big ideas
These are the things I worry about in the night

James Baldwin and Richard Avendon

Being Black and Black and White

I was reminded of Avendon and Baldwin by a Monoskop reference to the book ‘Nothing Personal’. I had this paperback copy because, well, at the time (late sixties) to be up with pop-culture, you had to.

Charon and The Psychopomps

not a pop group - a modern myth.

I probably first heard of Charon from Robert Graves “Greek Myths” but ‘paying the ferryman’ is, at least in my generation, a common term.  In the back of it all is the love story of stupid Cupid and the silly, mortal Psyche. I made a video.

Between Sleep and Waking

By Georges Perec from Paris Review

“There ought to be texts on the subject, authoritative texts that would enable one to deal with these situations, far commoner than is generally believed.”

Captain Crunch

The original phonehacker

We need our computer folk heroes, and if they come with an air of danger around them, it restores the feeling that we were on the digital frontier. Another story from MM, for the last print issue June 1995.

The zen of the long drive.

From Another Country Diary 3 Feb. 2002

It’s like the Seamus Heaney poem ‘Postscript’ where he writes about driving through County Clare  – “when the wind and the light are working off each other … Useless to think you’ll park and capture it, More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there.”

9 May 2002 - a 'poem'

A country diary day of some pain

As I rounded the corner I saw the road covered with white flying feathers and a splattered chook being picked up by a tall young man with a look of pain on his face. He crossed the road just in front of me, the early yellow sunlight on him against the dark road.

A story about Dana Atchley

A digital story, therefore vulnerable to magnets

Dana said it was the best thing that had been written about him and he linked to it for years. Besides being flattered (after all it was just using his words) I like it too. He died in San Francisco on December 13 2000.

Conjunctions

Then there are splices hard and splices soft.

While remaking some old film splices, I was thinking about conjunctions, those joining words and the relation to film.

Falling

I don’t look at this page much.  If you have had recurring dreams about falling from a tower, you might want to give this entry a miss as well.
I won’t mind.

The Journal of Albion Moonlight and Kenneth Patchen

I rather prefer short critics to long ones.  I like critics with tan shoes — look nicer, I think. . .

When the things you know go on auto-pilot

Wikipedia credits this to Martin M. Broadwell  who first articulated the model in his “four stages of teaching” in February 1969.

Beat

Discontented? Ok, but scrawny?

An attack on “some of the hairiest, scrawniest, and most discontented specimens of all time”. Hang on I said, that was me, I wanted to be Beat, did people really think that?

Nothing more than his own biography

A quote from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human with a , with a hairy portrait, 1974 ish

Where do I look?

What did I see? What did I look like as they ‘see’ me? Thinking about photography and the photographer’s eye.

The White Goddess - Robert Graves

Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody's servant

You chose your jobs because they promised to provide you with a steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore valuable part-time service.

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