posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

anarchic food – Day 5 – eNZed

near the art museum, on the anciant dunes, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

There’s quite some stress around the catering for the symposium as the person who was to do it had a terrible family trauma arise in England. There will be around 50-75 people coming from around New Zealand along with a few foreign presenters, and the food requirements are vegetarian, vegan, lacto-ovo, etc, etc … complex on limited resources …

Turns out that Gregers though, was the cook and manager of that anarchist vegetarian dining room near Bjorn’s house in North Copenhagen — I’d even eaten there a couple times when visiting Bjorn — so between Gregers and Jonah from the local community, along with volunteers, things will come together. It’s a challenge!

Oh yeah, and it’s Gregers’ birthday dinner in the evening. I work on a big fruit salad, and get the opportunity to introduce Freya to pomegranate seeds.

posted

trauma

Yes, there was an event; yes, an event began, barely, when she began to say something. But this event did not come to fruition, for nothing, nothing really, happened — except a sudden defamiliarization of my world, an unforeseen estrangement brought about by the least violent of all acts — the mere emitting of sounds — that topple the sense-structure of my world. After she breached my silent existence, silence returned, devouring both of us again by expropriating my ability to respond. So nothing, nothing really, happened. But this nothing, compared to “idle chatter” and the “forgetfulness” of an ordinary conversation, was much more dramatic. It produced in me an effect like no other. Considering what happened, or rather, what failed to take place, I must confess that I was profoundly affected by it. In fact, I am still living that event through the unique nothingness brought home to me by the incident, suffering from it, agonizing over it as an event that keeps returning as a non-event. In any case, the undeniable fact is that there was an event, there took place a situation that, although nothing, nothing really happened in it, is still happening now. It was like a traumatic “primal scene,” forever gone but constantly coming back. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p 224)

Reflecting on the abstracted essence of the gap between the self and the other: it suggests the reality that we cannot share the same point of view. There exists an infinitely deep irruption, separation, or gap, between the Self and the Other. This is defined partly by the presence of the energized matter that makes up our bodies and by the fact that this particular embodied form of matter cannot be collocated or commingled with another body. There is the warm and wet topology of sensual engagement, but this is not collocation, though some would like to believe that it is. The Self will never share the same point-of-view as the Other. My eyes cannot be collocated with yours. I may exchange places with you, but when all is change along the arrow of time, what you experienced there and then, I cannot experience there and now. The interstitial chasm exists within constant change and flow and it exists as long as life is embodied. Some models of transcendence suggest a unification, an omniscient one-ness, after embodiment ends, but here and now we all face the challenge of hypostasis, that puzzling duality of existing in a transitory body now and yet connected with an apparently detachable spirit before and after.

Communication cannot not take place. — ibid, p. 227

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: Berlin, Germany

practicing levity

pondering the best way of delivery of the Regime text. possibly a podcast.

always the question: how to express?

is it mere ego-centricity that places a priori limits on the reception of Self-expression? or an internal complicity in guaranteeing obscurity? density of expression is an interesting concept. what are the conditions where density is counteracted? isn’t that where levity is found, or expressed. (it does go back to Light and Gravity again). where the gravity is that-which-coalesces, that-which-brings-together, which tends to stasis(?). and Light is the dispersive element which tends to activity. working with Light (photography), to counter the dark gravitas of Family, the density of matter that is the Self. finding expressions of Light, versus the dense expressions of language, for example. how this all works. creating Light in language, levity. that’s something I have talked to Nick and Deb about, no, not really talked about, but actually practiced. the practice of levity. (I finally saw that the trauma of Family had gradually driven levity out of my be-ing — levity I once held and expressed).

what factors contribute to the levity of a text? (certainly oral delivery allows this Lightness, ahah, a revealing of principle!) how to decrease the density? by inserting Life into it. orality. skipping the printed Regime.

