Joris invites me out on a drive and a hike after I happened to see him in town as I was taping bird sounds. it is a beautiful fall day, so getting out of town is an excellent idea. on the way out, we stop at the Icelandic Folk Art Museum and meet the founding Director, Niels Hafstein. the Museum is not open, but Niels gives us a short tour of the museum space, formerly a school and community center. with a handful of informative brochures and catalogs then we are off to Grenivík. then proceeding north on Látraströnd to , stopping the car near Nónbrík where I camped with Nick and Chris way back in 1992. the view of the fjord is spectacular as we scramble up Ausugil or so, somewhere between Kaldbakur and Svináknjúkur -- looking directly west across to Borgarbrík on the island Hrísey where I have often been with Loki and his family. in this portrait of Loki's grandfather, Jón, that I took when we were out fishing one day, you can see the mountains on the east side of the fjord, Látraströnd, in the background. the colors today are psychedelic, the miniature willow trees, a bright yellow, the blueberry plants, a red that is not reproduceable through any rational means, not to mention there were still berries to be had. as is always in clear airs here, the sun pierces the eye and etches all vision in the retina, almost painfully. blue-shifted, and carrying little heat. the cirque opens up at around 600 meters, but it's no use going further because of time limits, and I'm not so well equipped for heavy hiking, with only cross-training shoes that give no support or stability for the foot. snow is not far above, and the sun, already not so high, ever, is sinking lower. so, we head back to the car, stopping for small handfuls of berries and to watch the waves and currents on the fjord. a drive up the Fnjóská past Draflastadir and Háls to Vaglaskógur, something of a 'real' forest, one of the few, with birch trees reaching 12 meters in height. and back over Vadlaheidi with a magnificent view of Akureyri and the high glacial mountains directly above the town.

later, when writing in the evening, something brings to mind previous lives. lived here and elsewhere. and dreams seize hold, and the bardo into sleep is crossed.

a video and reception at the Akureyri Art Museum and a concert by Bang Gang last night is the first social mingling with the local art crowd since arriving, been so busy. incredible how fast the time goes, but slogging on code, servers, files, tags, templates, formats, networks, samples, loops, and clips soaks up time in an infinite do-loop. having a regular schedule does the same, especially the limits on internet access as defined by library opening hours. and the resistance to going to Café Karolina for the 'free' access there, 'cause it costs, gotta buy something. but with sugar, chocolate, caffeine, and alcohol off my menu, there is herbal tea left. already hard enough to maintain the avoidance of these ever-present substances in the grocery store, where restless shopping catches me reading labels of things like Pringles to be reminded of the horrible substances hiding in the machine-perfect chips. monosodium glutamate. to be avoided. or my favorite cookies, Burton's Home Blest chocolate-coated digestives, to see if they have suddenly eliminated sugar from the ingredients. fat chance. fruit the only available sweet, or carrots. but going back to apples that are shipped from New Zealand or Washington State, definitely NOT organic, is not pleasant. at least the stores are now open 24-7 in some instances, though I remember from a decade past that there were price differentials of up to 300% between the cheap generic Bónus chain, and the small local 10-11 shops, on the same items. not sure it is so high these days, but prices for very normal food is roughly double the cost of normal organic foods in Boulder, for example. I try not to shop, but when doing so, ignore the prices. depressed starvation would be a direct result.

fall sweeps across the land, from the north. thought it would take a couple weeks, but all the trees are changing, the poplars (Populus alba) as pungent as ever when the air is still, yellowing from the inner leaves, outward to branch ends. the rowans ( reynivithur, Sorbus aucuparia) berries hanging in heavy clusters, walking under them, invisible birds (wrens or músarrindil in Icelandic, Troglodytes troglodytes and redwings or skógarthröstur, Turdus iliacus) chatter incessantly somewhere above. only in the rowans. but it doesn't seem that they are celebrating the berries, more, some nervous discussion about the approaching winter. nah, just noise of be-ing and living in the moment. the higher mountains far to the north, the ones that gate the fjord into the Arctic have now a heavy cap of snow. they do have more-or-less limited permanent snowfields, but the new snow completely covers the tops. in mid-winter, everything is covered from top to sealevel. the sides of the fjord, which in the clear air seem much more vertical than they really are, broad and stepped, tinged with alizarin, rust, vermilion, and gold where the miniature Arctic willow and other small bushes are spectrum-shifting. musing on the dip of the Tertiary flood basalts that make up the entirety of this area to a depth of 3000 meters. as a mass, they dip slightly, perhaps 5 degrees towards the center of the island, rising layer on layer towards the sea on the flanks of the fjord. from adiabatic depression of the center of the island persisting from more extensive Ice Age glaciation perhaps? or something else? this feature complicated by the fact that the island underlain by abnormally buoyant magmatic activity, conjectured to be a mantle plume, though this particular concept is presently under contentious revision. the whole island, approximately the size of the US state of Georgia (100,000 km2), is an igneous petrologists and vulcanologists wet-dream (albeit a cold one!) -- they focus on vesicals, picrites, and intrusives. of course, foreign glaciologists are always boondogling here in the summers with expensive field work as well.

at the pool, a familiar place on the Akureyri agenda. usually have a lane to meself, sometimes share with people who don't freak out when not circling. the added bonus is the variety of hot-pots to hang in afterwards, though I feel less pumped after a workout that is followed by 30 minutes of vegging in one of the pots. best thing is that it's cheap, ISK 160 (USD 2.25), and it's a two-minute walk from my flat.

so sister Janet gets online with her Fallen Leaf webspace after some earlier attempts. good job! here's a pic of her newest puppy, BonChance Bella Mia @ Fireskye, or "Bella" for short. judge Denise Dean gave her Best Puppy in a recent show!

