in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?

it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.

how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

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

Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

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

with the mass of storage space available on the godaddy account, anything’s possible. so, an upload of a work finished a couple years back — a prototype for the kind of works that I would really like to make for all the friends that have been included in the archive over the years. ideally, making individual video-based works which include the diverse re-presentations of people, encounters, and events that have transpired over the years. it’s a tremendous amount of work, and requires a dedicated working place with two or three machines crunching away on the material. along with the four or five terabytes of raw digitized material easily available. not possible at this time. will it ever be? hmmm. we’ll see.

this work starts with the visit Stefan made to Finland back in 2000. we rented a car and spent a weekend with Kaisu and Risto in Noormarkku. Kaisu took us on a tour over to the Bay of Bothnia, but the high-Light of the weekend was a private tour of Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea which Risto’s company was managing, and that was just a five-minute walk away from their apartment. amazing house that my old acquaintance Johanna still uses as a summer retreat on occasion.

the video follows us to Tallinn in Estonia, followed by a brief pizza dinner in Tribeca with a visit to the WTC, then there is a fast forward to 2004 when Loki and I visited Stefan and Ellen in their place in Glen Ridge. We all make a party & campfire visit to Bill and Andrea’s place up in Bedford.

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

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

finally solved the tech problem of the real audio/video stream files from the archive playing properly in a pop-up window. have the space on the tech-no-mad server to load up all media archives, and now it’s just a matter of organizing the html files, and making sure the audio and video windows are sized properly. it’ll be nice to get all that stuff back up and running for posterity. the stream index page is full of those ancient-looking 320×240 streams that were pumped out during the time I was at Boulder, teaching at CU, with access to phat-pipe Real Helix server. a few others go back to true pre-historic times with 160×120 files from the initial neoscenes occupation project in Tornio in 1998. the accretionary process that is the core of this web space goes onwards to an unknown end. with a minuscule audience. and no prospects.

finally getting around to a good look at Oog, a curatorial project by Dutch artist Nanette Hoogslags curates at Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily newspaper. I happened to meet her for the first time when I was in Amsterdam last March when I had dinner with she and her husband, network activist David Garcia, an acquaintance of mine. Nanette comments on the current state of the project:

Oog is a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily national newspaper. It began in September 2004 as a platform where every week a different artist working in sound and image is asked to respond to news and current affairs. The selection of artists participating has grown into a varied group of national and international artists working with very different forms of expertise and approaches. In this way, artists are using their skills to become commentators on events in a news environment. After each week, the work is placed in the archives, making the Oog collection accessible as a whole.
(more …)

meet Sophea, from ‘podes to antipodes. three continents in less than a year. shaming our carbon footprints and our inst- & dis-abilities.

earlier wandering around the Opera. and making a 15-minute piece skyline of Sydney along with some sonic work. that should end up being quite good — catching the ambient reflective sonic environment and the microscopic skyline with the video cam zoom on full. slowly and unstably tracing the man-made and natural intersection. earth and sky (back to the infinite half-spaces) — that is, the tracing of the separation of earth-bound objects and the sky. trouble, what trouble? can you pick out the numerous CCTV’s?

over to Randwick, do the coast walk to Bronte, recording some lawn bowling, eating fish&chips. once a decade enough on that score — last time was in London visiting Joanna in 1996. sitting in the park that adjoins Bronte Beach, twiLight falling, the atmosphere cool, reduced, mellow. somebody playing Bob Marley on a decent sound system, a rasta picnic at the beach. hmmm, pretty nice lifestyle.

