aloofdork

Hello Blog

2011-01-09T16:45:00.002-05:00

Is blogging dead? Anyone listening? This blog just came in handy for me, actually. I needed to look back to find out when I'd participated in an event, and voila, there it was.

phinster

2010-02-07T18:40:00.004-05:00

phineas had a birthday a while back. i shot some fun pictures of him. here he models his present's wrapping paper. i had just purchased an off-camera flash unit and was learning how to use it.

optics

2010-01-05T16:23:00.004-05:00

i've been taking lots of pictures lately, but sorry, none for this post. david hockney has my imagination lately, priming me with ideas about photography, painting, art in general. i read a book by lawrence weschler over the holidays titled "True to Life: 25 Years of Conversations with David Hockney". i feel as if i've been through art history all over again, and this time am excited about it. a while back, hockney began to think that old masters had used optical techniques to achieve their works, a controversial view even today. his investigations are fascinating. his point isn't that the works are any less compelling because the old masters may not have created everything on the canvas with their own eye, but that artists of that time used all the tools available to them to explore, almost like scientists. i love that idea.

personal truth

2009-12-31T11:33:00.001-05:00

Specific, personal truth is the best medium in which to grow relationships.

movies

2009-11-24T17:31:00.002-05:00

another long time between posts. i've been sick with flu, probably swine flu, for about four weeks. all that's left is lingering cough. despite physical discomfort, i've welcomed the opportunity to rest, reflect, and spend a lot of time alone. i was supposed to shoot a short movie, the first since making a short dramatic film six years ago, but i was too wiped out to do it. we've rescheduled for march, 2010.

my film activities continue with star trek phase 2 and a couple documentaries, but they are not my own projects. being in bed has given my own projects new immediacy, because it feels like i have a lot less time to work. i know this flu will pass, but the restriction of waking time helps give weight to the most important things. i've resigned from the few boards i participate on, and have cut back on commitments. i sense the importance of having lots of time and time-space in which to create, to absorb, to integrate thoughts, ideas, images, sounds, feelings.

i've watched hundreds of films while in bed, shorts and features, drama and docs. streaming movies are fantastic. the quality is okay, but having an on demand film festival in my lap worth the sacrifice. it's great to see so many films back to back, to compare styles, lighting, scripts, pacing, camera work, acting, sets, scenery, sound, music... for the last few years, i haven't been able to stay awake through a film. it still happens, but somehow watching so many films has awakened me. i'm looking at films not for entertainment, but for content, story, creativity, craftsmanship.

i've watched a lot of short films. curiously, they are often too long, lacking density, plot, though often technically very good. the features, by and large, even the bad ones, tend to be more condensed.

Return of the Blog

2009-08-18T19:22:00.004-04:00

A long hiatus, yes. A molting process, yes. A shift in direction, yes. A new career, apparently. Renewed enthusiasm: yes.

In a nutshell, I've become a budding cinematographer... budding at the age of 46. And why not? I'm an admirer of makeovers, especially buildings. What happened? Last summer I took a film lighting course at the Maine Media Workshops and loved it. Since then, I've become involved with Star Trek Phase II helping shoot their one-hour webisodes of classic Star Trek, all for the fun of it. The production values are high and I've learned a lot on the set which operates more or less professionally in an amateur kind of way. Then this summer, I happened to see a course at the Media Workshops and lucked into it via their waiting list. I met some great people and we made some fun little films. After that, I was hooked and declared my intentions to take up filmmaking. It's not like I haven't done it before. When I sat down and figured out how many little films I'd made over the years it totaled more than thirty, a couple are award winners. But, deciding to move further into it is a big break from my prior architectural commitments but it feels right. If there were any place you'd know you weren't supposed to be, it would be a film set, because it can be brutally boring. If you don't have the bigger picture in your grasp it will feel insufferable. I've watched (and filmed) people in this mode and it's not pretty.

Right now I'm working with Tim Wolff, of New Orleans, on his documentary about gay social clubs who spearheaded a unique gay rights movement in the south. I was down there to shoot earlier in the year and Tim is up here in Vermont now as we edit it. I love thinking about the structure of film, how to tell a story.

I'm also working on a short film with Richard Ballon, a playwright and writer, whom I met at CineSlam, a short film festival in Vermont. Also in the works, possibly, is a feature to be shot in Los Angeles this fall or winter and for sure a segment in a documentary project about Vermont. I'll be helping one of the filmmakers I met this summer in Maine complete his project next week. I'm happy with the speed with which things have started rolling.

facebook killed the blogger star

2009-03-16T09:08:00.004-04:00

as with all things new, there is a period of adjustment in which i figure out how a new thing affects the balances of my life. facebook has been a lot of fun but i find that i'm spending more time in facebook than writing here. i've substituted people watching for contemplation and reflection. composing the one liner status update is a haiku-ish art in itself and seeing what friends respond to is fascinating, but i miss the benefit of spending an hour or more stringing together more than one or two ideas.

tomorrow, i am traveling to my meditation center where i'll be serving this time for about two weeks. i will be meditating, but not as intensively as if i were taking the course. i think i'll be learning to cook all the simple vegetarian food they serve and i'm excited about that as well as learning to integrate meditation with work. i'm not as successful as i'd like to be at maintaining my practice at home. it's easy when at the center. everything is set up to help you succeed. at home, much more difficult. i awake with thoughts of my business, things to do, and before i know it i'm out the door looking for a coffee.

oh, and i won and lost the election. i got the most votes but because i was a write-in, and some folks wrote me into a slot i wasn't running for, i didn't technically win a seat. no regrets!

politics

2009-02-11T22:58:00.003-05:00

i'm running for a seat on my town's selectboard. it just so happened that there was a slot on the ballot open and friends urged me to run. so, here i go!

