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

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

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

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

04 2007′, ’23 10927

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

clearly lost at words. in words, without words, for words, back words. energy ebbed under the circumstances. the demise of the workshop still a real bother. will be into the future. and not very auspicious first visit to Australia. perhaps the last visit.

missed Sophea today, she lagging from jets, coming the other way ’round the globe, via Delhi. worked on slow machines. after the walk to the College. jetfuel coffee and a nice muffin in one of the many cafs along the way, reading the newspaper, catching the local drift. the word ANZAC (Australia – New Zealand Army Corp) in the context of recent political scandals, historical honor and glory, contemporary resistance to the Iraq/Afghanistan crisis. nationalism? you bet!

walking back and forth trying different pathways, the row bungalows with the iron-railed porches and verandas, steel gratings on the doors, the more modern apartment blocks, slick, shiny, bright. life-style. many of the row houses are under remodeling, for sale and resale. there is a significant market, though nothing like the California frenzy. apparently people have also flocked to the huge tower blocks that fill the center of town, built in the last five or so years. where there used to be porn shops and big business districts.

interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.

Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

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

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

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

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit
(cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

long day! Adriene and I finally f2f before her morning class which I jumped into. traffic made our anticipated leisurely breakfast turn into a quick stop at the local Whole Foods for a turkey wrap and on direct to class. interesting group of students. I do not make a roll listing as per usual, twice now, I’ve missed that opportunity. one of the students, Tara, graciously takes me on a walking tour of campus, and a long lunch conversation.

and finally Gary and I rendezvous after 11 years passed. last time was in Baltimore WAY back or so. this time in front of the UCSD Geisel Library, hanging.

dinner with Adriene at the house of Michael Krichner and Carmen Cucina — a reception for a candidate for curator of the UCSD Art Gallery. finally met Jordan along with the curator from the SDSU Art Gallery who invited me to an artist’s talk tomorrow for the exhibition John Q. Public & Citizen Jane: Private Americans in the Political Domain.

well, what to write. taking a walk with Fling-dinger, seeing the development proceeding apace here in the West, bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, and surveyors. confess to doing some small monkey-wrenching, symbolic, but real: kicking a few fluorescent-pink-painted survey stakes out and tossing them into the weeds. what the hell, I’ll be out of the country shortly anyway. but there are just too many people on the planet, eh? needful of a 90% depletion of stock. maybe more. just to reset the clock to when? why do we need to reset the human species’ clock? what about letting the process run itself out? thermodynamics will take its course. and evolution will also operate along its predetermined trajectory. wait ’til next year and see.

Sandy, Kathy, Maureen, Jake, and Lon — hiking partners on a nice 6+ mile loop around Yeager Canyon in the Prescott National Forest.

on the way home there’s an ambulance heading out Williamson Valley Road when we come up Pioneer Parkway to the light. heading north out Williamson Valley to mile 5 there are some cars pulled over, the LifeLine ambulance crew unpacking the stretcher. not apparent quite what is going on but as we drive by a large heavy-set Latino guy drops from standing to squatting next to the crumpled front drivers fender, sobbing. so it goes.

long hike onto the bench above the campground and above Mitten Park. lizards, snakes, birds, jack rabbits, mule deer, limestone, sandstone, chert, black widows, other spiders, textures, sounds, steep climbs, looking over several precipices. there is nothing here. there is only. there is only energy. mind reflects back surface noise and shapes, so far. noise of social engagement. clearing will take time. and will ultimately bring back more power to the spirit. hoping that no job offers arrive during this period of being offline. doubtful that anything will. given the record of life to this point.

darkness falls drifting slowly upwards from the ground. under the huge cottonwood Light is lost. in the branches of the piñon. blond dead grass radiates sunshine recalled from noon. sandstone walls the heat. moon begins to Light canyon walls after twiLight. high-pitched bat chirps ping fast when bug is echo-located, otherwise, slower twips as they sail around the heard space, defining its dimensions. all this mostly unseen to eye.

walking around the ancien institution, meeting old faces, seeing how it goes… and the dark storm of cancer seems to loom in almost every life encountered. what is this beast? it is the package that mortality, a gift to all, arrives with industrial efficiency.

sitting in the lobby of the “Y” this morning, resting for a moment between swimming and having to cycle back to the car place to pick up my truck after a front-end alignment. two of the day-care folks are in the process of herding a group of 4-year-old’s in through the front lobby and through to the locker rooms. there are sounds coming from them. not really coherent, but remnant vocalizations of something they were engaged with before they entered this interior space. noisy, one might say. suddenly a jaunty harmonica tune begins, filling the entire space with its irresistible energy. the kids are instantly quiet. the beast tamed by a song. as I turn around to look, the kids are reverently walking by an elderly guy sitting with an over-sized baseball cap on, letting the music flow from his mouth. marvelous. I catch the eyes of several other humans within the sonic range, everyone silently confirms that the event is significant in the granular scale of life.

