dinner with Steffi, Christian, Petra and Jan (along with Lynn the turntablist).

Pynchon crosses my path. long time since Gravity's Rainbow. but Vineland strikes at the Steve Kurtz vs US gov't affair that regurgitates into view from the belly of the beast. stepping into a swirling nightmare with only mine-shaft black facing up ahead. all future painted over with a slathering mix of carbon and steel, not to mention the shank-boot stamping on fingers and face. thank you taxpayer dollars. not a shred of romance, or even optimism except in some ethereal winding of ideology that transcends this life. leaves the corruption of state in its own self-made hell.

She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providentially stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Avenue for a '66 Plymouth Fury, bought a wig at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies' gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers' community, and emerged a different, less noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors' "People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let go of any of it, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky -- holding on, letting go, re-dreaming each night stop the less easterly places she'd been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give. -- Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

the regional Geheime Staatspolitzei Headquarters is just down the street. it is now a local police station. we stop to look at a sculpture commemorating the local Gestapo victims out front. it's done by one of the Muthesius art students. the stamp has the Gestapo text, while the platten beneath has a list of victims. there was a regional concentration camp where around 600 people were liquidated. then grocery shopping, errands. was able to find a new clip for the waist strap on my daypack which I broke by slamming it in the door of Sanna's car. critical item, it allows me to shift the weight of the pack off my shoulders and onto my hips. when doing the air travel, I have to carefully carry all fragile/valuable items in that pack, making it a load for the aging back.

dinner with Rieka, Anselm, Theresa, Jakob, Malo?, Sophia, Barbara, Kersten, Sabena, Alf, and Chris.

at the airport, seems I missed Mari, but the security line got too long and the time to boarding got short. goodbyes stack up spent language, brief embraces, and what is felt? leave-taking, quiet hollow winds scoop up surface moisture and make prolapsed thunderheads that range to the east. offshore is clear. wet tarmack. aching jaw. writing of future is fiction, drawing on the past only sustains the images. no substance. don't recall the first time of a view down a perspective convergence to see what comes, or at least understand that inside the drift is the tidal current which pulls on all bodies. keeps them orbiting. and crashing together at various speeds. escaping that leads to interstellar space. cold, dark, infinitely feeding on any warmth and life.

airport. Friday afternoon, flight to Brussels will be full of returning EU vips. at least the middle-class roving managers.

while the news from the US becomes more and more grim. the Steve Kurtz case would be laughable except that it is only the beginning, and it is nothing to the FBI and CIA. it appears there has been a deep culture shift in the mentality of Amurikans. bunker-mode hardly explains it. smells like fear of living.

another airport. looking at things in that critical view.

the last night on the island. darkness drifting after some late afternoon storms, with hail even. time. to go. gathering things into the usual one suitcase, one travel bag, one daypack. realizing that I might never be back here, because other things might happen. anything can happen, anytime. on the phone around Scandinavia (taking maximum advantage of the telecom possibilities). so many items to consider, with workshops popping up in Norway, Lithuania, Denmark, and Iceland during just a short period in the fall. keeps the blood moving and the mind alert. always that way. coming three things at once.

with the three-month residency behind now, reflections? nope. life passing, life passing, life passing. concern about this makes for time burnt without even the rising smoke of holy incense. only floating in the drift of human development. is the historicity of change merely the gained perspective of time spent in this incarnation? the perception of the increasingly predictable in genesis, but largely chaotic in application, range of human interventions that destroy life rather than nurture it? and the Buddhist who is not attached to all of it.

okay, giving up for now. closing connections, unplugging cables, powering down, packing the last bits and pieces.

readying things for another launch. over-busy, but enjoying seeing people. still have severe pain with the tooth item, ibuprophen keeping me going. that and exercise, good food, good conversation. dropped in on Kaisu's opening, saw Perttu at Kiasma after swimming in the afternoon. then back to the burbs with Sanna, followed by a too meaty pizza at the ubiquitous middle-eastern-run pizza house and a psychedelic sunset on the ferry home late. time in this place shrivels like a lettuce leaf on Mojave asphalt in July. even life time seems to be doing the same. it's going to be over soon.

