prison. Nevertheless - and just so, that you do not get deadly bored - the advertising in the bus station changes every five seconds!

Yes, I know that YOU know what I know! However, what now? Are we doomed to fail, because of this external failures of whatever? A system, an empire, a school of thought maybe? Capitalism? Or are we failing, simply because we oversee the obvious, while we stare on our monitors? OUR monitors? Are you kidding? THEIR monitors! The up keepers of this mirror cabinet, whoever they are. External forces They need not to be humans; they might be laws of logic, self fulfilling prophecies; but maybe more than anything the will to exist, which might include not just people, just live, just ideas, but also dead machines of all sorts. It is not that they think, it is enough, that they cost! And

that alone keeps the thinker in constant care of his machine To keep it running, multiplying, selling itself.

Therefore, we turned into slaves - sort of - instead of masters, of our own inventions; unknowingly keeping alive the spirit of few inventors. What would James Watt think of our modern world? I am not sure; he would even agree with half of the applications of his own invention. The steam engine, itself an offspring of the canon by the way.

So here we are, 200 years after the first revolution of the first motor, but not only have the motors become million folded common place, also the canons still roar, somewhere. Right now in Syria, a town gets bombarded with artillery grenades at a rate of one every five minutes. The wide branch on the human tree of innovations, the war arm, holds guard over all its offshoots. Which by now are the combustion engine and all other derivates out of the steam engine idea. Which was a great idea, two hundred years ago, even a hundred years ago, even fifty ago it still looked and smelled OK, modern, kind of!

The industrial revolution, I am sorry to announce this miserable fact, has not gone far! Technically we live in medieval times, horse around in full body armours and fight for a king. The streets still smell sickening, but because of different reasons. Does it matter? The only true advancement created by the industrial revolution is the introduction of each person with the rest of the world. Thanks to the dynamics of capitalism we get informed about its downside. Thanks to Hollywood we can watch (live!) how the US is slowly loosing it The pillars are crumbling of a whole mindset! So far has the industrial age brought us. To know! Thanks for that!

However, what is knowledge exactly meant FOR? Is it not rather a precondition to act in an informed way, than a final value in itself? Is freedom already freedom, when it just exists as a possibility? Is a tomato a tomato, when you just have a seed? Try make a soup out of it, and you will know!

Others complain the industrial revolution has not gone far enough! Some are sincere believers in a positive outcome of a further teknification of our daily lives, some are not, but salesman, working for the king. The first goggle monitors are on the market, so the day is near, when we all walk around with google goggles. See flagged people in the bus station, with messages swirling around their heads. Looking for a one night stand! Or Leave me alone, fuckers!

This will be a new option, soon available in a shop near you! This is, what we dream about! Killer aps, which tint the buildings green and pink and the cars orange or blue, depending our individual tastes. Bunte neue Welt! Why not? For a year maybe, or a day in live But despite opening again new vessels for creativity, creating some jobs for a season or two, all this is complete rubbish! Latest when the next model comes on the socalled market, which has as much to do with a real market, as an open fireplace has with a nuclear reactor.

Or are we on the completely wrong branch? Some might say, fear in their eyes. This are the ultimate questions nowadays, twittered about on the human tree of possibilities, by more and more color thirsty birds. We still cannot fly without help, but we can still ACT and CREATE without help. All we have to know, we learn in the shortest time, if we see the need in it. The only problem remaining is that seemingly simple things are vastly complicated for people trained in solving only complicated tasks! Simplicity is not an included freebie, when you have did all your degrees. Its a quality by itself, rarely considered in days as we know them.

It is one thing, to have the right of free speech, but a completely different affair, when it is about free act! People nowadays have problems in understanding this evaluation, but in the time of James Watt, anyone would have understood. Although many things this people did had a purpose, all were ACTS, deliberately done, mostly out of own judgment. Then something else crept in, slowly in form of innocent garment factories: the REaction. The mode, where somebody I do not know will take care of me, when I subject myself to his demands. Etc.

Respectively Electricity, Technique, Computer. Bang! That is it, dear recent followers of the famous industrial revolution - which right now gets into a trap, big time!

The trap

The trap is the crisis of lack of content for the millions of drawers, vessels, niches we have created a couple offshoots further away on the weapon branch of our human existence. All this traps, vessels, drawers are well connected, they constantly communicate with each other about their contents. However, they never MIX! Yes, they DO mix, in a pre arranged, utilitarian way, become products we ought to buy, but stay essentially the same, as they were before the inclusion into the progressing net. Weather the net brings together people, or separates people, is a question which time will answer. At this point it seems to be both. Means, it could get worse!

Of course, it would create a big bang, if we would return to the tangible world. After having spent a billion man-years behind screens, describing this world in its entirety, latest since Google etc., to look up again to the 99% reality and ask, what has changed?

I dare to ask: WHAT CHANGED? Changed since, or even more pointed as a question, BECAUSE of the net. I see the same old world when I walk my extra miles. The same old sky scrapers here in Cochin, as in New York a hundred years ago. The same old stinky, oversize cars, as in Berlin in 1912. The same ceiling fans like in old movies. The same silk shawls, the women wear, only that they are synthetic now (they THINK, they live their traditions).

I leave it to your own observations to discover, how completely retarded our (human) world looks these days, dear reader! Take off all your goggles and you follow my thoughts. I will not try to sell you something, just tell you about possibilities, possibilities to ACT, the by far least used mode of being this days. Nothing more I will cover in this wild essay, no fake sugar, no gods, not even fake ones!

Getting out of the trap

Getting out of the trap is not easy, but why should it? What is safety? - is a question, long time not examined. We speak like ants in a hive speak. While the river rises. About babys. About our kids. About Mickey Mouse. We want our kids to keep our course of life, how it has always been done. This makes total sense in a sustainable ant hive, in human evolution maybe up to the middle ages. But somehow it is nonsense, since we have equipped our ants with mobile phones. Them telling us, that the river is rising.

The river of goods, which has risen to the point of latent boredom, but still mildly camouflaged by glimmer and hope for a quich thrill. The longer the more it is only about keeping the ants interested in buying little antbeds and antpillows. Antcurtains, so they can hide from the other ants. All that. Toys, so the antbabys stay happy and later make sure, great aunt ants and great grand old ants had their toys to play with. I see them already marching over the horizon of time. Old time netters sit in wheelchairs in front of their monitors, scratch their buts and hide behind the same curtains (100% Polyester), in the same old, naked, grey high risers. Never in closer distance to each other than being together in the elevator, but there of course staring in a monitor, to monitor something.

Thats the monitor generation. Thats us! Thats a bunch of idiots, which have overseen the obvious, that by monitoring, we will lose

the sense of ACTING. ACTING OUT! Being, in one simple word. Which not conceivably can be a the case, if you just WATCH. Or just LISTEN!

There is no obligation to act! And there is no obligation of leaving a trap But there should be a grain of understanding, that this will be done by some. Done, even by people close from us, not only by movie stars and bankers on monitors. Our modern time floods us with arguments, why new ways have to be explored, new ways in our 3 dimensional world, I add, for clarity. But we

oversee this arguments, ignore them, think they are just passing clouds.

In our two-dimensional world - the computer in particular (which of course has also a huge, but slightly hidden 3 dimensional impact) - in THIS world I would not hesitate one millisecond to say, that a need of newness is not so absolutely tantamount. Everything is still so fresh, we have not even scratched the surface of what is already there. We use ten percent of our brain to play with a billionth of a general idea, the World Wide Web, which measures another billionth of inherent possibilities in breath, and a quadruple Quintillion Gigabites in already available storable niches, most of them free for the taker. The complete vacuum! Every dust particle gets sucked in through the smallest hole. The internet is boundless already! So why expand the boundries?

