On Desire

The outcome for 1/1 – 1/2 is to publish a clear and fun compendium and quick reference for the driving objectives of 2013.

Let’s begin with thinking about thinking. How do introspective sessions connect and coalese, how do I bind virtuality, what’s the ultimate digital expression? Perhaps not static, no mere ebook. Anyway, we’ve got to have a serviceable approach to building and updating our plans.

Each of the following chunks are lightning flashes of self definition I project / complete. Of course there may be too much, great gobbing mouthfuls of ambition beyond any reasonable expectation of chewing. How can I feel myself to be so much, so many? Worry about this for all of 10 seconds and just keep moving. Moderation in moderation. Like the Glimmung, we cannot know our limitations without a trial, a quest. Perhaps we have no limitations at all.

Then projects, the proving grounds of desire. What we want is what we do, we do things (ideally) to get what we want. Action then is a working through of desire, especially action towards a deliberate, conscious outcome. Whatever emotions arise are rich in vitamins and nutrients. Struggle is a flashing neon sign guiding us along the highway – turn here, keep going. If we are conscious and paying attention, everything speaks of what we want.

Why WordPress?

Ok, holy boners. We need to identify the pragmatic tool for recording AND indexing progress, having already tinkered with mind map software and such like esoterica, WordPress seems to be the down and dirty solution. Each post is sort of story, and the tags are great for cross referencing. WP is awesome enough except for 1) lack of local editing and 2) it’s handling of imagery and layout, which is execrable. So how do we get more pleasure out of thinking visually in WordPress? I love that all those open sourcerers made this happen, I’m down with not reinventing the wheel. Perhaps a plug-in exists, minor modifications to experience 90% of perfection. One normally would not get so specific at the start of a visioning document, but it’s really really important to get the documentation optimized. Blogging on the right brain.

God DOG!

The feedback form for a test screening of Bill W, a documentary about the founder of AA that Jeff and I went to. Soon I’ll be gathering feedback about DOG. Yes, the completion of DOG, the primary uber objective. Perhaps a bit of a joke to some, the puppets in my head throw up their hands at the mention of this seven year itch, or avert their gaze and snigger. I’ll show ‘em! Whether with raves or pans, pretty soon they’ll be filling out the forms. The end is nigh.

An archival post bath shot found while setting up the scanner – apropos of nothing except I like the filename stolen from Dick’s The Man Who Japed, “boiled enemy”. After an extended and near fatal voyage, the radiation scorched naked space ape helms his personal starship back to sparkling Gaia.

Ways in the World

Catch the Big Ball

Giving Mantak Chia a chance to guide my investigation and practice of sexual renovation. Current experiments have been very intriguing. Who can teach me tantra? Can’t believe I waited half a century to seek shakti.

Depth of Field

An intense portrait of my time shifted house mate. Imagine an alternate universe with someone like her as an incarnation of affection, companionship, adventure and seeing myself more compassionately. Choosing again to experience the loving, powerful and mysterious feminine with trust and confidence. In the not so distant past, I’ve incarnated the archetypal she as a capricious and even dangerous threat – another Dick reference, Galactic Pot Healer and the malevolent female deity who ravages creation and sinks the cathedral. My out as a powerful creator was loving one Kali after another, the pith-ed frog prince. I let that go in 2013, I don’t have to suffer any more. At a half century, the prince can be retired and the king or better yet the wizard can step up. See references for tantra.

 This is not a blog, this is not 2013, this is not a box full of pens

Look at this box. There is no clay or legos, no wood chisels, powdered mica, rolls of 16 mm film or coconut oil. What resources does this box offer, what is possible? If we make an inventory of what we do have, the list would certainly be endless. Focusing on what’s missing? The micro lecture I gave Lena – make a list of what you have right now.

Proof of Polymathism

Here’s an excerpt from the Huge Fuck Mother of all Lists, a riff on George Galloway and the Mother of all Talk Shows. Obscenity is often associated with sex, divinity and other unspeakables, perhaps that’s why it’s considered crass and even unprofessional. It’s tough to get collaborative traction on slippery unwords like god and genitalia. So too fuck. A giant to do list is a tribute to the impossible, inherently contradictory, like running over your grandmother with a time machine. Check all the items off the list and you’re dead. Including impolite words in the title hints that it’s a symbolic containment vessel for hot paradox, and you better be fucking clear on that, laddie.

Directorial – Live theater

Directorial – Feature

College Version 2.0

Room to Groove

 Love thyself

Ultimate Agenda

Adventures on the Edge of Apocalypse

Arnie Gunderson – 23 plants in the USA identical to Fukushima, 2 near Chicago, Dresden and Quad City neither are on Lake Michigan

I’ve been blogging in my mind for the last couple of months, here’s a sample of the topics I’d like elaborate on soonish.

First, a crisis of confidence. Gosh, why blog at all? With the explosion of FB, a personal blog seems like a lot of work for friends. I intuit (perhaps fear would be more apropos) that pushing out post links via email is just going to feel like obligation to my peeps. On the other hand (maybe this is arrogance now) it’s not impossible that my ravings are a lantern in the fog. Is it encouraging to think of Dan Kelly out there somewhere, still deep into his crazy schemes? I’d like to think that Doug Michels would give an approving nod from the command pod of Bluestar and of course James Allegro here on Terra. As I’ve oft stated, blogging is performance art for my crowd of internal personas, getting it beyond my skull feels wonderfully pointless, like a SETI broadcast to the cosmos. Is anyone out there? Whatever.

“Artist house, instantiate your metameme. Standby to vortex the vagus!”

x

Speaking of SETI, I recently bought one of these…

It’s the Flag of Earth, the planet whose “anthem is the wind in her trees and the waves of her seas”. From flagofearth.org… The Flag of Earth could be flown if you are conducting a project or event which benefits the Earth as a whole … not just your community or country. If that’s not Around Lake Michigan, well then heck.

Rosie the Pocket Cruiser, (25 foot Seacraft Dana clone).

I got curious about Earth flags after I acquired Rosie, my ticket to Cuba and support ship for the new ALM Hobie fleet. She deserves her very own post, but here’s a teaser – parked next to Hello World.

Rosie and Hello World apparently mouldering. Weapons to overthrow the inner oppressor, hidden in plain sight.

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Creative Film Finance

I’ve been perfecting my 0 APR credit card film finance scheme. I’ve got about 60k in available credit now and my FICA score keeps rising. Decrypting the system is really fascinating. I can’t say I’m gaming it yet, but I have hopes…

Save the Hobies

What are all these vintage Hobie’s doing in the garden? Are the neighbors complaining? I like to imagine jetskiers wilting in their shorts when they drive by. These specters of the 70s, embodied energy waiting for their moment in the wind, to shine and sparkle once again. Who will crew the pirate fleet? We need more H16s!

Artifacts of a Sustainable Civilization? Not yet, but dreaming in the right direction…

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New ALM

Around Lake Michigan has transmogrified from the Search for Sustainable Civilizations into the People’s Inspection of Atomic Power. Hard to close your eyes and read at the same time, but savor this… Sunrise on the Big Lake. A ragtag squadron of vintage catamarans suddenly surges into view, spray spinning off dancing bows, crews in harness hanging over blurred waves. Where are they going? Ahead… pale pink beaches rising into dunes, green forest and… incomprehensible! A behemoth of the industrial age sprawls across the shore! Concrete containment, plumes of steam, high voltage electrical infrastructure, a nuclear power plant.  A mysterious and unpredictable convergence of 20th century artifacts – leaping sun powered sail boats and a brooding atomic reactor.

Shack

So what’s all this about the shack? After a year of slogging, brutal renovations by Patrick and Dan, the family’s cow farm has a maker outpost. Hungering for a more proprietary scenario to build his race car, Patrick has recently vacated. I’m finishing the mad lab by my lonesome. Where will the Hobies be reborn? How will Rosie get her groove back? The shack.

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Animation Studio

Ben Woody inspired me to act on a dormant dream. I discovered Dragon Frame about a year or so ago, and have had it on the Birthday list. After my decisive move into VFX, with the nefs last year and the advent of an ambitious intern this year, I decided it was time to manifest. A little ahead of schedule but right on time, I’ve acquired a long coveted set of Dedo lights, a Canon T3i and Dragon Frame. Check some of our early tests at Ben’s YouTube channel. The garage is being converted to an animation studio where all this gear lives.

Personal Archeology

In the process of cleaning and organizing, I’ve come across a slew of old paintings, letters – my personal archeology. I’ve sort of boxed it all for the moment, but there will be a reckoning, oh yes.

James and Jeff

I seem to be spending ever more time talking with Jeff about his project Planet. Weston’s been revising the Ethiopia concept and I’ve kinda getting sucked in a bit there too. Collaborating with these two has been great, I really don’t have anyone else who is deep into projects and I didn’t realize how encouraging this comradery can be.

Ben Woody

I’m looking forward to sharing my Ben Woody boon with y’all, but for now check out his blog BenWoody.com

Ben and I do DOG daily (have you met Ben Woody?) but my early evenings and weekends are dedicated to acquiring old Hobie 16s cheap – usually with soft decks and other structural issues. This is long range planning for the return of ALM and a tribal post apocalyptic fable idea.

The hulls need to be opened to make repairs but the trick is to cut the glass without shattering it. The in and out of reciprocating saws tend to rip apart the lamination at the cut edge. I’ve pushed drill bits sideways to make cuts, but drill bits are designed to go cleanly down, not sideways. I’ve seen a Rotozip in Home Depot which I gather uses spinning bits to make horizontal cuts. I already own two routers but these are heavy, high RPM devices that are best be kept on a flat surface and guided by a physical template – it’s not safe or practical to try to use them free hand for the surgical cuts required on hobie hulls. Designing a counterweighted arm for the routers could allow them to be guided with a precise feather touch. A thin routing bit could glide through thin glass laminate without traumatizing the surrounding material – think hot knife vs butter.

Buying and trying a Rotozip might be the most practical idea.

Along with building the pirate fleet, there’s also a support boat possibility. A little scary, stay tuned.

In preparation for the epic Year of the Rabbit New Year Party on February 5th,  Joe Cissel, Liz Paladino and I started construction of the combination skating ring (k) / ice diving stage in the form of a yin yang symbol, which is approximately 70 feet in circumference. In the next day or two, we’ll be loading up the electric chainsaw with olive oil to open the holes and inscribe the borders. We decided to place it a little closer to shore than originally planned so that the water will be only about 5 feet deep, making an easier exit for the ice divers. We also discussed the feasibility of making the entire disk free spinning.

I wrote this originally for Gretchen Eichberger’s “Music for Sleepy Beings” CD, but it didn’t make the cut. Even though I’m an old wolf with no kids, I know what it is to be up late and wishing I could sleep. “Go to Sleep Now Baby” is a dual use ditty, appropriate for calming children or (in my case) a manic girlfriend.

I had to strip the Planets off the You Tube version of the Power Down PSA, and tho “Baby” is kind of a weird replacement, it was expeditious.

Go to Sleep Now Baby

Play movie for computer, phone or youtube

An ALM inspired public service message about giving up jet travel, whipped up in response to a regional fund raising effort that seemed inherently contradictory. The more I learned the more I felt compelled to speak out. The catalytic event was the release of a video by musicians May Erlewine and Seth Bernard on their kickstarter site.

Several aspects of their project appear problematic, but I’ve focused on the environmental impact. I’m down with Awakening the Dreamer, a movement to realize a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on the planet. These three outcomes are inherently linked, achieving one at the expense of the other two is no achievement at all.

There are certainly bigger fish to fry, why critique local activists and artists? Who elected Dan Kelly the arbiter of worthiness?

Folks disagree on how dire our environmental situation is, but it’s pretty clear we’ve got to make a change. Transparency and open communication are critical to deciding what that change should be. If we artists and activists can’t figure out how to do transparency and communication within our extended local tribe, how can we expect anyone to figure it out?

I don’t know many of the principle actors personally, but I am aware of their worthy efforts in the past. For my part, I just spent the last couple of years searching for artifacts of future sustainable civilizations. Having sailed a 16 foot catamaran 600 miles Around Lake Michigan, I’ve got some unique information to share especially with regards to travel.

I’ll be posting on youtube after a bit more polish.

I tested my PSA yesterday – me doing a talking head with ALM b-roll. It’s got potential. This morning I simplified the narration.

I am Dan Kelly

In 2008 I was invited to sail around the Hawaiian islands and make a movie about sustainability. Getting to Hawaii usually means flying – and jet flight generates lots of carbon. Documenting low impact lifestyles while having a big impact myself – that didn’t make sense. So I decided to stay home and make the movie right here, in Michigan.

sync sound
opening of ALM

In fact, I haven’t flown on a jet since. This summer I visited my brother for a trip down the San Juan river in Utah, a round trip of over 4000 miles, and it was Amtrak and cars the whole way.

river trip montage, floating

Flying on jets is probably the most environmentally damaging American behavior. If we’re concerned about climate change then jets should be the first thing we give up.

video of “on jets” calculation

I love to travel – adventure is my middle name. There’s so much to learn from other people and cultures. Maybe we can even help the folks we visit.

whoa! shots, that suckers coming right at me
http://ondesire.com/story/09-09-28_ritch_branstrom/01.html, carol

But trying to do good deeds by flying to far away places seems an obvious contradiction. We don’t need jets to have adventures or be of service. Wondrous discoveries await within 200, 20 or even 2 miles of our front door. Plenty of people need love and support in our own home towns.

(montage of more sailing, arriving on beaches, characters, town signs)

We are all responsible for each other, for our common survival. The choices we make now determine what will happen to us and to our extended family on earth. Jet travel is not a responsible choice, it messes up the global life support system we all depend on.

earth animation

let’s live fully, pay attention and power down

black with text, then “resources”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_and_the_environment

http://www.ondesire.com/ search for “jets”

I’ve been away from ondesire.com for a couple of months, reconstructing my land based life and recovering from an NYC exit. Let’s return now to the Around Lake Michigan archives for further extraction and posting. I’m starting with a PSA exploring the ills of jet travel. ALM is a search for what’s useful, the artifacts of future sustainable civilizations. Rather than look at what is wrong and complain, ALM explores what might be right, what seems to work. Explaining why something works may require contrasting it with what doesn’t.

There’s a local effort underway to fund extensive jet travel, ostensibly for good works on the other side of the earth. Certainly the organizers mean well, but on the balance they’ll probably do way more harm than good. Having recently sailed hundreds of miles in an open catamaran, I’m in a unique position to comment, to offer some perspective on travel choices. Here’s a first draft of my narration.

Two years ago I was invited to sail around the islands of Hawaii and make a movie about sustainability. Getting to Hawaii usually means flying on a jet plane – and that’s a huge carbon footprint. Talking about the low impact lifestyle while having a big impact myself – that didn’t make sense. So I decided instead to stay home and make my movie right here, in Michigan. In fact, I decided to give up jet flight in general. This summer I visited my brother for a trip down the San Juan river in Utah, and it was Amtrak and cars the whole way.

