We ret’d. to Lexington, arriving at 5:30 PM, going through Atlanta and Idlewild.

Rode home with HS.

Finished the undercoating on Jeep.

My suit from Filene’s was at home on my arrival. One pair pants & the coat fit good, the other pair is slightly tight in the waist. It is good to have a new suit again. First winter one since 1955.

Entered a few more elements onto the data flow diagram.

Left Lab at 3 PM for airport — arrived at Satellite Inn, Cocoa Beach, Florida at 1130 PM.

Rode with HS.

Left for airport at 3 PM for trip to Patrick AFB. Arrived at Satellite Inn at 11:30 PM.

the Wednesday flight to Auckland looks in doubt as of today. volcano Cordon Caulle shot so much stuff up to extreme altitudes (over 15 km) and some of that got caught in the jet stream of the Roaring Forties weather pattern, and now, a week later it’s traveled around the globe and hit southern Australia, Tassie, and eNZed. crossing the Tasman Sea is best done by boat. sheesh. Darwin Station keeps an eye on it all locally for the VAAC.

already entering the drone zone of movement, though, regardless of what goes on with the ash cloud. though would not relish being a passive observer of an ash-compromised turbine engine. Air New Zealand hasn’t canceled any flights versus all the other carriers who have up to Quantas which has canceled all their flights to Tassie and eNZed. what to make of that? the NASA images are at least definitive, and surprisingly not referenced in Australian media anywhere.

500 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile flying
250 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile driving

These are very approximate/average numbers and are affected by the type of plane/vehicle and its relative efficiency.

We are changing the course of nature. Or, more precisely, without life on this planet, nature would be different. We are life in this place. Or we are life, as life is a perturbation of basal flows. An always-inchoate flow, but never completely still. This is all we are, a way for the cosmos to increase entropy, perhaps, as some believe, the best way for the cosmos to increase entropy, to wind down, into a cold and silent nothing.

But it’s all in the language, isn’t it? And even the language needs to get shucked, ripped from its stalk, tossed away to reveal and remind of the truth that the word is not the phenomena that it de-scribes …

Back to:

All Roads Lead To Rome.

as principle.

The questions are, What is Rome, and What is a Road?

et cetera

Nine km. in three days, not bad — it’s actually getting easy — I need to do more sprinting and drills, but just moving faster is best, feeling the greater resistance of the water and consequent speed. That and watching the sky and listening to the birds on the walk from my office to the pool. The sky was exceptionally dark and clear last night, it got down to maybe 40F, pretty cool. Totally dreaming about being in the bush, as they say here, in the back-country, the wilds, the wilderness. To watch the stars sink right to the black edge of the world. Squatting, eyes tearing in the chill condensate of mid-night. The Southern Cross is practically at Zenith now which seems strange, but at a similar latitude as in the north in winter, Polaris also reaches quite close to Zenith. Pity no chance of catching a good sky on this tour. Now too many folks to visit with before possible departure, too many things to do, including whether not to leave again.

Left Oak City for Boston at 0830, transferring to a jet at St. Louis. My seatmate from St. Louis to Boston was a Mr. Masselli of the Electric Power Cooperative in the Midwest that supplies power to the AEC; he must be an executive. I enjoyed talking photography with him as he was carrying a Nikon Reflex with an attached & coupled Light meter with an f2.0 lens. The rangefinder is brilliant. I wish I could get one of these cameras, but it costs $349!

Arrived home about 1900.

Found letter from Mr. Halaby’s office re: the Committee on Safety for the FAA.

Went on to Boston, getting home about 7 PM, after a $10 taxi ride from Harvard Square.

Left Boston at 0800, arriving at Phoenix about 2:30 PM. Left in an Avis car at 3 PM for Bisby, arriving at 5 PM, where we checked in at the El Rancho Motel.

Windy – warm

Went out to Bisby, Arizona, arriving there about 1700 after a two-hour ride from Tucson

Returned to Boston. What a contrast between the clean West and the dirt of Boston!

Returned to Boston. My, what a contrast the newness and cleanliness of the West is in relation to the dirt and grime of Boston.

Drove home from the Lab in JLV’s Plymouth.

Left Boston at 1125 via UAL 853 for LA, arriving at 3:35 PM PST. Drove down to Newport Beach and checked in at the Jamaica Inn at 5:20 PM.

Rec’d. a call from a Mr. Gast at Aeronutronics at 9 PM re: a mtg. at 9 AM tomorrow.

Left for LA at 11 AM arriving at 3:50 PM via AAL 707.

