And this is the house we chose!!!

Filming the show was a lot of fun. Two times filming in Salta and another day of filming in NYC. Exhausting but fun. The directors and producers were fantastic. The entire experience very professional.

And now that the House Hunters episode has aired, I can talk about the house openly. They wanted us to keep a bit quiet about it until after so we wouldn't give away which house we ultimately chose.

So now what?

This house is our home but also the home of our new organization Cloudhead Art. Cloudhead is an arts and education NGO guided by our mission to build community through art. We gather technology resources via social media and bring them to local communities. We like to say we bring people together who in another time and place would not have met.

This is the view from the studio. It's a great place to paint, write or build things. This is in winter. In summer, it turns all green.

 We also host artists from all over the world. So far, we've had visitors from New Zealand, Italy, Rome, Denmark, Canada and we're looking forward to more.

And yes, Lila got her dog. I think you met Mani in the HHI show. He's grown. A lot.

Since we filmed the show, we got another dog. Mani clearly needed a friend and for the first time ever,  we live in a place where we actually have room for dogs. Meet Pipa.

The look on her face says, "Yes, your suspicions are true. I was the one who ate your shoe." Never leave your shoes unattended downstairs. She opens the door on her own, then comes in and steals things. Like shoes.

So yes. Dogs. New house. New art organization. Lots of changes.

Any questions?

Now that you've seen the house, check out the art and education projects we do at Cloudhead Art at the new Cloudhead Art website.

You can also get updates by Liking the Cloudhead Art Facebook page and our Twitter feed as well.

Ten Years Ago Marked the First Day of the New Normal

I saw it from the top of our building in Brooklyn, directly across the river where I stared in shock at two massive burn marks seared onto the side of the Twin Towers. 

Sandra, our neighbor, emerged from the stairwell as we stood atop that old schoolhouse-turned-condos on Hicks Street, “The second tower just fell,” she said, explaining the cloud of grey-white dust that billowed out from the buildings and toward us. So matter of fact, it seemed, reporting what she heard from radio, just letting us know.

Then it was a quick succession of burning asbestos, sirens, people crying in the streets, singed papers and ash wafting their way from Manhattan to Brooklyn leaving by our feet a charred memo reminding Michael M to file his expense report by the end of the week.  The radio told of six suspicious passengers removed from a flight at JFK. A truck thought to contain explosives was stopped near the George Washington Bridge.

We decided to go indoors as the dust cloud began to envelop us.

Ten Years Later and Things Feel A Bit Too Normal

Here I am in NYC after not living here in almost five years. On and off the subway. Great food. The weather has been perfect. Tonight I'm taking a yoga class taught by friend. But I expected things to somehow be different, an obvious mark in the air that this big disaster happened a decade ago.

Something to mark the day I stopped believing.

This Is What I Can No Longer Trust Or Believe

September 12, 2001, I listened to the radio to hear journalists speaking live from the scene, their media veneer stripped clean. “Oh my god. It’s falling. I can’t believe it. The building is falling.” There was panic, fear and a complete loss of control, something I had never before or since heard from the media.

I searched online looking for something to answer why this had happened. I read back issues of the New York Times, read the histories of Afghanistan on CIA World Factbook, my favorite site for basic information on any country in the world.

But all clicks lead me to realize that nothing can explain it. Nothing can explain with any true sense of satisfaction the level of destruction and pain we saw on the streets. And the news media didn't help at all. 

After those early days, the sheen of a well-oiled media machine glossed over the first response as Terror At the Towers and A City Under Siege filled the airways to introduce repeatedly new reports of the same information. 

Stories told in the first days disappeared. The six passengers on the plane became four then evaporated. I never learned what happened with the truck of explosives at the bridge, but reports of the buildings falling and man-on-the-street first hand accounts proliferated, singing the same song with pre-prepped intros, outros, b-roll yet provided nothing useful.

I felt deceived by a media that seemed to only want to present that which would garner the most eyes and largest number of clicks, and the surreal nature of reaccustoming myself to a constantly changing post-9/11 world left me grasping for something solid and real.

Until finally I decided, solid and real is an illusion. 

Question Everything.

Prior to 9/11, the news was all about shark attacks.  Every other day, it seemed, another child, man or woman had been being mutilated by these beady-eyed creatures.

Surely we could have found a corner of the world with a story worthy of telling. It’s not as if the Taliban popped up in Afghanistan overnight. Qaddafi wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops until a couple weeks ago when he was ousted. Mubarak of Egypt didn’t suddenly turn sour a few months ago. But they weren’t yet looming, a fearful and direct danger to our lives, our children and our futures.

