the immediate sensation of walking in the desert is that of dis-orientation, not as though the earth is not located in gravitational alignment with the body, but just that local principles of verticality and level are distorted by the radiating fields of each feature of the landscape. the barrel cactus making a vortex, the Joshua Tree making a rushing multiplicity of whorls that snake through the air in frozen torment. the Saguaro, massive, rakes the moving air with so many spiny teeth that there is a rush not so different from that through the branches of a live oak, in the fall when the leaves are stuck in crinkled brown misery, waiting for some winter storm to end it all.

I stumble slowly in random directions. stopping every few minutes to examine some thing, no, some tableau, of intricate intensity. first it is the flowers, the huge ones on some of the smaller barrel cactus, the color of which cannot be mapped on a spectral scale. it is beyond red, crimson, scarlet, and carnelian together. then the small yellow-orange poppies, scattered widely, punctuating, defining vertices. then there are the rest of the flowers, purple, white, yellow, spectral and brilliant, defining scale. then the variety of cacti. birds, seldom actually seen, unlike the red-tailed hawk that signaled the place to stop for the night. but there is plenty of song throughout the air. stone and earth given from volcanism, basalts and pyroclastics, with rare SiO2 thermal depositions. what looks like a man-chipped white quartz flake in one stream bed. nothing else of interest locally. one wash has some standing water alive with insects and larva in the water. butterflies and hornets, wasps drinking. water seeming fresh, but another week and it will be gone. for the rest of the 4 months until the monsoon brings an occasional flash-flood. then the sky, with a patterned layer of high-altitude clouds coming from a NW low pressure, bringing something from the Pacific. not rain, but only the dimness of vapor sun Light. something of a relief here in the day, at night, keeping the land-warmth in a bit. I walk for perhaps four hours, stopping frequently, in an outward spiral from the space-vehicle that brought me here. seeing it on occasion, far off and small, alien. near it’s track. forward advance was halted by a hill a bit too steep and rutted and graveled to gain traction. the powerful urge to buy a 4×4 Tacoma nags at my hydrocarbon-nurtured soul. the soul born of the road-trip. a extravagant luxury in the near future. and only a strange memory for the next generation. grabbing food, bedding, tents, stoves, chairs, axe, bug-repellent, sun-screen, and some good friends, and head out, some where. topping the tank off at the last outpost.

with the clouds, Phoenix announces itself 120 miles away with a malevolent reddish glow reaching up about 15 degrees from the southeast horizon between two mesas. it brightens while I watch Jupiter, led by its four main satellites, pulling it like a globular puppet on invisible strings up the ecliptic plane. the two main tropic bands easily visible, the spot not apparent. (more images)

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worth-while challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. — Carlos Castenada

naming of location is an old social process. it is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). event may be natural or social. the naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people.

located story-telling

physical signage is the first step in externalizing the naming process. as social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more universal. (exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a socially abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. why do we struggle to associate events with those places? are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates us from non-standardize be-ing? is there a praxis which can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation that the deference to standardization promulgates?

when I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency)-based mapping and location activities — Boy Scout orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) — reading, comprehending, and making the leap from the ‘coordinated’ map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable process. approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectors from paper to topography was practiced. watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations was also standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location.

when I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. a typical description would be: “you know the Hellisheidi road?” “ja” “well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a ridge for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about 1 kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi.” This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the landscape of the Rocky Mountains, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of the country with native friends that I realized that I could simply say that I went to Grensdalur. That localized naming precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. and indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location — creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name. the more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that ‘mapped’ the human occupation of that spot). the names came out of embedded human occupation of that exact place at that exact time (or over a period of time).

the key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. the loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transference of the experience that ‘names’ it. it would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagation method that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory.

using one system will not allow a Utopian ‘return’ to another system. they exist in parallel to some degree, but they are different paradigms and ultimately different living practices.

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.

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.

pissing in the night, first the awareness of a full bladder, then the struggle into a wakefulness or forceful sleeping to ignore it all. or checking the air temperature in the stellar darkness. chilling. unzip the bag and squirm out, sandals on, turn around, open the door. skin is less sensitive to the cold with sleep-warmth stored up. intake breath with the brilliance of horizon-to-horizon density of stars. vision is possible. it’s not totally dark. the Orion nebula clearly a nebula. planets almost shedding shadows on dark ground.

up in the morning with the sun cracking the southeast horizon. dense fog filling the entire valley to the south, covering the railroad line and floating the mountains far beyond on a silver sea. have a fast breakfast, load-up, and drive to the Cadiz-Soda Lake road, but there has been so much rain in the last week the road is flooded so instead retrace path to the old Route 66, paralleling the rail line east to Needles. stop at the BLM office and have a chat with Murl, a local with tremendous knowledge of the Mojave area. trade stories and show respective trilobite samples, mine not too bad, considering that I had little memory of the place and that I found outcrops that had not yet been worked over completely. thence on east, into the Arizona (Sonoran) desert with the Saguaro and cholla cactus. each growing in specific and very distinct ranges. The Saguaro limited to south-facing rocky hill- and mountain-sides, never in the flats. the cholla often in north-sloping gravel alluvium. as the local nursery-lady, working in the native flora department said to me — “if it (a particular native plant) isn’t growing somewhere, then it can’t grow there…” without enough help to overcome the negative characteristics of the location, water, soil chemistry, Light, etc — obvious, but profound at the same time…

the desert is green, some areas like a billiard table, wildflowers will be resplendent later in March and April as the rainfall in the last month has already totaled more than the usual annual fall.

clouds race towards the highlands to find the winter storms. still in the lowlands, I trace a prickly pear and a Joshua tree in electron fullness.

regarding the DVD that I pseudo-released a year ago. feeling for an “explanation” of why it is impossible to make a release of a work that is based in an art form that is performed live, juxtaposed with the wide issue of re-production and re-creation.

