We are at the coast now, overlooking from a height a large swath of the Pacific. From this view, the Earth begins to seem a planet, the ocean an impenetrable skin. There is desire to comprehend; some wall separates what I know of the world from what I can’t. The longing I imagine to be a death wish, in the finality of nature’s refusal to be utterly and completely understandable. I posit the separation of Matter and Spirit: is to be solely Matter, in the process of disintegration after death, to be at one with nature, and thus co-comprehensible with it? Is Spirit, then, the comprehending, the comprehensiveness?

The coast seems the dividing line between the world of memes and the non-memetic. There are no memes in the ocean. My pondering and positing seem to create the memes that, in any event, always reside on this side, not “out there,” in the region I’ll never fully comprehend.

This morning, waking up to the planet’s wet surface with a cup of coffee in hand, I notice far on the horizon a tiny irregularity. I pick up the binoculars to check it out. All I discern is a still-tiny form, but in a rectangular shape. It confuses me. Is it an island or a ship? It seems too regular shaped for an island, but I can’t make out a control tower that would make it seem a ship. I look again and it has moved relative to the Firs next to us that now obscure it. Now it is “ship.” A minute ago it was a rectangle floating on formless expanse. Geomemetry.

Sally and Tati approached us from her car, parked in the field near the equipment graveyard. Said she scared herself, hearing some shaking she thought was a rattlesnake. Ended up being stuff she was carrying in her MoMA bag, which she picked up in New York when I was working there. The bag originally held some shiny design object or art book, I imagine.

Yesterday began with stories and ended with stories. In the morning, we went to drop off Tati at her other grandmothers', Grammy Donna, and ended up talking with her for some time. She's an old family friend and hasn't seen Amery in years. She was in the midst of cleaning house to host the local historical society today: a researcher from a Portland-area university has been looking up obituaries from names gathered from local cemeteries, and he was going to present his findings for this area. Sally is the secretary of the society, so she's been busy writing the minutes in the midst of the farming.

At 6:30 we arranged to go look at some Nubian goats over at Rebecca and Paul's ranch. When we first moved back West, we visited a Sonoma County winery in California that had a few young Nubian kids, and sold a delicious cheese in olive oil. They are beautiful goats. Rebecca, walking with crutches, met us near the car, rescuing us from their barking Australian Blueheeler. She told us what happened to her when she tried to cross a stream at the beach. It was pretty bad – happened back in February, and she's still on crutches. Said it was a gloomy day, but pleasingly moist coming from the prarie, with lots of rain clouds in the sky. She was trapped in the sand waiting for the EMTs to get her out and to the hospital and feeling no pain, but with a torniquet around her leg under her knee. In the midst of all these rain clouds that were rushing through the sky, there was one small, beautiful white cloud just overhead and stationary that looked like an angel, keeeping her attention. All around her were the EMTs telling her "I'm Charles and I'm here to keep you comfortable" and the like, and each one had an uncanny resemblance to someone she knew well. As she was being brought to the ambulance she remarked on the cloud to her daughter, who had been seeing the same thing.

We spent over 2 hours at her goat ranch, getting the story on each one of her goats, over 100 in all. It was pure transmission of her lifetime of goat-raising. We talked a bit of the price to buy a pair, and Sally negotiated a bit on the hay she was selling for the goats, generally of bad quality as it contained "goat grass," but obviously pleasing to goats. Leaving, Rebecca offered to give us some of her extra milk, so Amery and I could experiment making cheese.

Actions around here are encircled by stories, maybe even the pretext for them.

Been brooding today. Trying to figure out what's next. Many, many possibilities, but nature offers resistance and time is an aperture allowing only so much to pass through. Comparisons with yesterday's hen are apt, but I don't plan on coming to the same end (she had to be put down yesterday, with her egg still half delivered).

Just returned from the chicken barn. Sally and Tati have five chickens, which produce green or pink eggs that we eat or they sometimes sell for a buck or two per dozen. One hen has been trying to push an egg out of her for three days; I went to the barn to help Sally try to help the hen. We thought of resting her in warm soapy water with a little hydrogen peroxide – that at least cleaned up the festering a little and maybe provided some lubrication. She seemed to like it, after an initial fluster. Half the egg is still inside (we broke it hoping that it might relieve a little tension); we'll leave her for a while and call the vet tomorrow if need be.

