photo by Kreep.

Last week my friend Emilie Autumn and I were tweeting back and forth. She joked that she was going to make me a one armed t-shirt with the band’s tour slugline, “Don’t make it weird.”

This morning I received the following email. Using Woot and data they have mined from social networking, Amazon appears to have generated a graphic rich advertisement, which knows what I shop for, what jokes my friends use, and how to tell those jokes back to me in context.

A computer is flirting with me… That’s a really creepy intense algorithm.

street-lights

I’ve returned, the Studio in New York City is back in action!

I had a wonderful, exhausting, inspiring journey all over the world.  Whatever you do life, take time to travel and really look around you while you are there.  Its worth it.

I’ll try to share more of my photos and experiences later…

With the hurricane looming we were afraid Saturday would be a mass NYC exodus. We decided to leave for Woodstock late on Friday night to beat traffic.  We got here at about 3 in the morning.  When we woke we bought some basic groceries, and moved our emergency supplies from the garage on our property to our fancy rental house.  A couple of V’s friends from the city asked to shelter with us as well.  The rains began that evening, but it was generally very quiet.

Sunday morning around 4am power went out, causing the home security system to beep constantly.  Unable to locate the code, we left a message for the owner, wrapped the box in make shift sound proofing and went back to bed.  Before sunrise, the alarm added a new beep to let us know the phone lines were out as well.

At dawn I was able to walk to the edge of the property and receive a text from the owner with the alarm code.  A little silence sure feels wonderful. It was still raining heavily and had been all night, but there was no wind.

The walk around the yard revealed a couple potential hazards.  The small creek that runs beside the house was very close to overflowing.  If the creek over flows, the driveway washes out.  The creek normally passes into a culvert above the driveway, then waterfalls down a small ledge below the driveway, then disappears into second culvert and exits at the bottom of the lower yard.  Now the creek was swelling almost over at the top, and under the driveway is was blasting out with such force it was missing the lower culvert altogether and flooding straight onto the lower yard.

Also, the rain gutters over the barn/art studio were blocked and a waterfall had formed directly in front of the door, causing water to hit hard and shoot under the door onto the nice hardwood flooring.  The river that borders the property is normal a few inched shallow, mostly rocky outcroppings and stretches of sand. Its the kind you can hop across at the narrow parts without getting wet.  Now it was a ragging orange, a hundred feet wide and carrying entire 100 year old trees in its torrent.  On a normal day this might seem traumatic, but we were in the middle of a hurricane.  I unclogged drains and stacked some rocks, and thought were doing quite well.

However, when Veronica woke she was insistent that we belonged back in NYC.  The sense of coming catastrophe had brought up a lot of stuff for V, she was very emotionally volatile.  (Remember we lost our house and everything in it back in April.)  She had been unsettled and unhappy since Friday night, and had a “bad feeling” about being here.  V’s bad feelings are hard to argue with.

At 1pm the rain just stopped. The air was suddenly still and the clouds began to break up.  We heard that the city was mostly fine, but had no real details. We knew the roads were very bad. I felt it was better to stay and wait for solid news. V was still intent on leaving.  I sent here to get more info while the rest of us started making food.

V went to the fire department. The fire department was in a frenzy, trees were down all over town, roads were getting blocked, and emergency lines were overloaded. They told her to stay at home, or go to the Olive town fire station nearby which had set up a flood shelter.  But they said, “if you are going to leave, you needed to go right now.”  Though the rains had stopped here, the valleys above were still spilling with storm water, the river was about to take the road, and when it did any exit would be impossible. They were preparing to evacuate the fire station.

So V returned to the house and we decided to do the least reasonable thing… leave our house (which was safely above the flood plain), head away from the Olive flood shelter, and drive instead to NYC 120 miles away.  I killed all the breakers, sealed the windows and I left my generator running to pump out water collecting in the basement. We packed the two vehicles with 4 people, 3 dogs, and sandwiches, and we pulled onto Watson Hollow Road while the radio man announced a state of emergency, and relayed pleas from local authorities to stay off the roads.

