posted
  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

finally

surpassed the 100 km mark on the lap club. have consistently been doing 3+ km/day for the last two weeks, with a few days off here and there. averaging 48 km/month, not too shabby. final goal for this pitch is to do 4 km. in an hour. it’s going to be harsh to be up at 2000 m. soon, after all this dense sea-side air.

and another emphatic finally, with the Prescott house being liquidated. after more than four years in a severely depressed market across Arizona, one of the worst-hit states in the US housing market, after numerous realtors, open-houses, renters, showings, repairs, and on and on. a bit strange that the place is no longer in the family. after all the maintenance work that I did on it over the years, back to helping on the original construction in the early 1980’s. getting burned by the imploded market is painful: knowing that other investments with the capital would have expanded significantly rather than contracted over the intervening time. a fire-sale three years ago would have, could have, should have … etc …

it was fortuitous that I happened to be there when the eventual buyers happened by for their first walk-through, and I ended up giving them a hour’s pitch on the energy-efficiency and other features of the place. that sold it. the husband is an electrical engineer, so he appreciated the numerous design elements that my father incorporated (in the otherwise traditional wood-frame construction).

but, happy to close that chapter. period. now for a place here in Oz.

posted
  • place: Preston, Victoria, Australia

argh, done

finished the rolling-over process from the travelog to this blog. pain in the arse! 2850 entries at this point, now the hard work of adding several thousand images along with much more audio, and other miscellaneous content in the next months. as acquisitions slack off, I can finally catch up.

in the same moment, I realize that personal communications with Others has dropped off precipitously in the last, say, two years — hmmm, a direct affect of thesis-mongering? or merely life in this instance? unfortunately, few keep up with this blog, otherwise they would have some inkling of what has gone down in the last 24 months or so.

the other thing I realized was that I’ve been making far more images of roadside memorials (Roadside Memorials?) than of live humans. that’s a bit of a shock to the system to consider. when I’ve been encountering quite a number of new people in life. plenty of opportunities. it seems that it’s too intense to drag out the Nikon — it’s too much. either that, or the recent diving into archive has made the further acquisition of images — the continual expansion of the archive — to be a hopelessly perverse exercise. when so much of it has hardly been surfaced to any of the many represented in it. what to be done? there’s only so much time in a rapidly-passing life!

not to mention the greatest down-side of archive is the life-time/life-energy necessary to committed to maintaining it. an archive is all about order, and a carefully constellated archive — one where things may be found! — tends to dis-order the moment that energy ceases to flow into maintenance of that order.

posted
  • place: Preston, Victoria, Australia

memory, it occurs

The problem with externalized memory is that when memory is extracted from the self, we may no longer feel its effects – in recall, in re-living. We may only simulate the feeling of it, or, at most, internally resonate with the symbolic values represented in its external reproduction. Individual embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body state. Externalizing memory is a particular and collective phenomena which arises when the pain of actual experience and its associated memory is too much to bear. Externalizing is available from the same (tele-)technologies which cause the pain to begin with — dislocation and the pain of separation. Perhaps technological development may not proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place.

This is illustrated through the wide-spread propagation of pictorial documentation and the subsequent sharing of those images. The originary documentation occurs to enhance or prove the fact that the individual was fully living; at the same time of documentation, the very documentary process dislocates the self from being fully in the life flowing around, causing a pain of loss.

It’s like looking at a stranger’s snapshots from their youth. They contain only generic and shared cultural triggers, nothing more (or less). Beyond that, there are resonant memories in the viewer, based in the configuration of their own experiences, and while these can be quite strong at times, the difference between lived experiential memory and those resonances is significant.

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

The Green Bench – Day 2 – eNZed

opening, The Greenbench, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

twiddling thumbs for the Knighthood

In art and literature the problem is different. On the one hand, freedom is more possible, because the authorities are not asked to provide expensive apparatus. But on the other hand merit is much more difficult to estimate. The older generation of artists and writers is almost invariably mistaken as to the younger generation: the pundits almost always condemn new men who are subsequently judged to have outstanding merit. For this reason such bodies as the French Academy or the Royal Academy are useless, if not harmful. There is no conceivable method by which the community can recognize the artist until he is old and most of his work is done. The community can only give opportunity and toleration. It can hardly be expected that the community should license every man who says he means to paint, and should support him for his daubs however execrable they may be. I think the only solution is that the artist should support himself by work other than his art, until such time as he gets a knighthood. He should seek ill-paid half-time employment, live austerely, and do his creative work in his spare time. Sometimes less arduous solutions are possible: a dramatist can be an actor, a composer can be a performer. But in any case the artist or writer must, while he is young, keep his creative work outside the economic machine and make his living by work of which the value is obvious to the authorities. For if his creative work affords his official means of livelihood, it will be hampered and impaired by the ignorant censorship of the authorities. The most that can be hoped — and this is much — is that a man who does good work will not be punished for it. — Bertrand Russel (1968, p. 66-67)

Russell, B., 1968. The Impact of Science on Society, New York: AMS Press, Inc.

Thanks for that positive, pragmatic, and ultimately true statement of current affairs. Fifty years later. We can only hope.

posted

acceptance

Yes, as an originator man is solitary. He stands wholly without bonds in the echoing hall of his deeds. Nor can it help him to leave his solitariness that his achievement is received enthusiastically by the many. He does not know if it is accepted, if his sacrifice is accepted by the anonymous receiver. Only if someone grasps his hand not as a “creator” but as a fellow-creature lost in the world, to be his comrade or friend or lover beyond the arts, does he have an awareness and a share of mutuality. An education based only on the training of the instinct of origination would prepare a new human solaritariness which would be most painful of all. — Martin Buber

Buber, M., 1985. Between Man and Man, New York, NY: Collier Books.

The originatory creative act perhaps requires a (painful) level of social isolation — is this the source of the ‘tortured artist’ syndrome? This in contrast to the integrated flow of socialized encounter with the Other which is (also?) the locus of creative action. hmmm…

posted
  • place: Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

Sand Canyon transect

west terminus of Yampa Bench at Chew Ranch, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, May 2010

Try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a $10K investment, or more.

Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, in the rain, but gradually it tapers off, though still very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll surely end up in a ditch somewhere.
more “Sand Canyon transect”

posted
  • place: Pat's Draw, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

Pat’s Draw

edge, Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

hike up Pat’s Draw and around the fault area, up a steep talus slope below the high scarps of Harper’s Corner, as far possible, and even some slow trundling down some very unstable and steep terrains. Seeing more 12-16-point elk racks, more mountain lion kills, and the weather is warm.

posted
  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI residency — Energy of Situation

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).

Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”

posted
  • place: en route Wendover - Gold Hill - Callao - Dugway, Utah

CLUI: Day Thirty-Three — finale

near Callao, Utah, May 2010

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular and rugged Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over-night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

posted
  • place: en route Prescott, Arizona - Paria, Utah

on the road again

sandstorm, Navaho Reservation, Arizona, March 2010
Heading out on a three-month road-trip. Tailwind across the reservation at least part of the time. Embarkation for slickrock and slot canyons, salt pans, playa, and rotated fault-blocks. Heavy tailwind expected, along with winter weather for the rest of the week across the entire west. Hope to appear, unscathed, at the other end in Wendover.

The road fills the head with eye-blink disorientation. Transient fragments of thoughts thrum along in no particular order, no rhythm, as unconnected as any sequence of fated events: reflecting fated events in minds-eyes. Too much seen outside the window, beyond the amorphous silica barrier. And too much not sensible because of that attenuated presence versus the full immersion. (Virtual) movement. Looking for roadside memorials this time. Something to lock the thoughts into the reality of mortal coils. Find a few. Stopping for them is always a bit tricky, especially with a 65- or 75-mph speed limit. I drive a bit slow with this old vehicle of mine, and slower still so that once I spy a cross of some sort, I can safely stop on the shoulder. To die on the same stretch of road somehow would not be auspicious; under the wide silent sky and red cliffs, stars, with the smell of spring sage in the air. Wind passing through shredded plastic bags caught on the barbed-wire fence. Someone told me those bags are called witches panties. A small golden bell tinkles vacantly, tied to a wreath of plastic flowers shivering in the wind.

What is the difference between that containable in the reduced tracing of recorded, reproduced, recreated image or sound and that which resists the reductive process with an impassive tenacity, no, a merely passive and eternal persistence. The difference lies in what the observer brings to the reductive process and what the hearer, viewer brings when consuming the reduced trace. It has little if anything to the originary energy of the thing, das Ding, das Ganze, itself. The emanations affect the reduction, there is a direct correlation, but in the technique, the process of reduction is deeply tied to the techno-social. No way to decouple that. (Or is there?)

All the way from telling stories to making movies to painting canvases to building houses.

What is the advantage of shunting the energy of a situation through more and more of the techno-social domain? Or does it matter at all? Compare (telling) stories in person about an experience (sono-linguistic reductions) with posting digital photographs online (visible radiation reductions). In principle a reduction is a reduction is a reduction. And when compared the the situated phenomena itself, any and all reductions are not the thing itself.

The dam at Lake Powell, as with the Hoover, a high-security zone, protected by hired guns. No bags allowed in the visitors center. Celebrations of all that the techno-social can bring to the merely social, along with a big-screen overview of the lake at 59-percent-capacity with a fat white bathtub ring contrasting the red rock cliffs. German tourists debate the advantages of the Best Western versus the Quality Inn motels.

posted

upheaval

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Saline Valley, California, May 1983

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

posted

routed, rooted

If everything now becomes about the Road: it all falls along that infinitely converging line, that pavement rising to the foot, hard, on occasion scraping the nose, the knees, or the palms; it is both that which is down-trodden, and the means to get there. A path for social flows, climbing, gathering, consuming, dispersing. Freedom, indeterminacy, hydrocarbon wastage, imperial protocols, signage, regulation, safety, danger, possibility, newness. On the road, carrying the old with oneSelf, in a worn knapsack, that which is old, known, important, very important.

So, three or four threads: 1) the Self on the road; 2) the encounter with the Other on the road; 3) the road as an expression of the techno-social context for human relation; 4) what to do on the road that cannot be done elsewhere or under other conditions — what the road proffers to life, how one gets there, that and imagining the end of the road (Oz! to meet the Wizard (or Sorceress) hehe, from the Yellowbrick Road to Oz, now ain’t that whacked!).

In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”

Writing on the road. The translation of movement and sensual input to text. Learning what filters to apply, what social protocols to apply, what protocols to transcend, what to hold, what to release. Discipline.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona - Berlin-Neukölln, Germany

48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III

A special live/streamed event, radio aporee presents flickering wastelands III in its long-standing open-house tradition. good foods, good sounds, good people. part of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival. neoscenes, fresh back from many weeks on the road in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona will take you, with hydrocarbons flaring, on a drifting trajectory through spaces that dwell restlessly between ears and leave traces of soot, soil, and water (listen below!). more “48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III”

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

living room installation

the work for the Williamson living room is finally finished and gets installed the day before I arrive. it works out quite okay for the space (opposite a huge picture window looking out on North Table Mountain). the Center hasn’t manifest itself at quite this scale before. the process was time-consuming, but Cyndy, a customer-service rep at Reed Photo where it was printed and mounted made it fairly painless. a good exercise to run through with digital scans of some of the black-and-white negatives scans I’ve been making. not too expensive, and quite spectacular quality on Fuji papers. mounting is expensive, however. but the whole process seems ripe for exhibition development of works that I started sketching 20 or more years ago — in the form of (long)tall scroll pieces that have multiple images on a single hanging piece of paper. gotta get to it! a slow day recovering from the long day before. Rick briefs me on the spike in activity surrounding the recent shale-gas plays in North America. missed that development in the last years, totally. StatOil alone plans 15,000 wells in the Marcellus formation of Pennsylvania and New York states. holy cow!

posted
  • place: Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

bush-walking

Today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. When standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. Standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is — like the hissing of blood in the ear.

On the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable unnamed mesa. The only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. A good objective for a bushwhack. After the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. Of course, any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. Miscalculated movement will be punished by some extremely sharp and pointed object intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. Then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.

This bushwhack takes me to the Cottonwood. It looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. Apparently some near-surface water is available. Paradise in the shade under the tree. Except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow 20 meters away in the scrub. The shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. It is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.

Minuscule F/A-18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. In the day and night. Moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. For our nation’s security. So it goes.

Otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect diminishes the Light of the desert — and with that, its nature; along with distorting the energy flux among the organisms living here. They did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. This is a problem. Just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system — this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.

The rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. Run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. Someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone un-turned. The West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small two-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. That mineral bonanza, that natural ‘surplus’ regime drove and still drives the development of the West. Straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. Without which, well, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker suggested — Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark — the developed world could not exist.

posted
  • place: en route Prescott - Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

four years later

Start off with hydrocarbon tanking at Woody’s Flying-Vee gas station. I ask the Latina cashier if she knows anything about the architecture of the station, she is completely puzzled by my question. Memory of glory days in the West. Road trip. This one very short, down from the mountains to the desert 1000 meters below.

back in the Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, this occasion in from the Peoples Canyon access — a very bad jeep trail which I only risk a bit more than one mile of the five possible. after a scout of a section up Cottonwood Canyon and finding several sections that would possibly doom my truck, I retreat (not without several stressful moments where a ten-point turn in deep pea-gravel in the wash almost fails). find a suitable spot back up on a scarp above the canyon to park the truck and aLight. no clock-ticking time passes here, only Light time. a treat, treating, retreating. self energy reflecting against the place. reflecting against imbricate order and connectedness and shimmering stars. air temperatures only in the low 70sF, but sun already hinting at the brutal intensity of summer to come. everything is green. air drone humming with winged insects, prepping or engaged in the initial stages of pollination. only a few cacti flowering yet. many of the wildflowers already peaking. the few cacti blossoms are infinitely small spatters of paint dropped onto the muted greens of the land surface. magenta scarlet purple of the beavertail and the strawberry hedgehog. other buds swelling and ready to burst in the next days. owls, rock doves, red tail, peregrine falcons, circling vultures; evidence of javelina and coyote; lizards and pack-rats, kangaroo rats.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

and so on

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable. — John Stuart Mill

Viva idiosyncrasy!

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

more DFW

coming to the conclusion that my writing talents are nowhere near my image-making talents. focusing on the image work might make more sense. but writing (sometimes) is more accessible as an output. here, sitting on a huge archive of images, the vast majority which have only been seen by my self, through the view-finder. the world framed there, then. and also, then, comes the question about the sonic work, and the moving image work. more on that later. I have to remember when back in Berlin soon to transfer all my recent miniDV tapes to hard-disk since my Sony miniDV cam is no longer functioning properly. I need access to all that newish material! it’s like the five rolls of Tri-X sitting in a box here. undeveloped since 2000.

so, a little bit of walkabout (on bike) of the town, beginning to see the place, warts and all.

and then, back to this flood of Wallace that I happen to be consuming right now. to catch up on his legacy — and his political oracle.

Now you have to pay close attention to something that’s going to seem real obvious. There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman. Because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is his own self-interest. If you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying really is in your interest (and it really might be) — still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman’s ultimately after is something for himself. And this awareness is painful … although admittedly it’s a tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious. But if you’re subjected to enough great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough — like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say — it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself. — David Foster Wallace, from “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub: Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain” in Rolling Stone 13 April 2000
posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

back in town

Belly full of travel fiðrildi. Bland poetic insights into leaving Berlin. Not much to say. I’ll be back is probably the most profound. Sooner than later. Profound unknown, the future, what’s the point in statements like that, unless they are based on oracular hypersight. Or delusion. As delusion is just as likely to fit into dream as any ten-year politburo plan.

Out there, outside the door is all this noise. Confusing sensory impressions. And arrival in Ice Land is strange, after a long four year hiatus.

(00:05:55, stereo audio, 11.4 mb)

I make my way to Valgerður’s place in Sund. Loki cycles over later to drop in for a bit. My boy. It’s good to see him.

Bummer, George Carlin dies a couple days ago. He made me laugh, and I am clearly not the only one that he had that effect on.

I look at it this way… For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers… so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

And godaddy.com threw me for a serious loop with an email thunking down into my inbox saying I had to remove any non-web-related files on my server within 24 hours. And yes, it does appear that the user agreement says no file storage on the hosting account, so I have to quickly create web pages that contain links to all the audio and video files on storage. Pain in the arse. But I shot back saying all the content was part of my accreting web space and that 100% of the audio and image files were my own content, so they relented for 30 days at which time they will check the site again. A-holes.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

dkfrf review

Rinus makes some nice notes on the Amurikan evening at das kleine field recording festival last week in Kreuzberg.

Rinus is one of those intelligent and grounded souls who facilitate events that are the polar opposite of pretentious. informal, humane, and best, they include a collection of found artists. artists who are connected by their desire to connect with others in an open way. my impression of the evening of performances was largely the comfort with which it proceeded. for example, I had not intended doing a visual set, thinking conservatively it was about field recording. but when Brandon got the video-projector set up, I thought, yeah, why not. so I started the evening with a slowly-building barrage. guilty, sure, of a phat mix. Rinus noted that it divided the crowd — it’s that polarizing influence that I seem to have. hmmm. it’s partly the software, got to explore how to slow it down for a more meditative mix. density. (going back to the thoughts about levity and density a few weeks ago). Brandon’s set was a perfect counterpoint to mine with the levity and Light of his life.
more “dkfrf review”

posted
  • place: Mechernich, Germany

Richter

make a Lightning trip to Mechernich to see Peter & Kersten & the kids. on the way through Köln, a race over to the Dom Cathedral between trains to see the controversial Gerhard Richter piece 4900 farbe which forms the main (enormous!) southern transept window. not bad, though I have a loathing for Richter as a painter. this based on an experience back in 1992 maybe, up visiting Chuck and Tina in Copenhagen, we went out to the Louisiana Museum where there was a huge Richter exhibition. feeling blasé about institutionalized art already, wandering through the museum we entered a huge room with 6 gigantic canvases and hundreds of incandescent Lights. the effect was so numbing and overwhelming the rest of the day was shot, and I have avoided museum mega-shows ever since. the energy force of patronized spectacular art is to overwhelm, not to inspire.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

RAUM

Zorka, from way back in the Muthesius times and IFKIK, comes by for brunch.

finally meeting the RAUM crew: Karsten, Matze, Jork, and some others. dinner, some openings, and a party at the Humboldt University. hard to imagine being there after walking through that neighborhood before the wall came down — the party was around the corner from the Pergammon Museum. Berlin. spread out. not so densely populated. 1.5 million people shy of it’s pre-WWII population. rents are low, but everybody complains about a lack of jobs, funding, and money in general.

exhibition by Diana Moro — who says about her paintings: as we move towards a new world order — spread your love like a fever and before that, another opening — pixel paintings by Enda O’Donoghue at Gallery Hunchentoot, not particularly interesting.

a skewed palette, perhaps with the idea to match interior design colors. galleries and art events fight for an audience not for the reason of lack of audience, but for the plethora of events and openings. too much going on and not enough people to actually be the audience.

and this

sotto voce: A thought voice-spoken into the ear is released only for a moment from embodied presence as the sonic energy passes from the Self to the Other. In the Other it manifests for ever as a changed energy state of be-ing.

