On the eve of the New Year by the Roman calendar, the time-marking sequences of the Christians. The turning time. As movements of planets and stars allow us some relief from stasis, life immobile. Talk, blather bunk!, as Randy would call it. Written words that have no aura. Rather manufacture fragments. Pure fragmentation. The worldview web site that I constructed with the content generated by students in my Critical Thinking on Art and Society class.
stamina
Shining movement, time divides only the static from the dynamic, the resting from the moving. Long weekends shiver into working weeks: work I like to do, but exhausting each time. Stamina of the sixteen weeks in fair weather and sunshine is different than the stamina of a week’s workshop in a strange land. This month is over. The year closes in the chill of winter. Spring will be June in Lapland again, a couple of months later than spring here. I gravely ponder where I will be, how I will be, when I will be, then. I cannot concentrate on healing this back, as the pain is a pure distraction that I cover over. I would wish for a quiet place to live for six months, nothing else to do but write and do digital work, take care of Loki, and strengthen the body. I, houseman, not a worker, but a dreamer, no, not even a dreamer, more a …
in the state
Structurally, things are different. Days have a different insistence of being which drives them, weeks likewise. Never thought too much about months and years, except now I have to make teaching and travel plans up to ten months in advance. The spring will be another sequence of movements — Iceland, Finland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lapland, Sweden, Iceland, and then finally back to the US in June with Loki for the summer. Being relatively immobile here in Colorado with the exception of the drudgery and stress of car-commuting 20 miles to Boulder three or four days a week, well, life is different. Cycling around is a joy, here in the middle of October, the sun is still brilliant and warm, the air, well, during the day, is still warm, though there have been several nights of frost already. Colorado has become back into memory and sensation a realness which draws me out. Looking backwards to the times in Iceland, how I could lose my social being, my need for others completely unfilled, the interjection of the jealousy of the ex to keep others at bay. And how different I feel here, watching Self and Others age gracefully. Careers formed. Lives forming. Eah, but nothing that I can mediate by language pulls me close to what is REALLY happening. There is a vast flux of human society that is completely un-represented. Representation. Why even care? It is possible to move powerfully in a region of … (case closed)
In a real conversation, a real lesson, a real embrace, in all these, what is essential takes place between them in a dimension which is accessible only to them both … If I and another “happen” to one another, the sum does not exactly divide. There is a remainder somewhere, where the souls end and the world has not yet begun. — Martin Buber
And there it is. Life in the offing. I had a rough week. Intense actions. Friday evening, I end up shopping on the way home. that is a concentrated activity that I don’t enjoy. food. shopping. I hated it in Iceland, for sure. but more here. Like going shopping for anything, it just doesn’t seem to be fulfilling … telephone call … I strike my forehead after I hang up. she was a real love of mine, but I guess I never told her. undeclared love is such a lost anomaly. always rooted in the past, that vanishing of any knowing. ahmmmmmmm. but the recognition, the coming-to-know of the past is such a rare thing. anyway, I never knew what love was then anyway. I start thinking of the area in Italy that has been seeing so many earthquakes. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there (although not since 1994). I am bummed that a good friend, a painter, Claudia Piell, has two houses in Umbria where that terrible series of quakes has been happening … Another sculptor friend in Finland was going to be doing a collaborative show with Claudia in Venice around now. No email and the regular post for both of us is forwarded multiply, so I won’t hear from them for some months. Kaisu, the Finnish artist, sends me a photo and letter. I miss Kathryn’s visit too, Finland in June and July to see Kaisu and do a workshop there. But I wonder about the places where Claudia and I were in Umbria in 1989. I need to revive some of those images. before time passes too much.
traverse no zenith
Forty-degree temperature swings signal the approach of winter. sun draws into a southern zenith. recall a phrase that meant so much — traverse no zenith — imperative demand, plea from a heart moving through bands of circumpolar cloud, Light of Being. on the phone caught by the unexpected, radio clipping sounds cut into aural continuity. two instances of deja vu fire into the continuity of recent cyclic time. the screaming train, braking downhill across the street. hearing, I race downstairs grab the video camera and begin filming. leaning against the frame of the front door, one foot propping open the screen, seeing the contents of the viewfinder, I am there in dream again. before, like during the Self-to-Self event way back in 1990 immediately prior to flying to Iceland, staying at Bill and Andrea’s place in Layton, Peters Valley. that Knowing within the flow of sensory information. reeling screeching of steel wheels pulsing to a halt over many minutes. and the visual construction of things, impression on eye. being pushed into the race of perception. and the thoughts strung out in a progression of order, like it was before, like it was before. I was here now. I am here then. and the coming-to-be yet a pure formation of new-ness in pre-dreams that are no longer real but are fragments of movement movement movement. somehow things have changed. back is stable, not hurting all day, for the first time in months. this was the year of back-ness, backwardness, spinal deficiency, upright challenged, anti-bipedalian. crawling, lying on the back, succumbing totally to gravity, being absorbed by the floor-ness, being at the bottom, close to the earth or pressed to lower matter. any change in this is a revelation, somewhere near Patmos, and the end Times not too far off. formed conversations are call and response. pressing idea out, energy, in the form of Words. Light. Words. Light. Words. saying that ignites, seeing the Other come back from the hearing in another state, hearing difference, and praying that the hearing is not distorted by the filters of learned being. WHERE IS MY VOICE? hidden behind the anti-truth of language, squirming under the weight of separate and solitary understandings. experiences unfold and leave a taste in mind that is akin to a dry polluted wind, blowing across steppes of post-industrial carparks. stained ground, offal of automobiles and material sinners. case closed. nothing reported today. late anyway, and over and out. from a western front.
