After a couple of years of college, I traveled around the United States engaged in various interesting employments: antique doll restoration, fish and wildlife biologist, waiter at a four-star French restaurant, curator and cook for an open air museum, museum curator (the regular kind), lamp-maker, offset press operator, and a designer/production director for a corporate promotions group in San Francisco, where I was fired for leading a labor strike. Actually, they fired me a couple of times for that, and then they would re-hire me, but my house burned down in the middle of one of these strike that left me homeless. I saw the opportunity to get out. None of these jobs really satisfied me, so after the fire (it destroyed everything I had except the wine in the cellar), I returned to Fresno determined to finish my degree.

It was about this time that I met Julie who, while we have never been officially married, has been my partner for the last 12 years or so. We met while I was helping craft venders build their shops and booths for various festivals and fairs. I was beginning to get a small reputation in the S.F. Bay area as a creative artist (I had had a couple of small gallery shows for sculpture) and met here when she was working for one of the venders. I was living in Oakland at the time, and soon after we met we got a house together. The same one that burned down. At any rate, we returned to Fresno, I re-entered the university and received my degree in anthropology after two years of 24 units a semester, re-taking several classes and achieving a 4.0 during that period. That was good enough to get me into a graduate program in anthropology in Sacramento, where I both taught undergrad classes in physical anthropology and was assistant curator at the state museum. I graduated with a 4.0 and was accepted to the doctoral program in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University, where I completed everything but my field research and dissertation. I currently have a grant to research artist's communities and colonies and am writing several essays on the nature of art and the community. One has been published and I have spoken at a wide range of academic conferences on the subject and am slowly gaining a small scholarly reputation. I am lucky to have two advisors who are well positioned in the academic community who have been of immeasurable value. One is on the American Research Council and the other just finished a stint as a member of the National Endowment for the Humanities. My focus on sociolinguistics and semiotics doesn't get one a lot of work outside academic circles and even within academic circles, opportunities are becoming increasingly rare, so having good contacts helps - although I have been teaching since I have arrived.

I have also kept up my artistic endeavors. I'm leaving for Lake Tahoe to do an event there in a couple of days and then will be in Ohio in august selling things at a multi-weekend renaissance faire. Julie and I make books, bronze sculptures, give workshops on book and papermaking, as well as various etching and printing techniques for the artist. We have also just started making our own inks and paints from raw materials and look forward to selling these as well as expanding our workshops and demonstrations. We are hoping to build our own small foundry in the next year so we don't have to rely on her brother's, but that costs quite a bit of money. At the same time, we are working with a group of artists who use pre-industrial techniques in the arts to form an artist's colony. We raised some money, bought some equipment, we even have a couple of horses, but we haven't been able to find the right piece of land yet and we could use a few more thousand dollars - okay,a million would be nice, and we are having a little trouble with the vision of this thing. We had initially thought to incorporate performing artists and had a large group who were interested in participating. The one difference between performing arts and arts that produce a material good is that it is much easier to "sell" a thing than it is a performance. In short, the performing artists had no money, and didn't really have any skills either that could make them money while living in a remote place.as a fine artist, it doesn't really matter where you live.

So that's it in a nutshell. I'm currently living in Indiana, but am probably moving back to somewhere on the West Coast in a year or so..... Here's hoping this finds you healthy and happy,