Looks like a road trip to me covering 2,811 km or about 1,750 miles and eight, maybe nine, countries.
Super-Complexity
A youth fraught with tension and the insatiable need for novelty propelled me to look to all corners of culture for the landmarks that would direct me to my creative stomping grounds. My mind was a minefield of explosive ideas that the 20th century launched onto the intellectual landscape. Covered in the excrement and entrails of the futurists and surrealists before being lightly dusted in the philosophy of modernity to the awareness of art Deco, pop art, and minimalism, I sought to find some kind of sense of what it meant to be human.
The grinding noise of modernity belched a symphony of agony first described by Luigi Russolo in The Art of Noises, followed by the anguish of Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty, which, when combined, acted as the dress rehearsal for the squalor brought upon humanity by the fascist propaganda and genocide of a world at war that has mostly stayed with us for the duration of my life. While not on the same scale of focus, the carnage of ghastly horrors with independent actors instead of state actors thrives in our internet age.
I looked to William Burroughs for insight into juxtaposed non-sequiturs as media and most information became a global cut-up. Charles Bukowski and his purple turkey neck collided with all that preceded him and would help forge the die that would manifest the model for a future president. Absurdity was supposed to be the domain of art, but as life is so apt to do, it has imitated art. We started becoming the embodiment of the cartoons of satirist Robert Crumb’s depictions instead of the aesthetic wholesome image Walt Disney would have liked to have modeled us in. One thing is certain, though: we should never have allowed ourselves to become characters in a comic strip.
Looking to complexity in the early days of the personal computer revolution, I was searching for a new technology manifesto that would channel the best of Tristan Tzara to create my own youth art movement in the spirit of Dada. I was ready for more nihilism, and anti-everything was on my agenda.
Nietzsche and Baudrillard were the perfect conduits for my rage against conformity. They knew the idiocy of our idols and icons that were programming us for mass stupidity. The bulwark of the money machine had other designs on the habits of people and preyed upon the laziness of those who would covet an easy path instead of one paved with struggle.
It would take decades before I would start to see the next big wave in creative intellectual meanderings that would illuminate a world not yet invented but just around the corner in our future. The minds of Marshall McLuhan, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno may have gleaned insight into the role our evolving media culture would play though they didn’t foresee the emergence of a distributed global real-time collaborative information and knowledge machine. The rules of distribution and ownership took a monumental turn with the close of the 20th century.
While the one-dimensional man hasn’t been reduced to ashes yet, the seeds of change have hopefully been planted, though the current socio-cultural landscape would certainly suggest otherwise. From Elon Musk’s Space-X, we learn more about Max Q and the pressures of reaching escape velocity, but who will be the inspiration that will help guide the collective mind of humanity to reach its own Max Q?
The ideas put forth in The Critical Engineering Manifesto lay a partial framework that, when merged with the nascent world of generative algorithms exploring blockchain-birthed truth tables, will, I believe, enable emergent systems to bring about creative swarms of enlightenment. This will effectively be the unveiling of a new language to the adherents of super-complexity.
Currently, fear of artificial intelligence is stymieing a majority of relatively older people by not allowing them to embrace the creeping lingua franca found in the abundance of readily accessible information. The machines that will first benefit from AI, also known as deep learning, will, in turn, share their new capacity for seeing the world differently to educate a new population unafraid and already raised on advanced communication in the ways of super-complexity. Just as a generation stumbled with electronics, cell phones, VCR clocks, and the internet, my own generation will likely fail the transition that is now underway.
Art has nearly always had the effect of alienating those in control bent on maintaining traditions. The situation with our current age is that we’ve been evolving a global mindset that some have started recognizing as maybe being “out of control” and are now trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. This cannot work, though the violence of trying to fight this change may wreak havoc before the cultural marauders trying to arrest progress are pushed into the background as history has always done.
We are living with the baggage from two centuries of conflict as well as great progress and are about to take a quantum leap forward to throw off the burden of carrying outmoded ideas of a species on the verge of extinction. I do not mean to imply that humanity is on a path of collapse. Instead, I’m suggesting that the intellectual dinosaurs are about to encounter their meteorite. Now is the time to adapt and survive. Embrace the change and get ready for a moment in our evolution that will be as consequential as when humans began to talk and control fire. We are on the verge of a radical pivot – or maybe we are heading for the exit?
What is Love?
What is love?
Love is the internal hope and desire to inspire others, to mentor, to teach, and to learn from. Romantic love comes when that desire arrives with intimacy.
