this lossy codec

After selling a couple older mac notebooks I just scored 17″ 2.5ghz for 1500! Shawing!

Getting down to the leftover scraps. No more thanksgiving sandwiches. Maybe enough for a thanksgiving shake.

In midst of first week out on a western called ‘doc west’. I’m booming and we’re filming outside of Santa fe. Lossycodec.com/blog for more.

In Bellingham for a few days. Ahh Bellingham.

Sara Silverman joins the cast of St. John of las vegas. In person she is just as you’d expect.

3rd day working on ‘St. John of Las Vegas’ starting Steve Biscemi, inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Today was the wheel chair strip club scene

overheard in Madrid, nm: “not so much brain damage as brain change…

Last week my son & I went to the zoo in Abluquerque. By far the most impressive animals were the polar bears. The intelligence and consciousness of these beings was undeniable. One of them seemed to be performing tricks for the crowdl, making me think maybe it had been trained in the circus(?). Then again, maybe it was just having fun. While we watched, it picked this barrel thing up and threw it into the water and then dove onto it over and over again, each time picking it up and throwing it back onto land afterward.

did I say death? I meant ’sex & lies in sin city’. Probably sounds even less interesting now, eh?

first day on shoot of ’sex & death in sin city’. Not fired yet.

Outside the bathroom at the campground at Whites City near Carlsbad.

Visiting UFO museum in roswell NM. Apparently a lot of folks take this stuff pretty seriously. 200k a year visit the museum.

On the way back from Denver last night we stopped at a rest stop that had this sign and accompanying button requesting input(?). Kind of an odd use of the first person plural tense.

Ever look around and start to notice themes popping up at certain points in your life? I do. I suspect it is a common enough phenomenon. Still, what people do, or how they react or listen to the world around them is an uncertain maneuver. Indeed, most people think that DOing something means being ACTIVE and moving foreward with little or no attention paid to the world around. There is an alternative view that has at its basis the idea that the ‘SELF’ is not merely limited to the physical body but that it merges into the environment in a way so subtle so as to actually be a continuity. “Huh?” you ask?

Here is a link to a fractal video created by my friend Jonathan Wolfe. It starts with the primordial Mandelbrot Set. Pay close attention to where the video continues to zoom. It is a choice made by the creator (in this case, Jonathan). It just so happens that the almost(?) infinite zoom is most heightened at the edges. Isn’t it interesting that no matter how much we zoom, the “edge” is never found?

Now, as I understand it, fractals are a graphical representation of a mathmatical proccess of recursive feedback (ie. feeding the solution of a quadratic equation back into the the formual over and over). Now this process of feedback has a great deal to do with Cybernetics. Cybernetics comes from the Greek kybernetes which means steersman. The idea is that the steersman is a part of a feedback loop between the rudder, the current and the allignment with where he’s going. He is constantly making adjustments and counter-adjustments to keep on his course. (Interestingly, our word government comes from the same root).

So this cybernetics stuff gets pretty heady. The basic idea is that the steersman is a part of a process. If he stops paying attention, he’ll go off course. Now, an old timer who’d been piloting for 20 years probably it becomes second nature. Like us driving a car. We don’t actually think about what we are doing (we’re too busy on the phone), but still, somehow we don’t ram that guy in front of us or run over any pedestrians (generally).

So what if our bodies were like this; vehicles we had long ago learned to pilot and gotten so good at we just unconsciously internalized the process. But where are we going? Did the Captain give us directions? Have we checked the current?

So. Environment+Self=Consciousness.

Of course, this can be sketchy territory. There is a fine line between seeing ’signs’ and hearing ‘voices’. A maximum of discretion is advised. Still, it is easy for me to imagine the ancients interacting with the world around them in this way. Magic? The Tao? I know not…

I actually was planning on writing about the themes that have popped up lately for me. I’ll leave you with this for today and hope that those who’ve read it have found it stimulating at least in some sense.

If not, check this out and at least you’ll have something to thank me for.

watching dateline nbc top 10 close encounters

…when you aren’t in excruciating pain!! That’s right folks, it has been a whole 4 days since my last attack (that is my current record btw – which makes me a little nervous about tomorrow). On Mother’s Day it hit moments after waking but somehow I was able to make it subside within a few hours. I’m not certain but some combination of the following did the trick:

1. 1000mg Aspirin
2. starbuck doubleshot
3. 1-2 mile hike w/ dogs
4. orange juice
5. bagle w/ cream cheese

And that was it. Somehow, it just faded away. The rest of the day I was fine, nay, BLISSFUL.

Interestingly, they do seem to strike earlier in the week, usually Sundays-Tuesdays. It is weird, wacky stuff.

no elaphents here though

running sound for jami sieber. She plays electric cello with elaphents (they play music too!)

Well, I thought it worked. Apparently though, whatever it is in my noggin that is misfiring has yet to be fixed. Yesterday I woke up and had a real doozy. omagod that was painful. I am amazed to read that some people can live with this for years. Today I am fine anyway. Ahhh, the lack of excruciating pain, how sweet it is.