Author Archives: d.perry

spiral center

All of these northwest-oriented faults in the Portland region are pressure release points that react to the larger movements of the plates below us.

“This fault probably formed in response to this broader clockwise rotation,” Streig said. “There’s a pivot point somewhere in Eastern Oregon, close to the border of Oregon and Washington. And all of the Pacific Northwest is essentially rotating clockwise around that pivot point.”

“It is as if with bare hands your player has stopped a meteor, changing certain destruction into: Here we are sailing on a summer afternoon.
Suddenly you are in an alternate present. The ball is tracing a graceful arc back over the net. It is a kind of communication, your player’s return: a flirting. I’ve ignored that you tried to kill me, says your player’s impossibly gentle slice, and I like you. Tennis is not only sport but spell. By changing force, your player reshapes time.”

“Music, chanting, and dancing are indispensable elements of the Phi Fa ritual. The khaen, a bamboo mouth organ, is the primary musical instrument of the ritual. It is creates a sacred atmosphere accompanying ritual prayers and devotions and encourages dancing around the sacrificial altar. The khaen is accompanied by the phing, a guitar-like stringed instrument, by a drum, and by ching, small bells, cymbals. The chanting is very similar to mor lam, the traditional music of Lao and northeast Thailand.

Phi Fa ritual participants dance around a decorated sacrificial altar. The dance lasts a full night and creates trance conditions for many of the participants. They believe Phi Fa will participate the ceremony and they expect healing and protection from unfavorable fortune.

The steps of the ritual are related to the songs chanted by the shaman and are always accompanied by the khaen. This is because the khaen is believed to be an important mean to communicate with the gods and the spirits. The steps of the ritual are as follows: inviting the gods or spirits, explaining the reason for the invitation, praying for assistance, praying for protection, consoling the patient, re-calling the spirit that has fled the patient, inviting Phi Fa to accept the offerings, Baasii ritual, fortune telling, and taking leave of Phi Fa.”

Unordered Old Top Ten “Albums” List (2019 or 2020?)

Incredible String Band – Wee Tam

Animal Collective – Campfire Songs

John Fahey – Great San Bernardino Birthday Party

Fishmans – Uchu Nippon Setagaya

This Heat – John Peel March 28th, 1977

Terry Riley / Don Cherry – Koln February 23, 1975

Jim O’Rourke / Christian Fennesz – It’s So Hard to Say I’m Sorry

V/A – Naturalism (off Nature Tape Limb Records)

Yoran – Montparnasse

Train Fantôme – Manémeur

“The baasii ceremony is an important part of Lao culture and few Lao would consider undertaking a long journey or important endeavor without holding one. The faithful sit around a small table on which a variety of offerings are displayed – bananas, sticky rice, biscuits, money, and rice whiskey. An elder or a shaman recites the blessing, while everyone touches the offerings or, if they can’t reach, the elbow of someone touching the offerings.

The elder or the shaman ties a piece of string around the wrist. In Lao tradition, the soul consists of many guardian spirits that occasionally wander away from their owner. These must be called back and bound to the body to ensure a person is properly protected before any important undertaking. Once the elder has finished other participants continue tying loops of string. Yet more string is produced and finally everyone ties string around each other’s wrists, whispering good wishes all the while. It is believed that the string must be worn for at least three full days to ensure the desired effect.”

Excerpt (from https://exweb.gearjunkie.com/top-expeditions-1970-2020-6-gasherbrum-ivs-shining-wall/)

“Out of fuel, they couldn’t melt snow for water and had no food left, either. McDonald describes how a hallucinating Schauer believed that there was a third member of the team, determined to kill them by pushing them into the void. The Austrian climber later recalled that he saw himself transformed into a raven, looking at his own corpse from above. Kurtyka himself went in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, he focused on his imminent death, which he accepted with dignity and calm.

…

Halfway down, hallucinations overtook them both: Kurtyka also felt, rather than saw, the ghostly third man on the team. It required nearly a miracle of human endurance to reach a food cache that they had left at 7,100m during the acclimatization phase. When they finally stumbled into Base Camp, they just collapsed.”

‘In common with mystery religions, there were secret teachings, and not all texts were intended to be read by uninitiated people. The text appears to have been written for a higher level of initiate who was part of the way through since it states, “Now behold! I will reveal to you my mysteries, since you are my fellow brethren, and you shall know them all”,[2] but tantalizingly, the next five lines are missing and followed by “I told all of them about my mysteries”.[3] Some speculation has considered the possibility that the missing five lines were always missing and had never originally existed, their absence itself being a teaching of the text.’

It’s curious, in the chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the world, how seldom sheer modesty comes up — living smaller, staying closer, having less — especially for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a fuel-efficient car, but maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot closer to work in the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods and people.

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LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”

Excerpts (from https://www.fastcompany.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at-airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)

Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

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Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright appropriation. Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple, were shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment that they listed on the platform for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office, down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard, and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects (in 2012 Airbnb itself had rented Las Cases and Dewé’s space to host a party). The couple sued Airbnb in late 2015. “They are branding their company with our life,” Dewé told BuzzFeed. In making the replica rooms, company designers would “reproduce the exact sofa, as close as they could to the exact chair,” recalls Lisa Bottom, a design director at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the office in 2014.

Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, the RISD graduates. Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that, “when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little snapshots of various cities,” Bottom says. All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.

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Schwarzmann critiqued the lack of locality in generic places, but Haid’s company suggests a different, paradoxical definition of locality: desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable. In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.”

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Yet the AirSpace aesthetic that Airbnb has contributed to, and the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic (“the vanilla tourist”) falsely defined as the norm. It is a “hallucination of the normal,” as Koolhaas writes. This is the harmful illusion that so much technology, and technological culture, perpetuates: if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must be doing something wrong.

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Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected source. “If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel like the mass. There is still a sense of unity,” he says. “We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that magic to them, the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country.”

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We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds.

Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”