this was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

and, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

the Abranowicz-Raisfeld clan preps to head to Costa Rica, an early departure tomorrow morning.

Marie-Hélène passes this on:

The dynamism and spontaneity of nomadism lie in its contempt of borders (state, civilization, ideological, religious) and in the real experience of the Universal . . . this is not something egoistical or self-centered but instead a surge of the spirit carrying on its way primal anthropological values and sowing a particular unease in the womb of everything that has a tendency to become firmly anchored. — Michel Maffesoli

breakfast pönnukökur with Egill and Alva

qWe define aura as a unique phenomenon at a distance, however close it might be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you breathe in the aura of those mountains, of that branch. — Walter Benjamin

Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart with Mari and Mika

Trümmer sind an sich Zukunft. Weil alles, was ist, vergeht. Es gibt dieses wunderbare Kapitel bei Jesaja, in dem es heißt: Über euren Städten wird Gras wachsen. Dieser Spruch hat mich immer fasziniert, schon als Kind. Diese Poesie, die Tatsache, dass man beides zugleich sieht. Jesaja sieht die Stadt und die anderen Schichten darüber, das Gras und wieder eine Stadt, das Gras und wieder eine Stadt.

Rubble is the future. Because everything that is, passes. There is a wonderful chapter in Isaiah that says: grass will grow over your cities. This sentence has always fascinated me, even as a child. This poetry the fact that you see both things at the same time. Isaiah sees the city and the different layers over it, the grass, and then another city, the grass and then another city again. — Anselm Kiefer

I head on down to hear Andre Vida jam on saxophone at Wendel with Jodi. it’s smoky, cool, hot, beat, and groovin — check this redux audio out…

Yellowstone. for the second day. struggling with the teenager and such. which distracts from and distorts the energy of place. interaction of place and person. the series of images continues domination of landscape which traces the very tangible interactions between human and land. in this case, 21st-century Amurika and the accumulated legacy of a pioneering land which is filling up. to be sure, there is the tribal essence of camping in a tent where nearby there is a very large and possibly very aggressive bull buffalo chewing its cud. and the thermal activities which do remind of the possibility that the planet could most probably simply throw off the species which has raped it in extremis and spend another few million years developing another species for potential evolution. but here we are now, the heart of the Western Frontier Spirit. Old Faithful. the semi-circle boardwalk with bench seats made from plastic 2×4 boards, those extruded from recycled polystyrene bottles courtesy of some corporation, surrounding the low and very trampled-looking tufa deposits. where the faithful, in their hundreds and perhaps thousands come on a semi-hourly basis to watch an endlessly variable repetitive event, marking a psychic continuation from those pioneering days to the present where the frontier is an unknown and fearsome — with Them bent on prising from Us everything that we’ve built up and enjoyed on the backs of Them over the last 100-some years.

that evolutionary struggle along with another one — the elegant mosquito which will still be around after this country is down-graded to a mere tropical storm from Cat-5 Imperial hurricane of the post-war era. though the moot question comes up, exactly which war am I referring to? and is a typhoon from the far east next?

Ready to vacate the camp ground: the omens and portents are not good.

Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

Nothing like the amplified throb of hydrocarbon explosion to go to sleep by and to wake up by. Camping in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) OHV (Off-Highway Vehicle) area. The premise is simple, the social system has generated devices, machines, both two-wheeled and four that allow a single driver to mount somewhat like a horse, and to ride at speed on rugged and steep terrain. For entertainment. (Note: three-wheeled machines were banned from production 25 years ago because of the vast toll of injuries and deaths which ensued as a fault of the basic design). The word entertainment is key. It is absolutely true, straddling one of these machines, with hydro-carbon explosions vibrating the body, landscape rushing by a high speed. The body transforms itself into the body of a god (or goddess). (more …)

head hanging, I have the distinct mis-pleasure of missing my godson’s Bar Mitzvah this coming weekend. hmmmm. lack of disposable income to increase carbon foot-print-stamp and head East. that’ll come shortly perhaps. but in the meanwhile, Andrea (Simon’s mum) shares her script for the evening (mind you, the photo above post-dates the beginning of this narrative a couple years — around the Buttinsky-Hoppy-Top & Armpit Dancing Era), that’s dad, Bill with big bro Zander along with Simon in his mother’s arms, lil’ sis Maxie is still in the oven):

Simon Arthur gracefully slid into the world on May 2, 1994. He had a powerful set of lungs, but he didn’t get much chance to talk those first few years. Zander was his big brother, and rarely missed an opportunity to speak on Simon’s behalf. Simon had to learn other ways to capture an audience. Silent, sly, comical ways. He innately understood the power of nudity to gain the spotlight, and used it regularly. It was the rare gathering in our house, or anyone elses house for that matter, that Simon did not make the scene if not fully undressed, then in his tiny little briefs. Whether it was his stunningly fast Ninja moves — which often had the unintended result of landing him on his own back — or his oddly endearing Armpit dance, Simon relished entertaining the crowd his way.
(more …)

washing clothes. necessary once back in a sweaty and humid climate. running between the beach and the center. something was left in a pocket of the pants. little chips of white paper on everything. literal remains.

