i flew back to vermont from los angeles today. sun to snow. california was surprisingly cold, but still green. i can see why so many people are attracted to it. i've posted a whole bunch of pictures on my flickr site.
happy new year! it can't get worse than last, can it? yikes, i don't want to think about it.
this is check out aisle 13 at the goleta kmart. i purchased shaving cream, hair gel, razors and floss. i chose aisle 13 because i always have bad luck choosing aisles and i thought, well, why not just go for it! i was persuaded to aisle 14 shortly thereafter by an impatient clerk with no customers.
having spent the majority of my time here in a priviledged cocoon (a nice house in the hills with mountain views, browsing pricey shops on state street, watching tanned, toned and groomed people jog, bike, and rollerblade, sipping latte's at custom roast coffee shops) i had begun to wonder where the real world was. and here i found it, in goleta. sandwiched between an upscale "shopping village" and a vacant modern office building, the kmart unimposingly sits back from the street. the signage is vintage, maybe late 70s or early 80s, dirty and faded. inside, a low ceiling (by today's standards in big box stores) glows with bare bulbed fluorescent fixtures dimly illuminating poorly marked sections of the store. people coursed the aisles in thick groups of familial resemblance. the register lines clogged the aisle to the left. fashion sense was absent, or at least unreadable to my sensibilities. i felt right at home, and thought, well, this is the first place in santa barbara that's felt like white river junction!
i was doing some christmas shopping here in santa barbara and walked by a coffee shop that seemed adequately non-corporate. there was a sign out front that said, "10% off your coffee if you can tell us the first year walkmans were made." so, i trod in pondering that bit of trivia. at first i thought early eighties and had settled on 1981, but when i placed my order i suddenly recalibrated my guess and said, "i'm going to guess '79." the barrista looked a bit surprised and said, "wow, you're right. congratulations." i was a surprised as he was. chalk one up for not thinking.
earlier in the day i visited my brother's print shop. he runs it with his wife and a few employees. basically they're an offset print shop but they've added a line of gifts and really nice paper-related products. it reminds me of a gas station, and in fact it was a gas station, but what i mean is that they sell printing (like gas) but have a convenience store that sells all kinds of things that you might want while getting your printing done, including post office services. it's a really nice hybrid business.
what's wrong with this picture? yes, my hair is a bit off, i know. i don't like the haircut myself, but that's another story. oh, you know i'm in los angeles from my prior post so what's this new york like streetscape? and what the hell are those hills apparently just beyond the end of the block?
this is the warner brothers soundstage lot which is amusing to amble about. you wander from paris to new york to london in a matter of minutes. the texture of everything is similar, a kind of stucco matte finish formed into bricks, stone, stucco itself and anything else required. it all looks old and weathered, unused. if they ever wanted to do a post apocalyptic urban film all they'd have to do is turn on the cameras, and of course obliterate those hills in the background.
my friend, brad (who was supposed to be in the picture but my aim was off) and i had lunch at the studio cafeteria. i had a turkey and gouda panini with oil and vinegar drizzed salad for $6.95. after having been here just two days i'm already delighting in the superficial. but, i didn't spot any celebrities. each soundstage has a plaque on it listing the movies made in it. it's pretty cool standing at the spot casablanca was shot, a kind of cinematic ground zero.
here's a nice brief description of meditation and yoga by swami rama:
Meditation/Yoga is a definite process for resolving conflicts. It is the simple and exact process of becoming aware of who you are. It is learning to know yourself as you really are. Meditation/Yoga is a practice of gently freeing yourself from the worries that gnaw at you, so that you can be free and respond to the needs of the moment, and experience the joy of being fully present. Meditation/Yoga is not what you think, for it is beyond thinking. You do not meditate on your problems in order to solve them, but through meditation you see through the problems you have set up for yourself.
here i am in grand central station, new york. that was last weekend. i was in new york for a radical faerie meeting. over two days we discussed the building that will be going on next summer, money issues (mostly how to raise it) and started to explore residency at the camp.
today i'm sitting in the west hollywood apartment of my friend marco who is a television director. he's off at work. i thought i'd be going out and seeing the town but i've really just felt like sitting around today and relaxing. he's got cable which seems like candy to me since i don't watch television at all. i've been soaking up independent film all morning.