ship a box of books from the Sibelius, meet Shinji (looking at Access Grid things), swim, and meet Mari, Eija, and Antti at Café Engel, then dinner with Risto, Kaisu, and Maria.

dinner with Amanda, Meridith, and Sophea. Kallio. white nights. late ferry.

the placard session with Sophea goes okay, after a late start at Fred's apartment with a few people in attendance. Juha put a page with some photos from the evening before, some recognized faces! nice vibe. now about to head to Shinji and Tarja's log cabin in the green and leafy 'burbs for a tour of the coast, a wood-fired sauna, and dinner.

drawing the window shade at 0030 last night. no stars. the annealed blue of a shotgun barrel reflecting moonLight. no stars. they won't come back until late July, early August. the whining drone of summer has arrived. only a week more here, time fills up completely with last minute meetings and time spent arranging the ensuing logistics of travel. many will not be seen. until the next passage through this region.

an other day. the birch tree outside the window begins to leave, fully. leaven, lather, laughter of the children playing on the swings and in the sandbox. in the courtyard, under the tree. staying home. saying Bohm in mind and finding more support for dialogue. which takes place in silence and sufferation.

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a person's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. -- Martin Buber

heading to the dentist this morning after 36 hours of pain. disgusted with my previous two dentists in the US who didn't listen to my suggestions that there were problems with a crown that was made by one of them.

Anna, the dentist here in Helsinki listened and agreed with my diagnosis, examined the problem and corrected it (with the hope that the symptom had not developed to the point to require a root canal after her intervention).

at any rate, she reduced the lateral occlusion to such a degree that it should slowly reduce the irritation caused to the root, crossed fingers, got to get some ibuprophen to deal with the dull pain, though. back home on the now-crowded ferry. school children by the hundreds on outings to the island, met by actors dressed in period costumes. "history-come-alive!"

now, on to the FLOSS meeting online at V2 in Netherlands, details here.

Geert (introducing): Rishab Ayer Gosh -- intro to code culture and economics -- code as society; collaborative production is not a new concept generally but economics of collaborative production is new; is there a difference between an idea and the embodied 'result' of the idea's implementation? how does the ultimate use affect the process of the tool creation. If all remains in the space of ideas (i.e. no real outcome, is it necessary to be concerned about the economic structure? Raytheon. parity with .com world? something more? just free, just open? design?

my notes degenerate into noize.

there were few real opportunities for interaction from the audience, and less so for the few who attended on IRC / streaming. the one question I did manage to address to Rishab had a surprising answer:

13:06: jhopkins: talking about code is talking in a fully enclosed symbolic system of representation -- what is the relationship between the real (physical!) world and the world of intellectual activity and ideas -- where does the interface occur?
13:06: jhopkins: not sure if that is clear, but...
13:06: jhopkins: same as economoics as being an abstracted symbolic system representing the 'real' physical world...
13:07: jhopkins: we live in both, and both are intertwined, but what are the characteristics of that intertwining...
13:07: FLOSSer: in terms of actual time+activity?
13:07: jhopkins: yeah, actual lived experience...
13:08: jhopkins: or lived be-ing
13:08: jhopkins: the economics presented here seems a bit isolated from the real...

Rishab basically said there was no difference between the two -- between the symbolic representation and the thing itself. same issue I run up against in other situations (the empyre list most often) where this is a basal unquestioned/unconsidered assumption. why is this such a dogmatic position?

half-way around the world from the second return. 34 years ago. I was 11. deep in the Maryland countryside. the only thing that forshadowed the intense development that has taken place in the last 34 years was the publishing of the Montgomery County Master Plan no doubt bought by The Developers like the Kettler Brothers who made huge profits constructing the "new town" of Montgomery Village, complete with zoning and convenant laws so tight that every one was happy.