Left Logan airport at 0800 for O’Hare/Chicago, arriving there at 0925 CST; went on to KC at 1105, arriving at 1210. Went up to Ft. Leavenworth in a staff car, arriving at Lt.Col. C.P. Hall’s office about 1 PM.

After some preliminary discussion with Lt. Col. Brown, he turned us over to Lt. Col. Kelley, who is concerned with the effects of nuclear weapons. They have taken most of the arithmetic out of the weapons selection process. We need a copy of FM 101-31 with change 1; I believe we can get the yields and LR from this. Brown later took us to his superior, Col. Monroe, who had a better grasp of what is going on.

Will talk to Intelligence gents at 0830 tomorrow, and then see what the archives hold.

Went into town for a Mexican dinner.

Worked on 1960 Income Taxes; income over $20,000!

Left Logan Airport at 0805 for Kansas City and Ft. Leavenworth, arriving at C&GSC at 1 PM! Weather good.

Went home (Boston) via AAL 86 + NAL 482. Left Detroit 0815; arr. Somerville 1430.

+ 3˚F

Left Detroit at 0815, arrived Idlewild 0930; Left for Boston at 11 AM, arriving 12:30 PM. Finally got out to Somerville at 1430, due to a subway tie-up.

JCH has bad cold, the others are well.

Met with Col. Halper & co about 0830 to renew our conversations. Their concept of a System Manager is based on the need of someone to manage administrative operations after the system is in being. Our present need is for a set-up to oversee the development of the CCIS. Col. Halper suggested a) that, if possible, recommendations should be directly related to conclusions, and b) that related efforts or areas of fruitful activities that have been discovered during the study be itemized also.

Discussed their work with Messrs. Springer & Greene who said that they were glad to be freed from MOMAR; he suggests that the FATOC & FADSOC be combined.

Left for airport at 2 PM.

Left airport (Indianapolis) at 4:25 PM

Arr. Detroit 5:20 PM

Found the 7:30 PM train to Boston was canceled. No air space so came to Henrose Hotel.

Left for Detroit at 420 PM.

Found that the NYC train for Boston from Detroit was cancelled a/c of dock pickets in the Buffalo Yards of NYC, so, sat in Detroit.

Started to work on organizing tomorrow’s briefing at 5 AM, working until 7 AM. Rode to work with Mr. Darr, arriving at 0815. Went directly to Conf. Room A263 and finished making a card for each slide. Started a dry run at 1010 with JFN & RJB. My part took 50 minutes, Joe’s an hour. JFN wants less detail and more of the system configuration, so we ill have to rework our briefing. He gave us a set of multilith masters with Section Two rewritten; I didn’t have time to even read it before leaving at 2 PM. Copied 3 paragraphs.

Left Logan at 535 PM. Reworked briefing, making a list of slid titles and selecting the ones that show system configuration.

Arrived at Indianapolis at 950 PM CDT; we were met by an Army driver who took us to Ft. Benjamin Harrison in Harrison, 45 minutes from the airport. We were put up in the BOQ Officers Qtrs. Worked until 130 AM to rewrite the Theory of Command for our talk.

Had disc. with Mr. Hussey re: will, in his office. Decided to name both Al and Edith as trustees & guardians of our children if we die in a common disaster.

Left for Indianapolis via AAL jet at 0530 PM; arrived there at 9:50 PM. Got to bed at 1:30 AM 19 January because JFH & I had to review our briefings.

Made a single diagram for the Admin Support Systems without any of the labels on the lines; sent it to Reproduction.

Discussed with JH the sequence of use of the slides.

Informed by Travel Office that rail space between Albany and Indianapolis on the night of Jan 18/19 is sold out, so thy put us on AA Nr. 61 to Chicago and AA 560 Chi/Ind.

Clear

Rubbed down one of the girl’s closet doors and coated it. The finish liquid has a lot of clots in it.

I miss the closing dialogue session with Doug Kahn. Goodbyes and a rushed departure from the house via taxi to the airport, a short wait for the hop to Auckland and on back to Oz for 20-some hours before heading boreal-spheric for a bit. Bags are mostly packed, but the trip to NZ made for some juggling and nervousness when booking two international flights within such at short time-span.

Ten solid and busy days leaves quite a positive first impression of New Zealand, although this is no surprise, given the richness of Kiwi encounters over the years. It was a bit distressing to see the extent of degradation of natural system that has and is still occurring, but this is a legacy everywhere there are humans. We, as life, have altered the planetary system (even as we begin to observe other planetary systems — can this act of observation alter those systems as well?). There are limits to the energy flux that a planet has access to, based on solar (Light) and gravitational sources. We, again, as life, have been increasing the entropy of the system at an incredible rate, mostly through the release of eons of stored solar (photosynthetic) carbon in two centuries.

Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.

A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.

The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.

Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.

The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.

Public transport to the airport in the rain. Portland has a close-to-German system running between trams, buses, streetcars, and suchlike. A change of planes in Salt Lake gives a view of the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Wendover stomping grounds on the way in, along with the nasty and turbulent winds. The next hop to Denver goes right over Echo Park. Weather on the Front Range delays us in a holding pattern over Rocky Mountain National Park. Those peaks are all too close! On the ground, full-blown summer afternoon thunderstorm patterns are in play. With the full moon rising over the eastern plains. Look at those clouds!

at Collin and Marisa’s up on Glade Park above the Colorado National Monument — sleep in a bit while those folks get down to the airport to prep for their Learn to Fly event that their company, the Colorado Flight Center, is putting on. The drive down is in a deep and moist fog which gives the Monument extra dimension. At the airport, the F/A-18s inject their presence with after-burner roars on flyovers and take-offs. After the flight training sales-briefing, the awarding of the door prizes (free flights!) and barbecue, Collin takes me over to another hangar to see the Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber that is being restored. It’s the heaviest single-engine aircraft in WWII. Wow, it’s huge!

Back up on the Glade in the early evening, we take a hike down the canyon that their land borders, hiking down to the Colorado National Monument boundary. Yet another wow! Yeah, jealous at the fruits of their significant labors! An intense piece of land with a house and several out-buildings — the land consists of the wedge of highland between two slick-rock canyons. The land seems relatively untouched with (perhaps) first-growth piñon, small prickly-pear cactus, with a thin sandy soil — I can imagine because of the steep drop on either side, anyone ranching the land would fence it off from cattle from the get-go. Collin tells the story of not having walked the entire piece of land before buying it, and then, when wandering out to the point of the wedge only to see a nice set of big slick-rock hoodoos stepping down into the canyon head. After that he wanders back and gets Marisa who is also oblivious of the sight as well. Nice surprise. And it’s not far from that point that the yurt is to be erected. Thunderheads build over Grand Mesa.

A KC-135 Stratotanker spends the morning and evening making touch-and-go-landings. In between I suppose he’s busy re-fueling the F/A-18′s that are prowling the air all day. Immediately prior to spotting him on the first round, a series of very large concussive explosions shake everything — either very close sonic booms or bombing on the range.

An early evening cycle ride to the east, around the industrial area, then south along the perimeter of the airport runways and the speed track, all the way to the distant bunker and taxiway where the loading pit for the Enola Gay’s special cargo stands. The bomb was so heavy and large, they had to make a eight-foot-deep rectangular pit with a hydraulic lifting mechanism to drop the bomb into, roll the plane over it, then lift the bomb into the plane’s bomb bay.

The platoon practices having their fixed machine-gun and observation emplacement attacked from a line of tamarisk bushes about 100 meters north towards the rail line and the interstate. Overhead, fighters prowl and engage. The heavy machine gun shakes the windows. The assault rifles sound like small fire-crackers in comparison.

back at yet another airport — north, east, south, west? future or past?

The Past Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past. Tonight here in suburbia as I sit
In easy chair before electric heater,
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream:
I am away
At the camp fire in the bush, among
My own people, sitting on the ground,
No walls around me,
The stars over me,
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind
Making their own music,
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there
Where we are one with all old Nature’s lives
Known and unknown,
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.
Deep chair and electric radiator
Are but since yesterday,
But a thousand camp fires in the forest
Are in my blood.
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.
– Oodgeroo Noonuccal

landed. routine flight. slept for a good portion of the 14 hours. sat next to an interesting woman, Shar, writing for The Epoch Times in Sydney and New York.

following a day en route. Prescott, Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri. meet Deb in Denver, then in Kansas City. driving from there eastbound, on that strip of hydrocarbon excreta, Interstate-70. eye-seventy. recalling the towns reeling backwards from that usual west-bound drive from Clarksburg, Maryland to Golden, Colorado, all those years ago. the 32-hour road trips. arrive at the house. Nick doing laundry, the kids in bed. dialogue continues. sleep in. and continue the dialogue that started yesterday with Deb. mirrors of situations reflect, catalyze, frame possible practices, pathways, ways to go.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it easier to define this ideal that to give practical instructions for bringing it about. — William James, Principles of Psychology

