dreams

i started therapy at the suggestion of a couple's therapist gabriel and are seeing to work out our issues. he suggested i write down my dreams. i've never tried this before. my knee jerk response was that i don't remember my dreams but it turns out i can remember them with clarity if i do a couple things. i either have to jot a few notes down right after the dream or repeat to myself a few key things from the dream for me to be able to remember the dream in detail in the morning.

i was skeptical that recalling dreams would have much value, but right after i started writing them down i had a few humdingers that woke me up, literally, and which have reverberated for weeks. one was about roger, the other about gordon. since then i've had some interesting dreams and i hope i have some more humdingers. i've found recalling the dreams and bringing them to consciousness during the day connects me to my unconscious during waking hours which gives moments like my hike today a magical texture. my senses are more alive, smell is amplified, colors sing and i find myself feeling slightly stoned, which is a pleasant sensation for me. it may be that acknowledging my dream world, giving it purchase in my daily life, somehow balances me. i feel better prepared to take on the ups and downs of the day and to respond lovingly to situations that i might have previously reacted to aggressively or hatefully. tuning into my intuitive/non-verbal side feels really, really great.

santa barbara hike

water caught

a pool along the trail

sage, the dog, who travelled with us the whole hike.

water tank. industrial objects make easy subjects.

this picture reminds me of lovers

moi

we hiked under lots of beautiful fog

nephew dario tries out his wooden boat

fallen eucalyptus bark

intact euclyptus bark

mom, dad, marlene, frank, dario, dela and i hiked into the santa barbara hills today. we made our way up the san ysidro trail to the mcmenemey trail that took us steeply uphill and west to the hot springs trail that i hiked a couple days ago. had it not been foggy we'd have had spectacular views of the ocean but instead we got magical and mystical moments the whole way with beautiful light for taking pictures. plans have changed. i expected to be in los angeles this evening. will travel there tomorrow. i'm glad i stayed here today.

xmas 2

paper whites

light in a tea cup

paper whites 2

magnetic motto

my portrait by nephew dario

more snaps from christmas dinner and thereabouts.

xmas

santa barbara, california: it's hot here, about 80 degrees days. i'm walking around in tee shirts. went for a hike up in the santa barbara hills yesteday afternoon. visited an abandoned hot springs hotel whose foundation is the last remnant along with a private property sign that no one respects. the sulpherous spring water is piped away somewhere but locals who like to use the waters have inserted various diverting devices into the piping to fill small rock walled pools. i was so hot after climbing up to the spings that i didn't feel like taking a dip. the water is 116 degrees.

christmas is over, at least the present opening part. my niece and nephew ripped through their presents in about half an hour. i wondered if i ate through presents as fast when i was a child? last night went to a christmas celebration at the local vedanta temple. i enjoyed the reading of the christmas story in a buddhist temple.

tomorrow i head back to los angeles.

some travel pix

california

no picture this time. i'm in california. flew into los angeles a couple days ago, rented a car, drove to my friend marco's house in west hollywood, where i stayed the night. got in touch with my other los angeles friends, brad, bill and anne. bill and anne are, ironically, in vermont. in fact, as i was leaving LAX they were arriving there to fly out. brad and i are going to get togther after christmas. i'm in santa barbara now staying with my brother and his family.

on the plane out i read three books—it was a fifteen hour trip. first was star girl, a novel that danny and roger gave me. it's targeted, i believe, at teens, but i loved it. it's about a girl who doesn't conform to small town teen life and who insists on being kind to everyone, including the opposite team during sports events. at first she's seen as a freak, then her popularity blossoms as everyone suddenly wants to be her friend, then events turn everyone against her and a love interest in a boy at the school brings her to put on a mask of conformity which ulitmately fails and she learns to simply be herself again.

then i read places of the soul. it's about what makes buildings lovable, meaningful and lasting. i found it interesting, and it shed more light on the use of intuition and feeling in design for me. the universe seems to be pointing me at intuition lately, from all angles. i also read drawing from the right side of the brain, an old classic that i've heard referenced since high school but which i've never read. there is a new edition out. it too focuses on intuition and "defeating" the analytic and lingual part of the brain so that the perceiving/feeling side gets a chance to control drawing.

today, at the natural cafe on state street in santa barbara, i picked up reading the timeless way of building by christopher alexander, who—why am i surprised—began talking about intuition and feeling as the benchmarks by which universal patterns can be distinquished within cultures. he argues that opinion, thought, argument and values are all fallible as metrics for determining what will create a place people like because they're contaminated by ego and divide people, whereas feeling, when it can be discerned seperately from analytic thinking, nearly always, in his research, brings people together in near universal agreement (he says 90-95% of the time).

