rafters up

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

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

i just like this picture.

slowga

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

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

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

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

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

gabriel, david and i drove down to brattleboro last weekend to catch the reverend billy and the stop shopping choir. our friend donald sings with them. they put on a gospel program complete with sermon about the evils of consumer addiction ("we're all SINNERS!") and how to stop shopping, "push back!" they performed in a beautiful old church turned community center. the exaltations to halt the plague of consumerism seems to have backfired with me and gabriel, because, while we're normally happy co-op shoppers, organic farm and local economy supporters, we suddenly had the urge afterward to get mocha coffee slushees at dunkin donuts. spring fever?

listmaking

i made a list of words about myself this morning. i recommend doing this. at first, only a half-dozen or so words came out. i thought, that's it? so, i sat for a bit thinking of more words. i realized i was editing out a lot of words subconsciously, things that i might not really want people to know about. but i wrote them down anyway. and then the flood came. it was interesting that locking out embarassing or undesirable adjectives about myself also blocked the good things. when the list was done, i scrambled the order of words. while the first incarnation sounded a bit like a hallmark card, the randier later version, all mixed up, was a lot more interesting and human.

phineas

the newest denizen of white river junction (as far as i know) arrived this morning in lebanon, new hampshire, at 5:08am. apparently he screamed. but, he's calm now with his moms, michelle and michelle, who are recovering from the surprise of his three-week early arrival. gabriel sprinted to the hospital at 4am this morning to be with the michelles and phineas announced himself shortly thereafter. they had some back up names in case he didn't look like a phineas, but i think everyone's agreed that he's a phineas. phin will be a cool nickname. because his full name is phineas henry roy-ollie his acronym will be "phro". that's pretty cool too, especially if he ends up with curly hair. i got to hold him a bit this afternoon. i have to say, there's nothing like holding a newborn.

buyer beware

gabriel and i recently visited ikea to look at kitchen furniture. we didn't buy any of that, but we bought a small cabinet for a bathroom.

the cabinet's swell, but i've always wondered, how do they make them so inexpensively? the morning paper held a partial answer: cheap materials. according to an article in the washington post by peter goodman and peter finn, china is ikea's largest supplier of wood furniture and russia is ikea's largest supplier of wood. ikea claims it audits its wood supplies, but they have only two foresters in china and three in russia. the problem is that great swaths of forest are being harvested illegally, shipped with falsified documents to china for production and the result is that the western diet for wood products will, if continued at the same pace as it's running today, exhaust the forest of some countries in just a decade. much of the wood harvested is protected, but apparently chinese import officials rarely verify documents and the production chain takes advantage of this oversight which spurs timber industries where there should not be any. so, the problem with ikea (or home depot, or kmart, or lowes, or any multinational) is that it's too easy for retailers to claim clean hands. the system which is supposed to protect forest resources in the places where most of the wood for our cheap products comes from is corrupt. i think probably the only gauge we have, as consumers, is to ask whether the price seems too good to be true (aka sustainable). this means we, as consumers, have to check our desires and purchase power with a vague and incomplete matrix of social and ecological concerns as we lust after product that is clear, immediate and available.

vaccum

i wandered into our local sears store a few days ago. all the well-worn salespeople with combovers and bad suits that i've long associate with sears have been replaced by an entirely different staff. at first it seemed there was no staff--i simply didn't see them. but, after a minute or so, i realized the uniformly dark-blue-clad youths strolling the aisles with engraved plastic tags just below their peach-fuzzed chins (the boys anyway) were the staff. is this a byproduct of a merge/restructure?

although the kids are definitely more attractive than their predecessors and brighten the place up with their lightness and slang ("that drill is so gay") it's just not the same place. the new staff lacks authority. the cast may have changed, but the script hasn't. there are some things only a pot-bellied 55-year-old can deliver convincingly. but the kids sure know how to make a great display. check out the way they arrange the vacuum cleaners!

WRIF 2007

i've finished the graphics work for our local film festival. here's the poster. you can see the program at www.wrif.org. we've got 34 different programs this year, double last years! if you live around white river junction, please come out and support the festival and catch some great independent films.