The boundries I have crossed so many, yet, I have never SEEN one! What I want to say, is, you only know something, when you are there. You only know a person, when you can look in his or her eyes; you only know a bed, when you have slept in it. This holds true in one way or another for all that is tangible. Tangibility has the negative connotation, that it wants to belong to someone, that it raises the question of ownership. This seems not to be the case with internet. It is a decoupling devise between appearance and matter. It does not matter, if you lose your laptop peanuts because the internet, the big magic flatness, will still be there, when you bought your new computer with twice the brainpower for half the price. I counted it down and came out with about

2018, when insanely advanced computers should come for free with a Macsuperwhooperfancyburger for the whole family, plus French fries and coke!

So far, so good. Great show, Silicon Valley and Hollywood! But whats next? I sincerely beg for an answer! What is next, when a billion people wake up from their face book coma and/or just puked their guts out because of food poisoning? In short words: Realize, that they are people, not just users, human beings, not just consumers, mindfull homo sapiens, not ants, bits, bytes or burgers. I suppose, a certain emptiness would engulf our lives when we fully apprehend, how the world minutes ago seemed to be in such an obvious progress But all the sudden, with the flick of a switch, long gone darkness or grayness would roam the streets. And an almost deadly veil of NON-action would rule the world as never before. That would be boring! And entirely dangerous maybe the less of both evils.

Back to the tree of human abilities, the core trunk on what we dwell. A different branch, than the technical, industrial, military, is the branch of arts. It looks a bit neglected this days, it seems, a mix of too many ingredients maybe, of which even the most recently added taste stale. A few fat fruits of art on some thinner branches, but endless rows of brittle grows, if any, along most of this branch. No juicy fruits, rarely some blossoms, except in street art and graffiti maybe. But that fruit is forbidden, as we all know it, or at the most scarcely accepted in some rare places, like the north pole...

Not much ACT this days, on the formerly busy and thriving branch of art. A branch, so low connected to the trunk of human abilities, that it can almost be seen as the start of them, as the start of US, as we know us: As acting, not just talking doers of the best (or worst) kind, evolution could possibly have come up with. A rare kind Tinkerers turned geniuses. Till Internet came

Slowly but surely, we have our heads turned by external forces, so that when and whatever we plan, we already have the net in mind. If you act, act in front of others! The net seems to tell us. In front of us ALL! Therefore, the focus turned away from actual acting to foreseeable hindsight considerations about the networthiness of our planed actions. We try to comprehend our past from the future and by this look at our selves through the lens of the imagined, but in reality ignorant net. Through the eyes of others.

If this is a good recipe for exploring yourself, I doubt! Again, there is no obligation to explore yourself, but it should be allowed. There are many ways to find out, one of them is acting, yes, DOING what you want, and then look at the results! And again, every compatriot of James Watt would have understood this notion, but not many now. What you mean with results, bradda? The ticket, because of speeding?

We have lost our most basic approaches to acting, since everything we do is REACTING to demands, followed by RECREATION, whatever that is. I doubt at James Watts times anyone would have understood the word recreation. Creation, yes, but re.? So, its one of this giant words, which hang like stones on the human tree, hindering it to grow.

Or is it a necessary branch, this re-cre-ation?

Yes, sure, there is time needed to completely wind down, unplug, reset. But are we doing THIS while monitoring the news of the world or play the world of warcraft? Sure NOT! Contrary, it sucks us into a void, into a vacuum. With the only clear intent, that by navigating through your normal live, more wolfs can be legally chased after you, to lighten your carriage by a couple gold coins at least. Legally, so no one will pay attention, when you scream: I was robbed! So you will not scream, but stay put in your line of duty, mercenary of the big machine, and rather dream, then scream.

Wake up from the promised dream of the net, get up from being hooked to your cables and start to use your logic, your built-in internet between your own faculties of judgment, what needs to be done, and what not! It is easy to gain free speech look at the Arabian spring but free ACT is hard as bone to achieve! Again, look at North Africa, wait a while, and you will understand, what I mean! Never forget, what the trigger was: A well educated young man, with university degree, who did not find ANY job in his country Tunesia. So he decided to sell fruits on a market, which he was not given permission to do, since the proper license was only given to old timers, guys with foot long beards, selling fruits since the beginning of time. So he burned himself.

Now, more than a year later, his almost messianic death has created widespread revolutions, which are still spreading. Great! The first genuine revolution for the freedom to sell fruits on markets! Or was it about something else? I can already assure you, dear hopeful revolutionary in the still cozy off of our nicely organized Western countries, that THIS right is still as far away from here, as anything imaginable. The right to sell your fruits, or any other produce or products you erroneously considered your right to fabricate with the intent to sell, is still a NONO! Is still TABU! Of course you can SAY whatever you want! But if you enter the restricted area of selfmade, selfsold ANYTHING, in any tangible, roomtaking way not via virtual presence on ebay you gonna enter the most unlevel playfield you can think of! You gonna eat SHIT, my friend! If you dare to try, if you think, that attached to the general right to BUY everything as long as you have money or credit that counteracting to THIS freedom, you should have also the right to SELL. Forget it! Being a Swiss Citizen, being an artist in a country, where the free market

plays haywire, I will have to dig myself through endless obligations and restrictions, till I can set up a table, 60 cm in length and 30 wide. Not even in a forest they would let me do that And anywhere close to a large enough population of possible clients, only on very rare occasions, like on century old fairs, markets, or a whine degustation, so the drunkards have something to tickle their senses. Otherwise? Forget it! Or lend half a million from a bank, open a shop with a ten year plan and try to survive the first ten month. Chased by the kings hyenas on a monthly basis, just because you need in fact not even as much space as a car does - but have to rent a whole suite in a castle.

OK, here we go! In a completely bloodless, boring future, since not only the means of production have been taken away from us, essentially the knowledge of SIMPLE production of ANYTHING simple in the way, that it is doable in small quantities, but great diversity no, also the very space to expose this has completely been, turned in parking lots, in most cases.

The problem is, that maybe the stages, on which we might have to act, should this become necessary because of a system failure, or just for the fun of becoming self-employed, has been withdrawn in the limelight of a prosperous time. Beginning with the onset of the industrial revolution, we have progressively been delearned to run our own affairs, but this was quickly furthered by the advent of the computer, another tool. An absolutely useful tool! But way overrated as kingpin of a new possible age, which does NOT fool itself into believing, the computer might be a means of itself... The computer and especially the internet are more a capping of the past, than a useful guidance into the future. An almost final conclusion of all the elaborate discoveries

of technical possibilities, Mesdames et Messieurs, where we enshrine all that has been done, all that has been found out, said, and even sung. A highly complex class picture of sorts, at the end of a rather bizarre and towards the end ridiculously wasteful age. Not much more, I am not afraid to say, but with the inclusion, that it highly entertains me when I am bored, which happens here and then. A couple million bells and whistles, with which to play, but in the end nothing more than a square picture in the size of a Kodak family portrait from about 1875, mounted on a black box. And a whole global structure behind, which does the rest Plays movies on our funny handheld cinemascope, or tells us what to do, as long as we know nothing better to do. Kicking a can down the road in a highly advanced manner, till the next turn off. I have serious doubts this will suffice to keep many human generations fascinated, fed, clothed, roofed, as happy campers on planet earth. SERIOUS doubts!