Today, about two-thirds completed, Montgomery Village is a family-oriented, totally planned, residential environment, close to the burgeoning technical research office industrial "1-270 Corridor.

anyway, the memory of those insects in the woods, the wild woods where I played for days and days through summer sultries. going far afield, looking at a map, well, the mysterious places were not so far from home, but going down the hill, past the pond, on the earthen dam, up the far side of the valley, past the bank full of terrarium-populating mosses, up to where the first field opened up. this field was most often fallow, while the next was almost for corn. corn that grew eight, nine feet tall by July or so. with leaves that would cruelly paper cut if brushed wrong. leaves that hid us from the dogs when we played hide-and-seek with them. making them sit at the towering green edge, stay Lady, Rusty, stay! walking quickly through the rows, getting as far away as possible, then whistling for them, and crouching silently listening while they ran barking through, high-speed, until they caught our scent and bounded up with barks and slathering tongues. don't remember how the dogs dealt with the cicadas. I remember the noise and the malevolent-seeming red eyes. at 11 years old.

what you look at subsequently affects how you see. musing, watching the sea pass by the ferry, on the way back home from another morning swim. then let eyes shift to the pressure-shaped plywood seat, varnish cracking, the surface flows like the surface of the water. not stable, not solid, not noumenal. neural fields firing memory of sight unseen. mind recalling ripples of playing Light.

at the Stadion pool in the sun, moving. 2000 meters. glittering morning. blue sky, plenty of that short-wavelength radiation. finished and back to the island by 1130.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" -- Jack Kerouac

the workshop ends, too short, but seems to move forward. questions are slow in coming, but do arise, from important places. language is a dominant issue, as usual, along with previous educational experiences.

Estonia is starting English education in the first grade now, though, which seems somehow extreme, compared to other places, and for what reasons? to catch up with some perceived lack or slackness? or purely pragmatic synergistics with global capitalism?

a fast tour of the sports shop deep in the mall, but the prices are as high as the US. with throb-annoy EuroClubTrash muzak blaring. outta there. the vibe in the whole place is something of a desperation that shopping will provide an existential answer to the emptiness of ideological allegiance forcefully handed over to the various historical Unions that Estonia is subsumed by.

the guy is laying face down on the variegated green marble floor with a few people standing around. there is a wheel chair next to him, he is speaking, turns his head and looks up, below his face is a pool of blood, and his nose is split. he is a paraplegic, from the looks of his legs which are lying on the floor like inside forgotten pants. his glasses are folded closed in the blood, reminds me of Lennon's bloody lenses on the window sill. one young guy is calling on a phone, but I can't tell what's the progress. a couple waitresses come up with napkins, one holds a hand in front of her face, and turns her head away. no one actually wants to touch him it seems. I am a prisoner of language, thinking that if I spoke the language I would immediately jump in. it's happened before. the blood is a source of concern, infection, but otherwise, being careful, at least get him turned over, moving his limp legs. he has heavy winter gloves on, to operate the wheelchair. the security guards, all of 18 years old outside the grocery store fingering the ID tag chains around their necks while they stare blankly at passers-by aren't around now. everybody seems young and confused. drawn from shopping and hanging-out to this microscopic happening.

the indoor mall is a monster in the center of town, just outside the Old Town east gate, other glass and steel monsters are rising all around the neighborhood. surely the Art Academy building will be razed soon. progress. global capitalism rooting out the remaining evil of anything old, authentic, or unmarketable.

staying in Mare's flat in the Old Town. the building dates from the 13th century. bedroom window wells are a meter deep, lined with the grey Paleozoic limestone/dolomite which seems to be the sole natural building material available here. turns out, it overlies extensive deposits of oil and alum shales as well, the Ordovician Dictyonema oil shales (polevkivi) used to supply the country with a domestic energy source along with peat production. but mining has decreased steadily since the 1980's because of a lowering in cost of competing energy sources.

