What's going down at DelARTe.com:

Chapter five: Fear and Loathing at the National Galleries &

investigating the real (?) thing (in private hands).

Adventures of the FMP, chapter five:

           (

( www.delARTe.com, as seen at the I-House in Berkeley.)       

The story will continue with each added brick.

$20 will get your name or whatever (within reason and real estate) on a new brick and a picture with a paragraph into this page.

Please note: As an added attraction for all "multiple brick buyers":

The "multiple brick buyer" who buys the most bricks by the end of March 2012 will receive a framed 16x20 art work of at least $169.- as a motivating bonus!

Image courtesy of delARTe.com:    

Francesco Franciabigio 1482 - 1525,  Excerpt from his original layout, with minor modifications in the service of the story.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), the Italian poet, wrote The Divine Comedy, an allegory written in three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. For centuries the involvement of the Red Pump has been omitted time and time again by overly eager publishers and censors by governments, ecclesiastical functionaries and homeland security agents concerned with the moral fabric of their own consciousness. Thus, in a way,conspicuous absence of the red pump is a direct reflection of the paranoia of officialdom. Again, just like with the Pravda (which is currently enjoying a substantial revival -complete with its old tricks) could always be counted on to reveal the true world picture by way of its omissions, western art and literature is a reliable reflector of up side down truth in its omission of the red pump. But then Hell (Inferno) is by definition an image of a world upside down. And we all know:

"Thou shall not make images".

It is reasonably obvious from the picture above that Dante himself concerned himself more with earthly things where else Beatrice had more of an celestial outlook. It is the assertion of this author that the right shoe is ascending, while the left pump is heading down onto what in the 13th century already was hell.

This brings us to Alexandria where the wheels of fortune turn on themselves, a tale of inferior craftsmanship and inopportune obstinacy in the face of the king; "ooooo kingy" - oddly enough this was how the game "Wheels of Fortune" was invented; they won't own up to that off course, but "heyyyyy what the hell." One good turn deserves another, but, you simply can't win all the wile. Hiding the shoe didn't turn out to help in the long run.

Soon the wheel was repaired; (turns out they actually had a spare at hand)

and the halo had to be,

and was,

earned.

..... Grandpa always said: "Watch out for the crack!", off course the wisdom of the elderly is seldom heeded:

"Step on a crack and you break your mothers back."

Means nothing, unless you take the long term view;

but, at least it rhymes. Beyond that the agenda ripens, as the plot sickens:

        As modern emancipation meets with antique thought a dance of dismemberment and re-memberment ensues; one that has the solemn promise of fixing the overpopulation problem once and for all. "Wanna be a member? Or just another wannabe?". "Seven billion can't be wrong" you say? History might just prove you wrong and then where does your argument play? And if history doesn't the Chinese authorities will. You may buy a motorcycle and make all the noise you want, nature will have its way by hook or by crook it will beat us all into submission. Just expect a tax bill from that parallel universe NPR has been filling your head with. I submit to you today that if we could travel back in time we would have erased all kinds of mistakes not from the past, but from our past. Contrary wise if we could travel into the future we would be insider trading beyond what could be expected from the most hardened criminal in Congress. The future itself would have been sold and obliterated thus many moon ago. That explains why physicists are rarely consulted for stock market transactions or used car sales for that matter, a matter of grabity which is in turn at the core of any and all arguments . Time, radiation and gravity never shall the three be unified in a single theory because "Nothing is ever simple! ..... Nothing". You can bend the coordinates to your hearts content, mutilate our concepts and reality (for that matter) to fit the feeble math attempts at unification and fail miserably, shipwrecked at the very thing that shattered the tower of Babel, way back. Nothing survived, but the gravy train that nourishes the illusions. Seems like we never ever learn, certainly not from the past; so, there is certainly no hope in learning from the future.

In this light you should consider that falling and rising shoes are, off course, subject to grabity (often referred to as gravity), a phenomenon that truly taxes the imagination and still hasn't been sorted out; let alone unified with the remainder of the quantum mess out there. A 12th century monk put it most succinctly: "Gravity is the love of god that pulls everything together." How does that grab you? Needless to say: Sometimes the shoes fly apart - ever expanding, and sometimes they come together; this seems to rather depend on who's holding the physics endowment at Oxford at the time. This author's money is on contraction, but not on a straight line or a linear scale, no, on some kind of twisted crumpet geometry which might explain the decided red shift in the color of the shoe.

