Still shaken by yesterday's conversation with scibe. At the gallery while she was installing her work.

"It has taken me a long time to see what has been happening," she said. "Now I am pretty sure I have been followed for years. And I can see the tricks that have been used on me. Sexual stimulation. Strange compulsions. A herding into situations where I was likely to get hurt. The suppression of my work.

The thing that makes me so mad is that I think there is a pretty good chance that I would not be disabled now if someone had told me what was happening. And I know there are people who knew. It is hard not to blame them. Not only the people who did it but also the people who knew what was happening but did not tell me, so that I could at least try to protect myself.

I know that it is impossible to always do this. Things happen that I could not possibly anticipate. But I was denied any chance of escaping what happened."

"We were also denied the right to demand that this be stopped." I said. "I am sure that this would have happened if we had been told. So you have to look at who benefits when the work of artists and writers and activists is suppressed."

On the table in the painting there is a cartoon of milk, a coffee cup full of coffee, an empty bowl, an open box of cereal. Every time I look at it I envision someone sitting down. A woman, dressed for the office, emptying cereal into the bowl, pouring milk on it. Or a man in work clothes, drinking his morning coffee before he leaves his home for work.

The work I placed beside it is very different in theme, and yet for some reason they work well together. It is a painting of Pete Seeger testifying in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee -- painted by the German exile, whose work I saw in a Los Angeles gallery the day I met Gunter's grandmother Claidia.

In contrast to the painting I saw then -- with its dark portrayal of the interrogators -- this one focuses on the musician who is being questioned. As always, Pete Seeger looks like one of us.

A regular guy called to account for a life of creating music.