sawmilling

operator's perspective

loading a log

jay

stacked

clark

michel

mckim

the blade

last weekend i headed down to the faerie camp to oversee the sawing of about 40 logs that had been cleared from the faerie land last fall. mckim mitchell, a sawyer from new hampshire, brought his portable saw mill up and parked it near the log pile. saturday and sunday a crew of faeries helped load, unload and stack the timber. it was amazing watching each cut reveal a new pattern and it dawned on me, as it has many times when opening up anything that grows, that i'm the first person to ever see this specific pattern (and i am the first human it is to see!). it happens all the time and i have to remind myself of the mystery and beauty being revealed to me. some of the cuts exposed spectacular patterns which we kept as wide slabs to be used for benches or some other large flat surface. it was hard work and we all sweated up a storm in the summer sun which has arrived finally after weeks of rain. in all we got about 3500 board feet of timber out of our logs. a refrigerator is about 20 cubic feet, to give you an idea. the saw mill itself is an impressive machine which can lift logs onto its bed, slide them forward and back, roll them, and lift and level them. the largest beam we sawed was 12" tall by 6" wide by 14-1/2 feet long. all of our logs were eastern hemlock and carry a great deal of water in them. the 6x12 weighed about 400 pounds, by my calculations. i did a lot of "one-two-threeing" to coordinate the crew lifting.

purple head

a friend, robbie joy, is visiting from new orleans. he brought along some pictures from last mardi gras. here's one of me at the "purple party," a party to which everyone wears purple. that's the whole concept. there should be more things in life so simple. if i'm ever feeling down, i pull up some pictures from mardi gras and the day immediately feels more well adjusted.

bush does U2

as an aficionado of cut-ups, i recommend this one (brought to my attention by my friend hugh). my friend roger and i thought about doing something like this after we'd cut up the wizard of oz. slice and dice is in the air. video cuisinart!

bush sings bloody sunday

re-org

as a prelude to turning my life upside down, i cleaned my studio space over the weekend. i took two languorous days to do it with trancy, ambient music floating overhead. i pulled old equipment from my shelves, dusted them off and put them into a "free" box. my shelves are organized, clear of the old, plenty of clear space for new. my desks are clear as the big blue sky. i placed books in one section, supplies in another, cds, video, music in a third. this all makes me very happy. i love organized spaces even though i'm not known for keeping my own spaces organized. my friend victory from new orleans spent a couple days last winter teaching me how to organize. actually, he commanded me for two days and afterward i pretty much got the drift of how he worked. he was a strict and wonderful teacher and i think i got it.

my studio now feels better prepared to become a design studio. i'm not sure what to do with all my video gear. i tell myself that i'll figure out some way to integrate video and architecture. but i feel strongly that i want to dedicate my time to architecture. i know how much i'm capable of when i dedicate myself to a single path and go deep and intensely into it. as much as i'd like to do everything all at once i'm ready to organize and prioritize my activities! as in yoga, core strength is critical. defining and energizing my professional core is helping everything else in my life find a place and a purpose.

happy birthday

it's my birthday. i'm 43. and i'm starting the process of becoming a registered architect today. this is something most folks do right after architecture school. i wouldn't have done it any sooner. it didn't feel right.

it's been 16 years since i graduated, almost to the day. i went to the yale school of architecture, which, it happens, was built in 1963, the year i was born. there is a stamp featuring it. yale was extremely challenging for me and by year three there was nothing i wanted to do less than be an architect. i burned out, fried, never wanted to hear another talk about architecture or engage in a conversation about it, which, naturally, was what people wanted to do with me knowing i'd just graduated.

instead, i dove back into my prior haunt: software engineering. the problems were simpler, shorter and what i did—create software—was invisible. i went into hiding behind a veil of binary code. this led to that and in 1992 i purchased a down-and-out building that i happened by one day. over the next seven years i, with the help of my sister and a few others, conceived and constructed a small artist colony within the shell of this 160-year-old mill building. i learned how to frame, sheetrock, paint, mix concrete, learned the building code, how to work with contractors, how to build with very little. i ended up spending about $12 per square foot. but, this project also burned me out, and i told everyone, "never again!" but, in 1999, i wandered into a 45,000 square foot bakery dormant in the center of town and asked to rent some space. they offered me the building and by april 2000 i owned it with my parents, brothers and sisters as partners. i got out the drafting board and with architect friends danny sagan, alisa dworsky and daniel johnson as my "design therapists", worked up a schematic plan which i executed over the next three years. this building, called the tip top, is another arts building like my first, but on a much larger scale. it is a success. it attracts hundreds of people each day and has served as the poster child for the revitalization of our small town.

