Soft is the wrong word
Expansive. A world of infinite horizon
extending beyond solitary comfort to
universal peace

No, really.

And clouds seem to brush against your skin
And there’s a sweet smell
but not too sweet and only faint
only small
only safe

Choir. Angels. Or something.
It doesn’t matter that much what
the sound really is. It’s far away and
yet
so very insistent in draining away
your rational thought

Stop thinking. Body can’t heal
while you’re thinking.
Pulling you toward that infinite horizon.

—-

No, really. I’m an insomniac sometimes.

I remember a long time ago, I used to listen to all kinds of music late at night. I’d listen to old Genesis records or Tangerine Dream or anything psychedelic or melancholy. Brian Eno. Jon Hassell. I still listen to these people, by the way. And David Sylvian. And Peter Gabriel’s ‘Birdy’ album, which is really wonderful.

I’d spend all night wearing headphones. I’d go to sleep listening to music that would induce a hypnogogic state. I’d wake up and the headphones would be wrapped around my neck, or on the floor next to the bed. I still have those headphones, by the way, and I’m wearing them right now.

When I moved to Berkeley, I’d drive around at night, and it seemed like every night someone at KPFK would play a couple hours of Joe Frank, which is a perfect driving-nowhere-alone-in-a-city soundtrack. I actually miss that. I miss how someone at some off-beat radio station seems to be psychically connected with me so that as soon as I get in the car, it’s time for them to start the Joe Frank.

I remember one time, when my parents were out of town, I was listening to the radio, and it was Hearts Of Space, which is still on by the way. I lay down on the carpeted floor of the living room and listened to a half-hour piece by a Japanese composer whose name I wish I could remember. And just listening, I started hallucinating. I started seeing tracers. This was just from the music without psychoactive assistance. The music was a series of smoothly percussive sounds, that I could only imagine as glass beads being poured between three containers, across and around the stereo spectrum. There was a more traditional music bed, which was some sustained but very spare synthesizer chords. But the beads were the real show.

I began to imagine what was beneath the floor, what deep history could be felt there. Who was buried there. What stories had transpired. A face, a motion, the flow of water, a hurricane… And now three containers of glass beads. Or at least their sound.

It used to be that when I’d tell my friends about these interesting things I’d heard, they seemed to wonder what was wrong with me. There’s something very lonely about this kind of music, and about this experience of music. It’s not something you can really share. The music comes from people who are in their basements with racks of synthesizers and multitrack tape machines, and somehow it filters through to solitary listeners.

Via Gadling, we learn of Fatpacking, or weight-loss oriented backpacking.

This is actually an idea I had a while back, and is one of the reasons I wanted to hike the PCT.

StepItUp07.org wants a massive show of focus on environmental issues. Lots of it sounds really interesting. They need some advice, too.

I have a request.

Please, if you will, think back to the last stupid thing you heard that made you do a face-palm. The last thing that was so stupid it stopped you in your tracks. Sometimes a smart thing can stop you in your tracks, but I want to hear the stupidest thing that someone said to you recently.

A source for the quote would be good, but the quote is more important. Politicians and public figures are off limits, unless it’s total mind-stopping stupidity, and not just something you disagree with.

Ready, set, go:

$70 and a half hour later, a new oil dipstick tube.

I had replaced the o-ring on the dipstick tube because it was leaking oil. Then it wasn’t leaking for a time, and then it was leaking again. So I took it all apart again as exploratory surgery and discovered the crack in the tube just above the o-ring. So I ordered the part and put it back together, because better a functional leaky vehicle than a non-functional one.

The part came today, I put it in, and voila. Let’s see how long before we start this process all over again. It’s one of those parts you have to get from the dealership.

I’m getting really good at manipulating the dipstick tube.

Via boingboing:

Lawrence Lessig cranks out a really good presentation on net neutrality and participatory culture (what he calls ‘read-write’ culture), all framed in a discussion of Republican de-/re-regulation in the ’80s

But most importantly: Lessig properly calls this a debate over our culture, not just our commerce. Media companies have set themselves up as gatekeepers for culture, and they want to maintain this power.

It’s not every day you go to the thrift store and find a copy of Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris.’ But I did a couple days ago, and naturally I bought it (along with the second Harry Potter movie and the first two Star Wars episodes).

I’ve been watching ‘Solaris’ slowly, and it’s a long, slow movie. There’s a Hollywood-ized version — though it’s really not a Hollywood movie — made by Stephen Soderberg and George Clooney. It’s a good movie, emphasizing the romantic aspect. Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris,’ on the other hand, isn’t good or bad; you really have to accept it or reject it on its own terms. It emphasizes such lightweight concepts as the meaning of existence, the fabric of reality, the nature of love, madness, and suicide. It’s basically a trip to the wish-fulfilling planet, Solaris, where man’s questions about the universe take form. All the grief and self-doubt that comes with a human is reflected back by Solaris.

