a happenstance crossing with oima last week on a V2 irc channel brought back warm memories of big streaming parties. so I checked in later with oima on their current home base DFM RTV INT -- home of veteran streamers based in NL with a nice global distributed network of djs. oima does a show NO FRAG LIMIT on Wednesdays 2300-0000 CET (GMT+1). hmmmm, thinking of doing a sonic gig on DFM in the near term. DFM has a nice vibe, reminded me of the best of public radio in the US -- ecclectic, smooth, and electric. and also, memories of Radio GoGaGa in Boulder a decade ago already.

True love is a sacred flame
That burns eternally,
And none can dim its special glow
Or change its destiny.
True love speaks in tender tones
And hears with gentle ear,
True love gives with open heart
And true love conquers fear.
True love makes no harsh demands
It neither rules nor binds,
And true love holds with gentle hands
The hearts that it entwines.
-- John Clare

Nam June Paik. resting in meditative media.

still adding to Kevin's memorial. mixed feelings about it. helping to re-member him for others, with others. perfect use of the archive. Mozart's 250 birthday. along the trail of rememberings. the Bedi's come for a visit. been nine years since their last visit.

Sam Harris on c-span. talking about blind spots of consciousness. solitary confinement. meditation needs to be brought into the normal spectrum of human experience. and this along with recalling the Challenger incident.



20 years since heading up from Tower Records near Columbia Circle to dinner at Emily's mother and step-father's place on the Upper West Side -- sitting in the livingroom aftewards -- as the television played the Challenger explosion over and over. her step-father was VP at Martin Marietta, the company that built the solid-fuel Titan IV rocket boosters which exploded because of the thermally cracked o-ring. he spent most of the evening with his head in his hands as the spectacle looped endlessly. a few months later, I visited with Emily in Paris, here with tulips to be set



right here on the cold steam radiator.



then heading south to Lyon to visit with Christine and then to Chalon for a week at the youth hostel and hanging out soaking up the ambience of Niepce.

Kevin passes away this morning after a three-year fight with brain cancer. a brilliant painter, always with pointed insight and incisive wry wit, good story-teller, and all-around warm and lively company. his embodied presence removed now will leave an empty space. we met way back during the infamous Conrans-Habitat catalog shooting that Bill was doing. Kevin was working for the Conrans crew, I was an assistant for Bill. day after day on location in Peters Valley for the first half of the shoot, a sense of humor was necessary. then Kevin and I drove a Uhaul truck to Acadia National Park full of furniture and location gear. many stories to tell about that adventure. nothing like shooting a 4-poster bed on the top of Cadillac Mountain at dawn. clearly an auspicious starting point for many friendships: I think it was all the lobster (lobstah) consumed in Bar Harbor (Bahhabba) with the



crew. on the way back, we filled a cooler with lobsters and ice, and had a big dinner at John and Laurel's place in PV. Kevin's aunt has a place in Venice, but I never was able to make it there when Kevin would go. a missed opportunity as I slogged around in the chill of northern Europe. we instead exchange postcards and emails over the years from points in between here and there. many shared dinners in New York and New Jersey along with friends Bill and Andrea, Stefan and Ellen, and all the others that bread was broken with. and Kevin's painting. intriguing process. drawing from cultural flotsam, re-producing re-productions, obscuring roots, with a solid and dedicated technique. (see the memorial webspace for many reproductions of his three most recent series of work). Labels is the most direct work -- deeply humorous, wry, scalding, beautiful. an earlier series of work, Mt. Fuji confused me at first, before I understood Kevin's wit. the entire series based on images once or twice removed from the mountain itself. stripped of the romance of landscape painting, wit and skill takes over the canvas -- where a collision of kanji characters from instruction manuals for the ubiquitous Japanese electronic devices that clutter our lives decorate the meditative re-presentations of that iconic volcano. and color. more staid a decade and more ago, but the Eiffel Tower series is fundamentally about color, the radiations of color energy that explode from every object that we are surrounded by. same with the Wave series which plays with the surface of the canvas, the quality of reflectivity it exhibits, and, again, color. and because Light of color of Light is the radiation that we all experience the world through, it reaches deepest in paintings. good paintings, that is. and Kevin's work is GOOD.

we subterraneans mostly ignore all this radiation, instead focusing on what things are supposed to look like -- that's how we miss the true nature of the world:

seeing mind in things

seeing things, you see the mind; without things, mind does not appear.
in the ten directions, open or blocked, the true mind is omnipresent.
if you conceive intellectual interpretation, it turns into a false view.
if you can see objects without minding, then you will see the face of enLightenment.
-- Chang Po-Tuan

Kevin's seeing was of this nature. fundamental, without the baggage of fluffy academic intellect. rather, incisive, intelligent, disciplined, having a sensuous dose of warmth alternately in the form of humor and in the form of that self-effacing obscuration. as though the full-tilt attention and vision stripped of pretension would overload the viewer. he made it a trifle more safe to experience, without taking the soul of the Light away.

