As long as man’s wants and his desires for military conquest were confined to petty hostilities between individuals or tribes, the necessity for roads other than mere pathways or trails was not felt. With the beginnings of land commerce and the spirit of conquest between nations, there arose the necessity of ways better adapted to the changed needs and conditions, and with the growth of trade and military operations successive improvements in the character of the ways and the means of transportation were made only to give way to others with new conditions made a change imperative. — Charles Whittle in “Ancient and Modern Highways”

We were not a wealthy Nation when we began improving our highways… but the roads themselves helped us create a new wealth, in business and industry and land values… So it was not our wealth that made our highways possible. Rather, it was our highways that made our wealth possible. — Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief, U.S. Bureau of Public Roads

the creation of pathways onto which energy flow is restrictively directed/sanctioned is primarily for the benefit of those who occupy the nexus of power within any particular system. all roads lead to Rome.

The need for criticism to include the framework for a new, alternate pathway to travel upon shows up when I find myself focusing too much on circumscribing the problems. This is the same as opposition politics that gets too mired in opposition (doh!) and forgetting that an alternative vision is necessary as well. How to find autonomous spaces when on the road, moving along the lines of power drawn by the dominant social system? How to find or facilitate interstitial spaces that are not under the control of that system. Do these spaces have a set of characteristics that makes them immediately identifiable? Or are they only identified by the precise instances of (uncontrolled) energy flow that occur within them? (chicken-and-egg situation!) For every unit of human-controlled flow of energy, there are countless flows of energy of many orders greater magnitude that are not controlled. Humans are capable of controlling a certain, very limited range of flows. This range has increased in time from those expressions of embodied reach to those far beyond the direct impact of that body. By collecting the energy of many bodies, humans are able to express and project the reach of their control over vast regions. Ultimately, this reach is limited by the number of bodies at the disposal of the regime and the efficiency with which that granular energy is harnessed (through those controlled pathways).

Ran across a couple (excerpted) essays by Ivan Illich, a radical critic of techno-social consumerist systems.

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed. — Ivan Illich, Silence is a Commons

The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. — Ivan illich, Tools for Conviviality

Morning, mourning notes on encounter, in no particular order.

It is on a pathway, the pathway, in the mode of movement, in the shifting of unknown situations, where encounter occurs. These encounters are traced with the full presence of the body and all aspects where they occur.

There is the general rule on a hiking trail, uphill gets right-of-way: those struggling and straining to make it to the top of whatever heights that you’ve just been on should be given precedence. It’s always a question, though, what the precise character of the encounter will be. Whether you have seen (or heard) the approach of an Other, through dense forest, or whether you round a turn to be confronted by a gaggle of silent walkers. Encounter is a culturally specific regime overlying that of the embodied, the animal. On trails in the West the density of hikers is generally low, except in National Parks which can see crowds as dense any on Fifth Avenue in New York City at lunch-time. This is one criteria on which to judge a trail — not merely the views afforded, but the number of people encountered. Escaping from human presence is as prominent a thought as what other ‘natural’ phenomena might be encountered.

Silence, or the absence of human-created noise, relates to presence of other humans as well as other beasts. While walking in bear country complete silence is not a safe option, so encounters with other humans in bear country usually begin at a distance, either with bells or simply boisterous activity. Encounters with bears are sometimes at a distance, but sometimes not. I have found that the presence radiated by large hairy carnivores with big teeth usually precedes any sight.

Bush-whacking is a situation where encounter with an Other becomes so rare as to evoke a certain fear if only from the statistical improbability of encounter whilst specifically not on a trail. Sadly, it is a probability that rises as the global population increases. Too many folks out there! And one has to be aware of the timing of the off-trail experience: hunting season is not a good time to bush-whack!

Enroute, one suspends the closed-ness of daily routine. The sameness of daily regimen is upset and in its place is the jarring uncertainty of arrival in unknown, medial, places. In between here and there. Starting point, ending point. Suspended animation is an apt term. Animate, moving, but somehow suspended by the vagaries of being someplace in particular, some nameable place, some identifiable locus.

It is in this liminal space, on the thresh keld, thresh hold, the border between the space of known nutrition and the potentialities of the unknown, where all learning and change takes place. As a setting for the encounter with the Other, partaking food, sharing nutrition with a stranger is an exceptionally powerful meeting of ritual.

Of course, there is the argument that says movement can be only in mind, and such mental travel is as efficacious in bringing transcendence as any physical movement. But the movement I write of here is not a simple Cartesian transposition of body, of point-of-view, it is the processural space of encountering the unknown Other. This will precipitate something of a shift in point-of-view, no matter how small in that Cartesian sense — it is the principle of change that matters — and in an open encounter, change occurs. This demands embodied motion. Turning to face the Other.

Over the years, I observe that I take very few photographs in the place where I live. With a few exceptions of concentrated exercise to see the unknown within the known, it is on the road where sight opens and newness brings that rushing tension of encounter. That tension, when unchecked, concentrates in the shoulders and subsequently crawls up the gall-bladder channel to root behind the eyes, migraine. Gotta deal with that. Opening the shoulders, the channel, to allow the movement of difference, the tension of change to simply transit the body without leaving damage in its wake. This will be a theme of movement. To pass through and allow a passing through of the energies of encounter.

The road novel: a tracing of the displacement of the embodies Self across the Greater (or Lesser) Unknown. The road journal. The road. What is it about the road. It’s not merely a metaphoric interpretation of life, it is life. blah-blah-blah.

(in clipped phraseology)

Writing the fluid movement, framing encounter, hopeless task except as is comes closer and closer to the asymptotic point of writing-while-be-ing. It’s not a wall to break through, it is a separate reality. Talk about parallel universes! Writing and be-ing. Writing-in-be-ing.

Writing is the pen/cursor traveling across the page/screen. A locked dialectic of eye-to-2D-surface. Smoldering neuronal fire slogging between.

