About Me

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Adalbert is a forum for me, to post ephemera, photography, poetry, occasional travel notes, and various spontaneous motions. Cover photo: Parsonage where my great-grandfather spent his early years. Taken near Liegnitz, Silesia, ca. 1870. The "xothique" portion of the web address is a nod to Clark Ashton Smith's fictional continent of Zothique.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

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.




Monday, January 26, 2015

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.




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


Saturday, January 24, 2015

Tijuana


Tijuana, Mexico, 1940s

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Family Harvest


Sunday, January 11, 2015

Saturday, January 10, 2015

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.






Saturday, January 3, 2015

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!