it's been three years since i finished the tip top, which also burned me out. being the architect, general contractor and manager wore me down and i found myself saying "never again!" but, with practice, we all become more resilient and grow. our little town is now growing, changing and seems poised to become a very happening little spot. i feel a role for myself as an architect here. there are lots more buildings that need work and i feel capable and want to help. being a licensed architect may help—i don't really know. my gut feeling is that it will but what's important is not the license. it's that i'm taking myself seriously and believe in my intention and dreams.

architecture

my birthday is coming up in a couple days and it seems that the cosmic present coming my way is a strong determination to pursue architecture professionally. i've been doing architecture for the past fourteen years. i've renovated two large buildings and am currently working on a project in southern vermont with a large number of volunteers. so architecture has been with me ever since i graduated from architecture school. but, i've always held it at a distance, said to people, "i will never become an architect." but, as it so often happens in my life, "never" means "i will". and, so i find myself excited and looking forward to the process of becoming a bona fide architect. i hear the exam is gruelling. call me if you need a house designed!

small is better (and more sustainable)

gabriel found these online: some fun small houses: tumbleweed houses.

lawngisland

sculpture, southampton

painting i did in 1992

discarded orange

wrapped boats

young bunny

gabriel

southampton nipple

i visited my parents in long island last weekend. gabriel came along. it rained most of the time making everything lush and the beach all blustery. long island has always felt almost out of control to me. trees, bushes, vines crawl all over everything. green is everywhere. my parents are well. on saturday, my mom, gabriel and i, took a trip to southampton to check out the museum there. mom did a lot of window shopping. mom discovered a tiny bunny hunkered down in the driveway earlier in the afternoon. while moving it, it shrieked. i've never heard a rabbit make a sound before. its mom showed up soon after.

wilted blog

this blog's been fading like this pepper i found in the grass. but, lots has been going on. i'm working on the radical faerie camp intensively. two weeks ago we held a film festival here in our little town which attracted double the number of people we had last time, about 800. we had four sell-outs and all shows had good attendance. the weekend after that i led a timber framing workshop (details here) for the radical faeries. we cut a nice gateway from rough-sawn timbers that will be erected on their land this summer. i also bought a truck! my neighbor accuses me of being a yuppie. it's hard to justify buying such a gas guzzler, but i am going to be doing hard construction this summer and my little VW Golf is not up to the task. i picked the truck up for $4,500. it's a 2002 Dodge 1500 with 136k on it. body is in great shape. engine sounds fine...we'll see. this weekend, going to visit my parents with gabriel. they're on long island at my grandparent's old house.

tra la la

i'm super busy right now, getting ready for our small town film festival this coming weekend. so, i've not been writing much. but i did have time to hang out with friends bunny and frank in randolph, along with gabriel and david. bunny is an amazing cook who delights us with her culinary talents every time we visit. she also has a fabulous new studio to paint in. at the moment it's empty which makes taking minimalist abstract pictures fun and easy. there was a mod chair in the corner that david chose to be his throne for drinking. nate, bunny's assistant, was also up for the weekend. he chose the wall. bunny had some great socks on.

roger's sticky weekenders

easter

heading down to lincoln, mass for easter. dinner last night with bunny and frank, gabriel, david and bunny's assistant nick. hung out with roger and danny on thursday. finished painting yoga studio friday and saturday.

curds and pigment

milk paint

curds before straining

more milk paint went up today. gabriel helped me out taking care of the goldenrod while i painted red. i'm getting better at formulating the paint. here's what i've found.

for about a quart of paint do the following:

