California Dream Time

28 Days by the Sea

2011-03-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

In November 2010, I embarked on a journey of studying bodywork at the Esalen Institute. My training began with a 28 day intensive in Esalen Massage.

This 3 minute video offers a small glimpse of the best month of my life:

Or watch in high definition on youtube: 28 Days by the Sea

Burning Man 2010

2011-03-22T20:09:00.000-07:00

A six minute film capturing my experience at the festival:

Or watch it in high definition on youtube: Welcome Home?

Dust to Dust

2010-09-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

Dust to Dust

"Welcome Home"

“It is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears”

- The Gift by Lewis Hyde

“Welcome Home!” says a tall, tan, middle-aged man in a cowboy hat, one of the greeters at the gates of Black Rock City. This man and I embrace, though he is a stranger. As is tradition for first-time visitors to the Burning Man Project, I am invited to lay down and roll around in the powdery, alkaline dust of the desert playa, which for the next eight days will be my home, and then ring a large metal bell, announcing to the city that another virgin has arrived.

Welcome Home? I’d just spent over two hours in a line of cars waiting to enter the festival – after turning off the paved desert road into the dust, we were corralled into several lanes crawling forward at snails pace. Slowly, the burners began to filter through from the city – all shapes and sizes, on foot and on bike, wearing the strangest costumes or wearing nothing at all. They peer into the waiting cars with curiosity while proudly presenting their freedom – a taste of what awaits us on the other side of the gate.

Coming into the city my stomach begins to tie in knots – campers and tents seem to choke the horizon. I knew it was big, but this is far beyond what my brain had projected – a temporary city of 50,000 humans on a dry dusty lake bed, arranged in a semi-circle around an enormous art esplanade, at the center of which towers the Man, who in six days time will be ritually burned to ashes. Absorbing all of this I am immediately disoriented – What the hell is this? What the hell is happening here? – and my heart sinks in correct anticipation of my one great regret for the week:

I didn’t bring a bicycle.

For a person like me, mobility would be key – I’m the kind of guy who wants to see and do everything, and not having a bicycle was going to limit my explorations considerably. It takes an hour by foot to cross from one end of the city to the other. Veteran burners warn that one can only hope to participate in 10% of what’s going on, and let the rest go – but that’s nonsense. I don’t see how anyone could hope to experience more than 1% of Black Rock City in a given year. The ‘catalog’ handed out at the gate is almost a cruel joke – with a dozen different events taking place at any given time around the city – yoga, meditation, dance parties, free food, open bars, games, healings and massages, discussions of philosophy, spirituality, art, politics, sustainability, an entire ‘university’ devoted to ‘pleasures of the flesh’, workshops on propane in live-flame art, workshops on lesbian fisting and erotic rope bondage and sex toy creation, workshops on shamanism and buddhism – this is only what I can remember off the top of my head – and that’s to say nothing of the informal gatherings and unlisted events – the hundreds of pieces of painstakingly crafted art decorating the playa, including the ones that have wheels and are often covered with dancing humans as they drive around the city streets – not to mention the simple pleasures of relaxing with friends in the shade under the hot desert sun and appreciating the unprecedented and unparalleled magic of one of the most incredible places on earth.

What I hope to express in the above is the overwhelming diversity of the Burning Man Project. No doubt many readers are still stuck on the sex stuff mentioned above (shocking!) but in so doing it is very easy to miss the point. Yes, some people come to Burning Man only for sex, or only for drugs – there are certainly some who come only to get shit-faced and act belligerently crazy for a week to counter feelings of being overwhelmingly oppressed in the ‘default’ world – but then there’s the other 40,000 people who come to Burning Man. For them, what’s happening here is nothing less than the experimental co-creation of a new kind of Utopia – an intentional community which is not only an escape from the ‘default’ world, but a powerful weapon for modeling a radically better way of life.

So what do classes on sadomasochistic sex have to do with Utopia? And what the hell do they mean by “welcome home?”

Implicit in any event that truly celebrates and revels in diversity is the acknowledgement that one person's experience is likely to be different from the person standing next to them. The 1% of the festival that I experience is not going to be the same 1% as anyone else in my camp – or anyone else on the playa! Before arriving I had two people say to me, “whatever it is you’re looking for, you’ll find it there” and another said, “it will be whatever you want it to be” – these predictions did not quite come true in the literal sense, but they carried a seed of truth that I can only imagine will grow as I continue to “come home” in the years to follow.

This year I camped with a tribe called “Debase Camp” – a group of close-knit friends who come home to each other – more concerned with time spent together than exploring the festival, some of them have been coming to Burning Man for a decade. Other camps have other goals in the fore – devoted to dance, or spirituality, or healing, gay pride, or sexual liberation – I won’t repeat the events list again – while others cluster together into whole villages built around similar values. One of the many villages I regret not visiting is Kidsville – an enormous aggregate of camps for families with children of all ages. It’s true, at Burning Man, one can find open sexuality, and one can find children running the streets. The sexuality isn’t judged or shamed, and the children are still somehow protected and respected. The goal here is to seek balance and coexistance – so far, it works.

Still! There must be some common principles to which all this diversity agrees to adhere. The first two principles of Burning Man are radical self-reliance and radical self-expression. Black Rock City is built on a desolate, arid desert, and nobody is let through the gate unless they have brought food, water and shelter to care for themselves. Self-care is the beginning of responsible participation in community (and all the more necessary as the gift economy unfolds – but more on that in a moment). The radical self-expression comes into play as each member of the community is invited to become fully theselves – no matter how strange, wild, ridiculous, or conventionally ‘shameful’ – as long as nobody is getting hurt, everyone is encouraged to let themselves unfold fully, freely, and naturally, in a way that mainstream American culture often abhors. For some, this means dressing up as robots, or bunny rabbits, or balarenas (this list goes on an on), for others it means letting go sexually or experimenting with drugs – or having beer for breakfast after a year of nine-to-five-drudgery. For me, among other things, it involved declaring myself a “playa shaman” and spending the week communing with the land, making clay figures out of the playa, and dancing ecstatically. For many, it means letting down their armor and loving their neighbor – strangers though they be – and allowing themselves to be loved, unconditionally, by the humans who have gathered here.

It’s a sort of corollary of the radical self-expression principle that one must not interfere with a fellow burner’s experience – to each his or her own. Don’t destroy the art or the experience another person is trying to have. Let each go their own way – whether that’s attending a 12 step meeting on the playa or attending a class on lesbian fisting.

And it should be no surprise, given that Burning Man was born out of San Francisco and is largely attended by liberals and so called “hippies” – that another key principle of Burning Man is leave no trace. Get as drunk as you want, but crush your beer can and pack it out. Digging holes is forbidden – even dumping grey water is forbidden; huge evaporation trays are constructed to steam under the hot sun and burn away dirty dishwater and toothpaste spittle. In theory, we leave the playa as we found it – and dedicated volunteers stay for weeks after, clearing away every stray piece of mis-placed matter.

If all the self-reliance and self-expression sounds very libertarian, it is! Burning Man is (perhaps unwittingly) probably the greatest libertarian event on the planet. People take care of themselves, and express themselves in full freedom and without shame – philosophically speaking, that’s what libertarianism is.

And, in brilliant counterpoint to the libertarianism, there is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the Burning Man Project: the Gift Economy.

Picture this: you are walking along a bustling desert village at night, and turn into a courtyard with a sign, “Galactica Ashram” which sports an exquisite, almost life-sized statue of the Buddha and a stage on which is being projected footage of strange animals. At the far side of the courtyard you pass under an awning and into a plush and expansive tent, decked out in extravagant reds and earth tones, ringed by soft couches, filled with a hundred souls dancing in the most outlandish costumes, and in the center of all this is a bar, where after a short wait you are given exactly the drink of your choosing – free of charge. Want another? Ask for another – still no money will pass hands. “If you can believe it,” the bartender says,” everyone in our camp fights over who gets to be bartender. We just love making people happy!” Want another drink? Ask.

Commerce is forbidden in Black Rock City. With the sole exception of ice and coffee sales at Center Camp, nothing on the playa is bought or sold. On the contrary, everything is given away. At Burning Man, the mark of the great man or woman is not one who acquires much, but one who gives much. Generosity is the currency of this tribe. Drinks, music, art, food, water, knowledge, wisdom, inspiration, healing – everything is given – nothing is sold. Bringing and giving gifts is a key part of participating in the festival. In Lews Hyde's The Gift - a study of gift economies in tribal societies - he argues that individuals always giving to each other - and always giving back to the greater whole - creates constant reinforcement of community bonds, and in many cases a connection to a higher power.

So yes, the beginning of responsible participation in this community is self-care. Before you can start giving to others, you have to be able to care for yourself. The purpose of self-reliance is not to isolate the individual as a self-serving island, but to create a foundation by which the individual can become a fountainhead of generosity. No one could ever go cold, hungry or thirsty in Black Rock City – under any circumstances – except perhaps that rare individual who simply doesn’t know how to ask.

In my opinion, those who leave Black Rock City without giving deeply of themselves may have missed the point entirely.

Saturday night is the Burn, and I get things off to an exciting start by busting my head open on an exposed, empty shade-pole socket, and bleeding profusely as my camp-mates look on in horror. After days of searching for a community bike (these circulate the city, but finding one is entirely a matter of serendipity), I’ve finally gotten my hands on one, and with a bicycle in hand at last, the city has opened like a flowering lotus: I've managed to have dinner with friends, drop off a love note, and make it back to Debase Camp to watch the Burn in under two hours – in fact I am moving so fast on the bike that I overshoot my camp by over three long city blocks before realizing I’ve gone too far. High on life and (almost) completely sober, I rush excitedly into camp – and into an exposed, sharp metal lip which pierces my scalp and leaves me lying on my back, clutching my head. When I pull my hand away, it is covered with blood. I stand and watch blood spattering on the playa around my feet.

“Guys, I need help.”

Debase Camp crowds around me, and I fall into their arms. They clean and dress my wound, re-assure me, take care of me. For someone like me – so used to going it alone, so sure that I have to do everything for myself – it is profoundly moving to be held and cared for by this group of relative strangers. I have only to relax and let them tend to me. In this sense, bashing open my head is a wholly positive experience. I would rather be wounded and held than invincible and alone.

An hour later, with a thick bandage around my scalp, we make our way through the growing throng, beyond the ring of art cars, out to the center of the Esplanade, to watch the Man burn. The emotional and spiritual energy that has built up over the course of the week is almost indescribable. I haven’t gotten a consistent answer as to what the burning of the Man “means” – I can’t help but suspect that the Burn holds multiple meanings simultaneously, and that they are all true on their own level. Only at the Parliament of World Religions in Australia this past December have I felt the presence of such a dynamic, multi-dimensional spirituality. After wave after wave of fireworks and cheering, and a dramatic fireball, at last the Man begins to burn, arms rising to the sky as he is consumed and topples to the desert floor amidst ecstatic cheering, and then dancing. What does it mean? Ashes to ashes? Effigy? Impermanence? Catharsis? Mortality? Crucifixion? Transcendence? Rebirth? I couldn’t possibly tell you.

Your Burn is your own.

I stay up all night. Talking, wandering, dancing, sculpting, filming, dreaming. The night is thick with magic. And when the day breaks, it is time to begin taking things down. I’m staying until Tuesday, but Debase Camp is going home now. So I help break down the camp (Burning Man is, among other things, a lot of work!) - I stay up all day on no sleep, and that night, a second pilgrimage is made out to the playa, to watch the Temple burn.

And that’s another story altogether.

Is Burning Man everything I’m making it out to be? Remember, I only claim to have experienced 1% of the festival, and of course, nothing on this earth is perfect. Bikes get stolen all the time, as do other valuables. The porta-potties are routinely vandalized, locks broken off etc…. Hundreds of thousands of environmentally-unfriendly neon glow lights are consumed by the event - even if they don't end up on the playa, they're still damaging the planet. ‘Leave No Trace’ is a constant struggle – I personally spent several hours on the last day picking up MOOP (Matter Out Of Place) – and that effort will be ongoing for weeks after this essay is published. Even if 90% of the people who attend Burning Man ‘get it’ on some level, the other 10% create a whole lot of destruction and misery for the rest of us in the short time they are here. I sometimes think that’s the tragic story of humanity – one person ruining it for everyone else. And then there are the dust storms. They rage for hours at a time and cover everything. I have never been so dirty in my life! If I hadn’t declared myself a playa shaman, it might have gotten to me.

My one major criticism is the noise pollution – apparently there are many who have mistaken Burning Man for a non-stop techno dance party. I remember waking up one morning at sunrise to the sound of blaring techno and finding myself deeply disturbed – going to sleep to pulse pounding unst, unst, unst is one thing, but waking up to it? I felt a strong conviction that sunrise, if no other time, should be a period of reverent silence. It’s a matter of balance – yes – loud music and dancing! Fun! – and then yes! Silence and reverence! If Burning Man is truly a place that celebrates diversity – that welcomes everyone – that makes pretence at being “home” to everyone – then there must be a container within it to appreciate the beauty of silence too.

Nevertheless, after eight days, upon finally hitting Reno on the return trip, I find my eyes welling up with tears. I had thought my emotional experience at the festival to be thoroughly mixed - but with some distance and upon return to 'civilization' I find myself overwhelmed by the beauty of what I just experienced - vandalism, noise pollution, dust storms and all.

But that’s what co-creation is all about – showing up and asking for what you need – and doing whatever it takes to make it happen, even when it isn't easy. In this sense, I don’t think that “home” is necessarily something one will find at Burning Man.

Home is something we make there.

Next: Who knows!

Lost in the Waters at Esalen

2010-08-09T17:40:00.001-07:00

Lost in the Waters at Esalen

(The California Dreamtime Part III)

“If I may gloss all of this with a modern American Mythology, we might better speak here not of a Superman but of the X-men, those gifted mutants whom evolution has graced with supernormal powers that need to be affirmed, nurtured, and trained…”

- Jeffrey J. Kripal

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” I say to Sarah. We lay sprawled on a cushion of plush African kikuya grass, overlooking the yawning waters of the pacific: the front lawn of the Esalen Institute. The sun has made a show of burning off the fog today, but enough ethereal mist remains to cast the afternoon in a bright, mystical glow.

“The only way I know I’m not dreaming right now is by the complexity of visceral sensation going on in my body,” I continue. “My body is never this complicated when I dream!”

“It’s great that you can be so aware of what’s happening in your body,” Sarah replies. She a child therapist from London with a refined British accent – we’ve grown close planting seeds and harvesting vegetables on the farm.

“That’s why this place feels like home,” I say. “I can talk about the complexity of visceral sensation in my body, and everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘soulful water’ – hot mineral springs churning out their contents over and into the ocean at combined rate as high as 600 gallons per minute. The Esselen Indians held these to be holy, healing waters – another outlet for the same deep spring that feeds the baths at Tassajara in the mountains above. These hot springs, as well as the creeks that rush through Tassajara and Esalen, belong to a water system which holds rainwater some 300 years before it pushes back up to the Earth's surface; the waters we bathe in here are older than the American Constitution. The Esselen Tribe lived on this land as long as 6000 years ago, when the last California Mastodons still roamed the plains. It was a holy place, where the three waters met – the healing hot springs and the rushing creek mingling with the waves of the Pacific. They named this land, where mountain meets ocean, the ‘spirit window’, and they were her stewards. When the Spanish came to colonize and decimate the Esselen, they followed suite and named the land Ventana – the Spanish word for ‘window’ – a name which remains to this day. And to this day, this land is a place of healing, and a place that reverberates with spirit.

The Esalen Institute is another story. Founded in the early 1960s as part of the Human Potential Movement, the Institute came into being as a place where humanity could evolve beyond the cultural constraints of its time. Fusing science and spirit, eastern and western philosophy, mind and body, Esalen was a place for great minds to gather, and for humans to heal and transform. Every decade has seen a new Esalen Institute – from the academic rigor of the early days to the use of open sexuality and hallucinogens as a means to enlightenment some years later – to the transformation of the institute into a kind of resort by Steve Donnovan (the man behind the curtain for both Starbucks and Peets coffee) – who grew it into the $12 million dollar non-profit business it is today, solving it’s financial crisis at what some consider great cost to it’s purported mission to discover and model a better way of life. To this day, Esalen exists as a decentralized conversation between several tribes – psychologists, bodyworkers & healers, farmers and sustainability advocates, spiritual seekers, artists, businessmen & businesswomen, community residents (I think of them as ‘villagers’) and the 12 thousand visitors who pass through the gates every year, seeking to be transformed.

I came to live at Esalen for 8 weeks as part of their 'work scholar' program – at the cost of $2200 and 32 hours of work per week, first in the kitchen, then on the farm, I would participate in two month-long workshops and invite the elusive ‘personal transformation’ alluded to in their mission statement. I had previously never spent more than 48 hours at the Institute – I came for a series of personal retreats over the Winter, first for my 30th birthday, and later because I had fallen in love with the place and what it seemed to be doing for me. Actually coming to live at Esalen for two months sounded like a dream – and now a week after departing, it seems like a dream in retrospect. A very long, very complicated, very intense, and very transformative dream.

I am both frustrated and amused at the difficulty I find in describing my experience at Esalen without resorting to mystical terms. It certainly wasn’t easy. Much like New York City, it’s a fantastic place to visit, but one would do well to think long and hard before going to live there. In fact, New York City is the only reference point I have to the effect that Esalen had on me – never, anywhere else on the planet, have I felt so continuously assaulted by the energy of a place. As though the towering mountains and the sprawling ocean were the arms of a vice in which I squirmed, my self relentlessly reflected back at me, and some merciless angel hovering above, whispering “grow, grow!”

In any case, that’s what it was like. I balk somewhat at the extremity of my own rhetoric, especially because it is so difficult to gauge so soon after leaving to what degree I feel a truly changed man by my time at the Institute. There is a strong temptation to express the process through the lens of ‘the power of the land’ – but I have always been unusually sensitive to my environment and cannot say with certainty that my experience of the ’energy’ at Esalen will speak to anything but my own unique subjectivity.

I can however attempt to describe this transformative process in purely social terms. The community at Esalen is both intensely insular and intensely porous. On a typical day the land holds space for 150 visitors who will be gone within the week, and another 150 residents who are staying for terms from several weeks to a decade or more. The longer one stays, the more enmeshed in the community one becomes. But this isn’t a typical seaside village. People come to Esalen to work on themselves, to process pain and trauma and limitation, and to grow. Every week there are ‘open seats’ available to anyone on the property who wants to emotionally process with a trained facilitator. But that’s really only the beginning – every work department has weekly process, and almost every department has a daily ‘check-in’ in which each member of the community practices both self-awareness and communication of that awareness to their fellow workers. Work scholars have their own open seat process gatherings, and extended students have theirs. Very much like a Zen center, each member of the community is encouraged to take increasingly deeper looks at themselves and the way they lead their lives, and the things that get in their way – and somewhat unique to Esalen, each community member is then asked to practice conscious communication about that process, in a way that tends to diffuse conflict and projection and open the way for social cooperation and strong bonds of trust and mutual support.

That all sounds rosy, until you consider the fact that this is not your typical American Therapy process with its hyperactive boundaries and complimentary social anonymity. In typical Esalen fashion, I’ll go to an open seat, end up spilling my guts about my most buried shames and traumas, cry in front of everyone, feel this cathartic transformation … and then: dinner time! All those people who just witnessed you coming unhinged will be with you in the lodge at every meal for the remainder of your stay. This is what I mean when I say that at Esalen, the individual is constantly reflected or mirrored back to oneself. If I’m brave enough to do ‘my work’ here, it will be with me for the duration of my stay – I can’t hide from my own shit here. Of course, the open seats and process sessions are confidential and very nurturing, but after a few weeks (much less a few months) you find you haven’t just opened to this group or that group – you’ve opened. On most days, between work, process, and socializing, I find myself to be overstimulated to the point of exhaustion. And this of course doesn’t take into account the fact that all those same people you’re processing with and emoting with are people whmo you are inevitably going to be naked with at the baths.

Ah yes, naked at the baths. Perhaps the most notorious and immediately button-pushing issue to the uninitiated – these soulful, healing hot springs are channeled into an elegant bathhouse on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Bathing is clothing optional (read: nude) and entirely coed. The biggest surprise though, is that none of this nudity feels particularly sexual. True, there are some bodies that want to be admired (part of their process), and both sexual partners and life partners are from time to time discovered at the baths – but the vast majority of bodies at the baths aren’t there to play our culture’s weird sexual games – they’ve come to be nourished and healed. Coming to Esalan has been compared to returning to Eden – taking off the proverbial fig leaf and returning to innocence. Coming home to a place where the body is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. Bodies of all shapes and sizes and ages, no longer hidden away, exposed to light and air and good intention. The healing power of the baths may be a self-fulfilling prophecy – but they are nevertheless a prophecy fulfilled. I was publicly naked at least once a day every day for eight weeks – as a man who has spent his entire adult life ashamed of his body, I cannot imagine a more potent medicine.

