glitchworks
along the road’s verge
portrait, Mabrie
along the road’s verge
along the road’s verge
portrait, urchin at the train station
house for sale
Open season! If you are looking for a retreat from the busy world, one with fertile soil, water rights, and high agricultural potential, next to some of the best Nordic skiing in the US, silent nights with dark starry skies, bright days with a sky to watch, read on. There’s plenty of wildlife: every sort of raptor, ravens, Colorado bluebirds, jays, magpies, flickers, marmots, foxes, deer, and ground squirrels, along with occasional coyotes, mountain lions, elk, and bears (haven’t personally seen these latter two on my property per se, but they are around!). The property is at 6500 ft (2000 m) on the southern flank of Grand Mesa with fine spacious views of the Uncompaghre Uplift, the Mesa, and the San Juan Mountains to the south. I’ve got decent neighbors as well.
I’ve put in a lot of sweat equity improving both the entire property and the house: removing tons (literally) of detritus from prior residents, caring for the trees and other vegetation, re-doing the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen (with its ever-changing view from the sink!); upgrading parts of the roofing; re-doing the deck; and the whole house is scheduled to be painted next week. Also, because the property is largely open, it is insurable (unlike many rural properties in the state)! This is becoming a serious issue because of climate change and risk of natural disasters! The property is essentially not at risk of flooding, landslide, rockfall, earthquake, or fire.
Much of the process has followed the principle of sustainable DWAM (doing with available materials), and with the idea of sustainably re-wilding the property.
– 13.4 acres (5.4 hectares) 18145 Surface Creek Road, Cedaredge.
– 2 bedroom, 1 bath; 1362 sq ft; 300 sq ft finished root cellar w/ water and electricity; 600 sq ft workshop/outbuilding; 2 additional outbuilding/stable areas; metal roofing throughout; some fencing supplies available;
– several producing fruit trees: apricot, apple, cherry plum.
– Electricity (DMEA) to house and garage (220v) with a 30 amp RV hook-up.
– Upper Surface Creek Water Users Association (USCDWUA) provides domestic water from their treatment plant about five miles upstream
– Agricultural water shares in Leon Lake and Marcot Park Ditch and Reservoir Companies.
– Fiber-optic internet to the house (up to 8gb available) via Elevate.
– Eligible as an Agricultural Property.
– Cedaredge is a small town about two miles away. It’s got a decent grocery store, laundromat, library, dispensary, thrift stores, doctor/dentist offices, a handful of restaurants, excellent acupuncture/CTM center, the Grand Mesa Arts Center, elementary-through-high schools, and a friendly Ace hardware store. There are abundant fruit, vegetable, wine and other organic sources locally, and if you are a carnivore, there’s plenty of game.
– Delta (17 mi); Paonia (32 mi); Montrose (40 mi); Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park (40 mi); Grand Junction (50 mi); Telluride (100 mi); Moab UT (150 mi); Denver (250 mi).
– if escape from this pleasant reverie is necessary, both Montrose and Grand Junction have airports with daily direct flights to DFW, Salt Lake, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and other points.
— if you know anyone who would be interested, let me know, I’m prepared for sale-by-owner. Price $400,000. The house will be listed in a few weeks at $459,000, I will not be signing with a RE agent until then.
portrait, Brian, Donna, and Zoe
field work
group portrait, 4th graders
field work
DMNS Meteorite Collection
Colleagues at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, led by Dr. James Hagadorn, the Curator of Geology at the museum, released a fine 36-page publication The Meteorite Collection of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. It contains a fascinating history of the collection with back stories on some of the many specimens, along with a reference list and a full catalog of the collection. It’s available as a free pdf download, but the paper copy is well worth the $3.16 price-point (how do they manage to sell it for so little??). It’s the next best thing to a visit to the DMNS … when in Denver!
RT-0046503-dmns-sr-17-meteoritesHagadorn, James W., Emerald J. Spindler, Ada K. Bowles, and Nicole M. Neu-Yagle. Denver Museum of Nature and Science Report 17: The Meteorite Collection. Vol. December 11, 2019. Denver Museum of Nature and Science Report SR-17. Denver, CO: The Denver Museum of Nature and Science, 2019.
Following is a selection of meteorite specimens in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science collection:
more “DMNS Meteorite Collection”
field work
group portrait, gallery
watching Hells Kitchen
clouds and meaninglessness
I set off with a sigh. Above me the entire sky had opened. What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscape-like formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads?