first-responders on the way home last night. on the way back from checking out the local sonic scene and to meet Shannon and Rick for their solo performances at LanFranchis, a (the!) local alternative space — reminded me very much of FishBon in Santa Barbara except folks were smoking. also met Katherine, a creative writing student at UTS. the performances were good with a decent 5.1 sound system. it would have been nice to do a mix like I did for leplacard in helsinki two weeks ago. here’s an ambient mix from the evening.

make it to Bondi this morning after long transport delays.

other notes on the antipodes: clouds (definitely the wrong word!) of black fruit bats the size of fat and dumpy seagulls drift (definitely do not fly!) in the late twiLight airs above the treetops. a … disturbing … sight. not for its natural curiosities, but for the way the beasts move — as though they are in a drunken haze of meditative zen tranquility while moving across a space of thick gaseous vortices, all lying at the bottom of the sea. and me looking upwards.

the next note: so far, while the National Art Museum has a permanent exhibition of Aboriginal Art, I have seen only two drunk Koori around Kings Cross — near the 20-meter-high Coke advertisement. enough said. maybe dumb idea along with this Colonial geometry but I would like to get a decent didje for working the breath when next in desert lands.

The whole world was asleep. Everything was quiet, nothing moved, nothing grew. The animals slept under the earth. One day the rainbow snake woke up and crawled to the surface of the earth. She pushed everything aside that was in her way. She wandered through the whole country and when she was tired she coiled up and slept. So she left her tracks. After she had been everywhere she went back and called the frogs. When they came out their tubby stomachs were full of water. The rainbow snake tickled them and the frogs laughed. The water poured out of their mouths and filled the tracks of the rainbow snake. That’s how rivers and lakes were created. Then grass and trees began to grow and the earth filled with life. — Koori creation story

more note: in the water. for the first time in surf for a long time. body at first not responding, that combined with the size of the breaks. a few minutes conversation with a beach guard who is out in the break herding folks away from a rip. he says it’s a hell of a first day to visit Bondi — they were pulling people out all day, jet skis crashing through the foam heading out beyond the breaks to check on surfers, and hovering choppers. sets get up to 3 meters, look like even more occasionally. it’s a workout to get through even the secondary shore breaks which are easily at a meter-and-a-half. noticed the surf report online is in feet. old timers guarantee that maybe? great to be out there, though. damn. but no room for error. no body surfing, just stroking between breaks, diving deep under the curlers, and staying out of the way of anything turbulent.

interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.

Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

not enough sleep after the dinner at Mokki with the Pixelache folks and the Prix Mobius people. finally caught up with Juhani who was on his way to Manchester today.

up early to meet Tapio at mbar for a short session about future polar/solar plans and dealing with future web-documentation and such.

then over to the gallery at noon to begin the final set-up. remote presence :: streaming life gets underway with preparations for the evening’s happening. all runs smoothly. except for the entire network going down about an hour before opening time. turns out to be one of those crazy glitches around a print job submitted to the wrong printer. it brought down everything for a tense 30 minutes before I could figure out what was happening. otherwise the transformation of the gallery space was completed some hours before the opening, and it looks very nice. did miss the final session of the conference with Lisa and Armin, as well as missing the last event of the Nordic VJ program. too busy.

many folks come to the opening — Antti, Bernice, Owen and his wife, Kaisu, Amos, and on. I was not so able to chat much, monitoring the outgoing streams, but the vibe was good. the sonic stream is an interesting mix, though the video input was sparse and not so electric. we would need another couple days to spruce up that medium & means. the ambient sound in the gallery is warm and party-like.

the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…

over at the Pakhuis de Zwijger offices, a too-short meeting with some of the staff, to explore research methodologies that extend into art-making. one hour simply is not enough to generate dialogue — it is good only for talking about issues at people. not with people. the network develops at the speed of life. later, dialogues spring up out of the initial meeting context, with vigor — accentuating the problematic one-hour theory. dialogues which are the point and an expression of (my) methodology per se.

also met the current keyworx development crew, Lodewijk & Jokke. to see the whole new Open Source paradigm, including the web-based patcher. looking forward to alpha and beta testing!

trying to get more job applications in, but time is so packed with meetings, there is only peripheral possibility. but the UNSW/COFA one is in and good. at least the interview process will be in hand whilst in Sydney.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walk man: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard

is it worth it in the end?

a long stroll to the Hauptbahnhof for tomorrow’s tickets. end up using the electronic ticket machine which leaves me with exactly no change because it doesn’t take EUR 100 bills. fortunately I have exactly the cost, EUR 87.50 from Kiel to Aachen. should have gotten a rail card 4-days/one-month it would have saved me a bit. too late now.

muttering German phrases, words, repeating to self the texts on signs. down to the harbor, ever so often, becoming mindful, not enough, but bringing the breathing and the hyper pace down a few levels, and deepening the breathing and shifting the worldview. on the way down there are several conglomerations of police in full riot gear. apparently a football match between Lübeck and Kiel is taking place today. the police presence is overwhelming, and at the Hauptbahnhof there are at least 100 officers deployed, forming a press to search fans as they get off the train from Lübeck. some are outfitted in dark green cloth-covered body armor, some are in black. no clear difference between the two uniforms. they mostly are large and imposing figures, a few women among the men. the football fans repeatedly break out in hoarse and echoing chants. the police escort the city buses to the stadium with riot vans, along with officers filming everything on dv-cams.

the sonic ambience is interesting. getting good use out of the Zoom H4. it seems to get pretty decent sound with the built-in microphones. I have yet to try the external phantom miking possibilities. now it’s a question of getting the content online, though, I’m way behind on that. when each day is full of in-ma-face email pressures and logistics issues. so it goes!

then Björn sends very dramatic footage from the riots in Copenhagen, right from his flat overlooking Sankt Hans Torv. he caught some of the molotov cocktails going off and some rude crowd action until the tear gas forced him to close his window.

