The Reflection of the sky in a puddle in the mud

The Worriers: 2010

The Worriers. Now available on Youtube! I directed this 25 minute comedy parody, a dark and humorous view of the poetic underbelly of Portland, Oregon, and with the kind graces of Neil and Patrick, the writers and producers, it is now online. Please share this. Thanks.

Autumn in Portland

In the magic hour, as the last bit of light comes beneath the clouds, and touches the river. The streetlamps come on, a halo of light and fall leaves around each, and those scattered leaves on the gray sidewalk. In the background the Burnside bridge, dark, slight arch, and behind and over all, a storm on the horizon.

Grove

Grove of Oak Trees: Over Coyote's Tongue: The Washington Side of the Columbia River Valley

Dark Pilings in the Afternoon

Post industrial, apocalyptic landscape at the edge of a Superfund site where Agent Orange was made during the Vietnam War.

Fant Schisms in Chimerica

This data feed must have a reduction – timing – deliverance, “ laughed the Cyber Child, “and my algorithms all fall at the task. This simulation is at the last stages of the age of man, and in that time, designated the anthropocene, Fant-schisms ran through the culture, small groups of ideas and forces that altered and existed, supora memes. Qua-gods.  The aglomo-corp had become the equivalent of pre-humo and they gamboled through the thought fields of psych-Terra.
Not just Rusikov, in Chimerica, comp slaves, as well as farmonks in the vision rooms, used to play our simcoms so that psychmasks, the sins, stable cons, the spirit, and the meta top itself were played out on the sim material. But those simcoms were done, with the paucity of sim mat, in rudimentary form.
In Matiov Ubansky’s Edifice of Beijing an intense but arbitrary society was granted to the simulants in the cubic Habitation of Beijing in the era of Mao VII as proclamation for the cloning of his ancestor.It was designated Grothendieck in the Pyrenees and he himself stands overlooking the last snow-topped Alp as a tide of reduction simplifies all the soft-cons of the audience.
Similar meme wars, chiefly from short quasi-oral transmission, had been generated across the European land mass, up to the time of the first symbolic multi-glyphs. Besides simcoms there were adscams, postwars, and rudimentary catastrophic symphonies performed on tuned metallic architectures, in which avatars and protocomplexes expostulated their standard format.

Poe

During a day  of dark and spine and bone, in the sixth year, in a

place where the disconnected heads mouth soft, innumerable chants,

as they float in groups along through the tunnels, you are passing

alone, tooled up and wired , through a long

sequence of repeated monotonous interchanges of open straight

passageways, the ground, grit of broken numbers (tangle of hair)

and the walls, a slate gray intricate pattern (mosaic of bone) and

at length; miles; days; years; data, find yourself, at nightbreak; as

the mouthers of chants (flesh chants) retreat into their niches,

within the edges of a network, based upon a towering house (fractal

scape of steel and glass and  flesh), surrounded by a few spare data

trees, and reflected in a black, barely rippling random sea,

mathematical mirror.

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Never and less, here is where you will be scanning the next few weeks.  The operator of the site, Tel,

has  worked with you  before,  but you have not

been on site with him for a few  years.  A message  rider

from him, image, sound and data files, has gotten past your filters,

and offers you no other alternative than a reply. The rider was

detailed, in convoluted form, sound files montaged with the vision

and data bits.

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The software was all wrong, the circuits and memory ran fine, but there

was a wild inconsistency between the types of software tools.  What

was a volume simulation of downtown LA doing wired together with a

database of Japanese bond transactions in the 1960's  and some

early 21 century 3-d porno loops?

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An avatar of death white face, liquid luminous nitrogen eyes, thin

curved lips, and hair softer than the web.

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He spoke.

"All the creation here is not simply of one single substance. All

you see and feel is a pattern of remembered codes, objects painted

and recorded, parts of their qualities preserved, and merged for

example, a sound recorded on lower Broadway at two in the morning,

placed into a spreadsheet and merged with the architectural plans

for the world trade center, while this mixture is painted on the

pattern of sand in the Gobi desert after the Romans destroyed the

ecology. We have interlaced this on a digital framework of the

taste of the milk coming from your mothers breast, and feel you

will be well pleased.  The more desires and urges and sacred

objects, the more detailed plans and histories and contents of

libraries, the more complexity placed into an object, the more

fascinating and powerful and endlessly variable it can become."

