LOOKING BACKWARD(S)

Reflecting, ruminating, remembering, lamenting, drawing and living with the past and the present...

Age, I suppose. LOOKING BACKWARD(s)... ‘Backward’ both ways, behind and awkwardly. Years of talking to myself, arguing, in an invisible courtroom. The ideas, fears, despairs that appear again and again. The world now, the world then, the past always prologue. Santayana’s “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. If only it were only ‘those’.

The old fairly tales, now suspect, Pinocchio according to Disney, watch-out. Home movies of people I no longer know or can remember. The new world of the iPhone, the domination of the device, the surreality of the street, the walkers eyes planted into hand-held talismans. The horror of religious fanaticism. It’s incredible stupidity, it’s love of death...

con’t

Oh, yes, and a bit of my bio. Drawn to photography and the ‘eroticism’ of buildings; the urban theater of it all. The Bronx, old 16mm footage shot on the el train. The memory of the place at one time burning down, the past never really past. The memories from a time in Berlin, when the Wall was there. The political nightmare of the past, now here in the USA. Beginning one day in November, and in short time the whole country could be lost. Remember what happened in Germany? That it repeats is too absurd, can history be so ironic? The old bird room at the Museum...also filmed years ago, but now ever more so a witness to the disappearance of things,of creatures paved over by civilization. ... Finally the past (the film) un-winding, like a skeleton falling to pieces into a trash bag. And Pinocchio, oh, he really was just a piece of wood, a “dream surrounded by a sleep"