Everything depended on geology. Any damn fool could see that the vegetation was directly responsive to the bedrock. Hence birds and wildlife were responsive to it. We were responsive to it. In winter, our life was governed by where the wind blew, where snow accumulated. We could see that these natural phenomena were not random — that they were controlled, that there was a system. The processes of erosion and deposition were things that we grew up with. An insulated society does not see how important terrain is to someone who has to understand it in order to live with it. Much of it meant life or death for the animals, and therefore survival for us. If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don’t fight nature. You live with it. And you make accommodations — because nature does not accommodate. — David Love, to John McPhee in Rising from the Plains

Adriene’s CD, Mauve Desert, based on the novel of the same title by Nicole Brossard, circulates around the space that is this place: the desert. I’ve never found it circumscribable with my own texts, or in images that I’ve been able to spin out from the hours and days spent wandering in these liminal locations. images, with still attributes seemed to have some potential to gather the loose photons but hardly re-present the fullness. nor do they touch on the possibilities that allow the heart to be monitored by internal ear. finding indescribable a surmounting way of this time of life. where a complex mélange of life problems flow through each day. job, location, art production.

The desert is indescribable. reality rushes into it, rapid Light. The gaze melts. Yet this morning. Very young, I was already crying over humanity. With every new year I could see it dissolving in hope and in violence. Very young. I would take my mother’s Meteor and drive into the desert. There I spent entire days, nights, dawns. Driving fast and the slowly, spinning out the Light in its mauve and small lines which like veins mapped a great tree of life in my eyes. — Nicole Brossard

Adriene’s compound, Hobe Chobe, on the outskirts of Twenty-Nine Palms, is a funky array of block houses, sheds, a 1950′s vintage travel trailer, a Buddhist bee hive, and assorted spaces shaded by some nice eucalyptus trees. dusty, I’m wishing for the fat shop-vac in Prescott to tidy things up from the infernal entropic advances of the desert system on this modest infrastructure. Adriene calls it humble, but Brad and I find it quite inviting, and in the end, after we figure everything out, comfortable. the weather is perfect for the situation — a bit warm for the season, high 80′s during the day, low 50′s at night. as the full moon wanes, the stars begin to appear.

memories of recent and undocumented interactions with rainbows. dredging up a spectral wonder committed to film at the God’s Falls in North Ice land. and this text composed some months back on the back deck of a house no longer lived in:

what sight of rainbow gives full and transitory is not the will to wake up the next morning, it’s just late afternoon, well before sunset. lightning strikes the house. the radio quits. do the dead feel the hissing crack of close lightning like the living do? a bit of dread, a bit of shaken body wonder?

rainbow gives nothing except the radiation to brush the eyes. but in that brilliant subtlety there is everything. the smell of rain soaked earth and sage, cedar and piñon. when it is leaving. gone. all is gone, even memory of persistence of vision an illusion. after all, memory is imprint of the primal mind leaving the moment. rainbow gives only memories of itself, written in state-shifted electric bodies.

Fleabane (Erigeron glabellus) fills Pool Canyon, along with the huge sage brush bushes.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as “the Copenhagen Interpretation,” because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers circa 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called “model agnosticism” and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, “The map is not the territory.” Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as “The menu is not the meal.”

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — “contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.” In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude. — Robert Anton Wilson (1986, preface)

(photo of Mariah by Cheryl Gerber for NPR)
when listening to an NPR report last Monday covering the one-year anniversary of Katrina, I heard a short interview with a woman by the name of Mariah Furze. could it be the Mariah Furze? recalling a recent conversation with another high school friend Meredith where she was saying that Mariah was living in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and was one of the many who had lost everything in the hurricane. we all attended high school together in Gaithersburg, Maryland, way back in the deep dark past. I found a number online and gave a call, and there was Mariah at the other end! still a jolt to be able to leap across such spaces and times in an instant. couldn’t really place her accent, but it’s been a long time since I been to that corner of the US. (back in the days of working on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi delta.)

at any rate, it was great to hear the basics of her story first-hand. she also pointed me to further information on the town, starting with the extensive web documentation put up by Dan Ellis — recovery, and the pre-Katrina town site. see for yourself the massive scale of destruction and the lack of progress in rebuilding as a result of un-responsive local, state, and national bureaucracies. indeed, following all the media hype and excitement over the “next big thing” to report on, it is hard to really comprehend the experiences of folks living on the coast there. except to say that empathy is necessary, and “you had to be there.” volunteers are still very much needed and warmly welcomed to Pass Christian. numbers have dropped sharply in the recent month (mostly because of the August heat and back-to-school), but the town is still in heavy and hard times. Mariah is the head of the Volunteer Taskforce with headquarters in The Grey Hut in town along with Amy Hardee, a volunteer from North Carolina, and others. Mariah is helping to lead the fight against the bureaucracies and to help folks get their lives back together, including her own by heading to the state capital to meet with the governor next week to literally lay it on the table. more power to you Mariah! they can be reached at 228.452.7270 if you can volunteer or perhaps have donations to help folks out. stay tuned for updates on the situation.