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying — Samuel Beckett in Molloy

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

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

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

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

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to a dance performance by choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that she is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.

crossing another path with sharedj people — Martin and Jürgen of the Bremen crew. turns out Jürgen participated in difusion 2002 using iVisit — he was doing some crazy things with the video image he was sending, and I remember that the students were really intrigued with his mysterious presence…

but the first time in a smoky German bar is too much for me. horrible environment. the Germans are on the verge of passing a law to cut off smoking in public places as have other European states have already passed — Norway, Ireland, Italy, France. it’s about time. head back to Frieder & Susi’s place.

wow, and I made all of $0.69 on Amazon referrals last month from my reading list of books and other media that has crossed my radar lately. I can retire now.

earlier, breakfast at Kuku, and a stop by the Kunsthalle, Frieder gets me in free (as Icelandic/Finnish artist union member) to look at the work of Annamaria and Marzio Sala. interesting, but not compelling. one video installation is absolutely juvenile and would not stand in a bachelors-level class. strange. hanging out in the permanent John Cage sonic installation work Essay.

Ethan sends this nice piece he worked on with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche up in Halifax. nice meditation.

Call for Workshop Applicants:

Remote Presence: Streaming Life

Presented by John Hopkins as part of the pixelache 2007 Architectures of Participation Festival and in collaboration with Artists’ Association MUU

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, L?nnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007

http://www.neoscenes.net/teach/pixel/index.php

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, finishing with the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

The workshop is open to anyone from any discipline with an interest in collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new collaborative level are also welcome.

On Saturday, 31 March, the final day of the workshop will be a live & online event. Workshop participants will not only develop digital content for the event, but will also help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambience, and the remote coordination.

For detailed information visit:

http://www.neoscenes.net/teach/pixel/index.php

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from local and international applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

THE WORKSHOP IS FREE OF CHARGE.

Those interested will need to send:

NAME:

LOCATION:

EMAIL:

Along with your reasons for interest in workshop and a brief background (studies, creative work, and activities) to:

neopixel@pixelache.ac

DEADLINE for Applications 5 March 2007.

this entry will morph in the next days, I’m really behind in getting images and entries online, so…

definitely here now. the house grows to accommodate the arriving crowd as the day wears along. several children, a dog, and a wide variety of humans. I prep chicken for dinner under the direction of Tanya, along with Jane and Jez. a fine curry from all fresh ingredients in the outrageously stocked kitchen (stocked with the food that packed the van to the ceiling). brought into the dining room set for 45 people. tonight it’ll be set for 75 folks. making sound recordings, images, and a little video tape. trying to not get too caught up in documentation to simply enjoy. massage is the theme for today — several masseuses were hired, and so folks are disappearing and wandering back to the first floor in bathrobes looking refreshed.

take a walk with Jeff and Lorna. to the church and graveyard, and around about.

over the door of the church:

Keep thy foot when thou goest to the House of God and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools — Ecclesiastes 5:1

snow-drops everywhere. rain comes intermittently, darkening the sky, and flushing the air, which already has a marine feel to it, with more clean moisture. finally head back to the house after taking a wander out to the huge Cedars-of-Lebanon in what remains of the extended garden beyond the croquet field in the back yard.

steam is building, literally, in the hot-water heating system, and in the party inertia.

Gary and I head out towards Balboa Park, but don’t actually make it. I wanted to get online for a couple hours of work, so he takes me to a cybercafe in North Park where the PowerBook exhibits it’s intransigent side — something that comes up about 2% of the time when connecting to a wifi node — it can see the node, says it’s connected, but refuses to actually establish a viable connection. grrrrr. the usual spate of re-starts, config changes, etc, to no avail. Gary puts up with my whining, then calls an acquaintance nearby, Christian Michaels, a professional photographer who happened to have a wifi network at his studio. we head south on Ray Street, a funky neighborhood to the beautiful studio built in a former sign-manufacturers space. he’s got a huge video projector with a 25×25-foot projection area at one end of the main studio. as we chat, turns out that he is hosting a share event in the evening! we have a good laugh that I am the share-nomad node. synchronicity! have lunch at a taqueria around the corner, and head back to spend the afternoon with Andrea and Ryan. then Gary comes by to fetch me for the evening happening. end up meeting Morgan Sully of share-San Diego and others. there is a screening of Metropolis, and I do a short VDMX improv. nice!