über-conservative
Brilliance of fall, cleaned air with a bit of refractive moisture. Snow draping Longs Peak down below the tree line, not the first, not the last time. I have watched this translation of condition creep down the mountains many times before. What will this winter be? Different and the same as others before. Only half will be at this latitude, the rest will be at a latitude that can make the nose bleed with cold. (some planes now have a continuously-updated screen playing where there is a rough icon of a plane moving across a pixellated mapping of the world, screens refresh with various scaled views as well as the outside temperature and ground speed) Outside temperatures, at least the numbers converge from Fahrenheit and Centigrade around minus 45, and at 10,000 meters, the outside air, screaming past the fuselage at 600-plus miles per hour, is around minus 50 or even higher. I theorize on the effect of instant exposure to that environment. The speed of the air. And the cold. And the lack of oxygen. Instantly stripped of any clothing, all limbs wracked to the extreme of their movement, probably beyond, burning frostbite, deep frozen skin, blood exploding from the lungs, acute edema, pressure drop, nitrogen bubbles popping in every vein, and the disorientation of minutes of free fall into a freezing sea.
But I am not flying at the moment. No reason to be developing that line of thought.
I am sitting in the ITS Fine Arts lab. Class is finished. Audio coming from the Internet is ambient from the streets of Bombay. This medium stretches itself. It is late. A good day, although I recall a night of little sleep. I am intent that the possible visits of Tapio, Susanna, and Brad be smooth ones. Meanwhile, my status at the University is determined by a rigid hierarchy of time, influence, and power. And I was even told point-blank by a nameless member of the administration something along the lines of we don’t recognize part-time faculty. Pretty short-sighted and über-conservative. Academia has taken the institution of tenure, once considered the bulwark of academic freedom, and has turned it into a device for maintaining a stultifying status quo. The vast majority of tenured faculty seem not to use their positions in a proactive sense — to challenge that status quo.
my home?
So many miles have rolled past the frontward hypnosis of my eyes in the last 25 days, I cannot recall but flashes and strokes of brilliance. Lightning, Lightening. In the blurred darkness of what passes by memory. Like the throbbing eye-pulse, after driving long hours, the eye still sees movement, rippling tunnel-ward from center to periphery. Formation of words. come to slivers, deep driven under the fingernails. shaking layer after layer of skin off, gone and gone. to the Other place. in the Other’s arms. meanwhile, hair falls out. inflictions of sensation. sensation vs information. which is ascendant? which descendant? massive attack. scatter shot and pleasure domes. scratch and ambient. destruction of the soul is vanity. having that immense luxury of concentration. a longing for the stammering glottal stops the shudder from paced expression. hearing stands for nothing like being (and another’s touch). where the, and the, or.
Across the sky, the clouds move, Across the fields, the wind, across the fields the lost child of my mother wanders. Across the street, leaves blow, Across the trees, birds cry — Across the mountains, far away, My home must be. — Hermann Hesse
dinner
A collective dinner tonight seems to be a precursor to the midsummer’s party that will follow on the coming Saturday night. And tomorrow night there will be an evening of touring some local parties and such. I am afraid that not much more work will be accomplished before I leave, so I am desperate to finish at least one more video work (waking up in Finland). 0345 and the sun is busy coming up, well, just still up, nothing different. Day is day. And there is no night. Coffee swelling in my veins. But I get much more video work done. The strength of the Solstice is a humming vibration shaking from the feet up, a harmonic oscillation with a frequency of the pulse, exactly synchronized from moment-to-moment. Pulse speeds for a flight of stairs and the heart-ringing does not become asynchronous but always stays tuned to the frequency of being. No deviation and the two become one whole massive vibration that shakes the self, and all that one perceives and senses, so that gradually one becomes aware that there is only the vibration and ones awareness becomes this vibration. Buildings and trees shake in perfect rhythm to the eyes, relativity rules. Nothing deviates except the internal awareness of swinging at a vast distance from the pivot, the fulcrum, moving through a knowing-ness at skin-peeling speed, yet there is no movement. The space within which things wholly revolve has dimension imposed by relativity. No faster than we can know, no slower than we can care.
