forioscribe

When I visited my mother a few weeks before she died, her husband Bully, my stepfather, turned over to me a pile of old photos that had been in a box in the attic for years. He said he guessed they were “Your mom’s people.”

Since she was in a terminal stage of dementia and recognized no one and could not speak, I couldn’t ask her who they were, what were their names, what was their history.

She’d told me earlier that a great-great-grandfather (she wasn’t sure how many greats) named Jack Joyce was convicted of sheep stealing in Ireland during the Great Famine, and transported to a penal colony in Australia. After serving his sentence he married, and had children, a few of whom migrated to America to work on the railroad.

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Coming up is the ten-year anniversary of my first sight of Isola d’ Ischia. Below is a video I took of the ferryboat coming into the harbor. Yes, I know. The camera shake is quite distracting and I need to work on a more professional shooting style. You might say this is more like a record shot, like you take at family gatherings or at Christmas, which has mainly personal significance.



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"...ones own ideal self, that which one is called to be, and
draws to the ascent of the levels of inner life..."

--In response to a post by seraphimsigrist

A young woman named Gia escorted me up a narrow, carpeted stairway to the second floor of a brownstone on Manhattan’s upper east side. George Plimpton was barefoot, in a loose fitting t-shirt and pale bluejeans, dictating to a young man who tapped rapidly on a laptop.

Gia told Plimpton, "You should put on a shirt." It was more a command than a suggestion.

Plimpton absently nodded, ran his hand through his shock of silver hair. "I suppose you're right," he said, and headed for the bedroom.



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Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters with Miles Davis
by Paul Maher Jr., Michael K. Dorr
Chicago Review Press

November 2008, 352 pages, $24.95

Review by Michael Patrick Brady

Highlights:


He also loves making other people uncomfortable. When dining with John Palcewski of Cavalier magazine at a restaurant in Boston in 1969, Davis terrorizes the staff, putting on a show for the writer. “This place looks like a whorehouse,” he announces, before needling the waiter about the quality of his soup. “It tastes like you look.” This aversion to comfort and desire for tension can be clearly seen in the evolution of his work from his landmark ‘Birth of the Cool’ recordings to his controversial fusion work in the latter stages of his career. Davis never wanted to stop moving, always wanted to be doing something, pissing somebody off, and driving people wild.

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On the beach, Ischia Ponte. At La Piazzetta, with Heather and Pippo from Roma.