opening at gallery, artists presentation, driving around town, working in the library, military vehicles in the air. semi-Santa Ana winds push heavy orange pollutions into the sea to the West. San Diego spreads to the south of Mount Soledad past the naval port, to disappear in heavier pollution hazes drifting seaward from Tijuana. Gary and I have a nice Cubano lunch with Sarah, faculty at University of San Diego, a Catholic school. then we hang out in her studio looking at some video Gary shot at Burning Man, and other things. end up watching the dvd Tell Them Who You Are, Haskell Wexler.

earth comes to meet the foot, slowly, imperceptibly. warming like a lizard in the sun. suryanamaskara.

later the 18th Acker Musical Showcase gets underway. too many places to visit, some great music, some mediocre, some embarrassing, some quirky. no video this year, forgot to buy tapes in time, and didn’t feel like shooting, though it was much warmer than last years showcase evening which made it more enjoyable. and caught a toasty set from the local band Shri — fresh off another long European tour.

the entire website server goes down again — of course at the moment when I have five job applications with web documentation pending — so, pondering a roll over to a dotcom hosting service, only have to settle the tech details of rolling the php blog platform over. too many problems with sharing a server which was once blacklisted, and these days goes down at mission-critical times. understandably systems are inherently unstable, especially for bottom-feeders who do not have triple-redundant military systems in place, but, weary of this one.

psychogeography, yet another buzz-word in contemporary media art Worlds. usually applied in the context of the controlled environment of urban human-scapes. a gravel and sand bar at the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers makes an ideal counterpoint. despite scaring off the wild geese and beaver. where to go? the water’s too cold to ford the river, and the canyon walls too steep to climb. around-about, then.

ever have one of those days… Pia Lindman will be doing some performances at The Storefront

Fascia refers to the body’s connective tissue, to a sheath or protective membrane surrounding wheat or bodily organs, a collection of objects that gives the appearance of a band or a stripe, an opening or doorway, or the layered surface that creates the illusion of dividing architectural structures. Engaging with many of these meanings, Pia Lindman’s Fascia project unfolds as a series of live performances, video recordings and drawings, that engage in a visual dialogue with Steven Holl’s and Vito Acconci’s renowned design of the Storefront for Art and Architecture façade. Like Acconci and Holl, she challenges the traditional notion of façade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside. Fascia departs from the definition of the membrane-wall as both a marker and an embodiment of space…

spend the morning with Sally Jane, checking out some of the exhibitions including a personal walk-through of the Animalia project with producers Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (more kiwis!). then on to the ART MUSEUM to see THE SHOW curated by Steve Deitz. some amazing works, leading off with the elegant live-chat-based piece.

lunch with Ken at La Victoria Taqueria, better burritos than Macho Taco which was inexplicably closed at lunch-time.

also happen upon the npr (neighborhood public radio) broadcast studio at the downtown cineplex in an unused ticket booth. was wondering where they were broadcasting from — last night I happened to tune them in at 88.9 on the car radio on the commute back to the ‘burbs. so, met Jon Brumit and

hard to begin and end the day with a rattling vibrating swervy commute that lasts about an hour, door-to-door.

some overviews on the conference:

yadda-yadda-yadda; blah-blah-blah.

so many words, so many moving images, so much sound, talking heads, and spectacle. along with nice personal encounters. the monumental, the hierarchic voices along with the personal, networked, and confidential/private.

