driving around town, spotted a van with huge signs on the side and back with the texts:

IN ISREAL JEWS TORTURE CHILDREN

and

SUPPORT PALESTINIAN FREEDOM FIGHTERS

and

THE JEWS ARE THE PROBLEM

the US is a complicated place. freedom of speech and all that. but somehow it is offensive. but combined with my knowledge from Elias, a Palestinian Jew who was representing the PLO viewpoint in Iceland. the whole situation seems endlessly tragic. including the whole historical and present US role.

finally got around to reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, an overview of the New Physics. it’s somewhat dated, but still carries a nice historical narrative with observations on the uncertainty of the whole thing that is being dealt with. watching a video (produced in Japan), on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. speaking with the Dalai Lama and others. all of whom were dying. phone call from Nick. catching up. possible travel plans to Missouri; also talked to Greg, possible travel to Seattle and BC or Moab. proposals off to NIFCA for a curators position. and waiting on the doctoral proposal. reading more than I have in the last years, on average. wider, and deeper. note-taking. resonating with stylistic text forms across academia, science, philosophy, technology, engineering, and esoterica. but unemployed at the same time. dog-sitting, using the riding-mower to cut some of the lawn, joined the YMCA since the college pool is closed now. getting used to a different regimen. lifting in the cybex room. sore today. getting my sunglasses replaced finally, ebay for a pair of artcraft round gold frames since they no longer make them. gotta call Kate at IBM to see about her open source connection. what else? weeding. and many emails to Europe for a fall tour. and the need to get back out to the desert on the moonless nights.

paint-by-number. reminds me of summers at Aunt Mary’s house, she loved doing paint-by-number kits. now she is an excellent painter, starting to free-style after retiring to Florida.

deciding last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms too. so they are nowhere in sight in the morning. after a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some. ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. later, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and later in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague, mostly for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. it is disappointing that this workshop imploded. but I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days.

later in the afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. we were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students. a real shame. it was a stretching excitement to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. googling Silurian Devonian Beroun karst trilobite tells much about the potentials! especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title “The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia.”

All told, the complete “Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême,” published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.

dinner later with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. a view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too damn cold for walking around.

in the process of re-tooling the site, catching fragments of the travelog from ages past it surfaces, that self-constraining cover over many events that did take place, but are not noted in the log. incidents that, if recounted from my viewpoint, might hurt, insult, or reveal something about an Other, or the Self.

make a rainy trip to Stockton to the Haggin Museum where Nancy has located a favorite painting, “Moose,” painted by Albert Bierstadt, one of the Hudson River School’s (German-born) shining stars. the museum turns out to be pretty interesting, quite a large collection of art, cultural objects, and historical items.

folks begin to migrate in their separate directions after the final main evening last night (which was interrupted by a fire alarm right when VideoHomeTraining was about to start their set at 0030. I was pretty tired by that time, because the fire alarm in the art academy building where I have a penthouse flat went off last night at 0300 with a huge clanging bell right outside my bedroom door for 20 minutes. so I missed the big finale with xploding plastik, oh well. today is spent packing, and having some final meetings for future reference.

It is less a question of the artist interpreting the world than of allowing existing or hypothetical biological processes, mathematical structures, social or collective dynamics to speak directly. In this sense art no longer involves the composition of a ‘message’ but the creation of a mechanism. A new type of artist appears, one who no longer relates the course of historical events. This new artist is an architect of the space of events, an engineer of worlds for billions of future histories, a sculptor of the virtual. — Pierre Lévy

half-way around the world from the second return. 34 years ago. I was 11. deep in the Maryland countryside. the only thing that foreshadowed the intense development that has taken place in the last 34 years was the publishing of the Montgomery County Master Plan no doubt bought by The Developers like the Kettler Brothers who made huge profits constructing the “new town” of Montgomery Village, complete with zoning and covenant laws so tight that every one was happy.

Today, about two-thirds completed, Montgomery Village is a family-oriented, totally planned, residential environment, close to the burgeoning technical research office industrial “1-270 Corridor.

anyway, the memory of those insects in the woods, the wild woods where I played for days and days through summer sultriness. going far afield, looking at a map, well, the mysterious places were not so far from home, but going down the hill, past the pond, on the earthen dam, up the far side of the valley, past the bank full of terrarium-populating mosses, up to where the first field opened up. this field was most often fallow, while the next was almost for corn. corn that grew eight, nine feet tall by July or so. with leaves that would cruelly paper cut if brushed wrong. leaves that hid us from the dogs when we played hide-and-seek with them. making them sit at the towering green edge, stay Lady, Rusty, stay! walking quickly through the rows, getting as far away as possible, then whistling for them, and crouching silently listening while they ran barking through, high-speed, until they caught our scent and bounded up with barks and slathering tongues. don’t remember how the dogs dealt with the cicadas. I remember the noise and the malevolent-seeming red eyes. at 11 years old.

the workshop ends, too short, but seems to move forward. questions are slow in coming, but do arise, from important places. language is a dominant issue, as usual, along with previous educational experiences.