This life is all checkered with pleasures and woes,
That chase one another like waves of the deep,
Each brightly or darkly, as on wave it flows,
Reflecting our eyes, as they sparkle or weep.
-- Sir Thomas More

the national teacher's union has gone on strike, closing all elementary and middle schools in the entire country. clearly recall, in the months preceding my 'official' departure from this country in 1995, there was a 6-week long strike of all teachers across the country including we who were working at what is now the National Academy. the only thing that the Prime Minister had to say was that he was happy that the government was saving so much money every day in with-held pay for the teachers. millions a day. yippee! in some quarters he's called "little hitler" for his stature and his contemptuous and power-mongering behavior. I'm not really following the politic so much while I am here, too many other things to deal with. but it seems this is a another surfacing of what I considered a very backward attitude about education in Iceland generally. already the system is weighed down by the Scandic/Lutheran socialist mentality that everyone should be the same, so that students with a special talents, skills, and interests are in no way encouraged to develop those areas, rather they are discouraged into conforming with the average. successful and talented people more often than not leave the country -- this in contrast to the general US situation of regimented hyper-competition which is equally warping.

still pondering the text about Robert Irwin, whose guest-lecture I missed, out of busy-ness, when I was teaching at CU in 2003. had I been more familiar with his work I would have definitely been there. happened on a copy of Lawrence Weschler's book on Irwin, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees" sitting on a shelf at the residency flat.

equinox, but no balance here.

it arises in thought that the outcome of human connection has/is an embedded dialectic -- either the possibility of open, transformative outcomes, or, the possibility of stylized, socially-defined relation. of course, the actual is always a dynamic mix, but the tendency to go one direction or another on this continuum is largely defined by the social matrix that the encounter is embedded within.
while on Icelandic National teevee, Greenlandic Lutherans sit in quaint chapels and worship the God of the Danes. women in traditional dress and men in pure white tunics sing in the choir. the native woman priest speaking Inuit with a Danish accent, christening a number of babies. where is the spirit in this spectacle?

a year since Dad died. doesn't feel like that at all. a year. one of an endless cycle of circles around a Light. how else would we know, without abstract methodologies of measurement, except to see that things are the same, and different each time around. time may be a continuous phenomena, but it is variable for different beings, and states of being. why not? the willows, aspen, poplar, and birch are all transforming. rapidly. along with the snow marching down the mountainsides. by the time I get back from Norway in three weeks, this place will be stark, winter. time passes. flooding all corners of the sensual world, and affecting change in all things. when in the pool, at each deep inhalation there are smells of the sticky-sweet poplar here, almost a taste. it's slightly different from the Cottonwood of the desert Southwest, but the smell brings a strong memory to surface. I've talked about this before in other places of this travelog. the smell of trees.

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously -- as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. -- Isabelle Allende, House of Spirits

big news for the day is the arrival of the Vilhelm Thorsteinsson, the slogan "ICE FRESH" emblazoned in 3-meter high white letters on the hull, back to harbor after 100 days fishing near Svalbard. the boat, one of 11 owned by the Samherji cooperative based here in Akureyri has taken 7900 tons of herring, amounting to ten procent of the total quota for that particular region of the North Atlantic. The region, the Svalbard Zone, is known for both its rich fishing possibilities, and for the contentiousness of the regional bickering over who controls the fishing rights. The Icelandic government has recently supported the rights of their fishermen to resist the efforts of the Norwegian Coastguard that interfere with their fishing activities. Today, a day after steaming heavily with a high waterline into the fjord, the bulbous bow is sitting half-exposed. the herring that once sat chilled on ice in the hold is now off-loaded and beginning to make its way into the local and national economy. a cash-cow on the water. understandably, the Mayor of Akureyri, Kristjan Thor Juliusson, met the two Captains, Arngrimur Brynjolfsson and Gudmundur Jonsson with a large decorated cake.

a single F-16 flies north at 400 meters above the fjord. and there are repeated afterburner blasts which say that there are more than one aircraft up there somewhere, and now, a few minutes later, two go over wing-to-wing. never seen that up here before, what's this about? not a normal event -- Icelanders do not like to be reminded that they are still an occupied country. the 85th Group, based in Keflavík, next to the international commercial airport, is a wing of the US Navy and has been based there since 1944.

after getting away from the Big City on takeoff, now moving over a landscape that is familiar at all distances possible, from the face pressed into the wet moss to stereoscopic squinting at satellite imagery of rifts, grabens, shield volcanoes, and glaciers. the fascination with geo-morphology never lessens. hanging out in the International Space Station would definitely be cool. but speaking of chill. on the way to the airport, the ex asks "why are you doing this residency in a land that you hate?" "hate? I never said that." "yes you did, many times." child in the back adsorbs this and the unmanageable dis-reality of being. I drag a suitcase into the domestic terminal, no check-in line for Akureyri, the guy behind me is already pushing at the counter in the moment I step over to heft my suitcase on the scale. excuse me.

