this is bloodcore

babble on to babylon

2011-01-29T22:08:00.001-05:00

time for me to ramble.

radiant city

2011-01-26T19:50:00.006-05:00

Le Corbusier's vision for urban utopia.

alonzo jordan

2011-01-21T18:54:00.004-05:00

"The quiet East Texas town of Jasper achieved notoriety as the site of one of the most brutal race crimes in U.S. history: the June 7, 1998 killing of a forty-nine-year-old African American named James Byrd, Jr., who was dragged to his death by three white men in a pickup truck. The protracted media coverage of this crime and of the trial of the perpetrators, in addition to the local and national trauma caused by this event, did not for the most part reveal either the longstanding pattern of racial animosity in the area or the rich and complicated social life in the African American half of that starkly segregated town. Many years before however, Alonzo Jordan (1903–1984) had been extensively chronicling that unseen portion of the populace. A barber by trade, Jordan took up photography to fill a need he recognized in his community, and over the course of his career actively documented the world in which he lived and worked, focusing on those civic events, social organizations, schools, churches, and activities that were integral to the daily life of the people he served. In so doing, he created images that not only affirmed the identities of his subjects, but strengthened self-esteem by enabling people to see themselves as individuals and in relation to others in the context of the social fabric of family and community. The exhibition is organized by guest curator Alan Govenar."

Via.

collective infection

2011-01-21T15:00:00.003-05:00

"To dream of an epidemic disease is quite common, and it usually symbolizes contagion through the collective mind." (Jung)

depression in technicolor

2011-01-21T14:01:00.006-05:00

Via.

fight club

2011-01-21T13:52:00.005-05:00

John L. Sullivan & the bare-knuckle boxers.

white lightning

2011-01-21T13:45:00.000-05:00

from the Alan Lomax channel on youtube.

incantation

2011-01-02T22:00:00.000-05:00

christiana

2010-12-16T02:28:00.002-05:00

fave recent find: sounds like Träd Gräs & Stenar crossed with Os Mutantes.

magnetic tales

2010-12-15T23:54:00.002-05:00

gold.

time is on my side

2010-12-15T23:35:00.002-05:00

"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death… our existence can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light."

— Stanley Kubrick

cine móvil

2010-12-14T18:29:00.003-05:00

"Filed away in the Centro de Documentación at the Cineteca Nacional are promotional brochures from 1975, records of an orange-saturated world of geometric-patterned carpets that hasn’t existed for thirty years. The Cineteca caught fire in 1982, less than ten years after opening, its entire collection destroyed. (Within Mexico, the cause of this “cultural crime” is still officially listed as unknown, although those inclined to paranoia whisper that it was sabotage, the obliteration of a country’s past. Legend has it that the print of the Polish film playing when the fire started was somehow salvaged from the rubble, and that everywhere it’s shown a fire breaks out.)

The Cine Móvil program sent mobile cinema units ambling around rural Mexico in those pre-fire years, bringing ‘buen cine mexicano’ to small villages that often didn’t even have electricity, let alone a movie theatre. There were three different vans with three different routes, outfitted with four-wheel drive (“taking the abruptness of our geography into consideration”) and with room for two: beds, a bathroom, a kitchen, storage space for the projection equipment, a small film archive, workbench, screens, sound equipment. The young projectionists lived in the vans for the month it took to wind their way through the countryside, traveling from town to town during the day, setting up their equipment for a screening each night and making super 8 documentary films on those they encountered."

Via.

hard travelin'

2010-12-14T12:20:00.002-05:00

the gambling man is rich and the working man is poor.

chiapas

2010-12-13T21:22:00.002-05:00

dancing plague of 1518

2010-12-07T22:23:00.003-05:00

The Dancing Plague (or Dance Epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, France (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and, over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

The outbreak began in July 1518, when a woman, Frau Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four to six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers. Many of these people eventually died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

Historical documents, including "physician notes, cathedral sermons, local and regional chronicles, and even notes issued by the Strasbourg city council" are clear that the victims danced. It is not known why these people danced to their deaths, nor is it clear that they were dancing willfully.

As the dancing plague worsened, concerned nobles sought the advice of local physicians, who ruled out astrological and supernatural causes, instead announcing that the plague was a "natural disease" caused by "hot blood". However, instead of prescribing bleeding, authorities encouraged more dancing, in part by opening two guildhalls and a grain market, and even constructing a wooden stage. The authorities did this because they believed that the dancers would only recover if they danced continually night and day. To increase the effectiveness of the cure, authorities even paid for musicians to keep the afflicted moving.

Via.

sleeping sickness

2010-11-18T00:44:00.003-05:00

The Insect Musicians (1986) is an album performed and produced by Graeme Revell. It is a symphony of tsetse fly, deaths-head hawkmoth, bog bush cricket, screech beetle, queen bee laying eggs, and 35 other insect sounds collected from around the world. Revell saw the potential for insects as an auditory art medium : « Perhaps the most fecund territory for future explorations in art and music lies in the miniature; in detailed experiments with nuances of rhythm and timber, detail and colour. And perhaps the ultimate horizon of technology is Nature itself.

Via.

Added bonus for me: it's almost what an epidemic sounds like.

all alone in her nirvana

2010-11-18T00:27:00.001-05:00

now that's some psychedelic shit.

Via my new favorite blog.

group therapy

2010-10-17T01:34:00.002-04:00

synchronicities

2010-10-17T00:33:00.001-04:00

Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were elected to office one hundred years apart (1860 and 1960). Their presidencies ended with their assassinations. They were both succeeded by southern democrats named Johnson (Andrew and Lyndon B.). Their last names each have seven letters. They both campaigned by debating their opponents. In their respective elections, Illinois was the deciding state. A major issue in each of their presidencies involved the struggle between states’ rights and civil rights. Lincoln’s secretary’s name was Kennedy and she warned him against going to the theater. Kennedy’s secretary’s name was Lincoln and she warned him against going to Dallas. John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln in a theater and hid in a warehouse, whereas Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy from a warehouse and hid in a theater. Both assassins are known by their three names. Both presidents were assassinated on a Friday in the presence of their wives. Also, both presidents had dreams in which they saw their own deaths.

rattlesnakeplumcake

2010-10-17T00:22:00.005-04:00

"According to the gospel of Mark, believers "shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." It is believed in some southern American Pentecostal churches that if a person truly has the Holy Spirit within them, they should be able to handle rattlesnakes and other venomous serpents. Snake handling is used as a test or demonstration of faith."

(National Archives and Records Administration)

Jim Neel

soon-to-be invisible cities

2010-10-14T16:10:00.003-04:00

what happens to ghost towns in the desert.

Via.

scenes from the road

2010-06-30T21:27:00.012-04:00

scenes from the south island

2010-05-04T17:46:00.007-04:00

"Now I shall tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmouted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes."

".. it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."

trading cities

2010-05-04T02:50:00.004-04:00

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come onto the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the sqare, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story or pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.

- Italo Calvino

stars over silos

2010-05-04T02:42:00.002-04:00

clarksdale, MS

inside looking out

2009-12-06T20:30:00.000-05:00

Via.

solargraphy

2009-10-17T17:22:00.003-04:00

Tanja Trygg has an epic project to map the world through solargraphs. Solargraphs are pinhole photographs taken with a lensless pinhole camera with a long exposure. By doing so the invisible movements of the Sun can be made visible in landscapes.

View the project here.

the invisible man

2009-10-17T17:02:00.012-04:00

Performing artist Liu Bolin paints himself into his surroundings. See more here.

atlantis

2009-10-17T15:13:00.000-04:00

"Our race has long been titillated by images of a 'lost civilization' beneath the sea. Some say it is legend, some say it is genetic memory, a few say there is small difference. Their common mistake is their relegation of this 'vanished' utopia to ancient history. Deep consciousness is hardly bound by the constraints of linear time. Atlantis is in our future, not our past."

- Tom Robbins

According to scientists, no creature on earth dreams as much as the human fetus. If the fetal brain has had no experience, then what does it dream about?

strange harmonies

2009-10-16T17:38:00.003-04:00

"Massimo Cristaldi creates 'possible and strange harmonies' between nature and industry."

"[His work] is concerned with the ineffable qualities of the visible world. Here, nature and industry make an unlikely pair, yet they make a conceptual reciprocation. The flock of starlings in this photograph are drawn to the refinery's thermal flows; en masse they create a kind of super-organism that almost emulates the scale of the artificial complex."

- from jen bekman

welcome to the machine

2009-10-13T21:53:00.002-04:00

housing projects in Ixtapaluca, Mexico.

sea change

2009-10-01T13:23:00.004-04:00

"On the outskirts of Salvation Mountain: lacking a proper river for his boat, Leonard painted his own."

the salton sea

fighting season

2009-09-30T13:12:00.003-04:00

An Afghan National Police officer who was injured by gunfire sings to mynah birds at an outpost on the front line.

