Category: 3 Old Men

3 Old Men: the staff (day 1)

Posted on by Dale

In an alternate universe, I would be nervously packing and repacking for to leave for Burning Man next weekend.  In this one, I’m just now getting started on a couple of items for Alchemy, the north Georgia Burn in October.

Each officiant in 3 Old Men is responsible for creating his own staff.  (Quick recap: the bare-chested officiant wears a long ceremonial skirt of monks cloth and carries an 8-foot staff.)

The staff must be eight feet long with specific markings:

The markings are specific because we use them to lay out the labyrinth.  The center of the labyrinth is an octagon eight feet across, so we lay out four staves in a square.  The 22-1/8” markings are the corners of the octagon, and from there we can stake out the center.  We’ll be laying out the center of each axis, and from the center mark on the staff, the 3′ and 5′ markings give the edges of the path.

Within this framework, though, it is up to each man to create whatever staff he wants to hold.

So with that background, here’s the first installment of the making of my staff.

My base is nothing more than a 2-inch round from Home Depot.  I’m going to be staining it, and so my first step was to build some stands to hold it off the tarp when I do that.

It was great fun dragging out my radial arm saw and my drill press.  As my friend Craig says, having the right tools is a joy forever.  Of course, he has this sizable quonset hut on his property with a real shop, so his joy is even greater than mine.

Still, it took no time at all to cut up a 1×6 into pieces, drill a 3-inch hole in some of them, split them, and then nail them to the bases.  I ended up with eight of them, so we could actually gussy them up a bit to serve as actual ceremonial pieces to hold our staves.

In action:

You can see the markings on my staff.  Close up:

I went out to Craig’s nifty workshop, and he rabbeted out those grooves for me.  I shan’t explain them.  I think I’m just going to show you each step of the process and let the staff grow for you as I work on it.
I sanded the staff, and thus endeth Day 1 of the making of the staff.

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered”

Posted on by Dale

Nice weekend—we traveled to Abingdon, VA, to visit my in-laws and to go to the Highlands Festival, a not-bad little arts festival celebrating its 66th year.  No great purchases, but I did get a handful of handmade-by-hand hooks on which to hang my shaman drums in the basement.  Currently they hang on bronze-colored 3M thingies, which are OK, but the whole vibe of that corner is “artisan crafted.”

I also picked up a small silver-plated vase which we might use to contain our body paint for 3 Old Men:

It’s probably too ornate for our purposes.  I’m open to further ideas—I had originally thought of an inexpensive ceramic bowl, but more and more I think we need to break-proof the whole process.  We saw a lot of hammered aluminum vessels from the 50s and 60s over the weekend that began to appeal to me.  Perhaps my fellow Old Men will have suggestions.

It occurs to me too that we need an acolyte to hold said vessel.  Hm.

So this morning I got back to work on “My mother, bored and pampered,” and I am not happy.  (So what else is new?)

The first part is fine.  It’s all appropriately honky-t0nk and sleazy.  But when Ariadne launches into her big moment and gets all opera-y, the accompaniment went to hell. What sounded really interesting and gorgeous in the piano score just sounds horrific with strings, too muddy and inarticulate.

So I’m not posting that part.  Here’s the part that makes sense:

Dream One, 4b. “My mother, bored and pampered” | piano score [pdf] | orchestral mp3

Body paint

Posted on by Dale

Those of you who have been reading along can skip this post.  This is for those who, like me, were looking for a cheap white body paint they could make at home for whatever reason.  I’ve tagged the post so that perhaps it will show up in searches.

Brief history: I and my compadres in the 3 Old Men ritual troupe needed a cheap white body paint.  There is no such thing as cheap commercial body paint, and so I had hoped that the intertubes would provide me with a recipe to make it myself.

Alas, all internet recipes I found were completely ineffective.  They were based on cold cream, which would have been problematic in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert anyway, but worse, they weren’t actually white.  I regard the accompanying photos of happy, whitefaced children as fraudulent.

Luckily, here in Georgia we mine kaolin, a white clay used for various industrial purposes such as making paper white and shiny and for Kaopectate.

Knowing that some people eat it for whatever reason—you can go do that research yourself if you like—I figured it would be available somewhere around here.  I asked the Facebook and got more than a couple of kaolin resources, the best of which is a nearby grocery store, where it sits in the produce section:

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?  Yes, the price is $1.49 for about a pound of kaolin.

So here are the instructions to make an incredibly cheap white body paint based on my experimentation.

Dump your kaolin into a bowl and add 1-1/2 to 2 cups of water to it.

