All Souls' Night

"It wer a col nite but we wer warm in that doss bag.
Lissening to the dogs howling afterwds and the wind
wuthering and wearying and nattering in the oak leaves.
Looking at the moon all col and wite and oansome.
Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing
in us it dont have no name.'
I said, 'What thing is that?'
She said, 'Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its
looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis
of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl
of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex your on your feet
with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your
han it were that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals.
It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan
and sheltering ow it can.'
I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got
to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.'
Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.'
I said, 'Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys
it loan?'
She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it
dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan
its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt
think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with
what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many.
Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and
oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us like we put on
our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the
arm hoals and it tears us a part. I dont think I took all that
much noatis of it when I ben yung. Now Im old I noatis it mor.
It dont realy like to put me on no mor. Every morning I can feal
how its tiret of me and readying to throw me a way. Iwl tel you
some thing Riddley and keap this in memberment. What ever it
is we dont come naturel to it.'
I said, 'Lorna I dont know what you mean.'
She said, 'We aint a naturel part of it. We dint begin when it begun
we dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I don't know
what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to
it or boils on the arse of it I dont know. Now lissen what Im
goin to tel you Riddley. It thinks us but it dont think like us.
It dont think the way we think. Plus like I said befor its afeart.'
I said, 'Whats it afeart of?'
She said, 'Its afeart of being bearth.'
I said, 'How can that be? You said its ben here befor us. If it
ben here all this time it musve been bearth some time.'
She said, 'No it aint been bearth it never does get beartht it
all ways in the woom of things its all ways on the road.'
I said, 'All this what you jus ben tellin be that a tell for me?'
She larft then she said, 'Riddley there aint nothing what aint
a tel for you. The wind in the nite the dus on the road even the
leases stoan you kick a long in front of you. Even the shadder
of that leases stoan roaling or stanning stil its all telling.'
Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things
in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since it seams like
they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben all ways
thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think
like us. Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we dont
know what it is. What a way to live. "



from Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban , p. 5-7

off to Budapest.

"Virtual Popcorn Popper"

Ok, link scrambletime:

-Nosnibor has a new blog here, well worth checking out.

-Jay di Feo has an excellent show (only the second best after Chris
Wilmarth's, at the Nielsen's) to be reviewed in minutae soon.
(Go shaped paper as passage between drawing and sculpture!)

-I had a 4-day show (which also took 4 days to prepare) at Studio Soto
last week, and am now thinking about this as a possibility for all art
shows in the future- as a way of aspiring towards the temporality of music.

Philippe Lejeune graciously created this page from a video interview of
the show.

-Studio Soto might be on its last legs; with a lease renewal pending, but
by no means certain, Soto will need to find some sort of substantial support
in order to continue. PLEASE GO TO SOTO SHOWS! and donate!

-Roberta Smith weighs in at the Anaba/Chris Buchel debate...but oh...oh!
Let's move on.

-To the 2008 calendar: there is, rumor has it, a revolutionary way of
paper-organization for next year.
To be published soon.
Start saving your 25 dollars now.


that's the beaut of a floor at Soto.

Bee Update

Back from Europe and listening to the news with voracity, yesterday heard a show about the real cause of CCD in North American bee populations. As it turns out, our cellphone-radiation speculations
were wrong: it's viral.

(the whole story here)


The fascination with the morality of the story, has turned into
fascination with the science of how this diagnosis was actually
obtained: researchers actually sequenced the genetic material
in bees, to find a possible agent of cause. Following this thread,
check out the video on the (new and expanded) X-prize page....
With bees it was probably much simpler than with humans, but
the ultimate question is...do we want a disease-free world?

Air in House

Yeah.

Barn Month

Some images from my recent residency at the Edward Albee
Foundation- (what a gorgeous ceiling to have over one's self!)
Of course all the beam/construction themes got into the work,
where they are most welcome...






Some dusk-waiting in these photos. Dusk seems to take a lot longer
(is noticed more acutely?) in the country. All in all, an idyllic month.
Many, many props to Mr. Albee for establishing the place...

www.albeefoundation.org


More images coming soon on the website.