It was becoming a beautiful day, the sun came out, and though the ground was soaked the air was light and dry. Trees were jammed on the riverbank like piled tinker toys, and the boiling orange water as feet from the road, but this road was passable.  However, 28A was blocked… In both directions. So we tried County 3, then County 2, then smaller roads.  In all of my life I have not seen more fallen trees, snapped power lines, and flooded roads, as I did that drive.

For 7 and a half hours, we wandered down, up, over and back, each road a hope and disappointment.  All these roads were strangers, miles from our usual route, many too small to have names, most un-passable. Some were blocked by barricades or police. Most were open to test on our own, till bravery or fear made the final call. We slipped under trees, drove over power cables, wadded roads on foot before risking a vehicle.  We passed lakes that had been farms, a hundred trees held only in place the power lines they leaned against. We saw cars that had attempted water too deep and now sat like glossy islands in the waterways.

We were almost to Pennsylvania when we reached New Jersey. We were exhausted when we reached New York City.  The city was bone dry. It was only fashion envy that made the hipsters on our block long for V’s knee high galoshes. There wasn’t even water in the gutters.

We staggered upstairs and passed out. We were beat tired and felt foolish for attempting the drive, but at least we knew everything was safe, here and upstate. In the morning Chris called.  He owns the house we rent in Woodstock.  A neighbor called, heavy winds had hit after the rains. A big tree had dropped on the house.

And so we packed a new set of sandwiches and headed north. Much easier going this time. Most of 87 was open headed north, and we were the only people who wanted to head that way, traffic was a breeze. (see the picture of V and Niney)

The wind storms must have sounded like the end of days. Dozens of trees came down on the property.  The lower yard is a sideways forest on top of a bog. The pool has been buried by birch trees. It was the largest white pine on the property that crushed the roof of the main house and most of the garden.

The interior of the house was remarkably untouched, nothing of ours was damaged. There is however a single 6″ hole in the living room ceiling. When the pine fell, a 6 foot long branch, about 5 inches in diameter, speared straight through the roof.  It passed through the roof shingles, one layer of plywood, layers of baton, then one sheet of drywall, and came straight down, point first onto the couch.

If you and 3 friends were holed up with no power, no water, and no road, waiting out a heavy storm by candle light, where would you be sitting?

Love,
b.

Around 5 am Saturday morning, an NYC police officer buzzed our Brooklyn apartment and gave us a number to call. It was a stark, confusing way to wake up.  The officer expected us to know what the number was for, we didn’t.  He called to check, perhaps the number wasn’t meant for us.

I was standing in the doorway with just a pair of pants on. Everything seemed a little surreal, and displaced, like i was standing a couple feet behind myself.  The officer was on his cell phone. He was very young. My mind was slowly catching up, my body had answered the door on its own really. I began to wonder if some elaborate prank was underway.  But he was in proper uniform, including a fire arm.

The visit was not an accident, the number was for us. All the officer knew was there might have been a fire at our cottage in Woodstock. But moments later he said a car may have hit our home.   A car hitting out house was the better option, our cottage is up on a hill, a drunk driver would have to work very hard to hit the house.  If there had been a car accident, they almost certainly meant the garage, located right along the road. Other than tool storage, I don’t have much attachment to the garage.

The officer left and I called the number, Woodstock’s emergency dispatcher. There was a fire, near our house, possibly our neighbors. All information was broken by long silent stretches as he fielded other calls from the sight of the incident.

Eventually this is what came together. At about 3 in the morning a driver woke our neighbors. They borrowed the phone to report a fire, coming from a home, our home in Woodstock.  The fire department responded within a few minutes, but by the time they arrived, the roof had already collapsed, and damage was “extensive”.

Veronica, Niney and I were in the city. No one was inside at the time of the fire.  No one was hurt. We are most thankful for that

By the time we reach Woodstock its after 7am, the fire is out.  The driveway is blocked by a cop car, and the neighbor’s drive is filled with other emergency vehicles.