Just let it sit for about half an hour, stirring occasionally.  You will want to use a little larger bowl than I have here, and my advice is do this outside.  It can get very messy very quickly, and as you will discover, a little bit of this stuff can go a very long way.

Add water if necessary:

It should be the consistency of sour cream.

Buy yourself a bowl large enough to hold your final mixture; a strainer that will hook over the bowl; and a spatula, one that is completely flat on its face (unlike mine).  It is possible to use your household utensils, but if you’re going to be making a lot you will want dedicated equipment so that you don’t have to completely clean the kaolin off of every nook and cranny.

Scoop the goop into the strainer, and force it through with the spatula.  The finer mesh your strainer had, the finer your body paint will be.

As you moosh it through, you may need to add water for any clumpy bits.  Also, of course, it doesn’t fall straight into the bowl.  A lot of it will cling to the other side of the strainer, so be prepared to scrape the bottom:

Finally, you will have a bowl of white, yummy kaolin.  Stir, add water, etc.

I was smart to buy a stainless steel bowl with a rubberized bottom, but I wish it had come with a lid.  You will want to keep it covered to keep it wet, although if it dries, it’s not difficult to reconstitute it.

How well does it cover?  Here’s about a teaspoon smeared on my arm, still wet:

And here it is dry:

Used in a fairly liquid state, it dries smooth and does not come off.  If you don’t use as much water, it may cake and crack—that’s a definite look as well.

It’s comfortable on the skin, and best of all it just rinses right off.  Pretty much perfect: cheap kaolin, water, comfortable, and removable.

Unanswered questions: how much does it take?  I started with a pound of the stuff, and I covered my entire body with maybe a fifth of it.  However, that was the first formulation, which was thicker and cakier, so it ought to go even further if you use a runnier consistency on fewer body parts.

Also, I don’t know whether this could be tinted or not.  I’m sure you could use food coloring, but you would risk dyeing your skin.  Perhaps sidewalk chalk or tempera paint?  I may or may not play with that; we just needed white.

Could you add cold cream to it?  I don’t see why not, but why go greasy when it’s perfectly comfortable the way it is?

Finally, there are online sources for kaolin, but it’s not cheap like that.  My advice would be to start checking around convenience stores and groceries that cater to the African-American community; it is mostly older black ladies who eat “white dirt.”

Bottom line: you can spend $12.95 for 4 oz. of body paint, or you can spend $3.00 for a pint.  You’re welcome, internet.

3 Old Men: skirts & stakes

Posted on by Dale

Hello, my old friend Holkeboer:

Back in the day, in costume design class, Dr. Jackson Kesler—who is a god—had us do “book reports” on a long list of resources.  We evaluated them for usefulness, and that list of books became our go-to library for the rest of our lives.    (Which was his intent, and which is why he is a god.)

Patterns for Theatrical Costumes was not published until 1993, but it would have been one of the tops on the list.  It’s skimpy on details, but it’s great for basic shapes/drapes/silhouettes:

So there’s the basic pattern for the ceremonial skirt that the 3 Old Men wear as officiants for their labyrinth.

Did you know that a new patio is a great costume shop space?

Five yards of muslin.  Step One of any costume, Dr. Jackson Kesler taught us, is to mock it up out of cheap fabric.  We had bolts of some cheapass cotton sateen that we called “grahdoo green” which was our preferred mock-up of choice.  (Generally speaking, the mock-up—after we used it for fitting and then disassembled it for the pattern—became the lining of the actual costume.)

It being a beautiful day, I thought I might as well set up the entire shop:

All told, it took me about an hour and a half to get the first mock-up put together.  More later.

That was yesterday.  Today, I removed the labels from 144 tent stakes:

Three plastic tubs, 144 16-inch stakes, water.  And then I peeled the labels.  Sometimes the work of ritual troupes is merely tedium.

3 Old Men: the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

All right, class, who can tell me what this is?

That is correct, it is a right triangle made of rope.  Each of the three corners is actually a metal ring to which the ropes are tied.  Stake it out and the ropes will automatically form a right triangle.  The Egyptians used something like this to measure acreage.

The right angle, though is not the angle we care about.  It’s the angle nearest us, which contains the arc between the short radius of an octagon and the long radius.  This is what we will use to lay out the octagonal labyrinth that is at the center of the 3 Old Men ritual.  You can’t see it in this photo, but the short radius is marked off every two feet with a little piece of blue duct tape, and the long radius is marked similarly with red tape.

So we’ll use our staves to form an 8-foot square, stake out the center, and position the triangle with the short radius along one of the directions of the compass.  From there, we have ropes with stakes already threaded through—we use the tape marks to determine where to place the stakes.  Flip the triangle, repeat.  Move the short radius to the next compass point.  Repeat.