Dictyonema oil shale (DOS) is a formation of the Tremadoc stage (Pakerord and Varangu regional stages) of the Early Ordovician. It is often called Dictyonema shale, Dictyonema argillite, alum shale, etc. The name "dictyonema" was given after the benthonic root-bearing Dictyonema flabelliforme, which turns afterward to a planktonic nema-bearing Rhabdinopora flabelliformis. DOS is not a methamorphosed formation like a common argillite, so the fragments of name "dictyonema" or "argillite" do not carry the true scientific meaning. In our works we stressed the quality of Dictyonema shale to be a low-grade oil shale, but DOS was mostly known as a source rock for uranium and some other heavy metals. -- R. Veski, V. Palu

the limestone has a completely different architectural energy from Helsinki's dense black-red granite, not least because of the age of the buildings it was used in. not sure if this region was at the edge of the Weichselian (Holocene) glacial coverage of the Scandinavian region, but suspect so. how else would the small berg of limestone that the old town rose on have survived? any serious glaciation would have plowed it flat. all the soft sand of the coastline, not to mention the south Baltic basin coast itself suggests that this was the fringe, like the Great Lakes were.

can't figure out how to turn the sauna on, but, oh well, enjoying the very quiet evenings. noticing my predilection to snap on any media source for a fill of anti-silence. so it goes. and missing the news fix.

enroute to Tallinn.

last time here was with Stefan in 2000, the fall, meeting Ivika. I guess I was teaching in the fall.

super sea cat, Italian boat, like a huge speed boat. stupid interview in bad English on Finnish raydeeoh. no translation. The Cranes. the deejay is pointless.

this way of blogging is pretty lame.

like writing in the notebook.

the hydraulic properties of water are very much felt with the cleaving of the water by the ship, it hits the waves, and there are sharp shocks. sky-sea interface, back to the infinite half space concept. sailing between two infinite half spaces. on one, through another. heavy traffic here in the Baltic. cats, freighters, ferries, tankers, roro's, containers.

Ivika meets me in the terminal with blonde hair. looking very different than the last time when Stefan and I popped over from Helsinki for a day visit back in 2000. it's brisk out. we walk from the harbor to Mare's flat in the Old Town, in a 13th century building. 51 Pikk Street. beautiful space with a sauna even. the city has rapidly changed from the dour shabby outlook of Soviet times to the slick consume surface of globalism. and is still transforming. watched by the glazed and red eyes of the drunken Finnish tourists. and somewhere, by invisible rich business-men between their buying and developing spells.

the workshop ends with another club evening in a former worker's hall in Pardaugava, replete with a red star over the proscenium. much conversation, until the music got too loud. started off with a drum'n'bagpipe acoustic set with vid projection and moved to an over-amped hip-hop scene. beat a retreat around 0100 for a long walk back to the hotel past empty overgrown factories and wooden row houses re-integrating assymetric with the deep Daugava sand. our Danish room-mates only stopped by the hotel to grab their bags at 0530 for a taxi to the airport.

wander over to a closed rixc, but at least pick up the wifi sitting on the steps. then over to John Lemon cafe to meet Derek and Sara, along with Mara and Sophea for breakfast.

Formula 1 on the box. one of three channels sailing through stuffy spectral airs.

the final day after some power-full sonic / visual performances last night including a nice visual-sonic collaboration between Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer of umatic. discussion starts with a presentation from Armin Medosch who makes an eloquent outline for the future replete with lessons from the past.

but many here have a passionate and singular dedication to the 'solutions' offered by technology. this I can only subscribe to a lack of experience in seeing the mapping from hype to reality of other, previous techno-utopias. am I a cynical oldster? there is an overt exhibiting of 'critical intellectual discourse' on the face of it, but the proceeding praxis is merely an over-heated implementation of a skewed representations of reality. hmmmm.

