My Best Times and Best Writing! At least I think so... :-(
Sometimes supreme happiness comes my way as a fold or potential field opening up vast possibilities and new horizons. All these languages that grace my shelves! Fijian, Tahitian, Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit, Romansch - the world blooms with new grammars, new structures for organizing the universe acoustically! Now I also play the erhu, some simple north- Saharan-like repetitive trance-songs - and harmonicas (I just read a poem which included a "mouth-organ" in The Ladies' Home Journal Treasury from 1956 - I've mentioned this book before, there's even a reproduction of a cover by Sargent! And the harmonic minor (C minor) harp from Lee Oskar is fantastic! I walk down the street making up Yiddish tunes as I go. And speaking of which - yes, on the short-wave, or upper middle-wave, around 1700, there's Rebs galore, what seems to be a Chassidic station in Yiddish and Hebrew - and the tunes are fantastic. I just installed a very old version of Final Cut Pro on my Mac Powerbook, and here it is, burning madly away, a new piece - it can take it's time, I have other machines, I'm rattling away on this new laptop which I need for my also new class in Beginning Filmmaking at Brown! This was through Leslie Thornton - the class emphasizes digital everything except the camera - in a way it's the phenomenology of film itself that's at stake! Here's a frame - what do you want to do with it? The Flower Ornament Sutra keeps my busy at night - and there are so many wonderful books here - Roberto Harrison's writings are nothing short of incredible, intense, abstracted, neuro-psychological, what does that mean?, slightly conceptualized, veering, always fascinating - and one can always go back to Kristeva's Language, The Unknown - how young she was then! - which reminds me of my continuous mourning-the-Alps and that never to be reproduced / revisited trip which produced probably fifteen or twenty hours of brilliant dance, video, soundwork, even just pacing the middle of the European continent, such as it is. And then that unforeseen trip to Rilke's grave in Raron - and the Duino, the Orpheus, the letters to Merline, and now Erich Heller's The Disinherited Mind, which I can always recommend as an old friend - here I am on the chapter about Nietzsche and Rilke! Not really a small world - I've been look for commentary - it just came along! Just as the wonderful O'Reilly book on Unicode - I mean really really wonderful! arrived after Sandy told me about it - I ordered a review copy - it's just the thing of course for codeworkers or anyone wanting to understand the potential of the graphemic universe transformed into universals given this-and-that tolerance class and an always already limited digital space! It's sitting right next to another review copy - this is PC Music, the easy guide, 3rd edition - and here I am on the Mac, making new video and audio, and on an old Mac! But this is what I found for the PC - something called the Taksi Desktop Video Recorder at Source Forge which promises great things, translating window into usable footage - as if video were still "footage" - one can imagine of course that 24 frames a second really implies these rectangles moving by us one by one - this is far from the truth now. It's all internal, it can be any way one wants! Unlike Badiou - and I have so much Badiou - and it reads like stringent iron, that truth that binds just about everything and then of course veers off into poetry and art - the French are like that - I think Kristeva's one of the best, not to mention M. Derrida. More and more I've been listening to disembodied voices on the shortwave - not the Net - which is so flat, so predictable - shortwave space - radio space - is deep space, the deepest space - you might or might not hear a signal - signals and stations come and go - static of all sorts intervenes - static itself is interesting - and listen to this! I picked up a numbers station a couple of nights ago - the same comforting female voice, Spanish numbers - even around the same place on the dial - about 6800 Mhz - that seems to be like a singles bar for spies - anyone can join in - the code's unbreakable of course, which just goes to show what one-to-one encryption can do - I mean both ends have the same code book - there's no structure, no rhyme or reason - you can't break a structureless code unless you've got the book or massive processing - and if the book's unique, even that - the processing - produces nothing. So you're listening to clear imperv- iousness. The other night, our cat got really sick - for the first time we sprayed for the larger cockroaches - I hate killing, but they were begin- ning to swarm - when they were injured, we put them outside, praying for their revival, karma, just elsewhere - anyway I think the cat caught something or other - not sure - but she became lethargic, drinking a lot - there was vomit and diarrhea - she's recovered well now and again purrs constantly which keeps us going; there are odd words in Sanskrit that relate to English words like 'middle' or 'calculator' - some languages from our parochial viewpoint just seem to meander - meanwhile that first video I did tonight - it was horrifying! apocalyptic! - as if sex and violence and death and suicide were all entangled in the television image - and this in less than a minute and a half - I don't dare show it! It's far too graphic, too disturbing! At least