I remember reading once that it is still not understood how the giraffe manages to pump an adequate blood supply all the way up to its head; but it is hard to imagine that anyone would therefore conclude that giraffes do not have long necks - Robert Solow

Quoted in Mankiw, G. (2006) “The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer”. Available at: So, everything is possible. there remains an imperative to dream like a giraffe. i wonder how big a giraffe’s heart is? hmm, that would be definitely procrastinating. oh, they are beautiful and noble animals, with their piny blue drool swaying in the breeze.

Enjoying the recombinant aesthetics of blood and piss - a personal, monthly observance - bends my mind to situations where this is ok(in private toilet cubicles; in the comfort of your woan home; bdsm play parties;) and where it is not (in public; as commercially compeditive art; enjoying). I hasten to add that I don’t mean this monthly bleeding is a divine right, a special woamnly thing. It might be a regular physical occurence for me, but lots of other people deal with this as work, in their social lives, daily bodily functioning, as queer desires, as consequences of violence, midwifery, various medical and or spiritual practices…the list could be as long as my arm (runs down my leg).

I’m not sure i’m a very good storyteller - each step of the way I like to shine a torch down other paths, wonder if they ever hook up again, imply whole other journeys with a syllable. Writing a report for uni yesterday reminded me of the shimmeringness of dreaming and how I like to think and dream while I’m reading. This is the quality that I want my writing to have, except I have a lot of psychological blocks to writing assessments these days and really struggle to complete simple assignments.

But…a recent art exhibition opening for “Avatar”, (at the Australian Centre for Photography) included an installation called “Havidol”, a spoof on lifestyle marketing of medication, featuring lots of images of conservative happy shiny white heteros with clean hair and teeth, and tennis. My younger sister made a surprise appearance as their interactive performative art - dressed as a Prozac nurse in trendy stilettos doling out mints from a large glass jar with a dental mirror. She works for ACP so her role may have more to do with the actual gallery’s value added production effort than part of the official artwork. I grimace when I think about this work, because it was boring and the kind of culture jamming that is no longer contentious, and there’s my sister having a ball dressing up and embodying a gentle critique of the feminised history of the nursing profession, and codes of feminine conduct in today’s late capitalist world.

Shortly after seeing her, I met a fine arts lecturer who made the unfortunate social gaffe of admitting her concerns that young artists today are discovering (20 year old) new media technique/ performance art as though they are the first to do so: “and you think, are they doing it for the right reasons?” An odd thing to say, but certainly related to what I was thinking. New media art history perhaps hasn’t been old enough to warrant codifying and retrieving “lost history”; indeed, perhaps they don’t want to be historicised or drawn into a grand narrative; the stuff and value of temporal artworks is often the inability to record them in halls of of the academe…maybe it’s even zooming ahead and can’t wait for academics to catch up?

Anyway, more platitudes later. For now, a provocative epithet: There is nothing so practical as a good theory, from a curiously named conference site: Balisage

Time was the not-so-secret weapon of the medieval church; the tolling of the church bells every quarter hour was a ubiquitous reminder of Death-the-Universal-Leveler. In the early centuries of the first millenium, the Gnostics believed that the souls of dead people entered the earth’s atmosphere as pure information. It was like the first sci-fi technology of time-travel. The living can absorb the dead at any time. Therefore everyone knows everything and all time exists simultaneously. The species has an infinite capacity for memory. Time is mixed with blood. At the end of the French Revolution’s reign of terror in 1789, the Jacobins invented a new calendar. The revolution is a break with past recorded time, ushering in a new regime. The years had names: Humidor and Thermador. Pol Pot, who’d studied history at the Sorbonne, tried to do this too after murdering half the population of Cambodia. Time starts new. In the 1920s, the Dadaist Hugo Ball saw his nomadic movements around the backwater towns of Europe as a flight out of time. He wanted to arrive someplace where time stood still. Is it a coincidence that Ball, like [Paul] Thek and Simone Weil, was ambivalently Catholic?”

Aliens and Anorexia, Chris Kraus, Semiotext(e) Press

i’ve been a little aloof from the internets, trying to have a holiday and ‘connect with people’, but a new friend said… i was reading this thing about how perhaps the nervous system doesn’t use electrickery to communicate through the body, but soundwaves, ie, on a cellular level.

this sounds interesting, don’t you think?