Louie Palu

swan song

2009-09-23T01:10:00.003-04:00

The phrase "swan song" is a reference to an ancient belief that the Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) is completely mute during its lifetime until the moment just before it dies, when it sings one beautiful song.

"The swan, who had been caught by mistake instead of the goose, began to sing as a prelude to its own demise. His voice was recognized and the song saved his life." - Aesop

"There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song." - Ovid

And Tennyson:

"The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear; ...
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow’d forth on a carol free and bold;
As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold..."

jestingstock

2009-09-04T22:52:00.002-04:00

The first time an angel heard the devil's laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil's laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range, but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.

Thus the angel and the devil faced each other and, mouths wide open, emitted nearly the same sounds, but each one's noise expressed the absolute opposite of the other's. And seeing the angel laugh, the devil laughed all the more, all the harder, and all the more blatantly, because the laughing angel was infinitely comical.

- Milan Kundera

the great influenza

2009-09-04T22:49:00.001-04:00

what's in a word?

2009-09-03T00:32:00.001-04:00

"When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.

That's where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world," she says.

As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English's light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian's goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that's a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for "in" when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

In Australia, the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre use compass directions for every spatial cue rather than right or left, leading to locutions such as "there is an ant on your southeast leg." The Kuuk Thaayorre are also much more skillful than English speakers at dead reckoning, even in unfamiliar surroundings or strange buildings. Their language "equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities," Boroditsky wrote on Edge.org.

Science has only scratched the surface of how language affects thought. In Russian, verb forms indicate whether the action was completed or not—as in "she ate [and finished] the pizza." In Turkish, verbs indicate whether the action was observed or merely rumored. Boroditsky would love to run an experiment testing whether native Russian speakers are better than others at noticing if an action is completed, and if Turks have a heightened sensitivity to fact versus hearsay. Similarly, while English says "she broke the bowl" even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more like "the bowl broke itself." "When we show people video of the same event," says Boroditsky, "English speakers remember who was to blame even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas of causality."

- article borrowed from newsweek

urban surfing

2009-08-26T16:32:00.000-04:00

"Far Rockaway, an inner-city, oceanfront commuter town is just a 40 minute "A" train ride from Manhattan, it is also host to a unique culture - urban surfers. 'Submerged' explores this unexpected juxtapostion of NYC's urban lifestyle with the profound relationship that surfers have to the ocean. Inspired by his own experience of discovering this scene in New York, director Jakob Daschek's contemplative camera uses the surfers reflections to narrate this short film."

and sometimes Y

2009-08-23T17:27:00.002-04:00

"In hot climates, A provides a shady arch, O is a siphon through which to suck liquids, U a cool cave or tub to slide into; A stands like a surfer with its legs apart, O hangs like a citrus from a bough, U rolls its hula hips - and I and E mimic the cries of monkeys and jungle birds from which they were derived. Consonants, like fair-skinned men, do not thrive in torrid zones. Vowels are built for southern comfort, consonants for northern speed. But O how the natives do bOOgIE-wOOgIE while the planters WaLTZ."

- Tom Robbins

simple creatures

2009-07-21T16:37:00.003-04:00

an argument in favor of space travel:

The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer... They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven, and the round face of the earth... Then the Creator said: "They know all... what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!... Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?"

- Popol Vuh, Quiché Maya

O True Believers

2009-07-17T15:15:00.006-04:00

She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side but she was too sleepy to figure it out. She was better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the men more solemn then they were in church, and the women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the first note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could hear the freak saying, "God made me thisaway and I don't dispute hit," and the people saying, "Amen. Amen."

"God done this to me and I praise Him."

"Amen. Amen."

"He could strike you thisaway."

"Amen. Amen."

"But he has not."

"Amen."

"Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God's temple, don't you know? Don't you know? God's spirit has a dwelling in you, don't you know?"

"Amen. Amen."

"If anybody desecrates the temple of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen."

"I am a temple of the Holy Ghost."

"Amen."

The people began to slap their hands without making a loud noise and with a regular beat between the Amens, more and more softly, as if they knew there was a child near, half asleep.

- Flannery O'Connor, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"

Las Baladas Prohibidas

2009-07-16T19:39:00.002-04:00

valient, outlawed songs of love and death among Mexicali's drug cartels.

"The policeman Carlos Pérez said that some of the most famous ballads were about Jesús Malverde, whom he called the patron saint of the narcotraffickers. He lived in Sinaloa. He was Robin Hood. He sold drugs and used the money to help the people. He was killed in a gun battle because he didn't want to give himself up. Some say he was never caught. Some say he died of old age, and others say that he is still alive. Everybody has his own story."

"Even Lupe, who trudged bitterly through life, cheered up when he heard this corrido, which was naturally so loud that he had to shout into my ear for me to apprehend that it dealt with the demure lady friend of a wanted drug lord who happened to be absent when two federales visited their residence, promising her that they wouldn't hurt him, so she told them to sit down and wait if so it pleased them; but while fixing refreshments she overheard their plan to liquidate her lover, so she sweetly invited them to rest just a moment longer, then strode out and blew them away!"

"I've failed to introduce you to the most famous narcotraffickers, whom even the police speak of with respect: Chapo Guzmán and the brothers Arellano Félix from Tijuana; Cárdenas the chief of chiefs, the Valencia brothers...But maybe I have showed you that certain individuals of a daringly decorative bent can paint the walls of hell with words as yellow, hot, and sulphurous as Mexicali at three in the morning."

read the rest of William T. Vollmann's article "Las Baladas Prohibidas" at Mother Jones.

(videos dug up by and borrowed from utne)

silence is golden

2009-06-10T18:57:00.005-04:00

i love this minimalist photography by Kim Holtermand.

skywriting

2009-06-09T22:26:00.003-04:00

(via slanted)

away, ghosts

2009-05-02T19:13:00.002-04:00

My favorite entry from Matt's old blog:

I saw a note in a garbage bin in the gym that had handwritten instructions: “Meditate or ‘just be’ for 5 minutes, then write a sentence or 2 about your experience.” Underneath the fold was the response, in a different hand, “I forgive you now.”

purgatorial night, redemptive morning light (part III)

2009-05-01T13:35:00.004-04:00

I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I realize I’ve been dreaming. I hear Jesse’s methodical breathing and know that she has fallen asleep too. I conduct a quick bodily inventory, making sure none of my limbs have fallen off me like heavy blocks of ice. I wiggle my toes and am startled that they still have sensation. I slowly maneuver my head out from underneath the seat. The cold air hits my face and saturates my lungs, causing me to heave. The car is filled with a tangible iciness, but also a strange stillness. I open my eyes, squinting, trying not to let the cold get to them too. Suddenly, I see lights. Someone is shining a beacon of light through the rear window of our car.

Shit, I think, someone called the cops. I jerk my head down, hoping they didn’t see me. My mind flashes, is this really happening? Are we really going to get arrested after a night like this? I remember that technically we’re parked on private property, and then there was that brief bout of voyeurism, which may be a bit difficult to convincingly explain away (“we didn’t come here for the small children, officers, we came here for the church!”). I quickly conjure up outlandish excuses we can use: amnesia, abductions, reality tv shows, whether we can claim temporary insanity. Our prospects look dim. And anyway, jail would be warmer than this - and I imagine Icelandic jails can't be that full. I gather my nerves and sit up to peer out the window, face-on into the headlights, into the eyes of those who determine my fate.

I see before me the Atlantic ocean, wide, vast. Its water, heavy with cold, moving like a colossal army of gray over hills. This is the first ocean I’ve ever known, fascinated as a small child by these waters, always wanting to be taken out beyond the breaking point and lifted over its upswings and currents. The sky has taken on the warm tones of early dawn, and I can now make out the horizon line, separating the effervescent water from clouds above, the ocean’s breath fogging just like mine. The sky churns in a moment of tension, like water about to boil, then clouds separate and the sun reemerges form its low seat, sending its cascading shimmering light out over the water, which in turn mirrors it back up to the sky. I feel yellow light on my face, pouring into the car. I call out to Jesse, curled up and sleeping behind me, to tell her with a slight lingering disbelief that we’ve made it.

In a daze, I fumble around, moving seats, searching for door handles, pulling myself in all of my layers out of the backseat and into the open, into the surroundings we missed the night before when driving in darkness. I gaze around. I’m a tiny insignificant dot in a world of white. Snow-covered peaks surround us, with cliffs dropping down onto white rocky beaches. Ice sparkles like stars in the sunlight, the land shimmering, shaking. White and grey sea birds soar over the glacial water, stretching their wings out in an early morning yawn. The sharp breeze carries the scent of salty life, and as much as it pains me to take in that frigid air, I take the deepest breath I can. I feel the tremor of cold begin to slip away, and a stirring of wakefulness deep within me, as my body slowly begins to rise toward the light.