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany
  • author: Sarah Chung

Sarah Chung

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: https://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
https://www.neoscenes.net
https://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
https://www.pierrebastien.com/
https://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
https://www.mutek.org/
https://www.haamu.com/launau
https://www.colleenplays.org/
https://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

after moving

uff, just when displacement seemed banished from thinking and imagination, here in Kiel to help strip all things from one apartment and install them in a house down the street. all in about 24 hours. not counting the packing up process which I missed while in Bremen. the actual move from the fourth-floor walk-up to the 1920’s mansion down the street in the affluent Düsternbrook neighborhood takes four hours. a crew of seven or eight college students and their boss, Leander (a multi-talented guy!), making the transition relatively painless.

for Steffi & Zorak, maybe a different story. beautiful new house, but much finishing work to be done, a flat on the second floor to be vacated in mid-November, a kitchen to be installed at the beginning of the next month, a cellar undergoing major repairs. and boxes. and boxes. and boxes. not to mention a sumptuous garden-intensive yard, garden house, garage, and all the accoutrements that a house brings. Fritz is the first to settle in. when all the world is new at one-year-old, a new house is merely another new-ness in days full of impressive living at the fore-front of be-ing.

lunch of goulash at Thomas’ place across the street. the street lined with early 20th century mansions. it has the vibe of the Glen Ridge neighborhood where Stefan and Ellen live. strange to get this similarity across this wide geo-social distance. although the BauMarkt and the Home Depot are also identical. the latter the same-ness of globalization. the former, the same-ness of local community.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

slogging

continue the slogging with Kevin’s website — getting the painting images processed (200 of 460 done) is incredibly time-consuming. they do look good, though. hope to have an organized catalog up as well soon, with complete information on each painting for possible sales. and trying to finish the Gaithersburg High School 1976 series (138 done of 450). suppose I could just do these for two weeks, finish both of them, and be done with it, but there are so many other things to be done. when Loki’s gone back to Iceland, I’ll endeavor to do that.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Flinger’s glee

Fling-Dinger laughs aloud, giddy with glee, over his favorite passage from Hesse: strictly accurate, it reflects Rousseau’s lament between the social and the individual.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death. more “Flinger’s glee”

posted
  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

right place at the right time

the Solstice, in Echo Park. what more to ask?

walking upstream in Pool Creek Canyon above the abandoned ranch. cross one branch of that major fault, and there the creek is, totally spring fed, gushing from a sand bank in the center line of that huge fault. continue up the canyon in the dry wash. find a cave with a crude lean-to fashioned in it. hung with clothes, boots, and other items. old, very old. at least 50 years, perhaps 75. on the wall are a couple rock paintings. the clothes are working ranch clothes, the rock paintings appear to be authentic. I do not disturb anything, but am very conscious that my boots are making footprints in the sand floor. continuing up the arroyo, the canyon is defined by subtle and massive structural essences of the rock. on the uplifted side of the fault, the underlying limestone shows in the wash. the down-thrown side is at least 1000 feet lower. dramatic geology, good location for field mapping exercises.

sense a mountain lion at one point, the sage is often taller than my head, so, walking through deep brush, scrambling over rockfalls, peering into the numerous caves formed in the eroded sandstone. shooting many images. this is one of the best walks taken in the area. with plenty of cool places to stop, even in the vibrating mid-day zenith of the Solstice sun — overhangs, caves, some Douglas Fir trees, large old junipers, and areas of over-hung canyon wall, rising a few hundred feet above. the absolute depth is about 800-1000 feet, perhaps a bit more. I do not go as far as I can, but stop for 30 minutes to remove fox-tail burrs from pants, socks, and boot liners, where they are beginning to drill into my skin.

Loki does not accompany me.

we later swim/wade upstream to the Green/Yampa confluence and explore. the Yampa seems a few weeks yet too strong to cross. the current is strong even in the hip-deep areas, making a perfect speed for swimming a hard workout in place. the flow of the Yampa is around 2000 (cubic feet per second, cfs), it was twice that at the beginning of the month (see the USGS water data site). in May it can reach up to 20000 cfs on rare occasions — with good snowpack and rapidly increasing spring temps. the Green is half that, and does not vary from around 900 cfs because of the Flaming Gorge Dam. there are a pair of beavers who have found a sheltered cove to hang out in, noshing on aspens up to five inches in diameter which they have cut down and dragged to the river, leaving strange markings in the sand whilst doing so.

the previous day, coming down from the Uinta Mountains, we pass the monstrous phosphate mine which has modified a significant chunk of the south side of the Uintas. I continue work on the Domination of Landscape series to be uploaded later. everywhere in the west is plenty of material for this project. unfortunately.

posted
  • place: Ukiah, California

OHV

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

Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

Nothing like the amplified throb of hydrocarbon explosion to go to sleep by and to wake up by. Camping in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) OHV (Off-Highway Vehicle) area. The premise is simple, the social system has generated devices, machines, both two-wheeled and four that allow a single driver to mount somewhat like a horse, and to ride at speed on rugged and steep terrain. For entertainment. (Note: three-wheeled machines were banned from production 25 years ago because of the vast toll of injuries and deaths which ensued as a fault of the basic design). The word entertainment is key. It is absolutely true, straddling one of these machines, with hydro-carbon explosions vibrating the body, landscape rushing by a high speed. The body transforms itself into the body of a god (or goddess). Speed and flight, and the power to conquer the land makes one a lesser though very carnal deity. It’s great fun. The wider world is narrowed down to a small slice of the road ahead and some limited peripheral vision that is otherwise masked with the (state-mandated) helmet. The system narrows to the challenge of moving forward along a pathway (state-defined, in this case, with designations for beginner, intermediate, and expert, like a ski area), maintaining forward motion and lateral balance while negotiating the shifts in speed and orientation. Essentially an immersive video-game experience. Back to the virtual. Hearing is both muted in the helmet, but also assaulted by the viciously loud hydrocarbon explosions happening with minimal attenuation between the legs, touch is overwhelmed by the vibrations of hands, holding onto the handlebars (feeling reduced by gloves) and actions reduced to wrist rotations for accelerating, and gripping for braking. Sight, limited by the helmet. Smell coming through a nose filter, and otherwise, smell and taste dominated by the grit of dust that chokes everything. This is circumscribed by my definition of virtual as that which entails an attenuation of sensual input to the body-system.