San Jose is interesting clash of urban-renewal towers of glass and corrosion-resistant metals: ringed some hard-core barrio Victorian bungalow scene, interlaced with the chronic homeless scattered between the shining spaces and conventioneers.

organized networks are interested in new institutional forms. tactical media has come to a stage of confronting itself. question of scalar transformation, (vs) networked organizations. democracy and networks are antithetical. bunk.

prototypes: sarai, iDC, srishdi school of art and media, indy media, etc

end up going to see a Mike Figgis remix of his film Time Code. a pseudo-press guy is giving away a couple tickets, so I snag one. he explains that he’s not really press, but a writer, and is trying to write a history of media art starting with the worldview of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose he very well might be a better writer that explainer. the film is a disappointment — the subject of the narrative is hermetically sealed in Hollywood and lacks any compelling visual or story elements. Mike is there, verily, and does a live “remix” which consists of rewinding the tape(!) and fading in/out the 4 different screen audio tracks. in form — the four frames which simultaneously inhabit the main screen that were recorded in four single simultaneous takes starting at the same time — there is an extremely interesting potential, especially as the overall resolution of video systems for shooting, recording, editing, and playback are gradually increasing. but the possibilities of the form seem completely wasted by the insipid narrative and visual void. is it a joke maybe?

head back to Livermore on the 87-280-680-84 pilgrimage route. not really liking that violent traverse of the land. though one segment moves across the Calaveras Valley which is still unpopulated and sports the rolling amber hills with huge live oaks scattered at stellar intervals.

head into the City early in the afternoon, burning heat. take the bus to Port Authority in plenty of time to get to Mundial for the performance at the regular Sunday evening sharedj happening. too early. sit in a café across the street for an hour.

then wander around to a garage sale in the paved yard of a Catholic Church.

then back to Mundial, grateful for the cool air when finally Patrick, one of the owners, arrives. Eric comes a bit later as does Dan, both main movers in the sharedj collective. Stefan, Sophea, and Randy are there for my simple mix, and only one glitch when the HD on the sound system crashes out because it gets too full when archiving the sound part of the mix. the only thing left is to continue with video mixing to carry the energy. then later, the video fragments are lost as well in the quicktime editing process — a mistake. so, yet another loss of archive. dogs of war.

we all head down to the Glen Ridge community pool for Evon’s first swim meet where he’s stoked for the 25-yard free-style. the first pictures with the Nikon D200 are clunky and … ill-composed. 6 years of shooting video — sonic & moving visual — so different from using a SLR camera. simple things like the 3:2 image ratio vs the video 4:3 ratio make a big difference, along with the limitation of having only one shot, and no sound. at least the camera works like a film-based SLR in that it actually takes the picture when you hit the shutter-release. none of that annoying delay as with cheap point-and-shoot digital cameras. but the size is a bit daunting as is the sheer number of buttons and menu items.

there is no privacy at the speed of Light is a project hosted on ORF Kunstradio and authored by Bernhard Loibner and Tom Sherman aka Nerve Theory. It explores contemporary be-ing and the impact of social and biological entities on that being. Fragment No. 23 is the latest installment:

We live in a world of strangers. Because more and more of us choose to live in cities, we find ourselves living in a world of strangers. We find privacy in the city, and loneliness. As we gain autonomy and our sense of individualism grows, it is more and more difficult to convince others that we are trustworthy. There are two ways we can prove our worth, with credentials and through ordeals. Credentials include credit cards and drivers licenses, and educational certificates. We have identity tags like social security and passport numbers. To supplement our credentials we must submit our physical bodies for measurement and examination. We must establish our reputations through ordeals. Photographs are taken. We are asked to take drug tests for certain jobs, say a hair strand drug test or a simple saliva test. We are asked to place our hands on devices that verify our identity through hand geometry analysis. We are instructed to stare into video cameras for iris scans. These ordeals have become common in many aspects of our personal lives. We live in a world of strangers and it has become increasingly difficult to establish and maintain our reputations. In this world we still rely on personal, instinctive judgment — the way a person looks and smells, the sound of their voice, and if they can look us in the eye. The way a person moves or responds to our touch still tells us a lot. But our intuitive skills only tell us so much. What kind of music does this stranger like? What are her favorite movies? Does he eat meat? Before we have sex or exchange body fluids we must determine the probability of various kinds of infections. Credentials are important, but ordeals are usually necessary to close the deal.

the Month of Sundays live performance mix is done. Neil recorded it here. Kudos to he and Roger for facilitating/developing the visitorstudio performance platform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embarking on the traditional trek across Indian Lands, Four Corners, to Gunnison to meet Chris and Scharmin at their cabin. Solo in the car, though, on this transit, without Loki it is sad, instead with Sage, the mild-mannered and warm Aussie.