I realize I’m standing next to the church. It looks smaller now, slightly old and decrepit. This intimidating force that had towered darkly over us all night, now cowers in its surroundings. For a moment, I consider walking up the stairs again and double checking the doors, just to see if I would find a key under a doormat that we had failed to look for last night, or a lock mysteriously hanging open. But my legs shake underneath me, I’m hunched over, leaning my weight on our tiny car. I'm still floating through this sunrise landscape, this view I would have missed had we slept inside, pacified by the comforts of shelter.

Suddenly, I hear the engine turn, and the car’s sputtering but triumphant rumble. Jesse is awake. I decide to forego the stairs, and the answers they may bring. I climb back into the car, ready for the heat bath, ready for the night to melt away. We unwrap our wrinkled roadmap, a casualty of the restless night, and pore over its dots and lines, semi-aware of its futility with the daylight illuminating everything before us. This place, this moment, has become the new starting point for us, on our road northward. Bathed in the night and swimming in morning, we begin to drive.

purgatorial night, redemptive morning light (part II)

2009-05-01T13:02:00.001-04:00

The freezing cold does strange things to you in your sleep. By the time 3am rolled around, I felt violated. The previous three hours had been a long sequence of shifting positions, reorganizing clothing on my body, shivering, chattering, and bargaining with higher powers for warmth. I was beginning to deeply appreciate delirium, which flashed by and temporarily made things interesting. I had emptied my backpack and was now wearing every article of clothing brought with me to Iceland. Two thermal shirts, two sweaters, a down-filled puffy winter coat, long underwear, two pairs of pants, two pairs of wool socks, two extra sweaters wrapped around my feet and tied into knots because the socks weren’t enough. A scarf, earwarmers, a hat, gloves, with my towel draped over me as a makeshift blanket for extra measure. I was still freezing, and night wasn’t even half over yet. I considered climbing into my empty backpack and using it as a cocoon, but decided my movement was restricted enough for the position shifts that needed to be executed every 20 minutes to maintain feeling in my limbs. I lay there and dreamed longingly of the horizontal collapsibility of folding screens and accordions, cursing my body for not being able to do the same. When did humans become so vertically-oriented anyway?

Another unfortunate discovery that surfaced while cooped up in the car, which we had dubbed the Hotel Yaris, was when I realized I was the exact wrong size to curl up in a ball in the passenger-side seat. This, I learned through trial and error, was the warmest sleeping position I could muster, but proved to be impossible to pull off over a period of time, as my epic battle with that horrid seat raged throughout the night. When I managed to pull my legs and feet – fattened with my many blubberous layers of clothing – onto the seat in a position in which they would stay, I found that my head hung off the top of the seat, bobbing violently every time I began to doze off. I squirmed down so that my head could rest comfortably enough to sleep, which then in turn sent my feet hurtling off the seat bottom, causing me to lurch, arms and hands flailing, toward the dashboard. My improvised sweater-shoes invariably popped off my feet when this happened, and I then had to take off my gloves, unzip my jacket, and strain forward to tie them back on with numb hands. My patience for this seesawing didn’t last long.

I gave up and toppled myself over the console into the miniscule backseat, my head wedged underneath Jesse’s reclined driver’s seat, my feet stowed underneath the other. My knees, elbows, hips, and other now incredibly inconvenient body parts rested in a heap of bones somewhere in between. This position at least eliminated the teeter-tottering, but required me to extract my head and come up for air every half hour so as not to suffocate - when did humans became so damn dependent on oxygen anyway? I treated the tiny crevice under the seat as a sauna, heated by my vaporous breath, and cherished the moments when it became so warm that I could pull my hat back off my face and strain my eyes enough to see the stars out the back window. However, it wouldn’t take long to feel that familiar fuzziness set in. The colors would begin to flash, the dreams surfaced while still awake, and in a sudden wave of alarm, I’d realize it was time to start the engines deep within, pull the levers and get the wheels cranking, to pull myself out from under the seat and up to the surface for some air. Goddamn, I was so tired. I needed an oxygen tank.

The only thing that precluded my need for air was my need for warmth. Jesse was struggling with the cold too, so we developed a system. All night long, we waited until it was too cold to bear – violent shaking, numb body parts, lips on the verge of turning blue – and then turned on the car, heat blasting full force. It’s a strange thing, when you’re this cold, that heat can actually hurt, but your body slowly begins to remember it and ease back into a temporarily normal state. We did this about every hour, letting the glory of artificial heat pour its sweet nectar vapors into the stale car interior until we felt the first inklings of perspiration under our thermal layers, our bodies welling up again from warmth, blood circulating, sensation’s magnificent return. These moments were the happiest pinnacle of my life. Then we’d turn the car engine off again to save fuel and try to trick our bodies into falling asleep as fast as possible with false promises of continued warmth, before the heat dissipated out the foggy windows and we found ourselves back in a cold nature’s deathly grip.

There are only so many mental states you go through in those subzero temperatures before you realize you’ve come up against the final wall of sanity. The path you follow to this point drives you along an emotional twisting road, allowing you to see as if for the first time, and ponder, the things you can handle and the things you can’t. But when you come up against that wall, you’re looking directly at the things you can’t. You’re staring right into their eyes – an army of headlights facing you in the dark. And they’re not getting out of your way as you push and push through the night. They move with you, growing in number as your patience and will begin to wear away. There’s always the looming thought of how much further you have to go, how you’re going to stay warm if the gas runs out and you can no longer rely on heat, how you’ll possibly manage to leave the car if your body wants to get rid of the water you’ve been consuming as a last-ditch effort to console your nerves. You don’t know what time it is – what if your mind’s been playing tricks on you and you still have ten hours left of this torment? And even if your mental clock hasn’t been deceiving you, you still don’t even know for sure what time the Icelandic mid-winter sun will decide to brighten the sky and tell you when you can leave this godforsaken town.

But, as the morning hours grow nearer, and you see with each passing hour that time is shifting onto your side, you begin to find a strength in these things. They become a badge displaying all that you’ve survived already. You think, I’ve made it this far, I can go a little further. You discover that the body and mind have a hidden reservoir, buried deep below, a reserve army of secret forces that it only brings out when you’re in dire need. They cushion you with a startling calm, and cheer you with memories culled from long stored away times, carrying you along your road when it becomes impassable by foot. You think of your childhood birthdays. You think of your favorite songs. You think of the first time you saw the Pacific. the first time you saw India. You think of your boyfriend and wonder what he’s doing at that exact moment, hundreds of miles away. You think of sex. You think of food.

I began to space out the hourly heat sessions in my mind as points on a mental map, visualizing as time went by how much closer I had moved toward the next spot. I passed through hour after hour like this, place after place, nursing and coaxing my traumatized body onwards, with eyes and hopes set on my ultimate destination – a mecca I was determined to reach that night, a brilliant radiating light beaming up from the middle of my map. I was aiming to reach the newest s-word that held the utmost importance for me: sunrise.

purgatorial night, redemptive morning light (part 1)

2009-05-01T12:19:00.003-04:00

The late-April heat wave that baked Brooklyn in 90-degree temperatures got me thinking a lot about the cold. Often when I don't want to risk the spike in electric bills from air conditioning, I comfort myself with thoughts of the frigid winter air, the cold wind blowing in off the river that numbs my face, snow creeping in through my shoes and bathing my feet in an unwelcome icewater bath. However, during these soothing and cooling remembrances (which do sometimes succeed in taking the edge off the heat), I always remember that the cold temperatures in winter had me pining for the blistering heat of summer. This April heat wave was particularly bittersweet, because it occurred only two months after one of the coldest nights that I've ever experienced - and one that I barely survived to tell about. And as a reminder to myself that even Brooklyn summer heat has its advantages, I am going to recount it here:

During a recent road trip around Iceland, my friend Jesse and I had been left with no choice but to sleep in a car, parked on a crest of land jutting out from the eastern Icelandic fjords, with our tiny two wheel drive staring pathetically into the immense icy jaws of the Atlantic. We had no sleeping bags or blankets, only the clothes we had packed for a week. Our winter coats, we discovered quickly into our trip, weren’t crafted for arctic temperatures and even by day, offered a flimsy defense against bitter winds and Celsius temperatures that we as Americans had no idea how to interpret, only knowing that negative numbers weren’t our friends.

