Any sort of "connoiseurship," which might be described as an extreme
knowledgeability and affection for a certain subject or practice, is a
potential "rabbit hole" down which one could descend quite far if one allows it. 

And the internet often makes that hole deeper and, shall we say,
smoother, all the time.   Easier to fall in, easier to fall down it, both further and faster.  It might be also possible that just as there are addictive personalities, there might also be personalities that tend to do this (is this the same as obsessive-compulsive?) - not about just a single interest, but that are more susceptible to getting geeky about any specialized area.  Because "geekiness" is another word for this, isn't it - either geekiness or its dark twin, hipsterism.  Hipsters differ from geeks in that they want to use Read more>>>

This is about a bad idea, and a set of other, good ideas, and an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called Dark Ecology in which he writes wonderfully about those ideas.  It's a long (17 page), somewhat slow, meditative, and often sad piece of writing, and you're no doubt extremely busy.  And so I will understand if you don't get to it. You may not even get to this here, as you peruse the title and first few lines of this blog post in your facebook feed.  But I'm writing, here, my summary of it, so maybe at least some folks I know might get the gist.  Still, there's no way I can really replace the original, so if you do feel interested, or inspired, you should click and read.

Who is this for? Is it for you? Well, first of all if you self-identify as an "environmentalist" or as "green" or as someone interested in "sustainability," then this, and Kingsnorth's piece, is for you.  It's also for you if you care about nature and where the natural world is headed and where our society and civilization is headed. Read more>>>

As the New Year slouches into being and beyond, one thing that is a goal I have is to write more, including writing more here on this blog.  Blogging has fallen by the wayside for me in the last few years, I think mostly because of Facebook. I think this has happened to a lot of good people with blogs.  On the other hand, lots of friends who could never have been bothered to have a blog are now very regularly posting the same sorts of things that they would have probably put on a blog if they had bothered, so I'm not saying Facebook has been a complete disaster, socially at least.

However, for me, to the degree that writing helps to center the thought
process and provide a map or template for life, Facebook has served to
fragment and defocus my thinking and leave me wandering a territory I'm a
little lost in.  And so, not a 'resolution', but a loose goal, to write
more here.  And if you start coming back here you will probably see it
first.

To start, here I'm going to simply provide a bit of textual accompaniment to some recent photos.  Because what our favorite social networking service has also done is fragment and defocus my photographic practice. Or rather, the practice of organizing and presenting the output of my photographic practice. Because I've continued to takes lots of photos, some of them even quite good.  But I used to be very diligent and prompt, for the most part, about posting the better ones on my Flickr account. I invite you to click through and peruse them more thoroughly at some point. Read more>>>

Early this fall, I was asked by my friend Peter Young to provide audio accompaniment to the opening of his art exhibition, "Capitalist Masterpieces", at Tucson MOCA. The original idea was that, instead of having a band or a DJ play normal music that would just get turned to mud by the cavernous, reverberant space of the museum (which used to be the city of Tucson's downtown firehouse), why not provide a soundscape performance that was more fit to that room, and also fill the other smaller galleries with abstract sound inspired by the paintings? Because of problems resulting from the museum's priorities, we weren't able to provide all of Peter's request, but I did create 3 site-specific audio art pieces for 3 of the back galleries, which I'm rather happy with and would love to have heard beyond the one-time, 2-hour event. Here you can listen to these pieces, and if you wish, purchase the tracks for yourself. Buying the whole album also gets you a map and some photos from the opening on December 14.

You can now watch all the webisodes of Truth On The Line right here in this handy widget:

For the last year or so Greta and I have been part of a little group of backyard chicken-keepers here in Tucson, called Zen Hens. We want to print up t-shirts and other stuff with our logo on it, but we're lacking the capital to invest in that, so we're doing a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. I made the campaign video. Click through using this widget, and if you want to help out, or just get a cool t-shirt or apron or sticker, pledge your support. Thanks!