I pedaled furiously across the city at midnight until I turned onto Guadalupe, the street that runs through campus. My body cold with sweat I pumped the air with my fist as I soared past groups of people making giant O shapes with their arms and chanting. My shouts and screams merged with their cheering and the honking cars that swarmed past.

It may only be the beginning, but it’s a incredible sunrise on a day that looks so full of promise– the promise that the day’s long hard work will lead us to an even more beautiful sunset and the satisfied grin that comes of a job well done when we sit together on the porch, sharing the moment.

In hearing about her life I felt suddenly like a very exotic creature. After college she focused on having kids and a long marriage and has hardly left the state. Her husband gathers the neighborhood guys to watch football once a week. I’ve never watched football and there may be only two states I haven’t visited, let alone the rest of the world. I’ve never even had a TV.

I realize that I live in a bubble, surrounded by freaky programmers, filmmakers and artists. Sometimes, though, I forget how significant the gap can be and Laura really grounded me. In particular, she connected me to the reality of our current financial situation here in America.

I hear about it on the radio. My friends have lost jobs, but most of my friends are the kinds of people who are laid off all the time. They work at small businesses that fail or contract jobs that are temporary to begin with and are used to free falling in between. Without kids or a huge attachment to material things, I myself consider hitting the road with a guitar and a backpack more of a romantic vision than a terrible hardship.

She lives in Michigan. Her friends are losing their critical long time jobs right and left. They have families and mortgages and people are so desperate they are literally abandoning their homes to foreclosure and heading to places like Florida and Arizona to live with relatives and friends. That’s the reality behind the ranting I hear from commentators as I cook in the evenings or sneak in Morning Edition while I write software and read email in the morning. That’s what is happening to real people in this country, the people behind the numbers.

The next few years are going to be rough, and things are only going to get worse as we run out of oil and water. I’m not sure if it’s time to ditch my extra guitars and load up my camping supplies but you never really know until it’s too late. I’m certainly feeling a little too far from Canada’s forests at the moment. I’m also glad that I have no debt and don’t need much to survive. If anything, I’ll be a resource for those in worse shape. At least, I know how to start fires with sticks.

I’m not sure what’s lead me to this point, or why I feel that everyone is with me. I know that I feel much more at peace with myself. I’ve finally reached a point where I’ve accepted my skills and talents. I’ve given up some of my bigger ambitions, which has freed me to focus more on what excites me and less on sacrifices that might lead to future gains. I’m less concerned about how my actions affect other people, and I am not obligated to let anyone know where I am or what I’m doing at any point. I feel like a more genuine expression of myself, less driven by my innate desire to meet the desires and expectations of the people around me. It all feels very sexy.

I’m not sure why I feel like every one else is here with me. Some of my older friends are starting to reach the point where the ups and downs of life affect them less and they’ve even begun preemptively laughing at the absurdly awkward or terrible times as they happen. My younger friends are learning some of the same tricks, or perhaps I’ve chosen younger friends that have already been moving in that direction.

I can say that after telling this story a few times I’ve had at least one person tell me that they have no idea what I’m talking about and they don’t feel the same way at all. So again, maybe this is just me and I’m projecting this little worldview on everyone around me. But I think everyone should accept my projection and get in on it. It feels great! So go tell someone something you’ve never told them about an old conflict between the two of you, a secret love you had for them, or a crazy view you had of them before you knew them better.

Right now. Go.

At the China Daily where Da Gu was an editor, every collection of news stories for the day would have to pass by a party official who would strike through most of them with red ink. It was just part of the process that you had to accept as a journalist in China. It certainly explained the news.

When television is about as entertaining as a sleeping beagle, it’s no wonder that so few people stayed indoors to watch it. Instead, people piled out of their houses at night and filled the streets. Neighbors laughed together and swapped stories over games of Chinese chess until late into the night. It was actually quite wonderful, and something I never experienced in all my time growing up in America. It wasn’t until years later, when I moved into a much poorer, older neighborhood, that I experienced the same sort of evening camaraderie.