It’s a holiday weekend, one for remembering the dead, fallen heroes, and the reasons that nation-states exist. The right to bear arms under any circumstances.

A radio blasts into the night as soon as the working folks arrive late on the Friday evening for the three-day weekend. Motors are tuned, beer is drunk, laughter and shouting echoes around the local space. The local space is a mis-en-scene, a tableau. The trees are decorations to be cut for fire, nails inserted into and chopped with hatchets because they are there, extruding from what is taken simply for painted or projected backdrops.

The camp ground is, as darkness falls, a backdrop for yet another kind of entertainment to take place. The BLM has posted a regulations sign-board, but it is the victim of target shooting with large-gauge shot-guns. Most of the regulations are unreadable, peppered with holes leaving letters, words, whole sentences unreadable. No shooting so far this weekend yet, but it’s sure to happen. Our campsite has a mound of big red 12-gauge shotguns shells, spent, under one tree, and several hands full of high-power rifle shells of a variety of calibers scattered around. And every once in a while one sees side-arm shells. Spent ammunition. Broken glass, beer bottle tops. Past remembrance-of-the-dead weekends. Celebrated by shooting into the air, shooting the trees, shooting anything that looks non-human. Most of the time.

The ambient audio mix also contains material from the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas compound.

(stereo audio, 12.4 mb)

There is nothing that does not flow forth from the Dharma Realm, and nothing that does not return to the Dharma Realm.

bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

The Planet

two rather friendly, though dark granite bears flank the entrance to the building I’m staying in. granite everywhere. that’s always the first thing I notice in Finland. the density of building materials. granite. the window in the bedroom looks out over the entrance from the second floor. another bedroom in Helsinki. realized in conversation last night that I’ve been coming to Finland for 13 years already. wow.

Finnish flags are unfurled on every building. not sure what that’s about.

head down to the Andorra Theater to meet Andrew and Sophea to see the movie The Planet. part of the Lens Politica Film Festival. I see Steve Kurtz walk out of the previous film early. I don’t know him, and didn’t really feel like interacting. he walks away through the mostly empty lobby. the movie is darker than Al Gore’s tour-de-force on the same subject of global warming. and it covers a bit different territory including e-waste, and developing-world attitudes about the problem. experts paint dark pictures, and pictures paint darker pictures. dark. realizing I likely won’t last to 2050 seems auspicious, though there is a curiosity at the idea of catastrophic change, planet-wide. what terrible lessons that would hold for those who are alive. how they will revile the fools of this present age. but the planet has the potential to re-generate another species if (once!) we eradicate ourselves. give it another 250,000,000 years. why not? or is our presence here a unique expression of order not to be replicated ever. what is it about these imaginations of disaster projected by science that seem to fascinate so much? and in the end, it is still us in the developed world, sitting in theaters in our cities, receiving the images of film producers, telling us what is in the world, rather than us out in the world, be-ing there. fully.

posted
  • place: en route Brussels Midi, Belgium - Maastricht, Netherlands

more meetings

Bad night’s sleep again, not sure where that is coming from. Feng shui of hotel rooms. Don’t like hotels. Open window too noisy to sleep; closed, nose imitates room and stuffs. Maybe caffeine. Some small cups of coffee during meetings, not just to be polite, but it smells so good. So, wake up before alarm, force the obligatory liter of water down, gradually clear head. body drags along behind. pack, and hobble down to breakfast and wifi access to at least consume croissants and Eudora. And some Firefox. Though belly is fat and getting fatter. Can’t wait for a swim, cycle, something aerobic. But Dirk has made a tight schedule of luxurious 2-3 hour meetings with such an interesting variety of people. And so, this morning, he comes to breakfast a bit after Thomas Laureyssens comes tentatively to my table.

Excellent generation of ideas, intuitive connections, and pathways, dynamically evolving possibility. Thomas is working on a social networking project which aims to create a functional gateway for Belgian new media initiatives.

Brussels as the background. some good food, some short visions, hardly any time to catch the tourist scene, and no photographs made. Nothing missed on that account. Previous visits, the most recent was in 2000 for the closing cafe9.net meeting which ended up in the scandalous shouting match among participants at a Chinese restaurant. So much for European solidarity.

Dirk and Thomas head off after Angelo Vermeulen arrives for a short meeting before I have to catch the train to Maastricht.

Angelo illustrates my dialogue-based worldview with several direct anecdotes which counterpoint his prodigious and stimulating formal creative output. And reminds me a bit painfully the lack of a PhD is a deterrent to social viability. That or a book. So that story haunts again in the background. Text trumps lived praxis, title trumps actual presence. sheesh.

We have lunch at the Brasserie Falstaff with a nice interior where “you can admire the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” and the staff looking like they should be in a Paris bistro. And the pay toilets governed by a wrinkled old lady. Just the way it used to be. Mais oui! Typically touristic, with a complete backwards look to the future. Tourists would never distinguish that this is not real. Maybe tourists are so conditioned by looking at the world via tele-vision, that when confronted by the real thing, they cannot tell when it is a simulation of something else authentic. Like Disneyland. Seems like a great place to actualize physical presence in the ‘world’ when compared to prime-time teevee. uff!

(00:04:52, stereo audio, 9.4 mb)

Over to Maastricht, train to bus to Rod and Lizbet’s place. Nine years since last time. Catching up on years of remote art, music, books, Iceland gossip. Talk about getting more of Rod’s work online aside from the wiki page that a friend has done—he’s a networker, and a singular one of that breed, a networker’s networker. No time to worry about publicity, the market, promotion. The work and the network are all that counts, matters, all that provides life reason. His output into that network is prodigious, profound, and humane. His archive is priceless, marvelous!

posted
  • place: Stepney-Limehouse, London, England

Valentines

White Heliotrope

The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half-open, where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread;

The mirror that has sucked your face
Into its secret deep of deeps,
And there mysteriously keeps
Forgotten memories of grace;

And you half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.
— Arthur Symons

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the gift of attention

in the days preceding the material frenzy that so characterizes the holiday in the consuming world, I ponder my own relation to the holiday. what could be nicer than receiving a gift? something usable in the course of survival or something completely use-less except for the aesthetic energy it slow-releases to the eye or ear over time. or something that touches on the architecture of the relationship of giver to receiver.

