Honeymoon Days 4-5: Boulder

My yin and I had the most amazing Memorial Day weekend in Boulder, staying with her cousin and his family. They have, without doubt, the most charming, well-behaved child I have ever seen in all of my entire life:

Morris and Allison

This kid is a veritable dynamo, joining us not only for the Creek Festival downtown, but also for hikes up into the Red Rocks behind their house:

It was on this hike that I was overcome by a desire to climb something, and much to my yin's chagrin, I took the opportunity to scale up the tallest rock formation:

Satisfied with myself, I scaled back down the rocks and took the opportunity to tell a young child, "The mountain always wins... It's more patient than us humans." She looked at me with that mixture of admiration and confusion that only a ten-year old can muster:

Morris was along with us, of course, carried along by his proud father. Andrew was in training for the "Boulder Boulder"; and although I have no precise idea what this is, it apparently involves some sort of intense physical exertion in the morning followed by barbeque, potlucks, and/or inebriation.

Andrew cross-training with Morris

In fact, all of Boulder was abuzz with the onset of spring, and one could see it from the wildflowers growing along the roadside:

to the blooming poppies:

to the beets at the farmer's market:

Best of all was the Creek Festival, which fills up the entire town with all sorts of freebies ranging from breakfast at the Kashi tent:

Andrew and I eating cereal

to copious sample-sized giveaways:

my yin counting the loot

There were also Zen-esque stone statues in the Boulder Creek itself, but I was unable to decide if these were an official part of the festival or merely part of Boulder's overall enlightened attitude. I suppose these made an impression on me because they represent the interplay between the strength and stability of stone with the fluidity and movement of water.

balance in all the things

More than anything else, this sort of cultural attitude epitomizes Boulder more than anything else. Besides Naropa University and a half dozen or more yoga studios, there are also two separate yoga merchandise outlets (Gaiam and Prana). This curious mixture of commerce and progressive ideologies struck me time and time over the weekend, and more than once I wondered how to reconcile the aspirations embodied by these endeavors with the underlying bedrock of consumer capitalism.

the studio where my yin and I took class Sunday morning

But this is beside the point.

The point is that, internal contradictions or not, Boulder is the sort of town to which I find myself drawn. It has all the conveniences of urban areas, the atmosphere of a college town, and enough open spaces to not feel like people are stacked one atop the other. In fact, over the course of the weekend, my yin and I walked and rode virtually everywhere.

one pant leg up, Boulder-style

On our final day, we hiked up above town once more to Royal Arch:

Along the way we got beautiful profile views of the Flat Irons:

And encountered all sorts of people hiking, walking, and running up the trail. As Andrew told us, Boulder may be the only town in America where the dogs can't keep up with the people:

dog trying to catch up with his owner

To sum it up, it felt bittersweet to leave Boulder. Not that we didn't want to go on to the next stop on our honeymoon, but that we would like to live someplace like that on a full-time basis. There was an electricity in the air that goes beyond merely the excitement of travel or love of the open road. People seemed to genuinely connect with one another, to truly want to help the community to be a stronger place.

my yin and I at the Creek Festival

Next stop: Yellowstone...

Honeymoon Days 2-3: Atlanta to Boulder

day 2

Days two and three were filled with hours and hours and hours in the car, as we made our way from one cousin's house to the next. Thursday was a cloudy fourteen-hour day, filled with photographs of the storied rivers of America shot through an increasingly dirty windshield.

the Tennessee River

the Ohio River

the Mississippi River

the Missouri River

While each of them was worthy of story and song back in the 19th century, it saddened me to know that these rivers have lost much of their cultural significance with the advent of the locomotive and automobile. Nowadays it seem people only mention rivers with regard to what is flooding where, but once upon a time, each of the above were vital to the establishment of great American cities like:

Nashville

St. Louis

I suppose I have a certain nostalgia for these times because they represent a certain idea of America that always existed more in theory than in practice. Judging from the billboards in MIssouri, I'm not the only one who suffers from this affliction.

Somewhere along the way I gave into my annual craving for Church's Chicken jalepeño bombers, which I first encountered years ago under rather sordid circumstances. They have long since disappeared from my diet, but I decided to indulge once more.

beard day 7

Moments after this picture was taken, however, I came to the disturbing, undeniable realization that they probably don't keep an extra vat of boiling grease at chicken just for the jalepeño bombers, which meant that what I was eating was undoubtedly contaminated with tiny specks of deep fried chicken. Suffice to say, I've said goodbye to yet another of my cherished vices.