Writing what is(was) is always the case.

Back to the idea of the performative expression. That of telling the stories from the road. I did this in an annotated form in the performance at the Ultimate Akademie in Köln, Al Hansen’s old haunt. But how to do that in a way that is meaning-full in the context of this thesis project?

Obviously, there are many domains where verbal language is not useful or sufficient for description, and the many alternate systems used by humans, like mathematics, music, chemical symbolisms, graphics, maps, etc., show that this has been addressed since a long time. But some aspects are not covered yet. The main missing factor is dynamics. All notation systems are static and don’t cover the essentially dynamic character of life. This is a possible problem for a civilization that commits by far the largest part of its cultural memory to a system of static representations. In many non-western cultures, there is (or was) a strong tradition of non-verbal, dynamic cultural transmissions and it needs to be noticed that western civilizations have lost “the science of ritual” to a large extent (Staal 1982). There is the large field of cultural movement patterns that are not amenable in principle to static representations, since movement, when frozen in a static form, simply vanishes. Dynamis is incontrovertible with Stasis. This essential lack of all the static CMM that are so widespread in western civilizations alerts us to the possibility that perhaps there may be some very essential factor that civilizations are losing when they commit the bulk of their cultural transmission to written, static representations. — Andreas Goppold, Criticism and defects of writing and language

death strewn on the highway. roadkill. carnivore, herbivore, amphibian, insect: getting to the other side of the road is just part of the inexorable (natural) systemic flow. Roadkill represents one intersection of human-defined flows and naturally-existing flows. The result of this fundamental intersection is near-death or absolute annihilation, a rapid reduction to component complex molecules. from the thathunk of meatier species to the simple fluttering splat of the butterfly. Leathery carcasses that persist for days despite the brutal pounding of truck tires and hard-to-remove stains on the windshield that resist even the most vigorous squeegee scrubbing whilst filling-up the tank.

Insects with a low weight-to-surface-area ratio can sometimes avoid liquidation by the slipstream effect which will carry them up and over the vehicle. But trajectory is all, and the meatier bugs, the swarming locusts and grasshoppers, have too much mass in their sagging torsos to experience this sanctified reprieve and thus become one with their maker in a soul-wrenching milli-second that can be a marvel of colorful abstraction a-la Pollack.

Along one stretch of the UFO Highway in Nevada, red locusts were on the march northward along a specific pathway that they were intent on following without regard to individual survival. At 60 MPH, the dynamic was such that their flight reaction to the approaching truck got them only a couple feet off the ground, not over the height of the hood, so, the lower grill was a mass of dessicated carcasses by the time we got to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a hundred miles away. Many more were simply crushed by the wheels, leaving greasy red-greenish stains on the road and in the wheel-wells: their natural trajectory on the ground was clearly discernible where it intersected with roads. I noticed in the gas station parking lot in Ely there was a small flock of birds who were picking over the the resulting detritus on the ground, and when they could manage, actually hanging onto the grills and directly harvesting the carnage, ‘burp!’ What would the evolutionary outcomes be? Birds that can smell idling cars? Locusts who tunnel for 40 feet underground when they encounter traces of heavy hydrocarbons, with luck, getting to the other side.

Larger animals, the mammals are the worst, though, when encountered at any speed. Moose and elk torsos will behave something like the old paper-straw-through-the-raw-potato trick — inertial physics at its most fundamental. The front bumper of the car will take out the long spindly legs whilst the massive quarter-ton of body-meat, at just the right height to clear the hood, will simply stay where it is. But where it is relative to the speeding windshield means that it will simply obliterate anything in the front seats of the vehicle. At low speeds, this can mean a struggling, injured animal in the laps of struggling, injured humans, gah.

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.
(more …)

Economic efficiency is not correlated to the material efficiency within a limited system. (as example, the Icelandic Hydrogen Economy scam — where the production of the consumed goods necessary for running the infrastructure is remote: off the island and not at all within local system. None of the materials in the infrastructure are available locally on the island, none, except for the human consumers and the human bodies for local construction labor. That simple fact takes economic advantage of cheaper remote industrial labor, ecological damage, etc, and removes those factors from the costing of the local system. Local politico-economic policies are calculated and framed without considering the material re-sourcing.) This approach could be the biggest factor driving the lack of material efficiency of the global system where the feedback mechanisms are more localized and limited and driven by abstracted profit frameworks (which are locally influenced by taxation/government, shareholders, boards, consumers). And very often there is a complete ignorance of the physical reality of the (remote) resource extractives industries which prop up the whole system. If one travels to the location where large-scale (and generally un-sustainable) resource extraction is occurring, it is inevitable that there are social and environmental issues, it’s just a matter of whether they are discoverable under present knowledge-bases, or whether they are recognized by contemporaneous social milieus. Life is a transitory phenomena at all scales. When available energy sources (concentrations of matter) are exhausted, life cannot proceed.

more about nomadism in a book so dense with academic double-speak I decide to deal with it by simply riffing through pages and seeing what appears on random pages. this particular passage reasonable, very reasonable, but clearly not from lived experience, more a constructed philo-reality from textual reportage. I can say, been ‘dere, done dat.

With the nomad as the living embodiment of the rootless, the homeless, and the boundless comes a perpetual displacement — if not elimination — of a series of conceptual couples (such as inside/outside, central/peripheral) that traditionally demarcate and define our social space. Embodying the boundless, the nomad disregards lines that insist on separating space, that predefine and hence foreclose the original open. Within the boundless space, each point is as central (and for that matter, just as peripheral) as any other point.