for me the highest gift in the sped-up road-warrior world of 21st century amurika would be the gift of attention. now, I’m not talking about the obsessively sought attention of media-to-star, the ego-centric attraction of appearances, of shiny and slick surfaces, of painted-over cardboard facades, of glimmering particles that exert the false-attraction of material desires. nor the gloming and needy self-centered-ness that requires vampiric sustenance.

but more the binary and reciprocated exchange of attentive presence where the floating self might turn full-faced to the other and in Light and in Gravity — making Light, making Gravity — the two beings take up temporary residence in each others field-of-attraction and field-of-reflection. this is the gift of life, lived life-time shared. attentively shared, focused, concentrated. a gift without value, except for the value of life-time passed. a commodity in limited supply for each, such as the Moirae decree. no higher value of gift except for the giving of life to save a life.

but what is the essence of this gift of attention? in the exchange, sharing of life-time, the self is open, and in that open-ness, adsorbs the be-ing of the other. in this, the self is changed, evolves, realizes the absolute character of other-ness, and what a precious gift it is — to provide the opportunity of change. and between this change, and the apprehension of difference, occurring in an unstable space of the not-knowing, creative spark flashes. and we become more than we previously were.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

gridcosm & slacker

it’s been ages since I’ve spent time checking out gridcosm — a SiTO project initiated by net amigos Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast pushing a decade ago already. it’s getting very active again, as a new generation of SiTO artists have at it. I’m quite sure it’s the oldest and longest-running collaborative visual network project around. a singularly deep (literally!) visual essay on the past decade of network pop-being. or so. explore it! Jon and Ed are brilliant networkers and an inspiration to me over the years with their easy-going attitudes and intuitive insights into distributed creativity. last time I saw those guys in meat-space was in Montreal at the 1996 ISEA. Keep up the great work!

then, watching Slacker on DVD by Richard Linklater, appreciate the smoothness of film-making and a fluid and spontaneous anti-narrative:

… When young we mourn for one woman … as we grow old, for women in general. The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, what are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. — Joseph Jones, Slacker actor

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

ghs 1976

Working out. In a room with others, loudish 1970’s rock music playing. Does this fit the demographic? Sweating. I climb the same number of floors in the World Trade Center. 110 in 25 minutes. Sweating. 275 calories apparently. Listening to Prairie Home Companion on the way home, there is strange background music playing for one song. Turns out it is my new phone, incoming call. Don’t know the ringtone yet. Static floods the radio when I park in the Frys lot, there is a radiostatic hole around there — no doubt related to the high-voltage lines crossing the land nearby and a massive switching sub-station across the street. And maybe a cosmic convergence. When I get home I erase Kevin’s home and cell number from my old phone. But what about his old address in my database? Leave the name, but erase the address? the phone? The plight of external memory in remembering and forgetting. Better to allow meatspace memory take over instead of archival databases. Especially when remembering those who have passed. My embodied memory of him. But then there is the issue of the painting archive. Digital? Rather look at the painting themselves. Have one sitting in the bedroom, a purple wave.

On the phone with friends who generously input into the choices coming up shortly. I seek energy from my network in this time of change, of possibility.

On the occasion of the upcoming thirtieth reunion — beginning to process and upload the scanned images from Gaithersburg High School, graduating class of 1976. As the main yearbook photographer, I ended up with several hundred negatives from that year. At that time, many of the negatives were not printed for technical and other reasons. Now, though, it’s pretty easy to scan negatives and make a decent image with Photoshop. So, a couple months ago I scanned around 400 of the images.

posted
  • place: en route Livermore - Kelso, California

next year

post wild-fire, Tesla Road, Diablo Range, California, August ©2006 hopkins/neoscenes.
post wild-fire, Tesla Road, Diablo Range, California, August ©2006 hopkins/neoscenes.

Hit the road, heading gradually south and east. Through the burned hills of the Diablo Range between Livermore and the Great Valley. Avoiding the main roads when possible, but spending most of the day at speeds too high, with death only a wrist-flick away. Here again in the Mojave. Fullness of stars. Moon will be up later. Tonight on the ground. Head exhausted after first the NYC trip and then the ISEA gig. Haven’t processed it all. And the short time need for employment. Prescott is a lousy base anyway for that.

Head exhausted with the whole last year. Need to clear it out and start a new life. Suggestions about going to OZ surface again, after the virtual contact and the contact with various kiwis and ‘strains in the last couple weeks. hmmm. That or Canada. Okay, heading for bed. Letting granite grit cradle my brain for a half-solar-cycle.

Great visit with the Pulsar Road crew. Left five of Kevin’s paintings on loan. Took the rest with.

The day before Loki turns 14. The separation is painful, especially with no clear plan for the next months except for heading to Colorado and to Missouri. Putting job applications in. Following up on the UC-Davis opening, and on. Spend the next week finalizing everything in storage. Keeping out what’s necessary. Trundling the rest off not to be seen for an indeterminate length of time.

posted
  • place: Brooklyn, New York

day one in the studio

Begin the arduous work of documenting Kevin’s ouevre, or at least beginning the process—with the 700+ works that are still here in his studio. The new Nikon seems quite up to the job so far. Got to shoot raw images, number the paintings on the reverse with a Sharpie, write a description in my notebook (enough to identify the painting in the image), then later I’ll edit the images, add any pertinent meta-data, and put them online. It’s an overwhelming task. Hope also to gather the 150 or so paintings that are already scattered across the globe—to list the owners, the story behind the acquisition, and assign numbers in the same system. But how is it that I have made the time/energy to deal with this stuff? dunno. Energy that could go into my own work. Although as the years pass, I become more the organizer of material goods, of spaces. Whatever that means. How many garages, garden houses, sheds, cabins, offices, attics, basements, systems, have I cleaned, ordered, and organized?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006

John Wester Learn sorrowfully from the network (from Karen (T.)) of another passing. John Wester was a great friend from junior and senior high days. we maintained contact after the college diaspora and when we were both living in Los Angeles after college (he doing his law degree, me finishing my tenure with corporate oil) and later through email, thinking that at one point we would cross paths. an obituary is a terse framework that little shows the life, only the social situation. I’ll add some words and, if I can find some, photos soon. Karen calls — the first time we have spoken in, what, maybe 30 years? nah, a few less than that. it is strange and nice to hear a voice that slowly stirs older memories — of those humid summer days down at the North Shore dock of what was a not very large lake in one of the first planned communities of the 1970’s, Montgomery Village. I would cycle down Brink Road from home to the Village on occasional summer days before a drivers license made more of the world available. At the dock, John, Richard, Taryn, Karen, Mark, Gary, Bruce, Sharon, and others would hang out — some of them working (boat rentals), some like myself, just hunting for summer friendship. more “John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

The GenerativeCollager

As a test-review for furtherfield neoscenes reviews a random online project by Sandra Crisp:

Hmmmm. Recalling a review I did some years back for kunstnet in Oslo, it seemed interesting to pretend for a moment I was a novice user who had just received a URL of interest from a good friend who’s critical opinion I trusted.