A performance of a composition that is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was … A recording of such a work has no more value than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that has not yet happened. — John Cage

few stars last night. high clouds move in right after the 1700 sunset. by 1900 there is a massive halo around the moon. there is a mouse in the back of the truck, with me. after several wakeful moments waiting to determine the situation, then, seeing the dang critter in profile against the window, I end up getting out of bed and ripping everything out of the back, piece-by-piece until I find a little brown desert mouse and shoo him out. finally fall asleep.

shifted locations, heading north towards Kelso, after a long detour to check out the fossil beds near at the south end of the Marble Mountains. after some poking around, and dredging up very fragmentary memory of place, engaging a coyote in a call-and-response dance around the steep and rugged terrain, I finally focus in on a rich location for the trilobites, or at least, the right place. finding a complete trilobite is something of luck and persistence. in the end I come up with a few fragments that are interesting, one with a head about 5 cm across, but very fragmentary (inarticulate, that is). all the while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line just to the south stays busy as long trainloads of stuff go by every 15 minutes or so. I make a recording at the Cadiz crossing, but find that my microphone is screwed up, between that and the heavy wind blowing. decided not to tour around too much, so, just headed into the Granite Mountains, stopping in a jumble of granitic intrusives something like Joshua Tree. the wind continues, but the altitude here is about 1000 meters higher. it’s COLD. missing a warm hat. the camping spot has sizable cholla cactus, juniper, and mesquite between the huge boulders. but it is north of the mountains, so the sun goes away at 1530. I cook half-a-dozen eggs, eat them for lunch-dinner, make some tea to warm up, but end up sitting in the cab of the truck to keep warm. hoping that the wind breaks enough to start a fire. if not, it’ll be an early night to huddle in the back.

no break. gusting, chilling. bright moon, few stars shining over orderly and neat blobs of buff phenocryst-laden slow-cooled granite. almost stumbled into the cholla tree that I parked too close to. gotta file the location at a high-level memory for night-retrieval in the case of a bathroom run. it would be a sad time to run into one of those in the dark, or anytime. so, no quiet sky-gazing, or fire-sitting. the box of firewood that I have been toting since the Dolores River trip with Loki, Lexie, and Janet will go back in the truck in the morning. and it’ll be up and away to Livermore as soon as I get up and start moving.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival… a survival of a hugely remote period when… consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds… — Algernon Blackwood

drop by Galerie + to give Pálina some papers and to check out the show by Krístján Steingrimur, a former colleague of mine at the Art Academy, and the present Rector of the Fine Arts department. very direct work. intriguing were the samples of stuff (literally) from different locations (GPS/UTM-defined). reminded me of my sand collection. I had collected several hundred small round plastic pill-boxes filled in locations all around the world. then, at one point, during a move-related purge, I took all the samples and layered them in a one-liter pyrex lab bottle which looked great, sitting on my desk in my UNOCAL office. it wasn’t quite full, and I never sealed the top layer, so the first time it tipped over (when I was moving to Boulder from Santa Monica), all the beautifully colored and layered sands mixed to a bottle of uniform gray earth-stuff. so much for anti-entropic efforts.

a year since Dad died. doesn’t feel like that at all. a year. one of an endless cycle of circles around a Light. how else would we know, without abstract methodologies of measurement, except to see that things are the same, and different each time around. time may be a continuous phenomena, but it is variable for different beings, and states of being. why not? the willows, aspen, poplar, and birch are all transforming. rapidly. along with the snow marching down the mountainsides. by the time I get back from Norway in three weeks, this place will be stark, winter. time passes. flooding all corners of the sensual world, and affecting change in all things. when in the pool, at each deep inhalation there are smells of the sticky-sweet poplar here, almost a taste. it’s slightly different from the Cottonwood of the desert Southwest, but the smell brings a strong memory to surface. I’ve talked about this before in other places of this travelog. the smell of trees.

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously — as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. — Isabelle Allende, House of Spirits

sonorous night of outside vodka partyers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now are comfortable hearing meanings in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.

a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.

mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.

I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.

this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.

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.

What you look at subsequently affects how you see. Musing, watching the sea pass by the ferry, on the way back home from another morning swim. Then let eyes shift to the pressure-shaped plywood seat, varnish cracking, the surface flows like the surface of the water. Not stable, not solid, not noumenal. Neural fields firing memory of sight unseen. Mind recalling ripples of playing Light elsewhere.

Up in the morning. A lone trumpeter plays Amazing Grace somewhere out on the street. The May Pole in the Rats Laukums decorated with EU ribbons and fake over-sized daffodils is taken down. The center is small, a Maserati, many high-end Mercedes, three stretch Lincoln limos, and a TurboCarrera on the walk from the hotel. Extreme wealth. Boutiques and still-crumbling buildings. The CD in the breakfast place skips continuously for longer than famished memory records.

Last night the national hockey team lost to Sweden, fans with maroon and white jerseys cluster around the bank’s plasma screen.

Playful Baptist preacher-ish presentation this morning. Spins off many good conversations with former strangers, more than I would have imagined, outside the formal pathway of the conference so far. (Maybe 24 months in the US had a stunning effect) but the day is kind of shot. Sleeping here, room-mate snored through the night making sleep impossible. So, feeling like shit all day. Sitting in on Derek Holzer’s open source audio workshop, was hoping to get PureData installed on the Mac, but had to retreat to a pseudo-nap instead. Make it to dinner. But am heavily phase-shifted.

Building up the usual ball-point email address list. Hand-written, signed. Embodied self-evidence of presence and being. A small facilitation.

Western line dancing in the main square.

Move the bed to another location, behind the fridge and next to the balcony door this time.

nauseating quote about camera-phones:

“This is no longer about disposable cameras. We call it ‘disposable photography,’” said Ben Wood, a wireless analyst (editor: that is an analyst w/o wires), “There’s no such thing as a bad photo. The delete key takes care of the headless body or any other misfire. There’s no cost for making mistakes.” … “Everyone stages their own reality.” … USA Today

loss of memory, or the cost of memory transference from the body, lived, imprinted, to the external, re-presented. what is the cost? the archive is a playground for ghosts. like the hungry ghosts of the Japanese Obon tradition. belly distended, gnawing, grinding teeth loose in ratcheting jaw, yellow claw fingernails tearing at anything living. the prototypical consumer.

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

a time which I could hardly believe would arrive so soon has come and gone. Loki returned to his other home in Iceland yesterday. bravely getting on yet another plane to fly alone, with a stop-over in Boston, to Reykjavík. the not knowing of the next point where our paths will cross is the most traumatic of the circumstance. a whole year passed. a whole of seamlessly fragmented tableaus, scenes, moments, seconds, events, incidents. now memory. re-produced here and there. in re-created form. but the thing itself, gone, and partly regretful.

F/A-18 Hornet overflight. sitting in a lounge chair by the pool, after a slow workout, on the deck, the air changes consistency, clarity. a dust storm fills the northern sky, far away in front of Book Cliffs and growing rapidly, vaporous, after the second F-A/18 overflight, landing gear down, visibility drops until the cottonwoods beyond the far side of the pool become only barely shadow-box projections in the taupe fog. it passes, eyes gritty and stinging. then the outdoor megaphone/speakers, tuned to a local pop music radio station, blare out the civil defense warning signal, followed by a severe thunderstorm warning for the area. some people are listening, but most are not. I stand to leave, a young man, a lifeguard asks a rhetoric question. what was that? we have a short conversation. I can barely understand his English, and when I say something, he also has a hard time understanding me. he starts telling how he was dirt-biking yesterday and his girlfriend was blown off her ATV by the wind. I cycle away on the shimmering asphalt.

the artist as presence. why shouldn’t it be that way alone. presence spilling itself around in doses or continuous flows of richness. direct and unmediated. and mediated. without considering both, and the conditions and movements that bring all to present being, nothing good comes. a visit to Tree and Pascal, about to build a straw-bale house on a 40-acre parcel west of the Colorado National Monument area. artists. sitting outside their trailer under the ramada: heat from the sky and ice tea of roasted barley. a breeze keeps everything tolerable. (I pop up a memory of breaking out the manual type writer on a picnic table in late fall, at the Sand Dunes picnic area, a crusty snow on the ground, air shimmering with heat waves off anything dark colored, Anthony and I on one of our passages through the West. I cycle infinity signs in the snow of the empty parking lot. and curse nothing. celebrating life. and complete presence.)