Liberty International Airport. 0500. Stef yet again, graciously, gets up at an infernal hour (though not too very much earlier than his normal working hours) and runs me over to the airport. a very long day it is before I arrive by taxi to Al’s place in Prescott. extremely bad weather in Chicago caused a couple hours’ delay, but otherwise a routine vegetation in the bowels of the transportation network.

en route. heavy security gauntlet, got picked for extra testing twice — once at Tegel in Berlin and once in Heathrow. sheesh… now immersed in the media and the seamless advertising of all places of transit and transport. in this fear-full new world of old ways. secure and safe in the knowledge that life in Under Control. now where’s the friggin’ baggage claim?

there are ways of movement that smooth the soul, and other ways which bring turbulence. turbulent systems are a product of the god within, rioting for, or simply bored with the offerings of the social system.

the lady in the next row reads Becoming Best Friends with God, what does this mean? can life be so transitory that anything (thing, why thing? any action?) potentially is transcendent. any event, instance, pattern of movement, Light refracted through the small round door portal shifts through all the visible colors. and we see. I must choose to obey God in faith. the book exhorts.

where you going to? no sleep, travel night’s sleep. and up in bright 04:00 morning. and away after hearing night movements of the teenage child. other kids over after I go to bed at midnight, doors opening and closing, and then escaping, returning at 03:00. (sigh) nothing to be done anymore except be another human on the planet. closer proximity might help, might not. while heart comes to ache emptily. but with a foreboding of malfunction as per the way. nothing is always. and forever shades the eyes from seeing everything this is. how to crack open what can be?

flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.

lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.

got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970′s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.

Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.

we stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. the garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. stone walls, narrow streets, no speed limits, bad roads — equals intense noise levels.

up at 0430, out the door at 0440, on the s-bahn by 0458, at the airport at 0550, on the plane at 0645, into Köln-Bonn at 0800, through Köln-Deutz at 0845, arrive at the Academy by 0900.

breakfast with Zil and a quick tour of the Academy — haven’t been here for years since visiting Nils Roeller back in 1997 to see what the progress was on the Flusser archive among other things.

Zil and I share ideas on teaching, art, creative active, facilitation, corporate be-ing, the desert, and so on. a very nice meeting with the unknown Other. as Miga and Hubertus are developing a collaborative project with Zil, I do hope to jump in with some seminars on collaborative creativity. we’ll see.

A jaunt in chilly weather down the hill to Esslingen, a self-proclaimed Middle Ages town, turns out to be quite nice, with a bracing hike to the Dicke Turm. A third round of Elizabeth’s Thanksgiving fare is called for! Jeff drops me at the airport in the early evening for the flight back north to Hamburg.

Car-plane-bus-taxi to a very empty Düppelstraße 15. I race around the house getting ready for the de Hoeksteen broadcast which ends up going so late that I finally sign off before my interview. Maybe the year-end broadcast in December will be better anyway. The half-dead PowerBook is really causing me some stress especially in situations like this — with the backLight on the LCD broken, I can only use the machine with an external monitor hooked up to it. I begin to survey what’s available on ebay. To replace the exact machine will be at least USD 600, but I will get a later model, as the 1.25 Ghz model seems to have a collective history of glitches (bad latch, this is the second LCD for the machine, and not to forget the dastardly motherboard breakdown in 2005. Better to get a 1.67 Ghz model which will run a bit more expensive — the prices are averaging around USD 800 for those. On the selling side, to have one of these models retain such a high resale value when three or four years old shows at least the perceived quality which they have over a comparable PC model. But technological instability just dogs my steps these days. iPod toasted, laptop fried, miniDV cam trashed. A consumptive electronics low point.

finally and finally leaving this place with some finality. except to retrieve a few boxes of things sometime later in life. or so, depending on how life goes. or does not. Europe looming yet again. how many times have I made this leap across the big pond? 15, 20, 40, or so? Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Luxembourg, Stockholm. and on. airports. this time KLM to Schipol and on to Hamburg, taxi to DüppelStr in Kiel. and friends. that’s the best part. but it doesn’t solve the over-arching issue that hides in movement. that is, what to make of life, as it surely enters the latter half if not later.

no images, no text.

prescribed burns. burning forests with control. choking the air.

waiting for the whole wheat pasta to cook. while the daily feelings-of-displeasure arise. versus the feelings-of-pleasure. which arise under other circumstances than those which stimulate the feelings-of-displeasure. that this is the dialectic of being.