‘Gestalt’ is a german word for ‘whole’ and ‘Gestalt Therapy’ is a psychological practice developed at Esalen which attempts to look at the whole human being in the present moment – mind, body, emotion, and spirit. All of the ‘process’ to which I’ve alluded is grounded in this practice. Heavily influenced by Zen, a gestalt therapy session involves coming fully into the present moment and coming to terms with what is happening right now. Like sitting Zazen for an hour at 6 AM, this can be intensely uncomfortable – but if we always push away those aspects of ourselves that are uncomfortable, how will we ever deal with them? “It’s like Zen with talking,” as described by Christine Price, one of the Institute’s gurus of gestalt awareness practice. I would take it a bit further say it’s like Zen plus psychodynamics. As we go deep and give breath and attention to those bits and pieces of ourselves which have previously been too painful to face, those pieces begin to transform, and we begin to evolve. “The organism unfolds,” as Christine puts it. The whole organism.

And yet all this psychology is also held in firm compliment to a practice of deep body-awareness (visceral complexity) and body-work. Regardless of everything else I’ve mentioned, Esalen is also a world-famous massage school. The bathhouse isn’t just a place for bathing – a dedicated and immensely talented massage crew practices here day in and day out, working with and nurturing bodies and spirits, to the rhythm of the ocean waves. “I don’t know what we are before we’re born, and I don’t know what we are after we die,” Christine Price says to my work scholar group on our last night together, “but I know that while we are here, the body is where it’s at.” That’s one of the most extraordinary things about Esalen – it remains wide open to the spiritual without abandoning the deep existential truth that we humans are by nature embodied beings – and the body, regardless of one's conception of immortality or lack thereof, is where our spirit is taking form. The inner work that results is grounded, in the body, here, and now.

As this piece of prose stretches on, I am increasingly aware that I cannot possibly do this place justice in the span of these words - because the mission of Esalen isn’t just personal transformation, but social transformation as well. The communication practice speaks to this, but nothing speaks to it more directly than the farm & garden. As an organization seeking to model a better way of life, sustainability is Esalen’s most worthy goal, and in many ways, its most obvious failing. What they are doing is extraordinary – the 30 year-old farm and garden provides bins of food for the lodge on a daily basis – the garden is spectacular and the farm is expansive – row after row of food grown organically in the here and now – working with the land instead of against it. The compost system they’ve adopted seeks to waste nothing – uneaten food from the lodge becomes immensely rich soil in 8 to 12 weeks – and everything returns to the earth, carrying on the tradition of the Esselen Tribe, thousands of years before. In a time where most Americans gorge themselves on industrial foods without know what's in them or where they came from, Esalen is modeling the other extreme - grow your own! At the same time, the Esalen Institute as an organization, like the rest of American Culture, is not environmentally sustainable. We still live in an era where sustainability is a flirtation with financial suicide. I find it deeply Ironic – American Culture shows the worst of the human species’ tendency towards suicide and self destruction, in that we live a lifestyle which leaves nothing behind for our great-grandchildren – and yet any business or intentional community that seeks to reverse this course of self-destruction is threatened with immediate self-annihilation.

Or is it?

What I find most heartening about Esalen, above all, are the free-for-all community meetings. They remind me somewhat of my community-oriented high-school in Los Angeles (Oakwood), which held town-meetings twice a week with an open microphone, and to this day pledges to give every student a voice. At Esalen's meetings, the CEO of this $12 million corporation sits on the floor with the people who wash the dishes in the lodge, and they face off about where the Institute is going. At one meeting I attend, a student kitchen-worker refers to the recent purchase of additional land bordering the Institute as a capital investment (as opposed to raising the notoriously low salaries of the staff) being “tricky” – and the President responds by saying he isn’t comfortable with the use of that word, which he feels connotes ‘deception.’ The brilliant Berkeley-educated kitchen-worker is quick to reply, “I think ‘tricky has two definitions, one being ‘deceptive’ the other being ‘hard to grasp’ – I meant it in the second sense.” – to which the President immediately concedes the point, and someone else in the room loudly proclaimes, “I love this place!” I honestly believe that if humans around the world practiced communication this consciously, there would never be another war.

But the thing about Esalen is that the person washing the dishes in the kitchen (which on average serves 300 people every meal) might very well have a PHD in Philosophy or Physics. But even saying that somehow misses the point, by subscribing to conventional definitions of social status. Because at Esalen, in theory, that PHD dish-washer could be working with a high-school drop-out from Germany, and the two of them would, in theory, still be able to sit down to dinner together and learn something from each other. Esalen, in potential, breaks all the social rules, and suggests in their stead a social order held together by the conscious practice of self-awareness, communication, and above and below it all, a shared humanity – inotherwords, love.

Still, nothing and nobody on this earth is perfect. Esalen has a shadow as surely as you or I or President Obama does. The danger in so much inner work is the possibility of narcicism. And as much as it purports an enlightened and community-oriented way of life, I’ve seen that community take a firm back seat to financial concerns. For anyone in the ailing middle-class, Esalen's programs are all quite expensive, raising the uncomfortable question - do only the rich deserve to be healed and liberated? Meanwhile, I’ve watched more than one person apply for the extended student program only to be ‘voted out’ by the department, not unlike an episode of Survivor. In their final week, work scholars actually find eviction notices pinned to their doors (eviction notices that 'wish them well on their journey', but even so!) – guests are expected to be off property by 2 PM sharp once their workshops are ended. Resources are limited. Agape love works in theory, and perhaps perpetually in the spiritual realm – but here on earth things are harder and firmer, and Esalen has firm limits to what it can provide. The most heart-breaking moment for me is when a fellow work scholar leaves the program ten days early – he’s the only one in my group who has experienced trauma similar to mine – he is leaving, he says, because he finds the kitchen (which, without management, has grown lax in it’s communication practice) to be a toxic environment – but I can’t help but wonder if, like me, he has found that our workshop isn’t really addressing his trauma in the way he had hoped. Who knows? When he goes, I am unexpectedly devastated, moreso by this than by anything else that has come up in my time here. I have to stop working, and sit and let irrational tears flow for a while – something has been lost, that didn’t need to be. That’s what grief is, I guess. And Esalen is not free from grief, nor trauma, nor disappointment, nor sadness.

But even in the turmoil of it’s own shadow, the Esalen Institute is a road through and away from those things, a road of potential into a more aware and integrated life.

And then there's everything I'm not mentioning: Yoga classes are offered to the community most days, as well ecstatic expressive dance classes and the occasional evening dance party; most weeks will see gatherings for singing or writing; the Art Barn is open to all every day with space and free supplies for creative exploration; the grounds are breathtaking and teeming with life - from the baths one can often watch otters splashing in the surf below, or catch a glimpse of california condors soaring above, and from the farm one might look up from tilling or weeding to spot a massive pod of dolphins passing, or - as I finally experienced after 7 weeks - the full-bodied breeching of enormous whales a mile off shore; on clear nights the milky way is a glittering band stretched across the sky; from time to time a shaman from the Esselen Tribe will come to offer a sweat lodge to a group of students or the community (I was blessed to participate in two); and day by day the whole community pulses with an acquired language of generous physical affection and conscious touch...

Driving away from the Esalen Institute after eight weeks, I find myself wondering vaguely, what the hell just happened? I find myself trying gauge who I am now – so much talk about personal transformation, unfolding, growth – I feel transformed, but is there more to it than just a feeling?

Personal growth is by nature an intangible affair. Not so easy to quantify as say an improved quarterly report or basketball shot, or stronger muscles after a couple months dedication to the gym. As the days pass and I move on to new familiar places - Tassajara and Berkeley - I watch my own behavior and reactions carefully. Do I have a stronger sense of who I am and where I’m going? Am I less reactive and more discerning? Do I indeed have better boundaries while at the same time an increased capacity for communication? Are these newly developed social and relational skills actually going to stick? Have I actually enlightened these buried traumas I came to Esalen to work through - or is it just a dream?

“I feel like I’m dreaming,” I say to Sarah, on the front lawn, cushioned by African kikuya grass and lulled by the ocean waves. “The only way I know this isn’t a dream is by the complexity of visceral sensation going on in my body. My body is never this complicated when I dream.”

That's why this feels like home.

Next: Burning Man!

The Treacherous Road to Tassajara

2010-06-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

The only constant in Tassajara is change. Perhaps the most pervasive feature of the settlement is the river running along the canyon floor, from the beautifully crafted bathhouse on one end to the run-down student housing on the other. Past the office and the student eating area, the Zendo towering over the courtyard, where aggressive blue-jays steal fresh-baked bread out of people’s hands, past the fancy guest dining room and hotel-like accommodations – a world apart from the students’ meager abodes – past the pool and on into the wilderness, the river runs.

Tassajara is the oldest Zen monastery outside of Asia. It is known for being hot and bright, beautiful, severe. It rests in a canyon in the Ventana Wilderness of California, far away from the buzz of modern life, a private world of bells and bird song, drums and chants and Buddhist silence forever interrupted by the din of rushing water, flowing out of impassable mountains, and returning to them.

One may reach Tassajara one of two ways: a three day hike inland from the Big Sur coast, or a treacherous 14 mile dirt road which passes over a mountain ridge before descending steeply into a secluded canyon. As do most visitors, I took the later route, a journey of at least an hour, navigating jagged rocks and sheer drops into breathtaking oblivion. During the final five miles of descent, the disconcerting smell of burnt rubber fills the nostrils as the car’s breaks palpably soften from over-use. On hot days, one has no choice but to pull over and let the breaks cool – the alternative is a quick ride over the edge.

For half of the year – the colder half – Tassajara closes its doors to outsiders and becomes a place of intense monastic Zen practice. But as the weather warms the monastery opens – to paying guests who come to unwind at this mountain resort and natural hot springs – and to students who pay nothing, but work hard in exchange for food, lodging, and stoic zen practice. The student schedule is intense: the wakeup bell sounds just past 5 AM, morning meditation lasts one hour, followed by thirty minutes of bows and chanting, then soji (temple cleaning), and after breakfast, work begins – and there is no shortage of it. There is work to be done for the monastery, and there is work to be done for the guests. They call it work practice – because the dedicated Zen student practices mindfulness in everything he or she does – chopping vegetables, cleaning rooms, tending garden, serving guests – each moment is an opportunity for meditation, awareness, growth, glimmers of enlightenment. At the end of the day another hour of sitting zazen ensues. One emerges from the zendo in the dark of night and a reverential hush falls over the grounds; the wakeup bell sounds in less than eight hours.

I am placed in the dining room, serving the guests, much to my horror. After the years spent trying to “be zen” about waiting tables in New York City, the idea of waiting tables at a zen center feels like a cruel joke. But in the spirit of service, and with a mindful eye to the emphasis in the Soto Zen school for being with discomfort (rather than living under its thumb), I smile and go to work. It is an opportunity to recapitulate my negative experience as a restaurant server – here I am a monk attending to the guests who make my education possible, and more often than not, they are gracious. Nevertheless the work is exhausting, and ironic in that Zen places such emphasis in doing one thing at a time with full attention, whereas waiting tables more or less requires constant multi-tasking. In my bolder moments, I think of writing a book – The Zen of Multi-Tasking – and smile at the great number of people that this would piss off.

There are a lot of rules here: no running, no reading while eating, no eating or drinking while standing, no humming whistling or singing, keeping silent during plentiful silent periods, bow to the Buddha every time you enter a bathroom (there are Buddha alters basically in every room), be in your seat in the Zendo five minutes before meditation begins, do not leave the zendo during meditation except in emergency, no alcohol, no sex (unless you have been there at least six months, and then, only sex in committed relationships is condoned – though interestingly they pride themselves on being very gay friendly.) If this sounds like a lot, it is – and the list goes on. At times, Tassajara can feel oppressive; between the heat and the sheer canyon walls, one may begin to feel closed in.

But at once there is a way of life here that is deeply satisfying. Among my favorite rules: anytime any student or practitioner passes another on the path, both stop and bow. No matter what is going on, who is rushing where (but not running!), whether the participants know each other, whether they get along or don’t, every time, we stop, we bow, and then we make our way. In this manner, dozens of times throughout the day, we honor one another, we give our respect, and we are respected. From this practice alone a community bond is slowly built and daily recreated.

From the end of evening meditation silence is held, through morning meditation, soji, and into the first 15 minutes of breakfast; nobody speaks. A kind of sublime peace descends on the settlement as we file out of the zendo into the cool night, as we quietly throng around the samovar to make our evening tea, and then step lightly along the dark, lantern-lit path to our beds, as the stars shine above us.

And sometimes Tassajara is just a tribe of mismatched people who have come together with a common interest, who need to joke around, blow off steam, have fun, break the rules, complain about their lives. The other side of the stoic dedication to the Buddha Way and the Bodhisattva Vows is a everyday humanity that suffers and strives like the rest of us.

Before it was a monastery, this place was sacred to the Esselen tribe, the Native Americans who lived in these mountains before the white man came. The waters of the hot springs were believed to have sacred healing powers. And when the treacherous road was first carved out of the mountain in 20th century, it was a road for the sick to come and take the cure.

There are many stories here of students who came to spend a few months during the summer and ended up staying for years. I feel the pull myself. There is such a sense of safety here, an honesty, a clarity of purpose, and of course, the rich tradition of Japanese Buddhism and the rewards of its daily practice. I am comforted to know that this place exists. However hard my life becomes, however traumatically my hopes and plans fall apart, there will always be Tassajara.

And it will always be changing. The only constant in Tassajara is change. Students and clergy come and go, the river runs high with the rains and shrinks to a trickle in the heat of summer. Every day brings new visitors, new weather, new bugs, new relationships, new concerns, new insights, new struggles, new enlightenments. Amdist the change the community renews itself, the morning bell rings, the zendo is filled with students. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

That's a little Zen for you.

The Bodhisattva Vows

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them all

Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them

The Dharma Gates are boundless; I vow to enter them

The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it

Next: the Esalen Institute!

2009-12-23T15:11:00.001-08:00

Avatar: Reintegrating Shamanism in the Modern Psyche

I’ll be honest: I find some of the current reactionary hatred toward Jim Cameron’s film Avatar to be as disturbing as anything that’s happened on the political scene over the last year. I would expect outrage at this film from neo-cons and Christian conservatives – and of course, we all have our own tastes and are entitled to our opinions. What gives me heartache in this case, I think, is a particular snap judgment amongst certain liberal circles that Avatar is somehow a film about Native Americans, or Africans, or Australian Aboriginals – i.e. that the film is a historical allegory with offensively blue aliens and mind-blowing special effects - a feel-good revisionary look at the horrors of colonialism on Earth.

Watching the film, this pseudo-historical reading didn’t even occur to me. Perhaps because I know something about tribal/pagan spirituality across cultures, and the history of shamanism (I’ve even made my own feature film "Tale of the Tribe" on this theme) it doesn’t make any sense to me, to think of these blue skinned Na’vi as having anything to do with the specific shamanic tribes of our own history – except for the singular fact that they are also a shamanic tribe. But guess what: almost all pre-modern tribes are shamanic - even the Caucasian ones.

Allow me to clarify – if there is a universal religion on earth, historically speaking it would be tribal shamanism. In Europe, the indigenous peoples were called ‘pagans’ – and before they were wiped out by Christianity*, there were a lot of them. Go back far enough, any of us, and we will discover that our ancestors belonged to shamanic tribes. Now I appreciate that specific surviving tribes don’t want their own specific traditions to be ‘appropriated’ or stolen by new age moderns or exploited by Hollywood – I agree with that – but shamanism itself belongs to no tribe. Having a spiritual connection to the earth, being part of a community that lives in harmony with nature, is our birthright as human beings.

That Avatar's Na'vi share certain shamanic cultural traits with all the original tribal cultures of earth doesn't make them allegories for the Navajo or the Aborigines or the African tribes - it merely makes them somewhat human. And, I think the film argues, it is the kind of humanity that we as a civilization would do well to listen to. They are our ancestors, and they might be our future.

In this context of shamanic history, Avatar did not for a moment appear to me as a revisionist feel-good allegory about white colonialism. It has nothing to do with white colonialism – it has to do with modern human military-industrial greed, intolerance, and violence. These are issues we face in the present and in the future, not in the past.

Avatar immediately struck me a much needed modern myth about how the reclaiming of shamanistic values and earth-based spirituality is vital to the health and prosperity of our entire species, and the survival of our own planet. To this end, it is also a film about seeing through the eyes of "the other" - whether that other is a person, an alien, a lover, an animal, a tribe, or an entire ecosystem. The phrase "I see you" is repeated a dozen times throughout the film, in english and in the alien language - explicitly characterized as a spiritual seeing, a looking "into" and recognizing the other person, as in the familiar sanskrit "Namaste". When I look at the blue skinned Na’vi, I do not see a distant tribal culture – I see a part of myself. A part which has been taken from me, along with all the other ravages of modernity; it is a part which I desperately want back.

Avatar is a very simple story – all myth is simple – about a modern military man who infiltrates, and ultimately embraces “the other". At the end, this brought tears to my eyes – that he actually becomes ‘the other’: he literally casts off his own human body to be one with his true people. To call him a white man at this juncture is quite frankly racist, as it completely ignores the somatic and spiritual transformation that has taken place - he isn’t a "white man". He is initiated Omaticaya. He is Na'vi.

On close examination, the Na'vi appear consistently culturally and spiritually superior to the planet-raping humans who have invaded their world. Their culture is rich, dynamic, and full of wisdom and balance. "Why would they trade what they have for beer and blue jeans?" Jake asks. "We have nothing that they want." Meanwhile, they have everything that we need - community, authenticity, consciousness. The humans are by contrast presented as greedy, small-minded, immoral, violent, self-blind, and heartless. If the film is racist, it is racist against the human species altogether. The Na'vi are portrayed as a light in our modern darkness, our better selves. This is not to advocate a romantic (and probably impossible) casting-off of civilization or mass return to tribal life in the forest - for even as it advocates respect for natural rhythms, the film is itself a miracle and testament to modern technology. Rather, the Na'vi suggest to us a necessary rebalancing of a world gone awry. It is not a question of replacing civilization with tribalism, or monotheism with shamanism. Culturally and psychologically, it is a question of reintegration.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the film is aesthetically stunning and visually beautiful - having seen it four times, I believe it might be the most visually detailed film ever made, perhaps impossible to take in all at once (one example, I watched the movie twice without noticing the Na'vi have four fingers, while the human-avatars have five). Nor do I forget that the innovative technical film-making skill required to generate and move within these astounding three dimensional environments is anything less than a marvel of human engineering. The artistic effect of these elements in tandem is meant to re-create the experience of truly being immersed in an alien world - to become literally embodied in the breathtaking world of 'the other' - but these elements and this aesthetic immersion are not the sole value of the film. The myth and the message stand with or without them.

Now I am certainly not going to argue that the film is perfect. It’s full of all sorts of silly Hollywood conventions – just like every other Hollywood adventure film ever made. I personally find extended action/war sequences boring, but one doesn’t get to make a film with the scope of Avatar without such a sequence – our culture doesn’t permit it. (I have heard a compelling argument, however, that this battle sequence performs a much needed catharsis in seeing the invading rapists taken down - something which has happened only rarely in our own history). Nor do I really understand some criticisms I’ve heard on how the dialog is unrealistic or 'pedestrian' – because no big Hollywood studio film has ever had realistic dialog. Studio movies consistently present a skewed picture of human behavior and speech (and image – nobody looks like Holywood stars in real life, not even the stars!) – movies with realistic dialog always fail at the box office. Culturally, we disdain realistic films as boring. I personally tend to find studio films maddening for the above reasons – but one area they work for me is when they don’t shy away from the heightened reality of myth itself.

Some of us just hate studio films altogether – bravo! Most of the time I agree with you – Studio films are usually contrived, often horrifically violent, and habitually give no value to human life beyond the protagonist and his kin. But when I do go to see a studio film and have the rare experience of taking in not only a mythic story, but one with a message of hope, healing, and evolving consciousness, I don’t know what to feel except gratitude and renewed faith in mankind. We live in a sleeping civilization that is decimating our planet and its people. You ask how America could commit the moral atrocity of invading Iraq – and yet when a film-maker puts all the might of Hollywood into a mainstream film which asks Americans to identify with “the other” – you go on the attack and rip it to shreds. This I do not understand.

Myth isn’t realistic, but it is true. The notion that a planet itself could fight back against the military-industrial complex is a fairy tale – we all know Earth isn’t going to come to life and suddenly defend herself – that’s our job as awakened humans. But this concept – this numinous archetype of the mother planet who fights back against her rapists – it is a story of hope, it is a story that catalyzes the minds of Earth’s defenders, and it is a call to action. Avatar is only a myth, but it does what myth has always sought to do – to enlighten and enliven us.