This is theory.  Practice may turn out to be something else altogether.

Here’s what 144 (give or take today’s shipment of the final 16) tent stakes look like:

There were two additional boxes already downstairs.  Apparently there is not a warehouse anywhere in these United States that is capable of storing a gross of 16″ tent stakes, so they came from everywhere.  That’s fine—they were delivered in two days and for free.

Unpacked and counted:

Notice the two spools of rope, not pictured in the second photo.

I’m getting very excited about this project.

A confession

Posted on by Dale

OK, I confess: I have developed an obsession with my new friend kaolin.

The discovery that I can have all the white body paint I want for practically nothing has me dazzled.  Yesterday I realized that instead of dipping chunks of the stuff in water, I could go ahead and dissolve all of my holdings into an earthenware bowl.  Even when it dries, it becomes like my own personal bowl of pancake makeup.  Woot!

Of course, the dissolving itself was fascinating:

Isn’t that just grotesque?  I love it!

Soon, of course, I will need to test it out to see how much it takes to cover my person so that I can make plans to create enough paint for our venture at Alchemy.  That’s where I will draw a discreet curtain over the process.

3 Old Men: one small triumph

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been composing/orchestrating with some excellent results, but the intertubes have been destroyed, no doubt by aliens, so we all have to wait until tomorrow to hear the duct-taped glories of “Rise and fall.”

In the meantime, I will share today’s other small victory via the miracle of my iPad and the 3G network.

I’m sure everyone remembers my musings on the 3 Old Men ritual troupe, originally created for a trip to Burning Man next month and now re-aimed at the Alchemy Burn in north Georgia in October. One of the items I needed to figure out was body paint. (At one point in the ritual, we will be adorning our aging physiques.)

The real stuff is expensive, so I went looking for some home made recipes on the web. I found a really easy one, just cold cream, cornstarch and water. When I finally got around to testing it, though, it was not in the least opaque.

I searched again, and found a similar one that added flour. Good, I thought, that’s opaque enough. But the admixture was still just cold cream.

So what would be opaque enough? I thought about using poster paint, but who knows what kind of toxicity is involved there.

And then it came to me: kaolin, Georgia’s own “white dirt.” I asked Facebook where it could be bought, and I got all kinds of responses for local establishments that carried it. The winner was Food Outlet, where you can find it in the produce section right next to the okra.

Next step was to drag out the cold cream and shave off some kaolin into the mixture.

Nope, still not really what I wanted. (What do I want? Something along the lines of Butoh dancers.)

Today, casting about for something to do other than get out in the heat and humidity, I remembered thinking that I should try to dissolve the kaolin in water and then use that precipitate to mix with cold cream.

Was kaolin even water soluble? It was. And as it began to dissolve a little bit, I picked up the piece of wet kaolin and smeared it on my hand.

And lo:

So that’s it: carry chunks of the extremely cheap mineral with us, have a ceremonial bowl of water, dunk a chunk, and smear away.  It doesn’t seem to rub off, and mere water washes it away.  More research is required to see if cold cream might in fact give us protection against rain, although frankly I’m not sure I’m going to be standing in a long, trailing skirt in the rain.

Alchemy (formerly Burning Man)

Posted on by Dale

You may recall that my plans to celebrate turning 60 by going to live in an alkali desert for a week were scotched by the inability of my partner in crime to travel with me.

We have regrouped.  There are more than a couple of regional Burns, and we have decided to go ahead and establish our 3 Old Men ritual performance group and start with Alchemy, taking place here in Georgia Oct. 2-5.  We have tickets (more than we need, actually) and are putting together our team.

We are also beginning to move forward with all the practical matters that we would be in the middle of anyway were we still heading to Nevada in 10 weeks, i.e., the labyrinth, staves, and skirts.  We met a couple of weeks ago to discuss these things, and now that I’m not having rotator cuff surgery, I’m ready to get started.

This weekend my lovely first wife and I have been in Raleigh, NC, for a family wedding, and while here we needed to visit some kind of “largest” fabric store for private upholstery reasons.  I’ve already bought muslin to mock up the 3 Old Men skirts cheaply, and I’ve pretty much decided to make them of monks cloth because of its hand and drape, but since I was bored, I messaged the following photos to my fellows:

The fake fur is a Burning Man joke, of course.  I don’t see how people wear anything out there other than loincloths, frankly. The G.I. Joe fleece was likewise a joke.

