whoa, way behind. but the email inbox gets more and more full, a tidal wave, or at least a tidal surge, about to cover nose with a sludge of glimmering words. back in Helsinki. having to take the extra time to type the word Helsinki slowly, otherwise it gets typed wrong.

workshop migrates into the second day. dialogues generate, pathways open up, words, energies are exchanged.

meet Tapio at mbar in the Lasipalatsi, where my old cafe9.net office was. the center of town, different now since the huge Kamppi underground bus terminal complex is finished. that complex is behind the Lasipalatsi, and looms like a mini-Tian’anmen (Gate of Accepting Heavenly Mandate), though the Finnish translation must be something like Gate of Accepting Earthly Commerce (Portille hyväksyä maallisen kaupankäyntiä)??

I joke with Peter — this is the way the World ends, this is the way the World ends, this is the way the World ends, not with a Bang but with a whimper — about the demise of cafe9.net. it ends in a Chinese restaurant, with the group seated around a long table, an argument breaks out about the bill, and all the frustrations and disagreements boil to the surface in a second. I walk out as Elukka and Paschatan are starting to use dirty words to describe each other — and as they happen to be seated at either ends of the table, they are standing and shouting. the polarity of the francophone contingent versus the Northern European contingent had developed over time. so, this expensive pan-European cultural project falls apart. the networkers, those working on the project with a deep desire and understanding about connections, will remain connected in the future. those who were just on the project as a a product of the “Cultural Industry” sector — as I disparagingly label it — neither understood the principle nor had any human interest in what the project stands for.

cafe9.net, the final chapter. forum with the folks from around about. the city, Brussels, is moving into the next state, as that is going. European Development. mapping into the spaces of being. the view from the hotel is raucous. the day after the ending day of the networking and creativity workshop with a nice compact, concentrated group of participants. five cultures. and seven points-of-view. synthesizing. in both form and function. small successes, leading to interventions of energized sparkings. crossings, no genetic alterations. no need for that. (reading in the paper about the GM fish. (faugh!)) needing to counter these migrations and permutations of the matrix of living energy.

potato and chicken soup, a local specialty. chocolate mousse.

another Icelandic recital, this time vocal works by an Icelandic choir. at the Lab today, trying to finish up a first-draft of my resume. getting tired of it all, but knowing it is needed. to make this next step. dinner party at Juhani and Rita’s house in Espoo, Bernice goes with. and Akeno, the Butoh dancer who will be in Juhani’s performance at cafe9.net next month. spinning. and the name server is down the entire weekend so online presence is limited to expensive phone calls.

surrounded by an enthusiastic bunch of cafe9.net hosts, well, anything can happen! good!

and at the other end of being, sadly, they bury Ingvi today.

cafe9.net is coming close. the host seminar begins tomorrow, with possible no network to network with. indeed, it has brought me to the limits of this project, being subject to too many external conditions to be able to function at an even moderately efficient level. any level of success will be difficult to generate with the seminar situation.

Wheels are made for rollin’, mules are made to pack.
I’ve never seen a site that didn’t look better lookin’ back.
I was born under a wanderin’ star.
Mud can make you pris’ner and the plains can bake you dry.
Snow can burn your eyes but only people make you cry.
Home is made for comin’ from, for dreams of goin’ to.
Which with any luck will never come true.

I was born under a wanderin’ star. I was born under a wanderin’ star.
Do I know where hell is, hell is in hell-o.
Heaven is good-bye forever it’s time for me to go.
I was born under a wanderin’ star, a wanderin’, wanderin’ star.
Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can bake you dry.
Snow can burn your eyes but only people make you cry.
Home is made for comin’ from, for dreams of goin’ to.
Which with any luck will never come true.
I was born under a wanderin’ star. I was born under a wanderin’ star.
When I get to heaven tie me to a tree.
Or I’ll begin to roam and soon you’ll know where I will be.
– Lerner and Loewe

what else can be said. the cafe9.net final group meeting before the execution … of the project. when will I write a history of these meetings?

(a group portrait of the cafe9.net crew in Brussels with a lousy digital camera)

Maison du Dragon. across the street, the Erotic Discount center, “Simply the BEST” and the Gascogne next door with “Non-Stop Table Dancers” and next to that, “Show Center California.” a central location. wink wink nudge nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean? anno 1873. while on the box plays a documentary on musicians from Burkina Faso.

public lecture tomorrow. dinner with the class also. meet Jørgen about cafe9.net things. brief talk with Øystein about the possibilities of coming back to teach in the fall, and this seems to be a good possibility. more negotiations are in line, though, as I begin to plot the NEXT academic year of nomadic activities.

already some place different. two flights yesterday, one from Reykjavík to Oslo over lovely Hekla, who decided with moment’s notice to erupt on Saturday evening. the second flight ends in a heavy Vestfjordene cross-wind and the pilot almost sliding off the runway, just two or three meters from the edge with the leeward wheels. and a hard double bounce with a sharp list in between. not a nice feeling that time. but back in Bergen. rain, and another workshop. interesting situation. complex groupings of beings. needing to continue extending the research into the dynamics of group interactions. chafing at the cafe9.net morass. the conflict between whatever and whatever. in the invisible arena of remote presence. ah, f**ked-up.

