sole train

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?

listmaking

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.

phineas

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.

buyer beware

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.

vaccum

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!

WRIF 2007

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.

8 inches

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.

april fools

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!