Frigid New York

If you are in New York City in the upcoming weeks, I am involved with a SWEET little indy theater festival called Frigid New York. It takes place in three small east village theaters – The Kraine, Under St Marks, and The Red Room – each with respective seating capacities of 99, 45, and 30 seats. There are 30 shows, each limited to one hour in length, that will put on a total of over 150 performances between February 22nd and March 4th.

This festival is extra-special because the selection process is completely unjuried. Once the online registration opens, the first 15 people who click “go” on the festival website are automatically entered into the festival (yes, seriously). Then another 15 are selected via random lottery a month later. Also, performing companies get to keep 100% of their ticket sales. This is unheard of, especially in New York City. It is a true wildcard festival that is sure to have some gems in it.

Tickets are mostly in the $10-$15 dollar range, and there is a cheaper cabaret show both weeks wednesday-friday at midnight at Under St Marks (5 advance/8 door). You can read teasers and promo material for each of the shows on the Frigid website. You can buy tickets online or at the box office at 85 E 4th street, or at the door if the show isn’t sold out.

I am the festival tech director, so please stop in and say hi at the box office at 85 East 4th Street, between Bowery and 2nd Ave. Hope to see you there!

Making Tempeh

Not all tempehs are created equal.

Perhaps I should say that all tempehs are created equal, but that the store bought version familiar to many of us has sadly had its life-force pasteurized out of it – removing many of the qualities that make fresh homemade tempeh one of the most divine earthly pleasures I have ever known. Making your own tempeh is slightly time consuming, but if you are up for the adventure, it is a fun and rare culinary skill to have in your arsenal.

What is tempeh?———

Tempeh is a traditional fermented soybean product hailing from the island of Java in Indonesia. It is made by introducing a specific mold culture (Rhizopus oligosporus) into halfway-cooked soybeans, and carefully controlling a 24-hour ferment in which the mold grows through and around the beans. The final product is a textured cake in which the soybeans are bound together by white mycelium, and with a delicious nutty and sweet aroma (I find that this aroma is not present in store-bought varieties). The mold also digests many of the soybean’s nutrients and proteins that are otherwise indigestible in the human body – meaning that this process unlocks a great deal of nutritional content and that tempeh is a very healthy food.

How It’s Done————

I am lucky to live in a place where there are several experts on hand, and a tempeh-making setup that is ready to use. It was fairly simple, and I think that anyone with a can-do attitude could get great results.

We started out with dried generic soybeans (make sure you have a generic soybean, and not edamame, which will not work well). We used 28 pounds of the dried beans, but this is a massive amount – we made tempeh to feed a community of over twenty people for several weeks (at least). Just one pound of dried soybeans would give you a couple of servings of tempeh and would be a lot more manageable.

The first step is to remove the hull from the beans. This can be done with a simple hand-powered grain mill, or I have heard you can also soak the beans overnight and stomp on them in a bucket in the morning (so long as you make sure your feet are clean!). If you are using a grain mill, set the coarseness so that the beans are cracking in half or in quarters.

Using a grain mill

Whole beans on left, cracked/de-hulled beans on right

Next, cover the beans in a pot with water and bring to a boil. Cook for about 1.5 hours, until the beans are halfway cooked. If you eat one, it should be a little soft and a little hard. Once they are at this point, strain them well and transfer them into a large bowl. They need to cool down to below 100 degrees F before you add the starter culture – so you can either just wait a while, or do what we did and set up a large fan next to the bowl while stirring the beans.

Once you are sure the beans are under 100 degrees (using a meat thermometer, if possible) it is time to add the starter culture. You can purchase a powdered tempeh starter culture from Gem Cultures at http://www.gemcultures.com/soy_cultures.htm. It comes with directions, but basically you add one teaspoon of starter per pound of dry soybeans. At larger quantities, this ratio becomes smaller, so we ended up using 14 teaspoons for our 28 pounds of dry soybeans. Mix the starter in one teaspoon at a time to help disperse it evenly throughout the soybeans.

