There is a peculiar super-modernity to Miami, a rabid anti-nostalgia. I detect peppery notes of post-post-modernity here, of post-internet culture, of irony so heavy it becomes serious. The city is incredibly diverse, fully differentiated, post-American. You could be anything here — anything, that is, except the past. No quaint 1990s pre-internet twee hipsterism. No pseudo-retro 80s dance nights.…
Hello. Pleased to meet you. Email Instagram Projects Algorithmic bugs Photography Music Publications Convento: art emerging from ruins , a catalog of photographs & text created during a residency in 2008 at Convento São Francisco de Mértola in Portugal Divers digital desiderata: Explorations in digital printing , presented at the 2014 annual conference of the American Printing History Association…
An exploration of an inspiration of the sounds of crickets and other related insects. As a recent emigrant to Spain, I was homesick for the springtime cacaphony American Appalachian jungle. And so, I thought, I will build myself a jungle of my own. The project combines digital and analog electronics, electromechanical sound producers (relays, beepers, buzzers), and networking. Each ‘bug’ makes a…
I fly in over vast superblocks of hip-roof houses, complex faceted crystals, arranged in whorls of roads and deadends, gridded by snaking freeways that inscribe a strange calligraphy of sprawl. Some of these suburban formations appear appear relatively alive, with greenery and blue pools; others are dead or abandoned, empty weathered gray-brown concrete pads spaced like a circuit board left in the…
My writings from across the years.
My first contact with Glenn House, the man often described as the center of the book arts in Tuscaloosa, ended with a rejection letter. It was the kindest of such: that ‘to fulfill the backlog of present commitments will place my hassled, beleaguered, flustered, agitated, bothered, vexed, stressed, beset, and plagued body well past the century mark, no matter how small my contribution to this…
My leisurely early-winter ride through the west climaxed in a somewhat frantic drive the last few days of the journey. I had hoped, maybe even prayed, that the housetruck’s transmission, hinting of pain by Texas, moaning by Memphis, would hold out long enough to make it to the eastern edge of West Virginia, to the little Back Creek Valley and the even littler town of Shanghai, and up the winding…
I enter Texas in its northern panhandle, near Lubbock. On cue, a horrible wind begins to roar at the state line. It is almost solid in its force, fearsome, angry, constant. At least the wind is blowing due east, and so am I. The housetruck becomes a minor object, apparently not much more mass than the tumbleweeds that merrily bounce down the highway. The sky is brown with dust, and I feel it in my…
I’m driving east, into the nameless areas past the military sprawl of Twentynine Palms and the tourist-heavy Joshua Tree, in the last gasp of California before it gives up to Arizona. A sign says ‘Next services: 100 miles.’ I’ve filled up with diesel, but double-check the gauge just to be sure. I pass a bicyclist coming the other way who appears to be towing a bundle of lumber. Something about the…
Adventures on my trip from Portland, Oregon, to West Virginia, in the fall/winter of 2013.
In which the powerfully delicate melodic labyrinth of William Ingrid play against the dark, thundering steam engine of The Tempers (29 July 2013, at the Portland’s Hebesha Lounge) William Ingrid are old favorites of mine. Their first (and, so far, only) album, 2009’s Where Are You? , is a regular soundtrack to my road trips and airplane journeys. Somehow it is perfect at speed, in transition. Yet…
Reviews of various media & performances.
On Highway 29, south of Lynchburg, I wind my way through the damp country of southern Virginia. Trees drip with kudzu, clouds drip with humidity, I drip with sweat. The air conditioning is busted in this old Audi, so I’ve opened all the windows. Over the roar of the wind, Modest Mouse escorts me with their clamorous soundtrack of the lonesome west, foreign music now in this eastern world.…
I’ve always loved the tiny independent motels that dot this country. Not parts of neon-emblazed chains, they are constructed of perhaps a dozen or two simple rooms, usually a family operation, often an Indian or Pakastani couple. Essentially, shelter; if you’re lucky, there’s a simple microwave and/or micro-refrigerator, a sufficient and not very leaky toilet & shower, and maybe a heater that…
Arriving in Asheville, the first thing I notice, past the surrounding hills now brown with winter, past the comfortable Craftsman homes nestled on quaint lanes, past the cars bedecked with progressive bumper stickers, is the gaze. Or rather, the non-gaze: the lack of eye contact. I walk the downtown streets, my eyes open with the observing look of the visitor, and all eyes go elsewhere. I think…
It’s Fat Tuesday, mid-morning, and it looks like it’ll be a hot day for February. I’m speeding along Interstate 10, through the Cajun prairie, where the already modest topography of south Louisiana becomes even more flat and wide. West of Lafayette and Opelousas, north of Crowley, lies a cluster of tiny agricultural towns: Mamou, Basile, Iota, Church Point. In the middle is Eunice, hardly larger…
Highway 182 draws a gentle half-circle through Acadiana, a hundred and fifty miles of two-lane blacktop, playfully jostling with the nearby freeways (mostly I-49 and Highway 90), shifting identities (becoming University Avenue in Lafayette), acting interchangeably as business route, scenic highway, and gateway to places that modernity long passed by. In New Iberia, I stop to get lunch and wander…
As I explore Acadiana, its coast and marshes and farmlands and towns, listening to the stories of the land, I find always that the water is a major element. Whether ocean or river, bayou or lake, marsh or swampland, the water is the central protagonist and leading character. In this way it is opposite of the desert, yet not fully of the sea: like the swamps themselves, the landscape is a…
Heading south out of Lafayette, the city turns to suburbs in that way that all American cities do, in that awful numb slog of strip malls and parking lots and traffic that goes on for miles of generic sameness. Eventually, though, the road becomes a pretty parkway, that wonderful old highway form in which the two ribbons of blacktop offer shelter to a wide green swatch of no-man’s land. It’s an…
I’m traveling in Acadiana , in southern Louisiana, during the month of February. I’m writing little essays about my experiences.
