after a short visit to the Courthouse Square Bluegrass Festival, we wander over to the Smoki Museum to hear a persentation by Ramson Lomatewama, a traditionalist Hopi artist and poet from the Eagle Clan. he referenced Martin Buber's I and Thou philosophy which pleasantly surprised me, commenting that the Hopi language did not allow for the it of English, making all relation an I/Thou state. with an audience of mostly greyheads, white retirees, he commented on several misconceptions about the Hopi, including a strong critique of Water's Book of the Hopi, and a short history of Navajo encroachment. he works in a variety of traditional and non-traditional media including stained glass, glass-blowing, cottonwood-root Katsina tithu carving, intaglio printing, and poetry, the following called After the Rains

Sandstone cliffs
reflect the red
of the setting sun.

My hoe is caked
with evidence
of my labor.

I see clouds
going to the east.
Dark clouds.

I look to the sky.
There!
A rainbow
is arched above me.

As I walk down
the dusty road
I look up.

Again!
The rainbow
dressed in beauty
walks with me.

There is no need
for us to speak.

Silence
will speak
for us.

it's a bit of a question, the whole concept of the Smoki Museum -- founded in the 1930's by a passel of white business men who wanted to dress up like Indians and fake traditional dances: there is a strong streak of paternal exoticism in the premise (even the name Smoki is made-up). somewhere there is a wish that what the bahannas (whites) have created for themselves isn't so great, and that the ways of the indian are somehow more romantically sustainable. add a dose of good old fashioned guilt at the unacknowledged centuries of genocide and lies, and an obsession with Southwest Art, and there you have it.

deep on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. we arrive in a heavy rain storm. arrive where? arrive at a destination, a short rough drive off the main dirt road, up a small canyon breaking off the Kaibab Plateau. deep on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. we decide to head for the top of the cliff that hangs right over our camping site. (more images)

across the expanse of Nevada, Basin and Range province.(more images)

traveling from Reno down 395 then off to the east into Williams Valley, and up a promising National Forest access road which dead-ends with the swollen creek covering the road. no bugs, not too hot. (more images)

off into the wilderness, but not before Loki hitches a ride with his California cousins. (more images)

sweet jet-lagged dreams.

stop for a fill-up in Livermore, the 'pod playing Woody Guthrie on the car stereo, This Land Is Your Land, filling the tank, washing the windows.

the fella behind me in a new SUV says, zat you singin?

nah, Woodie says I, I says.

say, I've got a CD of mine, if you like that kind of music, I just finished it last week, rummaging in his trunk, moving a couple guitars, and pulling a shrink-wrapped CD from a box full of them, I'll sell it to ya'.

nah, I don't buy stuff na'more.

then hop in the car, head to the City. across the Bay Bridge. to the Exploratorium.

happy birthday Nancy! waiting for Loki's long-delayed flight. he will be zonked, flying overnight his time, and arriving here at 0100 am. poor fella. San Francisco International airport is quiet and empty. I look at the art.

make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice's home and drove down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.

the gallery space is a beautiful second-floor room with first-growth straight-grain pine flooring, can't find that anymore. looks like the material that Aalto used in Villa Mairea. on either side wall there are a dozen or so color photographic prints, large. English text fragments are posted on the third wall along with stereo speakers, the fourth wall are large windows overlooking Mission, itself another scenario. Sirpa explained that the sound system is not so satisfactory for the work, but there were no options, and it just arrived a few minutes before the opening the previous week. there is a one-hour ambient audio piece playing. the environmental portraits are intimate, varied. some of them easily strong image works unto themselves. Sirpa starts the audio and we listen and chat about the project. the premise is that she asked people that she met to take her to a place of personal importance, she asked them on tape, while in the place itself, to describe the place and its relation to their life, and then she made a 35mm color portrait. half the works were done in Moscow in December, the other half in San Francisco in summer. might be called polar-ly opposed locations. the audio was mixed in fragments, not completely cut up, but the segments were short enough to maintain a flow of interest in the sonic material and intercut in pairs. the acoustic of the room is somewhat problematic, where the sonic material got garbled by hot and reflective surfaces reverberating. I would have preferred headphones to fully catch the ambience, but Sirpa felt it was important to have the free-association possibilities of spatial movement, which is understandable. in that case, a less sonically active space would have been more appropriate. not much to be done about that, though. as I was with the artist, she made connections between the sounds and the images, something I might have done, but perhaps not. it would be a challenge to match all media to it's respective situation. and I wonder what the matching would accomplish? it is better that the effect is more random. to give all possibility to each example. cross-correlation in randomness.