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.

score. life goes the right direction, so it seems. university faculty housing comes through, a relatively inexpensive apartment for the academic year. car is now registered in Colorado, drivers license is next. maybe even re-registering to vote, after the long hiatus of cynical attitude and expatriate status. but voting only to stick it to the folks who engineered the coup d’etat in the previous presidential election. the results don’t really matter anyway, as the core of the empire, the ranks and ranks surrounding the centers of power “inside the Beltway” are rotten and corrupt.

I penetrate the earth and sustain creatures by my strength; becoming Soma, the liquid of moonLight, I nurture all healing herbs.

I am the universal fire within the body of living beings; I work with the flow of vital breath to digest the foods that men consume.

I dwell deep in the heart of everyone; memory, knowledge, and reasoning come from me I am the object to be known through all sacred lore; and I am its knower, the creator of its final truth.
– Lord Krishna

meditating on the next video work. memory: moment-by-moment. dissipation of memory in time, re-production and re-collection, re-presentation. decremented sampling of single events. focusing on the crucial, the re-membered seconds.

while raging wildfires sweep through the human-adjusted environment. is it all too late?

it is midsummer. moon waxing, not full yet, but there is not so much that touches the eye with length of day, brightness, or even the memory of winter still etched in body. wintering in Colorado was easy. brilliant, and I repeat to many souls that “you will never hear me complain about the weather here.” how is it that I survived Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and especially, Lapland? it is all memory. now. some written here, some not.

shuffling through boxes of books and other things, I think: what’s all the energy focused on the reproduction of art? what is the obsession of getting all art configurations onto paper accompanied by words? paper is an easily preserved object, (the archival word), this is a related factor — to avoid the death of the material object, immortality of the material (the thousand year Reich). seems also related to democratic socialism. that the production of culture should be spread to all, equally. though it is, in the end, not egalitarian propagation by any means. the absolution of “you had to be there.” that an individual’s experience should not be singular, it should be reflected from the collective. rooted and growing only from the collective. not the individualized interpretation of unique seeing (as the reproduction applies a stasis to point-of-view (who’s point of view IS it?), it denies a multiplicity of points of view (portals into the realm of the spirit regarding see-ing and be-ing).

you can relive the voyages of the great explorers — advertisement

and now a brief memory of a death last summer, no, two summers ago already. seeing Ingvi one evening, talking with him about the future, what he’s interested in doing, then two days later, the young teenager is dead in an automobile accident where his father was driving. in the countryside of Iceland.

long day coming. (remember sitting on the deck of that bungalow cluster on the north-central coast of Jamaica, Andrea off somewhere, maybe in the ornate colonial room with the 4-poster canopied bed, lying back staring at the ceiling. I was sitting on the pool deck. on shore wind, moist, humid. the gardener walks by me, gray-head, I am moved to say, in a half-coded patois, tide comin’ in long today. he turns, stops, and looks at me with very blood-shot and tired eyes, slow-smiling. yea mon, ’tis so. unwired.)

day gone now. next begun and begun and finished.

convivial dinner with Chris and Scharmin and the kids this evening, don’t know where I’d be without them around, an anchor to real life. and then, despite Scharmin’s insisting on Chris giving me a ride, a cycle home in the beginnings of a big snowstorm, a slog up Baseline. feeling good to be tussling with the elemental beings. even at this simple level.

but otherwise, the month ends. in the hearts of space. nothing profound, but Venus begins to hang as the evening star; vague memories of a time earlier in these wanderings when Venus guided many steps.

A couple days later. With the long-sighted view of memory, and of facilitating this being-in-the-moment. I pass from day to new day. Looking at the Flatirons at least once daily, and looking at the sky carefully each day. How can I kid myself. Having often said to Others, in other lands, that Colorado is a place where I can read and understand the sky. It is no lame metaphor. It is the truth, to me. And what of it? What does reading the sky bring? It brings the opposite of reading a book. Maybe. Or it is the same as … Something else. Quel que chose. Or something else.

If one avoids looking a lot at pre-digested — that is, Light pre-filtered through another human — sensual reality, one would feel less out of balance.

And I have to remember, when looking at the sky, to stop walking.

the raw suspicion that stability is a straw dog. (a term that Anthony first raised into my consciousness). in that conversation in a bar-restaurant somewhere on the Delaware River a long time ago. wondering what happened to him, no words from him in many, 18 moons ago. while now in the moment, the Leonids rain down from the sky. he was supposed to be going to Flagstaff, the wanderer that he is.

the last morning of the Media Lab workshop, I have something of a microscopic revelation in the number six tram. understanding that I am talking deeply about the power of presence as a creative strategy and practice, traveling around Europe preaching this, and all the while, at the same time, leaving my little boy behind. a little boy who is not so little anymore. everything seems impossible for this family. relationships are crushed and fragmented, distorted and removed, applied over distance and imbalanced. hmmmmmm.

another thread that came from the workshop this week were characterizations about the externalization of memory and the problem of re-presentation. with memory removed from the embodied self, there is an erosion of personal autonomy (the external localized memory is the technological network — which is not a network after all, but a lateral hierarchy). the act of placing memory externally reifies what would be an internally dynamic condition of evolutionary presence. and contributes to an ethical or even moral slide. (assuming that a static condition of memory is problematic — haven’t meditated on that one so much.)

here in Jyväskylä, dinner with Niina, finding out about the local situation (email never provides enough communications spectrum), in a hotel on campus by the lake. seminar tomorrow. a late call, like those many others, of the sadness I have caused to an Other. by not respecting innocence. and not providing the right dreams.

with an image, Valgerdur reminds of a conversation we had early in the year at a dinner at her house. she was describing a trip with a friend of hers in the back-country of Colorado where they happened on an impressive place. synchronicity. nothing surprising, given the PLACE. and the person…

a walk to the Joensuu town beach, first along the river, then to the lake. the thin Light, sharp. always forgotten when away, dissipated from body memory as soon as body is exposed to the power of Colorado or Arizona Light. it evaporates, too blue to stand the brunt of vertical noon desert. but, on the returning north, passing through the land, there raises the high-frequency trace, intaglio, acid-etched, displaced faux-memory. to a temporary and precious foreground. from yesterday to today a chill entered the air. coming from 105F (43C) and going to 57F (12C) and wearing the same t-shirt. no shorts anymore, though, and no sandals. back to black work-boots, black jeans, dark everything. sit on a small floating dock and stare at the water-sun. geese scolding each other. sharp spicy air. elegant birch trees, precious in scale: these same eyes absorbed the Light of the Sequoias this summer. the birch tree leaves are changing color. over one night it comes. no turning back now.

