An illustration of the Mind Of The Web:

Browsing around GoogleEarth while I drink my coffee, I end up noticing that there’s some National Geographic featured content in connection with Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge. Naturally, I grouse. Er, sorry. Couldn’t help myself.

Anyway, this is a place I’ve been to and photographed. And down at the bottom of the article there’s a link to a list of endangered species, by region. Granted, it’s ten-year-old information, but I start poking around the list for the Northwest, since I kinda sorta live here.

Now, I wasn’t aware that there’s a Steller’s sea-lion. I was aware of the Steller’s jay, a raucous variant on the blue jay (Corvids make me happy for some reason), so I wondered: Who’s this Steller guy?

Well, it turns out Georg Wilhelm Steller was a German biologist who was working for the Russian government in the mid-1700s, accompanying Vitus Bering (as in Bering Strait) on an ill-fated voyage looking for an eastern passage to the northwest of North America. If you look at a map, you’ll see an island called Bering island. That’s because the ship wrecked there, and most of the crew died. Steller, however, continued in biologist mode and made all kinds of observations, introducing many New World species to science, including seals, sea otters, sea lions, sea cows, and sea birds. Take any kind of animal, put ‘sea’ in front of it, and Steller discovered one.

The remaining crew eventually constructed a new boat and made it back to the Kamchatka peninsula, where Steller spent a few years studying the biology of the region. He never made it back to St. Petersburg, though, dying of fever. His papers made it back, though, and the species he discovered were given his name.

He didn’t make it to 40, either.

Also, looking for images of Steller’s jays, I found this, which is abstract art based on the color patterns of birds.

Update: RamenDragonElok points out: There’s also a Steller’s Sea Eagle, which lives on the Asian coast ranging from Kamchatka to Japan. Basically an Asian bald eagle, with it’s white in different places.

I’m 40, as of today.

Not a day for thinking about the accomplishments of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Of course, he didn’t live past 35, so fuck him. There were a bunch of things I wanted to do before I hit 40, but none of them matter now, do they? Hah!

Previous Gorge-osity posts here.

This entry isn’t really about the Columbia river gorge, though it’s on the same trip, so it counts as Gorge-osity.

Southwest Washington state is the same story told again and again: Logging town, connection to Lewis and Clark, Wobblies were lynched, there used to be salmon. Seriously.

OK, maybe not a lynching in every town, but there’s a whole history of union radicalism in the place, just as there’s an undercurrent of environmentalist radicalism today. Everyone knows the arguments, even if they disagree, and even if they disagree vehemently.

The Lewis and Clark expedition is always upheld in song and tale and interpretive plaque. You can’t escape it. I talked earlier about the Longview bridge, but in the 1980 it was renamed the Lewis and Clark Bridge. Which I think is a silly name. But Lewis and Clark camped nearby (a place called Dibblee Point beach), so therefore it ended up with the name. The Voyage Of Discovery was important in so many ways, but what does this bridge have to do with it?

I found myself in a place Lewis and Clark could only dream of as they spent a winter eating bark on Cape Disappointment: Motel 6, watching The Weather Channel. If only they’d had GoogleEarth back then…

The Weather Channel was telling me a story I liked to hear: That the weather would be nice. I had camera gear, nice weather, and a National Monument I hadn’t ever visited. So it was obviously time to go to Mt. St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

But part of me wasn’t convinced. I had to argue with myself for a little while, driving up I-5. I could put off the decision until I got to Castle Rock. I needed gas anyway, so making the exit was no big deal, and then a right turn down WA 504, and before I knew it I was at the visitor’s center, giving a guy $3 so I could wander around and learn all about vulcanology. I watched a movie about the ABSOLUTE IMMINENT THREAT!!!!! of the Cascade volcano chain, and needed a drink afterwards. None was to be found. In frustration, I smashed a penny.

Cruising along a little later, I saw some folks building a cluster of houses on top of a small hill which I could tell would have the best view of the mountain in the area. I guess if you build a half-dozen houses then you can sell the same view six times. I like this approach better than the single house that hoards the view. Of course, the houses themselves were cramped and tiny, and looked to be made of cardboard. The idea of children building a subdivision of ‘forts’ made from discarded refrigerator boxes has it’s appeal, too, but doesn’t seem to be a worthwhile investment in the long term.