Estonia is starting English education in the first grade now, though, which seems somehow extreme, compared to other places, and for what reasons? to catch up with some perceived lack or slackness? or purely pragmatic synergistics with global capitalism?

a fast tour of the sports shop deep in the mall, but the prices are as high as the US. with throb-annoy EuroClubTrash muzak blaring. outta there. the vibe in the whole place is something of a desperation that shopping will provide an existential answer to the emptiness of ideological allegiance forcefully handed over to the various historical Unions that Estonia is subsumed by.

the guy is laying face down on the variegated green marble floor with a few people standing around. there is a wheel chair next to him, he is speaking, turns his head and looks up, below his face is a pool of blood, and his nose is split. he is a paraplegic, from the looks of his legs which are lying on the floor like inside forgotten pants. his glasses are folded closed in the blood, reminds me of Lennon’s bloody lenses on the window sill. one young guy is calling on a phone, but I can’t tell what’s the progress. a couple waitresses come up with napkins, one holds a hand in front of her face, and turns her head away. no one actually wants to touch him it seems. I am a prisoner of language, thinking that if I spoke the language I would immediately jump in. it’s happened before. the blood is a source of concern, infection, but otherwise, being careful, at least get him turned over, moving his limp legs. he has heavy winter gloves on, to operate the wheelchair. the security guards, all of 18 years old outside the grocery store fingering the ID tag chains around their necks while they stare blankly at passers-by aren’t around now. everybody seems young and confused. drawn from shopping and hanging-out to this microscopic happening.

the indoor mall is a monster in the center of town, just outside the Old Town east gate, other glass and steel monsters are rising all around the neighborhood. surely the Art Academy building will be razed soon. progress. global capitalism rooting out the remaining evil of anything old, authentic, or unmarketable.

streets will fill with people starting in early afternoon, tens of thousands ready to party, partying. students with their graduation hats which will not be white by morning. when May Day arrives. while naval and military exercises take place within sight and earshot. large rounds, heavy machine guns, Light weapons, naval vessels painted with dull, jagged edged black-greenish-brown camo park in the harbor, come and go at any time and in any direction. one is the newest addition to the small Finnish Navy, the fast-attack “Hamina-class” aluminum-and-composite hulled vessel equipped with South African guided-missiles. fetish culture of technology. another drags a set of large floating targets in from the open sea south of the island. rumbling, grumbling, rattling concussions. all day.

preparations for a war that will not come in the near future. does assumption of future war come from historical precedence, or does it come from a desiring well-spring inside certain beings?

through the only open window, raucous party voices begin to drift, along with the rumbling noise of the city beneath, propping up the fun. if there was only pure silence as a backdrop for the party, things would fall into the void, lack reflection, and draw all energy into itself. making the party fail to become the relief that it is.

shifting formats from the former travelog, built in HTML 2.0 with a sprinkle of java scripting, presents, no, really forces an interesting transformation in the flow from mind to finger to server to your eyes. spontaneity is, for some moments, shunted off into the space of “how do I execute what I want?” reading help pages, taking some time to dig around for the principles of how it all works. again, the most problematic area is the need to get images in reasonable form up and happening. gotta have pictures. it is, after all, an illustrated travelog!

also thinking of how much from the art/media related activities that I am presently involved with should I note down here. I have a history of taking copious notes at presentations and meetings, but not committing the thoughts or reflections to the travelog. had I done this from the beginning, it would have been a much richer historical document rather than the personal meander. oh well.

into town for a swim. love that pool. pretty optimal. only would wish to go every day. need desperately to work on my kick strength which is almost totally atrophied.

booooooring. just can’t get the hang of the medium yet. plz be patient. or go back and peruse the eight years of previous posts and images…

days alternate: hiding on the island, and going to meet folks. wandering to the ferry through the ice-fog. while meeting Sanna in Café Succés on Korkeavourenkatu, Visa sees me and drops in. on my first visit to Finland, in 1994, and then in early 1995, when I did a gig at Media Lab, I stayed in what was his printing studio, around the corner from the café. to save money on the Nordplus teaching exchange, I had a tea and wienari (a cinnamon and glazed pseudo-spiral of pastry dough with a berry jam center) for breakfast. earl gray. bergamot. it was enough to carry me until the institutional lunch at the university which packed belly with the standard fare. pea soup with ham on Thursdays. all across the country. anyway, it’s my favorite café in Helsinki, they have the largest and best wienari in town, made on the premises fresh daily. there is a constant level of coming and going, intimate meetings, where old lovers can have tea and conversation that drifts through all the subjects that once were whispered with entwined and humid breath in nights of late spring, no longer dark in these latitudes. tulips on the table are chosen with a color to match the only dressy shirt available, and time is mapped in eyes and souls. nothing changed, and only the future is left. the past is past. dialogue after dialogue. one, another, another, yet another. life spent in this vocal dance. and occasionally in the Lighter dance of embodied soul, where centers of gravity press close and don’t need calculus to predict a forceful trajectory.