tomorrow i'm going to visit friend brad who works at warner brothers. he asked me to come have lunch "on the lot." his invitation sounded delightfully insider and sparked memories of my old schoolboy dreams of being a hollywood director. in a couple days i'll be driving to santa barbara to visit my family, which seems to be relocating there. my brother and his family has lived there quite a while (my sister in law is a santa barbara native) and my parents have recently bought a house up in the hills.
there is something about los angeles that feels like home to me. partly, it's physically very much like denver where i grew up: flat in places, mountainous in others, smoggy, dry, overrun with cars and people tend to be well groomed and tan. there is a prominent latino presence. in high school, i was sure i was going to live here, work in movies, and spent long hours dreaming while browsing cinema magazines before bed, listening to movie soundtracks, trying to write screenplays, and making a few odd little super-8 films with my siblings and a few friends as cast.
once i created the bridge of a space ship in my family's garage. i cut holes in poster board and taped tracing paper to them and installed all our christmas lights behind them to affect the best simulation of control panels with blinking lights i could conceive. in my mind's eye today it was nearly perfect.
i've been back a few days now from my vipassana meditation retreat. naturally people want to know what it's like when you go away for ten days of silence. "oh, you can talk," was a common refrain this week. what happens when meditating is not easy to describe, actually, because the mundane details of sitting don't begin to reflect the profundity of the technique. what i did was sit for about ten hours a day for ten days, watching my breath and observing my mind and body. from the outside meditation is somewhat comic. the faces of meditators look more or less like the faces of people asleep on a subway. but inside the play of pain and pleasure force one to confront oneself more intensely than any therapy, course or program i've experienced.
here's what the website says: "Vipassana is one of India's most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self- purification by self-observation. One begins by observing the natural breath to concentrate the mind. With a sharpened awareness one proceeds to observe the changing nature of body and mind and experiences the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness. This truth-realization by direct experience is the process of purification. The entire path (Dhamma) is a universal remedy for universal problems and has nothing to do with any organized religion or sectarianism. For this reason, it can be freely practiced by everyone, at any time, in any place, without conflict due to race, community or religion, and will prove equally beneficial to one and all."
i'm going inside...for ten days, my third time, a vipassana meditation sit. catch you on the other side.
some pictures of fall i shot a few weeks back when my parents were visiting. we toured around new hampshire following a path that gordon took me on a couple years ago.
amazing landscape
reel pizza
amazing steps!
the magical light of november
early last week i took a trip up to maine to visit my friend peter who lives in bar harbor. i'd never been there before and peter graciously toured me around and introduced me to a number of his friends over the couple days i was able to take off. i met a number of peter's buddys tuesday night at a movie house that's also a bar and pizza joint. the theater has a mix of couches up front and regular theater seats with bar counters between in the rear. it was delightful drinking a beer and eating pizza in a movie theater. gives me some ideas for white river junction.
my last day there i got the opportunity to visit a site for which i designed a building in architecture school 17 years ago. my design wasn't built—it was just a school project—but it would have looked pretty good despite my absence on the field trip. i had intended to take my model up to maine, but forgot.
i love visiting resort destinations off season. there is an element of modern ruin that i find delicious. in evidence are stores, restaurants, bars, hotels, boats, cars, parks, really a whole urban fabric that's been wrapped up, sometimes literally, for the off season. people are scarce. peter and i met one woman during an hour-long evening walk through the heart of bar harbor. it reminds me of purposeless purposiveness. you can see that people were once present in hordes and yet there is no one about. sublime!
i've been playing a lot of music lately, with friends and by myself. over the summer i played acoustic guitar with friends at the faerie camp. we recorded some of our jams and i'm eager to hear them. because we didn't have anything else to record with we used a still camera in movie mode! lately, i've been spending some of my evenings using garageband, a simple but wonderful mac recording application that's great for making quick sketches. here's one i did this evening: PLAY. don't ask me what the lyrics mean! i sung them in one take while making them up. oh, and i cut off the first note of the song... sorry!
here's another one i did a couple weeks ago: PLAY.
the problem with not posting very often is that so much stuff builds up to write about that it seems impossible to start. topics become unwieldy. i have to remind myself to think small.
we had a great halloween party here in white river junction, aka rio blanco. enough people showed up to completely fill main street. our first parade six years ago fit entirely on the sidewalk. the word seems to be spreading that our little town is a fun place to hang.
i discovered a long lost friend online, but can't find a way to contact him. so, perhaps he'll google himself and find this: joshua love leave a comment with your email--i moderate comments so it won't go public.