walking down Bedford Street I meet the lady with the lime green brolly briskly on her way to the wine shop, kitty-cat in a tote bag, and stories about winning over the boys in the community garden. dinner with Amanda and Stephanie, at Amanda’s place in Brooklyn. along with Mr. Tiger, Amanda’s new cat who seemed easy-going and sociable despite battle scars from street life in Brooklyn.

earlier I was able to get together with Eric, a sharedj activist among his many other talents. at a cave-like cafe in Brooklyn he showed me some of his keyworx-based work which immediately brought to mind Stan Brakhage’s aesthetic which could easily be described as the precursor to much vj work in the present time (including my own). although my contact with Brakhage was, on a film-production level, limited, the discussions, and more importantly the simple exposure to his vision through screenings of his and other’s work was moving and formative to the inner eye. he had his little cubby-hole office next to and half the size of mine when I was a grad student, so we got to know each other better through informal chats — life is short art is long…

Imagine an eye un-ruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’ — Stan Brakhage

anyway, back to Eric’s output — he also collaborates as a tenor and lutenist on an entirely different plane in Asteria, a Medieval/Renaissance music duo. he passed on a copy of Soyes Loyal, their latest album featuring Burgundian chansons of courting and love from the 14th century. Eric’s divergent interests and skills are incongruous on the surface but stand as a strong example of how personal energy transmission does not have to be closely tied to form but rather to the efficiency with which one finds the projection of such energy through a chosen material mediation. Eric is attentive, concentrated, skilled, and definitely efficient transforming his energy into a variety of forms of inspiration.

you can test track their two albums at magnatune.

close to the end of the month. another one come by the time anything is uploaded. what would it require to upload from here? military support would allow it, or a significant chunk of cash. $20K? subscription to a satellite data connection in addition to the base unit. satellite might be limited by available sky in this narrow canyon. and data speeds are probably still at modem pace without elite service levels.

observing the sky, rocks, soil, flowers, other plants, beaver ponds, creek, what else. clean up the camping space. people sometimes seem so piggish. Winchester 30-30 shells, new silver brass, litter one spot. hard to imagine folks just reeling off rounds at such a rate there, what are they shooting at? I pretend I am a child, and play in the creek, re-routing a branch of it to pass directly below the campsite. drain another area which is swampy, and remove several contiguous rock fire-rings. make a nice fire — using some of the large logs that are left from the previous campers. in the tradition that Loki and I started in Crestone one year — a single large log makes a swell fire which will keep legs warm through a long and late evening.

and, in a special action, spent boots and half-gloves are sacrificed to the air via fire. last time was in Tornio, Finland, when boots were set adrift in the spring melt-water swollen Tornionjoki back in 2000 or so. time to retire this pair, though they were slightly usable, soles were worn through on the right side and the standard tear along the left inside of the right ball was in full display, and good for mountain-biking in that the smooth soles slipped in and out of the toe-clips compared to my remaining foot-coverings. the boots were bought in Flagstaff back in 1993(?) on a return drive from Colorado around the holidays, and when Loki was a tiny tyke. those boots were made for walking, as they say, keeping my feet happy on the way around the world.

Woodstock

Well I came across a child of God, he was walking along the road
and I asked him tell where are you going, this he told me:
Well, I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm,
going to join in a rock and roll band.
Got to get back to the land, set my soul free.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog.
And I feel like I’m a cog in something turning.
And maybe it’s the time of year, yes, and maybe it’s the time of man.
And I don’t know who I am but life is for learning.
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,
and everywhere there was song and celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bombers riding shotgun in the sky,
turning into butterflies above our nation.
We are stardust, we are golden, we caught in the devil’s bargain,
and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
— Joni Mitchell

gathering impressions from Barry Lopez from his collection of essays “Crossing Open Ground” and recalling the desires to aid the imprinting of the natural world on the child’s sensitive nature. in order for those impressions to guide the evolution and understanding of the inter-connectedness of human life and all that which is beyond the power of humans to erase or destroy completely.

The most moving look I ever saw from a child in the woods was on a mud bar by the footprints of a heron. We were on our knees, making handprints beside the footprints. You could feel the creek vibrating in the silt and sand. The sun beat down heavily on our hair. Our shoes were soaking wet. The look said: I did not know until now that I needed someone much older to confirm this, the feeling I have of life here. I can now grow older, knowing it need never be lost.

The quickest door to open in the woods for a child is the one that leads to the smallest room, by knowing the name each thing is called. The door that leads to the cathedral is marked by a hesitancy to speak at all, rather to encourage by example a sharpness of the senses. If one speaks it should only be to say, as well as one can, how wonderfully all this fits in together, to indicate what a long, fierce peace can derive from this knowledge. — Barry Lopez, from “Children in the Woods”

Loki has decided not to come to the US this coming summer. it will be the first time I have had a summer off, and the first time he hasn’t been with me for the summer since he was 2 years old. it will make for a long short summer. he feels the gravity of teen-age friendships drawing him away from prospects of hours in heat-filled places, driving, walking, hanging out. looking at clouds, thunderstorms, rocks, and wind devils.

okay, okay, I’m slacking here. using all these GIANT bytes of texts-from-elsewhere. well, Karen sent this to me along with a nice photo of her son Henry at the beach. it resonated with my state of being at the moment.

Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over — like a bridge. And lo! under the bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. And he was the biggest he had seen. And so with the fiery balls of this fish — one of which is the sun, the other the moon?

Yes, some uncomplicated peoples still believe this myth. But here, in the technical vastness of the future we can guess that surely the past was very different. We can surmise for instance that these two great balls?

We know for certain for instance that for some reason for some time in the beginning there were hot lumps, cold and lonely, they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space. These insignificant lumps came together to form the first union, our Sun, the heating system. And about this glowing gasbag rotated the Earth, a cat’s eye among aggies, blinking in astonishment across the face of time.

Well, we were covered with the molten scum of rocks, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steam room, and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew, and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living as we know it, was already taken over.

Animals without backbones hid from each other or fell down. Clamasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers. Then came the sponges, which sucked up about ten percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the Late Devouring period, fish became obnoxious. Trilobites, chiggerbites and mosquitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, edible plants sprang up in rows, giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.

Millions of months passed, and twenty-eight days later, the moon appeared. This small change was reflected best perhaps, in the sand dollar which shrank to almost nothing at the bottom of the pool where even dumb amphibians like catfish layed their eggs in the boiling waters only to be gobbled up every ten seconds by the giant sea orphans and jungle bunnies which scared everybody.

And so, in fear and hot water, man is born! — The Firesign Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

trawling, ANT (actor-network theory), social network theory, many many theories, some incomplete descriptions. mostly there is a neglect of the energy-transfer. most stay in the realm of abstracted social relation with only oblique reference to the actual embodied dynamic. why facing someone is different than standing at right angles. why eye contact is ‘important.’ and reading a book of Justyna’s about the architectural uses of glass (the airport here a good example of that usage). letting visible Light in is the normal paradigm. resisting natural flows, reducing the total possible bandwidth. from the asymptotic infinitude of blasting flows of the universe to something more manageable. the numerous graphs showing (transmissive) attenuation vs frequency only focus on the visible. a holistic approach would consider the full range of attenuation (what is not allowed to pass). glass is great for a narrow range of Light and some EM radiation off the incredibly narrow range of visible Light, but that’s about it. it stops everything else.

wind (as a formal naming of the flux/movement of air) is a form of energy. sit in a clear glass box in a tropical paradise. and you will die shortly. a glass box is the predicate for scientific (reductionist) experimentation. with a glass (optical) window observing.

again, back to the history of glass. a fragment of an idea that I have often explored with class groups. the history of glass.

They tore down the bus station
there’s chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I’m walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
300
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm’s Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered,

laughing,
in the mechanism. — William Gibson

about to have a meeting with Lloyd Dunn, a networker from the US who a few years back fled the regime and settled in Prague. we’ve never met f2f before, but have had contact through the MailArt network since sometime in the late 1980′s. he one of the Tape Beatles and the editor of the classic ‘zine PhotoStatic. very interesting to be able to compare notes on our similar creative backgrounds, pathways, and situations.

but first head to the perpetually crowded Tesco, chaotic but almost silent, long check-out lines. a rough-looking fellow in one line hands me an empty shopping basket. I’m surprised at this, though it is a necessary process for anyone coming into the store — more shoppers than baskets. and a stop in at Galerie Václava Špály on a powerful exhibition put on by the Právo na krajinu (Right to Landscape) movement in cooperation with the Ochrana Fauny Ceské Republiky (Czech Wildlife Protection Association). one floor was devoted to individual works in shopping carts, some of them containing sharp and sometimes harsh critiques of consumerism. I wasn’t supposed to make any photos, but got one. on the lower floor, there was a powerful installation by Miroslav Páral of a series of full-size sinks made out of enlarged dental castings of a lower jaw done in what appeared to be lead. inscribed in the lead were texts about consuming. the lower walls covered with roughly black-painted canvas. unfortunately a gallery guard followed me down, so I couldn’t make a photo of that. maybe they thought I was going to steal a sink.

Lloyd comes by FAMU at 1400 and we head out for a walking tour of the old town. plenty of tourists. recalling the distressing afternoon with Sanna here, and the warm evenings. those while-back years ago. dark and rainy. warm in the hotel room. interior heating is an extravagance. anyway, tea and a dinner with Lloyd.