There are a lot of things to mull over here, if you have the patience for Tarkovksy’s very slow, very deliberate style. Images that seem self-indulgent are actually integral, and he gives you a lot of time to figure out how. But I kept thinking about one of the themes of this movie: That man goes to space not to make contact with something larger, but to expand Earth, and make the universe smaller. One of the characters actually states this outright, even though the rest of the movie to that point has already got you thinking it.

I was connecting this with the idea that science fiction movies have followed a similar trajectory at the same time. ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ pulled SF beyond simple genre in 1968, and was an obvious influence on ‘Solaris’ which came out four years later. Since then, SF movies about space exploration have been about exporting humanity rather than transforming it. At least, that was the theory while watching ‘Solaris.’ Maybe some smart-ass out there reading this will comment and let me know how wrong I am.

My obvious example of this exportation is ‘Aliens,’ wherein James Cameron re-fights Vietnam in space and wins. Note that Cameron co-produced the remake of ‘Solaris.’ So there you go.

Washington Trails Association has a PDF about 12 legendary Washington hikers, including the aforementioned Harvey Manning.

gadling.com sent me off to look at RoadsideAmerica.com’s list of North American stonehenge replicas. There are more than you think. The first one was here in WA, by the way. I really want to visit Refrigeratorhenge.

ScienceFaction is a stock photo house customized for science-oriented content. (They need a metadata editor, and I might be foolish enough to apply for the job.)

Also on the photography front: Wallhogs will take your artwork/photography and turn it into a giant removable/reuseable sticker. They’ll even cut it to shape, if you want. Not that expensive, either.

Tristero is approrpiately shrill.

I’m so sick of talking about it, only to be met by yawns. I mention that the White House deliberately put a group into the Department of Defense to generate ‘intel’ about Iraq that would look good on paper, and then let the DoD take the fall. Which is to say, the White House lied us into a war. And the response? ‘So what?’ or ‘Other Presidents lied, too!’ or ‘You’re just a whiny liberal.’

What does it take? What’s required before anything will get done about this? Bush and Cheney should be in prison, not smirking on TV.

Our next President will be a Democrat. Let’s just get that out of the way. So if our next President were to do anything at all like this, they’d be in leg irons in minutes. So why does Bush get a pass? What kind of double standard do we have that allows not only for an administration to go to war based on lies, but also to be open about violating the civil rights of citizens, and also run a gulag of torture chambers around the world… as long as they’re Republicans?

I just don’t understand how any society could be so fucked up.

Some days I pull down a hiking book at random and start reading the actual written part. Not the maps of trails and the minimal description and elevation changes and so forth, but the introduction. Usually, I’m looking for somewhere to go, but sometimes I just enjoy reading Harvey Manning.

See, most of my hiking books are authored or co-authored by Manning, published by The Mountaineers. Manning speaks with a pleasant authority about the Pacific northwest with any degree of granularity you prefer: He can talk about biomes, bioregions, the history of a river, or why that mountain has its name.

In this case, from ’55 Hikes in Central Washington,’ describing (in 1990) areas he and co-author Ira Spring chose not to include:

We have stayed out of the 261,000 acres of the Yakima Firing Center, as well as the 63,000 additional acres the U.S. Army is seeking (Note: To the Army’s credit, maneuvers are scheduled to avoid disturbing wildlife during seasons crucial to perpetuating the species.) Looking (from afar) at these 500 square miles, we cannot but muse on how many splendid parks in Washington are the heritage of old wars: Discovery Park and Sand Point Park in Seattle, Point Defiance Park in Tacoma, Deception Pass State Park and the parks of the “Death Triangle” on the Whulge, and more. This war, too, the Fifty Year (so far) War that began in 1941 and has continued with only the briefest armistices, will pass. What wonders then will there be for the picnicker and the car-camper, the stroller and hiker and backpackers, the birder and beaster and flowerer, the riders of the purple sage camped at night by the chuckwagon? A state park — a national park — to dream on.

‘The Whulge’ is the native term for Puget Sound. He’s talking about naval bases.

Of course, the war didn’t actually end. It sort-of did, but then we had all these left-over guns and tanks and stuff, so we had to make sure more wars started up. In fact, the local economy of this region is based on mostly two things: Resource extraction and war. South-central Washington state, the area Manning is writing about, has an economy mostly because of the Hanford site, a nuclear energy research center, and also a big ol’ pile of nuclear waste. Which is interesting in this context because the Hanford Reach of the Columbia river is the last un-dammed section. The region around Hanford is a de facto wildlife preserve, and the area north and east, across the river from the Hanford Reserve proper is a eco-region research center.

Maybe one day it’ll all be a big National Park. Once it stops glowing, anyway.