It was a particularly black and snowy night. We had spent most of it snaking around mountains and delving deep into fjords, praying we wouldn’t be buried by avalanches as our windshield was pelted by the most menacing pebbles we had ever known. Each pop and crack was a threat to us intruders that the mountains would soon come down with them if we didn’t heed their warnings. After pushing on for hours, we realized we had finally reached our limit upon arriving in a small fishing village, whose name began with an S but left us at a loss when we tried to wrap our mouths around the following sixteen letters. This place would have to do, as we couldn’t go on any further without sleep - another word that began with "s" that we could pronounce and which we were craving voraciously.

When driving at night with no clear destination in mind, it’s easy to continuously extend your driving time. You think that by the time you reach a certain place, you will surely be exhausted and need to call it a night there. But when you arrive, you convince yourself that a little bit of coffee and the right music on the radio will keep you awake enough to make it to the next point on the map. In our case, this was coupled with the fact that most of the points of the map were completely silent and void of people when we pulled in, leaving us with no place to sleep even if we wanted to stay there, and willing us to seek shelter in the next town along the way. However, by the time we pulled into S-town at an hour that was late even by New York standards, we were ready to play our last hand in the hopes that it would gain us something. Anything.

We had heard from travelers at our Reykjavik hostel that there was a small church on a hill in this village that had been taken over by a local couple and converted somewhat rustically into a one-room guesthouse. In a haze brought on by hypnotic night driving, I allowed my mind to be carried off to the romantic and unlikely possibilities of sleeping in such a place. We would settle in on sheets and pillows spread across church pews that served as hard mattresses, as an eerie Christ statue cast his sad defeated eyes down upon us from his perch on a crucifix, our watchdog as we slept. We would fill our water bottles from holy water vestibules, store our backpacks away in a tabernacle locker, and feel the morning sunlight cascade in on us through stained glass images of death and suffering. It all had a disturbingly strange appeal, and I realized the price I would be willing to pay just to have the warmth and solace that the church’s walls could provide. The moon protruded from the clouds as we arrived in town, and there on a hill in front of us in the moonlight – what could only be described as the eeriest quintessential Hitchcock moment of my life - loomed the church.

We coaxed the car up the steep ice-covered hill - tires screeching and sliding, a menace to elfish lawn ornaments in its path, a raging Norse god of war on a leash. Worried about the wind, Jesse then pulled off the most incredible feat of driving I ever thought possible – a stick-shifted k-turn on a slippery road surface only big enough to hold a pick-up truck, with a steep cliff drop-off on three out of four sides. Standing outside waving my arms to direct her, I craved the fiery blazes of an inferno that should have accompanied the biblical red glow surrounding me in the brake lights. I imagined the horror the townspeople must have felt, rousing each other from bed to search out their windows for the source of the late-night screeching and hissing, only to spot a fiery red figure glowing in the distance, her arms waving, beckoning them to come closer, closer still… now stop, ok good you can approach a little more. Now… crap! too close! Go back!

As we should have predicted before ascending the hill, the church situation was too good to be true. We gazed up at its wooden doors, chained shut with an intimidating fortitude designed to keep stragglers like us out of its realm, with a foreboding paper proclamation nailed to its doors. We blasted the heat for longer than necessary, trying to absorb as much comfort and warmth as possible before commencing our arduous pilgrimage up the stairs on what was amounting to be this darkest night of our souls. After finally willing ourselves to venture out and read the sign, our worst nightmare was confirmed – it told us that in order to gain entrance into the church, we had to call the owner’s cellphone and ask him to unlock the doors. Travesty! Our hopes lay in shattered pieces at the doors, trapped outside with the souls of millions before us who couldn’t gain entrance into its salvation, as we realized that neither of our cellphones had reception. Higher powers had commanded a penance that we couldn’t complete. Darkness and cold crept in.

A few minutes of bleak pondering and regretful contemplation passed before we realized we could just find a payphone. Revved up by a new hope, we set out on a slightly detoured route to our requiem. Jesse descended the hill on foot, I on my backside, as my shoes had suddenly lost all traction. We roamed the town, lit eerily by a smattering of street lamps, and an occasional living room or bedroom light that taunted us from inside warm-looking homes. Our footsteps crunched, the wind howled. We passed the dock, its ships bobbing in the water like sleeping whales submitting to the will of the gentle methodical waves. We passed the only restaurant in town. A closed gas station. Driveways containing SUV’s – droolworthy, muscular, Viking snow warriors compared to our compact Toyota Yaris, which we likened to a whiny, cranky Brooklynite who figured it didn’t need to pack anything extra on a trip to the North Pole because its snow boots had managed just fine on concrete sidewalks.

There wasn’t a payphone in the entire place, as we should have guessed, since this wasn’t the land of convenience stores and 24-hour facilities. We were, after all, in a small fishing village in rural Iceland. We decided to try yet another plan. I whipped out my lonely planet guide, which I had bought at the last minute before heading to the airport, thinking it may come in handy at some point. I looked up the village and sure enough, there was mention of the church. And better yet – it told us which house in town the couple lived in. We circled back, night prowlers in search of our prey, and looked for the little yellow house on the hill below the church. There it was before us, like Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house in the woods.

There have only been a few times in my life when I’ve felt like I was acting really creepy. I soon realized this moment would become one of them. We stood at the gate in the front yard, straining our necks to see inside, checking to see if lights were on, if we could see people stirring. We noted children’s toys in the yard. We tiptoed up the walk, cringing at each loud crunch of the snow under our feet, wondering if the couple could use our footprints as evidence when they called the cops in the morning about two intruders sneaking around town all night. A quick spat at the door over who would be ringing the doorbell, and Jesse pressed the button. We waited a few moments, then rushed back to the gate, thinking it better to watch the door from there. No one answered. We quickly considered and dismissed the idea of ringing a second time. Nobody had stirred in the house, and it didn’t look likely that anyone was home, judging by the fact that ours were the only footprints in the walkway. The whole town was asleep at that point. We were out of ideas.

Shock Rock

2009-04-14T15:54:00.002-04:00

Screamin' Jay Hawkins - "I Put A Spell On You"

"Shock rock is a wide umbrella term for artists who combine rock music with elements of theatrical shock value in live performances.'Shock rock' first appeared as a loose genre term during the early 1970s, referring to glam rock era musicians. The genre's 'weapons of outrage' vary from decade to decade, but generally involve issues of sex and/or violence which are designed to push the current limits of decency.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins was arguably the first shock rocker. After the success of his 1957 hit "I Put a Spell on You", Hawkins began a stage show where he'd emerge from a coffin, sing to a skull and set off smoke bombs, among other gimmicks." (wikipedia)

Alone with Everybody

2009-03-10T00:12:00.001-04:00

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

(bukowski)

sundialing

2009-02-21T17:56:00.008-05:00

There's something that happens to me late in winter. I begin to anticipate the sweet relief of spring, so much so that I start to believe it’s there before it actually is. I convince myself, confuse myself, confound signals to twist them into what I want. Only to be disappointed in the end.

I woke up this morning to warm sunlight and birds singing, and became filled with that rejuvenated spirit of spring. My body stirred from hibernation, seratonin levels skyrocketed. But then I looked out the window to see the same gray winter sun, deceptively infused with warm tones by my green-gold curtains, and realized the bird sounds were actually from some squeaky diesel trucks merging into BQE traffic. My heart fell a thousand miles.

This happens every year, and I’m always just as crushed. But what happens then, when I realize that more winter is on the way, is that spring comes alive in my mind. Whether I like it or not, I can’t suppress it. It’s as if it needs to sprout there first, before the real spring comes.

I spent a good part of my Saturday listening to early electronic music composers, in a random music binge that consumed me for some reason. Maybe it was the shimmering mood of Steve Reich, or the intuitive sprawl of David Behrman, but I found myself deeply affected by the sounds, and unexpectedly experienced a wellspring of weird, long-forgotten memories that popped up all over the place, out of nowhere. Memories that had a significant emotional meaning, but also all had something atmospherically strange in common – in each of them, there was something about the sun that I’ve never forgotten.

The most prominent memory was from when I first arrived in Xela. In the weeks before, I had quit my job, moved out of my apartment, packed a few belongings in a backpack, and moved to Guatemala for an unknown period of time. I didn’t speak Spanish – but was hoping to remedy that – and didn’t know a single person in the country. I wasn’t looking to find myself, or start over with a clean slate, or to escape anything. I was just looking for something, though I had no idea what, and felt that I had needed to give up most of myself to find it.

However, my first days in the country had been marked by an onslaught of doubt, worry, loneliness, fear. My experience in the capital had been a teeming circus of whistling men, prostitutes on street corners, heavy traffic, diesel fumes, buses I needed to take that no longer existed, boarded up buildings, borrachos harassing me in the street, the constant fear that all I had brought with me would get stolen. My trip to Xela hadn’t been much better. I had held on tightly as my bus screeched around narrow mountain passes, teetering at the edges of cliffs, and blasting reggaeton so loudly that it actually succeeded at drowning out my thoughts as I second-guessed my decision to go there.

