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!