if only. on the edge of the seat, looking onto the eyes. averting when the intensity of that looking is too much. trying to see heart behind glassy lens. but, after awhile, nothing to do. effort for this is neither rewarded nor punished, only just tolerated. better to stay in the moment, forget past and future. be an oracle for the self.

the issue is, on this residency, what exactly to do? or not to do??

sweating in a hot bath. memories of Finnish sauna experiences. on the island, Selkä-Sarvi or so. back in October 1998.

Man who is born of woman — how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers; like a shadow he fades in the dark
He falls apart like a wine-skin, like a garment chewed by moths.
And must you take notice of him? Must your call him to account?
Since all his days are determined and the sum of his years is set —
look away; leave him alone; grant him peace, for one moment.
Even if it is cut down, a tree can return to life.
…
But man is cut down forever; he dies, and where is he then?
The lake is drained of its water, the river becomes a ditch,
and man will not rise again while the sky is above the earth.

– Job, as translated by Stephen Mitchell

the Art Faculty exhibition at the CU Art Museum. Amy (of Freeth-Rice Photography) comes by — she was an assistant of Bills at Peters Valley. way back in that historical epoch.

the Colorado is sluggish, cloudy, and low. beside the road it passes through many lands that will burn, have already burned, or are burning right now. so it goes.

Glenwood Springs, head for the busy Hot Springs Spa for a few hours. never been in all these years of hot-water soaking elsewhere: it’s expensive, and the water is too hot for a regular workout. but it is extremely clear, salty, and relaxing. the scene is utterly American. chaotic, summertime noisy, full of seemingly satisfied people. I film the scene. there are foreigners there, getting a better deal than only two months ago with the slide of the dollar against the Yen and Euro. I have made 20% on the money that I left in my Merita bank account in Finland. too bad there is only USD 500 in it, had to shift the rest here months ago when the Euro was at its lowest point against the dollar. banks always win, so it goes.

stop at a rest area in Glenwood Canyon, don’t read the instructional signs about the spectacular construction of the interstate in the canyon — well, yeah, I do, and it is all bragging like the eighth wonder of the world — but do appreciate the solar (active/passive) designed toilet complex. shit warmed by the sun. tromb walls, solar water heaters, solar panels for the ventilation fans, banked northern exposure (banked and buried roof), Arcosanti with composting toilets — titillating the tourists from Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Iowa. too bad hardly anybody else builds things like that here in the solar West. form trumps function, so it goes.

and in perused memory, halfway through Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner. it’s a detailed and well-researched treatise on water and the West. historical abominations that continue in this day. dams, irrigation projects, the madness of re-directing the flow of energies. of this stupendous place. overheard the phrase “when will the other boot drop?” humankind is wracking up a massive debt of energy that it has re-directed from its necessary flow, like a temper-tantrum with little kids, when they are too much controlled or ignored. they explode with pent-up energies. the world is waiting for this. anybody clever enough to understand that in the present is seen the kernel of the future, look around, and see the word apokalypse printed on each compiled imbalance. the transformative crises (plural!) will grow in cataclysmic intensity. somebody made an artificial polio virus this week, where will that bring us? they ponder if it is alive. it paralyzes mice and kills them. dead. science of science-sake, so it goes.

dam it. so it goes. but we can’t have that! re-route, congregate, compile, merge, co-mingle, and tap off the chaotic flows of the cosmos.

teaching begins. another experiment in the lossy transfer of meaning.

is the voice of the self available at any point? like, theoretically? practically, most people cannot sustain genuine self-hood for more than small fragments of time. or maybe this impression, feeling, of living outside the self is a singular self-impression. an anomaly. created by historical condition.

made the mistake of lying down to a restless 10-hour period of sleep. ending at 0400. jet-lag. more like body-and-soul-lag.

okay, already the system is declining. complete chaos in Hamburg. the Regional Express that Christian takes me down to in Kiel is delayed, stopping in Hamburg-Altona, so I have to race to the S-bahn to take that to the Hauptbahnhof. at first I choose the what I think is the wrong line, with several extra stops, but the most direct line is apparently completely shut down. make it to the station, racing to make the ICE to Berlin, only to find that it, too, is delayed by about 40 minutes. call Mark at the hotel, then race to another track which they announce with three minutes notice. on board the ICE, first class, full of German business types, swirling around and in between. I take an unreserved seat that has a power plug, much to the dismay of some others. settle in for the ride.

