FAST FORWARD

Video still from 'yogadometopia' visuals for Portable Shrines.

It's been a bit over a year since I started blogging on my portfolio site, an activity I dropped after a mere two entries. This is sadly reminiscent of my teenage habit of starting a diary, making diligent daily entries for a week or two, then missing a couple days and giving up on the whole thing.

My reasons for suspending the blog had less to do with losing interest, than with realizing that my blogging impulse was more focused on writing about my interests in craft and design and sharing my inspirations than posting occassional updates on my film projects, which Facebook provides an easy means to do. My first entry was intended to share news about a film screening at the Tacoma Film Festival, but it went off on long a tangent about the making of the film that I quite enjoyed writing. My second entry veered further afield, discussing my interest in communes and utopian architecture. That post was the seed of an idea that's been evolving gradually ever since, but has not found a new blog home until now.

Meanwhile, the past year has been full of projects in the 3-dimensional world. I've worked on two seasons of a kids' TV series, production designed a short film, and have been busy helping with a ton of shows, DJ nights, and a 2-day music festival put on by Portable Shrines, including making video projections for a couple of those. I also began participating in several of the vintage/craft markets that have popped up around Seattle--at Scenic Drive, Century Ballroom, and most recently Art Ache--and have found a new venue for myself as a designer--one that's refreshingly free of the demands that accompany filmmaking. Initially calling myself Caravan Vintage, I have since changed the name to Caravan Age and expanded the concept to include other projects that I see as related--my video making, several upcoming art installations, this blog, and plans for a curated pop-up featuring vintage clothing, wares, and designer-made goods.

I'm very excited about everything brewing around here. The next Art Ache is Feb 5. News about my upcoming installation/collaboration with performance duo Hair and Space Museum to be announced tomorrow. Seattle is blanketed in snow and I've had the entire day to hole up inside and make plans. 2012 is looking great so far.

Where I Want to Live Today

Note: This post has been imported from the sadly neglected news section on my portfolio site for posterity's sake. Originally posted Wednesday, November 3, 2010.

Watching yesterday's election results has me thinking about where I'd like to retreat to if, in a couple years, the Republicans take back the Senate and/or the presidency. I know I should be thinking more 'Yes We Can,' but at the moment I'm feeling encroached upon by the gigantic swath of red that dominates the election map. I am lucky to live in an urban oasis surrounded by progressive thinking individuals, but the oasis is increasingly endangered. Condos continue to proliferate while schools shut down, libraries go on furlough, and critical social programs are slashed (not to mention funding for the arts). Meanwhile, the rich erect museums to themselves and their quirky interests.

All this has me daydreaming about a rural hideout where my friends, artistic collaborators, and other like-mindeds can live communally, make art, and escape the bleak possibility that the legacy of 'Yes We Can' could become 'Well, We Tried.' While this may sound like a defeatist attitude, I am far from ready to give in to such a possibility. I'll continue to vote, to rally for sanity, and to promote a more desirable vision of the future.

This seems like a good note on which to introduce what I intend to be a recurring feature on this blog, "Where I Want to Live Today." One of my main preoccupations in life is collecting images of dwellings, for inspiration and for pleasure. I used to do this growing up. My parents, a home economist mother and an engineer father, had a small but significant collection of 1970s Sunset home reference books and one musty issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, that featured geodesic domes, modular furnishings and innovative space-saving designs for DIY homeowners.

Later, my mom subscribed to Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, and Martha Stewart Living magazines and I would spend hours lost in the pages, often with a stack of my dad's graph paper and a mechanical pencil, drawing floor plans. While I admit I spent a good deal of time fantasizing about my future life in a Manhattan penthouse full of modern art, or a home in the English countryside, my interest in architecture and interior design was more heavily influenced by the experience of seeing our own house being built when I was in Kindergarten. I can remember seeing the blueprints, based on a home plan published by Sunset called 'The Saltbox,' and walking on the plywood floor of my new room - on the second floor before it had walls.

In my seventh grade home ec class, one project involved building a shoebox diorama of our dream house. Other kids' designs were like a 1980s 7th Grade version of MTV's Cribs, featuring rooms devoted to Nintendo Entertainment Systems and indoor water slides, while mine was a compact studio that was designed like a sailboat or an airstream trailer with a fold down bed and all sorts of stuff that slid into hidden compartments.

I am still prone to daydreaming about the lavish interior design and styling featured in glossy shelter mags. As the category heading suggests, this part of my blog will be all about collecting inspiration material for my fantasy home du jour and so I will likely feature spaces that are all about luxury and ornament from time to time. More often, though, I draw inspiration from the way real people live and express themselves through decor and on a broader level I am interested in architecture and design as a catalyst for social change.

I believe in 'home' as one of the most fundamental units of community, and looking at the general state of housing in America it's not difficult to see our culture's ills reflected in the architecture. A friend recently began posting on Facebook a casual series of iPhone photos tagged 'Scenes from the Great American Foreclosure' with one-liner captions. It's a rather dismal portrait of where our communities may be headed if we aren't able to envision and build viable alternatives.

"Scenes from the Great American Foreclosure: All done! But can't shake the sensation we forgot something." Photo and caption by Tamara Paris.

 "Scenes from an American Foreclosure: Meteorite negotiable." Photo and caption by Tamara Paris.