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.

as per usual. workshop adsorbs any spare energy away from jotting here. different dynamic than last year, but similar. workshops in Germany are always more intense as far as the intellectual challenge goes, but on my side is the pressure to challenge what are not intellectual but rather other psychic spaces. Frieder and Susi are away to Karlsruhe for his opening at ZKM, so I have a routine of walking five minutes and catching the bus at 0748 to school, 15 minutes away. not feeling up to doing the bicycle thing. too spoiled by my own mountain bike in Arizona. finally over jet lag, and caught up on sleep. and body rhythms synchronize: hunger times corresponding to feeding times.

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

oh, dang, sleeping in the back of the pickup. plenty of room, but my back just can’t handle it anymore. tossing and turning, trying to find the combination of padding underneath, from available materials, to compensate for the flatness. always this way on the first night of camping. now breakfast, it’s windy, so, writing here instead of getting out and putzing around. trying to read and determine the location of the geological photos I got online compared to where I am now.

articulate or inarticulate trilobite (genus Olenellus or Dicellomus) hunting. first gotta find the local outcropping of the Chambless limestone, then trace down in the stratigraphic sequence to the bottom of that. or, figure out where the Zabriskie Quartzite is and trace upwards to several tens of feet of thinly inter-bedded quartz sandstone, shale, and limestone stringers. the Latham Shale is not ridge-forming or resistant to erosion, so it is found by default, identifying the two sequences that respectively over- or under-lie it to determine it’s location. a trained geologist can identify the rock types, but that information is no longer resident in my head in large or intact quantities, so, it’ll be haphazard. I have a few possible locations in mind, looking at the mountain directly above the wash, along with an old mine site which I want to check out.

inexperience and lack of sleep makes the surface seem rougher than it is. standing upright is an acquired skill, hiking is an acquired skill, and bush-whacking, the art of hiking off-trail, is no trivial extension of both those. here in the desert it is made somewhat easier by lack of vegetation and a clear view of possible objectives, but that fact does not make the scrambling across the surface and the constant calculation and re-calculation of optimal pathway any less processor-intensive. that and the fight to staying upright against the effects of gravity.

but. after a day of making two long hikes, it is possible to stand on an uneven talus slope and make a visual traverse without starting to fall over. the body beginning to adapt to the situation. a heavy climb up the stratigraphic column. no trilobites, but I did locate some nice samples of horizontal borrow structures — most likely the Latham Shale, but otherwise, it was difficult to figure out where in the column I was. the non-conformal contacts between several formations are not smooth, flat-lying, or revealed by the surface topography and have absolutely random strike and dip (zip and stroke we called in CSM daze). so, while making an ascent and some traverses, I was jumping through many different samples. of course, my geologic knowledge of the area is extremely limited, with no petrology lab background or even background reading except for the one field-trip document from Rick Miller at SDSU.

Joris invites me out on a drive and a hike after I happened to see him in town as I was recording bird sounds in the trees. it is a beautiful fall day, so getting out of town is an excellent idea. on the way out, we stop at the Icelandic Folk Art Museum and meet the founding Director, Niels Hafstein. the Museum is not open, but Niels gives us a short tour of the museum space, formerly a school and community center. with a handful of informative brochures and catalogs then we are off to Grenivík. then proceeding north on Látraströnd to , stopping the car near Nónbrík where I camped with Nick and Chris way back in 1992. the view of the fjord is spectacular as we scramble up Ausugil or so, somewhere between Kaldbakur and Svináknjúkur — looking directly west across to Borgarbrík on the island Hrísey where I have often been with Loki and his family. in this portrait of Loki’s grandfather, Jón, that I took when we were out fishing one day, you can see the mountains on the east side of the fjord, Látraströnd, in the background. the colors today are psychedelic, the miniature willow trees, a bright yellow, the blueberry plants, a red that is not reproducible through any rational means, not to mention there were still berries to be had. as is always in clear airs here, the sunLight pierces the eye and etches all vision in the retina, almost painfully. blue-shifted, and carrying little heat. the cirque opens up at around 600 meters, but it’s no use going further because of time limits, and I’m not so well equipped for heavy hiking, with only cross-training shoes that give no support or stability for the foot. snow is not far above, and the sun, already not so high, ever, is sinking lower. so, we head back to the car, stopping for small handfuls of berries and to watch the waves and currents on the fjord. a drive up the Fnjóská past Draflastadir and Háls to Vaglaskógur, something of a ‘real’ forest, one of the few, with birch trees reaching 12 meters in height. and back over Vadlaheithi with a magnificent view of Akureyri and the high glacial mountains directly above the town. all the while we talk about life and art and the land.

later, when writing in the evening, something brings to mind previous lives. lived here and elsewhere. and dreams seize hold, and the bardo into sleep is crossed. ful day, full life.