in other news, i'm moving ahead with a new building project downtown. i've been working with a business partner for the last year, nearly, to put together a new venue for downtown white river, a theater/performance/lounge space that i hope will become home to lots of funky, experimental and interesting film, video, music, puppetry and who knows what else.
i'll be soon doing another meditation sit for 10 days after which i'll be heading to california for a couple weeks to help my parents with their house and visit with my brother and his family.
that's the news.
i've had a long and wonderful summer working outdoors with my body, the first time i've worked so hard physically in a decade. i realized a couple days ago that i haven't taken more than a couple days off in five months. my body has grown stronger, i look fit, muscled, which strokes my ego, but i'm also feeling the drain of so many days without restoration. i'm glad to know that i can go five months without much of a break, but i'm also noticing how much my will to persist obscured messages from my body, especially my arms. they're pretty much yelling at me today, saying something like, "dude, are you crazy? we're beat. stop!" and so i've listened and am listening more as they sing an achey dissonant chorus of muscular overtones that don't seem to emanate from any particular place, kind of like the subsonic hisses and rumblings produced by a dead dog lying on the pedals of a cathedral organ. if i listen closely, i can almost hear reverberation.
one of the joys of working in community this summer has been more or less nightly jams with whomever was at the faerie camp. i brought my guitar up and with a bevy of african drums we found our way into lots of interesting rhythms, jams and songs. my chops got better, i got used to singing in front of people and i let myself explore publically more than i've ever.
over the winter i'm looking forward to recording with my friend jade and other faeries. i had a fabulous dream a few weeks ago, a recurring dream for me (many of my recurring dreams have come true) in which i'm on stage, and i'm in my 60s, jamming away to an adoring audience. in this case the dream included a bunch of radical faeries along with me, and it felt just peachy bein' up there on stage. my astrological bent is to be an entertainer. i share my birthday with tom jones and prince and there are lots of other famous entertainers around my birthday, including some of my musical heroes like laurie anderson.
here's the interior of the timber frame and straw bale structure i'm working on in vermont. with the roof on, the walls up and the windows soon to be installed, it's taking shape and it feels great! i've helped instruct about a hundred volunteers over the summer in varioius techniques from timber framing to packing mud plaster onto straw. i've come to think of teaching as learning and find that i learn as much as anyone while teaching. the act of packaging my knowledge into simple instructions somehow opens my mind. with all the physical work over summer i'm in good shape and that feels great, too.
i've become accustomed lately to "asking the universe" for help when i get stuck, and i've been surprised by how often it responds, and how quickly. it is as if the mere formation of a question in the mind establishes the space for the installation of an answer. i've noticed that when i become grumpy or irritated i'll often make proclamations: this sucks, they suck, i suck, whatever. it's not until after i finally give up damning that clarity presents itself. it would seem that a critical aspect of happy consciousness is an inquisitive demeanor. so i remind myself to ask, if not aloud to someone else, then to the universe.
i recently asked the universe for help on some sticky personal issues that have haunted me for quite a while. a day later i met some friends, a couple, who related to me a story about their relationship that shocked me in its similarity to the issues i've been coping with. this led me to find out that what i've been experiencing is first of all not uncommon and secondly is well studied and somewhat understood, so there is some literature about it. i'm being vague here to protect the innocent, but it turns out that somewhere from 1 to 2 percent of the nation suffers from borderline personality disorder in varying degrees with varying levels of functionality.
people with bpd, as it is known in short, are often charismatic, intense and sensitive but have trouble maintaining intimate relationships and typically are extremely sensitive to real or projected abandonment. the relationships they do engage in can start idyllically but then veer into stress and pain for both parties, ranging in a short time from intense connection with idealization to abrupt rejection and devaluing. there are a bevy of symptoms, some of which i don't quite understand, that qualify a person as bpd and i'm certainly not qualified to make a judgement, but just being introduced to the symptoms and patterns of bpd have helped me take a new look back at a stressful and painful relationship in my life which has, despite the fact it happened years ago, confused and affected me to the present.
i picked up this book which i've found helpful: Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder.
okay, i faked this smile. can you tell? i was walking down the road at faerie camp and decided to try to take a happy looking picture. this was about the fifth try. i think it still lacks sincerity but overall i like the picture. it reminds me of pharmaceutical ads promising vitality of some sort. i do this kind of self-observation of fake states probably more than most people. when i was doing lots of radio i used to record myself a lot, edit, re-record, until i'd get something so overproduced and slick that it had almost no personality, i suppose rococo in a way, overproduced, over-ornate, intricate but soulless. maybe it's my love of the banal that drives this.