But the boundlessness of the space in which the nomad roams also affects his experience of and relation to time. The boundlessness of space makes the nomad a perpetual traveler, and perpetual traveling can only mean the nonexistence of final destination, Without destination, the nomad can afford to be oblivious of time. The nomad does not have to be on time. This, in fact, is the nomad’s only luxury, which comes from rock-bottom poverty or, from a different point of view, from total freedom, of going-no-where. — Briankle G. Chang, “Deconstructing Communication”

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social protocol and the infrastructure it is embedded within.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

better late than never. postings fall by the wayside in the stead of other text-generation. Shannon invites me along to a late evening live broadcast performance of The Splinter Orchestra on the New Music Up Late program from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Goossens performance hall/studios across the street from UTS in Ultimo. small intimate event (remixed here), nothing like live-broadcasting to intensify the energy of a performance. it is energy that governs this form of performance, like all other performance situations, but especially when moving somewhat outside the established paradigm for music. restraint drove it. by this I mean that a low-level seeking-to-arrive at a ephemeral flow, a confluence that gathers all available input but is never overwhelmed by any one source. this generates a certain tension which then carries the listener through time with an imminence of potential.

not very satisfied with my image documentation, though. just haven’t been in a documentation/concert mode for such a long time. images get stale at some point. and I never did like to interject the snapping camera into live performances unless there is plenty of ambient noise (think Ted Nugent).

exploring modalities of communication. of connection, of be-ing. Kittler shows up on the radar immediately (hmmm, recalling that extremely uncomfortable evening with him in that bar in Linz before the Intertwinedness happening. he needed the table to circulate around him. and it did because of the language (protocol) gap. I was not fluent in German enough to access the discussion that inevitably circulated, hovered, around him. strange situation. instead I talked with his assistant (and translator whose name I have now forgotten), a young American who came to worship Kittler in Berlin for a time. I left early as I had to catch a train to Copenhagen early the next morning.)

how to bind energy in to the text [as the particular creative output]. to be released in TIME. to the proper receiver.

that from an earlier travelogue entry. it clearly has been on mind for a long time. actually the transition from print-making to performance/happening was a mapping of that need. finding that the silver print was just too rigid a platform when compared to presence. although the print is, as with anything, in retrospect, a resonance of presence and be-ing as is any trace left in the wake of life.
(more …)

a week into August already. more than two weeks in Oz, a number to go. haven’t made any images at all except the occasional telephone lo-rez abstraction. so that goes. this may be the way the travelog goes in the next months. as there are so many other things to get done now. teaching heavily underway, research cranking up, and networking. as well. essential life starts to make its way forward.

plenty of sound recording though. on aporee maps. and a few photos from around the house.

radio aporee ::: open – 48 stunden neukölln ::: flickering wastelands III
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Klangspuren aus der bewohnten Welt und angrenzender Gebiete: akustische Expeditionen zu ausgewählten Orten, begleitet von stündlichen Live-Interventionen internationaler Künstler.
———————————————————————-\rsound tracks of the inhabited world and contiguous regions: sonic expeditions to selected places, accompanied by hourly live interventions of international artists.
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### PROGRAMM (may change…) ###

freitag/friday 26.6.
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19:00 uno / radio aporee
20:00 benjamin laurent aman
21:00 Adam Thomas – Preslav Literary School
22:00 john hopkins / neoscenes (remote) (stream archive)

samstag/saturday 27.6.
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17:00 jonbo-n’jovi – Seiji Morimoto, Francesco Cavaliere (rehearsal)
18:00 uno / radio aporee
19:00 open
20:00 Henrik Schröder
21:00 James Edmonds
22:00 jonbo-n’jovi – Seiji Morimoto, Francesco Cavaliere (dress rehearsal, maybe…)
later topmodel, maybe…

excerpts of elusive movies and other fragments on both days.
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Preslav Literary School (Adam Thomas) makes tape music and fragmentary fiction using lost, forgotten and repaired sounds and words. For Flickering Wastelands he will perform using multiple cassette players and tapes found in the streets of Berlin. http://preslavliteraryschool.bandcamp.com
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Henrik Schröder: belastingdienst / belastungsdienst / taxforce improvisation für präparierte schallplatten, mixer und stimmen die arbeit basiert auf vorgefundenen oder bearbeiteten sounds von computerstimmen der website der niederländischen finanzbehörden (http://www.belastingdienst.nl). dort kann sich der besucher sämtliche informationen vorlesen lassen, die sich auf das niederländische steuersystem beziehen. und zwar in englischer, deutscher und niederländischer sprache. während der improvisation werden die generierten stimmen miteinander konfrontiert, um ihre unzulänglichkeiten (insbesondere im umgang mit fremdsprachen) herauszuarbeiten und sie in kombination mit nach dem zufallsprinzip präparierten schallplatten in eine neue poetische form zu überführen. ein spiel mit sprache und deren akustischen unwägbarkeiten…
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james edmonds – is a painter who works closely with photographs and processes that describe a kind of mediated human consciousness. A residue of the real world is flattened by the recording medium to produce a mysterious other reality/material existence. Through exploring sound recording and improvisation, his work has formed a coexisting musical language which reveals a similar atmosphere and resonance to these images. http://www.oilrigcatering.com/wafflecotton/
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experimental setup of a new system by Jonbo-N’jovi. J-N-J is a duo made by Francesco Cavaliere and Seiji Morimoto, playing with automatic instruments, aleatoric motors, vibrating speakers and different percussive setups. http://www.myspace.com/jonbo00njovi
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john hopkins / neoscenes
fresh back from many weeks on the road in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, neoscenes will take you, with hydrocarbon flaring, on a drifting trajectory through spaces that dwell restlessly between ears and leave traces of soot, soil, and water. http://neoscenes.net/travelog/ (stream archive)