snacking update

2009-01-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

it's been three weeks since i started the no-snack experiment. results so far:

i've dropped three pounds (1 pound per week = 3500 calories per week = 500 calories per day. makes sense. i was probably eating about 500 calories in snacks per day).
i feel thinner even though i would say i look the same.
i drink more water (instead of snacking).
i am less attracted to sugary food. in fact i don't think about it much at all. i used to crave sugar regularly. i wouldn't say that craving is gone altogether, but much reduced.
i seem to naturally select nutritious foods during meals.
i enjoy the food i am eating more, much more. knowing that what i am eating is it for the next few hours shifts my attitude toward it.
i am less compelled to eat seconds, which for me was about hording, competing, racing and probably has something to do with being trained as a child to clean my plate for seconds.
i feel more in control in my life. this one was unexpected.
i never feel bloated.
it has been easy to stay faithful, even enjoyable, unlike any other food regime i've tried.

edge portrait

2009-01-18T17:40:00.001-05:00

this idea came to me late one night: to take a bunch of little pictures of someone, just of their edge, then layer them to create an outline portrait. here's the first one.

body stuff

2009-01-05T22:09:00.009-05:00

okay, i'm sick of putting on weight. i'm a gay man and figure is important! so, i'm giving up snacks. i've tried diets, workouts, eating this, not that, eating that, not this. i've carefully combined foods, been a vegetarian, a carnivore, i've forsaken dairy and i've eaten pints of ice cream in a single sitting. i've slimmed my belly in photoshop. so, rather than add another impossible-to-maintain practice, i decided to keep it simple and real: no snacks.

i can tell its working already. i'm hungry before meals--a nice feeling actually--that's so different from the perpetually stuffed feeling i've grown accustomed to (as has my belly). stomachs hold only so much and this no-snacker "plan" takes advantage of that. i figure three meals a day, no snacks, that's just about the right amount of food for me. if i only eat two or three times a day, how can i really overeat? there's just not room. when i'm hungry, i tend to be attracted to healthier food, too, so i don't really have to worry about downing too many sweets. i do like a little chocolate before meals!

at dhamma dhara, where i meditate, we get two meals a day. in ten days i usually drop 5 to 7 pounds. i drink a lot of water, a dixie cup or two an hour. at least two of the pounds must be mental trash going out the door! but a lot of it is real weight loss, which just goes to prove that i'm on the right track with snackhibition. the two meals are breakfast and lunch, both vegetarian, no snacking between. this regime produces deep sleep with vivid (and informative!) dreams.

it's been fun to notice when and how often i feel like snacking. since i seem think about snacks almost as much as sex, it's clear i was a snackaholic. i'm thrilled by the sense of control i'm feeling when i ignore my snack attacks. not being a victim to an open bag of chips is profoundly empowering. going into a meal knowing i can eat it all guilt free makes dining almost ecstatic. americans are terrorized by food and the food industry. they've convinced us we need food all day long. forget drugs, it's time to declare a war on snacks.

Star Trek Phase 2: Behind the Scenes

2008-12-12T10:10:00.003-05:00

On the Set of Star Trek Phase II: Making of the Child By Matt Bucy
View in HD Download 404p Version Visit Matt Bucy's ExposureRoom Videos Page

i shot this video last fall during the production of a new episode of classic star trek called "the child." peter west assisted me with shooting and editing.

Maine Media Workshop

2008-11-20T18:13:00.004-05:00

i spent a week in rockport, maine last summer at the maine media workshops. above is a short exercise i directed. we had two hours to come up with the story, choose a location, light and shoot. it was fun to screen this at the end-of-week showcase. it got good audience response. it had a beach boys "good vibrations" soundtrack, but i nixed it here. mara laine came up with the story idea--to use books titles as a dialog--which was great, and i came up with the idea to use the bookstore ladder as a dolly as well as the device that connects the two characters. jim mcgathey directed the lighting and championed the use of "kino on the floor", which i didn't like at first but i have to hand it to him, it works! he also stars. george lamboy set the lights and kept us all in order! i'm afraid i can't remember the name of the actress (apologies).

interviews

2008-11-14T09:48:00.004-05:00

i'm in new orleans shooting interviews for a friend, tim wolff, who is directing a film, "the sons of tennessee williams". it's about gay social clubs, the men who pioneered them in the 1960s and 70s and the men who sustain them today. gay men in new orleans took a unique path to carve out rights for themselves. they produced fantastic costume balls that provided a non-confrontational, but edgy, interface between straight and gay culture that tested and ultimately prevailed over anti-gay laws.

our little town

2008-11-10T12:07:00.003-05:00

a great video by eva sollberger about our annual halloween parade in white river junction. it's part of a series eva makes called "stuck in vermont".

star trek phase 2

2008-10-30T18:37:00.003-04:00

here i am in my second episode, seated 2nd from the left.

my friend peter west came along to check out the production for a few days. we're going to be flying to new orleans next week to help friend tim wolff shoot his documentary about gay krewes. i'll be there with peter for a week.

burp

2008-10-28T15:35:00.002-04:00

excuse me. i am still here. but, boy, have i not had time to write! advice: never plan three intense projects for one summer with the hopes that two of them won't happen. like people who don't like cats and always have cats jumping on them, they will all happen. and all will require your undivided attention, just like a cat.

got me some new thangs

2008-10-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

i got new glasses. i got a macbook. together, these resulted in this picture.

lights

2008-09-11T18:57:00.003-04:00

dreamland's got lights! a generous donor gave me about 30 lights for the dreamland performance space/soundstage today. they're old, but in great condition, generally, and should allow me to set up a lighting grid sooner than later with the ability to light small performances decently. i think i ought to be able to use these for film production too, but they lack barn doors and filter holders and are set up to clamp onto pipe rather than c-stands. very excited!

