the play of reification. when mind stops, not confronted by any particular obstacles, but merely by an inertial lag. lacking the energy to proceed. while outside weather changes, un-noticed, unless it is rain. it has fallen below the threshold of modern awareness. inside people. like writing here. slipped by the side of lived be-ing.

wander over to to the Art Gallery of NSW to catch a screening of Gimme Shelter. flashing-back to Ancien Régime of mid-century Amurika, seeing the radical youth of that time -- youth who are now retiring boomers fighting to keep a big slice of pie -- what's theirs by right, eh? bah!



a stroll out to Sculpture by the Sea, an uneven sprinkling of expressions placed along the Bondi-Bronte path. Shar says the water is 19.5C, gettin' there. I'll be in before long. flammatory Thai dinner after that.

Willy and Andy unveiled a new blog, a collaborative effort covering "absolutely everything." Welcome to the blogosphere folks!

students from my class who are also in Shannon's as well have a live network radio performance on 2SER (the Uni public radio station) from the main recording studio, so we break from Ways of Listening and move over to the control room to catch the show. after hanging around there a bit in the control room, I started to rue the fact that I didn't push for a live online gig around the Microsound 10th anniversary festivities that officially happens tomorrow. just didn't have the energy to round it up. maybe next year. the school has the infrastructure, and there is interest.

move over to the Bon Marche Bldg. into the CMAI office, it's free for now, so I take over a corner of it. aside from the air conditioning which cycles between +18 and +30 C on a fifteen-minute basis, it's quite okay. good to have a fast iMac in addition to my now-ancient pre-Intel G5 PowerBooks. they always feel dogged by the ten or so chunks of software I have open at any one time. Dreamweaver, Firefox with Zotero, iView Media Pro, Now-Up-To-Date, Thunderbird, BBEdit, Skype, OmniOutliner, iTunes, Photoshop, Acrobat, Terminal, SoundTrack, Peak, NetToolbox, Activity Monitor, and so on. work.

Mika arrives back in town a few days ago from Newcastle and presenting Temp°Sauna at electrofringe (part of the this is not art event). the Nordic Embassy finds out and asks him to present the project -- in the foyer of the Dendy Cinemas right on Circular Quay next door to the Opera -- for the opening of a Nordic Film Festival. I cruise by on Thursday to help with the set-up which is a bit tricky because of a blustery wind blowing the entire evening, at one point almost knocking the whole rig over with the red-hot Finnish Army wood stove cranking away. there is a fancy opening with plenty of Finlandia vodka drinks, sushi, and posters from Saab and so on. at any rate, he managed to get a couple of the gals associated with the Embassy to jump in the sauna. I did too, with only one question -- when would the next opportunity arise to do a real Finnish wood sauna there on the Quay? it was plenty hot, and we had a good laugh hanging around in towels as did the guests watching us at the opening reception. it's a nice scene, and so I hang around to help shut everything down after some hours.

back again tomorrow?

Angel Place, one of those darkish urban voids produced by vertical development and poor planning, is host to the Forgotten Songs installation as part of the Hidden Networks program. sounds of extinct and near-extinct species that once filled this very ground before colonization. the bird (sounds) are in cages. what brilliant human-applied alterations of flow does (temporarily) to natural systems. when's equilibrium gonna happen?

down to the Don't Look Gallery, Greg's culture-project over the last few years down in Dulwich Hill, to catch another Shannon O'Neill performance and a gig by Random Acts of Elevator Music. it's pissing rain much of the time which adds another layer of sonic ambiance to the evening. after the performance, Carolyn takes me next door to the amazing Samir Abla Lebanese pastry shop, where they have an eight-dollar special box of mixed goodies -- mmmmm. good night.

and now this blog has 1900 entries. gah.

Willie Wagtails (Rhipidura leucophrys), Minors (Manorina melanocephala) ...

that entry stopped there. no time to observe and note things when constantly consuming texts and coping with the daily movements. it is highly inefficient to commute for this kind of work. research is 90% online, and moving between home and the office sucks up at least 1.5 hours a day. strange that it is able to absorb so much time when it's just a short distance away. walking takes about 40 minutes each way, though, and waiting for the bus and the slow crawl down George Street is tedious. I find that the mind-space that I take on when in that mode is very unproductive and deadening. I observe, while hearing is constantly assaulted, occasionally some energizing encounters, but the dominant Asian sense of personal space I find deeply conflictive with my own. and the reflexive sensory protocols I developed through the time in the desert and mountains has been thoroughly destroyed -- no stars to see, not even planets, and it is only in the 16th-floor office that its really possible to watch the weather develop albeit through heavy windows that cannot be opened and are filthy on the exterior (I cleaned the large inside pane of the window immediately over my desk, much to the amusement of several of the other grad students). optical clarity -- if I'm forced to look at the world through a glass filter, it's got to be clean!

the best situation would be the office/desk set-up in another room of the living place. productive work depends only on the network connection, the availability of a relatively unobtrusive sonic environment, and a way to make tea. the idea that (school) work and living are separate boxes, or boxes to be separated, is a traditional view which I find to be counter-productive to a holistic praxis. of course, having fun is necessary, and work can be quite fun, depending on the sustenance of a sense of humor about it all. it is an absurd process, after all, gazing at glowing screens, watching the colored Lights, entranced by the causal nature of keystroke and changing configuration of limited sight.

of course, the importance of social relation is key as well. I find that robust encounter: attentive, directed, relaxed, wide-ranging, inquisitive, and playful to be the most rewarding. I probably am lacking some of this here, without any close contacts, but the few folks who I share time with in the program are smart and engaging.

so what now?

it looks like this will work. settling in for the duration. more-or-less. but do have to focus on getting out away from town. I might sublet Nigel's place about three hours out of town for part of next year. it doesn't presently have broadband, but they might get that installed. anything to be outside the city. (walked over to Paddy's Market yesterday afternoon, started down the steps to the fruit and vegetable stalls, and just turned around, the whole place was jam-packed with people elbowing each other over the goods). ach.

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy's Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it's the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can't bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose.

the now-famous dust storm of '09 I mostly missed except for the ubiquitous aftermath -- a red layer of material as fine as chalk dust, such that, when wet, turns immediately into a dense pigmented wash impossible to really remove without numerous passes with a clean rag or sponge. the red morning I slept through, though I was aware of something irritating my nose and pressing on my lungs. the smell of ancient land laid bare through the efforts of hydrocarbon-dependent mono-culture farming. dust-bowl.

lunch with Morgan who just got into town a few days ago to work for CuriousWorks doing some workshops in WA (West Australia) starting on Sunday -- six weeks in the Out Back helping kids tell their stories -- Shakthi, CEO of CuriousWorks joins us. interesting organization facilitating creative learning solutions for under-privileged kids in under-served areas of the country.

alternating between productive dialogues, confluences, paths-crossing, and total wasted moments, with a feeling that the wasted ones are gone completely, life's energy diffused into the cosmos. not to raise the state of being one iota. dark energy, dark matters. the moments understood are the opposite, streaked with Light and Lightness.

Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process of creation and invented to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist now attempts to construct an environment, a system of communication and production, a collective event that implies its recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action. -- Pierre Lévy