badly developed negative fourteen years before the demise of these monuments.

on a day spent at altitude (zenith at 14,270 feet (4350 m.) up Grays Peak); with hypersonic overflights of military aircraft, some close enough to distinguish under-wing weapon arrays. are they joy-flying on regular deployments, or is this some memorial act?

a couple hours online between bouts of wild(er)ness solo and with old friends. have a long conversation with a solo hiker up in Mill Creek this morning. Steve lives out of his modest Toyota RV, a retired engineer, spends 5 months a year hiking in the Colorado high country.

Thirty years plus a few weeks since the original visit to the Center of the Universe. What does it reveal?

I decide to initiate a new series for the sacrifice project — this time, using the large bag of .50 caliber machine gun bullets collected out on the gunnery range on the expansive salt flat south of Wendover last year. The brass sheathings on the “balls” are weathered green from time and brine. These evidences of the military-industrial complex need to be re-distributed back around the west.

Cartridge, Caliber .50, Ball, M2. Used by M2 and M85 machine guns. The cartridge is intended for use against personnel or unarmored targets. The cartridge is identified by a plain bullet (“ball”). Type Classification: STD – OTCM 36841

EJ sends this along of his youngest daughter Nora (on the right) and a friend making the summer’s pilgrimage to the Center on the way to the Great Sand Dunes. the graffiti that was sprayed on the structure back in 2009 has been painted over (flip through the pop-up photos here to get to the Center, and you’ll see the juvenile work!) it did give me the idea of proposing a temporary exhibition of graffiti, say, Berlin-style (go through the pop-up photos to some classic Mauer-style stuff), on the three sides facing the road, wouldn’t that be awesome!

Chris Allen, one of my favorite students from way back in Master Black and White Printing at CU Boulder in the late 1980′s, passed today. Chris was a gentle, gracious, and humble soul, at the same time as being a fearless seer. His work at the time he was in my class was sourced in his tightly-knit family situation. He visually mapped the dynamic of his crew of young daughters and wife with an intensity and intimacy that I have not seen rivaled with such personal work. He was hard-working, focused, and completely un-self-conscious about his photography. We had many wonderful conversations about life and photography during that time. His wife, Sandy, was due with their fourth child, and they invited me to attend and photograph the birth which I did do. I remember saying yes to Chris, and then getting the phone call early one morning, “It’s time, come on over.” Uff! What have I done! I was terribly nervous about such an event, having never witnessed a birth before. But the vibe at the house, with the midwives and the kids, was incredibly calm and loving. I was blessed by their trust. (more …)

A rare Clarence without his sax at a gig with Bruce and the E-Street Band at McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado sometime in 1980.

pushing back the deep im-pressions of attention-diverting noise is the primary task I undertake in a learning situation: to the degree that the actual subject of inquiry is secondary. it is more the practice of facing the unknown which is the core of learning. attentively facing the unknown. mediating technologies tend to wrap us in a cocoon of dis-awareness of our own senses and from the flows that we are immersed within, making it impossible to focus attentions on the flows to begin with… ach! it’s such a pervasive problem. It becomes a powerful motivation to engage (young) people and to push back these im-pressing forces and watch them begin to breath freely again and then, to watch them begin to wonder what it is that they would like to learn about, then participate with them as they approach the unknown and engage it…

It’s been years since Gary and I were sitting in a car for a road-trip, but when he called me a few days ago saying he would be in Yuma and had to drive from there to the Bay area for a few days for some meetings, then back to Yuma, I figured, what the hell! We’ll head for Nancy & Steve’s place, and surprise Loki in the process. So, up extremely early for the four hour drive to Yuma. Pretty damn cold and plenty of snow on the road– moonset, icy fog, snow deep in the National Forest, until I drop down 3000 feet to the Sonoran Desert then it’s warmish and dry. Along with scenes of military-industrial development and other realities.

Meet Gary in a part of Yuma that is not on Google, 1000 yards from THE southern border. He had to talk me in — very strange place, hard-core crop-raising every other section line alternating with new or seemingly abandoned California-style suburbs. I drop my car at his friend’s place and we head out in a rent-a-car. West along the border, to the Salton Sea bypass (used to be only a rail access frontage, a bad one! Now it’s fully paved! Bizarre. Gary and I had last been on this stretch of Interstate almost 35 years previous. I remember it was 125°F so we sat in a MacDonalds for several hours before going to camp near the sea. Between the flies, and the earth re-radiating copious amounts of IR energy all night, it was a bad night, then we drove straight on through to Orlando Florida in somewhere between 48 and 52 hours. But that’s another story.

