"On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally penetrate this far. To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff ball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields  and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a distant tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring  to call them down into the hive again.  And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared."

--Thoreau

Although, I had been thinking about this work for almost two years now, I finally began building this kinetic soundscape on the evening of July 4th, 2008 .  It was completed on July 6th.  The image of the war machines used in these moving images is now lost.  It was lost in the mails sometime ago, but there is something--haunting?--about working with the idea of a "lost original."  Who is the host now?  How does this lost original perpetuate itself?  How is a directive from a "lost original" still received?  As opposed to Thoreau's image of the hive, I present the leach.  There is too, the matter in which matter itself feeds off itself, feeds off of a host that perpetuates the directive of the "lost original" in modulations of that horrible song, a song that ought now to be denoted. What is history?  What is natural history?

[Special thanks to Peter Gordon for use of the static CB and the warplanes sound effects.]