blast not having a digital copy of this essay, but as it is one that I use in teaching on occasion, and one that brilliantly explores the spiritual dimension of the alienation of the age we are stepping through -- so I type it by hand from the catalog printed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York on the occasion of a screening of Elder's Book of All the Dead in November 1988. I was not present at that screening, but was at the prior premiere of the first 18 hours of the 40+ hour cycle which happened in the Film Studies building at CU-Boulder. there were just three of us who sat through the whole weekend event in an ancient classroom in the now-razed Film Studies Building. a handful of others made parts of the reel-after-reel intensity. it was a transformative experience -- from the simple physical immersion that 18 hours of film induced, but also the visual energy from the work itself, and the intellectual rigor that was embedded into the narrative and visual contents. it has resonated for years as a source. neoscenes dreaming and the performative visual-sonic works that came around that impulse owe something deep and intangible to the Book of All the Dead. I was deLighted that Bruce assented to my hosting of the essay, adding to the small collection of 'third-party' essays replicated for interest and convenience.

on the way back from Phoenix, a stop at Arcosanti, which seems to be tired and spent, not so much changed since I visited about 20 years ago. some of the constructions seem to be very comfortable places for living, but overall, the infrastructure is marginal.

tripping onto small chunked bits of left-over text, text that was not consumed by the vacume-cleaner of the ages. text that is left-over to be digested and re-formed by the reader who is a writer at the same time as reading. consume, re-form, re-contextualize, excrete.

The Great Society arose through the discovery that men can live together in peace and mutually benefiting each other without agreeing on the particular aims which they severally pursue. The discovery that by substituting abstract rules of conduct for obligatory concrete ends made it possible to extend the order of peace beyond small groups pursuing the same ends, because it enabled each individual to gain from the skill and knowledge of others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly different from his own. -- Friedrich Hayek

Per sends this announcement for a participatory online project Democracy and Desire that will be exhibited at Vacío 9 in Madrid. the beginning of the essay regarding the exhibition:

I have chosen to name this project Democracy and Desire because it is virtually impossible to say the two words in the same sentence. No sane politician would ever dare to talk about our right to express our desires as democratic privilege. Together they open the gates to a political minefield. But isn't it the artist's democratic responsibility to go where our elected men and women do not dare to go?

Democracy and desire are not polarities. They just lay each other's weaknesses bare. Democracy today, is closely related to western capitalism and unquestionably 'good'. But paired with desire it reveals its own weakness - because our desires relate to greed, violence, jealousy as well as love and sex. Anyone who has truly loved also knows what behavior your loved one can provoke in you and vice versa. Desire opens a floodgate of questions that democracy cannot answer or deal with. -- Per Hüttner

brought to mind's awareness reading John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me where life is transformed through a material transform of the Self. the facts of be-ing which govern the contingencies of embodied presence in this passing life.

Dream Variations

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

-- Langston Hughes

reading Stephen Brookfield's two recent books on teaching -- The Skillful Teacher, On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom and The Power of Critical Theory, Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching along with Parker Palmer's essays on education as a spiritual journey, To Know As We Are Known. might as well be girding for the rest of a career in education while job hunting. weak areas include the feedback process, especially the short-term-feedback processes to gauge how students are coping with the course at different levels. this doesn't apply to the 2-week intensive workshops which have a constant level of dynamic feedback running the entire time. but the idea of having two online forum log-in ID's for each student -- one an assigned user ID (or self-selected user name) and the second being anonymously assigned (pull the user/password slip out of a hat at the beginning of the course) and used for posting reactions to the class situation. this can include both posed questions from myself as well as ad hoc discussions on subject material, procedures, processes, expectations, and outcomes.

part of me likes this idea, while part of me sees it as just another way of artificially coping with the chasm that has evolved over the years where the teacher and student start off their relationship not from a position of mutual trust, but of adversarial suspicion and imbalance. this largely because of the (de)formative pressures of the social system that sees education as a key element in the hegemonic production of consumables. nothing more. many now see 'higher' education as a mechanistic successor of primary education -- where primary education was the social mechanism needed to produce people literate enough to perform as a worker in the industrial 'revolution;' higher education merely fills the role of producing 'line' workers for the information 'revolution.' uff!

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness. -- bell hooks

Sandy, Kathy, Maureen, Jake, and Lon -- hiking partners on a nice 6+ mile loop around Yeager Canyon in the Prescott National Forest.

on the way home there's an ambulance heading out Williamson Valley Road when we come up Pioneer Parkway to the light. heading north out Wiliamson Valley to mile 5 there are some cars pulled over, the LifeLine ambulance crew unpacking the stretcher. not apparent quite what is going on but as we drive by a large heavy-set Latino guy drops from standing to squatting next to the crumpled from drivers fender, sobbing. so it goes.

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Annie Abrahams sends out an open invitation to participate in her project FearingS which is a part of:

"Oppera Internettikka - Protection et Sécurité" explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form -- live opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcasting. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace -- an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.

memories of recent and undocumented interactions with rainbows. dredging up a spectral wonder committed to film at the God's Falls in North Ice land. and this text composed some months back on the back deck of a house no longer lived in:

what sight of rainbow gives full and transitory is not the will to wake up the next morning, it's just late afternoon, well before sunset. lightning strikes the house. the radio quits. do the dead feel the hissing crack of close lightning like the living do? a bit of dread, a bit of shaken body wonder?

rainbow gives nothing except the radiation to brush the eyes. but in that brilliant subtlety there is everything. the smell of rain soaked earth and sage, cedar and piñon. when it is leaving. gone. all is gone, even memory of persistence of vision an illusion. after all, memory is imprint of the primal mind leaving the moment. rainbow gives only memories of itself, written in state-shifted electric bodies.

it's been ages since I've spent time checking out gridcosm -- a SiTO project initiated by net amigos Ed Stastny and Jon Van Oast pushing a decade ago already. it's getting very active again, as a new generation of SiTO artists have at it. I'm quite sure it's the oldest and longest-running collaborative visual network project around. a singularly deep (literally!) visual essay on the past decade of network pop-being. or so. explore it! Jon and Ed are brilliant networkers and an inspiration to me over the years with their easy-going attitudes and intuitive insights into distributed creativity. last time I saw those guys in meat-space was in Montreal at the 1996 ISEA. Keep up the great work!

then, watching Slacker in DVD by Richard Linklater, appreciate the smoothness of film-making and a fluid and spontaneous anti-narrative:

... When young we mourn for one woman ... as we grow old, for women in general. The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, what are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. -- Joseph Jones, Slacker actor

aren't disco balls just enhanced simulators for dancing around a fire? what's the dif? why not dance around a fire more often? gyrate under washes of starLight with limb warming fire to back and front as oscillations permit.

what of having fun while living?

Modern man is insecure and repressed -- isolated from his fellows yet desperately clinging to the collectivity which he trusts to protect him from the might of other collectivities. Divided within himself into instincts and spirit, repressions and sublimations, he finds himself incapable of direct relation with his fellows either as individuals in the body-politic or as fellow members of a community. The tremendous collective power with which he allies himself gives him neither relationship nor freedom from fear but makes his life a sterile alternation between universal war and armed peace. The modern crisis is thus a crisis both of the individual and of society at large. -- Maurice Freidman