I first met my future ex-wife at a party in the German city of Cologne, or Köln as the locals spell it. it was in one of those neighborhoods in Köln that had a name, like Deutz or Uni-Zentrum, but I don’t remember the name. I was wearing a dark-maroon and black smoking jacket. In Germany a tuxedo is called a “smoking.” I wasn’t wearing a smoking, but people at the party were smoking. mostly cigarettes, because at that time, all university students in Germany were required to smoke cigarettes, it was part of the social contract. because so many were smoking cigarettes, you couldn’t say that lots of people were smoking hash as well. although they could have been, as hash was often mixed with tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes that looked exactly like the regular hand-rolled cigarettes. nobody called them joints. I don’t remember much of the party. people were speaking mostly German, and I didn’t understand much if any German at that time. sometimes somebody would speak English, but mostly not. and as people got more and more altered, marginal English happened less and less. sometime that week, or that night, or on that trip to Europe, I lost that smoking. I was not happy about that. now I don’t ever buy such clothes, instead stay sheathed in the banal products of the banal culture of consumption. on sale.

raining on arrival, raining on departure, missed a huge downpour walking to the hotel where I caught the airport shuttle. Amurikan couple on board, from Portland, returning home after a couple months in Oz, revisiting places where they went as elementary teaching recruits in rural Australia in the early 1970′s.

in the airport. Dr. Phil playing on the plasma monitors. a cleaning lady is hypnotized, looking up into the susserating brightness. between the shopping possibilities, the food options, the sonic and atmospheric environment, and the general ambiance, this place would be as close to hell as one would want to be. the consuming heaven of the first world. active shopping mitigates the alienation. passive looking plunges even the most hardcore resister into a receiver. cracks open an interstitial space by invading the social self and occupying that self, pushing aside any non-social responses. and if that isn’t enough, the high-security regime underlines every possible line of action.

and then onto the plane. no comfort, though there is an empty seat in the row. bulkhead. exhausted. night comes unexpectedly quick. gaining a day. arriving four hours earlier than I depart. listening to Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451. in the air near the Hawaiian Islands. so it goes. I had forgotten that he used this phrase whenever he mentions an individual’s demise.

several projects/groups come up on the radar this week — Woytek sends an announcement about his locating Helsinki blog designed to host psychogeographical activities within the city of Helsinki. Annu sends a note from her residency in Japan about her personal pages which do include some of her image-based art projects. also, the discos invisibles collective in Tijuana, who were part of the remote presence event in Helsinki.

04 2007′, ’23 10927

a couple days in Livermore. lumpy sleeping on piles of dis-used or dis-placed bio-rhythms. but two days in the pool for abbreviated workouts. that’s a relief. though the real results of all the hard rehabilitation work of the previous 15 months has dribbled away in the hectic urban travel of the last two months. the only redeeming physical process has been walking around, taking the stairs rather than the elevator.

this day starts two days ago with an afternoon drop-off at the Bart Station in Dublin, exposed to the intensity of 10 lanes of rush-hour traffic on each side of the station. uff!

about to land, the plane delayed its take-off in order not to arrive before 0600, before which is an aviation curfew time when landing would initiate a fine of USD 250k! don’t wanna wake up those sleeping Aussies. the Pacific slipped by, unnoticed under a waning moon. have wondered at those who chose to sail it in times past. to be on it, at the center of a reduced world, as though on a ship in space, with stars filling the vaulting dome to the rim.

Europe fading into its own spring, much warmer than normal, so that it wasn’t such a stretch for the body to cope with along the way. up well before dawn, Alex takes the same taxi to the airport. we meet some other retreating Pixelachers at the cafe in the departures lounge. then it’s off to London for the first of four flights and four security checks — five airports later, Nancy and Steve meet me at SFO. always the luxury of familiar faces at the airport.

final calculations, despite the incredible synergy of this trip, it ends up being fiscally unsustainable. gotta shift gears. move to another model. the dynamic of encounter does not need to change, except in some surficial forms, but the social venue of encounter has to shift radically. putting out such immense quantities of life-energy in this engagement process. saying it over and over in mind, the deep disappointment after spending life-time in the face-to-face and having that not be sustainable. at all. seems like the different Others engaged with over the course of the trip have a viable position in the social system, have found that sustainability. where is the missing element in the equation? nothing in life is guaranteed, but examining the momentary conditions that predominated, there was an essential element of stability which is missing in the current personal modus. making contacts, having discussions about situations, conditions, systems, solutions, and most importantly, ways of seeing the world, and ways of action and remembering the reasons for be-ing. but the lack of sustainability remains the upper-most issue to be solved soon. converting attentions into cash.