red noise
I make it no further in that diatribe, forcing me to realize that it was not soul-full, only a cover of verbiage to the rather removed state of energies that is my presence here. I am seduced into symbiotic relationship with a machine, a network, and technology in general. In my head then, two forces press, push at each other, brain matter being heaved, grabbed at, hacked, pocketed, consumed, stolen, wired. The forces are not at war, that is, if you consider that our presence here, now, is a peaceful idyll of simple pleasures following one after another from birth to death. We are in the midst of a savage conflict whose outcome is the dispensation of the soul. Melodrama. I have to laugh, I see silly tinges of Gothic and English drama in my words, and I have to drop the seriousness because of the absurdity of the movement — words in the face of the wholeness being, pressing the senses without remission. Like the pumping heart, that does not stop in Life. Maybe that throbbing is sole reminder of who we are, that streaming rush through tympanum that gives the ear a base of red noise — it is behind all we hear, like the pulsing seen when eyesight drifts to a non-focused state against the sky, the granularity of Seeing. The skin-over-skin of touch, un-melding with the touched, shielded from simultaneous being. And smell and taste, how they are pushed hard into the flesh, yet can hardly be found at times. Didn’t take me nowhere. Still the outside is there. Window, the ever-present silicon dioxide shield. Today keeping chill wind out. South wind, some from the east, too. Only a two days hard-pushed travel by foot to Mother Russia. Over there, things are different.
productivity
Yet more days later. I have finished two new video works (mama, where are you going and memory of three infinite half-spaces), very different works, partly as a result of exploring the possibilities of the AVID digital editing system, and partly from the limited amount of raw material that I brought with me. I am wishing I had brought the collection of dinner tapes this time, as there are plenty of machines to do the heavy editing needed to finish that CD. But, here I am. So far I have learned a tremendous amount being around the others, it is really a luxury to be with other working artists when there is a relatively relaxed atmosphere that is free of agendas … The days blend directly into the nights which blend into the days. A seamless continuation of varying Lighting effects. I like working late into the morning when there is a special quietness that soaks the air.
Today I pick up the WinNT server from the computer department. Another project to get it running! We hope to get a REAL AUDIO server up for some weeks, although I see there is much to be done just to get the NT server up and cruising as I would like. But the real state of mind is rather indeterminate. Digital oscillations are interposed with human movement and various ocular stimuli arising from solar phenomena. Yesterday a huge sun-ring imposed itself across a quarter of the sky. This evening, now onto midnight, swallows are reeling across the sky and between the buildings. Outside the window which is wide open to catch the evening breeze and help dispel the interior new-building air pollution, there is a dirt and gravel space and then an elementary school building that workmen have been almost totally gutting over the course of the last week-and-a-half. New windows, new desks, and who knows what else. The first day we were here, there was a dumpster full to overflowing with birch desks which were thankfully carted off by locals before being discarded. The movement across life is full in the summer of this place. Winter is the Other. Activity is vigorous though tempered by the luxurious languor of warmth. The birch trees are filling the air with a sensual tree-essence that one smells to one degree or another all the time, and their trunks are warm from the flow of sap. A week ago they had no leaves, and today they are full and filling vast Cartesian spaces with detailed energies.
volume
Oh hell, what pretense to think that I could really get any sensible writing done here, when all other mediums seem to fail me as well. Concentration lags behind — a result of very poor physical condition that my body is in, and mentally I am really unfocused … Can’t really point to what is going on. Material stimulation and the stimulation of speaking to others seems to not hold my attention for long. I wonder at how others can focus and make massive and detailed material contributions to this monolithic world of Art. I am left babbling about spiritual transcendence, hypostasis, and being. Out of step with the environment that I have immersed myself in … This Art world. This world of commerce and culture and the intersection thereof. more “volume”
pilot’s strike
Well, days later. I sit, house-bound, stewing, steaming, simmering, stressed. An appallingly bad day yesterday dealing with Icelandair and the cancellation of my flight to Reykjavík. The stupid pilots went on strike a few hours before the flight was to leave … I was actually told to go to the airport last night by the telephone reservations people and ended up standing there for three hours before being told nothing would happen … And I was so wiped from that (including riding out there on the subway from Tribeca) I had to take a cab back to Stefan and Ellen’s place, for a cool U$D 39. Faugh! I actually get rather irritated with traveling through NYC each time I leave the country. I think that when I move my belongings from the storage unit in north-west New Jersey to Colorado or Arizona in August, I will rarely come through NYC in further travels. Every time I feel like I am being drained of cash reserves. Of course, I have a number of friends here, and visiting them is important, but it is so expensive just passing through. The suspension of the traveler in-transit is a suspension inanimate. A preservation outside of sanity within the crystal glass of potential movement, disconnection is complete from all possibilities. I shuddered in the jarring stop of this disruption. Angry. Upset. Thinking of the little boy who was/is counting down the days until he sees his Pabby. And me closer but still an ocean apart. I do not understand the torrent of emotion circulating around this permutation. As it is not technology that is the cause, but more, a measuring of the expanse of human greed in the realm of corporations — how those at the bottom are exploited more or less, and those at the top exploit more or less. No, I do understand the emotions. I am extremely insecure about certain aspects of my traveling. There are so many indeterminate things to cope with that I am rather rigid about the big steps like plane trips, and housing (something I have written about before in this travelog), and when these big steps go awry, I feel very vulnerable, and most of all, when disruptions affect my monetary situation. My monetary arrangements are made with basically no slack. And my fund this time is calculated for food for the three months of travel, and small daily expenses like swimming with Loki. Two days in NYC extra blows the entire thing (well, not quite). Money is my only disgressionary tool — but the quantities I work with are so minimal that it provides only the most primitive buffer — for example, the first time I went to the airport (Kennedy) this week, I went by subway, Friday afternoon, plenty of other people on it, so it is safe, and it saves me U$D 20 at least over the next cheapest form of transportation. However, I am so exhausted after the scene at the airport and pissed about the plane not leaving that I end up taking a taxi back into the City and again, the next time I head to the airport, I also take a taxi because it was a Sunday afternoon and the subway is a bit more questionable (safe?) (and a much further walk away from Stefan’s as some platforms are closed on weekends). So I take a taxi again. This really blows the budget. I do not make phone calls to people here in town. I have cut those connections. It is possible to deal with email, but there is no heart in it. I spend the day fixing up the travelog site to begin entries on this present trip that will go on until August where I will most likely end up in Boulder, Colorado, teaching a few classes in Electronic Media at one of the old alma maters — the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado. Long road ahead that hopefully will not have too many potholes like the present one.