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topmodel – from http://www.myspace.com/topmodeltopmodeltopmodel : “mireia sings, rinus plays broken tunes and clumsy percussive fragments on cheap instruments, magnus plays broken tunes and clumsy percussive fragments on cheap instruments, too. they tried to cover serge gainsbourg’s je t’aime once, but they failed.” (we succeeded later on)
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Benjamin Laurent Aman, french visual/sound artist involved in different noise, concrete/collage projects (poldr, Crystal Plumage, Lucie Huck Palace..). He will perform Lucie Huck Palace’s *visit#3*, on-board listening among traps, through loading places. http://www.benjaminlaurentaman.com/
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radio aporee: sound walks with fingers on the map. global mix mode listening sessions from contributions to the radio aporee ::: maps project
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next movements. north east from here to there. google tells me that going down to I-17 is slightly shorter than going via 89 north to Flagstaff, deciding the final route at the last minute: the most direct to the Great Sand Dunes. distance versus time. distance usually means better scenery: time is usually Interstate. a slow start, big breakfast, hard workout at the Y, some food shopping, and finally around noon taking off. heavy, heavy wind from the south west. kicks mileage on the truck up to 33 mpg rocketing across the reservation accompanied by wind devils and a haze of atmospheric debris. vehicle travel driven by hydrocarbons. stop to make images that conform to the materializing hydrocarbon system series and the domination of landscape series. make Cortez at sunset. and rocket through the San Juans in the dark, pacing a couple empty semi-trucks (they had to be empty to keep up the speeds and momentum they managed up Wolf Creek Pass). short stop in the dark at the Center of the Universe. that has never happened before in the near-30-years of visits. on the west and south side, for the first time ever, there are the crude marks of adolescent love, hardly to be classified as graffiti. too tired after the 12-hour drive to really contemplate it, head onwards to the Great Sand Dunes. the campground is about half full, crowded, I feel spoiled after a number of the previous visits way off-season I’ve been camping there solo.

mikropaliskunta is back again! An expedition collects artists to explore the nationality of a tourist in Canary Islands 03-10.march.2009 The travel can be followed in real-time at renewed website http://www.mikropaliskunta.net

mikroPaliskunta is a series of interdisciplinary expeditions exploring contemporary imagined nation called Finland and its eco-social changes in a sustainable way. mikroPaliskunta has already made two expeditions: across Finland from north to south by a biodiesel car with a stuffed reindeer in 2006 and around Berlin by bicycles in Germany in 2007. This spring, the group starts a series of expeditions themed The Finnish on Holiday. The first expedition in the hell triangle of tourism is made to Canary Islands – the ever-popular holiday destination and a border shore for African refugees risking their lives to enter European Union. Following two expeditions head to entertain centers in Vantaa and Lapland in Finland The Finnish culture is moved to warm climate in Canary Islands. How does tourism intensify presented national identity in tourists themselves and in local people? Also, the affects of mass tourism from perspective of economic depression and ecological awareness is an interesting subject matter, explains media artist and member of the expedition Mari Keski-Korsu. mikroPaliskunta website is renewed for the Canary Islands expedition. As with the earlier expeditions, also this expedition can be tracked almost in real-time. The artists of the expedition work with their own individual themes producing articles, photographs, videos, maps and a series of performances about coffee drinking as a social phenomenon. All the materials about this and the past expeditions are exhibited at the website. Members of the expedition include media artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Mika Meskanen, photographer Eija Mäkivuoti, author and scriptwriter Taina West. Researcher of sustainable consumption and production Satu Lähteenoja is a special guest of the expedition. mikroPaliskunta is supported by Arts Council of Finland and Finnish Cultural Fund.

spend the afternoon at a meeting with a group of about 15 enthusiastic Mizzou students who are interested in fundamental issues around sustainability and social activism. the meeting (01:20 audio) was organized by the Open Sustainability Network Mid-Missouri, under the title Tools to Thrive. hosted by Richard Schulte, one of the founders of the Mid-Missouri group (which is connected to the umbrella Open Sustainability Network). OSN-MM is also the initiator of the Columbia Missouri Exchange Circle. Lonny Grafman, the featured presenter, is a lecturer at Humboldt State University and is the founder of Appropedia Foundation, the self-proclaimed sustainability wiki which provides a public platform for information on sustainable community practices along with pertinent knowledge-sets for implementation. Lonny is also the Executive Editor of International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering (IJSLE). He introduced some of his work in the form of a presentation Democracy Unlimited Humboldt County Rainwater: A Case Study in Open Source Community Action for Sustainability which explored community activism in deployment of sustainable (in this case, domestic rainwater gathering) systems. words: creation of human networks … the search for a deliverable … starts with a sonic ambient exploration a rainstorm … examples of rainwater sequestering … Bechtel in Bolivia … anthropocentric impurities … a lesson in rainwater catchments: free … local infrastructures generate independence / autonomy. Too many details at first. without the principles of appropriate technology use — public perception, policy situation, know-how, resources, initiative, currency in Humboldt … hemp paper, soy inks … Temporary Autonomous Zone break-out groups: creation and organization of more and better public art; bike-powered something; CSPAN (Columbia Sustainability Policy Action Network); local economy (in general); moving from thought to action; facilitating dialogue; sustainable creative activism; expanding the sustainability community; empathy and interconnectedness; rooftop gardens where possible on campus; community networking club celebrations, gardening; organizing / participating in one implementation workshop for a physically appropriate technology setup; less plastic use, healthy local food, teaching sustainability to children … sorry no more detailed notes, I had to leave right after the break-out sessions to meet Nick and Deb to look at houses. I cycle across downtown from campus to the Walgreens where I lock the bike and go in to buy a snack. when I come out I wander across the parking lot looking for Deb’s car. an chubby white woman gets out of a sedan and asks me if I need a ride. she says she normally doesn’t do that, but I looked like I wasn’t a killer and that she’d be happy to help me out. I say no, no thanks, I’m just waiting for friends to pick me up. mid-western courtesy? I’m wearing a black leather biker’s jacket, black jeans, black half-gloves and a baseball cap from Germany, and dark brown sunglasses. who’s she kidding? she must have been one of those mild-mannered mid-western serial killers. just then Deb pulls up. saved! Nick stayed with the kids, so we drive into the countryside to some small towns looking at houses. the area is really depressed, many empty storefronts on Main Street. and this area is relatively affluent compared to much of the rest of the state. it would be very interesting to travel through these areas and document what is happening. sustainability? indeed. things are not sustained here. help is needed.

