loop de loop

this christmas's travel is beating my prior christmas travel hell. during that trip, an old woman used the emergency exit handle to support her as she sat down, inflating the emergency slide onto the luggage handlers. 24 hours later i made it to my destination, travelling through four different cities in a pattern reminiscent of needlepoint on acid.

but, today, was worse. i boarded a plane for charlotte, north carolina, arrived just fine, sat waiting for my next plane to find out it was cancelled. when i inquired about alternate flights they offered me a flight in FIVE days! i laughed out loud and said, quietly, no. they offered to fly me halfway around the country to a destination only 850 miles from where i was trying to get. so, they ultimately flew me back to where i started and said, good luck. pondering my options.

getting ready

getting ready to go to new mexico for holidays tomorrow. crazy busy. finishing film. emptying basement. doing end of year financials. too many things in one day.

crewdson

a friend recently turned me onto to the photographs of gregory crewdson. they're fantastic, highly contrived, look very much like film stills, and many use film actors as their subjects. i like the eerily lifeless quality they impart, despite all the color, fog, fire, water and other elements that make up life. crewdson's gallery in new york has an online presentation of his work here. there is a show at williams college contrasting crewdson's work with the paintings of edward hopper.

wiki

been setting up a wiki today. wikis are cool. the best example is wikipedia, a user written encyclopaedia. the one i set up is for a small film festival that i help organize. we needed a way to help collect comments and keep track of where screeners were for each film. a wiki is a pretty good solution. i'm impressed by the depth of the coding behind the wiki i used, mediawiki. it's the same wiki code that wikipedia uses.

challenge

"i had a problem before i had a problem, that's the problem." —ruth quirk.

results

i'm back from mental surgury, intact and happier. my ten day vipassana retreat was painful, ecstatic, frustrating and revelatory--generally mind-blowing. it was, along with the first retreat, one of the most fascinating things i've experienced. i got a little better at meditating, got a little better grasp of the technique and theory. the picture here is of the teacher, goenka-ji, who delivers the courses via audio and video recordings, assisted by live teachers. i highly recommend this program. dhamma.org

the central teaching is that through equanimity and awareness you can perceive and alter the mind/body interface and ultimately eliminate impurities in the mind that cause suffering in oneself and consequently in others. i find this tremendously inspiring. what can give more hope to someone than the understanding that their misery can be eliminated and that the technique to do so is simple and requires no devotion to objects, people or gods, making it accessible to anyone, with or without religious beliefs?

during this retreat, i discovered a heap of issues, not unlike the unattended laundry pile in my bedroom, that i need to work on. it's humbling to see the amount of crap lurking in my brain, but i also feel grateful that i've been shown it so that i know it needs work. vipassana (and yoga) seem to be the silver lining of the relationship trouble i've experienced the past three years. there is no teacher like pain.

going under the knife

tomorrow i go under the knife...an internal knife. i'll be doing another ten-day silent mediation retreat at dhara dhamma, the vipassana center in shelburne falls, mass. it's kind of like internal self surgery, where you peel layers of mental encrustations from your essential self. you do this by simply sitting still, concentrating on sensation, watching the mind and the body almost as if you were an outsider looking in. i'm looking forward to diving in again.

1984

i picked up a copy of orwell's 1984 before flying home from texas. somehow i'd never read it. it's eerie how many of the book's themes have manifested. perhaps it's actually a virus introduced to the ruling elite through prep school english classes so that when they eventually come to power they exectute the prime directives without knowing it.

along these lines, i was introduced to a movie in texas called the secret. it's getting the same kind of exposure as "what the bleep do we know" did. the production is melodramatic and focuses on material gain (do you want a car, money, a relationship?) but its message intrigued me. the message is that we attract whatever we imagine. our thoughts form the world around us. if we think negatively, negative things will be attracted to us, and conversely if we visualize the positive, we will attract the positive. this is not a new idea. i've encountered it in my yogic and buddhist studies, but i was happy to have the idea refreshed.

the concept that we are what we imagine is simple but i find it profoundly challenging and sublime. if all that is necessary to bring everything i want into my life is the adoption of a positive state of mind, why the hell don't i just do it? maybe nike is onto something. i normally go about my life thinking that my thoughts are essentially private and inconsequential, little electrical storms between my ears. but, if in fact they're coming attractions, as einstein called them, then a bit of discipline is called for! if it's true that what i think will manifest, i should not want to think about awful things too much. but, the irony in this early 21st century is that when i turn on the tube, read the paper, am confronted with an advertisement, i find that what happens in my head most often is negative. my habit is to exclaim in disgust that everything's going to hell. the refrain at the diner i frequent for breakfast is "isn't that just awful." it seems to me that if we really want to change the world, we first have to toss out notions that we're inconsequential and replace them with beliefs that, despite our relative tinyness in the universe, we are intimately connected and individually powerful and that what we collectively think creates our collective future. in orwell's 1984, the most important goverment branch is the "thought police." the slightest indication, even a facial gesture, that indicates a person is thinking about anything anti-status-quo brings on their demise. it is as if those in power know the potential of thought to alter/create the future and so they do everything in their power to control it so that it meets their needs (to stay in power).