Letter from Brooklyn

yeah i saw the article in yesterday's times. and it was cool. but this is something else.

hey i think i told you when i was 23, and working at kinkos on 12th and university, and ostensibly here to play the drums, i was already into walking around haphazardly on the streets after work to see if i could sniff out what was happening, and that is how, i think i told you, wandering around, i found this cafe that there used to be back then, this cool little cafe on saint marks place on the south side between A and first. it had two bays of kinda wide-ish windows with a door in the middle. it was shabby-chic simple east-village style and there was an anomalous heavy sheet of brushed iron on the left wall that said "Sin-é" in cut out letters.

so when i went in there were these two irish longhairs sitting at one of the like 8 tables in the place, looking like they owned the place, which i later found out that they did. and there was this pretty, sad-looking tough girl with frizzy blond hair working the coffee machine, really mellow. it was still light outside so i got myself a cappuccino and a beer and sat down, and i tried to look available for conversation, which didn't work, but eventually the longhairs paused and looked at me and gave me an in, and i asked what was going on that night and this gaunt guy with long stringy grey hair around these supersharp eyes looked at me for a second and said "Ah, it's good music tonight. jeff buckley. y'heard of em?" and i said definitely not. and this younger dude who kind of had robert plant hair, who was similarly quiet and precise, said this jeff guy was tim buckley's son, and that didn't ring a bell either.

but i hung around alternating coffee with beer until it got dark, and
eventually there were maybe 20 or so people, mostly the kind of office women who think they know what's up, sitting in there drinking either cappuccino or beer or wine, that's all the cafe had. and then finally a thin guy in a white wife beater walked in, sat down at a table where there already were some people, and talked to them while he took out his telecaster guitar and tuned it real casually, leaning back and talking, and everybody else in the place was talking too, it was not like a starstruck thing cause he was unknown, but people were definitely more psyched since he was there. after his conversation he stood up and plugged the guitar right into the p.a. system, there was no amp in the place, and started doing a little fingerpicking, like he was just fucking around. but he kept it going and then after a few minutes, he stepped up to the mic, sort of looking like he was now seriously in the zone, and started singing, and it was real nice and delicate. for the next like 10 songs everybody shut up real tight and all you could hear was the occasional steam exhaust from the coffee machine, and breathing and little talking and stuff between songs. the songs were long and he stretched them out with really relaxed and pretty fingerpicking on the guitar. more people arrived little by little, but not too many. i didn't move from my seat.

so at the end of the night, the place was pretty hopping, and i gave the irish dudes and the blonde girl the salute-bow of respect, and i decided right then and there i would definitely come back almost every week for many months, and I did and it was each time kind of a different revelation. i've seen all the jeff buckley music videos but they seem to have all been made more self-consciously- and i especially don't recognize the experience cause the music changed with the backing band, and all these videos were made after I moved back to virginia.

but finally today this video appears on an english newspaper's site, and it's the only one i've seen that shows what he sounded and looked like standing upin that really small cafe. I think it's maybe not even a lipsync, i think it's a straight up filmed performance of the song. he really did sound just like that, i think he maybe had a chorus pedal or something between his guitar and the p.a. board, but nothing else, it was just eq'd.

turns out the coffee girl was from hungary - this was 1992 and she was really on kind of an adventure with no plan B - and eventually i asked her out because i saw her like 3 times a week and she was unstandably pretty and mysterious. her name was marianna. she told me not to mess with her, she said i seemed nice but she thought she would probably break my heart, i hadn't experienced the things she had.

yeah.



http://music.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,2079313,00.html


written by Andrew Nimmo

Put-up of the day

Art-Walk roundup

Thanks to all who made it out in the rain
for our open studios. September's (real)
open studios will be massive.

{we hope to have our in-studio sauna built by then}

Anyone who wishes to be added to our mail list
should email either Cheryl (cheryl.time@gmail.com)
or myself (klicova@gmail.com).

Art-Walk

We're participating in the SOWA art walk this weekend. Unofficially.
Directions and more info here...

"Man would have only four years of life left..."

...without song and without honey:

On npr the other day, they were talking about the sudden and rampant disappearance of bees in North America... one theory, not entirely implausible, is that the navigation systems of the bees is blocked or disrupted by radiation emitted from cellphones- which prevents them from being able to find their way back to their nests, resulting in what's called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Ow.

