b.rox

I rented a car and drove west. All by myself. I drove and drove and drove until I got to Austin, Texas. And I thought to myself, how uncharacteristic. I felt like I hadn’t done anything like this before, at least not for a very long time. There was a reason for this pilgrimage, of [...]

If my recent posts have made it seem like Isaac was all fun and games, well, that only reflects my own personal experience. Other people experienced it differently. If your house flooded or a tree fell on you, for example, your experience was probably pretty negative. Even in our house, we had different experiences. Xy [...]

So remember how I said we were heading out — buggin’ — evacuating? That didn’t happen. We were planning to go, but the hurricane parties here were just too good to resist. Actually the real reason is that our anticipated path was looking worse and worse for a return drive. Of course we could have [...]

Watching The Theologians this weekend reminded me: I finished work on another movie earlier this summer and never wrote about it. It’s a five minute animated version of the Old Testament. Believe it or not, this took me five years to complete. If I’d cleared my desk and worked on nothing else it probably would [...]

Michael Homan has concocted another short movie of inscrutable strangeness. This one is called The Theologians. This one’s got a lot of academic in-jokes that are over my untutored head, but if you watch carefully you’ll see me in one brief scene, along with Xy and Persephone who are particularly adorable. I also provided vocals [...]

Since I don’t get back to Bloomington often, I made a point of getting together with folks.

I was mighty excited to see the Transit of Venus this past Tuesday. I set up a tiny mirror on a tripod in our back yard, which reflected the image of the sun through our kitchen and down a short hall into my darkened office. This is called the reflected pinhole method, which is a [...]

Just excavated an old paper, not by me but about me — check it out.

It was five years ago today that I got the terrible news that Helen Hill had been murdered in her home. She will not be forgotten. A few months ago I had the decidedly bittersweet pleasure of viewing Helen’s final film, The Florestine Collection, which was completed by her husband Paul Gailiunas. A true labor [...]

On November 11, 2011, eleven of us gathered at The 1111 Building, in parking space #11, and at precisely eleven minutes and eleven seconds after eleven o’clock a.m., we raised a toast — the No. 11 Cup. That’s eleven elevens, in case you weren’t keeping track.

A bit discombobulated and disconnected for this recent holiday. Perhaps that’s because I was traveling just before — the POD Network traditionally has their conference at the end of October, and this one was combined with the annual conference of the HBCU Faculty Development Network, and we mustered our biggest contingent (four) ever. Wouldn’t have [...]

Once again we interrupt our regularly scheduled investigations to draw your attention to a notable screening. The Florestine Collection Experimental animator Helen Hill found more than 100 handmade dresses in a trash pile on one Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans. She set out to make a film about the dressmaker, an elderly seamstress who [...]

Here’s Persephone’s directorial debut. Cast: Xy — Snow White Persephone — Nice Fairy Michael — Grumpy Therese — Dopey Nicole — Flower David — Prince Cinematography by yours truly. Obviously this was mostly improvised, but Persephone engineered the basic situation. She assigned roles and costumes. She didn’t want a Wicked Queen in her movie, for [...]

So I went down to Michael’s house last night to watch Treme. I fully expected to see a commemoration of Dinerral Shavers, and that is how the show began. The funeral scene was moving. Nakita Shavers, playing herself, gave a heartbreaking eulogy for her brother. I read that she had to do that scene four [...]

It’s the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo/BP blowout disaster catastrophe oil spill. I don’t know how much coverage it gets outside the Gulf Coast, but oil is still percolating up in marshes here, and it’s very discouraging. Generally I have supported science and the scientific worldview, but this debacle has shown how science is just [...]

I was just coming home from the first real parade of the carnival season, fired up and aglow with the love, and I get online and I check my e-mail and I find myself on Facebook, looking at a kindly invitation to enjoy the next night’s diversions, looking at the profile of a friend, and [...]

Just noticed I have exactly 666 “friends” on Facebook. Damnation. Now I can’t add anymore friends unless someone unfriends me. Because, of course, I am an ardent hexakosioihexekontahexaphile. Update: It took me a while to figure out how to save an image showing all 666 “friends.” (Abduction by Rowan Lewis proved to be the key.) [...]

I’ve gotta give some props to Eric Spears for continuing to excavate such gems from his personal video collection. Here’s Christy Paxson Behind the Scenes at the Making of the Latest John “Cougar” Mellencamp Video. Eric sez: “Between episodes of her access TV series, The Christy Paxson Show, Christy made several video shorts, and this [...]

We had some friends over for dinner.

Yes, it’s that time again. As I’ve noted here before, Twelfth Night is traditionally observed on January 6th in New Orleans, but in other places it’s considered to begin at sundown on January 5th. I guess this relates to the old idea of holidays beginning the night before, like Christmas really seems to start on [...]