what's so different about today? our media makes sure we're kept in a state of perpetual fear which, not unlike the thought police, enforces conformity by repeatedly focusing us on the negative. it would be fascinating to study a place where news, internet, any communication, for some reason, was cut off for a period of time to see if the events in that place would turn for the better or worse. do the thinking patterns of humans tend toward the negative or the positive? if it is true that we are what we think, how amazing would it be if everyone managed to reject hatred—to simply refuse to think it—and instead, when confronted with the awful, responded with a declaration of what would be nicer? how different would the world be today had the united states responded to 9/11 this way?

last of austin

i fly out tomorrow, back to the east coast. some final images of austin...

city hall has a pretty cool staircase in its parking garage with a waterfall. construction cranes dominate the downtown skyline as do naked structures to which they attend—my favorite state of most buildings. sunset from mount bonnell, just around the corner from my aunt's house, is stunning. apparently, the balcones fault caused this dramatic rift into which the colorado river flowed (fact check, please).

austin moore

last day in austin. my aunt's friend mary margaret was very kind to tour me around downtown austin with a special trip to the architect charles moore's house this morning. i've long been curious about this house having seen it published, and having been influenced by moore in graduate school. it was a treat to actually see this house because, like so much architecture, it's difficult to get a sense of a place from photographs and drawings. this house is especially challenging because, in photographs, moore's sizable folk art collection tends to dominate, but in person—in three dimensions—the complex spatial relationships are clear, inviting and delightful. kevin keim, the charles moore foundation's director, was very kind to tour us around and detail the story of the house. there's more information about the foundation at www.charlesmoore.org.

nasher

the nasher sculpture museum, dallas, texas. designed by renzo piano. more pix here.

the modern

i took lots of pictures of the modern, too many to post here. you can see them by clicking here. it's genius. designed by japanese architect tadao ando.

kimbell

the kimbell museum, forth worth, texas, designed by louis kahn. more pix here.

lone star

i'm writing from the radisson business center, fort worth, texas, open til 10pm, on an ancient ibm keyboard connected to a pedestrian dell desktop with free high speed. i just hopped out of the hot tub in which i chlorinated myself in shorts from the lost and found. the hotel is most accomodating.

today i visited two museums with my aunt and two of her friends, owen and judy. one museum i've seen in pictures, heard about for decades, the other is completely new to me. the first is the kimbell, designed by louis kahn. i once told a newspaper reporter that i thought architecture was at least 50% about photons. the kimbell is a testament to that notion, as is the second museum, but that comes in the next paragraph. kahn's design of long parallel barrel vaults slit at their apex to allow light to penetrate and be washed upon the vault's interior surfaces produces some of the most beautiful museum lighting i've ever seen. the light is made especially beautiful by kahn's use of travertine marble and highly finished concrete.

next we crossed the street to see the modern designed by tadao ando. the entrance is a modest and calm composition of glass, metal and steel. it's not flashy but, kind of like a good movie, the first minute of your experience whets your appetite and foreshadows the interior, which is one of the most beautiful museum interiors i've seen. i said to my aunt, "you can't take a bad picture in here." five wings house the art and sit in a reflecting pool. each is punctuated with a giant Y-shaped column supporting its cantilevered roof. there is perhaps twenty feet between wings and you can step out into a brightly lit floor to ceiling glass atrium at the end of each and observe people in the other wings looking at art. with so many panes of glass interacting you see reflections of the museum, people and art overlayed with what you are seeing directly. it felt like i was looking through memories and though the people i could see in the other wings were many panes of glass separated from me, i felt a closeness to them.

earlier in the week i visited friends michael and rebekah in wimberly. they had a surprise for me which turned out to be a session with glenda bell, a sound healer, who surrounds you as you lay in relaxation with vibrating metal and crystal bowls. when these bowls begin ringing together the sensation is, well, just amazing. my bones vibrated, my pulse quickened, the sound moved through and around me. at the end she placed a couple bowls on my chest and abdomen. i was high hours afterward.