fall sweeps across the land, from the north. thought it would take a couple weeks, but all the trees are changing, the poplars (Populus alba) as pungent as ever when the air is still, yellowing from the inner leaves, outward to branch ends. the rowans (reynivithur, Sorbus aucuparia) berries hanging in heavy clusters, walking under them, invisible birds (wrens or músarrindil in Icelandic, Troglodytes troglodytes and redwings or skógarthröstur, Turdus iliacus) chatter incessantly somewhere above. only in the rowans. but it doesn’t seem that they are celebrating the berries, more, some nervous discussion about the approaching winter. nah, just noise of be-ing and living in the moment. the higher mountains far to the north, the ones that gate the fjord into the Arctic have now a heavy cap of snow. they do have more-or-less limited permanent snowfields, but the new snow completely covers the tops. in mid-winter, everything is covered from top to sea level. the sides of the fjord, which in the clear air seem much more vertical than they really are, broad and stepped, tinged with alizarin, rust, vermilion, and gold where the miniature Arctic willow and other small bushes are spectrum-shifting. musing on the dip of the Tertiary flood basalts that make up the entirety of this area to a depth of 3000 meters. as a mass, they dip slightly, perhaps 5 degrees towards the center of the island, rising layer on layer towards the sea on the flanks of the fjord. from adiabatic depression of the center of the island persisting from more extensive Ice Age glaciation perhaps? or something else? this feature complicated by the fact that the island underlain by abnormally buoyant magmatic activity, conjectured to be a mantle plume, though this particular concept is presently under contentious revision. the whole island, approximately the size of the US state of Georgia (100,000 km2), is an igneous petrologists and vulcanologists wet-dream (albeit a cold one!) — they focus on vesicles, picrites, and intrusives. of course, foreign glaciologists and their graduate students are always boondoggling here in the summers with expensive field work as well.

so, finally made it up Granite Mountain in the Wilderness area. up early, but not early enough, so the late morning sun told us on the way down, but we didn’t know that at the time. on the trail from Granite Basin by 0715, the first mile a mild level upstream through the riparian wash that leads to the artificial lake across Mint Wash at the trail head. the next two miles a brutal climb zig-zagging up a south-west-facing slope of scrub oak, prickly pear, manzanita, yucca and such. with the main bulk of the mountain directly to the east, we were early enough to get some shadow cover on the way up, but even still, intense exposure. saw several horned toads and plenty of lizards, but nothing more (i.e., snakes). the last mile, a traverse through partly ponderosa forest was easy. the final ascent to the peak we were aiming for, (500 feet below the main peak which would require an extra six miles return trip, bush-whacking), was relatively easy. a snack at the top, and in the building heat, a tiring walk back. saw the largest (greenleaf) manzanita (Arctostaphylos manzanita, Arctostaphylos patula) I’ve ever seen, with several trunks over 9 inches in diameter. the splendid surface in molt now, but after the peeling bark falls, the trunks are soft-glisten smooth to the touch, and have an unmistakable warm coppery color. treks like this, moderate as they are, remind me that I am soft. no tough survivalist, though I can read much in the landscape, it is clearly a leap away from actually living in the environment. just the solar exposure for that brief time is grueling.

back in the ussa… after a grueling series of transport modes — walking, bus, wait, flight, wait, flight, monorail, train, wait, train, car — Stefan there at the station to meet me, so thankful for friends. remained comatose throughout the latter 14 hours of the 21-hour sequence. culminating with 90 minutes sitting in the waiting area of Penn Station, with that energy seeping into my reality, living Amurikans. seem so different from the re-presentation.

with the throbbing, aching jaw continuing for now two weeks, faugh, ibuprophen the only aid: nomadism seems ill-advised. security, stability, normality, insurance, and a steady income. retirement, pension, a house, a car. a zip code ’til death. head to Berlin tomorrow with Wolfgang. go directly into the workshop upon arrival, so.

a nice long walk last night to the harbor with Zorak und Steffi, full moon rising, wandering back by the old homes of Admirals of the Baltic Fleet.

today spent in organizing bags again, easier when not flying, so fragility and contents not such a factor. email from Janet, the roof collapse at de Gaulle in Paris is somehow affecting my connecting flight, have to check that out. warm sunshine outside.

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

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

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

workshop continues this morning. after the performances last night at Blå, the state-sponsored club across the bridge from notam.

walking around Oslo, there is the sense of the cosmopolitan that is almost completely lacking in Helsinki. bits of material and social chaos that are hidden or tidied-up in the Finnish system of propriety flutter, clatter, and clash on the streets of Oslo.

workshop ending, I’m not there, had to leave early to catch the plane, not sure how I made the reservation that gets me to miss the last evening of concerts, and the conclusion of the workshop. before leaving Bjarne, Kim, and I sit down to discuss future possibilities.

so many impressions again, and the mapping of these over into the representative space is a immature and delinquent action. another set of human encounters which translate into a viable if unstable future. Norway rises on my terrain map again. not quite sure how it made its original appearance, except through the Icelandic Nordplus connection back in 1992. true, I was quite focused on central Europe, France and Germany almost exclusively. between 1992 and 1994, though, the IT culture was on the rise in Scandinavia. that and the art educational exchange opportunities. hmmmm, how about those histories.

