posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Walden

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.

The whole of Walden is relevant to Life, such as it has come to be in this, the Age of Oligarchs and Desperation.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Windigo thinking

Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine, Victor, Colorado, September ©2011 hopkins/neoscenes.
Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mine, Victor, Colorado, September ©2011 hopkins/neoscenes.
The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as “quality of life” but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.

Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law, and yet a leading economist like Lawrence Summers, of Harvard, the World Bank, and the U.S. National Economic Council, issues such statements as, “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct. Windigo thinking.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. New York: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

easy come easy go

The disconnect from this j-o-b evolved quickly, and … easily, though with some angst in shifting the conversion of money to time rather than the reverse. After four years of 100% remote, 3.5 years office-bound before that, immersed in the cash-for-time schema, it comes down to the last day, spent mostly shuffling bytes. I did hear from a number of colleagues and one contractor who I worked closely with during the past year, which was nice, also the head of HR sent a pleasant note. She’d been very supportive when I was in deep conflict with the mindless, unimaginative, and utterly toxic prior management of the organization (thanks to her, I won that battle, seeing the asshole off into ignominious retirement a couple years ago!).

The only communications heard from my current boss the last week was “Have a nice weekend.” Late on Friday afternoon. Seemed a bit weird. He’s got plenty other stuff to deal with at the org. Oh well. Ça suffit!

That whole week was about shuffling data and information sets and writing procedural documentation that will likely never get used. Data acquisition, storage, and display has become an end in itself in many organizations: battling externally-applied standards (see the NGMDB‘s GeMS program), and the ever-present profit-motive of market-dominating libertarian vendors seeking to cash in on all steps of the process. At the same time, the binding of the data consumers into various platform ecosystems culls resources at the receiving end. Tired of addressing all the concerns around that. And what of the science that is supposed to be happening? It’s all the same: as the granularity of data acquisition increases, more and more energy has to be applied to organize and analyze the data. This side-tracks reflection, imagination, and even basic synthesis. The path from data to information to knowledge to wisdom is now largely externalized, rather than embodied. AI, the newest arrival in the fray, is injecting itself into the knowledge/wisdom process with a limitless ferocity given asymptotic CPU capacities and the vastness of the overall information space it is learning from. I will not look to AI for wisdom, only as a holographic representation of hubris.

Today is the second “work day” where I’m not working for someone else. My “mines.edu” email account is now defunct. That chapter of life mercifully over. It will take a bit of time to unwrap mind from all the noise that it’s been filled with over the past years. And to embrace what is to come. It’s happening, here, now. Conversations ensue with the network: Finland, Iceland, Germany, and points in between.

The next step, liquidating some assets so that they are more internationally portable: currency. The first big item, prepping and selling the Cedaredge house. Will have some documentation here so if you are looking for a quiet and dark-sky second home, a writing retreat, a plot of land to start a vineyard or apricot orchard, a base for some of the best Nordic skiing in the lower 48, or if you know anyone who might be … lemme know!

Integral to that will be the losing of accumulated stuff, so that the move back to the base in Arizona is less painful. Gotta get to work!

posted
  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Thursday, 21 December, 1961

Finished the index of the classified data that we brought from Patrick AFB.

Overcast

Picked up some merchandise at Sears at noon.

Tried to buff Howard’s pewter plate. After working on it for 2-1/2 hours, it still has some marks on it. I’ll take it to the shop in the morning.

Read some in Aristotle re: Wisdom; he says the same things as Plato — that Wisdom is the knowledge of being.

Ordered set of points for the Toro via COD from Boston, also an instruction book. It has a Briggs & Stratton Engine 8B Type 905032 serial 3515.

posted
  • place: South Acton and Boston, Massachusetts

Sunday, 17 December, 1961

Snow, overcast

A gray day.
DCH in bed.
Took the others to SS & church. Dr. Ockenga preached a good sermon on “The Birth of a King.”