star trek phase 2

2008-08-27T10:28:00.013-04:00

barbara luna in "mirror mirror"

me as a security guard (from barbara luna's website)

i briefly mentioned earlier that i am working on new star trek episodes with a dedicated group of fans. i mentioned one afternoon to an acquaintance that i'd like to do some sci-fi shorts and she told me about the production of new star trek episodes in upstate new york, about two hours from white river. so, i emailed james, the actor who plays kirk and who is the force behind the new episodes, who forwarded my message onto a guy named "sarge" and voila, i was engaged to volunteer. i couldn't wait to see the sets!

i arrived well into the shoot because i had other obligations, namely taking the production lighting course at the maine media workshop. so, i arrived well prepared to jump into studio production. but, i didn't expect to be put in front of the camera, which is what happened within minutes of my arrival. better yet, i got to act with one of the original star trek actresses, barbara luna, who played kirk's girlfriend in the episode "Mirror Mirror". she taught me how to fall when phasered.

i will be returning to the set in a couple weeks to assist in shooting "pick-ups", shots that are needed but didn't get shot during the principal photography. and i will be returning for another episode's production in october.

you can watch the new episodes here: www.startrekphase2.com

dreamland in the news

2008-08-26T12:03:00.001-04:00

the dreamland studio made it into the news... check it out

cigarette diaries

2008-08-21T07:46:00.003-04:00

peter and i whipped this up a couple weeks ago. he just quit smoking. rated R for language and sexual content.

vote for me

2008-07-30T11:13:00.001-04:00

politics (grrr)

2008-07-10T09:28:00.004-04:00

i've been loosely following the presidential campaign. yesterday i read that mccain's latest televison ad says the following: "Beautiful words cannot not make our lives better." i thought, well, that's it in a nutshell: if a politician believes that language, the foundation of so much of our culture, and the precursor to almost all action, especially political action, has no potential to better our lives, then how does one make better? it's painfully clear, thanks to the current administration, that ugly and deceitful words lead to ugly action, for which we have paid and will be paying, in blood, sweat and tears, for decades, and for the betterment of who? i believe it's difficult, if not impossible, to write beautiful words without beautiful thought. beautiful action is the result of beautiful thought. our lives are manifestly and directly made better by the beautiful: thought, words and action, an intimately linked trio. i'll be voting for the candidate whose words suggest he's thinking beautifully. sorry john.

location lighting

2008-06-27T16:32:00.002-04:00

i just returned from a couple weeks of filmmaking. the first week was a workshop at the maine media workshops where matt seigel, cinematographer, led fourteen of us on a most excellent journey exploring the world of location lighting for film and video. we explored about ten different locations around rockport and camden, maine, where the media workshops are located, lit and shot film and video at six of them. the learning curve was steep for all of us in the workshop, i think, but i came out of it feeling like i'd been through half of film school. matt is a great teacher and i know because right after the class i found myself on the set of a fan-produced star trek episode in upstate new york where i not only discovered everything matt taught us in the workshop came true on set but also got to act with star trek original series actress barbara luna who played marlena moreau, kirk's girlfriend, in the episode, "mirror mirror." it was a great follow up to the workshop because i felt awfully proud when the director of photography told me to "get a 650, drop a single into it with a party red" and i knew what he was talking about. the episode in which i appear (for about five seconds) will be delivered on the internet next year.

new camera

2008-06-12T20:21:00.005-04:00

i've been learning my new hi-def camera. this is a short little movie i made from shots i took yesterday, taken without the intention on making a movie, but cut together pretty nicely i thought. the subject: things that are still juxtaposed with things that move, with a brief into and outro from main street museum curator, david ford, who graciously divulged his inspiration just before heading off to a hartford historical society meeting on his bicycle (that shot got cut i'm afraid, though it was nice). i'm using a 35mm lens adapter which allows me to mount my nikon SLR lenses on my video camera. it makes for wonderful shallow depth of field and a look that usually doesn't come from a video camera. while i think the movie falls apart about halfway through, my intention was to run all the way through the production process to see how it worked, from shooting, to editing, to color correcting, to sound editing and finally compressing for the web, a process that took me through five different pieces of software. i'm happy with the result. it even sounds good on crappy little speakers!

energy

2008-06-10T15:51:00.002-04:00

with all the hype and fear about energy lately, it's interesting to take an objective look at it. i found this chart, produced by the government. it sheds some interesting light on our current energy use (2004). the most astounding fact is that of all the energy we consume, only 38% of it gets used, the rest is wasted. for instance, of the power an electrical plant produces, only 31% is useful energy, the rest is lost in the system. compare this to nature, specifically plants, which use photosynthesis to capture the sun's energy. they do this at near 100% efficiency, wasting almost nothing, and they contribute to the ecosystem. the human habit of consuming fossil fuels contributes little beneficial to the environment (excess heat, excess carbon dioxide, chemical waste, poor air quality, etc). vehicles are particularly dismal at around 20% efficient (the other 80% is lost to friction, so perhaps in the winter they're a bit more "useful" because the heat generated by the friction is used to warm the passenger compartment!). clearly, if we're all going to survive without immense decreases in quality of life, we have to become more efficient. the easiest way is not to participate in activities that use lots of energy, and the second easiest way is to, if one has to use energy, use it efficiently. incandescent light bulbs are among the most energy inefficient devices in existence, between 2% and 13% depending on the bulb. just a tiny fraction of the energy consumed by a light bulb produces visible light! the rest of the energy produces heat. when you consider that the electricity reaching one's home is just 31% of the energy consumed and multiply that by an incadescent bulb's efficiency of 8.5% on average, we get an overall efficiency of just 2.6%. that's 3800% less efficient than your average house plant, which happens to be the most efficient energy "appliance" in your house.

