friendly mike & the imodiums

in selinsgrove, mike tried administering some imodium. results here...

roger fire

my gifted friend roger came for a visit yesterday. he shared with me his experience assisting a teacher training program at the kripalu yoga center in lenox, massachussetts, where it looks like he'll be moving shortly to be the first practitioner in a two-year intensive yoga study program there. he can't wait to get started. his eyes were beaming! it sounds great, a challenging immersion, commitment to learn, explore. i'm a bit jealous!

i love just sitting with roger. i don't know how we do it, but it seems that when we sit we both enter a calm and meditative state where after just a few minutes we begin to dig deep and share, explore, bring to the surface some wonderful and some difficult stuff. this connection was forged a couple years ago in the intense fire of a brief affair during which we scared and hurt each other so much it's surprising we can relate today. but, i'm finding fire is a great teacher, and with so much fire between us and with the immediate pain now subsided, we're able to explore what it was that lit the fire, got to us, what spun us out of control, how we became entangled, what we both craved, missed, and how we repeat those same patterns today with other people. roger introduces me to or leads me to a new places each time we sit, to new questions, which sometimes bug me, sometimes delight, but always move me, light my fire.

selinsburg pix

there is a quaint and lovely downtown, but my eye is drawn to the banal.

mall bugs

i grew up with malls, loved malls as a kid. the mall near my house was called cinderalla city. it had amazing flying saucer-like light fixtures that i imagined putting into sci-fi movies some day. the parking lot had structural problems. the concrete deck sagged dramatically so that driving across it made you sick to your stomach. cinderalla city turned into a pumpkin and has since rotted away. a new, more glamorous mall replaced it, much like the new and popular susquehanna mall that we visited as bugs last weekend. gabriel, mike and i with a troupe of acrobats from philadelphia, flew our 16-foot tall butterflies about the mall delighting, terrorizing and non-plusing the shoppers. some of the most receptive people to the bugs were teen boys. this surprised me. lots of older grumpy men were heard to say things like, "i can't believe they pay people to do that." but, mostly, people smiled, laughed, teen girls wanted hugs, and lots of people told us how "cool" they were. the butterfly puppets were invited to perform as part of a butterfly celebration at the mall. there were real butterflies in a pavilion near the entrance and butterfly balloons, stickers and other paraphernalia. many people choose to spend their entire saturday at the mall. i noticed quite a few people who didn't appear to shop much. they mostly seemed to enjoy just being there. some meandered the halls people-watching or pretending to be on some kind of mission.

untitled accidental art

last weekend, a friend, mike duffy, and i drove down to selinsgrove, pennsylvania to perform butterfly puppets with gabriel and a small troupe of acrobats from philadelphia. we encountered this spectacular piece of accidental public art at a rest stop along the way.

parking lots

i love the markings in parking lots. i used to chalk my family's driveway with pieces of sheetrock i broke from our garage by ramming my front bicycle tire into the wall. my parents didn't appreciate this. i feigned ignorance. i once also set up a traffic light system with flashlights wired to a central battery controlled by switches i made from metal can lids and nails. i rarely had any traffic in my little world but i loved running it anyway. occasionally, a neighborhood kid or one of my brothers or sisters would happen on my chalked city and ride through it on their bike. it felt real.

paint experiments

in my quest for the easy and the cheap i have happened upon home-made paint. i guess making your own paint really isn't as easy as going to the hardware store and buying it, but it's a lot more fun and is less expensive. best of all this paint is non-toxic, made from common things like milk, eggs, lime and, for my tests, rust (iron oxide).

my friend danny loaned me a book called the natural paint book by lynne edwards and julia lawless. today i collected materials and made five kinds of paint. i tried them out on my studio wall, as you can see. i did have to prepare some things in advance, namely curd cheese (also known as quark) and lime putty.

you make quark by putting lemon juice or vinegar (something acid) into skim milk, place the mix somewhere warm and wait half a day or so. my first batch didn't work because i mixed it cold. i heated the next batch and it worked a lot better. you then strain the curds from the whey with cheescloth laid in a strainer.

lime putty is available in the u.k. ready-made. in the u.s. it's harder to find that way, but you can make a facsimile with type-s hydrated lime, available at building supply stores. you first put the lime in a bucket, add water, mix til it's smooth and then let it sit making sure there's water covering the mix. the longer it sits the better. i've let my mix sit a day and, yes, it's kind of like putty. back in the old days they'd let it sit for years!

so, now the fun part. you get to make paint. the first thing i tried was quark and pigment. mixing the two together i was skeptical. the mix was chunky. but, when i brushed it on the wall the chunks smeared onto the wall smoothly. the paint is tranlucent but dries flat. brushwork shows providing opportunity for interesting overlapping texture.

