despite having a nasty sinus infection, well, manage to make it with Bill to one of Simon's football matches in Brewster. the game is called for 30 minutes with an encroaching thunderstorm, but when that bypasses the area, the game continues. I hack, cough, spit, dribble, and sniff all the while.

back with laughing friends. good deal. and some serious 'death from above' action. hard to imagine that I'll be taking care of two of those beasts in December...

overnight at Eric and Sylvia's (aka Asteria) place



in Brooklyn after that nice share.dj evening at reboot in the City.

meet Trebor for lunch and coffee in Park Slope. hanging in a coffee house, cyber cafe. where hardly anyone is talking. this is the social venue of the time. wouldn't have been this way five years, ten, twenty years ago. with Bob Marley playing non-stop on the sound system. and photographic portraits of old gypsy women on the walls. the guy across from me, in the cluster of couches full of typers gets up and leaves, leaving an ipod or iphone behind. a gal next to him in an overstuffed smoking chair gets up and runs after him. no one else looks up at the ripple fluttering of off energy. I smile at her when she returns to her seat and her computer. no more contact.

and the urban vibrato in the space from ankle to nose. along with hard pavement. I walked two miles from Eric's down to Trebor's. it always surprises me, the condition of the general infrastructure of the city. would it be better if there wasn't a war going on?

on the way in, a curious Indian national promotion in Bryant Park. fashion show in a miniature Taj Mahal.

and finally met dear Keiko. hang for the evening, some nice performances. do a little ambient mixing in later. head home with Eric after he graciously offered a place to crash so that I didn't have to negotiate the train to Jersey...

and am working on a redux audio of the evening.

a nice party with friends of Ellen's at their place in Brooklyn -- a birthday party for Dale. under an old grape arbor in the back yard, then inside for a yummy dinner ending in sautéd bananas flambeau. then presents.



and then the retreat across Manhattan back to Jersey.

finally and finally leaving this place with some finality. except to retrieve a few boxes of things sometime later in life. or so, depending on how life goes. or does not. Europe looming yet again. how many times have I made this leap across the big pond? 15, 20, 40, or so? Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Luxembourg, Stockholm. and on. airports. this time KLM to Schipol and on to Hamburg, taxi to D?ppelStr in Kiel. and friends. that's the best part. but it doesn't solve the over-arching issue that hides in movement. that is, what to make of life, as it surely enters the latter half if not later.

no images, no text.

prescribed burns. burning forests with control. choking the air.

waiting for the whole wheat pasta to cook. while the daily feelings-of-displeasure arise. versus the feelings-of-pleasure. which arise under other circumstances than those which stimulate the feelings-of-displeasure. that this is the dialectic of being.

I first met my future ex-wife at a party in the German city of Cologne, or Köln as the locals spell it. it was in one of those neighborhoods in K?ln that had a name, like Deutz or Uni-Zentrum, but I don't remember the name. I was wearing a dark-maroon and black smoking jacket. In Germany a tuxedo is called a "smoking." I wasn't wearing a smoking, but people at the party were smoking. mostly cigarettes, because at that time, all university students in Germany were required to smoke cigarettes, it was part of the social contract. because so many were smoking cigarettes, you couldn't say that lots of people were smoking hash as well. although they could have been, as hash was often mixed with tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes that looked excatly like the regular hand-rolled cigarettes. nobody called them joints. I don't remember much of the party. people were speaking mostly German, and I didn't understand much if any German at that time. sometimes somebody would speak English, but mostly not. and as people got more and more altered, marginal English happened less and less. sometime that week, or that night, or on that trip to Europe, I lost that smoking. I was not happy about that. now I don't ever buy such clothes, instead stay sheathed in the banal products of the banal culture of consumption. on sale.

still reading too much of other's stuff. need to concentrate on producing rather than consuming.

To oppose these bad habits and the systems that embody them, as well as to suggest alternatives to them, is enough to get branded 'anti-technology' these days. Again and again, we are urged to celebrate the latest so-called 'innovations' regardless of the deranged commitments and disastrous consequences they often involve. What passes for leadership in our technoculture echoes the corruption of the Renaissance popes and foreshadows a new reformation. As Martin Luther King once observed, 'A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.' -- Langdon Winner

searching the net, pleased to see that Langdon is still around, teaching at RPI or so.

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it's an open project -- add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I'm interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitos, and dark star-brilliant skies. Camping: a simulation of imagined precursor human conditions. A simulation made possible via the automobile and its attenuating effect on the reality outside the windows. Many days were spent with friends in The Woods behind our home, a mysterious space that stretched many miles with abandoned log houses, creeks, poison ivy, and other special places. Oh, and one more experience during a cross-country (5000 km) road trip, when moving from the Boston to California. Somewhere in Wyoming, a heavy thunderstorm swept through, and when the sun came out, my father stopped the car, walked out into the sea of sage brush, picked some leaves, crushed them in his hands and had us smell it. Or was I dreaming this? It's something I do for my own child whenever we come into sage for the first time on every Western trip.

Where did you study and work as you reached adulthood? What are your strongest memories of encounters with nature during that period? Were there any landscapes that you especially connected with your intellectual and creative development?

sotto voce: I left home to go to university, legally emancipated from my parents at 17, and headed west (the West is the Best) from Washington DC, to Colorado. The moment I arrived, I had a deep feeling of being connected to the place. God's Country was a term we used while in the high-altitude areas of the Rocky Mountains. Despite a landscape partially altered by a limitless greed for metals and timber. As a geoscientist, I spent significant times in exotic and extreme places in North and South America in the service of basic industry (petroleum and geothermal, and it was during those extended times in very powerful elemental landscapes that I experienced a radical shift in awarenesses. A few years later, I lived in Iceland for seven years, and it was there, in all my writing, no matter where, I began to capitalize the "L" in Light. The Light of that place burned a hole in my soul and I will never be the same. That Light connected me to a creative source which persists, always. In the desert west of north Amurika I can read the sky, the clouds, and the land. Drawing in these energies, I am able to store and creatively release them when engaged in the human social system. Those energies are a source.