mini update

2008-06-10T09:44:00.003-04:00

i had a fun birthday a couple days ago, spread out over a weekend, in white river junction and at faerie camp destiny. my friend jon showed up in ghoulish attire for our green screen shoot that gabriel and jade arranged. otherwise, life is very busy for me right now. i really need to clean my office. it has reached levels of chaos unparalleled!

new camera

2008-05-18T12:58:00.003-04:00

i got a new video camera. the first thing i did with it was turn it on, point it out the window, and then went and had my signature breakfast: two eggs over easy, home fries, dry english muffin with peanut butter, coffee. when i got back this is what happened. if you imagine a whistling wind in the background you'll just about have the day.

new work

2008-05-14T17:49:00.004-04:00

as things seem to happen in my life, a seachange is in process. my architecture work is coming to a close while my film work is starting to bustle. this feels very very good to me. i sometimes wonder if i haven't approached architecture in the same way the george bush seems to have approached the white house: as a response to a difficult past event...a poor reason to approach anything. architecture school was extremely challenging for me and i suppose, in retrospect, i've always wanted to prove to myself that i could "do it" because in school i got the definite impression that i couldn't do it. in general, school seemed to communicate that message to me. what i find curious is that whenever i've tried to "do" architecture, i find myself in film. it happened as a kid, in high school, in college and in grad school. i would endeavor to create architectural projects and find myself dreaming in pictures. a common criticism of my architectural work was that it dealt in pictures, not architecture. i came away from those crits often wondering if i understood what architecture was at all. i do tend to think of buildings sequentially... you enter here, you go there, you see that, you do this... and i tend to like architecture that presents sequences of spaces, processions and especially cities (i liked urban planning a lot). the aspect of architecture that i dislike, viscerally, is all the regulation around it, the bureaucracy that attends most building projects, which, though i may be applying my own neurosis to this, seem to say, "you are bad for even thinking of this." it feels very much like my experience of church, actually, which involved a lot of rules that made no sense to me.

i can't claim that filmmaking is any better, especially in a studio format, where there are terrible pressures to make money, be successful, be glamorous, and climb the ladder. but, my sense is that as an independent, there is much more freedom (in architecture too, but the places you can practice without oversight are dwindling). i've been watching a lot of john waters films and i am heartened by the outrageousness and compassion his films present, despite their surface vulgarity, which i find hilarious and shocking, still! and, now, a teenage fantasy of mine is coming true: i will get to visit the starship enterprise and participate in the making of a star trek episode. this trumps all architectural possibilities! it turns out that not far from where i live there is a full-scale copy of the original star trek sets that are being used to create new original series episodes. it's astonishing to see how well the sets are reproduced, and i can't wait to see what a completely community driven production is like.

oh, and if you need a cinematographer, i've got a swanky new camera that takes gorgeous movies. ask me for references!

excited

2008-05-06T21:09:00.003-04:00

i'm so danged excited about making films and i'm learning so much. i found a great website, lynda.com that has extensive instructional videos about all of apple's movie production software. it's been a great way to learn for me. i like watching. i've never been much of a manual kind of guy. i like to jump and get going. i've also been researching movie making equipment. more and more, movie making is done inside a computer and the camera is becoming a capture device that provides files to the computer. the essentials are still the same, but rather than have to spend lots of money on big sets, it's now possible with your average mac or PC, to build fantastic worlds and place actors into them realistically (see prior post). i've always wanted to make some sci-fi films, and it looks like i will be able to, spectacularly!

holy....

2008-05-03T13:57:00.001-04:00

here's what you can do with a pretty cheap camera and a lot of software.

Filmmaking

2008-05-02T00:19:00.005-04:00

a while back i decided to put my attentions back into filmmaking. the last time i really looked at what was possible on a meager budget was around four years ago. since conceiving a short film that i want to make in my new studio, and realizing that i was going to need some special effects to pull it off, i've discovered that filmmaking as i knew it four years ago (low resolution video) has been replaced by much more film-like technology (better cameras, lenses, software). i'm frankly astonished by what is possible with a personal computer, a relatively cheap camera and a good dose of imagination.

for instance, the last scene in my film will involve a man tearing down a wall, revealing a beach behind the wooden framing, wind, fog, sand and paper blowing about gale-force. a week ago i was contemplating building a frame wall on a beach, thinking about big fans, and a bunch of stage hands to toss sand. today, i'm thinking it'll be a lot easier and less expensive to do it mostly in the computer.

my first tip that things had changed was a short clip i found of a normandy invasion re-enactment created by three guys--three guys total--who in four days created a 1000-extra-looking scene that's stunning. a month or so ago i watched some of the making-of features included with the "lord of the rings" films. throughout i thought, wow, wouldn't it be cool to be able to play with some of the technology they are using. well, now i can.

phineas birthday party

2008-04-19T17:52:00.003-04:00

today was phin's first birthday party!

new design

2008-04-17T19:36:00.003-04:00

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?