catch up

faith at dick and daisy's

feet after the hot tub

busy. finished my video for the opera tuesday morning about an hour before hopping amtrak to new york. on the train i read an excellent book about what makes us love buildings. it's called the old way of seeing by jonathan hale. i'll hopefully write about it when i get the time. tuesday evening tech rehearsal at new york university went well. hung out with faith, a friend of dick's, who is in new york for the naraya, a shoshone-bannock dance ritual. next day, met up with friends john and charles who were test screening their film at the quad cinema for a run early next year. it looked gerat. picked up the timeless way of building by christopher alexander, another excellent book, that echoed much of jonathan hale's book. visited friend wendy, who showed me all the risque cheese descriptions she's foisted on the general public (who seem to adore them) at the cheese shop where she works and told me how much she misses vermont and wants her house in brattleboro back. later, the opera played well to an audience of about fifty.

friday, daisy, cypress and i drove up to vermont for the radical faerie semi-annual meeting where we discussed the next year's work on faerie camp destiny. last night we trekked to a private faerie land, jay and dan's house, for a hot tub under the stars, er, clouds. i hung out with my friend john for bit who then also came hot tubbing. we drove back into burlington, met up with michel, another faerie who couldn't make hot-tubbing, who cooked us some delicious asian-ish veggies at midnight.

this morning we did a little more business. i left at noon to visit friends roger and danny in plainfield. they cooked up a delicious lunch, and we caught up. they played me a new madonna song and gave me a book called star girl. i'm going to read it tuesday on the plane to los angeles. danny shaved his beard, looks great. i love swift change. spoke to my friend marco in los angeles. i'll be staying with him for a couple days then driving to santa barbara for christmas. victory, my refugee friend from new orleans, who has been living at the mill for the past few weeks, left for new york today, and perhaps for italy, if things work out for him. that's the news.

decorated moose

here is president and chief curator and display-maker of the main street museum, the state of vermont's "strangest museum", standing below a magnificent and terrifying decorated taxidermy display at the museum. the museum will party with the moose and other inanimate objects next weekend.

i am off to new york for a few days to show my video. cya later!

falling asleep

i'm falling asleep at the keyboard as i'm dubbing "dubya" and all his pals in my howls for saddam video. i've had little sleep the last few days. the poster for the performance is pictured. if you happen to have nothing to do thursday and you happen to be in new york city, come see!

42 minutes

the howls video is 42 minutes rough cut, just 14 minutes to go and of that three are already done. my computer is rendering acts 2 and 3 right now--which will take about 3 hours it tells me. i'm enjoying this project. it's teaching me a lot. i'm trusting my intuition, giving up on big ideas and just putting one thing after another. my friend, jon appleton, a composer, has told me for years that this is his process. my painting teacher, clifford west, also hinted to me that if you just start doing and follow your gut you will create larger, coherent themes, often without realizing it.

i'm attracted to this shot of a picnic table i took a couple years ago. i've cut it into sequences in several places in the piece which has begun to make it symbolic--of what i have no idea, but it's definitely saying something. then, i found some online clips from the department of defense of bomb hits in iraq with informative voiceovers such as, "yeah, we nailed that one." i noticed the tracking videos all have crosshairs and some other info overlayed on the image. so i got some plans for a picnic table and superimposed them over lots of footage leading up to the climax for act 3. the table tilts, wiggles, moves and blinks, chasing birds, people, and ultimately is dropped like a bomb into a matrix of faces. staring at this picnic table for about ten hours today i'm beginning to grasp its significance. the fun part about this process is discovering what things have meaning to me and why. when i'm looking, searching, the editing is smooth, effortless. each thing suggests the next.

howls

this is a still from the video i'm producing for an opera in new york entitled howls for saddam by bill le page, which will be performed at new york university next thursday night, just six days away. i find myself amazed by how often my creative process repeats and how much i dread the process. i start with a lot of ideas, mostly vague and pick one or two to play with. i'm excited. i work on specific aspects of a piece, usually a detail of some sort. in this case i investigated slow motion. then comes the disillusionment phase when the slow motion, for instance, doesn't work and i find myself at a total loss. this throws me into the next phase, denial. in this phase i do anything but work on the piece. fear of failure and the unknown creeps in but, as i should well know by now, the unknown is where the solutions lie. i rediscover this in the next phase, which is often preceded by an accidental discovery of some sort, in this case, matting a series of images. i have a big "aha!" that compels me to open the door to the uncharted and creativity blossoms. it feels like the triumph of the unconscious over the conscious. work begins in earnest, hopefully not too late. this process requires tremendous pressure, kind of like the geology that produces oil. if i didn't have a deadline it is nearly impossible for me to produce. if i could internally generate the pressures deadlines impose i could really make something of myself!