Next is the only part that can be tricky – incubation. First, flatten the mixture out into slabs that are about 1.5″ thick. They need to be laid out in some kind of dish that lets them breathe, yet also retains moisture. We used hotel pans that came with holes punched in them, and then we used waxed paper with holes punched in it to cover the top. I’ve also heard of people just putting the tempeh in a paper bag with holes punched in it, and laying it top of a wire cooling rack (don’t just leave it on the counter or the bottom won’t be able to breathe). The point is that the tempeh needs need air circulation, but it also can’t afford to lose much moisture.

Then, you need some way to make sure that the temperature remains roughly 86 degrees for 24 hours. After about 12 hours, the mold will start growing so rapidly that it produces its own heat. This often means that you need to be adding heat to the tempeh for the first 12 hours, and finding a way to cool it off and prevent it from overheating itself during the last 12 hours. Our setup used an old industrial refrigerator as the incubator – it was not turned on, it was simply used for its insulation. It had an incandescent lightbulb inside it, attached to a thermostat kill switch that would turn the light bulb on if the temperature was less than 81 degrees. Just this little heat input was enough to keep the interior of the refrigerator at the right temperature. Then, twelve hours later, we cracked the door open – the temperature read 100 degrees and the pans of tempeh were HOT, so we flushed the heat out by opening the door and leaving it propped open for the rest of the ferment. This overheating can cause the tempeh to come out slimy and alkaline, so it is very important to flush the heat out.

Going into the Incubator

In very hot weather, you can possibly avoid the need of an incubator altogether. If you make your tempeh early in the morning so that it has all day in ~86 degree weather, then twelve hours later when the sun goes down, the surrounding environment might well be cool enough to take the extra heat away from the tempeh. But make sure you know what temperature you’re working in so that this method doesn’t backfire on you. If it is just right, you can simply leave the tempeh on the counter for 24 hours and wake up the next morning to a delicious fresh tempeh breakfast. As far as incubators are concerned, I have heard of people using plywood boxes, ovens with pilot lights, and several other crafty devices. The point is that you need to be a little creative on this and figure out what works for your kitchen. I promise you that the effort will be well worth it when you have a process that works every time, and you can bang out delicious tempeh whenever you want.

So…the final moment. Here is a picture of the tempeh coming out of the incubator 24 hours after we made it:

It should smell uniquely nutty, and maybe a little like ammonia if you get close to it. It should be well bound with thick white mycelium, and if you slice it, it shouldn’t fall apart too easily (although even if it is a little imperfect, it will still be safe to eat). If you don’t eat the tempeh right away, you should freeze it now to stop the mold from over-growing. Considering the quantity that we made, we have a whole lot that we froze as single-meal sized pieces wrapped in cling wrap.

If the tempeh falls apart, or is very slimy, or tastes too alkaline, try tinkering with some of the different elements in the equation. Perhaps you didn’t drain enough of the cooking water from the soybeans? Perhaps you let the tempeh get a little too hot while it was incubating? It is a delicate process, and tinkering is completely necessary to get the best results. Although I still recommend eating whatever you make, even if it is imperfect – it won’t be dangerous to your health, and it will give you a sense of how tinkering with the process will affect your outcome.

Cooking with Fresh Tempeh———–

Once you have your gorgeous hand-made tempeh, there are lots of things you can do with it. I have had tempeh/vegetable stir fry, tempeh tacos, and delicious barbequed tempeh with homemade barbecue sauce. One of the simplest and most delicious ways that I like to prepare tempeh is to pan-fry it in a mixture of vegetable and coconut oil, and add salt:

Pan Fried Tempeh

I find that tempeh is best when it is fried and crispy, so I suggest liberal amounts of oil and high frying temperature.

I hope that someone out there reads this and is inspired to try making this delicious food. There are many additional resources online – and I highly recommend Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, as well as his website www.wildfermentation.com.

Enjoy!