a few days before leaping off another earth’s edge. north almost over the pole. if it was Helsinki, would get to 80 degrees north. but only London, so, north Greenland. detritus spread around the room, juggling, sifting, compacting for the two-month tour ahead. some disturbing points, some to look forward to anxiously.

full days and nights. at the airport, feeling quite good, back not a problem. with a week off exercise. when the architecture of social relations break down. flight 473 waits for a part coming from Washington. some passengers become irate even though the flight isn’t technically late yet. one shouts really loud when the gate attendant is making a public announcement describing the situation. he does it again during the next announcement, with a stentorian voice that drowns out the announcement, so she storms over to him and they exchange words, he demanding to see a supervisor. she goes back to her desk and calls security. making connections. I should be in line to change my Denver – Phoenix flight, but what’s the point? the line is at least 30 minutes long at this point. later, security finally comes. they take him away. he broke the accepted relational barriers that exist in a public place — or the accepted protocols of relation, projecting his stored (pent-up) bio-energy into the space and at the agent. she, a spokes-person for the social institution of the airlines. an individual speaking for a mass.

happy birthday Nancy! waiting for Loki’s long-delayed flight. he will be zonked, flying overnight his time, and arriving here at 0100 am. poor fella. San Francisco International airport is quiet and empty. I look at the art.

fortune cookie:

Be satisfied with what you already own. lucky numbers 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 45. learn Chinese: Mayor = Shi-zhang

talk to Anthony on the phone, catching up with the poet hissef’, subject launches from Heidegger to Kennan (see following), to Paul Celan through to az’s own individual efforts at poetic production.

The automobile has turned out to be, by virtue of its innate and inalterable qualities, the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense of community are generally impaired. — George F. Kennan

from a longer article at Transportation Alternatives. clearly another stab evidencing the general principle that every technological implementation costs something on a scale of alienation. the obverse of destruction of community. I place the destruction back at that granular level: where the particular techno-social implementation splits the Self from the Other by some means. the simplest example is the television, where the attention vector, a metric of the strength of personal connection, is generally directed towards the mediated/socialized flow, and away from, or at least perpendicular to the attention vector of the proximal Other. it would be better to watch the teevee via a macro lens as the media is reflected in the eye of the Other. or, of course, just turn it off and do the face-to-face.

all day today, hypersonic craft rip through the skies, squinting without sunglasses hardly finds any of them, they are distinguished only by their small size, invisibility, odd flight trajectories, and the sonic delay related to speed and altitude, that and the sheer volume. to be under attack from one of them would be fearsome even with a rational understanding of what was going on. it’s not common that they joy-ride around here, but neither is it unknown.

over the Hopi reservation. coming into Phoenix. back in the southwest. a day of subway-subway-subway-bus-plane-van-car. with a bit of walking in between.

on balanced spin, equinox framed, about to board a flight. maybe the first, maybe the last, I can’t remember. who is who. Asian lady pressing cucumber slices on her eyes. halves the slices and rubs the edges around her temples, forehead, and face. a traveler. with some shamanistic knowledge about cucumbers. they keep away all sin and corruption. now a small group of children. with two women. the children are in varying stages of difference. bodies shaking and shivering, or crooked bent, but through that mere material be-ing, there are brightness shinings. words sound from shaking throats. life takes all form. any form, any way. two hours to the flight. and eleven hours on the plane. hours to arrive and depart.

London always is a memory. and what a racket at Heathrow. fire alarm goes off as I am perambulating around Terminal 4, almost making me miss my flight. automated grill gates roll down in front of all the duty-free shops. no shopping in an emergency! a crowd of anxious people, many of them obvious foreigners, wondering what the hell was going on. now on the plane, over Fargo, thought about Ken when just puttering over Winnipeg. encased in ice. might as well be north of Hudsons Bay.