The psychedelic fabric, though… There is some part of me that can see us standing in the woods of north Georgia, waiting at the entrances of the four-path labyrinth, clad in some pretty freaky skirts.  It doesn’t take it a lot of imagination to assign earth, fire, air, and water to them, either.

Also, I found as I wandered aimlessly around this largest fabric store that there could be many different interesting ways to build these skirts: brocades, sheers, etc.  I finally decided that I needed to get home and actually build the thing first, study how the skirt will move and flow, and then powwow with my fellows on what ritual aspect we want to present.

At any rate, we will now resume updates on the progress towards Alchemy/Burning Man.

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 4

Posted on by Dale

Finishing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

: Ritual sound & language :

What is the role of silence in the rite? … Do the people consider it important to talk about the rite, avoid talk about it, or to talk during it?  Are there parts of the rite for which they find it difficult or impossible to articulate verbalizable meanings? … How important is language to the performance of the rite?  What styles of language appear in it — incantation, poetry, narrative, rhetoric, creeds, invective, dialogue?  In what tones of voice do people speak?  … To what extent is the language formulaic or repetitious? … How much of the language is spontaneous, how much is planned?

I don’t have answers to any of these.  I have deliberately postponed any kind of planning on language/sound until Craig and I (and others, hopefully) get on our feet, as we say in the theatre, and start to play with it.  All I know is that when a participant exits the labyrinth, I must in some way connect with that person and offer one of the agones.  I honestly have no clue about how this will work.

I imagine that the offer of the agon will be formulaic, but then the rest of it is going to have to be improvised.

As for music/sounds, I’m not planning anything, but that could easily change as well.  As I said in our Theme Camp application, we would welcome drum circles and other musicians to contribute to the ritual as they see fit.  If our camp were bigger, say ten or more people, we could plan to have our own drummers in attendance.  As it is, we each have our own bells/bowls/shakers we can bring with us, but how we implement them I will leave to more shamanic minds than mine.  I can easily see a participant singing or playing an instrument or singing bowl or shaker while walking the path. It will be very interesting to report back what happens on the Playa as the community participates in the 3 Old Men ritual.

: Ritual action :

What kinds of actions are performed as part of the rite, for example, sitting, bowing, dancing, lighting fires (!), touching, avoiding, gazing, walking?  In what order to they occur?  … What are the central gestures?  … What actions are not ascribed meaning?  What actions are regarded as especially meaningful and therefore symbolic?  What actions are regarded as efficacious rather than symbolic?  What meanings, causes, or goals do participants attribute to their actions? … Which actions are repeated?  What gestures mark transitions?  What are the recurrent postures?  What qualities of action persist—quickness, slowness, verticality, hesitance, mobility, linearity, exuberance, restraint?  Are parts of the rite framed theatrically? … What parts of the body are emphasized by participants’ kinesthetic style?  … How do the social and environmental contexts influence the actions?  What actions are done with objects? …  What actions are optional, required?

Again, a bucketload of questions, some of which we can answer, splitting our focus between the officiants and the participants.

For the Old Men, for this Old Man anyway, here are some answers:

  • Performance includes standing, walking, dancing/movement (during the walking), and touching.  I would include the agones themselves as actions, and they are to my mind central and especially  meaningful.  I think from my perspective they are in fact efficacious rather than symbolic, although of course I have no control over the actual efficacy; I can only offer a gesture that I hope is effectively meaningful to the participant.
  • The agones are repeated, and they are themselves the transition from the journey of the labyrinth back to the world at large.  They are, however, optional: the participant may decline the offer, or even choose to exit where there is no officiant.
  • Again, not having gotten on my feet I’m not sure of the “qualities” of these actions.  In my head, I sense they should be slow, deliberate, nonthreatening, even the ‘struggle’ agon.  But I will not be surprised if, out on the Playa, the Old Men choose to become exuberant at least part of the time.
  • Body parts.  This is very important to me, since the whole impetus behind the 3 Old Men is of course our aging bodies.  The skirt will emphasize our torsos, specifically our bellies, which among our current participants are not taut.  I think too our arms and hands will play a large role by dint of holding the staff and engaging in the agones.  Also, if we go with the nude walk through the labyrinth as our opening, then all kinds of body issues will present themselves as part of the ritual.  One question that arises: do we paint just our heads and torsos, the visible parts of our bodies once we don our skirts, or do we paint our entire bodies for the trip through?  That will require some discussion.  (Sorry about the mental image…)

One question I have not resolved for myself is whether installing the labyrinth is part of the ritual.  I think it will be for me, although once we arrive on the Playa and set to work, it may become just a bloody chore.  Certainly we have no plans to take the thing down and re-erect it every day.

