Pangaea Archival Network (and other shenanigans)

All my trekking back and forth between California and the Pacific Northwest has begun to pay off.
Through some slight-of-internet I was able to help network together a disparate bunch of friends and friends-of-friends who now comprise the aggregated group known as the Pangaea Archival Network. We're putting together a 501c3 to fund our hit-the-road adventures assembling documentary films and archival databases about the effects of corporate globalization on indigenous peoples. And probably spin it off into a dozen other creative projects in the process. My friend who's spearheading the project is a get-things-done type of guy, which is a always a plus. I've got maps of different places on Earth all over the walls of my apartment, so clearly travel has been on my mind and I'm really exciting to have a reliable group of people putting together a funding and publicity infrastructure to support people going to lots of different locations and doing worthwhile projects in the process. Sure to be more updates on this endeavor in the future.

I attended a great potluck for the local chapter of Bill McKibben's 350 organization, "350" being the target parts-per-million of carbon in the atmosphere needed to ensure the continuation of life as we know on the planet. It's currently at 392.40, which is quite high considering that the pre- Industrial Revolution numbers are more like around 280. The local group seems to have some good momentum, they have regular monthly social/organizing mixers, and have multiple projects under way. I got networked with some folks working on community gardens, and was excited to learn about Urban Garden Share, which is using social networking web tools to facilitate collaboration around creating urban gardens. The pilot project started in my home town of Seattle, and now Santa Cruz is one of the first cities (along with Louisville, Atlanta and Boise) outside of the Pacific Northwest to give the idea a try. The website had cute fliers with tongue-in-check references to flirting with your neighbors, with is great. Some of my neighbors are really hot.

Been renting office co-working space at Cruzio, which is a great place to meet motivated professionals and the complimentary tea and high speed internet isn't half bad either. Plus it's near the library(!) and a local small business that totally rocks - Pure Pleasure, who do great work to keep Santa Cruz sex-positive with their many classes and events, also they're just a good place to buy toys. Voted best Adult Store in Santa Cruz County in this year's Good Times poll, it's quite the feisty little dildo store - be sure to read co-owner Amy's blog!

Becoming more active in Community Television, and looking forward to the upcoming Santa Cruz Film Festival, which is consistently excellent. Look for me taking your tickets. And I'm going to start making my very own Kombucha soon (thanks Andrea!). Good things brewing.

Our Hero plateaus, then launches.

The art experiment at the first apartment morphed into chaotic monster of residual neurosis. hardcore PTSD, man. That's what the streets will do to you. Then they put you in a box and at first all the basic habits of efficient box-person life seem like some enormous challenge. Then you gradually get used it. I learned plenty from it, then they moved me into a better place. Redo, with a stronger cognitive toolbox this time. I learned: There's some questionable (who isn't?) characters roaming this little beachside 'hood (but the brochure said it's a quaint little beach town....). So only allow brilliantly awesome people into one's domicile. If it smells like a crook.... Let the wall collage ideasphere evolve, not just accumulate - don't glue anything. Laser beams are lots of fun. Make the most of opportunities. Always continue striving and never give up. Be patient.... but don't let the world pass you by either. Avoid doing blatantly stupid things - there's no need to fly too close to the sun. Be disciplined and take your practice seriously. You want to keep things upscale, refined - in keeping with the higher standard of quality that defines construction the new home (it's a swank, sturdy little place). I'm Colin Campbell Clyde and this is my story: I've been to hell and back. I've been sneered at and smeared, tasted the bitterness of betrayal. That's a load of ancient history. Now things are looking up. Career opportunities. Paradigm rearrangements, man, really deep. This is my chance, starting today. The rate of change is accelerating. I've already come so far. Exciting fervent ferment. I'm starting a multimedia company - change the world. This blog is a record of the progress. I intend to accomplish remarkable things. I hope you'll join me, it will be ever so lovely to have you on board! Hop on, this rocketship is cleared for takeoff.

Further adventures in Paradise.

Geeking out on the Twitter feature that allows for tweets to be send to a cellphone via text message. Now I know what NASA is doing at any given moment. That's pretty awesome methinks.
I've been calling into KRXA talk radio periodically for a few months now, and decided to invite station owner and morning show host Hal Ginsberg to speak at the Penny University, a weekly event at the Red Church. Hal's a great talker so it should be a real treat.

My buddy Jon helped start a company, Flight of Harmony, that makes electronic music synthesizers. He says some man plays wild music on the streets of Tokyo with one of his company's boxes. I wonder if there's anything on the internet about that guy. I like the idea of a little mail order box of circuits shipping out all over the world and empowering people to make wacky noises. One guy playing music can change the entire mood of a place. Last time I visited Jon we kicked ideas around about starting a housing co-op for creative people, stay tuned to this bat-channel for further developments. And oh, Jon, I am looking in to those companies that you sent me... gradually. Also, another company to look into that houses artists is ArtSpace, they run the Tannery Art Center here in Santa Cruz and also run spaces in Seattle and Everett, WA.

Black Swan is a really good movie. Go see it.

I've been making a real effort to practice juggling, write, study languages, and draw pictures on a daily basis. There's a neurological principle that it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of practices to attain greatness at a skill. So I'm keeping a record of how much time I spend on those tasks. Here's the current tally: starting February 10 (18 days so far) 4 hours spent juggling (usually in 5 to 10 minute chunks). 2 hours 23 minutes drawing. 1 hour 30 minutes writing (probably a low estimate, lots of clever texting and whatnot that I don't count). Now that I'm forming the habit, I hope to bump up the average amount of practice time per day.