after yesterday’s delay, finally arrive in England after a routine flight and no luck locating my lost sunglasses at Heathrow. so, this is the biggest material loss I’ve had on the road in years — actually can’t recall losing something that critical and expensive (impossible) to replace. the frame-style are no longer available to purchase, though perhaps I might be lucky to find an old pair somewhere as I did with my regular glasses. got those for $5 at a flea market in Maine in 1991. nice gold wire-rims. glasses are another one of those items that I have great difficulty in selecting. and actually, I haven’t had a different style since 1980 or so. the temples on my present frames are from glasses that I would wear after surfing, and the salt water in my hair corroded them a bit. the idea of having to get a new pair is daunting. and after getting a pair of reading glasses a couple years ago in Boulder (using the really small round frames that I bought in Paris in 1982), I found that it is brutally expensive to get glass lenses anymore. I don’t like the plastic ones as they are so Light they fly off the face easily, and they just don’t wear well over time (scratching). but I think this is a paradigm similar to the ink-jet printer business — where lenses are made to ‘wear out’ quickly, and you have to replace them on a regular basis. oh well, not facing it yet, but as soon as getting back to Arizona it becomes necessary to deal. it would be impossible to spend any time outdoors this summer there (and in Colorado) without having sunglasses. the UV radiation is exceptionally strong and I get fried eyes even with the old and very dark sunglasses. hmmmm.

Pete is into a finely eclectic range of music (fantastic vinyl collection!) — resonating my own criteria defined simply by the maxim “whatever sounds good.” he gives me a great intro to the whole Northern Soul situation from the 60′s and 70′s with a collection of 25-plus cd’s that, after I do a clean install of OSX on his G4 tower, I proceed to rip the collection for him.

give it another go. it’s the first day of Easter holiday here in Germany, the airport is packed, unlike yesterday. supposed to call Pete before flying, but there are no phones inside the security area, and there’s no way to go back through with the huge lines. and the T-mobile hotspot won’t accept my one-time enrollment.

in relation with. impending movement. gotta leave books behind. finished the incredibly depressing but enLightening book on the Hopi. I had not been aware of the sad history of the Hopi as a people. a view that encompassed the entire world and all of history. speaking of floods, that we are in the third world, waiting for the conditions to move to the fourth. a major transition that is predicated on the arrival of the true White Brother. the problem of Navajo encroachment on the ancestral land (this augmented by numerous broken treaties and a lack of enforcement by the bureau of Indian Affairs). will keep all this in mind when in the region shortly. and will pass some of the stories along to Loki during the summer.

up at 0525. breakfast, walk-through of the flat to make sure everything is in good order, walked to the bus to the train to the strassenbahn, to the airport. first item of business is to locate the lost & found to see about my sunglasses. no luck. checked in, waited for the flight. waited, waited, and waited. something wrong with one engine. no more flying of British Air. gave them this chance, and the experience has been dismal. I had even planned to keep one of the keys to Volker’s place just in case, but didn’t at the last moment. otherwise it would be easy to just pop back to the flat for the night. at least the internet connection would have been free. here at the hotel it’s €4.50 for 30 minutes. ridiculous. will go online though, tomorrow morning or this evening to let folks know in London what happened. and will hit BA with a complaint and request for a refund according to the new EU statute covering delays and so on.

so, sitting in an airport Holiday Inn waiting for another flight tomorrow, rather than getting bussed around Germany to another airport to squeeze out today, I just gave up. fortunately no real schedule except to get to Pete’s and check out some experimental video work this evening. but the whole process and how the ground crew handled things was pretty poor service. quite a few Americans on this flight who were making connections through Heathrow, so their plans are in more disarray than mine, but either way. funny, though, how conversations start up, when the suspension of movement breaks down, finding out stories, how complex lives are, how rich and adventurous it is to travel. many dialogues today with many people.

and, re-reading some travelog entries from Dinosaur, talking about auras. where energy of a ‘thing’ radiates outwards, cannot be restricted to ‘the thing itself’ because the thing itself is not a thing and it is NOT of itself. the edge is only change, it is not difference in materiality, just present noesis. or so.

very hard to recap the dullness that ensues when en route. as I denote that always in notebook and travelog. back in a travel hotel, the pinnacle of bland survival. on the other hand, I did notice a nice-looking gal in the bar on the way up to the room. good night.

early morning departure. Frieder up hours before dawn as usual, Susi asleep. not too hard for me waking up. Light sleep on the before-travel night. some fast-moving image dreams that later skip-segue into closed eyes against the rising sun and the flashbacking shadows of trees flickering across rod-cone consciousness, triggering neuro-shock shivers to the system. icy streets have thawed after being salted. train on time. squeezed into my reserved seat by a large girl. two hours, change in Dortmund to the U-bahn, change in Apelebek to a bus, a short cold wait, arrive in plenty of time at the small airport. home to several of the extremely popular cheap airlines (http://www.germanwings.de, http://www.easyjet.com, http://www.wizzair.com, http://www.hla.de and http://airberlin.com) that are now flooding the Euro market. Prague for €UR40 (U$D48), could have gotten it for cheaper by €UR20 on different days. Cairo and a host of other Mediterranean destinations for €UR50. radical evolution in the market. probably won’t last too long — and might even be a strategy to get people accustomed to easy/frequent air travel, then stick them later. it is clearly having an effect on the Deutsche Bahn long-distance service and the legacy carriers. DB standard prices are extremely high, but they now offer quite some deals depending on the destination. Prague from Bremen was still €UR92 so I saved about €UR10 taking the train to Dortmund and flying. getting back will save me 50 €UR as I’m going to Köln: every little bit. in this corner of extremity and lack of fiscal consequence.

