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I'm not responsible for my photographs. Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. It's drowning yourself and then sniff, sniff, sniff--being sensitive to coincidence. You can't go looking for it; you can't want it, or you won't get it. First you must lose your self. Then it happens.

~Cartier-Bresson

I never look for a photograph. The photograph finds me and says, "I'm here!" and I say, "Yes I see you. I hear you."

~Ruth Bernhard

Many have speculated that Beethoven attacked the keyboard with such fury in order to feel the vibrations of his music through the piano's cabinet as he gradually lost his hearing. In 1818 Broadwood, the pre-eminent English manufacture of the day, offered him a grand piano that incorporated all of the latest features: stronger case and frame, trichord stringing, more responsive action. This piano, too, Beethoven damaged with he fervor of his playing (a contemporary reported that "the broken strings were jumbled up like a thorn bush in a storm"), but he remained attached to it until his death in 1827. Descending into deafness, he imagined music unlike anything his contemporaries were writing; the Hammerkalavier sonata from this period still strikes us as a revelation of the piano's extreme limits of power and expressiveness. The longest of Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas, the Hammerkalavier is generally acknowledged to be his most difficult and his most visionary composition for the keyboard, a technical and poetic tour de force whose fugue finale still startles listeners to this day. The composer predicted as much when he wrote to this publisher, "Now you have a sonata that will still keep the pianists busy when it is played fifty years from now!" In a sense, Beethoven was composing for an instrument that didn't yet exist...

On evening in the spring I was walking home across the Ile Saint-Louis, the smaller and more residential of the two islands in the Seine, when I heard loud piano music surging from an open window. As I drew closer I recognized Beethoven's Diabelli Variations being played forcefully and with a strange urgency. I held my breath in surprise and delight: to come across this piece is rare enough in the concert hall, much less by happenstance in the street, and the history of its inception is on of the great Beethoven stories......In 1821 a Viennese music publisher, Anton Diabelli, sent a waltz that he had written to fifty prominent composers asking each of them to contribute a variation; among their number were Schubert, Hummel, Czerny, and the 10-year-old Lizst. Initially disdainful of the project, Beethoven decided to use the unassuming little tune to showcase his protean capacity for invention. In thirty-three masterful variations on the theme, he paradies the styles of lesser composers, alludes to works of Bach and Mozart, anticipates Chopin, and finally reaches heights of such sublime beauty that all the other compositions for the piano pale in comparison. In short, he summarizes his entire art in an hour-long piece that is by common consent one of the towering works of Western imagination, as great and fundamental a manifesto for the classical era as Bach's Goldberg Variations are for the baroque. Only the greatest pianist can give a convincing interpretation of this masterpiece, and here was someone in full command of the music, pouring it forth in waves of subtle beauty.

......Luc explained that the wood-working tradition was firmly established in Germany from the Middle Ages, and that guilds and families regularly replanted trees in order to provide the right kind of wood for their descendants. It wouldn't be unusual for someone's ancestor to have planted a grove of trees two hundred and fifty years before they were to be cut down, say in 1520. After being harvested, the wood would then have been allowed to cure for anywhere from ten to forty years. And that would bring us to the late eighteenth century and to the instrument that Luc now referred to as "this little marvel."

.....The most difficult aspect of a master class, Sebok said, is trying to get the student to an emptiness, to a still point, where he can truly hear what he is doing. "It's mot an absence, it's an emptiness, and that is a sometimes subtle point to grasp for a young person."......Technique, he felt, was vastly overrated as an isolated element. The best technique is one that doesn't exist, a kind of disappearing act, so the real focus needs to be on where the technique comes from: an inner calm, the emptiness he insisted on so that one can really listen. "That's not the same as relaxation," he cautioned. "I never talk about relaxation. You can't plan Chopin relaxed. Instead, I talk about fear, and I contrast that with love and hate and other human emotions. Music comes out of those, but it is blocked by fear. That is very often the obstacle we confront in a master class."