hit the road, heading gradually south and east. through the burned hills of the coast range between Livermore and the Great Valley. avoiding the main roads when possible, but spending most of the day at speeds too high, with death only a wrist-flick away. here again in the Mojave. fullness of stars. moon will be up later. tonight on the ground. head exhausted after first the NYC trip and then the ISEA gig. haven’t processed it all. and the short time need for employment. Prescott is a lousy base anyway for that.

head exhausted with the whole last year. need to clear it out and start a new life. suggestions about going to OZ surface again, after the virtual contact and the contact with various kiwis and ‘strains in the last couple weeks. hmmm. that or Canada. okay, heading for bed. letting granite grit cradle my brain for a half-solar-cycle.

great visit with the Pulsar Road crew. left five of Kevin’s paintings on loan. took the rest with.

the day before Loki turns 14. the separation is painful, especially with no clear plan for the next months except for heading to Colorado and to Missouri. putting job applications in. following up on the UC-Davis opening, and on. spend the next week finalizing everything in storage. keeping out what’s necessary. trundling the rest off not to be seen for an indeterminate length of time.

long day in the city. starting in the United Nations Plaza which is, definitely a coagulation of spirits. first scenario visiting the eye on regaining ground-level from the Civic Center BART station is that of a seagull in the process of eviscerating a live pigeon. by the time I film, the pigeon is dead. the second scenario: to kill time, I drop in at the Asian Art Museum where the guards start to check everything in my backpack and begin to recite a mantra of all the things that cannot be brought in or used or done (or thought!) in the Museum. I stop them, and say that I am not interested in participating in their particular little corner of the social system, pack my bag and walk out. and head back along streets brimming with urine-reek, the displaced homeless, flophouse hotels, and so on. at a stop Light, a woman standing next to me asks the world in general how can I restart my career? I look at her and say I was going to ask you the same thing! it is clear that social empowerment is at an extreme low here in the center of San Francisco.

lunch with Casey, and on to a rendezvous with Sophea and Amanda. a double espresso puts an edge on the afternoon. on the way, evidence of a TAZ is spotted: a good omen! although the juxtaposition with other street scenes previously experienced in the day raises many questions about the way a TAZ might be expressed in this time, in this socio-political system.

on to Whole Foods for breakfast provisions, Casey goes home to study, we head back to Amanda’s place to prep for the trans-national breakfast with the Sydney

and Adelaide crews at 1630 local time. the breakfast — French Toast, fruit compote, pashed (!) potatoes, and champagne is streamed and rebroadcast on free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY as part of the live_feed: Breakfast Radio streaming project. the overall performance was initiated by Andrew Burrell and the Hybrid Radio Research Group as part of the Aural Degustation: Tasty Bites to Feed the Ears exhibition at the SCA Galleries at the SCA in Sydney, Australia. participants included: (in Adelaide): Mimi Kelly, Sasha Grbich, Jen Brazier, Heidi Angove, and Tamara Baille ; (in San Francisco): Amanda Hendricks, Sophea Lerner, and John Hopkins; (in San Diego – special telematic drop in): Amanda MacDonald-Crowley; (in Sydney): Lia Smith, Amber Moloney, Clara Chow, Bjel Bakker, Belle Brooks, Heidi Abraham, Sach Catts, Alli Barnard, and last-but-not-least, Andrew Burrell.

Kate Armstrong and I try out urbantells.net as their first guinea pigs. tech problems start everything off. and seem nearly as ubiquitous as the number of devices deployed at the exhibition.

the polar/solar brunch ends up with Ed, Ken, and I talking over lunch for several hours — nice, catching up — mapping the network, teaching, working, net-working. we then wander over to the CRUMB project run by Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham to have some tea and cakes and some interesting conversation on strategies for survival in the culture sphere.

yeah, isea ’06. stories begin to accumulate as to failures of the local infrastructure in support of the program of incoming artists and their projects.

later, doing the gallery crawl with Ken, run into Mathias. catch some interesting work and good food.

walking down Bedford Street I meet the lady with the lime green brolly briskly on her way to the wine shop, kitty-cat in a tote bag, and stories about winning over the boys in the community garden. dinner with Amanda and Stephanie, at Amanda’s place in Brooklyn. along with Mr. Tiger, Amanda’s new cat who seemed easy-going and sociable despite battle scars from street life in Brooklyn.

earlier I was able to get together with Eric, a sharedj activist among his many other talents. at a cave-like cafe in Brooklyn he showed me some of his keyworx-based work which immediately brought to mind Stan Brakhage’s aesthetic which could easily be described as the precursor to much vj work in the present time (including my own). although my contact with Brakhage was, on a film-production level, limited, the discussions, and more importantly the simple exposure to his vision through screenings of his and other’s work was moving and formative to the inner eye. he had his little cubby-hole office next to and half the size of mine when I was a grad student, so we got to know each other better through informal chats — life is short art is long…