for me - something like the avatar head pieces I did a while ago - but those were excusable! They went somewhere, said something! - This is just a dead-end piece; I found Waite and Dion Fortune on the Kabbalah - ok, I've read the real thing, the Zohar, know some Hebrew, used to know a bit about the Sephirot and for that matter used to know some Kabbalists - I mean people who really studied this stuff, obviously in the original, reminds me of Dogen - anyway - the Waite and Fortune are something else entirely - it's that weird British thing that sent ladies to ashrams - maybe the thing Koestler objected to in The Lotus and the Robot - just checked - the new video came out amazing - by which I mean that I've never seen anything like it - that's what keeps me going - when a world opens up like that - so I've been trading off books, paring them down - unfortunately there's more equipment around - I can't help that - without money, with all this stuff, we'll still starve - but the image will be ok. I'm one of those people with "irons in the fire"! I'm a "hot potato"! I've got "something on my mind"! I'm forever planning, forever Amber! I've been using the linux Zaurus 5600 again - it's fairly old as these things go now - small computer looking like a PDA - but with linux, one can do anything! Speed means something completely different in linux! Anyway I'm playing scrabble games and wondering if they somehow do increase neural connectivities - I sure hope so! PJ O'Rourke was on television today, a three-hour interview - it was fantastic, memories of Hunter Thompson - they were close - said that Hunter never figured it out - what to do after 50 - and collapsed - anyway didn't that whole period collapse? I saw Bobby Seale talking as well and got Soul on Ice again - just the force of language then - it's already going to read like history, flattened into non-existence - look at Marx's Capital or the theses or manifesto or whatever - it all reads like a whisper - that's happening to the Situationists - culture speeds - the way we're working now - all this distributivity - it's impossible to relate to modernism, I mean the telephone, old-time baseball, network television, the structure of Shakespeare or Hemingway. You can feel the canons passing in the night! When the caissons go rolling along! It's true what they say - it's all over before it began - this species - our own - is in full bloom - I mean in the technical sense - we're the red tide of the planet itself! Look at the deaths we leave in our wake! Look at the wakes we don't have for our dead! Who has the time! Hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq - no time - it's the killing fields - American men and women - the remnants of the anthem - I hope I can trade some of my cassettes to Steve Tobin who produced my latest CD - I'm remembering things like the Factory stuff or Sleep Chamber - just like Ayler but maybe fifteen or twenty years later than Ayler - there's some kind of absolute there - it's gone now - you'd think when things reach some sort of climax - Daniel Buren say - stuff's all over - but the truth is, people like to look at stuff and listen to stuff and it doesn't really matter whether it's been done before or not - it's the wonder of the world that's coming through to them, just like with the shortwave, and with all of the noise of the shortwave as well. I'm trying to place Grotowski - his poor theater in all senses of the word ended up at Irvine where he's world-famous - why not? That Artaud-like anguish seems to have vanished in favor of memory, but what do I know - I never knew in the first place. People are afraid of sexual work - it remains some kind of taint - what the three of us did at the Grutli set up disturbances a couple of magnitudes greater - how to release the tape - Crepuscule (Twilight) or some such - I can never remember plurals - for example it's Gruyeres for the area, but it's La Gruyere for the town - the cheese is incredible; they use robots similar to the new library ones but in the cheese factory they turn over I think seventy-five pound disks of the stuff for perfect aging. And it does age perfectly! Gruyere cheese or raclet cheese are amazing! I'm sure my spelling's a mess again. I never listen to cultural-political writers unless they're in power. All that energy in a posteriori analysis. I need someone to say - the bomb's going off in maybe an hour from now, here's the address, the people that did it, the reasons why, etc. etc. - and really have this down - not someone from the group itself - although that would be interesting - yes, maybe that - all this sudden speculation on/about Islam - our country isn't even pub- escent - there's not that much sex! - We're like infants with guns! - You know what a mess that is - even our speech is brutal - we're so drunk with brutality we don't recognize it - it's not in front of us, or what we swallow - it's our essence, it's our core, our primatology - and for that matter everyone else's - but the power and the waste is here. I've got to get the small Afghani rebab strung up - try ukelele strings? - one of the catgut broke - if my hearing were better in terms of native pitch, the erhu would be a piece of cake - it's not, but the rebab at least has three frets - not much to go on, but something. The ceiling crack in our loft has been widening; the beams might be broken and among other nightmares I imagine the whole thing collapsing. We've got a metering device on them.