quick series of presentations covering software, performative situations, and ... in the morning. non-keywords: collective and playful, revealing, (bob him say, "they materialize their every wish. everywhere is war."), (the possibility for personal data/info re-vealing confused with an open-ness for change as stimulated by the Other). two trees linked via data feeds, one in the north of Sweden, in (natural) situ, and another in Stockholm and elsewhere with a life-support system that mimics the limited quantitative data parameters.

up in the morning. a lone trumpeter plays Amazing Grace somewhere out on the street. the May Pole in the Rats Laukums decorated with EU ribbons and fake oversized daffodils is taken down. the center is small, a Maserati, many high-end Mercedes, three stretch Lincoln limos, and a TurboCarrera on the walk from the hotel. extreme wealth. boutiques and still-crumbling buildings. the cd in the breakfast place is skips continuously for longer than famished memory records.

last night the national hockey team lost to Sweden, fans with maroon and white jerseys cluster around the bank's plasma screen.

playful Baptist presentation this morning. spins off many good conversations with former strangers, more than I would have imagined, outside the formal pathway of the conference so far. (maybe 24 months in the US had a stunning effect) but the day is kind of shot. sleeping here, room-mate snored through the night making sleep impossible. so, feeling like shit all day. sitting in on Derek Holzer's open source audio workshop, was hoping to get puredata installed on the mac, but had to retreat to a pseudo-nap instead. make it to dinner. but am heavily phase-shifted.

building up the usual ball-point email address list. hand-written, signed. embodied self-evidence of presence and being. a small facilitation.

Western line dancing in the main square.

move the bed to another location, behind the fridge and next to the balcony door this time.

made the hop over here, starting at 0500 on the island, to the ferry to the bus to the plane to the bus. and finally to the hotel. spring has forced the trees from naked hibernation to sticky wet green orgasm. neck bones cracking at the ladies in spring clothing. or lack thereof. tracking spring rites. brilliant, warm sunshine. here at rix-c on the banks of the Daugava. the river moving to the sea, stiff tailwind accelerating the process. rumbling coal trains over the bridge. heading west. laptoppers cluster in the shade of a wifi love affair.

smartmoblogsociallocativefictiongpsteredmedia creatures feeding one on the other, in a frenzy of "what's next that's cool" and built for speed. (which ultimately will move 'it' on to the next "Next Big Thing.") seems like another wave of meme-hype reverberating around the extraordinarily limited space of global telecom networks (in collaboration with military satellites). is the price to be paid so removed and hard to comprehend? seems so. I have run across exactly zero critical words about this phenom. instead a flood of vacuous phrases and spin terms that are kept afloat in a social sea by the flatulent buoyancy of affluence, global capital, and ex-military industry. STILL. "radical decentralization" for autonomous consumption of text, image, audio and video -- the re-presented and ultimately consumable world. autonomy for re-presentation and re-production of reality -- one that fills the belly with gas and the head with language peddled by those same tired techno-utopian spin-doctors. technology always looks its ubiquitous best in the eyes of the über-class. as I click through the verbiage at locative.net it feels like RedHerring from 1999 or so -- so much interlocking terminology leading in a head-rich circle of hype-logic. headmap drops phrases like "everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached," "every place has emotional attachments you can open and save," and "life flows into inanimate objects." and behind these words (more and more of them) there is no awareness of or anticipation that there was/is an essence that is a substrate for knowledge and abstracted/systematized human apprehension. that something comes before knowing. and the vitality-draining construction of a Babylonish Tower is an ongoing exercise that society never quite purged from its mind. the path that re-creation bumbles along is not the same one as creation. not even in the same forest.

