Skiborg 3: Chairlift prosthesis

Skiborg 3: Chairlift observations from a mundane ski cyborg

I posted images from my phone (that boon companion and faithful sidekick) of my ten days at Kirkwood to my Facebook page. Why? Well partly I love the idea of people seeing a few images of sun-drenched snow fields, vistas of snowcaps and wild like-a-giant-did-it-with-a-white-crayon contrail writing in the sky, and then suddenly finding themselves dreaming of renting skis, driving into the mountains, and sliding down whatever runs feel like the perfect balance of safety and risk. And partly I do it because Facebook has become my electronic photo album, my external memory, my public private place to micro journal (status updates anyone?) and scrapbook (photo albums geared to events, holidays, vacations) and be silly (I recently posted a series of bizarre images of raccoons; previously, twisted Valentines Day cards and Visions of Future Technologies from old Popular Mechanics magazines, visions that shall we say didn't quite work out).

One of the photos was just a picture of a lift chair in the air. But it doesn't do justice to the amount of time I spent on lifts during my ten day ski every day streak.

So skiing is sliding down hills, carving shapes on the surface of steep pitches of white, going kind of fast and then going faster. But skiing is also waiting (not so much at Kirkwood though occasionally the line feels like a very cold Post Office line at Christmas). And skiing is sitting on a big iron bench as it lifts into the air and then climbs hundreds of yards up the mountain. Sometimes this is a real challenge; you dress for the skiing part, so you don't want to overdress and be too hot, yet often when it is cold out the lift part reminds you that you could have used one more layer, a neck gaiter, in extreme weather a blood transfusion or a portable large fireplace.

The long slow ride up the mountain is a chance, if you so desire, to pause the Doing part of the brain and engage the Being part. So I thought a lot, reflected a lot, spaced out a lot. Hard to say how much of each since I find reflection and spacing out blend at some point. And the hot sun helped too; no primal chilling blasts of icy wind in the face, no fiendish Jack Frost eight degree nose-pinching, no Jack London am I going to die before the lift reaches the top revisitings of To Build A Fire. No, it was mostly incredibly sunny, and the lift on a Tuesday or Wednesday is as good as it gets for meditating. And there is a fixed time, too; at some point the meditation ends, you mentally note the takeaway, and then you keep your tips up and pop off the lift and (and isn't this what we all hope from deep meditations, long reflections on life and love and liberty) there you are: on Top of the World. Literally.

Another thing about chairlifts: chair lifts are big metal arms for lifting humans as if they were children; that is, they do what amusement park rides do. Remember when you are little and your dad or mom lifted you up and spun you around? Threw you up in the air and caught you (hopefully every time)? I have body memories of my dad as a Huge Person picking me up and throwing me; I remember holding my son when he was the size of Mister Peanut from the ads, holding him up Kunta Kinte style as we stood at the edge of the Puget Sound and thinking "This is probably what I felt like back in the day when I was the peanut; someone godlike can pick me up and it feels more or less safe, like I'm literally in good hands, strong hands." Well I think amusement park rides are partly nostalgias for those days when Big People ran the show and took care of you, and when they were in a good mood even amused you and excited you. And chairlifts are a very mellow version of that. It's like your mom picking you up and putting you way way up on that slide that you can't quite climb yet.

And chairlifts are the slowing down of the pace of the day, forcing even the adrenaline junkies to do nothing, stare out at the mountains, feel the change of weather from low to high. They are chances to put your arms around your girl or guy, chances to look up at the sky and not down at the extremely interesting because at high speeds fairly dangerous whipping below and in front of you ground.