Imagine an eye un-ruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’ — Stan Brakhage

anyway, back to Eric’s output — he also collaborates as a tenor and lutenist on an entirely different plane in Asteria, a Medieval/Renaissance music duo. he passed on a copy of Soyes Loyal, their latest album featuring Burgundian chansons of courting and love from the 14th century. Eric’s divergent interests and skills are incongruous on the surface but stand as a strong example of how personal energy transmission does not have to be closely tied to form but rather to the efficiency with which one finds the projection of such energy through a chosen material mediation. Eric is attentive, concentrated, skilled, and definitely efficient transforming his energy into a variety of forms of inspiration.

you can test track their two albums at magnatune.

Mr. Sobol, while mentioning his wonderful gigblog, finds resonance in my travelog and the work of Kenneth Rexroth, and sends one of Rexroth’s works along.

Inversely, As The Square Of Their Distances Apart

It is impossible to see anything
In this dark; but I know this is me, Rexroth,
Plunging through the night on a chilling planet.
It is warm and busy in this vegetable
Darkness where invisible deer feed quietly.
The sky is warm and heavy, even the trees
Over my head cannot be distinguished,
But I know they are knobcone pines, that their cones
Endure unopened on the branches, at last
To grow embedded in the wood, waiting for fire
To open them and reseed the burned forest.
And I am waiting, alone, in the mountains,
In the forest, in the darkness, and the world
Falls swiftly on its measured ellipse.
* * *
It is warm tonight and very still.
The stars are hazy and the river —
Vague and monstrous under the fireflies —
Is hardly audible, resonant
And profound at the edge of hearing.
I can just see your eyes and wet lips.
Invisible, solemn, and fragrant,
Your flesh opens to me in secret.
We shall know no further enigma.
After all the years there is nothing
Stranger than this. We who know ourselves
As one doubled thing, and move our limbs
As deft implements of one fused lust,
Are mysteries in each other’s arms.
* * *
At the wood’s edge in the moonlight
We dropped our clothes and stood naked,
Swaying, shadow mottled, enclosed
In each other and together
Closed in the night. We did not hear
The whip-poor-will, nor the aspen’s
Whisper; the owl flew silently
Or cried out loud, we did not know.
We could not hear beyond the heart.
We could not see the moving dark
And light, the stars that stood or moved,
The stars that fell. Did they all fall
We had not known. We were falling
Like meteors, dark through black cold
Toward each other, and then compact,
Blazing through air into the earth.
* * *
I lie alone in an alien
Bed in a strange house and morning
More cruel than any midnight
Pours its brightness through the window —
Cherry branches with the flowers
Fading, and behind them the gold
Stately baubles of the maple,
And behind them the pure immense
April sky and a white frayed cloud,
And in and behind everything,
The inescapable vacant
Distance of loneliness.

floating through a high country day. mountain bike ride after breakfast. up to the trail head into the West Elk Wilderness. back out, Sage keeping pace even on the downhills. pack up and make the circle around the north rim of the Black Canyon, and down through Delta. saw a gal parked having a picnic. single bike on the rear rack, like me. wondered about how one crosses paths. make a stop at the Ute Indian Museum.

it’s far from present Ute lands, and most of Colorado was once populated by one or another bands of Utes who are now reduced to three small reservations in Colorado and Utah. another dreadful history of crimes against humanity. are we really better than that now?

seek wisdom, not knowledge. knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

to go on a vision quest is to go into the presence of the Great Mystery.

the soul will have no rainbow if the eye has no tear.

another stop at the Gunnison National Forest main office to check out any information they might have, as well as inquiring about jobs. looks like everything is through the JobsUSA website. one path to travel. have to look into that again when online next. Ridgeway seems interesting again, with some commercial buildings for sale. question is, what to do in these small towns to survive? could computer consulting work? construction is no longer an option with the L5 disk acting up, could be major trouble in the near future. website construction? teaching high school? vocational tech? uff. re-forming trajectories seems at the same time daunting and full of possibility. how can it be problematic when so many others are employed? and so many have managed to gather so much capital in this country. but the path between scraping poor-ness and abundant wealth seems so … arbitrary. there is no clear specifications except for self-confidence.

end the day almost at tree line, up Bailey Creek, off Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan National Forest. the luxury of dispersed camping (finding places up 4×4 roads that are not developed, but make excellent camp sites) is appreciated. no cost, only fuel to get there, and that expense suggested that instead of an immediate return to Prescott, that I take several days and enjoy being back in Colorado and check out several new places. in Curecanti Creek, I saw only one car in two days, and up this rugged route, doubt I’ll see anyone until I head out and down and south west tomorrow. feeling a little guilty being out of phone range, but have no messages except one from Gary, so, figure all is well in the greater telecom world. make a short video of sunset on a nearby peak. and in the process of reviewing the tape after finishing it, I discover that all the footage that I shot of Kevin’s memorial in NYC in March had that effing bad audio. really disgusting — Bill, Stefan, Martha, Rosemary, and others talking about their memories of Kevin. the glitch seems due to bad mike contacts, or a dirty record head. it pops up randomly, and has affected some other critical footage previously. and the pondering on the idea of getting a 3-ccd hd prosumer cam comes back up and/or a Nikon prosumer digital still camera. what else to do with capital? shopping is a dumb way to make a cash flow (negatively). better to keep the investments growing and multiplying. and purchase only items that can definitely be positive cash generators.