arrived, baggage somewhat delayed (the Lufthansa flight sharing the carousel was first). cold. catching the bus, focusing on the names being spoken by the automated announcer, I mistakenly got off three stops too soon and had to catch a tram to the Metro instead. duh. making connections, clean, crisp, fast. get to the National Theater, re-read the instructions. whoa, not a bad location. the security guard waiting for me, speaking rapid Czech. right on the river, center of the old town, across the street from the Theater, penthouse, the top floor of the Film Academy — for a view one has to poke a head out of the skyLights. sharing the very large five-room flat with a British screenwriter.

snafu. actually several. ground fog at Heathrow, so the Phoenix flight is re-routed to Stansted where it is re-fueled and takes off after waiting in the ground for an hour. thankfully, I have an empty seat next to me on a two-across row at the tail of the 747, so I can at least doze in a pseudo-horizontal position. land at Heathrow, and find that the Köln flight is canceled, so am re-booked on a flight to Düsseldorf an hour later, and then bussed to Köln. tried calling Volker from London and Düsseldorf, but we both have the handicap of no handy (German word for mobile/cell phone). I perambulate the airport every fifteen minutes, while it gets later and later. fire up the computer to get a list of other people that I could call to see about crashing. thankfully, after waiting for three hours and calling Volker’s home line repeatedly with no results, I decide to call Peter and Kersten in Mechernich who I was going to call later anyway, but from Volker’s maybe tomorrow. being the generous people that they are, Peter decides to drive to the airport and fetch me, thinking that I won’t be able to catch a train as far as their place at this time of night. I was thinking that I could, but. man. LONG DAY. starting with getting up early in Prescott, lunch with Janet and Annabelle (who cries almost all the way through lunch), they drop me at the shuttle, the Prescott Greyhound station. eyes burning, neck sore, not sure whether I’m hungry. tired. or what. chaotic systems. with the transit. and the weather. and just being in side that transportation system. and going from Prescott to Köln and on the Mechernich, a small town an hour from Köln. funny pathway. but this independence issue pops up immediately. what to do in the case of disaster. relaxing or stressing. to the flow of fate. just getting too soft for even this totally civilized level of travel, what would happen doing this in India? or traveling in places where there is no real ‘public transport’ or telecom system. wow. leaving life to the fate of connecting with people. it’s not necessarily a softness, because there is a body-wracking brutality of technologically-mediated travel. but there comes a conditioned state-of-being which propels the body through the spaces. where walking is embodied movement. flying is the externalization of all personality to a dominant social system.

en route. sitting on the floor. Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport gets poor marks on available mains plugs. very few, and so far, I found only one close enough to a seat that I could sit and work. and that chair was too far away from the gate for me to monitor what was going on, so, now perched o the floor leaning on one of the large concrete columns that support the jet-way. as usual mixed feelings in the heart on departure into the unknown. never made a direct flight to Europe from Phoenix (in memory), so this is a new protocol. security seems marginal. have to change planes and terminals in Heathrow, not really looking forward to that as it will be in the middle of my night. tried to go to bed a bit earlier last night, and set the alarm for 0500, but with the stars still shining in the window and the house cool, no way to get out of bed before 0700 when the sun starts Lighting the eastern horizon. in the shuttle down from Prescott, a young guy sitting in front of me has the word “ambiguous” embroidered on the back of his baseball cap in Techno font face. red on gray. he gets the attention of the two young girls in front of him by asking their opinion on the diamond engagement ring procured from his pocket — he decided this morning to buy it for his girlfriend who lives in Kansas City. he is on his way to the bus station in Phoenix. no baggage. he plans to propose in the Kansas City bus station. what a life. no baggage. can’t begin to penetrate the reality of that kind of life. as equally perplexing as the couple profiled in USA Today with a detailed recounting of their financial status with pension, 401k, and other investments. USD 200,000 saved at 30 years old. the plan includes paying for their grand children’s college. is this sacrifice or incredibly cynical control of life. nothing is made clear by media.