CURRENT MISSION

To see the world before humans shrinkwrap it and sell it to very rich aliens.

ABOUT ME

My idea of a good Friday night is on the floor of a used bookstore with friends, sharing great snippets of whatever we're reading. Or watching old movies together, or going exploring, or concocting wonderful things in the kitchen... Right now I'm living in my truck while traveling around and eventually settling on the east coast, where I hope to start a farm.

PHILOSOPHY

If it's not fun, why do it?
The unexamined life is not worth living.

Interests

I've been interested in things like film theory, photography (and, well, all the arts, and art theory), gender theory, literary theory, media theory and critical literacy, Zinn and Chomsky and all that.

Now I mostly just want to live in an off-the-grid hobbit house with like-minded people, gardening with permaculture in mind, cooking wonderful food, hiking/biking/canoeing through wilderness, telling stories and playing games and music, unschooling the children, and trying to be as self-sufficient as our time, skills, bartering and dumpster diving allow. Now I'm doing all the learning necessary to make that happen.

I'm not a complete Luddite though. I still think robots and synthesizers are sexy.

• animals
• arts
• books
• photography
• dining
• cooking
• vegetarian
• gardening
• technology
• movies
• reading
• traveling
• dumpster diving
• homesteading
• music
• cycling
• hiking
• canoeing
• scuba diving
• communications
• statistics

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies:
Most of all, I like films that break the rules: Into the Wild, Weekend, Masculin Feminin, Jules & Jim, Lunacy, I Am Curious, Easy Rider, Happiness, Schizopolis, Underground, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Forbidden Zone, Human Nature, Borat, Monty Python, Brazil, Secretary, Donnie Darko, Trainspotting, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre...
Also: cult movies (my membername is a line from Vanishing Point), animation (particularly from Russia + East-Central Europe... I ADORE Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Trnka, shall I go on?), city symphonies, weird Japanese movies, French New Wave, Indonesian horror films (for the same reason I love MST3K and exploitation/grindhouse and Tarantino), sci-fi, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Hayao Miyazaki, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Mel Brooks, Andrei Tarkovsky... and perhaps more relevant to the spirit of this site- "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset".

Music:
Here's a small sample
Basically anything but Top 40 mainstream pap.

Books:
"True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics" -Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of "We", the inspiration for George Orwell's "1984"

Offbeat yet brilliant fiction: Tom Robbins, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Bohumil Hrabal, Douglas Adams, Douglas Hofstadter, Hunter S Thompson, Thomas Pynchon (sometimes), Dave Eggers, Bill Bryson, Kurt Vonnegut, McSweeney's, anything satirical, absurd, witty, or offering interesting visions of hypothetical societies (e.g. "Left Hand of Darkness"), etc.

Graphic novels and comic books: "V for Vendetta", "Tank Girl", "Love and Rockets", "Ghost in the Shell", "Transmetropolitan", "Persepolis", "Strangers in Paradise", "Calvin and Hobbes", etc.

Silly kids' books (too many to mention!)... and not-so-silly kids' books ("His Dark Materials" trilogy, among many others)...

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I saw Jake the Alligator Boy at Tacky Americana Emporium!

Teach, Learn, Share

I've been reading Daniel Quinn, Wendell Berry, Ray Mears, various reference books for edible wild plants and ethnobotany, reference books for all the homesteading and country skills, permaculture, appropriate technology and natural building, greywater reedbeds and humanure composting, renewable energy and biodiesel, all (paleo)anthropological studies concerning things like food preparation, child rearing, social structure....

I've been on a meat thing recently, learning how to make liver dumplings, sausage, headcheese, pate, bacon, pickled feet, sweetbreads, stew roosters (coq au vin), etc. I think it's important that we not forget how to use every part of the animals we raise and butcher. It's not sustainable to only eat the boneless skinless chicken breasts, ham, and steak. Besides, meat's cheaper this way! If you're a vegetarian and want to argue with me, I gladly accept the challenge. I'm one of the ex-vegetarians who realized that meat != factory farmed meat. (All pro-vegetarian statistics are based on CAFOs)

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia

Countries I’ve Lived In

Czech Republic, United States