after just arriving, i drove a rented car east to houston, where my friends garrett and sarah live with their two kids. i've not seen them since they were married. garrett graciously toured me around houston, showing me the great and the banal, both of which i love, and which seem to be freely intermingled in houston. it's refreshing to visit a place which zoning has not homogenized. i've come away with an aesthetic appreciation for houston. some of the highway interchanges take your breath away.

tomorrow, dallas.

texas bound

i'm flying to texas tomorrow to visit family and friends. i haven't been to austin in a long long time, more than 30 years, i'm not quite sure. i'll be visiting my aunt, uncle, cousin and friends michael and rebekah, as well as friends from architecture school in houston, garrett finney and sarah newbery and their kids. i love to travel. i especially like airports. to me they're almost like meditation centers. i like the time alone to read, contemplate, people watch and the perspective from 30,000 feet. why are there so many undeveloped subdivisions out there in the middle of nowhere?

queer as loaf

i've been indulging in a bit of television watching lately. not actual television with commercials and showtimes, but queer as folk on dvd with pause, fast forward and bathroom breaks. two of my roomies, javi and justin, have been watching it and i've become hooked, consuming three episodes at a time. i've found myself intrigued by the coldest, perhaps least likeable, character in the show. he's skilled, intelligent, handsome, wealthy but he holds expressions of love at arms length, either ignoring them or slashing them with his wit and cynicism. it is television, but still, i wonder, could someone really be so cold, so abrasive and calculating and not lose everyone? even with this question in my mind, i'm find myself drawn to this person. i feel that though he's difficult he is also human and in his own way is being genuine acknowledging (or not) his difficulty with love. and like this character, brian, i'm know that deep down i have a hard time believing i'm worthy of love--i feel silly typing that out, melodramatic--but i know it's true and i know it's why i have sought out yoga, meditation, counseling and even some friends and lovers. pema chodron says that we, in the west, have lots of trouble with self-love. we doubt ourselves, sometimes hate ourselves, mistake indulgence for self-compassion. this baffles eastern practitioners, especially the dalai lama, who don't understand this western trait. it makes for good capitalism! sales of self-help products, including mid-life-crisis objects and holier-than-thou paraphernalia are high. so, while the other characters in the show seem to have more going in the self-compassion department, i deeply respect the challenge brian is up against and empathize with him.

happy election

for those of you who haven't seen my "award winning" video about the president and his pals i produced two years ago, here it is on youtube, called "powers of bush." just press play.

the awards were minor, but it was fun touring it around. it played on vermont public television and i recently re-used it in another video piece called howls for saddam with music by bill le page. maybe it'll get famous on youtube. tell your friends!

some friends have seen a similar kind of image on michael moore's website, but it ain't mine. that image appeared at just the same time i was producing this video. it always seems to happen that ideas pop into the greater consciousness simultaneously. i just read that autism was discovered independently by two researcers in different countries and both gave it the same name!

hardware hell/studio clean

i've disembodied my PowerMac G5 and taken it to be resurrected. resurrection takes 7-10 days and requires a $65 deposit. it may require additional time and/or materials, at additional expense. in lieu of waiting, i have purchased a replacement machine, a bit faster, more memory, dual processor which will arrive friday if all goes well. i pondered buying a brand new machine, but then realized i'd have to buy a new version of final cut pro (video editing software), new photoshop, and god only knows what else, for something like $2000.

while i was at the apple store i noticed the 23" LCD screens have dropped in price dramatically, making me salivate. i bowed but didn't bite.

what shall i do without a machine? i think i will clean the studio.

harmony

there is a fantastic sunrise out my window, crimson. yesterday, i seem to have killed my computer. i have a cold of some sort, yucky throat. today is election day. my car goes into the shop this morning. i have many unfinished jobs.

this morning i awoke with a micro-epiphany: i'm attracted to music because there is little harmony in my life. music fulfills a deep need for me and suggests to me that i might one day find harmony. i grew up in a dissonant family. we all had good qualities and individually we excelled in our own ways but as a family we chafed. coherent dinner conversations were rare. more typically they were fragmented and occasionally upsetting. perhaps because of growing up in this environment, or for some other reason, i can count on one hand the times i've felt completely at ease, harmonious. they have all been after intense experiences which exhausted me, brought me back to an essential self that was profoundly harmonious.