At the time of September 11, I was teaching composition at Stern College for Women.  When classes resumed after the attacks, I revised my curriculum completely. Instead of Langston Hughes and Hemingway, we pored over news articles, examined them and tried to answer the questions people asked.

Case In Point: Bush Officials Try To Calm Fears Of Anthrax

This article acts as if it's going to calm our fears about anthrax. Instead, it introduces Tom Ridge as the Bush administration’s new domestic security chief. His appointment, suggests the article, is meant to directly address concerns of terrorist threat in the United States as well as streamline methods of addressing those threats.

Mr Ridge describes his new role as such:

I may need some statutory authority down the line if I'm going to rearrange some of the responsibilities and give cleaner lines of responsibility to the agencies," he said.

Mr. Ridge said, for example, that he would not be the official to decide whether the military should shoot down a commercial airliner that behaved suspiciously. "My role, if there is time, would be more as an adviser," he said.

But, asked in the morning if he was "the boss here or are you a coordinator," Mr. Ridge replied, "The coordinator, it's like the conductor of an orchestra. The music doesn't start playing until he taps the baton.

Even after three separate descriptions of Ridge's new role, I still don't know what he's intended to do. I also wonder what exactly is this statutory authority he seeks down the line.

And then I look forward to now, post development of the Department of Homeland Security and wonder if those authorities are the ones that allow the department to wiretap, intercept mail and monitor our e-mails, blog writings, phone calls. Was this Mr. Ridge softening our desire for personal privacy in the hope that opening our lives to the government would protect us from anthrax and whatever else might arise.

Fear Is A Fantastic Motivator

As I told my students in the weeks after 9/11, if a piece of news tweaks the fear strings in your body, take a step back, analyze it and pull it apart.

That is not to say fear is useless. It protects us. Humans are more suggestible and more likely to listen to direction without question when under the influence of fear.

That is a fabulous thing when you’re caught in a flaming movie theater and someone tells you to remain calm, don’t run in directions and follow the aisle to the brightly lit EXIT sign.

It is dangerous and destructive, though, when the fear stimulus is prolonged and has no directed goal. Then, fear leads to random and useless action, often rife with violence and ultimately the mind and body breaks down into disorder.

I don't want to make my choices based on fear. Instead of allowing that belly twinge of emotion to guide my choices, I looked at my life and said "What am I waiting for?"

So many things I'd always wanted but never did because of fear, obligation, not wanting to do the wrong thing. Without fear, I am able to put aside the you-shoulds and what-ifs.

And, for what it's worth, it's easier to give up fear when you live through an event like 9/11. Because that's when I saw without a doubt that staying in one place is no more secure than moving. 

Last Week I Finally Saw the Airplane Footage

I chose not to watch the moment the planes hit because what good does watching a past event that cannot be changed. It's a spectator sport, and I prefer to live by my actions and my own memories.

It happened by mistake when I passed by a TV showing Tenth Anniversary coverage, and I was surprised at my response.

My chest tightened, breathing quickened. I went directly back to my apartment that no longer exists in a life that only lives in photos and memory. I was there again in all that pain and unknowing and indecision. 

Again, I felt the fear vividly. I re-experienced the wild look in the eyes of people around me, when they weren’t filled with tears, and then recognized the same wildness in my own face in the mirror. I thought I'd moved past these feelings, and I suppose I had. The image of the plen hitting brought me back.

For days, I closed my eyes to see those few seconds of footage repeating in my head on loop, watching helplessly as the flight speeds up in those last moments, as if the pilot relished the thought of all the damage he’d cause. Or was that my imagination?

The mind is powerful. It is up to us how we choose to use that power.

And Yet I Do Not Say No To Media

I often criticize the media for being self-interested and false. At the same time, I remain acutely aware that I am clearly part of the media. Am I being hypocritical? I certainly know I'm not immune to representing facts in a light that might misrepresent them or including mainly parts of stories that I know my readers will find most interesting.

Aldous Huxley says in Brave New World Revisited that all media is propaganda. It is impossible to present any experience in its entirety or as an absolute truth. The best we can do is write what we believe to be accurate with the goal of improving what exists in the world around us.

I try to keep Huxley's words as my guideline. I may not present absolute truth, but I do write what I believe to be true, given my own slants and prejudices. I try to think for myself. I make my best decisions with whatever information I have at the moment.

That is the best any of us can do.

This First Day Of the Second Decade After

I don't know what I expected to see on the streets of New York this week. Something palpable to mark the horror I saw? Sitting on the subway yesterday, with the credible threat of a new attack looming, a voice came over the loudspeaker reminding us to report any suspicious packages or people. I felt more vulnerable surrounded by so many people, because, were something to happen, it would be harder to escape.