Portable Wood Milling at Daffodil Meadow

Ever wonder how trees are turned into those nifty 2×4′s? I got to help mill some wood last week at a place called Daffodil Meadow, a piece of neighboring land here in Tennessee. All the trees were cut down from that land itself, de-branched, and cut into 10-15 foot sections with a chainsaw. The miller even came to us with a nifty and quite amazing portable wood mill. The wood will go toward structural building projects on the land, which already has a cob house, bath-house, yurt, and several other projects in progress.

Pretty badass.

 

 

On Marriage…

I have been thinking about marriage a lot recently. No, I don’t have a fairy tale fantasy, as in: “oh, when will my prince charming finally come take me away to New York, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, Connecticut, or New Hampshire to seal the deal?” Nor am I wistfully daydreaming of that perfect day: “there will be pretty white flowers on every table, and little folded cards with each person’s name typed in curlicues, and I’ll be wearing Vera Wang and I won’t have any blemishes and my hair will be fabulous…”

No. I have been thinking of weddings because a) I was the best man at my older brother’s wedding three weeks ago, b) gay marriage was just legalized in New York, c) I just attended a beautiful “deepening ceremony” held by two committed lovers in Portland, and d) I have been living in rural Tennessee with the “faeries,” a radical queer community that features many alternative expressions of love, sexuality, and gender. The intersection of these events has been fascinating, inspiring, amusing, and difficult at times. I am eager and excited to share some of what I have learned.

—————————–

Politics…

Before I talk about these personal experiences, let me be perfectly clear on my political stance: marriage is an oppressive institution because it rewards straight monogamous life partners, and only straight monogamous life partners, with a long list of health-related, economic, and social privileges. Should all people not be entitled to these benefits, regardless of what their love life looks like? Marriage directly builds inequality for anyone who doesn’t fit into a certain relationship model – and though the struggle for “gay marriage equality” does include gay, cisgender, monogamous life partners, it excludes everything outside of those boundaries. What about asexuals, polyamorous lovers, gender queers, and a long list of other marginalized queer identities?

The visibility and momentum of the struggle for gay marriage equality are so huge that they often overshadow other struggles within the queer movement that are, in my opinion, far more interesting and progressive. Queerness (as an open category that includes all marginalized sexual and gender identities) has the potential to revolutionize love, because it affirms *any* way that love, sex, and gender are experienced. Queerness is radical in its acceptance and recognition of all forms of love, whereas “gay marriage” is an institution that only acknowledges queerness insofar as it mimics the same relationship model as straight people and the conservative mainstream.

In this light, gay marriage equality is actually heteronormative, in that it packages queerness into something that looks a lot like straightness. Let’s consider a radical alternative: do away altogether with the current power structure that dominates sexuality and gender expression (including marriage). Let people love each other and express themselves freely, without attaching privilege to any particular ways of doing these things. This kind of sexual/gender anarchy would rock society’s boat pretty hard, considering the deep entrenchment of heterosexual patriarchy in mainstream daily living. So in favor of preventing the turbulence entailed in this revolution, it is desirable for conservative America to opt for gay-marriage-equality over queer-love-anarchy. “Gayness” and “gay marriage” is simply the easiest pill for America to swallow; it is justice dished out the same way it’s been dished out to women, people of color, and all sorts of othered peoples throughout history.

This is not to say that I am anti-gay-marriage, because I believe that anyone who wants to get married should be able to get married. I just think that channeling a ton of queer energy into the fight for gay marriage equality is selling the queer movement short. What about putting more of our resources toward health care reform? Immigration reform to help loved ones stay together, regardless of sexuality? School counselors that are better trained to help young queer people get to know themselves more lovingly and honestly? There are so many steps that we could collectively take toward a world that embraces and affirms all of its lovers, and I think that the marriage struggle diverts attention and resources away from more important change.

—————————

From Queer Fairyland to a Wedding on Long Island…

My story begins in middle Tennessee, where I was living with faeries on an off-grid land project for several months beginning in March. A lot happened to me while I was there. I wore drag for the first time. I learned how to use a chainsaw. I befriended genderbenders, trans people, anarchist punks, queens, and witches. Yes, real witches. I had my first polyamorous relationship (read: new and exciting partner + overwhelming waves of jealousy, anxiety, fear, and insecurity). I met my first true friend with HIV. The variety and intensity of my experience with the faeries was all-consuming.