so, as i'm learning about how music works, i feel i'm learning a big life lesson i somehow missed. i'm learning how harmony is built. for whatever reason, as a child i was much more inclined to chaos, and since then have always enjoyed disaster. my first drawings were about rockets exploding, houses catching fire (dad & mom?). in pre school i would paint a nice house, decorate it, the flames would erupt from a window, smoke poured out in the form of black paint and filled the paper as if it were a container until the entire sheet was black. i accompanied my painting with sound effects. i remember the amusement of my teacher. but as true as this state of mind feels to me (in that the world i grew up in felt chaotic and threatening) i have always recognized (sometimes with fear and loathing, sometimes with sappy abandon) the peaceful. deep down beneath all my armor, i am attracted to harmony. it moves me. i can be brought to tears when i turn on the news and hear about nations resolving deep tensions, people making up, an animal being saved.

i see all this tension, resolution, dissonance, and harmony reflected in music in a profound way. i see how that if you start with a note, a fundamental, and build upon that with certain relationships, you get a something that sounds harmonious. and when you put things together that have no particular relationship to each other you get chaos (noise). if i had a fundamental notion about my bedroom or my desk there might be the possibility of some harmony. but as they are, if you could turn them into sound, they would at best be an ugly chord tending toward static.

my advisor in college said to me after i'd had trouble with an architectural design, "you can really only have one or maybe two ideas in a building." he was speaking of a fundamental. i remember watching picasso in a movie create a painting. what impressed me most was how he never contradicted his own moves. he only built on what he'd done, harmonized with himself. i'm learning from music to consider my own fundamentals, listen for them, build upon them and harmonize.

petals and notes

first off, happy birthday brother frank! i have no idea if you read this but i hope you're having a good one.

ever since band in fifth, sixth and seventh grade, maybe eighth too, in which i played the trumpet, and ever since the few piano and guitar lessons i had in my teens, i've always wanted, desperately at times, to understand how music works. i did well enough memorizing notes and chords, but it was always a mystery to me how keys worked, why there were all those sharps and flats, and why, whenever i tried making up tunes myself, they always had a similar sound to them that i couldn't escape from.

it's ironic that i have spent a good deal of my professional life working with music-making machines and still have never figured it out. but, i'm taking long overdue action to remedy this situation. for the past many nights (and some days) i have been moving through a book i found on my bookshelf (who knows when i bought it) called how to write songs on guitar by rikky rooksby. i'm slightly embarrassed to carry it around with me becuase so many people have the impression that i know what i'm doing! but, let me put it out there right now, i don't! (i feel much better.)

after a few nights with the book, i have enough of a grip to see how fantastic the mechanisms behind music are. of course i knew they were magical because i love music and love the way it sends me, but to see how it works...wow! i have tried reading harmony textbooks, and i may try again, but because i had trouble hearing what the books talked about, and because they assumed some proficiency on a keyboard, i felt left in the dark. the rooksby book works for me because he uses popular music on guitar that i know so much better than classical to demonstrate chords, chord progressions, arrangement, rhythm, melody and lyrics. when i see a chord progression i often can play the song in my head and hear what he's talking about. if i can't, i go to the iTunes store and listen to a free clip of the song, which, most often, is the part the rooksby calls out. very handy.

it's exciting to begin understand how the simplicity of a seven-note system (scale) translates into nearly infinite possibilities, almost like dna. i feel like i'm a kid looking up into the night sky and trying to grasp it all. beautiful and sublime. so, what does this have to do with flowers?

halloweenie

halloween. this is the kind of situation i love: all i had for a costume was a pair of mismatched platform shoes, one white, one black. so, what to do? stay the course, of course--it's a national trend. black and white tights: easy. black and white tank top: required two tank tops sewed together. black and white wig: costume shop (same place shoes came from). black and white innertube: got from tire store for free (it had six holes in it, trip to k-mart to get a bike patch kit), old white paint i had lying around. one casualty: gabriel's old box fan which died while helping to dry the paint. makeup: krylon (the theater makeup, not the spray paint). if i ever get a tatoo i'll definitely consider spots.

why i thought i needed an innertube i'll probably never know but it worked great on the dance floor moving in a kind of counterpoint to my hip gyration. it acted like a fat hoolahoop. it was also kind of like having a dog when walking. it gave people an indirect way to say hello: "let's bump!" i'm definitely taking the outfit to mardi gras.

