Projects
Some people are laser cutters. I would put novelists in this category. They stay focused working towards the same goal day by day until a missive becomes a tome. I, on the other hand, have always been a sparkler. Some of my sparks fizzle out in air, or land in water, but some catch a corner of paper and ignite. Below find some of the projects I am working on; some slowly, some with more urgency. But I am always creating something—continually throwing some light into the world.
The Headlight Children
Collaborative Arts Collective/Circus/Extravaganza
Enjoy an early iteration of Headlight Children, featuring founding members kAmA and Jampa, with Quentin as Ariel:
Silver Salt
My love for taking pictures began with a Kodak pocket instamatic camera in 1974. Over the years I have shown and sold my work in galleries and stores, published it in books and journals and online, but really it is just about “shooting film.” I have so many negatives to discover in shoeboxes, and rolls of film to develop that I am unsure of my next steps here. I continue to work (artistically) only with film, with no AI enhancements. My Thumbnail Gallery is a sort of decades-long overview of some of these images.
“Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience…You can’t go looking for it: you can’t want it, or you won’t get it. First you must lose yourself. Then it happens.” —Henri Cartier-Bresson
Postcards
Years ago, while travelling through Germany by train, an Italian man gifted me a postcard of a Moise Jacobber painting. And he signed it on the back: Da Giovanni. That exchange revealed to me the magic of postcards: small, lightweight, inexpensive, yet able to hold signatures, notes, artistic memories. I have been beholden to postcards ever since. I began making my own in the late 1990s, and love giving my cards away, but also selling them in galleries and shops. Presently, I have a rack of postcards for sale at Old Skool’s in Ellensburg.
Popcorn Zine
Limited edition zine. May include collage work, writing, correspondence, transcripts, etc. Covers are made for first issue.
Fear of Music
I am finally incorporating sound/music into my creative experiments. I had always thought myself a bad student of music. I did not want to practice scales. I did not want to read music. But one does Not have to do these things to be musical. Fortunately, I have always been surrounded by music…all kinds of music….as well as a raw hutzpah of sound experimentation and improvisation. Thanks to kAmA, for always inviting me onstage. And thanks to everyone over the years who has taught me that everything is resonance; that “Everything we do is music.” –John Cage
Craftwork
You can find my blank greeting cards, postcards, suncatchers, pinback buttons, magnets, and jewelry at Old Skool’s in Ellensburg.
Collage/Mixed Media
I have been making collages since I was a child, and have over the years had the urge to occasionally cover some disparate object in wax, or cover a canvas in resin, embedding it with glitter and plastic pearls. Some of my work can be viewed in my Thumbnail Gallery. Some of my collage work has been published in literary journals, and I have shown, and sold, my work in various galleries over the years.
Cassette Tape Project(s)
In 1982 I made a super-8 film: A Lineman Is Better Than A Man Who Hands You A Line, which explored personal relationships by juxtaposing snippets of conversation with close-up imagery. The soundtrack for A Lineman morphed into an audio collection obsession, in which I collected over 2,340 hours of sound, interviews and conversations using a cassette tape recorder between1981-1995. So many options for these tapes—transcription; tape loops; Mp3s; mapping histories.
An Academic Manuscript
A portion of my master’s thesis was published in the academic anthology Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California (Vernon Press, 2020). I am in the process of typing it up, and hope to find a publisher that would be interested in publishing the paper in its original form.