Let us look at human society from a distanced perspective, like a first time visitor on this planet. Latest now you will notice: this planet is occupied by antlike occupiers, which seem to be happy, well fed and clothed in a few places, but quite the opposite in most others. This places exist very near to each other, in all nations. Another thing you might notice is the wonderful nature of this planet, its wonderful living life. Live, wonder, color, which is obviously, even looking from afar, in danger of being destroyed or diminished to a fraction in about a historic second. If necessary, take your binoculars out and look from afar, but VERY CLOSE! You will find out, what REALLY happens, if you also observe a large enough time span, like one generation of human beings. Only that relative instant in universal time dimension should tell you enough of our progress towards an uprooted, burnt, exhausted environment. The world future generations will

face - together with a rapidly shrinking diversity of non-human companions.

So far so bad. The real world, not the net NOT the technical world! Looking still from afar - means looking in a very broad sense - you can easily see that machines are doing VERY WELL! They are the TRUE winners! At least THAT, purebred cynics might add

So what can we do to bring all that in a kind of bearable balance again? I am not talking about instant perfect harmony, since that never existed before anyway. However our climate might change (it might even change in a favorable way), the big question

remains. No, gets more urgent every day! How do we achieve a betterment of OUR OWN human condition? Since striving for a GENERAL betterment can only be the result of many, who have found an answer for themselves already? And LIVE it! This is a VERY important point!

Yes, HOW?

First of all, there are many, who live decent lives, close to the thinkable ideal for our kind. To hope for more, much more, is nonsense! The quota should be, according to a revised version of utilitarianism, how much happy for how much oil? So Kants slogan, that each one of us has to live in a way, that all of us could live - could also be revised and the future included, what never hurts! To live in a way, that permits future. Or in stronger words: To live in a way, that the future not only looks back at us, as THE party-poopers of the big human party. A grand party never ever seen before, which only really does fun - according to utilitarianism too - when it never ends!

Great! So we are in deep shit, Mesdames et Messieurs! La grand merde! Rien de rien! And while revolutions spark like party lights on our free falling planet its normal course, dont worry the very economies of countries close by, look like a team of cross country motor bikers, stuck in a mud hole, with whining motors and screeching tires and smoking exhausts. Something is wrong these days, my friend Steven Tyler usually sings, but nobody knows, what it is!

Let me guess anyway, Steven! Just the obvious. We have lost our senses for the obvious, the simple, the direct, the instant we live in. Ours is only the past What we make out of. How we present it. I love your autobiographie, Stefen! I can see, you have not completely lost your grip

The present, the precious ten second split of the KNOW, is tremendously important. At least to employers, while they employ. A more relaxed homo sapiens might not even be so present in the present, but rather dream gaze in the past and the future. Since he has no machine to control, nor to watch at a monitor, this relaxed person will not need so much the constant influx of the present. The all so spoken for, valued present. In reality, I dare to tease, a hole in wall, through which we peek, like monkeys under a cardboard box, constantly looking for bananas on the ground. We are NOT humans, because we have this outstanding ability to concentrate on the present every mouse is better at that - but DESPITE having to live in the present! Having to stare out of that hole, day out, day in. If anything makes us wonderfull, its because of our memories, our harddrives. As well as our ability to project our attention towards the future. And therefore to combine this! And therefore have a whole internet going on in our brains, with data speeds far higher, and therefore really cool for gaming! Only the software is right now a bit one-sided The input we get, the illusions, which are held up in front of our two built in cameras, the beautiful world in Disneyland, or the latest bomb blast in Bagdad. The whole stream of pictures, words and together symbols, which brakes on our foreheads like Mother Ocean in Hawaii, is hard to wash out of the eyes, in less than a day. Therefore, our peeringout-of-the-cardboard-box-jobs rarely leave us run wild for more

than that one-day necessary, to tune back into something. Anything! Isnt that saaaad?

Sad is, that have to work, to buy things, we dont want. I know, this sounds over stated, but is the complete truth, if the gates of a truly free market SOCIETY (this is very important) open, the tinkerers start to tinker again, the shoemakers are making shoes again, the farmers sell their produce and we know, where they come from and the mobil phone factories would idly ticking along and stay somehow committed by what was on the market in 2012. And just repeat themselves till we are idiots or gone! I have absolutely no further wishes towards your walkie-talkies Mr. Jobs! Your ingenuity be blessed, and rest in peace!

And I have heard enough about the universe, Mister Von Braun, Mister Newton. Was nice talking to you! Helped me shape my understanding, that essentially we are a rare exception in a vast vacuum. How dense or undense this vacuum is? Sorry, I have something to DO! Riding this blue cannonball through a galaxy, being a proud inhabitant of the wide open space, running a small art business, so I can play monkey - but more often sail around, watch at the starry sky as a piece of art, the ocean waves as well. Be human in knowing, that I DO know nothing. Be it with the net. Or without.

So it all boils down to me as utilitarianism, or better say functionalism, but where the form is kept intact as a GOOD form. Good is enough! Now lets examine our forms Bloody hell! We seem to transform even our living units into command centers of intergalactic battleships. Well hidden behind fake woodpanels, or

condensed into a smart phone. We use tanks to go to work, where the command centers really are. Or at least the outlaying nipples of this ever more hungry biest, called economy, capitalism, you name it yourself! The one system we are thinking to be part of, but in fact has no more sympathy for us, as a lion has towards a gnu. We used to be added to this system with the sole purpose to work. This were the good times! The sole porpose now is to shop. To shop till you drop dead. However you get your bucks together, thats entirely up to your cleverness, bra! Its no more the working, which makes us us, but the shopping. Since it doesnt need workers anymore! Nothing new, I now, but not THAT old neither, I might add! So is in the end Karl Marx right, in his a century and a half ago prediction, that capitalism will meets its makers because of overproduction, unbearable overproduction? I see more than a grain of truth in that, but even this I see with a tear in my eyes! I just LOVE shopping, am a heavy materialistic person, would love to collect whole garbage dumps, since I think they are the shopping malls of the future. They will not stay free much longer, I fear

But we have a problem with art. At the very core of our being human. All this electric zoo we have surrounded us with with a couple exceptions arent they just great? Great little animals, showing us pictures and letting us talk to them or bake our breads or light our rooms. No doubt about, we really scored high on the ladder of possible innovations! But we have a problem with art. This long neglected wish in us, to be awed, not just entertained. It came up, big time, like a fire bursting through the roof, blasting all walls away, a mere hundred years ago. And what we see now is the aftermath. A still slightly glimmering fire, but close to the end, in every sense of this word.

It is not, that there is a lack of artists, of high priests of the symbols, but a lack of understanding of the basic principle of these symbols. That art, since becoming mans first guide in leaving the kingdom of animals, that art has always to bow to esthetic supervision. A much-dared statement this days, I know, therefore I repeat: Art without a grain of beauty might be anything including a political statement but it is NOT art!

Of this particular NON-art we have amassed shiploads and it is clogging our cellars, our markets, our galleries. The whole concept of letting artists cut back their statements behind the threshold of an esthetic base line is fooling the core value of art, is trash! It is worse than sex without orgasm! It is the emperors new cloth, newly spun out of the old new cloth of deceit Daily seen on walls of modern art galleries, museums and banks, finely tuned to their very concept of money.