My utmost thanks to James Cameron for making the effort. I believe he is a good man.

* I want to be perfectly clear: I do not seen any necessary conflict between Christianity and Shamanic connection to Earth. I am in general a big fan of coexistence.

On Not Eating for 21 Days

2009-07-17T21:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had my first real meal in 21 days, a raw collard green wrap with sprouted lentils & mixed greens in a coconut curry sauce, purchased from a raw vegan restaurant I fortuitously passed in Culver city, on my way to the beach. I had prepared my dormant digestive track with 36 hours of fruit juice and dynamic but bland homemade vegetable soup. I admit I scarfed down half the wrap in my Camry in the restaurant parking lot (though it was probably the slowest ‘scarfing’ of my life – my palette would only admit at little at a time, and then, only after vigorous and thorough chewing) – still, I henceforth restrained myself and made my way to the water, curious how the sudden advent of nourishment would affect my consciousness. I ate the second half on the beach, relishing the pleasure of each bite of life-giving sustenance, and then went to meditate by the breaking waves, allowing my stomach and gut the full resource of energy & blood flow they required to do their appointed task. It wasn’t just one of the most delicious meals of my life – it might have been the most fulfilling.

In any case, it was among my most fulfilling and successful meditations.

Truth be told, meditation got me into this mess. A little over three weeks ago I sent out a newsletter announcing the product launch of my films on DVD, along with two play collections, and shortly thereafter, I sat down to meditate for the first time in several months. It hit me like a blast of light, “Do the master cleanse!”

I never know exactly where these things come from – ‘marching orders’ as Julia Cameron would put it, dressed up with such certainty and drive that one doesn’t question them, because by their nature they seem the stuff of life. I had never seriously considered doing the master cleanse, and had only recently googled it out of vague curiosity (I am, for the record, the kind of person who will spend the better part of a day googling ‘arachnids’ or ‘Vietnam’ or ‘globster’, just out of curiosity). Nevertheless, “Do the master cleanse!” my meditation had told me, with a kind of insistent clarity that hadn’t come upon me in several years, and so I obediently sat down at my computer and began researching the idea – the pros and the cons, testimonials of glowing converts, ominous warnings from conventional western doctors.

The basic idea is this – on the Master Cleanse, one stops eating entirely, and subsists on a concoction of fresh squeezed lemon juice, organic grade B maple syrup, organic cayenne pepper, and filtered water. Meanwhile, one drinks daily a laxative tea and also consumes a quart of salt water (mixed with store-bought sea salt) which flushes through the system dramatically in a matter of hours and which, in tandem with the tea, completely cleans the gut of anything it was holding onto. The essential philosophy behind this practice is thus– under normal circumstances, our digestive track is constantly overloaded with an unnatural flood of (often) unnatural foods. Like a desk which has become so piled with paperwork that the piles never get attended to, so to do our bodies never really get to sorting out the crap we keep putting into them – they become overwhelmed sorting out all the new crap that keeps coming in every day. By effectively shutting down the digestive system, the body has a chance to take care of some long overdue business – sorting through, processing, and getting rid of the crap that has been piling up for decades. The theory is that once the body gets a break from being hammered with food, it will divert it’s energy to the long overdue task of cleaning house – hence, “the master cleanse.”

The man credited with inventing this particular lemon-maple-cayenne recipe (though of course, not the aeons-long tradition of fasting itself), Stanley Burroughs, went so far as to say that ALL disease is caused by the body being overloaded with food, both good and bad (it is a fact that humans have a much higher rate of disease in general than any other species in its natural environment). Thus, Burroughs declared, the Master Cleanse has the potential to cure literally any disease, including cancer. He, and those who came after him, state the case unapologetically – when the body isn’t using all of its energy digesting, it will instead use that energy for a natural process of cleansing and healing itself.

Fundamentalist Scientists (some of the most dogmatic religious zealots on the planet) of course scoff at this kind of thinking and declare it dangerous nonsense. And of course, I would agree that any system taken too literally and to great extremes has the potential for great destruction (especially Fundamentalist Science!). I disagree with Burroughs very strongly that diet alone can explain all diseases. I do, however, give him the benefit of the doubt that his master cleanse has at least the potential to cure disease – even cancer. Healing comes in many forms, and Science is far too young (and in the early part of this century, still too religiously dogmatic) to claim to have all the answers.

I don’t deny that there is a danger involved for anyone one who strays from mainstream scientific wisdom, or for that matter, mainstream wisdom of any kind. Burroughs himself once came up against criminal charges because one his patients died – the prosecution argued the case that the death by hemorrhage was directly related to Burroughs performing ‘deep abdominal message’ on the patient’s gut. Pretty disturbing stuff, and Burroughs did end up spending time in prison later on completely different, non-death related charges (he claims he converted the entire prison medical staff to his methodology of healing). But, on the other hand, one reads one anecdote after another, after another, after another, that doing the Master Cleanse has changed the author's life, forever and for the better. I understand and respect why anecdotal evidence is not permissible in Science, but I also know that I would trust the passionate anecdotes of my respected friends, family and mentors over an unknown scientist most days of the week.

And so, within 36 hours of that initial, jarring meditation, I had given up food completely.

If I could sum up, in one word, what I wanted out of this cleanse, it would be clarity. I had previously fasted as long as three days when I was younger, drinking only water, and each time I had been blown away by a gradual awareness of everything we Americans take for granted - constantly stuffing our faces with food especially. This fast was very different – the maple syrup was providing around 1000 calories a day, only about a third of my official daily requirement, but even so a mechanism to keep my blood-sugar up. There are many (though not enough) important vitamins and minerals to be found in the organic elements of the ‘lemonade’ – but just to be safe I took ‘Emergen C’ every morning as well, to keep things as balanced as possible. Burroughs wouldn’t have approved of this addition (any sort of supplementation is against the divine perfection of nature, in his book) but I didn’t do this because I’m a true believer in Burroughs as the keeper of ‘all the answers’ – no human being ever will have all the answers.

The first two to three days are the worst. Headaches, exhaustion, fatigue, confusion, hunger, and cravings (not the same thing as hunger) – in short it was miserable. I could barely function during this time and passed the hours napping and watching nature documentaries and old Star Trek movies. At one point, a splitting headache grounded me in bed as it seemed to move it’s way, slowly, through each set of lobes in my cerebral cortex, finally burning itself out at my brainstem.

And then, magically, it gets better! The very difficult initial transitional period is often explained as ‘detox symptoms’ by true believers – and the best experiential evidence for this explanation is that the symptoms quickly not only taper off, but almost completely disappear. Occasional, sporadic relapses of these symptoms are expected as one goes ‘deeper’ into the cleanse, but these are the exception. I had originally planned to fast for 10 days, but by days 8 and 9, it had become so easy, and I was feeling so positive, that I decided to keep going.

Jesus fasted for 40 days, after all. And the funny thing is, once I had transitioned enough to start going out into the world again, I found myself encountering again and again people who had done the master cleanse, or heard stories about people who had done it, many for 30 days or more. One fellow, a Christian, fasts for 40 days every year.

If nothing else, the point was to hit the ‘reset button’ on my body, and thus, in many ways, on my life. We all know what drugs can do to human consciousness, and drugs are only chemicals that we ingest or inhale. What we take into ourselves on a chemical level through what we do and do not eat, every day, determines in part how we see the world and how we feel, for better or for worse.

There were great moments of purpose and productivity, balanced by stretches of fuzzy-headed lethargy. I ran a relaxed mile every morning and meditated for thirty minutes every day. I wasn't at peak performance, but nor was I impaired in the daily activities of life. Ironically I found not eating was a much more effective ‘social lubricant’ than alcohol could ever hope to be – as if I were myself more naturally – I simply didn’t have the energy to put on any airs or play any social games – I was helplessly myself – and other people seemed to respond to this state with increased trust and respect. Lily, a small dog belonging to some friends of mine, who is usually prone to barking fits at the mere site of me, now instead immediately leapt joyfully onto my lap and licked my face. This tended to be the case, more often than not.

The clarity I sought – and by this really I meant clarity about how to proceed with my life, after all the disappointment and hardships of the last few years – came slowly and indirectly. Old ideas and painful emotions would surface and work their way through me, sometimes I would seem to be inextricably mired in adolescent depression, only to wake the next morning feeling that anything was possible. Slowly but surely, my whole worldview was coming up for review, one little piece at a time. It’s the kind of process that’s hard to quantify or understand … one doesn’t know which aspects of oneself have become unconscious until they are literally slapping you in the face – and even then, there is a feeling of, “what the hell is this?”

There were only three overwhelming bursts of clarity – all three coming first thing in the morning and with such force that I had to roll out of bed and write them down immediately. The first was that I had moved to Hollywood because I want to make Studio films, and there was no point in denying it any longer. The second was that I still believe in Art as the mirror held up to society, the great instigator of cultural dialog and progress, and that the artist is, first and foremost, a servant to country, species, and planet – and that this was a value that I must never abandon. Third, that a great deal of my present discontent comes out of the fact that I am a director who is not directing. That was it. And honestly, it was more than enough.

And then things got hard. Not that fasting got hard – life got hard, and started to impinge on the fast. A credit card company suddenly doubled my APR on a huge balance which I had amassed making my films – an event which threw all my finances into chaos and pushed me once again up against the worst of the recession. Then, a film distributor, with whom I had once again childishly invested all my hopes, rejected a film which had been recently and painstakingly re-cut to their specifications, re-breaking my heart over the film and deeply dampening my spirits. And in the midst of all of this, I got into a horrific fight with my father via email. Suddenly I felt weak and starving – and although I still believe this feeling had an emotional basis much more than a physical one, I realized life was becoming too hard, and I was going to need real food, and real, complex, and dynamic nutrition to see me through it.

I had my heart and mind set on fasting for 28 days, but as life became more difficult, I realized I was going to have to call it at 21 and give myself a pat on the back for a job well done. Carl Jung is famous for suggesting that those elements of our psyches that we do not become conscious of will inevitably manifest and confront us on the material plane. It’s a romantic explanation but as good as any – as the ‘cleanse’ plunged deeper, the most difficult issues of all came up once more to demand an audience, and in order to face them properly, I needed to once again be nourished.

At least, that’s what I’d like to think…

After eating nothing for so long, the idea of eating anything is a truly novel and celebratory notion, and so the idea of transitioning into a raw food diet for the remainder of the summer became a prospect which I could embrace with true enthusiasm. As convincing as the Master Cleanse zealots are about it’s health benefits, the Raw Foodists blissfully exceed them, and understandably so, as they have rich nutritional evidence to back up their lifestyle (with the unfortunate exception of vitamin B12). Their philosophy goes that all life on this planet evolved to eat everything raw, and that vitamins, minerals, energy, and nutritional enzymes are much more readily available before being cooked and otherwise processed.

Based on the raw lentil curry wrap I ecstatically (albeit slowly) devoured on Venice Beach last night, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt – at least a couple months worth of benefit. Of course, any system taken too far, and to extremes, may begin to acquire the stink of fundamentalism. I’m also inclined to listen to certain other contingencies that insist cooking certain foods makes them easier to digest and can even release vital enzymes. In my opinion, the truth is always more complex than any one individual or group would have you believe.

In the meantime, I’m thrilled to be eating delicious, raw, vital foods – aware once again that food is one of the great blessings we humans are given on this planet. 21 days is a long time to go without eating, especially during a great recession – but I’m adding it to my to-do list for Life, right after getting my black belt in Tae Kwon Do, to one day take the plunge and fast for the full 40 days.

After all, one need only ask oneself … what would Jesus do?

PS - For those who are curious, I lost about 19 pounds over the three weeks of the fast, some of which I expect to inevitably, naturally come back. However, while I have a generally positive perspective on this practice, I don't believe it should be done for weight loss alone. I advise anyone interested in trying this kind of cleanse to remember it is a major change for your body, which is best researched thoroughly in advance.

...And the Fundamentalists Take California.

2008-11-09T18:25:00.000-08:00

"You can't stop the river as it rushes to the sea,

You can try to stop the hands of time,

but you know it just won't be!"

On November 4^th, 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, effectively making it illegal for two loving, committed souls to be married, if they have similarly shaped genitalia. As one might expect, this victory for bigots everywhere was accomplished primarily through lying to the good people of California.

As a liberal, I am disappointed. As a libertarian, I am outraged.

The most heart-breaking aspect of the whole sordid affair is that those valiant souls opposing Proposition 8 trusted us to do the right thing, and made their arguments accordingly. This great state is their home, here they are surrounded by accepting, loving and affirming friends and family, and accepting religious communities -a culture evolved far beyond the hate-forged manacles of religious fundamentalism. The bigots may take middle America, but here in California, the people believe in love. And trusting, perhaps these brave souls didn’t fight quite as hard, or argue quite as incisively, as they should. After all, they thought it was a matter of justice; in fact, this hostile invasion of bigotry into the California psyche is apparently a matter of war.

(Not the aggressive war exemplified by our soon to be former president, but the defensive war of a righteous people, defending their right to life and liberty against a hostile force.)

The “Yes on Proposition 8” cartel lied to the people of California in the following ways.

1. If proposition 8 is not passed, gay marriage will be taught in schools. The California Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage had nothing whatsoever to do with our educational system, at all. It is illegal to teach about health and family issues without parental consent in California schools, including marriage of any kind, regardless of Proposition 8. By Law, parents may remove their children from any health and family curriculum of which they do not approve. The notion that proposition 8 had anything to do with education, in any way, is a bold faced lie. Parties concerned with health and family education in California were free to create a proposition to address educational concerns specifically - however, as those concerns are already adequately addressed under California law, they had no need to, and instead used the topic as a foil in order to lie to their fellow Americans. If Proposition 8 had failed, and gay marriage allowed, it would still be illegal to teach gay marriage in California schools without parental consent. Those who voted for Proposition 8 based on this information were lied to, and led to take the immoral action of robbing fellow California citizens of their basic rights.

2. If Proposition 8 is not passed, churches could be penalized by the government for refusing to perform gay marriage ceremonies. The California Supreme Court’s decision to allow gay marriage specifically stated that no church should be forced to marry anyone whom they deem unfit. No church would be forced to marry a gay couple, or penalized for not marrying a gay couple, under any circumstances, as the decision of who can be married within a given church is strictly a matter of that church’s faith tradition. Catholic churches wouldn’t be required to marry gays any more than they would be required to marry Hindus. This protection was already guaranteed to churches under California law, but Proposition 8 sought to BAN this freedom of religion and deny all churches the right to marry gay couples, even where their faith traditions affirm same-sex unions. This BAN on religious freedom does not protect conservative churches, which were already protected, but instead forces non-conservative churches to comply with the fundamentalist agenda. Proposition 8 in fact attacks religion, by denying religious freedom to non-fundamentalists, and thus effectively dissolves the separation between church & state – Uncle Sam can now officially declare Episcopalian marriages illegal.

3. Proposition 8 protects marriage. This statement is so patently false – in fact being the opposite of the truth – that it insults the intelligent reader to dwell on it too long.Proposition 8 is a BAN on marriage. It is a piece of legislature defining marriage in strictly fundamentalist terms, and forcing the government, and all non-fundamentalist churches, to comply with the fundamentalist agenda. It denies churches, the government, and the people the right to define marriage for themselves, and forces a fundamentalist definition of marriage upon them.Proposition 8 makes marriage a function of anatomy, specifically, the shape of the genitals, and BANS marriage that is based in love, faith, & commitment. It is however true that Proposition 8 protects loveless marriage - by removing love from the equation.

On Wednesday, November 5^th, 2008 I was never so proud to be an American, and never so ashamed of my home state, California.

Let me make one thing clear – as a libertarian, I don’t have a problem with bigots. They can go live their bigot lives and have their bigot thoughts and their bigot conversations and their bigot rallies. They can live in their bigot towns and go to their bigot churches and worship their bigot god with hatred as their sacrament. That’s all fine with me. I can even find it in my heart to forgive them and to love them – that’s what Jesus and the Buddha taught us. As a libertarian, all I ask is this – please keep that bigotry to yourself. Keep it in your bigot thoughts, your bigot conversations, your bigot towns, your bigot churches, where hatred is your sacrament, and even your bigot rallies, where you stir up hatred as a weapon against love and reason. If you’ve managed to convince your culture, God and Jesus bless and forgive you, then keep it in your bigot culture, that’s fine with me, I can still find it in my heart to love you and forgive you. If you’ve convinced your state, then keep it in your bigot state.

Just stay out of California, you bigots!

Is it possible to believe that marriage is between one man and one woman, and not be a bigot? Of course! God Bless you, I respect your religion. You can even teach it to your children! It doesn’t make you a bigot to believe what you do about marriage, as it doesn’t make you a bigot to believe Jesus Christ is your savior. If, however, you think there is something fundamentally wrong or sinful about Jews for disagreeing with you on the savior issue, you may be in danger of bigotry – and even so, God Bless you, that is your right, to believe as you do. However if you pass a law saying that Jews cannot get married because there is something inherently wrong with them, and that recognized Jew Marriage would erode society`- then, my friend, I think I must call you a bigot. You may live in a state and a city and a community which affirms all that, and God Bless you -

Just stay out of California, you bigots!

I choose the Jew analogy over the more attractive and more incendiary racial analogy because, I think, it is a closer fit. While blacks have certainly been victims of horrendous bigotry over the years, it can still be argued that race is something you are born with, and homosexuality is a behavior. Whether others would argue that homosexuality is also something inborn -a gift from God, as it were - is a matter that cannot be entirely proven, and this forces the play, once more, into the arena of belief. What do you believe about God and the cosmos? What do you believe about sex? What do you believe about personality, psychology, and soul? What do you believe about ethics and morality? Prior to the passing of Proposition 8, I had been under the impression that California was a state that still valued the individual liberty to believe as one sees right and just - a state which protected minorities who adopt a religion other than that held by the majority. However, this recent turn of events is especially confusing, because California does not hold a majority of fundamentalists. Where did they come from? Who let them in?

STAY OUT OF CALIFORNIA, YOU BIGOTS!

This is not your bigot church, it is not your bigot rallies, it is not your bigot town, and while it tolerates your thoughts and conversations, bigoted or no, it is not your bigot conversations, and it is not your bigot thoughts. This is California.

God and Jesus and Buddha bless you and love you, and live your own lives and believe whatever you want, whatever you believe – that’s fine with me - but you keep your legislating hatred out of my good, equanimitous, and ethically upright state! California doesn’t want you. California believes in love and freedom and tolerance and progress. California birthed the free speech movement, she birthed the internet, she birthed the consciousness revolution. She cannot rebirth bigotry, because bigotry is an old and dying thing. Your bigotry is a virus in her womb, attacking her unborn children, and she wants you out.

In coming here, you have crossed the line.

My outrage isn’t merely personal – for my many friends and family who are gay; good, upright, hard working, intelligent, compassionate souls all – who have now been told that they are unaccepted, that their citizenship is second-class, and that their love is unreal, unrecognized, unworthy. Their love - unreal, unrecognized, unworthy.

Love, they are telling us, is unreal, unrecognized, unworthy.

Nor is my outrage merely civil – a minority oppressed by the majority. The basic rights of a small group of people, voted down by their fellows. Their freedom, personally, sexually, spiritually, religiously, BANNED – because we cannot shake off the hate-forged manacles of fundamentalism. BANNED, their truth, BANNED, their love, BANNED, their religion. BANNED, you sodomites! BANNED!

My outrage is, above all else, spiritual. You have forced your fundamentalist Religion upon me – upon my friends and family, upon my city and upon my state, upon every church, every religion, in California, you have forced your Religion. You have forced your Religion upon my government, and told my government that it has the right to strike down marriages performed in other religions. You have denied us religious freedom. You have denied us a government that is separate from religion. Worst of all, you have denied us the right to love whom we love.

You have perpetuated the greatest lie of all, that Christianity is against homosexuality. As if there are not a multitude of gay Christians! And more so, a multitude of Christian churches, who have been performing gay marriages for decades, regardless of your attempts to use government to limit their religious freedom. The Episcopalian church, over 200 years old, now performing marriages for loving, committed, and faithful couples, regardless of their gender, - you have mandated the government deny them their religious freedom. The United Church of Christ, a nation-wide protestant church establish in 1957, now performing gay marriages for loving, committed, and faithful couples, despite your best attempts to wipe them out, to force their Christianity into silence, to force your fundamentalism upon the world.

My father is a minister with the United Church of Christ – he has devoted his life to God. Even when it meant he couldn’t be there for his family, he served the church, and Jesus Christ his Savior, with unconditional devotion and faith. He has performed Gay Marriages in his church and in our backyard – even before he knew my brother was gay. You attack his faith, you attack his love, you attack his freedom.

You are not welcome here.