premature declaration
Well, as I come to the close of this project, at least as I consider it, I look back at the fleeting year of movement through ten countries and tens of homes and beds. It has been a rich and complex movement in both space and time, exhausting, stressful, joyful, exciting, seldom profitable from a monetary point, but I think, profitable for the soul. And seriously problematic for the back — which is now broken.
worse back
Sunshine and snow out the window this afternoon. My folks slept in this morning, missing the alarm that usually get them to church on Sunday morning. I am still crippled after most of yesterday lying in bed and working on Web things. I am getting a bit afraid that something more serious than a pulled muscle or so is wrong. Fearful because I am one of those lucky Americans without any health insurance at all. The pain is strange and deep when I make certain movements. Changing directions, turning. How to solve this problem? I will stay today in bed also. Try to get this thing rested and recovered. Last evening Hope called from LANKaster Online and they were desperate to get the web site I have constructed for them online as their old site was causing some serious server slowdowns for an unknown reason (possibly because of some experimental CGI programming that one of their hackers had been doing). Mickey up-loaded the site in a version that I had put in my test directory earlier in the day, and it looks okay . I have made some updates already, but will have to wait on uploading until Mickey solves the direct-access ftp problem that has been causing grief with ftp clients.
This back problem has got me scared — just what I didn’t need, and just what I feared about being back in the US. A medical problem. Helpless.
Four robins sit in the tree outside the window.
David Byrne
Christmas over. I made a big breakfast for everybody on Christmas morning and then we opened presents. Janet gave me a copy of David Byrne’s book, Strange Rituals, which caught me somehow … I have always enjoyed the Talking Heads (one of my first concert and album reviews in the Oredigger was the Heads’ Fear of Music disk which, although I didn’t quite understand the scope of the minimalist urban perspective at the time, in retrospect was a great album. And of course, in-concert, the Heads were explosive: led by Byrne. I also caught a solo concert by Byrne, in, of all places, the national symphony concert hall in Reykjavík a couple years ago. I remember sitting, no, standing on my seat, dancing, while this older lady sat next to me and didn’t move a muscle—she was probably only at the concert because it was (literally) cool to be there. Byrne really has been all over the map creatively, and not in a spotty and dilettante-ish way, but in a struggling (and successful) movement testing, trying the responses of various media to see if they will be the proper vessel for his energies. Anyway, this book, Strange Rituals, is pretty interesting. It is a photography book primarily, with some text. I found it inspiring (not to mention that Janet posed the question in the accompanying card—When’s your book coming out?). I have been toying with the idea for some time, doing a book, and have made a few attempts at a beginning, although I haven’t had the time to make a more serious start. The images are there, and I guess the daunting task is the editing, layout, and treatment of text. I have gone through several working titles, the latest being Rituals of Movement, Rituals of Place. I guess it resonated, this Byrne book, the images had a vein of the raw and concentrated aimlessness with a thematic non-thema that concentrates energy on the flow and energy behind the images … A bit hard to settle upon, but striking. I have been put off of my own work by the over-riding need not to make a “best-of” type project, that is, searching for the images that are most accessible from the traditional photographic standpoint. Editing my own work has always been such a challenge for me. Some where, I have the wish that another person would come along and help me do the editing, be the Editor in the critical construction of this structure—a book—as I am unable, so far, to do it myself.
I am free to behave, to create, and to act in ways that have never appeared before on the Earth. Maybe. I am free to invent myself and my culture from scratch. I have, like Stephen Daedalus wished, cut myself off, released myself from the dead weight of history. The pressure of constantly having to build my own support system, my own philosophy, my own religion, my own unique way of life makes me slightly neurotic. It is more than one person, or even a living community or nation, should have to bear. America, for many immigrants, is the insane wilderness it always was. It is still the land of limitless dreams, boundless desires, and insatiable lusts. And of greed, psychotic outbursts, and subtle oppressions.
David Byrne, Strange Ritual: Pictures and Words (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1995).
