Canjos on the Wall

Three electric "canjos" built from repurposed film cans 

by Bill Raddatz, Asheville, NC

In the Garden Galleri on Kenilworth Lake. Stop by to see the colorful art and three and four-string electric "canjos". 

Call 828-550-2636 for an appointment and a cup of coffee or tea. One-of-a-kind art and merc made from Anita's distinctive paintings are on display all year. Check it out!

A Subject of Note

My accomplished murmurs complain of ecstasy 

taken to where, 

despite naive admiration of this bright phenomenon, 

cynicism would lead me to question them.

My little path of music answers 

with distinguished, but suggestive refuge 

that no traitor's lips would recognize 

hidden amongst other unconscious doubts.

Asheville

Billy Radd

Beautiful Minds

Dancing Windows

Humans live on the cusp 

where order and chaos collide.

We look at both in the same moment 

choosing which one to see.

But, this duality is merely illusion.

Reality reveals itself to us as it is;

without prejudice,

holding back nothing,

dancing naked, without shame.

Billy Radd

Asheville

Nature of Light

Above the Noise

Above the Noise

Above the noise, below the toys

I see beyond horizons

Inside my head, the background's red

I try to keep the lights on

While purple haze goes on for days

the rhyme's the first to go

I watch TV and drink green tea

to await the best-of-show

The talk of war outside my door

will never cause me harm

but feed the poor and you're a whore

Forget you bought the farm

I've always seen the world between

a rock and the place of hard

Rewind to the start, refuse to lose heart,

and rely on the mind of the bard

Billy Radd

Asheville

Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

There certainly is a vast right-wing conspiracy. 

Its roots are in American Evangelical Churches 

in league with the military-industrial complex and white, wealthy men. 

Its wealth rules the game of politics and is their main tool 

used to manipulate Big Lies 

like swords against common men and women.

Wilderness Sea

Wilderness Sea

I stand on the shore

of the great open blue

from the top to the core

of the deep ocean cool.

Do the gulls really see

that I stand all alone?

Or, because they fly free,

they don’t hear my low moan.

From the tips of the mountains

 to deep ocean's abyss

my voice sprays just like fountains

but, will never be mist.

Billy Radd

Inlet Beach, Florida

Notice Beauty

Notice Beauty

You'll find what you look for

in the great scheme of things.

So, look for beauty in everything.

It’s all there for you,

it makes your heart sing.

When you notice the beauty

you'll find it in every thing.

Billy Radd

Asheville

The Passing Instant

I began learning how to capture what is commonly called an instant when I was about 10.

My parents gave me a plastic, double lens reflex camera for my birthday because I wanted to take pictures of the starlings, robins and other birds always living around our house in the summer.

I thought all I had to do was to get the birds in the frame of the camera and push the button.  Easy, right? National Geographic, here I come!

My first halting attempts were instructive because the wide angle lens on my new camera took in too much of the scene and the birds were merely tiny, blurred dots on the black and white prints that my dad brought back from the camera store.

And, so I learned that the camera was limited in it’s vision when compared to the wonderful sight I was born with. I asked my dad why the birds looked so far away and, in his typical engineer fashion, he jumped right to the solution of my problem without explaining the "why" part. I needed a telephoto lens to get good pictures of the birds, he told me, which works like a telescope.

Just this tidbit of information made watching TV a lot more interesting because I began to notice that the individual shots were edited together using some closeups, while other shots were wider views, like my plastic camera.

A short time after that, my parents took my brother and me to southern California for a winter vacation from frigid northern Ohio to bask in the sunshine of the LA area. One of my parents friends, Bob Peebles, was an old Hollywood gaffer (a lighting man) who had many contacts “in the industry”, as people said then (and even now). Old Bob arranged for for our family to witness an afternoon of shooting The Rin Tin Tin TV series at a movie ranch's old frontier town set. My brother and I were awestruck.