I'm not saying most people see lifts like this. But I am saying that there is something about the very nature of powerful reliable dependable iron hands hauling you up a mountain. And perhaps for some - for many? - you only notice when the powerful reliable iron hands aren't reliable. On Tuesday Chair 2 stopped for what felt like forever (probably less than ten minutes, more than five). We were hanging fifty feet in the air; people grew restive, a guy yelled a couple of times (that sure helped); our Inalienable Right to being hauled up the hill by our metal parent was being abrogated. For me, I got to talk to the two Argentinian girls in front of me (they asked if I'd seen the movie Frozen, where skiers get stranded on a lift after dark and terror ensues), feel a moment of panic (stomach drops a little looking down), more than a few moments of envy (the people who'd gotten off the lift just before it shut down were happily scampering down the hill on their prosthetics and singing happy not stuck on a lift songs). The song in my bowling ball helmet sound system shifted to an old timey tune with banjo by Union Station, about going off to the Civil War. I listened, trapped dangling and looking over forbidding mountains; I imagined what this place would have been like in 1860, what it would look like to a man or woman on foot, on horseback, pulling a wagon. And the song sang its plaintive words:

From the bright sunny south to the war, I was sent,
E'er the days of my boyhood, I scarcely had spent.
From it's cool shady forests and deep flowing streams,

Ever fond in my mem'ry and sweet in my dreams.

I couldn't go anywhere. The mountains changed from playthings to obstacles to uncanny symbols of what divided here from an unimaginable there, where I might have to go, to fight and kill, to buy and till.

Then the lift shuddered, slowly we moved as if the horses hitched to the wagon were finally, and with much complaint, shuffling forward. The line gave a cheer, the Argentinian girls yelled "Watch Frozen!" and in a minute I was hopping off the lift and hauling over to the Ski Patrol hut with the big dogs sleeping in the sun, the bucket of Pepsis and waters and Mountain Dews. The bucket has a sign $1 and you put the money in a cast in the shape of an arm. Someone's cast, it seems, now just a memory of a fracture, a break.

Skiborg 2: Helmets and the Indie Movie effect

Warning: this blog comes with two fairly big lists of songs!

For Christmas, my lovely wife gave me a helmet in the general shape and color of an old school bowling ball. It has cool padding gizmos that velcro in and out to allow it to fit even my tiny head (though I use a lower tech method of sticking a small winter hat on my head and ratcheting the helmet over that). The helmet has vents and places to secure goggles and a very comfy chin strap. It also came with a fairly thick instruction booklet which on perusal turned out to be ways to hook up the cheap Bluetooth headset with the helmet.

The helmet is specifically designed for listening to music. It has cozy ear padding which upon inspection turns out to be two velcro-apart-able compartments for speakers; the wire snakes out the back of the helmet, and connects to the music player of choice (in my case the 120 gig silver and dark gray wheel driven iPod from a couple years ago).

Now I'd never worn a helmet, not due to some principled stand on my god given right to smash my brains out on a tree, but mainly because I skied infrequently. Ok and I'm cheap. Ok and it feels really good to be hauling down a hill with the wind in your hair. But last year I borrowed a helmet and you know what? If you put headphones in it, it creates a bitchin' little sound cave of your very own.

Of course this creates some dilemmas. Music on if you are skiing with others? If you are skiing with others with sound system helmets? If you are on a lift for some minutes with others? Music off at times just to remind oneself that this is what reality sounds like without a sound track? (Those of you who know me are laughing here, but go ahead; I can hear you anyway! Cuz for the moment I am not listening to the sound track of my life).

But there is another funny element to having a sound system in a bowling ball on one's head on the top of a mountain, or sliding/gliding down it. And that is selecting the sound track to the film one is about to star in. It's a ski movie, but not just. It's a film where the protagonist is alone in the mountains, and skiing is one way we get to hear his inner thoughts about all sorts of things.

I'm only half kidding here. The soundtrack element to it all, and the fact that often one is looking out at cinematically breathtaking scenes from unusual angles (feet dangling over the tops of tall pines; eyes surveying a giant bowl of snow from the vantage of a 7600 foot ledge), all contribute to the indie movie feel of it all. And I found myself going back and forth between that movie, and the "actual" reality in which I am listening to music and skiing. Occasionally other characters would come into the movie, and later I'd think about which ones would make the cut/be remembered, and which would be seen as not contributing to the overall unit of the experience/film. Yikes!

Sometimes I worry about the truism that everyone looks realer on TV.