Went over to VAN’s home in Weston for a party — it was quite pleasant — the usual cocktail party.

Started to read in the Great Books on wisdom. Plato’s “Dialogues” have portions on the kinds of wisdom. I should make notes on these readings.

There was a freezing rain in the afternoon, making it necessary to clean the windshield twice on the way to the Nedzel’s house.

posted

The Value of Nothing

Consider this example: My cell phone company gives me a free handset, bristling with features, so I become a regular contract subscriber or buyer of pay-as-you-go minutes. I am pleased, not least because I can now navigate through the city without having to remember where I am, and I have the pleasure of palming the latest little gadget. In order for those features to work, I’ll have to pay a little bit more, to buy either an app or bandwidth. Clearly, many people think it’s worth it. Indeed, there’s a cell phone arms race, in which increasingly swanky phones become socially necessary. These new phones come with new applications and uses that, again, become socially indispensable for the user, and the permanent sources of revenue for the provider. In the United States in 2007, cell phone expenditure per customer reached six hundred dollars per year (surpassing that of a landline for the first time). That’s a lot of cash, which gets divided out fairly unevenly. more “The Value of Nothing”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

this and that

Yeno (Hui-neng, 638-713) writes:

The Bodhi* is not like the tree;
The mirror bright is nowhere shining:
As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust itself collect?

This was written in answer to a stanza composed by another Zen monk who claimed to have understood the faith in its purity. His lines run thus:

This body is the Bodhi-tree;
The soul is like the mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean,
And let no dust collect upon it.

A nice example of the conflict between knowledge and knowing of a logical sort, and the wisdom of be-ing which Zen produces in a practitioner. The latter is business-as-usual, mega-churches, and MacDonalds; the former is living, spirit-in-motion, and sustenance.

* True Wisdom

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

the American Dream is only to survive

David Brooks, columnist at the New York Times writes in this commentary on New Years Day:

Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.

I have always enjoyed his pragmatism and basic awareness of a wider historical context. It frames the American Way as (merely another) expression of a global continuum of human presence on the planet. And he seems largely to avoid the hybridized reli(geo)-political Destiny’s Child(ish) mentality that so pervades the fragmentary remnants of mediated public discourse in this declining nation-state. more “the American Dream is only to survive”

posted
  • place: Sycamore Spring, Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

the spring again

head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out. how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn’t enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack thereof. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers. how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it’s bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form — dried and digested grasses, cellulose — for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts? more “the spring again”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Art and Teaching Philosophy

ART

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged and immersive pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated and directed by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a humane seeking: to engage in a dialogue of energies with an Other. Finding a proper pathway for those energies—transmitting: simultaneously receiving the expressions of the Other—this is the moving act of creativity. Creativity is the charged flow of energies between and through the Self and the Other over relative spaces and times.

These two proto-definitions are the basis of my art and teaching praxis. more “Art and Teaching Philosophy”

posted
  • place: Lübeck, Germany

seminar

back in a classroom. talking about data – information – knowledge – intelligence – wisdom. signal-to-noise ratios. adaptability, chain-of-command, defined functions, trend analysis, long tail, lexis-nexus, The WELL, protocols and standards, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, social infrastructures, complexity, hierarchy, networks, order and disorder, economy of attention, business models, power, money, socially-defined exchange, globalization of culture, and so on. I am a teacher, I am only human.

posted
  • place: en route West Elk Wilderness - Bailey Creek, San Juan National Forest, Colorado

long high day

floating through a high country day. mountain bike ride after breakfast. up to the trail head into the West Elk Wilderness. back out, Sage keeping pace even on the downhills. pack up and make the circle around the north rim of the Black Canyon, and down through Delta. saw a gal parked having a picnic. single bike on the rear rack, like me. wondered about how one crosses paths. make a stop at the Ute Indian Museum.

it’s far from present Ute lands, and most of Colorado was once populated by one or another bands of Utes who are now reduced to three small reservations in Colorado and Utah. another dreadful history of crimes against humanity. are we really better than that now?