• heat one gallon of skim milk to room temperature or a little warmer, either on a stove or by leaving it out a while. make sure not to overheat it or you will get big sticky curds! heat to no warmer than body temperature, so if it feels hot when you stick your finger in it's probably too hot.
• once the milk reaches room temperature, add 1 cup of white vinegar, pouring it slowly into the milk while stirring. or: 1tbsp vinegar per cup skim milk.
• when the last bit of vinegar goes in, you will notice the milk suddenly change from opaque to clear with curds (see picture).
• let the curds stand for a few minutes stirring occasionally. i'm not sure this does anything, but i do it. the recipies i first tried from books said to let the curds stand overnight. i haven't found that letting them sit overnight produces any nicer curds. but, what do i know?
• prepare a collander with cheesecloth, muslin or paint strainer (what i use) and place in your sink.
• pour the milk/vinegar mix into the cheesecloth and allow the curds (white stuff) to separate from the whey (clear stuff). it's important to find cheesecloth that's fine enough not to let your curds go down the drain. the curds will not be very big, so something like stocking mesh works well. the first batch i did all my curds fell through the cheesecloth.
• let the curds drain until there's little liquid coming from them
• i place the curds now into a blender, with a bit of water to start and puree them. be careful not to overload your blender with curd! lubricate the curds by adding water when the mix stops spinning. the curd can turn very rubbery around the spindle and stop the blender altogether if you don't keep enough water in the mix--not good for the mixer. after adding all the curds and water, puree for a few minutes. this will entrain a fair amount of air into the mix, but the bubbles work themselves out while painting.
• you should have about a quart of milk paint base when you're finished.
• next add pigment. i add between one and two tablespoons of pigment per cup, depending on how much transparency i want. one tablespoon gives a heavy stain look while two makes fairly opaque paint.

i really have little idea what i'm doing with all this. so, take the above with a grain of salt. the paint goes on very nicely, though, so i'm happy with the process. i can't make any claims about the paint's longevity.

satya

i've been experiencing the power of deep truth the past couple days. on sunday, i hung out with roger at the langdon street cafe in montpelier. i revealed things to him that i was deeply afraid to tell him, things that had built up, that i tried to suppress. i shook at times. but, roger responded postively, opening up himself, telling me things, sharing. we both felt high afterwards, flushed with energy. everything seemed vivid on the drive home. after such an opening, i thought that my therapy session with gabriel would be smooth. no such luck. it was difficult. i fumbled, found no clarity, had difficulty relating to gabriel or the therapist. i felt completely closed. the therapist said she felt i was hiding something. later, gabriel made me dinner. we talked, i centered myself, and tried to reach that same place i'd found with roger. slowly, the truth started to flow. it feels like energy to me, like a hot fluid coursing through my body. when i feel it, the fear of revealing myself diminishes, i believe what i say and find confidence in my own words. i find myself able to reach deep and say just what i needed to say, without fabrication, calculation, correction or even much thought.

i seem to have a strong fear of revealing myself. i don't know where it comes from, but perhaps it's a byproduct of all the practice i had as a teen hiding myself, especially those who loved me most, for fear that should they know my real self they wouldn't love me. the closer people came to me the more i hid. crazy. and a bad habit, no matter how understandable. it's no wonder i shake when the real stuff comes to the surface. i'm not used to it. but it teaches me how much being who you are is critical to being whole. i feel exultant after letting go. there is nothing more powerful than admitting who you are.

milk like plaster!

i've begun to paint my yoga studio, after a couple weeks of experimenting with different kinds of natural paints. i settled on the simplest, really: milk curds and pigment. it has a nice satin sheen when dry and goes on smoothly. you have to work fast, however, because it dries enough that you can't work it any more after just a minute. i like the way it's slightly translucent and how it adheres differently to different parts of the wall. from a distance it takes on the feeling of a plastered wall. it has luminence, a glowing quality, which is perfect for a yoga studio. i was hesitant to paint the wall such a dark color, but now seeing it on the wall, i'm very happy.

elightened sole

roger has had these sneakers for as long as i've known him. they're rock climbing shoes, actually, and will be the subject of a short film to premiere on this blog soon!

my favorite overpass

better paint

this evening i made a great new batch of milk-paint. at least, i think it's great. i'm not positive it's going to stick well. but, so far it looks great. first of all, i had to forget about the recipies i've been trying. none of them seemed to work as advertised. so, i've embarked on my own exploration. my laboratory (aka kitchen) results show that about two tablespoons of white vinegar per cup of skim milk produces good curd, the basis of milk-paint. temperature is critical. if the milk just came out of the refrigerator, very little happens even overnight. if it's room temperature, about eight hours produces good curd. if you heat the milk way up, but not boiling, the reaction takes place immediately, but you get very big globs of curd that you can't paint with. however, i've discovered that you can take these monster curds and puree them in a blender to produce a paint base that feels and goes on like "real" paint. tonight i tested out plain quark paint (with pigment), quark and linseed oil, and finally quark, linseed oil, whiting and pigment. they all seem to go on beautifully, cover extemely well and dry in less than five minutes. you have to work fast and be focused. this paint seemed too good to be true, so tomorrow morning i'll check to see if the pigment rubs off. if so, i'll have to make some adjustments.

friendly mike & the imodiums

in selinsgrove, mike tried administering some imodium. results here...