So, not surprisingly, we, the 99% of the people, face economic problems of tremendous, never seen proportions - although they might only become tangibly clear to a minority of us. Often artists. But arent we ALL artists? Sooner or later in live? The big nasty problem lays in a combined devaluation of our products we can shop, and the means of exchange, to acquire what we buy, the money. Both hold each others brittle hands and steer towards the gates of hell. In the big economical downturn of the past, when money devaluated on a rapid pace, at least the

products kept guard, from becoming devaluated. Only because of that, they got more and more expensive. Not like today, it seems to me. Both go down in unison. Not inflation is the risk anymore, but deflation of all there is, besides dentist bills and taxes, if you belong to the majority of underclass in the making. Good morning America! Bonjour Paris! Buona notte Rom! Another empire in the offing.

So we have to do what now? I ask and beg for an answer to this question in all sincerity and seriousness, a 56-year-old European with two kids (11&15) can ask. I ask Mister Barosso and Missis Merkel! Spend LESS money, pay more taxes, work harder and consume MORE? So that this Leviathan, which has just shot in three of his four feet, gets up and going again? The almost deadly sick economy? How should that go, without helicopter money? Or brain teasing ourselves on a flat earth?

This aint not work Mister Barosso! You cant convince me of the end of a time of reason. We might be at the verge of other times, we definitely are at the end of Mickey Mouse and many other times, but NOT at the end of the times of reason, my lord! Contrary, logic has again to trickle down into our distorted views about many things especially money. And where it comes from. And where it goes. All that! So, that we are no more - when it comes to money - about as knowledgeable, as a 4 year old is, about the whereabouts of his own existence. If we already define ourselves through money, lets talk about it to the END! Or are there any secrets, we ought better not to know? Any skeletons in the coffers of modern money making?

However! I am here in India, as I said, and seems quite funny to me, how also here the product world is tending to the banal, therefore to the cheaper and cheaper, but their MONEY is still real! It hangs around their necks, they wear it on their fingers and around their arms. Women, children and men alike. A truly wealthy nation, just recently gotten much richer, through the increase in gold prices.

And US? Void of all TRUE wealth, which can only be things in limited supply, are betting on brands, until they are copied and their meaning gets lost. But simultaneously we have omitted any ideas of blingbling values with which we can still be wealthy. We have no comparable values, against which we can judge our shopping decisions. We go shopping with bubble money on plastic chips and return home with bubble food in plastic or the newest new piece of fashion, which looks 0,1% different from what we were wearing before. We trade black jackets for jackets with a different black. We are hooked in a time, which was right at the time, but which is not right anymore! We are highly retarded in our looks, since we have no choice. We are offered only one color, but in a million different hues. And we can only pay in one currency, but in a million different shops. Which are in the hands of ten thousand, if I might add, in a rather subdued muffled laughter about this overstatement.

Come here to India, or go anywhere out in the world, where prosperity is not generally achieved yet, and the relation would be different. Here are a million shops, owned and run by hundreds of thousands. Oh, we are OVER that, Mister Barosso? Dont need THAT kind of freedom anymore? Only suffice

ourselves with being in the reigns of functioning corporations, whose boss we never go to eat with? Rrreally?

Well, so whats about spain? I remember the skillfully made leather jacket I bought in Barcelona in about 72. It lasted till about 85, when it disappeared on a sailing trip. I even remember the guy selling it. He had a mustache like Dali and a cute daughter helping him, since everything they sold, they had done themselves. The whole family was present. It was a happy tent full of funny stuff, more or less useful, but fantastically made, piece-by-piece.

Where are they gone? The craftsmen, the artists. When will they come back? Return from their misguided jobs as clerks, working for capitalism which never will fail, by the way, because it is TOO GOOD to fail - and become what rightfully exists in every stratum of people, the masters of the symbols as Paul Gauguin was a good example for, but every shoemaker is, in essence. Especially in times like ours! Where everything seems to be based on symbols, more than functionality. From status symbols to street signs and icons on the monitors, we are all but functioning by a set of symbols!

In that way, dear people of deep inner reflection, our great mistake might be to ask for more spiritual insight. Since exactly that not only leads us into deeper insulation (which might FEEL right), but also keeps us ignorant towards the outside, the tangible, materialistic, positivistic world. Logic, practical senses, down to earth approaches have never been as absent as now! La grand complication is the name of an extremely expensive Swiss

watch. But it is a good description of our times, as well! While anything goes, NOTHING goes, respectively is linked to a big complication. While you can publicly and freely talk about postnatal abortion (infacide, baby murder), including the ethic considerations if this might be rightfully done by parents, you still will run in big complications, if you want to sell fruits on the market, after having a degree in philosophy. Why that, Angela Merkel? Why that, my dear philosophers?

So how we get out of this mud hole? I frankly dont know! But still keep digging in it, to see, if there might be firm ground under it, something we have overseen, since a generation or two.

Where did all this penny pincherism came from? This notion, that the cheap will pull us up. The 99-centism? I hoped it will be over by the turn of the century. How wrong I was! It has become a joy of almost sexual proportion, to go for ever cheaper prices. We thought we only shoot in the feet of others, but in the end they will be ours! It is wildly hypothetical, if a nation, a culture, a people can just give up being tangibly productive. And retreat in the offices, to remote control people behind many horizons. Doing for us, what seems the only real things there are. Our empire of goods. The very core of what makes us proud. All our belongings, including the cases, we store them in. If houses could be built in China and helicopter lifted onto our lots, we would do so! But I doubt, many houses would be ordered right know Even for 99999 pounds, free of port. London, Barcelona, wherever.

So the whole house building frenzy has come to a sudden stop, I hear on BBC. You name it WHERE! It just didnt work like this.

Den letzten beissen die Hunde, we say in German. You should understand this, Mister Barosso! So why you did not wake up earlier, had your analysts walk an extra 500 miles, to see this coming? Was it so difficult to see ahead? I dont believe so!

As a result, the last tribe of craftsmen, mostly men, I might add, the house builders, the carpenters, the oven builders are out of work too, now After all the jewellery makers, T-shirt painters, beadstead makers, curtain weavers, have been put asleep. Turned into carboardboxkeepers. Highly concentrated in the here and know here being the whole world with no time left, to wander off in the past, or storm ahead in the future. With no time left. Period! So that tuned with eyes on monitors all day long, also the evenings will be spent by monitoring. Flooding our receptors with input, while slowly muffling out our voices, with which we used to speak out loud, when something got wild. Or the core values became wildly hypothetical. Should there be more than one!

No doubt, it speaks to me, when I open my eyes in a forest. Early in the morning, before the mist settles, but after the sun already came up. The only absolute is natur itself, but the only relative, is the planet we live on. We cannot deny the inherent beauty of any segment of nature, but we can change the value, we give our own bloody world. We can bargain about her, yes we can! She became a small little entity, compared to our weapons of mass extinction. Mickey Mouse is REALLY over, Mister Obama, even in your skies! Thanks for having brought man on the moon, dear Americans. We really enjoyed it! Wozz next, bradda? I know, you see us in Europe, riding out our storms of money, but dont worry, we see you too! And all your artists, the masters of

symbols, the once walking ahead of every new train to come. Or to go. We dont see you going right know, dear American artists, crafts people and makers, tinkerers and self inventors. Whozz UP, dudes? Long time no see! Anything NEW on the horizon, in Santa Barbara? Any new bangles or earrings, which look not like million others, sold up and down the Costa Brava, almost like spare parts for motors, like washers and nuts in five standard looks and starting at 99 cents. Oh my god, how deep is this trap? This trap of believing, we can source out our sources. How could we? For the simplest things to let others be in charge, respectively believe, they are the simplest of things, since we do not see them made anymore. A sad sad facet of our modern times. It is getting hard to see anyone WORK! Its a thing which is be done behind curtains this days. If anyone would like to find out, what kind of work he or she would want to do one day, it would be hard to find living proofs for any kind of craftsmanship, but relatively easy, to watch a million people press buttons from the first hour of their work, till they go in pension. Or get laid off. And told, that selling bananas requires a permission and involves external costs, which will be sucked out of you, poor human, for the sake of the order. The order of truth, faireness and free market.