It is pouring rain.  The season has only begun to turn here, the trees are still barren.  The wall of our house are the brightest thing in sight, a gentle mint green that suggests spring. We can see smoke stains rising from all the windows.

This lone wall is the best view of our little home. Closing in we realize it is the only standing remnant.  Everything else is leveled, no porch, no roof, no other walls. No color but black. There is a strange smell, not the smell of burning wood. I know the smell of a campfire and love it.  This is a different smell.

I knew before we arrived it would be bad.  I was braced and I was standing tall, for myself and for Veronica.

Veronica was already in rough shape. She had fallen into an unexplained sadness 2 days earlier.  I think it was a preemptive sorrow–a blessing (as well as curse) of being magically intuitive. When the cop first appeared in Brooklyn, I was thinking, “what now?!” But I was approaching it backwards. I should have been thinking, “Now we’ll find out what!”

The extent of the damage makes it easier I think.  There is so very little I recognize, it is just a pile of ash and cinder.  I can pick out a few appliances, the oven, fridge. I can see most clearly our wonderful wood stove.  But everything else is just gone.  It is better that way, no half burned furniture, no charred paintings on the wall, no melted toys from my childhood.  Nothing to spike a hope of recovery, or pang of loss.

I don’t cry till I see the crawl. Of all the stupid things, I’m walking around the grave site of my home, and I look down into the crawl, and I start to cry.

I fucking hate the crawl. Its dank, its too short to keep from banging my head, the sump pump strays you with water when it kicks on, and the only stuff down there is mechanical.  Who gives a shit about their crawl?  But now it is the least damaged part of our home. Yes, it is five feet deep in black ashen water, but it never burned. The brand new water pressure tank Francis and I installed is there, floating on its side. The new plumbing I cut my knuckles on is there, fresh pipes running from the water heater to blackened nowhere.

What is needed to develop a relationship is just time and effort, more than friendship or understanding.  I have a relationship with this stupid crawl.   I put all that stuff down there. The new floor joists are my work. There is a hole where the sump pump sits, a hole cut in solid stone. I know because I chipped it myself.  The hardest work in the house has happened down there, and now the crawl has left me, abruptly.  Hours of banging my head, cussing and cutting my knuckles is a relationship. Its like an abusive lover has left.  Its the only part of the whole house whose passing I should celebrate, but instead I’m crying.

Veronica has asked the firemen to dig in one particular spot.  She knows where her journal was kept.  All her journals were there, but she is looking for one journal in particular, her wedding gift to me, testament of our love, the singular collection of all our early moments. I journal I have never read. She has lost her proof that we were meant to be together, lost record of all the little omens she received. She has lost the words her grandmother gave her in a dream, the words which became our wedding invitation. She has lost the poems I wrote her, the pressed flowers from our first road trip. She has lost all her childhood photos.

A public adjuster has slinked his way up the driveway.  They get 10% of your insurance claim for their services, and they move very quickly. The kitchen is literally still smoking, and a stranger is trying to pull me aside for a business card exchange.  Veronica orders him off the property.  He does not leave. I sense the anger welling in her, and I separate them immediately.

I have my arm around his shoulder leading him quickly down the drive.  He is still proposing to me as Veronica is literally cursing him from above. She is not cussing, she is cursing him.  I am trying to protect him, by getting him away as soon as possible.

I reassure myself that he can’t be capable of understanding, or he wouldn’t be here. He must just be missing some basic human ingredient.  I try to be understanding.  He gets in his car. I return to our… home. Veronica is still yelling. She says something about sadness, about the sadness that will come into his life. From his car window adjuster decides to retort. Maybe he is incapable of understanding that his presence is causing sadness? I’m trying to be understanding.

He yells something at Veronica.  And I loose myself. I’m walking, pointing him away. Then I’m running, and my body is halfway through his window. And I have him by his collar and I am screaming. I tell him to never ever speak to my family.  I tell him many other things I cannot remember even as I am saying them. Its all rage, but I am sure it was all true.  Maybe now he will understand, or maybe his life will just stay sad and confused.

