Over three years in the making, the short film that @moviemountain made for @rivianofficial is finally out. Out of all the commercial work I’ve worked on, this is my favorite one, by far. The sets were massive, the truck was over 3 feet long. I’ll post later this week about the process but here’s the film in its entirety. Thanks to @3rd_larry for thinking that Gear Guard could come to life via miniatures and stop motion.
Rounding the long corner off of the Glenn Jackson Bridge and onto highway 14, I looked in my rear view mirror and spotted a black Rolls Royce Phantom Coupe accelerating around the clover leaf. By the time we merged onto 14, the Rolls had pulled up alongside me and was matching the speed of my e30 station wagon. Cruising with the windows down, I deciphered the unmistakable words, "DO YOU WANT TO SELL?" blared over the hum of the Roll's v12 and the whine of the e30's tiny four cylinder. "MAYBE" I screamed back. "Pull OVER." Downshifting, I let off the gas and coasted on to the shoulder. The e30's cloth Design Edition interior was too nice for my dog, and in all honesty, too nice for me. There's a cruel irony of appreciating and desiring beautiful things only to destroy them once you get your hands on them. Despite adoring this 1993 BMW e30 Touring, I knew that my lifestyle was about as compatible with it as a white shirt at a spaghetti buffet. Coasting to a stop, I put on the hazards, pulled the hood catch and opened the door. "I happen to have cash on me, how much do you want for the car?" Manny, as the early thirties man of Eastern European descent, opened the conversation. After ten minutes of back and forth, Manny and I agreed on a price, and I headed home to grab the title. In a Lowe's Parking lot, I counted stacks of 20's and 50's as a stream of onlookers approached the spectacle of the 6'6, 300 pound man wearing a tall tee, basketball shorts and Gucci loafers standing next to his idling Phantom. "Real estate." "Used Cars." "Property Management." He offered a different explanation for the origins of his wealth to each of the onlookers, answering questions that I too was curious about but I cared not to ask. "It's all here," I said, stuffing the last of the rubber banded stacks into my pockets and crawling out of the backseat. On the ride home, I told the bizarre circumstances to the uber driver. "I didn't make any money," I explained, "but I didn't lose any either. It was a wash" Despite my frankness, he didn't believe me until I pulled a stack of 20s out of my pocket and tipped him cash. These photos are from that day.
Some talking point ideas for family dinners, down time and post meal walks this holiday season, courtesy of the PROFESSOR @moviemountain . In order of appearance, Terrence McKenna, “Hot” Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson.
I first met @lloyd.kahn in the fall of 2013. I had just finished working at Patagonia and was heading up the coast to see my family in the PNW. I grew up with Lloyd’s books around the house; Shelter, Homework, and Builders of the Pacific Coast were staples in my mom’s living room and inspired the spaces my family lived in. While living on the road, I kept tabs on Lloyd’s blog and sent him an email asking about linking up. On a chilly day in October, I stopped by Bolinas, saw Lloyd’s house, the Shelter HQ, and showed Lloyd my recently completed Toyota and FWC camper. After a few hours, I headed north, inspired and determined to build something of my own.
Over the years, Lloyd and I have kept in touch and see each other once a year or so. He’s visited the tree houses a few times and hung out at @moviemountain . Mostly, I like to head down and spend time with Lloyd at his home or up the coast at his late best friend Louie’s.
In April, I made the drive down to see Lloyd. I spent 4 nights in Lloyd’s driveway, having coffee with him each morning in his kitchen, talking about the state of media, Baja, the ideal camper setup, Lloyd’s loss of loved ones, and things to do in San Francisco. I encouraged Lloyd to start a YouTube channel and write on Substack. We shared meals with friends, eating mostly halibut and turkey from the hunt and vegetables from Lloyd’s garden. We made plans for this year: hunting in September and hotsprings running to Nevada.
