It’s hard to see, but it’s there in the lower left spray painted on a flat beige building. “Turn off media, turn on your mind.” It reminds me of those famous Timothy Leary words, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” At the time, Leary said, “I mean drop out of high school, drop out of college, drop out of graduate school.” Curiously, Leary later explained in his writings that he meant to “drop out of conformity. Drop out means change.” Which seems to contradict what he spoke out loud when he addressed the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in 1967. All part of that 1960s counter-culture…but at the time, he had already earned his Ph.D…

I myself, dropped out of college in the late 1970s, though I don’t think Timothy Leary was much of an influence. Indeed by then, key figures of the counter-culture had conformed and been subsumed by the establishment they’d rebelled against. No, for me, it was a matter of extremely poor grades and a bit of wanderlust that took me cross country and deposited my disheveled self on the west coast for awhile. It took 15 years, but I eventually secured that college degree.

So spray painted on the abandoned building on Howard Avenue in Baltimore, the call to turn off media, perhaps our day’s version of dropping out, at thumbing our nose at the establishment, one that’s about nothing more than the sale of our distracted, disjointed attention. The other day one of my young-uns decided to delete social media accounts from her phone, saying that her scroll was taking over her thoughts, or something like that. Which is the idea, I guess, that these things on our devices want us to flit from thing to thing.

Speaking of flitting, this week’s collage is twenty-two pieces of paper glued onto a two-piece background, cut from photos I’ve taken over the last twenty years. A foreground of buildings with runners and a super-sized fiddler sitting on a building-sized box with a giant peace symbol. Along the top, another cityscape, a man on his phone, a bird, a couple watching the scene from a rusting disused water tank. A woman cycles by with her puppy in a basket. A woman takes a picture of a yawning lion while a man reads the Daily News, uninterested in the scene around him. Disjointed? Distracted? No unifying theme? How dare you say these things!

It’s untitled as yet, but I’m thinking of calling it:
– Bored man with lion
– Turn off, turn on
– Timothy Leary’s dead