Talent Manager to focus and drive writer, musician, artist to production goals.

Seeking an organized, well-groomed, professional Cultivator of Opportunities. Skilled in networking, research, marketing, and cheerleading, the ideal candidate is punctual, articulate, analytical and profoundly interested in the Arts. Ability to follow-through, express honest critique, schedule and pace-set needed.

"Common sense" maintains that to achieve any success, one must specialize in a single area. I have a yearning for more than one medium, however, and am convinced there is a way to link my talents. I need a business partner with whom to share the challenges and rewards of the art I can produce.

Help harness my three creative horses; writing, music, and visual art. Let them pull your ambitions as well. Develop your business, facilitation and support skills and experience a varied, exciting, and potentially lucrative career as a Talent Manager.

If, after you review my web site, you have a belief that what I create is worth nurturing and marketing, please call or email for an appointment to visit my studio. I'm looking for a win-win situation for myself and my "handler." S/he could be you.

"Everything went right. Just when things looked blackest for The Rams, a 5-8, 145-pound junior named Bruce Barone had his moment of glory and it brightened up the gloomy morning for the Blue & Gold backers. Minutes into the second half the fans along the sideline began to cheer when he hauled in the kickoff at the eight, raced up the middle of the field and, just as he got in heavy traffic, cut to his left and sped down the sidelines for a 92-yard touchdown scamper. It would be a game that everyone connected to The Rams would remember."

What comes after hold me
Kiss me? One more time
For slow readers. What comes
After hold me kiss me?
The idea of spectacle.
Have there ever been happy times?
There was no hat on your head.
Downtown people were affording things.
One day while I was out
A woman called on me
Seeing I was not at home, left
This note: "Is there no discretion?"
Since then she developed a past.
Everything takes on greater significance.
Who do you think is going to win?
And for what?

This is where it starts.
The embrace. And then
Later, long after
The band had retired;
What of music?
It makes everything worse
Or better; if you know
What I mean.
Have you been listening?
Now that that was
First love, what is this?
Let me catch my breath.
Here we go.
All the plants lean
Eastward. The clouds
Heave in Heaven.
To you this might sound silly.
In geometry we learned.
Of the the first kiss
There is wonder.
Waitresses do have sex.
For better or for worse.
Puffs of milkweed
Circle upward. And this
We look forward to doing.
What love?
It is important
To find the idea
Behind the first line.
There is light enough.
All of us up here
I think are afraid.

Do not say "This is a stone and not God."
God forbid!
Rather, all existence is God,
and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.

Moses Cordovero

"For Blake, the apocalyptic moment was personal and could happen at any time evil is recognized. Revelation and Judgment are internal affairs of the spirit, arising from a clearing of the senses which the artist, by virtue of his imaginative genius, can promote. The true artist then has a social role bordering on the religious. Blake took this very seriously. He sought prophecies of a particular visionary nature, and found them in the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Job, and Solomon......Apocalypse was not the only myth with which Blake was concerned. It was part of a general sequence, a cycle beginning with Creation and Fall and culminating with Apocalypse and Redemption. Apocalypse becomes the correction of the Fall, and Redemption, a reversal of the process by which the spirit was contracted into human form......This constricted state Blake called Experience; its opposite was Innocence. Blake's cycle from Creation to Judgment or Redemption is paralleled on a personal level as a progress from Innocence to Experience. The tension between the two states is essential: "Without Contraries there is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." This progress of opposites is man's learning to develop his spiritual aspects, to reject selfhood and learn true foregiveness. Final Revelation will be "seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the Situation he holds" and the Last Judgment will happen "whenever any Individual Rejects Error & Embraces Truth."

~by Bruce Barone, "William Blake, The Apocalyptic Vision." An Exhibition and Catalog.

What though the radiance which was once so bright	180
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;	185
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,	190
In years that bring the philosophic mind.