seek wisdom, not knowledge. knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

to go on a vision quest is to go into the presence of the Great Mystery.

the soul will have no rainbow if the eye has no tear.

another stop at the Gunnison National Forest main office to check out any information they might have, as well as inquiring about jobs. looks like everything is through the JobsUSA website. one path to travel. have to look into that again when online next. Ridgeway seems interesting again, with some commercial buildings for sale. question is, what to do in these small towns to survive? could computer consulting work? construction is no longer an option with the L5 disk acting up, could be major trouble in the near future. website construction? teaching high school? vocational tech? uff. re-forming trajectories seems at the same time daunting and full of possibility. how can it be problematic when so many others are employed? and so many have managed to gather so much capital in this country. but the path between scraping poor-ness and abundant wealth seems so … arbitrary. there is no clear specifications except for self-confidence.

end the day almost at tree line, up Bailey Creek, off Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan National Forest. the luxury of dispersed camping (finding places up 4×4 roads that are not developed, but make excellent camp sites) is appreciated. no cost, only fuel to get there, and that expense suggested that instead of an immediate return to Prescott, that I take several days and enjoy being back in Colorado and check out several new places. in Curecanti Creek, I saw only one car in two days, and up this rugged route, doubt I’ll see anyone until I head out and down and south west tomorrow. feeling a little guilty being out of phone range, but have no messages except one from Gary, so, figure all is well in the greater telecom world. make a short video of sunset on a nearby peak. and in the process of reviewing the tape after finishing it, I discover that all the footage that I shot of Kevin’s memorial in NYC in March had that effing bad audio. really disgusting — Bill, Stefan, Martha, Rosemary, and others talking about their memories of Kevin. the glitch seems due to bad mike contacts, or a dirty record head. it pops up randomly, and has affected some other critical footage previously. and the pondering on the idea of getting a 3-ccd hd prosumer cam comes back up and/or a Nikon prosumer digital still camera. what else to do with capital? shopping is a dumb way to make a cash flow (negatively). better to keep the investments growing and multiplying. and purchase only items that can definitely be positive cash generators.

whatever the end result, work is the next necessary step to confront. that and the June 18th Month of Sundays performance. finishing up with the house, packing things in a way that maintains some viability to several pathways of action. but meanwhile, watch the sky and the land.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Leary

In planning a session, the first question to be decided is “what is the goal?” Classic Hinduism suggest four possibilities:

  • 1. For increased personal power, intellectual understanding, sharpened insight into self and culture, improvement of life situation, accelerated learning, professional growth.

  • 2. For duty, help of others, providing care, rehabilitation, rebirth for fellow men.

  • 3. For fun, sensuous enjoyment, aesthetic pleasure, interpersonal closeness, pure experience.

  • 4. For transcendence, liberation from ego and space-time limits; attainment of mystical union.

…snip…

Instructions for Vision 4: The Wave-Vibration Structure of External Forms (Eyes open, rapt involvement with the external visual stimuli, intellectual aspects)

O nobly born, listen carefully:
At this point you can become aware of the wave structure of the world around you.
Everything you see dissolves into energy vibrations.
Look closely and you will tune in on the electric dance of energy.
There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles.
Consciousness will now leave your body and flow into the stream of wave rhythm.
There is no need for talk or action.
Let your brain become a receiving set for the radiance.
All interpretations are the products of your own mind.
Dispel them. Have no fear.
Exult in the natural power of your own brain,
The wisdom of your own electricity.
Abide in the state of quietude.
As the three-dimensional world fragments, you may feel panic;
You may beget a fondness for the heavy dull world of objects you are leaving.
At this time, fear not the transparent, radiant, dazzling wave energy.
Allow your intellect to rest.
Fear not the hook-rays of the light of life,
The basic structure of matter,
The basic form of wave communication.
Watch quietly and receive the message.
You will now experience directly the revelation of primal forms.