This is the scenario from which I was whipped away to be the best man for my brother’s wedding. I’d like to emphasize the dramatic nature of this shift – queer fairyland, open relationships, anarchy, growing food, meeting fun new glittery people in the woods, literally everyone is queer –> WHAM!  –> suit, tie, writing a toast, wearing deodorant, straightness all around, people who have “real jobs,” having to explain to my extended family exactly where I am and what I am doing these days (“oh, you know, just farming in tutus and milking goats on a queer anarchist collective in rural Tennessee…”).

I was at first frustrated to be pulled away from this wild new experience into a conventional heterosexual love ritual. Additionally, I was (and am) working to undo a great deal of social conditioning derived from marriage as an institution; my expectations of monogamy, my desire to control and to be controlled, and my tendency toward co-dependence are all things I’ve inherited in part from marriage, and are all things that don’t serve me right now. I am exploring polyamory and open relationships and all things non-heteronormative. Why would I be interested in participating in a wedding? Despite these doubts, though, I love my brother plainly and simply. I decided to forego my queer politics in honor of respecting his love ritual, regardless of its form.

The wedding was more or less a traditional one. My brother told me that he used a website called theknot.com to organize a great deal of the event. This website basically sets a schedule and gives guidelines for planning each element – choice of location, invitations, flowers, food, photographer, music, etc. The ceremony and reception were on the water in Long Island, in close proximity to both families. I am not sure exactly how much the wedding cost in total, but it was definitely many thousands of dollars. There were several personal touches. During the rehearsal dinner, for example, my sisters performed an original song. The kiddush cup for the ceremony was a hand-blown glass that I made, and my father, who is a rabbi, officiated the ceremony.

My personal experience of the wedding was split in two. On the one hand, I was disinterested in the formalities and conventions. The idea of a website framing the whole process, all the money spent on it, the staff of strangers in starchy outfits serving tiny appetizers on toothpicks, and all the dressing up and manicuring for the sake of traditional photographs were unappealing to me (to my family’s credit, though, they did let me keep my off-beat haircut). Why was this production necessary or desirable in order to celebrate this couple’s love? On the other hand, I recognized that this event, regardless of its nature, was an important opportunity to reconnect with my family – an opportunity that is easy to overlook (and even resent) in the midst of a radical culture like the faeries. I tried to imagine how to be present for this event without betraying my political and sexual identity, and without putting on a mask of traditional heterosexual culture.

I came to terms with this dilemma during the process of writing my toast. I wrote mostly about my brother’s curiosity, knack for exploring, and capacity for sharing and teaching. I included a line about how these are qualities that I see in myself, and that they directly contribute to my expanding identity as a queer person – curiosity, exploration, and sharing/teaching are all skills that are important to foster as I walk my path of self-discovery. I felt good about this content because it honestly illuminated my brother as a person, while making a direct link to my own experience. I found a bridge between two worlds that had previously felt very distant: my queer identity and my family identity. It was nice to acknowledge, in his wedding, the ways that he has positively influenced my own love.

It was important for me to go through this experience because of both personal and political reasons. Personally, I’m not sure I would have chosen of my own accord to reach out to my family after living with the faeries. I was disinterested in reconnecting with my past in an attempt to sever myself from old ways of being, and establish my new, “real” identity. Yet my family is a community that has supported and loved me on my path to where I currently stand, and it would be delusional and self-hating to reject that past.

On a less personal level, I also believe that it is important for those with strong political views (such as my views on queerness) to engage with external communities. Radicals are prone to isolation because they care deeply about their struggles, and it takes a great deal of effort to communicate with people who are not on the same page. I had something important to share not only with my family, but the entire crowd at the wedding – which is on the whole not used to engaging with someone like me. Integration and the weaving-together of different worlds are tasks that I hope to take on throughout my life, and I am grateful to have learned this lesson early on.

