chilling out, some waiting, planning the spring which seems to be falling in place (nicely). a second teaching gig comes up, et al. as well, some other future teaching possibilities. falling into some order and potential, although the bigger questions remain unanswered. the discipline and focus to create in textual realms remains the greatest challenge.

landed back in Bedford with the clan after some cold pushing and shoving of one of the cars, the Prius, up the driveway from the ski house. cold. cold. cold.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. -- Henry Adams

the rumored severe winter storm becomes only a Light sleet. despite all the globe-girdling technological network of weather sensors, they are wrong. it is a modest fall. mostly rain and a bit of sleet. windy.

The Meteorological Society ... has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine. ... It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe ... to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface. -- John Ruskin

at the ski house. fabulous. Kevin's skis are leaning up in the deck. he is on my mind, as his absence is always amplified when in the locations where there was once presence. presence does not need amplification. presence is. as absence is not. it is a similar relation to heat and cold -- where cold is the absence of warmth. warmth and heat is the presence of energy. the presence of life, of be-ing.

so, nothing lasts. and there is a return to the ever states of otherness and change. life is all that we have. cherish it. and endeavor to go beyond all possibility at each awakening day.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within.
I'm coming now
I'm coming to reward them.
First we take Manhattan,
then we take Berlin.
-- Leonard Cohen

waiting for the new(used) PowerBook to arrive to begin the laborious process of rolling the practice-base from the lame machine. crossed fingers for easy roll-over of software, as I have exactly none of my original install disks with me. I imagine problems, and might be forced to try a more extreme method of swapping hard drives which theoretically will work, but is sure to run into some kind of problem on the way.

The kinetic intercomplementarity of the finite Universe requires that what disassociates here must associate there. High-pressure atmosphere at one point is balanced by low-pressure elsewhere. The stars are all radiantly dissipating energy. The Earth is a celestial center wherein energies from the stars are being collected and buried ever more deeply. When after vast millions of years, enough energy has been impounded aboard our spherical space vehicle Earth -- then it will become a radiant star, as the discard of other burnt-out and dissipated stars are concurrently aggregate elsewhere -- some trillions of years again to become a star. No factor operative aboard our planet is so effective in aggregating, reorganizing, concentrating, and refining the disorderly resource receipts as is the human mind. -- R. Bucky Fuller

okay, I kind of get it, but Earth, Inc. is pretty obscure not least because of the convoluted language Fuller uses -- endless sentences of conjunction and adjectival amplification. but no references, I like that -- evidence of original thinking (or un-cited plagarism...). poems, fragments of ideas, what not. it can be done, but what impact did/does this text have on The Whole Earth?

tending to my own symbolic annihilation. making agreements with distant others to be there then. when being here now remains contested and thin in execution. and. still, a warm hand-shake and I feel like crying; gracias, gracias por todos, gracias, gracias to the guitar-playing Latino guy (is he my age?), a tenor singing in the L station. his spirit-voice shakes the rusted iron foundations of the city. it quickens autonomous space and heart in the urban subterrane and pushes everyone to the electric forefront of be-ing. the sustained highs transform the state of all things until suddenly I am here now. the I-beams shudder as the train pulls in. my head hangs as I enter the car and slump onto the fiberglass bench. peak experience, and the inevitable deflation.

feeling pretty lousy with this hanging-on cold, but a chilly and wet trip by bus in to reboot is rewarded with some very nice crossings-of-paths -- Keiko (talking share tokyo plans), Elsa (talking Lisboa and roguewaves plans), Anton, Dan; from share.montreal, Jim (is a polar/solar bear, surprise, surprise, yes, indeed, very nice to discover this!), Marie-Hélène, and ??; as was Katherine (another polar bear! great!). head home somewhat early with Dan and Emily to their place in Brooklyn for the night, then back to Jersey the next afternoon.




Emily's got a nice collection of conscious education books from her studies at Columbia's Teacher's College, I take some time to dig into a few of them for some good jolts. she fills me in on her work developing kids' social networking platforms for the non-profit takingitglobal.org.




see at a distance an undesirable person;
see close at hand a desirable person;
come closer to the undesirable person;
move away from the desirable person;
coming closer and moving apart,
how interesting life is.
-- Gensho Ogura

Victor and I put this conglomeration together one evening. stretching the limits of playful thinking. using all pieces possible in fast construction. to consume all local resources. then applying meaning to portions of the construction. along with the all-important smallest glowey bits. and all at an average cost of $0.10 per piece.

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is an innovative, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY deepens the reflection process and supports an effective dialogue - for everyone in the organization.

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way. one article starts out. wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c'mon, self-reliance??? when one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. how can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? the web of dependencies is both wide and deep. can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can't answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. there is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon. that baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

the dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. a dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. it consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

how can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? it is a relative issue. clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to that system. it is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. from covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. it is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the Self in relation to the system.

in the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct likely created by a subset of military technologies. but trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. this is where the Self engages the Other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of what's out there. trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other critical in the measure of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway which trust must follow to be realized. what is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous Others. what does autonomy mean when any minute failure of one of that thousand can create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don't know where I'm going anyway.

more on this in future rants...

Kim (Cascone) posts an announcement about Stockhausen's passing. giants falling, I reply. and send a short note to Simon:

Wanted to send my condolences to you. A father's passing is a complicated thing for us resistant and authority-fighting sons.

strange to have just been with Mary two weeks ago. wonder how she is doing. with a former husband gone. strong woman.

and meanwhile tracking Kim's recent (and, as usual, brilliant) work on Musica Excentrica, The Astrum Argentum. headphones are a must unless you have a fantastic hi-fi system. the FLAC loss-less files I will get Stefan to play on his phat tube-amp audio system.

Steffi makes a turkey for a very fine Sunday dinner. Fritz helps out with the cooking.

back to bed. where are the manacles? ;-) after a nice party for Barbara & Klause's combined birthdays. some interesting discussions with friends and neighbors. development policies of the Landes government. as well as on the politic of the current US regime. ach!