When people consider the dangers of the chaos of a free intensely networked spatially augmented augmented world, they should also consider that like all technological advances it offers tools to both sides of any argument. 'ends appropriate means' may seem ominous but the ends can just as well be social advancement. Even in a critical situation, disaster response and recovery in a world of spontaneous peer to peer mesh networks, running evolved social software, seems like a sane option for coordination of local efforts to recover and help from outside. The homeland security initiative raised the point that a citizen owned spatially aware communications network could be invaluable in a crisis. -- headmap ideolog

what kind of crisis? when shopping is compromised? what can be meant by the terms 'crisis' and 'homeland security' being used in the same context? and, invaluable to whom? a threat to the status quo? or is there a radical suggestion that the masters tools be used to displace the master? funny, though, the effect of wielding a tool is perhaps the same, regardless of the wielder. that is, on the wielder, not on the hapless victim!

and what if, just what if these technological deployments are subsequently used for command-and-control, will everyone be surprised and taken aback? gee, we never imagined...

and the other core issue -- whether you believe that all things are connected by a relatively un-knowable (or un-circumscribable) substratum or whether you consider that phenomenal existence is populated by discrete and completely independent objects, actions, and beings. that driving an SUV in Chicago rush hour has absolutely no connection to the presence of an M1 Abrams tank parked on a bridge outside of Falluja. that typing these words on this keyboard into this device has no connection with degradation of ground water in the Kwale region of Kenya from titanium mining.

soap bubbles drift past my window. waiting to catch a ferry into town to meet Sanna for lunch at the Atheneum. the summer ferry schedule is on now, so three-per-hour for much of each day. takes the timing aspect away. Maria and David drop in for a bit yesterday evening.

the impending travel to ram5 is on mind. presenting a short set of ideas "the human need for open source space" as a participant presentation in "the practice of open source architecture." fragments include:

in joining this workshop, I faced the issue of bridging between a series of phrases which I have yet to completely understand as a lived praxis, and my own understanding and praxis. This process is an essential part of open source, where a distributed system facilitates a set of flows that are not always subjectively related. In order to find a pathway across those often uncomfortable spaces of representational difference, one must sometimes let go of the actual symbolic content of ...

terminologies (need to remain open!) need to be fuzzy concepts that can accept input, crossover, and disruption from other directions.

and rather than a critique-filled, luddite, anti-technological call for caution or complete rejection of these technologies which the military developed years ago and are only now trickling down for the intelligensia to play with, (observation of this effect prompted Timothy Leary to come up with the conspiracy theory that "the KGB and the CIA collaborated to develop LSD and personal computers to keep the middle class intellegensia busy and out of trouble")

I would like to invoke a remembering of what these social systems are built upon, and what the goals might be in using them.

for me it's still a question whether it is possible to deconstruct (or pick the locks on) the Masters house using the Masters tools. picking the lock is possible, but who wants to live in the Masters house anyway, it's got a bad vibe and a bad smell in it.

recalling the basis of Open Source: the human exchange platform.

linguistic-based exchange is only the socialized framework, it is necessary to go beyond that mediated social space into the space of real energy exchanges.

this includes the abstracted space of finance (global capitalism being a subset)

Language, which includes

does not cover

split between linguistic/abstracted systems of exchange (which include legal codices, symbolic (vs real) monetary value exchange systems) and the 'real' space of energized exchange

(why con-fluence and con-ference and dancing afterwards are the meat of con-nection and com-munity)

should not end with movements of abstracted symbolic re-presentations of reality, but should be rooted in the real exchange... the adoption of these abstractions as reality is a core cause of alienation that is giving a very desperate edge to contemporary social systems

we must regain the root. (there must be an embodied corollary to each abstracted notion adopted)

this root is post-materialist, energized exchange that transcends at least at some points the limitations of abstracted re-presentations of connection and dialogue

it is clear that many implementations, sailing high on the hype of the dot.com days, are now merely the tools of state command and control.

we need situations that re-energize human connection regardless of their particular represented symbolic content. this is the essence of open source, it is more than a bazaar, more than a market place, more than any socialized system. it is about embodied be-ing and full-tilt presence, nothing more nothing less.

let's dance!

Andrew shows up, along with Alison and John, we watch the neighborhood cat prance in with a live rat or voll, play with it, and theorize on the range of possible outcomes.