daniel johnston

somehow i've never heard of this guy. i just watched a documentary about him called the devil and daniel johnston. highly recommend. (funny that the architect i work for is daniel johnson.) johnston is a songwriter, singer and artist. his work is raw, almost unpalatable from a craft standpoint. but his rawness isn't unrehearsed or careless. it's deeply felt, genuine. he believes he's right up there with the beatles. but he can barely manage his daily life. he turned off the engine of his father's plane while they were flying home from a gig and threw the keys out the window. they crashed and he enjoyed it, thought he'd done a good thing. what is it about people like this that endears us, awes us? i kept having the sense that the reality i think of as "real" is just a thin skin over the nature that johnston evokes. i've had the same sensation when talking with and dealing with some "crazy" people here in town.

electric shoe review

the electric shoes are done. here are some pix of them. gabriel designed them. i designed the electric. i don't have pictures of anyone else working on them, but sigrid, anna, mike, john, bonnie and rebecca worked feverishly to get them done on time. yesterday, we built crates to truck them down to new orleans. these will debut in the krewe of muses parade on thursday, february 15, along with the electric butterflies, now in their eighth season. there are six pairs, variously themed. they're hung off an armature supported by a backpack frame on the pupeteer such that they appear to walk above the pupeteer's head. i'll be one of the pupeteers this year. in past years i've walked along as part of the support crew. the burning question for me is: which pair is for me?

wednesday

today i imitated a machine that running quickly but not very smoothly. all good, but not very orderly. it's chilly here, down in the single digits feels like. i've been advised by my ayurvedic friend to take cayenne, garlic and ginger to balance my vattaness.

photo by sigrid

babies

i saw the babies yesterday. super adorable. gabriel, sigrid and i, with the mothers, brenda and eve, hung out with them for the afternoon. we just held them and looked at them. i couldn't stop watching them. i think i've caught a glimpse of why parents become goo-goo in the presence of a baby.

general comment

great massage today from vaea. worked on electric shoes all day otherwise. lots of solder smoke--icky. tested battery performance on a working shoe. 7.5 hours. good enough. wired 12 sequencer boxes with my cutoff circuit. lots of visitors. the shoes attract crowds. gabriel and i doing very well with each other. i feel tinges of lightness, happiness. meditating regularly in morning. tomorrow, going to boston to see babies, my first live glimpse. grateful.

jaden and isaac

here they are, gabriel's sons, twins, not identical. i've never posted a baby picture before. i may get to see them this weekend, with their moms, brenda (birth mom) and eve. my title... perhaps uncle. they're darlin!

faerie home companion #3

this weekend i hosted a gathering of radical faeries in white river junction. we have land in southern vermont that we steward and on which we're creating a retreat sanctuary. this was a business gathering, but in the evening, after dinner, we switched into performance mode and turned my studio into a recording studio.

what for? a few faeries started a podcast called a faerie home companion and we recorded material for a new show at the gathering in my studio. i usually have a lot of fun with the faeries. this recording was no exception. we jammed, performed skits, read poetry and had an advice "call in" program. so far two podcasts have been edited and produced. the one we recorded last night will become the third. you can listen to them via the faerie website or by subscribing in iTunes's podcast directory (search for "faerie home companion").

there are some good musicians in the group, but for the most part we would be better labelled curious wannabes. and i love this. there is a child-like openness and exploration that, while not always beautiful or graceful, on occasion, becomes inspired. those moments are delightful and encourage me to continue to make mistakes, forget about decorum and forge ahead with playfulness and imagination (forget, forge... hmmm). i admire musicians, bands, artists--anyone really--who eschews the establishement and simple declares themselves good enough!

nephew willem & the rubber band

midnight synapse jamboree

a lot happened yesterday.

gabriel is now the father of two boys, born yesterday, twins. i don't know the details yet, but things went well and both are healthy. a friend suggested naming them "A" and "B". i think B would develop an inferiority complex.