Consider the following: Anything that moves has a vibration. Though invisible, every aspect of our material world at the atomic level moves constantly. Wherever there is motion, there is frequency. Though inaudible at times, all frequencies make a sound. All sounds resonate and can affect one another. In the spectrum of sound - from the movement of atomic particles to the sensory phenomenon we call music - there is a chain of vibration:
• All atomic matter vibrates.
• Frequency is the speed at which matter vibrates.
• The frequency of vibration creates sound (sometimes inaudible).
• Sounds can be molded into music.

This chain explains the omnipresence of sound.

Resonance is the single most important concept in understanding the constructive or destructive role of sound in your life. Entrainment, sympathetic vibration, resonant frequencies, and resonant systems all fall under the rubric of resonance.
-from Psychoacoustics

and then she leant over my shoulder “ellen band, pink noise”

Acoustic Mirage: A Sound Installation

Acoustic Mirage invites you to enter a uniquely designed sonic environment in which the boundary between aural reality and illusion dissolves.

As you enter the installation, you will hear “pink noise”, a particular type of filtered hiss which excludes the higher frequencies heard in”white noise”. The sound is derived from many sources including, humidifiers, air filtering machines, ocean surf, and a dishwasher. Because the sounds are combined in random patterns, as you move through the room the “soundscape” changes subtly; new sounds appear and disappear, revealing a complex web containing other sonic information, details and imagery. For many people the combination of these noises produces a mysterious perceptual dilemma: “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” By moving slowly, focusing selectively on combinations of sounds, it is possible to create personalized acoustic images of your own, identifying “sweet spots” that you find particularly compelling or intriguing. ellen band

and further on from finding ellen was some big nerdfest ‘SoundCulture 96′, documentation of which includes this observation:

In Richard Lerman’s Changing States, a tiny flame was used to heat metal strips attached to contact microphones. As the metal deformed in slow and unpredictable ways under the heat, its eerie transformations were heard greatly amplified. Evoking at once the micro-world of the grain of metal and the macro-reality of plate tectonics, the piece served as an allegory for the process of generating sound itself: sound like fire is simply an artifact of the transfer of one form of energy into another, expended in an instant and then gone. the rest of the article

but it’s time to return to the nerves and soundwaves, so i’ve picked this article to share with you… no i haven’t! That one is good, but “The Nerve”, by Wes Phillips at Stereophile is far more interesting and entertaining, and for those reasons alone, I am going to reproduce it in full! Blockquote stand by!

The Nerve!
By Wes Phillips
March 11, 2007 — (This article has been edited to reflect factual changes and comments from our learned colleague, Dr. Kalman Rubinson, Associate Professor at NYU’s Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, who is careful to point out that he is commenting, not on the research, which he has not read, but only Heimburg’s and Jackson’s criticisms of current understanding and terminology—areas with which he has more than a passing acquaintance.)

In a statement that turns conventional knowledge on its ear, Thomas Heimburg and Andrew Jackson of Copenhagen University have declared that nerves do not relay electrical impulses from the brain to other parts of the body.

“For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation,” Heimburg says in a statement on the University of Copenhagen website. “The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that such heat is not produced.”

(Rubinson observes: “The reason is that the heat is produced in the creation and maintenance of a large ionic imbalance. The generation of electrical impulses (action potentials) uses the energy stored in the imbalance.”)

Conventional wisdom holds that neurons, the nerve cells that transmit information, send messages electrochemically—chemicals (ions) create an electrical impulse that is passed along to the next neuron. The impulse passes from one neuron to the next in one of two ways: either through direct electrical links (electrical synapses) or via chemicals called neurotransmitters (chemical synapses), which act on external receptors, which open channels that allow smaller ions (such as sodium, potassium, and chloride) to pass through.

Heimburg and Jackson theorize that sound propagation—a purely mechanical explanation—makes more sense than electrochemical conversion. One drawback to that suggestion would be that sound propagates as a wave, spreading out and becoming weaker over distance. Ah, they say, if the transmission medium has certain properties, it is possible to create localized pulses (solitons) which propagate without losing their strength, changing shape, or spreading.

(Rubinson thinks the answer is even simpler: “Vibrations (a better term than sound since no one ever hears this) can be confined to a single element if the physical impedance of energy transfer to other elements is high. That’s why most of sound bounces off the surface of a pool and a submerged swimmer hears little of what is going on above. Of course, that requires the restriction of the energy to a less dense medium.”)