I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, primary orality. It is primary by contrast with the secondary orality of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today primary culture in the strict sense hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects. Still, to varying degrees many cultures and sub-cultures, even in a high-technology ambiance, preserve much of the mind-set of primary orality. — Walter Ong

posted
  • place: Phoenix, Arizona

sufferation

fighting for breath, heart bursting, the horizontal trauma that surgery imposes on the body is severe. can’t imagine being older or in worse shape. fighting to get enough air, but no diaphragm muscles left, and pushing against the suture wall, non space for air. heart compressed into smaller-than-average ribcage. pulmonary edema. can’t draw anything near a full breath. even with an oxygen feed. a horrible suffocating night.

posted
  • place: Phoenix, Arizona

the curvilinear perspective of gurney travel

after four nights at home, a call to a local emergency transport company is in order for a trip to the ER. the shocking news. a shattered L3 lumbar vertebra. almost medivac-ed to Phoenix, but instead, a 2-hour ride to St. Joseph’s neurology ER on a backboard with a neck brace and morphine.

the ensuing flurry of activities I experience with a certain detachment, partially induced by the heavy meds, but also by a basic curiosity, as I have never spent a night in a hospital before, and certainly had never experienced such a trauma before. riding a gurney around, the world takes on a peculiar perspective. ceiling lines tend to converge towards the toes, eyes are blinded by Lights that penetrate the wounded body, the Other becomes a haloed face warning, bump coming up! to be a gurney driver is to transport the minimal common denominator of the hospital environment, the injured and sick body. from here to there, to be probed, radiated, and sampled, and once again docked to the variety of machines that sustain life.

the full spinal MRI marked a peak experience: one of the best industrial noize performances to date. can’t recall whether they actually added a claustrophobia-fighting concoction to the rest of the meds, but with headphones on, sliding into the extremely narrow white tube didn’t seem too bothersome. the operator stayed in contact with a mike, checking in with me every so often during the hour-long procedure. how to describe the sonic stimulation (along with the intense tesla-flux shivering through my body electric), glitch, techno, noize, industrial. and so on. excellent. I told the operator upon exiting, that it was one of the best noize performances I’d ever heard. how to reproduce it? probably impossible to record it with the heavy magnetic fields. what did it do to my embodied presence?

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

one home to another home

a time which I could hardly believe would arrive so soon has come and gone. Loki returned to his other home in Iceland yesterday. bravely getting on yet another plane to fly alone, with a stop-over in Boston, to Reykjavík. the not knowing of the next point where our paths will cross is the most traumatic of the circumstance. a whole year passed. a whole of seamlessly fragmented tableaus, scenes, moments, seconds, events, incidents. now memory. re-produced here and there. in re-created form. but the thing itself, gone, and partly regretful.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

united we stand

half-way through. another year. slipping through the anterior and nether spaces of family. make a cursory foray into town with Marianne, after the parade (with the theme “united we stand”) was over and before the street dancing commenced. a Guinness on Whiskey Row, right there on Courthouse Square, and then a pizza.

creeping jingo-ism. many television programs about police and military training and tactics. guns. at the garage I pick up a copy of American Rifleman, the house blotter for the NRA. Charlton Heston is an asshole. and what was that song “Pablo Picasso was never called an ‘asshole'” (written by Jonathan Richman and performed by the The Modern Lovers). From the soundtrack of Repo Man, the cassette tape of which disappeared during a party I hosted for my intro photo students at the old Mapleton house back in grad school. at CU-Boulder. and I circle back, closely, to that point again. soon. fifteen years later.

until family trauma strikes (soonly or later-like).

posted
  • place: en route Joensuu - Helsinki, Finland - Copenhagen, Denmark - Oslo - Trondheim, Norway

no keys

no keys in the pocket. open road. starts a period of movement that will be as intense as ever. seminars all over the place. on and on. with winter at the window. end the workshop here on a kahvio ja pulla session. a very pleasant group of students.

words are spun and spun. how to re-present the dialogue.