about half a year ago i bought a trumpet. i started to try playing it a couple days ago. i never realized how much a trumpeter can influence pitch with the lips. even though i played trumpet four years in elementary and junior high school, i don't think anyone ever mentioned intonation. in fact, no one ever mentioned a thing about theory or what exactly we were doing playing all those notes.
so, tying all this together, perhaps this is my first trumpet album cover.
selfless giving isn't something that comes naturally to me. my behavior twenty years ago was decidedly selfish and self centered. i wouldn't call myself bad, but i was doing for myself and no one else. i worked really hard to prove myself to others, not in order to give to them. my self esteem, self image and self worth were intimately linked to how well i conquered tasks and people, and not to how well i felt or how honest i was being or how others felt. i even voted for ronald reagan the first time riding high on his "greed is okay" platform, which seemed just the ticket back then, and seems to have permeated the baby boomer generation of which i am on the trailing cusp.
but over the years, through my various projects, i've discovered that i feel most joyous when my personal gain is small to nil. i feel best when engaged in helping others with their lives and projects. i'm now seeing my role as a builder and architect as a healing role, in which i am a part of a dream, often a communal dream or someone else's dream. my interest is in eliminating my interest in favor of a greater interest. figuring out what that greater interest is is fascinating to me. the reward for approaching things this way has been that all of the energy i put into a project comes back to me in various interesting ways and usually multiplied. so, it's more profitable, in a sense, than pursuing selfish goals.
another week gone by, another four days at faerie camp destiny, the radical faerie sanctuary in southern vermont. last weekend we lifted more very heavy rafters up onto the frame. it's very physical work, exhausting at times, but very fulfilling and the camaraderie that's developed while working on this project makes all the hard labor worth it. after a long day, we all settle down for a meal and afterwords hang around one of the fire circles on the land or huddle in the yurt if it's raining. i'm loving my time in the woods, a place where i don't own anything, and despite my responsibilities at the camp, i do not feel overwhelmed. the few times i've felt irritated have been when i've picked up power tools. their sound, vibration, threat and energy all irritate. it seems to be price of speed.
i've been very busy working at the radical faerie camp in southern vermont, more or less orchestrating the construction of a timber frame kitchen, bathroom and shower building. the frame is mostly up, just a few more pieces to go. the frame has been carved entirely by volunteers who, over the course of about 12 weekends, have learned from scratch how to carve mortises, tenons, peg holes, and how to plane.
i've been doing yoga for about eight years now. i practice more or less every day for between an hour and an hour and a half, usually in the early morning, sometimes in a class, sometimes with gabriel, sometimes with lots of others, mostly alone. a few years ago i trained to teach yoga at the kripalu center for yoga in lenox, massachussetts. at the time i really had little interest in teaching. in fact my decision to do a 200-hour yoga teacher training program was somewhat frivolous. i told myself i was deeply serious about yoga and needed to go deeper, but really i was looking for escape, something completely different, a hyperwarp to a distant galaxy with focus, clarity, physicality and good food!
the training was excellent. my two primary teachers, naresh and yoganand, were longtime yogis who had lived at kripalu when it was an ashram. they both practiced and taught yoga with unmistakable authority. however, my experience of yoga itself during the course was shallow. i did not experience epiphany, release or much of anything other than lots of sore muscles and a vague embarrassment that i seemed to be one of the only students not surfing deep emotional swells. i wasn't unhappy that i was losing weight, gaining muscle, growing limber and learning a lot of new-age vocabulary. all that was fabulous and i enjoyed checking out my new body in the full length mirror down in the basement men's locker room where it seemed many came to admire their own bodies and those of others (at least that was my fantasy, unyogilike as it was).
back at home, life returned to normal, meaning all the stresses and unresolved things that had complicated my life prior to hyperwarp into yogaland asserted themselves again. my life was remarkably the same, unchanged. i resolved to try teaching yoga and found a position at a local gym where i taught for about nine months, ironically in the same space that i had first taken a yoga class. i developed a loyal following of several students who told me they enjoyed and benefited from the classes. but, i found myself simply repeating what i'd been taught at kripalu and that grew stale very quickly. not much later, my own practice dwindled to a day or two a week, if that and it felt like a chore. i found myself not really caring at all about yoga, thinking about other things during practice, begrudgingly doing postures. the more i parroted what i'd learned in teacher training during my classes the more i realized how little i understood about yoga and how deeply shallow my experience of it was. i walked into a local clothing shop owned by a friend. she sported a tight-fitting "fuck yoga" t-shirt. i kind of gasped at first, but then i thought, yeah, fuck yoga. i stopped teaching partly because of conflicts but also because i felt fraudulent teaching it.
