Macska Moksha Press

“(t)h(i/e)m: exercise in fiction” – digital re-release

October 15, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

front cover of original CD booklet, which was designed by Rachael McIntosh, founder of Entropy Press

Originally released by Entropy Press in October 1998 under the nom d’arte “Russ.” A novel in scope, but a collection of short stories in form, the narrative (such as it is) follows the adventures of a male character named “T.” from birth to ~27 years of age. My take on the classic coming-of-age narrative.

“(t)h(i/e)m” (which I pronounce as “the aim”) is a multimedia project featuring visual art and a soundtrack, and was originally distributed on CD. The vision was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “unified work of art” that would synthesize different forms into a totality whose sum was greater than its parts.

Download it here:
[purchase_link id=”1357″ text=”Add to Cart” style=”button” color=”blue”]

The book is in the form of a website. All the files (including the MP3s of the music) are packaged in a .ZIP file you will need to uncompress. Then, simply open “home.htm” in a web browser and you will have opened the cover, so to speak. (Also included is “bonus-chapter-2015.htm,” the new story written to mark this re-release.)

“pining at pinenut camp” (a work of fiction)

October 14, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A latter day work of
Written as a new chapter to “(t)h(i/e)m: exercise in fiction” [Entropy Press, 1998], on the occasion of it’s digital re-release by Macska Moksha Press [2015]. “Russ” was my nom d’arte for the project, so I took it on one more time for this addendum. I thank N. for inspiring the title.

Pinenuts in the cone (Photo by N.)

T. was in anguish. Again. But he knew the drill: wait it out. All emotions come and go. Even the ones that strike with an intensity that seems like they will last the rest of your life. The ones that arrive without warning (but do they ever really?) like a roaring storm on a calm day (does that ever actually happen?) pelting you with heavy drops of misery, whipping you with biting winds of despair, deafening you with the thunder of your insistent self-hatred. “Oh Jesus,” T. suddenly said out loud, interrupting his own thoughts. “How fucking melodramatic! Where do I get such pathetic, sophomoric, mopey shit?”

“Like a fucking cry-baby. That’s what I sound like. What the fuck?” He shook his head, but nothing went away.

A stirring in the branches above T. broke his spell. (He was right: wait it out and it goes away, but in this case, so sudden was the transition that he didn’t notice it and had no conscious realization that he was no longer in anguish.) He was on his hands and knees, under a Single-Needled Pinyon tree, harvesting pinenuts off the ground. He leaned out backwards to get his head beyond the drip-line and look up to see what was going on.
Read More…

Love Letter to a Dying Friend: Joshua Tree Country

September 22, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Sunset in Joshua Tree Country

I first visited Joshua Tree Country on a Spring Break college road trip in 1990. Two buddies and I camped out for a few days in a tent, cooked our meals on a Coleman stove, and spent our days climbing the famous rock formations and our nights staring with wonder at the multitude of stars, making a game of picking out the satellites. No plant life caught my eye on this visit other than the iconic Joshua Tree itself which at the time we all associated with the recent U2 album of the same name. Though our journey had started in Northfield, Minnesota, and had exposed us to countless sights of beauty and wonder, the desert made the biggest impression on me.

Nearly a decade later, in 1999, I had not forgotten Joshua Tree Country and I returned on another road trip, this time with a girlfriend and from further away yet: Boston, Massachusetts. We camped for a couple days near the Cottonwood Springs entrance of what was then still Joshua Tree National Monument, again in a tent with a Coleman. As in 1990, the Joshua Trees were the only flora that got my attention.

Skip ahead to 2015 for visit number three, which turned into a stay of nearly four months. This time I was accompanied by my farming partner of the last few years and we stayed in a rambling house on the edge of the village of Joshua Tree. The large windows featured a grand view of the hills on the north side of what was now Joshua Tree National Park and of the Creosote Bush scrub rolling away to the east where it met a blurry seam of mountains on the horizon. Over the past ten years, I had been supporting myself as a farmer, herbalist, and seedsman, so on this visit all the plants seized my attention, not just the Joshua Tree.

As when one falls in love and is intrigued by every detail of a new lover’s body and being, I was entranced by the flora and fauna of Joshua Tree Country.
Read More…

Only Revolution Can Mitigate Climate Change

August 27, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Young tree growing after a forest fire in the Oregon Cascades

Fred Hampton, the assassinated Black Panther, once famously said: “School is not important and work is not important. Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”

That quotation has been running through my mind lately as I have been reading news about Climate Change. Replace “fascism” with “Climate Change” and you have a spot-on description of the state of the world today. Things have gotten that dire.

Before you accuse me of misappropriating Hampton, let me point out that Climate Change is fascism: fascism made manifest ecologically at the global scale. And actually, I would expand Hampton’s scope so that “us” includes all the non-human life on earth, its ecosystems, and even the soil beneath our feet. The amazing web of life — made up of “all our relations” as the Native Americans put it — is the “us” that fascism-induced Climate Change is stopping.

This is not a “doom and gloom” essay. Instead, I will picture what meaningful action would look like.
Read More…

Ecosystems At Risk, #2: The Lava Beds of Eagle Lake

August 2, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The effects of global Climate Change are felt everywhere, and all ecosystems are “ecosystems at risk,” but this series of irregularly-posted photo-essays focuses on ecosystems that are unusual, rare, or simply little-known.

