The problem of mapping fires and fires spread in Los Angeles is increasingly taxing, both as they are exacerbated by the new weather systems of climate change--high, dry winds; dried trees; low groundwater--and was we lack the urban infrascture to provide the water or fire mitigation needed to deal with them. But if the Pacific Palisades fire of this past year reminded no one so much as a dystopian image of Hell of Dantesque proportions--of raging fires consuming buildings, sending firefighters desperately running to staunch the conflagration's spread against all odds in flaming settings that raged with an intensity one can only call infernal, provoking collective questioning of what went wrong that our world was revealed so combustable--

Malcolm Margolin was the coolest people I knew. If we can't be hugely saddened by his passing, and the loss of his dynamic presence in the East Bay, he'll be a model for persisting a vision quest in a dark age. We first met while both walking the East Coast Trail in opposite directions, Malcolm as ever patrolling and using the newly reclaimed bayshore pathway that had been a tradition of the bayshore Ohlone people.

Can one map energy independence? The updating of the largest body of water in the Americas to the "Gulf of Mexico" is hardly an arbitrary choice. Does it map the seabed off the continental shelf, and the territorial waters of the United States?

Donald Trump has so skillfully adopted terms and coopted concepts by slapping his name on them to rebrand them as his own, in ways we may do well to question if this is entirely impulsively done. From CPAC to the alt right, Trump's second Presidential administration whole-heartedly embrace old ideas not only to invest them with new energy, but to draw energy from them, honing in on their logic and persuasive power as a strategy in incessant ways.

"All maps have edges," writes Margaret Atwood, noting that even slime-molds, bereft of a central nervous system, readily map adjacency. And although the notion of metric accuracy or or accurate indices are lacking--as is a frame--there is a distinct sense of mapping adjacency in the cave-painting or mural that has survived since circa 7000 BCE (6960±640 BCE) in the Konya region of Anatolia, in a valley that has  provided a site of intense archeological investigation of one of the earliest dense areas of human inhabitation.