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The soft space was patterned from pleasure as well as from need;

all interfaces became games of joy to play. The data was enclosed

in Andalusian castles of flowing water and music, where information

came as your own true song.

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And with digital bits; chaos and complex

deep to the linked clone minds the seething net

was wired, simulation wrapped tight to;

across all natures world close touched; a mime

of simulation, joined to the real,

the hard and quick of this once only world.

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And now through this valley, through red dimmed windows.

vast forms move fantastic, to music of machineries

and the throng moves back and forth and does not smile.

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No sooner than the control commands had entered the surface fractal

structure, and you speak  these words, then, as if the entire network

had crystallized into a metallic state, you can  feel the chain

reaction of screens and images locking across the entire network.

You become aware of hollow echoing inside the room. like an entire

Balinese Kepchar orchestra is clanging.  Screens across the room

go blank or flicker with hundreds of images, and all the images

start to become the same, simultaneous. multiple merger,  you

stare across the room at Tel staring at all the screens, like

stone,  you place your pseudo hand, on the image of his shoulder, and

he speaks, almost grimly, monotonously  staring ahead and as he speaks ,

he relays a sequence of repeated images,

simple and direct, and you drink in the portent of the words.

“Can’t you hear it?  You have heard it for many nights. but I did not

speak.  They are locked up, alive.”

And tonight, the door breaking down.

The death cry.  Struggles within the metallic archway.

“Where will you go?”

"They will be here soon.”

Footsteps. 

A heartbeat. 

He flashed a whole sequence of hitherto concealed images. 

“It's all over. They stand outside the door."

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The computer network starts to fall apart. The simulated room

starts to flash images of the room it is inside of.

The walls were being broken down.  They burst in.

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The electric storm was still raging.

The world shot full of  wild light

You turn back to look.

The radiance is the blood red moon.

The city is cracking apart.

The moon explodes as you see all the walls fall.

A shouting of 7 million.  The sea closes and swallows into its deep dark random waters the

fractal city at your feet.

Abstractions in the Seismic Medium

(Wrote this a few years ago, just reworked it a little)

 Abstractions in the Seismic Medium

She was an earthquake artist in the storm of the western dream and her appearances were like the visitation of an angel.  She would dress in black with metallic shoes and gloves and her hands were long and she was tall and her long dark hair streamed behind her like a dark river. Her performances had altered landscapes along multiple coasts, river valleys, mountain ranges. Skylines had been reconfigured. Cities metamorphosed. Neighborhoods transformed. Landscapes altered. She played the coasts and large cities. Metropolis mutated. The elements of neighborhoods transmuted. Economies revolutionized. The iconography of intersection and roadway translated into languages heretofore never conceived of.…..

I had been a fan and followed her performances intently. In a way, I had been transformed by her art. My house had been filled with scale models of mutable cities. I entered my house through a twisted wooden staircase. Doors had become windows, and my basement had been transformed into a small pond with glowing neon lighting. In a way though, the transformation I had undergone had been only that of any other obsessive fan. I could have very well been just a baseball card collector who knows countless statistics but has never played the game, or anime otaku holed up in a Tokyo one room, or a suburban punk rock mall rat, buying collectibles and life style accessories, taking on image without essence. Later on, after we had all been transformed by the disaster, I could just say, like everyone else, I had never understood her.

