Jump!

postcards a flurry click to view

Today is an exciting day for ZBOOK! Today we speak at UC Santa Barbara, accepting the invitation from our former Professor Kip Fulbeck to speak at his Personal Narrative class, which we took 14 years ago, the same year that both our friendship and ZBOOK was birthed. In preparation for our presentation/performance I have been going through our mass collection of postcards which we've sent each other since that year of 1996. All of our stories could be told just with these postcards alone, they are rich with history gleaned from the date, place of origin, destination address, particular stamps, adorning details such as stickers and drawings, image on card itself, and of course the words written therein.

alice postacard -C to J- 6 July 1999

I came across this Alice postcard and smiled, as Jennifer brought the Alice from Z page this week, "All and Everything," to light in her last post. It's fascinating to re-discover a postcard you've written... it's as if seeing it for the first time! For truly we write 'em and mail 'em and only the recipient gets to truly become familiar with 'em. This postcard was written on July 6, 1998 from Boulder, Colorado by me to Jennifer who was living her summer in Santa Cruz and received my postcards via our PSL buddies Hutch, Coach, and Millar's house in the Redwood Estates mountains of Los Gatos, CA. Vinh and I were on a road trip at the time which what brought us passing through Boulder. The words speak of how Vinh and I had slept in our "capsule" van parked at a public park which we hucked disc at by moonlight the night before and how we were now waking up to a crowd of people just outside our tinted windows going to the near by church on sunday morning. And to that I wrote, "Many a night, especially when we don't have an exact place to sleep, I think about you & your travels. I think about you sleeping in the sand," referring to stories from Jennifer's travels around the globe after her grad from UCSB the year before.

"All and Everything" click to view

Travel, the unknown splendor of it all. Travel is the never ending rabbit hole. As is life. So fun to be a couple of Alices together in our creative mayhem Hemphill. Today... we jump!

∞ ceci

6

enter here

"5:40 am"        click to view

Who knows where it all began, this page of word flurry.  It's fun to compare our passing of ZBOOK back and forth with each other over the years with the playful fun of girls passing notes between each other in class... and here is a page that is literally packed with actual notes to each other and other verses to the cosmos.  Jennifer and I, as this page reveals itself this week, enjoy how these morsels of expression bring us directly inside of a moment, dipping inside of our own stories, of which we may not know the date, but can recognize the FEEL, triggering our memories, like remembering bits of dreams... 

I don't know what day this journal entry turned verse is from (below), but I can picture the scenario perfectly ...a day in the life of Hemphill and cec roaming the streets of Isla Vista (IV), our potent lil' student town extending from our UCSB campus.
Hucking disc at dawn, 5:40am to be exact.  :)  Synergizing visions, getting into each other's heads like dancing synapes.  Discovering great little gems of spots all over IV and campus to commune in through drawing, tarot card reading, and other spontaneous rituals in honor of the magic of the moment.  The disc I speak of is of the frisbee variety, and huck it we O so love to do.  Back then we would aimFully stroll down the beachy streets of IV, Jennifer on one side, I on the other and we'd huck as we walked, back and forth, with one foot after the other in a full forward current, hardly missing a beat.  Of course there were cars parked at the street sides and so it became clear we were not only hucking disc, but also "saving cars" ...from their imminent risk of disc attack. For the joy of disc in not only in the huck but also in the thrill of the catch.  We became known as "car savers" as did our IV disc walking expeditions.  The only way to travel.
 

These (at right) are lyrics I wrote for a song I made with my band when I lived in
New York in 2001.  

 


These words (at left) I wrote the year after my accident during my last and best year at USCB (97-98). Ironically this was the year that all my PSLers, including Hemphill, were gone and graduated, but after my recoup time away, this last year was indeed my best personal year at SB.

"noticias"       click to view

This word flurry page reminds me of Z page "Noticias," however that one is more report and "5:40 am" is more rapport.  Baring no dates, the words of "5:40 am" are partial glimpses into stories, offering morsels of experiences.  (Just as I was last week with the word web in "Mapa," I am again reminded of Johnathan Harris' work)  It is fun to identify these lil' clues of our moments in time, each one holding a place from which we can enter the narrative of our lives.


∞ ceci
6

renegations

click these to view!