On to work at LANkaster.com. Plenty to be done. And money to be made. I move onward into the day. Lawren left early this morning, driving to eLAy, to get back to work. Doug came up with Jason and Angelique after flying in to Phoenix from NYC via Las Vegas.
no regrets
Sunday morning. Gospel radio playing. On board the yacht No Regrets at Port Annapolis Marina. Beautiful morning. SunLight streaming through the windows, crisp and chilly outside. Dreams last night were restless, falling through scenes of destruction, loss, movement, restoration and contact. As is usual for me at these critical points of movement, heading for NYC tomorrow, unsure of the future, a pillow for me head. Speaking with Greg last night at a noisy restaurant in Annapolis. I hadn’t seen him in many years. We spoke of the Apocalypse and the theology of living and the mysteries of the progression of being. Surrounded by noisy midshipmen from the Naval Academy celebrating a football victory that afternoon.
Paradise Yacht
Sitting in a 40-foot converted trawler in the marina across the Severn River from Annapolis and the US Naval Academy. Today I take Magga and Loki to Baltimore-Washington International Airport for their flight home. The schedule was a bit skewed because Magga had read her ticket wrong (Icelandair screwed-up again…) and they ended up flying out a day later than she had planned. We left Kathy’s place on Friday morning to head to the Baltimore Aquarium for the afternoon when she called to confirm her seats, she found out her ticket was for the following day. Earlier I had called up Mary Anne, Gary’s sister who runs a yachting service with her husband, Jeff. Since I was going to be in the Annapolis/Baltimore area for the weekend, I thought a visit to their place would be fun — and so, we ended up staying on board one of their boats last night and I will stay here for two more nights until I fly up to NYC on the 18th. Loki is on the plane at this moment. Leave-taking. Separation. I move through the material world as one in a mist, where sensual interaction is as though experienced through heavy filtration, heavy interference. It is cold. Winter is definitely here. Even saw a bit of snow last Tuesday morning up in Pennsylvania. But the seasons are only a backdrop, a set for the endless movements that have succeeded each other in the past years.
refined being
Flying in yesterday to this place from NYC. Been back in the USSA (as the Beatles would say) for a week now, longer. Too much movement to make any reflections or thoughts here … And dial-up access is expensive too. Spanish moss hanging from the trees, a palm in the back yard. I am in the South. It has been 15 years since I’ve been down this way in the US. It is different. I am in a different place. Last week, Helsinki, then NYC, and now here. I feel that I should be mining these cultural juxtapositions — to derive a special knowing from the differences and similarities. But I hardly have the time. I suppose simply showing a sequence of images — as I photograph all the time (well, only totaling 20-30 rolls of Tri-X 135-36 in a year) — is the only way… Savannah. I make a small foray out to meet Alyssa at an opening — paintings by the Vice-Chancellor of the College of Art and Design where she is teaching in the Fine Metals department. I walked down largely empty streets in the approaching twiLight. People take the form of small phantoms seen down leafy sidewalk tunnels. TwiLight and dawn are critical times to discover the true face of a city. Transition times. more “refined being”
time and space
Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of fluid memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My rough mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project.
The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?
At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
— Pierre Birot
And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.
uff
My time here is drawing to a close. Another period of hectic travel begins. And still I am unemployed. I do not know how this is happening. Obviously I am not in control. I even listened to a “How to make money at home with a Computer” self-help tape while driving back from Phoenix. I do have the computer, although it is getting old and a bit cranky, but as I have no home, I cannot grab a hold of these concepts. Instead I float on the very skin of being. Ignoring the future, forgetting the past. Floating. Waiting for weather. A storm. Waiting for the next movement with a bit more apprehension than previous travel, after the TWA incident. So it goes. Head down to the outdoor YMCA pool, thankfully, I have gotten myself up to 1200 yards a day (when the pool is open — the afternoon thunderstorms do tend to close the place frequently). There was a good storm late this afternoon, thankfully after I had finished a good workout. Lightning was exploding all around while Bob Dolt was making his acceptance speech for the Republicans. I am really sick of these media events, yet another one, following the Olympics, and next week, the Demagogues, I mean Democrats put on their show. They are sterile, hysterical, and so heavily controlled that it is foolish to use the word democracy in the same paragraph — on anywhere in distant juxtaposition with these spectacles. Buffoonery and frightening nationalism.
kisses thru the air
Took the bus down to Reykjavík from Akureyri yesterday morning, saying goodbye to my little boy who was blowing me kisses as the bus pulled away. These are difficult times. I face them sadly. Hildur and Simi met me on their way back home from the countryside — it was nice spending the weekend with them before flying south. though I had a migraine by the time the bus arrived in Reykjavík. The typical movement-induced one that goes away only with a nap, sometimes with an espresso or a muscle-relaxer-pill. But not this time, I had to huddle in the back bedroom for many hours before recovering, as per usual.