The fact that it was put to a civil majority vote at all is somewhat ludicrous – if the bigots put a measure on the ballet saying blacks couldn’t be married – or, if the racial analogy offends you – if the bigots but a measure on the ballot that Jews couldn’t be married (because it might lead to Judaism being taught in schools! Or the Catholic Church being penalized for not marrying Jews!) – would justice prevail if the bigoted majority prevailed over the minority? Or would justice call for the protection of the minority against its oppressors?

The most ironic thing in this tragedy of human heartlessness, is that Proposition 8 passed by the Black and Hispanic votes. It’s true, the Whites came close (47%) – but they wouldn’t have quite made it if 70% of African American Californians hadn’t voted to deny Gays their civil rights. And this, on the night that we elected our first Black President. I’d like to think that these are the fruits of a two-term Bush presidency, but perhaps it isn’t that complicated – perhaps it’s just sad.

I know it won’t last long, but it shouldn’t have lasted into 2008. Let the red states BAN gay marriage for as long as they like (though I doubt few will last more than 100 years – bigotry is old and ailing – but if they do, God bless them) – the fact remains that 60% of voters under the age of 30 voted against the marriage ban. Denying the rights of gays to marry in California in 2008 is like trying to stop the hands of time.

Jonathan Whittle-Utter

November 8, 2008

Hollywood, California

Git, Git, Git, Git, Git, you Doggone Bigots!

Summer in the Belly of the Beast

2008-10-12T12:12:00.001-07:00

“Everybody comes to Hollywood/
How can it hurt you when it looks so good?”

It’s a little discussed fact that the Los Angeles Basin is a desert. They don’t tell that to all the bright eyed youngsters who come out here seeking fame and fortune – they might tell them “art doesn’t put food on the table” or “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” or even “you’ll never make it!” – but nobody ever says, “do you realize you’re walking into a God-forsaken desert?”

I’ve spent perhaps 18 of my 29 summers in Pasadena - a hill-and-valley refuge 20 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. I’ve never cared much for summers in Pasadena, hot and dry and relentless and torpid - in fact last year I swore that I would never do it again. So this Summer I packed my things and bid my family farewell. I drove over hills and through valleys and into the Los Angeles Basin, to a land called Hollywood, and set up camp in the wasteland.

I pay $400 a month to live in a converted hotel room near the corner of Santa Monica & Vine – a heartbeat away from the heart of Hollywood. I have my own bathroom, a refrigerator and a hot plate. North and West, East and South, I am surrounded by concrete and billboards; the Hollywood Sign looms in the hills to the North like a post-modern guardian angel. I can see the sun rising from my window, and wash my dishes in the bathroom sink. I buy purified water, three gallons at a time, from a friendly Korean man named Dave, who installed a water purification system in the back of a store in which he also sells electronics and shoes. I march for ten minutes along endless stretches of concrete under the desert sun to pay for internet access in any of a number of cafés, or perch on the fire escape of my building and try to steal a signal.

I’ve become a working editor – an un-intended (and honestly not particularly desired – vis a vis the dream) side-effect of editing the three feature films that I somehow produced and directed over the last 30 months - despite my persistent lack of resource. I’m working consistently, paying my bills. I’ve even started getting work as a script supervisor for independent film and television shoots. It isn’t work I’m interested in or much care about, but it keeps coming. It pays my rent, it pays the credit bills I amassed shooting my films, it keeps me alive, it keeps me attached, it keeps me in Los Angeles.

It’s true you know – art doesn’t put food on the table, it doesn’t matter what you know, it’s who you know – and you’ll probably never make it. Those are the basics. And those of us who persist in this mad struggle for creative and financial survival as we dream the impossible dream – that’s the starting point, that’s square one. If you’re going to live in a desert, the first thing to know is this – food and water are scarce, and the sun is merciless. You can accept that basic fact and learn to cope – or you can deny it and perish.

Dismal? Perhaps – but life is still immeasurably better for artists and actors in Los Angeles than for civilians in Iraq. We Americans – all of us - have those people’s blood on our hands – the Republicans especially. And that is why, despite my unwavering support for Hillary Clinton as one of the great visionary leaders of our time – I look forward with optimism toward November, when we elect Barack Obama the 44^th president of the United States, and bring this nightmare of political regression to a close.

I’ve just finished a three week shoot, script-supervising a low budget film. The days often stretched on for 12 or 14 hours, without overtime. Still, some combination of dedication and (I imagine) desperation keeps us plodding on – giving our all, making this film the best that it can be, hoping that this job will lead to the next, that the next job will pay a little more. In the midst of this practically Marx-era labor, I had to move into a new apartment – two floors down and two rooms South, to a smaller enclosure with only one window, facing East – I chose it because it gets a little morning light. Moving is like dying, Greg says –and there’s nothing like dying when you’re working to the bone.

I have another editing job lined up already. One job ends, another appears – the more you work, the more work comes – at least until you hit a dry spell. I’m not doing what I love, but I have to admit, the Los Angeles Entertainment Industry is an economic umbrella, keeping me safe and warm. I may not care for the vapid, violent, life-debasing movies and television that pour out of Hollywood – but they put food on the table for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of us. It’s easier to stand up to glorified violence and shallow representations of humanity in the media when you’re perched in the ivory tower, or behind the church pulpit – not so easy when the production of that media is paying your rent, your medical bills, replacing the shoes on your feet. I’ll consider getting back to my outspoken criticism of Hollywood (for it’s lack of accountability in constantly introducing violent, negative and debasing energies into the culture) – maybe once I can afford a down-payment on a house.

As a good liberal (and libertarian) I used to bristle when I heard men use the term “gay” to put each other down, to suggest lack of substance or insincerity or masculinity in the other. After a year working in Hollywood, not only am I used to it as innocuous banter almost completely lacking in substantive intolerance – I’m actually becoming convinced that it’s the closeted gay and bisexual men who speak as such most of all. It’s part of the Hollywood culture of image – you project something palatable for the social scene, keep your real identity secret – just as the celebrities do. Hollywood is a place where everyone pretends to be someone else, and holds onto their true self like a secret treasure. Like a community of would-be super-heroes, guarding their secret identities, Hollywood fosters a legion of magicians and illusionists – some more skilled in the craft than others.

It’s odd, you know, as a Berkeley graduate, I’m passionately concerned about the state of the world and society – I wrote a 100 page bachelors thesis on the power of human creativity to change the world – through, for example and among other things, writing, acting, theatre and film-making that challenge the status quo. Hollywood culture laughs at all that – the film industry is about survival, then prosperity, then celebrity – not making the world a better place. Likewise as a deeply spiritual person I’ve long idealized the power of film to open hearts and minds – in fact I sank $30,000 in credit making two films meant to provoke, to challenge, to wake audiences up. The end result of this impassioned altruism, so far, is that my credit bills every month exceed my rent by almost 50%. The movies are too esoteric, the consensus murmurs – people don’t go to the movies to think, they go to check out, to be entertained, to be stimulated, titillated, scared, numbed, exorcised – movies aren’t about healing the planet, they’re about marketing, manipulation, consumption, box office. Still, I’ve been working towards this blasphemous approach to art & entertainment for the past decade – I’ve sacrificed for it – it isn’t just a question of giving up a dream – it’s a matter of giving up a whole life. I fantasize about moving to Europe or Australia from time to time – and who knows, if McCain wins the election and my third feature goes nowhere and I can’t get my novel published – it may be time to bid this crazy country goodbye. In the meantime, I’ll suck it up and keep playing the game.

The gardens give me hope. Strident blooms of life encased in a sea of concrete. Walk for ten minutes from the major streets and you start to see them, window sills and balconies, facades and whole front yards, bursting with vibrant greens. I recently went to Pasadena to retrieve some of my own plants – managed to fit twelve into the bedroom and bathroom windowsills, where they happily soak up the morning light. They range from Southern California staples like Jade and Geranium to the more esoteric Aloe Vera and African Paddle Plant – some I’ve been keeping alive for 18 months now, dispelling the long-held suspicion of a purple thumb. Since the addition of the plants over the weekend, two hummingbirds have cruised the window for nectar – miraculous to me, as the last thing I’d expect to see on Santa Monica & Vine is a hummingbird – I’ll hang a feeder shortly. Large blue and gossamer beetles buzz around the building from time to time, and every now and then, when the roar of the traffic, sirens, and helicopters ebb, I could swear I hear whole flocks of parrots and parakeets, chattering and calling as they make their way over the Basin.

And the biggest surprise, to me at least, is that I’m now sharing my small room with two small Red Ear Sliders. I rescued them from a movie I script-supervised, where they were essentially props, and spent weeks soaking in their own waste without access to light or dry land. Sliders can live for 40 years and grow to a foot in length – these turtles could still be with me when I’m 68 – and I’ll have to invest in at least a 100 gallon tank within the next 2-3 years – all daunting to a struggling bohemian who doesn’t know where the next paycheck is coming from. This was all researched thoroughly ahead of time, and the adoption took place anyway – they needed rescue, I needed some companionship, and, I guess, something besides myself to take care of. I’ve named them Terra and Althea - I find them adorable; they think I’m the devil, and try to hide from me whenever I come in range of their excellent eyesight. I trust with time we’ll work it out.

They’ve awakened a long dormant, pre-adolescent passion in me for the amphibious and the aquatic. I’m considering adding a catfish to the tank, and perhaps a couple of cichlids – Also flirting with the prospect of setting up a separate, five gallon freshwater aquarium of colorful fish (separate so as Althea and Terra don’t eat them)– as I’m monitoring water quality and temperature for one tank, it seems no great inconvenience to add another. These things bring me unprecedented joy – I find myself making another trip to the pet store rather than firing up my editing equipment. Living things return us to the essence of life - at least, they do so for me.

Like Winter in New York, Summer in Los Angeles drags on a little too long. The inevitably brief cold front in September offers false hope – “say, that wasn’t so bad,” we think – and next week stifle through a heat-wave to rival the worst in August. October is a wild month of blistering heat, wild winds, and spontaneous thunderstorms – a time of devastating wildfires or mudslides and floods, depending on the year. Life becomes vague and chaotic. I spoke too soon when I said the work was coming steady – a sudden dry spell strikes and I’m back milking my credit cards for food and gas.

It doesn’t bother me the way it used to – the financial turbulence – some combination of faith and Zen keeps me calm, even as I scrape the bottom of the barrel and find nothing there. Despite my piecemeal employment, I directed a short film over the weekend, and paid for everything out of pocket – that’s what a starving artist does, I suppose. You know I honestly thought I’d be a millionaire by the time I was 28 – really, I believed it – so while money is scarce, meaning will have to suffice. The blessing of choice persists – value my life at my financial circumstance and suffer, or value my life in spiritual terms and feel content.

Within three weeks of bringing my turtles home, I’ve purchased for them a 50 gallon aquarium for now, and a 150 gallon aquarium for when they grow up – the latter has gone into storage as it will not fit into my tiny room. My dream of a five gallon fishtank quickly grew into the 30 gallon aquarium now sitting on my dresser, full of strange and colorful tropical fish. On my desk I have a 15 gallon tank which will soon house a brackish-water puffer-fish. My mind swims with even more exotic setups, so I suppose my limited funds keep me grounded, amidst the unexpected reawakening of this childhood dream.

Since hanging the feeder, a dozen hummingbirds visit my window every day – and I’ve actually caught sight of the wild parakeets – they pass over Hollywood chattering in lime-colored swarms. I’m thrilled with my third feature film, “Autodoc”, and look forward to putting it out to market. With one short film wrapped over the weekend, I’ll aim to make one more before the end of the year, and try to finish a screenplay or two while I’m at it. I’m thinking of buying a mudskipper...

To tell you the truth, it's not a bad life.

... I'll look forward to the rains, all the same.

BIG EMPTY CLUB - a poem

2008-10-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

I

Big Empty Club
Dance Party tonight until dawn
I showed up at 9:38
because it was right around the
corner from my apartment
and I have work to do tonight.

No one is here
the loud music hurts my ears
the vacant dance floors hurt my heart, enormous.
Bright flashing lights and mist and nobody all around me.

Thank God I brought my pen.

II

This club has six bars
I'm serious
and three dance floors
There are maybe 37 people here.
Too bad I'm taking a break from alcohol this summer.
The pulse pounding music vibrates the plush
leather couch in which I sit.

I didn't have to pay to get in
because I know one of the DJs.
How many more people need to show up
before I start dancing?

III

I just shook hands with the DJ I know
I'm not sure he recognized me
with this black bandana tied around my head -
plus it's dark in here.
Also, he's the music supervisor for my film.
As far as I know, his name is Wolfie
at least, that's how I address my emails to him

It's hard to be in a gigantic room throbbing with music
and not dance.

tap, tap, tap, goes my sandaled foot...

IV

This place is awesome.
I wish I'd brought my laptop,
I could get some great writing done.

Except, of course, I'd be worried about protecting the laptop
and might never dance.

V

Actually,
the fact that I know the DJ
is probably the one reason
I'm not dancing yet.

His limited knowledge of my person
is a small but powerful antecedent
to my anonymity
and one always dances
best when surrounded by friends
or anonymous.

(I moved to a different couch
and now it's too dark to see what I'm writing)

VI

I've taken some
cursory rhythmic strolls across the
dance floor.
There are some colorful costumes here -
I admire the few who aren't afraid to dance alone.

They are my heroes and role models.

Sometimes they see me watching
and they contract
stifling their creativity under my gaze.
It hurts to know my inhibition
has the power to inhibit others.

This is what I get for showing up to a dance party alone
wearing a black bandanna.

VII

Eventually the Inhibition becomes
unbearable and I force myself
onto the floor and wait

for the rhythm to start

picking up my

body.

There is an art to being
one of those first, lone
dancers on the dance floor -
you have to be willing to look

like a Damn Fool.

Not because you are one
(necessarily)
but because if you're too good at it
the others will become

intimidated
and will not join you.
You have to make

being a Fool okay.

Plus, you know, when you're
not afraid to play the Fool,
the world has a way of
opening doors for you.

I think I come here
to listen to my heart -

- Dance from anywhere else
and they'll think you're an asshole.

There are a couple
hundred people here now.

Open Heart, Open

VIII

I went to the bar
to get a bottle of water
The guy tried to charge me $5
What!
$5 for a little bottle of water?

Time to go!

Cheap ass dance party.
Over-charging for alcohol is one thing
water is a vital fluid
we will become dehydrated without it,
and could die

I was only dropping by anyway,
I have work to do back home.

Another night,
another rave

Religion & Politics Made Fun

2008-04-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

According to the Belief-O-Matic, I am 100% Unitarian. This came as a surprise to me, as the last time I took the test, three years ago, I was 100% Mahayana Buddhist, with Unitarianism at a close second. The biggest shocker, however, is that I am apparently now a Quaker.

My top ten:

1.	Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2.	Liberal Quakers (90%)
3.	Neo-Pagan (90%)
4.	New Age (84%)
5.	Mahayana Buddhism (84%)
6.	Reform Judaism (81%)
7.	Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (78%)
8.	Hinduism (71%)
9.	Theravada Buddhism (71%)
10.	New Thought (68%)

My Political results at votehelp were less surprising. That test was more fun six months ago when there were a dozen people in the race. My results back then were something like:

1. Kucinich 97%
2. Clinton 92%
3. Obama 88 %
4. Ron Paul 79% (!!)
5. McCain 68%

Now I'm Hillary 84%, Obama 78%, and McCain 70%.

By this estimation, I liked Obama then more than I like Clinton now, I liked Ron Paul then more than I like Obama now - and most alarming, though only a slight increase, I seem to be liking McCain more and more as time goes on.

Does this mean I'm getting jaded about politics again? Maybe I should bring that up at my next quaker meeting... ;)
.

Thoughts on Witch Burning....

2008-03-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

I will start by once again stating that Barack Obama is an extraordinary individual – a genuinely good man with great ideas, a solid vision for America, and potential to be a great leader. I have recently, finally, begun reading The Audacity of Hope, and I’m quite enjoying his perspective on Washington (although so far I haven’t come across much that wasn't widely discussed amongst the student body during my Berkeley years, or featured more recently on The West Wing) – I think he would make a good president. Still, I have yet to be hit over the head and see the light, as to why he is so clearly the obvious choice for our Presidency, or why eloquence about change, unity and hope is generally being understood as an actual ability to manifest those things in the world. I have yet to understand why my vote for Hillary back on February 5^th was such an obviously bad idea, or why Obama is so clearly qualified to head the executive branch of our government and command our military. I remain open to being enlightened about these things, I just don’t see it yet.

But moving on to meatier subjects – there has, once again, arisen a chorus among Obamacrats – Excuse me, democrats – that Hillary should drop out of the race because her continued involvement is “hurting” the Democratic Party. This chorus, in addition to MSNBC’s “this week in Political Cartoons” in which almost every cartoon was a vicious attack on Mrs. Rodham-Clinton, with nary a thing said about dear, sweet perfect Obama – left me with some new thoughts on the subject:

Hillary is hurting the Democratic Party by staying in the primary, rather than conceding - because she is slightly behind? Why don’t you just come out and say the Democratic Party is hurting itself by holding the primary to begin with? Why even hold an election? Lets just grant Obama the title of Supreme Ruler of Everything Forever without a vote and be done with it! I mean clearly, the opinions of millions of democrats who are voting for Hillary, contributing to her campaign despite their own financial problems, inspired by the prospect of her leadership – clearly we’re just a bunch of blue-color idiots who don’t believe in “hope”, right? We’re not real democrats, because we calmly question Obama’s leadership ability, rather than worship at His Throne. True Democrats vote for Hope (that-only-Obama-may-bring), and dissent shall not be tolerated!

There seems to be a general consensus in the Obama camp that Hillary’s supporters are uneducated, working class fools whose votes shouldn’t count. Leaving aside the dangerous levels of elitism present in that sentiment, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I am young, intellectual, college educated at a top, liberal university, and that I have a bachelors degree in social studies and literature. Am I still not smart enough to realize that Obama is the greatest thing ever? Do I need to get a perfect score on my verbal SAT before I get to join the genius club and see Obama’s light? (By the way, I did get a perfect score on my verbal SAT). Or am I simply a traitor, not a True Democrat, because I have the audacity to speak up against the mob, and maintain my personal opinion that Hillary is the best person for the job?

Here is the fundamental contradiction – the basic fact that sends chills down my spine: Barack has promised us the hope of a less divisive, more inclusive America – and yet his followers are among the most divisive, hateful, irrational, and negative political bodies I have ever encountered. Their complete and total lack of respect for Hillary, their joy in tearing her to bits, their self-righteous assurance that she’s some sort of robotic power-starved criminal – their bizarre mantra that electing our first female president is “business as usual” (In the last 28 years, 20 have been under Republican presidency, and during the eight years Bill held the white house, for six of them he was facing off against a republican majority in congress – boys and girls, a return to Democratic Party leadership by anyone won’t be “business as usual”!) – while Hillary’s supporters sit back and say, simply, “I'm sorry, he seems great but he doesn’t move me.” If this rabid hate mongering, this shameless witch burning, is the kind of unity and inclusiveness that Obama’s leadership will inspire – if this is indeed a fair example of how his “change” will manifest - then I tremble for America.

You think I’m wrong? Try this one: I began here by saying that Obama would make a good president. Go out and ask Obama’s supporters to say, “Hillary would make a good president” and watch the words get stuck in their judgmental throats, a look of panic and confusion passing through their deranged, maniacal eyes. Ask them to say, “I prefer Obama, but I still support Hillary Clinton.” Can they do it? So who is dividing the Democratic party? Hillary for having the resolve to actually suggest we finish the race, as we’ve finished every other throughout history, or the Obamaites, enraged and delighted at the prospect of burning the witch?

What is exhausting about this primary for me is not its length, nor it’s indeterminacy. It is the fact that week after week, month after month, I watch Hillary getting flayed from all sides – by Republicans and liberals, Obama supporters and the media so dearly biased towards him. I watch them burn her, I watch her burn, and the crowd goes wild (we pretend to be progressives but who doesn’t still relish watching a powerful woman burn? The sound of her screams, the sweet scent of charred flesh...) – I watch her, and God bless her heart – she just keeps going, in what is, I believe the greatest display of public courage and endurance I have ever witnessed. I have trouble imagining anything, short of outright nuclear detonation, that would test her mettle more than it is being tested now – with not only the opposition party, but her own base turning gleefully and sadistically against her. It isn’t pity that elicits my support, but abject admiration.

They say that Obama is a symbol for hope and change and healing. I don’t deny that he is. I resist only the not-so-hidden precept in that chorus that Hillary would not also be those things – and perhaps moreso. After 43 male Presidents, the “leader of the free world” would be a woman. Which, in the end, is the greater symbol to humanity? Racism is a blight that has surfaced among different cultures and at different times, oppressing different groups in each instance – the oppression of Women has been almost universal throughout history. When the fundamentalist Christians and neoconservatives go after Islam, they generally cite two facts, the first of which is hotly contested, that Islam encourages violence – the second, which is widely accepted, is that Muslim countries have a tendency to treat their woman abominably. In the scope of a wound as old as civilization, which is the greater symbol of healing? Which is the greater symbol of change?