I was able to activate a guestbook on his website kevinburger.com.

and all this brings reflections on the rootlessness of being. a majority of the people I have met on the long kilometers of movement are based in a single physical location, and have been for a good amount of time. traveling some, perhaps an exchange or residency in another country, moving within a city or small region. on occasion a major relocation, a life movement. but rare. more rooted in a local community. connected to a local scene. changing jobs occasionally, sometimes not at all. stable. stabile. socially productive. personally productive. transformative. no green pastures, however. I missed that from the moment I was bundled into a car and driven from Anchorage, Alaska to McLean, Virginia to Acton, MA to Calimesa, CA to Clarksburg, MD. in 7 short years. dis-locations became the baseline. missing the development of community and friendships except as a remote activity. back to remote presence. as praxis. and time passes while bodies wear. sheesh.

John forwards this extract from Martin Luther King's opinion on the war in Vietnam:

A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

To save the soul of America.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

Unquote.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation?

it is the annihilation that is easy. it is slow, imperceptible, and complex to unravel -- the feelings of powerlessness in the face of the invisible macro-scaled inevitable.

keeping an email flood at bay. what for.

just got Christian back on a plane to Detroit and on to Paris and Hamburg. after a few short days of jumping around the local landscape. Sycamore Canyon, Toozigoot, Baghdad, 7up, and Perkinsville, among other places. places. and the sun, sky, moon, a few stars not drowned-out by the fullness of the moon, coyotes howling in the early morning. sleeping on the ground is cold even with the bivvy sack, but the back holds up to that test. Bella-boop accompanies us for some of the touring. dirt roads are tough on the truck. dusty. but the driving is something to get into. more of this kind of travel soon. after cutting losses and moving on from AZ to other places. loosed-feet. and free fancy.

and don't ask how Christian unstuck his hand from the saguaro spines ;-) ...

it isn't until late in the evening that Christian notes that it is indeed Friday the Thirteenth. but a day of rough-track riding, and hiking up Sycamore Canyon a bit, followed by finding an auspicious camping site keeps the evil eye away. breakfast is scrambled omelet with calamata olives and cheddar.

scanning the network for old friends, I look for my oldest friend, David. from 3rd through 6th grade in Clarksburg. a friend from exploring fields and woods, following creeks, playing soldier, fishing in the pond behind our house, slogging through swamps and bogs, long summer adventures with canteens and snacks, hiking sticks and knives, watching out for poison ivy, copperheads, and water moccasins, riding bikes into the dim of humid summer evenings, playing catch until eye could no longer see the ball. soft spoken and gentle, David stuttered a bit, but was a determined and stalwart friend. we ended up in different schools after elementary school, and we lost contact after that, but I knew he went on to be a commercial pilot. and now he's gone. he shared the same birthday as Loki. August 18. he was 9 days older than I, now he's forever younger, buried in the cemetery behind the little white clapboard church in the center of Clarksburg, not a hundred yards from the home he grew up in. and the school we attended together.

David Glenn Marshall, 42, of Frederick died Dec. 18, 2000, at Frederick Memorial Hospital. He was a lineman supervisor at Frederick Aviation.

Born Aug. 18, 1958, in Olney, he was the son of George J. Marshall of Frederick and Joan Edwards Ruff and her husband William of Gaithersburg.

Mr. Marshall was a 1976 graduate of Damascus High School and attended Montgomery College for two years.

In addition to his parents and stepfather, he is survived by his sister Susan L. North and her husband Michael of Brainerd, Minn., brother James E. Marshall and his wife Karolyn of New Windsor and sister Karen E. Nichols and her husband Brett of Frederick; grandfather Emory B. Edwards of Clarksburg; a nephew, Thomas E. North and a niece Jennifer L. North, both of Minnesota; and many aunts and uncles and cousins.

Services were held Friday at the Olin L. Molesworth Funeral Home, Damascus. Interment followed at Clarksburg Methodist Cemetery, Clarksburg. Memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society 11323 Amherst Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20902.

and

Since childhood, David G. Marshall had a passion for flying. In high school, when his aspirations of attending the Naval Academy did not materialize, he did not let his love for aviation and overall dream to fly diminish. He went to Frederick Aviation directly after high school and worked on the flight line. During the same time, David took flying lessons and earned his private pilot's license as well as his commercial license. In addition, he became a flight instructor. When a forklift accident claimed his life at Frederick Airport in 2000, family members created The David G. Marshall Memorial Scholarship Fund to help others achieve their aviation dreams. This fund provides scholarships to students with a 3.0 grade point average or higher, who demonstrate financial need, academic promise, character, a love for aviation, and a desire to pursue careers in the aviation industry as David had done.

Contributions to The David G. Marshall Memorial Scholarship Fund are accepted at any time in any amount by sending a check payable to The Community Foundation of Frederick County to 312 East Church Street, Frederick, Maryland 21701, with the fund's name inserted in the check's memo line. All donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. To make a gift using a credit card, call 301.695.7660.

The poet had wasted his night while others had feasted, and now he knew that it could never be recovered. He needed only to raise his face from the lamp to the sky to realize that the night was lost beyond redemption. The waiters hurriedly pulled the tableclothes off the tables. The tom cats slinking around the veranda had a morning air about them. The day was irresistibly bearing down upon the poet. -- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Rod passes this confirmation along in the darkening hours of what seemed to be largely a dark year. here's to 2006 being better, period.