mixed media

the question running through my mind this morning was: how do i integrate music, film and architecture? they seem to be three major interests that i cycle through my life. i guess another way to ask that question is how would i, as a professional designer, incorporate my interest in video and music, which aren't traditionally considered aspects of architecture. perhaps i'm thinking too stereotypically. one of my teachers in grad school always talked about hybridization being the most interesting kind of practice. when two or more things are brought together to the point that it isn't possible to determine where one begins and the other ends you are hybridizing. most people hybridize by procreating. this doesn't interest me but melding objects and ideas does. i suppose if i thought of buildings as sound and visual environments, which they obviously are, and if sound and the purely visual were treated with the same emphasis as the architectonic, then perhaps some form of hybridization might happen. architecture has been called frozen music. from the highway, through the cinema-dimensioned windshields, it looks like a movie. so, what prevents me from letting all this stuff flow? i find myself, more often than i'd like, segregating my interests when they don't need to be. i might even say they want to meld and the only thing keeping them from doing so is my aging sense of propriety. "you can't do that!" anyway, it's more interesting to let them blend. teenagers, with little prejudice, seem to blend, transmogrify, misuse and misinterperet exceptionally well, often to the dismay of their elders, but also often to great effect.

me me

can can you you say say cheese cheese ? ?

photo by salmonellapez

the art of blah

i'm feeling blah. i find it's a healthy state of mind for meditation. a subtle depression, lack of enthusiasm, lethargy--nothing calls me to action, no one is pressuring me. sometimes i feel as if i can't move. i'll look out at my leg resting on a chair and it's not a great leap for me to consider that it's someone else's leg. sit, feel, observe, stay quiet, don't move. the art of blah. i also feel like watching television while blah. i consumed two episodes of queer as folk last night. it didn't change my mood much, other than to cause me to reflect on how different my life is from those in the show. how did we, as a culture, come to consider blah as bad? why have we not been able to embrace it as a natural and beneficial state of affairs? when was the last time you saw blah being touted as positive? when i turn blah, it's my inclination to push it away, pretend to be happy. but, i've noticed that what starts to move me from blahdom is the acknowledgement of it. until i own the blah, allow that it's a part of me and stop bashing it (which really is bashing myself) i remain stuck in blah. static blah is a bummer. but dynamic blah is pretty interesting. so, i say, embrace your blah! relax into it, open up to its charms, soften your rejection of it, rejoice in blah, observe its flow. take boring pictures. say nothing interesting. make no excuses.

ecstatic reflector dream

i had a dream last night that reminded me of dreams i had about sex before i'd ever had sex. i drifted in this dream, into buildings, through parks, down streets. i looked, watched, at first casually. then i met a person who seemed to reflect me in some way. we stopped and looked at each other. we didn't speak, just stood across from each other. the more we observed each other the more difficult it became for me to distinquish him from myself. a sensation began in my heart, a deep tingly sensation and my pulse quickened. it spread through my entire body, intense enough that it was barely bearable. at the peak of this sensation, which felt in many ways like my experience of love, it dawned on me that there was nothing between us, that in fact we were discreet physical manifestations of the same entity. i felt as if i might dissolve, that one step further and i would cease to exist, that he and i would somehow short the universe. but, the sensation went only so far. there was no climax. this was the part that reminded me of my pre-sex sex dreams. i would reach the moment where i would have had to do something i'd never actually experienced and the dream would simply end, or go into a kind of inifinte loop.

so, i walked some more, looking for other people or things that might spark the same experience. how much of this world was undifferentiated from me, i wondered? i went on to repeat the dissolving with other people, things and even songs that i sang. i realized i could dissolve into anything if i found the right approach, state of mind. desire seemed to make it impossible. if i wanted to dissove, it wouldn't happen. to enter the experience, i first had to find a state of balance, calm, harmony, then it could begin. i practiced developing this state and i became pretty good at it. i was able to move further into dissolution, to push the envelope, but the further i dissolved the harder dissolving further became. it seemed that dissolving was a progressively denser experience that required increasing intensies of calmness to penetrate.

unlike in my adult life here on planet earth where i know what happens when you go all the way with sex, the other side of dissolution is still a mystery. but today i'm looking out the window a bit differently.

jammy skies

every once in a while a casual encounter turns magical. last weekend, daisy and i trekked over to jade's house in jersey city. we hung out a while then took a tour of the house. upstairs jade has a small recording studio and before long i had a guitar in my hands, jade a keyboard and daisy a microphone. we jammed for a couple hours. what delicious songs we made! if listening to music can get you high, making it can come close to...nirvana? someone said to me recently that you know you're in the moment when time becomes intangible. i know i'm in the moment when my tongue sticks out. i have a little sore spot just to the right of center below my lower lip where it hangs out when time-machining. i want to do more things that get my tongue out.