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Deepening Ceremony…

Here is a story that provides some contrast. While I was in Portland, I was staying with a friend who lives at Tryon Life Community Farm, a beautiful collective of about 15 people stewarding the land and growing food. During my stay, I had the pleasure of witnessing a wonderful event hosted by two lovers named Matt and Kelly who live there. They hosted a “deepening ceremony” for their extended network of family and friends in Portland – this ceremony was a way to celebrate their growing love for each other despite their decision not to get married.

There were many parts of the ceremony that inspired me. First, after gathering in a large circle at the beginning, everyone was asked to go explore the farm and bring back something to contribute to a love mandala on the ground. One by one, we laid down our symbolic offerings while offering a blessing to Matt and Kelly.

Note the bird wings toward the top of the mandala – Matt and Kelly added those themselves, explaining that they envision their relationship as though they were each one wing of the same bird. First of all, what a beautiful symbol?!? Secondly, before I even saw them lay down these bird wings, as I put down my contribution to the mandala, I shared a Hafiz quote about flying (Hafiz is a famous 13th century Sufi Poet):

This

sky

where we live

is no place to lose your wings.

So love, love,

love.

I was excited that I serendipitously chose a quote that complimented their bird metaphor.

Another moment that I really enjoyed: Matt and Kelly washed each others’ hands and faces in front of everyone present, to symbolize their washing away what that doesn’t serve them as they move forward and grow deeper in their relationship. I thought this was a beautiful way to anticipate and work with change in their future.

The rest of the event was very laid back. There was a huge potluck and several wonderful musicians playing music until late in the night. There was also a fire. I appreciate how this ceremony basically cost nothing, was inclusive and open to their entire Portland community, and was so simple! Good friends, good company, a fire, music, a love mandala…that is a pretty amazing love ritual if you ask me. Congratulations, Matt and Kelly, and thank you so much for sharing your deepening ceremony with me.

To see non-queer-identified people engaging in this kind of political struggle against marriage is unusual for me, and I am very excited by it. Matt and Kelly are other-ing themselves, relinquishing privilege (marriage) in honor of a lifestyle that truly reflects their values and ideals. This act is expansive because it integrates straight people into the queer movement’s vision of justice.

Let me expand that idea. Gayness, 30 years ago, opened up the possibility space for the larger idea of queerness to exist as it does now; likewise, I see queerness as preempting the next phase of the movement, which will be even more inclusive than the marginalized identities that currently compose it. The next thing will include straight people like Matt and Kelly, and anyone else that actively resists heteronormativity and patriarchy. Sometimes I joke that the next big thing will be “odd,” as in, “I’m not queer, I’m just a little odd.” Straight, gay, queer, trans, poly, and literally anyone should be invited to participate in the odd love revolution that queerness is starting right now. As an odd person, I am excited by the potential of my community, and I eagerly await major changes on the horizon.

In the meantime, though, I am not boycotting any weddings or feeling any anger toward those who choose to participate in them. Loving communication is critical to the odd movement, and as someone who believes in affirming the diversity of love, sexuality, and gender expression, I will continue to support loved ones who choose to get married. But I also long for a day when marriage is no longer the cornerstone of loving relationships, and when odd people of all sorts will be able to freely express their love in whatever form they choose without suffering a loss of rights or privilege.

Stay Tuned…

For more on Portland, Tryon Life Community Farm, and Rainbow Gathering. Photos and a post will be up in a few weeks.

Leather Goods

Just finished up 8 leather-bound journals and 2 hand stitched backpacks. They are ornamented with real python snakeskin. They are the first serious sewing projects that I have ever undertaken, and I am extremely proud of them! The backpacks took me 4 or 5 full days to make, the journals each took 4-5 hours. If you are interested in buying or trading, please let me know.

Journals

Backpacks

First Post

Hello everyone! Welcome to my brand spanking new website. The page you are currently on is going to be my blog/photo journal/travel log. If you look at the upper right hand corner of the screen, you can find tabs for all of my artistic and creative projects that I’ve done over the years. As they continue to unfold, I will be publishing documentation to those tabs. On this home page, you will find more temporary updates, stuff that I find interesting, and photos from my travels…enjoy!