Old Town: The Villa de Alburquerque, founded February 7, 1706, was to where Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdez, Governor of the Spanish Province of New Mexico brought twelve families and a Franciscan friar. "Cuervo had broken almost every law regarding the establishment of new settlements. To begin with, he displayed remarkable audacity in founding a villa, the highest classification of Spanish town, without first consulting his superiors. Secondly, he apparently failed to file a communal land grant of four square leagues of land for the villa. Finally, subsequent investigations proved that he had lied to the viceroy and king about the status of church construction and the number of colonists in residence." B.A. Johnson, Old Town, Albuquerque, New Mexico--A Guide to its History and Architecture. Albuquerque, 1980.

an obligation to the difficult whole: Robert Venturi.

human chatter: "Idle talk is something which anyone can take up; it not only releases one from the task of genuine understanding, but develops an undifferentiated kind of intelligibility, from which nothing is closed off any longer." M. Heidegger. Quoted in, G.L. Burns, Heidegger's Estrangement's. New Haven, 1989.

used first: H. Foster, "The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life." The Princeton Architectural Journal. Vol 4 (1992). >

animals in numinous awe: E.A. Armstrong, The Folklore of Birds. New York, 1970.

West Africans/fetish: "The term's first use, for example, paralleled the mapping of the 'dark interior' of Africa. The territory was literally annexed by the very gesture that defined it spatially, a process that begins by construing the space of the other as 'territory,' a potential extension of the dominant space, something that can be mapped and, therefore, entered. The word fetish is part of mapping. It is used at the borders to outline the unmappable, the strangest, least comprehensible symptoms of the other, that which makes the other truly other, bracketing it in order that the rest of the map can be completed. More than merely an agent of mapping, the word makes the map possible. The fetish is actively involved in the production of space." M. Wigley, "Theoretical Slippage: The Architecture of the Fetish." The Princeton Architectural Journal. Vol. 4 (1992).

blueprints: "The blue foundation is the imaginal ground which allows the eye to see imaginatively, the event as image, creating at the same time a remoteness from real things (Cézanne), from the green of the actual world (Stevens), a remoteness felt in the nostalgia which blue brings." J. Hillman, "Alchemical Blue and the Unio Mentalis." Sulfur #1 (1981).

somewhere else: "People who have their brains stimulated have experiences that they claim 'they' did not cause. They know rationally that the experience comes from them even though it does not feel like it comes from them. It is like getting a view from somewhere and a view from nowhere combined. Instead of being aware of its own physical substance, the brain is aware of a reality it creates outside itself. This world of the not-self appears to be an independent world of objects, space, and time." R.E. Cytowie, The Man Who Tasted Shapes. New York, 1993.

In the early cult: C. Blacker, The Catalpa Bow-A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. London, 1986.

,lands and laughs: "to marvel that it exists, to wonder what made it possible, to seek, in passing over its landscape, traces of the movement that formed it, to discover in these histories supposedly laid to rest 'how and to what extent it would be possible to think otherwise.'" M. de Certeau, "The Laugh of Michel Foucault." In, Heterologies. Minneapolis, 1986; M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2. New York, 1978.

poetry proper: M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. New York, 1971.

to recognize: J.P. O'Grady. Pilgrims to the Wild. Salt Lake City, 1993.

Eros himself: "Eros awakens us to the world and its particulars and helps us to order experience into artful shapes and rhythms, but by courting the daimon the poet is challenging the gods with all the insolence and overweening ambition of the original humans, only to risk being incinerated or cut in half, one part of himself forever looking in vain for the other." A. Kleinzahler, "Eros & Poetry." Sulfur #33 (1993).

pistol-whipped: T. Ragan, "Woman Helps Three Escape From Taos Jail." Albuquerque Journal, 26 June 1996.

green Escort: "Half curiously, half questioningly his sunken, glowing eyes peer into the greenish opalescent liquid. The look is that of a man not altogether certain of his identity--the fixed gaze of a somnambulist taking on a puzzled expression at the moment of awakening. Well might he question, for into that devil's chalice he had poured all his youth. all his fortune, all his talent, all his happiness, all his life." B. Applegate, Paul Verlaine: His Absinthe-Tinted Song. Chicago, 1982.

strange attractor: "But the truth was, she wanted to know more about this, this human. She rose again and began walking through the grottolike spaces of her quarters, in and out through the curved formations, past the small pool, pacing more like a first female in the height of courtship than a coolly reserved third female whose role was facilitation, not passion. It wasn't that she felt an attraction, but she certainly felt an intense curiosity. And that, she knew, was dangerous." J.A. Carver, Strange Attractors. New York, 1995.

The ancient sound: J. Ratti. From, "Tourists."

Rio Grande Zoo: "I am beginning to think of the zoo as a center, a node, out of which radiates the unthinkable solitude of the bison, the unwavering watchfulness of the tiger, the sweet dignity of the giraffe, the playful tenderness of the chimpanzee, the delicacy of the gerenuk, the stillness of the jaguar--radiating out in waves upon the city, like fountains of spirit, from which we all drink without knowing." Michael Ventura, The Zoo Where You're Fed to God. New York, 1994.

new conductor/guest pianist: David Lockington/Awadagin Pratt.

Chernobyl's birds: A. Weisman, "Journey Through a Doomed Land." Harper's, August 1994.

their act of: J. Riddel "Decentering the Image: The 'Project' of 'American' Poetics?" In, J.V. Harari, editor, Textual Strategies. Ithaca, NY., 1979.