Arriving in Lafayette, I am immediately enveloped in a warm humidity and the chirring of cicadas. It brings me back to the Maryland woods where I grew up, sweaty summer nights buzzing with activity, alive with creatures great and small. From the airport, I phone a cab, and ten minutes later it arrives. It’s a low-tech setup: no meters running on the dashboard, but the rates determined by the…
Highway 12 criss-crosses clumps of land, once islands, seem at odd to the inherent shape here of the land. I turn off a small dirt road, walk down, photograph ditch, field, grass. Two pickups loaded with ATVs pause where the dirt road meets the highway. Hunters. One, garrulous and a little nervous, talks to me, tells me how he nearly rolled his truck in the fog this morning, trying to make the…
It’s long since dark, and I’m driving straight south, as you do here in the Sacramento Valley. I’m racing down the 5, a rarity on this trip, but I figure a good idea, as I can only imagine the thick fog on the small country roads. Sure enough, my exit from the freeway leads me directly into the thick tule fog that is characteristic of the valley. I can see perhaps twenty feet ahead of me; the rest…
From Fortuna, the road winds eastward. Highway 36 connects the coast to the valley, bouncing and turning its way around the Klamath Mountains. My mother and brother worked at a summer camp here, and the names of the towns echo around the rocks from the distant past: Hayfork, Mad River, Hyampom, Peanut. It’s wild country: as much as California seems soft and luxurious, this land is rocky,…
The towns of Fortuna and Ferndale mark the point where I depart from the coast roads and head inwards across the forests to the Sacramento Valley. I’m hungry, and it’s a good stopping place, so I take the exit from Highway 101 and head across the fields to the little Victorian town of Ferndale. I’ve always liked this town. Like the best settlements of the late 19th century, it holds its head high,…
Adventures of a trip to the Sacramento Delta.
I’d planned to leave Portland over a month ago. I’d reduced, packed, planned again, reduced further, finalized, packed again, and even maneuvered the housetruck out of my little back-alley parking space on a bright but cold November day, and in the pause to squeeze in a last good-bye hug with my roommate Sara, I heard a sizzling, gurgling sound from underneath my truck. Steaming orange-brown…
At 7am, Noah & Tiare & I arrive on the playa, the conclusion of an epic all-day/all-night drive filled with stories swapped of circuses and protopunk and the theory of cattle guards. Dead-tired, crazy with the tedium of the start-stop incoming traffic to Burning Man, we are already breathing dust at six in the morning as we watch the sunrise from the insanely long line of vehicles creeping into…
I have built a ‘housetruck’ – a house on wheels. It serves several purposes: A compact and mobile home in which I can hang out and socialize, cook and eat, and retreat and sleep. A workspace for my photography and programming projects. A vehicle to transport me & my belongings to points beyond. A laboratory for research into alternative and mobile technology. An expression of art & creativity.…
I am rolling through the green lowlands of Washington, along the boggy places south of Seattle where the gray cities begin to dissolve into berry fields and forests. The train is full, but quiet: everyone seems hushed and lethagic beneath the cloud-filled skies. Nearly three years ago, I began to notice a certain mist that had begun to seep into my life, and behind that mist lay an odd and unseen…
I return to a Silverton under impending rain. Within hours, the metal roof of the housetruck is thrumming with cold drops, snaking down the road-dirtied windows. The storm becomes a torrent, breaking the record for that particular Thursday. The saturated ground surrounding the housetruck becomes a moat needing a sloshy crossing to enter and leave. Without a proper porch, my floor becomes a muddy…
North is calling. It is a strange voice, a curious whir, the rush of wheels on gravel, the fluttering wings of a dark black bird. Is it simply the land, Cascadia in its winter, calling for company? Or is it the future whispering? This is not the trip I thought it would be, and while there were parts I would not care to repeat, they were more than balanced by the discovery of a new home, and new…
It’s a bright and moony night. The landscape is painted the dull gray-blue of night, the jet contrails daubing slow streaks across the star-packed sky. The only sounds are the drone of crickets, the shuffling and snorting of the horses in the corral next to the housetruck, and the conversations of the pair of owls on the hill. A slight breeze chills the air. I can see the orange glow of…
Yet again I cross through California, and yet again I am astonished and utterly depressed by what I find. And not just on the coast; this time, I am in the central valley, the heart of California, hurtling down old Highway 99 that joins Sacramento to Modesto to Merced to Fresno, not to mention Tulare and Turlock. Expecting to find quiet agriculture towns, instead I find vast strips of franchise…
I have forgotten how the wind roars through the Carson Valley. It often succeeds a quiet morning, clear and sunny; just after lunch, the breeze starts, clouds appear, and the cottonwood trees begin to stir. As the afternoon comes on, the winds increase, whooshing and howling, and loose sticks pelt my caravan. This is the natural changeability of this place, but I had forgotten it since my visits…