gabriel and i have more or less decided to move back in with each other. we're contemplating renovation of the place i live, called "the mill." i've lived there since 1993. it never really got finished because i moved in half-way through construction. i'm excited about reworking it. since it's essentially a communal house, top on our list is creating private space so that sleeping and cooking can happen at the same time and improving the child friendliness.

i stayed up half the night reviving old coding skills while working on a website for my new architecture job. i enjoy working on code. it seems to be in my blood. how else could i spend 18 hours in front of a screen pondering rollover buttons, database queries, .ini files and javascript errors? i wonder if the reason i can do this is also why i enjoy sitting in meditation? i do notice similar sensations while doing both.

i'm now more or less functional in autocad, the computer aided drafting software that's widely used by architects and engineers. i have produced a couple small sets of drawings. i'm amused and endeared by autocad's paleolithic underpinning: the command line interface. most programs these days don't give you access to one of these. you have to use menus and toolbars. i actually like command line interfaces. if you know what you want and know how to get it, they're fast. plus they give your fingers more exercise.

architecture

i'm starting my second week of work as an architect apprentice. learning autocad, working on the company website, helping with the drawings for the new office that we'll hopefully move into in a month. currently the office is in norwich and i have to "commute" ten minutes. it's a beautiful setting, but i'll be happier when i don't have to drive to work. the work is fun and i'm learning new things--my faviorite activity.

picture from santa fe.

electric high heel shoes

this weekend i've been working with gabriel on giant high heel shoe puppets he was commissioned to build for the new orleans mardi gras muses parade that occurs the thursday before mardi gras. they will be paraded along with our electric butterfly puppets.

each puppet has about 80 feet of electroluminescent wire (from coolight) and i'm in charge of making it all work. our original puppets used ten AA batteries each to power a small computer that animates the light-wire, and while this worked and meant we didn't have to fiddle with finicky recharchables, i've felt awful about consuming so many batteries for each performance (120 each time!). for the new puppets we've employed rechargable batteries, which have improved a great deal since we started doing this. the rechargeables offer better performance (more power at more stable voltage) but they do have the problem that if you discharge them too far they can get very hot and catch fire.

so, i've spent the day figuring out how to prevent them from overdischarging. not being an electrical engineer and not finding anything for sale on the web to handle this, i've had to resort to guerilla tactics and build my own circuits. this has plunged me deep into an old haunt: analog electronics, ohm's law and big thick catalogs filled with dense tables of component properties. luckily, a hobbyist who flies battery-powered model planes posted a solution to the battery problem that i've been able to adapt to our high heel shoes.

(geek content warning) the solution is simple, elegant and tickles my geek fancy because it uses just three components: a relay, a resistor and a pushbutton. these three go between the battery and the sequencer. they're wired so that when you press the pushbutton electricity is supplied to the relay's coil causing its contacts to connect the battery to the light-wire and the show starts. upon releasing the pushbutton electricity continues to keep the relay's coil energized but through a resistor whose resistance is chosen so that when the batteries reach their maximum safe discharge the voltage supplied to the relay's coil will fail to keep the relay switch closed and the battery will be disconnected. i'll know if it works tuesday when the parts arrive.

local warming

it's january. it's going be in the mid 60's here today. here is vermont. typically january days here have 25-degree highs. so, we're looking at between 35 and 40 degrees above the norm. looks like a record breaker.

back / new job

i'm back in vermont. haven't had a chance to write. since i last wrote, i did make it to denver, then santa fe, back to denver, then boston, followed by vermont. lots of pictures i'll post soon (they're on flickr now).

i started a full time job today working for architect daniel johnson of norwich and soon to be of white river junction. right off the bat my workstation computer refused to start, much like the airplane engine in denver (more later), hopefully not an omen. it's being fixed, like the airplane engine, as i await my launch. i must admit, it felt strange to be at a job after so many years having the day to myself. but, i am excited to be incorporating structure in my life. part of what makes the retreats i've attended over the past few years remarkable is that they simply have structure.