so much comes, so much goes. stories to be carried, some just to be remembered, settled in mind, adsorbed. and body energy diffused outward. the consciousness of energy intake is largely overcome by the present reception of the swirls of external (to the body interface) vibrations. I often make a disclaimer to students that I am not working in a groove of “new age” after a particularly powerful performative lecture about the structures of energy and chi and quantum and so on. it all sounds so implausible. but in the end it is clear that the model, though quite simplistic, points the way to a form of being and praxis that IS empowering.

the former East still carries a different weight of presence, as a result of the historical flows. and, words stand as an impossible burden of fluff to deter the movement of energy. I don’t understand the relationship between words and actions very clearly. language as that silver wire of socialization connecting metaphorically but not actually, and at the same time accentuating the separation.

lunch with Mark in Potsdammer Platz. meeting under the Sony umbrella. one degree of separation. face-to-face. the realities of everything are juxtaposed with this and that. the Berlin Film Festival is gearing up to splash into the Platz there. film crews, and those wishing to be seen and to see those who have been seen by millions of others. to be seen again. until all sight of them is gone. and forgotten, or just mediated to death.

strange to see Mark there, in the middle of Berlin. he’s there for the Transmediale which I avoided this week.

a passel of nice emails come back around the two workshops that are now done. Kiel, Berlin. I would seek to have this encoding process of. no, well, the process of these workshops is in some ways remaining totally static, and in others, jolting ahead. only secret is in the engagement praxis. product to process to praxis.

später — later. it IS a principle that is resting below the surface, the concept of entropy, the greater the level of organization of a structure, the greater the amount of energy input required to maintain it. can these energy-sucking societies of the developed world actually increase their consumption? can the rest of the world increase its consumption to the point that their societies are similarly structured? hard to imagine.

just reflecting all the way, from here to there to here. the last leg to Zurich underway now, only 20 minutes late at this point. the rails are in much worse shape here around Karlsruhe, Mannheim, than in the north. post-industrial, I guess.

start the New Year in Hualapai Mountain Park, near Kingman, Arizona. up at high altitude in the Douglas Fir. granite boulders. a campfire of pine cones and needles with a few branches. quiet and cold in the night. no other people camping in the campground. a Black Widow in the heated bathroom. driving on the “historic” Route 66 from Kingman to Seligman. not seeing much, except that the “historic” roadbed is not even being used — too many curves and grades compared to the straightened and leveled new “historic” Route 66. so it goes. into the Grand Canyon Caverns. seeing a mummified bobcat grimacing in pain after falling into the caverns 200 feet beneath the surface. designated fallout shelter stocked with k-rations during the Cuban Missile crisis. a mimeographed sign on a bulletin board in the cafe asks for anyone in the nuclear test areas nearby, or downwind of them who has developed cancers in the last 45 years should contact…

Campbell gives a call from Phoenix. will meet tomorrow in Prescott.

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

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

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

workshop starts slow, inexorable. Christian is taking care of much of the business, but I see that the school is muddling along, crippled by its own historical structure. as I write there is a mechanical pile-driver in the harbor about 75 meters away rhythmically ramming a pier into the sandy earth under the water.

here with Günter and Christina, along with Manon. the third visit in four years. so it goes. Aachen, the site of several of my first European exhibitions, remains. the seat of power for the Carolinian power of Karlus Magnus. the Dom here holds his gold coffin hanging in mid-air in the apse. eleven years ago, Stefan and I were on a spontaneous trip to Maastricht from Köln in his old VW Golf on a Sunday afternoon. in the days before the European Union made border crossings almost transparent. we went to the Maastricht Zoo, and my high opinion of the Dutch people forever was altered with the image of the bear cage they had constructed. a deep concrete pit with a couple dead tree trunks and an iron-gated hole in one wall. barbaric. we wandered around a street fair with the requisite foreign food products — the most titillating part were the products from Sandinista-held parts of Nicaragua, coffee and the like — along with tee-shirts, Sandino masks, and such. later on that trip we were walking around the center of town and we see there is an art opening at a gallery. we go in, admiring the work, abstract paintings.

the artist, named HaWeBe, is there, and has finished a performance with the contra bass. we begin talking and immediately connect. speaking about Kandinsky, music and painting, and the concepts of Die Blaue Reiter group that Kandinsky started. HaWeBe (Hans Werner Berretz) invited me to meet him later in the summer when he decided to arrange some exhibitions oh damn it! chakras. and letting it all go. tort. and. tart. (to free words from pre-ordained meaning. poetry is that methodology that liberates. words from that way of deadness. 90% over a lack of. concentrated presence. Colorado has totally slipped from my grasp. it will happen. ever? summer. and how no chanting goes. (counting dollars and euros).