West Side Story: United Artists, 1961, Robert Wise, Director. Score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, choreography by Jerome Robbins.

the transition: "Putting a stage musical on the screen represents challenges. When you're in the live theater, you have the proscenium arch up there, you're once-removed from reality. The screen is a very real medium and doesn't take kindly to stylization. One of the things we struggled with the most in West Side Story was how to take all the highly stylized aspects of it and deal with them effectively in the reality of the screen. On the stage, you can have characters break out of a dialogue scene and go right into song and dance and you don't feel a twinge of embarrassment, but you can feel that on the screen. On the stage, the turf that the kids fight over were stylized sets. There was no way I could realistically open the film without opening it in the real New York streets." R. Wise. In, S. Leemann, Robert Wise On His Films. Los Angeles, 1995.

a sudden fall: G. Bataille, "Soleil Pourri." Documents. Second Year, No. 3 (1930).

made to forcefully oppose: A. Breton, "Picasso in his Element." Minotaure. No 1 (1933).

devoured by the fire: P. Reverdy, "An Eye of Light and of Night." Le Point, XLI, April 1952.

Pyroglyphs: "There are as many senses of time-flow, time-erupt, time-withdrawn, as the mirror of our eyes can reflect and refract. Thus the various sites stagger, misfire, and unite. Sounds, too, lay waste to eardrums, the deep slow beats of centuries of liminal enterprises, entering icy streams... where to meet those tiny figures, the imps of crankum, tricksters who mimic our heated debates on ontology and epistemology, grinning at the occluded channels we tend to carve through the liquid latitudes of our mind...Everything is questioned here, from parturition to extinction, all the somber intonations are lighted, then doused out." J. Weishaus. From, "Pryoglyphs."

Vasulka(s): Steina (Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir) was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1940. Woody (Bohuslav Peter), was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1937. In 1965, the Vasulkas moved to New York City, where they became pioneers in analogue Video Art. They presently reside in Santa Fe, NM., travelling often to Europe and Japan.

at present: G.P. Landow, "What's a Critic to Do? Critical Theory in the Age of Hypertext." In, G.P. Landow, editor, Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore, 1994.

a language that follows: R. Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects." In,
The Writings of Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, editor. New York, 1979.

intercourse between: V. Basilov, "Shamanism in Central Asia." In, A. Bhariti, editor, The Realm of the Extra-Human. The Hague, 1978.

tortured their mystics: "Nevertheless, there is a common denominator that determines the efficacy of all sacrifices and that becomes increasingly apparent as the institution grows in vigor. This common denominator is internal violenceCall the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric." R, Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, 1977.

Among the Volga Bulgars: A. Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe--The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage. New York, 1976. "Commenting on this passage, the Turkish orientalist Zeki Validi Togan, undisputed authority on Ibn Fadlan and his times, has this to say: 'There is nothing mysterious about the cruel treatment meted out by the Bulgars to people who were overly clever. It was based on the simple, sober reasoning of the average citizens who wanted only to lead what they considered to be a normal life, and to avoid any risk of adventure into which the "genius" might lead them.' He then quotes a Tartar proverb: 'If you know too much, they will hang you, and if you are too modest, they will trample on you.' He concludes that the victim 'should not be regarded simply as a learned person, but as an unruly genius, one who is too clever by half.' This leads one to believe that the custom should be regarded as a measure of social defence against change, a punishment of non-conformists and potential innovators." Ibid.

La Caldera: A group in Albuquerque practicing various Pagan rituals. Also the name of the "kiva" built on the property of the group's leader. "to be a kiva it did not have to be square or round, subterranean or surficial, to be equipped with any particular kind of roof, to possess a ventilator or a bench or even a sipapu. It merely had to be different." W. Smith, "When Is a Kiva?" When Is a Kiva? And Other Questions About Southwestern Archaeology. Tucson, 1990.

shot through: "The conventional postulate that information is received by sense-organs and passed by neurons to the brain disregards the possibility of a simpler account: that (as with the rifle), each stage is only triggered by the previous activity and triggers the following one. In this account stimulated sensory cells trigger neurons which in turn induce motor and autonomic effectors, which stimulate afferent neurons and vice versa in feedback loops. In this case the terms receptor and neurotransmitter are misleading. Receptors do not receive and transmitters do not transmit any physical or psychological knowledge about phenomena. Sense organs are triggers and not receivers of environmental information." icshezen@wiccmail.weizmann.ac.il

not simply: L. Irwin, "Urban Shamanism Was Future Theology." irwin@cofc.edu

suppose 'fantasy': D. Maclagan, "Fantasy and the Figurative." In, A. Gilroy & T. Dalley, editors, Pictures at an Exhibition. London, 1989.

into his painting: M. Schapiro, "On a Painting of Van Gogh." View--Parade of the Avant-Garde. C.H. Ford, editor. New York, 1991.

the impression: J. Needleman, Lost Christianity. Garden City, NY., 1980.

critical condition: The most edible parts reside in your innermost text. Here I will dig and scrape. When you write I'll carefully dissect each screenful, each para, each cluster of words. When you write I'll preserve the most delectable, collectable parts to be archived and bottled like an onion. Prime cuts will be filleted and filed. Marrow will be extracted. If possible, if at all possible I would like your permission to share some parts with others. Only the choicest tidbits will be excised and divided or cloned for consumption. From the heart I will extract the pith, the juice, the lifeblood. Think of me as your saviour sucking the lifeblood to replenish and resurrect. Think of me as your critical friend." glory@vibert.demon.co.uk