We spent night two in Lawrence,, which is the hippest place in all of Kansas. Like a nincompoop, though, I forgot the camera in the hotel room, and was therefore unable to take pictures of either the delicious food at Zen Zero:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

or the beers we didn't drink at a pub called The Bourgeois Pig:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

Vital Statistics: Day 2

Miles: 857
States: 6
Departure time: 5:35 am EDT
Arrival time: 6:24 pm CDT
Total travel time: 13 hours, 49 minutes

Average speed: 62mph

day 3

Day three was spent trying to get through Kansas, which is both dismal and interesting for the same reason: it is never a destination, merely a passage from one end of the country to the other. No one (who isn't from there) wants to be there, and the most convincing proof of this is that even its namesake, Kansas City, chooses to live in Missouri.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin continued reading Tina Fey's hilarious book Bossypants aloud as we drove, which made the prairies and high plains zip by far more quickly than if we had been forced to listen to the staticky religious rebel-rousers that populate the nether regions of the FM dial whenever NPR is unavailable. One cool thing we saw was a giant wind farm:

that sat direct across the road from this relic:

alternative energy situational irony at its best

Finally we crossed into Colorado, and within a couple of hours, we were able to make out the Rockies on the horizon:

I wondered to myself how the first European settlers must have felt seeing this for the first time. It must have been an overwhelming sense of exhilaration, knowing that the monotonous plains and prairies did come to an end, followed by terror – how in the hell are we going to get this wagon across that thing?

At this point excitement took over, and before we knew it we were looking at Denver's impressive skyline dwarfed by the mountains.

the difference puts things in perspective

Denver holds a dear and contested place in my psychic geography, but I will have to address that at a later time because we never entered the heart of the city, choosing instead to loop around on I-270. Perhaps this was little more than cleverly rationalized repression, but mainly it was because one doesn't need to go through Denver to get to Boulder.

Upon arrival, we went for a hike first thing. Our hosts live mere minutes from trail heads, and we took the opportunity to stretch our muscles and get our first real look at the city. With a few days in one place, our honeymoon feels like it's truly began. This picture says it all:

my yin, with Boulder in the background

Vital Statistics: Day 3

Miles: 580
States: 2
Departure time: 6:13 am CDT
Arrival time: 2:02 pm MDT
Total travel time: 8 hours, 49 minutes

Average speed: 66mph

Honeymoon Day 1: Boynton to Atlanta

My yin and I left our apartment this morning before sunrise and have arrived in Atlanta ahead of our already ambitious schedule, averaging nearly 70 miles per hour in spite of stopping twice while still in the state of Florida. In fact, our speed may even rival that of the Ramayana's mythical flying monkey god Hanuman.

arty picture of Hanuman, who watches over our journey

So far there hasn't been much to see, which isn't surprising considering we already reside in the most picturesque part of Florida. Both my yin and my allergies began acting up somewhere in the northern part of the state, though I didn't get poisoned by a peanut like the last time. There were, however, mysterious fires:

Southern Georgia or northern Florida? Is there even a difference?

And numerous signs of local culture:

subtle

The honeymoon beard is also coming in nicely, but more slowly than I had hoped. My goal was to have something worth stroking (that came out weird) by Friday. I did manage to shave it last night without butchering it, though, which announces to the world that my facial hair is not a symptom of laziness, but rather an indication of moving towards a specific goal. Funny how shaving one's neck can communicate such both moral and psychological implications.

beard day 6

The pack for the car came out especially well, and we're able to access everything without trouble or confusion. We even managed to keep the sight lines clear, which seemed important considering the amount of time we'll be spending in the car over the next month.

the most important thing is in the front seat

Speaking of time, did I mention what good time we made? Yes, I did, but yesterday I heard a radio documentary on self-quantifiers. In honor of them, I present the following:

Miles: 611
Stops: 2
States: 2
Departure time: 5:59 am
Arrival time: 2:52 pm
Total travel time: 8 hours, 53 minutes

Average speed: 68mph

Anyway, we reached our destination well before Atlanta's infamous rush hour:

tonight's resting place

Tonight we plan on going out for Thai food with the cousins, and we've had time to catch up over the past couple of hours. We haven't seen Tony and Deborah since the wedding, and our visit last summer was far too short.

Cousin Deborah, our amazing host

Finally, I was able to pull out the camera and take some photos. I drove the whole way today, and after hours of staring at the blindingly bright white concrete interstate, I was ready to play with something more abstract, moodier, and most of all underexposed:

"My yin's tragic feet (experiments in underexposure)"

Next stop: Lawrence, Kansas...

in praise of minor insomnia

"If I were a psychiatrist, I should advise my patients
who suffer from 'anguish' to read this poem of Baudelaire
whenever an attack seems imminent."

-Gaston Bachelard

I woke not long after 4am this morning. This has been happening, more or less, for the past week, and I typically consider these minor insomnias as unexpected gifts. There is a special pleasure that comes with being alone in the middle of the night. One is able to take comfort in the precocious knowledge that he is alone with his imagination while the rest of the world is sleeping. When this occurs, I'm able to read, journal, and meditate all before sunrise, promoting a sense of industrious that would make proud Poor Richard himself.