So far, so bad. We need jobs, because we are sucked empty every day, but we dont get them, because the suckers have set up this trap of supposedly wise division between work and home, between producing countries and consuming countries. La grand complication! We cannot let these erroneously called markets be without competition, dear friends! This would be foolish! We do not have to find our place in a virtual sphere, but have to turn business man and business women. Foremost, I might add, but maybe in a vastly different way, as times tell me. Who says, a businessperson only has to care for MONEY? It is all, what we

were before, that should count towards our business behavior, maybe the most unfriendly of our human skills. Yet, necessary like long ago already, as a livelong game for goods. Instead of war. The best compromise between never achievable world peace and going back to the caves in a couple generations, because of the big one. How could a government, based on the order of a free market, deny a craftsman the least bit to set up camp on parking lot? I dont see any reason, why it should be allowed, to park my truck, but forbidden to SELL (my) products on that same space. Do that, try that out on a Wall Mart parking and you can be lucky, if you are not walking away handcuffed within two cigarettes length.

Interesting

Part 2 Look closer!

Having so described some obstacles which are in my opinion in our way of a really free market society, which should go hand in hand with our freedom of speech to contribute not only verbally to our societies, but also substantially in form of products let me explore into the rainbow of opportunities to overcome this. These boring times, where ourselves, our entire human existence, is run by the dictate of an economy of specialization. While this one sided approach might be necessary to produce networks the veins it is not necessary for all, like the blood itself it carries. This redness in us all, this urgent desire for colors and form. This forms of human output, which can be done in the

simplest, almost uneducated ways. Like forks or spoons, carpets or bedsteads, cups and jewellery, wallpaper and hammocks, garden sheds and wheelbarrows, yellow ceiling fans and blue writing desks, green cucumber and red ink.

Of course, all this mentioned products and produce can only be produced with SKILLS. But maybe NOT skills, which you need to study in Berkley, but on the road, while you walk through life, by some friends is perfectly enough.

There is a grain of truth in the capitalistic logic, when countries are asked for their contribution of what they can do best to the world market and buy ALL THE REST from outside. Well, that is the rest of the bag of slightly rotten grains. Poisonous already in the fact, that they have to be transported. Which for say jewellery would not be a catastrophe, since the fuel involved to get it around the world, would not be very substantial. It can be very well carried on foot. But bringing just a bed, one single bed, from Siberia to London is a task of gigantic proportion. By the development of trucks etc. it does not SEEM like this, but on a technical and substantial level it is. The bed we spend our nights in are a child of the thought, that every region should supply what it can do best or have the substances to run this worldwide economy. La grande complication! Looks good on a screen, but somehow lame in reality.

So like the world at large, ourselves too have become hesitant to keep contributing our other faculties towards society. Our many other talents, which by the flick of a finger can turn into skills, products, businesses. It is not true, that we are all artists only,

but also, we are all crafts people, every man a carpenter, every women a dress maker and we are all gardeners, we are all patrons of garden cafes, we are ice cream makers, toymakers, shoemakers.

So why can we not be all that?

Because we are told, that we are sheer amateurs, that we know nothing. And we are told, that a bed has to have perfectly straight edges, and every crafts man gets measured out, if he or she can achieve the precision of the competing machines. The machines, as a kind of road show, have right now the upper hand when it comes to employment, because we hold fast to this outdated model of esthetic. A model, which is purported as the essence, what clear minded, logic society MUST come up with: Minimalism. The end of the road of the art of living. We are almost there.

Minimalism, as cool as it looks, is in same time the counter concept of all dreams. You do not wake up inspired after a minimalistic dream, but after one full of form and color. Our dream world is based on our real world and our real world is at least in part result of our dreams. Monitors feed our dreams, by stories remote from our own lives. It is OK to live the dream of others, but there should be more to it! Yourself, your friends, your own identity. Only in comparing both, your dreams are healthy and you are not constantly chased by dragons or machines while you sleep. Rather we should dream DOING, so that we CAN do, when reality calls for action.

So, when we are barely functioning in our specialized doing, but are nothing but consumers in every other aspect of our highly materialistic ways, we are taking ourselves not serious, all the other faculties, in which we could participate in the concrete forming of our world.

Our world always and forever is a regional, familiar, observable world, however long we stretch our periscopes out into the larger world. Instead of the moment, which counts, it may be the place, which counts. Instead of the moment, it is the movement

The movement is the river of changes, which engulfs our small little worlds. In the absence of change, it is a lake, but only few people still live in lakes of time, in still corners, where the movement has not torn away layer by layer of the past. And replaced with a supermarket, in essence. While I do not believe in superman, I believe in market!

Markets are about as old as humanity, but became something so remote from the mark, which was a defined AREA it seems like a rocket was attached to the whole idea of market. Its boosters shed, the second and third thrusters burnt out, right now flying through empty space with about twenty times the speed of sound. Little side rockets are lit, to correct the course, but otherwise we seem helplessly convicted to witness the reentry of our colossal economy into the atmosphere of reality.

But are we so helpless?

I have just read a lengthy article in the New York Times, asking the question, why all consumer electronic comes from China, especially Apple products. And why it is not made in the US. Supposedly, it has to do with the lack of mid level educated technical staff. Who do not revolt by sleeping in dormitories and being woken up in the night, to kick start a new line of products.

This, in essence, is blamed for high unemployment, slow economy, overworked people in our Western countries. Why?

Because we gave up forming our world and see jobs only possible in complex structures. Any father advising his son to become a shoemaker would be ridiculous in modern countries. Nothing we

wear, or walk in, nothing we cook in, nothing we cook or eat, nothing we spend our days or nights in was made by anyone we would know, most would have been brought from far away factories by trucks, ships and airplanes, machines we do not understand, and of course by leaving massive trails of garbage and destruction.

In this new world order, or better say world chaos, feeling secure is not easy. It partially is UNsecure, because every person participates in omitting as many jobs as possible, by choosing always the cheapest product. This is nothing new, but becomes serious for everyone minus one percent, when there are no new markets left, to expand the production. Even niches on this planet get stuck in global business thinking.

So all the talk talk in concerned media is about businesses making high tech products, of course. Of course? WHY?

At the end of the day it does not mean anything, HOW money is generated. This could especially said nowadays. We could run a jewellery based economy, a kava based, a tree based, an artist based. Economy is the creation of value. Value CAN be an Iphone, but it not necessarily has to be. We are advised right now, this to be the hip thing, but while texting on them, the devises, we do not feel, how our old carpets get pulled away from under us. Our whole fabric of threads, which connected us once to our places, to our tribes. All the inter weaving of meaning and back ground has vanished in the concrete world around us. Anatomically studied, a modern appartement is a belly full of meaningless garbage, hard to digest products of a global

structure, which is as alien, as no other structure ever developed. While no more able to find meaning in life since Sartre, which is fully understandable, we unfortunally also packed away any meaning in our products, anything magic, or believed magic, anything heart touching, besides the price. We have hung up all conversation with our past. Up to the time gap between the production of something, until having it in our hands. This three month, or whatever, we give a shit for. The dark little cloud coming out of the chimneys in far away valleys. The cloud, especially for us.