gallup
So it goes. The Icelandic presidential election goes on. Around 57 percent voter turnout to select from the four official candidates. Polls close at 2200, so the results will have to wait until tomorrow, for me at least. Not worth staying up for. The holder of the office of the Presidency of the Republic is largely a powerless figurehead. The soon-to-be former President, Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, was a pleasant person, and put Iceland on the map of women’s suffrage as the first democratically elected female head-of-state. So it goes. The woman candidate in the present race is in third place with 26 percent of the vote as of last nights Gallup poll. MB votes in the morning, and then she, Loki, and I head to Dalvík to swim and make a hike on the headland north of town above the road/tunnel to Olafsfjördur. At the highest point, we are 200 meters above the sea on a steep slope and shear cliff. The view is to the east and west to the headlands beyond the fjords, and then north to the Arctic which was shrouded in a low fog bank. We were in clouds a bit, but otherwise a clear day. My mind drifts forward to the movement of the next few days, on to southern latitudes, back to my native land, back to hot weather. A bit of reflection on these last fifteen weeks of travel since I left that fair monument to the Port Authority of New York, Kennedy International Airport. One of the garden spots of the Western world.
ultimate performance
Up at 0800. I wake even earlier, but stay in bed relishing the lack of movement and the quiet. Volker comes back for breakfast, and begins to make some calls to see what is to be recovered for the evening performance/lecture. It is possible that there may be some few people there, so I will do what I have to do. Which is, let’s see. We stop by at the beautiful restored farmhouse of Rolf Hinterecker (the Director of the Ultimate Akademie) for a chat and then head back home where I simply collected my concentration for the performance.
Performance/Lecture at the Ultimate Akademie Köln: This event was a challenge for me from the moment I scheduled it when passing through Köln back in early April 1996. Normally I would rather do a formal and structured lecture at the schools I visit. I knew this would not be the way to go at the Ultimate — with its close association with the Fluxus movement — I knew that it was an opportunity to try something that would possibly be scandalous at a ‘normal’ school … I knew, for myself, it was a challenge, it had to be a challenge. The primary problem internally was to completely remove myself from any pre-tension that might arise by attempting a performance that did not emanate direct from my internal energies. Pretension is a form of energy that, for me, has a significant negative resonance. I think it is one reason I have never enjoyed theater very much with the enormous pretension within the actors who have to Act. I would like to do three or four things this evening. 1) Cut and eat an apple 2) Name the Places I have been since leaving Iceland on the 22nd of June, 1995, the Summer Solstice, and name the people whom I have been with 3) As I am a traveler, I am a carrier of information and stories from place to place, I would like to find out about you, hear your stories that I might carry them on the the next destination. To name some of the attendees: Pietro, Hans-Jürg Tauchert, “couple of names of couples for a couple of talking travelers relaxing,” Detlef Brezel, Mimi Flick, Skulli, Rolf Hinterecker, Volker Hamann, Paul Virilio, in kind …
Volker and I laugh that in the middle of the performance, Rolf, in an increasingly agitated state suddenly asks “when are we?” as I am reciting three hours of people and places in order of the year’s movement. Without breaking my stride, I say “October,” and continue on for a couple more hours as the space darkens in the twiLight.
embedded movement
Again up early and have a quick breakfast with Björn. Then I have to jog to the bus to the train station in Copenhagen. Board a south-bound EuroCity train (as all German-bound EuroCity trains, this one has a name, the Karen Blixen, who was the Danish fiction writer and author of Out of Africa.). The train boards a ferry at Rødby in southern Denmark for the short crossing to Puttgarden. Suddenly, after leaving the train car to walk up to the deck of the ship, I am shocked by Germans. Loud, aggressive, and self-possessed. It is something of a let-down, after the simple drunkenness of the Swedes and Finns on the other ships. Welcome to Germany. So it goes, on to Hamburg where I change trains to the Gorch Fock heading to Nurnberg via Köln, which is where I get off after a total ride today of only 9 hours. The Köln Hauptbahnhof and the Dom next to it, that familiar island of madness is a rather comfortable sight as we slowly cross the bridge over the Rhine from the east. Volker is there to meet me with news of complications in the arrangements for the performance/lecture I am to do at the Ultimate Akademie tomorrow evening. The original flyer handed out had the wrong date and day which confused everyone, and so the hasty reprinting with the correct times doesn’t get around to many people. Then it turns out that on Friday night (tomorrow) when the performance is to take place, there is a big opening in Bonn of an important woman artist who is active at the Akademie. Such is life. We head to Rösrath and have a beer, and then retire to Volker’s place. I am burnt after about nine hours sleep and some 36 hours of movement in two days. I can still feel the ship movements embedded in my body. that will wear off with a good nights sleep which I get. Volker heads to his girlfriends place, so I am left alone in a quiet flat to check email and sleep. It is then I discover that internet communications to Iceland are down, and remain down for the next two days, as far as I could test from Köln. Never did find out what was going on, but I couldn’t raise any of the Icelandic servers I knew about.
