the memorial service for Dad, bringing him to rest in the Ukiah cemetery where other relatives -- Howards, Clevelands, and Hopkins -- are buried. it's a peaceful place, Ukiah, probably less peaceful than 100 years ago when his family had a pear orchard and the area was quite rural, but with a temperate climate that supports vineyards, sequoia, live oak, and manzanita, it is classic California. the orchard is now a retirement trailer park, the unusual Craftsman-style house that my grandfather and namesake Charles B. built by hand is now hemmed-in by porch-on-porch single-wides, the line of elegant trees that led up the lane to the front reduced to a pair of lone firs, the house divided into three apartments. progress. (or just crass and profitable development).

landscapes: social, cultural milieu shift in range of eye and ear. amurika, what it is, should be, imagines itself, synthesizes, acts, predicts, with the full depth of the unsustainability. to surface through the fragile impossibility of material wealth. it's confusing. no critique, rational or irrational, will have any effect. teevee shows of crying parents and wives, reading last letters of soldiers gone in Iraq. what is this for? why this mediation of grief. what is this? presenting the lined faces, the tears, the quavering voices, and the simple expressions of life now gone, erased through some destined fate, whatever that is.

back in Amurika. familiarity of being. and seeing what I want to see. or not. in the immediate surrounding there doesn't seem to be a heigtened sense of paranoia, but in the extended media surrounding, there is a sense of impending. bus ride from Newark shows the levels of social being. stratification, segregation. lower levels of infrastructure are eroded and the interstitial spaces of chaotic dispersion seem increased. obvious, and overlooked. that the overall depression evinced by the more open individuals, a tangible fear not of terror or violent intervention in the social order, but by the acceleration of intolerant and oppressive attitudes that are locking the society up into a polarity of ideologue and dogma. that the fundamentalism of one external social system is stimulating a reactionary rise in rigid (reactionary!) fundamentalism internally. with no good view in the horizon. no sense of optimism. (to such a degree I can't even find a spark here in text, a fiction of easy life ahead.)

of course, there are elemental ways of going that do not slow down under a matrix of oppressive social conditions, ones that don't acknowledge the dominion of legal, political, economic, or general social strictures. spirit. that which is removed from the relativist social sphere. the region where the Self moves as a flame, a fire, an entropic configuration.

yesterday's stream and the conversations woven around with Steve are enLightening and stimulating. as is the rare case when the possibility to engage with an Other who shares not only the material basis for formal working, but when the aesthetic explorations, the attitudes, and the human interests are sympathetic. we are both net workers. it's been a pleasure sharing contacts and possibilities over the decade since we met, remotely, during the Fax You project. I was at the Helsinki end, he and Genie at the New York end. contact. and sustained contact. what it's all about.

time slips into the next several steps, with no spare to make reflexive jottings here. now in Catonsville, on a long-delayed visit with Steve, about to do a collab stream as part of his art@radio project which takes the form of a weekly streamed hour of sonic art works and a variety of other collab sonic streaming projects. it was previously airing on WMBC, the university student station, but with infrastructure improvements, Steve can now broadcast a stream from home via nicecast to a server maintained by the IRC

Kevin is here, Ellen and Stefan away in the City for work, the kids at school. so we catch up in a wide ranging flow of words. jump over to Whole Foods to get all the makings for dahl which I prepare for dinner. red lentils, ginger, curry, coconut milk, bullion, cumin, coriander, masala, carrots, potato, olive oil. different every time. I've never been very confident of my cooking, as when making food for myself, I don't dig into the process as deply as I could. and with all the nomadic scene, I don't often get to host people for food in a place where I can confidently gather the ingredients for something that I know how to cook to begin with...

just incomprehensible. I, Robot, twice in a row. Asimov in Hollywood. dribs of humor, drabs of car chase, gobbets of fire, punching, swat teams, body armor, and guns. and imagine that, I get to see it a third time, four days into the future. on 21 November, enroute across Amurika. another 6.5 hours in the air.

back on routes, a grueling week from Iceland to Denmark, to New York to Maryland to San Francisco. all in seven days. after the early morning departure from Ice Land in a chill dark snowy wind. nothing else but. so it goes. leave-taking, the usual heart pain.

dash away for a lunch and meeting with Søren in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at the Åarhus UNiversity. then a brief stop at the Art Academy of Jutland, home of splab, to meet Tanja and take a tour of the place to satisfy my always-keen curiosity to see schools and organizations on the ground. run into mr. noisejihad himself, Mikko, who participated in both di-fusion events and was a co-curator of the overgaden festival as well. connections, connected, but the total brevity of the visit makes it almost useless. feeling antsy about getting somewhere, and the in between sensation gets overpowering when stops are too short. needing like a week to chill and engage anymore. and I didn't even visit folks in Iceland hardly. nomad leaves for the steppes where stars are hard and cold, and many. check out. rocketing through the night by train, in the hvileplads car (the quite-place). phones and talking are banned. I lucked out getting a seat in this car, the train seems pretty full. yeah, just noticed that I haven't heard anyone speak except for the conductor going through asking for tickets. even the guy selling food didn't really say anything, but is suddenly smiling in my face.

strike continues, wandering downtown with Loki to the center to meet Val and Niels for a tea before leaving. the carrot cake at the cafe is too hard to resist. so much for a sugar habit.

Neils, Valgerdur and I head to Selatangar for a short hike in heavy rain and thick misty airs. the sea roils against the smashed and solid black stone. lichen splash some rocks with colored and white spraying splotches of paint. a visit to the Blue Lagoon is ... different ... from when it was a rough dredged pond in the lava, and a small wooden shack for changing. now it is business.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn. -- Walt Whitman

several trips this week to the 50-meter pool in Laugardalur. my 'home' pool in old times. luxury. and next door they are finishing construction on a new 50-meter indoor pool.

the future belongs to portent, so as when on the night that the first Gulf War started, back in 1991, when Hekla vomited back what the US military was to shortly throw at the earth in the Gulf region, so, on the eve of the unfortunate re-election of the Bush Regime, Grímsvötn in the middle of Vatnajökull feels intense gastric distress about future warring and earth-raping. and belches in protest. so it goes. the same volcano that caused the massive and catastrophic flooding in the fall of 1996, when the subglacial lake of the same name located in a large caldera, breached its banks and sent a huge volume of water blasting out under the glacier, coming to the edge at and blowing out a 2 km wide chunk of Skeitharárjökull, cutting a 1 km wide swath through a terminal moraine about 200 meters high and a kilometer across. this flood left giant pieces of glacier ice, some the size of large apartment buildings scattered across the jet-black expanse of the sandur (outwash plain). and took out 15 km of the national ring road. all in 5 minutes. there's the story of the local policeman from the town Vík nearby the glacier who had gone out on early morning patrol on the ring road, and forgot his coffee thermos, right after he turned around to get it, he saw the flood in his rearview mirror. thank god for caffeine-addiction! MB, Loki and I cruised through the region and jeeped up to the glacier face in the early spring of 1997 where I shot quite a bit of material. good thing, as all those huge chunks of ice were completely melted before the tourists arrived that summer. quite an incredible sight though.

too depressing for words