THEN,

Tom Ashbrook hosted a woman who discussed a similar thinning-out occurring in the songbird population:

"We are losing our migratory birds. ... Over the last 40 years, many
species have lost 30 to 40 percent of their numbers...a lot of migrants
are coming back earlier because in general springs are coming earlier.
Birds are tracking climate change and they are noticing"


The solution: to toss the phone, and build bird-habitats in the backyard?
Well, there's more at stake here...

For millennia, bees have been symbols of perfect polity. Pliny,
Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch- they have all pondered upon the
virtues of the little buzzers... but that's wild bees. The disappearing
bees mentioned here are domestic. When man domesticates, he corrupts. He intends to be symbiotic, but cannot help but abuse. Bees have had enough, are leaving, going back to their own perfect, natural polities.

If man threw away his cellphones and went back to nature,
he'd corrupt nature all over again, in another way... we won't
settle for stasis, but will always seek progress. Being human is a
blessing and a curse, but for nature, the existence of humans is
definitely a curse. Humans doesn't need nature if they have
technology (which can make food out of non-nature), and other
people (to define themselves against); nature doesn't define
itself against humans, and doesn't take anything from
mankind, only loses to it...

The irony is that even man- who anthropomorphises
nature (as in the ancient symbols of birds, whales, bees)-
still corrupts nature.

The story of disappearing species is a metastory, a story that unites and transcends an already established tradition of stories, which use anthropomorphisation to express fundamental truths about man vs. nature. The new metastory restates and supercedes the same: humans are incompatible with nature, even and especially when they are doing their best to be compatible. As every man dies alone,
so does the species. There is no home to go back to, there is only us. As we stand.
Alone, together.

Hippies and druids and greens and others are right in their
actions, wrong in their thoughts; there is no balance between
man and nature that can be recaptured or recreated. Man has
been an anomaly, a sore thumb sticking out, ever since he
appeared in nature. Those who glory in being an anomaly say
the same thing, but in reverse terms: Nature is here for the
sake of man, for man is special. Man is the paragon of Creation,
Creation was created for man's sake. In either case,
the anomaly theme unites the greens and the priests.
So may as well stop pretending otherwise.

Hence the prophecy is wrong: when bees disappear,
and birds stop singing, it shows we're doing great.

And they're not.

I o' D

Intaglio of the Day


1 of a series coming from drawing a blank as to what an image might
be (upon preparing a set of plates), and then seeing a fingerprint
embedded in the asphaltum ground on the plate...its magnification.

fwd: save the wails/ a petition

Hi, it's Tim from Pandora,

I'm writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn't pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/issues/alert/?alertid=9631541

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I'm no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster's business potential.

I hope you'll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

-Tim Westergren
(Pandora founder)

GMF

Just a belated congrats to Flash's
entry into the Hall of Fame. A lifetime
of "never touching the grooves, but rather
always the side of the record"...



White Lines for the ears (realplayer req.)

some revised Americana writing from 360 days ago and a picture of the sky after 4 days of rain

Washington, Allston, Eatonia- greenest of the greengrass then
shymy dew caught on barely blossoms now, the different academics,
differently walking than talking and on to Camino Real- the ROYAL
PATH by the new england where they buy gold cause more than
paper does it weigh
the only new garage doors on the block,
we had a guy come paint them that green of Fenway hinges
left black, looks sharp now we rent them out a sixteen year old
towing a hummer first job, mother still in apron, wipes her
hands from dough
the balcony over
the enclosed alley they just throw things there-
food scraps, papers, whatever- the younger brother
recounts these stories and can barely supress laughter,
the older one wishes he hadn't (friends) the sound of Portuguese,
not
turning around to see the source it's all very much like a sketch
for a pristine tank someone long ago drew up, a museum tank, never
to be used, little dashes
where light falls, fit to be the treasury engraver,
and everything dissipates with the same cadence as the engine below
falls into neutral

from one point,
John Hancock was to be seen from the best, elegantest angle
our arc of triumph at the end of the avenue, a deliberately
exaggerated vertical signature being eaten by fresh mist.