sharp refrains, movement, movement. nothing but. controlled burns raging in ancient trees. filling vast airs with lung-choking particles. the descent from Moro Rock is memorable. and all perspective is distorted by size.

dinner with Neils, Valgerdur, and Haukur. mmmmmmMMMMMmmmm. in the midst of a long conversation catching up on each other’s activities, Valgerdur was recounting her travel to teach in Colorado Springs at Colorado College. She took a road-trip with a colleague which, by chance (well, nothing is chance, all is inter-connected, so…) they are driving south through the San Luis Valley, and they make a short detour to see the Great Sand Dunes, driving past an abandoned house on the side of the road. they are both taken by the place, so, slow down, stop, back up, and photograph it. it is the center of the universe. no coincidence there. electricity. synchronicity. actually nothing really to comment about — it simply happened, period. aside from me being a tad jealous at not being in the Rocky Mountains in the springtime. it’s been 12 years since I have experienced that state of being.

forgot my sun glasses over at their place.

snow. falling. on the way to school, is it almost time for long underwear. cold legs always were a bane, standing out at the bus stop, waiting for the school bus which was invariably late on snowy mornings. cold mornings. shivering. acclimating. back to that memory of the landscape of my childhood in winter. echoes.

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.

The sky-scraper stands shadowing the physical self as the ultimate manifestation of the material Age of Industry. Turning around from this retrospective view, eyes still dilating in the deepening shadow that stretches across the shrinking self, there, Babel-towering over head is the edifice of the Information Age. That shape-shifting edifice is Life-Style. It has no common social locus but rather embodies the fantastic and distributed presence of hierarchic global networks. There is a definite place for (pseudo)nomads in this structure. They are the promoters and producers and simultaneously, the perfected consumers. The techno-fetishists, oiled and gleaming skins with secret odors of plastic and metal, hair blazing in a variety of artificial colors, clothing sleek and clean, with alchemical accouterments of chrome, molybdenum, vanadium, coltan, and titanium. They sit at terminals, eyes reflecting the ever-changing scenes. They are pose-able props in places of transit, they drive late model vehicles, they move through airports, hotels, underground shopping malls, and parking garages at all the same harmonic and unstable high speed — the speed of Kali Yuga, the last age of the Hindu, when the complete seduction of fantasy and sin takes over all human endeavor: righteousness and godliness forgotten. It could be that these fashionistas used to be called the imperialist vanguard, back when the name was self-applied, back when Life-Style was more centralized, more focused on and applied to the edifice of physical empire. But conditions have revolved, memory is digital and discontinuous, and now the center is everywhere, the perimeter is ringed by the delocalized and networked center. The vanguard becomes the Other, apparently, never the Self.

A Closer Look at the Edifice of Life-Style

It embodies the entire projected reach of globalization, consumer fetish, and the materialization every whim and fantasy. It projects a uniformity of being and a homophobia towards the Other more virulent than any previous oppressive ideology ? woven into the warped threads of sexism, racism — to the extreme that the Other must become the same or become nothing at all. It is omnipresent and changes its skin every day. Its appearance and being are only skin deep, yet it stretches to envelope the soul. Faustus. Its reach is infinitely small because the human self is constricted, compacted and appended to a materialistic worldview of intellectual and physical property and ownership. Life-Style then needs only to expand into small space of the abandoned self. Skin deep. Soul flown, it is easy. It has only one dimension left.

rain. laundry. and the return. 0500 morning. good morning. lazy day after a garlic pasta omelet. preparing for the movement into the next days. which will be intense. Italy. Bologna. been a long time since then there last. 1993, I think, Loki was a baby and MB and I spent a week traversing northern Italy trying to have a good time while not spending much money. starting in the Maritime Alps, coming from France. at a small primitive auberge where I have the terrible memory of me holding my hand over Loki’s mouth in the middle of the night while he was crying. afraid of waking up the other guests which I am not even sure there were any. how I got to that condition/position, I will never know, except, in retrospect, it seems unforgivable. that was a long strange voyage, starting in Köln, Monschau, pick up a vicious bronchitis sleeping in a cold and drafty room there at Astrid’s house, running around the countryside of Champagne-Ardenne looking for a particular round church that I saw in an art catalog once, in a hotel in Paris, after a visit to Mont St. Michele and a prayer in front of the statue of the bleeding heart — a fevered dream where looking onto a mirror mouth opens wider, wider, until the top of head is back and out from gaping throat comes a growling demon — and the fever passes; the Louvre; Sebastian’s family’s abbaye in the ‘burbs (RER Défense, end of the line, Poissy), with MB lying half-dead with fever in the garden guest house, Vézèlay, Chalon, Lyon, the Haute Alpes, then to that auberge. which was surrounded by military bunkers, as it was right on the Free French – Facist Italian border. Down into the upper Po Valley, and over through Parmesano and to San Pellegrino where we stayed in a lousy cold hotel with a bed that made a tired hammock seem solid. anyway, back to presence, Sanna sleeping next to me at noon, while I quietly type. she’s back from Portugal, but not soon enough for me.

no celebration here. just fatigue soaking deep in to the body. celebrating a revolution? no way. and no Mix-Master de-Light ramming of content down any local body’s constricted vocabulary projector. no bodies care lies still, encased in streams of spiral-wrapped conduits, snaking, (no fixed address), but a carrier. tired of things to carry. it slid into my burnt awareness to day, wandering over to school, second time in 20 minutes, fuming, that a nomad takes no prisoners. makes no documents, and tells stories only about others, not himself, to strangers. no form of permanent record, except organic and portable memory. no weight. gravity is a nomads enemy.

