When I travel to Europe I take the opportunity to visit my twin brother Ben in Brooklyn. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation-- a sociological study of bike messengers-- while teaching at NYU. New York has a vibrant messenger community that expresses itself through many diverse forms: art, film, music, critical mass rides and alley cat races that simulate the job of being a messenger: navigating a complex city while moving things from place to place on one of the most elegant machines humans have yet devised. When I visited Ben in July I arrived at the tail end of a long weekend of messenger events: races of various kinds, films, parties and bike polo. As it ended up, the last of these activities was the one I caught. If you've never seen bike polo, be assured it's a most excellent thing. Unfortunately around this point of my trip I discovered that the batteries of my camera leaked acid on the terminals so I got no pictures, and for the duration of the journey relied on the generosity of others with cameras. Here's a link though to a New York Times article on bike polo. It even has some video footage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/sports/othersports/27polo.html
A good friend of Ben's named Squid took this picture of us at the Bike Polo Tournament. It was scorching hot in New York and most of the Eastern US at the time. Then I flew to Ireland where it was wet and cold, but good fun.
Aria Ungerer coordinates the workshops that I teach in Cork. She lives a half hour south of Cork City with her partner, Herman. On the right are Aria and Lisa. Lisa is from Dublin and is the coordinator of the workshop I'm about to teach there.
Aria and Herman live in an old fog station-- where people used to blow foghorns to warn ships away from the coast. It sits amidst grain fields, stone walls and brambles on a windswept cliff that overlooks the Atlantic. Sounds romantic, yes? Except the scope of the renovation (multiple old neglected buildings) puts my own epic home restoration to shame. It is a great deal of fun to stay at “the compound” as Aria’s father calls it. Here are some pictures.
I'll be visiting in a few days before travelling to Austria. When I was there in the summer they were starting to put up a sun room on the south side of the house and I'm curious to see how far it has progressed. I always look forward to staying with Aria and Herman. They are great friends and the combination of ocean, cliffs, sky and wind that surrounds their home is a wonderful thing. I feel at ease there, despite (or perhaps because of) the driving busyness of nature; so much movement expressed through waves, gusts, birds, crabs and clouds.
From Ireland I went to Brighton, England to teach a series of therapeutic workshops. My friend Jo Tytherleigh organizes the workshops I teach in the UK. Brighton offers a chance to catch up with many good friends from this part of the world. Here I am hanging out with Jo and our friend Aki from London.
And here's Ken, Jo's partner looking tres hip wearing a Plum Creek String Band Shirt.
When I wasn’t traveling this summer I spent a chunk of time with a few friends clearing brush for a utility pole at the back of my property, and then digging a long, deep ditch to bury my electrical service underground. Call me crazy, but for the most part, I like digging. The project dragged on though-- as Stewart projects sometimes do-- in this case because just at the point we’d finished, Oberlin had several days of unbelievably torrential, monsoon-style rain which filled the ditch with water-- a problem in terms of burying electrical cable. My friend Robert Turman had the brilliant idea of using a hose to siphon the water down into my basement sump pump, which then pumped it out to another part of the yard. We had to prime the hose from the outdoor faucet and it took all night and half the next day for the siphon to drain the whole ditch, but it worked. A week later I got my new service all finished, a big step in the odyssey of 43 Spring St. Here are some pictures of ze ditch.
With house construction, teaching and band gigs on the plate this fall, I felt I did not have quite enough to do so I decided to take introductory German from Ines Brünner at the college. It's been a great class, but completely overwhelming in terms of fitting the homework with everything else. Now that I'm on my way to Europe though, I'm glad to have done it as I'll have the chance to employ my meager Deutsch sprechen skills when I'm in Austria.
The Plum Creek String Band has been geographically dispersed with Jamie in North Carolina and Bruce in Pittsburgh but this fall, fortune smiled on us and we were able to string together some gigs in Northern Ohio. I wanted to get some band pictures taken while we were together but it kept not working out. Then on the last day while standing in a parking lot, just before going our separate ways, who should drive by but my sister and then our good friend John Seyfried, one after the other-- the two people I know who carry cameras with them at all times. John took this picture of us in a back alley.
Coming soon, tales from Europe.