So, on this November 3rd, I'm beginning the Where I Want to Live Today series with a few homes and places I've been daydreaming about lately, with a focus on communal living. My ideal commune of the future, or 'Where I Want to Live Today,' rather, might look something like this:

250-square-foot Mongolian Yurt in Keene Valley, New York. Images via Re-Nest

The 16' diameter yurt was constructed in 10 days in 1976. Since the original yurt was built on the property, the owners have built a second yurt, a cooking area, a sauna, and other communal features.

Or this:

A modern trailer park. Photos by Stephen Karlisch, via ReadyMade.

The interior of a rehabbed vintage Trailer at El Cosmico, in Marfa, Texas.

I recently stumbled upon the website for El Cosmico, a modern retreat in Marfa, Texas that pretty closely resembles the commune I'm envisioning, except that some of it's communal ammenities are unfinished and rather than housing a permanent community, it's more like an RV campground for the creative class. Design-savvy vacationers can pay by the night to participate in the communal experience offered. At El Cosmico, vintage trailers, yurts, and teepees are placed around a central hub. The commune I imagine would contain a cluster of personal dwelling units like yurts or tiny A-Frame cabins would surrounding a central community building that would house shared resources like kitchen, dining and  laundry; as well as workspaces for creative use like a screenprinting studio, music practice/recording space, lending library, or woodshop. Also at the center would be a community garden. That central hub could look something like the home/studio of architect Fritz Haeg, the mind behind Sundown Salon, a series of artistic happenings that took place in Haeg's geodesic dome in Los Angeles:

A performace inside the dome. Images via FritzHaeg.com

People gather in the thriving garden on the dome's property. Photos from the installation Where.

And finally, perhaps it might draw inspiration from this.

Food for thought this post-Election day. What does your dream home/commune of the bright new future look like?

True Adolescents and the Universe: Closing Night at the Tacoma Film Festival

Carr Thompson, Linas Phillips, and Davie-Blue in True Adolescents. Image courtesy of Furnace F

Note: This post has been imported from the sadly neglected news section on my portfolio site for posterity's sake. Originally posted Tuesday, October 12, 2010.

True Adolescents has enjoyed a good festival run since its premiere at SXSW with screenings in Seattle, London, and Norway to name a few. This week it comes home to the Pacific Northwest as the closing night film of The Tacoma Film Festival the screening and closing night celebration are on Thursday, October 14th.

It's been more than a year since I last watched TA, but it's been on my mind lately. A couple of weekends ago I went camping in the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, near North Bend, where many of the woods scenes in the film were shot. The spot is accessed via 11 miles of rutted gravel road - pockmarked with potholes the size of boulders. I must have driven the road a dozen times during the shoot, heading to or from set, so the rough ride jarred me into a state of nostalgia for the making of TA. I half expected to see the familiar sight of pop-up tents and production vehicles as we pulled into the parking area, but as luck would have it on a Sunday evening, the lot was nearly deserted - just a pair of hikers loading up their car to head out.

We set up camp in a site by the river and cooked over a fire as the sun went down. It seemed that we were the sole humans out under the stars that night and I stared up in amazement at the vastness of the universe. The scene was familiar, literally straight out of True Adolescents, but by moonlight, with the river in front of us and mountains jutting up towards the sky, I felt a million light years from the hubbub of filmmaking. At the same time, I found myself full of thoughts about the story and the characters - identifying with what they each must have felt out there in the woods.

Due to the complex logistics of filmmaking, the woods where I went camping were just one of several "woods" that stand-in for the coastal rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula in the movie. While location scouting for True Adolescents, I made two trips to the coast, once with the director Craig and once on my own, and I feel a strong connection to the territory I covered on those excursions. I've been longing to return to one beach especially, along a 23 mile stretch of unaltered primeval coastline within the Quinault Indian Nation, since I first had the privilege to set foot there. It was the final destination on my second scout trip and it seemed like a long shot that I would be able to see it. I had communicated with respresentatives from the Quinault tribe weeks earlier, but had not gotten a confirmation about my visit before slipping out of cellphone range the day before. I was planning to go to the tribal center in Queets and hope that they could help me track down the woman I needed to see. I was in luck to find here there - she was leaving the next day for a two-week canoe trip.

The road leading to the beach was longer and even more rugged than the one to the North Bend woods, and unnavigable without the help of a guide. It's glutted with twists and forks that my guide mapped by the roadside flora and fauna that she identified for me as I craned to see it out the open windows of the Bronco as we rumbled past, a cloud of dust rising up behind us. The road ends abruptly at about 12 miles in, taking a hard 90 degree turn, then becoming steeper and rougher for the last 100 or so feet with nowhere for a caravan of production vehicles to park. I scrambled down to the water and almost cried at the breathtaking beauty, certain that we would never be able to film such an inaccessible location. In the end, the disadvantages of filming there were trumped by the beauty, which was captured stunningly via the lens of D.P. Kat Westergaard.

Since I learned about the upcoming TA screening shortly after my camping trip, I am grateful that my recent lusting after True Adolescents' scenery will be indulged so immediately on the big screen at Tacoma's Grand Cinema. I'll be lucky if destiny ever guides me down that road to the Quinault beach again - for now I'll settle for 16mm.