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away.
and the trees stand. I think I have known
autumn too long
— e.e. Cummings

suddenly, on the flight from Helsinki to Copenhagen, an intense conversation began. the woman sitting next to me. middle-aged. I noticed she was served a vegetarian lunch. she spoke to me first. (I say a bit ashamedly, knowing that I have the tendency, when in the travel mode to wrap myself tightly with a cloak of silence, or isolation. in a way, not being anti-social, but just focused on arriving rather than allowing too much extra awareness of the movement.) a silent seat-partner. but anyway, she made a small leap. and we begin to cover extraordinary territory. she is headed to a small town near Stuttgart to take a refresher course in Rudolf-Steiner-based massage. she is a massage therapist at a Steiner clinic for traumatized/handicapped children in Helsinki.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

autocracy

musings. a chaotic class session. people displeased. people struggling to have autocratic decisions made for them. rather than making the decisions themselves. from fear. this devolution process that I undertake in class is always traumatic for participants who expect and want only the kind of education that has kept them powerless and loving it. taking control without an agenda leads to anarchy. but a movement through different relations of power in “the classroom” is a transformative process. almost without fail (unless the student has already been through it consciously and is ready to move to a more daring state of interaction. like the relational dialogue which is friendship!

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

sysadmin

permutations of Helsinki, as typed by fingers on ancient keyboard interfaces include Helsniki, Heslniki, and Heslinki. just can’t type no more. sitting in Carroll’s — the burger chain that is consuming Finland — sitting looking at my burger and fries, and I hear a small, then larger wail coming from behind me, then I see a guy sitting in front of me leap out of his seat and run to the door where there is a little tyke, maybe three years old with his finger caught in the door hinge that just closed behind a customer going out. the mother, sitting next to my table was right behind the guy. the mother doesn’t say anything to the guy about his quick action, probably she is a bit traumatized about the accident. the little boy cries for some time, but seems not the worse for it all. the guy sits down and I make an “oh shit, I bet that hurt, and that’s too bad for the kid” face that he returns at me in affirmation. the wailing goes to my stomach. I have been thinking about Loki a lot lately — thinking how far away he is, and of the times we spent in the US this summer — how he will grow into this mixed and different life. whether he will grow strong or weak for living with his mother in Iceland and seeing me only on occasion. multi-culturalism is a position of power in the time we live in, but that advantage can be wiped out by (culture) wars in a moment, depending on the position of the cultural heritages. Presumably, being on the fringe of both the Amurikan and European spheres of power will serve to his advantage, but one can never tell. And anyway, what is politics in the actual scope of life, anyway?


Choose no life. Choose sysadminning. Choose no career. *****
Choose no family. Choose a fucking big computer, choose hard * *
disks the size of washing machines, old cars, CD ROM writers * A *
and electrical coffee makers. Choose no sleep, high caffeine * D *
and mental insurance. Choose fixed interest car loans. Choose * M *
a rented shoebox. Choose no friends. Choose black jeans and * I *
matching combat boots. Choose a swivel chair for your office * N *
in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose NNTP and wondering why * S *
the fuck you're logged in on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting * P *
in that chair looking at mind-numbing, spirit-crushing web * O *
sites, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose * T *
rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last on some * T *
miserable newsgroup, nothing more than an embarrassment to * I *
the selfish, fucked up losers Gates spawned to replace the * N *
computer-literate. * G *
Choose your future. * *
Choose sysadmining. *****

— Joona hunts that down in his fight to keep several servers up and running smoothly in Tornio…

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

musings

I arrange my things in the room that Terhi just vacated, looking forward to six weeks of not too much movement and a fast Ethernet connection only a meter from the bed. ain’t no slackin’ gonna happen! not that it will affect my dreams, memories, but there is something of a fear that I will nerd out here. gotta remember to go out and dance with students some, even though they have hardcore patterns of sleep deprivation and such where bands don’t start ’til one in the morning and people party all night (thank god the nights are shrinking daily!). push-ups, recollections, replays of fragments of this and that memory, and I am not losing my hair except as it is SO long now, longer than it has EVER been, that it gets tangled, and for the past year I rake a handful of it out each couple days. still plenty. how is it at this AGE to have long hair. retro hippie that I never was because I wasn’t old enough to do those hippie things like Free love and stuff. more “musings”