drmstream[writing]

This is John the Evan­ge­list, who wrote the Gospel of John.  John was the wit­ness, the dis­ci­ple who was always in the right place at the right time.  The eagle that soars into the sky, hold­ing a man­u­script in its talons, is a  metaphor for his faith. Some 700 years after the death of Christ, a […]

Lis­ten and let your mind go still.

The con­cep­tion of the library in Stock­holm has wormed into my imag­i­na­tion. Then I stum­bled upon a curated sam­pling of book­shelves from Desire to Inspire. Here are two of my favorites. Just like the Stock­holm con­cep­tion, these images cre­ate kine­sis in my imag­i­na­tion. I grew up sur­rounded by books — lit­er­ally, sur­rounded by books, in […]

Every Sun­day, the young man who wanted to be a writer went out early to the cor­ner news­stand to buy The New York Times. He had a rou­tine. Shuf­fle and deal, like a casino hand: sports sec­tion, arts sec­tion, week in review, and last, because it would get the most time and con­sid­er­a­tion, the Book […]

I’m focused on the Canar­sie Line, and a young girl name Sadie who lived off the Broad­way stop in the block that even­tu­ally became Sternberg Park.

I’m just a sucker for Joey Ramone’s soft voice.  He recorded one of my two all-time favorite cov­ers with It’s a Won­der­ful World (the other is the for­mer Stu­dent Teacher’s Philip Shelley’s unrecorded ver­sion of Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right, which I had on a cas­sette tape for the longest time before it sucuumbed […]

Amer­i­can Band­stand meets Deb­bie Harry. She goes utterly cool, a McLuhan-like anti­dote to the hot main­stream­ing of the Band­stand. The audi­ence? Watch for the hot-body boy­toy in the yel­low form-fitting T in the front row. Just to be sure younger read­ers know, that wasn’t the typ­i­cal look for the launch of New Wave. But it […]

Con­text is so much of what you under­stand when you expe­ri­ence an image. Take the photo below. I came across it brows­ing. It’s pub­lished on a site I don’t know. The image is styled to be jar­ring: a young child of inde­ter­mi­nate age and gen­der, sport­ing a mon­o­cle and with a cig­a­rette dan­gling from the lips. The photo […]

This sketch is from Leonardo’s note­books in the 16th cen­tury. The note­books con­firm the cat­alyz­ing impact curios­ity has on cre­ativ­ity. Da Vinci method­i­cally observed and recorded — the mechan­i­cal attrib­utes of the human body, of the phys­i­cal world, of the pat­terns of thought. He had a remark­able gift for record­ing his obser­va­tions. His mind’s eye […]

The dynamic of the Greek the­ater is com­pelling for the ten­sion between the nat­ural open­ness of the bowl and the archi­tec­tural weight of the cen­ter stage. Let’s put our­selves there for a moment. We sit 20 rows up in the cen­ter, warm in the later Spring sun. The sky is blue and end­less. The air lightly […]