back to Kiel briefly. eating a bag of M&M’s in the train. crossing through Wittenberge in the former East, there is still a complete awareness of the divided society here. derelict buildings everywhere in the East, wild undergrowth, a bit of chaos. my English is suffering — so many spelling mistakes as I write, I can hardly deal with it. retyping things constantly, back-spacing, returning to a crime-scene and fixing the evidence, this text exists in many forms that are changed sometimes months, sometimes years later. in flux. Theresa and Wolfgang will leave tomorrow for Trondheim for the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Art that Theresa has curated.

note from Anthony:

REMARKABLE
trANSPOSITION
FROM SANTA BARBARA
THROUGH SUPERLATIVE ANGELES FOREST
REARRIVING AT MOHAVE KELSO DUNES
here this northern sky
sinks a sliding drop
surprise
a gliding sustain
stretches in suspension
firedrip gamos meteor gift
–Anthony Zega, letter

Zorak graciously fetches me from the train, direct to the Forum, and then I go out shopping when Jennifer calls me about the Content Coordination situation with cafe9.net. it seems to be degenerating as a result of both Heikki and I stepping away. I am really thinking I need to write a parody of European cultural cooperation. it is such a joke. but the idea of writing a narrative account of it seems a waste of time. rather try to continue digging further into the network. later in the evening, I make a garlic-pasta (ail del’olio?), a favorite recipe of mine. easy to prepare, and unless folks don’t like garlic at all, it goes over well, with some Romano cheese, a good salad dressing, some vino tinto. late evening. some strange drinks, and so on …

talk with Ingileif today about how the meeting in Prague went without me. sounded like everybody survived and the project moves to another stage. relating more details of the plans, though they do sound in need of informed advice and assistance for this thing to actually work.

back in Helsinki already. offline for almost seven full days, barring a short peek at email on the 11th from the center for Contemporary Art there in Prague, sandwiched in between a hectic schedule of meetings and discussions with the cafe9.net crew there. so much going down that it is TOTALLY impossible to make flowing sense or documentation of anything! stumbling back to Helsinki, on the screaming wind of jet streams, to the top-floor rabbit hutch I am soon to bail out from. head out back on the road again. Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau, Bauhaus. Kurt Weill and Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Brecht. and wet historical sex.

This is the life of man on earth but of darkness we come at birth
Into a lamplit room, and then
Go forward into dark again ….
Now a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim and the clouds blow over and darken him As long as the Lord God’s watching over them, keeping track how it all goes on. But I’ve been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey.
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away
Forgetting the promise that we heard him say.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
– Maxwell Anderson

massive flows of people in the brisk air, crossing stone-line spaces in complete human order. while I sit in a silent room, drifting through remote lives, remote life. so many points of presence in the matrix, the embedded volume of life, that calculation has to be estimated, by orders-of-magnitude, unspecific, prone to inaccuracy, messy guess-timation, and catastrophic over-runs and under-flows. slipsticks drove WWII efforts of calculation. slide rules. painted, demarcated bamboo slivers. then came the electronic calculator that I desperately needed after one semester at CSM, exams were constructed with a calculator speed in mind, so, the slipstick had to go, had to spend five hundred on a TeeEye-71 magnetic-card-programmable machine with advanced scientific equation features. playing land-the-lunar-module on it, same as on the main-frame over in the Green Building.

breakfast, moving around the town to catch the atmosphere. another breakfast, then meeting the Bologna2000 people, and so on. the meeting will go on. and on. and the energies will cross linguistic boundaries and so on. simultaneous translation. on into the day and then night. finding levels and places of communications. seeing sights (an Apple sticker on the front windscreen of a motorbike, later a World Wildlife Federation sticker on another windscreen). many shops have succumbed to the chain invasion, but not as many as in Scandinavia. There seem to be many more independent product lines. a magnificent cheese shop around the corner from the hotel. I could buy a whole wheel of Parmesano or Romano if I had the possibility to carry it back (to where?). these are the things (even global capitalism cannot crush — the crystalline atomic interstices — but that is not a good metaphoric image from the energized view of the world — interstices cannot be in a continuum of energy — perhaps a model of flow pathways fits better, a sense of small, granular paths where flow takes radical liberty). Maximum packing densities for global capital is being reached, and still there are large interstitial gaps, spaces, based on the limited ionic structures of capital distribution. the larger the molecule chains, the greater the possibility of impurities. so on. cafe9.net, the official name of this pan-European networking project. now that I have been involved in this project for almost 1.5 years, opti-pessimist. imagining that already at least 150000 Euro have been spent on it so far — on culture-sector subsidies. maybe 50% of it going to the various airlines, 25% to hotels, and 25% to food and other meeting costs. meetings and how that goes. the cultural industry sector of the European economic system is probably the most heavily subsidized sector — not in absolute numeric terms, but if one compares the monies that are available in the private/public sector, and the total public expenditures. artists who complain here become objects of derision, or at least quiet scorn — that things don’t get better, anywhere in the world! and yet, people complain.