And if you would tell me that our presidential elections need to be about more than just symbolism – I couldn’t agree more. That's the other reason I voted for Hillary Rodham-Clinton. She may not have his charisma and charm, his skill at oratory or his grace as a performer – but after watching her play the game for the past 16 years, and these last few months in particular, there is no doubt in my mind that this woman will get the job done; stanch the flow of blood from our country, begin to dress the wounds we have dealt our neighbors.

You have every right to disagree with me on that last point – that’s what democracy is all about. I suggest only this: be mindful who you trample on, and what you’re giving up, as America races once more to the stake, to set the damnable woman aflame.

In Support of Hillary Rodham Clinton

2008-02-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

Let me begin by saying that Fiscal Conservatism makes a lot of sense – and if the platform of the Republican Party were actually Fiscal Conservatism, as it claims, I might be willing to reconsider my current unwavering loyalty to the Democratic Party.

As it stands, the Republican Party has, so far this century, demonstrated itself to be the party of Violence, Oppression, and irrational and enraged Religious Fervor. They claim to stand for freedom while taking away civil liberties, mandating social behavior, and legislating their own opinions. They claim to stand for small government and lower taxes while siphoning $12 Billion every month to fund a war effort that was based on lies, paranoia, arrogance, and a unilateral lack of respect for non-Christian and non-white cultures.

McCain may be a genuine Liberal Republican, but until the republicans cease to represent legitimized pathology, there’s really no question in my mind which ticket to vote for in November, regardless of whose name is on it. Anything to get us out of this quagmire of regression – this desperate and schizophrenic attempt to apply values and policies from the Nineteen-Fifties onto a 21^st century global community.

I consider myself among the most "progressive" people I know – I’m so progressive I find in general the Democratic Party woefully outdated in representing my values, and I find my own political thinking falls in varying degrees on a scale between the Green Party and the Libertarians – that’s right, I’m so progressive, I’m willing to reconsider certain conservative principles as being a form of progress. It is a stance so far removed from current Democratic Dogma, and so confusing to Republicans, that in general I manage to convince members of either party that we’re on the same side within about five minutes of straight talk – despite my belief that the Republican Party, as it stands, is a fountainhead of irrationality and hatred.

The highlight of the 2008 Democratic Primary Election, for me, has been those moments at the beginning and end of the debates, when Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama have publicly pledged their deep respect, friendship, and devotion to each other.

The low point, without a doubt, has been the slow and sickening realization that the “movement” that has grown up behind Barack Obama is every bit as irrational, self-righteous, and hateful as the conservative fervor that elected George W. Bush and rallied behind his war.

I have hoped for a Hillary Rodham Clinton Presidency since I first heard stirrings of it in the embryonic years of this century. After 232 years of unquestioned Patriarchy in a country supposedly founded on equality and freedom, we’d finally have a woman calling the shots. And as the Bush Administration continued it’s divine comedy of driving this nation into the ground (and dragging the rest of the planet down with it) here was a candidate who has shared not only the white-house, but also a life (and a bed), with a man who, for all his faults, walked through the fire of an American Presidency which by all accounts put the Bush Administration to shame. A woman who has been through the fire herself, unelected, as the Republican Hate Machine slandered her with everything it could muster.

I like to think of Republican policy toward the Environment, America and Abroad in terms of how one might treat a house and one’s neighbors. As Bush has bankrupted, trashed, and sowed the seeds of psychological and emotional anguish in his own house, while simultaneously physically attacking his neighbors with fanatical monomania – when I think of who would be best equipped to step in and take over his mess, my mind does not go to a silver-tongued visionary – it goes to a pragmatic cleaning lady – someone who has been in the house, and around the block, long enough to know exactly how to smooth out a disaster, and begin a much needed process of healing.

When I realized that Barack Obama had arrived on the scene as a legitimate contest to Hillary Clinton for the 2008-2016 presidency, I was a little disappointed, but as a rational, enlightened (in the 18^th century sense) and highly intelligent individual, I thought to myself – well alright; may the best person win. I understood that Barack really seemed to be inspiring young people, which was certainly a boon. But I was a little unnerved, as a hyper-progressive and a "young person", that for all his eloquence and charisma, he wasn’t particularly inspiring to me. Fine, Fine, I thought, I’ll continue to root for Hillary, but accept that another viable candidate has hit the scene – and I shan’t worry too much over which one is the next president of the United States. I’ll trust that after eight years of slander and oppression by the party of legitimized pathology, the Democratic Party will be savvy enough to make the right choice.

I knew all along that the Republican Hate Machine has been extensively programmed to slander my candidate of choice – like most republican victories in the last 20 years, the success of the Anti-Hillary program has been founded in irrationality and hatred, and in this case particularly grounded in hatred toward women. When a man tries to win at a game, he’s congratulated as a player – Hillary in the same situation is called cold and calculating. When a man fails at a task, he gets a pat on the back – learn from your mistakes – whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – when Hillary Clinton failed to pass Universal Health Care in 1994 against tremendous opposition, it was taken as a Scarlet Letter on her character.

Most attacks that have been leveled at Hillary Clinton wouldn’t hold water for all of five seconds if she were a man – every mistake that she has been accused of, every compromise that she has made, have been the bread and butter of male politicians since Rome. God forbid if , when in Rome, she did as the Romans did. When Hillary’s opponents rally against her, the entire thrust of their arguments are made possible by one indisputable fact: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a woman.

I was raised by a feminist – The notion that there might be some kind of inequality between men and women has been blasphemy to me longer than I’ve been able to formulate sentences. After a lifetime of loyalty, the fact that the Feminist Left has come out against Hillary Clinton has finally begun to shake my faith in their movement. Here is a woman who went into the trenches for you, fought the man’s game, and fought it well – fought on until she was actually in position to finally topple the patriarchy and become our first female president – and on the eve of your victory, when she needs you the most, you pull your support. You pull your support because she compromised, because she played the game the only way she could - by playing it. Were you expecting a Pagan Lesbian? Were you expecting the Goddess herself to deign descent as a female Messiah and assume the role of Commander in Chief?

Do you want change, or do you want a Messiah? Obama may be a stellar individual, but his campaign, for all it’s talk of “change”, seems firmly rooted in the latter.

I remember, on Super Tuesday, which was, incidentally, my birthday, I felt an odd and overwhelming pressure to vote for Obama. You’re familiar with the arguments (if you can call them that): “Change you can believe in!” “Look to the future, not the Past!” “Yes We Can!” – I felt that morning as though I would be going against (gasp!) the popular opinion – that I would be daring to have my own voice in spite of the pressure to conform to the Liberal Media Machine (before you bristle, remember how much I hate the Republicans). But it was my birthday, and to quote my candidate of choice, when the time came, I found my voice. I remember the look of disappointment and confusion in my (liberal) family’s eyes – the desperate attempts of my Obama-supporting friends to sway my vote.

The irony was, the harder they tried, the more I realized how deeply my support for Hillary Rodham Clinton ran. And I began to get my first taste of something much more insidious – the fervor with which the Obamaites would stop at nothing to win this election. While I was ready to respect their opinions, they were certainly unwilling to respect mine. It seemed to me that all that work the Republicans had done to build a case against Hillary, based primarily, as I have mentioned, on the fact that she is female - had somehow migrated across the party lines to fuel the Obamaite narrative - and how passionately they believe it! How many times, in the days since, have I received propaganda designed to tell me my instinct and intellect are fundamentally wrong? – when Hillary has a 6% lead over Obama on Super Tuesday, the CNN reporters say, “Obama is on his way!” – when Obama has a 3% lead a few weeks later, the same reporters say, “She can’t win!” – I wonder who those reporters are voting for?

I continue to wait for Barack Obama to show me what the hell “change you can believe in” actually means. I remain open to the fact that there is actually some substance behind it, but I have not yet seen it demonstrated. In absence of that demonstration, I have seen Hillary outline her positions with clarity, confidence and pragmatism. And while I have been observing these things, I have seen attack after ceaseless attack from the Obamaites against my support of Hillary as the first female president – irrational, self-righteous, unbalanced, unfair.

How have we reached the point where electing our first female president is "politics as usual" while electing a charismatic media star is somehow the true spirit of progress?

I do not question Obama’s character – I think he is a good man and in potential would make a good leader– but I question a movement which borders on worship, a movement which can’t seem to find a substantial argument beneath all the platitudes and speculations on electability.

The problem with wanting a Messiah is that in Christian cultures, Messiahs get crucified – it’s one of those things only a preacher’s child comes to notice – and I am very much a preacher’s son.

That said, as disappointed as I will be if Hillary does not win the nomination, I will be even more disappointed if, upon winning the nomination, she does not call Barack Obama and invite him to be her running mate and incumbent for the year 2016.

EIGHT BOOKS I'D LIKE TO SEE

2008-02-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

1. JUST KIDDING I'M A LIBERAL! by Ann Coulter

2. JUST KIDDING I'M STILL ALIVE! (AGAIN) By Robert Anton Wilson

3. I APOLOGIZE by George W. Bush

4. HERMIONE GRANGER AND THE CASTLE OF CONSEQUENCE by J.K. Rowling

5. OBAMBILLARY! (How Obama, Bill, Hillary, and the National Democratic Party secretly planned to land all all three of them on the same ticket from the start.) by John Edwards

6. DEVIL WORSHIP: The True Aim of the Religious Right - (A Response to Ann Coulter's GODLESS: The Church of Liberalism) by Al Franken

7. THE AUDACITY OF PRAGMATISM by Hillary Clinton

8. DAGOBER - A Love Story for the 21st Century by Jonathan Whittle-Utter

A Hero For Our Time

2007-12-29T22:18:00.000-08:00

Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to be elected leader of an Islamic State. She was Assassinated on December 27th, 2007.

May she be more powerful in death than they could possibly imagine.

[For those who would accuse me of "hero worship" - you must admit, heros are getting pretty hard to find these days. I don't know everything about this woman's policies and I'm sure she had opinions and took positions that I would object to. Welcome to politics. What I admire in Benazir Bhutto is that she become a leader in Pakistan despite the Islamic cultural bias against women - in that sense, she is an inspiration to us all, in the power of the individual to dissolve and refine oppressive systems. I also admire her for returning to Pakistan and resuming an unofficial position of leadership knowing full well that it might mean her death. Would you go forth to lead the people, knowing that you might be killed at any moment, in an age of horrific violence and suicide bombers? If that isn't courage, I don't know what is.]

The California Dreamtime Part II: Valley of the Shadow of Death

2007-12-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH
(The California Dreamtime Part II)

“And I’m not in the best shape that I’ve ever been in – but I know where I’m going and it ain’t where I’ve been.”
-Ani DiFranco

“Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.”
-Christian Prayer

San Diego had been burning for several days now, and a quarter million people had been evacuated. Chris and Cindy made it through okay, but Josh and Michelle lost their house. Burnt until it collapsed. A house they had designed and built themselves, together, as a home for their new family.

Penny drove down from San Jose immediately – she wasn’t sure what help she would be to her son in this time of crisis, only that she needed to go. Care for the grand-daughter while Josh and Michelle try to sort it all out, perhaps. Digging through the ashes and all that.

Penny stayed with us in Pasadena on her way down the coast, and we gathered around the patio table in the back yard, where at the end of the evening, as I stood to get Penny a clean towel and wash cloth, I lightly brushed the table, and a bottle of beer beside my macbook pro toppled over and spilled its sticky toxic contents all over the keyboard of my livelihood.

My first reaction was denial, I suppose (although it wouldn’t have been denial if things had turned out differently) – I whipped the shirt off of my back and mopped up the spill. Everything seemed to be fine. But an hour later, after the others had gone to bed, the computer shorted and couldn’t be raised.

(I had spent thousands of dollars on this thing – it was my editing deck for my film projects – and it still wasn’t paid for – I bought it on credit along with the rest of the budgets for the three films – I didn’t have any credit left, and now I didn’t have an essential tool I needed continue my work as a film-maker.)

So I sat alone in the dark for a while, and then I got up and began to pack my car. I drove a hundred miles to Barstow and the next morning entered Death Valley.

…

Death Valley is the hottest, driest, and lowest place in the Western Hemisphere. The Bad Water Basin runs against a tectonic fault, and keeps slipping deeper into the earth: now 282 feet below sea level, and still slipping. Circling the valley rugged mountains tower at heights of over 5000 feet. One has never felt so small, or that the earth is so alien.

Self Portrait at the "Devil's Golf Course"

The highest temperature ever recorded in the United States was 134 degrees Farenheit, taken in the valley during a sandstorm. On the hottest days of the year, birds “drop dead in mid-flight” or so the informational plaques tell us. Great salt deposits build up as centuries of minerals run down out of the mountains in flash floods, onto the basin. A salt-water creek runs teasingly along the valley shore, nourishing a few highly adapted plants and little else. The Badwater Basin itself is named for a small salt water pool, home to a unique and (obviously) endangered species of snail. It is, I imagine, the most inhospitable environment one will find in the Americas. And yet somehow, the Timbusha tribe (part of the Shoshone people) lived and prospered here for over a thousand years before the White Man came.

(Detail of salt crystal at the "Devil's Golf Course")

The visitors guide tells of only one tragic death – a newlywed couple on their honeymoon out on the sand dunes on a 120 degree day – She came back early, he continued on, and later that night, after they found him, he died in a Los Vegas hospital from heat stroke and severe dehydration. Horrific, I suppose, but a far cry from the hundreds upon hundreds of macabre tales of earthly demise told in Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon (which I must admit, I have read the majority of). I didn’t think about it much – it was late October and I didn’t bother to carry water on the shorter hikes. The Sand Dunes were lovely, especially at sunset.

October 25^th was the full moon, and that was the night I actually spent in the valley. I stayed at a rustic little resort near the center of the valley floor, in a comfortable motel room. I actually believe it was the same place we stayed, back over New Years 1991, when I first learned that my mother had been abused by her father as a child. That night with my mother, almost 16 years past, was hauntingly present, and I could see clearly, now, the shadow it had cast over my entire life, right up until this moment. That night under the full moon, in the middle of the valley, was the best night’s sleep I’ve gotten since the night of February 18^th - when I slept in the back of my van in a motel parking lot in Carmel, the night of Robert Anton Wilson’s funeral.

You see, it gets even worse. The week before beer fried my livelihood, my PC crashed – the one I did all of my writing on. Some of it hadn’t been backed up since Berkeley – whole plays and screenplays gone, hundreds upon hundreds of journal entries, bits and scraps and ideas – everything, every record of my existence for these last three years out of the Ivory Tower – on a hard drive that died suddenly in the night. Three years of my life! So by the time the Mac shorted out a week later, the situation was officially graduating from the tragic to the absurd, and I decided I’d better get to Death Valley, quick!

(I mean honestly, look at the bright side – at least I wasn’t born into a poor family in Iraq! That would be much worse than this. Compare losing three years of my life to the War in Iraq, and I’d better just shut my upper-middle-class American trap.)

So, I was in Death Valley, more or less after everything in my life went wrong. It was a good trip; I was dubious, at first, being in despair and all, but sometimes you find magic just when you need it.

That night in the valley, the moon was full, and at the desert resort in which I camped, there were a pair of great green trees, and in the trees, under the stars, a large coven of big black birds made their presence known. I wanted to believe they were Ravens and not Crows. Every New Years Eve, beginning some ten years ago, each member of my family draws an animal medicine card, in the Native American (well, New Age Native American) tradition. My father had once drawn Crow and I had once drawn Raven. As that new age ritual espoused (I find it advantageous to go along with these things every now and again) Crow represents Law and Raven represented the Void - the messenger from beyond and the bringer of magic. So, moving my consciousness back into that paradigm, I hoped they were Ravens and not Crows, but either way I was glad to see them. I think they were ravens. At the Badwater Basin, one of them became very performative when I trained the camera on him:

(This is probably a crow. Both species are known to visit the valley...)

After a day spent “seeing the sights” in DeathValley, I decided I would move on – but rather than returning by the Eastern route, I made up my mind to cross the valley and exit to the West. I hadn’t been to the Bristlecone Pine Forest since 2004. I bet the 5000 year old trees hadn’t even noticed I had left yet.

…

That night, I drove through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The winding road west out of the valley became a treacherous trek through high hills and steep ravines by moonlight. Most of the other cars on the road, fortunately, were friendly. On the car stereo, Ani Difranco crooned, and I’m not in the best shape that I’ve ever been in, but I know where I’m going, and it ain’t where I’ve been. I finally stopped, long after the sun had gone his way, on the high plateau of Crowley Point, and got out of the car. The-night-after Full Moon hung plump in the East, casting an orange glare onto the brown and purple valley. I imagined strange forces at foot, old consciousness from the basin that ran below sea level, cracked open and accessing our modern era from forgotten depths of the earth. It didn’t seem so strange, in that place, to think of werewolves prowling the hills (humans have been wrong about so much else, haven't they?); I wondered if somehow, unicorns were real. And then the valley was behind me; I was driving North towards the White Mountains.

(High in the White Mountains of California)

October 27^th, 1993 – the day the fire raged across the Kinneloa Mesa (where our house is built) – we saw it coming down the mountain, an eerie red and gold luminance gathering in the Western sky before Dawn. By the early afternoon we were evacuated, and as we drove away my father looked back to see the flames licking up the canyon walls towards our house.

On October 27^th, 2007 – exactly 14 years later - I am perched on a desert mountaintop in the Bristelcone Pine Forest. This is higher and deeper into the White Mountains than I have ever been, and I shiver beneath my Cambria Fleece and Berkeley Sweatshirt. The fire synchronicity (that fire brought Penny down the coast, and so consequently brought me to the Bristlecone Pines on the 14th anniversary of the Kinneloa Fire) – was lost on me at the time – I wouldn’t look up the dates for another week. I was, at that moment, reveling in the sensation of being alone at the top of the world, among a gathering of the most ancient and enduring beings on the planet.

It was a sight to see, surely – our house is built along a canyon wall and everything in the Canyon had been burnt to cinder and ash. The flames crept into our backyard, reached out to touch my mother’s office – and there they stopped, but a few feet away from destroying everything we knew.

(This beautiful old Bristlecone is no longer with us...)

The Bristlecones grow in wild, twisting bursts, but in very slow motion. Some of the trees were saplings when the Pyramids of Egypt were being built. As dramatic as that sounds, I’ve been to the forest about a dozen times and the initial novelty has begun to wear off. Ok, I get it, you are a hundred times older than me, get over yourselves. When I was a kid, I used to imagine what it would be like to have a conversation with a millennium year old being. You could come back in five years, and they would be like, “oh, did you forget something?” And I now imagined my reply, “No. I was just kidding, I'm not really leaving!”

“Sweet are the uses of adversity” a plaque at the visitor center quotes Shakespeare, going on to explain that these trees evolved to live 5000 years precisely because conditions at this elevation in the White Mountains are so harsh. It was through adapting to conditions on these barren, arid vistas, that the Bristlecone Pines live on beyond the lifetimes of nations and even civilizations.

(Believe it or not, this Bristlecone, felled by a storm, is still alive!)

In the end, I had a choice between shelling out cash (well, credit) for the beer-fried Mac, on which I forged my films, or for the crashed hard drive, on which three years of my life and work was recorded. I chose the Mac. Crossing my fingers that I will be able to retrieve the data from the hard drive at some future point in time, I decided the ability to keep working was more important than preserving past work.

Life sucked, but I had gotten a road trip out of it – that was enough. Life on the mesa has been a little weird ever since; it has been one of the driest years in California history, and the land cries out, monotonous and desperate, for respite. But I do believe it is going to rain before long. If the Irises are any indication, it might even rain this weekend…

(This little Bristlecone may be younger than you, but it has a fair chance of living past the year 2107 (not to mention 7007), human insanity notwithstanding...)

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST INTELLIGENT DESIGNS

2007-09-11T18:33:00.002-07:00

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST INTELLIGENT DESIGNS
(Portraits of the Whittle-Utters, Volume I)

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives, it is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
- Charles Darwin

"But I'm good at being uncomfortable so I can't stop changing all the time" - Fiona Apple

Having been allotted only thirty minutes to snorkel in the icey-cool waters surrounding Isla Bartolome, I quickly jetted away from the tour group and circled Pinnacle rock, peering down at the alien fish in the blue-gray basin below. We were one of six-to-eight tour groups, so the humans were everywhere. They were irritating, as all tourists are irritating, but I nevertheless took heart in the number of elderly people coming to the Galapagos, unafraid of the cold.