The raw earth, impinging on sky, fills many gaps in motion-saturated being to a fullness not reached under any other circumstance. More about that later.

Make it across the reservation, across the heated spaces, rapidly. 60-70 mph. But stopping more frequently to check on Sage — to see how she is handling the heat in the back of the truck in a crate. She seems unfazed, and completely carried away by the smells at each stop. So much so that she can hardly go potty. Too many good odors to follow up on. The landscape is, as always, stretched taut between earthliness and heavenliness. Light traffic, few tourists. Shiprock shows up on the southern horizon on the stretch of road past Four Corners. And I try to make the connection between that apparition and the video I shot of it five years ago from the same vantage. All is apparition. All is unrevealed by Light shimmering from the sky. Seeing people only far off through a reversed telescope. And now that all gas stations are direct credit-pay, there need be no interaction between Self and Other. Not even exchanging money. It’s a change in the social fabric, a deep change. Another alien-nation manifestation. Flagstaff, Navajo Reservation, Ute Mountain Reservation, Cortez, the Dolores River, Lizard Head Pass, Telluride, Montrose, the Black Canyon, Curecanti, West Elk, and finally here to Soap Creek. The main decision upon arrival, whether or not to sleep on the ground. The choice bounded by limited knowledge of the local wildlife, but south 30 miles into the Uncompaghre Wilderness there are definitely large carnivores, must be here as well as Soap Creek is a trailhead dead-end into a wilderness area. The thought of being wrapped in bivvy sack, sleeping bag, liner, and clothes, zipped up, and becoming a meal. Uff. But the desire to be prone, between earth and stars, with ponderosa silhouetted, black on black is of opposite attraction. No moon. No moon.

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

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

catch the J.S. Acker Musical Showcase again this year — this time with video camera. one small fragment, the Chancel Chimes Handbell Choir, is ready to clock ur noggin’. more morsels to come. like the violinist in the knick-knack shop.

logfile

tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.

the irc discussion parallel leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

finally get around to uploading 25 sonic samples into the next Soundscapes project called SoundTransit that Sara and Derek are running. good excuse to consolidate some orphan files and to create several new ones. now that the video archive is almost all digitized, I can easily jump around and take audio or video samples from the last 5 years of video work, as well as work done on Hi8 back in 1997.

make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice’s home and drove down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.

the gallery space is a beautiful second-floor room with first-growth straight-grain pine flooring, can’t find that anymore. looks like the material that Aalto used in Villa Mairea. on either side wall there are a dozen or so color photographic prints, large. English text fragments are posted on the third wall along with stereo speakers, the fourth wall are large windows overlooking Mission, itself another scenario. Sirpa explained that the sound system is not so satisfactory for the work, but there were no options, and it just arrived a few minutes before the opening the previous week. there is a one-hour ambient audio piece playing. the environmental portraits are intimate, varied. some of them easily strong image works unto themselves. Sirpa starts the audio and we listen and chat about the project. the premise is that she asked people that she met to take her to a place of personal importance, she asked them on tape, while in the place itself, to describe the place and its relation to their life, and then she made a 35mm color portrait. half the works were done in Moscow in December, the other half in San Francisco in summer. might be called polar-ly opposed locations. the audio was mixed in fragments, not completely cut up, but the segments were short enough to maintain a flow of interest in the sonic material and intercut in pairs. the acoustic of the room is somewhat problematic, where the sonic material got garbled by hot and reflective surfaces reverberating. I would have preferred headphones to fully catch the ambiance, but Sirpa felt it was important to have the free-association possibilities of spatial movement, which is understandable. in that case, a less sonically active space would have been more appropriate. not much to be done about that, though. as I was with the artist, she made connections between the sounds and the images, something I might have done, but perhaps not. it would be a challenge to match all media to it’s respective situation. and I wonder what the matching would accomplish? it is better that the effect is more random. to give all possibility to each example. cross-correlation in randomness.