Flying on jets is just about the biggest environmental impact we can have as Americans. Trying to do good deeds by flying to far away places is usually a contradiction. Do the ends justify the means?

I love to travel – adventure is my middle name. There’s so much to learn from other people and cultures. Maybe we can even help the folks we visit.

We don’t need to fly in jets to have adventures or be of service. Wondrous discoveries await within 200, 20 or 2 miles of our front door. There are plenty of people who need love and support in our own home towns.

If we want to help people in China or Africa, we can send checks to reputable organizations already there. If we want to make new friends on the other side of the earth, we can reach out through social networks, telephones and… wait for it… posted letters.

If we traveled around the world without taking a single jet, we would have a richer and more immediate experience, make more friends, have many more adventures and probably be a lot smarter after.

We are all responsible for each other, for our common survival. The choices we make determine what will happen to us and to our extended global family. Jet travel is not a responsible choice, it messes up the global life support system we all depend on.

live fully, go slow, power down

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.

10-06-04 Adjustments in Arcadia, Michigan (computer, phone)

Day 24

There’s steady WNW wind this morning, good for heading south. I’ve got a stop I might make along the way to Benton Harbor today. I’m looking to round out the Lake’s bottom before the month ends. What’s in Chicago? I don’t have any hookups there yet, I’m just going to wing it – maybe make a spontaneous landing north or south and introduce myself to some beachfront homeowner or find the municipal marina. Likewise, I don’t have a clear plan for Gary which I’ll be passing before Chi, but I do have a dark fantasy about a clandestine overnight somewhere in the industrial badlands. This could be the most beautiful and/or harrowing leg of the trip.

First Benton Harbor then a night somewhere in the Indiana Dunes, favored by sweet breezes. Alternate outcomes are infinite, I am open.

Yesterday I edited some of the Vince Gallant segment, pulled Hello World further up the beach and then took the Swans up on their gracious offer to share food at Tracy’s. The rye bread? Fuggedaboudit!

Thanks to Dawn and George Schummer and Fred Eagle Royce for providing power and showers, Catherine Bragdon for our interview in the park, the crew of the chain ferry who I didn’t get a chance to film cause it was closed when I went back, the Swan’s, RJ Peterson, The Oval Beach staff including Tom and especially Vicky Morales, Barb the beach glass and rust collector, Kelsey, Bruce, Tom for the sobering reminder that white supremacy skulks in these pretty little towns (some of my best friends are black people, but…), Amos Kennedy the humble negro printer, Tracy and Marcia.

A new strategy is needed for the blog. Tho I enjoy writing, trying to craft posts just takes too much time! I’m falling further and further behind. The plan is to try a twitter influenced approach, distillation and supplement with pix when available. Let me know how this works.

Around Lake Michigan, Search for Sustainable Civilizations

Watch the movie excerpt – 13:30 minutes. This is intended to give the basic premise of the project. What artifacts of future sustainable civilizations can be found in Ritch Branstrom’s interview?

The full size and fixed size versions require a fast internet connection. For slower connections, try small.

Feedback about the ALM excerpt is encouraged and appreciated via comments. Please let us know which link you followed above.

Day 15 – 16

Paused in the Pine Motel parking lot on the way back from Wallys, riding the Zilliax Miyata back to Oval beach in the rain. It was a warm rain and I wanted to add a little more to this blog entry. I stopped there for some solid wireless, dripping and pecking at the screen. I should have just checked in. I got back to Oval Beach and following through on my promise to not camp. I pushed Hello World into the surf and anchored for the night… or so I thought. Once out there snug in the tent, the wind came up and started to buffet the boat. Waves smashed the bottom of the trampoline and rolled down my spine. Backwards and forwards, up and down with Hello World creaking and complaining all the while. I eventually bit the bullet and traded my warmish sleeping bag for a wet wetsuit in preparation for an emergency beaching. The worst thing is to do have to hard manual labor after nearly falling asleep. She was secure by the time first light arrived and I got started getting her ready for a few days alone, hauling gear to the parking lot.

Day 16-19

Susan’s smiling face around 10:00 am then 45 minutes back to Kalamazoo (Kzoo, Kazoo) and Garland Gardens (Vince and Susan’s house). Trot the gear up to my garret and start charging. Quick tour of the home farm, 100+ tomato plants. Vince’s mom and Aunt Rose arrive, then Vince himself from packing his classroom, (they’re refinishing the floors at school over the summer). Pizza for dinner, then off to record Vince performing with the Kalamazoo Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra conducted by Miles Kusik and featuring Carlo Aonzo. There’s an after glow at our house where I finally break out the Larrivee and play and sing with members of KMGO. Vince fuels the evening with homebrew beer.

Since constant vigilance and top performance is not currently required, my body demands rest. I yawn and groan constantly.

Wake up on Thursday and organize the blog and posts. I am way behind and intent on catching up. Processing Vixia video with Final Cut Pro takes time, so the computer and hard drives are constantly munching. In the afternoon take the camera to a practice of Great Lake Aquatics (Akitas) the swimming club and racing team that Vince coaches. His coaching is what I’ve come to document. Use the Aquapac underwater bag for the Vixia successfully, tho it continues to be awkward. Kids are a little creeped out by guy in pool with camera. I am caught of guard when Vince introduces me after practice and do a lame job of explaining the project. Home for dinner with Susan and noodling on guitars. Blackout.

Great Lakes Aquatics Summer Solstice swim meet starts on Friday and I’m there to make movies of the Akitas racing against other clubs from around the Michigan and Canada. Catch a ride there and back with Dan from the team, a habitually happy guy. Big storm sweeps through with winds up to 70 mph on Lake Michigan. I fret for Hello World and put a call into Vicki at Oval Park and text to Dave and Allison at Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance. While waiting for the pot of oopama I am making for the fam and visiting swimmers, get creamed at the card game Set by teens. Spend an hour or so interviewing Vince. Video processing is ongoing, begin to run short on hard drive space. Will have to buy additional drives eventually.

Visit the meet again on Saturday for events with Swim for Success kids. Party again at the house with the meet officials and some of the other coaches. Interesting conversation about how pool swimmers have anxiety about open water. Problematic to move pool swimmers to a wild venue (we got lakes) for promotion and expansion of swimming sports around Michigan. Vince and Susan force me to agree to visit the Ondrej, Mattej and Jan Pekarovic at their goat ranch on the way back to Saugatuck Sunday. I disappear to edit Vince’s video and blow off packing.

Watch for a flurry of blog and video posts in the next 24 hours. I’ll be in Kalamazoo with Susan and Vince until Sunday morning then heading back to Saugatuck Dunes Natural Area where Hello World is parked.

Climb the bluff carefully for a thrilling view of the big lake and better cell reception.

Nearby construction along the bluff edge reminds me of my reason for sailing around Lake Michigan. Activating global consciousness to steward and EXPAND the wilds.

Wandering about I discover a whacky development project with faux stone and dune grass (?) Head spinning, I borrow stairs back to the beach.

Maybe I’m being judgmental and forgetting essential principle of project – unexpected artifacts. What do the real estate agent and developer have to offer? Interviews?

Take the bike to town, bad reception and depressing juxtaposition of industry and wetlands at nearby park. Forget iphone maps, just ride into town. Synchronistic stumble on the Secretary of State’s office, I forgot to renew my drivers license before launching. Phone rings… date with developer next morning.

Google ‘ludington organic’ and find the Plaza Cafe, interview Tom and then check out Redolencia.

Chad recommends a half press and a couch with power. Blogging and recharge, Chad impromptu set and interview. Meet Lars and head on home, stashing bike in the meadow at top of bluff.

I don’t want to leave the tent. 7:20 am, sore and wishing to sleep more. The waves take a little breath now – big surges with a rest in between. That’s a change from yesterday – constant roll and crash.

Finally pushed off at 5:00 pm from Point Betsie after a tedious couple of hours of preparation. The first moments in the water were a comedy teetering on tragedy as the boat lept into the big wind and ran me over. I slid under the trampoline and just caught the tiller bar as it rushed over me. Imagine a backpack laden catamaran arriving in Wisconsin all by herself… That’s the reality I might have blogged about this morning.

Instead we fought 2 hours to go 2 miles south – in a south wind. Negotiating a inexorable procession of kinesthetic questions, shining choices between staying upright and catastrophe.

Imagine ground that lifted and sank against your feet, endlessly twisting and folding into itself. If every step required tight concentration and presence, would you, could you walk?

On my first day, 2 hours was all I could handle, so the end of the day was a convenience. I slid into e beach and wrestled with Hello World in the sucking surf, eventually stabilizing her with the help of Kari who appeared all smiles and shivers.

She watched my days end ritual and gave me a bagel from Lychaim Deli, to life! Relief in realizing I wasn’t out there anymore. It was a tough start.

Kevin and Brenda built a beach fire and made me stay up until 1:00 am talking! Cool folks and local too, great to meet them and a wonderful way to bring in Wednesday.

Movie: 10-06-01 ALM 2010 Launch (computer, phone)

Are we ready? Not quite yet. Fiberglass repairs will take another few days. An ordering snafu has delayed the arrival of some gear. Chuck is fabricating cargo plates that need to be tested. This weekend’s weather forecast is not beach friendly.

It’s official! Launch has been pushed back to May 15. This Saturday’s party is canceled.

Progress is otherwise stellar. Dan Kelchak did a beautiful job on the Larrivee and It’s first coat of armor is on. The body tone still seems to be quite bright. The 1720 Pelican cases are ideal for both guitar and the new 30 cubic ft scuba tank. Winslow’s self silencing torus has arrived and it’s voice is reminiscent of indonesian gamelan and himalayan monasteries.

Here are some fiberglass components fresh from their molds. The collar is intended to reinforce the hull access ports. Note the black stitching showing through where the strips of glass cloth were sewn together – Patrick’s idea. The 5 foot strip was saturated with resin and then wrapped around a circular form to form about 1/4″ thickness. The S shaped bit is a casting of the hull lip and was passed on to Chuck to be used as a guide for the stainless steel cargo plates.

The Larrivee with armor plate. The overlapping edges have to be carefully sanded flush with the guitar’s body.

Winslow’s fabulous torus. Loud! Movie…

Hello World in the rain. Not quite dry dock.

Beautiful. Inventory and ordering continues today, with a bit of general organization around the house.

Yesterday I became 6.5 lbs heavier when I started wearing a scuba weight belt. Carrying extra weight is an easy way to challenge the body and build strength, even when just walking around the house. I ran 3 miles with it too and felt fine. A year or two back I owned a weight vest designed for training firefighters but sold it after a few months. It was too much of a hassle to wear it with less than 15 lbs. The belt I hardly notice.

I’ve been writing for an hour just about every day for the past few weeks. That’s the drill with any serious practice – do it daily. My writing might improve if i keep this up, imagine that! Once on the water it could be challenging to keep the longer posts coming. I may only be able to check in on days of easy wind.

Gear ahoy!

Getting close now. Order of operations seems to be holding together, it’s spooky that I’m mostly on schedule. Everything can go right between now and launch… it’s possible.

I am noticing more, recognizing the unfolding of a larger story. A lot of ideas to fit into a coherent movie… I guess I started this, mostly just made myself available and let the pieces fall into place. Is this what I want?

How it began… On location in 2006 shooting my first movie with a budget. For the next two years I spent most of my days free climbing the first movie learning curve. Daughter of God – http://dogthemovie.com. I kept the fridge full with freelance production work for NYC dancers.

In 2008 I spent yet another perfectly good summer sweating in a tiny apartment staring at screens. The DOG project has merit and is worth finishing, will be finished. Is anything worth giving up a whole summer of diving Crystal’s blue, of running barefoot in the forest, of waking up to waves lapping?

Here’s the deal… Daughter of God is set in a post apocalyptic world, it’s a post apocalyptic surreal romantic comedy, sinister in the sense that some humans still dream of asphalt plains resplendant with the snaking migrations of countless multi-colored cars. It’s over tho, human population has been devastated, industrial infrastructure deleted and nature is reclaiming the cities. Certainly there’s toxic aftermath, sure the survivors are traumatized, but they dress snappy!

Meanwhile, back in RL I’m listening to Democracy Now every morning on WBAI radio. Assembling a fictional apocalypse seems pretty pointless when an actual apocalypse is nigh – I can never match the Pentagon’s special fx budget, let alone Gaia herself.

I wondered… Is DOG the best use of my time right now? Wouldn’t I rather be swimming? How about that super hero correspondence course I just aced?

That’s the setup. In the autumn of 2008 Kai invited me to make a documentary about sailing in Hawaii and – of course – sustainability… Well? What would Jesus do?

That was earth momma’s little joke. Come summer 2009, Kai abandoned Desire and Pele for a motor sailor… and I noticed there was a 30 year old Hobie Cat in my driveway.

Is this what I want? To act as an agent of Earth disguised as a pirate filmmaker? Hours drifting wind free followed by contact improv with Shiva? Three months of wilderness occasionally interupted with regionally brewed stouts and porters? The making of a saint?

I say, Yes.

take me, sneak up and surround me
smother me in the unknown, unseen
unfathomed
the darkness of depth, underwater
danger and cold
almost death only to awaken
live again, breath in sunlight
but I lie a little
you are not a cold night nor dangerous
merely mysterious
warm and friendly in fact
at least as April nights in Michigan go

Time for a list of lists, a preliminary inventory. With 19 days left, we’ve got to design the optimal sequence of actions. To avoid the carbon cost of airplane flight, new gear needs to be shipped ground which means ordering within the week. Gear requests should be started first so we’ve got to decide what we want and who we are going to ask by Monday.

One of the prerequisites for asking is an effective introduction to the project. This is where the mini-movie fits in and it’s several days behind schedule. We are just going to have to make requests based on written materials with references to the long running video excerpts. There are five components to our collaboration proposal – a good idea (√), a coherent and workable plan (√), established distribution channels eg Ondesire.com, Facebook and Twitter (√), a documented mob (growing) and an articulate introduction (pending). Having a non profit umbrella would also be helpful so that contributions would be tax deductible. Since I missed my NP liaison last month, I doubt I could set this up before June 1, so I may just have to skip that. Perhaps it’s worth a phone call.

Monica Evans asked about making cash donations to the project. The trip itself is not all that expensive because it’s designed to be replicable/low budget/low impact, but post-production after the trip could cost $30k for labor and services. Asking for money doesn’t have to happen before launch, but it wouldn’t hurt to identify prospects now. I could then schedule several days during the trip to make these requests.

The origins, an overview. I’ve written deeply about the inspiration and origins of the project. Along with completing and posting the mini-movie, linking to the most articulate of these posts is vital. Methinks it might be a good idea to link first (today) and the sort out the mini-movie immediately after.

We’ve can instantly develop a starting inventory by linking to last September’s checklists, and then replace them with updates. They will also be helpful in identifying gear collaborators.

Posting our itinerary will not only trigger suggestions from the tribe about where to go and who to see, but other potential collaborators.