But having circled the rock completely, I had left behind me fully the vision of the thronging tourists, and I was alone with the island, and it murmured; two Penguins sat on a rock upon the nearest shore. I swam to them, drifted slowly across the jagged lava rock, now beneath my fingers as I floated beneath their gaze. They saw me, but did they care? Did they fear me – certainly not! They sat placid, perhaps with a touch of wariness that faded with time, as I pulled myself up out of the water and sat beside them. I attempted all measures of communication with them, some more effective than others, including my ubiquitous, “how’s it going? I was a few feet away and lower on the rock so as to stay beneath their eye level, my legs still sprawled in the water. They stared at me, ogled me, ignored me and talked to each other, perhaps even performed for me. I know it isn’t supposed to be possible but I think those Penguins loved me.

They are perhaps the only animals in the Galapagos who loved me – because all the other animals met me while I had a camera pointed at them. And as a director of 10 years experience only knows, actor-director relationships are always complicated.

The food in the Galapagos is horrendous – never anywhere else in the world – not in meat-loving Korea nor impoverished India nor Muslim Malaysia has ever been vegetarianism so difficult – only that night I spent in Indonesia, in that poor concrete village across the water from Singapore, where the children and teenagers thronged about me on the rocks as though they had never seen a white man before, and a young male prostitute first solicited me, and then offered to pay me money for sex (I was flattered but politely declined)– only in the urban backwaters of Indonesia was it ever so difficult as the Galapagos to be a vegetarian. Yet it was in the Galapagos that my brother joined myself, my mother and my sisters in becoming a vegetarian – leaving my Christian Minister father the sole carnivore of the clan – weird isn’t it? That the Jesus guy should be the meat eater? - But I have the utmost respect for my father and his faith, including his decision to eat animals; -- We debated Evolution versus Intelligent Design constantly, all of us taking up different sides of the argument at different times. We decided we couldn’t decide, except of course that Dad still believes in the Creation (albeit not in the literal six days), while Jesse and I are more Buddhistic about it (i.e. that obsessive addiction to certainty about the universe is, like all obsession and addiction, more of an obstacle to the divine than a means to it), and Mother and Katie are anyone’s guess: Mom is also an ordained Christian minister AND a Hindu – What! - and Katie is about to leave for college, and, after eighteen years of listening to this religio-spiritu-political babbling, finds the rest of us somewhat irritating.

The Whittle-Utters spent three weeks together on this trip, Costa Rica, Ecuador and the Galapagos, and I actually think it is the most consecutive time we have spent together in the last eighteen years. Seriously, we don’t even eat meals together, most of the time – we never have (we forage for ourselves) – but on this trip we ate like 45 or 60 consecutive meals together. I made a “real world” style documentary about it – I have about 16 hours of footage so far, including extensive interviews with all five subjects (myself included), and the recent addition of the sixth subject, my sister Jordana, whom we visited in Arizona, two weeks after the Galapagos, in order to meet her new baby boy Emerson (named after Ralph Waldo, the original American Transcendentalist) – my adorable nephew, and the first baby I have held for an extended period of time

My beautiful nephew

He is adorable! The most striking thing about a baby is its helplessness –this is not a baby horse running around the mother within minutes of birth. Human babies are completely helpless for months! They can’t even move! Human babies are the only babies, other than the pouched marsupials, that must cling to their parents for so very long after being born. We sat around Jordana and Dan’s house, in the arid mountains, taking turns holding the baby as we discussed Evolution, Intelligent Design, Theology and above all Politics. It was the weekend of the Senator Craig scandal – you know, the anti-gay republican who got arrested for soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom - and we took turns being baffled, delighted, righteous, and concerned. Once you add Dan and Jordana into the mix, we are probably one of the most pro-gay families in America. That, and the importance of community, are some of the few things we all agree on (oh, and George Bush was a stupid prick). The debates go on more or less consistently, and I have increasingly taken the opportunity, over the years, to argue the Libertarian perspective – I think I’m doing alright with it

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE GALAPAGOS?

Right, well, I was trying to describe the psychic landscape of the trip, you see. This was the noise, buzzing against the vast, open empty silence of the Galapagos. Not quite empty; the animals have never been so loud and clear. The Iguanas especially: they let me walk right up to them, holding their gazes steady, some with golden-auburn eyes and deep round pupils - perfectly mesmerizing. And they just sat there – some resentful, some tolerant, some proud, as I walked right up next to them, set up my tripod, and angled the camera down. It was somewhat eerie, actually, their trust in us. The scientists tell us the animals are fearless due to evolution in an environment without natural predators - the resulting calm is almost otherworldly.

With a few individuals, those of the middle-aged and older variety, I had the oddest feeling that I was shooting someone’s portrait.

In the midst of all this, Katie was preparing to say goodbye to her boyfriend, when we got back to the states, and so by our third week in Latin America she was prostrate in bed, being a more sensitive vegetarian then my mother and myself, and watching the Apocalypse fall over her high-school world from this high perch in the middle of nowhere. Was it a genetic imperative to pass on her genes that had her longing for her lost love? Or is there more to the story? When they met again at the airport, at the end of our journey, I wasn't afraid to film them.

Young Love: Katie and Harrison

When I swam up to those Penguins in the Galapagos, it was on the same island where they had just previously marched us across a narrow sandpit to the far side, and we saw in the muddy waves of the other shore a whole school of white-tipped reef sharks, circling in impossible, wave-ridden shallows. I joked with my siblings that they must be animatronic – an artificial portion of our tour. I mean, clearly, they weren’t, they were real, but they did sort of look animatronic (why were they all just staying there? Why right there? Are they always right there? Why aren’t they anywhere else?) - And in any case, fifteen minutes later, when they declared it was time to snorkel, I had no reservation about getting into the water. Not because I wasn’t afraid of sharks, mind you, but because I wasn’t afraid of those sharks.

Reef Sharks in a narrow channel

On our last day on Isla Isabel, we took a tour to a little volcanic mini-archipelago just off the shore, where all the iguanas were babies, and dozens of reef sharks swam in the trenches just below us. That was where I swam with the Sea Lions. They let me film them first - two of them floating in the surf, breaking with the waves, greeting one another. Then I put away my Camera and took off my shirt. Storm clouds were forming, all the way across the volcano, and the air was chilled. There might have been 16 of us on that tour - only three decided to swim. An Ecuadorian boy, almost a man, myself, and my 62 year old mother - who had dreamt of swimming with the Sea Lions for decades. We waded down the lava rock until we were submerged in the icy water, as the Sea Lions did back flips around us. In time there was a third, all of them young, flitting about us and beneath us, and, when we dived, above us. Watching them under the waters surface I thought these must be the most affectionate creatures I had ever encountered - the warm electric joy of touching one another, spinning circles around each other, nuzzling and kissing and chasing and performing - Abruptly, one of them swam right up to my face and snapped his jaws aggressively: perhaps I had gotten too close. My mother retreated to the shallows, but I remained, letting them circle me - I didn't believe they meant me any harm. If anything, they were overjoyed at this opportunity to swim with the Humans.

This sea lion loves me

The Sea Lions and the Penguins – those were the animals who, for a few moments, might have loved me. Maybe some of the Iguanas and Tortoises loved me too – maybe. They were certainly some of the best actors I’ve ever worked with. Perhaps that’s unfair; I had my moments with the Iguanas and Tortoises as well – camera or no – the only animal that I really offended was an octopus, who seemed too good to be true and was (she leaped brilliantly out of the water, all eight tentacles outstretched, as I turned my camera toward her)– I should have left her alone. The camera is a blessing and a curse.

Do you know why I like Ann Coulter? I don’t know why either! I’m sure it must be some sort of hormonal/genetic thing. I’ve always had a thing for women warriors, even when they fight for the wrong side. I know, I know, Ann Coulter stands for everything I believe to be destroying America and Eating the World! – I’ve tried to fight these feelings!

But as with those moments of truly making contact with an animal, there is sometimes something more between two humans than immediately meets the eye. There is something within me capable of feeling affinity for Ann Coulter, as there is something within those Penguins and Sea Lions, capable of feeling affinity for me. This subtle bond, so softly felt and so unobtrusive it can be ignored for years at a time – that subtle, steady hum – life beating in our veins – comforting warmth reaching through the air - the water - between our skins to electrify the other – even so minuscule as the gentle brush of a whip scorpion’s antenna caressing the skin -

We cannot deny that nature often makes enemies among the beasts of the earth; but neither might we forget, that among them she has also offered the possibility of love. Certainly among certain species, and some individuals, more so than others - but the seed is there, where even in the most base of organisms, it can be felt and observed - (and speak to me not of clinical studies - for what is the purpose of a clinical study if not to shut nature out - so we might be more comfortable with our simplified, isolated findings! Nature knows no laboratory - even when we rape her, she does not submit!). If you think the Scientists cannot make the same mistake - cross the same lines of false certainty - as the Priests have - I think you are wrong.

Love, not just between lovers, not just between family, not just between humans - love is the guiding light that has brought meaning to our wretched struggle on this planet. This higher road, so set out for us from the beginning, has in my mind always been the deeper meaning, and the higher purpose, of the word evolution.

Post-Script: Just a note to those who would accuse me of anthropomorphizing - I actually think I’m doing quite the opposite. I’m not attributing human qualities to animals so much as attributing animal qualities to humans. We have an unfortunate tendency to keep very low opinions of animals, I assume because of their lack of abstract language skills, so many assume that by saying humans are like animals, I am somehow putting down humanity. On the contrary, I have a very high opinion of animals (some of them may be violent, for example, but they fully lack the human capacity for brutality – war, genocide, terrorism and the rest) – so there is no insult intended. We have bigger brains, true, but in a sense that just means we can get ourselves into that much more trouble. What do you want from me, I’m a Buddhist! I think all matter has consciousness, so of course I’m going to think highly of animals – animals are highly organized matter, to say the least.

[To view the trailer for my short Galapagos Art Film click here ]

PURA VIDA

2007-09-09T21:36:00.000-07:00

“Can you blame nature if she’s had enough of us?” – Tori Amos

Costa Rica is a land of riches. They put down their army, they take care of their ecosystems. I wonder if the fact that Costa Rica has 5% of the worlds biodiversity is coincidence, or evidence of eco-consciousness? Biodiversity, who gives a shit about that, wondered Ann Coulter: I held a Tailless Whip Scorpion in the palm of my hand.

The Bug Woman allured me; her name was Tracy but I thought it was Teresa and she was Irish looking. In the glow of the flashlights her eyes were dark pools beneath a tangle of fiery red hair. She took us out in the dead of night, into the humming rainforest, to look at the Spiders: Wolf Spiders and Golden Orb Spiders and a solitary Wandering Spider which she described as “extremely aggressive” and “capable of killing you” or something, and Trap Door spiders, and lots of little spiders that hid in the grass whose eyes shown green when you held your flashlight at eye level. An anteater passed overhead, moving swiftly across the path amidst the branches, her baby clutching at its mother’s back as she clambered through the trees, bathed in a smattering of our artificial lights.

“All sphiderrs are poiszoness”, said Elizabeth (“LithzsaBet”), our Dining-Hall-Waitress/ Rainforest-Tour-Guide, and she said it slowly so as to better inform this inquisitive Gringo (she had a crush on me). She later accused me of “scaring away her crocodile” – referring to a Juvenile Crocodile high in the hills near a waterfall, whom I had scared away by getting far too close with my camcorder. He slunk obligingly into the pool and sank down into nothingness. I ran over a similarly sized Crocodile in a kayak the next day, as it perched on a shallow shelf of rock. I stopped immediately and drifted back toward it. It tried to pretend I couldn’t see it - when I stopped right next to him and it became clear that I very well could see him, this Crocodile also dashed for deeper waters and sank out of sight.

I’ve always been terrified of Tailless Whip Scorpions (well, Whip Scorpions in general) so I watched with abject fascination as this young woman reached over to the dirt wall and gingerly plucked the little monster from his perch. It scurried off her palm and around her body a bit, but she gingerly plucked it again and returned it to her palm, where it inquisitively remained. “Anyone want to hold it?” she said, immediately moving toward the crowd with her palm outstretched.

The thing about the Crocodiles – they were my biggest fear about going to Costa Rica, perhaps in par with the Spiders. Our first or second night there, I had a dream of an enormous legged serpent (20 feet long) passing under the Rope Bridge that runs across the river on the path to town. I had always been taught, rather matter-of-factly, that while Alligators are generally peaceful, large Crocodiles have been known to eat humans. The 20 foot Crocodiles tend to stay near the mouth of the rivers, the Costa Ricans tell us, and will sometimes swim between rivers in the ocean.

The Bug Lady told us, matter-of-factly, that the US Military was splicing Golden Orb Weaver Spiders with Goats in an attempt to get the Goats udders to produce Golden Orb Silk, in order to build a super-airplane. The silk is over six times stronger than steel, so you might understand their resolve. I used to have a pet goat, named Persephone, and I found this story disgusting and further evidence of the stupid cruelty of Geneticists who use their powers for Evil. I’m serious, they wanted the spider’s silk – it’s apparently much stronger than steel but much lighter, making it perfect for aircraft construction. Birds have been known to get trapped in the Golden Orb Nests. These Spiders are bigger than the Tailless Whip Scorpion and so when I got a strand of web attached to me, I became a little nervous and pulled away until that strand of web (which I am ashamed to say was somewhat essential to the web’s architecture) snapped – freeing myself, but at the cost of a disapproving look from LihzsaBet, who was supposed to be protecting the spiders from the gringos. “Is it Poisonous?” I asked her at some point before becoming entangled in the web, and she looked at me like I was a little slow witted and said, “All Sphiderrs are Poiszoness.”

The Bug Lady claimed that she used to have a pet Orb Weaver in her house. She also went on some yarn about another spider that gets chemically hypnotized by wasps to do the wasps bidding, spinning a harness shaped web for the baby wasps, in complete violation of its own web-spinning genetic programming, before finally being disposed of by the voracious babies – now that is one Inconsiderate Wasp (much like the DEMOCRATS circa the CIVIL WAR, oh!) – by which I mean the wasp was enslaving and killing the spider much like the Democrats supported the Enslavement of African Americans as recently as 140 years ago. I know, I know, ancient history, right? But even as recently as the civil rights movement, do you know who Martin Luther King was fighting against? Southern Democrats. So when did the Democrats become the good guys (as I was raised to believe)? It’s worth thinking about. It certainly explains a certain self-righteousness among the Republicans, don’t you think? History counts for something, and the Republican Party was formed specifically to oppose slavery.

Anyway, this absurdly specific wasp-spider relationship was the best argument for “Intelligent Design” I’ve ever seen - I mean come on, how can you possibly explain that relationship through natural selection? The wasps that randomly mutated one day to have a chemical in their bodies that just happens to brainwash a specific spider into spinning a specifically shaped web - survived, and the one's who didn't experience this miraculous mutation didn't? The wasps who's chemicals tended to make the spider spin a slightly more harness-shaped web had a better chance of passing on their genes why now? – it’s a shame the conservative fanatics promoting “Intelligent Design” belong to a movement that believes in raping and razing the natural world, present wasp and spider included. God gave us the Earth so lets rape it! That’s like saying, God gave my family this house, so I’m going to burn it down!

(Don't panic folks, I still believe in Evolution, I just feel the need to point out that it isn't as comprehensive an explanation as the secular humanists demand that we believe...)

Then at another point we were in a boat out on the ocean and a hundred dolphins were playing and jumping around the boat, swimming with us and against us and flying into the air – unfortunately I was only vaguely aware of them as I held myself steady in an attempt not to throw up from the incessant violent rocking of waters. (However, later we met some other dolphins on another, much slower boat in the Galapagos and they were also quite playful and swam with and against the boat, gazing up at us out of the cold blue water, and I later that day found myself wondering fancifully if I might be a Dolphin who had taken human form to better study these intelligent naked apes who had taken over the dry world above, but couldn't remember it - that the memories of my cetaceaic origins had been erased from my mind, so as better to aid me in my mission. That was the most romantic I got on the entire trip, imagining myself as a metamorphosed dolphin.)

The Bug Lady’s jig was up – I saw that she had no fear of the (Tailless) Whip Scorpion, so I knew I had no cause to fear it either. I held out my hand. The muscles of my palm were lightly clenched flat as the Arachnid set down and obediently paused to reconsider the situation for a little while. It actually does have a tail, of sorts, which is really two very long, very sensitive anteanna sticking out it’s abdomen, which reach over and around the spider’s head and gather data from the environment. Something about the pattern of the antenna lightly brushing against my skin began to suggest intelligence and a moment later I thought I detected in the creature an impulse to move, at which point I finally lost my resolve and asked Teresa to gingerly remove him. I never thought I would be capable of feeling love for a Whip Scorpion. But I do - I hope that little guy is okay.

We also saw some monkeys – the White Faced Monkeys often hissed and violently threatened us, so I felt less affection for them. The Howler Monkeys were more interesting although they almost always kept their distance (they are vegetarians). We didn’t see any of the famed Squirrel monkeys who are apparently so damn cute and you can feed them bananas! - Never mind them! The most affection I ever had for those hissy White Faceys was when they crossed the Rope Bridge (the one from my dream) and I was directly underneath the bridge in a kayak. Their balance is extraordinary, and those babies are very good at hanging on to their acrobatic mothers. They would fling themselves between the branches overhanging the river, catch hold mid-plummet, and ride the elasticity of the wood. I watched an entire tribe cross the river as such, and not a single one fell into the water. I suppose that redeemed them somewhat.

The Rain Forest Guides know that there is a baby Crocodile living at the tourist swimming hole, and they keep an eye on him while the tourists swim, but they don’t seem particularly concerned. “It can hurt you” LithzsaBet shrugged, implying that I might do something to it that would encourage it to hurt me. So we went swimming! The Crocodile perched on a ledge above us, pretending we couldn’t see it.

I suppose you could say it began to dawn on me that having a multitude of deadly animals in the area didn’t mean I had to live in fear. I kayaked out of the river and into the open water of Drake Bay, where they say the 20- foot Crocodiles sometimes swim. It was one of our last days there, and I did it for exercise (and I suppose to challenge my fear of Crocodiles) – of course if I’d actually seen a Crocodile I would have been paralyzed with shock and awe. But apparently getting eaten by a Crocodile in Costa Rica is less likely than being killed by an American in America. I actually don’t have a study that proves that – there have been rare cases of humans being Crocodile dinner – I just assume that proportionally more Americans kill Americans than do Crocodiles. I was probably safer out there on the Crocodile waters than I am driving to the store for groceries. I certainly felt more alive.

My second favorite animal in Costa Rica were the terrestrial Hermit Crabs, who often venture into the forest, and at one point were observed evacuating the forest in legion, thousands of them in a steady stream across the narrow path. They are apparently the reason one doesn’t see dead plants and animals all over the place – because they eat the corpses immediately. They were exceedingly cute and would come out of their shells confused if you held them in the air and blew lightly on their little legs. I loved those little hermit crabs – I admired the way the big ones would climb the slopes high into the forest alone.

Although my favorite animal in Costa Rica was Milo, a small short haired dog who had taken it upon himself to guard the resort. He was the most stoic, gentle, focused little critter I ever met. He appreciated my affections but only vaguely returned them – he was busy.

And that, in addition to Mr. Gore’s scary stories, is why I consider myself Green Party – oh, and also because they believe in Decentralized Government.

Later, in the Galapagos, I swam with Sea Lions.

[you can watch the trailer for my short Costa Rica documentary here]

2007-07-23T02:18:00.002-07:00

Summer on the Mesa

Sunday, July 22nd

Technically speaking, if you look at the maps, my family lives just outside of Pasadena on an area of land known as the Kineloa Mesa – a Mesa at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, just a valley away from the site where they erected Downtown Los Angeles (if I decide to stay here, I plan to move to that intermediate valley.)

Legally Speaking, Kineloa Mesa is a territory of LA County – i.e. it is subject to county law, not city law. How it is that we, and our neighbors, all manage to receive mail in Pasadena is a mystery to me – it probably has something to do with the fact that to live in this neighborhood, you need to be at least upper Middle Class.

As anyone who has been following this Blog knows, I planted eight baby oak trees along the canyon wall of the mesa back in spring – my fantasy was that if these trees took hold, they would provide a root structure that would prevent catastrophic mudslides for centuries to come. In reality, they all died, along with the Confused Camelia, under the heat of the Coastal Desert Sun. I haven’t removed any of them – there are eight dead twigs with brown oak leaves carefully planted along the canyon wall; the Camelia is a skeletal structure of dead wood – she lived for almost eight years – how could I just remove her? She is a dire reminder to me – the karma of moving forward without understanding the consequences of my actions. I watered those trees, first every day, then less often as they started to die, until I finally gave up. I’m sure some solution existed, but I couldn’t see it – how can I compete with the Earth and the Sun?

I lived this summer 14 years in a row, before departing for Berkeley. Everything dies in the summer. The back yard becomes a collective grave of thistles and whither. My skin is burnt. My body swollen with fat cells. In the north, they have their winters, but in Los Angeles it is in the summer that everything dies.