These characteristics of inspiring, mentoring, and teaching are also the cornerstones and essence of parenting. We, humans, learn from others, investing decades to share their knowledge with us. When the basis of that sharing is poor or ineffective, the results can greatly limit the potential of the person who was to be the recipient of those investments. Over the course of time, the benefits of this community involvement and individual sharing have the potential to aloft those students into various specializations. I suggest that this is an act of love.
To defend in law, treat with medicine, or enhance through invention then becomes the extension of offering love through skills that the one benefiting from these services would not be able to provide themselves. So these skills then reflect our inherent need to offer love and, in turn, require love to be reciprocated.
Art, music, and storytelling are gifts of creativity that allow us to demonstrate abilities that others can strive to emulate so that they, too, might share in the pleasure of witnessing others’ passions. In an age where mere survival is no longer the primary concern of a people, the arts and crafts have the potential to flourish and evolve as new levels of expertise are allowed to find expression.
Finding ourselves able to enjoy passion, inspiration, and finally, intimacy, we may encounter those we can romantically love. Cultivating and then nurturing these relationships requires finesse and nuance to establish mutual trust, finding a sense of certainty that the other will not hurt us.
Because love and pain are so often experienced as being delivered by the same person, we have built defensive mechanisms that can fan the fires of mistrust, making the seed of love difficult to germinate or keep alive. But it is not just love that is harmed by the effect of blurring the line between love and pain; it has an equally damaging role in our ability to learn. Trust between those who are bound together with this delicate emotion must nurture the relationship and not abuse the ability to inflict pain, or else the tender root of love can wither with dramatic negative implications for the individuals and society.
As we move out of adolescence into adulthood, we explore the fragility of deep trust as we try to nurture an exclusive relationship with another person we have not previously given our love to. The effort to satisfy and bring shared experiences passionately into someone’s life requires a tremendous effort where a symbiosis of novelty is evolving between the two people. The herculean task of opening space in oneself while exploring new space within another is precarious as both egos are exposed, and both are made vulnerable. It is then, out of these shared moments of tenderness and acting delicately within the senses of perception that we are able to realize the connectivity of moments that further act to build love.
But what happens should we forget to make these explorations or we never learned how to trust someone else while our most exposed inner selves are laid bare? Can we know love? What of those who are constantly denied love? Most of us start our very lives in the embrace of the people who unequivocally love every single atom of our existence and are willing to take their precious time to start teaching us how to communicate with one another. When will we recognize our own innate ability to share the love and return to inspiring, mentoring, and teaching one another?
The Office Park
This is the location of the offices of TimefireVR LLC. I should be finding myself here most days of the week, but so far that’s been difficult due to a multitude of reasons ranging from my mother’s recent death to the issues surrounding the raising of capital to keep things going forward. Through the troubles of operating an entrepreneurial endeavor to dealing with complexities of personalities that move in and out of our lives, I find myself searching for the passion that was available in abundance prior to the fall of 2016 when things detoured. Back then we went public and embarked on a hiring spree.
Over these last years I’ve been asked dozens of times how I got involved with making games in virtual reality and during those explanations, I realize that others are enchanted with this idea that someone is creating something. I’ve gotten this same impression back when I was making record covers, shooting videos, opening an internet cafe, writing a book, and now this. So while it may be of interest to others, I wish to be inspired by their enthusiasm and always find what I started here with this project to be of great motivation. But reconnecting with that is hard and at the moment it only arrives in fits and spurts. This is a dilemma.
Daughter In-Tow
If yesterday was for grieving the passing of my mother, Jessica’s grandmother, today is for exploring. We dropped Caroline at her office an hour early and my daughter and I headed east. I have a loose idea for our road trip but it’s flexible enough to detour. Our first stop is here in Superior, Arizona where we encounter a surprise I’d have never dreamed would happen: the Magma Hotel has been renovated. We first learned of this town from the movie U-Turn and most everything on Main Street then was boarded up. Today though things are looking better with the old Magma Hotel set to open around May along with a new restaurant across the street.
Kathy over at the Rolling Rock Gallery & Copper Triangle Mining Services was in the shop early, a matter of fact she informed us that she shows up roughly at 7:00 so she can practice her bagpipes. She’s also the incredibly informative person who gave us the rundown on the improvements coming to town and of her time as a security guard on the various sets around town back when Oliver Stone was directing Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez, Billy Bob Thorton, Joaquin Phoenix, and Nick Nolte in U-Turn.