A novice user perhaps wouldn’t be using FireFox on a Mac, that’s clear. More likely Safari. When I attempt to go to the project from the introduction page, as the Java applet loads, waiting, waiting, until finally I get an error window with the following text:

WORKING VARIABLES NEEDED FUNCTIONS ***************************************************
// SET UP ALL THE VARIABLES FOR THE IMAGE BLISTERING void setup() { // CREATE THE TIMERS AND IMAGE COLLAGERS size(WIDTH,HEIGHT); t = new Texter(width,height); timer = new Timer(500); collager = new Collager(); collageCount = new Counter(3); // <- CHANGE IMAGES PER TIMER COUNT //load a sound and loop it soundA = loadSound(“SURSHLOOP.Wav”); //this loads the sound soundA.Loop(); …Snip… Timer.SetTarget(floor(random(500,1500))); // <- CHANGE IMAGE DROP TIME } // TELL THE COLLAGER TO PUT A RANDOM PICTURE ON THE SCREEN collager.Paint(); // MAKE IT ALL NICE AND SMOOTH smooth(); } loadPixels(); performDblBuff(dblBuff, pixels); updatePixels(); t.Paint(); //updatePixels(); } / ******************************************************

Somehow I want to add the e.E.Cummings text:

this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper. more “The GenerativeCollager”

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Kevin Karl Burger 1957 – 2006

portrait, Kevin, New York City, New York, July 1995

Kevin passes away this morning after a three-year fight with brain cancer. A brilliant painter, the source of much pointed insight and incisive wry wit, a good story-teller, and all-around warm and lively friend. His embodied presence, removed, now transforms to empty space, but, certainly, no vacuum. We met way back during the infamous Conrans-Habitat catalog shooting that Bill was doing in the summer of 1990. Kevin was working for the Conrans crew, I was an assistant for Bill. Hot summer day after hot summer day, on location in Peters Valley for the first half of the shoot, a sense of humor was necessary. Then Kevin and I drove a U-haul truck full of furniture and location gear all the way to Acadia National Park, ME. Many stories to tell about that adventure. Nothing like shooting a four-poster bed on the top of Cadillac Mountain at dawn. It was an auspicious starting point for many friendships: I think it was all the lobster (lobstah) consumed in Bar Harbor (Bahhabba) with the crew. On the way back, we filled a huge cooler with lobsters and dry ice, and had a big dinner at John and Laurel’s place back in PV.

more “Kevin Karl Burger 1957 – 2006”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Jón Gudjónsson

Jon, Eyjafjördur, Iceland, June ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
Jon, Eyjafjördur, Iceland, June ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.

Loki’s grandfather, Jón Gudjónsson, passed away this past night in his sleep, at the nursing home in Reykjavík. My former father-in-law. This, an image of him from 1993 when he still had a fishing boat and would put out in summer from Hrísey sometimes for a day or more, fishing for cod. I was fortunate to accompany him on several occasions, running the hook lines, piloting the boat back to harbor while he cut hundreds of filets. He had a seaman’s eyes, Light blue with a far-seeing squint. He navigated simply by watching the water and any nearby landmarks. Whenever standing onshore, he rocked from side to side, feeling the sea after 50 years of fishing. While the word jolly is overused for Santa Claus, it would apply to Jón, with a boisterous and quick laugh, no mistaking when he entered a room. He was an expert making landi, the garage-made Icelandic hooch with a kick. He brewed it to 95% alcohol and then watered it down a bit for mere humans to consume. Pure, potent, no hangover. And hárfisk (dried filets) which he supplied the whole family — he had a whole production facility in the back of the tar-paper cabin on the island — along with a noisy fan assembly to speed the drying. He was the master of repairing things with whatever was available in the moment. Enough to get through the next winter. I considered him to be one of my few connections to ‘authentic’ Icelandic traditions. Growing up in the times when famine was not far away, moving to the big city during the WWII boom, and then capitalizing on the purely Icelandic boom brought on by the international law increasing national coastal (fishing) control to 200 miles. He owned and captained a large trawler for some years. He could cat-nap anywhere at any time, even after several cups of jet-fuel black coffee. On the sea, he admitted to me once that he had conversations with the seagulls. He kept a weather log book which he would make regular entries in the most beautiful handwriting, with big tough hands that never saw gloves ever when gutting fish for hours in freezing temperatures.

I remember one late spring, accompanying him north to prepare the Arnarberg 101 (his boat) for the summer — scraping and painting, fixing the engine and autopilot, and other tasks. First thing, however, on arriving by ferry to Hrísey was to make the rounds, visiting the locals, he knew everybody. house after house of coffee, cakes, pancakes, and landi. Oh my gosh, my stomach was trashed after several hours of that. When no one else was around, he would mostly speak English, but when there was a family gathering he would imperiously demand that everyone use Icelandic with me.

He will be missed by all who knew him.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

George Saunders

George (Saunders) leap-frogging a parking meter somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, sometime in the year that Orwell’s O’Brien tagged when the lesser shall have a future controlled by the greater, thus:

How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
…
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
…
And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. — George Orwell