attend a screening last night of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos at the RagTag Cinema in Columbia. he was in attendance. and again this morning, he gave a presentation for science academics at the university as a part of their Darwin Days (where the Chair of the Life Sciences Department pointed out they were not allowed to say “celebration” but rather “commemoration”). the film’s premise was to map out the way both sides of the evolution/creationist divide are communicating and presenting their POV to the public. scientists are shown to be poor communicators, creationists shown to be poor communicators except for some who know the value of style and appearance (the Discovery Institute being the chief antagonists posing as a non-partisan think-tank). they are the ones leading the issues. in the same way Republicans have been successful in constructing the narratives guiding the story-following population to the conservative Nirvana. Olson, a former Harvard PhD biologist transitioned to Hollywood via a degree at USC’s film school. he now tells stories that bridge the divide between science and the general public. but the leap from stories to action — stories that form a context for action — well, there is generally a passivity that is a condition of listening/watching a story recitation. listening to stories has to stop at some point. so, the story has to have a transitional mechanism leading to action. how does that work? telling a story and have action arise out of the exchange of energies. the attentive focus of absorbing a story transforming into world-changing action. in the evening Nick and I catch the screening of Sizzle also by Olson. overheard today:

mass media is directed at the pelvic floor but what about having Kegels for Consciousness…

a repaired drum appears, as does a Tibetan singing bowl, and a basket full of instruments. resonant sound-making ensues.

a brilliant day, 70 F at least. Nick takes the day off and we (Nick, Deb, and I) head out to the Katy Trail at Rocheport (located in Missouri’s Rhineland which was settled by Germans from the Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft in the 1830′s). we do a leisurely twenty mile ride southeast along the Missouri to Huntsdale and back. then a nice aprés lunch at the Les Bourgeois Vineyards. the entire area around Columbia is a classic karst landscape of Mississippian Burlington/Keokuk Limestone forming deeply excised drainages, caves, and springs, along with damp soil caused by the limestone weathering to a sticky clay. all along the Missouri River floodplain where the Katy runs are high bluffs of the limestone. the Katy came about as a Rails-to-Trails park and is built on the former Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) Railroad corridor.

Interstate-70 slices across the river, through the deep karst, into the sky, with death-rattle sounds and falling gravel.

Nick, Kieran and I attend a marginal lecture about Saturn delivered by a nervous and not well-versed graduate student (kept in line by his adviser, Dr. Angela Speck and distracted by Angela’s son writing his name upside-down and backwards on the chalk-board). it is followed by a visit to the observatory enclosing a 16-inch telescope at the top of the physics/astronomy building on the UM campus to see Saturn. there were some folks from the Central Missouri Astronomical Association running the ‘scope. I recall an evening spent with Loki and Annie at the CU observatory doing the same. Light pollution is not so bad given we are in the middle of Columbia at an altitude of 740 feet, but the facilities management forgot to turn off the stadium Lights as agreed upon. collegiate sports 1, astronomy 0. Saturn was visible with the rings at the minimal inclination of less than a degree — not to be seen again until 2038.

there you have it! Al needed a haircut. so I drive him down to Bob’s where he has been going since 1984, to Bob. it’s next door to the recently-moved Merry Maids dispatch office. across from three 1950′s travel trailers on blocks, squeezed close enough that the doors had only a little leeway in what was at some point a single family home, carved up into a couple creaky multi-room business spaces. the first magazine in the plywood rack is a civilian aviation magazine surprisingly packed front-to-back-covers with military stories and profiles of military aircraft. with a nostalgia looking back to WWI and WWII planes as well as contemporary (deployed) weapons systems. at the barber’s shop. one could claim an ‘interest’ in such issues, reading everything pertinent to the topic — the efficacy of an ‘augmented’ human — but is it necessary? (to be interested? to kill? or is it merely a religion? the religion of the State?) talk at the barber’s moves through several spaces, all critical of the incoming regime. buying ammunition, lots of extra ammunition, and weapons before Tuesday next…

January 2-22 the NomadicMILK project by GPS artist Esther Polak travels to Nigeria. There she is using the satellite technology to track both the distribution of “Peak” brand milk from harbor city Lagos to the capital of Abuja as well as a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity. By showing the people involved their own tracks and videotaping their responses to it she creates a reflection on current nomadic life.

A custom built robot accompanies her to Africa. Once fed the GPS data it draws the people’s recorded routes using sand, allowing large groups of people to gather around the image and reflect communally.

Esther Polak has been following the dairy economy for some time now. During her previous MILK project she tracked how milk from Latvian farmers ended up in Dutch cheese, earning her a Golden Nica award at the Arts Electronica festival. Milk, she says, has always been a fundamental part of our diet and as such has sculpted our lives and our landscapes.

Her activities can be followed live on the nomadicmilk blog as well as via a twitter account she updates via SMS.

a quick note on the 50th anniversary of the vote by the US Congress and signing by the then-president, Ike Eisenhower, that made Alaska, the 49th state of the current union of Amurikan states. this is some footage my father shot six weeks before I was born, 30 June 1958, and right after the territorial government passed a bill in the legislature approving the statehood process. the day before my arrival, the people of the Alaska territory confirmed their desire by referendum to become the 49th state on 26 August 1958. the US Congress subsequently passed a statehood bill on 03 January 1959.

Memories. how to surface, how to frame, how to recreate. images, in the process of uncovering three decades of work primarily unseen. thousands of images of friends, places, strangers, objects, situations, events. a very small percentage are so far away in mind that what, who they are, is now unknown. so, looking through the external sources, the calendar, the email archive, other images, the travelog. to set a location. but some cannot be deduced. where was I? who are those people? what’s going on?