This means, we live in a totally disconnected time, despite the belief in the contrary. We might be highly connected with the present, but cannot afford to study the past anymore. The past has always to be seen in the light of the present. The present always changes. So also the past changes. As much as Europe needed the Renaissance, we need a Renaissance of even bigger dimension now! But what needs to be reborn, is maybe not (only) the wisdom of the old greek, but of all other insular cultures. Why insular cultures? Because we live on an island! What else?

Insular cultures.

There are so many, as there are islands. But there are NEW islands forming also, islands of PEOPLE, forming far out in the sea of the internet their platforms of ideas. Mostly ideas.

So we have ideas without tangible relevance, except in a PURELY tangible way by ordering something at ebay. On the other end

of the scale we have the shops, the malls, the great wall of boxes full with ONLY tangible, three dimensional creations, but void of any idea. Lacking the breath of person behind, who turns the whole shopping experience into an encounter with a stranger. So we are guided by our angles, while we shop, but our social contact ability would only be used online, monitoring, or being monitored. In a highly sharp and supposedly realistic way, which should be open for debate

So We live in the three worlds. The always same three dimensions, which we basically stopped observing much, the clickable two dimensions, which are quite hip right now and make nice night lights and lets not forget the first dimension, money and time. This could be called the chief dimension, but it would be a mistake. Its just one, of three evenly important - at least!

So we, the artists and craftspeople of this lucky planet, should have our Renaissance. It does not matter, if money comes from the 37th generation of a communication device, or from the 370th Generation of carpet weaving. With the last generation being still around

We live in the very fortunate time, where the presence of the past is still alive! Through internet we have access to more craft techniques than ever before. No craftsman, doing things with his hands and simple tools, had as much possibilities of KNOWLEDGE and GENIOUS simple tools, which get produced by machines of course, but no problem with that. It is not about bringing down the stream of advanced products, but to compliment this stream, with a river of creativity. How else, besides with more wars, can

we get going again towards a healthy economy, if not with healthy products of any sort?

But healthy alone is not enough. Making money is not enough. It needs art! It needs art more than ever before, to counter balance a world of machines. They need to be put under scrutiny in an almost darwinistic way. But WE cannot just do this This is a process, something like the Nurnberg trials, but against technologies. And in slow motion. No rush! Is still the mother of evolution.

So it needs art, which is dead right now, to be born again! My god of art! What a quest! What a question?

Art, like working, is too new of a word to be taken too serious! Art, in the best sense, is the art of LIVING. And this in a concrete sense, is about WHERE you live. Here in India, hundred meters difference can make a beggar out of a millionaire. Our whole life is about WHERE we are WHEN.

Having not full control over that, one can only improve the inevitable private space, the nutshell of our selves. But being hunters in modern life, we only use our spaces like retreats from the hunt. We are either ready to move on anytime or we are called stuck, while we hunt to feed our hungry houses. There are no non hunters around anymore, not many at least.

So we should (ugly three words) INVITE us again into a different concept of life, without turning couch potato in front of a monitor. We need to lure ourselves back in a more meaningful environment, which can only mean, that we understand this environment better. As I pointed out, the opposite is our situation now. We might have been unaware about the details of our belongings in earlier times, but we knew their most striking qualities, one being, where they are from. Now we know all the fine print, all the molecular structures, all the wonders, one might even feel, but we have regrettably given away every curiosity in us, about the background story of any thing we buy, since a thing in its existence, is not worth being hinterfragt. Asked behind Besides, that no one gives an answer on that, while you push your cart along the aisles, you are also detrained from this kind of thinking. As long as transport is guaranteed we would sell the whole world for a trillion rupees in a kiosk on mars. Or not even trade it for our carpets What is value? Money? Sure! But WHAT kind of money is a bigger than ever question. Euros might not be enough to keep Europeans happy!

So it needs artists to redefine value, since REAL value does only exist in the mind. Artists and craft people giving this boring product time the long due overhaul. Doing this on markets, which might have the size of whole parking lots, something interesting will happen. The trade between them. The exchange of relatively RARE goods, since if they are not rare, it would not create the demand in a more individualistic time, where also products become individualistic. Isnt it funny, how our seemingly individualistic time lacks individual products, made by individuals? Individualism is externally not much more than the mix of a narrow selection of branded products on human models. And the only TRUE reason for this, is supposedly the unwillingness of

the beloved customers to pay a bit more. This, their will in mind, professional buyers fly all over the planet to buy the dullest, un-individualistic products there are but with important labels on them and as cheap as shit! In this doublepronged approach, nothing ever gets debated, because nothing REALLY changed from last years collection, and the shoppers stay happy. Happily dreaming

Debated is everything, which gets held under the nose of the shopper, be it in shopping malls, markets or, in a different way, what appears on the net. This is right now the only niche, an artist or craftsman can occupy without paying an arm and a leg for his mild trial, to be part of the CONCRETE economy. Without trial, nobody knows, if his product can be sold. This would, as I say it here again, be the easiest of things, of trial, here in India. You need about three boards of wood, some fabric to beautify your vending table, and in less than an hour, you would hold the outcome of your productivity under the eyes of as many Indians, who venture along where you sit, stand, talk, bullshit around with them, laughing your guts out, shaking hands, receiving so called real money, IF your products sell. And yes, they MIGHT, in this dullest of all dull modern times! Believe me, dear artists, dear craftsmen, its up to us, to change the stage dress of modernity! Or do you expect the drummers to shake the grey out of the wall, the musicians to paint the three dimensional? Or the manager, to paint spirals on the chimney of his factories? Do you think, bureaucrats open the floodgates of colors? Do you hope, politicians will give us more, than rose tinted goggles? Do you wait for Wal-Mart to reinvent the wheel of phantasy?

So we are humans again. In charge of bettering our own conditions without destroying our marvelous planet.

Do you, for the baker, who only bakes the best bread in the world, so that he can serve best his own demands, that HE will take care, of the other side of the street? Where this grey, dull, ugly wall is, the puddle on the walkway, the beggar sitting? No, he will NOT! It is not in his interest to be surrounded by an environment of beauty, rather the opposite one can speculate, so his little bakery stands out of the ruins of modern reality and feels cozy and warm inside. A nice smelling heaven full of chocolate angels surrounded by hellish smelling road valleys in concrete mountain ridges.

This much about bakeries. And the big hinderance in a Renaissance of our market beliefs, which unite us more, than any religion..., REALLY! It is THE uniting factor! What do we value? And how much TIME we want to submit, unfree, to what we value. And, I dare to say in May 2012, how much RISK is involved, which lays in the bargaining between sugar and art, or shoes and sandwiches. I observe, these are still important factors, even in the life of the meanest blogger. You cannot be without sugar or sandwiches, maybe you do not need shoes, brother, but you need ART! And this is, where the misery startet. As a result, we live in the most symbol driven times ever! Not in the darkest times in Europe, have symbols guided us as much! In soon every walk of life, symbols are our guidance, not our selves

At the end of Mickey Mouse, it is up to artists to reinvent the wheel of fantasy. Which is the king pin of the human machine. Out of craft developed industry. The act of weaving is good old VERY old grandma of mathematics and geometry. Even MORE fundamental, drawing is the grand daddy with a beard growing half way around the world, the grand daddy of having IDEAS! (See Icon and idea by Herbert Read)

Wau, Mesdames et Messieurs! La grand merde! The big shit! Where do you let people DRAW? Seriously, and then let them SELL their art? Oh, in a GALLERY, I hear To support the middleman circus, the whole world seems to become. The buyer, who pre selects, the editor, who pre selects, the politicians, who pre select, what should be decided by the people. And what better not.