since then, slowly, i've dropped a lot of what i considered yogic discipline: i started eating meat (killing); i started having wine with dinner now and then (and recently even some martinis) (impurity); i started drinking coffee, even getting into a dunkin donuts coffee-in-the-morning habit complete with eco-unfriendly piles of styrofoam cups in the back of my car (more impurity!); and there's more. but, what's fascinating to me about this turn of events is that re-engaging my old habits (and dropping the superficial yogic ones) has brought me face-to-face with yoga.
how? well, in saying "fuck it all, i'm going to just be who i am, not try to be perfect" the yoga postures became real to me. i began to feel my limitations, muscles that were held tight by stress, fear, anger. postures seemed to intensify and filter my experience--if i allowed them to--providing feedback about myself. this has helped me realize that almost all yoga classes i've experienced move much to quickly for me. it takes me a long time to sense what's happening and without awareness yoga is meaningless to me. this new sense of yoga has more than once made me think about teaching again--i'd love to bring this slow yoga to others. but, i want to remain, for the time being, in research mode. i'm very much enjoying yoga as an experiment, as a kind of self-science that uses the body to enter the soul. after i've banged about with this strategy, and maybe cleaned up my act, perhaps then i'll teach again.
hey, i'm not even taking pictures any more. but, i am organizing my life. i've discovered some online organizing tools that i'm really enjoying. though it feels a bit remedial in that i like to think of myself as an organized person (though my physical environment would suggest otherwise) it's been an excellent exercise to parse my life into projects and tasks and see just how much i've got on my plate. as with so many revelations in my life, i am the last person to see what others can see perfectly clearly. in this case: i have too much to do myself. applicants for jobs at the new aloofdork corporation should contact me directly. i have many positions available.
the hardest part of delagating for me is letting go, acknowledging that there are limits to human endeavor. it feels a bit to me like giving away something very valuable. there is a pain to it but also a fabulous sense of lightness when the cherished task is given away. i cling to very little materially, but i do cling to tasks. "that's my job!" part of this control-freakish behavior is yankee frugality (though i'm not a yankee, at least not directly). i dread spending money. the other part is losing control, having to trust, having to communicate a need to someone else, admitting that i have a need. i somehow have programmed deep inside me the delusion that i should be self-sufficient. it's a ridiculous concept given the way i live, with so many inputs from others, including energy, money, food, transportation, entertainment. very few of us, even the most remote, live in isolation. i need to admit my enmeshedness, my interconnectedness and reliance, that while i'm a strong person, i'm deeply indebted to my family, friends, society and the planet. seeing this clearly is a first and crucial step in genuinely organizing myself.
gabriel and i are putting in a shower at home. we've had a bathtub for about a decade. it sits in the upstairs hallway and came from the original main street musuem on south main street. the tub ended up there because the bathroom i designed turned into a bedroom and the hall was simply the only place left it could go. after a few friends expressed shyness about bathing in the hallway (it's not really very public, actually, because it's upstairs, above most of the apartment, but, yes, you can be seen if you go upstairs) we started a tradition of taking pictures of people in the bathtub and posting them on the wall as a way of saying, look, all these people did it!
despite the new shower, the tub will remain, and hopefully more folks will grace the wall. we haven't come up with any shower traditions. but, already it has expressed some personality. the shower walls are backed with a cement fiberboard and while cutting it to face the shower walls we created the one pictured. a mistake forms a nose, the mouth is the cutout for a sprinkler pipe and the eye is the shower head hole. it's still visible but will soon be covered with tile.