John Shaft walks across the screen, shot from the hip, he is tall, singular, and the people around him are invisible. there is only Shaft and coolness. get hip. dude, I tell him. get hip. don’ fuck wiff me, I’m Shaft he says. he makes a rendezvous at Cafe Reggio. I am flickering with remembrance. Cafe Reggio. oh yeah, McDougal Street, SoHo, right south of Wash Park. I was there, sitting in the same ornate booth as Shaft. about ten years later. from the look of the street, things were MORE hip then, grunge. in the days when matchbooks still had the striking surface on the front face, not the reverse side. after the Beat People were driven out of their hovels and into the streets, ranting, homeless, mindless, howling. when I was there, it was to meet Emily, somewhere there might even be a picture of her, and further down McDougal, there was that open-fronted wine bar where Bill and I went the evening we first met, after his course at Parsons. memories of Manhattan. absolutely no possibility of making reasonable condensations of the flux now. mid-Summer, though still three weeks away is a roaring, a roaring that I have spoken and written about before many times. nothing stops it. it is the subversive sub-ductive opposite of that other time of year that cannot even be named now in this moment, it cannot be expelled from the center, core dumped, into being at all. because all is Light now, glorious Light.

back in the east. of Finland. on the western border of Russia. a border drawn partly by the movements of the Winter War that began sixty years ago last week. where Russian bombers hit Vypori at 0915 in the morning. they drove deep into Finland, but were later driven back, and the borderline was repeatedly re-drawn by the fortunes of war. first the Finns were supported and allied with the Nazis (the Whites), and then by the end of the war, they (the Reds) had turned against the Germans who subsequently withdrew through Lapland into Norway, leaving behind total devastation — the scorched-earth policy in action. the city of Rovaniemi in south-central Lapland was 99% destroyed. There was a brutal internal Civil War between the Reds and Whites prior to WWII, something that almost tore the country apart before the great General Mannerheim (White) won over the Reds. Independence Day, December 6, is still a day for old people, especially the soldiers to remember the suffering and be remembered in solemn ceremonies around the country. living memory is the word. different than in Amurika, where the Revolution and the fight for independence is only cause for over-eating barbecued food and watching fireworks while eating watermelon in the dead heat of summertime. dead memory. big difference. that life and living is so much more important than any material constructs or mental/social constructs like history and language and institutions and other imposed and largely abstract constellations of apparent energy. nothing real. snowing and very cold these days. it makes the town and the landscape look like a very idyllic picture postcard of White Christmas. heavy frosting on gently curved fir and birch trees, reposed for the chill. rocks and streets alike white, most form obscured. the river, split in to two narrow channels in the middle of town, both of which are dammed for a hydro station, one a bit further downstream than the other so that from a bridge over a narrow gorge, one can look upstream and see one small dam structure, with the dry gorge below full of fluffy white shapes. the same bridge passes over the river immediately upstream of the turbine intake, and there the water is flowing fast, strangely smooth, with harmonic anti-waves with an amplitude of half a meter and a wavelength of, say, five meters, migrating upstream against the current. today, in the thick falling snow and deep chill, the water there has a scummy skin of thin slush onto which is mixed swirls of fresh snow. last night I seemed to come down with a minor sinus cold that has lasted the day, though with no serious symptoms. generally I throw off these things in less than 24-hours, though more generally, I simply don’t get sick. back to the water thing. but this week I had two very bad nights of sleep, for some reason, and that, combined with long, badly-timed waits for the bus between the teachers’ house and the college, and early mornings, wore me down a bit. was thinking that the teaching here in Imatra stretches my toughness — and actually it is quite easy conditions, but I have gotten just too soft. ain’t no hungry barbarian.

running around. MediaBase, talking with Oliver, Visa — visiting his studio and flat. Tarot-tossing, fast and sure. dinner with my favorite Icelandic students Solveig and Sara, along with Sara’s son Arnar. ghosts and the Wittendorf Venus. MTV and wine. pachouli on my fingertips. garlic on my breath. making garlic noodles again — ever since that afternoon in 1988 on the upper slopes of the main volcano on Isola Ischia off of Napoli, Italia. waiting for the others to do some shots elsewhere, I find myself at a small bar/restaurant, ceramic figurines everywhere, but my memory is not too clear. I lost one roll of film (I remember every roll of film that I have ever lost in processing, a total of five) in the period from Isola Ischia to Isola Stromboli, on account of an old developing canister I was using at Bill’s lab in Jersey City at the end of that summer. running two rolls in the tank, and the LID POPPED OFF in my hand. I was pretty quick to get it back on, but not before the top roll was pretty badly fogged. so, images of this little place where I first experienced the pasta dish l’aile d’olia (not sure if that is the correct Italian spelling, but) are not extant. garlic-breath the day after, especially if there are any left-overs, they make the perfect filling for a fabulous omelet! the recipe is simple — enough olive oil to cover the bottom of a cold frying pan. heat on medium heat, add at least eight cloves of garlic pressed or chopped, more if it suits your inner desires to fend off vampires and other forms of obnoxious life. sprinkle with pepper — preferably coarse-ground black or Tabasco, cayenne, but any will do, more to your tastes. let this mixture saute slowly — if the heat is too high, the garlic can burn, and that is definitely a no-no. start the pasta. it is best to use spaghettini (smaller in diameter than regular spaghetti), or angel hair. I find that heavy pasta pieces soak up too much oil. put a spoon full of crushed basil in the boiling water with a little oil (little or no salt), cook pasta. drain, and then quickly pour the hot oil and garlic over the pasta, mixing everything well (using a pasta spoon or two forks). the oil will quickly spread throughout the pasta. serve hot with baguettes, a good Bourgogne, water, a green salad, and lots of grated Peccorino Romano cheese. Plan ahead, make extra: the next day, leftovers can be used to make that scrumptious omelet!

Sunday. St. Olavs cathedral is over there. as I look out the sixth-floor windows of the Academy office. sunLight coming over the hills to the south illuminates the row of buildings along the fjord. the far side of the fjord is bright, too. mind is flat. with all the activities that churn and churn the mind. silence is broken by whining hard drives and other high-frequency beings. outside is behind glass.

AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) is undertaking its last meeting of the 20th Century. I recall going to one of those meetings in Boston when I was just 14, accompanying my father. photographing the Vice-President, Rockefeller, giving the opening keynote speech. later going to see Arthur Fiedler perform with the Boston Pops (he was sick, so had a replacement, could it have been Seiji Ozawa?). we ended up sitting next to Dr. Harold Edgerton, the famous physicist from MIT who developed the electronic stroboscope for making ultra-high-speed photographs. my father knew Edgerton tangentially from when he was working at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Harold gave me a signed copy of a postcard reproduction of the famous image of the milk drop frozen like a royal crown. Edgerton was one of the founders of EG&G, a major military-industrial corporation.

dreaming of something, but the memory is gone. 20:20 and listening to a Monty Python CD. ride in from Lahti on the bus with a group of students to Kiasma. Kirsti tells me about her mother who died this spring. we’re on an art field trip. art at 10:15 in the morning. Bruce Naumann, and the rest. coffee and a weineri in the Kiasma cafe and I have lost the foreign students that I was to take around the museum, so I head to a shop to buy a bunch of flowers and then on the number 10 tram to see Sanna — we end up hanging about talking for several hours before she has to go to work for the evening.