2008-04-16T09:21:00.003-04:00

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
aloofdork
boobs and biceps
how much land to feed one person?
parslaine
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timo elliot
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incongruency
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look at that faggot
matt bucy sea creatures
meaningless comparisons
number of acres used to feed a single person in one year
ratna pappert
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matt bucy

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

2008-04-14T20:02:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-05T16:59:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-01T20:02:00.002-04:00

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.

flaming mops / ice chunks

2008-03-28T18:11:00.003-04:00

this is what my driveway looks like today. crusty, dirty, partially melted snow muck. i thought this particular bit of it was intriguing.

i've been more or less a workaholic the last week, preparing to purchase the building that will become, in part, the movie studio. the prior owners have mostly cleared it out and it's looking mighty tasty. i can't wait to get my hands on it. i'm not sleeping all that well, worrying about all the little details that have to be attended to before the sale can close.

on top of all that, there was a fire in my big building. thank goodness a friend happened to be in the space when it started and managed to put it out before it did much damage (not much means around $10,000 to $20,000!). it's amazing what a little fire burning for about two minutes can do. crazy. advice: do not store mops anywhere near hot water heaters.

i've continued my home-brew-film-school, watching at least one movie a night and consuming yet more movie-making books. as the date nears for the studio to be mine, i'm seriously contemplating what exactly it is that i will make. i've never quite had this opportunity before, and i'm very excited to allow my creative endeavor to expand in my 3000 or so square feet. i'm also particularly interested in what other people might be interested in doing in the space.

get real

2008-03-21T15:34:00.001-04:00

houses, studios, babies, faeries, films

2008-03-18T09:23:00.005-04:00

in less than two weeks i'll be purchasing the future studio building for dreamland, the vision for which has shifted dramatically over the past year but now seems to be stabilizing in the form of a filmmaking soundstage that can be used for events as well. this weekend, the radical faeries are coming up to white river junction for their annual meeting and will be staying at our place. gabriel and i have been working hard the past few days to get our shower project done. we tiled all weekend. we started the project a year ago! tomorrow, gabriel and i are travelling to boston to see the moms and the boys and catch a matinée (and maybe get a couch). meanwhile, other projects are on hold, such as the house i was trying to buy and the purchase of the land across the street, both of which have been tangled up variously. i am working on drawings for my parent's house in california, which is a simple but dramatic reworking of the windows and some interior partitions. i'm also working on a house for two friends in new hampshire. and soon, very soon, i'll be working on the graphics for white river indie films, which will be showing fourteen independent films at the tip top at the end of april. it looks like a great slate this year.

winner

2008-03-11T17:23:00.003-04:00

the results are in. people like the facade design pictured here. i concur. i like the large areas of color. the next step is to figure out how to make those areas of color happen. they could be made of stained natural wood, or untreated wood of various species (it wouldn't be so vibrant), or possibly cement-fiber board, which is durable. i saw a building in los angeles that was done with fiber-board. it's pictured here, too.

dreamland design

2008-03-09T14:13:00.004-04:00

before

after

i've been working this weekend on new designs for the dreamland theater and office building. my business partner and i already went through a round of design and permitting but we decided the project was too ambitious, with a third floor, an extension off the front, and significant rehab of the interior. so, we're now playing with a less ambitious scheme, and i'm finding it's a lot of fun to work with just what you have. limits are the source of so much creativity.

so, the top picture is how the building looks today. the bottom is a model i've been playing with. because our budget is limited, our radical move is going to be to re-skin the front facade and change the shape somewhat. i'm leaning toward bright colors. power poles are ubiquitous in white river junction, so we decided to use them for decoration as opposed to spending near $100,000 to have the power buried.

i'm curious what you think. there are 27 different and flavors of this in a web gallery located here. take a look. let me know what you like.

if you're curious about the materials, we're thinking we will strip the vinyl exterior and replace it with additional insulation sealed with a rainscreen over which will go decorative natural wood, stained or untreated, or alternatively painted or stained cement-board. the first floor street level will be mostly glass curtain wall for retail or public-oriented businesses. the theater/soundstage is out back, down an alley. haven't got to designing that yet.

dreamland website

2008-03-08T08:33:00.003-05:00

for anyone interested in staying abreast of developments at dreamland, i've just put up a really simple website. eventually, it will list events and describe what and how you'll be able to use dreamland. you can also sign up to be on an email list.

www.dreamlandwrj.com.

soundstage

2008-03-05T18:15:00.004-05:00

i had a great meeting today with jane applegate, who will be the executive producer for dreamland. the concept for dreamland has developed in an exciting new direction, just minutes ago. time will tell if it sticks, but we were thinking about the decor for the theater, what kind of theme it might evoke, and how it might operate not only as a theater but as an event space. and then it occurred to me, partly because i'd been thinking about where i might be able to shoot scenes with sets the past couple days, why not make the space a bona-fide mini-soundstage? most of the elements would be more or less there anyway: lighting, sound, video projection, some staging, and a big open floor with tall ceilings. so, i'm running with this idea. the picture is not the space, just inspiration. lovely, naked, functional space.

i've always had a feeling that white river could be home to some small independent film production. a number of filmmakers live and work in the area. it also serves my desire to have the space be a creative place, rather than a consumer driven thing. so, coming to dreamland will invite you participate, create, join in, and experience. when you enter, you'll be not only witnessing some kind of show or event, you'll be in a space that's infused with creative energy and tools. i think this is pretty cool. it will also allow me to spend money i would have otherwise dedicated to decor on better lighting and other studio gear because the decor will be "soundstage." the bar will be "kraft service."

camera envy

2008-03-04T15:45:00.006-05:00

i've been drewling over this camera for the last month, ever since having used one to shoot documentary footage for a friend in new orleans. i'm promising myself i will not even think about buying one until i have a project worthy of the price. it's not a super expensive camera, as they go, but more than pocket change. you could buy a decent used car for the price.

the picture quality is stunning. having worked with standard video for years now, my first shoot with this camera knocked my socks off. i'm used to what is now called standard video, in which approximately 480 horizontal lines of picture make up each frame. by comparison, 35mm film, which is what is used to shoot most motion pictures today, can resolve in the range of 2000 to 3000 lines (however, according to a paper i just read, by the time it's printed and projected in a theater the resolution drops to somewhere in the 700-800 line range). this camera, the sony pmw-ex1, resolves about 1000 lines, which by comparison is apparently better than what you'll see at most movie theaters. hot damn! the color quality is half that of more expensive broadcast cameras and a quarter that of the most expensive (as in $200,000!), but if you're in a situation where you need higher color fidelity, the camera can output it via cable to a recorder or computer, a really nice feature.

