dress up and be silly

one of the joys of carnival for me is making costumes out of cheap stuff and going to fancy parties in them. for a party we went to last night i made a dress out of paper plates with plastic cutlery fringe, a top out of napkins and a headpiece out of a water jug covered in paper cups, napkins, plastic cutlery and a few strings of beads, all either black or white. someone at the party asked me if i was truman capote's last picnic. two nights before we performed in and attended the krewe of muses ball where the shoe performers wore headpieces with large upside down shoes that gabriel designed.

parade

our parade with muses on thursday went well. the shoes performed flawlessly and even handled the high winds that we encountered in the skyscraper district of new orleans. the butterflies had to cut out early because the wind was literally blowing them over. we've never encountered such strong winds in our seven years of parading with orpheus and muses. earlier in the week, we trained performers in the bywater neighborhood along the mississippi river and photographed the shoes along the seawall. after the parade, the shoes were placed in the front window of the new orleans contemporary art center where they looked splendid. the krewe of muses, the organization that runs the parade we're in, throws a great party afterwards that we got to attend. dr. john played several sets of great blues. we danced for hours.

quiet in new orleans

it seems quieter than usual here in new orleans. last year, post katrina, there was a sense that carnival had to happen, that if it didn't new orleans would be giving in, giving up. this year, that urgency seems to have succumbed to the reality of a slower than expected recovery and the now permanent removal of a large percentage of the population to new cities, new jobs, new lives. but, those who have decided to stick out here are making a big difference. there are small signs of recovery everywhere and while i hear lots of complaining it is happening pretty much the way i would have expected it to happen here. new orleans is famous for it's own special style, it's own special sense of time and the pace and pattern of rebuilding seems to be no exception. most obviously, the ubiquitous crosses spray painted on practically every building that marked when the building had been searched for survivors and dead have been painted over with fresh, sometimes brighter colors. the high water mark that, like a giant conceptual art project, sliced through the entire city is visible only occasionally. there is a patter of hammers, the hiss of nail guns, and piles of remodeling debris, demonstrating a commitment to new orleans' future. the city government, on the other hand, is struggling. while private homes and businesses are being revived, things a simple as traffic lights simply don't work. the famous st. charles streetcar line is inoperable. just weeks ago, the city hired a private firm to clean the french quarter (in the nick of time for carnival) because the city couldn't handle it and now federal agents are at work tackling crime. it might be time for the city to press the reboot button. as ususal, however, none of this seems to deter revelry, which though it seems a bit less intense this year, is nonethless spirited and unstoppable.

another fifteen minutes

we arrived in new orleans to find that gabriel and i have been graced with another fifteen minutes (square inches) of fame. we're featured in new orleans magazine in our bathtub costume from 2005, the mardi gras before new orleans itself became a bathtub. this costume also made onto the reuters network and we appeared, as far as we know, in the san francisco chronicle and and in some arizona papers. i like being recognized for frivolity.

the other day, while in a yoga class, i wondered if designing buildings couldn't be as joyful as designing costumes.

nawlins

i'm in new orleans for a couple weeks. it's mercifully warm here, not to natives, but to a northerner its summer--balmy, sweaty, deliciously humid. mike, tim and i drove down in my car in one shot--24 hours straight with a break at waffle house in alabama. i brought a new toy with me, a nikon digital single lens reflex camera with a wide angle 12-24mm lens. it was an impulse purchase after i saw some photographs taken with one. i'm getting used to its complexity and bulk. i still love my little canon elph. it takes movies for one thing and the nikon doesn't. it's also about 1/8 the weight and bulk. the nikon takes beautiful images, and i love the super wide angle for shooting architecture. we're staying in a beautiful apartment on frenchman street, just a block from the french quarter. it's enormous--about 3,500 square feet--with a restaurant grade kitchen. we have a four burner professional stove, a grill and a pizza oven. it's on the top floor at the top of a very long run of stairs (pictured). it was nice to get down here in one day. i had stayed up nearly all night before leaving so i was up pretty much for two days. after arriving about noon, we went to barkus, an dog parade that we viewed in jackson square. afterwards, we ate middle eastern food at a cafe around the corner from our place and then i crashed for fourteen hours.

njork

i'm heading down to new york for the weekend to see friends, work on the faerie camp designs and do a little recording for faerie home companion, a faerie podcast. gabriel is off to new orleans, probably somewhere in virginia right now, where he's hopefully going to meet up with friends rebekah and michael who are also on the road.

daniel johnston

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

electric shoe review

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

wednesday

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

photo by sigrid

babies

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

general comment

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

jaden and isaac

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

faerie home companion #3

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

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

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

nephew willem & the rubber band

midnight synapse jamboree

a lot happened yesterday.