A firemen hands Veronica her journal, matted and wet and burned to a small black oval, maybe having the center portion of many pages will be enough to spark her heart and memory.

When the cops and firemen leave. We pick through the rubble. I help Veronica drag remnants to the garage. They are garbage and I know it, a melted bike frame, a shattered christmas ornament.  But I help her.

Then we walk up the hill, and sit.  And we see the daffodils, the first sign of spring, clean stalks of green and yellow buds.  They return every year, and they have not stopped for this.  And the moss is growing, covered in dew. The rain has paused by now and the mist makes everything soft, even the black ashes below. This home was our friend, we have lost a friend.  But nature has no surrender, no ending.  It will swallow this death in rain, and sun and moss and lichen, and a thousand little creatures will bed in this sorrow and make new life. The mice are probably inside already nesting for children. The pond has eggs and tiny tadpoles.  Life here on the hillside is emerging from a deep sleep. And everything will be alright.

If I were as wise and grand as as the land we stand upon I would know it is already all right, as it always has been. I have only forgotten the steps for a moment, but I will fall back into the dance soon. Spring is coming. And we will build again.

That night I woke before dawn and drove us across the island to the west coast. It is very rare to see the sunset and rise over the ocean in the same night!

I just found this on Rafa’s vimeo page. Its a little behind the scenes footage from Exposed. Rafa (Rafael De La Uz) was our cinematographer, said it was his favorite scene. I’ve never seen this clip before… fun to see all of us working together. I’m in the brown fedora. I don’t remember being so talkative.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

Download the MP4 (iPhone, iPad, Android)

Alright, I’m awake again. A little more about the bender…
Schaffer The Darklord, STD for short, is a nerdcore rapper. We know each other because we both host burlesque shows in NYC. Only so many people can work craigslist, typographical fonts, or having sex with your own clone into a song. STD is on this select list. He’s very refreshing. By STD standards the Bender is pretty straight forward, a song about going on a three day, life-ruining, drug-induced bender.

My concept for the video was pretty straight forward as well, lets pack in every hedonistic drug induced fantasy of mine… then make it all go horribly wrong. STD was charmingly cooperative.

Marshall Rose (the cinematographer) and I came up with a couple old school frills to spice things up. The X eyes, for example, are not a post production effect and aren’t contacts. We did that the old fashioned way, lighting and camera tricks. The shots of Schaffer flying through the city on the glowing box involved a lot of ratchet straps, a safety harness, and streets quiet enough not to ask for a permit. Cause who would give a permit to a guy strapped to the back of a glowing box?

What else… Oh yeah, lots of hot girls, cause who doesn’t like hot girls? I for one, like each and everyone one of the girls in this video. Even the ones puking in the bathroom. “Hey girls, I’m making this awesome video. I’d love you to be in it, so wear something really sexy and oh yeah, you’re going to be leaning over a toilet the whole time, are you cool with that?”. Boo Bess (who played the ‘swamp thing’ and got the longest uncut shot in the video) is actually very attractive… nothing some really bad make-up and lipstick on the teeth won’t fix. Troopers.

If you’ve seen the feature film $9.99, you’ll recognize this immediately, sort of. A Buck’s Worth was the short Tatia Rosenthal made to raise interest in $9.99. It is basically the first 5 minutes of the full length script, but with different models and different actors doing voice. It was my first time doing stop motion cinematography. I had a lot of fun.

Stop motion is a very different creature than the rest of the film world. As the cinematographer I’d show up for an hour or two in the morning, light the scene and set the camera, then leave for the day. While I was gone Tatia would crank away into the wee hours of the night, one frame at a time. On a very very good day she could blast through 9 seconds of story! For me it was sort of a perfect job, for Tatia?… who knows, all stop motion animators are a little crazy.

