The letter "A" January 2011 excerpt

A strange snow is falling today, leaving Fort Greene Park flocked - like an old-fashioned Christmas display in a department store window. Inside the darkened subway car, I wait for Bill Brand's subway zoetrope to take me from primary-colored protozoa to a rocket ship. When we emerge on the bridge, I see a wall of white. Looking out through the windows in the Picture Collection,  the streets look like the inside of a snow globe.

In a folder labeled "Animals, A-L," I'm returning to images I liked last summer:

I'm particularly fond of this aye-aye, an animal from Madagascar. Pretty soon, I imagine him cavorting across other "A" images, like this one:

 

Many thanks to Shannon MacLachlan  for the top two photos, and to David Chiu for his story in the NY Times blog The Local, which  I linked to above.

Welcome to My Abecedarian Adventure:

For the past few months, I've been working on a project inspired by the New York Public Library's Picture Collection, an amazing compendium of over one million image clippings that has been preserved, categorized and added to since 1914. These images are painstakingly labeled by hand and filed alphabetically using subject headings that range from "aeronautics" to "zoological gardens." My short film, with the new working title “A is for Aye-Aye: An Abecedarian Adventure”  will use animation and live-action footage to create an alternative universe of dirigibles and deserts, forests and fortune tellers, hypnosis and the history of hairstyling, Zimbabwe and the zodiac. 

On this site, I plan to provide snapshots of the vast array of materials I've been looking through and then add to that some rough photoshop sketches of some of the alphabetical worlds I hope to create for selected letters of the alphabet. I'm going to start out with some excerpts from the journal I've been keeping about the piece and then, ideally, move into writing in what William Burroughs called Present Time.