(My first course was a weekend spent learning alternative print processes – cyanotype and van dyke – with Leah Sobsey.)

For the Intro class when had to do a short presentation, up to five minutes on a documentary idea. It could be any form, and I chose to make a short film. I filmed the Crop Mob in Carrboro, read the New Blood for the Old Body essay into a narration track, strummed on the banjo to make a 30 second loop and came out with this -

Crop Mob is primarily a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to work and build an interconnected agrarian community. Crop Mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians. The Crop Mob is open to all regardless of experience, background or age as it is intended to be a community effort.

Pretty straight forward and to the point – peppers, pepper tasters, the end.  Since then the pepper festival has grown and evolved. The same can be said about my life in photography.

For this year’s festival, the big attraction for me was all the kids playing with the giant bubble wands. I shot this event with my Nikon D300. This was the last fest for that camera; I sold it last week. I used an ultrawide lens for the most part, which demands that you get close. So I got close and then got closer. I wiped bubble spatter off the lens more than a dozen times. All worth it though -

Now, freshened from rest and with plenty of built up demand to participate, the plan is to complete four mobs in two months with two of the mobs organized as “mini-mobs” with several nearby locations getting mobbed simultaneously.

In August we returned to Spence’s Farm to do some of the tasks that we do best – pull weeds, make large piles of compost disappear and lay down mulch.

This past Sunday we split up to hit three location in Durham. The Interfaith Food Shuttle’s urban farm plus the home gardens of several long time mob participants.

Kristin and I attended the mob at Steph and Steven’s house, turning a lot full of English ivy and wire-grass into several nicely cleaned up and mulched garden areas.

I am excited to see many, many first time crop mob participants. Ever expanding and pushing the model forward, I am still in awe at how it all continues to come together and function so well.

Most of the very ripe (and tastiest) will go to the birds in the next few days, but human hands will grab the ones in reach.

The short season is basically defined by the birds’ activity and not so much about how many we pick for our pies and our freezers.

We Who Are Not As Others (or The Untitled)

“Pepper King” John roasts peppers while kids get into trouble -

Katy washed the apple press before making cider -

A photo of a photo of a courthouse on fire -

This first shot (from early January) will be part of the “Sense of Place” exhibition at 18 Reasons in SF. If I had to describe why I chose to submit this one, I’m not sure that I could. There was a break in the construction of our scrap wood greenhouse, and it was starting to get late in the afternoon. Gray was taking a break.

Another one of Gray, this time using a skateboard deck for some fun time in the snow -

Warmer weather and a candid shot from Hannah and Link’s wedding -

Stevie processing a deer -

Slim pickings at the blueberry patch -

Things change, ideas evolve out of or into one person’s control.  To stay static is to admit defeat in some ways, to admit that you or we are no longer capable of dealing with the dynamics of just about anything.

We live with the rules, consequences and laws of thermodynamics, of gravity, of genetic drift, of economic quality.  We come as prepared as we can, but it is often not enough.  Gravity is unbeatable but yeah, we adapt and upgrade and try to keep our faces from hitting the dirt with too much force.

Two years into my return to a rural lifestyle, and I feel that we are gaining some traction on some sort of identity. We are on the edge of an era in which we build the place that makes the most sense to us, to the people who live at Circle Acres full time, for the transients who might like to someday live there full time, for the folks just stopping by for a week or so.  What do we mean to each other? How can our differences be energizing instead of polarizing? What models of community labor make sense for sustainability? Someday we might figure it out. Until then we’ll keep polishing the edges and looking for a nice spot in the grass.

I am still moving through photographs for the show, trying to figure out sizing. It looks like there will be six at 24×30. I thought it might be eight, but finding two more has been a challenge. In the 16×24 and 16×20 sizes I feel that there are some strong themes developing. I’m just moving on from there.

On the food and drink fronts, on Friday night we harvested sassafras from our land for use in the root beer. On Saturday morning I helped out with a sorghum harvest just down the road at Okfuskee Farm. I am hoping that the sorghum molasses will be ready in time to add the sweetness to the root beer.

There are ten days to go with the Kickstarter page and then seven more days to the actual show. Please continue to spread the word and add your backing!

Update #1 – Response to this project has been strong right from the start, and I hope that momentum continues to build. If you are considering contributing please be aware that the $600 goal is just the minimum. Funding can go well beyond that – it means more prints on the wall at the show, more support of local farms and more invested interest from you all in seeing this project become a success. It also means the ability to take the show to other locations, which would be amazing!

Update #2 – call for 200% It only took five days to reach 100% funding on my project – I am extremely happy that that has happened. Feels like the support is just getting started and the word is spreading.