"caution"   click to view

In the upper left of "caution" we see a snag of caution tape from a renegade mission accomplished by Jennifer in february 1999, in which she traversed the construction zone of the new UCSB art museum.  We have long fancied such impromptu expeditions, as upon our many walkabouts we encounter such zones of construction or the unseen that beckon our exploration.  Z page this week got us reminiscing about our renegations from the last 14 years, via "chat"

ceci (10:49 AM):  hi! I was vaccuming    hemphill (10:47 AM):  Me too!!!     ceci (10:49 AM):  lol   

hemphill (10:49 AM):  wow, - what does that mean?... about us both sucking up dust and bugs and other particles, before coming to this session... interesting, especially for me because of the dust factor, dirt, which comes with going into a construction zone. You don't go in new, clean clothes, ya know.

ceci (10:52 AM):  right!    ceci (10:52 AM):  renegades often are in camouflage of their terrain     

hemphill (10:53 AM):  yes, color blending...my favorite memory

ceci (10:54 AM):  so let's see... we would be on adventures at night on campus... off hours...no man's land ...ours for the taking

hemphill (10:54 AM):  ...remember when we went ontop of the new humanities building - and scaled the thin disk, record like escapements?

ceci (10:54 AM):  that was the BEST, way high   up like treading on a saturn ring ...way beyond imaginings    

hemphill (10:55 AM):  I think Hesse or McLaughlin were with us on that one?    

ceci (10:55 AM):  Hesse for sure    hemphill (10:55 AM):  I thought so   ceci (10:55 AM):  after us breaking into a classroom!

ceci (10:59 AM):  so the first I remember, is the new admin building being built in like spring of 1996 I guess, yeah, 'cause when I got back to school the next year it was finished and in use by then... it was night, of course, we were walking by and we both looked at each other like.. we just knew what was next

ceci (11:03 AM):  in that moment I was remembering that back in high school Vinh and I snuk into construction zones of new homes being built and had romantic evenings in the wooden skeletons of homes to be, complete with candle lit dinner.

ceci (11:04 AM):  and I think you also shared with me at the time some memories of your past construction zone fun too...   what did we do, climb the fence, or find a gap to enter through?

hemphill (11:06 AM):  I'm pretty sure, we wiggled through something - a gap or whatnot... we may have needed to climb fence to get out.

ceci (11:06 AM):  I think a dumpster was involved... for helping boost us... and we went to the structure's upper levels, right?

hemphill (11:07 AM):  quick sideflash - the first time I ever climbed a fence, was with my dad, after we broke into my moms school and office to decorate her room for her 40th birthday, I think I was - um, 12?    

ceci (11:08 AM):  that is RAD.... another school!.... afterhours baby

hemphill (11:08 AM):  Ok, a dumpster, I do not recall that... ha ha ha....  And, if we went to the second floor, you may be thinking of another entry besides what i'm thinking of, though I don't think you are... I remember very skeletal - and lots of holes, and cement.

hemphill (11:10 AM):  That was the first I remember too though - and it was awesome! it was a possibly a greater turning point in our friendship... like, no turning back, ever!

hemphill (11:11 AM):  do you think that was pre- zbook? i'd guess pre for sure.

hemphill (11:12 AM):  I was so bummed by that whole new stretch of buildings and reconstructions, which that admin building seemed to be the first... because of the loss of z perfect tunnel.

hemphill (11:12 AM):  where else?    hemphill (11:13 AM):  I remember a disc hucking session on a big construction zone in Vegas - like a parking lot in construction - do you have that memory?

ceci (11:14 AM):  yes, in the back lot of the Venician, 1999...may...  we somehow, only Hemphill and cec, got out a random backdoor...

hemphill (11:15 AM):  p.s.l. that's the first time I've heard about yours and Vinh's exploits into off- limits - coolio - nice picture

ceci (11:15 AM):  .....and ended up where no one ever goes, total behind the scenes..... behind the sets....   where the garbage and dirty golf carts live....

hemphill (11:16 AM):  yes, that was a great trip too - minus the loss of the genie - somewhere out there, on the road to Vegas!

ceci (11:16 AM):  alleys and dumpsters and nthing painted pretty...   

ceci (11:16 AM):  O yeah!  sacrafice to the gods    hemphill (11:16 AM):  oooh, I didn't recall dirty golf carts.    ceci (11:17 AM):  ...yeah, just so not "Vegas"....  ...but what makes it all run you know...

hemphill (11:17 AM):  what do you remember about sacrificing to the gods? - I must have been imbibing something.

ceci (11:17 AM):  ...leave it to us to discover the real deal...   ceci (11:17 AM):  the genie    hemphill (11:18 AM):  I'd be paranoid to day, I've seen to many CSI episodes.

ceci (11:18 AM):  DUDE and it's VEGAS, where there is a cmaera in every crack and cranny!... although we were doing nothing wrong at all, just tooling around and hucking disc

hemphill (11:19 AM):  yeah, but still, Vegas seems, run by people...who don't play frisbee!

and, O yes, and let it be known that we adore hucking disc, or tossing the frisbee as it is commonly known, and play as we walk and travel as we huck, the disc always leading us to new terrains to trespass...

∞ ceci

6