the exhibition takes time, I gained by staying for the whole audio duration. it's a bit hard to imagine, in the rush that is California, at the beginning of the decline of the Age of Oil in 2005, that an American audience would take the time to engage. unfortunately. another testament to the cultural width of the Atlantic, or, perhaps in this case, the divide of all Asia and the Pacific between Finland and California. perhaps feeding the work in a different form, say, on the web, or as a audio/video installation would be speed-appropriate. of course, it would lose the intimacy that less mediation leaves. maybe intimacy is the first energy level to be lost when mediation takes the place of presence. communicating intimacy and place. how to suggest this. how to give this. place. locative media. audio recording puts you in the place of the microphone. a photograph puts you in the location of the camera. the two devices, under the observation of the artist, eliminate the indeterminacy of the self-experienced and lock it into a definite outcome. making a reality materialize. the characteristics of the materialization are literally subject to the observer. the collaborator who uses the tool to make the observation. the energy of the images is surprisingly modulated -- there is a reflected difference between the images made in Moscow and those in San Francisco. do they simply reflect a difference in the observers state-of-being? it's not clear. and also, to eliminate the effects of the sampling tool, especially the camera, it would have been helpful to see printed images of the same genesis. the largest prints, Sirpa tells me, were made by a soon-to-retire printer in Helsinki -- a printmaker clearly with quite some skill. it's a pity he retired before the rest of the images could have been matched in size and quality. that would have removed an artifactual difference from the manifestation. allowing the viewer to see situational, posited differences more clearly.

the sounds bring voluminous information and ambience to experience. it is closely modulated by the human connection and makes concrete the essence of place. images alone are too explicit. sound suggests. and the remembering of speech brings to a crux the personal placement. the three are a tri-partite unity, lacking nothing. having explicit, implicit, and soul-full presence.

choosing the right place to bed down is always critical to personal well-being.

back to the desert. around 95 F from Kingman onwards past Needles, then the turn north off the Interstate into the Mojave. things are still green. the Buckhorn cholla (Opuntia acanthocarpa) is blooming, along with sacred datura (Datura meteloides) and other plants. there is one generation of spring grasses that is now bone dry and gone to seed, dead. reason for some alarm in human quarters: fire hazard, from simply driving through the stuff with a hot exhaust pipe. southern Arizona is already seeing higher than average burn acreage even though it is early in the fire season. sliver crescent moon, shadow bathed in blue-green earth-Light. Venus slightly below, eclipsed by granite boulders. Jupiter with an extended string of pearls high and wide. close by to the place I camped in December on the way up here. not as cold as then, but the temperature swing from day to night will be at least 30 F tonight. but the dry air has a ethereal soothing quality. limited material content, terrestrial-bound equivalent of Mars. day and night. hot and cold. long drive tomorrow, the rest of the way for Dana's birthday dinner. 500 miles away still. mostly interesting drive, as a virtual show of landscape variation. but tedious when there are deadlines. would rather take several days to cross the Great Valley. so many strange scenes there.

Smithsonian magazine echoes my words again. how the visibility of the West has contracted from 145 miles to between 35 and 80 miles. more dramatic than I mention to folks, but I got my statistic some years back. it is decreasing. from the right vantage, overlooking Tejon Pass and the gap to the south of the San Bernadino Mountains, thick jets of raw burnt-red eLAy air burst into the desert, making a dusty haze that spreads east to Arizona and further. ever got caught downwind of a campfire? what's the difference to that and being downwind of 13 million Los Angelenos swarming in single-passenger SUV-droves, simultaneously towards and away from their every desire. not much. weepy, stinging eyes, raspy nose, and asthmatic breath.

imagining if I came into a sizeable chunk of money I would buy a 3-ccd video camera. I shoot so much nice footage in cool places that it is a bit of a waste having a crappy consumer cam. would never settle for such lousy optical quality doing still camera or traditional film work. the cheapest one could get would be $3K, and the prospect of a used pro cam is unsettling. hmmm.

well, once the doctoral direction is settled (or dropped).

sightless eyes, black hole, the first thing to go: wet fruit to the vultures. coyote (Canis latrans) has downturned mouth, sad to leave before the time that normal systems of predation would leave for him to lope the Big Chino Wash, laughing at night with friends.

after a couple weeks of desiccating in the low latitude sunshine, the beauty of the beast is gone, as all but scales, ligaments, claws, and bones remain. and the house finch nest at the front entry was raided by something, presumably a carnivorous bird which made off with the hatchlings, dropping one on the front sidewalk, as well as eating the unhatched egg. the parents are nowhere to be seen. I'll build a more protective birdhouse to attach to the wall directly, like I did in the back, one with a small entryway to keep the predators out. I have a hunch it's the roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus, a ground cuckoo) which is seen every day, wandering around the yard, looking for ... food? apparently they eat lizards, scorpions, snakes, other birds, insects, and rodents. urp!!

my lovely niece, Dana Christine, graduated from High School today. congratulations dearie!

Reasonable (wo)men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable (wo)men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable (wo)men. -- George Bernard Shaw