So what I do is I collect stories, stories and songs and poems. I seek out the elders and garner stories and songs and poems. Stories characterized critically as “oh that’s that 60’s stuff”, like suddenly doing old rock n’ roll will be doing “that 50’s stuff”, well, this is the 90’s you know — I have a good friend in the east, a good singer and a good folk singer and a good song collector, who comes and listens to my shows and says “Uh, you sing a lot about the past.” So I sing about the past. You can’t live in the past, you know? And, I say to him, “I can go outside and pick up a rock that’s older than the oldest song you know and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn’t go anywhere, did it? It’s right here, right now.” I always thought that anybody told me that I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered would get them in serious trouble. It’s not that 50’s, 70’s, 90’s…that whole idea of decades packaged, they don’t happen that way. The Vietnam war heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975. What’s that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize important events and important ideas. I defy that.
Time is an enormous long river. And I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders were the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem that they laid down flows down to me. And if I take the time to ask and if I take the time to seek, if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs, I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world. Bridges — from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time, and we all put into the river, and we let it go, and it flows away from us and away from us until it no longer has our name or our identity. It has its own utility, its own use, and people will take what they need, and make it part of their lives.
— Utah Phillips - Bridges
As we kick 2009 to the curb and bid a not-so-fond farewell to a rough decade, let’s not forget all the good things that happened, the great stories told, the friends made and the good people lost. Whether 2010 is really the turn of a new decade, or even just a journalistic convenience as Utah says, it’s never a bad time for a fresh start. Just remember that the past didn’t go anywhere, so make good use of it.
(Photo via Ben Harris-Roxis on Flickr)
Hello to you two or three people that read and care about the things I post! It’s been awfully quiet around here, hasn’t it? I’ll give the weak excuse that I’ve been super-busy this summer, and the best laid plans of mice and men etc., etc. But I’ve also not been posting much to del.icio.us lately, which was always the filler that gave my site the illusion of some life in RSS-land.
I have been quietly posting stuff, though! I’ve moved most of my side-note activities over to Tumblr, which is usually more fun for me to play with (hey, it’s got graphics and video posts in addition to links!). If you’d like to follow along, head over to debris.adamnorwood.com or sign up for my new “side-channel” RSS feed. That feed will eventually track my other linked entries around the web, from del.icio.us, YouTube, Vimeo, and whatever else I feel should be annotated and passed along and shoved into your reader. I’ll also soon be offering a firehose feed, in case you want to keep up on all of these posts from both the full blog as well as the side items. Just got to figure out how to keep Yahoo! Pipes! from chopping and screwing my media <embed>s beyond recognition…
Okay, get back to reading the rest of the web!
Freshened up my personal blog and portfolio site for 2009. While similar to the transitional look and content that you’ve seen for the past couple of years, this theme has been hand re-written from scratch and features many advancements over the old style. The entire site is better integrated through Wordpress than ever before using features newly available in WP 2.7.1 (gravatars, per-post styles, threaded comments, etc), a handful of customized plugins, subtle jQuery enhancements, and Subversion to tie it all together on the backend. I’ve also moved to a new domain after about ten years of being at asnorwood.com. All of the old links should still point to the right place (or get you pretty close), but let me know if you find something missing.
The bulk of the improvements are behind-the-scenes, but I can at least say that the following changes make my life easier and me happier:
- Uploading new portfolio work is much more straightforward.
No more need for a separate gallery plugin!
- The category and link organization is more sensible! Tags, too!
- Better error-handling — hopefully you won’t end up 404 Not Found, but you at
least have a sporting chance of getting unstuck now!
- The search engine optimization (I hate that term) seems to be working
already, too. Thanks, Google!
- The search form pulls up better, more accurate results!
All of this tech stuff is secondary, of course, and I’m still trying to decide how best to balance the blog entries between my different interests. Maybe I’ll eventually split off into two or more distinct sites to keep things from rambling together. I’d also like to figure out a better way to incorporate the side-channel links (currently I’m using del.icio.us) and scrap-collecting elements (I love Tumblr for gathering quotes and other detritus, but not sure how best to tie that content in with my main site). Being nearly the fifteenth anniversary of my first website, you’d think I’d have this all figured out by now!
What do you think? What would you change?
Hey kids! I’ve relaunched my site, moving it to its new official home at adamnorwood.com (goodbye, asnorwood.com). It’s got a new, hopefully better design, a stronger Wordpress backend (the bells and whistles have all been polished), and I’ve got a slew of new content coming down the pike (I know, the last real post on here was from…last July? Uh-oh). I’m launching it into the yawning chasm that is SXSW2009, so maybe everyone will be too distracted to notice any temporary glitches or missing bits. For you faithful who are reading this in a feed reader, I thank you and ask your forgiveness for the horribly jumbled updated feed that probably greeted you this morning!
Things to look forward to:
- More posts on art from someone who’s trying to figure it all out, with more of a focus on the local (Austin, Texas) art scene
- Posts on design and technology, including some lessons learned while building up my Wordpress chops
- More signal, less noise
As always, I’d love to hear any criticisms, complaints, questions, comments, or commiserations. Leave me your good words!