— Timothy Leary, Ph.D., Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., & Richard Alpert, Ph.D. The Psychedelic Experience

Ah well, stumbled on that, following a thread from Aldous Huxley. As for the effort to shift awareness from a dominantly materialist point-of-view to one that has a central locus on an energized movement: I just had the realization that I probably will not ever produce a text-based representation circumscribing the territory of my own worldview. [ed: well, fast-forward to 2013 and my dissertation!] And unless in a situation where there can be an unfolding of the thoughts, in concert with an Other, there will be no revelation, no representation. Only action, doing, facilitating, and teaching. The 2126 class moves fast and with gusto. A deep difference with the spring class, where students seemed tight, fearful, and distracted. Just war? or, hmmmm, does it confirm or refute my theory that much education is about saturating individual, forming humans in a certain fear of non-conforming, while in-validating divergent behaviors and thoughts. How come I resist letting my child be wild?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

overt war begins

and then WAR starts, so much hype. madness. and the situation here. seeing hospitals again. and mortality. why do people want to kill? to add to the misery of living that already smothers so much life on this planet.

whole seasons peel away, onion skin, how many left. Black Elk speaks, through his transcribed words. loudly, clearly, and with no fear for his own idiosyncrasy. and full of knowing relevance and wisdom.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

dipoles

okay , forget it. a mantra to leave behind everything once known and strip it, along with all its embodied effects from life. a command to leave ones own life behind, flush, purge, re-format, erase, re-aligning small magnetic dipoles to another field. polarity. no time to extend this network presence here. it is going other directions. mailing lists, email, streaming performances. and the lived presence is deep in the shit of materialism.

The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religion. — Albert Einstein

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

reversal of perspective

goooood-mornin’ Lawd!

One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by “reversal of perspective”; and he told the following story. Two brothers deeply attached to one another had a strange habit. They marked the nature of the day’s events with pebbles a white one for each happy moment and a black one for each moment of misfortune or displeasure. But when, at the end of the day, they compared the contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the other only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man famed for his wisdom. “You don’t talk to one another enough” said the wise man, “Both of you must give the reasons for your choice, and discover its causes”. From then on they did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained faithful to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been about thirty there were hardly more than seven or eight. After a short while they went to see the wise man again. Both looked extremely miserable. “Not so long ago,” said one, “my jar was filled with pebbles the color of the night. My despair was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but what these eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable that I cannot go on like this.” And the other said: “Every day I piled up white pebbles.. Today there are only seven or eight, but these obsess me to the point that I cannot recall these moments of happiness without immediately wanting to relive them more intensely and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments me”. The wise man smiled as he listened to them. “Excellent. Things are shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can, ask yourselves why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses so much passion in you.” When the two brothers next saw the wise man it was to say “We asked ourselves the question but we could not find the answer. So we asked the whole village. You can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening. squatting in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part. They say a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value.” The old man didn’t conceal his pleasure. “Everything is developing as I foresaw. Don’t worry. Soon the question will no longer be asked: it has lost its importance, and perhaps one day you will no longer believe you ever asked it.” Shortly afterward the old man’s predictions were confirmed in the following way: a great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of a troubled night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the elders and chieftains, impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of the palisade. — Raoul Vaneigem

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

year six

about to turn another corner with this document. moving into it’s sixth year, already (it seems) that there is a deep past. But the interface, well, as I see examples around of the possibilities of .php and other forms of SQL database management, maybe I will have the opportunity to migrate the data to a different form in the future. quite tired of the present form. tedious at best. should it matter? implementation of other scales, levels of interface. what is the point of all the contemporary race towards a significant new way for the human body to interact with the digital dataspace. if it is to come, it will come.

