A Day in the Life of Chaos

Over the holidays as my father and I worked diligently to rewire a number of things in my son's 1973 Karmann Ghia and during the process I became intimately acquainted with the most disturbing example of wiring I have yet to witness.  Wires that go nowhere and some that vanish into hollow cavities like snakes disappearing into the black of night left me with nightmares of smoke and acrid burnt electrical smell.  Fuses popped with disturbing regularity as I followed each wire like a prospector seeking a vein of gold.  Somewhere within the tangled jumble of dubious connections and occasional curse words I started to assume a philosophical approach and wonder if in fact the tangled mess before me was in reality a metaphor for life. I love the metaphor.  It is an art most cultures of the world understand but in our own it is sorely misunderstood and sadly underutilized.  I think I came to appreciate the metaphor the most when I was a college student and engaged in the study of Easte

Palace Corbelli Classroom Obsolescence is a part of everything.  We see it every day.  Devices we once couldn ’ t live without now no longer serve a purpose.  It could be a record player, the cassette tape or the rotary phone.  We are now even witnessing the demise of the fixed phone for that matter.  Every generation has them and are defined by them.  For my father it might have been the milk man, my grandmother the streetcar or the horse.  Some objects seem to even have programmed obsolescence like the home computer.  The saddest obsolescence of all is when it is our very self that has lost its need.  Time carries away all things but for a shining moment in our own existence in our minds, we exist.  We live, we love and we thrive.  At least those willing to breath, willing to dream willing to love, willing to give will leave the world with a smile on our face. Christian Tanzer and Joe Funk I lived in Vienna the winter of 1987 and spring of 1988. I attended an American program