We have a constant conversation from the moment we cross paths. Last time crossed paths was in Missouri last year, spring with Nick, Karen, and Deb. And before that, it was years. Although we’ve talked by phone every few months. So we talk our way past the Salton Sea, through Palm Springs, Yucaipa (used to live there ages ago), Riverside, Santa Clarita, over the Grapevine and gun barrel north on Interstate 5 to the I-650 Bay turn-off to Livermore. Surprised Loki.

portrait, Bruce Springsteen, McNichols Arena, Denver, 1980

digging deep into the 35mm archive, from 30 years ago now. 18,000 images. back from the time I covered around 150 concerts in two years, as well as being the photo editor for the yearbook, special editor for the newspaper, and doing some advertising photography — at the same time as slogging through one of the toughest engineering schools in the country, argh. hard days … but much fun: our motto was work hard, play hard. doing all that with good friends, what more can one ask?

this archive will surface in some form in this thesis project, possibly, and if not within that framework, it will simply surface as possible. the (life)-time required to do this is significant. and perhaps that time is short.

with a truckload of stuff, it’s too complicated to camp extensively. and, in retrospect, not much to say anyway. got to get back in Prescott to get organized for the ensuing departure.

dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.

the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!

Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — as deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam.

So: two major mechanisms and the second is responsible for the construction of the first. It takes an energy (depletion) to create these barriers which subsequently carry and direct energy flows as prescribed by their particular socially-mandated configurations.

[This all goes back to the hypothesis about virtuality -- where virtuality is (merely) the presence of a situation of attenuation of 'natural' flows (and here, tool-making is a key component). The question of what is 'natural' may be approached from a couple way, but more on that elsewhere.]

And all the way, Coyote laughs.

The day spent in leisurely absorbing the energy of place. The campground is built under the only trees for miles, (eucalyptus, from Australia!) so there is raptor and other bird activity all the time. The owls at night contribute a fantastic dialogue to the silence.

A short hike west to some low hills, down a wash, ends up, with the recent extreme rains, at a cattle pond full to overflowing. As per usual, I do not do a ‘before’ image (note to self — do a before image next time!). The downstream side of the small embankment dam has been undercut to within a meter of the main body of water which is substantial. With a small stick, I scratch a small line across the top of the dam, gradually increasing its size, using the initial slight flow of water to clear the waste from the cut. After twenty minutes of play, there is a sizable gap in the dam along with a flood of water rushing through, further eroding the dam body. Monkey-wrenching? Nah, this is merely a slight acceleration of what is happening ‘naturally’ — the breaching of the dam will occur eventually unless there is maintenance energy applied into the system. It would have likely occurred with the next substantial rains.

I do take an after image, and then head back to camp circuitously. It is after I see Coyote’s paw-print in the rain-damp soil, walking on a trail, that I cross the wash on which the dam is built. I am surprised that the huge rush of water from the breach is just reaching this spot. It is first a trickle which then ramps up to a full-on rushing creek. Fascinating to see the water fill the bed of the wash, pooling in hollows, flowing over small water-falls. I see immediately this is a perfect audio situation to continue documentation of the ‘changing the course of nature’ or ‘changing the course of history’ project that I have undertaken in the last few years. I lope back to camp, grab the recorder, and race back, downstream, to the wash. The flood is proceeding slow enough that I can run further downstream several times to record the ambient audio and make some images of the process.

Then it’s back to camp for dinner.

Sky-worms bugger the clarity of the atmosphere, attenuation the flux of Light reaching the surface. Obviously this is under a major north-south air-route — the only good thing is that the planes are at 10 km altitude, so the sonic disturbance is minimal. The affect on high-altitude haze, however, is profound. Long vision (at the sky and at the landscape) refocuses eyes through these worn diffracting glass into another focal point. Eyesight goes bad with all the reading and writing. The next year will make all that has gone before (go pale in comparison, argh!) as the PhD takes shape. No life, no sight left.

I have not seen another human the entire day with the exception of a well-armed ranger cruising through the campground. A droll chap, probably 30 or so, from the East Coast, a Federal employee, dislocated.

Around sunset, a car pulls in, first they park in the next slot, but then pull out and park across the campground, 50 meters away. There is a couple, they mill around, looking like they are setting up camp, it’s cold, getting colder, sunset. I’m sleeping on the ground. They turn on a radio playing pop mariachi music. It gets louder and louder as time goes by, getting later and later. They are sitting in the front of the car probably drinking, smoking, whatever. At one point well after 2300 I yell over to TURN IT DOWN. That has no effect. I honk my horn, also to no effect. I contemplate going over, but also realize the odds are that the occupants are armed. I instead pack the car up, fuming, and drive to a side-road further south in the valley and find a spot there. Faugh, why would somebody drive all this way — it’s at least 50 miles from the nearest town — to sit in their car and play loud music? Sorry, I don’t get it. [expletives deleted!]

