In the heart of the heart of the country

I was up early at 5 a.m. I stood, barefoot, just outside the doorframe to the house where I was staying, deep in the West Virginia hills. No traffic noise since this was the heart of the heart of the country. Only a rural road curved around the house ...

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Categories Essays Photography

The Long, Strange Trip of Dave Evans’ Notable Life

He was a West Virginia coal miner’s son who lost his legs below the knees in a deadly ambush in Vietnam at age 18. What happened next sounds like a movie script. Dave Evans went on to work across the planet, building and fitting prosthetic legs, hands, and arm for thousands of adults and children in conflict zones worldwide. A…

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Categories Longform Essays

A starry exhibit vividly worth one’s time

While "VAN GOGH: The Immersive Experience" wows you with its flash, such as a 7,000-square-foot Immersive Gallery animating his work and a must-experience virtual reality fly-through of Arles, I came away just as intrigued and moved by the more intimate details.

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Categories Art Essays Video

Holy Ghosts and Scapulars

I came upon one of my mother’s old rosaries in my collection of family stuff, and paired it on a tack beside my writing desk wall with some old religious medallions I earned on some long-ago Holy Day. Catholicism didn't take, but the accoutrements remain.

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Categories Photography

After an Influenza Retreat, what the sky looks like

After weeks upon weeks of miserableness, suffering though the worst bout of sickness in his adult life — aka Influenza A — your videographic interlocutor finally has (mostly) passed out of the Valley of Miserableness. This is what he saw looking up once sprung from his sick house.

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Categories Video

Thumping out a solo on a West Virginia winter afternoon

What can I say? I make weird, short videos. This one goes out to the 7 to 17 people with an odd enough sensibility to appreciate this brief, thumping encounter with the sculpture 'Earth Portal' in Ritter Park, in Huntington W.Va., which if you didn't know it, is playable.

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Categories Video

One key to rule them all

Much of my life and existence, my world view and how I spend my time, plus how I orient myself in the space-time continuum of ongoing mystery and confounding confusion, is summed up in this photograph.

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Categories Photography

Dear General de Gaulle …

The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?

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Categories Essays Memoir Profiles

The Art of the Song Lyric

The hand-transcribed song lyric considered as a work of art. Bouncing around Paris and the volcanic heartland of Gaul before easy access to printers and scanners, you had to make do when you wanted to travel with lyrics to the songs you hoped to sing.

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Categories Memoir