Hrefna meets me at the airport and takes me on a short tour of town to show some of the changes since the last time I was here onto 4 years ago or so. do some quick shopping, enough to get me through the next few days. no internet access.

back in the pool, a leisurely 1500 meters after dealing with the hurdles of gathering all the relevant equipment together, buying a 10-visit ticket (the 30-visit tickets no longer available), forgetting a towel (renting one cost more than a single entry to the pool!). under thick clouds of varying shades of dark gray to almost black, scudding hell-driven across the low sky, varying rain, a relief to be in the water after almost a month. left shoulder feeling weak and wobbly. Ice Land. walk downtown to send some mail (overdue papers for the Berlin Academy, they always screw up payments, this one now 3 months late. hmmmmm).

checking out the og vodaphone isdn service that Magga has, to see about upgrading it to wireless so that Loki can get his new iBook connected. as has often been the case in Ice Land's past, the population is still ghettoized by its physical remote-ness. in this case, because of the necessity to send and receive data on sub-sea cables (the CANTAT-3 and the newer FARICE lines), data downloads from locations outside Iceland are penalized by very high per-byte fees. and there is basically no competition. it was the same before, with goods -- a total monopoly between Eimskip and Icelandair on any goods from North Amurika, heavy import tariffs on most items (like, books 100%!) imposed by the government to deal with the constant loss of hard currency from rampant consumerism; a social system that emphasizes a passive acceptance of monopolistic price gouging; and the apparent lack of due process where normal citizens might force the government to change it's behavior. the most astonishing case is the building of a dam in the east -- one that is obliterating a vast untouched wetland area of the highlands -- all for Alcoa -- the electricity will power another aluminum processing plant that will itself pollute an untouched fjord in the east of the country. there was much popular and international opposition to the project, but in the end, it was simply the fact that those in power stood to make substantial profit, and there were no checks and balances on their power, so the dam went ahead, with the government website lashing out at environmentalists and generally propagandizing the whole process.

so, no surprise that information is not so freely available to the citizens. privatization to the hands of powerful individual interests takes that possibility away.

back at 66 north again. mind ribboned by proximity to laser life. sheer optical precision. short wavelengths. high-energy.

spend the day packing up and cleaning the gallery space with Björn and Tanja. and end with a full plate of dahl and rice.

Wow! free internet access at the Vilnius airport! should have arrived earlier, but the ordered taxi never arrived, so I had to walk to a nearby taxi-stand to catch another one. and had to barter with the guy.

at the vilma offices thanks to Gediminas and Nomeda -- for hosting the stream I'm sending to Steve of art@radio in Baltimore who has an elaborate studio set-up for the live streaming he'll be doing from there to The Long Night of Radio Art that is part of the Reinventing Radio project of KunstRadio. the whole project will be broadcast on FM, shortwave, a special 5.1 digital satellite transmission, and online. (taking a breath). yeah, live online. meet August on the IRC channel broadcasting from Santa Barbara.

Alvydas is first up, off to the sea to swim. after another late night. other teachers arrive to join the group, now around eight of them, with as many students. school doesn't start for another four weeks at the beginning of September, so folks are intent on enjoying some holiday time though this is technically an official workshop for the students who need the credit. very relaxed.

head to Vilnius on the only daily direct bus this afternoon. can't wait until Friday as I would arrive too late to prepare for the stream to Steve for kunstradio. have to arrange to meet the keeper of the Academy flat where I will stay until I leave on Sunday. good deal, saving money seems to always be a victory against the inevitable drain on resources that this year has been, though it's been in the black so far despite only six weeks of teaching with another two yet ahead in Norway.

just two weeks since leaving the US, so much activity. constant. looking forward to some quiet time in Akureyri swimming everyday again.

bus ride from Nida to Kleipeda and on to Vilnius where I have to orient and walk to the center of the old town, and then call Konstis, the host of the guest teachers flat at the Academy. no hitches, at short notice he's able to get bed linen and keys. so, thanks to Alvydas, I have a nice place to stay in the arty side of the old town. always a relief to have a roof, a locked door and a warm bed. back in Vilnius for another 56 hours, nursing an aching back which flared up the moment I sat in the bus seat for some reason. very intense sciatica that I hope will go away by morning. I'll stretch then. long day tomorrow, until at least 0030 on Saturday morning with the art@radio / kunstradio stream. here we go Steve!

sonorous night of outside vodka partiers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now are comfortable hearing meanings in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.

a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestle, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground -- from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambience, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don't speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.

mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them -- peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.

I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.

this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.