thicket

Photo copyright 2000 Gazelle

Bali bamboo

i need to believe in super heroes

Darfur photo from NY Times

With crap like this going on, we need all the help we can get.

dry and crispy

Photo copyright 1995 Gazelle

It's getting to be that time of year...

Summertime scene near Circle X Ranch, Santa Monica Mountains, CA

rope and a broom

Photo copyright 1994 Gazelle

Play time in Yelapa, Jalisco, Mexico

be a man!

What does it mean when somebody says, "Be a man!". What should it mean? Should it even be said at all? How about "Be a human!" instead?

This book is painful to read. Not because it's poorly written - it is extremely accessible, especially considering it was researched and written by an academic. What's painful is reflecting on what "masculinity" means in this society and what modern, mainstream porn adds to the mix. Powerful stuff that should be reflected upon by all of us, male and female - it represents a dialogue that should be (but isn't) taking place everywhere in this country.

stop-time

"One warm spring night we staged a revolution. All the Junior boys, thirty or forty of us, spontaneously decided not to go to bed. We ran loose on the grounds most of the night, stalked by the entire faculty...A few legitimate captures were made by the younger men on the staff, but there was no doubt most of us could have held out indefinitely. I, for one, was confident to the point of bravado, coming out in the open three or four times just for the fun of being chased. Can there be anything as sweet for a child as victory over authority? On that warm night I touched heights I will never reach again - baiting a thirty-year-old man, getting him to chase me over my own ground in the darkness, hearing his hard breath behind me (ah, the wordlessness of the chase, no words, just action), and finally leaping clean, leaping effortlessly over the brook at exactly the right place, knowing he was too heavy, too stupid as an animal, too old, and too tired to do what I had done. Oh God, my heart burst with joy when I heard him fall, flat out, in the water. Lights flashed in my brain. The chase was over and I had won. I was untouchable. I raced across the meadow, too happy to stop running."

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time

pitchfork rebellion!

So I was reading about Oregon Forestry laws and history recently, just trying to understand how and why such an often progressive state could have such unsustainable logging practices, and I learned some interesting stuff. There is a citizen group founded about 3 years ago in Lane County's Coast Range area called Pitchfork Rebellion. These are rural folks tired of the big logging companies' practice of clear cutting and dousing the neighboring hills (and their families) with herbicides. They don't like the naked hilltops, choked streams, or the resulting mudslides either. Who would? There's a big rally set for this Sunday July 27th in Portland.

Apparently when Oregon's forestry laws were passed in the early 70's they were somewhat ahead of their time. Now they are lagging sadly behind the times and are considered by many to be the weakest protections for the forest in the Western US.