Kim’s work. extreme, lean. subtle, sharp, mapped, choreography of chaotic textures. picked up a couple cd’s to be tracked asap. (they’re mini-cd’s so, can’t run them in the slot drive on the PowerBook). he mentions the Cassette Underground in passing, and, aside from others who were active in that anarchic pseudo-network, like Lloyd Dunn and Bern Porter, I haven’t personally run into any folks from those real tangible and underground US art networks ever. only through the network, not f2f.

so, in the way of human connections. this movement since leaving Boulder is simply evolving, electrically. so good to be back in tech-no-madic form.

the equinox. walked some in a peace march yesterday. a thousand or so people marching down Alexanterinkatu and Esplandi in the afternoon. another performance, ambient, with sigma at Koetila in Kallio. the bad-ass neighborhood in Helsinki. mkk and others are there.

all day laundry and working with Reason, slogging through a learning curve, but make some good progress — enough to realize it will be some time before I can use this as a sonic production tool. living in an ice-bound snowy citadel. Sunday. with no place felt to be gone to, except the cerebral ones. along with the general drift into (snowy) work. or chilled leaden ambulations with, for the moment, balanced footsteps.

almost a full moon, Venus brilliant. walking around the island this afternoon, after realizing I could. no agenda. and already thinking ahead to tomorrow when I will head into town to catch what surely will be a sincere show — nazca with mika and mkk. three former students involved. fine to see. of course, how to measure anything like that. I only intersected with them for a few of life’s many hours. what does a teacher take credit for? some microscopic catalytic event which leads … nowhere? or simply the estimation that the teacher’s heart has been transformed. is it such that a change in One must be reciprocated in the Other for the change to be real and sustainable? if the change in One is not real, than the Other remains the same as well? is it possible to fake change? it is possible to simulate it for some perverse purpose of social engineering, but what’s the point aside from command-and-control??

dinner with Sara & Gulleik last night, always a power jolt of energy sharing stories. and now faced with the dilemma on how to circumlocute the Amurikan situation. what exactly IS going on there. inside and outside impressions. as usual, my politic is anecdotal, but the changes that have been implemented since September 11, 2001 are extreme, subtle, and hidden from view. the book that Rick passed on to me, the “Clash of Civilizations” details the continued demise of the Imperial power of the West, and the rise of Muslim political power and Sino-centrism. I believe this trend has been happening for years. predating Anthony’s pronouncement as we were walking onto 5th Avenue in NYC from the Parsons photo lab one afternoon — that the primary characteristic of this age in the West is decay. that profound and concise observation marked the beginning of a long friendship that has explored the world and the energies behind the surface of the world.

canyon face in there. juniper there, grass, cedar, sage, rock, rock face. having a gravity. yesterday taking another side slot-canyon, up and up to gain the bench-top over-looking the campground. find two un-matched halves, elk antlers, 7-points each, so, 14-point animals. one almost as tall as Loki. after seeing the bighorn sheep kill earlier in the day, lower jaw crushed, nose chewed away. the mountain lions have things pretty good, except for the constant interference of humans into their wide-patterned space. Loki playing in the dirt. part of the time, this seems problematic, the play seems to be generated from a vacant boredom that I can’t fill, nor would really choose to, other times, it seems to be holy. god-inspired, god-directed, god-sanctioned play that is of evolution-leaping intensity compared to the Game-Boy. what a stupid vapid name for an object devoid of any redeeming spiritual value. a generation of gamers swallowing simulations, and the entertained. faugh, what will come of that? everything is boring. speed is fun. simulation is way better than the real thing. not sure that this auto-adapter is running right. worked on the plane, but now, not able to concentrate anyway, on anything, too stressed about being a dull parent. maybe starting to count days until this phase is over. but next week back to school. teaching again. reading Lemke’s draft of a concept of “traversals” — recalling a flash of text that dropped into one of the Solstice videos that I made in Iceland. traverse no zenith. so it goes. battery runs low. no satellite uplink anyway, so bloggish reflections are useless. darkness falls. I will sleep on the ground tonight, and hope for the best. something nervous, but not for any good reason. with towering face of sandstone leaping to converge with rotating Milky Way.

and hardly anything to be said about this place. no textual naming enough. walking the riparian canyon with clear running water. not too much, but enough. not too cold, but enough. harvesting a few spring fronds of sage. not sure exactly why, but just to have, perhaps for future blessings. climbing to the smallish cave that overlooks the end of the access canyon at Echo Park. turns out it is not really a cave, but a hole into a face to a whole slice of open fracture plane. open to the sky. the whole small canyon follows a massive fracture plane cutting across the formation. these energy configurations. we are so used to, so comfortable with, pre-configured energy packages. that the raw flow on all scales, at all levels, under all conditions, is just too much to bear. while the wind blows across skin. and the skin is raked by the radiative solar flux. and this machine starts its own fan. the environment too harsh for it. couldn’t take outside into the wind and dust, that’s clear. soft device. needing the feed of electric energy to keep it functional. at all. or it becomes a paper-weight only. to fight the wind.