Later, Orion drags his belt and sword from the sludge of Light pollution that sits to the south: Los Angeles, more than 150 km away or so. To the east, light from Taft and Bakersfield. A strong wind arises late in the night, there are no trees where I have moved to. Uncomfortable night after the luxury last night.

If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
– Tung-Shan

Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitate: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.

Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.

This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.

On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.

gurls, dogs, and Christmas lights on display. somewhere in California.

I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.

There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.

Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.

It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.

The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.

Can’t wait to get another dose of NZ!

The ADA Symposium officially starts up, fueled by some excellent, tasty grub for breaks and for lunch. (sorry, no comprehensive notes here… no time at the time and no memory ex post facto.)

Julian and I do an impromptu dialogue on Energetics and Informatics in the stead of Graham Harwood’s keynote, as he’s quite ill right now and couldn’t Skype in. As Julian and I have been talking so much in the last week, it is a natural extension of that dialogue.

The day is full, ending with Doug Kahn’s talk, dinner, and a video screening. Packing things up and taking them back to the house, and I crash.

Can’t remember which evening Julian fell down his stairs after getting the girls to bed, dislocating his toe, and requiring Sophie to drive him to the hospital to have it reset. Ouch!

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. (more …)

Cycling down the river to first the boat house, then downtown and The Green Bench for more work, stopping to photograph the river in the brilliant sunshine and I see a huge cloud rising from the direction of Taranaki. could it be an eruption? I ask a woman walking down the bike trail, but she looks and seems completely indifferent, seemingly not recognizing that it is a smoke, not weather cloud. Weird. Turns out that it is likely just an agricultural burn.

Up early again, before all the girls are off to school, the morning routines are quite entertaining to witness. Compared to similarly-aged kids in other places (the US!), all the kids I’ve met here seem quite relaxed. Is it the culture here, or? There is a laid-back quality, but I haven’t been here long enough to see how it suffuses through the society. There have to be substantial social issues, with colonialism having left such an influence on things. The stack of histories of NZ that Kerry loaned me before traveling told of savage open conflict until around the time of the US Civil War which is quite recent. Though no longer in direct living memory, it is still quite close. It’s is obvious, from the clear-cut timbering alone, seen from the air, that there is an ongoing and deep conflict over land-use, with powerful development and/or exploitation forces. On the other hand, there are definitely strong voices for nurturing the environment (and human lives on the island) back to something more sustainable.

We take a visit to the waka (canoe) boathouse to check on things — there is a crew of young gals who are practicing waka racing for the national championship. A group of absolutely charming young women.

Mike, our main Maori host comes by, what a expansive and powerful spirit he has! Julian has really cultivated some amazing connections with people here. Everyone met so far has been friendly, open, welcoming, relaxed, ready with a smile, along with some challenging/enLightening conversations.

Hardly time to make any entries now that the road has come up to meet my feet, so to say. Prepping mentally for the symposium coming up in a few days. But there is still so much indeterminacy that I will really have to improvise, and simply go with the available and auspicious energies of the moment. Many stories are already told about energy and informatics.

Towards sunset, an impromptu picnic on river turns out to be a neighborhood gathering, yet another example of a relaxed bunch of folks. Such a (WELCOME!) contrast to Sydney!

There’s quite some stress around the catering for the symposium as the person who was to do it had a terrible family trauma arise in England. There will be around 50-75 people coming from around New Zealand along with a few foreign presenters, and the food requirements are vegetarian, vegan, lacto-ovo, etc, etc … complex on limited resources …

Turns out that Gregers though, was the cook and manager of that anarchist vegetarian dining room near Bjorn’s house in North Copenhagen — I’d even eaten there a couple times when visiting Bjorn — so between Gregers and Jonah from the local community, along with volunteers, things will come together. It’s a challenge!

Oh yeah, and it’s Gregers’ birthday dinner in the evening. I work on a big fruit salad, and get the opportunity to introduce Freya to pomegranate seeds.

Julian, Gregers , Heidi, and I do the drive up to New Plymouth to check out the Puke Ariki exhibition/library and museum complex in New Plymouth, on the north west coast. There is a street festival and some electronic media installations as well.

We meet Ian Clothier eventually for a beer and a tour of the data-installation connected to one of the Museum installations in Pukekura Park. He’s teaching at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki

On the way back, Mount Taranaki is wreathed in a morphing cloud hat. We take a bit of time to drive to the Egmont National Park visitor’s center halfway up the east flank, and take a short walk into the forest. Marvelous vibe under the trees. The exotic feel comes from the strange vegetation.

The drive crosses mostly land that was originally forested, but is now stripped dairy farm land, the product of which is shipped to China and elsewhere. There are milk-trains crossing the land every few minutes. The Fonterra dairy factory is reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world.

I’ll be back to Taranaki, someday.