But then it all changed in an instant as we arrived in Xela, a haven for me after a nightmare journey. I was living with a family on the east side of the city for the first month, and when I met the mother, Blanca Aragon, we walked through the streets together toward her home. This is where the memory starts.

It was about 5 pm, the sun resting lazily in its seat in the sky, casting long relaxed shadows everywhere. The streets had the quiet feel of a late summer afternoon, despite it being early April. Cobblestone streets were lined on each side by small brightly-colored homes. Children played soccer in a nearby side street. Mountains and volcanoes rose around me, over rooftops. I walked down the middle of the street, no cars around anywhere. Stepping out of a deep blue shadow, I felt the inviting warmth of the sun on my face and stopped for a moment, struck by it. I squinted in the light, over at Blanca as she made her way carefully over the steep curbs. She smiled at me and said something soothing in Spanish. I started to walk again, this time slower. I was in a dream sequence in a movie. Sounds diffusing in the background, sparse, echoing. Warm yellow light everywhere, bathing us. A gentle breeze. Gentle noise. A feeling of familiarity overtook me. I was going home, but to a place I’d never been before. Miles away from everyone and everything I knew, to this place in the sunlight.

Maybe spring is like going home again for me. And I struggle with being so close, but still not there. But the moment of finally reaching it is so deeply enthralling that it makes this long winter necessary. Guess I'll just have to wait it out.

nest houses

2009-01-27T15:56:00.008-05:00

oh how i'd love to live in one of these.

See more of Patrick Dougherty's 150 twig art installations here. Curator Linda Johnson says: “Dougherty’s works allude to nests, cocoons, hives, and lairs built by animals, as well as the manmade forms of huts, haystacks, and baskets, created by interweaving branches and twigs together. Many of his works look ‘found’ rather than made, as if they were created by the natural force of a tornado sweeping across the landscape. He intentionally tries for this effortless effect, as if his creations just fell or grew up naturally in their settings.”

nyc alleys at night

2009-01-27T15:42:00.007-05:00

images by phatwalrus

lucky

2009-01-16T15:02:00.011-05:00

While waiting what seemed like hours for my plane to unload on the runway, I noticed this NYC-bound plane next to us, parked at Gate 13 and marked with "666". I immediately deemed it the Unluckiest Plane Ever, and joked to my seat neighbors that it was a bad omen for my return trip to New York in a few days.

Less than 24 hours later, a plane crashed into the Hudson River, proving my hyperbolic blanket statement wrong, and also making me think twice about poking fun at omens.

I never thought it possible for people to survive a plane crash. I hardly pay attention to the safety talks at the beginning of flights, shrugging it off as unnecessary - I figure if we're going down, none of us really stand a chance anyway. But after the incredible emergency plane landing on the Hudson River yesterday and the rescue that salvaged everyone's lives (except for the geese caught up in the engines), my mind is blown.

Matt's office is located near the site of the crash, and he and fellow coworkers watched the scene from their office window:

[via mattyu.ca]

150 people owe their lives to the pilot, who I understand did a masterful job of landing the plane with its nose elevated, which kept it afloat long enough for everyone to be pulled from the passenger cabin. Pilots are said to have a job defined by excruciatingly long stretches of boredom followed by moments of sheer terror. Thankfully, this guy worked brilliantly under pressure and deserves all of the acclaim that is currently rattling through the media.

We New Yorkers are quite familiar with our own personal terrors of low-flying planes. After more than seven years, my heart still leaps out of my chest every time I hear the rumble of a loud jet engine, so I'm doubly glad that this time resulted in something we can all cheer about. But regardless, I'll be bringing my parachute, drysuit, and superhero cape with me in my carry-on luggage on Sunday. JUST IN CASE.

And here is a view of what passengers onboard flight 1549 missed - early twilight over the Hudson Valley, exactly 24 hours before, sans birds:

skeleton dance

2009-01-09T13:34:00.003-05:00

morbid anatomy

2009-01-09T12:58:00.011-05:00

The National Museum of Health and Medicine has been uploading pictures to flickr since September 2006 that portray the human struggle with disease. Photos span almost the entire 20th century, showcasing rare diseases, epidemics, iron lungs, war injuries, and astounding medical procedures (such as the replacement of a nose with a finger).

The archivists have created several flickr pages, which can be seen here, here, and here.

p.s. The Library of Congress has been doing the same.

man on wire

2009-01-09T01:09:00.006-05:00

"On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world's tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. Following six and a half years of dreaming of the towers, Petit spent eight months in New York City planning the execution of the coup. Aided by a team of friends and accomplices, Petit was faced with numerous extraordinary challenges: he had to find a way to bypass the WTC's security; smuggle the heavy steel cable and rigging equipment into the towers; pass the wire between the two rooftops; anchor the wire and tension it to withstand the winds and the swaying of the buildings. The rigging was done by night in complete secrecy. At 7:15 AM, Philippe took his first step on the high wire 1,350 feet above the sidewalks of Manhattan."

che

2009-01-08T16:31:00.025-05:00

Last night, Matt and I made it through the full 4 hours of Che, which is playing in its entirety (both halves with intermission) as part of the Special Roadshow Edition at IFC. We preceded the epic with a che-lebration of Cuban sandwiches and mojitos at Casa Havana:

The movie picks up well after The Motorcycle Diaries left off, as Che meets Fidel Castro in Mexico City and leaves shortly thereafter on a boat for Cuba. It portrays his rise to power during the revolution’s conquest of Havana, and then follows as he leaves Fidel’s Cuba for Bolivia and toward his demise.

While we don’t see too much blood and gore, we see more of the man behind the icon that’s forever imprinted onto our memories like a brand - though we are still prevented from getting too close. Soderbergh only hints at Che’s personal life and uses it as a distant backdrop to the time spent in the jungle, in the mountains, and in combat. The communist principles that Fidel’s revolution brought with it to the Cuban government had to work their way up through the ranks too, and we see this come through again and again as Guevara points out to his troops the mistakes they make that exhibit individuality over the benefit of the entire group. He comes across as someone whose principles determine every action he makes, and color every situation in which he finds himself.

However, during his rise and fall, his principles resound with different notes. We see his defiant slogan “homeland or death” serve both as a rallying cry behind which Cubans push their revolutionary front all the way to the capital, and the heavy weight that pulls a doomed Bolivian resistance down to its end. In the final moments of the movie, we watch his death through his own eyes, notably absent of the vision of a revolution and instead staring at a pair of boots and a dirt floor. I was reminded of Che’s famous (reported) last words: “Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man”. While to me, those words always meant that the revolution would never die with the death of just one man, I felt in the final moments how much of “just one man” he really was, alone amidst a failed insurrection, dying in the way that icons are not supposed to.

While watching the movie, I couldn’t help wonder what certain others would think of it. Back in 2007 while I was in Guatemala, I met several former guerrilleros, and for most of the movie, I thought of Amaro. I climbed Tajumulco – the tallest peak in Central America - with him and his 70-year-old father Pedro Cifuentes. Amaro, or Ronaldo as he also went by, had returned to Guatemala to join the guerrilla movement after his family’s exile to Mexico during Guatemala's civil war. He had gained an education in Mexico due to some intervention on behalf of the guerilla, and so he felt a need to repay the movement by returning to fight for them. He later spent eight years living and fighting on Tajumulco as a guerrillero.

I climbed the volcano with them in a day and a half, carrying one night’s worth of equipment and food, and still view it as the most difficult physical exertion I’ve ever experienced. For Amaro, it was nothing. Those who lived on the volcano had to make the trip often in one day, carrying up to 60 pounds of food and supplies on their backs, while sometimes under military fire. They often went without food, due to the difficulty of transporting it. The nights up there are also frigid - and many didn't have tents. But they played a crucial role in the war - they had set up a radio station in the volcano’s crater, sending off radio broadcasts to the highlands of Guatemala that informed campesinos of the activities of both the military and the guerrilla, information that Rios Montt would rather have had suppressed. The army searched for years for the source of the broadcasts, even going as far as Mexico and El Salvador, but never thought to look in the most obvious place - the overpowering peak that loomed over them at every moment.

As I sat on the summit early in the morning on the second day, with the sunrise casting a fragile light over the lip of the crater and onto its empty contents, I began to realize for the first time the utter size of the movement, how so many people adapted their lives to living on the brink of death. I couldn’t imagine spending 8 years there, the long sprawling days, idle hours of sitting up there and looking down on a land filled with war and turmoil, with Rios Montt’s bloodthirsty army (backed by US interests) lurking behind every tree.