whatever the end result, work is the next necessary step to confront. that and the June 18th Month of Sundays performance. finishing up with the house, packing things in a way that maintains some viability to several pathways of action. but meanwhile, watch the sky and the land.

so on. scanning all sorts of crap into the archive so I can continue to liquidate hard-copy. thinking about shopping. thinking about film-based photography, thinking about digital photography, thinking about video, thinking about cars, thinking about moving. thinking about stopping, thinking about flying, thinking about sitting. thoughts over done on being stationary. thoughts about work. what is possible, what is not. maybe all is still possible. doesn’t look like that, except when one runs into one of those supremely un-qualified jerks making money for nothing (and the chicks fer free). so, everything is still possible.

Sarah decides to apply to KHIB, hope that goes well. I send out information to the network to aid in the process. networking.

The local controversy around widening Williamson Valley Road continues. It is a microcosm of the more general issue of development in the southwest of the US. Arizona has one of, if not the fastest growth rate of any state and the Prescott – Prescott Valley – Chino Valley “Tri-city” area is near the fastest in the state. When the folks moved here and built their retirement home (purely my father’s impetus — the clear-sky suitability for his astronomy), theirs was the second or third home on the street, and the view — a 200-degree panorama that reached 100 miles to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff — was long and relatively free of any spurious Lighting at night. Williamson Valley was still populated by several large ranch spreads, and the road was narrow and twisting as it approached Iron Springs Road and the fringe of northern Prescott proper. That was twenty years ago. The population of Prescott has increased by a factor of four, and the Tri-city area by a factor of six. Everything from Mac-mansions and gated communities to cheap tract housing and trailer courts are changing the landscape on a daily basis. Traffic increases, and now, with development along the WV corridor stretching 20 miles northwest along the fringe of the National Forest, the wealthy folks who have chosen to live that far out are upset when the traffic slows their ingress to town. The first five miles of WV road has more than 75 side roads — everything from driveways to major roads — many of them blind entrances. The second five mile stretch is more straight and has only around 50 intersections. The City of Prescott, working with Yavapai County officials decided unilaterally (well, with the heavy hand of The Developers behind them!) on a “Master Plan” to widen the road, now two lanes, to five (and sometimes 6 or 7) lanes to accommodate the increased traffic and make the road “safer.” If only! Given the drivers who are already tailgating folks going the speed limit (anywhere from 35 to 55 mph) an extra lane means there will be, in effect, an extra fast lane in either direction. That means, if any of the other local 5-lane roads are any indication (including the infamous “Blood Alley” of Rt. 89A between Prescott and Prescott Valley) impatient drivers will be hitting 65 to 80 miles-per-hour in the fast lane. Residents with entrances on the opposite side of the road along that ten mile stretch will be required to cross up to three lanes to turn into their driveways or enter the road. Try that with a blind entrance and 80 mph speeders. The body count will be significant.

It is clear that it is The Developers who will benefit the most — that class of people who carve up the ranches into salable chunks and build houses. Most frequent now are the aforementioned mentioned Mac-Mansions — monstrous homes up to 5000 ft2 (450 m2). Emblems of consumerism, with Hummers and other SUVs parked in the driveway, in front of the four-car + RV garages.

The most annoying aspects of this housing excess is the lack of design features that show any awareness for the local environment. Generally the only nod to the surrounding environment are massive windows (usually placed towards the north-west) which allow the standard spectacle of virtual-environment-as-entertainment. No need to actually go outside!

The house my parents designed and built went up during a short window of time when the state and federal government was giving tax credits for energy-efficient features. My father took full advantage of this, although the house was going to be designed for solar anyway. It has active and passive solar components along with energy efficient characteristics like 6-inch outer walls (instead of the normal 4-inch), anywhere from 3x – 5x the normal insulation factors in the foundation, exterior walls and attic, and so on. Perhaps the single dominant factor, one which affects the comfort of the house most, is the simple orientation of the foundation. There is a sun room at the south end of the house — a room that gets a full blast of Arizona sun during the winter months. The room has a concrete-slab floor which acts as a heat reservoir to store the solar influx. The room has a sloping ceiling which carries heated air up towards an intake vent which carries this pre-heated air down to be pumped out into the 4 – 6-foot high crawl-space which is under the rest of the house. The air then comes out floor vents located in each room. This simple system which needs electricity only for the circulation fan — it easily keeps the entire house at at least 68F in the winter when the sun is shining, the sun room in the 80′sF. On the rare cloudy days, the wood stove in the sun room acts as a substitute. There is a solar water heater which acts as a pre-heating element for the regular water heater or, it can supply the house with 50 gallons of 100F water by itself. Not bad.

Sure, my folks were part of that wave of retirees who came 20 years ago, just another wave coming to the warm west. It’s been going on for 150 years at least.

