The letter E, January 26

Today I feel like a kid in the (image) candy shop, but also like  I'm racing through the Louvre like the characters in Godard's Band of Outsiders, as if I'm missing great stuff by rushing, yet enjoying the exhiliration of the run anyway...

I'm always drawn to the files on places I've never been, especially the ones that trace our ever-shifting Euro-American ideas of the other (and their art). The noble savage, the intrepid (pith-helmeted) explorers, the magnificent monument, and the scattered skeletons. Take Easter Island, for example:

 
There's also a strange (if inadvertent) humor to the collection just because odd things are juxtaposed simply by virtue of their alphabetical proximity. Right after Easter Island, I looked at Easter Eggs:

And then there's always Extinct Fauna...

THese should make for an interesting E-world, but now I'm wondering whether and how I can integrate the labeling for these images into the film:

I love all these slightly different pencil marks, as well as the category names...

But mostly, today, I'm thinking about my brother-in-law, Craig Arnold, whose blog is still out there in cyber space, though he himself  disappeared in Japan in 2009. The story is far more mysterious than any of the news accounts, but I'm not sure it's mine to tell. I miss him still, though, and when I found a translation of a Basho poem on the same day as one particular Easter Island image above, I decided to color in the engraving and put them together here...