But, of course, the personification of the middle man, are the banks, if there should be more than one left. The WORLD BANK. The tightest web of all maybe, easy to get caught in them, but indestructible, because of being too big to fail, which I think was the motto of the Romans too. Also churches where too big to fail! The pyramids where too big to fail

Well, last might be true. Egypts past being is still with us in the form of examples. A time bomb, or tomb, from where a steady stream of symbols caresses us gently. What will be left from banks, however high they are built, are in the best case gold piles surrounded by empty Champaign bottles, quickly turning into empty spam boxes, the further away you go from the gold, or the

certificates found in the basements of former banks - too big to fail!

So, in the end, we have to be bankers ourself, thinking about our products as our own currency, which we exchange on the free market into real money, or other products.

On markets you do not just give a shit, how the market looks as a whole. It is wholly important, to perform well as a group of individuals, selling individual goods. Here we might have to start from very low The experience of standing in the rain at London on a market and selling for 666 pounds to otherwise frustrated shoppers, is like driving a Harley from Cannes to Saint Tropez in a full blown mistral. For 66 pounds, it is rather like walking up a sand dune in the heavy rain. I have done both many times!

People are HUNGRY for anything TRULY new, but there is not much, if bargaining is only restricted to very few giants in their global hedges, but nowhere TRULY to a much wider part of the population. I am talking about Europe, good old market place Europe, but maybe the US have not even had the opportunity to develop a healthy market culture, which requires denser population. However, this might be the case now! The American way of business developed early into a franchising system. The snake oil sales man became the leader of business style.

Communication was the base of banks and businesses very soon, while Europe was still walking through the aisles of markets.

Which were all there was to participate: A Laden (a shop). Literally a plank of wood.

For reasons of war and following progress, the idea of markets became reinvented, as we know now. It became not an extension of the whole market idea, but a replacement, at least in modern Europe. Interesting how well many countries are well off, where markets in a very simple form still exist. India, Indonesia, Brazil

Since the unemployment of many hard hit countries are not into the 80 percent, but more in the 10 or 20, I observe two things. It can get worse. And 10 percent of many rather well developing countries have approximately this number of self employed, inclusive kids selling coke in subways. The same kids are in Europe in the situation, as being unemployed, broke and bored to hell and return. There they sit and sip. The best of them drawing pictures on each others shoulders with a felt pen, the best playing on a bamboo flute, the best filming what happens next When only one of them paints other peoples shoulders, but in exchange for money, and the flute player would held his pirate hat into the stream of bureaucrats hurrying to work. We all know it, they would be losers left behind.

Artists and craftspeople are nowadays comparable to workers before the invention of unions. But our union does not need to be abstract and political, but concrete like the feet of our umbrellas and solely based on the long time agreed on first principles of a truly free market based economy. With a heavy dose of

unleashed, un-middleman controlled art. THAT would create jobs!

Markets are, or should be, also banks. Sellers of stuff, in which you can trust, to be of any value for a long time. Good luck artist! I usually give 300 years guarantee for my mirrors, 100 for my jewellery, and I like to smile!

Markets are like trees. They have so many branches, so many people meeting each other, so much talk without a phone, so much chatter and twitter. To take ones market away is a cry against humanity, a closing up of so many avenues, where people interact and trade. Without markets, our language would not have evolved in this way. Without markets, we become lonely shoppers. In this loneliness, we sink deeper and deeper, like in a tunnel of sweet marshmallow, which gets tighter and tighter, until we are stuck. After having overseen for a historic five minutes, the very necessity of having REALLY open forums, which markets in essence are, there should be NEW markets, and not ONLY free markets, but markets with conscious guidelines

But it is not, that markets are set up platforms to discuss a certain issue, yet they are open for this! There is almost nothing imaginable, which is as free as land with a market happening on it. Anything could happen there!

This is why they are not the least bit encouraged! Because they offer alternatives in doing business. In general, they are hard to control, when it comes to taxing participants in free markets. It

is the only place, where the middlemen might lose So markets are even LESS encouraged!

Economical (mega) structure and political structure as closely connected as the church was with politics, I cannot help myself, than seeing the middle ages in all of Europe. The ruling of new kingdoms, the tsars, the Berlusconies and other comedians. Its a time to sharpen the pencils again!

We almost drown in an ocean of opportunities, but we do not see them! We got dull senses for anything we buy, because there is not much to choose from. One million shades of red, and we start to think, this is a complete rainbow. So there is plenty of blue left, tons of green, yellow submarines, not seen surfacing since the sixties, the golden sixties, where for some years, art was allowed out of the cage. Where art serves time again, because there is a really long train of ones and zeros crossing high street, seemingly endless

A good train to get from here to there, but no luggage permited! A fooling device, so you see a new world, as long as you stay online. A brief interruption of the regional thinking, which is making its way back at a frightening speed.

But how can one identify with the regional, if there is no regional content? All but carried here productivism of future global trash? How can we identify, at the peak of boredom in visible reality, our own little souls?

This question is too important to leave it to trend scouts! Again, markets lend themselves to identify. Trends are easily visible, not shown on a monitor. We only identify by human interaction, whatever we think we might be, is just a guess. Take away this human playground called market, and with this the automatic congregation of people, and you have perfect conditions for the development of religious beliefs of all sorts. Only: their congregations are not as open, as a market. They serve this hugely important purpose to bring people together, but do this in churches or temples in an often hierarchic, and always monopolistic way, when it comes to their market attitude In a way, they seem to be the predecessors of shopping temples! Creating a warm feeling under one roof, this we are all one feeling, which even individualist need, only dualist maybe not, the people harmonic in themselves.

Which artists not often are There might be lots of anger and frustration coming up in art, once people were encouraged and allowed to participate in the looks of towns or houses. Friedensreich Hundertwasser is a good example of a gifted REALITY artist, as Gaudi was in Barcelona. Now we have parks and public squares - better than ever maybe - we are allowed to stroll around, sit down and wonder, take pictures and breathe better air, but we are seen as mere rats, if we occupy a meter square and show our art. We would do the least accepted thing in our straight societies: Try to run our own life, try to develop a deviant style, invent something, outside of the official norm. Act just by consciously NOT cooperating with companies and universities and their pre-selectors of human material, or

resources, which might sound a trifle nicer, to find new ways to new productivity.

Again, I point out, that not every office clerk should jump in the artist suite, but it should be allowed to do so! There should be an even playfield, even here In the world of art, nothing is more missing that actual space. Playroom to experiment not only in the creation, but also in the merchandising.

How could such a product driven time, be so strict in controlling the righteousness of a product? In choosing nothing but red products? Or black, which is closer to the actual truth. Black, the color of importance, of gravity, of hidden secrets, and of course the clerics of medieval Christianity. Half of Europe walks around in the color of chimneysweepers and has given up on anything colorful, except what comes delivered over phone.

So language turns nuts, together in a cage with smilies. Language turns imprecise, like all nutters do, when degraded to messages, integrated in animated pictures. Language gets vague on this cushion of set fonts, which seemingly come in endless variations, but still have lost in value. What are words, if only machines are creating them? The very forms you follow with your eyes, the road through someones thoughts, someone else, but not much related to the form, in which content streams along, like a meandering little river, on which you drift on an otherwise motionless boat made out of twigs and a bent over cow skin. Glide and glide along this essay, my dear drifting reader, looking at events along the shore, along this river of time, of mine.

What should I have come up with, then expressing my maybe bizarre thought that markets, real markets, need to be at the bottom of our economy. Not non-existend, instead! Not ebay, instead! Not only free speech! But also free ACT!