Finally, Hello World needs glass and rigging repair. There’s about a week worth of labor plus curing time after each patch, so this has got to begin no later than day 14 on the countdown.

So – here’s the  order of operations draft…

19 days

• inventory/checklist rebuild 4/18

• introduction with links to inspiration and origins 4/18

• inventory revised with potential collaborators identified 4/18

• mini-movie 4/18+

18 – 16 days

• asks initiated 4/19 – 4/21 + mini-movie

• itinerary posted

17 -15 days

• ordering 4/22 – 4/23 + mini-movie

14 days

• Hello World repair 4/24+

12 – 10 days

• ordering and ask follow up 4/26-4/28

9 – 8 days

• provisions 4/29-4/30

• hulls complete and float test

7 days

• preliminary pack 5/1

• trailer and transport arranged

6 – 5 days

• final orders and provisions 5/2-5/3

4 – 2 days

• complete Hello World repairs and adjustments 5/4-5/6

1 days

• final pack 5/7

0 days

• trailer to E beach, launch party, overnight 5/8

ALM 1

• launch 5/9

Here are the general questions which helped me to develop this post.

Who can help, what companies are already involved?

What companies could be involved?

What’s the itinerary so far?

What does Hello World need to be water ready?

What provisions and consumables are needed?

The On Desire tribe reached it’s objective yesterday of 100+ fans for the Facebook page and the Around Lake Michigan movie project.

“This milestone demonstrates that we’ve got a solid core of kick ass collaborators,” said Dan Kelly, ALM’s guide. “Everyone knows that the fool in front of the camera is just the red ribbon on the birthday present, a bit of whipped cream on top of the sundae. We’ve got one hell of a Sundae going down here – the works! Bananas, several flavors of ice cream, nuts… all organic and fair trade of course. Most important though, remember the big dirt ball underneath – Earth. You can’t have a sundae or much of anything without a life friendly planet, well cared for and robust.”

No one was quite sure what Kelly meant by all this, but his delivery was very enthusiastic and animated.

Angela Saxon was one of several newly recruited fans who had no idea what they was signing on for,

“now i’ve gotta figure out what On Desire is all about…”

Due to the hypnotic nature of the Facebook interface, Luke Kelly and Winslow Morgan were able to induce a powerful Svengali effect, as evidenced by Mikayla Bajtka’s and Tim Howard’s posts,

“oh yah i think thats the one my friend luke told me to join lol.”

“OK winslow I fan-ed up”

Though effective, outright bullying triggered residual resentment, as evidenced by this response from the project’s potential spiritual advisor Victoria Weinstein,

“Yo mo-fo, I did it. Okay?”

“Whatever it takes,” responded Kelly. He said some other stuff too but folks were certainly more interested in the naked swim advertised to celebrate the 100 fan milestone. Dan and the project fabrication specialist, Patrick Kelly estimated the water temperature to be in the 40-45 degree F range. Why cherries? It’s Michigan. Roll the video.

10-04-16 Swim to celebrate 101 Facebook fans variable / full screen
10-04-16 Swim to celebrate 101 Facebook fans fixed size

Here’s a rough sketch of an introduction to artifacts, one of the components that’ll help explain and set-up the Search for Sustainable Civilizations. I’m running late on the mini-movie / extended trailer, let’s see what happens this weekend.

Without further eloquence…

Richard Burris, Artifacts (full screen)

or

Richard Burris, Artifacts (smaller but more compatible)

Beauty is a feeling and this morning I have it. It’s the combination of rapport, getting fit and making progress.

In the past two days I’ve reconnected with Brook Hash, Susan Gilbert and tonight Kari Tomashik will be stopping in for a bite. My excellent nephews and I ran hard yesterday. I need a few more days on the mini movie / extended trailer but I may have figured out how to introduce the idea of future artifacts.

Still and gray tho it be today, the momentum of spring is near. Life is stewing and brewing, electric green is sizzling up though the concrete and lighting up the tips of twigs. This is a wave I can ride – renewal, awakening.

The solar panels will deploy, the wind pumps sway and twist. It’s the sun harvest and the global life support system, extant. Welcome back miracle and much thanks. Show me the science and I’ll show you the presence, live and direct.

Let me be as useful as an early leaf today, stretched taught and crispy in the brisk new day.

Lovely chill morning. Yesterday I surprised a fox as I came out of the house. Sienna and umber, pretty big too. He wasn’t in a huge hurry, eventually trotting off past the nitrogen accumulator (outhouse). Last Friday I passed a momma fox and her kits lounging on some cottage stairs. It’s still too early for most of the lake houses to be occupied, so the foxes have carte blanche. Never seen so many that I can recall.

Today I continue with the mini movie. I need to amp up the global life support system sequence. I think it happens after Larry does MIR the first time. Then we’ll show iconic examples of life support, balance maintained in the face of entropy. Examples from NASA, scuba and science fiction. When we play Larry the second time, we’ll be into the connection between Hello World and MIR with the rebuild and packing. The next question will be – why? Why go on this trip?

I edited a short sequence with Dick on Beaver Island, tho the sound quality isn’t stellar. He’s a mason with 68 years of experience, 40 of those working with stone. He talked about his trip to Peru and the stones there – artifacts of a technology (and perhaps even a worldview) that we moderns don’t understand.

The Peruvian stones/culture sequence leads to the trip’s premise.

“We assume that modern industrial capitalistic civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement, but if ancient people could do things that we can’t what else are we missing? If our civilization isn’t the most advanced, what does advancement look like? Certainly future civilizations must be sustainable – in accord with the planetary life support system – because we can’t stay suicidal indefinitely. We expect our kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews to have a future. Certainly to survive and even to thrive. Sustainable civilizations must emerge within the next 10-15 years. Since entire civilizations don’t just pop up overnight, they must *already* be in the process of emerging. We should be able to poke around and find evidence of future sustainable civilizations everywhere, right now. Just like the stones in Peru are artifacts of an advanced ancient civilization, so too there must be artifacts of advanced future civilizations. Can we find these artifacts and figure out what they imply, what they are pointing towards?”

“What does an artifact of a future sustainable civilization look like? How do we go about searching for them? I think it starts with asking the right questions… Listen to this talk I had with Ritch Branstrom and see if you hear any clues about the future.”

Ritch interview (already edited).

Review Ritch’s “artifacts”, bullet points.

Conclusion / credits

I watched one of the worst movies last night, one that I had seen long ago – Dino De Laurentiis and David Lynch’s Dune. There were so many awful things, but especially bad were the voice overs of characters thinking.

I’m working on a voice over for Around Lake Michigan, a way to get the search started. It might be fun to do an homage to De Laurentiis / Lynch. Imagine the ALM guide, gazing heroically over a rocking horizon or shaving in his rain pounded tent. We hear his thoughts…

•••

Where you see rocks, watch out! They’re going to come alive… Alan Watts.

Earth is a giant ball of rock and metal skinned with life. Where does the rock end and the life start? People are alive, and trees and animals, that’s for sure. There’s even tiny things alive in the soil. Life is everywhere. Supposedly though, these things are not alive – water, rocks, air. Folks argue about how life came from non life – god or darwin. I am more interested in how life stays here. Whether by accident or design, the earth is a nice place to live. Everything is just so – the precise amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, consistent temperature, the right kind of light… but how does it stay that way? Somehow, life friendly conditions are maintained. That’s the global life support system, (analogies from NASA and science fiction abound).

Can humans damage or break the global life support system? Have we already? Maybe. Probably. Shit.

A more useful question is, can humans live in accord with it? Can we actually become an integral part of the global life support system? What would that look like?

A sustainable civilization would be in perfect accord with the global life support system. Concepts like garbage and pollution would be obsolete, archaic. There would be no consumption or waste, only cycles of transformation and renewal. Energy is free and abundant.

Hard to imagine, right?

The amazing thing is this…

•••

This could be a preface for the premise.

In a scalding tub, burning away the muscle ache from yesterday’s kooky backward run. I skip showers for several days running just so I can dip neck deep in steamy agua caliente.

Today I bought a minivan from my fam and pondered how to introduce the concept of future artifacts into the project. I’ve got some major elements present in the current extended trailer. What’s missing is character development including DK’s science fiction influenced premise for Around Lake Michigan which points to artifacts of future sustainable civilizations. Take a breathe!

What does an artifact of FSC look like? Tricky, that. An artifact is anything that gets us past the hospice culture and on into living. Sure there will always be uncertainty, but can’t we take the pistol out of our maw for a decade or two, just give it a rest? Yes we can! Yes we did – in the post present.

Artifacts are telegrams from the future – we solved it and here’s how. Jet cars or sail boats? Soylent green or CSAs? Artifacts can be RL processes and perhaps cybernetic extensions. When Mozilla builds an open source Facebook into Firefox – that sort of thing. If Monsanto were run by Geshe Michael.

I know, it’s Dan Kelly’s perplexing internal world. Not since Tolkien has any artist fabricated a fantasy so arcane and detailed. Forget about comprehensible, this is the future talking. Buckle your seatbelts.

We’ll clarify all soon enough. The really big waves are preceeded by a sucking sound.

Either by…

http://twitter.com/OnDesire

or

http://twitter.com/FutureArtifacts

Thanks for taking the time to check us out.

My name is Dan Kelly and I am working on the documentary movie. From May – August of 2010, I’ll be sailing a 16 ft catamaran all the way around Lake Michigan – solo. That’s about 1000 miles.  Along the way I’ll visit people and places related to sustainability. With a high quality mobile production kit,  I’ll record my discoveries and post them here.

I want to establish local connections before I go, that’s why I followed you. You might have great ideas about where to stop or who to visit. Perhaps you’d like to meet me yourself and talk about the future over tea or a beer.

Feel free to wander around this site and learn more. If you are intrigued with the project, email me directly wild@artisthouse.com or  follow me for updates on Twitter – http://twitter.com/OnDesire.

Thanks for your time!

Dan
Hello World
and the On Desire team

Open water on Crystal Lake, the ice is off.

Woke to the murmer of a gray lake and an empty wind in a deep silence. The kwhoo of a morning dove, caw of a crow, and the trill and warble of song birds never overlapping. Each event takes it turn, opening and closing the lovely quiet as if to make it more.
The sudden rich echo of a seagull’s cackle reminds me what’s ahead. A maybe March in Northern Michigan, maybe waking up, maybe winter is over – just maybe. Around these parts that’s enough.
Without my morning sojourn in the icy outhouse, I’d be a just another human without a clue. So thanks Dan Kelly for having the good sense to accumulate nitrogen outside and open to awakening.

I did it. Redesign and radical simplification of http://ondesire.com has been implemented. There’s more to come but the major scaffolding is in place.

Here’s the landing page. Pretty sparse eh? The idea is push some of the complexity deeper into the blog by establishing a traditional branching structure and with limit overwhelm. There are basically three points of entry… “Our collective destiny – Desire”, “Blog” and “Movies”.

This page needs a stronger visible presence and I plan to stick at least three movie windows between the current image and the sidebar.

“Our collective destiny – Desire” is an introduction to the main theme – that our desire determines everything, the choices we make.  It connects desire to our present situation. It also implies that desire can be designed. The copy doesn’t yet make the connection between desire and survival, that our other desires are all piled onto survival – so it needs some work. At the very bottom of this page is a site map, “Navigating On Desire” which provides a structured view on the mad cacophony of posts. Let’s skip that for now and look at blog and movies.

The blog has two views, by year “Latest news” and by month. An alternate view is the “expedition map”, which structures the posts with geography rather than time. The site map might also be appropriate to provide another post sorting modality for a total of three – time, place and relevance.

Digression – This data viewport idea flows from my CHI design days with Fred Oefline and Tamarack Software in the 90s.

Based on Google Analytics, “Our collective Destiny – Desire” and “Movies” were the most popular choices on the previous landing page design. I suspected that visitors were clicking ”Our collective Destiny – Desire” out of confusion rather than interest. The new landing page design should offer insight. “Movies” will likely be the most selected now. This “Movies” page is clunky and would greatly benefit from thumbnails and a reordering of titles to put the most recent first.

Here’s the structured design for navigating On Desire’s content. There’s still quite a bit to do, but it should be enough to assess visitor interaction.

Yesterday – while all these changes were being implemented – the bounce rate for the landing page jumped up from 20 – 45%. I’ll give it a say or two to settle and then check again.

Here’s the state of the art.

Bounce rate has been *bouncing* over the last 5 days. When it hit 70% on March 15, I almost flipped. I waited another day without making any changes and sure enough, it dropped back down to 35%. So what’s going on? Obviously I don’t really know, so perhaps we ought to hold off on changing anything else for the moment.

I have considered what I would change. WP’s becoming a limiting factor. I’d probably be better off with a Joomla deployment but I don’t have time to climb that learning curve.  I want to get back to the fundamentals of movie making asap. So sticking with WordPress is the plan.

Overlay shows most of the clicks on the landing page happening on the link for the page itself, indicating that visitors might be getting confused. The next most popular link is the movies. The blog archives take up a significant space on the page and are hardly getting touched at all.

The obvious plan would be to remove anything that is not popular or confusing and emphasize what visitors are into. Since this is a movie project more pictures would be a good idea, with a few text links branching off into more specific content.

I think a test site would be worthy.

I just spoke to web design maven Lauren Di Scipio. She had several great suggestions, which I’ll paraphrase.

1) Folks come to the site and make a good faith effort to get oriented, but the landing page is not providing any orientation, so they have to look elsewhere.

This makes sense. The sidebar’s list of pages is like a mini sitemap and the title “Desire – our collective destiny” suggests a direction to take.  Folks look at the map and try and find out what it’s all about.

2) It’s all about immediacy, we want to see what’s happening at this moment. Perhaps an RSS feed of the recent posts…

This is also interesting, having a static page is helpful to monitor visitor response but it kills the flow of updating.

3) More pictures, put a movie or movies there.

If you are landing here from Facebook, relax – you’re safe now.

OK everyone, this is going to be our first old fart singalong. Instructions:

click this…
lyrics

then this…
music

If you don’t read music don’t panic – right after the “doo, doo, doo” (16 beats in) start SINGING… really belt it out!

Special thanks for Andrew Gold of being such a future civilization trooper.

Jonathan, Luke, Steve and I were looking at analytics for ondesire.com last night. After posting the Premise page on Friday, bounce rate shot back up to 40%. The point of looking at bounce rate is to see how effective the landing page is, but several factors could be influencing the results – other than the project totally sucking. For one thing, analytics code needs to be added to the html for the video so it can be tracked.

Feeling superstitious, I altered the premise to be more focused and moved the character development off into it’s own link with an intro. I also won’t cross post any more analytics progress reports to http://ondesire.com – it’s not relevant to the experience of ondesire to see all the wiring hanging out – it’s confusing enough just trying to communicate the concept. Showing the jury rigged tangle is what holyboners.com is all about.

