phineas birthday party

today was phin's first birthday party!

new design

as with most things i'm involved with, there are many iterations. i like this process and get nervous when things move too quickly. i like a lot of time to reflect, absorb, integrate.

the design for the new building has gone through many iterations and i think we're finally at one that's going to stick. the picture shows the concept. the prior design was completely flat and i couldn't get past the overall size of the facade being too big for the street. the scale of the other buildings is smaller, more human. so, the idea developed into keeping some of the stepping, but making it symmetrical and also keeping some of the slope. the major change was pulling out the center, not unlike a good ol' fashioned new england church, giving the front some depth. i also played around with keeping the brick facade on the first floor, but it just has to go.

the design is somewhat traditional, but we're going to implement it in a new way with a rainscreen that will be made probably of wood. this is a kind of floating facade that has been a standard in northern european countries with weather not unlike new england's. the advantage of the system is that the cladding and the weatherproofing are separate and have an airspace between them that lets water drain out should it get behind the cladding (which it almost always does, eventually).

how do they find me?

one of the fun (and scary to some people) things about the web is that you can find out how people find you. for instance, people found this blog by searching for the following (ranked in order of frequency):

aloofdork.blogspot.com
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the most pressing question seems to be how much land it takes to feed a person, family, city. now that i've included these search terms in this blog more people will find it as a result.

tracking

my epiphany of the day: life is like meditation. my mind constantly takes me away from my simple task: observing, staying focused, just watching. it takes me to far flung places that may or may not exist, away from the present and into the past or future. the same is true of my life. i have moments of clarity when my path is perfectly clear. then all kinds of things crowd into the picture, as if i were taking some kind of family portrait in which almost everything in my life, related or not, decides they're part of the family. the clarity dissolves and i end up spending all my time explaining what all the stuff is in the picture. so, those kernels of clarity... i say to myself, keep those at heart, keep bringing them to the front, keep tapping them on the shoulder and asking them to turn around and look me in the eye.

oh, and a candy heart poem... enjoy.

aristotle

first, i read a whole bunch of books on filmmaking. i've made a bunch of films, but i've never studied how to make them. so, i started with some lighting books. i never knew that the reason they used to say "lights, camera, action" was that the lights were turned off between takes in the early days because they put out so much heat. nowadays, with cooler, brighter fixtures, they're on continuously, for the most part.

next i read some screenwriting books. there are a lot of them out there, most of them geared toward someone who's trying to make a killing in hollywood. i noticed that many of them referred to aristotle's poetics. i tucked that in the back of my head.

next, i picked up, at the recommendation of a friend, david mamet's "on directing film". it's a short little volume that packs a punch. in it, mamet, with a class, create two scenes from two different dramatic situations. it's fascinating to see how it unfolds. mamet also talks about poetics.

so, i went and got poetics and read it. i now understand why so many books refer to it. it lays out the essential structures and relationships for western dramatic tradition. it's to drama what patanjali is to yoga, i suppose: a concise written account of a practice, in the case of poetics, drama.

now that i'm all loaded up with good advice from 2300 years ago, i better get to work making some stuff up!

building purchased

today was the day and things went smoothly. at about 4pm, my business partner and i purchased a downtown white river junction building that will become a combination office building and soundstage. it feels great to have the purchase behind us. we can now get to work.