Sage Liemhttps://sageliem.neocities.orgSage Liem's websiteSomething Good for a ChangeSomething Good for a Change: Random Notes on Peace thru Living
You have some gravy in your ear...

It was an honor to produce this artifact of a remarkable life.

bandcamp

written and read by Wavy Gravy -- prod. Rainbow Valentine/Thessaly Lerner, Gordon Taylor, myself, and Wavy and Jah

]]>Shasta Baths + Nightshade

Two Egora albums released in early 2025. The first was made in Santa Cruz, California, and the second in Oberlin, Ohio.

tracklist

Shasta Baths

  1. Colonnade
  2. Live Well
  3. Beguines
  4. Aptos Basilica
  5. Marktplaats
  6. Oubliette
  7. Happened

Nightshade

  1. Prologue
  2. Feel so nice
  3. Viaduct
  4. Hieromancy
  5. Rhabdomancy
  6. Waterlilies
  7. Mts Thousand
  8. Sorrow Token
]]>On gravity

On gravity

I heard that at Confusion Hill they built a device that can generate gravity. There's this swirling hurricane of electrons drifting over the surface, and particles rising upward, and the attractive force emerges from the center. They cut down a tree and found European history inside of it. Aliens crash-landed and left their engine running.

Later that day, I drove to Portland to meet up with some people. In Eureka everything became faded and horizontal, and then I followed the Smith River, which was impossibly clear and vertical, and then things became clouded with Oregonian dust. For an hour or two everything was burned. I passed another gravity machine, and bought the cheap gas from a casino.

That night, we went to a bar called the Lutz and had a round of chocolate pudding, and the morning before I was 600 miles away, but those miles were clustered around and spread out as though something pulled them in different directions, and I wasn't tracing a line, but connecting a series of points together like a constellation.

When I was a kid, I listened to a cassette tape called Star Theater that told the stories of constellations. It came with a plastic globe that projected the night sky onto the ceiling. A long time ago, the sky was a mirror whose reflection was more true than reality.

In Oregon I met someone with a tattoo of a cloud of points, concentrated in concentric rings. A nexus of matter and energy that radiates outward, recollecting and redispersing itself. Never is anything created or destroyed. She said that the most interesting kind of motion is between two phenomena: time and space.

]]>MapsMaps

There is little to say.

How do places become themselves? They rise from the seafloor, then they fall back into the ocean. It's difficult to reconcile with what we consider important.

I only know how to communicate this as failure.

Fragment of signage at Bodega Head nuclear reactor site.

The only signs that matter are imperceptible: the obfuscated source of a recording, the interior of rocks beneath us, the images passing by on the highway.

Charter

Power wants to do away with the materiality of places, to extract and consolidate value from every inch of the earth. The resistance of land becomes apparent. You could be religious or spiritual about this; I am not. Resistance is also a property of media—through constraints and affordances, media exert influence on the communities that use and inhabit them. The media of the atmosphere and hydrosphere afford particular behaviors, and resist others. The earth is a medium for transmissions that both implicate us and will far outlast us.

Tourism

In rarer parts of the world, it seems as though every act is a form of extraction. In tourism, each eye that sees takes a share of the difference sold. To sustain this requires labor to produce difference until everyone is as alienated as the tourist himself, in service to this artificial reproduction of difference.

The tourist is unable to access authentic experience, able only to destroy. There is an alternative, where the outcome reflects the inner life of the observer, transcending extraction and exchange. We hope the future affords this possibility.

This mode of failure is abstraction, which transforms everything that exists and will exist into a resource. We encircle the earth with satellites so that we may flatten it into a perfect sphere, or better, a plane, or a single point where everything collapses.

Waterworld

The movie Ponyo is about breaking the boundary between water and air. Water washes over the earth, leaving it unscathed. Briefly, we witness this potentiality, until the realms are divided again. In reality, water is not so gentle—it seeps into infrastructure, washes away surficial features and signs, and alters minerals deep underground. The water of true life affords no permanence.

Huell Howser at Tulare Lake

In the rock cycle, volatile and water-rich melts rise up through the lithosphere, altering minerals and rupturing the surface to form volcanic arcs. The characteristic greenstone and serpentinite formations of northern California derive from hydrous alteration of the lithosphere during subduction.

It's very difficult to understand the deep structure of a mountain belt by direct observation.

"It's very difficult to understand the deep structure of a mountain belt by direct observation."

Perspective

An impression is what captures the character and form of a place. Scanning, near instantaneously, the landscape before you, where do your eyes or your mind linger? What does it stir up in the moment before it ceases to be wild and startling?

As experiences pass, the shape of the world self-organizes into a map of impressions that resembles no empirical mapping. I know vast areas of the United States only through these impressions.

What we find important is not entirely solipsistic; it passes through a form of mediation or cultural filtering. We often share in what is beautiful, sad, joyful, and so on. But categories are not experiences, just as recordings are not experiences; they are derivatives of increasing poverty. The imaginal quality of life runs beneath the level at which we share in each other's experiences, and so we can only attempt to obliquely induce a form of understanding.

~~~

Tracklist

Acknowledgement

This work is indebted to the following:
  • Heather Mease
  • Francis Wilson
  • Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
  • Zeb Page
  • Maia and Jed
  • Jeff Taylor
  • James Piper
  • The house in Portland

Reading

  • Yi-Fu Tuan - Space and Place
  • Hakim Bey - Overcoming Tourism
  • Jean Baudrillard - America
  • J.B. Jackson et al. - The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes
  • John Durham Peters - The Marvelous Clouds
]]>Untitled (9 April 2023)

Untitled

1st
True love
Haha
It's early and the stereo's icy and cheap
facing east at the second I can't remember what we picked up there
The coldest eye—One time when I was younger we went to the landfill and looked at the big bricks of crushed scrap metal
It all looks like that, sometimes
the prettiest star/dust suspended in hot air
2560x1600 cans of coke turned inside out

Tracklist

  • B.O.R. based REMIX
  • Chancellor
  • bummer + Lazarus
  • As the brush of a leaf landing in the palm of your hand
  • The Motel
  • polar ring 720 / Drive
  • Iii Can't Lose
youtube

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