fark under "everybody panic!!!"

Just the dose of fear we need on a rainy Saturday morning to spice up our lives:

An article from the AP, kindly distributed in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune, about brain-eating amoebae living in warm lakes across the country.

Naegleria lives almost everywhere - in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.
Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose - say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff - the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve.
People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they'll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes.
There is no good treatment. Some drugs have stopped Naegleria in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

proof

Conclusive proof that I have spent waaaaaaay too much of my time on the internet during the past five years:

I got at least 90% of these references the first time around.



Make that 95%.

quick

- How's that?

- Quick.

insomnia, part 4,561

yipe!

repeating loop

So insomnia again, and here's the song that won't leave my head.

Mark Strand

We went to a poetry reading by Mark Strand last night.

The Tunnel

A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep,
I shine my flashlight
down on the lawn.
He is always there.

After a while
I open the front door
just a crack and order
him out of my yard.
He narrows his eyes
and moans. I slam
the door and dash back
to the kitchen, then up
to the bedroom, then down.

I weep like a schoolgirl
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily.
I destroy the living
room furniture to prove
I own nothing of value.
When he seems unmoved
I decide to dig a tunnel
to a neighboring yard.
I seal the basement off
from the upstairs with
a brick wall. I dig hard
and in no time the tunnel
is done. Leaving my pick
and shovel below,

I come out in front of a house
and stand there too tired to
move or even speak, hoping
someone will help me.
I feel I'm being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man's voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

Mark Strand

balls

Why I got out of academia.

v v

lyrics

One night to be confused
One night to speed up truth
We had a promise made
Four hands and then away
Both under influence
We had divine sense
To know what to say
Mind is a razor blade.

abaco wildfire

The time we recently spent in the Bahamas was dominated by my father-in-law's funeral and otherwise mostly spent in seclusion, taking care of grief. We did get out a couple of times, once to snorkel at a local reef and once to take a copy of Bob's funeral program to a friend who lives way out in the bush.

John wasn't there when we arrived, but a fire was well within a hundred yards of his (wooden) house. I left the program for him, and then we were stuck with a conundrum: there was a hosepipe out on the road, and the fire had obviously been burning for at least 24 hours, so he had to know about it...and it had also apparently burned closer to his house than it was at the time, so he'd been managing it. But yet - turning your back on a wildfire? It just doesn't feel right.

We went back out on the road, and I got some footage of the fire (below). Although I scored the clip with a track from Boards of Canada ("Chromakey Dreamcoat" from The Campfire Headphase), I left the original sound to fade in at the end. It's such a primal noise. It makes you want to run and hide. I haven't felt that propelled by a sound since hurricane Floyd.

Eventually, we decided to drive back to town and see who we could find who might know where John was. Luckily, we met one of the local volunteer firemen on his way in as we were driving out to the main road, and he said he'd come down to keep an eye on the fire.

That night it began to rain, and it rained for the next two days.

Click to Play

the american dream

This year's art theme is about patriotism -- not that kind which freights the nation state with the collective weight of ego, but a patriotism that is based upon a love of country and culture. Leave ideology at home; forget the blue states and the red; let parties, factions and the so-called issues that divide us fall away. Flag burning or flag worship play no part in this year's theme. Ask yourself, instead, a more immediate question. What has America achieved that you admire or feel proud of? What has it done or failed to do that makes you feel dismayed? Put blame aside, in this election year, and dare to ask an even greater question: What can postmodern America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, yet give to the world?

- (Burning Man theme, 2008)

Of all the possible international symbols of the United States of America, there is no more potent one than this:



In the end, it really is the economy, stupid. Nations are many things to each other, but the only true international language is trade. The U.S. dollar has been suffering against other currencies as the U.S. remains entrenched in the Mesopotamian quagmire, and the Fed has lately been all aflutter dealing with the subprime mortgage crisis and attendant market volatility. The economy is of such ultimate importance, it's difficult to comprehend that the essential unit - the dollar - is entirely imaginary. There is no gold standard. Fiscal relativity has governed the worth of lives since 1933.

So if you're looking for an American Dream, you don't have to look much farther than the Benjamin in your wallet.

coincidence?

Random thoughts on a rainy Saturday:

The Uchronians logo bears a startling resemblance to a lefthanded Burton Snowboards logo. Coincidence? Or global conspiracy?

Jeez. I need some coffee or something...

too much audio

I spent Burning Man with DJs. You could say it was a mind-altering experience - though I wasn't aware of it at the time. I've always been a visual kind of person. I could tell you the minute differences in color balance between aquamarine, teal, and turquoise, but ask me to identify why I like a song? Never much thought about it. Don't have the requisite vocabulary, either.

Roaming around a giant desert playground with audiophiles who stop every few hundred yards just to take in the changes in the ambient aural soup - well, at first I didn't get it. Then I started listening. And lo, it was cool.

On the flight between Midway and Denver the other day I dialed up that Mylo album that's three years out of date, and after a plastic cup of Southwest's best chardonnay, all of a sudden the tracks just fell apart and I saw how they worked.

But this morning, while waxing the hall floor, I backed through the kitchen doorway and caught my ankle smartly on the doorframe. In the half-second between the hollow thwock of impact and the onset of pain, I thought "wow, what a great noise - someone should sample that."

burning man time lapse

green

La noche se puso íntima

como una pequeña plaza.

