The Hero of the Hang. He makes fine furniture for a living & he lives off the grid on top of a few ridges of mixed hardwoods and pines along the 45th Parallel North. We call the place The Monastery because Iwojima has his own cell on one of the ridges and some of the Captain's wives still squat in small cabins & shacks around the base of the Captain's Hill. It has the ambiance of a village if you Emically count huts. But it's actually a Monastery where work is mixed with prayer and you take all your needs and energy directly out of them both. So the Captain lives off a mix of solar and wind power. Kenny La Roche helped the Captain erect his first wind tower decades ago before it became a fad or a science - when it was a pioneering act. The Captain has been mining the skies ever since. He's a beautiful man and he tries to live a beautiful life. One of these days some Young Republican will tattoo a number on his arm.
The Captain lives closer to the land up here in the North than anyone else I know. He is Emically attached. But he has been a student of the Cognitive Sciences for decades as well as Mythology and Cosmology. So he's a rounded man Etically; he can spit categories like a coon with its paw in a trap. So he's a dangerous man because of this education. He has perspectives which are out of the norm and uncomfortable facts to prop them up. I used to think he was a Jesuit undercover - and like their Baroque Temples, had a trompe l'oeil way of asking questions whose answer was always: "both." He built the desk and chair pictured below for Skippy's wife - notice how - like Gaudi - he propositioned the task around curves instead of straight lines. Guys like that always end up on lists.
"Over the bodies of Metamorphosis and Metaphor hovers the body of Metastasis."
A word about the site: the Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne exists on a few more dimensions than you can represent on a map. It rises and it falls over time and in different places. Sometimes outside agencies quibble about one or more of the Cathedral's dimensions: like - "how come you put it on State Land?" Always implied in such questions is the Phattic meta-message: "you fucking felon." So we don't put them on State Land anymore - our parts to our Cathedral. The Rose Window, for instance hangs on a branch which is clearly spread over Private Property. The trunk of the Tree is, however, squarely on State Land. A Cathedral, like the Captain, and all its builders, is a dangerous construction bridging many dimensions.
In the Glory Shot above, and below, from left to right: that's Iwojima and next to him is the Captain's son with his two chillin below. Thomas Aquinas has his arm around JackyO and we all hate him for that. Then there's Toby, Iwojima's dog, the Captain - who is being elbowed out by Slag, then Bruno the Magnificent next to Bill Allen - who had a story about his art and his own workings with mudmen in the local paper yesterday. I don't know the name of that other little dog. But then neither does he, really - it's all just an Emic Skeuomorph to quadrupeds anyway.
The date on the poster below is not wrong; it's just not inclusive. We began the Athanorian Rose Window Mission in 2002 and originally planned a fall Hang in the same year. Things intervened. Things got in the middle. Like a mad year making Temple Bells. Then there were deaths in the family. Marriages. Foreign Wars. So it took until the Spring of 2005 to finish the Mission and install the Rose Window to the Cathedral Our Lady of the Ligne. There are only 2 Exceptionally Cool Cathedrals being built on the face of the earth right now. Ours is one.
Continue to Page 14 Rose Window Mission