walking around a couple evenings ago, I am overcome by the level of noise in my head, too many things to think about, too many plans, situations, alternatives, impressions, sensations, thoughts, possibilities, scenarios, interpretations, flickering visions of futures, incomplete bits of past and pseudo-past. and suddenly I am perplexed why I have not been using this state-of-mind, this way, this part of me, this aspect, this actuality as a part of my working and teaching. spontaneous being. and forget these trivial descriptive and formalized words. gotta bad case of Love B.B. King wails out to my right, and yo’ heart is filled with misery. then Santana, you got to change your evil ways… before that, Ted Nugent, that freaky guitarist who was/is an avid bow-hunter and into casual sex with as many women as would prostrate themselves or throw panties at him in concerts back in the late 70′s. damn good guitarist. cat scratch fever, I make the pussies purr with a stroke of ma hand, they know they gettin’ from me… so if it goes, so it does go.

rumor, and innuendo, bad radio now, talking too much, load a CD that is from somewhere, after listening to Monty Python earlier in the evening. it is not my flat, but here I am lounging around, shaving (unshaven chin leaves bright red rashes on somebody else’s soft and sensitive inner thighs), feeling new somehow. bottle of red wine from Bulgaria, I have a son in Iceland who I am losing. shape-shifting I leave temporary body and lift into ether space above the flat, through roof, wet tiles, leaves on the maple tree out in the front are gone, a red-yellow stain on the grass, leaves collect on the interstices of urban organization, edges of separated matter, curbs, roads, paths, and cut grass. puddles absorb them, hydrostatic, no capillary attraction sucks on them once caught floating on the surface, tires grind them into a brown sludge that sprays up onto to the handicapped man trying to cross the road, frenzy of sales at Stockmanns, thousands of people, and it seems like every other person has an expression of an undercover guard, but it is only the expression of winter coming to shade faces, 22:32, I’d like to eat you up, I’m try’na move around the box in the corner wails. still lifting up with no silver-chained umbilical trailing from center of being. loose, cosmological, transcendent.

cut, back to the desert. Vegas, 0300, on that blitz drive to eLAy with JC and George and Rick and JC’s girlfriend, that sexy coed, forgot her name. there is a tape recording extant somewhere of a fragment of conversation in the middle of the night. the fragment is recorded onto the end of a tape of Lennon music, which ends with a piece with Yoko Ono and Frank Zappa. it shifts to loud driving noise, maybe somewhere half-way across Utah from Grand Junction where we piled out of the van (inside there is a computer a DEC pdp-11 or so like half a refrigerator in the back along with some mattresses) to load up on a case of beer (Budweiser and imports, probably Heinikens — Heinies, we called ‘em, when we would drink em’ while eating smoked oysters in field camp — and frosted donuts and cold Arby’s roast beef burgers) before heading in to that large unknown that was a night road-trip across the desert. that fragment of conversation painted across a signal-to-noise hiss of grumbling engine and wind, abruptly following Yoko Ono wailing runs something like JC says something, and I reply uh…, huh…, what? he repeats, that was garble garble garble? me, uh…, no, no, that was John Lennon and Yoko Ono with Frank Zappa… he, oh . tape ends. pipe was already out, I guess, I imagine. somewhere, there are slides taken in the hotel room where the five of us crammed into during the week of the Society of Exploration Geophysics meeting there in downtown eLAy, I went to the follow-up job interview with Vince at UNOCAL headquarters just across the Harbor Freeway from the Bonaventure Hotel where the conference was being held — wearing jeans, tennis shoes, tee-shirt, and that maroon silk smoking jacket I used to have.

cut, why not dredge, dig, into all those scenes that have played charged particles across my neural network? replay them in moldy words, fix them and make tart reifications of nothing remotely related to factoid reality, because that realness would be so too much charged to be anything anyhow to another, except for like being a tongue stuck in a Light socket, or deep into a warm…

cut, later, the words written down, but no one reads them, so, perhaps it’s better to get back to bed and stay there for hours exploring the wet vicissitudes of embodied carnality.

cut, to the Ocean Boulevard parking lot where that lady in the bikini was there almost everyday, on roller-skates (before days of roller-blades) with a hand-held sail, sail-skating around, never a scratch on her oiled and sleek body, she never fell down, body never violated.

alien nation. night train really isn’t. leaving the flat at 1745 by taxi. leaving Tornio by bus at 1810. leaving Kemi at 2000, trudging in Light to the South, but noticeable dimming within the roaring grinding cabin, high whine of air movers, both the two bunks too slim for two, but two forced to be in one because of need. needs of fate, needs of whatever. I do not know, needs of time, beautiful in sleep, beautiful upon waking, stretching away, and the shyness that for me is an inscrutable hidden in language and culture difference and herself. her silence given to searching for words, and that thing I know well of Babylon — the excretory hubris to attain God after the language leaves. maybe this can never become anything other than what it is. and for that I am thankful, for it to be what it is in the moment of when it is enough. the word romantic surfaces, but this is only a poor shake of letters not touching on the actuality. romantic movements are gritty-eyed, skin-burnishing events. hallucinogenic Light flashing through the trees when the shades are opened in the morning, well, at the 0500 hour because sleep is not possible for me. last car in the train. yeah, the language difference, something I am too familiar with, and the limits of expression. can we substitute one form of expression purely for another? the example being the susseration of skin-to-skin, a touch-language (this has been thought of for years: and acted upon more than once), instead of this ancient way of going that would never be now — constructs of letters making sound, making sense and dissonance. the shaping and imprinting, wanting to remember the feeling (do we ever have memories of feeling?) hand moves back and forth, pressing the body-wall of Other, never knowing what it is to be. the conflict of sensory feeding and sensory survival and sensory overload and sensory subjugation and sensory purpose. goodbye is goodbye when the first meeting is only days in the past. saying goodbye is unspeakable. the way one looks at the Other. the eye as receptor (not transmitter like history gazing on itself) nor ear as receptor, only a transmitter of attention. The body and the voice as transmitter (touch, the receiver and transmitter.) Light emissions. (voices move) through the containing ether. shaping the words to trace an outline of being on the vacated space of that body once known or thought to be known or thought to be anticipated (memory of loss. and loss of memory.) anticipating that I would. or just anticipating what it was. shoulder, arm, wrist, finger. ring.

unfinished language, expression, unfinished, all remains unfinished, until the end, my friend (Jim Morrison speaking there partially). May Day celebrations passed, I think they are mostly about the end of winter.

Don’t look for truth in people’s accounts of journeys or rants, but an honest portrayal of how they would like to see time pass. It passes, we pass. Our urge to live is our urge to remain. We all leave marks, and we all take them away. Erasing pictures of ourselves, we contradict our own stories. The stories we do remember and retell soon become inadvertent myths. One day all that stops, and the world gets to toss our stories around all by itself. In the end, none of our stories will matter much to time, and the art of reckoning will have no human place as we recede into dinosaur memory. Until that time there sure is a lot to do and keep track of, but the certain end of time someday is a sobering thought. One day there will be no more days to pass, and time itself will cease to exist. — David Rothenberg

well, David: sobering, realistic, unknown, where else does one go. except onwards. I am quoting too much here, trying to absorb mediated things, but what is not mediated? if body is the primary tool, I can see that I am still boxing myself in (it is a box as long as I do not change my life!). the box walls are the ideologies of the world. to break free of them is the goal.