And then the questions, are the images interesting, compelling, usable?

and to the Thoreau reference:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe’d horn. — William Wordsworth

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

http://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980′s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

http://neoscenes.net/info/cv/

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT (more …)

Do the rest of the drive, feeling on edge — that the conditions at Flagstaff are deteriorating by the minute. No leisurely road-trip photos, only images from the road, social mind floating on radio scanning instead of ipodding. Doing I-40 west from Albuquerque as fast as possible, unfortunately, as the Light is always stimulating across this corner of Arizona and New Mexico. There are serious winter road condition issues in Flag, as expected, and it’s always hairy to be rocketing down the road at speed on ice, not pavement. It’s been worse, but when it’s worse, the interstate is then closed. Very marginal. Very stressful. A relief to finally drop down the Mogollon Rim 3000 feet where the snow turns to rain.

The verdict is that the truck handles very well in winter conditions — with some weight in the back and marginally decent tires.

Flying J Travel Plaza, 400 Transcon Lane
7.856 gallons
$1.739/gallon
$13.66

Sky City Travel Center, I-40 Exit 102
3.687 gallons
$1.799/gallon
$6.63

Truck buffeted by winds all night, then the snow starts, this propels dreams into fitful scenarios of drifted doom, a winter spent among the dunes. Unable to proceed, popsicled. Up early, road is wind-cleared, but only locally. Weather threats drone on the radio, and whiting-out proceeds. Pack up and head out. Pass the ranger, give a wave, and don’t even stop at the Center, only a mobile image or two fired off. South and west is where the bad weather is. Wolf Creek Pass is closed. Have to call Richard and Holly to check in from the messy Safeway parking lot in Alamosa, they are completely snow-bound in Durango, and Richard is pretty sick, so, head more south than west. But SR-285 continues to degrade and traffic drops off to nothing. A foot of packed and drifting snow on the road, and more coming every minute. First I was bummed at the pick-up truck in front of me going pretty slow, but after a while, I was happy that there was someone else who was on the road and directly ahead of me to at least get some idea what was happening up there. Plows were not making much progress against the snowfall and for a time I thought that I’d end up in a drift, but it gradually tapered off towards Santa Fe. Hands aching from gripping the wheel.

Shut down driving systems at 1400 a bit north of Albuquerque at the Motel-8 parking lot in Bernalillo, too late to do the run all the way to Prescott today without pushing my throbbing head through several glass, brick, and stone walls. Check in with a couple right jolly Pakistani guys running the front desk. Long hot bath. And lying in somebody else’s bed watching enough cable teevee to get my money’s worth. Free wifi, regroup for the next storm coming through tomorrow morning.

in deep cold, and emptiness. trees aching. even the Lightest breeze cuts through all layers. a long wander, trekking some mule deer and finding some big cat scat. until feet are too cold to get around. didn’t have a chance to get any firewood on the way through the National Forest, and a fire would hardly help unless large.

it’s so cold in the evening that the electric wires running to the water pump house are buzzing and cracking, even the wooden telephone pole is vibrating and humming. snow underfoot gets that high-pitched crunching whine when walked through. while mind-thoughts drift, reflected off the wide and formative landscape. what to make of all these crossings of path with Others. as time slips. platitudes slip also.

last night it was so cold that almost all my water including the 5 gallon tank froze solid, so, I ended up having to boil a little, pour that into one of the frozen bottles, let it defrost some, boil that, and continue. tonight I boil a liter and pour it into a bottle and put the bottle in the sleeping bag. eventually pushing it down to my feet to stay the night. good idea. much warmer feet. despite some heavy wind and snow. and a fresh liter of warmish water for breakfast.

Jane also organizes a nice Denver dorkbot event along with the Denver Open Media crew live broadcast on community cable channel 57 and on KGNU. she invites me to do an hour talk/presentation on whatever — networking, projects, community activism — live. interesting dynamic, I’ll get a copy of it at some point. Mark Hosler from negativland does the hour after mine. later there is a small party upstairs.

a chaotic night, as it was also Dona’s photo exhibition opening at Sliding Door Gallery, only a block away. very strange coincidence as I practically never had any engagements in Denver, ever. it was a First Friday street night. and the neighborhood was packed. very nice to see such civil activities like that in the US, maybe there is a cultural renaissance about to fire up. maybe in response to the collapse of consumer capitalism in the developed world. folks had consumed enough of all that consumer crap on credit on loan on mortgage on plastic (now, is that hydrocarbon plastic we’re talking about?).

Dona had some photographic print work along with Camilla Briggs and her organic textile set-pieces. Dona’s images of the Dalai Lama which impressed themselves into works about Light were distracting, perhaps because of his iconic status, but more basically, to have a human form entering the field of radiative holy-ness of Light, well, either redundant or simply not necessary. or maybe too obvious. dunno, precise problem can’t be circumscribed without seeing all the images again. were these stills from a movie? why not. fluid seeing. it seemed to miss the regularity of decisive format choices — sizing and positioning. a smaller panoramic cloud sequence, while not astonishing for those of us humans who fling ourselves about in metal tubes high in the air, was moving in its internal brilliance. abstraction helps to refine expression of aesthetic. unless the figuration is more personal — the opposite of iconic. any body would do. any body is holy enough for Light to play with.

Camilla’s wax-sealed rose petals needed intimacy, something played out right there in the middle of this civilian crowd. they needed to be touched, to be touching the participating humans in the room. the patio behind the gallery was funky.

and, otherwise, I especially enjoyed the DOM folks, lead by Directrice Ann Theis, and their real passion for what they were doing. haven’t run across that too often — the last time, in Latvia, at the Cultural/Historical Museum dance party in 2001 — and especially not among US cultural-industry sector folks. usually there is a desperation and even irritated defiance in the air.

