fortune cookie: Keep you plans secret for now. Lucky Numbers: 6, 18, 22, 33, 51, 08

Now what shall we call this new form of gazing-house that has opened in our town where people sit quietly and pour out their glancing like Light, like answering? -- Rumi

the movies at the festival begin with a brutal schedule, Oscar nominated shorts were quite intense as was Afghan Star by the British director Havana Marking who was there for a Q&A. today included Forgetting Dad the expat American director was there, and remarkably the film was funded largely by a German film fund. each screening is preceeded by a different busker band playing. audio samples forthcoming when there is time to edit.

gray, damp, cold. on the drive north to the Ditch Witch dealer in Moberly to meet Deb's mom and drop off the kids so that Nick, Deb, and I can get to the full schedule of films at the True/False Documentary Film Festival. they got two passes, but there are numerous situations where the films overlap and such, so I end up getting to see a number of screenings in between long conversations catching up with the six years that have passed since we last had the chance to break bread (and other things). cataclysmic, catalytic, cathartic? where to start?



well, breakfast at Cafe Berlin seems an auspicious point.

following a day enroute. Prescott, Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri. meet Deb in Denver, then in Kansas City. driving from there eastbound, on that strip of hydrocarbon excreta, Interstate-70. eye-seventy. recalling the towns reeling backwards from that usual west-bound drive from Clarksburg, Maryland to Golden, Colorado, all those years ago. the 32-hour road trips. arrive at the house. Nick doing laundry, the kids in bed. dialogue continues.

sleep in. and continue the dialogue that started yesterday with Deb. mirrors of situations reflect, catalyze, frame possible practices, pathways, ways to go.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it easier to define this ideal that to give practical instructions for bringing it about. -- William James, Principles of Psychology

a long bush-whack up the back side of Granite Mountain via the Mint Wash trail is rewarded by a burbling creek where 95% of the time is a very dry canyon. I stop after three hours to turn back at a dense manzanita grove and fresh mountain lion scat.

abiotic, biotic factors. suggesting that more hostile stress-inducing environments drive rapid and broader speciation... (latitudinal diversity gradient...)

Species richness through time may correlate with energy. The species richness - energy relationship posits correlations with evapo-transpiration, temperature, or productivity, and studies of terrestrial and marine ecosystems have shown that these factors may explain as much as 90% of current diversity, although relationships between species diversity and productivity change with spatial scale.

adaptive radiation -- the absorbtion and expression of life-energies in an energy-rich environment

energy availability in a usable form (a form developing based on energy availability)...

iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching... and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.

sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) -- among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had 'for free.' We need only 'pay' the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter -- because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known -- is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated ('virtual') spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon -- the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.

well, time to write some thing or another. here. in February before heading out on the road (again). to another location. elsewhere. waiting. packing. unpacking, repacking, waiting. writing.

the Migrating Realities book got the top design award for all books published in Lithuania in 2008. Knygos meno konkursas Vilnius: Competition in Book Arts Vilnius.

the design crew, Joseph Miceli and Lina Ozerkina of alfa 60 were very professional and organized and it was a [pleasure working with them. kudos! (Joe is third from left, Lina, far right).

the first review came out at the same time (in Lithuanian; English coming soon).

we'll be putting up copies for sale on Amazon and at select book stores around Europe. after a bit we'll then make a free pdf available for downloading. if you would like a copy, please let me know...

scanning photos from 1992, mostly moving back in time. from the year that Chris and Nick visited Iceland; and we celebrated the summer solstice at the north end of Hrísey; the year I fell into a geothermal mud pot and sustained 3rd degree burns on both my ankles; the year Loki was born; when I hosted Nan Hoover and her students at the Academy for a few weeks; when I had a huge photo exhibition in France, by far the largest public manifestation of my photographic work ever; the year my parents made a pilgrimage to Ice Land, uh, what else? scanning these hundreds of images dancing around the world, brings a rich intensity to daily life, though at the cost of a certain loss to the 'be here now.'

I have more time, less money. so I wait for events rather than paying to make them happen.

the transition from this blog platform to the new Wordpress-based one is really confounding. I cannot yet duplicate features that I have come to enjoy and use frequently (like the randomly loading content), and I find the CSS design base combined with the php coding of WP still too cumbersome for me to control as I would like, it's almost like being back in straight html coding days, before any WYSWYG editors existed. I did pretty much re-write the canned theme that I ended up using, but there are still too many issues. got the audio plugins working and several other items, but more work to be done! it's interesting, but time-consuming.

so, when unsure, I stop producing. thus the three week break in content.

but, the road opens up again in a couple weeks, and that will bring me to a location that I have passed through numerous times, but never have stopped except for gas. about half-way between Washington, D.C., and Golden, Colorado. I used to leave Clarksburg, Maryland, home, at 0500, so would invariable hit St. Louis at rush-hour, Colombia, Missouri another couple hours, around sunset. and time for a gas stop or maybe a burger before heading on to Kansas City, and the wide, flat, and tiring darkness of Kansas itself. the Big Road.

storm number two.

storm number one.