I remember the strange quietness up there, an effect of the ridiculously thin air. As we ascended the volcano, I had heard voices echoing from somewhere. Disorienting voices that sounded like they were coming from behind me, next to me, below me. As the clouds parted, I followed the direction of the voices and found their source – there were people climbing a peak from across a ravine, yet I could hear their entire conversation. I stopped in my tracks for a few moments, wondering what it would have been like to live there, each day hearing sounds from near or far, never knowing if i was hearing the sound of a stick breaking across the ravine, or the sound of a gun safety being clicked off just behind my ear.

But the sounds weren’t the eeriest part - it was the clouds. After setting up camp toward the end of the first day, I wandered through the trees, taking in what had been both the home and dying place of many rebel fighters. Since we were in the middle of Guatemalan rainy season, the afternoon cloud cover was growing thick and the rain would soon start below us. I stood holding onto trees at the edge of a steep drop-off and watched the wall of clouds roll toward me. They moved past me and over me until they surrounded me, and the effect was disorienting. It was like a sea, with waves ebbing and flowing, the momentary relief at seeing my surroundings again and the vague panic when everything disappeared again. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of movement next to me, yet when I spun around thinking someone was there, I would see nothing, a shadow quickly lost in the white. As I turned to leave, I noticed how the clouds all rolled with me through the trees, moving swiftly, steadily, silently, and I walked as if accompanied by an army of ghosts, back to the camp that Amaro had set up.

Maybe it was because of this experience that I found myself consumed by the scenes where Che and his troops moved steadily through the jungles and the mountains. In order to live such a life, you would need to voluntarily give up all of your comforts, live under deplorable circumstances, and face death in the form of a thousand possibilities each day. As Che put it, you need to live as if you were already dead. How many of us would be willing to do something so drastic for something we believe in? To give up everything, even our names, and accept a rifle? While the image of Che Guevara can take on the nature of either a superhero or murderer, depending on whom you ask, I think back to those I met who had fought similarly in the mountains of Guatemala – everyday people, the jokes they told, their favorite foods, the longterm injuries they sustained but took in stride – and I begin to suspect that most of us have it in us to do such things. We’ll just never know it.

blitzkrieg

2009-01-07T14:33:00.003-05:00

"germansrockingthefuckout.jpg"

(via matt and fffound)

through the gates of the sleepy silver door

2009-01-07T00:10:00.008-05:00

I'm used to taking pictures of the industrial world by day, but the other night, I found myself walking the streets of Bushwick with my camera in hand. Midnight is apparently the hour at which the colors start creeping out of the cracks.

theremins and dio RAMAS!

2009-01-03T19:49:00.011-05:00

Last night, Matt and I went to see world-famous thereminist Pamelia Kurstin play at the Issue Project Room. I was expecting a night of spooky ghostlike sounds in a, well, spooky ghostlike setting, since the show was located in the Old American Can Factory, a 19th century complex at the Gowanus Canal. To add atmosphere to an already strange night, the sky was filled with backlit clouds, and as we wandered around the desolate area past empty condemned buildings and construction sites lit unnaturally by fluorescent lights, even Matt agreed the night had a creepy feel to it.

Was the show everything I expected? Not quite. When Pamelia first came out, she approached the mike and spoke as if she were playing a recording of her voice in fast-forward high speed motion. Something about a party in another room and a vodka cranberry. Hmm. She first played a lengthy set of what she described as a “work in progress”, a tapestry of complexly woven sounds, deep bass lines sliced out through the air with her right hand, and her left gesturing in a unique sign language as she arranged the pitch. Notes whirred and wavered like ghosts, and vibratos echoed like sounds you would only hear from a 1950s B-movie spaceship. The piece was dark, heavy, theatrical, yet moved freely through the air. I liked it a lot. Though we soon realized that this part of the night was only the beginning. There was lots more in store for us.

Before intermission, Pamelia invited 2 friends onstage to perform a comedy act (huh?!). Neither turned out to be comedians, as they both admitted and which was also readily apparent. After trying out a few jokes on the crowd and being met with a cold response, the girl brought out her friend Cecil, an old vaudeville ventriloquist dummy that she had bought for $300. Cecil promptly announced that he hated the theremin, and proceeded to repeatedly hiss and whisper to the crowd “You’re all dead!!” and “There’s poison in the wine! Mwahahaha!” Since I love scary homicidal dummies, I thought it was hilarious and immediately found in Cecil a new best friend, but the rest of the crowd seemed slightly more hesitant at meeting his acquaintance. Especially when he told a 9/11 joke and a terrible Sarah Palin joke that even I (as in myself) didn’t find funny. Even Cecil was straining at this point.

We had 20 minutes of much-needed respite, during which we recovered, slightly. Matt and I wanted to give Cecil the benefit of a doubt and sample the poisoned wine, but we decided that we should probably not put ourselves to sleep if we wanted to make it through the second half. At the end of intermission, Pamelia announced that she was going to have more friends (more friends??!!) come onstage and play with her for the rest of the show. Enter: Stian Westerhus (Norwegian avant-garde guitarist), Seb Rochford (giant-haired British drummer), and Shelley Hirsch (Brooklynite and human sound-effects machine). Cool.

When Shelley came to the mike, she said she was first going to tell us a story about Pamelia, and much in the spirit of Cecil, she began to tell us something we weren’t exactly expecting. Apparently, when Pamelia was 15 or 16, she was staying with a family on a farm somewhere in the midwest. Pamelia wanted to milk a goat, but chose one that wasn’t pregnant. The goat got a little PO’d when she started yanking on its nether regions, and so it began to pee... sideways. Pamelia laughed hysterically at this story, in her one-of-a-kind high-pitched laugh that always seems to take a while to get out of her system. This was, if anything, a dark foreshadowing to the awkwardness that would follow at the end of the show. We just didn’t know it yet. (Don’t worry, we didn’t witness any sideways peeing).

The second set was pretty cool, actually. Since it was going to be an improvised set and Stian was the only one onstage with whom Pamelia had never performed before, she made him begin. There were a few awkward moments as he began to set up when she pointed out how nervous he must be, and he began to laugh uncomfortably, and she began to laugh her chipmunk laugh again. We all followed suit in an effort to break the tension, looking around to find solace in other audience members.

But then he started playing and we momentarily forgot the strange events that were unfolding. His guitar was set to play a number of effects, and later, he figured out a way to echo the ethereal whirs of the theremin. I was a fan. Seb, short for Sebastian, was good too, altering the intensity and speed of his drumming to match the mood. Shelley, at first, was hard for me to get a hold of – her performance fell somewhere between scat and schizophrenia, but her humor and skill got the better of me. Matt and I even found ourselves laughing out loud at points when she cleverly worked in references to the goat story, masterful rhymes (pajamas! Dioramas! camARas!), and even facebook.

However, the minutes began to really drag after a certain point, and several times, everyone onstage except for Pamelia seemed ready to end the show and go home. Around this time, I began to take notice of the amount of wine Pamelia was drinking, as evidenced by her purple-stained lips and teeth, and I started to think “omg! is she going to stop tonight? Will we be here forever? OMG!!” I learned the hard way that those fidgeting, seat-shifting trapped-at-a-show moments are far worse than having your life threatened by lifeless wooden objects. When would it end?

It finally did, or so we thought. The music stopped, at least. Pamelia came to the mike to say what we all hoped would be a thank-you-good-night. But she, instead, talked about pee again. She announced she wanted to play another set after everyone went out to the bathroom to pee. Shelley saw the opportunity and made a mad dash out the door, as we all wondered “Is she coming back? Are they really gonna play another set? Is there really poison in the wine?? We’ll never leave! NOOOO!!” Not wanting to leave the stage or mike unattended, Pamelia continued with her pee talk, asking random audience members what we thought Shelley was doing in the bathroom – number 1 or number 2? This led to a monologue of her thoughts on “taking massive shits” and people’s need to just announce it already instead of covering it up by saying they were just to have a “tinkle”. The fidgeting and seat shifting continued. At this point, we were silently willing the comedy duo to take the stage again, anything but this.

But at last, Shelley returned, unaware of the dissertation on her bathroom activities that had developed during her absence. And an audience member volunteered to get Pamelia more wine so she would stop talking about it (Noooo!!! Don’t do it!!!). Pamelia had promised the set would only last 2-3 minutes, and after a few moments of loud blasting heavy-bass jamming, Shelley made sure she stuck to it (thank you!!).

As the music came to its final descent, Matt and I made a mad dash for our coats, scarves, hats, gloves, why did we bring so many things for christs sake, but it was too late. Pamelia took the mike again. And again, she talked about pee. “I would like to thank the audience members who held their pee long enough to stay tonight. If you all get bladder infections as a result, don’t blame me. Cuz you know, that’s the thing with bladder infections…” and she went on and on. However, much to the rejoicing of all, the guy who helps run the issue project room took over the mike and said good night. We were all free to go into the night, shivering, but not from the cold.