I was too distracted by observing the social scene and having rather intensive conversations and interactions with others. very dynamic evening. enjoyable.

bravo!

Sarah invites me to go to a morning pre-screening in the Atlas Center of the movie Speaking in Code along with David and some of the other principles from the Boulder Media Festival. they are considering the flick for screening at the next festival. it’s … okay … funny how historical the scene got so quickly. ancient times, techno seems.

right after lunch, I meet Holly at the UMC and we take a wander around campus talking about her options upon graduation from high school this spring. we make a visit to David’s office to talk about the TAM program, etc. it’s cold out. and the art department is now a construction site. I decide to cycle downtown to meet Sarah and Kate later at the Laughing Goat. then still later, we wander back up to campus to catch negativland who Jane brought to CU for a couple (free!) shows featuring their concentrated and comprehensive performance on the mediated social system of religion in It’s All In Your Head FM.

We believe that the healthy evolution of art and creativity has more value than simply counting how much money is lost or made. Art, science and technology have evolved because of how we all build upon the ideas and works of those who came before us. Copyright was always intended as a balancing act between giving ownership to creators so as to provide incentive to create new works, and allowing works to lapse into the public domain so that new ideas could develop. But our founding fathers could never have imagined the kind of world we live in today and the amazing new technologies that we are surrounded with – technologies that encourage and inspire us to interact with the world and create in unprecedented new ways. Protecting the author of a creative work is a good thing, but the benefits of copyright have been thrown off balance by the disproportionate influence of those with the most money. In fact, the more recent expansions of our nations copyright laws represents a break from our nations past and from the intentions of our own Constitution. — Mark Hosler

long day, many ideas are danced around. it’s good to see former students so active with things, thoughts, and spirits.

EJ (Arch11) asks me to make some images (and sounds) from a spectacular house he designed and is building under the third Flatiron in Boulder. the work crew are clearly high-end professionals doing very high-end work. and the location, very fine!

pick up Sonya after my yoga class at the Y. she’s got basketball practice, so I sit for a bit with some of the parents.

send off the UTS application at the South Boulder Post Office. recognize the guy working behind the counter. he used to work at the Main PO downtown decades ago when I had a PO box there. small town. construction work around the corner, and a brisk wind keeping the flag pole cable clanking. I’m not being very quiet with my leather coat on and squatting outside the front door. will Homeland Security come?

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
(more …)

Food on the table, in the kitchen, turkey in the oven. Jim and Dona assemble a crowd for dinner. Kamikaze wind-up, uh-oh! stuffing stuffed. mmmmmm. good! second to arrive last to leave, hmmm. party!

up early. zero Fahrenheit. low clouds. solo in the campground. spilled water freezes immediately. ranger passes through, we chat for a bit. brewing tea while ravens flock back and forth in the pines. a long slow wander through the Douglas fir and fore-dune scrub, up the dunes a bit, and back. silent. low chill breeze. cold, cold, cold.

have lunch at the bajada in the sun. listening.

stop at the visitors center on the way out and happen to meet the woman who would have been my boss had I nailed that position as educational liaison a few years back. very nice instance.

then to the Center, of course. for a circuit or so.

then onto the Gunbarrel north-bound. dinner with Rick and Sally in Golden, then on up to Boulder. Chris and Scharmin and the kids prepping for their Hawaii jaunt. Sage a bit more gray in the muzzle like some of us.

up at 0600, toss the last items in the truck, 0640 departure. head north-by-northeast. one of the five or six route options for traveling between Prescott and Boulder. gas relatively cheap. clear, dry roads. modest traffic. migraine ensues. why? still no answers. face frozen by the icy landscape shape-shifting outside glass cocoon. travel-day migraine.

Navajo voices in my head. a roadblock for a funeral cortege winding in to a ragged and desolate cemetery near Naschitti. a couple Navajo guys hit me up for change at the gas station in Farmington. tens of F350 Ford pickups streaming back in towards Farmington from the gas fields that have raped the region in the last six years since the Bush regime opened up the area to uncontrolled drilling.

migraine persists all day from noon. hard will staved off a gut explosion until going up the gunbarrel (Route 17) from Alamosa, in the dark, an 18-wheeler in front of me going way too slow, and another behind me going way too fast. suddenly, with head simulating internal combustion with Pallas Athena to be birthed out the forehead or so, I have to vomit. no place to pull off without wrecking, fortunately I have a camping wash-tub in the passenger seat that I had some munchies for the trip in. I dump out the food, swing it between me and the steering wheel and immediately heave my guts into it whilst cruising down the road at 50 mph. three times, gah dam. finally a turn-off. so eff-ing fortunate to have the tub, otherwise, it would have covered the entire interior of the cab, likely. get the car stopped on a side-road, without spilling the tub, open the door and dump it, get some water to rinse acid from mouth. nothing has spilled or splattered. gah. another 20 miles to the Dunes. where it is closing on zero degrees Fahrenheit. zombie-driving past the Center of the Universe and on into the empty campground, and then death-by-sleeping in the back of the truck at an empty camp ground at Great Sand Dunes. -20 C/ 0 F cold outside, but toasty warm in fleece and down. 680 miles. 12 hours. some stops. and all that land, passed by the eyes that are set stereoscopically in a head that wants to implode into the single dimension of a deep sleep.

month’s ending. All Hallows. images accruing in a form to share — 1996 (of this travelog) will be augmented first. complications with Berlin logistics, may throw off the November trip. and force a cancellation of Transmediale collaboration, hmmm. recalls the cafe9.net debacle in 1999.

end of the month, Friday.

