russlerville arkansas witch

she calls herself a witch-- a title she is reclaiming from it's historically negative associations. here she explains and reads a fortune for brittany. she lifts up addicts, prepares healing herbs, studies archeaology, keeps two "husbands", practices alternate agriculture, runs a loose intentional community in the manner of ancient matriarchies of the steppe. she used to be an out and proud feminist lesbian, then she was a "back-sliding" lesbian in relationships with men and women alternately, and thirty years later is quite surprised to find herself with two different men at the same time, both of whom tolerate her relationship with the other. she says that her relationships with men are lower maintenance than her female-female relationships and that she doesn't have time for the intrigue.

we meet her through day brown who is one of her partners. she says they met over the internet more than seven years ago, and initially she was under the impression that he was a female lesbian living alone in the arkansas woods. she was struck by the power of "her" feminist ideas. when she went to meet "her" with the intention of connecting "her" to community so that "she" wouldn't be living all alone, she was surprised to discover that day was in fact a man and on the strength of thier intellectual connection they began a mostly friendship right away. this is our introduction to one point in a web of counter-cultural connections that extend throughout arkansas, tennessee (short mountain), missouri, ohio, and perhaps further if we look.

Ozark Pagans

here in the ozark mountains we find a rural area where, we're told, some counter-cultural elements from the 1960s and 70s moved in. now, day brown tells us, they run the schools and the local ACT scores are in the 90th percentile. day brown is a 70 year old man who's lived in the ozarks for the last 30 years. in the last seven or eight years he's become involved in breeding varieties of artichoke, potatoes, blessed thistle, and other herbs for effectiveness and affinity to the ozark climate. he believes there will be a growing market for herbs and, if his prognostications of the apocalypse come true, his living situation will scarcely change. he still eats mostly off the land. when the currency collapses, and war and famine ravage the cities, only a select few with any wherewithal will even make it out to this far off corner of the ozarks. the rest will die in the cities without medication, food, or any help.

via the internet, he stays quite well informed. when we ask a leading question of ours, "why do gay people exist, given that evolution selects against them," he fires back, "hold on a minute, being gay doesn't prevent you from passing your genes to the next generation." and we continue into some discussions of bisexuality in males and females, serial monogamy, poly pods, and the stabilizing influence of sex on men and women. and as we talk into the night, day tells us that the whole world is a matrix-- a projection out of the mind of the goddess. it's like movie the matrix, he says, except there's no world outside, just the goddess. then the real catch of this theory is that all the people you run into are in fact just avatars there to help you work out your karmic knots. you in fact wrote the script of your own matrix a long time ago, and you get little glimpses of your script in dreams. yes, the time you spend on the internet reading this was scripted by you a long time ago.

longhorn cattle

out on a ranch near ennis, we don't find exactly what we expect. there was some talk of the old red-blue dichotomy, but i'm not sure how many expectations we actually had given the unpredictability we've seen everywhere we've been. we discover the rancher here is a travelling audio engineer who raises longhorn cattle not for the meat but for the horns. and that there's an extensive trading network for these cattle. "tonight," he says, "they're puttin on a pretty good foreplay for you. they'll probably do it sometime after dark." it's the solstice, and the sun has just set out over the texas highlands. we ask if there are any lesbian cattle. he chuckles at the question and says, "wouldn't that be great."

bi conference in toronto

bi the way goes up toronto to film the annual bisexual conference. after a complicated turn of events, the details of which i'm not sure of, as i wasn't there, and probably wouldn't be sure of even if i was there, the directors realized the camera was GONE! STOLEN! and this photo of three filmmakers in the conference bathroom is all that remains of the trip.