I'd forgotten the anthrax threats, tucked away in my mind images of two massive plumes of smoke pouring upward where the Twin Towers used to be. I realized I no longer notice the proliferation of police, blockades and metal detectors. They, too, have become normal, and I accept them as helpful.

I Have Chosen To Forget

My most vivid memory of September 11, 2001 is watching a flock of pigeons flying their rounds from my side of the river to the other, circling the smoke as if it wasn’t there.

It was a beautiful day, much like today. The sky rings clear azure, not a cloud, and the sun shines brightly. It's the kind of day when moms take their babies to the park to play and people sit outside chatting with their neighbors over a coffee.

How can the sun shine when the world is falling apart? But then, here we are, ten years later.

Photo courtesy of David Barrie's Flickrstream.

Original photos taken by the children of the Hickmann Wichi community. See the world through their eyes from the  Wichi/H20 project of Cloudhead Art Foundation.

Inauguration August 1, 2011 at 7pm

Exhibition runs from August 1-13, 2011 at the Casa de la Cultura, Sala Mecano in Salta, Argentina.

Bear with me for a moment while I gush.  The photos are really incredible. From photos of pigs lounging by the cooking fire to squash picking to preparing dinner in huge metal pots over a fire, the photos tell the story of their lives. They show how these children live and what they love to do.

One boy named Javier has already developed his own style. I always know it's his photo because whether he's out exploring drain pipes or walking across dry cracked earth, his bare foot peeks into the right side of the photo. 

What we're trying to create here is art. When people buy these photos -- be it originals, reworked through photoshop or on t-shirts -- they buy them because they love the photo and not simply out of kindness.

Even better, when you buy one of these photos, all profits go toward fruit trees, goats and gardening tools, so the photographer and the members of his community move one step away from dying of malnutrition and one step closer to supporting themselves through sustainable means.

Thank Yous & Appreciation To:

Casa de la Cultura who is hosting the event. Corralon America who has graciously donated wood for mounting the photos and to Maximilliano Mura of Mura Fotografia for organizing the exhibition. 

One More Thank you!

We and Cloudhead Art Foundation have just received a grant from Burners Without Borders to help us develop our website through which we will sell photos and more to support the Wichi/H2O project.  

If you're interested in getting involved in Wichi/H20 or any of our other projects, you can send me your information through the Cloudhead website.

We're also currently accepting cameras for donation. So if you have a digital camera you're no longer using, consider sending it for this project.

Audrey and Dan of Uncornered Market tagged me as one of their bloggers.

This comes at a particularly perfect time as I’m in the process of moving my blog over –- finally – to Wordpress and have been going through all my posts to decide which I want to keep and which will be left to seep into the dark and forgotten corners of cyberspace.

And now, with no further drama or ado, I give you my seven.

Most Popular Post

How To Pay For Two Years Of Travel, Part I

This one was easy to choose. This post has by far received the most hits, the most links in and the most e-mail.  It's been featured on AOL twice, MSNBC and other places I don't even remember.

I do remember, though, exactly where I was when I wrote it. Sitting in Cafe Victoria on Plaza 9 de Julio, the main square in Salta just a few weeks after we arrived. At that point, I had no idea we would still be here three years later.

I was just starting to gear my blog beyond family members so this was one of the first posts I wrote with a larger audience in mind. I published How to Pay For Two Years Of Travel, Part II, shortly after.

Most Controversial Post

Why Thanksgiving Can Never Be Just A Day Of Thanks

Almost immediately after hitting publish on this post, I began to receive nasty and usually anonymous e-mails about how I'm not a good American and have betrayed my country. Then I watched as my blog subscriptions dropped more in one week than in the rest of the five years I've been blogging.

I don't believe myself to be unpatriotic simply because I'm willing to be honest about a very ugly part of American history. I believe it is only through that honesty that we can become a better, more inclusive nation. Anyone who can't handle it? Too bad.

Most Helpful Post

How To Avoid Being Scammed When Traveling To Another Country

My choice for this category was a toss up between this one and a post giving the nitty gritty, boring details of renewing your tourist visa in Salta. I ultimately chose How To Avoid Scams, because it has a more widespread usefulness. While the scam I encountered was in Buenos Aires, the methods to avoid, handle in the moment and report afterwards are universal.

Post That Surprised Me With Its Success Most

My Birthday Challenge: How Can I Help?

This was my first post to go viral. I published one night before ped, and the next morning when I saw my hits were about 1000 times what they normally were for the early morning, I was surprised. 