However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why should we? If the various formations had had some meaning, if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing, what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds suggested it was meaninglessness in its purest form.
Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012.
The photos were made around the same time Karl Ove was living in Bergen: I was teaching at KHiB (now the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen). Probably no need to explain the resonance of this particular passage to other entries on this blog.
watching Hells Kitchen
field work
field work
from the archive
My favorite aunt, Mary MacKenzie, was Dr. Toms’ secretary for many years. She is in both photos, with dark hair, at the top of the stairs in the middle, holding her sunglasses and camera, and on the second photo, fourth from the far left, again holding her sunglasses, up in the air. Dr. Toms, aka “Kahu,” is the somewhat impassive fellow in the dark suit and sunglasses looking more like a Secret Service agent … Hawaii-Five-O, here we come!
The Long Night of Radio Art
At the vilma offices thanks to Gediminas and Nomeda — for hosting the stream I’m sending to Steve of art@radio in Baltimore who has an elaborate studio set-up for the live streaming he’ll be doing from there to The Long Night of Radio Art that is part of the Reinventing Radio project of KunstRadio. the whole project will be broadcast on FM, shortwave, a special 5.1 digital satellite transmission, and online. (Taking a breath). Yeah, live online. Meet August on the IRC channel broadcasting from Santa Barbara.
Baltimore, USA :: jamming radiophonic space :: 19:30 – 06:00 Eastern Standard Time
“jamming radiophonic space,” modulates the interplay of radio, Internet, wireless transmission, an private space.
This experientially diverse and geographically scattered group will contribute to “jamming radiophonic space” through decentralized, networked, and collaborative strategies of production and distribution. Streaming feeds from microphones places in and around artists’ workspaces will be gathered along with ambient sound called in via wireless and landline phones; requests have already gone out over electronic list-serves for individuals to call in and point their live phones for 10 or 15 minutes towards sounds emblematic of their time and place.
These sonic interruptions will then be mixed and processed into a stream of “hot media” by artists present in the Baltimore studio space using baby monitors, short-wave radios, software, and other improvised sound tools. The stream will then be made available world-wide to streaming clients via wired and wireless data connections.
Artists:
Chris Basile, Goeff Bell, Steve Bradley, Phaye Poliakoff-Chen, Chad Eby, John Hopkins (Vilnius, LT), Brendan Howell, John Hudak, Jacob Kirkegaard, Tim Nohe, Joe Reinsel, Jodi Rose, Bill Shewbridge, Nicole Shiflet, John Sturgeon, and others …
domination of landscape 16:26
field work
along the road’s verge
field work
portrait, S & Z
field work
field work
portrait, Tim and Mary
field work
group portrait, dancers
along the road’s verge
documentation
[ED: Documentation, yes. That’s all I do with the photography, all I ever did. Documenting immediate life scrolling by. And let that accumulate into a modest mass of imagery. Extracted from the mass, they appear fragmentary, and not so replete with ‘meaning.’ Here’s a handful from a warm 1988 summer’s end.]
Upon my re-patriation after three months in Iceland, Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, following is a sample of what happened hanging with Willy & Andy in Hoboken:
domination of landscape 15:23
hypostasis
is this where we’re headed?
watching Hells Kitchen
longevity conservation
Earth’s old animals are in decline. Despite this, emerging research is revealing the vital contributions of older individuals to cultural transmission, population dynamics, and ecosystem processes and services. Often the largest and most experienced, old individuals are most valued by humans and make important contributions to reproduction, information acquisition and cultural transmission, trophic dynamics, and resistance and resilience to natural and anthropogenic disturbance. These observations contrast with the senescence-focused paradigm of old age that has dominated the literature for more than a century yet are consistent with findings from behavioral ecology and life history theory. In this work, we review why the global loss of old individuals can be particularly detrimental to long-lived animals with indeterminate growth; those with increasing reproductive output with age; and those dependent on migration, sociality, and cultural transmission for survival. Longevity conservation is needed to protect the important ecological roles and ecosystem services provided by old animals.
Kopf, R. Keller, Sam Banks, Lauren J. N. Brent, Paul Humphries, Chris J. Jolly, Phyllis C. Lee, Osmar J. Luiz, Dale Nimmo, and Kirk O. Winemiller. “Loss of Earth’s Old, Wise, and Large Animals.” Science 387, no. 6729 (January 3, 2025): eado2705.
watching Hells Kitchen
The lifetime of situation
BEFORE
Thoughts unreel, leading nowhere in particular: parrots leading monkey-brain. So many sketches started—more than one hundred drafts in the ‘pending’ zone—while lacking the embodied discipline and focus to finish any. Blah, blah, blah.