roger fire

my gifted friend roger came for a visit yesterday. he shared with me his experience assisting a teacher training program at the kripalu yoga center in lenox, massachussetts, where it looks like he'll be moving shortly to be the first practitioner in a two-year intensive yoga study program there. he can't wait to get started. his eyes were beaming! it sounds great, a challenging immersion, commitment to learn, explore. i'm a bit jealous!

i love just sitting with roger. i don't know how we do it, but it seems that when we sit we both enter a calm and meditative state where after just a few minutes we begin to dig deep and share, explore, bring to the surface some wonderful and some difficult stuff. this connection was forged a couple years ago in the intense fire of a brief affair during which we scared and hurt each other so much it's surprising we can relate today. but, i'm finding fire is a great teacher, and with so much fire between us and with the immediate pain now subsided, we're able to explore what it was that lit the fire, got to us, what spun us out of control, how we became entangled, what we both craved, missed, and how we repeat those same patterns today with other people. roger introduces me to or leads me to a new places each time we sit, to new questions, which sometimes bug me, sometimes delight, but always move me, light my fire.

selinsburg pix

there is a quaint and lovely downtown, but my eye is drawn to the banal.

mall bugs

i grew up with malls, loved malls as a kid. the mall near my house was called cinderalla city. it had amazing flying saucer-like light fixtures that i imagined putting into sci-fi movies some day. the parking lot had structural problems. the concrete deck sagged dramatically so that driving across it made you sick to your stomach. cinderalla city turned into a pumpkin and has since rotted away. a new, more glamorous mall replaced it, much like the new and popular susquehanna mall that we visited as bugs last weekend. gabriel, mike and i with a troupe of acrobats from philadelphia, flew our 16-foot tall butterflies about the mall delighting, terrorizing and non-plusing the shoppers. some of the most receptive people to the bugs were teen boys. this surprised me. lots of older grumpy men were heard to say things like, "i can't believe they pay people to do that." but, mostly, people smiled, laughed, teen girls wanted hugs, and lots of people told us how "cool" they were. the butterfly puppets were invited to perform as part of a butterfly celebration at the mall. there were real butterflies in a pavilion near the entrance and butterfly balloons, stickers and other paraphernalia. many people choose to spend their entire saturday at the mall. i noticed quite a few people who didn't appear to shop much. they mostly seemed to enjoy just being there. some meandered the halls people-watching or pretending to be on some kind of mission.

untitled accidental art

last weekend, a friend, mike duffy, and i drove down to selinsgrove, pennsylvania to perform butterfly puppets with gabriel and a small troupe of acrobats from philadelphia. we encountered this spectacular piece of accidental public art at a rest stop along the way.

parking lots

i love the markings in parking lots. i used to chalk my family's driveway with pieces of sheetrock i broke from our garage by ramming my front bicycle tire into the wall. my parents didn't appreciate this. i feigned ignorance. i once also set up a traffic light system with flashlights wired to a central battery controlled by switches i made from metal can lids and nails. i rarely had any traffic in my little world but i loved running it anyway. occasionally, a neighborhood kid or one of my brothers or sisters would happen on my chalked city and ride through it on their bike. it felt real.

paint experiments

in my quest for the easy and the cheap i have happened upon home-made paint. i guess making your own paint really isn't as easy as going to the hardware store and buying it, but it's a lot more fun and is less expensive. best of all this paint is non-toxic, made from common things like milk, eggs, lime and, for my tests, rust (iron oxide).

my friend danny loaned me a book called the natural paint book by lynne edwards and julia lawless. today i collected materials and made five kinds of paint. i tried them out on my studio wall, as you can see. i did have to prepare some things in advance, namely curd cheese (also known as quark) and lime putty.

you make quark by putting lemon juice or vinegar (something acid) into skim milk, place the mix somewhere warm and wait half a day or so. my first batch didn't work because i mixed it cold. i heated the next batch and it worked a lot better. you then strain the curds from the whey with cheescloth laid in a strainer.

lime putty is available in the u.k. ready-made. in the u.s. it's harder to find that way, but you can make a facsimile with type-s hydrated lime, available at building supply stores. you first put the lime in a bucket, add water, mix til it's smooth and then let it sit making sure there's water covering the mix. the longer it sits the better. i've let my mix sit a day and, yes, it's kind of like putty. back in the old days they'd let it sit for years!

so, now the fun part. you get to make paint. the first thing i tried was quark and pigment. mixing the two together i was skeptical. the mix was chunky. but, when i brushed it on the wall the chunks smeared onto the wall smoothly. the paint is tranlucent but dries flat. brushwork shows providing opportunity for interesting overlapping texture.