With that said, let’s keep it going. Another $600 is another full wall of photographs at the show, 24 more feet of my work on display. That would be immensely incredible as well as immensely humbling, the support of friends and strangers coming together to help me achieve something so rewarding.

As I post this, the project is just shy of the 200% funding goal with 21 days to go. If we make it to 200% by tomorrow I have some crazy ideas for what can come with 300% funding and beyond.

For full disclosure, I will post what this money will go towards. The quick summary is printing, mounting, hanging hardware, postage, promotional materials (postcards and flyers), food and beverages.

Please consider funding this project!

Gray seeds out some flats

Scalding a chicken before plucking

Filming a music video with anarchists

Madeline framed with a fence under construction

Jack

I thought it would be fun to look through the photographs I took during the last year, the ones that weren’t posted here on Cricket Bread as part of an essay.  These photos don’t necessarily tell a story all together. That said, there is no particular order in time or in theme.

Noel focuses on starting a fire with primitive tools

Mike Slaton prepares for Diner Night

Jamie hula hoops at the Pittsboro Pepper Festival

Kristin relaxes in Denver

Dance party in Pittsboro, North Carolina

Kristin destroys a door frame

Danielle, Noel and Gray cook dinner in the Wolf Den

As the busy day of butchering ended, those who drink bourbon were entitled to their sips.  Sips turned into larger sips and those sips turned into songs and poetry and stories about Henry Hudson and the Catskill Gnomes.  A fire maintained through a little lingering drizzle as people kept nibbling from the tables full of pork.

There was a ragu with trotters, braised belly with apple cider and tenderloins melting in their dishes.  And there were people from the city connecting with the farmers and the farmers connecting with their butcher.  It was an introduction to food sources that will continue beyond the empty bottles and fire warmed feet, beyond the apple orchard and the muddy ruts.

The next morning it was back to work on the pork, cutting up the remaining pieces and getting the fat ready for sausage making.  Fat was also rendered for frying apple fritters and doughnuts, greasy little snacks that went well with the monotony of grinding the sausage.

When the work was done I took the train back to Manhattan, carrying a package of sausage for a friend in Jackson Heights.  We ate some for breakfast the next day.  At that point I was at the pork threshold and could eat no more.

Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads -

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.

We were there to attend the commitment ceremony of our friend Duncan and his partner Rachel.  The ceremony was fun and short and a good time to catch up with old friends and listen to new friends.  The reception was a potluck with long tables full of all sorts of yummies.  There was even banana pudding, which is my favorite locavore exemption.

In the corner was a whole roasted pig, all wrinkled skin and a nice tan head still attached.  It skeeved Kristin a little.  Her thoughts and imagination turned to the three little pigs we have at the farm and how they would look spread out on a table, some chef’s hands all in their insides pulling out hunks of smoked muscle and fat.  But she says she may eat them when it comes time just because she knows that they have had amazing lives full of good food, tons of space and belly rubs twice a day (more on weekends!).

The reception after-party wasn’t really my thing, which was kind of a bummer.  Since I don’t drink or smoke anymore  I find it increasingly hard to relate to the folks who I consider “my people” – the artists and anarchists and renegade agrarians who wash over me wherever I go – once the sun goes down on a Saturday night.  I can’t keep up or interact.  Maybe I’m getting old or maybe I simply over did things way back when and now I am paying the price for my lack of foresight .  As I keep repeating to myself and others – regardless, here we are…

* The name of this post comes from a song by …Revel in the Morning. They once did a show in the basement of the Local Revolt house in Wilmington. I lived there for quite a while, well from start to finish actually, and our friend Duncan lived there for six months or so. Nathaniel, pictured in many of the slides in the above slide show, lived there for a year. There is a video of a song from the Revel show featuring the actual basement of Local Revolt. It was shot by the band on August 14, 2003 -

We’d have to throw the rocks into the tree line or into a tractor bucket, breathing the dust as it split with the crevices of the basalt and granite and diorite brought to the surface with the most recent bottom plowing.

The rocks arrived long before we were thought off, catching a ride on the gray belly of a two mile thick glacier.  In the deposits that followed came everything from the boulders – now sitting in front yards painted with house numbers or enveloped by lichens – to the baby minerals of feldspar and hornblend and all those magnificent magnetic bits of iron.

Picking up rocks is as fun now as it was when I was eight years old, which is to say that it is no fun at all.  It reminds me of work for no pay.  It reminds me of long summer days away from friends.  It reminds me of responsibility that I had no need or want of.  It reminds me of time ill-spent laboring for someone I could care less about.