My situation is moving rapidly towards a major change, assuming I can manage, and that is the main focus of a very blurry existence. Blurred by fractured attention, internal and external stressors: societal instability, monetary insecurity, psycho-spiritual transience, mortality, inexorable cosmological flow, etc.
Reflecting on the four-year tenure here in rural western Colorado, the “Western Slope” as it is called, being on the west side of the main range of the Rocky Mountains. It’s been a mixed experience. Initiated in the depths of a bad cancer prognosis, it had a harsh essence from the beginning. Three of the past four years was spent, primarily, working full-time/remote for the CGS. Two of those years were with the most miserable excuse of a boss, the former State Geologist. With new management, the final 16 months were far better, but the profusion of way too many responsibilities simply burned me out. After a disturbing interaction with one of my colleagues—one whose work was an essential support element to mine—who had confided to me that he wasn’t going to do anything at work unless forced to, I decided to pull the plug with just three weeks notice. Precipitous, yes, but somehow necessary, given how life-time was/is slipping away at a rate that continues to disturb tranquil thought every day. It was a bit surprising how easy it was to ‘retire,’ and how quickly the job vanished in the rear-view mirror. How all that time spent since 2016 evaporated almost without a trace. I did leave the highly organized legacy in the form of their information/dataspace, built with my life-energy. That along with putting in place workflows that guaranteed—to the degree possible at my level of responsibility—the highest quality of their public-facing information.
“So what?” Richard Pryor asks.
The other focus of attention was to the house and the 13.5 acre property, the land. Once I left the job, the countdown started on the retreat from this place, first back to Arizona, and thence back to Iceland/Europe. All along, since I bought the property here, I’d spend hours each week day, many more on weekends, working on clearing up something or other. Cutting and collecting dead wood, pruning trees, moving rocks, weed-whacking, clearing defunct fencing, encouraging re-wilding, selectively reinforcing aging out-buildings and root cellar, removing vast amounts of detritus from same, improving the water drainage situation, setting up a large composting system, and re-doing the house interior and exterior to some degree (roofing, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom especially). I have made a couple thousand images from the property, but rarely explicit before-and-after images, there is some evidence of the improvements. The main goal was to stabilize the physical infrastructures and fix things that bothered me or obstructed optimal enjoyment and operation of the facilities. This became, cumulatively, the dominant creative act. In retrospect, I could have done more careful documentation and explication here on the blog, following my efforts, but there wasn’t the will. If nothing else, the move from Golden saved me from paying $50K in rent over the years. I do have a potential buyer.
I do watch the sky here. With a 360-degree panorama (the property has few trees) and a view up to a hundred miles (the San Juan Mountains to the south, the Uncompaghre Uplift to the southwest, Hells Kitchen directly west, and Grand Mesa to the north), there is always much to contemplate in the sky. And aside from a paranoid neighbor from Southern California who recently installed a ridiculously bright night light on his garage, the area is known for its dark skies. This will be the greatest adjustment, as my place in Arizona is deep in the ponderosas. I’ll have to wait for Iceland to ponder and enjoy big skies again.
The economic demands of this particular period of existence, from 2016 until now, have impacted life in ways that confirmed my long-standing perspective on the pursuit of money—as Blake expressed in Laocoön—“Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only.” Formal creative pursuits were sporadic, and amounted to little more than recording fragments of life along the way, this blog being the only public venue aside from aporee::maps and participation in a few international streaming projects.
Contemplating my next situation includes mulling the question of how the physical dislocation and change will go down. The next temporary physical landing place is known, but far away, and the inertia of being here is now exceedingly large as precipitated by time and age. That and TOO MUCH STUFF. The Archive weighs heavily on mind, and, once moving, on body. In a cosmos that is transitory at all scales, the attempt to stop entropic decay is almost completely pointless. And through aging, The Archive becomes something of a retroactive creative crutch where delving into it is a poor substitute for actively creating *now*. At the same time it presses down heavily with the message that there is enough stuff in the world: no need or reason to make more. Best to simply live and spend time with Others instead.
Stay tuned. Oh, but wait, there will be stiff competition for eyeballs here, what with the ongoing socio-political conflagration about to receive another corpulent splash of gasoline… Sigh. I’d advise dropping social media.