Jonathan has been questioning the veracity of the doom assertion in the ALM / artifact premise. A premise or pitch is a shorthand introduction to a project – typically delivered in less than 15 seconds (and often in an elevator). A great pitch should distill a project and summarize it rather than simplify. Here’s the current version of the ALM pitch.

We know that a sustainable civilization is coming because if it doesn’t show up, we (human beings) are doomed. Since we all expect to survive, survivable civilization(s) must emerge within the next 10 – 15 years. That means they must be already coming together, they must be in the process of emerging right now.  We can can expect to find fragments and partially assembled components everywhere. These artifacts of future survivable civilizations can be discovered and shared, growing awareness globally. That is the objective of Around Lake Michigan.

Is this premise inherently misleading and broken? Jonathan offered some interesting insights.

Jonathan – What’s the proof that we are doomed? That reminds me of mainstream media’s fear mongering and exaggeration which makes intelligent folks allergic.

The more I think about it, the more of a core issue it seems this might be, as far as making this site truly communicate with folks.

It isn’t clear who is the source of the information, when you say that there’s dark things up ahead. Where is this prophecy coming from, you (dan kelly), the scientific community, the mainstream media, etc.? If the prophecy is coming from one of these sources, then you need to explain why the audience should be looking to themselves to answer what the solutions are, rather than this source. And that isn’t usually easy.

Example, if the scientific community is saying global warming is the problem to focus on, and people respect them and this opinion of theirs, then they’ll naturally look to the scientific community to tell them exactly what they should do about it. They won’t look to themselves for the answers, because they weren’t even capable of noticing the problem until science pointed it out to them.

Another example is 9/11. From observations and common sense people could see that it was not an accident, but not who was to blame for it. Later that same day the government/media started putting up a picture of Osama Bin Laden, explained who he was supposed to be and that he was supposed to be responsible. And so it was the government/media that folks followed to war, not their own individual pieces of knowledge or independent viewpoints.

If you want to break out of this system, of people following “leaders” or “experts”, and instead trusting in and finding solutions to problems themselves, then they have to become aware of the problem within their own experiences and minds. Otherwise it is just more blind faith. You need to show people the symptoms of a problem they can become aware of within their own life experience, independently. Ask them to confirm what you are saying within the things they have already seen.

Certainly if the artifacts of the solution are already around us, there must also be the artifacts of the problem for people to confirm what is going on for themselves.

Within the context of ALM and this website, you as the stand-in character for the everyman, the joe average, could talk about your personal experiences that made you become an environmentalist. Maybe recount how you saw certain things change over your lifetime that made you aware the present course was heading in a very dark direction.

Then recount some of the artifacts of a possible future way of life, that you experienced over your lifetime, that lead you to start this search for a sustainable way of life.

This reminder about individual experience is indeed powerful and worthy. Mass disconnection from direct experience is what makes the toxic consumption juggernaut possible. On Desire is a DIY effort, it’s about taking personal responsibility for the situation. “What situation?” Jonathan asks. What exactly is our ALM guide, Dan Kelly talking about? Let’s tease out some story from this.

A character effectively developed is believable. The audience travels with the ALM guide because they can relate to him, his struggles and aspirations have been offered and accepted by the audience. They don’t need to agree with him or even like him to go along on his journey, they just have to get him. Search the posts for “guide” for more background on this.

Andrea made the point that Dan Kelly can’t be a detached observer. Who would believe that a detached observer would fix buy a 16 foot cat and sail 1000 miles searching for artifacts of a survivable future? That sounds slightly passionate if not a obviously nuts. This character is motivated by something more compelling than reports on CNN, he is acting from his gut. He may be delusional, but his direct experience has galvanized action.

Of course the audience should look to their own experience, absolutely. That’s what makes character development possible. It’s tricky to ask for that in the premise though, there’s just not enough time. All we need to do is communicate that this is Dan Kelly’s premise, and illustrate how he acquired it.

Now the pitch starts like this… There’s this guy who believes (insert premise). Well – that’s interesting, how did he come to believe that? Cue character development.

The character development will illustrate how this guy’s direct experience – a heady brew of ecstatic physicality, presence with wilderness, speculative storytelling, an affinity for science and intuitive mysticism intoxicated him with the premise.

If the character makes a robust commit to act on his direct experience, that will be an example for others to attend to and act on theirs… and we’ve made a training film.

In conclusion, deconstructing the premise is a useful exercise. The character Dan Kelly has an epic bent. He has a strong feeling that earth and her human inhabitants are facing a crucial moment. Does he conjure the threat of annihilation to spice an otherwise dreary RL existence? Is he tilting at windmills? There’s no story without conflict, right?

Frodo lives!

We’ve had two dream team meetings, in Brooklyn (Faisal, Erica and Dan) and last Saturday in Beulah (Steve Elrick, Melonie, Jonathan, Lucas Kelly and Dan).

Inviting collaboration and contribution was the focus of Saturday’s meeting. Components of the ask package for fundraising were presented and discussed. Our collective web presence, including project blogs like http://ondesire.com and contractor blogs (http://meloniesteffes.com and http://jonathankellyarts.com) are key. We reviewed the design of the landing page for http://ondesire.com and discussed what our expectations are for it.

•

Melonie – The silhouette image of Dan on Hello World looks “girly”. It’s the first thing I think about when I see this page.

Dan – This is because the camera pack on his left side  gives an impression of wide hips which combined with the long hair  makes the image a little confusing.

Actions

Is it disturbing or discordant to visitors? Some testing is needed. It’s possible to either switch out this picture or try to ps the camera pack out. Might not be a bad idea to broaden my shoulders and add an ornate cod piece while were at it.

•

Jonathan – I’d like to see a link to the latest news, so that folks can jump to immediately to the last 5-6 posts.

Action

The simplest solution is a link to all posts. The most recent will show up first.

•

Melonie – “Desire – the crux of human experience.” That’s important, it should be a headline or bigger.

Dan – “You are here” was intended to give a sense of place, suggesting maps and geography. We can repurpose this for the maps area.

Action

Replace “You are Here” with the crux of human experience” to give it more prominence and simplify the page. Move you are here to the maps page.

•

Dan – On Desire was conceived as a container for many projects, Around Lake Michigan being one of them. Currently, ALM is the only project in there, so it needs to be more prominent.

Action

On the sidebar, move Events up to the top and all the ondesire.com background down to the bottom. Perhaps move the background out of the sidebar totally.

•

Jonathan – The archives take a lot of real estate, be good to move them farther down the sidebar so it’s less cluttered up top.

Dan – Not sure that’s possible. If we had a little WP magic we could link to a separate page where the archives could live. Look into it.  A benefit of the archives being on the sidebar is it demonstrates project longevity.

Action

Investigate whether archives become a landing page link?

•

Dan – Perhaps Dan and Hello World are the vanguard for a wave of expeditions worldwide, perhaps one objective is to inspire other expeditions. ALM could be a demonstration on how to look for artifacts of a survivable future. How could the site be an aggregator for artifacts? Searchers could report discoveries by…

writing a letter / email

leaving a phone message

sending audio or video recordings – youtube, vimeo etc.

Steve – what about incorporating song writing? Steve relates a recent effort to rewrite the lyrics of Route 66 to fit the sights along M22. Could this be worked into ALM? Would song writers and performers be inspired with images of trip geography?

Dan – I really wanted to bring my guitar with me last September, the idea of a giant song writing quilt is awesome. Lucas and Melonie are both making music too, Steve sings so maybe we already have a strong base.

What other ideas can we deploy for hooking the general public into the project?

Action

Who could organize  and manage the music project? How would it work? What’s our protocol for integrating new artifacts, a resource for contributing must be developed.

•

Melonie – Right now the project is the Dan show. We need more artifacts up ASAP.

Dan – absolutely. We have some great material.

Action

Priority – put up other interviews.

•

Dan – The premise, the pitch. We know that a sustainable civilization is coming because if it doesn’t show up, we (human beings) are doomed. Since we all expect to survive, a survivable civilization must emerge within the next 10 – 15 years. That means it must be already coming together, it must be in the process of emerging.  We can can expect to find fragments and partially assembled components everywhere, right now. These artifacts of a future survivable civilization can be discovered and shared, growing awareness globally. That is the objective of Around Lake Michigan.

Jonathan – What’s the proof that we are doomed? That reminds me of mainstream media’s fear mongering and exaggeration which makes intelligent folks are allergic.

Dan – maybe “doom” switched to “things getting really unpleasant,” (wink, nod). Kind of under-promising approach.

Jonathan – Showing change from past to present, activate personal observation.

Melonie – focus on the good stuff, spreading the solutions

Action

A 15 second premise video could be the first thing that visitors encounter.

Jonathan – we need definitions on the site, like xroll, civilizations and artifacts.

Action

Build a project dictionary or a wikitionary

Dan – How do you guys feel about the process of blogging?

Melonie – an old friend found me through my website, I was embarrassed. the first thing I thought was I hope he didn’t read my blog.

Jonathan – I am posting technical stuff because I don’t feel very creative right now. When writing about technical issues, there’s a lot of overhead involved in explaining something simple. Saying exactly what I want, a process of taking stuff away.

Melonie – What about exploring your feelings about the project?

Dan – We will continue to blog, because it’s very powerful to look into ourselves and express what we are becoming. It’s very helpful for our development as artists and for our ability to communicate clearly – to each other and to the world at large. It’s an investment in ourselves.  Melonie’s reaction is very telling, why should we be embarrassed about our own thoughts and feelings? What’s the matter with developing a public presence? Is that ego or just sharing? An open project means we share our lessons and discoveries.

Action

Steve and Lucas can be encouraged to launch showcase sites with Jonathan and Melonie’s help. Jonathan and Melonie write a 1 or 2 paragraph premise – why writing and sharing my journey makes sense for me, or if it did make sense for me, why would it?

Today I am thinking about the indivisibility of story and audience. Which comes first? In May 2010, Hello World and I return to the Big Lake. I’d like to start with a more robust social presence than the project had in 2009. WordPress and Twitter apps on the iPhone were swell, but there hadn’t been much outreach before the launch.

Could we start this May with a robust and attentive audience of say 5000? If so, who would they be? Who should we invite? How should time be balanced between building a following and building the story?

That last question is a doozie, it scares me. Scan back through the posts from July – August 2009 and you’ll see how much preparation was going on. That’s where I am now, just two months from launch. Do I have time to build an audience? Do I want an audience if I am ill prepared for performance?  What’s the point of having an incredible performance that nobody sees? What does an auspicious balance between audience building and story building look like?

Let’s back up and look at who the audience might be.  Content attracts an audience that can relate to it. Context diversifies the audience. Both content and context flow from my story, so what’s my story? Story -> content + context -> audience. This might all seem abstract, so here’s an example.

A guy is going to sail a small catamaran around Lake Michigan. If that’s the story, then the content would be sailboats, water, beaches, maybe some interesting weather. This content appeals to folks familiar with Lake Michigan, sailors and some outdoor enthusiasts.

Add more story and the content expands… This guy believes he can fathom the future of the human race, he thinks he can figure out how we will radically reinvent our planetary presence and avoid environmental apoocalypse. Now the content includes encounters with all manner of kooky folks with clues about the future – rocking chair philosophers, garage scientists, mad prophets, sincere visionaries, hard working fanatics, angels in brown paper bags, irascible recluses and so on. The audience now includes folks who enjoy debate, new ideas, all the friends and family of the kooky folks, folks who are themselves somewhat kooky and anyone who thinks the human race is in big trouble.

Now comes the lovely magic of context. This guy who is going to sail around Lake Michigan likes science fiction. Not the watered down low octane Hollwood fluff, but the hard core, straight to the vein hard core. Science fiction from books. His shelves are sagging with ragged paperbacks from the masters – Bradbury, Wilhelm, Le Guin, Clarke, Dick, Lethem, Swanwick, Stephanson. He’s steeped deep. We explain this to the audience and suddenly we get this guy a little more. Poor dear, his brain’s been fried from too much reading! He’s projecting his imagination into the real world, he probably thinks his catamaran is the space shuttle. What will happen to this sap, will he end up drowned after being knocked off his boat by alien Asian carp? Now the content includes the guy’s history, scenes depicting his heartbreaking literary obsession – moments that make a connection to him. The audience may not agree with who he is or what he believes, but they can relate! He is every man, every woman. He becomes a placeholder for all of us. A 21st century Don Quixote on an impossible quest. If context is pulled off properly, the audience includes all, whether or not they like boats, philosophy or give a rats ass about the earth.

So I guess the question of balance didn’t get resolved here. Hmm. I’ll be back.

Since the Around Lake Michigan movies are presented in a resizable window outside of the blog proper, folks couldn’t comment – doh! Just created a stack of posts to fix this slight oversight… and away we go!

Watch the movies and let us know what happens to you!

Last year my documentary about sailing around the Hawaiian Islands morphed into a documentary about sailing around Lake Michigan. In September of 2009 I soloed 300 miles on the 16 foor catamaran Hello World, searching for sustainable civilizations.  The plan for 2010 is to sail the entire perimeter of Lake Michigan, over 1000 miles!

The name of the documentary is (appropriately) Around Lake Michigan, Search for Sustainable Civilizations. Here’s the pitch.

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If we can’t figure out how to live in accord with the global life support system, human beings are doomed. Becoming sustainable is bigger than recycling or buying low flush toilets, it’s a reimagining of our presence on the planet.

As the operations of governments and corporations are often at odds with human survival, we can’t rely on their guidance. The adventure of survival belongs to each of us.

The fragments of a sustainable civilization already exist, we have but to gather and assemble them. All over the world folks are figuring out what it looks like, inventing and rehearsing the survivable future.

In the spring of 2010 Dan Kelly resumes his expedition aboard the 16 foot catamaran Hello World, sailing Around Lake Michigan to Search for Sustainable Civilizations. Dan picked the big lake because it’s close to home, but it doesn’t matter where we start. The answers are all around us – wherever we are.

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Visit the Around Lake Michigan blog at http://ondesire.com and toss in your two cents. We’re looking for ideas – people to interview and places to check out along the shores of Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois.  Share your clues and rumors about sustainable civilizations. Offer feedback on the video vignettes,  comment on the posts or create your own posts about relevant issues. Blogging is fun!

Lots of visitors and activity at http://ondesire will translate into contributions of equipment, expertise and funding for Around Lake Michigan this spring.

Folks always wonder what they can do beyond insulating their homes and installing compact florescent light bulbs. Flooding On Desire with your awareness sprouts the seeds of our native weeds.

Choose one…

I can toss my two cents but I’ve never visited On Desire before. Register at http://ondesire.com

I’ve already registered and ready to contribute, let’s go! Log in at http://ondesire.com

I only want to visit On Desire for now. Visit http://ondesire.com

There was another way of doing things once, a way that has become marginalized and almost forgotten but perhaps not quite totally annihilated. A way that isn’t self destructive.

We all know the legend… the native people of several continents knew the way, lived it. Then the bad old European colonizers showed up with their plagues, organized ignorance and naked greed. The native people were nearly rubbed out and their ways was lost, almost.