What aspects of nature are important to you now? How do you engage with it in both physical space and virtual space? Prompts* for this question might include: Do you grow plants at home in a garden or indoors? Do you live or vacation in the countryside? Do you wish you did? Have you built 'natural' spaces in virtual places such as Second Life, MOOs, game spaces etc?

sotto voce: The primary aspect of nature which I observe and rely on is the principle of chaotic flows. Looking at the world from a post-Newtonian field, that all things are flows of energy, a natural system seems to have a full range of flows within it -- this versus human systems which (attempt to) have more-or-less defined and limited flows. I like to immerse myself in these chaotic flows because they directly charge my system. I like to walk in these extreme places, usually with no particular objective, and spend much time listening, looking, smelling, allowing the energy of place to enter my body system. As an image-maker, I do gather the energies of those places in the form of photographs, but also as sonic and video works and writing. However, the primary process is the charging up of the Self directly. I spend as much time possible watching the sky and stars. In an average year, I spend six months in urban (European) centers, the other six months, I seek out those other places. While I have used and do use remote presence as a performance artist and nomadic networker, I do understand the limits of remoteness and the loss that it subsumes. A key element in my work is the concept of the Dialogue -- as the prototypical form of energy exchange between the Self and the Other. Exchange that is not talk, but the face-to-face full-bandwidth exchange of presence. When there is attentive and focused concentration on the process of exchange, there arises a phenomena where the two humans, following their exchange, are both, literally, inspired, and energized over-and-above the energy level that they entered the exchange with. While technological mediations impress limitations on this exchange by routing the exchange through defined techno-social pathways, it is possible to engage. And with that engagement comes a surplus of creative energy. SO, having explained that in brief, yes, I have used IRC, iVisit, MOO's, The Palace, KeyWorx, streaming media, faxes, the postal network, to mediate collaborative situations. At this point, while I use some social networking platforms, I am a bit tired of re-tooling every 6 months for the latest fad of tele-mediation. The Second Life fad is especially annoying as it surfaces the extreme a-historicity of technological development which, at this point, uses that development as a powerful tool to subjugate the user. Each succeeding techno-social deployment further refines the possibilities of the Dialogue, limiting and defining the possibilities of the ensuing human connection to fulfill the needs of the techno-social system.

This question is about any connections you may have made between the way you experience computers and the internet and the way you experience nature. Do you find yourself noticing similarities between the two lifeworlds? Prompts for thinking about this might include the way you experience the passage of time; connection; travel and movement; spirituality; physicality; emotion; abstraction etc. I'm interested in any synergies around this area that you may have noticed in your own thinking or that of others.

sotto voce: Unfortunately, I find very few people who do not subscribe to a very conservative materialistic view of technology and its affects. It's time to move beyond a Newtonian view of the world into at least a Quantum view. but this issue is far to complex to deal with here in 300 words... so, other thoughts... Simulation stands as contemporary anathema to spiritual be-ing. I see little point in engaging in something that is supposed to be something else -- except to fulfill the pre-defined roles that the determinate techno-social system has applied to the situation and perhaps gaining the subsequent social rewards. Human created, a simulation is a defined, limited, reductive, and attenuated re-creation of something else. When nature is simulated, the simulation takes on fully the attributes of the socio-economic-political system that spawned it. So when the 'user' consumes the simulation, they are merely consuming of that social system. What's the point? I do realize, sadly, that most people have very limited access to relatively un-disturbed natural systems, so that the simulation seems to be 'the next best thing.' Indeed, in this world now, the air we breath is disturbed as is the sky we see. However, it seems now that simulations of things are actually replacing the originary events/situations. As someone who has spent significant time in extreme natural environments, I find little satisfaction in simulated situations and attenuated living. The loss that simulation pre-supposes, the loss from original signal to attenuated signal, is a root source of the predominant feeling of alienation that creeps evermore into the contemporary consuming life. Now, rather than this being an anti-social position, it is indeed the opposite -- where the originary act of human connection which is the primary defining momentary event of life is what is gradually being lost and simulated. I make no particular distinction between the so-called real and virtual. All technologies attenuate the blast of chaotic flows found in nature to some degree or another. Digital devices have merely slid us a bit further to the attenuated end of the scale, and through that worship of simulation, has further dis-connected us from the natural system of which we are one connected part and to which we owe our lives.

This is a very loose question ? feel free to skip it if it doesn't attract you. If the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?

sotto voce: Attenuated flatness, nothing like a real mirage. When moving in it, one is rewarded by compliance with the illusion of freedom.

preying, or is it a praying mantis hooks into window screen wires, on the outside, with the fluttering Others gathering to the seductive Lights. and, a feasting begins, first a snapping quivering snatch, and some bug is devoured from head to ass, wings and legs fluttering down when attaching flesh and tendon is consumed. imagining the mandibles, a multiplicity of angled jaws cracking, shredding carapace for juices and soft meat inside. a crab feast. a result of meditative posturing, carefully controlled breathing. and fast reflexes. a neck that can pivot the two 180-degree eye-spheres. serrated arm ridges clamp prey. deadly machine, and a shivering to watch.