There was also no sense of crime. Not that there wasn’t any crime, but no one had any idea how much there might be or where it occurred. There had been a murder in one of the many huge buildings of apartments we were visiting, somewhere around ten years earlier. The rumor, which was the only information available, was that it was about drugs. Without any legitimate news sources, rumors and the stories of travelers were the only information available about the rest of the country. Some talked, for example, about drugs problems that were growing into an epidemic in Shanghai, but no one knew anything with any certainty.

I have to wonder whether not knowing about these things gave people a sense of security that we lack in the U.S. Here, every act of violence is held up and flashed before our eyes. Stories of violent crimes are used as tactics to frighten Americans into owning guns and dogs or giving up their civil liberties. It certainly doesn’t encourage anyone to meet or talk to strangers. It certainly doesn’t create an environment where neighbors become friends and spend time together outside on the streets. With the China streets filled with people, I’m certain that this in turn makes it safer for everyone to be out.

The real solution is clearly not to tidy up our world into a baby’s playpen, but rather to educate people to the point where every scary story doesn’t create an instant fear response. Marvin Minsky talks a bit towards the end of this talk and there are many better talks by brain people about how reverting to a purely emotional fear state strips we humans of our higher level resources. Steven Levitt talks (if I’ve found the right talk here) more about the general inability of human beings to evaluate the scale of a threat, and how quickly humans will base their estimations of risk or danger on the proximity of single events.

But I’m still hopeful that education can help, and you can’t properly educate people without free access to information. So despite some of the potential downsides to what might be available, I will continue to believe that in the long term, full and open access to information will bring the population up to a level where they can better understand the viability of threats, the world around them, and each other.

Da Gu was an extremely tough woman. She never once let her physical ailments get in the way while spending time with us, and she insisted on making us tea and having ranting, passionate discussions with me. After growing up in China as a child, she had traveled to England to study english literature. She returned to work as a reporter and, ultimately, editor for the China Daily, China’s english language newspaper. Her use of the english language was so far superior to my own that I felt almost as ignorant saying hello as when I tried to discuss American history and politics with her.

Da Gu’s ex-husband was a literature professor, and apparently just as tough, opinionated, and stubborn as she was. They had been divorced for more than fifteen years, and to the day still took the time to argue with each other. She explained that two people so strong willed could simply never make it work. What she said next etched itself forever into my brain. “But if I was ever going to get married again, it would only be to him.” Weishi assured me that he had said the same thing to her.

Several weeks after I left China, the cancer finally won out. Someone likely scattered the smooth stones that took in so much pain, leaving them, too, to rest. I wonder how her ex-husband felt now that she was gone. To me those almost, but not quite, solvable problems that linger forever are the most tragic. Is there a point when they should have given in and cut off communication forever? Or was it the dynamic struggle that made what was left of their relationship so irresistible? Maybe, once again, the only answer is to continue to ask.

It was in talking to an ex-stripper friend of mine that the idea first appeared. She talked about how much she enjoyed being on stage and being playful and sexy, but how the environment of the modern strip club was stifling and didn’t allow for any creativity or real performance. I’ve always been a fan of big horn bands and that loud, bold brass music from the old burlesque shows. Before the idea of nude performance was, well, stripped down to what we have today those shows were so much more. Instead of women simply dancing naked around poles all night, there were huge performances with outrageous costumes, long teasing dance routines, fans, people under water with flowing silks, comedy acts and songs. The more we talked, the more excited I became. I started contacting potential venues and then, as often happens, I got distracted by some other series of projects and it never came to fruition.

Years later I was riding out the end of a tough breakup and living on my best friend Steve March’s couch in San Francisco. He had hundreds of books lining one entire wall, and every day he would leave a few more book spines protruding seductively from the enormous bookshelf and head off to work. I paced back and forth through the sunlight that bathed the wooden floors of his large studio apartment, ingesting books about psychology, spirituality and the self and scribbling furiously in a notebook on the end table. In the evenings he would return and we would jump into his Miata to roar into the city for sushi and philosophize late into the night.