If the people who practiced the old way couldn’t prevail in combat, then that’s the way it goes. One culture is stronger than another. Survival of the fittest, that’s natures way, right?  One might just as well believe that dumb Poles charged their horses directly at Nazi tanks in the battle of Krojanty.

You can turn a zillion dollars into 10 zillion by making a movie about it – big blue people, lots of explosions and a happy ending this time.

Meanwhile back on earth, we’re still fehgked. Our current behavior is killing us, we need to rediscover what’s been forgotten. Is there anyone left who remembers how it worked?

I am mostly invader stock, descended from European peasants and workers.  My mom’s parents had been farmers in Austria/Hungary. My dad’s parents were a mish mash of ingredients from the British Isles – Ireland, Scotland and England, and had been in America for several generations. However, there’s a rumor that my dad’s mom had some cherokee blood. Maybe I can claim lineage.

The bottom line is that this knowledge of the way is inherent in the earth’s systems, the wilds. If we just pay attention we can get back in alignment. Lineage is good – knowledge passed down and life ways maintained, but it’s built into the planet, we need look no further than the great big beautiful planet.

Inspired by http://www.suppressedhistories.net/

We’ve been writing and writing. What has all this writing accomplished? Here’s what we know so far.

• Objectives for the project are identified
• The story centers around the guide character – his motivations, experience, starting point and transformation
• Several character development schemes have been proposed
• An insane/ingenious approach to generate cutaway material – xroll – is on the table
• Scene construction supporting non linear presentation has been outlined

to be continued

Holographic scenes are trembling moments of pure gestalt. Put them in a sequence and call that a movie.  Perhaps an alternate sequence reveals more. If you play it backward you hear, “I buried Paul.”

I’m imagining a burst of experience that also has a whole story inside it, everything is there.

Won’t a series of holographic scenes feel repetitive, like we are saying the same things over and over again? What if the things we are saying in each scene are slightly different. One thing about people is their layered motivation. I don’t shoot you because I hate you, that’s like so totally impoverished. I shoot you because I burnt my toast this morning AND you’re a brutal serial rapist AND you remind me of my older brother who I loved but was killed in the war then my parents kept his room like a shrine AND my girlfriend want’s to get married though I don’t really love her AND I dreamt of red roses last night AND…

It’s the layers of motivation that give the story depth. They can be completely separate tracks, none alone sufficient to prompt action, but together – viola!

What the hell is xroll? What if it’s not a gimmick, but a central organizing principle? It’s thoughts and experience, something like the memories of Spotless Mind and the dream sequences of Brazil. There’s symbolism and layers of meaning, but xroll doesn’t have to resolve in the sense that everything is sewed up nice and neat, it just has to evoke. Resolution is an evocation, everything comes together and wham, there’s an emotion there. The typical Hollywood resolution is “Yippee, we won!” Think about Casablanca, that resolution was bitter sweet comradely cynicism between Rick and the french cop. Dude, layers of emotion, complexity.

A turbocharged vignette that serves up an emotional cocktail to nuance the next moment, flows from xroll. After Effects verite, magical realism in motion.

A plot is the structure that sequences events, yes/no? No – a plot exists however the events are sequenced. Humans have a strong temporal sensibility, even if the events are out of order, we’ll put them back in sequence. On second thought, yes – maybe a plot is a structure that sequences events, maybe what we call plots are just applications of temporal sensibility. This scene leads to this scene which leads to this scene… we’ll find a plot given enough chunks.

If we think of xroll as the spine of the narrative, then perhaps the actual traveling and scenes of same are extensions of it. Xroll contrasts to b-roll in that it’s central as opposed to peripheral. It’s what we keep returning to, the continuity. In ALM, are the sailing moments Xroll? The best part of the trip certainly, the core of the adventure. Why not?

Looks like a script is about to happen, the old index card shtick.

Holographic scenes… moments which taste of eternity, fragments that contain the whole. Xroll… the threads between the scenes, revelations of the underlying fabric of reality.

I’m skating the edge of confusion and rapture here. If the above sounds like blather, there’s a 50% chance it is.

The last several ALM posts have been about clarifying DK’s journey, why exactly did he get on the boat? Is he really searching for sustainable civilizations or was there another reason? Why is this trip shrouded in mystery? Maybe he was really sailing off to commit murder, to make a remote rendevous with extra terrestrials, to perform a sacred ritual of summoning… with only the eyes of gods and satellites upon him. Why does he take this trip and why do we care?

He has a stated mission and maybe he is sincere, or maybe he’s obfuscating his true motives. Perhaps he is sincere and he achieves his mission, but maybe the achievement pales in comparison to an unexpected boon. If he is hiding something, is the secret mission ever revealed? Does he achieve his objective and what does his machinations have to do with the world at large? Does he even know why he is really going, or is he driven by sleeper programming?

It’s intriguing to dive deeper into a treatment, to treat the significant layers.

Whatever his reason for going, the mission doesn’t necessarily determine the outcome. It’s perhaps the difference between what he sets out to do and what actually happens that’s interesting. Someone wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it, having difficulty remembering what it is, changes his mind, get’s something better – the game has many variations. Deconstructing DK’s motivation is a worthy excercise, because there may be more here than even he realizes. BTW, it creeps me out in a fun way to view myself from a meta perspective, PKD style.

‘What’ DK is going after implies ‘why’ – and that’s the basis of the story. DK is going after super powers, he is searching for sustainable civilizations, he is channeling wild wisdom. The ending comes when the going after is done – DK demonstrates enhanced power, he has retrieved artifacts from the future, he shares the wisdom… or he gave up, failed, found something better, changed his mind, etc.

I think a start and end is cool, that is we understand why DK goes and can evaluate what he gets, decide for ourselves whether he was successful.

Last night coming out of Sanshiro Sugata I and II, I overheard someone say, “the message was be nice to your enemies”. They missed the point, Sanshiro wasn’t being nice to his enemies, he de-enemized them, that was the triumph of Judo. That’s the essence of Japanese martial arts as portrayed by Kurusawa, not to vanquish your enemies but to transform them. Sanshiro’s strength is his power to transform.

It’s very the ending that we understand what Sanshiro has actually accomplished, and without being hit over the head with it. Lovely. A student becoming a martial arts master is a perfect vehicle for this sort of trip, what does he set out to do, what is the completion of his journey?  Does he get the girl? Without question – after he gets himself.

Dan Kelly is on this journey of discovery, he’s off to become miraculous, he’s searching for sustainable civilizations, he’s just an average American with an FBI record. Whatever his journey is, it’s open ended. Perhaps he has a general idea why he is out there but he doesn’t know what he will find or how it will change him. ALM is his transformation, what he thinks he’s about and what actually happens to him. The premise is open ended, but at the same time we have to know whether he succeeded in doing what he set out to. We want to know his start and end points.

Andrea’s approach is to cut the interviews short and then just have DK summarize what he learned, fitting the pieces together as he goes. His process is interpreted, translated to flow as a story. After Effects verite. Whatever’s not relevant drops to the cutting room floor, or maybe we’ll flashback out of sequence for special emphasis. Essentially I (the director) take over the narrative, it’s about getting the audience inside DK’s head, his thoughts and experience. This sort of thing would typically get tied together with voice over… but wait!

If we want to make these meta observations, long leaps of intuition and connection, why not do it experimentally – xroll? Suddenly, xroll isn’t a contrivance, it’s a way to experience DK’s thought flow directly, or at least as translated to the silver screen. Beyond mere voice over – it’s visual voice over.

The guide’s voice is like glue that holds the disparate pieces together and makes connections. Xroll goes beyond the guide’s voice to create a visual and audio style or environment that tells us we are in thought space, a bridging mode, the spine of the narrative.

What if there were a visual structure, a visual reference that anchored everything back? It could be map based – folks would be expecting a map anyway so we could make the map mental but disguised as geography. Or imagine an interface or an idea web. Since film is linear, we use a linear design rather than a spatial web that has to be scrolled across. How are elements organized in linear fashion, what’s an effective system for that?

Duh, a plot. A plot is a linear structure for organizing information. Wow, 360 degrees in one post, phenomenal. A book (comic book) seems linear in theory but it’s not strictly linear in execution. We can open a comic to any page and jump forward and backward pretty much instanteously. Except in a social setting like a theater, this is increasingly the case with movies too. Forget about physically rewinding the VCR tape past the playback heads, that’s archaic technology. Now we can pop to anywhere on the timeline with a click, or jump between chapters. Movies are designed to spool from beginning to end, they are typically not designed to work as random access.

Another circle – ALM could be designed for random access. Xroll and holographic scenes support this. Even in traditional linear spooling, xroll is the scaffold for constructing the experience, it’s the spinal cord of a flashing, sparking neural network. There’s where the script starts, the central concepts adjacent, meshing and turning together. What are they? The great galloping thoughts of DK on his journey, the fundamental ideas that infect him along the way, he stages of his transformation.

When you love a lot of people, how do you keep the connections fresh? This is a quandary for me as I’m blessed with a large extended family. Blogs help me make big chunks of my life public.

With the explosion of activity on the net, ‘public’ doesn’t mean seen by everyone. The idea that privacy is dead is misleading. I can publish my life via this blog and 99% of humans will never know I exist. Only 25% of poeple on earth have access to the internet and maybe 50% of those read English. Only a tiny fraction of the remaining 1 billion will ever know about my blog, read one word of what I write.

Public really means available to my clan. Let’s face it, most of the folks who are willing to wade through this dross already know me. They are here because I invited them. My guess is that even with all my tagging and whatnot, most of my bloggees are going to have some RL connection to me.

Blogging is really  for my extended family – that’s today’s insight – and I ought to remind the tribe of that. I fantasized that I was writing for a future world, for the crowds who will be showing up once I hit my stride as a filmmaker, world saver, visionary. Reality check – I write for myself and for the crowd of simulations that run in my head, my cast of precious and very personal characters.

What a relief!

introduction for character Dan Kelly (everyman)

Unless you’re totally evil or from another planet, you are probably concerned about the future of this one, our earth. It’s old news to talk about how much trouble we are in, so I won’t waste time doing so. Basically, we are screwed. The mutant marriage between governments and corporations is pulling the plug on the global life support system, pretty soon there won’t be enough food, water, air to breath, etc. As I said, this is old news.

Scuttling around trying not to think about it – the end of the world as we know it. I got fed up with this 21 century duck and cover. Recycling, new light bulbs and donations to the Sierra club weren’t enough somehow. I wanted to get out into the world, learn and take action. Change my own destiny and maybe the rest of the world’s too.

We’ve been are our own enemies for at least 100 years, starting back when the father of public relations Edward Bernays got his start, training women how to smoke. I am talking about consumption, our shared madness. I’ve been committing suicide for the better part of my life, me and a few billion other people. We’re consumers. Can we find a way to really live? A better question might be, do we want to live? Can we find a way to enjoy the benefits of science and art without wiping out the foundation of our lives? Is there a sustainable civilization?

I decided to answer this question for myself – what would an excellent life feel like? I am not so different from other people, a civilization is made of individuals like me. Maybe if I found my life, I would find a tiny part of our collective future. Perhaps others could learn something from my search. I could bring a whole planet along with me, as I search for sustainable civilizations.

Options

Discuss postponing DOG to do ALM

Carl and Yves as mentors

introduction for character Dan Kelly (becoming miraculous)

During intense experience I often get a clue about my full potential, what I am capable of. If I get into a situation that calls for a little something extra then lo, something extra shows up. When there’s no other option but to tap into extraordinary energy, it’s always been there. I am going to call this extraordinary energy – magic.

Miracle making.

When I realized how much trouble the planet was in and assessed the task of healing all the damage, I realized that a miracle might be needed to turn things around. If we were past the point of no return on carbon loading, then the global life support system would crash and that pretty much means we’re doomed. I have an affinity for science, great stuff – astronomy, cognition, computers… love it. However, if I’ve got to go beyond science to save the planet, I don’t have a problem with that. If I’ve got to go with divine intervention, fine.

In 1976, after watching the first Star Wars I wondered where my light saber was. The feeling has never quite left me, even as I hit my 30s then 40′s and watched George Lucas dilute his vision in sparkle and schlock.

Over the years, my powers began to manifest. It started with healing – if I found a damaged body, my hands would tingle.

One day, Richard showed up in his wetsuit. He had been windsurfing near my house and injured his knee. I think he had problems with it in the past and had seen a doctor, so he was pretty distraught, “I know I am going to need surgery this time.” I asked him to sit down and share the food I had been making with another friend, Ann. He eased into a rocking chair and I brought him a plate. I felt the tingle. Richard was a professional massage therapist and so I was a little shy asking him if I could help him, but he cautiously accepted. We all sat around for an hour or so, eating and talking while I gently worked on this knee, following my intuition. Eventually he stood up and said that it felt better. He got in his car and went home. A couple of days later we checked in with each other. His knee was totally fine.

On a remote island, hiking at night, I discovered I could sense objects in the darkness, as if some kind of proximity radar had activated. It was an experience totally new to me, like growing another sense. I wondered how many other undocumented features the human body had.

One rainy evening I slipped off my friend’s fire escape and fell 12 feet to concrete, landing flat on my back. The impact was so intense that I involuntarily pissed myself. After lying there for a few moments, I felt compelled to move. Movement is contraindicated after a bad fall as spinal cords can be severed by broken bone, leading to permanent paralysis. Knowing this rationally, I ignored the calls of my friend Jon to “stay still, don’t move!” I painfully rolled over onto my stomach, got onto my hands and knees, and promptly passed out.

I had a vision. I was in a sort of control room, doing something really engaging and important. I felt both ecstatic and purposeful. Then, an annoying noise began to intrude. It was alien and at the same time vaguely familiar. It was a person’s name (what’s a person? what’s a name?) being repeated. I then realized that the name was somehow my name, that there was this other existence where that name belonged to me. My friend was back there, calling my name. I felt compassion for my friends who were very worried about me, perhaps I better go back and make them feel better. I left the ecstatic place and came back to consciousness with the friendly flavor of loamy soil in my mouth – I had buried my face in a little swirl of dirt and leaves by the floor drain. I told Jon I was back and asked him how long I had been out, he said about 20 seconds. Seemed like a lot went down in those 20 seconds.

I told him I was going to get up and he protested, he said an ambulance was coming. I asked him why and he said that his wife Laura had called 911 as soon as I had passed out. Now I was totally determined to get up and out of there, this was not an experience I cared to end in a hospital – and me with no health care! He asked me again not to move but I told him to trust me, I was alright and ready to get up. “I’ll help you” he said and I replied “No, don’t help me,” but he was having none of it. “I am going to help you!”

I slowly stood up with his arm on me, everything intact, amazing. I tried walking and that worked too, tho there was quite a bit of pain. We went back into their house and waited for the ambulance to arrive. I convinced the paramedics that I was fine and that I wasn’t going to ride with them. They made me sign papers and I headed home to a hot bath.

