What do we want?
Archive for August 2010
Day 5 was the second and for real launch. June 1st was the official day of getting Hello World into the Big Lake and starting to sail but the truth was we weren’t ready. A few days of puttering around in Bear Lake and Beulah and then 6.5 hours organizing and prepping on Arcadia beach got us there. This short 3:33 segment gives a taste of Day 5 and Day 6.
10-06-05 Ready to go for real, Arcadia to north of Portage Lake, Michigan (computer, phone)
With ALM, I have three basic flows for telling the story – raw video, motion graphics and posts (text). Though I wasn’t as faithful with imaging everything, I was fairly thorough in my writing. I captured details that I certainly would have been forgotten now. The posts are ready made narrative. It’s another voice, a different Dan, another processing perspective.
What stories do I want to tell, what is the story? Are details like my struggle with Wordbooker worth telling? This geeky stuff might be trivia, but if ALM is about learning how to do a project, how to be low impact and effective, if it’s about an open source approach then these details could be the components of a future epiphany.
The details I choose to include reveal my opinion of what matters. What’s most important and what’s next most important? Including the disaster details means I can turn around and talk about what did work…
“The best gear (approach, attitude) is often not mentioned because it’s never part of the problem, it’s never a cause or contributor to trials and tribulations. Rather, good gear is an invisible assumed element of every solution. Here’s my roster of invisible stuff.”
Now we’re into collaborator territory. This could also make me a field testing force to be reckoned with. The question is – is grabbing collaborators part of my main theme(s)?
I can also bring the blog right into the movie as screen capture while narrating.
Tangents aside, there’s an immediate goal here – to make a first pass on the video, to post it. To revitalize the project and find out what it is, who’s on board. Can there be an online following between trips? How does that work?
Another tangent. Recently I saw Dave Hart and we had a great time just hanging out. When I think about philosophy of projects I am reminded of an argument we had about cam chocks for climbing protection, back on the South Manitou boat when he and I weren’t getting along so great. I gave Roger Bonnet’s argument that cam chocks were overly complicated, expensive poser gear. I can’t remember why Dave liked cams – maybe because they were a sort of one size fits all solution that ultimately reduced the amount of metal (and weight) on a rack. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t know about climbing, the basic argument was simplicity vs complication. Both of us felt probably felt like we were arguing for simplicity.
Simplicity will emerge as one of my principles of preparing for and approaching a challenge, but my idea of simplicity has to be clarified, rigorously polished until it’s perfectly obvious.
What this all helps me to understand is that I’m ready to take another whack at the index cards and sort the main themes of the project. It’s a great day, except for this burning pain in my adrenals. But that’s another story.
An easy afternoon on the beach making adjustments to Hello World, mostly the straps and plates that secured the waterproof rifle cases. There’s also insights about yawning.
Behind the scene details were posted on June 6.
Sailing from Elberta to Arcadia on Day 2 was much easier than getting from Point Betsie to Elberta on Day 1. In this episode, I discuss the plan to beach Hello World and run some errands while still within range of the home base, recap Day 1, ramble about where the water comes and marvel at the miracle of solar power.
I took advantage of the 2010 expedition’s abrupt end by soaking up the rapture oozing outta Hello World’s home base, the Artist house on Crystal Lake. Truth be told, the spring had sprung so sweetly last May that it was tough to tear myself away and start the trip. Though Hello World’s broken paw was a bummer, the prospect of staying home for the rest of the summer was decidedly excellent.
The end of the expedition wasn’t all sex on the beach, tho. Being back early made me vulnerable to wedding invitations. I loathe weddings generally and ALM was supposed to be my get out of jail free card. Now my nephew and brother-in-law’s weddings were looming, in New Hampshire and California respectively. Shit.
Having a limited supply of nephews, I decided to shag my ass out east. A visit to New Hampshire would put me within striking distance of the four 20 foot galvanized pipes I left on the roof of my alternate crib in Brooklyn, NY.
Heading to wedding in New Hampshire with an iridescent obsidian knappage by Steve in Ogden Dunes, IN.
Weddings - gak!
Family face time, my genius niece with her two main men, Gordon and my famous brother, Jim
Galvanized pipe and AIS Klamps are like Legos for big kids. Originally I had intended to use the pipes to build a fire escape for my 3rd floor apartment and facilitate direct access to the ground floor gardens. Static from the snooty french neighbor on the second floor complicated the design requirements and the 20 footers were no longer practical. The plan was to bring them back to the Artist house and build a passive solar greenhouse informed by Mike Reynold’s Earthship aesthetic.
The transport protocol involved stacking 2″ thick foam blocks on the roof of the Honda Odyssey to supplement it’s wimpy 100 lb capacity roof rack. 5 ratching cargo straps locked the load down with a couple of tee shirts around the leading straps to dampen high speed vibration. Having 1 1/2″ pipes poking 6 ft over the windshield made my POV rather like commanding a tank or missile launcher.
While packing the pipes I realized that I wasn’t excited about returning to the Brooklyn apartment in the fall. After 6 years of living between Brooklyn and Beulah, perhaps it was time to return to Michigan full time. I let that thought settle in during the 15 hour drive back.
En route, I got a call from Gene, a fellow devotee of Swami Bua, my yoga teacher. Swamiji had died in India from complications of stroke. He was about 120 years old. Here are articles from Hinduism Today (obit) and The New Yorker (2006).
An ~80 year old Swamiji in the 1970s. I was 13 when I first met him in 1976.
A few days back in Beulah and I knew I was finished with NYC. The Odyssey and I headed for NYC once again – on a mission to extract the last of my gear and wrap up obligations. Mission accomplished on August 1.
I plan to visit the Big Mango every other month for my Taoist check-up and After Effects New York. It feels totally right to be back in Michigan full time – consolidating my resources, building a production alliance, focusing on the local and letting Lake magic flow through me. It’s hard to describe how that works here, you’ve just got to experience it.