i'm way behind in my blogging. i'm down to about a post every ten days. i enjoy writing and lament that drafting seems to be edging out writing for the time being. but, i keep snapping pictures, which doesn't take any time at all really, other than remembering to bring a camera. here's a shot from the recent revolution fashion show. this is not actually the fashion show but kim and brandon hamming it up in the hallway. brandon has the biggest biceps in white river junction. i enjoyed photographing them as much as he seems to like showing them off. i'm not really sure if they were comparing things here, but kim is also certainly big in all kinds of ways, though she's petite (a plus as you'll find out later). she not only brings us this glamorous fashion show twice a year, but champions her clothing store, revolution, which has just risen from the ashes (well, the ashes are actually across the street where the strip club used to be) and now features not only cool used clothing but prominently presents a half-dozen independent (and some local) designers who make beautiful collaged clothing from recycled garments, cloth and other found things like old billboards and computer parts. kim gets to wear all the cool clothes that someone like me at 6'4" never gives two serious thoughts about, though i must admit i do give them one thought most of the time until i remind myself that one, i'm male (which isn't that big an obstacle these days) and two, i'm a giant (which is the show stopper). i've fantasized for quite a while having some custom clothes made that really fit me. but, most of the time, for what i do, i wouldn't want nice clothes. i never know when i'm going to have to climb up on the roof and fix an air conditioning unit. truth be known, i am pretty vain. so, when i become rich and famous and no longer have to pull the hatches off rooftop air handlers and unclog toilets and change dusty old lightbulbs, i promise i'll hire a tailor.
yesterday, i drove down to the radical faerie camp in grafton, vermont. on the way there and back i listened to a talk by pema chodron, the buddhist teacher from gampo abbey, nova scotia. i hadn't listened to her for quite a while and it was refreshing to listen again.
today, on my way into white river junction, i stopped at the local coop. there was a car in the lot with a woman standing next to it, door ajar. the rear door was also ajar and a person in maroon robes was leaning into the car. i see buddhist monks and nuns around where i live frequently, so i wasn't surprised, but then i caught a glimpse of the person's face, and it sure looked like pema chodron. i went inside feeling giddy and somewhat silly because of my childish excitement at the possibility that someone famous (at least in buddhist circles) was in my town.
i bought a burrito--though i'd lost my appetite--and then circled into the pasta lane. there she was and i couldn't think of anything to say. what do you say to someone whom you know from books and talks and who knows nothing of you? so, i said, "are you pema chodron?" and she looked up, a bit puzzled perhaps, and paused. for a second, i thought, oh, i made a mistake. but then she said, "yes, i am." and i told her i'd just listened to a talk of hers the day before and thanked her. she asked me where the vitamins were, specifically echinacea. i showed her to the other end of the store and she found what she was looking for, said she was coming down with a cold.
and that was that. i've always wanted to thank her for her books and teachings. and without much fanfare, i got to do it in person, in a grocery store.
gabriel, david and i drove down to brattleboro last weekend to catch the reverend billy and the stop shopping choir. our friend donald sings with them. they put on a gospel program complete with sermon about the evils of consumer addiction ("we're all SINNERS!") and how to stop shopping, "push back!" they performed in a beautiful old church turned community center. the exaltations to halt the plague of consumerism seems to have backfired with me and gabriel, because, while we're normally happy co-op shoppers, organic farm and local economy supporters, we suddenly had the urge afterward to get mocha coffee slushees at dunkin donuts. spring fever?
i made a list of words about myself this morning. i recommend doing this. at first, only a half-dozen or so words came out. i thought, that's it? so, i sat for a bit thinking of more words. i realized i was editing out a lot of words subconsciously, things that i might not really want people to know about. but i wrote them down anyway. and then the flood came. it was interesting that locking out embarassing or undesirable adjectives about myself also blocked the good things. when the list was done, i scrambled the order of words. while the first incarnation sounded a bit like a hallmark card, the randier later version, all mixed up, was a lot more interesting and human.
the newest denizen of white river junction (as far as i know) arrived this morning in lebanon, new hampshire, at 5:08am. apparently he screamed. but, he's calm now with his moms, michelle and michelle, who are recovering from the surprise of his three-week early arrival. gabriel sprinted to the hospital at 4am this morning to be with the michelles and phineas announced himself shortly thereafter. they had some back up names in case he didn't look like a phineas, but i think everyone's agreed that he's a phineas. phin will be a cool nickname. because his full name is phineas henry roy-ollie his acronym will be "phro". that's pretty cool too, especially if he ends up with curly hair. i got to hold him a bit this afternoon. i have to say, there's nothing like holding a newborn.
gabriel and i recently visited ikea to look at kitchen furniture. we didn't buy any of that, but we bought a small cabinet for a bathroom.