The crickets are in an uproar. They are the only noise, besides my tomato sauce bubbling on the stove and the moths tapping against the lampshade. Yet the racket soothes: finally I am not bouncing along the freeway, being quickly passed by the crazed California drivers. Nor am I in the streets of a city, negotiating the unsaid crosswalk protocols. Or hunched and cold below the frigid fog and…
Sometimes I feel that I collect places, like a child collects rocks. My basket of places holds the complex and variegated boulders of Seattle and Washington, Istanbul and Tokyo, but also the smaller and simpler places: Meknes, Fishguard, Silverton, Freestone. Sebastopol lies midway; it is a small place, but bountiful in its experience. I’ve lived here, or nearby here, twice now. When I return,…
The weather’s shifted suddenly. The clear, warm days of early fall have turned their faces towards the winter. The sky fills with the mountainous, gray spectrum of clouds I’ve only found in the Northwest. Wind and a light but constant rain shortens the view, defocusing the landscape, removing the colors, and turning everything to monochrome. The ocean roars with high waves, crashing on rocky…
Even at the very start of this haphazard trek across the country, I seem to be following the nature of the trip. A happily drawn-out going-away party on Sunday and excited plans to leave Monday morning became a growing realization that we wouldn’t be packed until at least Tuesday. A quiet Tuesday led to completion of a few projects (like mudflaps) I’d been meaning to get to. Finally, two and a…
I traveled around the western U.S. in the housetruck in October and November of 2010. This is the story of that trip.
It’s the long end of a day spent journeying to Astoria, cutting northwest from Silverton through the Yamhill valley. Classy vineyards and tasting rooms grow like fireweed out of the bones of decayed farms. The small roads zig and zag around fields, through towns, across freeways I see only momentarily before I’m again humming along a country road. Here in these dry valleys that angle up to the…
I had a wonderful day showing the housetruck to many interested folks at the Open Source Bridge software conference being held this week in Portland. I’d proposed a presentation and it was accepted – Housetruck: Building a Victorian RV – and the conference organizers were kind enough to offer me an opportunity to put the housetruck on display today. And not just any display, either: in the public…
A year and a half ago, I started designing a portable home. First a trailer, then a truck, the home evolved through my mental pictures and planning. Functions became spaces, spaces became edges, edges became structure. Six months ago, I committed myself to representing the structure in steel. Through the autumn the skeleton formed its flesh of wool, plywood, cedar, and fir. A roof was erected,…
Midnight, and the subway stops are closed, the final riders shuffling out of the tunnels and into the wet streets. I’ve just left Jim’s place, where I’ve spent a convivial evening cooking pasta in tomato sauce for his surprisingly appreciative Italian flatmates. His flat is a few blocks from Sagrada Familia , whose stone spires now stand silent, its ever-present construction cranes shut down for…
I begin to wake up in the gray streets of the city. It’s winter in Barcelona, and the city’s storied color and flair are muted under the leaden sky. The pedestrians hurry along the small streets, bundled up in overcoats and scarves of earthy browns and greens. I am relieved, a little; my palette of Northwest woolens will not look much out of place – except that, oddly, absolutely no one wears a…
In the best kind of travel, I shed my skin, that hard exoskeleton of personality that grounds me in a regular place. I break the link with the past moments that led here and the future moments that lead away. The everyday schedules, the projects, and the to-do lists fall away, filed into into the future in a small pile in my bookcase. I close the doors of my kitchen cabinets, allow my stomach to…
I’m traveling in Barcelona from 9 February to 25 February 2010. I’m writing little essays about my experiences.
Here are some questions that people often ask. Is this just going to be your home away from home while you’re traveling or are you planning on living in it full time? A bit of both. I am designing it to be fully liveable – that is, according to my definition of liveability, which may not be yours. Especially in recent years, I have spent a lot of time making my life simpler. One of my life’s great…
A year ago, the housetruck was quite unreal: simply ideas, drawings, notecards, weblinks, and inspirational images of other similar vehicles. Gradually those sketches became a rough physical model, bits & pieces became systems, complexities were thrown out. The housetruck became defined, shaped through the slippery vectors of 3D renderings. I spent hours zooming around the structure, testing…
I’d been waiting for Byron to finish his other projects, and start on my housetruck frame. I’d promised him, too, that I would get him the Isuzu truck so he could figure out how to mount the frame, as well as any other needed details. This wasn’t an easy task, as the truck, with a bare chassis, was difficult to drive, and I was worried that it would be stuck at the foot of Wayne & Julie’s field,…