i'm also used to video looking, in my opinion, like hell, especially when outdoors in high contrast situations. back when i shot film in my still camera, super-8 and 16mm cameras, i could usually manage to keep the sky, faces, even shadows, within the range of the film, meaning each of those areas would have some tone. with video, i've always grimaced at having to choose what to let go, shadows or highlights. this is mainly because i use cheap video cameras, and don't spend much time with lighting, but it's also partly the result of the narrow range of electronic image gathering. this new camera, to my delight, had adjustable response curves and several presets that allow you to set up the camera to respond much more like film so that the sunny side of a face, for instance, doesn't bleach out but maintains tone at the same time the bicycle in the shadows of a tree is still visible. hot damn, again.

okay, one more thing: this camera seems to have a real lens. what i mean is that the usual three controls, focus, iris and zoom, each have physical rings that you can turn to adjust manually, which makes shooting, for me anyway, so much more enjoyable. i'm not a fan of automatic.

there are a number of other manufacturers making similar cameras today. i can't vouch for any of them, but from what i've read and seen on sites comparing them, this camera has lots to offer for very low budget independent filmmakers. now, if i can crank out a script that i feel is worth shooting, maybe i'll get one.

dreamland

2008-03-03T19:32:00.004-05:00

soon, downtown white river junction will have a new venue for movies, music and other laudable entertainments (no, not the wrap, our infamous strip club that burned down a while back). this is the back door, soon to be the stage door. in about a month, i will be purchasing, along with a business partner, a downtown building and converting the back 3000 square feet into the dreamland theater. the plans are by no means set in stone, but the concept is to create a space in which almost anything can happen that requires projection, amplification, lighting and an audience, all of which excite me! i'm hoping for lots of experimentation. i'm very excited to be able to use the space myself for projection of my movies and god knows what all else, maybe even some performance. there will be a bar that will serve a variety of beverages and food so that coming to dreamland will be sort of like going to a giant living room with creature comforts and all your friends. i've been scheming with a variety of people about producing programs at dreamland which will vary from indie film to indie music to indie theater. indie seems to be the key word. the space will be able to hold about 130 people sitting and more standing. during the day i'm hoping the space will be used as a community auditorium where lectures and presentations can be made. we are sorely lacking a place for this kind of thing in downtown. the rest of the building will be renovated as office space, some of which is already leased and some of which is available. talk to me!

ideas

2008-03-03T10:36:00.003-05:00

over the weekend i took time to re-read a couple screenplay writing books i've had for years. the curious thing about every screenplay book i've picked up is that they all describe the same structure for narrative films, which is: 30 pages of act one, 60 pages of act two, and 30 pages of act three, each page corresponding to roughly one minute on screen. act one and act two are punctuated by "plot points" near their end which turn the movie in a new direction, either towards conflict in act one or resolution in act two. i remember the first time i saw this formula and how i thought, "that is so lame." i couldn't believe that all my beloved feature films followed this structure. but, in fact, almost all of them do. apparently this structure derives from vaudeville, which early films imitated, and is partially what we expect and love when we go to see a feature film.

feeling rich with possibility from sucking up so much advice over the weekend, last night i suddenly felt overwhelmed. i was thinking things like, "how do you even start?" "where do the ideas come from?" i ought to know by now, having created my whole life, but it seems i'm forever susceptible to this "blank canvas" panic. perhaps one just has to get used to it. but, this morning i thought, wait, i take notes all the time with my camera. it's kind of my idea catcher. so, voila, a hundred ideas poured into my head. fear is the gatekeeper.

this way

2008-03-02T18:21:00.003-05:00

although i am supposed to be doing other things, i have been obsessing on filmmaking. it's my pattern to do this. the only downside to my habit is that i tend to overdose and flame out which means i attend to my interests sporadically as recovery permits! it would be nice to nurture a smoother approach, but, it may just not be in my cards. i also tend to obsess on details but only those that are easy to reach, such as things on the internet or things that i can manipulate in my mind.

it occurred to me today that much of what makes people seem old is the weight of their aspirations. the older one gets, the more one may have aspired to this and that and the more you aspire, especially if you aspire unrealistically, the more you don't get done, so life starts to seem like a long list of unaccomplishments. this may be just my take, but i feel my energy surge when i keep my goals clear and simple, and specifically focus on one thing. as a teenager, with the structure of my life defined for me (and little past to ponder), focusing was easy. as an adult, i think it's possible to maintain a similar focus, but it requires discipline to keep minutiae from taking over. for example, it's easier to sit around and answer email and surf the web than to actually create something. like any good story, i think life requires structure in order to succeed.

film

2008-02-29T15:14:00.003-05:00

my pendulum swings again.
my friends all laugh.
i try not to wince
at the thought that i might be
wasting my time.

schindler

2008-02-29T14:47:00.004-05:00

here are some pix of the schindler studio house on king's road in los angeles. i visited here the last day of my trip and was happy to have done so! friend and fellow artist timo elliot accompanied me. the house impressed me because it is small but feels grand. this is partly because it is literally small scale; i could not walk through the house without ducking. all the pictures were taken on my knees! were people smaller in 1920? i've had similar experiences in frank lloyd wright houses. schindler worked for wright.

as usual, i found the bathrooms the most interesting places. the play of light on fixtures, pipes, porcelain and the private nature of the spaces draws my attention. they are functional sanctuaries.

the living spaces were a bit hard to judge because they were bereft of furnishings. bare concerete walls and floors run throughout. the fireplace is marked only by a copper hood. i guess the logs just went on the floor. pedestals with speakers playing an audio piece punctuated (or interrupted, i found) the architecture. the house is in okay shape. it's clearly old. the wood is dark with age and the paper-fiber wall panels (paper walls!) are stained. it looks fabulous in pictures! being the first modernist house in los angeles, it's a gem, and should be preserved. it's great that it's open to the public. we were allowed to wander as we pleased. there are guided tours on the weekends. a must see if you're at all interested in architecture.