Thanks to Claire Stringer for reminding me that the point of creative work is joy. It's terrible for it to start to feel like a chore. You're a real gem, Claire.

Thoughts on trip to Seattle.

Had a great time visiting Seattle and Yakima for the holidays.

Seattle was awesome, you don't really get to enjoy and appreciate your hometown until you return after being gone for a while. I might even move back there someday, I think it's just a great town with a lot going on. (My ideal goal is to get filthy stinking rich and rent/own housing in many different cities so I can travel around and always have a place to stay, also my friends can have somewhere to crash while I'm out of town).
I was happy to see old friends doing worthwhile things with their lives and took the opportunity to strengthen my social network with entrepreneurial schemes for the future in mind. I talked to my old high school buddy Jon over delicious Italian food about his modular synthesizer business, Native American sovereignty issues, and ideas for starting a media company and housing co-ops. My buddy Thomas Hays has been quite the productive troublemaker since we last saw each other. He's now working on a retrospective book about his wartime postering campaign that got him in the newspapers in Seattle. Brooke works at Seattle Children's Theater and I got to see their impressively massive set-building room and all-around great facilities and posters for what looked like some awesome shows. Some other friends have a good scene going in Yakima with kids running around and music production whatnot.


Other misc: I learned about Artist Eye Portfolio Studio, which helps artist's put together a slick presentation of their work. I took lots of pictures of visually stimulating architecture and graffiti, and feel like some kind of boneheaded techo-idiot for not yet figuring out how to download them from my phone to a hard drive. (Otherwise I'd post for all to see. Maybe an intrepid reader has experience with these matters and can point me in the right direction?) I decided never to take the Greyhound bus ever again, ever. And I wouldn't recommend that you try it, either. Save a little extra money for Amtrak.

The decline of the visual world along Interstate 5.

Taking a road trip up to Seattle area for Christmas. Nothing focuses the mind and lower back like spending more than a day riding a Greyhound bus through three states, and one happens to be California which is, you know, pretty big. Aside from the whole sitting-in-one-place for hours thing, it was an enjoyable bus ride. Many interesting women ride the Greyhound. All that time gazing out the window you inevitably learn a few things about the commercial geography of the land traversed. I had an even epiphany half way through Oregon about architecture - specifically about why I had very little interest in the topic of building design as a child, yet I now as an adult find it fascinating. The reason is that at least in the United States, most architecture is garbage, and only upon discovering notable exceptions to the mediocrity did I realize that how and what we build is actually an exciting and consequential field of human endeavor.
Small and medium sized towns along the I-5 corridor are practically interchangeable, characterized by the ubiquitous homogeneity of the corporate outlet. The RV wholesale lots all look the same, the fast food greasepits all look the same, the retail stripmalls are all constructed from identical blueprints with identical fake siding facades, the ticky-tacky housing blights the eye after many miles with the soul-eroding boredom of its all-encompassing sameness, the same motel and hotel chains iterate ad infinitum. Very rarely does anything visible from the highway express any significant individuality, and finally the little towns all blur together into one unending advertisement for itself. Only the older buildings and big cities show any hint of unique character. It is a triumph of commerce over aesthetics, function over form. Simon and Garfunkel's "Each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factory" captures the spirit of it, although now the factories are no longer here, manufacturing jobs having fled to overseas low wage markets. The retail service industry multinational institutions dominate the economic structure, smaller operation mom-and-pop stores having become largely an anachronism. For many Americans, it's the only visual world they've ever known and over time being surrounded by it's homogeneity erodes our ability to imagine any other possible social environment. The logoland moves capital around voraciously, reproducing itself. There is an ever diminishing set of expectations rooted in visual blandness.

I'm in Seattle now and ran around today looking at tall buildings downtown. There's been a construction boom during my decade-long absence from my home city. The downtown is now lively and upscale. I'm discovering again that it's a beautiful city, a testament to the value of quality architecture and urban planning. There really ought to be better buildings to look at in more places.

And what is up with our obsession with the 90-degree angle? There must be some historical lineage that accounts for this, I must research this. There's so many different kinds of shapes...

Going home for Christmas

I'm looking forward to going to Seattle for Christmas. My buddy is going to help me put the data on my cellphone onto the internet, so look forward to pictures soon.

Some new obsessions: crying Boehner, Wikileaks. More later.

FUNdamentalism

I went to the "secret" church. They were "fun"-dametalist Christians are they were a lot of fun actually. Great music and dance, lots of hugs and affection. I think I'll go back. The Lord must be working on me and my godless secular humanism. Yeah, right.

I like my new phone. It has a video camera. That makes it swell. Many projects will come of this. I will post vids and pics as soon as I work out the technical issues involved. Some interesting stuff, I recorded bits of a great lecture by Greg Laughlin about extra-solar planets, that will knock your socks off. And lots of other great footage. You'll see.

Blogging class every Tuesday @ 3:00pm at the Empowerment Center, which is the computer lab at the homeless shelter on Coral St/River St. You don't have to be a bum to go to the blogging class. This is part of my plan to accumulate an army of minions. We get the room to ourselves and blog like blogging maniacs. It will be lots of fun for every one. Plus come find out for yourself. Be there or be squid.

That's it for now. Oh there's this. Um, yeah.