arrived in a snow-free urban zone from a historical fortress sheathed in ice, snow, and rime. Best Western Hotel. just like all others. cars rev their engines and burn rubber at each stop Light. what is this about? can’t do that in Helsinki. that would be useless as a display of aggression or macho. Journey to the Center of the Earth plays on cable, here I am in another box with teevee fed in, and I turn it on.

colder today. this has turned out to be the coldest winter here in 100 years. snow, head into town, icebreakers have been busy in the harbor, passing back and forth between the two main quays, shredding pathways in the half-meter-thick ice. Michael Blackwood presents some his films at the Atheneum and I meet Visa for one of them, a documentary on new music composers in New York City. the city is dead quiet, this week is the winter sports holiday, so a huge percent of the population has gone skiing. elsewhere. from the vantage point of one of the hills in town, it is fascinating to see the people walking. dark bundled shapes carrying the weight of chill on shoulders well-padded with what my father calls horse-blankets. historical resonance. I know nothing of his life! strange. will my own son say that of me when his time comes to step into the front of the life-line? no, I don’t think so, I have shown him many things of my past, told him stories, and walked with him along pathways where I was growing.

morning, cool night (inside) cold (outside). my sister Janet, the family historian, transcribes and sends this story written by my grandfather, George Blodgett Hopkins, of an incident from his childhood in Linn, Missouri in the late 19th century.

Sometime between 1875 and 1877, when I was ten or eleven, a terrible tragedy occurred. My father, sister and older brother had been in California for some time. Mother, brother Walter and myself were still living in the old home. The new Linn courthouse that I had mentioned previously, was completed and part of it was occupied. The basement, composed of numerous rooms, 16 or 18 feet square, was not occupied. The rooms were located on either side of a long hall that extended east and west, the full length of the building. As I recall, the ceilings were about 10 feet hight, the walls were plastered, painted and nicely finished.

There was a family of four, composed of a father, mother, one boy and one girl. The girl was cripple and used one crutch. They came to our home and were anxious to secure rooms. I don’t know what the arrangement with Mother was, but they were occupying one room at the time of the disturbance. All they had were a few grips and sachels, etc. The man, I can’t recall his name now, was rather an elderly gentleman, probably 60 years old, quite good looking and I think was a lawyer. He dressed well and made a fairly good appearance. The woman was in her late 40′s, good looking and dressed rather attractively. The girl, the oldest of the two children, was about 16-18 years old. They called her Addie. The boy was my age, sort of a rough youngster, full of mischief, and was hard to manage. His name was Steve Jefferies. It turned out that the man with this group was not the husband or the father at all. The real husband and father was a Mr. Jefferies, though he was not the father of the girl. The woman had married the man she was now living with and the girl was his daughter. After some time, the couple had separated. The woman had then married Mr. Jefferies and had her son. Later on, they separated. I never knew if the woman had a divorce from either man, all that we ever found out was that the family that had come to our house was trying to keep out of the way of Jefferies. They had come to our little town thinking it would be a refuge for them. Unfortunately, Jefferies was hot on their trail. Only a few days had passed when he appeared on the scene, carrying a rather small hand satchel. Shortly after arriving in Linn, he came directly to our house. The elderly man had gone into town or was away when he arrived, however he made a terrible racket. The woman and girl screamed and cried and finally Jefferies left the house and headed for town. The next we heard of him he had gone to several places in town and finally found the older man in a harness shop across from the courthouse. There were some words between the two men, the older man ran out the front door of the shop and up a slight incline past the corner of the courthouse and possibly 60-70 ft. From out of the harness shop came the younger man, Jefferies, with a big pistol. He laid the pistol across his left forearm, took careful and deliberate aim and shot the old man in the back of his head, close to the top. The wound did not prove to be fatal at once, but the man had fallen and was unconscious. Willing hands soon came and carried him into the southeast corner room of the basement of the courthouse. A cot was procured from somewhere and bedclothes and a pillow were brought from our house to make the old man as comfortable as possible for the time being.

I remember going into this room before the old gentleman passed away. There was not a thing in the room but the couch and the body laying on it. The white painted walls and ceilings of that cheerless, cold room with its victim of a tragedy just enacted not long before lying there before me, brought cold chills all over me. I had expected to find some other people there when I went in and had made several steps before I realized I was there staring at a man that had been shot and was near death, perhaps close to the very moment life was going out. I seemed frozen to the floor for a moment, then realizing where I was, I turned quickly and hurried away, chills running up and down my back. The old man died in that cheerless room. His body lay there until he was buried a day or so later. The woman, girl, and boy left our house soon after. Whether they left town or moved somewhere else, I don’t know. I never seen them again. Jefferies was put in prison and after due process of law, was convicted of murder and sent to the state prison at Jefferson City, Missouri. I never saw this man, Jefferies, and don’t remember how long he was in prison, as we left Linn for California a year or so later. I don’t remember ever hearing this tragedy discussed in our family, though that corner room in the courthouse is vivid in my mind today.