next i tried quark and oil. i mixed five parts quark to one part oil then added pigment. the mixture was substantially different from the quark only mix. it went on thinner and dried with an eggshell finish.

next i tried quark and lime. this created a kind of gritty paint, more opaque than the others. it dried flat.

last i tried pure lime and pigment. this went on super thick and opaque, very solid. it dried much lighter than the others, though, kind of mauve where the others were clearly dark red. it also comes off a bit when you rub it. the others do not.

i've ordered bulk pigments from realmilkpaint.com and hope to be painting away next week.

one handed community

i'm typing one-handed after slicing my finger open on a piece of glass stuck in the dishwaser pump. the pump's been grinding on it for weeks. i also found in the pump: a chopstick, a bread tie, a clothing tag doohickey and foil. i live with other people, but i seem to be the only one who notices that these things do not belong in a dishwasher. it's not easy typing one-handed because the keyboard on our community compter has only three legs after an unseen incident. whenever i hit a key over in the "qwe" region the keyboard lurches. i found the missing fractured leg while vacuuming. perhaps the cats did it. the tripod keyboard actually replaces the original keyboard. someone busted the "e" key off of it a ways back and never said anything about it. when things break, no one ever seems to know how they broke. it's always a mystery. there are upsides to living communally. at the moment, with my finger bleeding profusely they're hard to conjure.

duck and cover

i've just discovered archive.org, a repository of online educational, instructional and commercial films in the public domain. they're free to preview and download. if you click on the image you'll get to watch one of america's classics, duck and cover, an instructional film that teaches children how to survive nuclear blasts. the last thing i need right now is distraction, but this caught my eye. in my video work lately i've been using a lot of collected footage, as well as my own. these are completely free of copyright snags. wonderful.

in that vein, there is new alternative to copyright that seems to be taking root, especially in europe. it's called creative commons. website is creativecommons.org. the idea is that artists control the way their work is distributed through a variable copyright that creative commons facilitates. for instance, an artist may want to allow non-commercial use of their work. or they may allow anything to be done. in some cases, work is restricted to replication only, no modification or synching with other works without permission of the artist. for my little squirrel video a few posts back i searched for car at the jamendo.com and up came a band named "car crash" that had a song that seemed to work. it creative commons license allowed its use with a movie and so i downloaded it and, voila, soundtrack. i look forward to working with more of this kind of thing because i've been hampered in the past by copyright issues.

my favorite squirrel

iRaq

saw this in a shop window in los angeles last december. stumbled upon it digging through pictures on my computer. caught my eye. look at the numbers at the bottom of the poster. it seemed bad then. think about how bad it is now.

by the way, i screened an amazing BBC series called "Power of Nightmares." if you get a chance, the three-hour series is well worth the watch. it follows the parallel growth and inspiration of radical islamists and neo-cons and shows how they're working on the same problem and these days are co-dependent.

scrofulous puppy

this long-nosed creature will greet you in the back of david's '67 caddy. i believe it to be a long lost davinci piece, a canine version of the mona lisa (at mardi gras).

meaningless comparisons

me and squirrel

sigrid and arches

david and donald

i love parking lots

there is something about parking lots that i simply love. i haven't thought about it much. i take a lot of pictures in them. and i've shot several videos in them, especially at night. twilight is also a nice time when the lights come on but the sky is still glowing a bit. they are such grungy places generally yet to me they feel pristine.

foggy

it was fabulously foggy last night making for lots of film-noir-like scenes in white river junction. but it was in color. sigrid, david and i visited mark, michael and barbara last night for dinner. we had lasagna, bread, salad and a movie afterwards.

green hot house

this plant wintered over

with the sun now rising above the hillside south of my place (i'm on a northern slope) my greenhouse is getting some sun during the day. i checked temperatures yesterday. 37 degrees outside, 76 inside! during december, january and february it didn't get much sun at all and pretty much stayed in deep freeze. nonetheless, most of the plants didn't seem to mind, though they look a bit tawdry, they're alive and with the heat seem to be reviving. i wonder what they'll taste like?!

lucy & mike

one night in new orleans while waiting for a parade's arrival we struck up conversation with lucy and her friend mike (i think that was his name, correct me if i'm wrong). i promised them i'd make them famous on my blog, so here they are! nice to spend a bit of time with you all.

mardi gras

i've posted a whole bunch of mardi gras pix on my flickr account here. click on the mardi gras set. i walk in a small neighborhood parade called the society of saint ann. nearly everyone costumes.

purple party

purple me

purple ute

purple daisy and kenny

i'm a few days behind with pictures. here are few snaps from lundi gras, the day before mardi gras. lundi gras afternoon there was a purple party.

mardi gras day couldn't have been better. blue skies, warm, thousands of costumed new orleanians, brass bands. i'll post some pictures later.