Guardias civiles borrachos

en la puerta golpeaban.

Verde que te qinero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.

El barco sobre la mar.

Y el caballo en la montaña.

- Federico García Lorca

excerpted from Romance Sonambulo

playa skydive

If at first you don't succeed...so much for skydiving

- Henny Youngman



playa skydive from lukkucairi on Vimeo.

three videos

I've posted them below - from Burning Man, non-Duck-related stuff. Hope you like them.

"Good Morning" was taken out on the deep playa at sunrise - I had cycled out the previous afternoon and discovered a group of people putting up a Russian-themed vodka bar, in operation from sunrise until 9am, or whenever they ran out of Stoli. So the following morning I woke up with the sound of last night's rave still rocking the sides of the truck, and realized I would be in time for sunrise if I hopped on my bike and started riding out right then. So I did - I had a shot straight - and got this little clip, which pretty much embodies what Burning Man is all about, at least at 6am.

"Cubitron" in no way actually captures the experience of standing in front of this particular artwork - which is a bit of technological genius that absolutely dominates its corner of the playa. In the middle of the night, stumbling around amid the craziness out in the vast expanse of flat nothingness, we would need to find a porta-pottie and the only one we could find without fail was the one near the Cubitron. The Cubitron is like the galactic core. It has a black hole at the center, and a gravitational pull that's almost impossible to escape. There were always many, many people sitting in front of the Cubitron, saying intelligent-sounding things like "woah!" and "holy shit!" and wow!"

"Temple Burn" is a straight-up record of the annual burning of the Temple of Forgiveness. Every year, the temple is built for people to write on and walk through and to put things into to release to the fire. It's an amazingly powerful place. When it burns, it's sacred.

good morning

good morning from lukkucairi on Vimeo.

cubitron

cubitron from lukkucairi on Vimeo.

temple burn

temple from lukkucairi on Vimeo.

strandbeests

wow!

monkeys

an amazing kinetic sculpture at burning man:



monkeys from lukkucairi on Vimeo.

thanks to Craig and Ange for the night footage!

eclipse of the moon

Click To Play

Death is a Dry Place

[S]uddenly he thought the child
was dying in his arms.
Summoning his power all at once
and with no thought for himself,
he sent his spirit out after the child's spirit,
to bring it back home. He called the child's
name . . . Thinking some faint answer came
in his inward hearing he pursued, calling once more.
Then he saw the little boy running fast and far
ahead of him down a dark slope, the side of
some vast hill. There was no sound. The stars
above the hill were no stars his eyes had ever seen.
Yet he knew the constellations by name . . .
They were those stars that do not set, that
are not paled by the coming of any day

- A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin

the duck dive, explained a bit

Click to Play

Well, I wasn't planning for him to go in beak-first, but that's how it turned out...

WANT!

making shit up as we go along

Have a look at this:

What has been happening to the world's stock markets?

The value of the world's major companies has taken a tumble as the world's stock markets have plunged in recent days - one of several such sharp declines in the past few months.

The move has wiped billions of dollars off the value of shares owned by individuals and institutions such as pension funds and insurance companies.

This most recent fall started when a French bank, BNP, said it would freeze three investment funds because it could no longer accurately measure their value.

Markets fell around the world because they were nervous that the problems are not just confined to French banks, but are more widespread in the financial sector - especially in relation to sub-prime mortgage lending.

Nobody planned this economy - it just evolved. It persists because it's the best thing so far invented for conveying goods and ideas throughout the human population of the globe. It's not perfect - nothing is. We're just making it up as we go along.

There are shitty people out there, and they are doing shitty things. There are people who make a profit off the suffering of others, and who don't care that they're doing so. But even these wastes of human flesh don't have steering control over the juggernaut that is the human economy. The combination of economic heft and keen foresight that could actually influence things in a planned, stepwise manner has got to be vanishingly rare.

chop wood, carry water

What now?

More than anything, Burning Man gave me a dizzying sense of perspective with regards to the past decade of my life. Every day that goes by, you change a little - you put one foot in front of the other, travel this way and that, back and forth, and you lose hold of the singular and extraordinary fact that you are alive.

There is no heaven. The crystal city is only a point on the circumference of a circle, and you don't have a choice but to keep moving. You could get disillusioned about this - all of our mythologies here in the west, don't they all point to an end? But you reach the crystal city, and you find out it's just a waystation and that beyond it is a vast landscape, vaguely familiar. There is no destination, just the journey.

I saw into myself. I saw the alleycat fury that has kept me alive, and the smouldering fire in the junkheap of my heart. Burning Man isn't about the man. The man is an excuse, a doorway, a manifestation that enables the people dancing around it to pour out their energy, create spectacle, lose themselves, rip themselves to pieces, and come back whole again. Contemporary society doesn't have a channel for this. We are animals, blessed and cursed with thought and self-reflection, and the burden of awareness causes us no end of trouble.

We create government that dictates to us how we are supposed to be, but no human agency can encompass the entirety of human experience. There will always be tension, never resolution, as long as we are individuals.

Are we supposed to be happy? I don't believe so. We aren't supposed to be; we're supposed to do. That's all.

the duck burns

Click to Play

Monday, September 3, just before sunrise, the Green Duck dove beak-first into its funeral pyre.