back in this place again, camping up against the wall that looms over the campground. maybe sleeping out tonight. remembered yesterday that I had sent one of the tent poles to North Face to be replaced before we went to Florida. it had not returned yet, and they didn’t have a record of its arrival. tent is useless without it. a short walk along the wall, seeing the marks of complexity, flows, reconfigurations, conformations, transformations. rock to sand to rock to sand to rock. illustrated, no, manifest. fundamental richness of source to press inwards on eyeballs until seen. I have no words for this place, or for life anymore. so, commentary, that gradual or catastrophic removal from presence, is in contradiction to lived experience. the experience of birds singing no longer calls up the multi-fold apprehension of that momentary, transitory now-ness that can no more be duplicated in the flux of life.

sotto voce: the years drift by, suspended, swirling. here in Crestone, standing, walking, sitting on the roots of the Blood of Christ mountains. an old Volkswagen goes by. camping and wondering about everything. watching self (over-consciousness. trying to feel the place.) leaving Colorado soon. too soon. sometimes a thought how to damn my connection to the Place. that I could move, complete, away, fully en-souled, but that does not happen.

here in this dreamy Colorado location again after five years. an impromptu crossing of paths. long drive from Prescott yesterday, passing through some brewing monsoon storm systems. the first in Gallup, New Mexico, rinsing the Interstate of the red dust that had accumulated for the dry months previous, and a second wave in Durango, Colorado, where the rain was falling heavily on the Missionary Ridge fire area, near Richard’s house. the air was saturated with a sour wet camp-fire smell, and on Route 250, I passed through a corner of the fire area, houses reduced to stone foundations, cars to half-melted piles of steel. forest turned to a sepia and black caricature. over/through the San Juans to Ouray and Silverton, down through Montrose, on by the Black Canyon to Gunnison. the day before Independence Day, when the President declares that there will be Fighter planes protecting all Amurikans on this special day of the celebration of freedom. bleah. I park in Gunnison, off of Main Street to wait for Chris and family to arrive from Boulder. waiting, I manage not to attract the attention of the circulating police patrol cars. at 2300 the traffic signals shift to the blinking yellow or red mode, signaling that this is still one of those towns where night time is the time to be in bed.

Chris tells the story of his flight with Jan von Richthofen, a glider pilot and the great-grand-nephew of the Baron von Richthofen, and doctoral student at the Forschung Zentrum Jülich where Chris was working on a post-doc research position.

well, we flew from the Aachen airport and he wanted to glide over Jülich where I was living, we had to put parachutes on, which I thought was strange. Jan said that we won’t need them unless we have to, and then he would tell me what to do. we apparently flew too far, however, and were beginning to head back, neither talking, while we lost altitude. a high-tension tower came and passed, followed by an audible relaxation in the cockpit, and then the Baron’s great-grand-nephew said we wouldn’t make it back to the airport. we landed in a wheat field, all I could see were stalks of wheat blurring by the cockpit, hoping there wasn’t a tractor or other implement in the field.

we finally stopped, Jan said I should wait there with the glider, while he went for help, catching a ride on a horse cart, telling me to tell any farmer who came that we had insurance for this. I read the insurance papers.

some lady came out walking her dog, a friend of the farmer, then the farmer came out, he recognized that I was an American, but then the farmer’s brother came, and wanted 100 marks because it would take him time to fill out the paperwork and wait for the insurance money. this was not the first time this had happened. we went back to the airport where Jan had to buy everybody a beer.

a hike up Mill Creek to a cirque of brecciated cliffs and hoodoos towering a thousand feet up above the aspen, spruce, and fir. barefoot in the creek, relishing the sensations that seem as strange and enlivening as any impingement to body wall during time passed here, now. drenching rain falling on us on the way back to the car, wet there and the dryness only a few hundred meters further, where the rain did not fall. water and the West.

so in the way of going and going. walking in the big trees and the snow and the sky. all at the same time. and never again. the way of walking, and that the snow came in the night, while it rained in the valley. at the confluence of three rivers.

I find out in retrospective that today Yoko-Ono, my kitty from olden times, was put to sleep last month. at 21 years, she was an aged being.