Yesterday, Amery and I drove the '55 Chevy flatbed out to the fields, to follow around Steve as he picked up small stacks of hay, placed them on the truck bed, and reconstructed them into large stacks. There are 10 bales per stack lying horizontal in the field; the grappler on the Case backhoe grabs them from above, and places 1 on top of the other, reaching a height of 10 bales high, 100 per stack. We place 4 of these together tightly, so the sun won't dry out the edges, making it more scrumptious for the cattle. It was a bit inefficient for both of us to go out, but I was tired from hand-stacking bales the day before, and it was nice to be alone together in the old truck. Amery brought a New Yorker with her to read, I brought a camera. I got out to take pictures of the Olin House in the distance on the prarie, revelling in the land and space. When I returned to the Chevy, I saw the cover of the The New Yorker: a couple with a realtor standing on the balcony of a Manhattan apartment. The couple are beaming with delight at the view; of course it is obscured every which way with skyscrapers, but one tiny slice remains in the far distance that they are obviously fixated on, of a boat on the water next to a beach. It's not like that here.

There is a texture to the farm that is distinct from what I've known. Like now, as I look out the picture window facing Mt. Hood, the dog Chocolate, who has been sleeping on the mound of dirt in front of me, has decided to stretch. Nothing very unusual in that, except that she is within this extraordinary framed landscape in front of me; that she and her sister Freckles have always been kept outside; and that they have such a swath of land to roam. As often as not they are there to greet you at the house when you return from the fields or from town, friendly dogs who always approach together,seeking the same thing, which is to say attention. They come up to you wagging their tales and lifting their heads towards you. One makes it first, the other follows and positions herself adjacent, like a Siamese twin. They seldom bark, the are preternaturally quiet: every bark has meaning. When going on walks they gladly join you uninvited. The other night, walking from the main house to Sally's (which isn't far), it was pitch black, couldn't see a thing. We were feeling the gravel under our feet to navigate. Shortly we were startled by the feel of silent flesh along our thighs. It could have been anything, but we figured it was Chocolate and Freckles. I don't know if they made a decision to each cover one of us, but they walked closely with us up the short hill, advancing beyond us as we got closer, turning the automatic garage lights on to our delight.

There are many other animal displays as well, though more wild of course. Deer are all over: when driving on the highways or on the John Deere raking, or in the barn we were cleaning yesterday before stacking the hay, where they had made home. Always, hawks gliding the sky, especially when raking or swathing. Yesterday, Amery was out in the hay fields with Steve, a farmhand. He was driving as he noticed a hawk descending towards him, shooting right past his face before plucking a mouse out of the field in front of him.

There are little birds, I forget their names, who make their nests in the swathed hay, and as you are raking you need be careful not to rake them over. As you approach, the adult birds start flying around, with their children struggling awkwardly to get out of danger, only partially flying and with a lot of flapping. There are rattlesnakes to be aware of, and other less venemous snakes as well. Tom, Amery and Sally's father and chief farmer among us, pulled a skin out of the small pool next to the house, looked like a rattler but could have been a bull snake. Around dusk last night, five to ten yards beyond our window a coyote stalked past. There are groups of ants near the door handle into the garden, bees vying to get into the tractor cabin, mice in the ceiling or seats of some of the old trucks, holes where gophers are, enough earthworms to suggest the idea of selling them, owls and bats, and of course, cougars (though no one has spotted one yet).

There are stories, many of them, giving a dense and boisterous texture of remembrances to the farm: of fires, floods, crashes, encounters with wildlife and crazy neighbors, to name a few. There are trucks too, from '55 flatbeds to newer dumptrucks, a plethora, but more finite in number than the stories.

BW Online | June 25, 2001 | Table: The Complete List of 2001 Winners

When I wake up in the morning, sometimes at dawn, through the picture window facing our bed I can see a miraculous view: the high prarie, wheat field in foreground, with rolling hills gently sloping down to to the Columbia River Gorge. Beyond the Gorge sits an impressive, solitary, and snow-covered Mount Hood rising beyond. At first dawn, the view is a soft blur with the mountain intimately differentiating itself; a little later the colored filters of the sunrise begin to reflect on its snow. Now, if my Powerbook monitor didn't directly obscure it, I could see Mount Hood standing bright white against the morning sky. We have arrived at the farm, following our 1300 mile trek up the coast from LA.