– George Blodgett Hopkins

spend several hours in the National Historical Museum with Viktória. I needed to receive Light from the royal crown, scepter, and orb. now, strangely, I am thinking of several more complications with this concept of mediation via silicon dioxide. VERY often, intensive pieces of art (in the majority of cases, the MOST intensive ones) are encased or shielded by SiO2. no exception, the royal stuff here in Hungary. what, if any, is the significance of this simple observation related to the thread of thought about VR, mediation, and the two most abundant materials in the earth’s crust? no real clue, but directions for exploration should be towards examining the theoretical/scientific views of the material composition of the Earth — below the surface, specifically, as it relates to gravity. (oh yeah, the scepter was INTENSE — topped by a 8-cm-in-diameter sphere of rock crystal (there is that SiO2 stuff again) engraved with a lion and some other icons, polished, and encased in a frame of gold with some short gold chains with gold disks about a centimeter in diameter.

home-coming football game yesterday made sense only after leaving it and going to the Ace with Erica and Max, then Sally, Rick, Karen and the kids show up. Nothing like the Ace Hi Tavern in downtown Golden, Colorado. A certain type of energy vortex and situation that is an unbounded whole. I make some cultural video footage as I go along. Thinking of the future, but suddenly I realize that the archivist in me has bloody well documented all but a wipe of the ass (well, I guess that, too) of friends for 20 years long about now. I scan in negatives from around 1982 to 1986, there are many, why I scan them I do not know. Just to have them digital, have copies for posterity, whatever, but I have so little connection to things that I have aggressive sensibilities to just burn it all. go for the Taoist solution, the unruffled path, and the unwobbling pivot. bull shit! that’s what it all is, just a crock of shit. any kind of mediated action. like this here, dammit. Being immersed in a historical context, and seeing faces brought into juxtaposition in former ways, age vanishes, or becomes relative. I sit with a friend for an hour on a park bench in the sun, the waning sun. energy wanes, boredom sets in, I faced the consequences later. I am not ready for entanglements, I suppose confusion is the key factor to set alarms going. confusion. what the hell is happening. those whom I know, their lives are plateaus of flux, burning to varying degrees, slipping, engaged, floating, whatever metaphor of being one could want. the spectrum that spans from unsaturated living to saturated being, the range, the range floats. And I can hardly care anymore, did I ever? chant chant chant, come we go Chant Down Babylon one more time. if only.

The weekend is over, and now, my last week in Helsinki before heading north to Lapland, I have to begin to prepare for the performance. I have to think of what it has become, as memory is a major factor in it. And specific memory of non-specific times. An array of times that span the distance.

As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meaning of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one’s palms keep slipping off. — Joseph Brodsky

Kati passes that one on to me this morning, or, was it last night? I would agree with the sentiment, but would seek to expand its essential whatever-ness. That is, ones facility at recalling the past is contingent on practice and discipline. A text-based piece that one memorizes is less an experience of the past than a rote exercise of mental faculties. Recalling the past, and especially, revivifying the past, is an anguishing effort of not being-here-now. Of dropping the sensual moment in exchange for the unreality of that possibly-lived then. Too often, the collective of the historical then pushes its way to the foreground, leaving untouched the brain synapse-records of what REALLY happened un-recalled. No, not even that. Most of our memories that are in need of recall are lost under a furious blast of PRESENT NOW. No time to recall the past, except a quick review back to the instinctual lessons of survival.

My workshop at MUU MediaBase began this morning. It has the title Dialogue and Technology and will be addressing issues where the power of individual dialogue intersect the mediating forces of technology. My own introduction runs something like:

Now time moves quickly. Loki and I go swimming in the morning. It is cold and clear. The knife-like Arctic wind comes from the north and fights the relatively warm sun. But this sun is only a shadow of the one that I left in Arizona. And I keep forgetting that it is not summer here yet, although it is bright until late in the evenings. Things are brown and dry at the shore although there is a lot of snow on the mountains. The trees are not even approaching spring revival. My back is still not too good. I am hoping that it will get better in the next week or so. It is difficult to get comfortable to play on the floor with Loki, to pick him up, to sit long in a hard chair. Only when I am in warm water does the pain go away. I embark on an ideological analysis of Lego toys. First noticing the heavy role-influence of the figures and how Loki does not like it when I trade the pirates accouterments for the outlandish wild natives outfit. I wonder where the rigidity comes from. Is it a cultural adjustment or is it simply the way little kids are. Mixing is a sin. He doesn’t realize that he is a half-breed by some Icelandic standards. Legos have nothing to do with all this, they are simply another layering of cultured being over the essential presence of life. there is no Lego, there is no culture, there is only the Void … I also begin to reflect on the measure of cyber-sustenance I partake of from day-to-day. And how the open challenge of nettime, as it lies wholly on the stage of intellect, would fumble and stall if faced with the challenge of instilling its system of being in a child. (nettime is a listserv that I have been interacting with for the last fifteen months or so — it is comprised mainly of critical writers and pundits of culture, technology, and its impact on society.) Intellectual discourse interests me only mildly — far more important are the personal contacts that I have with some of the participants and the networking possibilities that the listserv represents. The discourse seems so pre-positioned and static compared to live conversation. And so impossible to implement in daily life — almost totally unrelated to and removed from the flux of daily life, except for a few of the writers who can write with a style not replete with selective and exclusive historical references. Too many things spoken that exclude the reader unless he or she is a member of the same book club as the writer … The Master texts that all should read (to make sure the hegemony of the Past is promulgated on the Future).

fortune cookie:

Two small jumps and sometimes better than one big leap.
Lucky Numbers 2. 10, 20, 24, 33, 44

Out on a hike with Janet and Jazzie around the Inscription Canyon area north of the house here about ten miles. A day where things look alive and still. Jazzie, the Aussie (Australian Sheepdog), is a live-wire, sharp and witty.

Making this walk reminds me of when we were kids, going up in to the cornfields behind our house with the collies, Lady Jane, and Rusty Nails and playing hide-and-seek with them in the towering stalks of silage corn. Conversation being played out on different backgrounds and at different time of life. How things change, how they remain the same. We read the writing on the rock in tones of age, time, and especially, place.

Yesterday was an exhausting day working on three people’s Macs, swimming, and then driving round trip to Phoenix to pick up Casey (my niece from California). Driving fast. Something I have noticed about the US recently, that people are really driving much faster than either the posted speed limits or what might be construed as safe. The fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit is a thing of the past. No more savings needed. Oil seems an inexhaustible resource to Americans once again. I wonder how it will be in the future. For my child and the other children of today.

I talk to George on the phone today. I guess the last time was back in October or so, from Stefan’s place in Manhattan. The difference between our long virtual conversation and these short ‘real’ ones is immense. But of the substance of the difference I am not able to dissect. Like walking in the land today. Under Granite Mountain behind the folk’s house.

I feel almost completely cut off from the land, in a way that I have not felt before. It is truly strange. Yet familiar. As though I am drawing away from the being-ness of it all. And simultaneously drawing into complete alignment. I go to look at the stars and I realize that I am seriously slacking. have only made a couple hundred dollars in the past month. here under the winter sun. and not much future happening yet either. not hustling enough.

The Solstice. The shortest time of dayLight. Here in Arizona, there is not so much meaning or impact as there was in Iceland, and all those Northern places. Here is another day in the wind-up to the Christmas consumer free-for-all. So it goes. But for me, the day does resonate deeply, in a tone that goes unheard here, in this Place. A tone too deep and of a harmonic that sympathetically moves not the body, but the Soul. It is in me. From that other Place. That I once was.

Lawren, my niece, arrives by car from eLAy last night, late. Traversing the Mojave.

mind wonders if my sixth grade teacher, Mr Fichter, is still alive? He’s the one who turned me onto Modigliani, Cezanne, and the other impressionist painters. way back. deeply. I have not stories to tell. It means so little to write here. In this form, mediated. I am no free-thinker. Rather. I see myself as a human who is unable (passive, rather than determined, active) to exist in a mediated space. so it goes.

Loki and I drive back to Kathy’s place around noon today. On the way we stop again at the house where I grew up and took a hike into the woods behind it to see what was happening there. Developers, those fiends who would wish to see the world paved and marketed, have begun their work in the area, and direct behind our old house is a new development of about 20 houses built in what were open fields and forest. Walking down the steep hill behind the house I was a bit shocked to see the large pond gone and only a creek running down the center of the open space that the pond used to occupy. I had spent hours and days at that pond, fishing (there were a number of large bass, countless sunfish, snakes, and frogs there), sailing model sailboats, skating, and paddling about in our canoe. The pond was formed by an earthen dam erected by farmers perhaps a hundred years previous, maybe more. Either the developers had knocked a hole in the earthen dam or flooding had washed part of it out. There were only a few weeds growing up in the silt which lead me to believe that it had not been empty for more than a year or two… I stood in the middle and stared into the sky above feeling the years wash away. Remembering the times. And watching my own little boy wander around the place, throwing rocks into the creek. I spoke to the sky. Musing. Back up the hill, I took a look at our old back yard and saw that, much to my disgust, the current residents had cut down the 20 fruit trees that my father had labored so much over. They were all highly productive after the initial few years of tending — apples, nectarines, peach, plum, apricot, crab-apple,and pear. The row of Christmas trees which we would plant each year after having them inside for the holidays were now up to 40 feet tall. The Coastal Redwood likewise towered over the house.