Flatirons wreathed in ice-crystal clouds. resonant. the Bouger Anomaly calculation in the total gravitational field analysis of a particular point is made to consider the effects of large variations in the topography local to that point. the effect of a cliff or mountain nearby cannot be ignored. below the mountain, ones body is Lightened by its gravitational attraction, while on the top, one is drawn downwards by its mass beneath the feet. that is countered slightly by the greater distance from the center of terrestrial spin which, because of greater velocity, Lightens ones body centripetally.

no mapping

and then, lately, I have been trying to reconstruct the visualizations that Akeno taught one week when teaching butoh at Media Lab. she was teaching us how to walk.

walk as though there is a large carp in your belly, swimming forward with a deep swerving, slow, against the current;
walk as though you are 20 cm above the surface of the ground;
walk as though there is a large eye in the center of the forehead, there is a thread coming from the center of the eye, the thread is being pulled slowly forward;
walk as though there is a massive hand behind the back, pushing;
walk as though there is an expansive forest of mint behind the slightly open mouth;
walk as though there is a wide and shallow ceramic bowl on the top of the head, filled with a deadly poison;
walk as though each joint in the body has a thread going upwards to heaven;
walk as though you are on razor blades;
and the most intense of all:
walk as though you are seen, are being watched by all that is around you, by all the universe.
–Aki Suzuki, butoh teacher

day blows with a half-Chinook wind. with half-lenticular clouds. always with the breakthrough around 3:30 in the afternoon, the sun coming to the westward leading edge of those clouds, giving another one or two hours of strong western sunLight, unless you are right up at the Flatirons, like my place happens to be, sunset by 4:00 at the latest. or so. sun, mountain, cloud, sky. remember again, when looking at the sky, it’s best to stop walking ahead. a maxim? perhaps. but so busy talking to people that, well, nothing got done. half-way through the afternoon, Kari showed a couple to my office door, a quiet knock, and I meet a Turkish fellow, and his American partner. she was working in New York, but got offered a position in Fort Collins, they were visiting the area to check out what might be happening that was interesting. he is an artist, but I didn’t have time to check his site out. and so on. afternoon happening at the blurr_lab. meeting people, talking. end up looking in on and helping some of the students testing equipment for <di>fusion. and stumbling home after another 14-hour day at school.

the 20.02.2002 project (pdf) from zonezero catches an inconsequential Gregorian time-slice the other day. I fill the bathtub in earnest desire to get to warm and wet states.

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

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

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

twists and turns. waking before the early dawn to see the cloudless sky painted in many colors. silence broken by the furnace, and the cat who, once she realizes anybody is awake, begins to yowl for food until she is fed. Sage, on the other hand, waits patiently in her kennel until liberated for a morning potty. go potty, Sage! and she races out into the back yard, bounding over the catclaw and prickly pear to find that right spot in the morning chill. dawn. getting up before dawn is special. it’s easier when dawn is at 1100, but here in the south lands, it means getting up at 0630. in the quiet.

chapter has changed. this text probably has to end in the form of a travelog. as I will not be traveling much in the next months. 12 years of European holiday behind me. now back to the reality of life in Amurika as I have often quipped. the media portrayals in Europe of the US situation are extreme and narrow. just like the views of the rest of the world here. the only difference is that re-presentative imaginations dominate people’s lives far more here — giving a distinctly shifted absence to every thing and every event. and every facing of the Other.

shopping defines much of being. I shop, therefore I am. walking by the bell ringing Salvation Army guy. I am already digging into my pocket before I get near. 27 cents. I catch his eye, smile, and as I turn away, he says, bless you. I go shopping. I missed yet another chance. the substitution of money for less mediated (and less socially structured) exchange is a loss.

walking to school in the morning in a soft rain, on the pea-graveled sidewalk. the stones just the right size to always get stuck in the sole of my black combat boots — a ubiquitous feature of Finnish cities and towns. tons of crushed rock, granitic mostly, from the ancient regolith, angular, sharp, are carefully spread along every meter of sidewalk and bicycle trail all through the winters after each and every storm. it persists in the spring despite socially-organized efforts to retrieve it or make it vanish. anyway, back to the sidewalk, walking under the stripped roof of leafless black and white birch trees and gray sky, the sound of raindrops on the bed of small yellow leaves leaps into my awareness. just like lying back in the limited comfort of the tent. in the rain. the sound.

over and out. there from Sredniy Prospekt 25, near the Metro Vasilevstrovskaya, on Vasilyevsky Island not far from the central campus of St. Petersburg University. the last evening of the lecture. walking around the city this morning, the KunstCamera of Peter the Great. what an individual he was. doing everything, insatiable appetite for life. building material monuments to Empire. now it is post-empire. infrastructure only just barely maintaining the massive and ubiquitous monuments, streets, palaces, museums, and cathedrals. what comes after Empire? is that decay the inevitable result when the inflow of energy sources dries up, when command and control weakens, when chaos descends bit by bit?

months change. the Light begins the fast drain to the winter. eleven minutes a day of shrinkage … the dirt soccer field has been transformed to a hockey rink, well, at least the walls are in place, the cold soon. walking back from the swimming pool, I am puzzled by the presence of a large 6-foot-high pile of snow sitting on the rec center parking lot. from the indoor hockey rink, possibly? but it really looks like snow, just like the piles that persist everywhere here well into May. there is no ski area nearby, actually no hills more that 20 meters high within an hours’ drive. a mystery. it’s definitely not cold enough to snow … yet …