8 inches

april 5: 8 inches of snow. it was beautiful snow, big fluffly flakes that drifted down out of the sky as if there were a giant pillow fight going on above.

april fools

with a bit of time to kill waiting for a train, i decided to wander the little town in which i reside with my camera to take a "new look" at it. it was a dreary day, overcast, trees leafless, streets empty: really a perfect day to examine the patient—no pretense.

white river junction has always struck me as an odd place. there is something charming about it but at the same time it seems always just a bit off, a little tawdry, a little bent. this is what i love about it.

looking at it through my super wide angle lens, i saw some things i've never noticed before, perspectives and vantage points i've never considered. it occured to me how much driving eliminates this experience (wandering) and how much it restricts one's perspetive, or rather, replaces the walking perspective and sense of time with a very different experience. i've whizzed around the downtown block hundreds of times without taking note of the myriad perspectives, vistas, juxtapositions created by buildings, streets and other municipal affects. they've been there all along. it took a bleak day to point them out to me. perhaps it was the lack of any activity whatsoever, plant or animal, that made the town's structure stand out. in any case, i'm coming away with a much greater appreciation of the town's peculiar nature as well as its potential. there are some spatial gems hiding amongst the chaos!

a picture of my brain

i'm feeling a bit like this right now: lots of circuits, somewhat organized, but impossible to describe simply. it's easier to take a picture of it.

my favorite picture from new york

i put lots of pictures of new york up at my photo site. sleety snow streets, natural history musuem, people, and my favorite, banality.

doing doing doing eek

okay, little time to write, been busy. went to nyc last weekend, saw friends, went to nico muhly's concert at carnegie hall. great. met some new friends, too. i have pictures, but haven't uploaded. on the drive home, by myself, i read out loud a long story, a novella really, that i made up as i drove, speaking it in a strange, low, slow voice. i really got into it--the story that is--and i really didn't want to stop driving when i got home. the things i uncovered--as good as therapy! designing lots: my apartment, a house for a couple, a faerie camp, a recycling of a building into a theater, offices and apartment, and a couple websites. doing photos with jason. doing a television commercial for revolution, a store here in white river. starting graphics production for white river indie films, our local film fest. i am doing, doing, doing. and in the midst of my doing i was stopped, full stop, unexpectedly, by the image of someone i once knew intimately posing suggestively in a brochure. startling the power of an image, startling the power i confer upon his image, his memory.

polka dot howl

last weekend my friend jason and i did a long photo shoot exploring among other things handstands in the presence of chairs and howling in an unbuttoned polka dot shirt. jason is no stranger to being photographed and is recently famous in some circles as a cover boy for butt magazine. butt is a breath of fresh air in the thin atmosphere of gay magazines (at least my experience of them) and i'm reading nightly a compilation of its first five years which i'm loving. it's brash, broad, unapologetic, printed on pink paper, and carries interviews with gay luminaries as well as garbage boys, all pluses in my mind.

i'm no stranger to being photographed either but i haven't yet achieved the heights jason has, although in new orleans i'm quite sure i am on at least a few refrigerators in various mardi gras getups (who really knows?). but, i've never been photographed at length, with hundreds of shots of slightly different expressions, allowing time for ideas, concepts, thoughts, feelings to develop and be captured. the challenge for me was to drop the idea i needed to look good, sexy, cute, whatever and to just let loose whatever surfaced, much like meditation. watching the faces of isaac and jaden, brenda, eve's and gabriel's new baby boys, i see a stream of emotions rising, falling, rising and falling, seamlessy and without particular order or consistency, and i think, why not be just like that in front of the camera? turn off the filters, take down the guard, unpeel before the lens, just let your own humanity flow. this seems to make interesting pictures. in some ways, it's like therapy, because there is the observed the observer. just the presence of someone else, in this case with a lens, provokes confession when the setting is safe, so it's possible to make deep psychic inroads. i know i hit some powerful stuff because i'm still tingling from the experience.