Summer of The Prisoner

It was the summer of 1977 when the local public broadcasting station played the British series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan. My father had seen the show previously, in the late 1960s, and introduced the show to me. I then told my friends Jeff and Roman about it. I remember Jeff and I walking to the neighborhood store, frenziedly debating the identify of Number One. Roman and I heavily tapped the show's audio component, recording, cutting-up, and re-mixing the music, sounds, and dialogue of the series, as part of homemade sonic experiments. We produced a number of mixes on cassette tapes, few, if any of which have survived the years. We discussed various character actors appearing in The Prisoner, such as Angelo Muscat and Leo McKern, and the elements of different episodes: Living in Harmony, The Schizoid Man, and so on. Roman and I even adopted the farewell phrase "Be seeing you" for a time. The embedded strangeness, excitement, and momentum of the broadcast had a great influence on me.

Vancouver Victoria 2004

I located this old journal from a Canadian trip, not long ago. First post I've done on Tumblr in quite a spell. After posting my 1986 Trip Journal (before the Canada piece), I realized I placed the pages reversed from what they should have been.  I may redo it sometime if I get to it.  Algernon Blackwood might almost have composed the language on the plaque.

Vancouver Victoria

HERE STOOD

HAMILTON

FIRST LAND COMMISSIONER

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY

1885

IN THE SILENT SOLITUDE

OF THE PRIMEVAL FOREST

HE DROVE A WOODEN STAKE

IN THE EARTH AND COMMENCED

TO MEASURE AN EMPTY LAND

INTO THE STREETS OF 

VANCOUVER

Photos by me, Vancouver, BC, 2008

Tijuana

Tijuana, Mexico, 1940s

Family Harvest

Our Lady of Bilocation

Jimmy Webb and the Cry of Nature

I have seen a couple variant explanations of the inspiration behind the song Wichita Lineman, written by Jimmy Webb, performed by many, most famously Glen Campbell. One version has a prosaic sheen. I'll go with the second:  "All of a sudden there was somebody on top of one of those telephone poles -- out of thousands of telephone poles, there's one that has a guy on it, and he had one of those little telephones hooked into the wire." I see the worker in Webb's ecstatic existentialist vision as the figure as one of Munch's productions of The Cry, or a loner from an Edward Hopper painting. The scream of nature surrounded the Wichita lineman.

Unrealized Film

Roman and Dave Scott, Sandy Oregon, 1987. The photos (and a few others) are the only fragments remaining of the production of a Super 8 movie on which we worked. As I recall the camera malfunctioned, so little if any footage resulted from the shooting. The movie was to have been an exercise in rural independent surrealism. Photos by me.

And happy 2015!