You've heard of those fat shaking machines? They consist of a big rubber bands that are yanked left and right, jiggling the jiggly areas which vibrates the frustrating fat away. That way you can get fit while perusing TV, munching low-fat chocolate bars, and huffing down to the day job where you sweat behind screens for the remote controlled predator and kill Iraqis patriotically. We've all been there. But that lucky Goldilocks found the right temperature after only three tries. I can never find the comfy medium. Everything's either too much or too little. My own chocolate laxative relates to socializing. I want to be able to be social, but only when I want to be. And socialization, although I should know by now, leads to others reaching out to me rather than me reaching out to them. I mostly like the me reaching out. So, then, Goldilocks is either lonely - and calls everyone she knows in order to find something to do, or Goldilocks is swamped with the outgoing social searches of others. Last weekend I found myself swamped by the latter problem. So I ditched everyone and headed down in search of my own connections. It was a blast. I took a few pictures.

I recently joined up with a little group in Provo that has sprang up as a response to the recent bombing in Gaza. What I think so so cool about the project is that they are not looking particularly to meet fourth order Maslow needs, the food/water/shelter stuff, but to hit at the first order. I don't know if that seems silly, but I like the idea of addressing needs (art IS a need) that go beyond day to day survival and allow for human expression that connects widely disparate times. No offense to Americans (well, maybe a little), but considering that art is usually at its best in the midst of turmoil, boiling violence, and fear, the spoiled, pale-green, super toddlers that we Americans are probably make some pathetic creations compared to what the Palestinians are capable of. The purpose so to open a communication conduit between artists there and artists here, and to raise money to donate for art supplies and that sort of thing.

We had our first event on Wednesday. Food was cooked (tabouli and this other "meat bread" thing) and we paired up with the Provo Cafe, Pennyroyal in order to show a documentary and hear an intro by the filmmakers. It was a success! 98 people responded on the facebook page Event page, and although not that many showed up, it still was a pretty decent crowd for a group that has just started making connections. I didn't have time to take many pictures, but there are a few.

Uncle Uncanny's music festival was small enough that you could get around to see everything, but big enough that doing so was more than likely to cause exhaustion, fatigue, and loss of sleep. With larger events you just have to give up and acknowledge that there are more experience available than obtainable, but with this you could perhaps get close. We arrived just after a torrential downpour had made mini-flash floods sweep across the place, but because of the dark and the absorbent desert sand we couldn't see a sign of it. So the earth felt alien and unexplainable to tip-toe across, non-solid and squishy under foot. Music, shadow dancing, and sleep commenced.


Inspired by the wondrous Circus Pandemonium, I set up a trapeze and then proceeded to just about break my neck. After blacking out, waking up, letting the blood dry, and then running into the sunset with my camera in hand, I ended up at a sweat lodge. And this is where my story really begins. I've been to quite a few lodges before and they have usually been free, creative places to express and explore and get to a point where you almost pass out. I love the sounds you can make inside them when you can get everything out of your nose and throat and just have these resonant open air canals. Sometimes there is a bit of mysticism and oddness, but I usually ignore that.

China Blue resident Starman was running the sweat, and to begin he asked if anyone had a song to share or something to say. I was there in part because I wanted to meditate on my neck injury, give it some rest, and "cleanse," so I said that. The person to my right, in a beautiful Irish accent, said that he wanted the lodge experience to help think about how to better know when to assist other people and when to keep silent and stay back, for their own spiritual or experiential growth. I agreed in my mind that this was a challenging boundary to figure out. It butts the ego itself against the instinct to baby others against letting them figure out everything on their own. I felt satisfied that I was in good company.

And then the weirdness began. I wanted to open the conversation up to allow for responses to people's statements. I did not want the dialogue to simply be people on their own soapboxes, so I began talking about how I hoped it would be an environment where people could respond to what others said. The Irishman's response was something like this: criticizing other people meant that you did not accept what they had to say, which meant that you had your own worldview you wanted to spread in the world; the critique of others was the reason why there was so much violence, bloodshed, and war in the world.

I was stunned. I'd always thought that wars are only fought because people do not ask enough questions. The leaders and those in power very love this mindset. People with weak foundations are afraid of being questioned. And then we heard about how the universe was split into two genders, male and female. And then we hear about how humans are beings of light, made of photons. It's ridiculous. You won't find a physicist alive that would agree with that. Regarding gender, it's more social than anything else - and a recent one. To be even looser and say that the universe is divided into sexes - male and female - is just as silly. These are categories based our own view and the fact that most can be easily put into on or another box. It's comes down to one having a large reproductive cell and the other having a smaller one. For much longer than sexual specialization has been going on, life has continued through asexual means. There are all sorts of sexes in the natural world. We shouldn't believe these silly sorts of analyses simply because they make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Never let the aura of a situation stop you from calling bullshit!