AFTER
Case Study: Big Thompson Flood
On July 31, 1976, a powerful thunderstorm over Colorado’s Big Thompson Canyon unleashed a deluge that became one of the state’s most catastrophic natural disasters. Known as the Big Thompson Flood, this event claimed 144 lives, caused significant damage to infrastructure, and left a lasting impact on both the physical and social landscapes. This flood serves as a case study of the interplay between geologic conditions, meteorology, and human activity in a high-risk environment.
The Meteorological Trigger
The Big Thompson Flood was caused by an intense, stationary thunderstorm that dropped more than 12 inches of rain in just four hours over the steep canyon. The localized nature of the storm, combined with its high rainfall intensity, overwhelmed the Big Thompson River’s drainage system. This type of weather event is not uncommon in Colorado, where summer thunderstorms can deliver large amounts of precipitation over short periods. The semi-arid climate, combined with the region’s high topographic relief, creates conditions that are particularly conducive to flash flooding.
Thunderstorms of this magnitude occur when warm, moist air is forced upward by the mountainous terrain, cooling and condensing into heavy rainfall. In the case of the Big Thompson Flood, the storm’s stationary position ensured that all the precipitation fell within a confined area, greatly intensifying the flood’s impact.
Geological Setting of Big Thompson Canyon
Big Thompson Canyon, located in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, is a steep and narrow valley carved over millions of years by the Big Thompson River. The canyon’s geology is dominated by granitic bedrock interspersed with loose sediments and colluvium, materials that are easily mobilized during heavy rainfall. The steep canyon walls and limited floodplain amplify the destructive potential of flash floods, as water rapidly accumulates and accelerates downhill.
One of the key factors in the severity of the 1976 flood was the canyon’s geomorphology. The steep gradient of the river increased the velocity of the floodwaters, allowing them to carry massive amounts of sediment, debris, and rock. This debris flow not only caused direct damage but also increased the erosive power of the water, undercutting slopes and triggering landslides that further contributed to the destruction.
Jimmy Carter 1924 – 2024
watching Hells Kitchen
Covid
brutal
bed
Case Study: mine subsidence, CSM
For decades, the west side of the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) main campus had subsidence issues related to historical mining activities. At one point, in the 1990s, one of the married student housing units in that area was so badly damaged that it was condemned. In the early 2000s, after the school converted the subsidence-prone area into intramural-athletic (IM) fields, ongoing subsidence-related issues were still being reported.
Clay mining in Colorado dates back to the mid-1800s and Golden was a particularly good location for clay found in the Laramie Formation. This clay has been used for a variety of industrial purposes over the years including construction (bricks, structural tiles, sewer pipes), terracotta, refractory clays, and earthenware. The mining of kaolinitic claystones in what was later to become the western area of the Mines campus left backfilled/collapsed mine workings and the possible presence of underground void spaces. To complicate matters, that same area was also the site of coal mining in the 1880s and 1890s. In particular, the Pittsburg Coal Mine entry shaft may have been located in the vicinity of one of the observed subsidence features. This mine reportedly operated between 1876 and 1880, but is un-recorded by the State. The mining operations were thought to be on three levels at depths of 100, 150, and 225 feet running parallel to the mountains.
portrait, Daphnee and Darren
Windigo thinking
The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as “quality of life” but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.
Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law, and yet a leading economist like Lawrence Summers, of Harvard, the World Bank, and the U.S. National Economic Council, issues such statements as, “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct. Windigo thinking.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
The Crazed Janitor
[ED: During a visit to his apartment/studio in Denver last month, I asked Jim if he would consent to showing this piece on neoscenes. His art oeuvre is always challenging, humorous, playful, and both linguistically and algorithmically sophisticated!]
The Crazed Janitor is a pangram, a sentence employing every letter of the alphabet. Pangrams are frequently used to display a specific typeface, in this case, one of my own design—Magic Squares. The letterforms are colored systematically by letter frequency usage, coloring consonants with a range of grays from black to white and assigning spectral colors to the vowels.
The T is colored black as it is the most frequently used consonant in the alphabet. White is assigned to the Z because it is the least frequently used consonant and all of the rest are assigned incremental values of gray between black and white according to their frequency of use. The vowels are assigned colors according to their respective wavelengths, thus Red (of the longest wavelength) is assigned to the E which is the most frequently used vowel. The remaining colors are assigned according to their respective wavelengths and usage, so that Violet (the shortest wavelength) is assigned to Y, the least frequently used vowel.
That the pangram might also represent a form of synesthesia, where some people see individual letters as specifically colored (not all black), is an unintended consequence of the composition.
watching Hells Kitchen