Anyway, the helmet allows for all sorts of mergings: a meditative playlist can generate a meditative mood, and hence meditative skiing. A rowdy mix (Dandy Warhols, the Stones, some Hendrix, some Black Keys, etc) can lead to some speedy runs, pushing that big hard turn harder, exhilaration). I began my time alone up here with the following mix:

Quietage Playlist

Home Zero 7

Besos de Sal Federico Aubele

All Apologies Sinead O'Connor

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying Rickie Lee Jones

Shadowboxer Fiona Apple

Peace Piece Bill Evans

Alone in Kyoto Air

Silky Delta Euphoria

Calypso Suzanne Vega

Surrender Kaskade

Casimir Pulaski Day Sufjan Stevens

I May Know the Word Natalie Merchant

Everything Is Free Gillian Welch

Little Green Joni Mitchell

Urge For Going Tom Rush

Kashf John Surman, Dave Holland, Anouar Brahem

J'ai dormi sous l'eau Air

Night Like a River HEM

I'm Going To Stop Pretending Eels

Spencer The Rover John Martyn

Treefingers Radiohead

Slow Down Morcheeba

Playground Love (Vibraphone Ve Air

Like Someone In Love Chet Baker

Windham Hill - 3 Gymnopedie

Thoughts On A Grey Day Fleetwood Mac

Bless the Weather John Martyn

In the Waiting Line Zero 7

This was a pretty fun mix for Tuesday, and made for a very chill afternoon of skiing and sitting on lifts in the ridiculous sun (I think it topped out at 50 degrees that day, total April spring skiing weather and snow conditions). In particular the instrumental pieces (Peace Piece by Bill Evans, Alone in Kyoto by Air, Gymnopedie by some Windham Hill musicians) were stunning. I remember being carried up up up by huge metal hands in the shape of chairs, and listening to Along in Kyoto, as the ground slowly fell away, the trees slowly shifted position on the mountain, clouds scudded and so on. The music set a tone that meshed wonderfully with the landscape, and took me out of my talky/thinky head for great swaths of time. And then the lift is done, you hop off and ski to the next run and make a micro-decision: change the music? Or keep?

Each of these songs, and especially the first ten which got repeated listenings, is now linked in my mind with a snowscape. And not simply that: a mindscape. Was I thinking of Arcadia? Desire? Cyborgs? Death? The quality of emotions? My Uncle Dan? My grandfather whose birthday I share? Music helps in some ways inform the arc those thoughts took/take, and helps me remember them.

I was alone in the mountains Tuesday, Wednesay, Thursday, Friday. Each day was utterly sunny, fabulously sunny. Some days were quite hot; other days stayed cool; but I will never forget those days of sking alone under that almost absurdly optimistic comb of bright sun and blue sky. So I of course on Monday night made up a new playlist dedicated to the sun. Here is what I played on Tuesday:

Ski Sun Mix:

Another Sunny Day Belle and Sebastian

The Sun On His Back Camera Obscura

Honey In the Sun Camera Obscura

Sundialing Caribou

Love The Sundays

Blister In The Sun Violent Femmes

Sunday Part I Cibo Matto

Sunday The Cranberries

Sunshine Regina Spektor

A Sunny Sky Trevor Hall

Sunshine Of Your Love Jimi Hendrix

Breath of sun kareem raihani and jazzy d feat. jimmy rage

Bright Sunny South Alison Krauss & Union Station

Sol Tapado (The Covered Sun) Thievery Corporation & Patrick de Santos

Standing in the Sun (Afterhours Chilled Mix) Brainiacs On Dope

The Sun Doesn't Shine Fatboy Slim

Rockport Sunday Tom Rush

Sunshine Sunshine Tom Rush

I Was Made For Sunny Days The Weepies

The Sunny Side Of The Street The Pogues

No Sunlight Death Cab For Cutie

The Sun Is Shining (Fire House Club Mix) Bob Marley

Sun Toucher Groove Armada

The Sun Doesn't Like You Norah Jones

Love From The Sun Gab.El

Breath Of Sun Kareem Raihani & Jazzy D

Blister In The Sun Nouvelle Vague

I Wish I Never Saw The Suneshi Beth Orton

Good Day Sunshine Beatles

Sunday Papers Joe Jackson

Sunrise Norah Jones

Sunday Table Pink Martini

In The Sun She & Him

California Sun Rancid

Sun Is Shining (Dub Version) Bob Marley

Sun Is Shining Bob Marley

Sunshine Rock Upsetters

Sunday Sun Beck

There is something wild about being the first audience for one's own mix; would it be a good ski mix? Would the sun theme augment the already wonderful sunny ski experience? Well, Right away