Which is the first thing any homo sapiens do, once you open the cage. Our cage is an invisible one! It is the cage of our market believes! The looking up too much to high buildings, instead of the money on the road. This, instead, gets sweeped in by large fishing fleets, setting up factory ships on land, which last not one generation, to prepare for the last battle with humanity. There is soon nothing human needed, to run them! There is nothing human needed, in controlling them! They control each other!

No, there is unfortunally nothing left, we have to do! We are the outriders of recent ideas of mostly dead inventors! We got Mickey Mouse down to the gutters!

And now we kick an empty coke bottle down the road, look on our wrist TVs, send smilies and thumbs UP to our 469 best friends, and thats about it, what I got the impression, when I last saw Europe, Paris, two years ago. Is it STILL like this, Mister Sarkozy? Still no playgrounds for new ideas? Still convinced, our free market economy is basically outmost defined and future proof?

It should be said freely by anyone involved, we have hit a roof! The roof I have not to describe, others do that in length, and much more accurate than myself, a street vendor on the roads of

Cochin. My look goes rather out of the window, from where we have hit the roof. I still see blue sky and still see Indians in blue silk dresses. I still see a difference, uniqueness in their day-today life approach, compared to any other place in the world I have seen. It is this uniqueness, which has gone forever; in good old post industrial central Europe. Welcome dear Swiss out there, and Germans, dreaming the dream of dreams, the post-postindustrial age. The BY BY age to anything left, after you scrutinized ESPECIALLY: your ART!

Everyone of us carries his burden. By some a Buddha in bronze, others have carvings of bears long gone. In short: The shelves are full like souvenir shops in everyones homes. The basements full of boxes with oil paintings or DVDs. I am sorry, dear shoppers, but this is a problem

So maybe, before we even fully try to get in a market-based economy, we have to perform an act. A simple, free and funny joke! We have to GET RID, of art!

Now, art is in this aspect different from all else, because it can always be seen as different meanings by different ages. We would be nowhere without the influx of the thriving Mediterranean cultures of the past. In a processional way should we let go of the vast majority of our logos and symbols, but not just burn them Therefore, we need to have festivals, where art is not produced, but given into the trusted hands of Mother Nature, somewhere around 5 meters deep, in more affluent areas maybe 10. In a forseeable,

calculable timespan not worth digging so deep deepness. Lets say, one day every year, always different locations, on leased land, bought land, occupied land. One day, where the big and touching opportunity to get rid of all this Mickey Mouse stuff comes up, which might be send together with Barbie and Warhol posters into the distant future! As well as your best carvings, your most important ring, or just a feather, you found along the way. Or, a well sealed container of DVDs, DVD players, all the gear, down to the solar panels, so the watchers in the future can have a good time! Let ALLOW them to get a good time! Let allow them, to peak into OUR time, OUR world!

Otherwise it might be just a sorry lot of survivers. Unimaginably stupefied by the amount of trash left by a quick outburst of no more understandable medias. It would be just mountains of TVs, rivers of poison coming out of rotting piles of mobil phones, ununderstandable, un-decodable, brain-dead three dimensionalities, which you cannot plant tomatoes on, nor built decent houses out of them. Its only monitors, my friend in the future! Monitors, we monitored, while the time got dull, since the beginning of the assumption, that life foremost should be safe - which of course we know since ever - but the formula got changed, how this safety is achieved, a formula not as a result of our own striving, but of others calculations.

I feel living in a too safe country, when I live in Switzerland! Safety has on the other side of the coin written: Control! I know, that every offer in safety, is as well the snapping of a freshly caught Barracuda, called Blinbling- Capitalism, snapping his jaws, pulling you towards the checkout, with the 80 percent chance to live a decent live. So they check you out, my friend! They will

nest with their ant workers in your black brick, checking you out, what kinda guy you are, dude!

I am trying out many kinds of freedom, from living in cars, to living in ships, living in a haystack, hitchhiking and always backpacking, of course! Not always WITH backpacks, but bags of all sorts, in the end carrying them on and always WITH my back. I therefore do not understand why backpackers are since 28 years backpackers. Backpacks full of dope and art and millions of travel dairies, have never lead to a better description of the traveling person, than HOW they carry their belongings? This cant be TRUE my friend! Do you not remember the walk on the wild side? We have not just seen the world as BACKPACKERS, but as so MANY!

So many different ways to travel, how can there be only two? Two, in the color of red Why TRAVEL, I wish to ask! Make the walls travel, go away, pull new ones out of the ocean of art. Marry a peacock or an owl. Do not just follow the big game hunters, they travel in balloons and often shoot in their left foot. It has almost become a new world discipline, to shoot in to your feet. To close factories here, to open new ones there, always after the blood, the sweat, the sugar to live high above the sorry masses. Another balloon, full with popcorn and coke, to which, there is hardly competition, outside the color of red The bakers, baking REALLY good bread, where have they gone, Mr. Smith?

So artists welter, like flowers on a high, dry wall, after many days of drought. Maybe they should climb back down, look anew for spaces and cracks in the wall of our modern cities, like my beloved Zurich could be, would it not be ruled by gnomes, how they see themselves. Swiss banksters in plain English, the groupiers of the worlds best gambling nation! The dealerwheelers of symbolism in the form of gold coins or chocolate filled gold coins. We are very inventive in the field of knives and medicine, have inspired the idea of a Red Cross in one Swiss citizen. Long ago, we were fierce and frightened by others and not so long ago we were still dying by hunger all over Switzerland. Now we are the upper cream of the known world! Isnt that funny? Woodcarvers becoming certificate dealers, priests running banks, artists well. The live WAS harsh in these high mountains called Alps. We were the Afghans of Europe! At one point, everyone stopped fucking around with us. Isnt that GREAT? How our main resource become the trust of others, because we got the most out of our secret caves, used for hiding war chests of far away kings, even Napoleon. And now all the world has a Swiss bank account! Any citizen of the world applying to the soft rules of my country, can have his money Mickey Moused!

So gone the times of fear, we might loose our money! Gone, because money has gone! Gone the times, of at least a symbolical stream of values, which could be folded in the shape of a frog, used to snort Kokain, or to leave notes to future users of this printed piece of paper. After the gold was used elsewhere - just to keep at least this nice little double sided and color printed sturdy pieces of double standard paper - which you could carry a million around without being detected - was it not nice, almost REAL! This nice little thank-you-note written by

Washington, or who else, is in the sad situation of being surrounded by a better technology: The plastic chip. You can only use it as an ice scraper, or to open hotel doors. Soon it is going to be the thumbs up, we give, pointed to a laser at every check out. And the look in the mirror makes the elevator start and bring you to your level.

We are informed by an idiotic assumption, that only in this way you get up there, in the heaven of red - but we do not question other colors than red. As big corporation dude, chances are ninety-nine percent: you spend your bucks in other big corporations.

They are the carriers of pride right now, despite their failures; everyone would change with them their positions. The big dudes. We just imagine towards the smell of blood, the money, and therefore got colorblind, one dimensional, the essence of money. Money can be more, or less, but there is no BAD money It is never like bad movies, like bad art. But it is a lot about the looks of our towns and cities!

It is a funny game, no one truly understands. Which might be necessary to study better, to allow different avenues, which go towards the better, the colors, the freedom of markets.

Here in India I see the remnants of a certain behavior, the happiness of many people still being handcrafters, or otherwise tangibly productive. Cities become lifeless monsters, when

nothing can be seen done anymore; everything coming out like a wonder of an uncertain snake oil economy. Even art Interesting!