Here's a painting, made from approximately the same distance to the mountain as we are at the farm.

On our first walk, we experience the primal brand violation: a small herd of a neighbor's cows eating our newly planted alfalfa. Before I know it, my wife goes chasing after the cows, scaring the cows away (Amery spent most of her adult years working in the higher echelons of fashion, so this is an eyeopener for me). Shortly Sally, my wife's sister comes racing along on the 4-wheeler scooter, her daughter Tati in tow hugging her back. "Did you catch the brand?" she asks. We didn't, so there is no way of knowing whose they are. I didn't know we'd be chasing brands on our first day.

The hay harvest began before we got here. I was already in the tractor the afternoon after we arrived. Sally does the swathing, laying the hay in rows before it blooms. Once the hay has "cured," my role is raking, combining two gentle rows into a larger and taller braid. Then James, Amery's youngest brother, comes along with the baler around 2 or 3am (catching the dew), collecting the braided hay into bales and depositing them back on the ground in one layer of 12, stopping around noon when the dew dries up. Later, someone will come and stack the layers together, so large cubes of baled hay stand out in the distance. Finally these stacks are placed on the truck's flatbed, to be delivered to the next customer in batches of 1 ton (20 bales) or more. All of this can be seen in its different phases in different places on the farm.

There's been a drought this year, so the yield is low and the prices are–thankfully–high. Hopefully the farm will make money from this harvest, but it is uncertain yet. The drought has been good in one respect: this is only the second year the farm has switched to hay, and new customers are calling looking for this scarce commodity. Hopefully these customers will call back next year, when hay might be in greater supply.

Would I have thought I'd find myself in a tractor now, when I was in New York, for instance? I remember Amery and I went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Design on 92nd Street to see the Henry Dreyfuss retrospective. Towards the end of the exhibit, on its own pedestal, was Dreyfuss' redesign of the John Deere tractor. Not only did he strengthen the John Deere brand through stylistic development, more importantly he placed brand recognition where farmers valued it most, namely in the redesign of the seat where the farmer spends much of his time. This was the first thing Sally pointed out to me during my initial orientation to the tractor, my current workplace.

Here's a site I discovered called Brand Genetics that wraps its branding practice within the mystique of the science of memetics.

The "sabbatical" has begun. All our things are in storage, except the boxes we sent to the farm. We are in LA now, flying to Aspen for the design conference next week, and then begin our drive up the coast from LA to the Washington border to arrive mid-June.

The first thing we did after closing up in San Francisco is to spend a day in Napa, taking a friend for her birthday to the Di Rosa Foundation, an art/nature preserve in southern Napa which is the home to a collector's 1000+ art objects, the vast majority from the San Francisco Bay Area. There is no label info for any of the artworks (though it can be found somewhere in each room in a book), so the viewing experience is relegated to the visual, and more importantly for me, becomes a collective experience of the Bay Area meme.

Why do certain areas produce visual art over time that revolve around similar artistic strategies? Why are there movements in art on an international scale that have some cohesive homogeneity for a particular time? Two separate questions, two angles on the same memetic phenonemon.

I remember being in Basel, Switzerland for the first time, and discovering the vibrant art scene there (not during the annual fair). The Kunsthalle was showing a regional Trienalle (Basel, plus two cities near it in France and Germany). I had been at the time at the bottom of an S-curve in my attention and interest in contemporary art; and my wanderings to its many galleries and museum opened me to a powerful experience of art, place, and time, the understanding that certain kinds of art thrives in certain kinds of places, at specific times or traversing time. What artistic memes "rise to the top" in particular places? What relation does a regional cohesiveness have to an international memepool of art? If memes are primarily about the human ability to imitate, then at what point does the imitation which leads to regional cohesiveness batter against the rigorous survival standards of the International Art Meme? And, like, where is individuality in all this memetic posturing?

Off to see a few Nanni Moretti films at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.