George Orwell I did not know, but George (Saunders) is a friend from some distant past. I heard a cryptic review on NPR of his first novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil that made its way to shelves recently. I’d buy a copy, but I don’t spare cash for material things that I would just have to carry around. I’ll wait until it’s online with the Gutenberg Project or so. maybe somewhen else I’ll resurrect some visual histories of other days that were shared. why George was leaping over the parking meter I no longer recall. why I made an image, I only know that I have been taking images of friends in various stages of living at various ground coordinates for more years than I can remember why. certainly not for nostalgic reasons because when I took them, there was no future, only a present that skittered along, like the rocks I sometimes spin across bodies of water, or the rocks that I have held in hand, drawing lines on another’s body, or those same rocks, smooth in their repeated collisions with other rocks, now in my jean’s watch pocket, getting warm from expended body heat, and grounding one side of my body to the body of the earth. humans have life collisions. I collided with George, numerous times, it wore down some sharp edges, maybe. maybe not. I still have sharp edges, George perhaps not. maybe not proud of that, as evolutionary alteration is a sign of maturation.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

lame duck

November comes already. a week shy of four months in rehabilitation. there are still many problems in the body. lying on the couch reaps intense stiffness and pain when getting up. belly distended, stretching some muscles, and others don’t knit back together. discouraging. the exercise regimen is rewarding in that the body doesn’t hurt so much afterward, but during, it is a struggle. keep thinking that progress is made, but then there is so much yet to recapture. watching the chickens and ducks. there is a lame duck, bottom of the hierarchy except for the young hen hatched from an egg a couple months back. Giant Jeffrey, the Bantam cock, is at the top, by virtue of size, formidable spurs and talons, and aggressiveness. then come the hens, ranked by size. then the ducks, at the top there is the brown one. only when I throw locusts into the pen, large and juicy, will the young hen fight the ducks for it, chasing whoever gets it, even one of the large hens. Janet fed the young hen insects early on, and after awhile it would go berserk when you tossed a moth, cricket, or damselfly into her cage. so now, she is very focused on insects, more so than the other birds. I separated the two feeding troughs — when they were together in one location, the cock and hens would not let anyone else near. this way it complicates their hegemonic attempts. also occasionally put the chickens out into the large corral, and leave the ducks in the small space with the food. and every time I see the white duck, with a game leg hobbling around, I can’t help but think “Dubbyah.”

can true democracy coexist with hierarchies of power?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

killing hidden waters

Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process, like the looting of ore deposits, soil, forests, and fuels, is the machinery behind the expressions “conquest of nature” and “the miracle of the deserts.” Rip away the veneer of western history and this consumption of resources links the centuries.

[and the final paragraph of the book:]

This writing has always been on the wall. It is not a revelation to learn that cheap energy makes societies boom, that groundwater in arid regions has negligible recharge, that humans tend to use as much of anything as they can lay hands on. We can ignore these facts and pump, mine, and combust with abandon, or we can recognize these facts and attempt to construct a sustainable society. There will be no painless answers, nor were there any in the past.

Bowden, Charles (2003) Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.

I was not expecting what he presented, and was fascinated when he repeatedly makes the connection between levels of technological implementation and several attendant processes — the consequent overall social structure, the impact on the environment, and the absolute energy cost of the different implementation levels. Starting with indigenous tribal groups and continuing through the contemporary inhabitants in the desert Southwest, he examines the usage of a range of resources — water, fossil fuels, soil, and forests — and makes a good case for the cataclysmic risk of unsustainable use. Indeed, pointing out the obvious, he makes it clear that unsustainable use (always) ends in some kind of socio-economic collapse — perhaps deferred temporarily by substituting one resource for another — but eventually depletion precipitates a collapse. Noting a sequence of energy-coalescing advances (the horse for the Comanche Indians, fossil groundwater for the High Texas Plains (the Llano Escatado), the metal shovel for the Pima indians, etc), Bowden examines the consequences of resource exploitation via those technological advances and compares the social system both before and after access to the resource (as afforded by the technology change). Basing the view on the intrinsic energy value of the resource, he forms a powerful critique against contemporary social systems that blindly insist on technologically maximizing usage of a non-renewable resource base. It is probably necessary to be reminded that these cycles occur across any (and all) civilizations, down to rather small population groups.

Compared to my own energy-based worldview, Bowden confirmed some examples that I often use in class — where the history of civilizations may be directly correlated to the existence of one or more non-renewable resources which causes the ‘rise and fall’ of the society. The rise is facilitated when the resource-base becomes exploitable through technological advance or through simple physical access to the geographic locus of the resource followed by the subsequent fall when the access is denied or the extent of the resource is exhausted. One example I use are the British hardwood forests that, through technical advance became the basis for the construction of the British fleet which eventually defeated the Spanish fleet. When those forests were depleted, the British had no substitute for the first-growth elm and oak trees which were used for the unitary keels of ships-of-the-line. Not long after the depletion of British forests towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, coal, a potent form of concentrated solar energy is discovered, and drove the industrial revolution. British Imperial hegemony follows the decline in this readily available coal. And, aside from a tenacious clinging to Gulf oil resources following World War I and continuing as a secondary partner to US hegemony, the British Empire is in very late decline. This example is over-simplified, but it is not difficult to make the case that a single fundamental resource or energy source or a combination of a few underlies any concentration of social power. And, conversely, it is not difficult within any social system to identify those primary sources, given that much of the attention of the social system as a whole is dedicated to the secure utilization of those resources.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

deflated

no energy. good days are fewer than bad days. bad days come when sleep is not found. a particular kind of diffuse pain or sensation keeps body from sinking into deepening slumber. no fast-racing head thoughts, just sensate disturbance. strings the days out in a fog of lack and pointlessness.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

next steps

now concerns have all shifted to simple things like how to manage post-surgical edema in my left leg, as it migrates slowly towards the figurative ground of foot-dwellers. this seems to be the most intensive source for problems (pain and discomfort). unless there is an underlying neurological pathology, which I hope not.

still have a yet-uncounted 12-inch string of surgical staples decorating my left abdomen. my surgeon is on summer vacation, so, won’t meet with him until next week to find out what is going on with the surgery, recovery, and probable causes of the bone density problem. almost two weeks out of surgery. should I feel better or worse. having no baseline makes life frustrating. although my base health was excellent going into the whole thing, it’s not clear where I would be or even how the original injury actually happened to begin.

still processing the whole paradigm-shift of plan-changes, and possible life-changes. hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

descent into hell

Details aside. Woke up this morning in peak condition, ready for a lively 4th of July. Hours later, stretched out in pain on the bedroom floor apparently suffering from a herniated lumbar disk or so. The truth turned out to be far worse.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

car wash, then meaning

portrait, Jeb and Dave, Prescott, Arizona, May 2005

meaning in/at the car wash. finding meaning from employment or perceived fiscal worth. bad direction to go in. moving around town,

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. — Viktor Frankl

on the phone, Bill suggests Frankl’s logotherapy concept of finding meaning in life. at any rate, Jeb and Dave of Deep Canyon, the painters, have created meaning by protecting houses with thick layers of vinyl acrylic latex stuff. took them five days total to do the house. whilst not disturbing the nest with four pinky-sized hatchlings in the house finch’s nest in a wreath next to the front entry.

painting the house, Prescott, Arizona, May 2005