This incident was something of a demonstration. Did I slip off the deck by mistake? On a dark rainy evening, I tossed my body into the void, fell 12 feet down into darkness, missing iron handrails and push mowers by inches. I fit into a spatial keyhole with very little room for error and impacted flat backed on concrete, taking most of the impact on my coccyx. My head did not bang against the concrete, my neck didn’t break. I was up and walking within minutes and fully recovered within a month. I got xrays just to be sure and there were no fractures. Fluke, crazy luck? We make our luck.

I began to make my luck in earnest, to train my power decisively. I knew that if I told folks I was traveling around becoming magic, they might not get it. So I came up with this idea of searching for a sustainable civilization. Basically, one formula for healing the earth would be to replace the current status quo with something more humane and balanced. It might be a good idea to figure out what that looked like first and then I could cause it to be. This would be my cover story, but the main objective was to open my channels of power, to activate all my undocumented features. etc. If saving the earth was going to take a miracle, I would become miraculous.

introduction for character Dan Kelly (time traveler)

Yes, another movie about how much trouble we are in. It’s also about how we got out of the trouble. If you remember the future as I do, you’ll know that we almost didn’t make it. Did I mention that I am a time traveler? Actually time refugee is a slicker fit.

Anyway, we almost didn’t make it. Looking back from the future, it’s much easier to see just how precarious the present is, but of course it’s not so obvious if the now is all you’ve ever known.  At the risk of sounding optimistic, I think the human race learned a valuable lesson by going through this, so in the after-future we won’t likely make the same mistakes we made in the pre-present.

To simplify the tenses, I’ll just refer to the present as the past. So how did we do it? We found our survival by looking for it. Folks just got bored with killing themselves and decided to try to find a little life. Some walked, some rode bicycles, some let the wind blow them hither and yon. They were like backwards archeologists – instead of searching for past civilizations, they went searching for future ones. The theory goes like this – since we decided to survive – then we would. That implied there was a way to survive, and probably the seeds of that way were scattered all over the place, just waiting to sprout. If folks found those seeds, then they could extrapolate what the seeds might grow into. Viola, the future. That’s how time travel works, btw or at least did work back in the day… that is, right now.

Let’s relive your ‘about to be’, discover what has almost happened and reenact a search that so many have yet to make. A sailboat I think and an inland ocean. I will be your guide of how we survived, how we didn’t cook the planet nor allow ignorance and greed to prevail – as it so ominously threatens to do so AT THIS VERY MOMENT, again, even though that may not be totally obvious. I am catching you at your most receptive, cause when the shit starts to hit the fan, there won’t be time to watch documentaries, you’ll be too busy building dikes and fending off looters. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Who is this character Dan Kelly, ALM guide? Why is the audience intrigued by his journey?

Based on my discussion with Andrea, I can’t assume the audience will understand my assumptions and motivations regarding ALM. The 900 lb gorilla in the room is me, this project springs from my own crazed mind. Andrea’s golden nugget – the audience doesn’t need to agree with me, they just need to be able to get me, to find me plausible.

It’s easy to forget just how weird a cat I am. The audience might not believe I am for real, so the project provides context. It’s helpful to step back and think of myself as a fictional character that has to be introduced to the audience. Rather than flooding the screen with a DK fest, I like the idea of providing just enough character development to intrigue and maybe vex a tad. Who the hell is this guy?

There are two objectives for ALM, to establish rapport between my character and the audience, and to present a pragmatic magic primer aka Terrorist Training Films TM. The pragmatic magic can be integral to the character development, or it could happen incidentally without ever being named, just oozing across. That’s a key question – do I put the magical agenda front and center or allow it to suffuse the project, giving it to the audience by osmosis? For the character Dan Kelly magic is an underlying rhythm, a given. He brings it to the fore only occasionally, either through his musings or by getting kicked in the ass by the big boot of circumstance.

These are worthy distinctions because initially I didn’t think much about my own role in this, I had the idea that I would somehow be this ghost collaging the insights of others. I was just one of those others, a host. Now I see that the whole thing is driven by DK, his choice to go in the first place, his decision where to stop, who to see. Why? What’s he about? What makes him do this? If we don’t know, nothing makes much sense.

I am test driving different versions of the ALM guide, just to see what pops. So far they are…

ALM guide, becoming miraculous – out of the closet about the true nature of ALM, provides ‘evidence’ of magic, no shame.

ALM guide, time refugee – a science fiction enthusiast, slipping into iconic characters as a way to speak about the unspeakable, “you’ve seen it in movies, now live it – THE END OF THE WORLD”

So the guide discussion is this – how much DK is enough?

Good Earth, have you been reading the recent posts from http://ondesire.com and http://holyboners.com? I have – and they are beginning to spin out of control. Some sort of fugue state is being entered into here, so many eggs are cracking wide I expect there’s one heck of a mega omelet on the horizon. I haven’t even done my review of Cameron’s Avatar in 3D or last night’s dinner with my favorite Africans. Let’s get this sorted out right now.

The Questions

What are my objectives for the two current projects?

What’s my plan to finish them / take them to the next level?

The Answers

I’ve got a mission, so let’s start there, Activating global consciousness to steward and expand the wilds. It’s a good mission, and one would expect my current projects to be in alignment. How then do these two movie projects support my mission?

1.0 Mission

1.1 DOG

Daughter of God is my most ambitious narrative project to date. It’s a surreal exploration of how picturesque and hilarious a crippled global life support system can get. The backstory also explores colonization and exploitation on a planetary scale. With this project I model my theories, channeling the answers to the questions that Fia asked last night – who benefits from the demise of an entire planet? Follow the money, follow the extraction of wealth. Who’s targeting all the world saviors, whose running this prison?

So Daughter of God is a vehicle for piercing the veil. It’s a way of figuring some things out, of playing with the story. Ah, there’s an insight.

What if the story has fragments, alternate eddies and branches? What if the edit is actually scrambled up to suggest alternate possibilities, variant explanations, visions beyond the existing narrative where all the backstories intermingle and cross pollinate? Y’all getting this? That’s how we rebuild the edit, with intersecting time lines and outcomes. Moments that suggest, fragments.

That means that the best moments are extracted and then interwoven as flash sidewise or parallel possibility, while remaining perfectly ordinary, like brushing teeth. Little diversion this, but worthy.

In summary, DOG supports the mission by being a way to better understand what might actually be going on in RL, suggest in ways like the i ching, never the same movie twice, ya get me? Got cha.

1.2 ALM

Seeking the artifacts of a future sustainable civilization is pragmatic action. No external authority is going to assemble our optimal existence and conveniently implode. We are responsible, I am responsible. The future surrounds us, fragments of annihilation and transcendence for the taking. We choose what we gather, I choose. That’s ALM, humans taking responsibility for our collective destiny, one Dan at a time. An adventure of autonomy and connection, of becoming miraculous and capable of planet saving. A hero’s journey waiting for each of us.

It’s about me, as Andrea pointed out, and my reinvention disguised as a sailing trip. Is it universal? Does it translate beyond boats and big lakes? Only if folks share my starting point. They don’t have to agree, they just have to get me. Stepping back, I realize that I am a character in this story.

The Dan Kelly character has a premise, aspirations, a costume, a budget, skills, assumptions, experience and a history. What do we need to know about him so that we can travel with him, suspend our disbelief, make his joy and pain our own?

He is a treehugger, an artist, a science fictionary, a warrior, a lover, a mystic, a caretaker, a technologist, a dreamer, a visionary. My character needs to be introduced to the audience, my character wants something badly and is having trouble getting it, my character undergoes a transformation. Don’t we all?

In summary, ALM supports the mission because it’s about what happens when WE decide to thrive. As my glorious destiny relies on the repair and care of the global life support system, I must become capable of healing planets. I must discover and eventually implement sustainable civilizations. If these epic outcomes are beyond the scope of my present self, then I must purposefully transform and become miraculous. That is the journey worth taking, the true and vital journey of ALM, common to all.

Epilogue

Many folks will find the premise crazy, so I’ve got to make a solid case that my character actually believes that he can develop extraordinary abilities and has ‘evidence’ to support it. Then even if they think my character is crazy, they’ll go on the journey with him. This crazy character will venture out to become a super hero and the surprise ending will be – maybe he was not so crazy after all.

The audience attitude might begin with ‘the poor delusional fellow is captivating’ then gradually progress to ‘wait, maybe he’s making sense’ and finish with ‘whoa, where do I sign up?’ It’s a cognitive hack for extracting folks from the suicidal hypnosis of dominant culture. Start them off with the idea that they are watching a crazy person running amuck, then give them cause to question that premise and in so doing examine their assumptions about what it means to be rational in a culture bent on apocalypse. Wonko the Sane lived outside the asylum (and he got his movie made).

I scanned and posted the audience feedback cards within a week of the Evening of Exploration, but over a month went by before I read and sorted them into categories. Why did it take so long? This question triggered a small crisis – Am I loosing momentum on the ALM project? Do I have a plan? What have I accomplished in the 3 months since the end of the trip?

This is one of those exciting blog moments where I have to grope around for a bit. Flashback!

October – December 2009

In early October Hello World and I returned home with about 30 hours of HD video. During the next two weeks I converted the video, shot a visual inventory and edited Evolution, the repair and packing sequence. I sorted, cleaned and stored all the gear. Hitching a ride back to Brooklyn with my brother Steve on 10/20, I settled down to catalog the video and post excerpts to the ondesire blog. Was there a feature length documentary lurking in there somewhere?  In theory, a methodical review of the raw material would allow major themes to percolate.

Watching the video and seeing all the folks who supported ALM started me fantasizing about throwing a big party. I also wanted to introduce more of my Northern Michigan tribe to the project and expand it’s audience. I imagined organizing an event around a rough cut of the movie and including structured feedback both to foster interaction and create a sense of participation. I was planning to return to to Northern Michigan for Thanksgiving anyway, maybe a month was enough time to plan an event and cut a rough…

The Evening of Exploration was born!

Turns out that 1 month was not enough time to become familiar with all the footage, edit something coherent AND organize / promote a public exhibition. I dedicated a lot of energy to getting the theater filled – repeatedly emailing the scattered tribe, blogging, creating enticing imagery and composing press releases. To expand and diversify the audience, I invited Gretchen Eichberger to present choreography and the ukulele duo Saldaje (Melonie Steffes and Shawn Anchak) to play music. The price I paid for a nearly full theater was less time for editing.

Sweating bullets that the bumpy NYC to Chicago Amtrak ride would ding the stack of sata hard drives humming at my feet, I finally found a decent introduction – only four days before the Evening. My brother and sister helped me hash out a protocol for audience feedback in the rental car from Chicago to Beulah. Over the holiday, I grappled with the stark realization that my rough cut would NOT be the kernel of a coherent structure, but rather a smorgasbord of loosely connected ideas.

The Evening was fun and I reconnected with many excellent people. My original objectives were achieved to varying degrees…

Celebrate those who helped with the project

Seeing themselves onscreen often makes folks excited. Just being invited to a special event is nice too, especially if there’s food and  interesting art. I could’ve done a better job of recognizing the collaborators if the movie had credits and / or if I mentioned specific names during my introduction. Basically, that didn’t happen because I ran out of time.

Connect regional folks to the project, build community support and awareness

It’s been over a month since the evening, so if I am planning on following up and consolidating this audience, I had better do it in the next couple of days. The evening did facilitate a productive feedback session with Steve Elrick. Also, a fantastic new friend and ally has appeared as a direct result of the Evening’s intense promotion. Andrea Maio is a film maker who missed the Evening but tracked me down after. We had a blast hanging out and she has since decided to relocate to Benzie County. I’ll be linking to her blog as soon as it’s up. Finally, Susan Koenig wrote an article about the Evening that may or may not have appeared in the Benzie Record Patriot, I’m still waiting to hear.

Get some structured feedback

I threw a variety of material at the audience, curious only to know what stood out, what made an impression. My feedback protocol wasn’t all that rigorous because the editing had barely begun. The responses were useful, the same five moments were mentioned by 52% of the audience. Several folks disregarded my instructions and offered detailed advice about editing and some even felt compelled to trot out their personal angst… awesome! I am so grateful for the responses, the only people I have a beef with are those that didn’t bother to fill out cards – like my brother and father. Geez, relatives can be a real pain.

Deadline motivates

Setting an intense deadline was both good and bad.

Rather than taking that the time to move methodically through the video, I was forced to slam together disparate fragments just to have something to show. This deferred the real edit process by a month. As the Evening got closer, I felt very scattered and struggled to let go of my expectations. I fretted that telling a disjointed story would actually deter the audience from following ALM’s progress. Key elements of the event were scaled down or abandoned because time was tight.

I am only now recovering from the trauma of promising a little too much.  Deadlines are productive only when matched to specific outcomes well within the range of the possible. Deadlines can have an element of risk, they can stretch our identity and push our personal envelope – a little. Finessing the balance between what we are and what we want to be is the art of the setting deadlines. It’s wise to take an inventory of variables first – how many new things will have happen at once? Even for a turbo charged polymath, attempting more than 2 new things is asking for trouble.

The Evening would have been a better if I had conceptualized the event as presenting ‘selected excerpts’, rather than promising a ‘rough cut’. The problem was in my own mind, most folks don’t know the difference between selected excerpts and a rough cut anyway. Crazy expectations caused me to wig out.

December 2009 – January 2o1o

I whiled away another 2 weeks in Beulah before renting a Hyundai and returning to Brooklyn. Once back, I bit the bullet and dropped $2000 on 20 x 1 TB hard drives for cloning my archive. I need about 6 drives more to finish, but at least now I can travel with ALM. I finally tallied the feedback results and posted some comments. Andrea suggested a new tack for the project that I like. I’ve been reorganizing the blogs in preparation for the next push and feel the power flowing back. So maybe I am not groping anymore.

Gretchen and I are excited to welcome Saldaje to our Evening of Exploration. Shaun and Melonie do some spooky and magical things with ukuleles.

Lake Michigan shares 1600 miles of shoreline with 4 states. The 2009 expedition of Around Lake Michigan explored about 300 miles or 1/5 of the perimeter in 3 weeks.

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1. Elberta Beach 09/05 – 09/06

2. South of Esch Road and Otter Creek 09/06 – 09/07

3 South of Sleeping Bear Point 09/07 – 09/08

4 Crescent City, North Manitou Island 09/08 – 09/10

5 Northport 09/10 – 09/11

6 West End Beach, Traverse City 09/11 – 09/17

7 Old Mission Peninsula 09/17 – 09/18

8 Barnes Park 09/18 – 09/19

9 Charlevoix 09/19 – 09/20

10 St James Bay, Beaver Island 09/20 – 9/23

11 Garden Island 9/23 – 9/24

12 UP 9/24 – 9/25

13 Dune Buggy Blowouts 9/25 – 9/26

14 Stonington Peninsula 9/26 – 9/30

15 South of Crescent City, North Manitou Island 9/30 – 10/1

16 Point Betsie (bike ride back to house) 10/1 – 10/2

I recorded an iPhone audio snippet of my moolit sail to Otter Creek.