Benjamin Franklin, America's most respected home economist and nudist

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this morning's insomnia was not the productive restlessness of the preceding days, but rather marked by anxious impotence. Sometime in the night I must have crossed over the invisible line that separates motivation from neurosis, the boundary that each of us must navigate each day in order to balance the uncertainty of the creative process with our need for the security of routine. If we veer too far in one direction, we find ourselves in the insufferable company of Pollyannaists and Franklin-eyed entrepreneurs; too far in the other, the tragicomedy of failed poets and lesser intellectuals. This is the same line that separates Woody Allen (the director) from Woody Allen (the self-caricature that populate his films).

So, it was with these things in mind that I stumbled upon the quote that opened this missive. Unfortunately, Bachelard isn't particularly clear with regard to which poem he is prescribing, and my copy of Fleurs du mal is already packed. (How could one not bring Baudelaire on his honeymoon?) Nonetheless, I hope this prose poem from Paris Spleen will serve a homeopathic function, balancing out the pre-dawn solitude with Baudelaire's resplendent celebration of:

"Crowds"

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and of certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and the thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

(translation by Louise Varèse)

promising results (experiments from first weekend with new camera)

I've spent most of the weekend playing with out new camera, trying not so much to create art but to simply familiarize myself with the machine before we leave on Wednesday. I have to say, the early results are promising:

grated cheese bokeh

This image was taken Saturday night at our friends' home. Their daughter (the blurry child in the background) turns four at the end of this week, and unlike last year, my yin and I will be unable to attend her birthday party. Producing these blurred backgrounds – at least with a stock lens kit – is more challenging than one might think.

The dog, however, was unimpressed.

As the night progressed, a Scrabble game appeared, and I took the opportunity to add exposure and composition to the mix. This idea was stolen from a photograph I once saw in either Tricycle or Ascent.

wisdom, overexposed and losing focus

One thing I like about this photo is its ability to communicate complex ideas with mundane objects. So, while the referent in this photograph is nothing more than a board (bored?) game, its true subject is the effect of time and context on our understanding of knowledge. This idea could undoubtedly be developed more thoroughly by staging additional words, but we were there to play Scrabble, not photograph philosophy or explore the epistemology and teleology of space-time.

Speaking of, during our game CNN reported the world had not, in fact, ended as predicted by some millennialists and true believers. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but I was somewhat perplexed by why the network was reporting on it at all. It seems that, simply by being alive and watching television, the viewing public already knew that the rapture hadn't come; therefore, this information seemed both redundant and unnecessary.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the experimentation reached its pinnacle last night. My yin and I had spent the afternoon filming a short, simple hatha yoga video for one of her clients; and although the camera performed admirably, I found myself running into several potential future problems. So, once we were finished, my yin went to overdub vocals while I searched for tutorials on how to smooth out pans and build a makeshift Steadicam.

The amount of information is truly overwhelming, though, and I soon found myself frustrated. It's tantalizingly easy to fall into the Black Hole of How-To, so much so that one can spend more time looking at instructional videos than developing his or own expression. Certain in this knowledge, I walked outside, set up my painfully inadequate tripod, and pointed it our front door:

I stared at it a little harder, waiting for it to open.

I remembered the words of Gaston Bachelard, which I would not read until before sunrise the next morning:

"Words... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce,' or on the same level as the others, the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by his peers always to live on the ground floor?"

Then I realized:

Images are no different than words...

and perhaps even more so.

What difference does color make?

Our new camera arrived yesterday, and while my yin was out bringing home the tofu, I was at home pushing buttons. Fortunately, the former action was metaphorical and the latter literal rather than vice versa; otherwise it would have made for a soggy, aggravated bean curd dinner.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this new toy is way, way cool and makes me incredibly pleased that we chose not to purchase the iPad. Besides having a camera that will actually take photographs worth seeing, it's also capable of full HD video. And, in the ninety minutes between my yin's departure and return, I was able to read the manual, familiarize myself with the layout, and make this short experimental film, which questions the signifying practices of language:

The possibilities, it seems, are endless, and I find myself more interested in filmmaking than at any time since my undergraduate days, when I stayed up all night with my roommate in an abandoned theater shooting a heavy-handed, well-commaed, overly-hyphenated, quasi-sado-masochistic 8mm black and white film that used the text of the "Our Father" prayer like placards in a silent movie.

Lamentably, either I or the camera malfunctioned that night, and the negatives returned from processing totally unexposed, leaving me soured on the whole filmmaking endeavor for the remainder the Nineties. I suppose the experience was something of an aesthetic trauma, and I found myself drawn more and more towards the analytic side of cinema rather than the production. Lighting design for the human eye became more important than production design for that of the camera, and by the time I graduated my sole focus was live performance.

(Do you see what I did there?)