It was in this context that I got the call. My friend G-Fire was hosting an all girl DJ night at Elysium, a club in Austin, for her birthday. She wanted male strippers and wanted to know if I was down to be one of them. At this point, I’d never done anything of the kind. The idea was terrifying and, therefore, immediately something I couldn’t resist. Better still that I had only days to prepare and was currently halfway across the country. I packed up my notebooks and headed home.

Back in Austin I drove straight to my favorite thrift shop and rounded up a whole pile of outfits and equipment. When I got to the club I was nervous, excited, and ready to throw down. I burst through the door to find the two other guys cowering at the bar, huddled over drinks. They were simultaneously attempting to goad each other into taking action and trying to somehow avoid the whole affair entirely. I had a duffle bag loaded with costumes and wasn’t having it. I found the next DJ and told her roughly the kind of music I was looking for and went into the bathroom to change.

Her voice boomed through the speakers as she called the audience forward to the stage, “and now I give you… The Professor!” The house lights came up and the music started slowly with a simple pulsing beat. I was standing, head down, my hands held before me completely covered in a thick black graduation gown. The gown turned out to be a good choice, as it completely hid my knees, which were clattering together like castanets.

Each of my arms extended into the opposite sleeve and I slowly began to wripple around like I was working something out under the front of my outfit, doing my best to imitate the girls I remember changing under sweatshirts on the bus after track practice. Then my arms burst free and a huge white bra flew out of my sleeve, arced through the air and landed on someone’s head. The crowd went wild.

From that point I teased and danced and worked my way through layer after layer of outfits. Having never done this before, I had no idea how long it would take and I was only halfway done when the DJ had to scramble to put on another track. It was also my first experience with shoes. There’s nothing sexy about trying to pull off shoes. Hopping up and down and spinning didn’t help, so I yanked off a sock, inhaled it deeply, and threw that out to the crowd earning me more cheers.

As girls were scrambling to fill my waistband with dollar bills, the other two guys were running for their chance to get on stage. Each one turned it up another notch, one by leaping off stage and doing a knee slide. When all was said and done all anyone wanted to know was when it would happen again and how they could get a turn. A few months later, Audrey Maker started ramping up for the first Burlesque for Peace.

For months afterwards I would meet countless people at parties who would insist on calling me The Professor, many of whom only knew me as The Professor. I had so many demands for a rerun that I eventually did another version of the same act that was much better scripted and featured a ruler and a variant of the famous endless handkerchief gag using neckties. Another year I had a really profound moment helping my friend, who had finally left the army, strip off her uniform for the last time. As I handed out her medals from a silver bowl, she threw the trappings of the life she was leaving behind to the crowd.

The all volunteer show has raised money for numerous causes, from the clearing of old landmines to Amnesty International. This year the focus is on voter registration and there have have been several sexy librarian vote drives leading up to the event. I haven’t performed in the last few, but I definitely got a twang watching my housemates Natalie and Jules prepare for their first show this last week. As they bounce and giggle their way through the house, covered in balloons, I have to wonder if, or when, The Professor will one day return…

I’ve previewed enough film submissions to know that even though 5000 feature length films were entered into Sundance this last year, it’s doesn’t mean that many were, despite their two million dollar and up budgets, even watchable. Statistically only about five of those have a chance of making money. But it does mean that there is so much noise in the system that it’s almost impossible to be noticed.

Admittedly, I spent far too long working on other people’s projects before doing my own. This has put me a bit behind the curve, but what I’ve seen is that many of those friends who’ve produced a lot more and better work, have had successful festival runs, and even received small theatrical releases still aren’t bringing in any more food money than I do. In a quick informal survey after a recent shoot most were living off of about $9k a year. I felt like a wealthy baron with my $13k and health insurance.

This is the moment when you wake up and realize that you are not building a career, but are in fact living much more like a painter. (Although, sadly, the brushes are far more expensive.) It doesn’t make me want to quit making films. On the contrary, I feel liberated. If I don’t have to fuss about the potential commercial success of projects I work on, I can focus instead on making things I care about. Their value is determined entirely by my own metrics, and not where they might take me.