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

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

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

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

architecture

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

picture from santa fe.

electric high heel shoes

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

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

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

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

local warming

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

back / new job

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

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

loop de loop

this christmas's travel is beating my prior christmas travel hell. during that trip, an old woman used the emergency exit handle to support her as she sat down, inflating the emergency slide onto the luggage handlers. 24 hours later i made it to my destination, travelling through four different cities in a pattern reminiscent of needlepoint on acid.

but, today, was worse. i boarded a plane for charlotte, north carolina, arrived just fine, sat waiting for my next plane to find out it was cancelled. when i inquired about alternate flights they offered me a flight in FIVE days! i laughed out loud and said, quietly, no. they offered to fly me halfway around the country to a destination only 850 miles from where i was trying to get. so, they ultimately flew me back to where i started and said, good luck. pondering my options.

getting ready

getting ready to go to new mexico for holidays tomorrow. crazy busy. finishing film. emptying basement. doing end of year financials. too many things in one day.

crewdson

a friend recently turned me onto to the photographs of gregory crewdson. they're fantastic, highly contrived, look very much like film stills, and many use film actors as their subjects. i like the eerily lifeless quality they impart, despite all the color, fog, fire, water and other elements that make up life. crewdson's gallery in new york has an online presentation of his work here. there is a show at williams college contrasting crewdson's work with the paintings of edward hopper.

wiki

been setting up a wiki today. wikis are cool. the best example is wikipedia, a user written encyclopaedia. the one i set up is for a small film festival that i help organize. we needed a way to help collect comments and keep track of where screeners were for each film. a wiki is a pretty good solution. i'm impressed by the depth of the coding behind the wiki i used, mediawiki. it's the same wiki code that wikipedia uses.

challenge

"i had a problem before i had a problem, that's the problem." —ruth quirk.

results

i'm back from mental surgury, intact and happier. my ten day vipassana retreat was painful, ecstatic, frustrating and revelatory--generally mind-blowing. it was, along with the first retreat, one of the most fascinating things i've experienced. i got a little better at meditating, got a little better grasp of the technique and theory. the picture here is of the teacher, goenka-ji, who delivers the courses via audio and video recordings, assisted by live teachers. i highly recommend this program. dhamma.org

the central teaching is that through equanimity and awareness you can perceive and alter the mind/body interface and ultimately eliminate impurities in the mind that cause suffering in oneself and consequently in others. i find this tremendously inspiring. what can give more hope to someone than the understanding that their misery can be eliminated and that the technique to do so is simple and requires no devotion to objects, people or gods, making it accessible to anyone, with or without religious beliefs?

during this retreat, i discovered a heap of issues, not unlike the unattended laundry pile in my bedroom, that i need to work on. it's humbling to see the amount of crap lurking in my brain, but i also feel grateful that i've been shown it so that i know it needs work. vipassana (and yoga) seem to be the silver lining of the relationship trouble i've experienced the past three years. there is no teacher like pain.

going under the knife

tomorrow i go under the knife...an internal knife. i'll be doing another ten-day silent mediation retreat at dhara dhamma, the vipassana center in shelburne falls, mass. it's kind of like internal self surgery, where you peel layers of mental encrustations from your essential self. you do this by simply sitting still, concentrating on sensation, watching the mind and the body almost as if you were an outsider looking in. i'm looking forward to diving in again.

1984

i picked up a copy of orwell's 1984 before flying home from texas. somehow i'd never read it. it's eerie how many of the book's themes have manifested. perhaps it's actually a virus introduced to the ruling elite through prep school english classes so that when they eventually come to power they exectute the prime directives without knowing it.

along these lines, i was introduced to a movie in texas called the secret. it's getting the same kind of exposure as "what the bleep do we know" did. the production is melodramatic and focuses on material gain (do you want a car, money, a relationship?) but its message intrigued me. the message is that we attract whatever we imagine. our thoughts form the world around us. if we think negatively, negative things will be attracted to us, and conversely if we visualize the positive, we will attract the positive. this is not a new idea. i've encountered it in my yogic and buddhist studies, but i was happy to have the idea refreshed.

the concept that we are what we imagine is simple but i find it profoundly challenging and sublime. if all that is necessary to bring everything i want into my life is the adoption of a positive state of mind, why the hell don't i just do it? maybe nike is onto something. i normally go about my life thinking that my thoughts are essentially private and inconsequential, little electrical storms between my ears. but, if in fact they're coming attractions, as einstein called them, then a bit of discipline is called for! if it's true that what i think will manifest, i should not want to think about awful things too much. but, the irony in this early 21st century is that when i turn on the tube, read the paper, am confronted with an advertisement, i find that what happens in my head most often is negative. my habit is to exclaim in disgust that everything's going to hell. the refrain at the diner i frequent for breakfast is "isn't that just awful." it seems to me that if we really want to change the world, we first have to toss out notions that we're inconsequential and replace them with beliefs that, despite our relative tinyness in the universe, we are intimately connected and individually powerful and that what we collectively think creates our collective future. in orwell's 1984, the most important goverment branch is the "thought police." the slightest indication, even a facial gesture, that indicates a person is thinking about anything anti-status-quo brings on their demise. it is as if those in power know the potential of thought to alter/create the future and so they do everything in their power to control it so that it meets their needs (to stay in power).

what's so different about today? our media makes sure we're kept in a state of perpetual fear which, not unlike the thought police, enforces conformity by repeatedly focusing us on the negative. it would be fascinating to study a place where news, internet, any communication, for some reason, was cut off for a period of time to see if the events in that place would turn for the better or worse. do the thinking patterns of humans tend toward the negative or the positive? if it is true that we are what we think, how amazing would it be if everyone managed to reject hatred—to simply refuse to think it—and instead, when confronted with the awful, responded with a declaration of what would be nicer? how different would the world be today had the united states responded to 9/11 this way?