I was walking with Volker between the buildings of the Kunsthochschule in Kiel, and I see something sitting on the sidewalk, something round, about an inch high and three inches in diameter. I can’t believe it, it is too strange. it is a cake of Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax! surfing days resurrected in my brain, body, right there in Kiel, fifteen years stripped from experience, just thinkin’ of that swallowtail triple-fin board again, bellying up over the small waves out, diving under the big ones, leash tugging on the ankle, keeping the board close enough but not to close to thrash the dayLights outta yer head when you surface after the thrumming pass of water mountain overhead. sand grains get into the wax and leave the un-wet-suited belly a bit raw after a long afternoon of trying to ride six-foot curlers… I write to George, who I haven’t heard from in a coon’s age, he’s too busy trying to beat the definitive NOVEL out before inertia takes over, and teach at the same time. Somehow, he is one of the few people who I feel comfortable writing absolutely ANYTHING to … He knows what language can do, and I guess he cringes sometimes at my linguistic ineptness, but at least I think he enjoys a twist or two …

After putting a book down (I am reading a book!) in the pile of to-do (I have to mail it to Terhi later in the week), finished, I put on little Sony earphones that are plugged into the laptop A POWERBOOK which, in turn, is plugged into a 10Mb line out into the wide buff gray ether out there, where I have tuned in internet radio gogaga from Boulder … good ole Joe and Joel keep it comin’! and check email to keep myself from concentrating on anything more close at hand, like dealing with a class plan for 13 Finnish students that threaten to blow my head away after it has been wrapped around a cocktail of students from too many cultures, too many mentalities, too many personalities, like I would enjoy flat middle-class middle-Amurikan dolts instead, for a change, the kids here are too fucking whatever. Here I am. Let’s talk about creativity! Dig into it, and then do it! I know they’ll rise to the occasion!

I arrange my things in the room that Terhi just vacated, looking forward to six weeks of not too much movement and a fast Ethernet connection only a meter from the bed. ain’t no slackin’ gonna happen! not that it will affect my dreams, memories, but there is something of a fear that I will nerd out here. gotta remember to go out and dance with students some, even though they have hardcore patterns of sleep deprivation and such where bands don’t start ’til one in the morning and people party all night (thank god the nights are shrinking daily!). push-ups, recollections, replays of fragments of this and that memory, and I am not losing my hair except as it is SO long now, longer than it has EVER been, that it gets tangled, and for the past year I rake a handful of it out each couple days. still plenty. how is it at this AGE to have long hair. retro hippie that I never was because I wasn’t old enough to do those hippie things like Free love and stuff. (more …)

lethargic and slow snow falls, something like I imagine the fallout from a nuclear winter, ashes, ashes, we all fall down …

Manus manum lavat. (One hand washes the other)

Thom quotes that to me, and it brings back the memory of high school with Mr. Crawford, the Latin teacher. who used to entertain us by tuning a little am radio to the same frequency as his heart pacemaker and his whole ancient body would start jiggling. this was 20 years before Stelarc ever considered the body-as-machine-the-machine-as-body. Mr. C. is dead, surely, now, his body gone. later that day, lazing around, writing correspondance et al. Christa is playing the piano in the living room. Thom and I end up deciding that I should visit his class tomorrow in the Institute of Computer Sciences at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

here for a couple days. visiting Kaisu who has an artist-in-residence atelier here for some months. yesterday we take a day trip to Köln. unusually clear and warm for this time of year. it is strange to be in that city again, with all the personal history that has happened there for me. a visit to the Ultimate Akademie finds Hans-Jürgen and Lisa, I speak with Rolf on the phone and find out that Volker is indeed around, but has a disconnected telephone, a group of them had been in Chaing Mai, Thailand for some weeks, and Volker had not paid his telephone bill. so, I will probably see him when I return to Köln later in this month. circles draw tight. smaller circles, and every time I look at Works of Art, I am repressed, not depressed, but re-pressed. they repress me in the way of a reminder of the drives that exist around us in the world, the drives to control the world, maybe only to make sense of things, der dinge. needing strong touches of being. impressions of materiality. impressions on body. simple burdens of. intersections of material and body. no, it is not the intersection of body and material, but more the exercise of control. not making any ideas here. no ideas are better than formations of being that are simple and forward. Hans-Jürgen says I should do another performance at the Ultimate Akademie when I am back in Köln — he jokes about the other performance a bit, and seems a bit impressed that I am STILL traveling! meeting so many different people constantly. it begins to strike me that I am also now moving through spaces that I moved through when I started this mnemonic device two years ago. so there is introduced a reflexive element to my ramblings, being some place again. a cycle of memory, what do I recall? a dinner-party with several artists living locally, telephone calls from Claudia, who I missed by only a couple days in Finland, I haven’t seen her since 1989 in Köln when she had an exhibition there and in Roma also in that same year. I introduced Kaisu to her remotely a few years back when Kaisu was staying at the Finnish atelier in Roma, and they have since become good friends which is nice. Claudia’s new catalog which Kaisu shows me illustrates her strong and evolving works — now using photography. all things cease in mind, I am a receptacle for liquid experience, and not more, a vessel. even consuming experience. biting air, and chewing a stick of words that issue from mind to mouth. fiber. chewed and flayed like papyrus, bound together in bundles, dipped in wax, lit, they become torches carried by those who search darkness for the meaning of being. Kersten is home when I call there to say hallo, she is going out on a date and is in a hurry; I will see her also later in the month. Still no contact with Hubertus about the teaching in Kiel. catch Adele in Budapest, but she will leave for the weekend, and I will probably not cross her path. too bloody complex, these arrangements, even with email. telephone is easier. why? and sitting face-to-face better still. Samu and I talked about that. incontrovertible that Presence is the base to build on. writing through time.

in a small cabin on the Silja Festival. once again. my memory is not so clear, but it seems the ship has been changed somehow since I took passage two years ago. redecorated. no, i look back into this journal and find this is a different ship altogether.