the cabinet's swell, but i've always wondered, how do they make them so inexpensively? the morning paper held a partial answer: cheap materials. according to an article in the washington post by peter goodman and peter finn, china is ikea's largest supplier of wood furniture and russia is ikea's largest supplier of wood. ikea claims it audits its wood supplies, but they have only two foresters in china and three in russia. the problem is that great swaths of forest are being harvested illegally, shipped with falsified documents to china for production and the result is that the western diet for wood products will, if continued at the same pace as it's running today, exhaust the forest of some countries in just a decade. much of the wood harvested is protected, but apparently chinese import officials rarely verify documents and the production chain takes advantage of this oversight which spurs timber industries where there should not be any. so, the problem with ikea (or home depot, or kmart, or lowes, or any multinational) is that it's too easy for retailers to claim clean hands. the system which is supposed to protect forest resources in the places where most of the wood for our cheap products comes from is corrupt. i think probably the only gauge we have, as consumers, is to ask whether the price seems too good to be true (aka sustainable). this means we, as consumers, have to check our desires and purchase power with a vague and incomplete matrix of social and ecological concerns as we lust after product that is clear, immediate and available.
i wandered into our local sears store a few days ago. all the well-worn salespeople with combovers and bad suits that i've long associate with sears have been replaced by an entirely different staff. at first it seemed there was no staff--i simply didn't see them. but, after a minute or so, i realized the uniformly dark-blue-clad youths strolling the aisles with engraved plastic tags just below their peach-fuzzed chins (the boys anyway) were the staff. is this a byproduct of a merge/restructure?
although the kids are definitely more attractive than their predecessors and brighten the place up with their lightness and slang ("that drill is so gay") it's just not the same place. the new staff lacks authority. the cast may have changed, but the script hasn't. there are some things only a pot-bellied 55-year-old can deliver convincingly. but the kids sure know how to make a great display. check out the way they arrange the vacuum cleaners!
i've finished the graphics work for our local film festival. here's the poster. you can see the program at www.wrif.org. we've got 34 different programs this year, double last years! if you live around white river junction, please come out and support the festival and catch some great independent films.
april 5: 8 inches of snow. it was beautiful snow, big fluffly flakes that drifted down out of the sky as if there were a giant pillow fight going on above.
with a bit of time to kill waiting for a train, i decided to wander the little town in which i reside with my camera to take a "new look" at it. it was a dreary day, overcast, trees leafless, streets empty: really a perfect day to examine the patient—no pretense.
white river junction has always struck me as an odd place. there is something charming about it but at the same time it seems always just a bit off, a little tawdry, a little bent. this is what i love about it.
looking at it through my super wide angle lens, i saw some things i've never noticed before, perspectives and vantage points i've never considered. it occured to me how much driving eliminates this experience (wandering) and how much it restricts one's perspetive, or rather, replaces the walking perspective and sense of time with a very different experience. i've whizzed around the downtown block hundreds of times without taking note of the myriad perspectives, vistas, juxtapositions created by buildings, streets and other municipal affects. they've been there all along. it took a bleak day to point them out to me. perhaps it was the lack of any activity whatsoever, plant or animal, that made the town's structure stand out. in any case, i'm coming away with a much greater appreciation of the town's peculiar nature as well as its potential. there are some spatial gems hiding amongst the chaos!
i'm feeling a bit like this right now: lots of circuits, somewhat organized, but impossible to describe simply. it's easier to take a picture of it.
i put lots of pictures of new york up at my photo site. sleety snow streets, natural history musuem, people, and my favorite, banality.
okay, little time to write, been busy. went to nyc last weekend, saw friends, went to nico muhly's concert at carnegie hall. great. met some new friends, too. i have pictures, but haven't uploaded. on the drive home, by myself, i read out loud a long story, a novella really, that i made up as i drove, speaking it in a strange, low, slow voice. i really got into it--the story that is--and i really didn't want to stop driving when i got home. the things i uncovered--as good as therapy! designing lots: my apartment, a house for a couple, a faerie camp, a recycling of a building into a theater, offices and apartment, and a couple websites. doing photos with jason. doing a television commercial for revolution, a store here in white river. starting graphics production for white river indie films, our local film fest. i am doing, doing, doing. and in the midst of my doing i was stopped, full stop, unexpectedly, by the image of someone i once knew intimately posing suggestively in a brochure. startling the power of an image, startling the power i confer upon his image, his memory.