late nights

i'm working on a video piece for an opera that's to be performed next week in new york city. i'm cutting it close but i've got confidence it will come together! i've been staying up late working on it and find myself driving home when no one else is on the road, a pleasant experience. the piece plays in extreme slow motion—1/50 normal speed. if i had to give advice now i'd say: don't try this at home. specifically, with the work i'm producing, i've found no way to get the slow motion effect i'm looking for. so, i've begun writing a piece of slow motion software myself. whenever i start something like this i begin with foolish confidence that i'll tackle the problem in just a few hours. now sitting with some code that i've been working on for over a day, i'm humbled, as usual. but, i don't mind running into technical problems, they engage me and get me into the project and i find that technical thoughts inspire creative ones.

row cloth

some of you dear readers out there have asked about my greenhouse. i'm happy to report that it seems to be working. all my winter crop is green, happy and apparently doesn't mind freezing, to my astonishment. when it is below freezing the leaves tend to flop over but as soon as it gets above freezing they perk up. i recently placed row cloth over one of the rows to see how it improves things for the plants. within a greenhouse it is supposed to raise the temperature beneath the cloth seven degrees.

the book that inspired me to create all this, four season gardening, by eliot coleman, says that you need at least four hours of unobstructed sun to make a winter greenhouse work. unfortunately, the sun at this time of year just barely peeks above the land and it's light has to make its way through a lot of trees that, though leafless, block most of the light. so, i'm afraid i'm not going to be seeing high temperatures in this greenhouse until march. being on the south slope of a hill makes all the difference. if i ever buy land it will be south facing.

clean sweep

an organizational god from louisiana descended upon me here in white river junction this weekend. his name is victory and we set upon my studio with religious fervor. out went chairs, a couch, endless old papers, wires, clothes, rags, books, magazines, drawings, paintings, phones, a coffee maker, a dead rat, and a couple dirty light bulbs from the local burnt down strip club (i donated them to the main street museum. everything is arranged according to use. there's a computer area, a music area, an architecture area and a lounge area. i can't thank victory enough for helping me out. it feels great to be here. this cleanup was therapy.

second life

so, while in the midst of pondering my identity, a friend and fellow filmmaker, liz canner, introduced me to a way to remake myself: second life, an online world in which you create a persona, dress it up and wander the miles and miles (meters and meters actually) of user-built environments with mountains, forests, cities, skyscrapers, bars, clubs, teleports, flying saucers, motorcycles, bonfires, stores and casinos, amongst other things. you can meet people (aliens and animals too) and trade stuff with them. creating your first character is free. it costs for more. my character is named aloofdork fasching. he's tall, as you can see, enjoys fishnet and doesn't mind showing off his tight tummy. many aspects of physique are adjustable, including "package." you can purchase more detailed genitalia if you like but not wanting squander my meager L$250 allowance on vanity i chose the free, but vague, standard package at 100%. you can walk or fly and if you want to travel to a completely different part of the world you can teleport. land can be purchased, buildings built and what you create can be sold or traded. people are generally nice, but my outfit seemed to scare away most guys. for all the possibility of a fantasy online world, modesty seems to have an upper hand. guys mostly elect to keep the default denim and white tee outfit. a sassy black girl sitting on a staircase said to me, "honey, i love fishnet but you have to moderate!" she gave me some clothes to try on. later, i found a dance club full of less inhibited people, stepped in and stood watching everyone groove wondering, how do i get in on this action? the answer: F9, F10, F11, and F12. they're dance keys. soon i was gyrating like everyone else and found a hot cutie in chaps to strut with. my heart fluttered.

slamdance=no

from slamdance programming:

There's no good to tell you.  I could rehash the most volatile moments of the final programming meetings, recounting the gallant attempts to get your film in.  I could remind you of the incredibly high number of submissions for the very few amount of slots.  Finally, I could offer solidarity, revealing that I got a rejection myself yesterday and another on Friday.  But I can assume none of this really matters.

This year Slamdance received more narrative features than we ever have before.  We saw such an eclectic mix of films.  Thank you so much for submitting to Slamdance.  I sincerely hope you will continue to send us any future projects.  I wish you the best with your ongoing festival applications.

Congratulations on making a film!

is this confusing or what? i'm pretty sure they're not going to show my film ;)