This, too, was shortly after I began writing posts for people other than family or friends, and I was just beginning to get a feel for what worked and what didn't. While I can't say I have mastered the art of making posts go global, seeing the response to My Birthday Challenge taught me much.

Most Beautiful Post

Homecoming Is As A Bittersweet Chocolate Truffle

This post always gets me. I think because when I read it I remember being at Lenox Mall so clearly and being overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of being overjoyed to be home while simultaneously and with equal force wanting to return to the beach and the freedom of travel.

It's a feeling all travelers know well, but it's not so easy to capture and explain. I think this post does both.

This post was also featured at the TBEX 2010 convention in New York City. I couldn't be there in person, so I'm glad a little piece of my writing could represent for me.

Post That Didn’t Get the Attention It Deserved

What Is Death To A Four Year Old

When a family member, pet or human, dies, once we get over the initial shock, we parents soon realize our kids are going to have questions. How does one explain death to a child? How are we supposed to encapsulate and clearly transmit information about something that, quite frankly, adults don't understand either?

When we talked to Lila that day in August, she made it easy. She asked the questions, and she was content to accept that sometimes Mommy and Daddy don't have the answers either.

This post didn't have much readership, though. I think in part because, well, I didn't have much readership. But it's also because it is so difficult to talk about death. So often, we hide it, push it away, cover death in metaphor in an attempt to avoid our own discomfort with not knowing.

Dan from Uncornered Market cited Unspoken Patagonia as his choice for Didn't Get the Attention. I think it didn't for similar reasons. We simply don't really know how to talk about death and the injustice that often comes with it.

Post Of Which I Am Most Proud

A Portrait Of Lila On Her Fifth Birthday

The way I describe her on this day a bit over two years ago is no longer an adequate portrayal of my daughter. Now, she rides horses. She can swim. She reminds me every morning to take my multivitamin and even brings it to me with a glass of water. She still loves art and music. She's still very much attached to us, but has lost her fear of going places without us.

I am proud of this post, because I am proud of LIla.

*******

Now that I've finished my 7 links, it's time to tag five more blogs. All are from people whose blogs I read and opinions I respect. 

First, Juliane Huang who knows the best place to find sandwiches in NYC and writes from her own twisted and wonderful view of the world.

I had a chance to get to know Aracely and Jason of Two Backpackers when they spent some time with us in Salta. The writing is funny, poignant, interesting, but don't forget to check their videos, too.

Christine Garvin of Confronting Love & Living Holistically With Humor. A good friend who always has a unique perspective and solid advice which you'll find in her writing as well.

Paul Sullivan of Slow Travel Berlin, crazy funny English guy who knows how to take a photo.

I met Susanna Donato in college. She writes the Cheap Like Me Blog where you'll find endless ways to save money and the environment.

And I know the rules say five, but there's one more person I have to add. Hal Amen from Wayworded. His recent photos of roads traveled, landscapes (including the South Dakota Badlands which hold a special significance for me) just got me.

So tag, you're it. Thanks again to Audrey and Dan for tagging me.

I went through your iTunes playlists a few weeks ago with the intrepid plan of finishing this post in time for our anniversary. It was to be an open tribute to you, our marriage and our life together.

I started chicken scratching in my notebook -- you know the one I won't let anyone else touch --  three days after our anniversary but never made it online until today.

I know my lateness with this won’t bother you. It won’t bother you any more than it doesn’t bother me that you probably won’t even read this unless I tell you it's here. I know you usually don’t read my blog because, as you tell me, you don't read any blogs. Besides, there’s little I’ve written over the years online that you don’t know in more detail and with infinite repetition in real life.

So in no particular order or even of importance, I give you sixteen songs. One for each year.

Farmhouse

Phish. You were always more partial to the Grateful Dead. I didn't care one way or another until Lila's first week of life  when Farmhouse was the only song that put her to sleep.

I played it the other day for her to see if she’d remember it, even a shadow of it. She didn’t.

Must Have Been the Roses

I barely knew anything about the Grateful Dead when we hopped in a car with that guy Eric -- the one who lived in your building and refused to stop for bathroom breaks because of his obsession with making good time --  to drive to Buckeye Lake. All I really knew of them was from the tape -- yes an actual tape -- you made for me the first month we dated.

I played that thing endlessly, and it was still going the week over Christmas when all my Orthodox room mates went home for break, leaving us alone in that apartment on 116th street and Broadway.

We lay in bed in my tiny room listening to the sounds of other people's moans as they bounced off the walls of the airshaft outside my window. We smoked cigarettes and weed and ate hummus and peanut butter sandwiches while we asked ourselves “What would the Lubuvitcher Rebbe say if he walked in on us right now?”

