about that eclipse...

"The Sun happens to be 400 times the Moon's diameter, and 400 times as far away. That coincidence means the Sun and Moon appear to be the same size when viewed from Earth. A total solar eclipse, in which the Moon is between the Earth and Sun, blocks the bright light from the Sun's photosphere, allowing us to see the faint glow from the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere."

from freemars.org

Then I read this mind blower from NASA:

"A quick trip to the Moon provides the answer: Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding the sun behind it. The eclipse is underway. You might expect Earth seen in this way to be utterly dark, but it's not. The rim of the planet is on fire! As you scan your eye around Earth's circumference, you're seeing every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all of them, all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth's shadow, filling it with a coppery glow and transforming the Moon into a great red orb."

source here

Fucking amazing.

For my part, I was in a friend's backyard with about 5 other friends. There was a nice fire in a pit, a telescope, and clear skies. Good times.

(photo by thomas loupe)

shells on wood

Someone had put them there. I don't know who.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Holy

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

self on fire

I printed and framed this one the other day to send to a guy that is doing an art show in Columbus, OH. Took it with my Droid phone.

earlier this evening

Earlier tonight I went into the basement to do a load of laundry. I put the detergent into the washing machine (I always put the detergent in first, before the clothes) and when I did so I noticed something hopping around in there. It was fairly dark and I had to look hard to see what it was, and when I did so it turned out to be a cricket. Not one of the old-school black ones, but one of these new camelback crickets that seem to be quite popular at the moment.
I had to get it out of there before washing my clothes, and for some reason was adverse to killing it. At first I tried using a mop handle but it wouldn't take the bait, so I took an old dryer sheet and let it climb onto that before pulling it out of the washer and away to safety. As I placed it onto the ground I said out loud and quite audibly:
"There, I just saved your life. REMEMBER THIS."

Well, I am back

It's true, but the previous post that was here has been redacted because I didn't like it anymore.

Rest In Peace, Richard Dunn.

It was a few days ago.

Haiti, Monsanto

"A new earthquake" is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto's seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation's presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

read more here.

Sudden Mass American Enlightenment

Washington - President Obama, U.S. congressmen and their aides held an emergency four hour-long meeting Wednesday to decide what action to take to stem a sudden and unprecedented mass enlightenment of the US population that threatens to destabilize the Government and create a fiscal crisis.

read more here

Amazing guitarist from Botswana

I can't get this out of my head

specifically this version.

As I Went Out One Morning

Last-minute show announcement

Television Hill plays this coming Sunday night at the Windup Space in Baltimore with Noble Lake and someone else (don't really know).
The band lineup will be Rob Wilson, David Bergander, Walker Teret, and myself. We'll be focusing on material that has mainly to do with pirates- the old school ones, not so much the recent Somali variety.

Hope to see a bunch of friendly faces at this one. It will be good, I promise.

Go Ask Ali

Welcome to this new blog column that I hope to feature regularly, in which I pose inane questions to my friend Alison and she answers them.
-dh
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trust is key for this column. You are about to follow me into the void, so I’ll deceive you not with pretensions of nobility or intellect. Hereto forth will commence a most serious discussion of the most asinine concepts laid out for you, the reader, with utmost sincerity. What will be revealed: profound logic? Profound madness? Most likely a light drift into the supple lap of mediocrity where so many, so long, so languid, lie. You’ve bought the ticket, but only at the price of a few moments. And possibly a small dulling of your wit.

Q: Imagine a place called ‘Bestaurant.’ What would that be?

A: My initial thoughts went towards the automat, that 1960’s bastard child of a diner and a vending machine where pre-made sandwiches, layered puddings, and iceberg salads carouselled with the urgency of unclaimed orphans. You saw your meal, you grabbed it, you ate it. All immediate, sterile, and in the name of progress.