on the poverty line that, at least relatively, strikes across my reality. realizing that though life is tenuous. Not enough money to live by, and the heartache worry paralysis stuck to this life-position drains me. this whole academic year — a year that starts when crops have been brought in from the fields, and ends with the spring planting time — has been a drain in that respect. and the upcoming preparations to leave this place permanently. recalls the final exodus from eLAy. poor planning, like a night flight into the wilderness, with wolves following, coyotes howling, but strangely no tangible fears except for the rooted one of home-less-ness. did the nomad ever fear that? doubtful. the nomad fears only the city and immobility! the howl of the coyote, who laughs anyway at most of the world, is not a chilling energy, but a firing, stirring, generating source. and watching the stars is a source of wisdom.

a long discussion with Akeno yesterday evening. synchronization within spheres of thinking that are surficially (in the abstracted levels of cultural meme) disparate, but in depth, in root, in fabric, warp and woof, threaded by the energy that carries that same social abstraction.

but now, on to the NEXT year of this bundle of words.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

to the dentist

well, the pretty/evil dentist, Riita, didn’t need to pull my wisdom teeth, they weren’t really infected, but rather (it appeared) that it was just a cavity in another tooth that has been irritating me. I was so worried about going to the dentist this morning that I forgot the PIN number to my bank account, fortunately I had my Visa card with me. Riita wasn’t really evil, actually a bit timid as her English wasn’t so good. and I think she was new at the job. hmmmm. but I just have to head home. spending too much time with this machine. Sanna is in Portugal for a week, so life is different yet again.

posted
  • place: Bergen, Norway

laundry memories

equinox energies abound. perfect balance at one moment today. can you guess the exact moment? not sleeping well, think I have an abscessed wisdom tooth. had two removed about five years ago — two on one side, and was SUPPOSED to go back the following week to get the other two out, but between the pain of getting the first ones out, and the question why should I have two perfectly good chewing devices pulled out, I never went back to the dentist. so, now, dental things creep into awareness. several migraine-like symptoms all on that same side of my head are pointing red arrows direct at that tooth, though I can’t specifically feel pain radiating from there. have to find a dentist in Helsinki when I get back on Friday. and then, the laundry problem to be solved. the building I live in has a laundry room, but one needs a key to get in. the janitor speaks no English at all — my first attempt to get a key went something like, find his flat, the door was cracked open, I ring once, twice, and finally this geezer comes to the door looking like the recently fired (for over-consumption of vodka) footman for the Czar. at his heel a growling chihuahua. I ask politely, “do you understand any English” and am met with a stone-glazed look and some words which I was sure weren’t Finnish, and the chihuahua growling all the time. I motion and say to him that I will have a friend call instead, he shrugs and turns away with a suspicious look, the chihuahua poised for attack like a Doberman. sometimes I really don’t like living in a foreign country. how come I have been doing just that for a DECADE now? what quirk of fate brought that along? shit. now here in another place, networking. again. meeting people met before, and people never met yet. until now, slinging emails and SMS messages and phone calls across fiber optic cables and stuff like that. never ending. remote presence. and tomorrow morning, I have to leave to Oslo. now I go to call Kenneth, and Hilde, and so on.

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

next five minutes 3 – tactical education

into the NextFiveMinutes conference. I have been burned out for much of the time for some reason, almost catching a cold yesterday evening, then this morning, spraining my back with the most minimal movement zipping up my suitcase, I wasn’t even bending over. scared the shit outta me. my panel presence (Tactical Education/Media Competence) was shortly after, and that went quite well, but by mid-afternoon I hobble back the the hotel, barely able to walk because of the sciatic pain. missed an appointment with Nan which I was quite looking forward to, not to mention several dialogues with new contacts. really don’t believe it, that I have done something serious. been stretching all afternoon and evening between bouts resting in bed. nothing else to do! Faugh! miss a dinner with an interesting artist. following are notes for the Tactical Education presentation (on the neoscenes occupation project):

sotto voce: introduction: start by restating my conviction that:

venues like this can, by their nature, only mirror or document what is happening “out there” — and although this precise venue here — me speaking to you is probably not anyone’s first choice of interaction — but I was eager to participate in this part of nextfiveminutes as an opportunity to open some dialogues on methodologies and experiences. I would wish that the expressions here will represent ideas so vital that there will be nothing to do after our brief time together but to ACT. but I suppose that the most one can hope for is that some of these thoughts would be on a level fundamental enough that some of you might share these dialogues at future times. or at least be entertained by my ignorant display of polarized generalizations.