rugasana

last friday i drove down to new york with my architecture school friend and classmate andrea to attend a memorial dinner and party for a classmate who died last summer. i hadn't seen most of my classmates in sixteen years. i was impressed by how good everyone looked. and not that anyone is getting senile just yet, but i was reminded of my grandmother who had alzheimers because, even though we'd all obviously aged a bit, like my grandmother in the midst of her decline, our personalities seemed utterly unchanged and entirely independent of our experience. we all had more stories, more things, more people in our lives, but our essences hadn't shifted one bit. my first boyfriend ever, john, said to me over dinner, "you seem just the same." my impression that the last sixteen years of my life had wrought tremendous change evaporated, perhaps through my eyes. it reminded me that the most efficient and peaceful way to live is to simply accept oneself, or better yet, celebrate oneself.

the party started at a restaurant called "park," an old parking garage, and moved on to a small living-room-like bar called "bongo" then proceeded to an apartment in the now chic gallery district of chelsea where we enjoyed more alcohol and delicious buttery egg sandwiches until 4:30am. at that point, andrea and i, not relishing the idea of crossing town and the river, begged a couple couches and a few blankets with which to crash.

in the morning, i did a little yoga with a rug thing over my head.

public art

i was in new york over the weekend. on my way to the train station i encountered this amazing projection of madison square garden on the wrapped post office building.

jbw effect

the jason bruce whipple effect has me in its grip. it's a pleasant effect inducing convulsions of creative thinking and performance. i would call it inspiring. many people have this effect on me and i am grateful that they continue to appear in my life like muses and cheer leaders. in this particular instance, photographed, the jbw effect induced me to enter a friendly's restaurant in the springfield mall. the effect emanates from jason and in this case was amplified by his leaning up against a post and making incoherent gestures. if it hadn't been for jason's alluring performance at street level i doubt i'd have considered entering the place. i was more attracted initially to the absurdity of the brief strip of colonial fence atop the modern strip mall. at one point in my life i would have been drawn in by the oversized greasy posters of deep-fried food in the window. but, it was jason, his lust for ice cream, and his offer to buy one for me, that ultimately sold me on friendly's.

inside, we were assaulted by a layout reminiscent of bad highway design. visually, it was confusing. the busy carpet pattern made understanding the relationship between stools, benches and tables difficult, if not impossible. it appeared at once organized and completely chaotic. in contrast, the stainless steel production line extended directly behind the registers to the rear of the restuarant inducing a kind of horizontal vertigo. i nearly pitched directly into the counter.

after declining to sit, which caused some confusion, and after ordering two ice creams, one hard, one soft, which required at least 70 keystrokes at the register, a noisy and rapid stream of paper emitted from a bank of printers down the line and three employees in regulation uniform began to execute our order. i ordered soft. the fabricator operated the twistee machine competently, if slowly, and presented me my cone with the exclamation, "now, isn't that beautiful!" in fact, it was misshapen and listing. jason and i looked at each other in silence. as she handed it over to me i mentioned that i'd requested "chocolate sprinkles." she frowned, walked it back down the line, consulted the printout which apparently did not specify sprinkles. a bevy of command and control language ensued between the person who took our order and the woman who'd made my cone. it sounded like the chatter pilots make when approaching an airport. sprinkles were finally added to my order, sparingly.

unfortunately, for jason, his order was first presented to him as a denial: "i'm sorry, we are out of cookies and cream." jason immediately began a search for a second choice while the friendly's team offered to create cookies and cream for jason by taking vanilla ice cream and mashing cookies into it right on the spot! i applauded their ingenuity, but jason moved on to another, perhaps safer, choice which i cannot remember.

this is the kind of situation i find myself in during jbw effect. i thoroughly enjoy it. it reminds me of kant's description of beauty (the one thing i remember from philosophy class): purposive purposelessness. we were very seriously up to nothing in particular and that was pure delight.

slabbiness

faeries circling the new foundation

me posing on a post

the foundation is in at faerie camp destiny, a concrete slab of varying thickness protected from frost by a somewhat elaborate gravel and insulation sandwich beneath the concrete that, in theory, will keep it from heaving. this foundation marks the end of the construction season at destiny, where i've been camping for the last month. we'll be working a couple more weeks to tie up loose ends and put the place into hibernation. it's been wonderful to be in the woods. i miss it now sitting here at the computer. i hadn't realized how much my strength had abated, even with yoga, until this last month. i love the feeling in my body after a full day's work on my feet. i feel the day's work embodied in my muscles, bones. i mentioned in a heart circle at destiny how i really don't get feelings of accomplishment from milestones like the foundation going in. i realized after i said that that i in fact do feel accomplishment but it comes in much smaller packages. i feel accomplishment after lifting a beam, making a fine cut in a post, keeping my tools sharp, little stuff. at the end of the day all those little things bring me peace. the feeling is more one of harmony than pride, that i've achieved some kind of balance.

