Halloween. As a kid, celebrating Halloween in West Hollywood was usually a blast. By the late 1960s, when I was just about old enough to join a bunch of friends for a few hours of parent-free “Trick or Treating”, which quintessentially meant knocking on our neighbors’ front doors begging for candy, Rexall Drugstore, across the street from Kiddieland (the Beverly Center today) had a plethora of cheap mass-produced and heavily marketed Halloween costumes to choose from.

Each costume came in a cardboard box with a plastic transparent window that showed the flimsy face mask inside. Folded underneath the mask was a thin outfit, also made of some kind of plastic. I don’t remember what these boxes cost at the time, maybe under five bucks, but I vividly recall there being long aisles with deep shelves packed from top to bottom with them.

I don’t think I had a particular preference for whom I wanted to dress up as, yet I’m pretty sure that I celebrated at least one Halloween as Batman and one as the daredevil Evil Knievel. I was into capes, I suppose.

By far the scariest gathering of friends during this year’s Halloween begins today at Cop26 in Glasgow where all of the climate meeting’s participating politicians seemed to be (metaphorically speaking) dressed up as ostriches and with their heads buried deeply in the ground.

It’s not an easy gig, this climate crisis. I totally get that. For there to be any real impact, we all need to make huge sacrifices. And herein lay the mother of all conundrums. How the hell do you as a politician explain to voters and donors that some hard truths must be told and that some really tough decisions must be made if we are to avoid future cataclysmic meteorological events, without inadvertently creating a global shit storm as an appetizer?

I’m writing this post from a bed on the 15th floor of a relatively new hotel. I just got back from a tumultuous breakfast hall where hundreds of tired kids and their parents stood politely in line before stacking absurdly tall piles of pancakes, bacon, cheese, pickles and toast on their plates. It was like a factory and it got me thinking about how complex the supply-chain logistics must be for just this one hotel. I have to admit that I kinda missed the good old covid days when I was one of just a handful of hotel guests and enjoyed an amazing level of service and personal space.

Climate guilt. I think everyone feels it. At least to some degree. It’s probably a fleeting thought for most people. It is for me. You think about it and then just continue with life as you know it.

Simply put, the situation is way too troublesome and involuted to get a grip on. Insofar that we acknowledge that Earth is in deep shit, and far from everyone will agree or admit it is, we delegate the responsibility to fix the problems to our politicians. And rightfully so. But if our representatives are in denial or too corrupted to act appropriately, regardless of the heat they’ll feel from voters and donors, we are most definitely in a huge bubble of trouble.

Historically and evolutionarily, our species has accomplished some astonishingly remarkable feats. We have survived and thrived.

So, in the long run, I know we can solve our planet’s climate crisis and still come out on top. But we’ll all have to pull together, be willing to make some serious sacrifices and above all, stop hiding behind cheap plastic masks that obscure our view and distract us from our problems.

Halloween is over folks.

I’ve set aside going through my many wonderful Resurfaced discoveries from Kyiv/Kiev in order to revamp my film and photography portfolio.

The initial idea was to hire a web developer via Fiverr, which I did…but that idea not only backfired, it was such a disaster,  that the fallout pushed back the project for almost two weeks. But I am resolute and confident that by Wednesday this week, I will have a new incarnation up and running.

Shot this yesterday evening with my four year old iPhone at the airport in Riga (RIX) just after arriving from Boryspil International in Kyiv (IEV). Once we landed, a rep from Air Baltic firmly but politely instructed me to board the same plane again (above) as soon as I had passed through the rigorous passport, covid, and security checkpoints.

I don’t think that kind of loop has happened to me since a refueling stop in Karachi (Pakistan) several decades ago. I vividly recall a small army of extraordinarily slender Pakistani men wearing dark blue overalls topped with bright red baseball caps, holding a variety of cleaning equipment, stood patiently on a separate platform adjacent to the jet bridge of the PIA jumbojet we were exiting from. I remember thinking that few if any of these young bearded men had ever been in a plane that wasn’t neatly parked on a tarmac.

There couldn’t have been time to clean the cabin yesterday, that’s for sure. Then again, most of my fellow passengers looked like corporate seagulls heading to or from yet another glorious meeting where Powerpoint slide decks were shown and shared ad nauseam. One of them sat next to me and worked on his presentation the entire flight from Kyiv. Everything about him seemed so neat and orderly. Nothing wasn’t carefully mapped out and planned. It was only when he opened his briefcase to put away his notebook before we landed at Kastrup that I noticed total chaos. Which I found in someway found reassuring. He was human, after all.

For all the shitty stuff the various flavors of Communism have represented thus far, the commie’s propaganda machine has always been much better at crafting powerful symbolism and manifesting it publicly, than any other political system I can think of besides the Nazis and, possibly the Roman Empire.

The US was absolutely fabulous at crafting and promoting effective propaganda prior to and during WWII. But I think the government lost its way shortly thereafter. And in today’s divisive, uber-cynical, unforgiving cancel-culture, American society, what isn’t propaganda?

You have to be severely ignorant not to know how brutal comrades Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, and the Castro brothers were and how tyrannical their successors continue to steer their countries.

I am out and about again. It’s hard not to fly, even if I know that I shouldn’t contribute to the lifestyle that is fucking up the planet. But it’s hard as hell not to travel again. One livable planet, one livable life (as far as we know, anyway).

I captured the above image at Riga’s International Airport a few days ago. Shortly after the shot was taken, a plump woman in a tight uniform told me that it was forbidden to photograph planes at the gate and that I needed to instantly stop what I was doing. Surprised, I shrugged, packed down my camera gear, and strolled over to the tiny bar adjacent to the gate, ordered a cold, refreshing beer, pulled down my mask, and gulped half of it down in one take. Travel ain’t what it used to be.

In most cases, function has higher priority than form. But form can also be an incredibly important part of function. Something that’s easy to hold and use has a thought-through form/function ratio. Consumer companies, at least their industrial design teams, have to keep this in mind to be competitive. We’ve all become so aware cognizant of design and how aesthetics can determine the ease of use of an app, a phone, a camera.

When I saw this stairwell not too long ago, I wondered who decided to put in church-like stained windows instead of, well, just normal glass. And what made the architect or developer of the property choose a staircase that was so generously wide and tall? And who chose that gorgeous green color?

There are obviously added costs when you add features. Especially if the add-ons aren’t actually adding anything. But when I walked up and down these beautiful stairs, I could understand how the people that lived there would enjoy using them. There’s a level of generosity gone lost in much of today’s residential architecture. Too much function and rarely any form to speak of. In order to produce as rationally and cost-effectively as possible, form has at best become an afterthought. Sometimes at the expense of function.

A lavatory in economy class on a regional plane is a good example. Super-functional insofar that everything you need is right there. But it’s squeezed into such a tiny space, that even if it’s hyper-functional, it’s also hyper-claustrophobic. Now when you’re lucky enough to sit in Business Class during a long-haul flight, the restrooms are usually somewhat larger in size. The WC designer has been provided a bit more room to add some form to the small space’s functions, making the experience, if not enjoyable, at least a little less unpleasant and easier to get done what you have to get done in there.

Though I do have a free account on Spotify that I rarely make use of, I am an Apple Music subscriber and frequent listener. Just a while ago, a song came up on the AI-generated AOR/Westcoast playlist that I’d never heard before. And it was only when the tune’s solo started playing that I realized it was likely legendary record producer and guitar virtuoso Jay Graydon picking the strings. The band’s name is JaR and the song is Cure Kit Scene 29

At the time I was working on a new resurfaced piece for uncle Paul’s latest poem. So naming felt intuitively easy.