Circus Bookazine is a printed not-quite magazine, not-quite book, not-quite blog… hence the slug line ‘bookazine’.  Every article is written in both German and English, reminding me that I not only don’t read enough, I don’t speak enough languages. The first edition is focused on fashion.

How exactly I got involved is a little bit of a mystery… they really like the pin-up/burlesque aesthetic, but mostly I think Anke, their Editorial Office Darmstadt, has a girl crush on Veronica Varlow, my partner in crime, and was hoping I would get V involved… which I did.

I’m not really a fashion photographer, but they said they didn’t want regular fashion shots and what-to-wear articles anyway. They were trying to dig a little deeper, into the stories underneath the glitzy industry.  So this is what they got from me, a gentle mash up of vintage burlesque fashion and that terrible 90s movie ShowGirls.

Much love to Gal Friday, Jenny Cest Quoi, Nelson Lugo, Olga, and Marshall for their help.

And thanks to the Slipper Room where we shot… probably the last shoot to take place before the demolition ball arrived. The Slipper Room was NYC’s longest running burlesque venue.  Its currently a very sad constructions site, but promises to return in a few months with 2nd story balconies, rigs for aerial performance, and a stage curtain which the owner promise will close all the way, denying future audience members their usual sneak peek into the half-naked and frantic backstage world.

[Show as slideshow]

The 3 pieces I choose are life sized prints, or larger. Everything just feels fancy when you see it that big.

One of my photos is composed of 96 small prints, which make one whole photo. I broke a large image apart and labeled each piece on the back, so it could be re-hung easily and quickly. Then I sent the pieces of to be mounted… covering the labels and giving me a 96 piece jigsaw puzzle. Turns out i kind of suck at puzzles. Fortunately, Joe loves puzzles, otherwise I might have given up and hung it randomly (I kind of liked seeing Betty Valentine half formed in a pile of loose body parts and dollar bills).

The show will be up for another week. If you are into art, photography, burlesque, or just pretty girls you should check it out. There are several burlesque photographers showing, everyone who’s anyone in a very small scene. Some really nice pieces have turned up. There’s a closing party on Dec 16th. I’ll be there.

West Chelsea Arts Building
508 W. 26th St. Suite 5G
Show closes Dec 18th.

…Joe tells me the same 96 piecer is curling off its mounts, so I guess I’ll be there before that as well. I should have left it flat on a giant table for the guests to complete.

But here we are 72 hours later, the site looks awesome… and functions. The charming transition happened thanks to Jim…

…whose own site is ironically modest given his capabilities. Its probably cause he’s working on other cool projects, like the one above.

I called to ask a few critically important questions, “like how do you type a (bullet) in a post?” But he was out scouting locations for a play that will only take place on the first day of snow… Try facilitating a large scale production based on that not-so-schedule-ready event.

We created this trailer to raise interest in our cross-country road trip screenplay, Revolver. We wanted something to present to investors, and a picture is worth a thousand words. The Revolver trailer won at the Golden Trailer Awards in Los Angeles, officially making it the world’s sexiest preview for a yet-to-be-made film. Step inside my world…

She is fantastic performer. Even has her own army.  Seriously. They call themselves The VKA short for Veronica’s Kissing Army.

Lost to the Lonesome, directed by Zina Brown

“Lost To The Lonesome” sees… Billy and the rest of Pela as traveling revival salesmen, traversing that old timey www (the wild wild west), peddling their personal brand of elixir, converting the masses. Or, really, slaying the masses. Cool video…”

Nature of the Beast Trailer directed by Nate Pommer

A psychedelic comedy starring Andy Samberg and Rob Delaney. See the entire film now at natureofthebeastmovie.com

Still Life Decay – Detach – featuring Burton C. Bell from Fear Factory, directed by Zina Brown

ThingsToLookAt is in a state of gentle transition, including this new blog.  Eventually this will be stacked with exciting images and an articulate sentence or two.  But in the meantime a cute animal photo will have to do. Veronica was on the road, I got bored, Niney got a bone…

Who needs a caption when you've got a chihuahua?