the exhibition takes time, I gained by staying for the whole audio duration. it’s a bit hard to imagine, in the rush that is California, at the beginning of the decline of the Age of Oil in 2005, that an American audience would take the time to engage. unfortunately. another testament to the cultural width of the Atlantic, or, perhaps in this case, the divide of all Asia and the Pacific between Finland and California. perhaps feeding the work in a different form, say, on the web, or as a audio/video installation would be speed-appropriate. of course, it would lose the intimacy that less mediation leaves. maybe intimacy is the first energy level to be lost when mediation takes the place of presence. communicating intimacy and place. how to suggest this. how to give this. place. locative media. audio recording puts you in the place of the microphone. a photograph puts you in the location of the camera. the two devices, under the observation of the artist, eliminate the indeterminacy of the self-experienced and lock it into a definite outcome. making a reality materialize. the characteristics of the materialization are literally subject to the observer. the collaborator who uses the tool to make the observation. the energy of the images is surprisingly modulated — there is a reflected difference between the images made in Moscow and those in San Francisco. do they simply reflect a difference in the observers state-of-being? it’s not clear. and also, to eliminate the effects of the sampling tool, especially the camera, it would have been helpful to see printed images of the same genesis. the largest prints, Sirpa tells me, were made by a soon-to-retire printer in Helsinki — a print-maker clearly with quite some skill. it’s a pity he retired before the rest of the images could have been matched in size and quality. that would have removed an artefactual difference from the manifestation. allowing the viewer to see situational, posited differences more clearly.

the sounds bring voluminous information and ambiance to experience. it is closely modulated by the human connection and makes concrete the essence of place. images alone are too explicit. sound suggests. and the remembering of speech brings to a crux the personal placement. the three are a tri-partite unity, lacking nothing. having explicit, implicit, and soul-full presence.

Back to the desert. Around 95°F from Kingman onwards past Needles, then the turn north off the Interstate into the Mojave. Things are still green. The Buckhorn Cholla (Opuntia acanthocarpa) is blooming, along with Sacred Datura (Datura meteloides) and other plants. There is already one generation of spring grass that is now bone dry and gone to seed, dead. A reason for some alarm in human quarters: fire hazard, from simply driving through the stuff with a hot exhaust pipe. Southern Arizona is already seeing higher than average burn acreage this year even though it is early in the fire season. Sliver of crescent moon, shadow bathed in blue-green earth-Light. Venus slightly below, eclipsed by granite boulders. Jupiter with an extended string of pearls high and wide. Close by to the place I camped in December on the way up here. Not as cold as then, but the temperature swing from day to night will be at least 30°F tonight. But the dry air has a ethereal soothing quality. Limited material content, terrestrial-bound equivalent of Mars. Day and night. Hot and cold. Long drive tomorrow, the rest of the way for Dana’s birthday dinner. Five hundred miles away still. Mostly interesting drive, as a virtual show of landscape variation. But tedious when there are deadlines. Would rather take several days to cross the Great Valley. So many strange scenes there.

Smithsonian magazine echoes my words again. How the visibility of the West has contracted from 145 miles to between 35 and 80 miles. More dramatic than I mention to folks, but I got my statistic some years back. It is decreasing. From the right vantage, overlooking Tejon Pass and the gap to the south of the San Bernadino Mountains, thick jets of raw burnt-red eL-Ay air burst into the desert, making a dusty haze that spreads east to Arizona and further. Ever got caught downwind of a campfire? What’s the difference to that and being downwind of 13 million Los Angelenos swarming in single-passenger SUV-droves, simultaneously towards and away from their every desire. Not much. Weepy, stinging eyes, raspy nose, and asthmatic breath.