Pamelia was brilliant on the theremin, but I don’t know what got into her last night. Matt says she’s quirky like that. I think it must have been something in the wine after all.

Damn, we should have had some.

cryin' shame

2008-12-19T11:10:00.005-05:00

Junior Wells performing with Buddy Guy and David Myers in the movie Chicago Blues, 1970.

dedicated to matt.

anything is impermanent

2008-12-18T17:51:00.005-05:00

In his set of lithographs entitled Neo-Ruins, Japanese artist Hisaharu Motoda portrays vivid and exceptionally detailed scenes of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The images exude a sense of silence, an absence of human life, and an alarming vulnerability of the places we think to be invincible. Motoda says: “There is a Japanese saying ‘anything is impermanent’... I feel beauty on such fragile things, and would like to express it in my work.”

speaking of abandoned places

2008-12-17T12:43:00.003-05:00

Read about the emptied prairie in North Dakota.

"In the early 20th century, railroads lured settlers into North Dakota with promises of homesteads. Towns were planted everywhere. Houses rose from the sweep of the plains, many, like this one, with a story no one can trace. People believed rain would follow the plow. But they were wrong."

[from National Geographic]

frank zappa hates coughs

2008-12-17T01:29:00.001-05:00

Award-winning commercial for Luden's cough drops, featuring a soundtrack by the one and only Frank Zappa.

antarctica is a popular place to abandon

2008-12-17T01:15:00.006-05:00

The Ghosts of Antarctica: Abandoned Stations and Huts
[dark roasted blend]

from our mouths a perpetual light

2008-12-09T19:53:00.005-05:00

the neverending search for perpetual motion.

zzzombie

2008-12-01T23:49:00.000-05:00

"those who live, live off the dead"

- antonin artaud

moon and sand

2008-11-25T11:37:00.003-05:00

meet me children meet me
meet me at the top of the sky
all i want for you to do
is take yourself a little higher

(image via life: mojave desert lava cave were technician is testing a space suit for apollo flight)

when languages die

2008-11-25T10:36:00.004-05:00

"A new book by K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore, titled When Languages Die, looks at what we lose when languages disappear. Unusual ways of counting. Unique landscape names and calendars. Specialized vocabularies for the natural and agricultural world. Fantastic rarities of grammar, such as the suffix -sig in the Siberian language Tofa that means "smelling like." Examples come from dozens of languages from all over the world. He even illustrates with his own adventuring among nomads in Siberia and Mongolia, hunting down the last speakers of atrophied cultures.

But what caught my eye was this claim by Harrison: "Languages can package knowledge in radically different ways, thus facilitating different ways of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world." Elsewhere he calls languages "packaged information." In systems of kinship terms, for instance, which vary dramatically among different cultures, each one is "the result is a highly compact, highly efficient system of knowledge that packs multiple bits of information into small spaces."

In other words, languages are design objects."

Love it. Read the rest here.

toiletbowlsheviks

2008-11-20T21:44:00.003-05:00

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?
Originally uploaded by Will S.

ballad of a crystal man

2008-11-20T21:28:00.008-05:00

Illustrations by Gustaf Tenggren, from an extremely rare 1923 edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

daito manabe: electronic facial contortionist

2008-11-20T20:15:00.005-05:00

Daito Manabe’s newest art piece uses a machine that translates music into electrical pulses. Through the electrodes taped to his face, these pulses cause the muscles to twitch and jerk into contorted expressions along to the beat of the music.

Polysics - Black Out Fall Out

2008-11-18T00:49:00.001-05:00

(thanx Matt!)

it was a bluff and it turned into an art

2008-11-15T16:51:00.008-05:00

Speaking of Lithuania, Vilnius is also the site of a world-famous Frank Zappa memorial statue, whose national public support was rounded up by a world-famous white lie. At the opening ceremony, Zappa surely would have been smiling as he looked down upon a formerly communist military orchestra playing his anti-establishment tunes.

rollingstone has the full story.

soviet bunker theme park

2008-11-15T16:32:00.010-05:00

(image from azillphotos)

"When confronted with the issue of what to do with an ex-Soviet bunker in the countryside, an enterprising Lithuanian decided that some things should be left the way they are…

Welcome to 1984: Išgyvenimo Drama, otherwise known as Survival Drama in a Soviet Bunker.

Built near Vilnius in 1980, when Lithuania was still a part of the USSR, the bunker’s past life includes protecting a television transmitter and acting as a secure outpost for Soviet troops. Encompassing 4,000 cubic meters and buried 5 meters deep, the bunker is a remnant of Soviet occupation, which the Lithuanians have found more difficult to get rid of than the army.

Instead of letting the building fall into complete disrepair, some lucrative Lithuanians decided to put the bunker to some use, so, concerned about young Lithuanians lack of understanding about their country’s past, producer Ruta Vanagaite was prompted to create a re-enactment project, demonstrating the experiences of the previous generation.

Išgyvenimo drama opened in early 2008 to some controversy. Tourists pay 120 LTL ($US 220) each to step back into 1984 as a temporary USSR citizen for 2.5 hours. On entry, all belongings, including money, cameras and phones, are handed over and under the watchful eye of guards and alsatians, tourists change into threadbare Soviet coats and are herded through the bunker.

Experiences include watching TV programs from 1984, wearing gas masks, learning the Soviet anthem under duress, eating typical Soviet food (with genuine Soviet tableware) and even undergoing a concentration-camp-style interrogation and medical check.

The Soviet Bunker is not a theme park for the faint-hearted; all of the actors involved in the project were originally in the Soviet army and some were authentic interrogators, however there are performances tailored specifically for school groups so they know when to cool it, too.

Before heading back into the real world, participants are treated to a shot of vodka. They leave with a better understanding of life under Soviet occupation and, no doubt, a new respect for their elders past."

- from environmental graffiti

Dia de Los Muertos

2008-11-03T17:57:00.002-05:00

Catrina, in a 1913 zinc etching by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada.

The word catrina is the feminine form of the word catrín, which means "dandy". The figure, depicted in an ornate hat fashionable at the time, is intended to show that the rich and fashionable, despite their pretensions to importance, are just as susceptible to death as anyone else.

the amazing octophant!!

2008-10-23T18:57:00.002-04:00

banksy's pet store

2008-10-10T09:00:00.003-04:00

a leopard napping in a tree, chicken nuggets sipping on BBQ sauce, fish sticks swimming in a tank, and a surveillance camera nurturing its young. your typical west village pet store.

(thanks, Matt!)

lau nau

2008-09-25T21:46:00.004-04:00

In 2006, I hopped on a plane and flew to Helsinki on a mission to find the roots of this foresty psych-folk coming out of Finland. I was utterly fascinated by the sound. It wasn't just that I wanted to buy records - I wanted to breathe the air and see the light that was causing such a sound to be created.

Lau Nau, short for Laura Naukkarinen, is one of the more famous artists hailing from the way north. I was lucky enough to catch her performance at the Knitting Factory on 9/19/08, and lucky enough to have Matt there to film it since I was too busy being carried off to strange worlds by her songs :)

If you like her sound, be sure to check out Fonal Records. Along with some of Lau Nau's stuff, they're responsible for putting out Kemialliset Ystavet, Islaja, and Paavoharju, artists you may have heard of since they're gaining popularity nowadays (yes!!). Just be sure to support them, since I don't know what would happen to my music life if they ran out of money!

lightnin' hopkins - baby please don't go

2008-09-12T01:35:00.000-04:00

love his guitar style.

eldfjall

2008-09-08T22:09:00.001-04:00

Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist with an interest in the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time and hearing. His performances, audio/visual installations and compositions deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain inaccessible to sense perception. With the use of unorthodox recording tools such as accelerometers, hydrophones or home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard manages to capture and explore "secret sounds" - distortions, interferences, vibrations, ambiences - from within a variety of environments: volcanic earth, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, crystals, ice... and the human inner ear itself.

A graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Kirkegaard has given workshops and lectures in academic institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the last ten years, he has been presenting exhibitions and touring festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label "Touch"). Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Ann Lislegaard, CM von Hausswolff, Philip Jeck and Lydia Lunch.

the conet project

2008-09-08T15:32:00.002-04:00

"Static. Faint voices. Seven slow, monotonous tones. A pause. Suddenly, you hear music--one of those wind-up songs played by a child's toy. The melody repeats three times. A pause. Suddenly, you hear a female voice counting off the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 in German. A pause. She repeats the numbers. A pause. The children's toy melody returns."