I’ve also been repressing my other artistic outlets, like writing and music, so that I could focus on film projects. This shift also means that taking time to work on music, either for one of my current film projects or an album of children’s music, becomes more viable. Without profit there is only art.

Kevin Bewersdorf comes from a different world. Despite his work in indie film, he considers himself to have been in the realm of painters and installation artists from the beginning. We exist in a new era wherein individual copies of an artwork have no inherent value. Everything digital is immediately pirated and available for free online. So borrowing from the world of prints, he made limited edition DVDs of one of his recent video installation projects and sold them, with certificates of authenticity, for extremely high prices. The buyers know they can get a copy of the work itself for free online. What they are buying instead is a piece of the artist’s work that may increase in value as a collectable over time and, more importantly, they have the opportunity to support a valued artist’s continued productivity.

I should also note, for the record, that Kevin’s deadpan, playfully sardonic artwork has been hugely inspirational to me lately. Highly recommended are his photographs and his Four Sacred Logos bit.

So while the road may have become rough with the remains of broken dreams fallen to earth, it doesn’t mean that I have to stop and turn back. If the sky really is falling, I can finally take my head out of the clouds and realize that what remains to be seen is just as beautiful.

The house had been falling apart for many years. The massive grecian columns were shedding the last of their sun-bleached paint to reveal the cracked wood beneath. The old chain link fence that wrapped the front of the place was completely overgrown with an ivy bursting with purple flowers. Bees swarmed around and through them and danced about the metal sign that read, “No Trespassing”.

The porch was a nest of rotting teeter totter boards that groaned and cried quietly beneath my feet as I heaved camera equipment to the door. Just inside I swung the sound mixer off of my shoulder and dropped a handful of sand bags. The owner of the neighboring restaurant had bought the house out from under the previous owners after the trouble started. Now he seemed to be using it as a storage space, as I was surrounded by tall, thin metal mushrooms of the sort used to heat an outdoor patio during the winter. Stepping through the little forest I had to climb around a pile of fat CO2 canisters squatting in the corner and past a huge rolling metal storage container.

The modern tools of the restaurant trade were loathe to extend any deeper into the house than the front room and I left them behind to explore. The railings had all been removed from the massive staircase and I could already see the evidence of the young woman’s chainsaw work. She had stripped the house of all drywall or plaster and left only the bare skeletal structure. Next to the stairs the floor had been torn away as well, and I could see through the lines of boney ribs to the earth below. Under the stairs, protruding only halfway up through the remnants of a floor was a sink, still installed and complete with copper pipes running off into the bowels of the house. It was as though it were designed for babies to crawl across the floor to the bowl to bathe. Equally as mysterious, a toilet sat resting, isolated, on top of the exposed floor supports.

I climbed up past the outline of an archway to the second floor where the damage was much the same with the exception of one room. Some of the ceiling and three of the walls had been covered with new drywall and painted a bright pink color. The remaining wall was no more than exposed studs, and light shone up past the ends of the floorboards. At the center of the room a brand new ceiling fan hung down into the room. It was like a guest in a tuxedo showing up for a barn raising, dangling from on high to survey, with nose held high, the piles of old nails, rat feces and raw wood thick with years of dust.

I left this odd oasis to climb a metal ladder into the attic. Here the low roof sagged inwards towards me like a wet blanket. Instead of supporting or repairing it, they had popped in a new skylight that protruded from the tired wood like a pimple. Again all of the wood structure was exposed with the exception of but a fragment of original plaster, from which a tuft of pink insulation dripped towards a hole in the floor. Despite this, absurdly, to one side was a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto a tiny, exposed portion of the roof.

The dreamers who had come to this house years ago had arrived with great vision and little skill or money. The tall bamboo helped hide the eyesore from afternoon diners, but at some point the little mexican restaurant next door couldn’t play their music loud enough to cover the screaming as the young couple began throwing each other’s clothes out onto the street. Their fights grew louder and more frequent. It was the chainsaw being taken to the walls that finally lead the restaurant owner, fearing for his business, to buy them out.