The automat was ahead of its time, predicting a future wherein human interaction is increasingly obsolete. It predated the ATM machine, the self-checkout, Amazon.com, those modern conveniences which further dull our lackluster social skills, creating a race of self-involved (yet not self-reliant) consumer drones who buzz from task to task interested only in the final product, the get, with no thought for the simple beauty of getting there, that oft-forgotten phase of consumption that is, essentially, life.
The automat, though not without its value in kitsch, is representative of a certain ideal: a value placed on speed and sterility that was mark of the Greatest generation and later so hypocritically embraced by the baby boomers whose culture of WANT has left us to tread within shoddily founded societal structures that make each life step so necessarily tentative. So when every rung on the ladder placed in front of you seems rotted out by greed, lack of forsight, and -just generally- Facebook, where do you place your next step?

The answer is, of course, to go down to the ground. The Bestaurant lies at dining’s very foundation. And what is the prototypical meal?

Mothers’ milk. Bestaurant, is, in fact, Breastaurant. The ultimate marriage of food and human togetherness. That paradigm upon which all comfort and satisfaction is based, that unceasing focal point of art, science, all great pursuits of humanity:
The tit.

Binaural Beats

This website has an embedded player that you can listen to binaural beats with. The idea is that the two tones, one sent to each ear, are ever so slightly out of tune with each other. One can listen to these through headphones (better to use the kind that cover the ears rather than earbuds), and there is an effect created whereby two tones can be heard beating against each other. The theory is that the brain reacts to this effect via entrainment to produce brainwaves of higher or lower frequencies, which can create intense relaxation effects or other altered states of consciousness.
I have tried this myself lately over the course of several sessions listening to different examples- "euphoria box", "through the mind", "alpha meditation", and "schumann resonance" (which is the resonant frequency of the earth's magnetic field and correlated with theta waves). While I haven't used the technology to try and induce out-of-body experiences like some people have done (mostly because I'm too freaked out to try stuff like that these days), I can definitely say that I've tripped the fuck out at times, experiencing flowing colorful visions, loss of bodily awareness, throbbing "third eye" sensations, etc. I've even gotten so far into it that I've fallen asleep sitting up and ended up drooling on my shirt, only to awaken half an hour later with a sore neck. The latter issue can of course be avoided by lying down.
It's also a great thing to get into if you have a really old dog who snores constantly and you need something to shut out the sound with. Such was my reasoning tonight.
There is another related page I've found where beats can be downloaded from as mp3s.

white weight and other scenes of temporary destruction

a few more photos from Baltimore's most severe snowstorm in recent memory here.

Yardsharing

I ran across this today. I had never heard of yardsharing before, but it's a pretty cool idea.

the new clarity (and other possible worlds)

new harinezumi shots on my flickr.

PRISM index

Some music/photgraphy/writing of mine is going to be included in the upcoming multimedia compilation PRISM index, along with work from a lot of very talented people.

I had submitted the stuff and largely forgotten about it, when today I recieved this email with a link to the website and the information about how it was going to be released. Here's how:

Handbound book, DVD & CD sewn into middle
A mixed-media art compilation of over 50 artists.
Limited edition of 500 copies – Hand numbered

Cover
- Handmade paper
- Two color silkscreen
- Size – 8.5 x 11"

Interior
- 80 pages professionally printed
- 60 lb paper
- 56 pages b/w offset
- 24 pages color offset

DVD
- RT: 88 minutes
- 12 short films
- Hand stamped

CD
- RT: 72 minutes
- 25 tracks
- Hand stamped


I am very excited about this thing coming out, and honored to be included.
My page is here.

Photography: Leslie Burns

She has been a friend of mine for a few years now. In 2008 that Human Bell record come out, and she was generous enough to let us use couple of her photos for the cover art. Now she's doing this platinum/palladium printing that has been blowing my mind, and the conceptual aspects of her work have been getting more and more awesome. Here is her website.

Your World of Text

I discovered this the other day. It is "an infinite grid of text editable by any visitor", a lawless, boundless, interzone of sorts. It has the capacity to be a time-waster of epic proportions, or one could see it as a framework for psycho-spiritual experimentation. I must admit, I have myself spent hours here- hours that I will never get back. But despite my own personal dearth of productivity while exploring this realm, I think I leaned something. I say "I think" because I can't exactly put my finger on just what I learned...though it did feel rather exciting.

rising crests

Hope everyone had a good New Year's.