My new favorite word is “estivate” (aestivate) – it reminds me of what is to come, when the rains finally come, in October.

I’ve spent the last two weeks on a movie shoot up the Coast, just south of San Luis Obispo, in a region that walks the line between suburbanity and the rural – those rolling golden hills dotted with oak trees. They had some kind of Australian tree in their Backyard – the Director’s family – a gum tree or a eucalyptus – haven to a hundred hummingbirds – and an entire colony of wild peacocks, which raised their raucous calls in the dead of night, perched in the pine trees – an owl on a wooden post by the driveway, watching me – hawks and turkey vultures circling the roads in the daylight. It felt like the beginning of a new life.

When I returned to Pasadena from that shoot, it felt like my life was over. The air had been cool up the coast – the relationships tempered. I returned to the Mesa to find our home in it’s annual Summer Aestivation; the lilies and calalilies in the front yard surviving only by means of our generous sprinklers. The baby rose bush in the lavender pot in my room died while I was away, but the Wild Rose in the southern camellia grove waits sturdy and blossomless for the rains – almost everything outside of the sprinklers range is now dead.

And yet the rains will come, as they have come every year, as long as this ecosystem has existed. This graveyard will become a cool patch of new life in December - and in January, once every five years, there is a frost. Winter in Los Angeles, life begins anew.

My room is the hottest in the house – this was admitted by the rest of the family a decade ago – my windows are the only ones to face west without some shelter from the avocado trees - as the mid-day sun passes over the house, it passes into my room, which in the Summer afternoons grows ten degrees hotter than the air outside. It was in this furnace that I edited my films.

- although to be honest I do have an air conditioner – they dare not deny it to me, given the position of my room in relation to the sun – the air conditioner is powered by the solar panels on the roof. It was just as hot in my dorm room in Singapore – but the heat there was moist, life-giving. Not so here. Here, I am on my own, and everything dies under the sun.

And yet here, year after year, life begins anew in winter, just as North and East of here, life begins anew in the spring.

On Thursday we escape North America all together, as my family departs first for Costa Rica, and then to those remote islands in the South Pacific, where Darwin first had his epiphany…

Post Script the following morning, Monday July 23rd - I can't believe it but it actually rained last night, just before dawn - It's 10 AM and the entire neighborhood is drenched!!

Not All Christians Are Evil

2007-07-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

July 06, 2007

You know, I think it’s not such a bad idea to include an “intelligent design” segment in our public schools. Not because I’m endorsing creationism (give me a break) or want to advance the agenda of the conservative church (which I consider to be every bit as destructive as conservative Islam) – on the contrary, I believe in evolution, or more specifically, I believe evolution to be the best working theory to date.

I think we should consider discussing intelligent design in schools because it’s the most honest option available to us – that is – to provide both sides of an unresolved (and unnecessary) argument, rather than trying to force one agenda or another down our children’s throats. As long as we insist on polarizing and warring between equally fallacious poles of Fundamentalism – that is, Christian Fundamentalism and Scientific Fundamentalism – we are selling our kids short. We are selling them short because regardless of who wins that ridiculous debate and becomes the new Supreme Dictator of Truth – either way we have sold our kids on the necessity of Fundamentalism, which is in my opinion the most destructive and debilitating mindset of them all.

Let me put it this way – if I meet a Christian and an Atheist, and upon talking to them discover that their values include the importance of love and forgiveness, treating others with kindness and respect, honoring life and upholding freedom for all people, regardless of race, gender, or creed – then as far as I’m concerned these people are my family. If on the other hand I meet a different Christian and Atheist, and upon some discussion begin to suspect that both are hate-filled, intolerant, prone towards violence, judgmental of anyone and anything that falls outside of their rigid and limited mindset, and desperate to convert others to their claustrophobic delusions by any means necessary – these are, to the best of my knowledge, the people who are destroying America – and what’s more, they’re in it together. Why are we so resistant to the basic and inevitable truth that any time we try to cram a huge and diverse group of humans into a single word (here, “Christian” or “Secular”) we make a mistake on par with summarizing Moby Dick in 25 words or less and being so pleased with our summary that we don’t bother to read the book?

What foolishness – the way the secularists go around preaching about how Christians are all intolerant, heartless warmongers while simultaneously the Christians rile themselves up declaring secularism devoid of morality, community, compassion, and kindness. If you want an example of “evil” warmongering Christians, there are certainly plenty to go around – in fact, America has grown sick with them under the nurture of our fine President. But if you want to find an example of “evil” secularists, have a look communist Russia and China, where Atheism was mandated and innocent people were slaughtered for their faith.

Human knowledge and understanding is by its very nature limited in what an individual or group can encompass, and diverse in the number of simultaneously demonstrable truths that various individuals and groups will be able to “prove” to their satisfaction. I find it a complete waste of time to argue over “the” truth simply because our society is so bizarrely allergic to the notion of plural “truths” – of a multiplicity that is by definition always larger than any one individual or group can hope to comprehend at any given time. Every time one individual or group declares their truth “the” only truth and proceeds to force it on others, the demons of Fundamentalism have been invoked. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “religious” truth or a so-called “secular” truth – the minute self-congratulatory or self-righteous arrogance reaches a critical mass where one entity takes the liberty of forcing any “truth” whatever on a second entity, they become, in my mind, members of the same club. Whether it’s America forcing “democracy” on Iraq, Evangelicals forcing Creationism on their converts, or Secular Liberals forcing a unilateral, unquestionable and impenetrable theory of Darwinian Evolution on the open and trusting minds of innocent children.

What a shame that I manage to anger all three the groups mentioned above with that statement, and yet as far as I can tell, the operation of all three groups is in potential exactly the same. And so often, so are the justifications – it’s alright to force this ideology or belief because we “ know” it’s true – because we know it’s “good” – because it was revealed to us by the light of God, or the light of Enlightenment Period Rationality, or the light of something our Mommy or Daddy said and we love them and we want to keep them on their pedestal. You know what – you don’t want to believe in God? Fine! You do? Great! You want to believe in Reincarnation? Aliens? Fairies? Fantastic. Everyone have a blast and let me know how it works out. All that matters- all that is worth our time debating with any serious rigor – is how to live together and treat each other well in the meantime. If you think God or Science wants you to put aside the common down-to-earth day-to-day good of mankind in order to uphold the literal truth of an abstract idea or scientific theory – even if it came from Paul or Darwin himself – then you are giving your power to a completely irrational and heartless entity which, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t worth a great deal more discussion, much less such devout faith.

The enemy isn’t the Christians or the Atheists or even the Terrorists, as far as I’m concerned. The enemy is hate, violence, and fundamentalism itself. Think about it – if you found a way, through social , psychological, or spiritual outreach, to heal excess levels of hate and significantly reduce fundamentalism within the human race – the present Iraqi War, The threat of Terrorism, the Tragedy of 9/11 would never have come to be. And yet rather than recognize a root element that all these horrific realities share – we have done quite the opposite – we have escalated the violence, which always and inevitably becomes a breeding ground for hate, which in turn feeds the engines of the fundamentalist machine.

Believe it or not, secularists, not all Christians are evil! A very large percentage of them are (if you can fathom it) liberals who support gay marriage and actually believe in the scientific theory of evolution! And guess what, Christians, the Atheists have every right to believe as they do after centuries of witch burning, crusades, slaughter, and general unmitigated oppression at the hands of corrupt church leaders who, like George Bush, claim to be doing “God’s Work” as they wet their hands with blood (blood sacrifice being the darkest of “occult” rituals) – the Atheists have a right to be pissed off, defensive, terrified of your self-assured insistence on faith and your sly attempts at conversion – they have a right to believe what they want to without being maligned or disrespected! – who can blame them? I sincerely doubt Jesus would feel anything for Atheists other than love, understanding, and non-judgmental empathy. If he felt otherwise, I don’t see why you waste your time worshiping such a morally decrepit and obsessively controlling dictator.

I personally believe that Jesus was a messenger of peace and love. That is the only possible interpretation I have for a “higher being” incarnating as human. I simply cannot fathom a “higher being” preaching hate, violence, intolerance, and monocultural fundamentalism. That would actually be a “lower” life form – at least as far as I understand the meaning of the words “higher” and “lower” at this particular moment in time.

As a student of literature, one of the first things you learn is that a literal interpretation of any text is only one among many meanings that every text contains – it is also the simplest, most limited, and usually the least useful interpretation – and to complicate matters further, different human beings will immediately register vastly different “literal” meanings from the same text, based on the pre-disposition of their neural nets. A phrase as simple as “we should feed the hungry” – taken out of context – will register as a slightly different communication to every nervous system that absorbs and processes it, depending on each individual nervous system’s predisposed neural clusters around the meaning of the words we, should, feed, the, and hungry. A starving orphan on the streets of Delhi will interpret those words with vast difference from a wealthy adolescent republican, an indigenous medicine man, a professor of economics, a lonely forest ranger – they won’t just agree or disagree with “the statement” – they will literally attach different meanings to each of it’s constituent elements.

That’s why it’s ultimately futile to play the game of “forcing” one neuro-linguistic structure onto third party nervous systems. The only way to do it effectively (as opposed to the numerous ineffective methods being used on Planet Earth today, such as the War on Terror and the Mass Media in general) is to wipe out the dissenting nervous system’s basic imprints to make room for the new programming – and when that doesn’t work, there’s nothing left to do but kill them. So the witches burn, the Jews are gassed, and Iraq is invaded and razed – all in service of the perpetrating nervous system’s neural cluster surrounding the words “greater” and “good.” The only way to actually solve the problem of rival and incongruous neuro-linguistic systems, as far as I can tell, is through a consciously increased capacity for heightened, dynamic communication. That is to say, we can either refine our methods of communicating with each other, or we can continue to kill each other.

I suppose “Fundamentalism” reads to me as a desperate attempt to shut out individual perception and free will; a desperation for the security of simplicity, an effort to put off actually taking responsibility for one’s actions, one’s community, one’s species, and one’s planet. I’m sure others (for example, self-proclaimed fundamentalists) would define the word a little differently, but that’s sort of my whole point.

And you know what, if that’s how you want to live your life, that’s fine with me – I don’t even feel any particular need to judge you for it (Jesus wouldn’t, if he is what he claims to be). You can be Religious, Secular, Fundamentalist, Bigoted, Selfish, Altruistic, Liberal, Conservative, Promiscuous, Celibate, Straight, Gay, A Drug User, a Gun Owner – whatever – as long you don’t come pushing it on me or my people, or anyone else. What matters to me in the end are not the specifics of what we believe, but that we strive constantly to treat each other with love, humility, and respect, as individuals, and as a species.

I suppose that’s what I mean when I call myself a libertarian.

Pasadena in Spring

2007-05-02T12:18:00.000-07:00

There was a frost in January – frosts don’t come often to Pasadena - perhaps once in five years, and this year was one in five. The sun drenched grass lay stiff, dappled with ice, resilient. But some of the other plants wilted almost immediately, betrayed by their trusted Mediterranean climate. The Calalilies were done for –their thick, pulpy stalks collapsing, their leaves shriveling in upon themselves – flowering plants that could withstand 100 degrees or more of desert sunshine, perishing in just a moment of frost.

The bulbs start coming up in early February. The ones I know the best, the ones I wait for, grow beneath the Liquid Amber on the northern corner of the property. These little spikes of green that appear only in the middle of winter – their tiny white blossoms are the sweetest smell I know, rivaled only by the tree just outside my Father’s Study, which flowers at night, also in February, enchanting the dark with sensual pleasures, on a cold winter’s eve.

That Liquid Amber is our best indication of the Fall. It goes all Gold and Scarlet in December, and then it goes bare. But there is no Winter in California – we travel from Fall to Spring almost immediately, winter a brief phantom in the interim. This time, just back from New York in late December, I noticed every tree gone to color – I saw winter attempted and thwarted. January in California is cold, but never merciless.

After the frost, we cut the Calalilies back almost completely. I did it myself, and it felt like murder. How can these wilted, collapsed, glass-like stalks possibly survive almost total decimation? The roses too – it’s hard to believe – you cut them down to almost nothing come winter, just a bunch of thorny stalks. But in a month’s time, they shiver with leaves, and a month later, they bloom.

My mother wanted one of them removed – it was a hybrid, a wild rose bush with some sort of “properly” bred species grafted onto it – the “proper” branches of the hybrid had died, and she had no use for an unpredictable wild rose. I tried to transplant her near the Birds of Paradise in the back yard, near the staircase to the Canyon, but my mother refused. We quarreled then – I accused her of allowing this enormous garden to go to chaos, too preoccupied to attend to it properly: why let it grow so wild but object to a wild rose? She scowled and turned away, so I dug up the wild rose for a second time. I planted her again, along the concrete path around the southern Camellia Grove, shaded though she was by the arms of the old oaks above her, and waited to see if a rose could indeed blossom in ice.

January in Pasadena I knew, and February, with those sweetest of scents – but March I knew not. It was not until living through March in New York, courageous shoots coming up through the snow, resolute buds on the trees, content to wait however long it took, faithful to the end, that the warmth would return - now as March fell across Pasadena I saw, for the first time in my life, the California flowers bloom, subtly and everywhere –subtle and everywhere – the cycle of life and death, the cycle of life eternal.

The hummingbirds, though they never truly left us, were now upon us, converging upon the multitude of red and orange blossoms now bearing their nectar in the yard. We have a pair of owls too – a mated pair, we suppose, who came to us in the cold of Winter and who still I heard this evening in April at dusk, having their strange and haunting owl conversations. California hummingbirds’ wings can beat up to 1400 times per minute – almost the speed at which the still images flicker past in a film – and they flit about our half-remembered paradise, dull and grey in the shade, but shimmering with bright emerald and ruby, gossamer and amethyst and onyx, while feeding in the sun.

Pasadena isn’t even a Spanish word, believe it or not. Pasadena is the second oldest city in Southern California, the first to Incorporate after Los Angeles. It was, at the time, a lucrative orange grove. When the Colony decided they wanted a Post Office, they tried to come up with a name. Eventually, they consulted some Native Americans in Minnesota (The Chippewa tribe, I believe) who suggested “Pasadena” – “Of the Valley” – I shit you not. The Chippewa of Minnesota named Pasadena. Of course, before the White People came and started re-naming everything, Pasadena was the land of the Hahamog-na tribe, a branch of the Tongva (part of the Shoshone language group). You can guess what happened to them.

The southern Camellia Grove was in poor shape. When they first moved here, my parents, they made a circle of stones at the center - but over the years all the fallen oak leaves had been piled in the region, resulting in a thick blanket of crisp brown thorny catacombs, quite unnatural, and a civilization of invertebrates, nesting therein. Copses of sharp, blade like shoots, coming up dark green like spiders through the golden brown earth-cover, and a very confused baby Camellia, growing up in the middle of it. This has been my ongoing project in the yard. After many hours spent clearing the brittle brown oak leaves from the old stone circle, I began to transplant everything that had in the meantime grown up within it. I believe all of the spidery things survived in a spidery-thing grove just outside of the circle, but the confused Camellia has had a rough time of it. She had grown in too many directions at once, so when transplanted her diminished root structure couldn’t support her brevity – her many branches began to wilt. I very slowly watched on in horror.

The Calalilies are relentless. By April they were the most ambitious species in the yard, having somehow re-grown every wilted leaf, and now over-flowing with their enormous, single-petaled white blossoms. Dappling the grounds nearby, an army of giant Irises, purple and gold and white, thrust their apple sized triadic flowers forth in the front yard. Meanwhile, my dad looked up from his work one day in his study, to find the room was filled with bees. The Family quickly gathered – THERE WAS A SWARM OF BEES IN THE BACK YARD! THERE WAS AN ENORMOUS BEE HIVE IN THE WALL OF MY DAD'S STUDY. The bee people came and opened the wall just above the fireplace. One by one we crept toward it, marveling at the millions of bees who were making honeycomb in the wall. Why weren’t we afraid? The bee man was in an airtight suit, but the rest of us just walked right up to the hive, for some reason unafraid. Granted, that was before the bee-man began vacuuming the bees into the bee-containment unit. Apparently this process doesn’t hurt the bees, who are then dropped off at a nearby bee-farm. I miss the bees. There aren’t so many of them in the yard anymore, and I miss the re-assuring buzz of pollination.

The smallest Hummingbirds in the world, the bee hummingbirds, have wings that beat as many as 70 times per second. Almost three times the speed of film. Apparently they can be found only in Cuba. We’re going to Ecuador (the Galapagos), my family, this August. There are apparently 162 species of hummingbird in Ecuador.

The confused Camellia dwindled toward death and so we decided to cut her back – back back, back, at first generously, but then with increasing intolerance for dead looking things. I don’t know if she will live, but she hasn’t died yet. I also transplanted eight baby Oaks from the stone circle (where I assumed they would have died, crowded out by the five grandfather Oaks in the grove) to the sun-drenched west side of the canyon wall. They almost all began to die immediately. I don’t expect any of them to survive. But I water them every day.

At the edge of the southern grove, a wild rose blossoms.

I love New York - Or - "But if I leave Manhattan, I'll die!"

2007-04-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

Recent foray across the coast - transmission from the nether regions:

http://golddragon.blogs.friendster.com/viking_in_new_york/

Also, I shaved my head yesterday.

City of Angels

2007-04-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

March 24th

Went for a walkabout in the City today. Boarded the Metro Gold Line at its last stop, in Pasadena. The Metro station is a forty minute walk from the Whittle-Utter’s perch in the hills, so I drove down to it, and parked on the fourth floor of the five floor Metro Parking Structure – paid my $3 all-day fair with a twenty dollar bill and received 17 dollar coins in change, and climbed aboard an easy thirty minute ride into the heart of Los Angeles. Having grown up in the hills a mere twenty minute drive from the center of the sprawl, I had driven into it perhaps six times, and even then, quickly and bewildered, perhaps trying to shut it out, eager to find my specific destination and slip inside. In all these years spent in California, I had left my explorations to the outer reaches ringing the city – the beaches, the valley, the suburbs, Hollywood and its adjacent bohemian enclaves, UCLA in the east, with its urban college weirdness. I had never explored Los Angeles itself, and I had never traveled though it by foot. I think I was afraid to.

It was my second time riding the LA Metro – construction was completed after I left for Berkeley – and returning I joined the rest of the Los Angelinos in scratching my head at it. Los Angeles is a city of cars and a tangle of freeways – I commuted thirty minutes every morning to my high school, and considered it a short commute; I never had to brave the 405 during rush hour, as my father did – and much longer it was out to my acting class in Manhattan Beach – an hour each way. Now they’ve built 70 miles of Metro rail against this gulf of urbanity, across a city predicated on the fact that everyone drives? It didn’t make any sense.

It is in fact an artery in the social fabric. I was happily devouring the final story in Ursula Leguin’s Tales of Earthsea when the thought occurred that I had better put the book down and see what this public transportation innovation had got itself up to. It was a Saturday afternoon and the car was sparsely populated with a myriad of people of various ethnicities and markers of social class – it was, in potential, a mixer as surely as the New York Subway. This is actually a very good idea – connecting the pockets of commerce and culture, drawing the people out of their hermetically sealed automobiles, and into a common train. Along the freeways and then south through the hills, cutting sharply through peaceful suburbs, past little homes with their gardens and fruit trees, one with a giant oak so big the branches extended beyond the walls of the house in all directions, the metro snakes like a vein of gold, a little bit of unity to our fractured culture, out into the endless expanse of concrete that is now the Los Angeles Basin, through patches of vestigial desert and ugly lots of machinery in full view, over concrete gullies in which, if you look just right, you can see the traces of whole homeless tribes making their rest, each stop on the train some strange new curiosity, some thing you never suspected to exist so very close to home, racing through Chinatown, where the floor of the metro stop sports a giant wheel detailing the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, and to my destination at Union Station, where the Gold Line reaches it’s end.

The station was clean – the architecture spacious and beautiful. I passed a little mosaic, detailing the position of the sun in the sky at the solstice and the equinox, and ventured through the main terminal with plush seats and an unexpectedly cheerful looking multi-ethnic crowd, and out the front doors along walkways lined with flowers and across the street, I stood now at El Pueblo De Los Angeles, a vibrant little Mecca of Mexican commerce, where shops and restaurants filled a narrow alleyway flooded with visitors, a large banner advertised the “Blessing of the Animals” soon to come, while a man and woman in Aztec garb danced and sang in a large, tree ringed plaza for a crowd, and the mood was every bit as vibrant as the red blossoms lining the paths.