put neoscenes occupation within a larger context of praxis, personal philosophy, and reality. more “next five minutes 3 – tactical education”

posted
  • place: Pori, Finland

stupid thought

Kaisu made an appointment for me to use an Internet terminal at the Pori municipal library for an hour in the afternoon where I was at least able to check email. The situation with PC vs MAC is causing me some trouble — there are so very few public venues that are using Macs. I would like to be able to easily use Eudora between the two platforms — just to keep my mail in some kind of order. No such luck. I look out the kitchen window here, the sun is finally shining, although the air is still very brisk. The neighbor’s two black Labradors are wrestling in the back yard. Kaisu is off teaching photography at a local night school, and Jim is at her studio drawing. I write. Talked to Visa on the phone, but don’t get in contact with Tapio or Anders first off. (and fight the fear for the future) … I do finally talk to Tapio, and we will meet next week when I get to Helsinki. He’s been busy working on a series of essays and a dissertation, and so, hasn’t been around MUU Media at all lately, and is off until August.

is everybody in the same boat?
at what time does wisdom cry out in the streets?
are smiles sexy? — Robert Filliou, from Ample Food for Stupid Thought

posted
  • place: Stockholm, Sweden

ArtNode-ing

Another long, interesting day. (Starts off: girl dressed in black on the train into town with a rhesus monkey on her back reading Kalil Gibran’s The Prophet). I went directly over to meet Mats at ArtNode in the afternoon. I never got a good connection working, though Mats was generous enough to let me hack for a few hours. It seems that their access provider doesn’t have a good server, nor do they give good technical support — I was suspicious that it was a problem with the PPP configuration and the modem init string. At any rate, I was able to download what email I had waiting and upload the string of messages I had been nursing along the past ten days. However, Fetch wasn’t working, so I couldn’t upload these very pages which was very irritating as I need to update and renew these to make them even marginally interesting … So goes the InfoSuperCrawlingWay… Email brings this from Gunnar Viglunds, a former student of mine in Iceland:

Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music. Music is THE BEST

this from Mr. Halfler Trio hissef, Andrew “don’t-find-me-and-I-won’t-look-for-you” McKenzie:

… he who is in you is greater than than he who is in the world … [1 John 4:4]

and this from the painter, Carol Sutton, in Toronto:

No foe, no dangerous pass, we heed,
Brook no delay, but onward speed
With loosened rein;
And, when the fatal snare is near,
We strive to check our mad career,
But strive in vain.

Could we new charms to age impart,
And fashion with a cunning art
The human face,
As we can clothe the soul with light,
And make the glorious spirit bright
With heavenly grace,

How busily each passing hour
Should we exert that magic power,
What ardor show,
To deck the sensual slave of sin,
Yet leave the freeborn soul within,
In weeds of woe!

— excerpt from “Coplas De Manrique (From The Spanish),” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I then went directly over the the Academy and found the performance space without much difficulty. Bettina will be sending me the name of the artist — the title of the performance was “Body as Space.” Mats Hjelm was there, and it turns out that he is working in the Video Department there at the Academy. Also in attendance was Monika Larsen-Denis, who studied up in Iceland at the Academy a couple years ago. Bettina and a friend of hers and I hung out after the performance talking with different people, and then headed to a noisy/hip/cool bar in town. I just made the last train from Stockholm to Barkaby that evening, but that arrived after the last bus ran, which meant I was destined for sore feet after the seven kilometer walk back to Selma and Martin’s place. Ouch!