For now this site is a working scrapbook that reflects my enthusiasms, projects and things and people I like. It also has some information about my writing. I like doing the daily chess puzzles (slide down the sidebar to the bottom). Some recent notes:
The Eric Classey Burren Green Collection
The Eric Classey Burren Green Collection
The small personal collection that contain Classey’s famous Burren Green moth and the exhibit drawer in which it was first presented to the world. Sixty drawers catalogued and photographed with full list of species.
Alive, alive, O! Amazing images of life.
The image on the front of this website is the retina of a baby Danio rerio. Wait till you see the cave fish and the leg of the diving beetle.
A glimpse behind the masks of Dow
A personal response by artist Paul Phare to Dow Chemical’s “Human Element” ad campaign.
Songs of the brainfever bird
The eerie cry of the brainfever bird, last heard fifty years ago in a remote Indian forest, brings back old fears.
A Walk Through H: Reincarnation of an Ornithologist
Watch Peter Greenaway’s beautiful, funny, and ultimately sad film. With music by Michael Nyman, and words and drawings by Greenaway himself.
Jason DeCaires Taylor, sculpting undersea masterpieces.
Swim in drowned gardens of sculpture that the sea is transforming into coral reefs.
Painting with light: the amazing Wholeo Dome
Artist Caroling Geary worked from 1967-74 creating her stained glass dome, the work of art which came to define her philosophy and shape her life.
A preposterance of collective nouns
The weird world of English collective nouns, given new life by Woop Studios, graphic designers to Harry Potter. Could this spark a craze?
Animal lives on!
How artists and sculptors see the narrator of Animal’s People.
Turn off your mind, relax and float up to the Wellcome
London was swinging long before the Sixties, as the Wellcome’s exhibition, “High Society: the rich history of mind-altering drugs” reveals.
Virginia Peck’s Journal III, Anima, the Trickster Journal
the book’s painted spreads are full of magical shapeshifting beings. Turning its pages is like watching a ceremonial spirit dance.
Remembering Ted Briggs, last survivor of HMS Hood
He was one of only three men, from a crew of 1,421, to survive when the Hood was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck on May 24, 1941. All his life, Ted remembered his old ship and her crew.
“Wine and Cigarettes”: an interview with LA outsider artist X-8
The idea for an extended conversation between X-8 and myself, to be called “Wine and Cigarettes”, came up in October 2006, but . . .
Ben Wilson, London’s brilliant chewing gum artist
Where others see streets splattered with gummy eyesores, Ben sees thousands of tiny canvases.
Chiö-tá-kwö-kwé
“The uncontacted Sentineli may be the best hope for humanity’s survival. They have a right to protect themselves against disease, alcohol and greed. It is we who are the savages.”