FMP- light?      GRABITY?

As the very speed of light is now becoming unstable on its way from Switzerland to Italy (another" industrial north" - "slothy south" dynamic) it is hardly surprising that the very crustaceans in charge of holding the shoes are turning a little red as well, what in the trade is called a "red shift". This is possibly owing to certain austerity measures that always result in a red shift. A slow down, commensurate with blushing with embarrassment? I wonder. I mean, the oysters are still "turning a little blue" if one is to go by what Lewis Carroll wrote." They will never get dry this way - got to run with the others, you know. Look at me, I am dry as a bone already......". Neither carpenter nor walrus will stand for it! But will the shoe ever be occupied again? So many questions and hardly any answers. It seems reasonably clear that the very people responsible for the shifty activities are somehow in charge of correcting the very problems they have created and they continue to raise their own salaries and further gold plate their golden parachutes beyond what is good for the planet. Amok, amok, amok, amok ................ And here you thought I was crazy, or at least the physicists!

Golden para* , oh shoot, I lost my train of thought! ...... As you get more enamored with your own image things have turned more narcissistic by the very definition of the thing.

It has been said the a little gold behind the glass makes you see all, but yourself.

Well, all it takes is glass nowadays.

Even in the face of a dead end or a bankrupt approach why, oh why, do we engage the very people that got us into the mess in order to get us out? Is the assumption that they must have learned something from the multi trillion Dollar blunder the have maneuvered us into? Pay as we go education for the presumed experts? Its like asking Zebrignev Breshinsky about the Russians, this guy failed at every stage in the last 60 year drama to predict what's going to happen, and what do we do? We'll ask him again for more forecasts. Obsolete talent content with managing decay.

While it is true that the red shoe appears to be perpetually un-occupied, it may be thus by choice; current goings on are hardly convincing and seem to fail to bring on anything but endless dialog. Yes the pain is real but without a game plan the waiting for that stork in the face of a myriad of pelicans is unbearable, after all who wants to live in a tent city. The hippie movement tapered into the same long term disaster. Clearly the answer is not in either extreme, but in a sensible compromise; a form of bridled capitalism which recognizes that ethics and social responsibility are part of the protection packet afforded by the laws of incorporation. If a corporation wants to be seen as a legal person under the law it better damn well better behave within civil discourse of the society that facilitates it.

A fate cast in bronze.

A certain slippage is to be expected, none the less it must be the anomaly, not the game plan. What goes around inevitably comes around and with a vengeance. Thus a long term strategy will do much better than short term tactics! A measured approach! Now, this brings us to the next point of the story: Measurement. It has been said that you cannot be king of what you cannot survey. But as with the speed of light and the speed of particles measurement is tricky, especially when based on the almighty buck: A Dollar is 6.14" long and since it is currently considered the measure of all things it should thus be used in liew of the foot or the meter for that matter. This is simply cutting out the bothersome detour by way of inches and the like out: Why bother anyway?! Functionalism rules, so let it rule in honest recognition of what's important.

Essentially this means that on a warm day you too could be a Dollar long (I am paraphrasing) but, as you may remember, this is roughly what Alice said to the caterpillar before the caterpillar answered: "I am exacataggely 6 inches high, and it is a perfectly good height" - clearly it must have been a cold day; such a cold day always leads to all manner of inaccuracies.

The shoe might even still fit ..... but .........! Safety is in numbers and thus on the internet.

"I have always depended on the kindness of the Internet" Blanche used to say.

Sure enough, a slice of "occu-pie" always satiates instead of using compulsive shopping to ease one's pain.

  Humble pie or "occu-pie" that remains the question. Is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous greed and avarice, or take up arms against a sea of abuse and by evoking ethics, morals and common sense, in an effort to stop the theft? To stand up on behalf of the over committed, under educated free loaders? Is ship wrecking against the face of time and automation enough of an excuse to upend the system they enjoyed and enthusiastically joined time and again while the going was good? Well, the answer is in fighting both ends of this vile spectrum; cure the dumb of their ignorance and at the same time combat the callous manipulators and cure them of their insatiable greed. "Unbridled Acquisition Syndrome" is a disease and not a good strategy for a healthy collective economy.

In this context: Congressional approval rating has gone from "less than 10% approval rating" to "they are the enemy - rating!"; where will it all end?.

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