today while visiting a beautiful church i met a beautiful pipe organ, to whom i quietly apologized for the undignified tunes it was being forced to play
"Reinecke was a smart though modest man — along with his early Chicago partner James Barnes, he once argued that the idea that “form follows function” was stupid because it assumes “that there is one, and only one right way of doing a thing.” The designers considered this restricted concept a “a hangover from the Platonic postulate of an eternal and immutable ideal form inhabiting a misty other world.” Here is a properly Deleuzian (and West Coast) sentiment: don’t make copies that derive from fixed tradition — make novel simulacra that work!"
early attempts at cataloging the language of shiitake
"All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend."
ideals as "probable cause for future experience" feels like a pretty good reason to have a few ideals! how do we talk about ideals?
schizmogenesis is the creation of division. graeber and wengrow cite it frequently in groups primarily defining themselves in opposition to one another. to say, it's been happening basically for eternity.
seeing how our present moment inclines one to be more or less against everything, the challenge becomes speaking about ideals on their own. not simply in reaction to garbage.
"She looked up fondly at the façade of the House. That it had been built as a bank gave peculiar satisfaction to its present occupants. They kept their sacks of meal in the bomb-proof money-vault, and aged their cider in kegs in safe deposit boxes. Over the fussy columns that faced the street the carved letters still read, "National Investors and Grain Factors Banking Association.' The Movement was not strong on names. They had no flag. Slogans came and went as the need did. There was always the Circle of Life to scratch on walls and pavements where Authority would have to see it. But when it came to names they were indifferent, accepting and ignoring whatever thy got called, afraid of being pinned down and penned in, unafraid of being absurd. So this best known and second oldest of all the cooperative Houses had no name except The Bank."
here at monome we are versed in a wide range of technologies.
when we teach soldering workshops i like to repeat something conveyed to us when we worked for a cinematic robotics company: hot glue was originally developed for the electronics industry, but co-opted by the craft world. in some sort of futile missionary work to elevate the reputation of this very useful material, we show how it strengthens and insulates wire connections.
i have no idea if this story is even true. and we also employ hot glue like any unsuspecting scrapbook enthusiast.
a friend suggested simply calling it what it is, even if it takes more words. for example:
listen to music
outside
in the daylight
under a tree
which is a radical departure considering my currently favorite-named thing, isms: technically correct in a meandering poetic-philosophical way yet also completely obfuscating and i dare say, stupid.
weird is relative
we saw the way but then got distracted
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
fifty years on, contemplating how far into the future they thought they were inventing. how many different futures there may have been. the potential recklessness of precipitating the truly unpredictable.
accelerated season willow fluff lands on pond outer space
thundering bass cabinet inside
inaccessible building heard from
outside, longing,
yet imagination alone does not
disappoint
in celebration of unseasonably hot weather, a capture from end-of-winter peculiar ice formations during melt-flood.
"...recall Ursula Le Guin's famous short story 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as 'simple', but in fact these citizens of Omelas were 'not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is just that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.'"
hello again.
168 - entries to this log
013 - longest gap between entries
009 - unpublished draft entries
005 - entries edited
001 - entries deleted
108 - photos shared (1358 taken)
003 - audio shared
003 - video shared
065 - hidden bookmarks
001 - modification to the list
271 - days since changing the site code
000 - readership statistics collected
it's been just over a year. numbers don't capture the spirit, yet allow a different sort of processing. i was going to write an analysis, but my first reflection (since deleted) was writing is hard. (the second, what matters.)
solstice tomorrow.
change.
black/black
it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine ________.
it's easier to imagine ________ than it is to imagine the end of the world.
“Panpsychism re-enchants the world, embeds us profoundly within the climate crisis and places us on a continuum of consciousness with all that we see around us.”
the conscious universe [web]
video [mp4] for the serpent by jay gillian.
from gnostics.
clouds descend upon old stones
meteorological [mp3]
navigating changing waters, time flows, where did november disappear to?
last month i transformed myself into a turkey tail mushroom.
welcoming the approaching darkness
current research:
listening:
senescence [mp3]
wind carried
soft
explosions
in july we visited the sea.
when is next time.
these grey oyster mushrooms emerged on the exact same day last year.
mycelial consciousness, revolution of celestial spheres.
"I ascribe space a certain significance with regard to death. It’s as if I’ve buried loved ones there. I can’t touch these stars but can they now? And somehow I understand that everyone is always ever together, because I don’t feel the distance that their deaths would imply. They are in me, and we are all ever in space. I am not the only person to experience the night sky in this way. We’ve all looked up and felt that sense of awe."
ecstatic to be the caretaker of one of these drawings, which i responded to viscerally on first sight. reading the later-released text illuminates an uncanny resonance, a previously hidden message landing perfectly.
soundtrack: roberto donnini, tunedless (1980) [youtube]
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co