Despite not quite being over a cold that kept me home from teaching on Monday, in a dull-witted fog of sinu-kalyptic mondo-cosm, I drove over to visit with Homare whom I had not seen for some years. He has a bigger studio now, near downtown Denver, filled with oil, water-color, and acrylic paintings, monoprints — exploding from each corner and surface. A prodigious amount of work, he produces artifact after artifact, and has a storage unit full of canvases. His work is calmly explosive, and at the same time, meditative and electric. somehow I run into Krishnamurti…

Memory is always in the past and is given life in the present by a challenge. Memory has no life in itself; it comes to life in the challenge. And all memory, whether dormant or active, is conditioned. — J. Krishnamurti

Structurally, things are different. Days have a different insistence of being which drives them, weeks likewise. Never thought too much about months and years, except now I have to make teaching and travel plans up to ten months in advance. The spring will be another sequence of movements — Iceland, Finland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lapland, Sweden, Iceland, and then finally back to the US in June with Loki for the summer. Being relatively immobile here in Colorado with the exception of the drudgery and stress of car-commuting 20 miles to Boulder three or four days a week, well, life is different. Cycling around is a joy, here in the middle of October, the sun is still brilliant and warm, the air, well, during the day, is still warm, though there have been several nights of frost already. Colorado has become back into memory and sensation a realness which draws me out. Looking backwards to the times in Iceland, how I could lose my social being, my need for others completely unfilled, the interjection of the jealousy of the ex to keep others at bay. And how different I feel here, watching Self and Others age gracefully. Careers formed. Lives forming. Eah, but nothing that I can mediate by language pulls me close to what is REALLY happening. There is a vast flux of human society that is completely un-represented. Representation. Why even care? It is possible to move powerfully in a region of … (case closed)

In a real conversation, a real lesson, a real embrace, in all these, what is essential takes place between them in a dimension which is accessible only to them both … If I and another “happen” to one another, the sum does not exactly divide. There is a remainder somewhere, where the souls end and the world has not yet begun. — Martin Buber

And there it is. Life in the offing. I had a rough week. Intense actions. Friday evening, I end up shopping on the way home. that is a concentrated activity that I don’t enjoy. food. shopping. I hated it in Iceland, for sure. but more here. Like going shopping for anything, it just doesn’t seem to be fulfilling … telephone call … I strike my forehead after I hang up. she was a real love of mine, but I guess I never told her. undeclared love is such a lost anomaly. always rooted in the past, that vanishing of any knowing. ahmmmmmmm. but the recognition, the coming-to-know of the past is such a rare thing. anyway, I never knew what love was then anyway. I start thinking of the area in Italy that has been seeing so many earthquakes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there (although not since 1994). I am bummed that a good friend, a painter, Claudia Piell, has two houses in Umbria where that terrible series of quakes has been happening … Another sculptor friend in Finland was going to be doing a collaborative show with Claudia in Venice around now. No email and the regular post for both of us is forwarded multiply, so I won’t hear from them for some months. Kaisu, the Finnish artist, sends me a photo and letter. I miss Kathryn’s visit to, Finland in June and July to see Kaisu and do a workshop there. But I wonder about the places where Claudia and I were in Umbria in 1989. I need to revive some of those images. before time passes too much.

Classes begin tomorrow at this Institution of Higher Learning. What drives it? The desire to learn, the quest for knowledge, or simply the will to accede to the power base that stands ascendant in this Nation-state. Recalling the skies here is a pleasure of deep memory and mindfulness that brings my eyes some great energy, although I still am in the state of feeling that the outdoors is hostile. A left-over from life in Iceland. Yet, as though far away, my skin luxuriates in the sensations, drawing me, a topological being, forwards into the landscape. Driving is a safe of passing through it all, but I see many things to be imaged.

So many miles have rolled past the frontward hypnosis of my eyes in the last 25 days, I cannot recall but flashes and strokes of brilliance. Lightning, Lightening. In the blurred darkness of what passes by memory. Like the throbbing eye-pulse, after driving long hours, the eye still sees movement, rippling tunnel-ward from center to periphery. Formation of words. come to slivers, deep driven under the fingernails. shaking layer after layer of skin off, gone and gone. to the Other place. in the Other’s arms. meanwhile, hair falls out. inflictions of sensation. sensation vs information. which is ascendant? which descendant? massive attack. scatter shot and pleasure domes. scratch and ambient. destruction of the soul is vanity. having that immense luxury of concentration. a longing for the stammering glottal stops the shudder from paced expression. hearing stands for nothing like being (and another’s touch). where the, and the, or.

Across the sky, the clouds move, Across the fields, the wind, across the fields the lost child of my mother wanders. Across the street, leaves blow, Across the trees, birds cry — Across the mountains, far away, My home must be. — Hermann Hesse

A short note about the installation that I just opened yesterday as part of the Akureyri ListaSumar 1997 (Summer Arts Festival). It is an extension of the performance series solstice-to-solstice: a naming of the Light of Being [it takes a few minutes for the java slide-show to upload] and the intro on the wall looks something like this:

Probably a measure of bullshit, but the 40-meter long strip of images that span the space impressed the hell out of my back, leaving me crippled and craving more of the pain-killers that the Doc prescribed. One step forward, two steps back. A photographer from the national paper came in to do a portrait for upcoming coverage of the town’s summer art festival, and during the opening, the most retro and pin-headed critic (no, I can’t honestly call him a critic — should simply say guy-who-fills-columns-with-pointless-drivel) employed by the newspaper ran through the installation. The poor old fellow knows little about art, and nothing about photography. I recall the review he wrote for an exhibition I did some years back which was of as much critical value as an equal quantity of paper pulp destined to clean a baby’s arse. Some people don’t know when to quit. The only positive point is that a bad review from him pretty much confirms that an exhibition is at least interesting.

Well, as Terhi, Tapio, and Liisa and I begin working on our net.sauna project for the Ars Electronica festival in September, I suddenly have to laugh as a memory from the surfacing of a deep personal history. I think I was around seven or eight years old,

living in Clarksburg, Maryland, in the rural suburbs of Washington, DeeCee. The Clarksburg Elementary School that I attended had an annual community festival each fall. For one of these events, I think it was in the fall of 1969, my friend Peter and I decided to do a project. In vogue with the fact that we were both sons of engineers, and that computers had landed two men on the moon that previous summer, we embarked on the construction of a large device that we dubbed The ElectroThinker. We crafted it from a large refrigerator box, painting it blue and grey and yellow, and attaching as many Lights and switches and knobs and such as we could collect from my fathers cluttered workshop and elsewhere. There were various electric bells and noisemakers. Of course, the heart of the machine — a machine that could answer any question for the small sum of a nickel, five cents — the heart was the imaginations of two kids writing answers on small scraps of real(!) computer paper and making some strange speaking sounds. My own memory fails to recall how much money we made, but the event itself is a small evidence of the impact that my cultural and social upbringing had on my relationship with machines, computation, and technology. The second instance that comes to mind following this remembrance is the time that one day, when foraging near the ruins of an old cabin — a place I rarely went for the profusion of poison ivy and snakes — I came across the intact trans-axle of a very old Ford truck. It had the wheels, tires, differential and some kind of transmission box. I was consumed with the mission to deconstruct this device and see what was inside it. I must have been only ten or eleven if that. I remember taking all my father’s heavy wrenches, hammers, chisels, whatever I could in a wheelbarrow into the woods, and spending a number of days hammering, unbolting, chiseling at this thing until I had taken most of it apart. I was rewarded by a huge collection of shiny gears, Timken® taper bearing sets, and assorted solid brass bearing axles — all which I cleaned up carefully with gasoline and displayed in my room.