Friday, April 3, 2015

An Autobiographical Note

  



Indentured (as are we all) to the implacable exigencies of material existence, I served a long, happy, satisfying, productive and profitable employment at the Cleveland Museum of Art, ending as its Director of Facilities, in which role I assisted in the institutional navigation of its complex and compelling re-imagining. Simultaneous with that social effort, I pursued several equally compelling private endeavors. I was for several years the cartoon editor of Eschatology Today, the renown (and too little referenced) journal of end time speculation. I sat for a number of years on the board of Escuela Oscura y Tragica, the highly regarded Life Preparatory Institute founded by distant relatives of Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, and professor of classical Greek. I still serve on the Collections Committee of the Museo de los Pecados de la Humanidad, the Institute's cultural  outreach center in Sonora, California. I was a contributing editor to Elucidations: A Compendium of Profundities for All Occasions, winner of the 2006 Writers' Forum Bukowski Bar Tab Award. An amateur gardener, I regularly contributed articles to West Virginia Hill Country Horticulture and New Age Gardening.
Upon my retirement from the Cleveland Museum of Art I was honored to be named Managing Director of Say What?, the litero-technic collective founded in the early 1970s by my esteemed mentor and teacher, the late Alexander Burnbridge (see this blog of 27 September 2014). Working across media disciplines under the umbrella of what we call the Cassandra Project, we are presently engaged in assembling Burnbridge's voluminous notes, drawings, film and video clips, wire frame sculptures, and musical fragments for theremin and baritone recorder --- what he referred to collectively as his "plastic intellections and psycho-active assemblages" --- into the "instantaneously accessible multi-loci simultaneity" that he predicted would only become comprehensible in the last decades of the twenty-first century. Determined both to affirm that prediction and to best its timeline, we hope to present it by 2026 as a "symphonic perturbation" under Burnbridge's own working title, The Big Whirly: Life As Ontological Theme Park.
Sustained in my private life by my wife, my son, and my cat, I age quietly, watching the changing of the seasons, listening to the music of the spheres.    

     

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