I was going to try to live-blog the NOFA-NY Conference last weekend, here in Rochester, but I couldn’t get a good, free Wi-fi connection, and then I’ve been ill all week, so I’m just now getting to it.

I missed the first session Saturday morning, so wandered around the tradeshow and found Mark Dunau talking to the tractor guys. In another life Mark was a playwright, and we got talking about irony and a remark he’d made back in November that I’d thought about since. We were talking about bio-char and he’d said the irony was that so much of the northeast had been de-forested to make charcoal. Later I started thinking that it was the playwright saying that. I started noodling on the connection between a sense of irony (or lack of it) as a connection to some kind of humility, to a connection to landscape in some way. I haven’t got this fully worked out yet, but it was important to think of sustainability as both a science and an art. In fact, art became quite a theme for the day.

Saw Jan MacDonald of Rochester Roots, who we were sharing a booth with, and she introduced me to James Allen, who’d put on a sustainability conference at U of R a couple of years ago. We talked about walnuts and berries among other things.

The next session I attended was on Apples. Lou Lego from Elderberry Pond Farm near Auburn had used a SARE grant to do some real analysis of heirloom and new apple varieties: which were the best for eating, baking, pies, juicing, cider, and drying. Some of the winners included Northern Spy, Pink Pearl, Cameo (best storing apple), Caville Blanc (best baking), Pristine (best eating, best early), Enterprise, Jona Free and the overarching winner Spitzenberg. This one had a story-Thomas Jefferson claimed it was one of his favorite apples, and the descendants of Jefferson’s apple are quite hard to come by. As a novice orchardist, I appreciated the detail of which varieties to look for.

For lunch, Jan and I went out to John’s Tex Mex in the South Wedge and talked about various projects, grants and art. Jan’s a former artist, and used to have studio space in the Searle Building years ago. We talked a fair bit about the creative work involved in gardening and sustainability efforts. When we got back we were both at a lunch discussion hosted by the CSL. Deb Denome, recent winner of the Canandaigua Athena award was there, but didn’t get too much opportunity to talk with her. Met Steve Melcher who runs Odonata Sanctuary just a few miles away in Mendon.

As I was wandering out of the lunch hall in search of better coffee (organic, free trade is nice, but I needed a good chocolatey French Roast) I ran into Maria Grimaldi, sitting at a table with Mike Kimball of Essex Farm. The topic was raw milk products and Mike’s ingenious way of churning butter using a milk can and a trampoline. I picked out a couple of “edges” running between groups at the conference. There was the age differentiator (”kids today”) and there was the meat / veggie divide. The livestock people were certainly very vocal.

Next up was a session from a Cornell post-doc who’d modelled New York’s ability (or not) to feed its population. The concept of a “foodshed” was put out there, and it turns out that Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are well-positioned to feed ourselves, and of these Rochester had the best relocalization potential for food. New York City, as you may guess, is somewhat less apt to feed itself from nearby land. In all it was estimated that the State could sustainably feed about 5 million, a quarter of our current population.

The results of the Foodshed map are available at http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/css/extension/foodshed-mapping.cfm

Finally I ran into Lisa Wujnovich, who’d presented a poetry session earlier. She said that her MFA program was going well and was feeling more and more connected to the writing. Generally, I think she and Mark were happy for the PDC we ran at Mountain Dell and were even perhaps serious about pursuing some of the students’ ideas about labor housing.

I discovered a couple of cool videos on the Guardian UK about Guerilla Gardeners (here, and here). Then I found another on YouTube that really introduces the concept with some humor. I think this guy deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

I heard the other day that my friend Jim Mott was on the Today Show, so I tracked it down and you can see the clip here. Jim is one of the few people I know who actually makes his living solely as an artist, and has done so for the last 20 some-odd years.

Aside from being a great painter, he’s also the person that turned me onto global warming as having a real effect (swans in upstate New York) and Diet for a New America.

One Sunday morning I was in the studio working. I was about to have an opening and wanted to get in touch with Jim, but didn’t have an e-mail address and I hadn’t seen him for a while, and didn’t even know if he was in town. Just then there was a knock on the door and there he stood! He’d been teaching using the space next door.

I’m glad to see him get some recognition after many years of hard work- huzzah!

Just read an article in the Independent by a journalist who visits the Utopia Experiment in self-sufficiency for a month. The site is located just outside Inverness, Scotland. The good news is that people learn quickly, especially when the food is at stake. The less good news is that they haven’t gone a winter yet, with no water or electricity, or faced the “hungry gap” in March.

They must be aware that there’s a similar experiment just 20 miles east of there that’s been running successfully for nearly forty years. I had the good luck to visit Findhorn in my college years, if only for a month. My experience with the learning I can echo, as within a day or two I had adopted what I can only call the rhythm of the place. The pace there seemed much slower, and people rarely blinked. They kept their eyes open. And so did I, once I let go to this energy and let it carry me.

It was there on the Moray Firth that I, too, learned to cook: something for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I learned about working in a bindery, about meditation, about demolition work, about pine trees and the connection between natural resources, sustainability and peace. George Galloway recently had a video piece with David Strahan (hat tip TOD)looking specifically at the recent wars and their connection to resources.

I saw a poster in the Art Store the other day for an MFA exhibition by photographer Anna Druzcz that caught my attention. I finally went to her site and it is very cool. Very inspiring to me in the type of work I’ve tried to do with collage, but she does a great job of poking stuff out of frames / contexts.

I’m reading Claude Levi-Strauss’s The View From Afar, which contains a short essay entitled Schizophrenia and Cosmopolitanism. As always, I have an interest in most things having to do with schizophrenia from an intellectual standpoint. In this essay Levi-Strauss is trying to draw some parallels between the features of schizophrenia (dualistic splits, identification with celestial bodies, sensation of internal organs re-arranging themselves, etc.) and features of a Chinook myth. The final conclusion is that the features of the myth were borrowed from other tribes with whom the Chinook had commercial relationships, and in some cases reversed or trans-figured.

This borrowing, in a cosmopolitan culture, looks alot like cut-up or collage to me. Many of the photomontages I’ve done for the last 20 years have a quasi-mythical feeling, and the essay starts to explain that. I’ve always felt this about surrealism, and there is overt exploration of the unconscious as revealed in “random” placements and re-placements.

I was wondering today if Burroughs, John Cage and Duchamp, the artists I consider the paragons of the 20th century, had ever met or been in the same place at the same time.

We’ve been watching the early episodes of 24 lately. I love intersecting story / POV plots in general. Crash and 13 Conversations About 1 Thing come to mind. They do a great job in some of the title prologues of showing the same scene from separate cameras. This is like a sort of temporal cubism, which is a kind of reversal of the collage technique (explosive vs. collective / implosive).