I really can’t put into words what it was like for a 10 year old TV fan like me to watch the busy crew shoot about 6 scenes of one of my favorite shows. We even got to meet Rusty, Sargent Masters, and two of the three dogs that played Rinty. I had thought there was only one Rin Tin Tin, but there was one that did the fighting scenes, one that walked and ran around, and one that was for the closeups - the prettiest one. It all seemed surreal, even if I didn’t know what that word meant then, like looking behind the curtain of reality.

The whole experience that day had a profound effect on me. I comprehended that scenes were shot out of sequence, that the camera was moved to a new setup for every shot, that the actors had to re-say their lines for different camera angles, and that it was all rather “fake” but quite manageable if you knew how to do it. Plus, it took a lot more people to make a TV show than I had ever imagined.

From that event forward I was bit hard by the movie making bug. So, in a sense, my long film making career began while I was only 10 years old.

The thing that strikes me the most about this is that I knew what I was interested in at a very young age and was lucky enough to find my way there despite the maze of our educational system that tries to imprint what is perceived as society's needs on each individual through our industrialized, politicized, patronizing, out-dated educational system. I am fortunate in that I finally, at age 22, was able to follow my dreams and develop my passion by enrolling in a film school in Hollywood.

The vast majority of people are not so lucky.

Emerald Sunrise

Silence in the spaces between where no thing can live

Blackness rounds the corners of my fears

Can’t be seeing anything that really isn’t there

‘cept through tiny little prisms of my tears

Only for a moment in the center of my head

Can my churning heartbeat touch the point of pain

Shadows from dark rainbows ever fading from my view

I hear loud silence in the cold black rain

Billy Radd

Asheville

Unfolding Progress

I see it all again, 

the turning of nature, its everlasting change,

subtle colors marking an eternal spiral 

blending mankind into and out from the universe

as it evolves without needing clock nor microscope

to measure its progress.

Constantly changing, never pausing, 

always immediate 

with no boundary

and no end.

Billy Radd

Asheville

Choices

Choices

Ever since I studied the martial art Tae Kwon Do with my daughters way back when, I have pondered creating a simple graphic to model the choices we, as humans, face every day. I regard making choices with positive outcomes to be a skill just like every other, and I often wondered why some people seem to automatically, on balance, make beneficial choices, while others seem to complicate their lives with choices that generally result in negative outcomes for themselves and others around them.

Why do some people wind up alone, sick, alcoholic and living in a cardboard box? Yes, I agree that some folks are born into affluence while some are disadvantaged by poverty. But, conversely, some wealthy people make choices that render them on the skids, while some poor kids wind up being successful adults with many choices to make, most of them good choices.

So, I think I’ve finally “cracked the code” with this iconic, minimalistic chart I came up with yesterday. I purposefully decided not to use words on the chart since I’m a visual kind of bloke and I think icons are more universal in that they are not so connected to more parochial interpretations colored by nationality, religion, gender, etc. My chart does, however, require some explanation since it reduces common experience and the choices life presents to each person to a bare minimum usually not associated with issues of human behavior and psychology.

The upper left-hand box represents what other people want or expect you to do. Into this category we can put school, work, family responsibilities, civil laws, etc. Basically things that you might not choose to do but you must.

The upper right-hand corner box represents what your ego does for self gratification, like hobbies, who we choose to befriend, choosing what we wear, eat and are entertained by - the list goes on and on. When you choose to do what you want, it fits here.

The lower left box includes those actions or occurrences in the universe that “work”. The yin and yang symbol connotes balance and harmony. I put things like love, respect, laughter, nature, pleasure, compassion, giving, etc. in this category because to me it means that life is good, and is what most sane people strive for.

The lower right-hand box symbolizes what doesn’t work in the universe as we experience it, like hate, war, violence, pain, greed, insanity, stealing, bullying or what most folks detest and shun - outcomes that don’t work for most people.

The active operating factor in my chart is found in the arrows between each box because they represent the conscious choices we humans make hundreds of times every day and the directions, intentional or unintentional, our resulting actions can take.