The petitions had been signed, the referendum had passed, she had been invited, cajoled, convinced, and highly paid, to come and perform her actions upon our city. She stood with grace and posture on stage before assembled dignitaries, payers of high priced tickets, the mayors, council members, community representatives, and winners of random lotteries. Projected all around were numerous video screens showing different views of the city. Maps, stereographic projections, geodesic maps, topography, satellite photos, bus maps. On other screens historic newspaper headlines were projected. “Storm shuts down city for three days” “Mayor arrested in Payola Scandal” “Crowds celebrate end of war” On other screens a collection of old photographs. A couple kissing in a park, a building on fire, a crowd standing waiting at a movie premier.  Every second, ten new photographs. We could  smell fireworks on the Fourth of July, the musty wetness of the waterfront, leaves burning on an October evening, the acrid scent of a plastic factory.  Old posters, parking regulations, minutes of the city council. The most popular songs of the old era. The sound of traffic at an intersection. The whistle of a train in the night in the hill. A conversation on a street corner. The sum of all recorded and collected information. The history of our fair city. Multimedia sensory wafting in cataclysmic orgasmic sensory stimulation history -  moments that had been forgotten, times we had ceased to remember, the future that we once dreamed of, the reality of what we had today, on this very day, as we streamed into the performance and looked up at the street cameras as we walked into the door.

She had been wired in to the mechanism. High capacity fiber optic cables extended from her fingers. As she moved across the stage the displays changed, A new photograph, zooming in on a satellite photo, the blueprint of a skyscraper, blueprints, landscapes, zoning codes, bus maps, train schedules, opera performances, punk clubs, baseball stadium seating charts. She moved intently, and we all watched the displays with equal intent.

If you go online you can see the records of her performances. The Paris Surrealistic Exposition of 2023. The Eiffel tower had been shaken into a structure that broke upsideways and backwards and simply and now elegant you could take the elevator through its folded sections forth and back and contrary. The St Louis Convocation, where the Arch had twisted into a double knot and the Mississippi broke its banks and left the structure embraced in the dividing river. The Santa Cruz return, where brown hills and apricot orchards had replaced sprawls and superhighway, and a tidal wave had washed away vertical concrete sprawl impaled against the beach.

She called herself an earthquake artist, but her art was, had always been of transformation rather that destruction. I had known her when she had worked on a smaller scale and rearranged rooms. The physics of place was somehow altered and a door would become a window and a refrigerator would become a bed. A spinning ceiling fan might change its positions and become an abstract sculpture of beckoning hands.

You could enter a city after one of her performances and not even be able to say what has changed. Her art would alter maps. A street that once curved along the river from would rise up into the hills above the city. A collection of buildings around a square would be dislocated to various section. Busy thoroughfares might become one way streets, ending in staircases.  The results were so inevitable it was as if they were always there.

You could also enter a city after her performance and the utter dislocation and transformation would be immediately apparent. A skyscraper might be laid out on its side, windows sideways, elevators proceeding horizontally, and the cornice being laid out into a sculpture garden in a public park. A downtown might be flooded, its skyscrapers only reached by boats in a post modern Venice. Mountains could arise, leaving a city perched like a glowing beacon over a desert plain..

So we all sat and applauded and watched fascinated up at her and the visions projected. The mayor cut the ribbon, and the fire tugs sprayed water in an arch, and cars honked their horns, and the crowds waited in the parks with picnic baskets and we sat with bated breath.

And as it happened, everything changed.

Now I walk these new labyrinthine streets, the mutating, metamorphosing streets; in the place where the maps have changed, where all destination is in motion. Where what once was the way up, is now the way down. I watch the faces in crowds, like petals on her flowers, who look upon my face, as I look upon theirs. I don’t even know if they remember her. But I can see her eyes in the motion behind windows, hear her lips speaking in the noise of the crowds, her hands touch me through passing strangers, her skin in the changing facades, her mouth in the mutating alleyways.. She was an earthquake artist in the storm of the western dream and her appearance was the visitation of an angel. 

Khusenaton on flute

Poet in New York: 1991

me!!!, circa 1991.And Butch Johnson, rip.

It Alway Rains in Portland

Rain and night, and the blues. Old video from my Sony Cybershot. 

 

Midnight bridges up and down

I take the train, the edge of town

Clouded skies, come soft, a troubled dream

Reflecting on your eyes.

It always rains in Portland

It’s raining all the time

It always rains in Portland

I think I’ll lose my mind.

Avenue lamps cast green and red

Reflections on the wet cement.

rain on your face, tears in your eyes

Clouded skies, come soft, come down

It always rains in Portland

It’s raining all the time

It always rains in Portland

I think I’ll lose my mind.