At least one obligatory selfie had to be taken, though I want one without my progeny wearing her sunglasses hiding her stink-eye. She and I passed through this way about seven years earlier and while I may have liked going somewhere with her today we’d never been, I think we’ve pretty much been everywhere in Arizona.
I’d bet a dollar that not one prayer was given today and this was all about the performance for the camera…..and the recreating of the same scene we had photographed years before.
Of all the times I’ve passed through this part of Arizona down interstate 60 I can’t say I remember seeing this particular church. Pay attention to these blue skies because out on the horizon the clouds are building with an ominous dark layer low in the sky.
A quick stop for a coffee in Globe at La Luz Del Dia Cafe & Bakery was more for consuming a half-hour until our lunch spot opened. Our server seeing we had been taking photos and I writing while having my coffee offered to show us a bit of history and took us out back and told us about a three-story building that claims to be the “Tallest three-story building on Earth” with the distinction of also having been a brothel back in the days when that activity was considered a bit more normal in old west mining towns.
Lunch at Ed’s La Casita East in Globe, Arizona starts with their amazing and, famous to us, Spicy Salsa with Avocado! I’ve probably blogged about this before but we were first introduced to Ed’s La Casita West when they had the location back in Superior. It closed years ago and it’s a rare day we happen to be out here and that it coincides with this place in Globe being open.
We stopped at the long-closed Seneca Lake Campground that Caroline and I have visited previously that on occasion even had RV’s still camping (squatting?) here. The dogs had the chance to stretch their legs and I had the chance to wander the ruins which I have a serious fascination doing.
The more I look at this photo of the bridge here at Salt River Canyon the more I don’t like it, but it’s really all I have as the other photos are worse. So it goes. We were here today too.
We stopped for the view but found something of far greater value.
We found Mildred’s false teeth and have rescued them for her. Her address in Minnesota is etched into the inside gum so we’re sending them back to her. While Jessica is most times quite brave she was just way too timid to shove this old lady’s teeth in her own mouth. I then tried to convince her to wedge them in her dog’s mouth at which point she thought it would be hilarious to see my anus smiling with them jammed in there. Had the picture turned out halfway decent I would have shared it, ask to see it privately and I might share it with you.
These are my daughter’s blind dogs Sparky and Piggy, Piggy is in the foreground. It seems that evil Piggy, who is ashamed to show her face, somehow blinded Sparky, as he had his eyesight for many years until it started to fade away; surely it was the doing of the evil (but mostly sweet) one named Piggy. Jessica has been traveling with these rat terriers for nearly a decade or more, they have been her constant companions. I tried to get them both to look my way but that coordination just wasn’t going to happen. Piggy was adopted blind by the way and she’s certainly not evil, but Sparky the butthole sniffing, obsessed idiot in the background probably has more issues than anyone cares to talk about. Apples and trees come to mind as I write this…
Karen Mae Kurchoff RIP
This is my mother, Karen Mae Kurchoff. She was a difficult person with questionable decision-making processes, but she was still my mom, and now I will only be able to look back at our lives because hers has passed. In October, she experienced a stroke that affected her left side to an extent that, without her concerted effort, would leave her paralyzed; she chose paralysis. A couple of weeks ago, she made another poor choice when she stopped eating, followed by the stopping of drinking any fluids four days ago. So tonight, with little struggle and no fanfare, she quietly and by herself, through the haze of a morphine-induced stupor, took the exit ramp.
Should my short note of memorializing my mother seem distant, she effectively chose suicide by self-neglect instead of taking the more difficult path. That is how she lived most of her life. I cannot know what ultimately made her the person she was, but I know she had plenty of blame for nearly all that were a close part of her life. I can’t say I really ever knew her to be genuinely happy, as there was always an undercurrent of frustration and wanting things to be better because good enough was never enough.
While my mom was affable and could endear almost anyone to her loud Buffalonian screech, she often honestly tried to be a good person for others she respected. For those she was supposed to love, there was conflict and tension. I will wonder in the years to come what was it in childhood that impacted her ultimate happiness. Why, at 14 years old in 1962, would she get pregnant and then, six years later, abandon her children? Why did she take the easy road and endure the pain and suffering of abusive husbands? Why didn’t she fight to live to a ripe old age?
In the end, she would never explain a thing, though when my sisters and I asked her a week ago why she chose the path she was most recently on, she said, “Because it’s easy.”
Is it really so easy to just go die?