Lloyd defies this, possessing wisdom and perspective native to his age but with the energy and enthusiasm usually reserved for a teanager. Spending time with him relieves some of the franticness that I live with every day, the drive to make the best things I can, but at the same time, it inspires me to think longer-term. He often says, “Perfection is a direction.” To me, this highlights the importance of not being too precious with individual creations and instead focusing on making improvements along the way.
Lloyd is on substack these days, and this fall i plan to make film about him hunting his first deer at 89.
As the sun rose over the hills of Sonoma, @mike_idell scratched away on a turkey call. Methodically, I looked around for any sign of a turkey through the rolling oak savanna around us, and instead noticed a familiar, yet distained breed of three leafed plants poking up around me.
“Fuck me, We’re sitting in a poison oak bush.”
“Yah, I just noticed that too,” Mike whispered. In the distance, say 500 yards down in a draw, a group male turkeys announced their presence from their perch in a eucalyptus tree. Twenty minutes later, a group of seven Toms flew down, and n a game of cat and mouse, Mike called in the Toms towards our decoy. I missed my shot but Mike made his. By lunch we were heading back to Bolinas to process the bird and link up with @lloyd.kahn .
Shoveling down the turkey with some brown rice seasoned with matsutake mushrooms from up the coast and kale back at Lloyd’s place in Bolinas, Mike and I listened to a depiction of the bay area during a time the counterculture flourished, and the cultural pole of the west coast was not 300 miles to the south. I wondered when and what happened.
The next morning we left at 7 and headed over the hill to the boat launch at San Rafael, to take Mike’s 15-foot Boston Whaler out in search of California Halibut. We joined a hundred other boats trolling in circles in 10-14 feet of water as the tide came in.
By noon our coolers were full, and we motored back. In Lloyd’s yard, next to his 50-year-old garden, Mike expertly processed the fish and Lloyd, with a spryness that defied his 88 years, took the scraps and shoveled them into the compost pile. With a gas wok from my camping set up, I fried up some of the 30 pounds of halibut we got.
As I munched on tacos, I pondered the irony of eating hunted food less than an hour away from a fleet of the first fully-autonomous self-driving, Amazon Prime one-hour deliveries and the epicenter of the development of general artificial intelligence.
Before I could formulate this thought enough to share, I moved on to pondering if the itch on my ear was from the sun or the first hint of the onset of poison oak. It ended up being poison oak.
For a year and a half, two of my best friends, @tucker.gorman.designs and @philliptannand , have been working on a project called @highwizardry . Phil and I met in 2008, when we both had blogs in college. We’ve stayed close since then, both pulling stints in NYC before both making our way west. For years, Phil and I have talked about doing something, but the stars never aligned. Tucker designed the tree houses and oversaw the build, and he has been a frequent collaborator when it comes to all things built.
Marketing and brands are all made up. Why not have the core of the brand be a fictitious character and the products be relics of their made-up world? Products and media becoming increasingly accessible and consumable haven’t made it any more enjoyable. For years, I’ve been trying to convince companies to be more imaginative with the media they use. Phil has been fighting a similar fight, working on graphic design and creative direction. From the start, High Wizard has been based around the idea that holding something physical in your hand and then engaging with a world that way is far more impactful than fighting for bandwidth on your pocket computer. High Wizard isn’t meant to be infinitely accessible. The products we make will never be sold on the open internet. Our shirts are all made and printed in America and are limited to a few dozen shirts per design. Many of the products we sell are one-offs. The media we make will largely only be accessible through buying a mailer. Buy the mailer, scratch off the code, and take the ride.
A year ago, I got a box of shirts and started handing them out to friends and family, taking photos along the way. Work started at @moviemountain building Merc, the @highwizardry puppet, miniature clothes, and sets, and we are now a few weeks away from starting to shoot the first short. The mailers are now up on the website for $5 and come with a bumper sticker. Inside the mailer, you’ll find the first bit of lore around Merc as well as the scratch-off code for the first batch of shirts. Link in profile
The original idea for the twin turbo wood-burning hot tub came from an article in Mother Jones. I took the recipe from the article in Mother Jones, a 400-gallon stock tank with a Chofu stove, and doubled it. Starting in March of 2014 and ending in the early summer, we piecemealed the set-up seen here in a few weekend pushes. We built the platform out of dimensional doug fir, with some old railroad ties as footings. We burned out a dying Doug Fir, cut it in half with a chainsaw, and turned it into a cold plunge.
Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about how to use the tub most efficiently. For best results, I use Douglas fir, chopped small, and check the fires every half hour. Getting lazy with fire maintenance just prolongs the whole process. How long the tub takes to warm up depends on ambient temperatures and how attentive I am to the fires, but usually ranges from 3 to 5 hours. I suspect with a better insulated top and bottom, this time could be reduced by maybe 25%. I don’t stir the tub until I’m ready to get in.
Now, the sauna is in need of a total rebuild, if not a serious refresh. The deck is covered with tarped cedar tongues and groove boards for the sauna rebuild. The galvanized 500-gallon stock tank is starting to rust. The cedar hot tub cover, after being thrown on the ground for the last time, met its demise courtesy of a barbecue fire last week. The twin stoves have seen better days, but they still have a lot of life left in them. It will be rebuilt; there’s no question about that, just how it will be done. New Cedar tanks are expensive, I’ve been looking on Craigslist and Facebook, and if I find one I’ll grab it. Most likely, I get another stock tank and focus more on insulating the sides, top, and bottom and wrapping it in cedar. Hopefully, with a bit of luck, the next iteration will last another 10 years. With any luck, it will last another 10 years. Check out my substack for a more indepth break down.
The morning the tree swallows arrive marks the end of winter. Growing up, my mom was a bird nerd, and her favorite bird was the tree swallow. In the summers, they nest far up into the northern hemisphere, and in the winter, they retreat down into northern Mexico and as far south as the Darien Gap. As a kid, we built cedar wallow birdhouses out of cedar with signature oblong openings in our wood shop and nailed them to trees and the side of our barn. The swallows would come sometime in late March or early April, announcing their arrival with dive bombs and chirps.
For around 6 weeks in the heart of winter, snow covers the ground or drifts under the eaves. As soon as it’s completely gone, a low-pressure system brings in new weather. When cold air from the continent meets with a warm storm from the Pacific, everything on the mountaintop gets a coating of an inch of ice. The first winter, I thought the additional weight of the thousands of pounds of ice might damage the trees, but nothing happened. Now, when the ice comes, stay inside, and make sure I have enough firewood stacked to keep the house warm when power inevitably goes out.
In winter, I get into a routine. I watch movies, sometimes two a day, and I cook a lot. I go to a local 24-hour gym in Washougal a few days a week to stay active. I burn cords of wood, and see how many days I can keep a fire burning in the lone Jøtul stove that heats the house. When I have a few days without work, I head east to Central Oregon to camp and escape the rain. I make plans for the next year. Some of them happen, and some don’t. Without months of rain and snow, and especially those dark days in January, the morning the swallows arrive would taste bland. Last Sunday, I woke up to familiar chirping and dive bombing. Read more and see more images on my substack.
I did a deep dive on my substack this week talking about how I like to cook while camping and the gear I use. Needless to say, its evolved a lot from living off of avocados, hot sauce, and chips in my early 20s. My low point was backpacking through the Lost Coast and eating exclusively protein cubes from a hippy health food store for 3 nights and 4 days. These days, I like to enjoy eating good food in the middle of nowhere, or even sometimes in my backyard if I’m feeling cagey. In short, I like using a Skottle, an adjustable fire grate, a Dutch oven, and a Jetboil for hot water and making coffee. I got my start blogging 16 years ago on A Restless Transplant, and I’ve really enjoyed getting back to writing and posting videos and photos. Some of them are more informative, like this week’s post, and others are more stories and essays. Founding members get to pick between a copy of Home Is Where You Park IT or The Cinder Cone, both of which are out of print. Follow the link in my profile to see this week’s article and subscribe.