"So begins The Conet Project, perhaps the greatest collection of found art ever produced. This is not only a monumental work; it is also a monument, a testament to 50 years of Cold War espionage, a living document of the world's most secret agencies. That most of these agencies are still around today merely enhances the importance of this work."

"...Numbers stations transmit coded messages through shortwave radio. These messages are transmitted from places all over the world, yet the basic numbers station message is remarkably uniform. It usually consists of a voice (most often female) reading off a series of numbers. On many occasions, this reading of numbers will be preceded by a song--usually familiar (like the English folk song, "The Lincolnshire Poacher") or distinct (the weird children's toy music I mentioned earlier, which is called "The Swedish Rhapsody"), though there are signals without music and signals that simply transmit Morse code messages. Above all else, one thing remains constant: nearly every transmission begins on the hour, lasts between ten and fifty minutes, and is almost invariably repeated several times over a 24-hour period."

"What are these messages? Well, no one has ever come forward to prove that these stations are linked to spy networks, but almost everyone who has ever studied the signals believes that they are. But why would a spy network like the CIA or the KGB or Israel's Mossad or Osama BinLaden's Al-Qaeda--with all their money and resources--bother transmitting messages through something like shortwave radio, a cheap technology that would allow anyone in the world to listen in? There are two reasons. First, shortwave is not only cheap but also common, meaning a spy can easily carry around a good shortwave radio without attracting any attention whatsoever. Second, the messages use what is called a one-time pad, which is generally considered the most secure cipher ever created--provided that the sender and the receiver are the only ones in possession of the key to unlock the message."

comforts of home

2008-09-08T02:03:00.005-04:00

domestic UFO detection of John Shepherd, who set up this station in his grandparents' living room in the mid 1970s.

(from Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults)

the australian lyre bird

2008-09-08T01:32:00.001-04:00

it can imitate cameras, car alarms, and even the sound of chainsaws cutting down its home.

rock medicine

2008-09-04T01:55:00.004-04:00

Paul Devereaux on archaeoacoustics:

"Canadian rock art interested us because of a traditional Algonkian Indian belief that manitous – spirits – lived inside rocks and cliff-faces, and that shamans in trance could enter the rock surfaces and meet with them in order to exchange tobacco offerings for supernatural power, usually referred to as “rock medicine”. (If the shaman failed to carry out this operation correctly, though, it was said he could become trapped in the cliff or rock he had spiritually entered and never return to his body outside. In our terms, he would die or go mad.) We wanted to test the hypothesis that such rock art marked venerated, magical places where the spirits could be heard; perhaps places where echoes were unusually strong. Had the Indians, like the ancient Greeks, believed echoes to be the sound of spirits calling, mimicking human-made noises to do so?"

cryptobotany

2008-09-04T01:04:00.003-04:00

"Man eating plants, most frequently inhabiting the jungles of Africa in popular fiction, may have been based on initial reports of plants that could trap and kill mammals, such as Nepenthes rajah.

However, there are unconfirmed reports, primarily from Latin America, that allege the existence of still-undiscovered species of large carnivorous plants. The most comprehensive compilation and discussion of such reports currently in print can be found in British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker's book The Beasts That Hide From Man (2003)."

(from wikipedia)

baobabs

2008-09-03T23:23:00.008-04:00

referred to as the trees of life, the upside down trees, and in antoine saint-exupery's le petit prince, the trees that could split small planets.

they held prisoners inside their trunks.

one bush legend has it that the god Thora took a dislike to the baobab growing in his garden and promptly chucked it over the wall of paradise; it landed below on earth, upside down but still alive, and continued to grow.

in another, the gods got so irritated by the vanity of the baobab, as it tossed it branches, flicked its flowers and bragged to other creatures about its superlative beauty, that they uprooted it and upended it to teach it a lesson in humility.

swimming cities of switchback sea

2008-09-03T15:03:00.005-04:00

part floating artwork, part performance, part mobile utopia.

"Swimming cities of Switchback Sea is a flotilla of seven intricately hand crafted vessels that will navigate the stretch of the Hudson River between Troy and the New York harbor this August 15th - September 7th. Imagined as a hybrid between boats and bits of land mass broken off and headed out to sea, the Switchback vessels will make stops in towns along the river bringing performances and music. Over the course of three weeks they will make their way toward their home port - an invented landscape tucked into a niche along the East River in Long Island City, Queens.

The Swimming Cities is designed and organized by printmaker and installation artist Swoon. Collaborators include playwright Lisa D’Amour, the band Dark Dark Dark and circus composer Sxip Shirey." (from switchback.org)

(photos from nytimes)

robert fludd's musical instrument illustrations

2008-08-29T14:05:00.004-04:00

"These ingenious illustrations are from the book De Naturae Simia written by the very controversial physicist, astrologer, philosopher, and mystic Robert Fludd (1574-1637) who was first to discuss the concept of blood circulation. Maybe this is why so many of his instruments seem to involve hydraulics." (from oddstrument)

sunrisescape

2008-08-29T13:52:00.001-04:00

"Sunrisescape is the sound of the sunrise. You listen to the day getting brighter and brighter. From the time before the sun starts to rise over the horizon to lightens up the sky until the sun have risen high enough to give a more constant daylight. The lightwaves from the sun are translated into audible soundwaves with the help of light sensors and two oscillators producing sinewaves."

Recorded November 2004 in Helsinki:

tentacular

2008-08-29T13:41:00.002-04:00

languages die, but not their last words

2008-08-28T21:45:00.002-04:00

From a Sept 2007 New York Times article by John Noble Wilford:

"Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record endangered languages, Dr. Harrison has traveled to many parts of the world with Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society.

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families."

"Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.

“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said in a news release.

The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.

In eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages, like Russian or Sakha.

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants."

photos by richard evans schultes

2008-08-28T16:12:00.005-04:00

"Richard Evans Schultes, an explorer and botanist, spent much of his career penetrating remote reaches of the Amazon, where shamans taught him the healing properties of plants often unknown to science. In his pursuit of natural pharmacopeia, he imbibed strange brews and snorted potent snuff to personally test the effects, often donning traditional costume and participating in tribal ceremonies. By the time he died in 2001 at age 86, Schultes had documented 300 new species and cataloged the uses of 2,000 medicinal plants, from hallucinogenic vines to sources of the muscle relaxant curare." (from smithsonian)

slime is cool

2008-08-28T00:24:00.002-04:00

watch slime mold and mushrooms grow in time-lapsed video.

8-8-08

2008-08-11T14:46:00.004-04:00

2008 Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing. 2008 drummers countdown to the start of the games on 8/8/08.

88 Boadrum. A Boredoms-conceived performance taking place in both LA and NY on 8/8/08, beginning at 8:08 pm, lasting 88 minutes, and including 88 drummers.

os gemeos paint kilburn castle

2008-08-02T03:41:00.001-04:00

with Nina and Nunca, completed June 2007.

creeping on toward totality

2008-08-01T21:08:00.004-04:00

Solar Eclipse - August 1, 2008

and a previous eclipse, viewed from space:

the madman is a waking dreamer

2008-07-12T18:43:00.003-04:00

Thoughts on dreams, borrowed from James Hughes' Altered States:

The Greeks built temples to Hypnos, the god of sleep, where sick people would sleep, hoping to be cured by dreams.

The Romantics fed on the irrational dreamworld for their art, preferring it to the certain rationality of the Enlightenment. Some used drugs such as laudanum, opium, and hashish to bring them to these places when their rational minds could not.

Freud said that dreams are our repressed sexual and aggressive urges. In most of us, the ego censors these urges during conscious states. Since the ego loses much of its control during sleep and thus cannot block these urges, it must make them “acceptable” by disguising and distorting them.

Carl Jung saw parallels between psychotic delusions and ancient myth and theorized that below the personal unconscious in all of us lies a collective unconscious, shared by all of humanity. This could explain why many of the same dreams and mythological themes appear in otherwise unconnected cultures. He viewed dreams as gateways to this collective unconscious.

Shamans and yogis act consciously in “dream bodies” which can take them to other locations and other worlds.

Dutch physician Frederik van Eeden was one of the first in the Western world to record an account of lucid dreaming, noting that the dream worlds in which he traveled “cleverly imitated” the real world but with “small failures.” Like shamans, he described being able to slip into his “dreaming body” and believed that flying in a dream often indicated the onset of a lucid dream.

While for most people, dreams are considered an altered state of consciousness that is different from a normal conscious state, in some people the line is blurred. Psychotics do not appear to need to dream during sleep to the extent that non-psychotics do. It is believed that this is because psychotics dream while being awake.

Circle on a Bus in San Francisco

2008-07-12T16:28:00.001-04:00

Best guys, on and off stage.