I noticed that as the mountain drew closer, the trees grew thinner. What could be mistaken for clearcuts were actually the result of a volcanic blast. I was in the blast zone. The blast zone is clearly marked for any visitor with signs reading ‘Weyerhauser Tree Farm.’

There’s a story about a time just after the volcano erupted, when a group of visiting journalists and reporters got on a helicopter with one local journalist. When the helicopter got close, the crowd in the back started remarking… “What devastation! What horror!” “It’s all dead, all flattened.” “There are no trees left standing!” The local journo piped up: “We’re still miles away from the blast area. Those are Weyerhauser clearcuts.”

But the fact remains that right after the blast, the area of downed timber was quickly transformed into a tree farm. There are lots of young trees, but no forest. And it’s strange, being in a place that was as wild as the surface of Mars, but now transformed into a post-natal ward for cloned trees. If any of these trees could say, “Howdy, glad to meet you,” they’d all say it at the same time, in the same tone of voice, with the same inflection, with the exact same limb offered in handshake. Nature abhors a vacuum; Weyerhauser doubly so.

Concentrating on the floor of the valley, as one sometimes might do when confronted with such bleak fullness as the tree farm, we see a giant mud flow. I immediately want to go down there and spend a bunch of time poking around in the ever-shifting streambeds, but it’s not allowed. I keep expecting to see a bear bouncing across the bottomlands, or a moose or even just a deer, but then I turn around. Tree farm. Oh yeah.

No megafauna survived the blast. There are rumors that the blast killed the last sasquatch, too.

There were really two pictures I feel as though I was supposed to take that day, and I only took one of them. I was supposed to take a picture of that mud-filled valley from up high on the roadway, with the overcast sky turning the streams to loopy curves of silver. But I was too impatient to get close to the mountain itself. By the time I eventually got back to that place, the sun was in the wrong part of the sky.

Eventually I get to Elk Rock viewpoint and take the other picture I was supposed to take.

I also catch these German tourists. The one on the ground is taking a picture. It’s not as obvious as it could be.

The place wasn’t busy at all.

The rest of this story would just be an account of walking a quarter mile down a trail, sitting by a lake for a little while, eating a Clif bar and not taking any more pictures.

The rest of the trip back to Seattle was uneventful.

Danny Hoch.

What I like most about this is the diveristy of audience, but similarity of response.

Via the quite excellent Red State Son.

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

Ok, today’s bass line of the day might set an impossibly high standard, but here we are.

A semi-rare clip of King Crimson playing ‘Elephant Talk’ for a studio audience. Listen first, then discussion:

This video goes back to 1981, a year I hold dear in musical terms.

This is the only elephant in captivity on YouTube, and it’s not such a good example, though it does illustrate some important group dynamics in King Crimson: Adrian Belew trying to put on a show while Robert Fripp is hiding behind his guitar synth. Unfortunately it doesn’t show off the part I really wanted to show off: The loopy stick part at the beginning. Tony Levin is that tall bald man, and he’s playing a Chapman Stick, which is a sort of ten-string tapping-only bass guitar. On the record, there’s a longer intro, and it’s pretty amazing.

This song came from an album called ‘Discipline,’ which a lot of people heard, including myself, and including a friend of mine named Brett who bought a Stick at the first opportunity. Maybe I’ll feature something he did before long. But one of the next generation inspired by Tony Levin and the whole King Crimson vibe was Trey Gunn, who eventually switched from Stick to Warr Guitar, but who went on to play both instruments in this incarnation of King Crimson twenty years later…. ‘Construktion of Light.’

Note that playing drums is Pat Mastelotto, who formed a band called Mastica with an Austinite named Mark Williams, who will most definitely be a Bass Line Of The Day artist in the future.

I also want to point out that Adrian Belew, singing in both videos, quite frequently writes lyrics that aren’t just lists of words. Like, for instance, this little ditty I sometimes sing to myself while making coffee in the morning.

These things make me happy. Seating and pillows that look like giant river-smoothed granite boulders. Available in neoprene for outdoor use.