Presently, along the road, on the wide easements are horse, mountain-bike, and ATV trails paralleling the road. These will be wiped out, further reducing the ”usability’ of the corridor to local residents.

I dunno. Watching the developers consume the landscape of the West is pretty depressing — unfortunately, though there are alternative ways of going, they drive the process with little effective opposition. There is the web site of citizens opposing the widening at http://www.Wvroad.Com.

Jim sends an invite to a current show at Studio 258 in Denver — brought to you by discopie.com. this is one of my favorite designs that Jim has available at discopie — that you can get it on everything from thongs to buttons to tee-shirts. irreverent, thought provoking, and always with a wicked sense of humor. over our 15+ year friendship, it’s always a nice surprise to see what’s happening in his studio in Denver. and it’s one of Loki’s favorite places to go, ’cause he always walks away with a special little gizmo from the many glass cases filled with jetsam from the High Water Mark of the Amurikan cultcha of the millennium shift. yessiree!

From Armin Medosch in a call for papers to WAVES – electromagnetic waves as material and medium of art (Acoustic Space Issue #6)

Pantha Rei – everything flows

Radio waves occur naturally. Society puts the biggest emphasis on the ability of waves to carry signals. Radio, television and mobile telephony are some of the most widely used applications. The worlds fixation on content and its socio-political implications makes us forget the waves themselves. The proposed exhibition takes a look at the physical properties of waves. Waves are considered to be ‘immaterial’ from the point of view of visual art. However, light is just a specific band in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves. Some of the properties of waves change according to their frequency and wavelength. It is worthwhile looking at those properties and exploring their implications for art. Wave-like phenomena play an important role in various aspects of reality, from the physical consistency of the world (audio-, air-, water-waves) to Kondratiev-cycles and the carbon-cycle (the storage and release of CO2 by oceans and forests).
(more …)

sorry — this is no longer available!

Marianne Murdock, Arizona-based author, singer, song-writer and self-confessed-but-reformed coffee-slave releases this straight-ahead rockin’ blues number about life as a espresso-maker in a world where java is the drug of choice. Everyone’s happy to see the dealer, but the desperation for the fix over-rides everything. Baristas everywhere will be toe-tapping to this one and no doubt Starbucks employees will be line-dancing on the counters to lyrics like

… some caffeine-depleted repeater causin’ trouble in the line …

and

… you don’t want no sleeve because you like it when it’s hot …

For a free mp3 preview or to pick up your personal copy, head to http://www.baristasong.com/. What’s an addict to do now?

Dance!

Outi, a former student sends this link http://www.liveherring.org, a project she’s been working on.

and more iDC mailing list commentary

George (Saunders) leap-frogging a parking meter somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, sometime in the year that Orwell’s O’Brien tagged when the lesser shall have a future controlled by the greater, thus:

How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
…
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
…
And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. — George Orwell

George Orwell I did not know, but George (Saunders) was a friend in some distant past until I had a téte-a-téte with an ex-girlfriend of his. he doesn’t think of me anymore, nor I of him, except hearing a cryptic review on NPR of his first novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil that made its way to shelves recently. I’d buy a copy, but I don’t spare cash for material things that I would just have to carry around. I’ll wait until it’s online with the Gutenberg Project or so. maybe somewhen else I’ll resurrect some visual histories of other days that were shared. why George was leaping over the parking meter I no longer recall. why I made an image, I only know that I have been taking images of friends in various stages of living at various ground coordinates for more years than i can remember why. certainly not for nostalgic reasons because when I took them, there was no future, only a present that skittered along, like the rocks I sometimes spin across bodies of water, or the rocks that I have held in hand, drawing lines on another’s body, or those same rocks, smooth in their repeated collisions with other rocks, now in my jean’s watch pocket, getting warm from expended body heat, and grounding one side of my body to the body of the earth. humans have life collisions. I collided with George, numerous times, it wore down some sharp edges, maybe. maybe not. I still have sharp edges, George perhaps not.

since Mars is taking bright place in the heavens these weeks, no need to imagine the canals when one can go to the Themis site and see broken levees at 17-meter resolution. meanwhile in a conversation with Master Zega, the prognostications of a certain Frenchman come up:

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. — Jean Baudrillard

so, from here on forward (and backward), recognizing that there is plenty of material to be culled from the email archive and the daily outgoing rush of words to generate relevant content here. as I run into the issue of editing — why not put material here that is more immediate, more intense, more reflexive of the trajectory of life in this incarnation? one old memory popped up — that of a small scandal that I precipitated when I was in my last year of teaching at the Icelandic Academy in 1995. with a group of students, I was running a collaborative email- and fax-based project with a couple other schools and as I had also built the first, very primitive, web site for the school, I decided to put some form of documentation of the collaboration up as well. I stupidly put transcripts of emails that I and the students exchanged with the other schools. at the time there was a part-time video teacher at the academy who was using the computer lab repeatedly without asking me, for his own projects. I objected that unless he clear things with me, I would rather that he not use the machines during the day for his own things. somewhere in an email I mentioned this to one of the other schools, complaining about this guy. and somehow he ended up reading it (doh, I did put it on the nascent web) and complaining to the Rector. I was leaving the school anyway, but it upset some of the other teachers who were already ticked about the amount of money that I lobbied for — to build up the photo/video/computer lab. anyway, sotto voce will become entries culled from email. they will only be scandalous for me.

