Dharma Bum

Alaska Bound

I leave for Alaska first thing in the morning. Michele will be riding in the first leg of the 2012 Iditarod, the Last Great Race. After all the festivities around Anchorage, we then head over to Alyeska to go skiing and see the Northern Lights (hopefully) and check out glaciers and fly around in helicopters and stuff. I'm pretty excited. I've always wanted to see the last great frontier. I'll be throwing up pics and updates around here so please come back and enjoy my boring vacations slides. Cheers!

Therapeutic Conversations X

Hello all. Just a reminder that registration is open for Therapeutic Conversations X happening in Vancouver May 8-12. This year looks to be an epic conference, and just a sampling of the great presenters lined up include: Karl Tomm, Jill Freedman, Cheryl White, Kiwi Tamasese, Colin Sanders, Stephen Madigan, David Denborough, Sheila MacNamee, Aaron Munroe, Charles Waldegrave,  Vicki Dickerson, Ottar Ness, Jeff Zimmerman, Bill Madsen, Lorraine Grieves, John Winslade, Peggy Sax, and Lorraine Hedtke.

I will be there and would enjoy some company in one of the finest cities in the world. All the info can be found HERE. Let's go!

Foucault, Bertolt Brecht & Truth To Power

I like that title.

So hopefully I will be doing a little more posting around here now that I finished my first draft of a review I wrote of Foucault Beyond Foucault by Jeffrey Nealon for possible inclusion in a narrative therapy related journal. It was not a typical review, at least in my opinion. I included a piece on implications for practice where I hope to raise some considerations around taken for granted notions of justice-doing, and the continuing insistence of the scarcity of resistance. Now I wait to hear back from the editor, which I am finding is the hard part. This is the time when the insecurity around writing is the most intense. I hope it doesn't suck... Fun!

Continuing the power theme, yesterday Michele and I visited UCI's Experimental Media Performance Lab to catch the wonderful production of Galileo In America by Robert Allen & Antoinetter LaFarge. Galileo In America is part examination of the mythologizing of history for political ends, part German cabaret, but mostly addresses; under what conditions does anyone speak truth to power, or who gets to speak at all?

As I sat in this performance struggling with insecurity around  my recent writing project, and my insistence that resistance is everywhere. It was the character of Virginia, Galileo's daughter (but also representing Brecht's little known female collaborators who co-wrote many of his plays) that said it best at the end of the performance while calling out Brecht, when she insisted "even the furniture has a story." I couldn't have said it better myself. The show runs for another weekend. Go.

Narrative Therapy Consultation Group w/Anne Arnold - Starting March 16th!

Hello Everybody! The Narrative Project of Orange County is pleased to announce that the new consultation group facilitated by Anne Arnold is set. It will take place on Friday afternoons at 1pm and the dates are March 16th, April 13th, May 4th, and June 8th. If you would like to participate please contact me at narrativechris {at} gmail.com. Hope to see you soon!

"Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can’t take it all in at once." quoted from Audrey Hepburn

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

— Thomas Merton

Eye Candy

I know what you're thinking, not another social media site Chris, enough already! But I can't help myself. My friends Sarah & Suzanne turned me on to Instagram a couple of weeks ago and now I'm hooked. It might help that most of the people I'm following are artists, so it raises the bar a bit, but there's a ton of inspiration to be found on Instagram.

My site can be found HERE. Go be my friend and get creative.

Image by Sarah Walsh. Used without permission ;)

Last Night

Last night I was at an opening and a friend introduced me to her friend.

Friend: This is Chris, he's an artist.

Me: No, not really..

Friend: You're a fucking artist! You are a lot of other things but you ARE an artist.

Why is it that even though I have a long history with this art thing. I have shown work HERE, and HERE, and various other spots. I just can't own the artist thing.

This is the year to own it.

 

Chris Hoff (Huntington Beach, CA) “The Lamb” 16 x 19 cm., photograph in frame on paper, 2005; 37 x 30 cm., photograph in round frame on paper, 2005

 

 

Chris Hoff (Huntington Beach, CA) “The Lamb” 16 x 19 cm., photograph in frame on paper, 2005; 37 x 30 cm., photograph in round frame on paper, 2005

World Press Photo of the Year 2011

"I don't know what I'm doing most of the time. There's a certain humor in realizing that. I can never figure out the kind of tie to put on in the morning. I don't have any strategy or plan to get through the day. It is literally a problem for me to decide which side of the bed to get out on. These are staggering problems. I remember talking to this Trappist monk in a monastery. He's been there twelve years. A pretty severe regime. I expressed my admiration for him and he said 'Leonard, I've been here twelve years and every morning, I have to decide whether I'm going to stay or not.' I knew exactly what he was talking about."
- Leonard Cohen

Moonset.

Sent from my iPhone

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Close.

Missing this hippy..

How to live - someone asked me this in a letter,
someone I had wanted
to ask that very thing.

Again and as always,
and as seen above
there are no questions more urgent
than the naive ones.

—Wisława Szymborska