darkness
Thankfully, this morning, Martin decided to drive me all the way to the Silja terminal, about 30 minutes away from Järfälla in Stockholm proper. It was raining heavily, and that would have been an added hassle to make the two train connections and a 500 meter walk to the terminal. At this moment, I am on the Silja Lines MS EUROPA, heading east across the Baltic which can barely be seen out the windows in a brilliant dense fog. I am happy that the boat has a few electric plugs available for me to use with this machine, as my battery only lasts about twenty minutes these days. (Somewhere in the background the World Cup in hockey, between the Czech Republic and Canada is playing itself into a frenzy). Strange energy running on the ship. Finns all around, of course, along with a real variety of folks. A tribe of freaks from the UK with dreads a meter long and jack boots taped together. Not a band, just a tribe heading god knows where. In the huge cocktail bar trimmed in granite, with laser Lights and all, a Finnish honky-tonk/tango band just started up, people are dancing! It’s early in the afternoon. The ship is moving through dense fog, and I have a bit of a feeling that I am in a TwiLight Zone. Downstairs is a shopping mall and, among other consumptive enticements, a MickieDees at which, to be truthful, I will probably have a Big Mac at later. The tango dancing is getting more frenzied, lemme outta here! The traveler, in this age, at least when moving by the techno means of the day, often must surrender him/herself completely to technology. Boarding a boat, a plane, a train, bus, u-bahn, subway, tram, and so on, at that moment, biological life is given over to an Other that is usually faceless and who, him/herself, navigates the space-time of movement in a way that is more or less mediated by technology. What of traveling with the old ways. Walking? I did have that walk from the Barkaby train station back to Martin and Selma’s place two nights ago, as the last train arrives after the last bus. Seven kilometers or so. Puts the reality of sore feet into the technological equation. (fog horn blows). After arriving at the port of Turku I make a quick transfer to the train to Tampere. The train ride puts me into a state of floating awareness. Perhaps this is because when on a train, either one sits so that all things are falling away or so that all things converge. Or, floating because I was on a boat for ten hours. Whatever, I suddenly was aware that I had re-entered the Arctic Realm again. Not sure where/when the dividing line was passed over, but it had been crossed. Perhaps it was the visual experience of watching the twiLight come to the land. I write:
Darkness is blooming from deep under the earth. There is not yet much of it to be seen, but it is there. Driven deep by the reversal of energies that comes each year. It starts at the base of the biggest fir trees, waiting for the right moment when no one, no thing is watching. Creeping upward at the instant one turns away from meditating on the possibility that it may get dark — at some distant future moment which might be an eternity or no time at all. There are times when any thought of darkness becomes impossible. Absolutely beyond the sensual capacity of a human be-ing (and only other things are left to know what will eventually happen, not humans). But, now, darkness is entering the houses, slipping up the trunks of the trees, and spreading through the loam of needles that receives in silence below the green canopy darkening above.
Changing trains:
Tampere
Darkness has consumed the railroad tracks, but the sky has not lost its Light. The Darkness will eventually consume, devour all things touching the earth — phone poles, even the high-strung wires will be turned to total blackness. But the sky will not succumb. Here in this Place. (I feel that I am in a place, a place new to me. A foreign place. A strange place. But a comfortable place.) I am a traveler. I travel. The artificial Lights outside the train window are being sucked into the Darkness. Man produces Light, or, perhaps, only concentrates it in one place or another. But the Darkness consumes it. (Still the sky is Light).
Vammala
My eyes are so tired that I cannot see what I write when the train is moving. My eyes start to jitter and shake. But now we slow to the station at Karkku. In this place, Darkness has almost won. The trunk Light of a car Lights hands and torsos loading luggage, but then all Light is consumed. The sky is now at risk. At 10:45 in the evening, five degrees south of the Arctic Circle.
Harjavalta
Perhaps the conductor of the train and I are the only ones in existence now, except the others who wait. The conductors wife, she waits. Perhaps watching teevee. Programs played by people who no longer exist or maybe never existed. She watches and waits. His children are already asleep, they have entered the Darkness of Night.
Pori, finally, Kaisu there at the station. Kauniita unia (Sweet dreams…)!
crowns
This morning I went into town to the Konstfack (aka, the University of Art and Design), where I had lunch with Hans Hedberg and Olof Glemme, the two full-time faculty at the School of Photography. They showed me slides of student work and the facility which is modest, but includes a bit of digital equipment. They have only 14 students and the program is only for a Masters Degree, not undergraduate work. The school just recently got on-line, with a server and a LAN-line to most the terminals. I never got a hold of Art Node people today, either the phone was busy or no one was around, so I ended up sitting in yet another café, writing myself into a depressive frenzy of self-negation. Not the best way to spend an afternoon, and I topped off the rage with some french fries from McDonalds of all places. I don’t know what has gotten into me … Maybe just too much travel and too little work being done. I think living (the last six years) in Iceland has damaged me, broken my power in a way. For all the intensity it precipitated, it left me without the ability to concentrate and work hard on producing Art. Maybe I never had those characteristic to begin with. Okay, I won’t dwell on things like that here. There are more important things to talk about. For example, tomorrow it is King Karl XVI Gustaf’s 50th birthday, and there have already been quite some celebrations going on in the media leading up to whatever happens tomorrow. The last day of April is also a celebration of the coming of spring (or the ending of winter, whatever), something like the May Pole parties of Germany.
