It's not just an excuse, it's a lifestyle...

Yeah, yeah--the blog's been severely neglected yet again. The reason: been doing a lot of writing and research lately, and it's been awfully fun.

I interviewed an artist, Isabella Kirkland, who was once the only licensed female taxidermist in New York City. Now she does elaborate, life-sized and to scale paintings of large groups of species, sort of like an exhibition in biodiversity. So I met her at her studio which was actually on a houseboat in Sausalito (some of those houseboats are fantastic--like quirky-cool, floating mini-mansions), and was charmed by her clear-eyed intellect and warm humility. The resultant article in the Pacific Sun "Green" issue is in preview of the upcoming Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, which I'll be attending in October--as soon as I can figure out how to be in two places at the same time (the NORML Conference in Berkeley is the same weekend, naturally).

I also did an article in the same issue about enviro-friendly sex, called "Make love, not global warming..."

And I did some stuff for our Fall Arts Preview issue, focusing on performing arts and film, which meant I got to go to this sorta cool press thing/film screening/continental breakfast for the Mill Valley Film Festival at the high-tech Dolby Labs in SF.

But also, for the past couple weeks, I've been interviewing a group of women for an upcoming story, which took me to the San Francisco City Hall--a beautific and surreal structure--amidst a large group of protestors outside, and some happy hetero- and homosexual couples inside getting hitched (the camera crew and group of onlookers are much larger for the same-sex marriages--the hetero couples are largely ignored these days, in SF anyway).