Imagining if I came into a sizable chunk of money I would buy a 3-CCD video camera. I shoot so much nice footage in cool places that it is a bit of a waste having a crappy consumer cam. Would never settle for such lousy optical quality doing still camera or traditional film work. The cheapest one could get would be $3K, and the prospect of a used pro cam is unsettling. Hmmm.

Well, once the doctoral direction is settled (or dropped).

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

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

The most sacred of places is made powerful by the history, stories, songs and prayers it contains. As we see this place, it is an experience of awe and gratitude. It is as if the Holy People are physically comforting us, encouraging us, smiling at us, strengthening us. That Diné Tah (the land of the Navajo people, the Diné) seems an empty, barren place suits us — we are among the most fortunate people in the world because of it. — Luci Tapahonso

a successful trip with Uncle Al to Grand Falls, and with last night’s rain and full moon, the falls were a torrent of mocha-red water.

Josephine, the dynamo-hostess at funksoup asked me about adding a aud/vid stream to a live/situated performance called deCrypt0graphic she was choreographing as part of the Music for Peace Project out at Stony Brook University, so, fresh off the desert intensity, jump into practicing yesterday, then the performance runs today. she needed some Morse code remix, so I was able to dredge up a series of recordings of my father’s from his days as a HAM radio enthusiast — practice tapes for learning Morse code, along with real message transmissions from some of his radio friends. remixed that along with the audio from the archive. I’ll be uploading some sample aud/vid clips shortly…

Dedicated to cultivating peace as both a means and an end, the Music for Peace Project creates a global celebration of peace and provides a voice for the vibrant community that believes in peaceful solutions for the future.

these remote things, never know what is actually happening at the other end, so, there’s always a bit of a sense of dis-satisfaction, not knowing whether one’s outgoing stream has any relevance to the located ambiance at the receiving end. but Jos is great to work with, so it’s always a good vibe. dunno when we will ever meet. she had a Fulbright over at deWaag in Amsterdam, with Guy and the anatomix crew, that’s how we met, remote, when I was on the NIFCA residency in Helsinki last spring.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

make the trip to Mechernich — via the regional mass transit system which has gained the attention of local taggers, actually to quite a nice effect — to visit with Peter & Kersten and the kids. we spend part of the afternoon at the Rhenish Open-Air Museum, arriving too late for the special exhibition on German immigrants (Auswanderungs) to America entitled Brave New World: Rhinelanders Conquer America. pity, it sounded interesting. Germans began immigrating to the US early in the 17th Century, with more than 45,000 in “Penn’s Sylvania” alone by 1745. Driven by religious, economic, and environmental factors, many made their way from the old Palatinate region (the present Rheinland Pfalz or Rheinland Palatinate and part of Baden) to England where Queen Anne passed them on to America if they would swear allegiance to the British Crown:

I, —, do solemnly & sincerely promise & declare that I will be true & faithful to King George the Second & do sincerely & truly Profess, Testifie, & Declare that I do from my heart abhor, detest, & renounce as impious & heretical that wicked Doctrine & Position that Princes Excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any Authority of the See of Rome may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no Foreign Prince Person Prelate State or Potentate hath or ought to have any Power Jurisdiction Superiority Preeminency or Authority Ecclesiastical or Spiritual within the Realm of Great Britain or Dominions thereunto belonging.

afterwards Jonas makes a short guitar concert for us. then a fine dinner that Kersten puts together.

take a long walk with Marcus around the city. talking film, he lent me a tape of some of his experimental film work, excellent. Brakhage has been a frequent topic of conversation in the whole week here. snowing, windy, bitter cold. then later meet with Milos and Dana for chai. snowy walk across the Charles Bridge. still tourists wandering about. despite any dislike for tourism, there is the platitude that the city is beautiful. from my penthouse in the Lazansky Palais, I make some nice ambient shots of the rooftops and the snow. that along with abstract tele shots of two people doing tai chi in a blizzard on the island park in the river. it’s a good address.