sotto voce: I’m pretty slow on the reply — just now coming out from under what seemed to be a large rock. I can walk (slowly), sit, drive now without the brace I wore until last week. it feels weird to be without it — like a shell-less turtle. & still months before I hope to get back to full strength. it’s been strange though. everything from the hi–tech repair job, the interruption to ‘real life,’ and dealing with a very material body…

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. (more …)

here’s a side view of the titanium in my back — up to the right. the cylinder in the middle is located at the core of the L3 vertebra. and the HUGE wood screws are in the L2 and L4. sheesh.

sliding into fall. this is the first year that I have not been working, teaching somewhere in the world in the month of September since 1986. instead, nursing body to some state of health, slowly. bored with reading and other forms of mediated consumption. can’t sit long enough to really do concentrated work on new videos and such, but do want to at least get one new dvd done with the 3 or 4 new videos finished before summer started.

everything is in slow motion except for time passing rapidly. now more than two months from this cataclysmic accident. no meaning to interpret in the event and the subsequent process of recovery.

talking by phone to folks occasionally, hardly doing email, don’t understand the malaise.

reflecting on parallel universes, light musings surround the controversy that today ceased rumbling around CNOOC (Chinese National Offshore Oil Company) and Unocal (Union Oil of California). back when I worked for Unocal in the early 1980′s, it is hard to imagine any other response than hearty guffaws to the suggestion that, in 20 years the US oil concern would be up for auction with Chinese buyers out-bidding Chevron. no longer in contact with any of my colleagues from those days, I would be curious to hear their situations, if, indeed, they still are employed by the firm. times change the conditions of the market. Unocal has been an acquisition target since the early 80′s when I was there — when the infamous Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was in hot pursuit of the company, such that the board tried to sink the company into multi-billion debt to make it less attractive. it is a different time indeed when a Chinese company, 70%-owned by the Chinese government, makes an aggressive bid to acquire a legacy US corporation. and on top of that, a company dealing with THE major strategic resource of the developed world of the 21st century. no wonder Washington hawks are screaming! after watching the entire Cspan-aired Senate hearings on this precise merger, I was astonished at the lack of intelligence in the expressions of the ‘experts’ called in by the Senate. so little understanding of the movement and evolution and change of power in a dynamic world. fighting or resisting inevitable power shifts is for the naive who cling to temporal power under highly conventional paradigms. it is clear that China is rising, and the US perhaps falling — in the broad sense. the empty cup tends to fullness, the full cup tends to emptiness. rather than deal with the realities of socio-political evolution, the Washington power-brokers cling to an out-dated and very static worldview. few seems to get Sun Tzu.

but how is it, these men and women who populate a corporate landscape, how do they live? remembering back to the instance of going on a executive retreat to an exclusive resort in Ojai, north of LA, for a 4-day review of Unocal’s status in the oil business. my task was to present at an informal seminar an overview of state-of-the-art technology and applications for gravity and magnetic in petroleum exploration. golf was on the schedule for a majority of the older execs, their bonding exercise. open bar helped with that. I got the feeling that everything simply went along a certain and safe pathway to the intended goal of regular paychecks which were fed into mortgages, car payments, and very short vacation splurges (only 10 days of holiday per year for the first 5 years). like a corral to tame the wild engineering student broncos. at the end of my briefing on the Colombia Llanos project, I showed a series of slides including portraits of the local peasants, the landscape, and the on-the-ground operation. It was very quiet when I was showing images of the people.

I have always maintained that my departure from the Big Oil scene was in no way an altruistic choice. this despite an early radicalization which included studying “The Communist Manifesto” in 7th grade — a fact that classmate Russ Werner picked up. he was the funniest kid in the junior high school, and the best cartoonist as well. he left a note in my yearbook addressed to the Pinko Commie Rat. no, that predilection did not factor in, though I can point to Roger Steffens program on KCRW, where I was a volunteer-member, The Reggae Beat brought the vibes of the Rastafarian belief system into high relief with guests the likes of Bob Marley, Alton Ellis, and Peter Tosh. If music can radicalize, it did. Bob Marley speaks as powerfully as any German philosopher! Jah Rastafari Makonnen! not to mention programs like “Alma del Barrrio” on KXLU “schizo-radio on the Left.”

I also recall, when living off of Lincoln and Ocean, taking a long slow look at a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard, running around $1200 at the time, now I really wonder what would have happened if I had bought that rather than a Nakamichi tape deck, a used 6’2″ twin-fin swallowtail surfboard, and a Fiat Spyder.

no, leaping from the Big Oil gravy train was merely the next step. on the eve of departure, the actual handing in a letter of resignation to Dennis Mett, the director of International Exploration, there was the huge Mombasa project that came up. For six months after I left, I would get occasional phone calls from Bill Sax, the VP of the International Division, asking if I wanted to continue working for Unocal and go to Africa for 6 weeks to oversee a mag survey from offshore up into the Great Rift Valley. by that time I was on another trajectory completely.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa. — T. Boone Pickens