I knew that the first Camera Obscura song would become epic in my personal history; I've been singing it for days now. Ditto with Honey in the Sun, and the crazy duo of Blister in the Sun (that punky northwest whisper/plaint) and Sunday Part 1 (with Cibo Matto two Japanese hip hop artists aided by Julian Lennon). The Hendrix is a pretty unusual track, with Jimi covering the Cream song Sunshine of your Love and just killing it. From that to the chill track Breath of Sun is a true eclectic jump, and just when you've shifted from 60s blues jazz rock to Ibiza 2007 trance music, suddenly up comes the banjo and the dude from Union Station singing about fighting for the South during the Civil War...and you look out over these mountains and imagine them in the 1860s, and it is a whole different reality, let me tell you. The Tom Rush and Weepies songs were pretty forgettable and made the angrier songs (No Sunlight, Rancid's California Sun) necessary as brain cleaners.

I could go on: the different Marley takes on Sun is Shining (I think I sang "To The Rescue" pretty loud in the chair on Lift 2 because I saw a skier top and look around); the killer remix of Sun Toucher by Groove Armada bringing an urban set to the rural mountain with its suburban and rural patrons in their ski and board finery; Zoe Deschamel hitting those notes on the She & Him tune In The Sun. Each one was a surprise, then a provocation to thought, feeling, a merging of music and lyric with setting and weather and time of day.

A great film, impossible without my cyborg helmet.

Ski Borg 1

I'm on Day 8 of living at Kirkwood (someone texted me and called me Captain Kirkwood which seemed apropos, though I haven't sucker punched any aliens or hit on any attractive females of the species) and I've been thinking about skiing as a mundane cyborg example. Here are a few of the things I've been contemplating while sitting on lifts being carried above treetops and up onto ledges.

First, skis and boots. You put on ski boots and you instantly feel (and look) like some kind of anime monster: feet are suddenly huge, encased, like the boot of an exoskeleton. And walking in ski boots (all 300 yards to the lift, insert cat who ate the canary look here) you move in an uncanny, monstrous fashion, like a cyborg martinet, heel clicking, toes snapping down, walking become mechanical. The boot makes regular walking harder; in fact you need to learn to walk again, like some very tall baby. But then you get to the lift, throw the skis down, click in, and voila! You have become a man-machine system ideally designed for sliding, turning on snow, throwing snow crystals into the sun while slamming a hockey stop halfway down the hill.

Now a word or three about the boot/ski interface. Modern ski boots are cyborgian, no doubt; they add a prosthetic foot that links to another prosthetic "foot" (in my case a pair of parabolic K2's in orange and yellow flames that say Burnin' Love and are a handmedown from my wife, which I proudly mention to lift operators who give me grief and/or admire my sweet K2's). But the real issue is the nature of the interface. That is, up here there is a human/machine, with a brain (encased in a helmet that looks like a bowling ball; more of this later) that now reads messages from the body as it extends all the way to the tips of the skis. My body has a different proprioception; it wants to lean forward, it learns to "read" slopes and the quality of snow (from corduroy and chatter to icy Cascade cement to fluffy soft powder to warm/cold Spring skiing soft snow), and this "reading" is partly visual, but also partly a felt sense of the ski/boot/ankle/knee/hip system. The mind learns to hear the feedback from the legs and skis and adjust (now pointing down the hill, gaining speed, carving tighter turns; now traversing or paralleling the hill to slow or stop; now flashing red lights as the skis try and fail to gain purchase on an icy morning run).

This is in part obvious. And in another way it is astounding. You stand on the top of a ledge and look down and instantly perceive the landscape as though you had long thin parabolic feet. The brain is able (usually!) to be cyborg, and then to adjust when you take off your boots. (And there is a moment when you are in your stocking feet back at the ski place, and you have a funny feeling in your body and realize you are "seeing" the mountain again, feeling what it would be like to shove off and start carving below lift 4).