Smoky Mariposa Lily

In early June, a friend and I were traveling through California and we stopped to camp in the lava beds on the west shore of Eagle Lake, in Lassen County. Eagle Lake is one of many bodies of water in California that have been shrinking in size during the drought. Along the shore, docks stand on dry land with grass growing around their piers, the water hundreds of feet away or more. When a body of water sinks, so does the surrounding water table, which inevitably affects neighboring habitat.These photos were taken near our campsite, less than a mile from the original shoreline. Since this was my first visit, I don’t know if the diversity or density of flora and fauna is noticeably different than in the past. But I am providing a record, even if only in snapshots, that shows something of the area’s status this season.

The landscape is rugged, with black lava rock throughout. The clayey soil is red. Certainly, the ground is rich in minerals to uptake for those plants that can take root there. Flowers and shrubs grow out of cracks in the rock and grasses and ephemerals spread out across the clay. Pines and Junipers stand singly or in scattered groves of just a few trees. The beauty of the place is somewhat austere, but not stark.

Most spectacular, though, was not what we saw but what we heard.
Read More…

A Day of Tears: Report from the “sHell No!” Action in Portland

July 31, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

As has been well-documented, Royal Dutch Shell has plans to drill for oil in the Arctic, despite their knowledge that such extraction will exacerbate Climate Change (see here, here or here). President Obama has given these plans his blessing, as could be expected of a politician beholden to the extraction industries. In order to commit such an ecocidal act, Shell has to transport many different resources to the area by ship, and activists have attempted to slow the process by blocking, if only temporarily, a couple of these key transports. In Seattle, kayakers delayed the departure of a Shell oil rig in June.

In Portland, the Fennica, a Shell ship carrying a key piece that is required on site before drilling can legally begin, docked for repairs about five days ago, giving local activists scant time to put together a response. Another kayak blockade was quickly planned, and to the surprise of most locals, Greenpeace pulled a surprise action a little after 3:00 a.m., early on the morning of July 29th. Thirteen people with climbing equipment lowered themselves off the St. John’s Bridge, downriver from the Fennica, and positioned themselves in harnesses about a third of the way down, with ropes strung between themselves. This simple, even elegant, set-up made passage of the Fennica impossible without injuring the climbers. They were provisioned with enough food and water to stay there for days.

Life and Death on Route 395: Water Wars, Baby Birds and a Crashed Harley

July 1, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Storm over the White Mountains, 6/6/15

I awoke the morning of my 46th birthday on top of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Not immediately on top of it – it was buried at a depth of at least 25 feet in this spot – but just a few steps from our parked van it was exposed by a service shaft: an open concrete box lidded with a thick grate. Standing over it, I could hear the roar of water being sucked southwards by the thirsty urban monster 100 miles away. Down the hill from my vantage point, the giant metal drinking straw of the aqueduct’s pipe emerged from the soil, spanned the dry creek below, and thrust itself back into the ground of the opposite slope. Another service shaft stuck up out of the hilltop above it, just like the one in front of me.

The Romans made far more elegant structures for the same purpose, but I marveled at the feat of engineering laid before (and underneath and behind) me. I wondered about the degree of angle it employed in order to run slightly downhill over such a long distance. I looked in vain for any sign of the tremendous excavation that must of taken place. Or did they bore a tunnel? If so, that must have been a big powerful machine. The engineering feats of the 20th Century are a wonder to behold for their sheer scale and complexity. The long-term costs of these projects, though, have not been so wonderful.

Breakfasts with the White-Tailed Sand & Seed Lovers

June 21, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Mrs. Stubbs (Ammospermophilus leucurus), eating sunflower seeds

Mrs. Stubbs, eating sunflower seeds

While in Joshua Tree, California, this Spring, we met a delightful animal whose scientific name, Ammospermophilus leucurus, literally translates as “white-tailed sand and seed lover”. Commonly known as the White-Tailed Antelope Ground Squirrel, this creature is native to the southwestern U.S.A. and Baja California, Mexico. Although they are technically squirrels, because of their small size we couldn’t help but to think of them as “chipmunks” and to call them “chippees.”

The first one who started showing up by the door when we went outside had a shorter-than-usual tail from a past injury and a plump-ish matronly shape, so we named her “Mrs. Stubbs.”
Read More…

How Green Is Your Pot? Questions for Conscientious Cannabis Consumers

April 19, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

How green is it?

It’s not news that marijuana is becoming mainstream in the U.S., and as legal restrictions loosen and social acceptance grows, the amount of marijuana being cultivated is rising rapidly. A big business is getting bigger. The cottage-days of the industry were left behind in the 1980’s and if anything holds true in the American economic system, it’s that larger scale brings lower quality and greater damage.

Conventional food agriculture is a case in point: it wreaks havoc on ecosystems, its products are unhealthy, and the farmwork itself is underpaid and dangerous. As these facts have been publicized, many people have become rightly concerned about where their food comes from. The same questions that can and should be asked about produce — Was it sprayed? Is it free of contaminants? Were the workers mistreated? — can and should be brought to bear against marijuana now.
Read More…

Ecosystems At Risk, #1: The Belly Plants of the Pebble Plains

April 18, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A tiny geological treasure can be found in the San Bernadino Mountains of southern California: the “Pebble Plains.” Located near the famous ski town of Big Bear Lake, this 92 square-mile area exhibits a soil type found nowhere else in the world, a combination of clay and quartz fragments left behind by a glacier lake that existed during the Pleistocene Era. Over the last 10,000 years, these ingredients have been subject to repeated swelling and shrinking from the freezes at that altitude (6000-7500 feet) and the sun’s heat at that latitude (34° North), resulting in a unique composition.

Tiny botanical treasures are also found there, collectively called, “Belly Plants” because they are so small you have to get down on your belly to see them. About a dozen of these plant species are found nowhere else in the world, having evolved there in isolation, adapting to the unique soil.

Like many other ecosystems worldwide, this one is at risk from the effects of Climate Change.
Read More…

Navigation