last weekend my friend jason and i did a long photo shoot exploring among other things handstands in the presence of chairs and howling in an unbuttoned polka dot shirt. jason is no stranger to being photographed and is recently famous in some circles as a cover boy for butt magazine. butt is a breath of fresh air in the thin atmosphere of gay magazines (at least my experience of them) and i'm reading nightly a compilation of its first five years which i'm loving. it's brash, broad, unapologetic, printed on pink paper, and carries interviews with gay luminaries as well as garbage boys, all pluses in my mind.
i'm no stranger to being photographed either but i haven't yet achieved the heights jason has, although in new orleans i'm quite sure i am on at least a few refrigerators in various mardi gras getups (who really knows?). but, i've never been photographed at length, with hundreds of shots of slightly different expressions, allowing time for ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings to develop and be captured. the challenge for me was to drop the idea i needed to look good, sexy, cute, whatever and to just let loose whatever surfaced, much like meditation. watching the faces of isaac and jaden, brenda, eve's and gabriel's new baby boys, i see a stream of emotions rising, falling, rising and falling, seamlessy and without particular order or consistency, and i think, why not be just like that in front of the camera? turn off the filters, take down the guard, unpeel before the lens, just let your own humanity flow. this seems to make interesting pictures. in some ways, it's like therapy, because there is the observed the observer. just the presence of someone else, in this case with a lens, provokes confession when the setting is safe, so it's possible to make deep psychic inroads. i know i hit some powerful stuff because i'm still tingling from the experience.
i've migrated to gmail, google's email service. it's interesting to me how the computer world started with large centralized machines, moved to desktop machines, and is now, in many ways, is heading back to the centralized model. both have their pluses and minuses. neither is perfect. with respect to email, i like the centralized model. it's useful to be able to check email from any machine, or even cell phone, rather than have it bound up on a single machine. i chose gmail because it imports email from all my other email accounts, sorts it nicely into conversations and then allows me to download it to my home machine for backup, just in case. it's also very fast on slow machines and is almost advertisement free and doesn't tag my emails with advertizing footers.
along similar lines, perhaps, the remark made by einstein, "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler," or words to that effect, has been resonating with me. my life is pretty complicated and i find myself, on occasion, trying to simplify it beyond its simplest, and as a result stuff gets lost, forgotten, ignored, unattended. it's not good. i'm trying to embrace all the complexity of my life and myself without trying to crunch it into this or that paradigm. i guess i'm a sucky fundamentalist.
a cold that had been simmering for days became terribly wicked right after mardi gras and put me through spells of chills, fever, coughing, sneezing, wheezing, snorting, snotting, and sleeping. the headache was perpetual and intense. various remedies helped but the cure was simply time. i found that driving home on 1000s of milligrams of vitamin c was a pleasant experience. i stayed very alert despite my fatigue.
so, life is back to normal. what that means is that i'm attending to the three weeks of stuff that i didn't do while i was in new orleans at the same time i'm pressing the wave of future things to do further into the future. my most prominent skill seems to be heaping my plate full and disregarding all dietary recommendations to cut back and chew slowly. i can't seem to resist a new project. the old ones i either try to swallow whole or spit out. perhaps i should have been a snake.
more pictures here.
mardi gras 2007 unfurled itself upon new orleans, a tapestry of creativity, revelry and jest, with near perfect unpredictability. i find it a wonderful celebration not only because it's the best free and serindipidous party i've experienced but because the panoply of emotions i feel in a single intense long day awakens me to the richness within as much as without. and, it's not all gravy. i seem to have crises between the moments of ecstasy, at least a few times a day, and i see it happening all around me, reminding me that the human condition is an ephemeral concoction of ups and downs. beside a person smiling from ear to ear is another weeping. it's a radical self-check-in and the pageant can just as easily bring about introversion as it can extroversion. walking the streets mardi gras day in new orleans can be as in the moment as the most care-free of experiences or as challenging and reflective as psychotherapy. at times, i've imagined i'm walking through my consciousness as much as i am parading the french quarter, the panorama (at least from my perspective) of costumes triggering experiences and memories (as well as the literal present) in a soup as thick as gumbo and spicy as cajun seasoning. if you're at all competative, as i can be, marching with the krewe of saint anne will test your ego. the quality and creativity of costuming is mind boggling. it occurs to me every year that if the planet could orient itself to the energy and positivity of mardi gras the planet would be a much more self-aware and happier place.