The interface is in this case an "inter" between one face (the face of the mountain covered with snow) and another face (the set of inches that define the places the skis hit the ground). The interface changes constantly, is complex, massively so. You are screaming down the mountain and considering the next turn, and the next...but it turns out that there are Other People skiing, and you need to take them into account, and the possibility that the snow over there may be significantly different than what you are successfully skiing on now.

I'm imagining: this is your brain. This is your brain on skis.

Now, there is another cyborg element: a kind of pleasure you can have as a human (sliding down hills of snow as a kid, sliding down a waterfall in Vermont with your brother, sliding down a hill of mud into leaves) but ramped up, adrenalized, made into an entirely new field of possibilities. The cyborg pleasure is the pleasure of the (new, entrancing, difficult, intoxicating) interface. It is a new space to play in, with new pleasures and pains, new skill sets and patterns. And while there are some utilitarian reasons for being able to ski (you live in Sweden and want to ski over to the neighbor's house for lunch; you are fighting Nazis in Finland during the war), mostly the ski borg is a cyborg of the nonutilitarian, the Arcadian.

Next skiborg topics:

1. Helmets are really sound systems.

2. Chair lifts are big metal arms for lifting humans as if they were children; that is, they do what amusement park rides do. And chair lifts are the slowing down of the pace of the day, forcing even the adrenaline junkies to do nothing, stare out at the mountains, feel the change of weather from low to high.

3. The organic part of the equation sometimes is not up to the cybernetic one. So snow boarders' wrists get broken and damaged; skiers don't break their legs as much but damage their knees and acl's.

4. As with other cyborgs, skiing is embedded in a complex set of relations, including corporate ones, environmental ones, gender, class, race. These are not innocent, or without negative impacts.

5. Finally, put a bunch of people with prosthetics onto a big mountain with lots of changes to intersect, interact, interfere, and you have an interesting temporary society. Like burning man in the snow, someone said.

Does it tell us anything to see skiers as cyborgs?

Stoppard's Arcadia, Cybernetics, and the Cyborg 1

I've been reading several books up here in the mountains, including David Golumbia's "The Cultural Logic of Computation" and (for perhaps the eighth time) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I promise to write more at length on both of these texts, but for the moment I want to mention that when one reads the history of cybernetics, one comes across Maxwell's Demon and the second law of thermodynamics all the time. It is as if entropy, the heat death of the universe, the irreversibility of time, all constituted not simply problems for thinkers like Norbert Wiener, but emotionally felt conflicts.

What I begin to see, as Stoppard lays out his always doubled drama, was that the attractions that Newton (and other scientists) include in their studies (gravitation, repulsion, etc) and "the

attraction which Newton left out" (sexual desire and love as a disruptive element in our lives) create a tension that itself disrupts. Desire is entropic; we suffer it, and feel more alive because of it, and iterate it just as one might iterate (as Thomasina the young female student does in 1809) an x and y equation, feeding the solution back into the equation and then solving it again, producing a graph, a picture, a sketch of feedback. And the results of such iteration in modern times - the analysis of animal populations, stock prices, weather - is that we see, as Valentine the scientist sees in the present day half of Stoppard's play, that numbers begin to behave like, or indeed represent, natural phenomenon. The language of computation, at least in Stoppard's play, does not yield order, or Order, or contol; it reveals that "the future is disorder." And in just the same way the weather is predictably unpredictable, so are we, given the other set of attractions (and here I would add not just sexual desire, but the range of emotions, aesthetic attractions, the imagined self and community and polis in predictably unpredictable orbits).

So beyond Classic and Romantic, the Two Cultures, the language of computation and the language of the attraction which computation leaves out...or rather, comprehending both, is...Arcadia. And if as Leo Mark wrote, the Machine in the Garden is a central and productive trope for American fiction and political imagination, then the Cyborg in the Garden - the Cyborg in Arcadia - may be the next iteration of this theme.

I'm off to ski. When I come back, I'll try to solve for this x and y, and I'll use other, noncomputational language, to embrace x and y. I think the result will be that for Norbert Wiener and the cyberneticists of the 50s, Arcadia turned out to be pools of counter entropy.