I spent seven days at this year's rainbow gathering, which was in Wyoming this year.



The biggest question I have returning from the rainbow gathering is this: what was the impact on the mosquitoes!? I, myself, noticed a dramatic shift in the cleverness of the mosquitoes after about four days of battling. The early ones were lazy. I must have killed hundreds. Jen, sitting in one place while people were balancing rocks around her, killed one hundred and five, placing them in a morbid graveyard which was intended to warn the others. But after three days of massacre and blood exchange, they would not simply land. They would hover near, test their landing pad, and would require much attention.

Humans were driving evolution by killing the careless. The arms race had begun. If we had been able to stay I'm sure that we would be able to have conversations with them in 100 years.

The stories from spending a week with thousands of people are endless. I could write all night. There was death camp, the warriors of light, searches for people, rock balancing, wacky mysticism, my own secular preaching, nonchalant nudity, incredible and continual acts of altruism, and loud people.

Loud people. When you get so many people together you are quite certain to have a number of annoying ones. And the fact that they are prominent and vocal makes them seem to be more numerous than they are. I mean, some of the kids there were downright coarse. A 15 year old girl's voice could sound like a raspy 40 year old, screaming out constant obscenities. I couldn't believe it at first, but eventually I simply slept through the pre-dawn "good morning!'s, fighting dogs, and incoherent thundering.

It makes sense, though. I mean, what is the rainbow gathering but a collection of numerous regional outsider groups. Most of the people don't fit in, are socially awkward, and have antisocial tendencies. It's an odd mix, and some will always feel like outsiders even among a throng of thousands of others that feel the same way.

Bassnectar blew away all my expectations. Thank you: Chis Sick and all the others, for getting this organized and bringing an amazing party to the local area. Click the image above to get to the page of images. What follows is little more than my own thoughts on the photographic progress. It's probably boring to most and so it can certainly be ignored; writing is simply a way to articulate and reduce ambiguities in thought, and so I need it.

Bias is a complex issue in photography due to contradictions in the way people ingest and understand photographs. On one hand, the objective factuality behind a given image has been popularly dethroned; most people take for granted that photographs are only small slices in time aimed at a narrow field from a single perspective and mind frame. Although internalized, it seems that even deeper within the collective gut still lives the weird little feeling that - still - there is an objective truth being represented in an image. People don't seem to mind if a photograph makes them more beautiful than they really might be, but cringe when faced with the opposite. People don't tend to object if a photograph skews a memory into one that is preferred. And as we know, photos can become stronger than memories, coloring and shaping them. The picture becomes an unchanging reference point as our recollections slowly dim. If we gain much of our own identity through our own memories, that means that photographs - to at least some degree - have the power to alter who we think we are and were.

I am often amazed at how easy it is for a bias, a world view, to be spread by the process of selection. For example, although just about every club has a vastly disproportionate male/female ratio, photographs produced from these events would lead one to believe otherwise. It's the "chicks equal rockin' party" bias. Look at any photo set and count how many times a female is the focalpoint. These sets distort reality in a way that is obvious, but what about the biases that aren't so?

I don't post every photo I take. (Some people do, but I mostly put that down to laziness rather than a desire to be more objective.) It's been a matter of personal discipline to pay a lot of attention to editing down, especially to ease the suffering of viewers who might otherwise be met with blurry swarms of photographs and hordes of repetitions. However, as a goal, I attempt to represent - through 50-odd photographic perspectives - a kind of summary or approximation for what I felt encompassed the "vibe" of the night. By doing so, I may be removing images that actually did represent the night but did not represent what I wanted the night to have meant. Take the following two pixel puddles:


The first images was selected for the set. The other was eliminated and would never have made it to the glow of lcd screens if not for this particular digression. The photos are similar in composition and only a split-second apart, but the meanings are radically different. In the selected image, the focus is on camaraderie; the other takes on a sexual tinge (by freezing time, there is no way to know how long this hug lasted; it may have only been a moment, but the impression is that it could be lasting forever). If I was a club owner who wanted to portray a place as sexual dynamite or a pheremonal paradise (as many do), my selection would probably have been inverted. By examining both, the case could probably be made easily for my selection being the "truer" in representing the actual relationship of the two females, that they are indeed good friends and not overtly into one another. But does the trueness of their relationship reflect the truness of the party?

The image was selected because it captures a rare, semi-intimate moment of joy between two people. Was the night completely filled with these kinds of moments as a viewer might be led to believe? I've heard people say that my photo sets made a dismal party appear "off the hook". So where is the truth? My desire to make impressive looking photo might bias the actuality of the party. If photographs aim to be some sort of documentary record (or even anthropological), these questions must constantly be asked. My set could have easily been shaped to give another impression. Any photo set anywhere is produced from the biases of the photographer and a reality - or a desire for a reality - that existed in their head.