The slight wind continued for what seemed hours. In the dark, I passed chatty smokers anchored by what I guessed to be Platte River. Later and far ahead, a bonfire surged in brightness almost rhythmically. My destination was supposed to be a sort of Benzie ‘Burning Man’ near Otter Creek and I figured that must be it. After a long approach, I was disappointed to find two idiots squirting their campfire with lighter fluid – for fun. I felt as if I was participating in a post apocalyptic moment, and perhaps my passing sobered them – beyond their fire dazzled eyes, a ghost ship near enough to touch and pale with moonlight, passes in utter silence. Urgent whispered voices…

“There’s a sailboat there.”
“What?”
“There’s a sailboat right there”.
“Whoa.”

Maybe their little moment of squandering petroleum was trumped, their boredom pierced and shredded finally by the sublime. Hello World and I certainly felt like a manifestation of the Mystery that night.

Just activated WordPress for the iPhone, and that’s where I’m posting from. Who needs Twitter?

A set back today in the reassembly of Hello World. I bunged the starter threads on both sides of the dolphin striker, so I’ve got to fix ‘em before I can rivet the mast step and raise the mast. I’ve tried grinding off a bit of each end and bought fresh nuts to reestablish the threads, but no dice. My plan is to find a small concave grinding stone tomorrow and round off the ends of the striker so they’ll be more likely to accept nuts. If that doesn’t work i’ll have to find a set of Murray’s thread chasers and pull the whole striker apart. Another busy day ahead.

Patrick and Luke just stopped by with cake.

Look Ma, pictures! A very handy little blogging utility, the iPhone.

Dan here! Those of you reading On Desire so far may be annoyed with my quirky and often obtuse writing style. With the delivery of the Macbook Pro two days ago, Kai is in the process of coming online and catching up with his posts. I’d love to find a competent and courageous editor to svelte up our ramblings. In the meantime it is with great humility and not a little trepidation that I attempt to edit my colleague’s writing. This could mean the end of the entire project…

The editing process provides insights about blog protocols and standards that we can all apply. Steeped in usability issues during my days as an interface designer, I try to take a reader friendly approach to writing.

After grappling with Kai’s first page for an hour or two, I retired to the bathtub to re-read the first 15 pages of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I think I’m finally savvy enough to get the E of S message. Whether I actually apply it’s directives only time will tell. To all On Desire bloggers – make life easy for the reader – apply Elements of Style!

An aside – I think my fondness for code and working with complex software like Final Cut Pro and After Effects has set me up. Language is an artistic encryption. Crafting language is problem solving – how to make an idea clear and concise, how to provide the reader with an efficient workflow. Last night I re-enacted Archimedes by fusing hot water, a geeky past, Elements of Style, and, of course, a bathtub. Eureka! I’m ready to write better.

Here’s my comments for Kai…

I put some serious effort into editing because blog pages are more permanent than posts and therefor more frequently visited. I think it’s worth the effort because our ability to communicate clearly will have a big impact on our ability to 1) share subtle insights 2) attract collaborators and 3) achieve worthy outcomes for the planet.

Some sentences were trying to say too much and some i couldn’t decipher – those are in bold. I’ve attempted to simplify the sentences while keeping the jist. I’ve added a little introductory material so that folks get context. I’ve broken up unrelated ideas into separate sentences.

One question to ask is what are you trying to get across? Why write at all? It’s not just a list of what happened, it’s your humor, philosophy and approach to life that should come through. What you choose to write about says a lot about you. Your pride in your skills reads well, don’t be afraid to give geeky details if there’s a story to tell. Remember the African Queen, not such a great movie except when the details show up – forging a propeller on the beach, leeches in the swamps, homemade torpedos, the character’s development …

Here are some standards we can use through the blog.

Our main characters should be named in full when first introduced – my filmmaker friend Dan Kelly, then say Dan after that. First names are fine for minor characters, but they might still need some intro. You know who your cast is but our readers don’t. Why are they important to the story? Give us some context. Using full names also increases the value of this narrative to the world at large because it can be productively tagged.

We don’t need to put ships names in quotes if we capitalize them -  Torea instead of ‘Torea’, Desire instead of ‘Desire’.

Try and maintain a specific timeline. It’s too much work for the reader to try and figure out your history when the narrative jumps from now to 4 months later, then there’s a flashback to last year, then a few more days pass. Just insert the month and year, (no abbreviations).

After my sex change operation in April of 2006, I enjoyed a few months of acclaim working as a trans stripper. I was reminded of my first exposure to Queen in 1981, and how I dreamed of channeling Freddie Mercury, even though he was still alive then. By the fall of 2006, I felt a little discontented and began investigating how to shift my bio identity beyond human limits, perhaps to a lichen hybrid. I had always liked lichen and often played at being lichen as a wee lad, crouching low on a rock and not moving for hours or even days at a time. It was great to be 6 years old in 1969.

I took out pictures because something buggy was going on. We can put them back once the text is right.

As reported a few weeks back, Kai’s got problems with Desire. It’s been sitting for so long unattended that there’s no way he can get it ready in time to return to Seattle ahead of big weather in September. After a weekend of soul searching, he decided to keep Desire dry and prepare her for an eventual sale.

There are other boats we can borrow and hitch rides on, but that’s different from having our own boat on our own schedule. Combined with my inability to find boat transport to Hawaii, we are facing a radical redesign of On Desire. We don’t have a reliable boat in Hawaii nor am I even in Hawaii. Even if I could get there, summer is about half over.

Why not fly? It’s not about the money – jet service from LA to Honolulu is around $100, I could do a round trip from Michigan to Hawaii for less the $400 and be there in a few days. Al Gore gave himself a free pass to make Inconvenient Truth, but how much Co2 did he loft in to the atmosphere jetting hither and yon? I have to take responsibility for my own impact, whatever my good intentions happen to be. It’s about kicking my terrorist/consumer addiction, even if it means passing up on a groovy summer in Hawaii.

How can Kai and I discuss sustainability without shared geography? How can we leverage our complimentary powers if we can’t combine them in physical space? That’s exactly what we are going to figure out in the next 2 weeks, right here. The wind turbine slices the sky in blogdom – and you’re invited.

Still working on getting over the last dregs of my Honolulu cold. Several interesting developments in the last week though. Apple has come through on it’s pledge to loan us a spanking new Macbook Pro laptop with all the latest software to write and edit video from your lap. I also went ahead and bit the bullet on buying a video camera that fits my action packed lifestyle. Panasonic, who also make bullet proof laptops called Toughbooks, offers a flash card video camera that’s water proof (to 5 feet) right out of the box. Between the laptop and the camera I hope to get the On Desire project at least off of the ground into a low hover.

One of the things about being in barnacle mode, as opposed to spending much of my effort surviving on the food chain, is that occasionally a really tasty morsel drifts your way. Serendipitous synchronicity. It’s just a matter of patience and recognizing it when it is brought to you on the current.

Yesterday I got a call from Dr. Roli, a good friend of mine in San Diego. He asked me if I’d be interested in helping him deliver a 58′ Mandarin motor sailer (Sea Horse Shipyards, Hong Kong) named Jungle from Hawaii to Newport, CA. I spoke with Jim, the owner, this morning for about an hour and a half.

It sounds like a solid boat, appointed well with the makings of a capable crew. In a worst case scenario Roli and I could run the boat by ourselves. Plus Jim wants to pay me to do a bunch of electronic/electrical upgrades on the boat. The time frame is to leave from Ko Olina, HI on August 22nd with about a 20 day passage to Newport, CA.

That gives me plenty of time to get Desire sorted out, as well as work on some video stuff and do some sailing on Siesta.

I don’t see a down side.

Back in Kona after a long weekend in Honolulu, racing on Siesta and whooping it up under the 4th of July fireworks. Sick as a dog from a cold, most likely picked up on the flight to Honolulu.

Too many nights celebrating with the tribe this week. Forsaking my sauna pals I crawled into bed at 9:30 pm last night for much needed tissue regeneration. Up at first light this morning and wrapping the Shop and Save project from June 28. Find it under the ‘project chapters’ category.

Waiting for transportation news from various fronts. It’s a radiant day, slightly brisk with sparkling waves crests and fluttering leaves. There’s a dance event happening here tonight.

Speaking of container ships, Marc Levinson’s ‘The Box‘ looks tasty. You can read the first chapter as html or pdf. Looking forward to having it in hand as I ride the Southwest Chief.

So here I am again, in my well appointed fiberglass barnacle on the edge of paradise behind a chain link fence, only this time no dogs parole the perimeter. Instead of smelling cordite and consumed jet fuel I’ve got whiffs of paint, diesel, vog (volcanic smog) and the occasional sun baked stinky fish dumpster next to the boat ramp wafting to my land bound boat. I’m entrenched here, stuck in barnacle mode, only coming out of my 26 foot shell to feed, crap and occasionally wash.

Captain Zardoz with no sign of angles in the LZ. My ethos is overwhelming my sensibilities. I live by my dreams but have learned to dream within my means and I’ve always made it work out for me (with occasional help from friends and strangers). It’s just a matter of humping it through the rough times to the next shiny valley or coastline beyond this swamp. I’m getting too old for this shit. I’d rather just stay in blissful barnacle mode but I can’t sustain that for more than a few weeks at a time. I have to deal with the other side of my nature which in fluid and transitional. Vagabond, hobo on life’s coat tails or at the helm. I need to move forward in some direction. Any sensible direction. It’s just a matter of packing lightly, picking a direction and not annoying the other passengers (while navigating around the ones that annoy you).

Like I’ve said, I’ve been here before and have gotten through it to the next plateau of my existence. Bernard Motisie understood the fallacy of focusing on a fixed destination. He understood the magic and uniqueness of the moment. The Zen of being involved with the sea and life in general. Honing your craft and your spirit to meet life on it’s own terms in what ever manner it comes to you.

I don’t think Dan’s coming to Hawaii. It seems, for ideological reasons as he won’t fly in a jet due to it’s carbon footprint. I can respect his convictions though I don’t fully adopt them as my own. He’s been trying to hitch a ride on a boat headed this way for the past couple of months. The container lines haven’t returned his call and TransPac left yesterday. My own window for sailing Desire safely back to Seattle  is closing rapidly. Dan’s bought a Hobie Cat and plans on filming while sailing around Lake Michigan this summer.

I asked John to come out to Hawaii to do some of the filming I had planned to do with Dan but it seems like more of a wank-fest at this point that anything. The On Desire project that Dan and I had been whittling, honing and distilling for the last half year or so hasn’t so much been about documenting my own exploits on the water as much as using Desire as a vehicle to get a bigger message out into the world. Namely, using the Hawaii Island chain as a metaphor to explore the questions surrounding sustainability of the planet, humanity and our collective culture as a whole.

So where does this half filled balloon of an idea leave me? Desire’s blue water integrity has been seriously compromised by the elements and by my neglect of her over the past few years. She can still be a viable boat for inter-island travel. This is the minimal state that I would need get her in to do our On Desire project.

But I am having serious doubts about her long distance capabilities. While her rigging and hull appear to be sound, her electrical and mechanical systems are in question. To get her to a state where I would trust her with my life to transverse the 3,000 mile sailing route between Kona and Seattle I would basically have to gut her internal systems and start from scratch.

I have neither the time nor resources to accomplish what is really needed. If I was bull headed enough (and some say I am) I could get her off this rock and pointed towards the Pacific Northwest with little more than sweat and a minimal amount of blood and tears. My biggest concerns are not really with Desire at all. My concerns are with my own ability to spend 35-40 days by myself in a 26 foot leaky boat.

Then there are my concerns about large moving objects. In my previous journeys I was pretty much paralleling and safely trying to offset the tracks of shipping routes. Still, with all possible diligence I nearly got run over twice by ships and once by a fishing vessel not to mention nearly T-boning a 900 foot Korean container ship, dead in the water with no signs of life 80 miles off of San Francisco. Whenever I needed to cross a shipping route I crossed it at a 90 degree angle for 5-10 miles and then continued on my course.  On the track I need to travel the 3,000 mile sailing route between Kona and Seattle I will be crossing the paths of ships going to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. Kind of like an armadillo crossing the interstate.

I don’t ever really have nightmares. It’s the lucid reality based wake-mares that concern me. Even with my radar, marine radar detection system, radios, lights, reflectors, all of my safety and survival gear and well honed nautical senses it’s a crap shoot at best. Ninety percent of what I need to rely on when I have to sleep are my electronics. Even if I outfit ‘Desire’ with the latest AIS system (a localized ship transponder identification system) I have to rely on Desire’s solar panels, wind generator, engine, batteries and switching system to produce, store and channel the power I need to keep her nervous system and senses alive.

In short I feel that Desire has become a very well mannered and distinguished old lady, who shouldn’t (for mercy’s sake) stray too far from the porch without major surgery.

So the working plan now is to salvage what I need from her, box that up and ship it by slow boat to Seattle. Spruce her up as best I can and put her on the market, reestablish some sort of career in Seattle and plan on the next chapter of my life, most likely involving some sort of water born activity.

Watch Gretchen Eichberger at Shop and Save

Here’s another chapter of On Desire in collaboration with Gretchen Eichberger and the Northwest Michigan Folklife Center. Camera ops are Patrick and Yo. Enjoy!

The first wave of Transpac 2009 starts without me tomorrow. Jets are only $100 from LA to Honolulu – not an option. So how am I getting to Hawaii?

I spoke to the San Francisco office of Greenpeace and passed them my information. I also tweeted what I believe to be the GP national office in Washington DC. I’ll follow up on Monday.

On the suggestion of my brother Mike I called Don Seth,  an alumni of the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. He gave me Lisa’s number at the Academy and she said that it’s hard to get civilians on government boats after 911, but that she would try and find contact info for her environmental liason. Don also suggested I survey the harbor masters for news of boats headed to Hawaii, which I’ve started.

There are no cruise ships going to Hawaii until September. That’s kind of a relief actually. Shuffleboard gives me the willies.

I’ll be reposting to all the Cruiser communities on Monday. Findacrew has been sending me updates, but so far the closest they’ve come is a research boat returning to California from Hawaii in late August. That could have worked for the ride back, but my posted profile did not scintillate the ship’s skipper.

It’s time to talk to the container ship companies. This is my first preference and so I’ve taken a little more time getting ready to make the calls. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, container ships are a major enabling component of the Hawaiian economy and consumer culture in general. Documenting a container ship’s passage to the islands would be a fantastic starting segment for On Desire.

I have about 6 more days for my ship to come in. Passage can take from 7-30 days and it’s already almost July. So we are right down to the wire. Whoo hoo!

In other news, I’ve been working with the Bear Lake fellowship to get their movie business up and running. The entire team was out in the field yesterday to document a local band. Then Gretchen Eichberger, Patrick and I shot a fantastic segment in the Shop and Save for the Northwest Michigan Folklife Center and On Desire. We may try another pass today.