Heimburg and Jackson argue that the nerve membrane, composed as it is of olive-oil–like lipids, is a medium that changes its state from liquid to solid at a particular temperature trigger-point. And wouldn’t you know it? That freezing point is perfectly suited to propagating concentrated sound impulses.

(You can almost hear Rubinson’s eyebrow arch at this one: “Is that freezing point in the biological range? I’ve used olive oil, as have you, and it gets viscous in the cold—but at temperatures not found in a living mammal.)

Heimburg and Jackson have a number of publications looking at medical issues from a physics perspective, most recently a joint paper in Biophysical Journal on “”The thermodynamics of general anesthesia.”

It appears that Heimburg and Jackson’s focus on anesthetics is what has led them to this radical theory. In their précis, the physicists ask: “How is it possible to operate on a patient without pain? It has been known for more than 100 years that substances like ether, laughing gas, chloroform and the noble gas xenon can serve as anesthetics. These substances have very different chemical properties, but experience shows that their doses are strictly determined by their solubility in olive oil. In spite of this, no one knows precisely how anesthetics work and how the nerves are ‘turned off.’”

(Rubinson found a lot to rumble with here. First, he points out, “ether, laughing gas, chloroform and the noble gas xenon” are “really CNS poisons and do not eliminate pain but, rather, eliminate consciousness so that pain and every other sensibility is blocked.” He points out the claim that any substance that has to cross the lipid bilayer that makes up the cell membrane must also be soluble in lipids—even our old friend ethanol. As to the claim that we don’t know ” precisely how anesthetics work and how the nerves are ‘turned off,’” he begs to differ: ” We do know how topical anesthetics work, including those that are injected for local anesthesia: They generally block the membrane channels that let the small ions in/out of the cell. So, this entire paragraph is dreadfully misleading even if the original papers deal with it responsibly.”)

Heimburg and Jackson write: “If a nerve is to be able to transport sound pulses and send signals, the membrane’s melting point must be sufficiently close to body temperature. The effect of anesthetics is simply to change the melting point—and when the melting point has been changed, sound pulses cannot propagate. The nerve is put on stand-by, and neither nerve pulses nor sensations are transmitted. The patient is anesthetized and feels nothing.”

(Again, Rubinson is dubious: “This paragraph seems to be pure speculation of a phenomenon that can already be accounted for by current knowledge.”)

Do we buy it? Is it time to throw out everything we know about the nervous system—and trickier still, revoke a few Nobel prizes? Of course not—but we do love to watch a good fight, even if we don’t have a dog in the fray. We’ll be watching developments in neurophysiology with great interest.

Not to mention starting an office pool predicting when we’ll see the introduction of the first lipid-augmented audio cables.

(03/14/07 Update: We received the following letter:
“Dear Stereophile,

As a long-time reader, I was surprised and delighted to read your piece on the website (”The Nerve!” March 11, 2007) about my work with Thomas Heimburg.

“Regarding the office pool, it may interest you to know that we have already produced lipid cables (called ‘tethers’ in the trade). Thomas, who does the experiments, has beautiful photographs clearly showing the tethers and alternating regions of liquid and solid phase. Our next step is to introduce electrical contacts with the aim of exciting solitons in these ‘artificial nerves.’ Since Thomas and I are both serious Bach listeners, we will certainly attempt to be the first to transmit his music along these lipid-augmented cables!

“Of course, it’s not likely that such cables will be in your local audio store soon. At the moment, they are short (about 100 microns) and quite fragile. And they would probably be both of poor audio quality and expensive.

“Our work seems to have touched a nerve (sorry), and it has received an amount of media attention that is somewhat bewildering for a pair of ivory-tower types. Your piece stands out both for the fidelity with which it presents our scientific ideas and for its accuracy in mirroring the fun we have had in developing them.

“Many thanks!”
Andrew D. Jackson,
Professor of Theoretical Physics
The Niels Bohr Institute)

Rocking out with the scientists! Gimme high 5! Hi fi! Hi sci!

i haven’t read it all yet, but it looks interesting: the nature of online art

via my big backyard

What I have come to like about exciting contemporary published academics is their ability to elucidate fine upstanding paragraphs from other authors and/or each other. And with the immediacy of blogging, and a reluctance to enter into the archiving ahead of me this afternoon at work, I am going to share with you a couple of paragraph quoted by Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer cultural landscape, women’s press, toronto, 2006.

