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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