Patrick and I bought a 16′ Hobie cat with trailer for $400 from Benzonia potters Alan and Suzie Vigland. A serious platform for adventure! Stone monger Mike Murphy and I are picking it up today.

Here’s to magic and flowing with the cosmic plan.

8:50 AM 8/3/06

For me, the ocean is a place that keeps me riveted to the reality of the moment. A place which is always changing and one that keeps me focused and alive in so many sublime ways. I feel comfortable there. I am always learning new things and honing the art and craft of crossing large amounts of water. Dwelling on land as need be, building, fixing, preparing, before heading out to sea again.

12:25 PM 6/20/09 hst – Kona dry dock (again)

I wrote the above three years ago and here I am back in the same relative place again. Desire is a shambles bordering on a disaster. The three years of dry heat, volcanic sand storms, intense UV, salt, ozone, acid rain from the volcano and, (don’t forget) the bees, have not been kind to her. Rubber is melting, turning to tar. The other day I picked up a graduated plastic cup that I use to mix paint and epoxy. It shattered in my hand like glass.

The bilges were full of rain water and diesel: rain water from all of the leaky deck fittings and diesel from a fuel hose somewhere between the engine and fuel tank. The whole outside of the boat is coated with a chalky white UV ray oxidation of the paints and fiberglass, metal corrosion from the salt and acid rain and a fine black grit everywhere from the volcanic soil blowing around.

The Marina staff set Desire down in the work yard. After wiping the tar off of my hands from the bike lock jacket that holds Desire’s main hatch closed, I dig through her main cabin like an archeologist returning to a long lost site. I take a pick-up load of sails, boxes and assorted boat equipment to a rented storage locker while I sort through the rest of the boat. For two days I wash and scrub the dirt and oxidation off of the hull and topsides and pile tools, deck equipment and near term parts/projects next to the boat.

Desire in storage yard.

The bilges keep filling with diesel tinged water every time I wash the boat. It’s refit triage – doing the best I can to get things sorted and organized.

Meanwhile, the truck I borrowed from Steve starts having problems at speeds over 30 mph. Seems like a fuel thing so I swap out the fuel pump and filter. No change. I take it to a shop and they want $550 to change the plugs, wire, distributor cap and rotor. Steve buys the parts for $80 and we install all the new parts the shop suggested. No change. Steve suggests we call a tow truck that he knows and take it down to his mechanic in Kealeakua. The tow truck shows up and it’s too small to haul a herking Ford F-150 long bed. A second truck shows up a couple of hours later and the truck is gone.

Desire and BF2 (big frig'n ford)

Sans transport, I do what I can with the boat. More bad news – the entire battery system is essentially fucked. I can’t get any of the radios to power up even with the charger on full blast. I need to replace all 5 batteries in the 3 separate banks I have set up on ‘Desire’. At this rate she’s sinking faster than I can bail her out. Thank the powers that be that she’s sitting solidly on her keels on a relatively stable concrete pad here in the Kona boat yard.

Dan calls to tell me he may have a ride on a big boat called the ‘Lynx’ in the upcoming Trans-Pac race. That’ll be at least mid-July before he gets here. But then I’m not going anywhere fast with ‘Desire’ and the later I leave Hawaii for the mainland, the faster my passage will be. As long as I get to Seattle before the snow and ice, I should be all right.

So here I am, again. Stuck on a semi-deserted island, my boat a shambles and miles to go before I sleep. I have to get ‘Desire’ wet again – even if I can just get her out of the harbor and she sinks. In that scenario I could raise her to the surface with my non-patented emergency flotation system (assuming I can get THAT operational), drag her up the mountain, set her keels on a winds swept lava flow and convert her into a nice, nautically themed cabin. I’ve already draw sketches of her with an added cockpit sleeping loft and the v-berth virtual office array.

While getting her back to her former glory should be my primary focus I don’t think that’s practical right now. With bull headed determination I know that I can get her floating and functional again. After that I could do what it takes to take her get her blue water capable again.

Maybe I’m inspired by my days in Brooklyn and what I accomplished there. Today Dan and I reminisced about the time I took him and my brother Dirk bridge climbing. We summitted my favorite, the Manhattan Bridge, via the east tower route.

The Manhattan Bridge has a series of huge suspension cables draped between 4 sphere topped towers. These ornamental spheres are approximately 6-7 feet in diameter and although the appear solid from the ground are actually made up of cast iron verticle slats. Furthermore, each of these globes sit on a short pedestal that has an entry hatch underneath. Besides the ocean, these balls are one of the most dramatic spots I have ever been in.

All three of us squirmed through the hatch into the interior of the globe. Leaning back against the curving slats, we enjoyed a 360 panorama of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. To the east and west, the massive suspension cables curve down to the road surface far below. Gazing through the slats, it looks like we are about to roll down the track of a massive pinball roller coaster – like in modern art museums and fashionable bus terminals. Being inside a globe perched on a pedestal 400+ feet above the east river, there’s a simultaneous impression of being inside giant golf ball on a tee. At any moment a cosmic golf club could swing out of the heavens and whack us across Manhattan and the Hudson River into the back woods of Jersey.

You are truly on top of the world.

Ultimately it comes down to the two most fundamental questions of human nature. How did I get here and where am I going?

From:       Dan Kelly
Subject:   Hey Steve!
Date:        June 16, 2009 7:36:07 PM EDT
To:            Steve Jobs, Apple Computer

Hey Steve,

Trust you are doing well. I haven’t been following your progress, have you looked into the Gerson Therapy? There’s a couple of documentaries out there that are intriguing. Please find a way to stick around awhile, you make the earth an more interesting place to live.

I am a filmmaker working on an environmental documentary around the Hawaiian Islands this summer. My collaborator Kai Schwarz needs a new computer, but he’s been busy trying to get our boat in order and hasn’t had much luck with craigslist on the big island. I need him posting his adventures to our project blog asap, so I thought I’d ask you directly. There doesn’t seem to be a official channel at Apple for this sort of request – we don’t work for a school or a non-profit, though we definitely want to share what we discover for the benefit of the planet.

Here’s the blog for our project… http://ondesire.com

In any case, if you have time this summer and feel like hanging with a couple of trouble makers, get in touch. We’ll be dreaming some big dreams aboard Desire and could always use another visionary in the mix.

Much love,

Dan Kelly
231 882-0460

I laze. It’s spring at the artist house, lovely. One might conjecture a very slow tourist season hereabouts, what with the end of capitalism and all. Sigh! What a time to be thousands of miles away. A cat eating mackerel in the late afternoon glow.  A silver lake sparkling. Shrug aside the to do list and the clamoring social appointments. Recline in the rocking chair with a laptop to tap on. Bliss. I turned down a tribal sauna for this moment, so you know it’s pretty special.

Life as a practice, cultivating moments of utter rapture while living in agreement with earth. This is both my lifestyle and quest. It’s the basis for creating without instrumentality and for healing. It’s sweet.

I’ve got a friend who denies that anyone can live in agreement with earth. According to her/him, all the people who might have been capable of living in agreement were wiped out by us, the modern people. Any attempt at balance is futile for we ourselves are out of balance and totally crazed. It’s the old ‘people are a planetary cancer’ schtick. She/he’s not a bad sort, just murky. Some smart people don’t know how to settle the silt – always making with the spoon, stirring up their guts.

If I am addicted to anger, I might get a fix by ranting against the hypocrisy of green tinted consumption. If I’m addicted to disconnection, I might declare myself to be lone member of an elite environmental vanguard, ready and willing to slam everyone who doesn’t conform to my ideas. Righteous arrogance doesn’t promote stewardship any better than sleeping in front of a TV does. It drains away alliances. It makes folks sick. It’s boring.

Hard truths rock, don’t get me wrong. I want to reveal my insidious assumptions, identify the buggy lines of code. What am I ignoring? I appreciate uncomfortable insight from cantankerous curmudgeons. To awaken the world, we must unbundle the personal horror show.

I used to think that anger was a response to forces and events outside myself, but I’ve discovered that anger is always my responsibility. This recognition transmutes rage into productive energy and eventually anger becomes less prominent in the palette of emotions. Although my friend can be a pain in the ass, I know about her/his struggle. I don’t expect her/his journey to parallel mine, I just imagine her/him finding the center someday, cutting herself/himself some slack. Perhaps she/he feels that humans are incapable of balance because that’s her/his personal experience. It doesn’t have to be so forever.

Ah, to be less of an informer and more of a demonstrator. I want to demonstrate pragmatic practice for getting us all where we want to go – environmental sustainability, social justice and, (taking a cue from the Pachamama Alliance), spiritual fulfillment.

Anyway it’s time to make dinner and revisist the to do list. 10 more days before I am late for the boat!

It’s actually July 9, 2009 and I just now found this poem from Kari Tomashik for On Desire.

From:     Kari
Subject:     RE: On Desire
Date:     June 3, 2009 8:02:42 PM GMT-04:00
To:    Dan
Cc:    Kari

p.s.
on desire……

deserving of a poem….

sail
to whom?
to what?
what from?
what to?
loneliness and video cams wrapped inside a cabin
two flowing to one island
your pants may get too tight or too loose
but remember they are your pants
and if you can’t remember that
just throw them overboard
and watch within
the water
where do they go?
what will they become?
remember everything can get thrown over
shit, you can even throw your self over
and then what will you become?

peace, love, artists in love,
Kari

May 28, 2009… Train as in practice, not what hobos ride. How do we prepare ourselves for anything. Just because I am drinking a beer right now doesn’t mean that I couldn’t whoop a battalion of fascists with one arm tied behind my back or run 10 miles in under an hour. Ok, so maybe I am almost in shape, but that’s a temporary state of affairs. Here’s the training routine starting tomorrow, after I sober up.

Pre-production training May 28 – June 5

Daily

blog planning and update, (30 minutes maximum) x 2
top 3 objectives visualization and feeling into being x 2, (10 minutes)
yoga or tai chi (1 hour)
production (2 hour)
Pre-production and preparation (6 hours)

Sunday

blog revisions and organization (4 hours)

Here a silver gray and green morning with rain lightly tapping on spring leaves, copper roof and stone.  Location – Artist house, Beulah, Michigan, USA, Earth. It’s exceptional and a little hard to believe. I drove 18 hours in a Penske box truck loaded with Brooklyn life, crashed, unpacked and returned the rig and then spent a day with the Bear Lake family. Now quiet and comfortable in a rocking chair, looking out at the lake – a perfect moment. In a week or so I’ll be on the road, lugging a light production kit across continents and oceans. Come along, we are to adventure together.

I’ve got a hefty to do list yet to process, make no mistake.  Yet I feel the pace changing with the start of Desire. I am at the way station between what I was and what I am about to be, shifting into travel time. Cultivating presence. Everything is adequate, enough.

Babalu, the Deduytsches and Kai have reached Atuana, Hiva Oa. Land ho! He should be online in about 3 weeks.

Register on this blog and contribute, we’d love that!

I’ve been listening to Zietgeist addendum today while rotoscoping Almonds and had a flash on self education.

My brother Steve and I have been talking about how students emerge from college with significant debt. His kids (my nephews) are not very interested in college at present. They are expanding their artistic chops and making movies. It’s the family business.

Just as independent film has broken out of the Hollywood formula, perhaps  Zeitgiest is a proof of concept for independent education. An exploration of an education strategy that might lead to a resource based society.

Certainly the documentation of life is commonplace, absolutely ubiquitous. Cheap cameras could be the enabling technology for independent education. What makes an event documentation worthy? Vacation, family… what about education? Epic adventures and insight, fantastic pratfalls and utter disasters, fortunate accidents… Document it and share it, add it to the archive of knowledge. It’s already happening all over the net but I’ve got something slightly more deliberate in mind.

Almonds was created as a finding of the way and Desire grows this experiment. These projects are inventing an approach to independent education. Maybe a protocol, a paradigm, a perspective. There’s a subtlety here that I may not be quite able to tease out, having something to do with ubiquitous cameras, the world and learning. Anyone else get it? If so, let me know.

Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation is trying something interesting. They are posting chapters of the documentary Rethinking Afghanistan as they are completed. This provides for a lot of interaction and audience involvement, even audience building. Here’s the URL…

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/

I heard an interview with Greenwald on the radio program Counterspin and it was beautiful, because I had been thinking along these lines for The Desire Project the last few days. I was riding around in the rain today (warm rain – euphoric) and thinking about how important it is to get some NYC context before I jaunt for Michigan and then west. It all gelled after listening to Greenwald, I need to shoot and cut several short “chapters” between now and May 15.

Here’s Counterspin for 05-01-09, Robert Greenwald’s interview is in the last third or so of the file. Don’t get him mixed up with Glenn Greenwald who discusses torture earlier on.

I see the Desire project as a pragmatic application of the ideas that are presented in Bleep and Secret. It’s one thing to gas on about the creative power of the universe while making with the trippy graphics, but what about a workshop? What about a real world demonstration? That’s what Terrorist Training Films are all about (see ‘Almonds’, the precursor to Desire). It’s what happens on North Manitou Island.

Hawaii is another highly friendly environment for creation, for sure. What with the big blue waters, Mama Pele, dolphins and a robust native culture. What with two mad men on a mad max sailboat. The universe is tingling in anticipation of our dreams.

I had a wonderful inspiration a couple weeks ago – I wrote a letter requesting permission to change a man’s circumstance, a man I’ve never met but greatly respect. If he agrees, I will bring his new situation with me aboard Desire and manifest it. I get excited thinking about having the chance to do this because the outcome is worthy and this outcome has profound implications for creating change on a global scale.

I recently re-read Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and I get flashes from it. It’s a cautionary tale but my flashes are always highly encouraging. I am not sure if my famous science fiction writing brother actually said the following or if I imagined it, but it’s one of my favs. “I write science fiction but you live it.”  Oh… yeah…

This blog is a tool to both plan and publish. Electricity will be scarce on Desire so we’ve got to make the most out of keyboard time. I want to compute less and live more!

Planning by blogging is an experiment. WordPress implements ‘posts’ for transient information and ‘pages’ for persistent information. To adapt this paradigm to planning, research notes or cognitive improvisation can be ‘posted’ and extracted salience can be ‘paged’. The pages might naturally form a sort of wiki (Hawaiian for ‘fast’). We can simultaneously clarify our ideas and share them, expressing a transparent and ‘open source’ aesthetic.

WordPress continues to reveal unsuspected utility.

Watch Astoria Virgin

This is supposed to be a video blog, so finally I am getting around to catching up on the chapters of the story. Here’s the first Vixia video from April 7, shot with an HF-11 I later exchanged for an HFS-10. Today is actually June 16, but I back posting this to keep them in sequence.

Astoria Virgin refers to the first time me and the virgin Vixia went to visit Faisal in his Astoria crib. I cut this little vignette to prove that one could get Vixia files into Final Cut Pro. It’s auspicious that my swell pal Faisal had his soul captured first.