arrival after an early wake-up, not nice to get up. dark and cloudy, rainy. slow breakfast, belly feeling unwell. unusual not to be able to finish breakfast of oatmeal with bananas. but I could not. the actuality of anarchic living, of fringe being, of psycho-social unfitness is pure angst. not that I am at that social locus, but there are other aspects of being that … conspire … to corrupt the mind from it’s state of pure flux presence. (and can’t mention certain things here directly, things about the details of life, for … fear … of being … found out). somehow. that’s why the confessional is a false medium for me. that diarist writing is impossibly self-less. it has to rely on external, observational content. but anyway. Italia. it’s been awhile. feeling the fashions, the food, the buildings. of course this was a cultural city-state like the rest of the Lombard League. ah, nothing to write here, anyway. Heikki and I have dinner around the corner from the hotel, food seems cheap. filling and good. after the zombie-hood of the plane flights, being totally zoned out, I begin to come alive, but head straight for bed after making a few entries here and jotting things down in my notes for the Content presentation tomorrow night.

up at 0600, but awoken at 0410 by somebody opening a door in the house, then, an hour later, the black cat — who I met yesterday first on the front steps, then, later, sprawled on the (heated) bathroom floor — jumps in the window. in bed at 0100. then, here at the airport, the plane in canceled, the next one also, and I have to transfer to an SAS flight an hour later. on the way over to Tone’s place for fish soup dinner, I stop to call Hilde, and at the same moment, Sanna calls, multi-tracking. and still the questions of what to do in the spring, after the holidays, causes me tight-chested breathing, and sleep deprivation. this is very unusual for me. so it is something to work with my breathing on, my concentration, my future. more offers to do workshops, this time back in Bergen in the spring. Cafe9 got another boost from this visit, very interesting intersections. for old times’ sake, I wander over to see Johan, who was teaching in the Institute of Photography at the Art and Design school when I was a guest lecturer back in 1992. or was it 1993?

Rasa and Raitis arrived last night, and today is filled with the energy of them starting their two-week workshop in streaming media. plus the busy-ness of continuing my installations of network administrative software around the Macintosh net. Stef calls from Manhattan, and right after, Sanna calls from Helsinki. I was able to fix Annika’s printer, solve a hub relay problem, reformat Bernice’s computer, go swimming and shopping, and make some calls re: Cafe9 plans. many emails. words with others. thoughts. a full day, leaving me tired-eyed and exhausted now, and it is only Monday.

logfile

the cafe9 project seems to be coming in to its own condition. there is an inherent flow moving me towards some kind of stability in Helsinki. if I can keep my energies in a state of alignment, this has become the absolute question. keeping surface explosions, well, holding onto the long enough that they dissipate and do not throw bad energy off at other people. heightening the awareness of others’ energy so that the flow and movement of the combined intersection is balanced and positive (when that is the needed condition). helping Harri on his thesis for an hour or so, I am rushed. cycling over to the pool, fast, the attendant is not in the cash cage to take my turquoise-blue 10 FIM coupon that I buy at the college cashier, the normal price is 25 FIM. good deal. but nobody is in the cage, and it is before eight. I wander around and one of the lifeguards comes over to help. I am a little surprised that his English is so good, as I have frequently had some trouble communicating with local people here. he takes care of things, and so I race in to the locker room, change and get into the water, thrashing a quick kilometer before the 2030 closing time. cycling home across the pedestrian bridge, I watch the ice on the river. it is disappearing rapidly. it will be all gone in two days.

the pointproject crew in Trondheim collab with Annie Abrahams to perform the I have only my name? irc event, I act as a facilitator (they have no background with IRC) and participant.

enough of that. no calls. wonder if my corn meal makes it to the Helsinki 2000 offices where the meeting is later today. so much travel for such a small meeting. on the harbor. at the Helsinki 2000 offices. Janna tells me that, yes, a package arrived for me at the office, a bag and a letter. I freeze for a moment, a letter. oh no. but it turns out to be a notice from the Academy Bookstore that an English copy of Chopra’s Path to Love has arrived. ironic. but I have my corn meal, and maybe that is more important than having that form of love anyway. nice hot cornbread, get-away bread they call it, ’cause it goes so fast, slathered in butter and hot maple syrup, a side of bacon, what more could one ask. mmmmmm. thanks Sanna for not ditching it in the organic garbage bin, but what about the bottle of Pastis? oh well, I’ll get another one in Duty Free when I come back to Finland in April. meeting goes all day, and somehow I find myself at Kiasma again, and there is Sara, from Iceland. funny to run into former students. I knew she was coming to stay at one of the ateliers on Suomenlinna this month anyway. we have a beer together before my dinner with the remaining Cafe9 folks.