For example, we typically choose to work for others (upper left hand box) so that we can make income to eat and clothe ourselves and our loved ones, and have money to spend to provide “what works” (in the lower left-hand box). But also on the chart you can see that there is an arrow from the upper left hand box to the upper right-hand box because in this case we WANT to work for someone else who will tell us what to do so we can get what it is that we REALLY WANT - thus the arrow between the upper right-hand box to the lower left-hand box.

As I hope you can see, there are also connections from the same boxes to the unwanted lower right - hand box because sometimes, even though we think we are choosing some action to result in one positive outcome, it can result in unexpected and unwanted negative outcomes.

I think what is so revealing about my chart is that life’s choices are not very complicated since you do get to choose most of what happens to you, but you can never predict 100% what the outcome will be.

I conclude from this that the trick to making good choices most of the time is to know that this is mainly how choices work and to look as far ahead as you can while realizing that the arrow of the actions you are taking run in two directions and can change direction at any time.

So, choose wisely and expect the unexpected. 

If you have faith, as many do, that there is such a thing as fate, or the will of God, or that things are pre-ordained by nature and that your personal choices really don’t matter in the long run, then my chart might mean nothing to you.

But, if you live in the moment, and take responsibility for your own actions, this chart may have some relevance to you if only as a reminder of whom is responsible for your life - YOU! Please feel free to copy the chart with this link and put it on your desk or refrigerator. It might spark some interesting conversations.

Between Always and Never

Livin’ between always and never

walking down the line

always doing somethin’ but never

lookin’ to seize the rhyme.

I can’t get me none

'cause I already got one.

And, I can’t give away

what I really don’t own.

Gotta get me some

in the middle of the road back.

Can’t find my way alone

'cause I never left home.

Me, myself and I,

we just, bye ‘n bye,

come around again

to the middle of the pie.

Billy Radd

Asheville

Seeing

See? I told you so.

Don’t you see?

Did you see that?

I see.

I don’t see.

Seeing is believing.

I don’t see why.

I don’t see why not.

You just don’t see, do you.

I see it, but I don’t believe it.

I see what you mean.

I don’t see what you mean.

Come and see.

See the light.

See in the dark.

I see it all now.

Let’s see what happens.

See for yourself.

We shall see.

That’s the way I see it.

Only Now

I occupy the center of a point in my mind where no one else can be.

My eyes face one direction only, so I must imagine what exactly goes on all around me.

Only perceiving certain colors, I am blind to all the other hues scattering around me.

My two ears hear vibrations of the air around me, an ambiance of mixed frequencies,

but not nearly all the existing tones around me.

Likewise, my senses of smell, taste, and touch are severely limited

in their ability to discern and differentiate aspects of any environment I occupy.

I can never, ever sense everything all at once since my perception of the world is 

always severely limited and edited by the discretly focused directionality of my senses.

My memory of all experience is further limited by the “outline form” of my brain

in its organizing and storing of these edited versions of my existence, 

and, like a documentary film, not nearly reality

but pointing to it from a prejudiced point-of-view.

So, I must rely on others around me to give me clues about my reality

since I can never experience it from outside my own senses with me as a part of it.

Like looking out of a slightly fogged window, I am separated from everything else

by the wall of my own physical senses and perceptions.

That is as close as I can ever get to what really happens 

within my mind, within my body, and within the world.

Now is the only reality.

The moment, the present, immediate being, that is reality.

Past and future reside in my imagination and are as accurate a representation of the world, 

bygone or to come, as a pencil sketch, an audio recording of a song,

a photograph, or words on a page - symbols of what is truly real.

They manifest as grain, as texture, a particular point-of-view, or an artistic treatment, 

just like the recollection of my memories or my visions of the future,

and thus, embody unreality (not reality).

As human animals, our best “trick” seems to be remembering the past

and projecting our ideas into the future through creating stories within our present minds,

with symbols structured by the literary device of a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But, we tend to confuse the useful symbol/story with what is real.

So, stories are useful fabrications

for remembering personal occurrences

or communicating abstract ideas to each other.

Otherwise, in reality, there is no beginning nor end.

Only now.

Billy Radd

Asheville