For our participants, the ritual action is pretty straightforward:

  • Approach the labyrinth.
  • Choose an entrance.
  • Enter the labyrinth.
  • Journey to the center.
  • Choose an exit.
  • Journey outward.
  • Choose whether to engage in the proffered agon, and if so, engage.

What meaning our participants assign to these actions is, as I’ve said before, anyone’s guess.

And that fact leads me to question whether what we’re doing is a ritual at all, since it is not part of an actual culture that produced it other than that of dirty hippie freaks like me and the 68,000 other Burners.  Still, my experiences with my own labyrinth have convinced me that this offering to the Burning Man community will in fact be received as a meaningful experience by those who participate.  In any event, I have an interesting anthropological study ahead of me.

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 3

Posted on by Dale

Continuing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

 : Ritual identity :

What ritual roles and offices are operative—teacher, master, elder, priest, shaman, diviner, healer, musician?  How does the rite transform ordinary appearances and role definitions?  Which roles extend beyond the ritual arena, and which are confined to it? … Who initiates, plans, and sustains the rite?  Who is excluded by the rite?  Who is the audience, and how does it participate?  … What feelings do people have while they are performing the rite?  After the rite?  At what moments are mystical or other kinds of religious experience heightened?  Is one expected to have such feelings or experiences? … Does the rite include meditation, possession, psychotropics, or other consciousness-altering elements?  … What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? … Are masks, costumes, or face paint used as ways of precipitating a transformation of identity?

Well, that’s a lot to cover, isn’t it?

As for the role of the 3 Old Men in the ritual, I have noted in one of my Burning Man notebooks the following:

  • What are the attributes of the officiants?
    • solemnity
    • compassion
    • serenity
    • wisdom
    • openness
    • groundedness
      • not anger
      • despair
      • decay
      • aggression

I have avoided from the beginning calling them guardians, because they’re not guarding anything.  They’re there as anchors more than anything, providing a sense to the participants that there is mind behind the installation of rope and stakes.  They are also there to provide a sense of closure at the end of the journey, whether or not the participant elects to engage in the proffered agon.  (I think the Old Men can at least bow/nod/reverence an exiting participant—and I really need another term besides “participant.”)

So let’s just go with Elder, since that’s part of our gestalt anyway.

Transformation of appearances: this is one reason I’m leaning toward the idea of the Old Men opening the ritual by stripping from their regular clothes, painting their bodies, walking the labyrinth, then donning their skirt and staff.  It makes it pretty clear that we have become the Old Men.  The last question in the set addresses this as well, and I think it’s important.  Just as priests and shamans and judges put on specific garments to become their role, the 3 Old Men put on theirs.

The body paint thing is problematic, of course.  For one thing, it’s going to trigger associations with Butoh dance, with its visceral emotions and existential terror, and that’s not what we hope to project at all.  For another thing, it’s 100° out there and we don’t have showers.  Ew.  This is an idea that we’re going to have to consider carefully before committing to it.

Who is the audience and how do they participate?  All of Burning Man is the audience, all 68,000 of us.  Such is the nature of the festival, however, that we will be one of thousands of experiences available to people, and unless we are selected as an official theme camp and given a space where we might attract attention, we will be off on one of the side streets and will host whoever stumbles across us.

How our participants respond to the ritual is anyone’s guess, since nothing about it is prescriptive.  Our hope is that the experience is meditative and personally transformative.  (As for psychotropics… I’m shocked—shocked—that you would suggest such a thing might be possible at Burning Man.)  Our hope is that people find meaning in their walk through the labyrinth, and that engaging in the agon upon their exit gives an extra push to what they found in their journey.  Our hope is that they find themselves still thinking on it as they walk away or in odd moments during the week.

What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? Honey, please.  You just defined Burning Man.  We would be idiots to presume that we’re not going to host Burners whose Dionysian impulses make a mockery of the solemnity of our setup.  And that’s OK: clowns can be priests; fools can be visionaries.  I expect to see people walking the labyrinth in silence and prayer; singing and dancing; giggling and inattentive; naked; stoned and lost; smirking and cynical; hurriedly.  I expect drummers and other musicians to join us.  I expect people to be puzzled or put off by the offer of an agon; I expect some to accept it gratefully, with tears, with joy.  I expect to be quizzed—”What is this about?  How do I do it?”  I expect to be ignored.  I expect to have others expect me to be something more than I have offered.

And I expect to be transformed by all of it, to learn more about my identity as an Old Man.

Tomorrow: ritual sound & language, and ritual action