The drive up here from Virginia starts with a short detour past the house where I lived from 1965-76. The landscape of my childhood in winter. So it was, although much of the nearby farmland has been butchered in the wake of suburbia that is burgeoning and multiplying as Legion. The road that our family house is on has changed little. The houses are still small, the trees bigger, many of the same people live along it, as I saw on the mailboxes. But the house. Well. Other people live in it. Maybe I will stop by on the way back south and ask if I can walk through the yard to the pond in the woods behind down the hill — to show Loki. And to make some photographs. To fix in Silver the volume of time that has moved through my senses. I am feeling not old, but as one who has lived long. A certain richness has moved into my experience. The layers of time and space and experience have grown to be a fertile loam where groves of narrative being can erupt in a single evening, in a single conversation. Sparked to life by the intersection of life-energies. Old friends, new friends. So it goes. We are staying with my oldest friend, Gary, his wife Ellen, and their daughter Sarah who is the same age as Vika. We speak in memories, where each phrase has a resonance unobtainable in new friendships. That resonance of historical experience, built up over time and time again, multiplied and divided.

Time moves so quickly I can only manage small realizations. Like, last evening I was walking home (to a new home — house/cat-sitting for Tapio and Suzanna for the week they are in London) and while watching a Volkswagen Beetle drive past and seeing a few of them parked on the street, I caught myself wondering why I was thinking it would be fun to own one again. The first and only one I ever owned sits in a junkyard outside of Amarillo, Texas — or, well, maybe it has been completely recycled. I rolled it 4-1/4 times in the middle of the night on Interstate 40 just west of Amarillo about 18 years ago … I survived but the car didn’t. It had all four wheels ripped off, the engine and transaxle were split, all the windows broken. Long story. But anyway. Nostalgia for the days I rebuilt the whole vehicle from the ground up, and destroyed it in about ten seconds.

Warmer still today. I worked on the PowerBook for the morning, but had to get out to enjoy the weather. Took a leisurely stroll back to Public Netbase and spoke with Konrad shortly, checked out the library they have downstairs and then went back to check my email at the university … It struck me today, what a strange path this is, this Mad-Tech-No-Mad I have become. At the same time as experiencing a real existence in a rather large variety of places, I have a double life running through email and the Web which extends the range of my experience to each of the many nodes to which I am connected. Of course it is a question how much the impressions sent from others via email make an impact on my daily existence. Sensory input is limited to the reading of the texts that carry the sentiments, logging into a computer, sitting for some time reading from a screen, and so on. But certainly in my internal existence, these communications form a web of, what can I call it, emotional intensity within which my daily existence is suspended. Not that it is womb-like in the sense of encompassing, isolating, or stabilizing, but it forms an ethereal internal tableau upon which the momentary impressions of reality play out. Difficult to describe. I have experienced a similar situation when engrossed in a good book while on holiday, where the reality of the written text becomes intertwined with the other, more direct, sensory input, resulting in a compound memory of place, one that is intimately tied to both sets of stimulation. How can this compare to existence without this more-or-less instant form of communication? I have traveled before in situations where I have gotten no post, no telephone, and, of course, no email. It is hard to recall exactly what it was, but it does seem that there was a similar level of internalization — probably relating to my own personal psyche. Still the daily writing, writing that, as I call it, is a chanting, the chant taking the form I keep to the center, comatose or I keep to the center, not comatose. I find that the writing is a self-conscious manifestation of internal uncertainty that seeks to contain as a vessel the total accumulation of experience and what is to become the memory of the time. The impact of rapid communications with others around the world broadens the intensity of the situation by making the cumulative text expression (both incoming and outgoing texts, as well as text remaining within my journal) dynamic and dialectic: containing the powerful ritual of call-and-response. It does not devalue or lessen the impact of momentary sensory experience related to a Place, instead, with careful attention, is allows a means to fix real events in memory and share them with others likewise. There is a point, though, where one wonders about the amount of time is required to sustain this kind of active networking (a networking that has no goal, in a way, no ultimate purpose other than as carrier of this experiential content, a ritual sharing of stories).

The nomad is not neccessarily somebody who moves: there are travels in which one does not move, travels in intensity, and even from a historical point of view, nomads are not those who move like migrants, on the contrary, they are those who do not move, and who start nomadizing in order to stay in the same place and free themselves from codes. — Gilles Deleuze