Peggy Phelan on nostalgia, or “the wound of wishing to return”:

…even at the seemingly simple level of the linguistic sign it is impossible for writers to convey the complete context in which a[n]… act occurs. To report it back, to record and repeat it, is at once to transform it and to fuel the desire for its mimetic return … Much of the writing [about performatives] is a record of a living relation between the writer and the artists she sees. This seeing is, necessarily, a distortion, a dream, a hallucination; writing rights it back towards reason by creating enabling fictions … The effort to “cite” the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It cannot be done. (Phelan 1993a:19-22) (ie from Noble 2006:59)

And Bahktin on words:

“When one finds a word, one finds it already inhabited … there is no access to one’s own personal ultimate word … every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone elses’s manner … almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s.” (Bahktin 1981:91) (ie from Noble 2006:71)

And finally a stellar bit from Noble himself:

“…Whiteness is marked and articulated - that is, made to work by revealing itself. If you think about the verb to articulate, it means to devide into words, to pronounce or utter. But it also means to connect or mark with joints - thatis, to be connected with sections. Thus, to articulate is to express fluently and to manipulate a site where component parts join (as in a knee or hip), to bring segmented parts together to enable functionality. These kings dissemble White masculinity, break it into parts, and then reassemble those parts to make them work differently, to render them dysfunctional. If White supremacy works best when it’s hypervisible and invisible, it cannot work in quite the same way when it is denaturalised, rearticulated, and most importantly, de-cloaked.” (Noble 2006:65)

This afternoon, after a delightful morning of doing bodyweather training in public, in a shallow pool in Bondi, in a training bra and undies, around the edges of a baby and parent swim class and serious lap swimmers, while the surf boomed and crashed on the rocks on the other side of the big pool, and bits of seaweed churned around us - there were 4 of us, in various stages of v’s wardrobe, and after we’d stretched and sweated out on the balcony in front of the iceberg’s gym, with nary a concern for how silly and patently ridiculous we might look, and an awesome lunch of spiffy cupcakes and brilliant tomato pasta (key highlights- olives, anchovies, coriander pesto, feta, a little lemony-green salad on the side) in a ‘30 apartment, the stairwell of which smelled just like aunty nancy’s house -and the kitchen design was almost exactly the same - after all of this, I lay down on a lounge and listened to the 5th lecture given by Thomas King in the Massey lecture series ‘the truth about stories’, 2003. And fell asleep a little bit, and drifted in and out of the stories.

I tried to make the link to the sample appear in this post, but i can’t quite work it out. So I strongly suggest you go here, and listen to the sample - which contains material from all the lectures Mr King gave, because they are excellent things to listen to, and it is a lovely thing, to sit quietly and listen to a story.

porosity: by the throat :The term “porosity” describes the nature of the edge condition, which exists between the skin of architecture and the public space of the city.”

It’s about time i did some blogging. Tonight’s theme is things that I am reading, or have read recently. Gee, that’ll really get em in won’t it? Ok, let’s start with a picture:

Ha-ha! Yesterday, this was making me laugh all afternoon. The joke being that generally, pieces of music are written in particular keys, which are generally named alphabetically from A to G. H is “off the scale”, it’s like turning the volume up to 11. Naturally, there’s a perfectly understandable explanation for why JS Bach wrote this prelude and fugue in “H”. H is german for B. Clearly this is the short story. There is a longer one in the ancient oxford companion to music, but it is not the story I want to be telling you tonight. There is half a bottle of red in front of me. I’m going to pour myself another glass of wine. (more…)

Yes! It’s what you’ve been waiting for! The final word on the most exciting event in next week’s calendar!

We’re launching “Self-Organising Men”, an international anthology of ftm transgender creative types (writers, artists, poets, performers)
(see www.homofactuspress.com if you’d like to know more about this publishing company)

Wednesday 18 April 2007
6-8pm (showtime 7pm!)
Black Rose Anarchist Bookstore
22 Enmore Road, Newtown
(opposite Oportos)

There will be wine and cheese and nibbly things!
We’ll have readings from local and interstate contributors! and podcasts from overseas contributors!
There will be swanky fundraising teatowels for sale!
We’ll even be selling copies of the book at a special booklaunch discounted price!

And then we’ll tool up to the sly fox for those of you who’d like to party on and launch the book all over again to the dulcet strains of Karli’s genderbent clown performances! What an awesome night!

love, and irrepressable hugs,
Gaylourdes