For some reason I remember you wearing a silly hat, the kind with a pointy top and earflaps, because the heat didn't work. But I think I'm making that up.

That was the same winter your father called us up and told us we should be concerned because people were talking about us. There were rumors we were having sex, and I should worry about my reputation.

You realize, the same ones so concerned about the sex lives of nineteen year olds, have long since divorced or died. Just saying.

Sea of Heartbreak

Your bedtime song for Lila, and you sound a lot like Johnny Cash when you sing it. You also sound just like Bob Dylan when you sing his songs and can affect a Neil Young so perfect that when my new neighbor came over to complain we were playing music too loud, she didn't believe me when I told her the stereo wasn't plugged in yet.

I sound more of the Roseanne Cash variety. I always mess up the same words and Lila corrects me.

Simple Twist of Fate

We walked down the aisle of our orthodox Jewish wedding to this song. It was a kind of wordless muzak-y klezmer remake, performed by the band a la mode for Atlanta Orthodox Jewish weddings.

No one aside from us knew the tune or the words or how not-quite-appropriate they were for two 20-something not-so-Orthodox-anymore-but-no-one-knew-yet jews to walk down the aisle to these particular Bob Dylan lyrics.

I couldn't find the master himself performing this song on Youtube. Only covers. But it seems like Jeff Tweedy now carries the mantel for this song. I think you'll like it.

Comeme

These days, all you want to listen to is Rza, Gza, ODB aka Big Baby Jesus who’s now dead anyway and really, for you it’s more about the Method of the Man. But I want that Latin beat be it funk or reggae or Calle-trece-ton with a little Brazilian samba.

How when I fell hard for this song, you didn't complain when I played it over and over.

Now I can’t listen to Comeme anymore after the person who introduced me to Chambao fucked me over so badly it's made me reevaluate how easily I open my life to people and trust them. You told me it doesn’t matter. Music is music. Don’t let the real world ruin it for me. Then you tell me I shouldn't let some asshole change who I am in real life either.

Tom’s Diner

I listened to it in high school and again in college when I spent late nights chatting at the diner of the same name. I went there with Ken my last night of my first year of college. That was before we even met.

I sang Lila to sleep with this song since before she could speak. She still asks for the "On the Corner" song and sings it with me as a duet.

I sang this song to her in Rob‘n’Joy’s apartment down the street from the place we sold in Brooklyn the night we really almost ended things. It was right before we left New York, and the process of moving was like ripping out deep roots. At a certain point, you figure, “Hey, I’m getting rid of everything, why not just get rid of you, too?”

Lila woke up in the middle of our serious talk. I took her back to bed and tried my best to explain what was happening without scaring her or confusing her then sang Tom’s Diner again and again.

I was surprised to find you still in the kitchen after she finally fell asleep. I don't think I ever told you how glad I am you stayed.

Shady Lane

I used to like Pavement. I used to love Pavement. But it has gone the way of Johnny Cash for me after too many roadtrips with the same few CDs on repeat.

Shady Lane makes me smile and think of one of our first trips together when we heard Pavement live in Dublin, and I was convinced I wanted to move to Ireland, never go back to New York.

Trains Across the Sea

 We were in Amsterdam three months into our world travel trip and had only just started to find a rhythym. We finally started to relax and enjoy it.

I hung out with Lila one morning and you went off to explore. When you took her that afternoon, I dragged the manuscript of a novel I’d been butting heads with for years and went to The Rokery with a pen and notebook. 

I spent most of the afternoon people watching. There was the guy who refused to remove his hat before going down to buy whatever it was he was going to buy. And the woman behind the counter who was young and beautiful but damn could she handle herself when the guy with the hat became belligerent and began to threaten her. Soon after Guy With Hat was escorted from the place, she showed me how she cut her t-shirt to make it more interesting. “I don’t like things that are boring,” she told me.

The Rokery manager hit on me the entire time, and I found him adorable and sexy. It stopped being flattering, though, the moment he smiled and suddenly aged fifty years and turned evil. I went back to my notebook.

I'm glad I can tell you these things. You're never jealous or upset. After sixteen years, you know where you stand with me. You don't have to worry.

I left soon after, and waited on the edge of a canal when I saw you down on the other side of the bridge. You with Lila asleep in the stroller, and I watched as you floated across the river to the tones of the Silver Jews.

Ok, so really that's eight, and my intention had been 16. Can we call it one song for every two years? That way I'll be finished this post by the time you get to this wifi cafe where I'm working, and we can have a coffee together and talk about other things.

Then I a can surprise you with this today instead of waiting until, maybe, it never happens because I'm reaching for more instead of being happy with what I have right now.

Happy anniversary, Noah!