This is a verbose profile. I can be long-winded and otherwise full of it.
I generally live in Carrboro NC, and spend lots of time in Chapel Hill, but due to a combination of hipster overload, cancer recovery, and quality time with aging parent, I’ve been dividing my time between Carrboro and Concord, NC. Concord isn’t much of a city, but it can be very refreshing to spend a few weeks in a town where no one has been recently published.
Life-long resident of North Carolina. A professional worker bee – at various times, I’ve been a retail clerk, retail manager, college student, gofor for a map publisher (I collect city street maps), writer at a tiny (failing) arts paper, indie rock musician, pizza boy, office manager and a buyer for an independent music distributor. When I’m not being under-employed and otherwise unimpressive, I also write and occasionally continue to play music. As of late, I’ve been cultivating a variety of fruit trees: calamondin, yuzu, pummelo, sudachi, ice cream beans, guava, lemons, and strawberry guavas – in lots and lots of large pots in my apartment.
I have a great love of and interest in books, history, politics, economics, architecture and urban design/history, nature/botany, food, philosophy, film, music, art and varied art movements, weather, and the American South. I have neither the space nor the finances to maintain a great collection of anything, but I’ve seen thousands of films, read thousands of books, and become familiar with thousands of bands.
Family and friends are important to me, and the interestingness of others’ lives fascinates me. I have family in 7 states on both U.S. coasts, and varied kinfolk of mine have lived, at some point, in South Korea, Lebanon, Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, The Philippines and Greece. A distant cousin was a painter and collage artist who launched a career during the Harlem Renaissance, and a one-time neighbor was a participant in the Greensboro (NC) lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.
Many favorite films appear below. Apart from those, a few of my favorite things would include books by Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, Bohumil Hrabal, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Pu Songling and Junichiro Tanizaki. And the music of Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Al Green, The Velvet Underground, Can, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Kinks, Zappa, Beefheart, The Clash and Sonic Youth. And the varied ideas of everyone from John Cage to Malcom X to Jacques Derrida. Thunderstorms, blizzards, chocolate, citrus plants, lemon rosemary bread, and creatures that won’t kill me are yet other favorites. Discovering the world, it’s art and ideas is always a great pleasure.
As of late, I have been extremely inactive online. I’ve recovering with a bout with a thankfully treatable cancer; I am now in remission. For a period of months, consuming theraputic toxic waste, lying around in bed, and deciphering obtuse symptoms became a far more substantial part of my life than maintaining any sort of online presence. Once upon a time, I was extremely active on the forums, but my interest was weakening at just about the time I was struck by a puzzling array of unpleasant symptoms between November, 2010 and March, 2011.
Shortly thereafter, the news went from puzzling, to bad, to worse in a matter of a very long afternoon and evening. Maybe I’ll become more active again – buying huge movie collections, showing them off, and making this a center of your social world is for the young, wealthy, or both: on a grocery store salary, while staring at thousands of $ in hospital bills, I will not be collecting much of anything anytime soon.
Philosophically, and perspective-wise, and perhaps economically at well – I feel a twinge of shame i will not be able to engage in Ozu pissing contests, not owning every single one of the films. But I’m not always convinced it’s such a bad thing.
Staring down a serious, potentially life-threatening illness, at an age one might not have expected to, massively re-orients your take on any number of things.