timo

2008-02-28T20:07:00.006-05:00

i had lunch with the magnificent timo while in los angeles. we hadn't seen each other in nine or ten years. we toured the schindler studio house together. timo is a painter and graphic designer. you can check out his stuff on flickr here.

you can see a picture timo took of me taking pictures here. i'll post some of the pix i took of the schindler house shortly. until then you can see them at my flickr account here.

favorite film

2008-02-28T09:25:00.004-05:00

eraserhead, by david lynch, is one of my all time favorite films. i watched it for the god-knows-how-manyeth time last night. i recall defending this film in college and graduate school to befuddled friends who thought it was gross, stupid, incomprehensible, and a waste of time. i still feel it's one of the best films ever made and it holds up, for me, viewing after viewing. i just learned the libarary of congress has deemed it "culturally significant," so i feel supported in my early defenses. if you haven't seen it, i highly recommend it.

eraserhead was lynch's first feature. he'd made a few shorts prior. it took six years to complete, which is hard to believe when you watch the film because there's no indication of that time span, other than perhaps the lead character's hair which gets longer. it was made by a small crew working mostly at night in unused spaces at the american film institute in los angeles. the script was just 21 pages long (a typical feature script is usually around 120 pages).

it's a tense film despite the lack of dialog and action. the story is told by the environment as much as it is by the actors. radiators, door knobs, lamps, steam, sounds from outside, long periods of silence, and misunderstanding move the story along. one of my favorite scenes is henry's wife's departure late one night. she leaves him because she can't stand their baby's constant crying. she gets dressed, goes to the foot of the bed, reaches under, and rocks the bed, moaning in escalating intensity. it seems like sex. this goes on quite some time. henry watches, dumbfounded, as are we. finally, she lurches back and we realize she has pulled loose a stuck suitcase from under the bed. it's brilliant.

abstract city

2008-02-23T12:02:00.002-05:00

driving around los angeles with marco provided lots of opportunity to shoot pictures from his car window. because traffic in los angeles is chronically jammed (average speeds of around 7mph at 5pm) i was able to spend a lot of time looking. the variety of architecture provides lots of interesting shape-making, especially against a dusking sky. i've posted all my los angeles pictures here.

los angeles

2008-02-18T13:48:00.002-05:00

i'm in los angeles for a little less than a week, checking out architecture, photographing, hanging out with my friend marco and his friends. then back to vermont.

mardi gras 2008

2008-02-12T15:17:00.000-05:00

my favorite pic from mardi gras. there are lots more here.

sor you

2008-01-29T21:07:00.000-05:00

i found this this morning on frenchaman street.

new orleans moviemaking

2008-01-29T09:51:00.000-05:00

gabriel and i arrived in new orleans a couple days ago, greeted by sunny warmish weather. it feels so good to be here. i love changes of venue. i suppose that is my gemini sun shining through. i always loved those scenes in westerns when someone turns a table over and the everything flies into chaos.

i'm working the first week here on a film being produced by a faerie friend. we had our first shooting day yesterday. i was a bit nervous because we are shooting high definition wide-screen, which i've never done before. the cameras are new and excellent, sony xdcam ex. these cameras have no tape, pure solid state. it took me a couple hours to get used to the controls, and my greatest frustration was confusing the start/stop button with the detail focus button, so i'd get a good shot going and would go to focus and stop the shot. but, otherwise, i found the camera easy to operate and love the manual focus, zoom and iris. we do a second day of shooting today.

pix

2008-01-25T11:22:00.000-05:00

here of some favorites i pulled from my photo collection.

new orleans or bust

2008-01-24T12:55:00.000-05:00

gabriel and i are just about to head off to new orleans with a trailer full of costumes in tow. we'll be meeting friends there for the usual work and celebrations. but, this year i'll be spending a week shooting a video with a television producer friend who is making a documentary about gay mardi gras krewes and their place in new orleans and gay history.

media fodder: here's a clip from a fabulous party a couple years ago. i love this dress that i made out of napkins and scotch tape. the dastardly david ford tore it mercilessly from my body on a near empty street after it had survived for hours in a crowded room.

and here's one of a nice man i met on the street.

magic

2008-01-23T14:27:00.000-05:00

"Children see magic because they look for it."
—Christoper Moore

sublime separation

2008-01-21T12:24:00.000-05:00

something this morning told me there was a separation in the universe. i'm not sure why i felt this but i woke up feeling a kind of emotional hangover and took a nice long bath, shaved. the older i get the more aware i become of the deep interconnectedness between us all and at the same time the infinite distance that separates us. the latter seems to manifest for me in inverse proportion to the closeness i perceive in a relationship. the more i get to know someone, the clearer the distance between us becomes and conversely in the company of complete strangers i can feel deeply intimate. at times i'll feel a potent intimacy with someone with whom i've lost contact. it's as if in the presence of fulfillment there is absence and in the absence of fulfillment there is presence. it's a beautiful paradox because it always (usually after periods of struggle and pain) points me back to the divinity within myself, the wholeness that i've only experienced from inside, to the principle that one finds the deepest contentment in oneself, that the habitual reach to the outside for balance only unbalances. in the brief moments that i've wintessed my own wholeness i've felt capable of loving everything, unconditionally.

jim jackson video artist

2008-01-21T10:45:00.001-05:00

my friend jim in boston makes cool animations based on his paintings. here's one!