A few weeks ago, however, I worked a video shoot that must have reignited this passion for the camera's mechanical gaze, the same one for which Chris Marker once wrote a poem:

LET US PRAISE DZIGA VERTOV (1967)

Let us praise Dziga Vertov
for if I had to choose the Ten Best Documentaries of All Time
i’d call it preposterous
but if there's ONE to choose:

“A SIXTH OF THE WORLD”
Because this moment of our history, this palingenesis
this dawn, this birth of our memory,
this first draft of what was due to be our world, good and bad,

Paustovsky made us think of it
Eisenstein made us dream of it
but only one man made us SEE it
DZIGA VERTOV

KINO GLAZ Film Eye Eye First
Camera Eye But Man’s Eye (you SEE what I MEAN)
Camera, machine, montage, eyes, like hounds at Harry’s heels
(O for a Muse of light…)
but the Eye über alles, the Eye leading the pack
seeing—donner à voir
and not only the faces, the gestures, the segments of life
but words also, words suddenly alive
by filling the whole screen, heavy words, real words,
(and the magic of the cyrillic, of course, but who’s complainin’?)

Words coming to a new stage of perception
owing to these large, big BLOCKletters,

words achieving equally with images
ideas achieving equality with facts
art achieving equality with life

How d’you say that in Russian?

DZIGA VERTOV

(More films and poesy to follow...)

for Gaston Bachelard's insomnia

“Our memories are encumbered with facts.
Beyond the recollections we continually hark back to,
we should like to relive our suppressed impressions
and the dreams that made us believe in happiness.”

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I make coffee
and contemplate
the absurdity of sleep:
what hours would be lost
if not for the Dreaming, when
imagination rebels against body and
spirit combats the monotony of slumber.

How does one
express the underlying
subtleties of karma without
resorting to the gross ineptitude of
language? Words always fall short of
the page's empty promise, and so we bathe
in the tepid waters of symptom and pathology.

A high wire
stretches across
the River Lethe from
sophism to naiveté and
a timepiece walks between: fetal
at one end, cadaverous on the other.

Does the second hand ever truly slow? Or
does one merely watch more closely,
finding peace in the suspension
of disbelief and jouissance
in the impatience
of longing?

Gaston Bachelard, sometimes you can judge a man by his beard

bear(d)s

My yin and I are leaving on our honeymoon in less than a week, and today marks the last time I plan on shaving between now and sometime the end of next month. I've grown a beard only once before, at the end of the last millennium, when I was on tour with a well-known modern dance company. I referred to it as my "protest beard" to anyone who would listen, and when asked exactly what I was protesting, I would respond in my very best impersonation (which was not very good) of Marlon Brando in The Wild One:

"Whadya got?"

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I'm protesting nothing this time, merely responding to the inconveniences of spending so much time in a tent. Running water will be a luxury for at least the middle third of our journey, and I don't want to be shaving in creeks at sunrise every morning when I could be snapping photos with our new camera, currently en route:

I do not remember the last object that inspired such obsession.

Furthermore, my yin's cousin is especially heavily-bearded, and I need all the lead time I can get before we reach his home in Boulder one week from tomorrow. It would be shameful to show up with a scraggy little beard that could be mistaken for simple laziness, or even worse, the inability to grow facial hair altogether.

There is nothing more untrustworthy than a clean-shaven outdoorsman – and this applies even to temporary, honeymooning outdoorsmen like myself. I'm of the firm belief that growing a beard brings one closer to nature, which is especially important in my case because I have a substantial, imaginary fear of bears.

They have one on the state flag for heaven's sake!

I've been told this fear is both unnecessary and unfounded (as opposed to contrived and perfomative), but I have seen proof of what happens to city slickers who go off into the woods in search of themselves.

for my response to Grizzly Man click here

Although my mountain upbringing and the fact that my surname is a corruption of the word "bear" would probably protect me from the worst of the maulings, it still seems prudent to enter Into the Wild:

[slippage: 34 months ago

At what price freedom?
If one must go somewhere to get it
is it really free at all?

I have not truly considered
the size of this life
how infinite and small my being.

Contemplating dharma and meaning;
there are untold possibilities
stretching in every direction from this single moment

and these twenty-six letters are not big enough.

Imagining myself in the wilderness
with only pen and paper.
The writing would change
but the pads would still be filled
the intricate balance of dandelion and larva.

Caterpillars spinning their coffins.

There is no end.
There is no beginning.
And one of the meanest lies we tell
ourselves: there is something better than now.

The breath in lungs, the blood in veins, the pen in hand.
I cannot write what is touched and if it were to open, if it were to open…
There is nothing more than what is, and what appears is, truly is not.

Was the path I took any less desolate than that of Alexander Supertramp?

and return to present]

with as much facial hair as possible. I do not want to end up like those dreamers and fools in Alaska...