But that all changes with the crop mob…

Sometimes I know that rocks need to be picked and weeds need to be pulled.  These tasks are best accomplished with more than one person, in a mass of asses and elbows, jabbering on and on about everything other than rocks and weeds and tasks that really have no end.

Weeds decay into their components of minerals and carbon and nitrogen within days.  A person could watch the whole process if they had the patience and justification.

Rocks decay much more slowly and, without the aid of the outside crush of a human or machine doing some work, they will not likely decay within a person’s lifetime.  You can watch if you want, but you might want to bring something to eat while you wait.

So picked and piled rocks will remain picked and piled rocks wherever we place them at least until some other monkey comes along and moves them again.  Maybe they will be hidden under weeds as the years pass only to be rediscovered by a passing lawnmower or an unprotected toe.

Only when I was a teenager did I realize that there existed mechanical rock pickers that pulled behind tractors and did the work we did in seconds rather than hours.  This made me realize that dropping off kids at the edge of a field was just a convenient way to get rid of those kids for the day.  Tasks without end make good kid-sitters.

With the beauty of the snow in NC comes the problem of clearing it from the roads and the ridiculous frenzy and panic of the local population.  Just the threat of snow is enough to close all schools and most businesses.  Bread and milk flies off the store shelves, people forget how to drive and banks close their doors.  It took me three days to make a deposit at the local bank branch; even the day of the deposit had a delayed opening.

Snow plows are in very short supply around here, and it can take a day just to clear a major highway.  We live on a side road off another side road off yet another side road and then down a dirt road, which basically means that we never see the snow plow anywhere near our home.

It is nothing like New York where the plows come fast and often, their sounds destroying the quiet of night.  I wrote about the plows in Quitter #5.  Here is a taste -

Oh, How Long December…
During a snow storm, the plows mostly come at night.  In the sturdy, hoary months of childhood in Western New York, I would lay awake listening as the distant scraping of the plow brushed its steel blades over the roughly poured asphalt.  In the dry winter air, the low hum could be heard for miles, the flashing orange roof lights of the plow radiating off the lumbering snowflakes, themselves moving unpredictably towards any available surface, wrestling the wind’s vacillating directions.

First the plow would pass to the south of our house, down the thin Barville Road, then up North Byron Road and finally across our unmarked, no-shoulder road.  As the sound grew closer I would pull my face up to the window, watching the coming lights reflect off every available inch of ground, the thick cover of flurries yielding very little until the massive vehicle was right in front of my eyes.  A wave of snow and rock passed over the giant chisel, driven by a mass of grinding metal and boiling oil, echoing brutal noises off the aluminum siding of the house.  The sound and lights would fade as the driver made way through the expansive grid of rurality, on and on towards the gawking of other children unable to sleep.

***************

In Chatham County we are blessed with the ability to grow food all year round.  With this blessing comes the curse of trying to fool the natural cycles either through the creative use of energy (wood stove in the greenhouse) or by the less intensive means of row covers and low tunnels.

Yesterday’s snow meant that the folks at Piedmont Biofarm had to battle the flakes in order to keep their crops alive.  I found farmer Doug Jones busy in the storm sweeping off his row covers with a push broom.

Even he had to admit that it was a losing battle.  A day later, he and a few of his interns finished the work, clearing the snow and ice by hand.

***************

Yesterday ended up being a half day of work for myself and Kristin.  The first snow at the farm was an event for me even though snow and cold and ice is basically in my blood.  I haven’t studied an icicle in years.  The icicle is an indication of poor roofing and a lack of insulation, but let’s leave all that for the adults to think about…

One thing you don’t usually see is a Magnolia grandiflora full of snow.  The evergreen leaves stand out during the brown of our short Winter, but they really stand out against the cold white of an even shorter and rarer snow fall.

And what would the short work day be without a little snow fight action?

We threw snowballs at each other and at 80 (our doggie).  But she was busy with work most of the afternoon, and could barely be bothered to play along.

Her “work” mostly consists of chasing mice in the back field and running around like a crazy person.

This work keeps her occupied and healthy, alert and slim.  It is almost a script – the mice run; she follows their scent, bouncing from grass clump to tree stump, digging up rocks and fallen branches all day long.  The mice run some more.  Repeat.

80 doesn’t really come off as a killer.  Now I’m starting to think that I should be cheering her on.  After all, with a depleted mouse population, we may be able to lower the tick infestation in the Spring.  Mouse blood is the gateway drug for young ticks.  Damn delinquents…

After she caught the mouse (the first one I ever saw her catch), I basically took it away from her.  Later on in the evening I thought that it probably would be best if she had been allowed to eat her catch.  We live in the middle of nowhere, so these field mice are not eating poison.  Kind of a waste of protein.

