fluorescent february
January 26, 2024
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First things first: if you are a gmail user and you have actually received this email, would you let me know? As usual I went a pretty arcane route for making my newsletter, and gmail doesn't like it. I may need to shift to a different service, so I'm trying to figure that out now. Onward.
I wanted to write a newsletter. I'm not exactly sure why. The biggest news in my life is that my spouse and I had another kid, Rami, on November 7th, and so that means, obviously, that I don't have much other news to report because more than 100% of our time and energy is now constantly devoted to the two small humans we steward through the world. But still, I wanted to write a newsletter for some reason.
I think it's an effort to send some small amount of energy outward, rather than inward to the constant needs of our house and our family. I think the bleak state of things in the world -- genocide in Gaza, the utter failing of our leaders in the United States to do anything besides send us into various concurrent death spirals, the number of hawaiian birds that have gone extinct this year -- leads to an uncomfortable split in the emotional experience: slow, tedious, warm, nurturing of life in here; violent death out there. It's hard to work concurrently with these two things right now, and so putting digital words onto digital paper provides some small kind of action or movement that is not resignedness.
And there are a few things that I want to share.
I did an artist residency this summer at WaveFarm in Acra (pronounced like the measure of land area), NY. I got to spend some time working on Telephone Hills, my effort to think through my family's involvement in the fossil fuel industry, particularly in the area of telecommunications, as a practice of creative engagement with culpability in a future of fossil-fueled climate change. I've been listening to and recording radio communications of the fossil fuel industry, and at WaveFarm I re-mixed these communications into television transmissions -- images globbed together from these radio recordings, radio signal visualizations, radio infrastructure documentation, family photos, and native floral color palettes that were transmitted over amateur slow scan television frequencies. I also built an antenna. I made it to Madison, WI, all on 10 watts! WaveFarm is accepting applications for their next round of residencies. I enjoyed my time there immensely, and encourage people to apply (but hurry! applications are due 2/1): https://wavefarm.org/ta/residency-program/info-apply
While working at WaveFarm, I also spent a lot of time thinking about semi-automated composition remixing these oil-industry radio transmissions, and about the utility of tools like Sam Lavigne's videogrep, which makes automatic "supercuts" of language-based videos by searching for a word or words in the recording. Videogrep did not work for my needs though, because it does not handle audio filetypes natively. I know just enough python programming to break things, so after I returned from WaveFarm I took a look at the code to see if I could figure out how to make it work with audio. I thought I could do it, so I did! Sam helped mentor me and I updated some of the codebase to work with audio. I'm proud of this, because this is the first time I've made a contribution to open source software that is relatively clear in its "usefulness." We were supported in this work by the Clinic for Open Source Arts.Try it out if you have a bunch of recordings in need of parsing, and let me know if you encounter any issues. We will solve them! https://github.com/antiboredom/videogrep
Finally, I wrote "Taking the Waters," another set of scene reports on the sites and infrastructures of extraction, this time on the hot springs and geothermal power plants of Nevada, for my dear friend and long-time desert-road-driving colleague par excellence Alison Jean Cole's Thunderegg zine. It's hard not to be interested in these things once you've driven by one, but this writing helped me clarify the ways in which "Green Energy" with a capital G capital E functions within the same logics as the "Old" energy and extractive economy, and makes the same people rich. The zine sold out in like 5 days (Alison's kind of a big deal, you know), but she has helpfully made the digital copy available to anyone, so you can read it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q41XhEcjz_89TOCqYv1grrB2_z_N_2tq/view?usp=sharing
Let's hype some other random stuff up:
I've been reading the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for NASA's request to withdraw the Railroad Valley dry lakebed in Nevada from "all forms of appropriation or other dispossession under the public land laws." They're making this request because they use this lakebed to calibrate light sensors on their satellites but it's in serious danger of being shredded up for lithium mining. The EIS is fun, because it's talking a whole lot about the potential impacts of doing nothing (NASA's withdrawal would be in order to keep the lakebed unchanged), as opposed to the usual gist of an EIS which is talking about the potential impacts of some kind of immense disturbance. Also,it's just interesting to know how NASA satellites work, why they need to use this lakebed, and to think about the ways that advanced technology relies completely on things that sometimes seem to be outside the sphere of technology, like, for instance, a dry lakebed.
Speaking of dry lakebeds, I recently learned that Caroline Tracey, one of my favorite reporters at High Country News (among other outlets), has started working on a book about saline desert lakes, combining"a conservation history and imperiled future of these strange and delicate ecosystems, and their intersections with her own queer coming of age story." Can't you tell it's going to be incredible? Maybe it's silly to pump it up at this point -- I don't think she's even written it yet -- but keep it on your radar because I am sure this book is going to be a hit of the goddamn year, whatever year it actually comes out.
So many friends keep writing great books. Back to Alison, she also just finished her book on rockhounding for the 23rd century (is that where we are?). You can preorder it, and you should do it now! https://bookshop.org/p/books/beautiful-rocks-and-how-to-find-them-a-modern-rockhound-s-guide-alison-jean-cole/20227309?ean=9781797224435
I just finished listening to the latest full episode of Ingrid Burrington's RIP Corp podcast, this time on the Fansteel corporation and the history of Tantalum mining and refining. It's amazing. I could listen to Ingrid talk about random mining stuff all day, and the stuff that she and her team put together in their research is impressive in its scope. Also it leads to all kinds of fun internet mapping rabbit holes -- my favorite way to waste time on the internet -- like trying to find the location of Fansteel's now-shuttered Oklahoma processing plant which is, of course, a massive environmental cleanup site. The street names really gave it away:
//// ROCKS ->
This time it's fluorescent february up in here, so I've gathered a few choice specimens. Unfortunately I can't really give you much of a technical description at all of what these are but we'll roll with it anyway.
First up are 2 bad FLUORESCENT AGATE biddies
These are from the Sump a timeless collecting spot at the north end of the Fish Lake Valley in Nevada. A mini-badlands of fluorescent agates, petrified wood, and even some fossils, this place is well worth the visit the next time your in the Fish Lake Valley, which I'm sure will be soon. This is also on the road to the Fish Lake Valley Hot Well, which you can read more about in "Taking the Waters," and the habitat of Tiehm's Buckwheat, both special places in their own right. What are you waiting for? Get your ass out to Fish Lake Valley!
Next it's... ANOTHER FLUORESCENT AGATE
Unfortunately I have no idea where I picked this up. But look at those stripes. All these agates fluoresce under shortwave UV light. I'm totally a gear guy, so I'd recommend picking up a cheap shortwave uv flashlight (different than a black light!) for when you need to check for mineral fluorescence or scorch the eyeballs of your bros at the NFT rave
Please keep the people of Gaza in your thoughts and actions, this killing must must must stop. Bye for now.
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Charlie Macquarie's newsletter. Sent from Oakland, California, Lisjan Ohlone Land.
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