Our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death. — Pascal, Pensées
Stockholm is an interesting and rather complex city. It seems on the verge of becoming too urban compared to other Scandinavian capitals, and the architecture has a certain heaviness that Vienna, for example, doesn’t have. It could be merely the building materials which are predominantly the dense, dark, ancient granites from the glacially scoured Nordic shield. And the fact that today was cold and overcast. Spring will be held off for some days, it appears, even though the trees are desperately trying to bloom. I do imagine in full-tilt summer Stockholm is beautiful and very pleasant like Helsinki. At any rate, I am enjoying every minute I spend here.
heavy weather
At Mathias’ old student/artists flat south of central Vienna on a gloomy, rainy, snowy, sleeting gray day. I take some time getting settled, and aside from a short trip to the Westbahnhof for some food, I stay here, writing, and feeling heavy with the weather, and wondering what the hell I am doing here. It is hard to maintain concentration on anything when there is nothing sure, here on the edge of movement. Not that I have it rougher or anything. More so, I have it not so bad. Just unsure of future.
Es ist genug
Made it to Aachen in about 5 hours from London, not counting an hour layover in Brussels and the time change from the UK to the continent. The ride on the Eurostar was impressive though a bit disorienting when the train peaked speed in the French countryside at 300 kilometers-per-hour. I felt a bit queer and got worse when looking out the window. Other than that, though, it was quite the techno-experience. The tunnel was invisible in the darkness and mirrored windows except for the occasional small green light that flashed past. The terminals at either end were basically nice airport lounges with plenty of stainless-steel, white, and techno-gray accouterments. Staying with Günter and Christina (and their newest addition, Mary Manon, a sweet bonnie bairn, just born on January 4),
friends from Avantière days in the late 80’s, early 90’s, right when I was moving to Iceland. Avantière was an artist group loosely organized by the Aachener artist,
Hans Werner Berretz who I first met when visiting Maastricht with Stefan back in 1988. Manon is named after the daughter of Alma Mahler, the former wife of the composer Gustave Mahler, who was married at the time to the architect Walter Gropius. Sadly, Manon died at age 18. The composer Alban Berg was so taken by the tragic passing, he wrote a violin concerto in her memory, dedicated to the memory of an angel. He died shortly after finishing the composition.
In the spring of 1935, however, he interrupted that project to write his Violin Concerto that had been commissioned some months earlier by the Russo-American violinist Louis Krasner but was directly inspired by the tragic, sudden death, in April, of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband, the famous architect Walter Gropius. Berg usually composed slowly, but in this case he worked quickly to create a memorial for the dead girl (the concerto is dedicated “to the memory of an angel”)—the complex masterpiece was fully sketched out by July and completed on 11 August. It is one of the greatest of all violin concertos and one of the most moving of all 20th-century compositions. Its four movements are paired into two larger parts. According to the composer and scholar George Perle, the first part “was conceived as a musical ‘portrait’ of [Manon Gropius], the second as a representation of catastrophe and, finally, submission to death, and transfiguration”. The vivacious second movement makes use of an Austrian folksong; the third contains the shattering climax that represents the girl’s death; and the fourth, based on Bach’s harmonization of the chorale Es ist genug (It is enough), is a prayer for deliverance from earthly suffering. By scoring the chorale for woodwind, Berg creates an organ-like effect. There are two variations on the chorale melody and brief, touching reminiscences of the folksong and the chorale, and then the Concerto ends quietly, like a soul finding rest. — Harvey Sachs
packing notes: leaving Ice Land
Packing Notes Iceland – NYC:
Albums (Beatles albums separate)
Tapes (in cases?)
Cameras
CD’s (together in trunk)
Software (together in trunk)
Video Tapes (together in trunk)
4×5 negatives (together in trunk)
35mm negatives (BANK!)
one box of wearable clothes
one box immediate papers
one box teaching materials
boxes of archived letters and papers
Nakamichi (in own box) (leave?)
Turntable (in own box)
Camera equipment (in trunk)
Books
Print work
Camping equipment
Darkroom stuff
Tools
Cycling tools
Art tools
Papers
File Cabinet
Trinkets
Framed prints
Art works
Posters
Print drying racks
To travel with:
Daypack
Green suitcase
Grey suitcase
Backpack (zipper repaired in Boulder)
Black bag
Tan bag
Nikkormat
Nikkormat Black (to be repaired in NYC with receipt)
2x lenses
Hard drive
PowerBook?
recent 2x negatives (Get a DAT recorder?)
Glasses
new notebook
2x pens
slides of ?? in a notebook
some audio tapes?
toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, scissors, q-tips, shampoo,
hiking boots, good running shoes, hi-tops?, low black shoes,
anorak or Gortex?
1x wool sox
2x jeans
Icelandic sweater
belt
6x tee shirts
3x tank tops
half gloves?
swimsuit
goggles
I CHING?
paper case
passport
copies of Icelandic papers
drivers license
credit cards (PINs)
no keys!
no towels
African hat
jean jacket
jean vest
Movement: (Gravity)
Movement: (Gravity). Downward. Ocean’s Surface — movement (Carefully singing movements — Singing for Life, Singing the Earth Alive. The Sea. (Movement of Air (Breath of Life).). The Sea. Light on Water. (A Series of Traces. Movement). Transposition of Space and Form.