No one really knows what happened to bring them to that point, but anyone who has tried to rebuild an old house (including Wendy Spies and myself) might have a few ideas. Our fearless director Bryan Poyser had a few ideas of his own, and you can see how they play out when he completes this next film.

Sadly it didn’t turn out, as I’d hoped, that a big budget reality film was being shot of us. I kept waiting for the moment that the door wouldn’t open and we’d be forced to spend the night in the place, or for something to grab my leg. Instead we had absolutely incredible natural light that made each shot look like a million dollars. At one point, watching Kevin walk up the staircase into golden light filtering through light clouds of dust, we all swore we’d just seen him ascend into heaven.

Soon this old house with all of its history and mysteries will be rolled off into another young couple’s dreams and the land left behind will become a parking lot. Even then, it could well be the place that a pair of future newlyweds emerges from a romantic dinner at the restaurant next door to share a first kiss. I’m glad we were able to add one more piece of history, and capture a bit of the soul of this place before it moves on.

All photos by Kevin Bewersdorf

As my last film project has been winding down I’ve been allowing the long stifled and barely contained musical Kai to emerge. The result has been a slew of song ideas and a nearly insatiable desire to play guitar. I was struggling to get some tech work done the other day but I kept finding myself mired deep in guitar porn, checking out old videos of Stevie Ray or websites of minutia about the history of the EVH Wolfgang guitars. This was intensely frustrating because web surfing for guitar porn wasn’t anywhere on my priority list. I wasn’t getting tech work done and I wasn’t playing guitar either.

At last I just picked up my old Strat and played my heart out for the last few hours before going to bed. The lights were out and I’d just dropped my head onto pillow when I could almost hear the snapping sound as the relays clacked over in my brain. Suddenly I knew just how I was going to restructure my tech solution and solve my problem. Brains are mysterious things that way.

So I decided that it would be worth heading out to Orfunner for a day to do nothing else but play guitar all day with my friends at the blues bar. I pulled up, loaded my gear into the tent, and we started practicing immediately. Everyone left for a break and I goaded Nobodobodon up on stage to tell some really terrible jokes, in part so that I could keep vamping away behind him.

When night arrived to drape the Blue Moon Roadhouse in the more appropriate robes of murky darkness, the bar rose to take it’s place in a long history. The walls were dipped in blue light and the bar tables were moons. A hand painted, full sized cityscape backdrop filled in behind the band. Along the pilers were framed photographs of BB King, Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn and, of course, Patrick Swayze who appeared in the film, “Roadhouse”.

The first notes chords of Red House punched from the ancient speakers, leapt out into the night and immediately began grabbing people by the ears and dragging them in. Soon the club filled with tiki-cup wielding patrons and hooting tutu clad cowboys. With Michael’s heckling and my reassurances we were able to get quite a few people to step up to the mic. Some were actually quite good vocalists and improvisors but most made use of the stacks of cue cards written mad-lib style by the audience members. They were everywhere, intently scribbling out tales of their deepest woes with sharpies. Lost cats. Shaving cuts. Embarrassing unintentional bowl movements.

There were swing dancers and guest musicians. We even took things down a peg for a few jazzy spoken word numbers. The band sounded good, gelled well and did a great job of working together to come up with off the cuff musical bits, dropping right into grooves and playing off of each other. The sound system Aaron put together was fantastic, and I couldn’t get over how well my old friend, my pink ‘62 re-issue Strat, was singing. My playing is a hundredfold better when I sound good and can hear myself well. My friend Jose had been out of town for quite a while and despite my having grown a beard and lost the glasses, he claimed the reason he couldn’t recognize me right off was my playing. “You were playing so much better than I remember that, combined with the hat, I thought you were some great seasoned old blues guy!”

In trying to duck out quickly the next morning I was only waylaid once for an hour or two, and it was time well spent getting to know some people I’d been wanting to talk to for a while. I loaded up the van and cruised back to town to be welcomed by my projects now freshly infused with life and proceeded to knock out both code and video editing progress like they were the best things in life.