faerie foundation

here's what i'm up to lately...putting in a foundation with the radical faeries. i'm having a great time building something new for a change. my prior projects have all been renovations. i suppose you could say that all construction is renovation because you're altering the earth, landscape, ecology, so forth to make way for a building. in fact, i would definitely argue that, and would also argue that most construction does not think of what is being removed as integral to a design.

i'm having a fantastic experience in the woods, working on this project with a bunch of volunteers. we're learning together. my days start awakening in a tent, then breakfast and usually some chat with other people camping, then doing dishes from the day before. next we begin work which includes working on the foundation, cutting timbers, fetching water, cutting wood, repairing tools. lunch happens sometime after noon, then more work until sundown, after which we have dinner and sometimes light a fire and make up crazy songs together. i'm on my feet most of the day. my posture has improved. i noticed yesterday when i lifted a heavy saw how much stronger i've become living out in the woods. i feel hearty!

banal glory

i love this kind of scene. they're all over the place, but occasionally you find a gem, like this one. i'm attracted to the geometry. big box stores create fabulous diagonals. i suppose any place that's as large as a shopping center is bound to create powerful vanishing perspective effects. in this case, many of the diagonals resolve in each other creating divine harmony. i wouldn't want to live here, but visiting is just fine.

morning wood

here's my view every morning at faerie camp destiny where i'm speniding most of my time. i enjoy living with trees. they're majestic and reliable, most of the time. occasionally they tip, drop a branch, uproot. they encourage me to take a long view of things.

lukoil faggot

the other day i drove into our local lukoil to fill up. at one of the pumps stood two guys next to a truck. one guy was middle aged, a bit pudgy. the other was thin, muscular, short-cropped hair. he was talking loudly. the gas station attendant was standing outside on the curb arms crossed glaring at the younger guy.

as i drove past the two to get to the other side of the pumps i heard the younger say, "look at that faggot in his red faggot car!" i laughed to myself at the same time i felt a primal tinge of animal fear in my spine. i got out of my car and began to fill up. the younger guy was yelling at everyone, everything, calling people names, screaming at cars driving by. i thought i'd been spared when he guffawed and yelled, "look at that faggot in his orange faggot shoes." he had a thing for color, i realized. i ignored him and continued to fill up. then he came right over to me and said to my face, "hey, what's up with those shoes? are you a faggot?" without much thought, i looked right in his eyes and said, "yep," a bit surprised at myself. for the first time since i'd been there, he stopped talking. then he said quietly, ducking his head a bit, "really?" i said, "uh huh." he asked me more about my shoes. i took the cue and asked him if he wanted to try one on. he looked at me for a second then accepted. he took off his boot revealing a dirty sock. i handed over my orange shoe, an orange rubber clog actually, and stood on one foot while he tried it on. he said, "wow! where the hell you get these things? i'll buy these off ya! how much?" i told him where to get them. he then introduced himself by name, asked mine, shook my hand and told me it was nice to meet me. then he told me how his uncle had come out of the closet and what chaos that had caused in his family. the scene closed with him returning my shoe, putting his boot back on, getting in his truck with his pal who had silently watched, perhaps in as much amazement as me, and drove off holering out the window that he'd just tried on "some faggot's orange shoe!"

if i had been with a group of gay men i'm sure there'd have been a lot of cat calling and name calling right back at him. but it was just me and for some reason, i didn't resist him, i just told him the truth. i felt great afterwards. i don't know if it made any difference in his life, but it brought home to me that telling the truth, honoring myself in the face of attack and more importantly respecting and honoring the attacker is a weapon powerful enough to interrupt patterns of violence and hatred.

timber framing

here's a pic of me and peat at faerie camp destiny. we're working hard cutting a timber frame that will eventually house a kitchen, bathroom, shower and mechanical room for the camp. it feels great to be working with my hands. though i was incredibly sore after three days of physical labor, i know my body likes it and my spirit likes it. i sit at a desk way too much.

picture by jason. more pix of timber framing and faerie camp destiny here.