From now on at Circle Acres, the number one rule for all of us is “You eat what you kill.”

I’m not sure which pie bakers ended up with dates, but I don’t think that was really anyone’s intent.

With pies filling bellies, it was time for the entertainment to begin.  A puppet re-enactment of the victory over the police, presented in three hysterical segments…

Then on to some anarcho-country folk punk from Dan Mac.

My favorite song from Dan was about liberals, their hypocrisy and how they are part of the problem and not the solution.  My distrust of the right is often eclipsed by my distaste for the inaction, posturing and verbal drooling of the left.

i’m sick of you
and your goddamned hypocrisy
if peace is patriotic
i’m starting a fight

they’re not my soldiers
and they’re not my astronauts
we can all be leaders
and we don’t need fuckin’ cops

clear cut the forests with hybrid machinery
Brutus and Judas have nothing on us
don’t say the “R” word, just write to your congressman
we’re here and profiteers, traitors of trust

The recent Obama selection of big-ag, cloned meat cheerleader, GMO loving, ethanol guzzling, bio-pharmaceutical conman, and all around jerkstore cowboy Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture illustrates the last verse perfectly.  When you trust a politician, sooner or later you lose.  Now we’re losing sooner – maybe there won’t be rainbows, peace on Earth and gold raining from the sky on January 20th after all.  Thankfully, we can still rely on each other instead of the so-called representatives.  Can we just call them “self-described representatives”?

Anyway, the last band to play was From the Depths.

Their set was energetic, but it was the crowd that made the show.  Animated and dynamic, many of the folks were pulling out some of the old dances, but I saw some new things during the show as well.

Intensity was not lacking…

During the From the Depths set, someone said that they voted for Obama because he promised to make punk lyrics understandable and audible.  They are going to hold him to that promise…

From that seed
A mighty root
And it grew

Yeah, capitalism is dead to me, but mine is a minority opinion.  I’ll dance on that grave someday, and my own grave too, thank you.  But what happens when people decide that a symbolic gesture is in order, a mock procession of ecstatic mourners cheering the burning hulk of centuries of mistreatment?  What happens when a funeral for capitalism gets disrupted by folks who simply don’t want to believe it is dead?

To back up, in late November Kristin and I were planning to go to a street party in Chapel Hill to celebrate the death of capitalism.  The plan was to have a funeral in the street and then dance in the same street.  But that night was cold, so we decided to stay home, stoke the wood stove and get under the blankets.  We figured the industrialists, et al wouldn’t miss us at graveside.

Many other folks thought it too cold for a funeral as well, but eventually enough people showed up to actually make the party go on.  The cops didn’t like the idea, started shoving and pressing and yelling and spraying and doing all the things that annoy all the people like me who have any sense of the rights and responsibilities of anti-authoritarian living.  Just try to get your dancing condoned in the streets of Chapel Hill!

Police Chief Brian Curran said his officers dealt with the situation appropriately. He said police do not condone dancing in the street and had not issued a permit for the protest.

As the clash went on, several un-arrests were made, but one person was taken to jail.  It is that one person that brought about the need for another party.

Nick Shepard, 24, the manager at International (sic) Books on Franklin Street, was the only person arrested. He was charged with assaulting an officer.

This is where the story pretty much starts for me.  I love knowing that if I were in a similar situation, a hundred people have my back even if they don’t know me very well or know me at all.

Friday night Kristin and I went into Carrboro for a benefit event billed as “Punk ‘N Pie”, a date auction where the winner of the pie gets a blind date of their choice with the pie baker.  After the auction would be a re-enactment of the defeat of the police using puppets, then a smashing of a capitalism pinata and finally a bunch of bands.

Yeah, we made a pie – a chunky, buttery, local sweet potato pie made with Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes, local honey, local eggs and sweet cream butter from Homeland Creamery. No, it wasn’t a vegan pie, but I wanted it to be different and supportive of local farmers.  Local fat is hard to come by unless it is from a creature.

There were a dozen or so other pies on the table when we got there, many with multiple bids on them.  There was the dumpstered pie with the added slogan “Let’s Paint the White House Black” with a black flag decorated on the side.

There was the giant apple pie with a heart cut out…

…a vegan pot pie and several cookie pies.

Then there was the “Let’s Make a Pie Together” date pie…

…and a Mud and Flowers pie that was really a pie pan filled with mud, leaves, sticks and flowers.

The auction raised several hundred dollars for a legal defense fund for Nick.

Kristin won our pie despite some other pretty high bids.  So I got that date going for me.

More to come…