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Stefan Sagmeister, FlashForward2005 Film Festival, San Francisco

FlashForward2005

Stefan Sagmeister started out the film fest/conference this year, and many more followed: Brendan Dawes (what a funny Brit!), Eric Natzke, the JibJab.com guys (of "This Land" animation fame), Jared Tarbell of complexification.net and levitated.net and his evolving computational creatures. An exhilerating conference showcasing the evolving future of interactivity as it relates directly to Flash and its ubiquitous player. Check out flashforward2005 for the winners and what is coming up in the New York. Highly recommend the conference for anyone thinking of going. —5.05

Snow Canyon State Park, near St. George, Utah, 2005

The West

"You might like it so much out there that you'll want to stay." We heard that many times before we moved from Indiana to Utah in the summer of 2004. As of this writing, we've been here in the second driest state in the Union for almost 10 months.

Perhaps it will end up being the newness of this place that gives me such joy, and this will dissipate with time, simply drift away. But I don't think so. My gut says no.

Compared to "back East," there are many more times I find myself standing in silent awe of the world that surrounds me. "Do you see the light on the mountains there?" I say to Paula or another hiker, and "Look at that," and "Amazing, look at that." The light shifts on the peaks of the mountains, the sun blasts one moment, then vanishes, the wind picks up and scatters the clouds, and the ravens always seem to be flying overhead, above this small town, or along the cliffs of the canyons.

I am a neophyte. I grant that I am new to the Western landscape, to these mesas and buttes and slot canyons. So new that I hardly know the names of things, of plants and mountain ranges and rock formations. We moved away from a beautiful place, the forested ravines and hills of southern Indiana. It was beautiful in its own right, but . . .

But we see "beauty" in different ways in different places, and southern Utah has enormous beauty, drama that plays out on a ridiculously large scale every day.

Each step I take these days, as I jump from pink rock to red rock along these swelling-with-Spring-runoff streams in the eroding canyons now, the ubiquitious black ravens above me, the sagebrush greening now, the sun growing more intense as the calendar drifts into summer — with each step, I feel more intensely here, right here, eyes wide open.

Today we hiked up the canyon. A mudslide blocked the usual route. More boulders were scattered about the wet dirt road along Coal Creek, which rushed and leaped with the Spring run-off. The newspapers warn there will be tremendous flooding this Spring, due to the unprecedented snowpack up on the mountains. Things are in flux. Pieces and parts of the mountains are coming down every day now.

"I have never lived in such beauty," I hear myself saying to friends on the phone, friends back East. Perhaps this joy will dissipate, but I do not believe it. —5.05


"Mountain" digital trash