integration

2008-01-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

i knew that i had a lot of photos. but, i had no idea exactly how many. right now i'm importing all my photographs into iPhoto and it's telling me i have 35,471 so far. until last night they were spread across a bookshelf of dvd backups and an armload of smallish external hard drives. i bought a 500 gigabyte internal drive for my PowerMac and last night imported about 20,000 images. this morning i brought in about another 10,000 and now am finishing up by importing the dvds. i should have room for another 50,000 or so, which will keep me cool for a few years more.

i tried out iPhoto a few years ago and was not impressed. but, apple seems to have improved it dramatically. it operates quickly and is handling my tens of thousands of photos nicely. i love the way iPhoto puts all your pictures into a giant contact sheet. i put the thumbnail size down as small as it will go and it turns into a tapestry.

it feels really good to have all my images consolidated. a few weeks back, working on a magazine, i remembered a picture. it took me nearly all day to find it (it happened to be on a firewire drive that i thought was on but was off, duh). this triggered my research into ways to organize photos. for the past three years they have been organized by a variety of methods defined by my different camera upload softwares. it turns out that i had the answer under my nose with iPhoto, but i looked at quite a few packages before settling on it. the most powerful was aperture--from apple too--sort of iPhoto on steroids, but i had a lot of trouble with it and it seemed very slow by comparison and even corrupted one of my hard drives by creating folders that crashed my system when i tried to open them. i had to mount the drive on my PC laptop and delete the files through windows. the problem may have been related to that drive's windows file system... who knows. anyway, while i liked a lot of the organizational aspects of aperture, i didn't like the way it imported. iPhoto does a great job of sucking up whatever photos are on a hard drive and letting you organize later. maybe there is a way to do this in aperture but i couldn't figure it out and i wasn't too keen on spending $300 on photo management software. so, the short of the long is that with now almost 40,000 pictures, iPhoto is doing great. i hope it continues!

sea life

2008-01-17T08:39:00.000-05:00

these are shots i took of gabriel's most recent puppets. they are sea creatures for an entertainment company in california. the glowing wire is electroluminescent wire from coolight and is a lot of fun to play with.

parthenot

2008-01-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

i'm working on the redesign of a banal building in my downtown. this occurred to me this evening.

incongruency

2008-01-14T16:48:00.000-05:00

i found myself on a cold but sunny day in boston with a zebra wearing this outfit last sunday. there's more to the picture which includes a hobby horse that i'm riding as well as my lucky jeans, which i adore and which fit me like no other jean ever has. the zebra was asleep next to the fence until i approached it. something about my outfit apparently registered as a threat and the zebra snorted and trotted off into the background. i like the mona lisa quality of this snapshot. there is only foreground and background, no middleground. it reflects the economic divide of the united states.

the occasion was the birthday of the twins, jaden and isaac. they are now one year old, walking and saying a few blurry words. their moms are doing a great job bringing them up.

tube

2008-01-03T17:44:00.000-05:00

i found this lovely tube in santa barbara. it's located off mountain drive, up in the hills behind the the city in the crook of a hairpin turn. i'm not sure what drew me to it but once i cleared the brush away from the entrance and peeked in i couldn't resist crawling in. it was remarkably clean. back east the tubes aren't usually so pristine. the light filtering in, casting shadows on the concrete ripples, fading away to black and then reappearing at the other end captured my attention for quite a while. i also shot some self portraits in it.

back in vermont

2007-12-30T21:48:00.000-05:00

me in santa barbara

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.

fashion sense

2007-12-24T01:55:00.000-05:00

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!

10% off lattes

2007-12-21T23:17:00.000-05:00

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.

back lot

2007-12-19T19:55:00.001-05:00

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.

meditation

2007-12-18T17:43:00.001-05:00

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.

travelling

2007-12-18T17:11:00.000-05:00

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.

vipassana

2007-12-12T19:22:00.001-05:00

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."

back from meditation

2007-12-11T19:55:00.000-05:00

i'm back from meditation. check this movie out.

going inside

2007-11-28T09:54:00.000-05:00

i'm going inside...for ten days, my third time, a vipassana meditation sit. catch you on the other side.

fall

2007-11-19T12:52:00.000-05:00

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.

maine

2007-11-19T12:01:00.000-05:00

peter fills out forms

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!

tunes

2007-11-06T00:23:00.002-05:00

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.

boo

2007-11-02T12:29:00.000-04:00

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.

RIP Daisy

2007-10-12T17:23:00.000-04:00

may daisy be happy wherever she is now.

pain

2007-10-11T18:11:00.000-04:00

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.

music

2007-10-10T22:31:00.000-04:00

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.

construction

2007-10-04T09:04:00.000-04:00

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.

swirling electric energy

2007-09-20T19:36:00.000-04:00

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.

fake bliss trumpet

2007-08-31T09:37:00.000-04:00

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.

giving

2007-08-07T17:27:00.000-04:00

i've just returned from a long weekend of work and companionship at the camp i'm working at for the summer. i'm volunteering a lot of hours to complete a new building there, teaching people construction and timber framing. it's a lot of hard work but i'm slowly discovering the deep power of giving, and more specifically selfless giving, a practice that's mentioned a lot in yoga and buddhism, as well as western religion.

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.

rafters up

2007-07-26T15:20:00.000-04:00

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.

faerie camp

2007-07-17T08:45:00.001-04:00

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.

like

2007-06-14T20:24:00.000-04:00

i just like this picture.

slowga

2007-06-11T21:56:00.001-04:00

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.

oh boy

2007-06-06T20:55:00.000-04:00

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.

face it

2007-05-22T21:08:00.000-04:00

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.

biceps and boobs

2007-05-10T22:39:00.000-04:00

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.

pema serendipidy

2007-05-06T15:48:00.000-04:00

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.

sole train

2007-04-26T22:18:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-25T10:09:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-17T21:40:00.000-04:00

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.