finished with the DFW immersion. Oblivion is a brilliant set of stories, each one containing numerous positions, layers, points-of-view, (what to call the vantage of his voice/eye?). maybe the term channels applies. he has a multi-tasking eye, picking up information not just at the focal point of optics, but instead, immaculate macular generation. he has the recall, along with synthesis. imagination? springing from impression and spreading out through spaces which have not been mapped in that exact way. an example of voice-declaiming-self’s-model-of-cosmos. with a pivotal crux for the entire collection coming on page 326:

‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.

the deeply buried oblivion of our situation, now. everywhere. whenever. a weepy sad sketch of the human conditions. here, now. whenever. and a stiff finger punched into the chest of gloating cultural superiority. it all falls down.

how to push shaped impulse charges out, through the gate of psyche. and while pushing out, receive direct all the more.

college art gallery, opening, student work, yawn. Dana and Marianne were there and then we run over to The Raven, the only reasonable place in town to hang out in the evening. until some guy dumps a beer over on my lap which was holding my pack with camera and audio recorder in it… shhh…

Starting at the hospital reception and lobby, and on to hear the cafe at the way-overpriced health food market. Sounds good.

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Kim proposes a new microsound project, making sound tracks for the experimental films of David F. Wallace’s fictional character James O. Incadenza in the book Infinite Jest. I pick Kinds of Light as it immediately strikes a resonance and subsequently patch together an obsessive piece in 24 hours (4,444 frame splices on a multi-track of a water performance in Pool Creek Canyon (changing the course of history)), shatter-welded with audio from video footage of standing at a confluence in the West Elk Wilderness entranced by the Pele’s hair of water coming from the sun). definite sonic hyper-retinality.

I missed Wallace during my North Amurikan vacancy of the last 20 years. surprised I hadn’t run across him randomly, though, given the households that I have ramble through on the nomadic way. George knew him and speaks highly of his character. sadly for all of us, another victim of the intensity of be-ing. I plow through Oblivion, and a couple other books that I managed to recall at the library. extremely dense. the first short story I read drove me, half-way through, into a delirious sleep from which I woke ten minutes later, not knowing where I was. jittery, caffeine-fueled, precise jewels. you see the faceting process, the cutting of the entire glittering crystal, a tedium of focus, the high-speed grind with diamond grit, a rocking, polishing movement across the charged wheel. spun tales. fiber glass. each brittle thread opening a bloodless wound which nano-gapes at the whole fuckin’ world, all at once. he would be Brakhage’s cinematographer if Brakhage was blind and able only to see the inside of his eyelids.

the beat-masters of the high school marching band attempt to get their mojo on.

take a wander around the center of town, to Courthouse Square and the library.

reverberatory, wet, raucous, humid, and somehow the same as it always was: a swimming pool.

late Monsoon storm rolls by Granite Mountain, seen from the deck.

hmmm, Equinox spent in a mega-church, The Heights Church or a church aspiring to be one. dot.com. which suggests the necessity for threading through the complex layering of cultural, social, and political detritus. a guy walks in ahead of us with an NRA tee-shirt on and a giant insulated travel-mug of coffee in hand.

Al always sits in the front and center of the large industrial sanctuary space. one row back from the front row. his eyesight is pretty bad, macular degeneration, and likewise, his hearing is attenuated to whatever narrow frequency band that his hearing aids provide.

I have my shit-kickers on, the dressiest items available for church at this point. can’t find my Colorado School of Mines belt-buckle with the hand-tooled leather belt. the bronze buckle in the form of the school seal cast in a metallurgy class with an ancient prof, forgotten his name. proof of Western citizenship.

anyway, there on the stage — one of those portable raised prefab affairs for concerts and political spectacles — is a miked drum-set, a bass and amp, a Rhodes with vocalists mike, a set of congas (not timbales!), and a guitar on a stand. no podium, dais, but plenty of microphones. on either side, two very large video projection screens.

club scene? will there be a concert? the Rhodes is the most prominent object, at the front edge near the center of the stage. later the preacher uses it to as a place for his notes and Bible.

it’s the eight o’clock service. Al tells me that there are usually around three hundred people at this, this first of four services. the 300? we are early.

as the service starts out, it’s clear that I should have brought earplugs to attenuate the 100 db blast from the sound system.

somehow I can imagine doing a visual-sonic performance here. good sound and video system, focused audience, yeah, a good venue overall. more notes on this later.

the sonic flow through the night is a subtle symphony.

with my Discraft freestyle disc. another event fifty years ago this year… ah, for a nice freestyle workout…

Another important event occurred in 1958. Bob and Jake Healy organized a frisbee game at their family’s Fourth of July celebration in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Ball Yard at Eagle Harbor. This family’s frisbee get-together became an annual event that grew in size and popularity each year. It became known as the IFT (International Frisbee Tournament). During the mid-sixties, the event’s enthusiasm attracted the attention of Wham-O. The synergy that developed between Wham-O and the IFT started the modern era of disc sports. The formation of the IFA (International Frisbee Association) newsletter in 1968 was a direct result. The IFA newsletter spread information to frisbee enthusiasts in Canada and the USA. Frisbee players started to travel to the IFT in huge numbers. By 1970, the tournament became the Mecca for frisbee enthusiasts from all over the world. The event fostered the free exchanges of ideas on all types of frisbee play. This is where the idea of freestyle as a distinct type of disc play got disseminated to the frisbee community at large.

head from Bedford by train into the Big Apple, through Grand Central, cross town to Port Authority, and catch a bus to Glen Ridge with all my stuff. but despite the material over-load, managed to make a few nice audio samples from deep in the city. along with a phone pic or so.

Hurricane Gustav appears to be moving the political process of the late empire. natural systems biting back. ultra-left Fundamentalist Christians will claim that it is the LORD striking the Republicans and their national convention down in the heat of globe toasting climate change.

the gang heads to Roxbury for the Turn of the Century Days (the dot.com bust? nope, the previous century…). old time baseball, music, food, in a mellow atmosphere.

later, Monopoly and a campfire under the stars.

08 2008′, ’31 342