I especially like the picture of the kids in a puppy pile underneath a rock pile. CHILDREN CRUSHED BY GIANT STONES! Oh, wait. Never mind.

I realize some of you folks might be the wrong audience for this. Just remember that you can stop it at any time.

Curious who that old guy is? He’s William S. Burroughs, of course.

I’m hyperliteral. Just so you know.

To me, ‘appreciation,’ is not thanks or gratitude. To appreciate something is to acknowledge it. If you appreciate something, you see it, you understand it, and you acknowlege the understanding. To say you appeciate something someone did for you is to say that you understand it, and you acknowlege whatever hardship or sacrifice went into it.

‘Thanks’ (the noun) occurs between peers. Someone shares with you, and you’re thankful. You’re together in the heirarchy. The use of the word makes this equivalence happen. If I thank you, it’s because I identify with you. Thanks create community. We’re together because of both your act and my thanks.

‘Gratitude’ puts whoever feels it at the bottom of the heirarchy. As I mentioned before, it shares a common root with ‘grace.’ As in, ‘amazing grace/how sweet the sound/that saved a wretch like me.’ I never liked the ‘wretch’ part of that song, but it expresses the central idea. ‘Gratitude’ says I’m not the powerful party in this transaction; I’m the ‘wretch,’ receiving something I might not rightfully deserve.

I don’t think ‘gratitude’ requires a belief in one’s worthlessness, as terms like ‘wretch’ might imply. One can have worth and still be powerless in the transaction. In fact, it seems to me that this is the common state of human affairs, but that people make an effort not to see it. People want power. They want to be the winner and not the loser. They want to give thanks or appreciation, and that’s fine, too.

Getting back to the theme of my previous post: I think I’m mostly powerless in the realms of things that I take on. I’m interested in politics, for instance, but I’ll never run for office. I’ll never wield the kind of power that others have. My power in that realm would be derived from whatever power you, the reader have. A sort of minimal, viral power. Not overpowering. I can’t dictate anything, and why would I want to?

That’s just one example. I’m not here to infect your minds with political whatever. Although….

So I’m grateful, because letting me in to your pre-frontal lobes is an amazing grace on your part. No one has to read this far, not even me.

I’m trying to develop my relationship with gratitude. I’m not especially thankful for anything that I wasn’t thankful for last year; it’s all the same stuff. And being me, I’m not sure what value there is in listing it again.

The practice of gratitude, however, is different from having a list of things for which you’re thankful. I’m grateful. I’m grateful for everything. Just now I completed a cycle of inhalation and exhalation. I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for the money in the bank. Grateful for the banana I just ate.

See how this list is boring? If it contained everything I’m grateful for, it would be literally endless. Gratitude is the bottom layer; everything’s built on top of it.

Of course, we lose sight of that. Or, I should say, *I* lose sight of it, and I bet you do, too. Whether that’s a big deal is up to you, of course. Sometimes it’s a big deal for me.

‘Gratitude’ and ‘grace’ share word origins. They both come from Latin ‘gratus.’

Thus, gratitude is the acknowledgment of grace. Gratitude for the continued metabolism of my pulmonary system is acknowledgment of the grace of the universe. Breathe in, breathe out. Neeto. The universe decided to keep me alive again.

Grace is sometimes defined as slack. That is, if you’re late on your payment, there’s sometimes a grace period, right? Cut me some slack, man..? I’m grateful for the slack. My life is one long slack. A series of pointless misadventures, it seems sometimes. The very pointlessness leads one to think in terms of grace and gratitude rather than thankfulness.

There are things for which I am grateful, for which I will never give thanks. I don’t like them and would rather they not be associated with me, but I recognize them as meaningful and powerful and in many ways graceful. And deserving of gratitude. This is the interesting list, as opposed to the boring one above. It’s undergoing constant revision. It’s hard to write out. Hard to believe it even exists.

Thus: My ongoing relationship with gratitude.

That said: I’m both thankful and grateful for all the people that come around here and hang out and say stuff and let me know they thought about what I wrote. Or even acknowledge that they read it. Or even left ‘footprints.’ But that’s in a descending order of matter-ing-ness, so if you just looked, you don’t get as much thanks. Seriously. I mean, thanks, but you really should start commenting.