still drinking coffee

it's got me. coffee shenpa. my feet are tapping, my fingers tingling, my teeth gnashing. it's chemical stress and i'm a coffee achiever! i used to hate the way it tasted. i had my first cup on a hot summer day in silver plume, colorado. i'd not had a drink of anything for hours, my parched lips begged me for cool moist anything, my head ached with the kind of pain that can make you cry. why i'd not asked for water is now a mystery to me. i was a nervous teenager obsessed with the illusion of self-reliance. i came across a kitchen-service-sized percolator in the back of a dusty general goods store, the kind with the glass tube on the side that shows you how full it is. some cups next to it invited me plus no one was watching. i drew a cupful, drawing the black spigot tab toward me, watching my cup fill. an acrid steamy smell filled my nostrils. i had my doubts but took a swig anyway. i gagged. it tasted terrible. in fact, it probably was terrible in the scheme of coffee these days, but i didn't know that then. i added lots of powdered creamer, so much that it became sludgy. i couldn't bring myself to finish it. i don't recall how i found water later, but i'm sure i thought it was nirvana.

nico's roast

some pictures from nico muhly's birthday lamb roast over the weekend. nico is an up and coming composer and conductor and the son of painter bunny harvey and filmmaker frank muhly. david ford and i met bunny and nico in rome while visiting my friend garrett finney who was a fellow at the american academy. bunny was also at the academy during a break from her teaching job as an art professor at wellesley college. we ended up renting her apartment for a week while she was away in paris. when she returned we discovered (well, probably before then) that we all lived very close to each other in vermont. nico was then 13 years old and could play a mean streak on the academy's piano. he's now 25 and has been called one of the most promising young composers in america by the new yorker, has worked with bjork on her recent album, has conducted and premiered pieces at tanglewood, will debut his own album soon and the list goes on.

the lamb roast was somewhat grisly. the sawing and carving was done on a woodworker's bench with a hack saw! nico requested a roast to put to bed or at least acknowledge an early life trauma around his pet lambs being put before him on his dinner plate. i'm not sure how the event worked for him but everyone seemed to delight. the liver was the best i've ever tasted. yes, i ate meat. i've been doing it lately. hmmm.

shenpa

shenpa: tibetan for "attachment". read about it here!

nova scotia

bench at gampo abbey

sunset at gampo abbey

gabriel and i travelled to nova scotia, canada, last week, to visit buddhist friends and buddhist places there. the car became our home as four of us crossed the vastness of nova scotia on our pilgramage. the land is stark and beautiful, quiet and reverential. it's no wonder it was chosen for the seat of shambala's western practice. the elements force plants, animals and buildings close the the ground, creating a short and messy haircut of a landscape. i took lots of pix. more are here. i'm being lazy. i only posted a couple here.

the highlight of the trip was a visit to gampo abbey, a tibetan buddhist monastery quite literally at the end of the line on the north side of cape breton. this is the place pema chodron lives, teaches and practices. she's a fairly well known author now, apparently canada's best selling. despite the monastery's distant and difficult location, quite a few "pilgrims" showed up for the afternoon tour. we were guided through the main floor, library and finally the meditation hall, passing many shrines to shambala's teachers. those who wanted to meditated for about a half hour.

our friend deborah, who kindly drove us hither and yon, is a buddhist shrine and flag expert known as the "betsy ross" of shambala because she sewed the first shambala flag designed by chogyam trungpa rinpoche. she prepared the shrine brocades in gampo meditation hall and, i believe, also makes traditional clothing for monks and nuns including pema. i enjoyed seeing and being in this place that i've heard about for so long. it is much smaller than i imagined. but the setting is more spectacular and inspiring than i could have imagined. set upon a cliff high above the sea, the sun sets through the meditation hall windows over water rippled by the play of whales and dolhpins. it's breathtaking.

we took a ferry home across the bay of fundy to cut some of the drive home. coming back we realized how much wilder nova scotia is than coastal maine, which felt like a shower and shave after a week of roughing it.

willoughby and bread and puppet

jenny and eran

sky above willoughby

a bread and puppet ship

moving the crowd

hands in the forest

after the show two performers cross the field

some of vermont's highlights: lake willoughby and bread and puppet. the former is a lake in the northeast kingdom of vermont that sits between two enormous rock cliffs. it never seems real to me. just too darned amazing. it works pretty well as a wind tunnel too and on saturday sitting on the beach felt more like being on the prow of a ship.

the latter is theater troupe based in glover, vermont that puts on shows during the summer in a giant outdoor semi-circular theater vaguely reminiscent of greek amphitheaters (it used to be a sand pit, if my memory serves). back in the good 'ol days tens of thousands of people showed up for one giant event. they're now doing shows on weekends to smaller, less insane crowds. the way they use the landscape in their productions is breathtaking. the way they use cardboard is inspiring. one of their mottos is "cheap art".

with smaller crowds the performance moves about the land. we started in the theater, moved in procession up the hill, back down to the theater, then another procession to the hill, then into the forest where the performance ended in silence. slowly people left.

there's some information on bread and puppet here.