But after five minutes of walking I had left that little pocket of life behind completely – like a hermit crab crawling out of his tidal pool and across a barren rock to the next, I was now once again a lonely traveler in a sea of concrete and traffic – crossing over freeways, and roads wide enough to be freeways, alone on my journey through an enormous machine. But presently I was passing tree lined courthouses with lush flowerbeds, and ten minutes out of El Pueblo, I had wandered into the courtyard of a strange and imposing building, rectangular but without right angles, the color of peaches, with fountains and statues of animals about it, and at my feet carvings of astrological constellations – The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels – where inside, far below the cavernous ceiling, I waked along the soft lit hallways and dipped my fingers in the fountain of holy water at the chamber’s end, and welcomed my demons away.

As I drew near the source of the Los Angeles skyline, that small cluster of obelisks fingering the sky, visible from Pasadena on a clear night and a high perch, I watched the architecture grow increasingly opulent – so much space, even here at the City’s center, that skyscrapers were surrounded by gardens and staircases and sculptures and endless waterworks – a solitary mallard duck in an elaborate pond at the base of a veritable staircase of cascading waterfalls, in the middle of a shopping center, surrounded by skyscrapers – had this duck lost his way, or was he merely alone in his home? I wandered around and between the mountains and trees of stone, glass, and concrete, thinking that while New York confronts the individual with the awesome power of urbanity, Los Angeles declares an Urbanity grown so large it is beyond both recognition and comprehension, our creation now a living thing so big we can barely imagine it, we being merely the blood cells flowing through its body, nourishing it’s alien brain. I came around the courtyard of one such building and found myself on a veritable Cliffside, the city street quite suddenly a hundred feet below.

Presently I came to Pershing Square, my arbitrary destination where I had hoped to stop and sit a while. A purple monolith gave way to a narrow aqueduct which emptied itself in the cobble-stoned center of the square, where algae grew and pigeons bathed in the frothy fountain, and it smelled disconcertingly of the sea. Like the other Squares I had passed, this one seemed to be a resting place for the homeless tribes, and I eyed them and the frayed pigeons for a bit, tentative to stay. In time, though, it was clear that none would trouble me, and among even the most world-weary and ratty pigeons there were also pigeons quite beautiful, with delicate feathers and that subtle shimmer of magenta and green about their throats – I wondered what they did differently, to avoid the urban mange. I wandered over stretches of wall and grass and pavement, and sat in the sun some short distance away from a pair of Latino lovers, who eyed me for a bit to be assured that I would pay them no notice, and returning to their kisses. And there I ate my lunch.

In time, a young black man came and sat on some stairs a short distance away. He was handsome and dressed like a bohemian, and wore sunglasses and clutched a pair of drumsticks in his hands; he was unhappy. After a while he cross his arms over his knees and buried his head between them, and stayed so for quite some time. It was a posture of despair and resignation, and yet I could not shake the feeling, as the minutes passed and he did not move, that he was being comforted, sitting there, baked by the sun.

It was not at this precise moment, but rather both before and after it, that I looked about me at this unknown world in which I now sat at the center – and felt suddenly overwhelmed and enveloped. Whatever this place was, she now reached out to me like an old friend, and surrounding me, invited me to unburden myself in her presence. I felt a quickening, an energy tingling up my spine, meeting and merging with an energy rushing over my shoulders and down my back, and together undoing all the knots of my recent past. I felt her presence, tangible, as something I could lean into, like the gentle comfort of a lover’s caress. And sitting there, a stranger in a strange land, I felt for the first time in all my weeks in Southern California, that I had at long last come to the right place at the right time, exactly where I was supposed to be. The path, so long obscure, reopened, and there she stood with gentle hands and loving heart; the City of Angels.

Like that wise person said – I don’t remember who – “at the end of all our searching, we will return to the point from which we started, and know it for the first time.”

Like all vision and emotion, it lingered and faded, eager to be recalled, permanent only in whatever trajectories it succeeded in tracing on my soul. As I left the Square I spied a fellow traveler, a man carrying a large backpack, and I thought of all the cities in Europe and Asia through which I had carried my own pack, and that of them all, Los Angeles would be by far the harshest city for a Backpacker to brave. I shortly turned onto Broadway, looking for theatres; I found instead a thriving crowd: by day the street was an open market for all kinds of wares, no different from the open street markets of New York, and not altogether unlike the open street markets of Bangkok and Delhi. Some places are the same, wherever they are.

Back home in Pasadena, I sat under an old oak tree and read my book, pausing for a while to listen to a flock of parrots, who, circling and landing in the trees overhead, had an arcane and complex parrot conversation, while the sun slowly set.

“At least I have her love, the City she loves me. Lonely as I am, together we cry.”

– Anthony Kiedis

The California Dreamtime

2007-03-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, February 21st

Five hours up the I-5: I was approaching with anticipation that particular moment coming over the hills and into the glittering lights of the East Bay. It was, for so many years, the moment when my heart would flood with the knowledge that I was home at last, and I wondered now, anxious, if my heart would flood again.

An hour later I crossed the Bay Bridge, impatient to come around the bend and see the San Francisco Skyline for the first time since life in Manhattan. Isn’t it odd to look back and find only fond memories of crossing a bridge? I was shocked, when the moment came at last, when I realized I barely recognized that skyline at all. Into the sea of rolling golden lights, went I.

The first dozen times I drove into San Francisco as a Berkeley student, I got lost. It came to the point where I simply expected it – getting lost was what, at the time, the city of San Francisco was all about. It wasn’t until six years later, after Graduating, that I strapped on my traveler’s backpack and explored the city by foot. Now, crossing the bridge upon my return, the city embraced me, and I flowed through the streets with ease toward arrival at my brother’s apartment - where he got into the car and we began to circle, for all eternity, looking for parking.

In the morning I fought my way through the aggressive homeless tribes of Market Street to reach the Metro into the East Bay, my home for six years, and the home of my Alma Mater. The campus was unbelievably charged with memory: I ate my favorite foods, sat quietly in all my old favorite spots, bought my favorite incense, eyed my old apartments, wandered past those campus buildings where I had learned the most important things, strolled through my past and questioned my future, wrote a blog entry as I sipped pear cider and ate guacamole in Raleigh’s beer garden. Ah yes, I remembered, this is what joy feels like.

But the streets could still be lonely at night, and I drank my signature drinks alone at Blake’s, just south of campus, remembering that there had been too many lonely nights in the end, and eager to move on in my journey.

In the morning it was on to the South, slowly leaving off the signs of urbanity and making my ways through those enchanted hills and gullies until I reached again the open coast, the wide waters of the Pacific, and the secret Utopias which lay in hiding there. I arrived in Santa Cruz and parked just after 1:00, and, not knowing what to expect, attended the public funeral of my favorite writer.

Having no budget for this sojourn, I knew I had to sleep in my car that night, but had not quite figured out the safest way to do so. Sleeping in the van back in 2005, during a road trip out to Mississippi and back, had always been a precarious endeavor – and I was well reminded of that old fear, where might I find safe haven out on the open road? I drove down to Monterey, my eyes alert for campgrounds, and after much circling of the bay I finally found a Nook in a major motel parking lot, where I slept, unmolested, until dawn.

Breakfast was held at a family restaurant, where I sat alone scribbling notes in a sketchbook, as the local community feasted on their Sunday Breakfast. The restaurant staff were a bit late in processing my bill, so I was a bit rushed in getting to the Healer, for whom I had come to Monterey.

I had an hour and a half or so and it was going to cost me $150 – which would have paid for a nice hotel room, come to think of it – and in such situations it’s always hard to know where to begin. She asked me why I had come, and, as I had no idea why -other than her image coming to me in the course of a meditation one week prior - I quickly attempted to distill the answer to that question. Forty-Five minutes later I lay on a padded table, set inside the metal frame of a large pyramid, a quartz pendulum dangling from the apex, essential oils placed lightly under my tongue. Her hands were placed on my body, which trembled, wracked with tremors of impossible memory, as I sobbed openly over events I did not understand.

“You do not disappoint,” I said as I slapped the money down on the table, and she grinned and made a “Namaste” gesture. Somewhat shaken, I drove south, eager to follow her advice and spend the remainder of the daylight hours in the soothing beauty of Big Sur. Presently driving along the sheer seaside cliffs of the region, I passed the Esalen Institute, remembering for a moment one particular New Age Myth, that the Movement had begun at Esalen. Upon reaching the park recommended to me, I passed a ranger writing citations for cars that had not self-paid the $8 entrance fee, and grudgingly turned the car around – I literally didn’t have $8. Further down the road, I precariously parked in a dirt turnout, and walked back to the park entrance, defiantly past the ranger, and to the sea-mountain beyond.

The main paths were populated by a glut of tourists, but eventually I made my way along an unmarked trail (which ironically took me right past my parked, un-ticketed car on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway) along a well worn path ripe with wild yellow tree blossoms, past an occupied camp, to yet another fence, where the local Government warmed me against continuing on, for legal and safety reasons. Still, there was an ambiguous area of that flat which had yet another trail, seeming to go directly down the forbidden cliff. No fence or sign threatened me, and so I descended, and found myself alone on a rocky Cliffside, with a maelstrom of violent surf crashing against walls of a lagoon, a hundred feet below. The coastline went on, sheer, in either direction, and there I sat for a while.

In time, I saw I had a visitor – my Scandinavian namesake, the Otter, swimming in the frothy kelp bed below. I watched the little critter ride the ceaseless violence of the surf with ease, occasionally flipping, arching his back, and plunging into the deep blue waters, to search for tasty treasures along the coastal floor. I scanned the water, turbulent with foam and shadowy stalks of kelp, until again he returned, and floated casually on raging waves that, just a few meters hence, dashed drunkenly against the cliffs.

In time, he drifted off, in a direction I couldn’t quite point to, until at last I could no longer find him. A solitary sea lion came crashing through the waters, his muscles thrusting against the surf, headed north. He surfaced once, twice, three times on his journey, and then he too was gone.

Driving further down the coast, the sun sank toward a misty horizon, rays diffused in a heavenly glow. I stopped to watch it fall, pulling into another state park in the south of the region, this time ignoring completely the self-paid entrance fee, and making my way down a gulch to the sands. A para-glider, whom I had spied from the highway, was just making his landing. I passed informative displays about gray whales and shore-birds before standing on the rocky shore, watching the sun descend between enormous, jagged boulders, as starfish and hermit crabs went about their business in the tidal drifts at my feet.

I was beginning to dread return to Los Angeles.

A Hero's Funeral

2007-03-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

Robert Anton Wilson died on January 11^th, 2007. I just happened to check his website that morning and so learned of the news. In accordance with his final web log statement to his readers, that evening I cooked and hurled a slice of Lasagna into the canyon behind my house, in memory of him.

I dedicated my academic thesis to Bob. I first began reading his books when I was a lad of twenty – his Illuminatus! Trilogy seemed to open up some sort of trans-temporal, multidimensional door within me, and his nonfiction soon after had me questioning if it was indeed inside of me, or if it might not simply be everywhere at once.

I won’t say that Bob’s writing didn’t muck about with my life. My newly opened and illuminated mind was flooded with living ideas and images, the ultimate result of which was a mad genius phase and a cuh-razy Epic play in the style of Brecht, which I produced on the Berkeley campus in Spring of 2001, and which more or less ruined my life. Soon enough I didn’t know what was real anymore – too much light will make one go blind – just like an “I for an I.”

But enough digression – this is about the send-off of my intellectual American Idol. The event was titled “The Robert Anton Wilson Meme-Orial” and open invitations were issued to the wider community of Bob’s readership; at the cost of $23 a ticket, with proceeds to benefit Amnesty International. It was an opportunity to get one last look at “the Man Behind the Curtain” as Bob sometimes referred to himself - a reminder that a closer look would reveal the true, humble nature of the Wizard of Oz. I was eager to enter the California Dreamtime, and embarking north towards San Francisco and Berkeley, I eventually wound my way to Santa Cruz

Drawing near my destination, I was somewhat alarmed to discover the event was apparently taking place in a gigantic ballroom attached to a Casino, next to a Roller Coaster. I nervously presented my ticket and entered the crowd: There were Wizards, at least one brought his staff, and Witches (the good kind, like Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter), there were High Priestesses and Psychics and Pagans and Mystics and Dry Academics and Rich People and Poor Hippies and Libertarians and Discordians and Cyberpunks and Students and Pot Heads and Old Hippy Acidheads and Rebel Academic Acid Heads and Goths and Angry Young Men and Sufis and Existentialists who though it was all Darkness - and there were Buddhists who thought all of the above was just Maya, illusion, and there were Yogi’s who were confused by the cross-multiplying myriad types of Prana in the room, and some were just ordinary guys, who had read and enjoyed one of Bob’s books, some of whom had brought their girlfriends – there were – and these provoked my curiosity the most – young women who had gotten something out of his work that I had apparently missed altogether.

There were homosexuals and metasexuals and kids from the south, one of whom thanked Bob at the open mike for helping him separate from the “consensus reality” of his Southern culture, which he described as “not good” (this got a laugh). One woman thanked him for getting her involved in Discordianism - the worship of Eris, Goddess of Discord - when an endless trail of the number “23” had eventually led her to his work (earlier, this young woman had given me a card officially declaring me a Discordian Pope). Another gentleman read a veritable essay extolling the influence of Bob on his thought and research as a Graduate Student in Religious Studies; though Bob’s writing often seems non-spiritual or even anti-spiritual (his final official stance on the afterlife was “Maybe”), everyone seemed to wish him luck in the afterlife, although there was some disagreement about which one(s) that might be. When it came to the business of communing his ashes out to sea, that they might rest with his wife, Arlen, in the deep and bright blue waters of Monterey - we were asked to come forward and take Chinese Noise Makers from a blanket in which both he and, many years earlier his wife, had been covered with when they died – and we swung them about with a great fury and whooping and tribal calls as his daughter paraded around the room holding aloft the wooden box containing his ashes, adorned with a Golden Apple, Symbol of the Greek Goddess Eris, and inscribed with his name, dates of birth and death, and the words. “Keep The Lasagna Flying!”

These were also his final words in a statement prepared for those at his funeral. There was a woman who was Homeless when she first read Illuminatus!, then became a Housewife and is now a Journalist - who apparently shares a birthday with that trilogy. And a man who in my humble opinion stole the show; a mystical looking gentleman who might have been a Sufi, who went forth and had the audience in peels of laughter declaring forth a blanket in which Bob was often wrapped during his long illness, and declaring it The Shroud of Wilson and inviting his followers to come forth and leave hundred dollar bills upon it that they might please Him.

Another really cheerful old fella said that Bob’s sage advice to him, as to how he might lead a more mindful life, was threefold – firstly, say “I” less often, second, say “maybe” more often, and thirdly, deepen the love and appreciation for those around you. From this the shaggy man concluded that, as these were, in many respects, the teachings of the Buddha, that Bob was indeed a Bodhisattva, and then quickly added,” Maybe.”

I was quite frankly touched by the Family’s openness and generosity. It was hard to accept that they were letting us all in (I have no idea how many of the thousand or so people who came and went during the five hour event actually knew him, but many admitted to not knowing him personally). Needless to say, when the boat set sail to deliver his ashes out to sea, the crowd stayed behind on the shore.

I had read about two dozen of Bob’s books, and only a fraction of his alleged 2000 + articles (he claims that he once wrote for and edited “five publications” simultaneously for only $125 a week during his youth – that’s how weird he is). I had known that he lived in Ireland for many years* – Now I listened to his friends and family speaking of James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, Celtic Lore, Music, Magic and Pub Culture – a whole dimension of his work came into focus for the first time.

Bob was such a fan of physics and I now wonder how many Physicists were there. For that matter, I had gone into the experience wondering if there would be any CIA or other Secret Societies represented in the crowd. I spent much time people-watching, and in the end I left with the impression that no such clandestine individuals were present – but in retrospect I’m reminded that if such individuals were to stand out, they certainly weren’t very good at their job. Still, with no real evidence, I am obliged to consider government or illuminati presence a likely flight of fancy. Maybe.

My favorites of Bob’s books, along with Illuminatus! are Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, The New Inquisition, Sex, Drugs & Magic, Email to the Universe, The Widow’s Son,, and Prometheus Rising – although that last one still frightens me a bit.

- And there were Healers and Jesters, a woman with a crown of feathers, a man with a giant hot dog hat, and a self proclaimed “multi-orgasmic high priestess”/singer who played the harp on stage and wrote a song about Bob, and there were folks whom I couldn’t identify at all…-

A bit dazzling isn’t it? That’s pretty much been my overall experience of Bob over the years, pretty dazzling. Still, he’s just a man, he got sick, and he died. The day ended, and alone I walked out onto the Pier, and gazed at the inky darkness of the bay, while around me the night fisherman cast their lines.

The final activity of the evening had been to sing collectively “Auld Lang Syne”, with the instruction to change the words “Auld Lang Syne” to “Old Lasagna.” Bizarrely enough it was a bonified “spiritual experience”. They were good words to honor him. We were all a little sad the party was over.

That night I slept on a mattress in the back of my van, in a motel parking lot in Carmel, just south of Monterey. It was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in many years.

They say that his final words were “I love you.”

We love you too, Bobby. So long, and thanks for all the fish!

“If the Illuminati did not exist, we would have to invent them." - Robert Anton Wilson

* Incidentally, Saint Dagobert II, the Merovingian King, also lived for many years in Ireland, when political upheaval forced him to flee his country for many years as a child, before eventually returning to reclaim the Austrasian throne. History tells us that he spent his formative years studying on the Emerald Isle, and legend holds that his first wife was a Celtic Princess, though she died after giving him two daughters – the King himself being mysteriously murdered only a few years later, on December 23^rd. This entire footnote is a gratuitous insider’s digression, I’m afraid…

"Let There Be Light"

2007-03-02T14:13:00.000-08:00

February 17^th, 2007
Berkeley

It feels strangely removed to be writing on my laptop at Raleigh’s Pub– I never would have done so when I lived in Berkeley - and it leads me to feel like an impartial observer, or, perhaps, a time-traveling magician, who can enter his own memories, but dares not to touch them.

More than anything else it is the smells of this city which have had me on the verge of tears this afternoon. I taste the Springtime of my life and wonder where it has gone off to. It gives the impression of being alive and well, hidden, and just around the next corner. But every corner I turn, I find it isn’t quite there. It teases and tickles me almost like the memory of a lost lover, who insists she is still present, by my side.

The bulletin boards posted with cast lists and theatre workshops around which my life once revolved are rendered inconsequential. The Berkeley Playhouse, a formidable entity in which I dared to dream of some day directing, seems dilapidated, neglected; without the Auhtority I once gave it, it doesn't seem quite so powerful. But the trees blossom with flowers and young people abound with a quickening and vitality about them, awakened minds and courageous hearts, and the scent that we might just yet save this sorry old planet of ours. The windows of bookstores glow with a hundred enlightened titles.

The word “Jasper” carved in the pavement of the sidewalk lining People’s Park, sits placidly and lazily almost regardless of me, just as I found it five years ago, only after having produced that damnable play in which “Jasper” was a principle moving character. I thought a lot about time travel in those days.

I remember those first wonderful months in the dorms, wonderful even when I was sure I wanted to drop out and never return, the sheer possibility, the freedom, the immensity and mystery of what might life might become, and who would become a part of it. The dance classes which I pursued obsessively despite (lets be honest) having no predisposition whatsoever for Dance, and a general hostility from the department that being a writer-actor-director was already pushing it, and I ought to leave dance well enough alone. Those wonderful mornings, awakening for a 9 AM acting class, or entering the darkened hall for a lecture on Social Theory and Cultural Analysis, watching society broken down into complex organic parts, and put back together again, as I sipped my espresso. Dancing in the playhouse for the Spring Dance Concert; completing a hundred page sociological thesis on creativity, and graduating two years late.

The funny thing is, the dream died long before I left Berkeley. I experienced the betrayal of friendships, or perhaps just their inevitable endings, I saw my heartsblood art-work crushed by bureaucracy on opening night, I saw that the graduate students grading my papers weren’t necessarily any smarter than I – only slower to leave the tower. I witnessed the incredible destructive power of my own hubris. And I discovered that all of my big ideas and ideals and education didn’t mean squat when it came to finding a job to pay my way through that final semester. And when I returned from India and lived in my van for four long weeks, prior to finding that job, I learned that even a city of liberal intellectuals will take almost any measure to shut out the reality of what living on the street entails. These things I knew even before I left.

During my years in Berkeley I always seemed to be on the verge of something – one step away from realizing my self, inches away from a lasting light which would illuminate all my days, and brighten the worlds of those around me. Always it was just within reach, and always as I turned the corner I would find that it wasn’t quite there.

How surprising then, to arrive here a whole world away later, and to discover that here in Berkeley it sits, almost regardless of me, the dream is very much still alive, right where I left it.

All said and done, I’m afraid my only legitimate regret about my college years is that I didn’t have more sex.

"VIKING IN NEW YORK":

2007-03-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

I lived in New York in 2005-2006. The story continues, backwards in time...!

www.golddragon.blogs.friendster.com/viking_in_new_york/

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