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

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

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

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

workshop ends with the thunderous rabbling-rumble of loud knuckles on desktops. Frieder later remarks on the enthusiasm judged from the volume that reached his office. I tell the participants that I have to record this phenomena sometime as it is … different … a definite culture-specific way of applause-feedback-energy! starting with a mid-morning breakfast, I was surprised that the discussion continues un-abated right up to 1600 on the last day. last year there was an exhausted fizzle after the Thursday happening, so that Friday was a few closing comments and some de-briefing, a collective lunch at one long table in the Mensa, and then departures. matter of fact, I think I took an evening train to Kiel to C & S’s place to catch a plane to Helsinki a day or so later. cycles. orbits, gravity. this year, an equivalent level of energy, different forms. students here desirous of ideas and relevant pathways.

the box proceeds as though it has found a unique energy source in the configuration of the students and the situation. although our stream is lamed by a lack of time for preparing content, the local energy is considerable.

traveling Lighter than usual. Eagle Creek suitcase: 2x jeans (blue & tan), 7x socks, 7x underwear, swimsuit, swim goggles, knit hat, 4 teeshirts, 3 dress shirts, 3 pullover shirts, scarf, leather gloves, heavy wool gloves, biking half-gloves, umbrella, Birkenstocks, cables (firewire-dv, rca, 2 rca-to-minijack adapters, s-video, composite video, ethernet), three miniDV cam batteries and power adapter, usb mouse, digital cam battery charger & usb adapter, 160 gig ext hard drive, power adapter, cd/dvd case w/ OSX disks and 8 blank dvds, spare 250 mb zip disk, shaving cream, razor, 3x blades, tiger balm, skin cream, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, electric toothbrush and charger, toothpaste, dental floss, brush, hair ties, 4x earplugs, extra glasses frame, 3 cans of almonds, bag of almonds, bag of pistachios, bag of walnuts, bag of cashews, 4 Luna bars, uh, what else? oh, an incredibly compact self-inflating sleeping pad — normally my camping pad, but with my back problems, it is a good solution to soften some beds enough to ensure a decent night’s sleep.

daypack: digital still cam, iPod, adapter, 2x earphones, miniDV cam, boom mike, remote control, spare DV tape, PowerBook & case, power adapter, dv-to-vga adapter, passport, ticket printout, several select rail schedule printouts, 2x Science magazines, Finnish bank deposit forms, glasses prescription, Visa card, Visa Gold card, SIM art union card, Icelandic residency card, bound notebook, eyeshades, 1-liter water bottle, toothbrush, ear-plugs, toothpicks, fine ball-point, cd marker, Euros, Dollars, some GB pounds and Danish Kroner…

wearing: bikers jacket, black boots, black jeans, red pullover, fleece pullover, heavy socks, tee-shirt, money belt, leather cap, earplugs, sunglasses, ear-plugs in pocket, but otherwise nothing else that will set off the metal detectors…

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.

so it goes

Brassica oleracea var. acephala — Although more highly developed forms, such as cauliflower, broccoli, and head cabbage, have been produced in the last two thousand years or so, the kales and collards have persisted, although primitive, because of their merits as garden vegetables. These leafy nonheading cabbages bear the Latin name Brassica oleracea variety acephala, the last term meaning “without a head.” They have many names in many languages, as a result of their great antiquity and widespread use. Kale is often called “borecole,” and in America collards are sometimes called “sprouts.” “Kale” is a Scottish word derived from coles or caulis, terms used by the Greeks and Romans in referring to the whole cabbagelike group of plants. The German word Kohl has the same origin. “Collards” is a corruption of coleworts or colewyrts, Anglo-Saxon terms literally meaning “cabbage plants.” — Our Vegetable Travelers