next i tried quark and oil. i mixed five parts quark to one part oil then added pigment. the mixture was substantially different from the quark only mix. it went on thinner and dried with an eggshell finish.

next i tried quark and lime. this created a kind of gritty paint, more opaque than the others. it dried flat.

last i tried pure lime and pigment. this went on super thick and opaque, very solid. it dried much lighter than the others, though, kind of mauve where the others were clearly dark red. it also comes off a bit when you rub it. the others do not.

i've ordered bulk pigments from realmilkpaint.com and hope to be painting away next week.

one handed community

i'm typing one-handed after slicing my finger open on a piece of glass stuck in the dishwaser pump. the pump's been grinding on it for weeks. i also found in the pump: a chopstick, a bread tie, a clothing tag doohickey and foil. i live with other people, but i seem to be the only one who notices that these things do not belong in a dishwasher. it's not easy typing one-handed because the keyboard on our community compter has only three legs after an unseen incident. whenever i hit a key over in the "qwe" region the keyboard lurches. i found the missing fractured leg while vacuuming. perhaps the cats did it. the tripod keyboard actually replaces the original keyboard. someone busted the "e" key off of it a ways back and never said anything about it. when things break, no one ever seems to know how they broke. it's always a mystery. there are upsides to living communally. at the moment, with my finger bleeding profusely they're hard to conjure.

duck and cover

i've just discovered archive.org, a repository of online educational, instructional and commercial films in the public domain. they're free to preview and download. if you click on the image you'll get to watch one of america's classics, duck and cover, an instructional film that teaches children how to survive nuclear blasts. the last thing i need right now is distraction, but this caught my eye. in my video work lately i've been using a lot of collected footage, as well as my own. these are completely free of copyright snags. wonderful.

in that vein, there is new alternative to copyright that seems to be taking root, especially in europe. it's called creative commons. website is creativecommons.org. the idea is that artists control the way their work is distributed through a variable copyright that creative commons facilitates. for instance, an artist may want to allow non-commercial use of their work. or they may allow anything to be done. in some cases, work is restricted to replication only, no modification or synching with other works without permission of the artist. for my little squirrel video a few posts back i searched for car at the jamendo.com and up came a band named "car crash" that had a song that seemed to work. it creative commons license allowed its use with a movie and so i downloaded it and, voila, soundtrack. i look forward to working with more of this kind of thing because i've been hampered in the past by copyright issues.

my favorite squirrel

iRaq

saw this in a shop window in los angeles last december. stumbled upon it digging through pictures on my computer. caught my eye. look at the numbers at the bottom of the poster. it seemed bad then. think about how bad it is now.

by the way, i screened an amazing BBC series called "Power of Nightmares." if you get a chance, the three-hour series is well worth the watch. it follows the parallel growth and inspiration of radical islamists and neo-cons and shows how they're working on the same problem and these days are co-dependent.

scrofulous puppy

this long-nosed creature will greet you in the back of david's '67 caddy. i believe it to be a long lost davinci piece, a canine version of the mona lisa (at mardi gras).

meaningless comparisons

me and squirrel

sigrid and arches

david and donald

i love parking lots

there is something about parking lots that i simply love. i haven't thought about it much. i take a lot of pictures in them. and i've shot several videos in them, especially at night. twilight is also a nice time when the lights come on but the sky is still glowing a bit. they are such grungy places generally yet to me they feel pristine.

foggy

it was fabulously foggy last night making for lots of film-noir-like scenes in white river junction. but it was in color. sigrid, david and i visited mark, michael and barbara last night for dinner. we had lasagna, bread, salad and a movie afterwards.

green hot house

this plant wintered over

with the sun now rising above the hillside south of my place (i'm on a northern slope) my greenhouse is getting some sun during the day. i checked temperatures yesterday. 37 degrees outside, 76 inside! during december, january and february it didn't get much sun at all and pretty much stayed in deep freeze. nonetheless, most of the plants didn't seem to mind, though they look a bit tawdry, they're alive and with the heat seem to be reviving. i wonder what they'll taste like?!

lucy & mike

one night in new orleans while waiting for a parade's arrival we struck up conversation with lucy and her friend mike (i think that was his name, correct me if i'm wrong). i promised them i'd make them famous on my blog, so here they are! nice to spend a bit of time with you all.

mardi gras

i've posted a whole bunch of mardi gras pix on my flickr account here. click on the mardi gras set. i walk in a small neighborhood parade called the society of saint ann. nearly everyone costumes.