Honestly Kid

by Daniel Damkoehler

 

2nd thoughts archive

Saving the World One Letter At A Time

So, this being Blog Action Day, you'll find many bloggers going off about slowing down human caused climate change on planet earth. My favorite link so far has to be the one I stumbled upon to Ecofont, a font that slows down the resource drain of printing fonts by excluding itty bitty bits of ... +more+

October 15, 2009 | 2nd thoughts

Why I Left Theatre

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience. - John Cage
Substitute theatre for music in the passage above and that's pretty much the problem I was facing back in the mid-90s. I wanted more experience. More life. And it had ... +more+

October 14, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Theatre

Insight Photography Project

I recently joined the board of InSight Photography Project based here in Brattleboro, Vermont. It's mission: "to provide local youth with a creative outlet away from school to develop a  visual language that will provide them tools to communicate with others while discovering something about themselves." Why did I join the board? Well, I keep telling myself that I want to do things, concrete things, for the ... +more+

October 9, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Vermont

Fred Friendly: Television God?

If you've seen the George Clooney flick Good Night and Good Luck then you already know something about Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow's co-creator of the 1950s CBS news show See It Now (George Clooney played Friendly). While in reality not quite a Clooney-esque heart throb, Friendly made his lasting impression on our culture carrying the torch of truth rather than Hollywood beauty ... +more+

October 7, 2009 | 2nd thoughts

What Festival Are You?

Every autumn a great thing happens in Brattleboro Vermont: just as the leaves change, as if on cue, there is the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Through the committed and and ardent work of a small group of devoted local literati,writers, and book fanatics, world class authors of every stripe descend on our small southern Vermont town for a week of readings, discussions, workshops, and ink stained elbow ... +more+

October 6, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Vermont

My Head In Paris

I confess. True all week. My head has been in Paris. Having to shout across the Atlantic has caused some difficulty being heard (much less hearing), but the sore throat is well worth it. More challenging still: seeing what I was doing each day, where I was going, what I was 'working on', what I wore, and what I was feeding the cat. Navigating Paris with just a head on the other hand wasn't ... +more+

September 25, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Spare Parts

Aeschylus versus James Ellroy

My Google quote for today:

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish. - Aeschylus
versus James Ellroy plugging his latest, Blood's A Rover, on NPR. I've only read Ellroy's The Black Dahlia and on the basis of that book alone (read the book before you see the movie)  the guy deserves all the bravado and swagger he can muster. Listen to today's NPR ... +more+

September 22, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Books

Conversion

Conversion. What is it? Who converts and why? Strictly speaking, to convert simply means to change from one form to another. To editorialize on that dictionary definition a bit, I'll add that to convert is not quite to transform and a bit more precise than simply change. Convert is a special kind of word, a special kind of change - it's not the same as transform, revolutionize, invert, or simply adjust. ... +more+

September 20, 2009 | 2nd thoughts,Peregrinations

Crude Dystopia

crude_300_250George Orwell would be 106 years old, just a few years shy of today's oldest man in the world. Quite a bit less than that lifetime ago, Orwell foresaw a world controlled by double-speaking oligarchs who manufactured information, global conflict, and the war machines to wage it in order to control human beings as resources owing service ... +more+

September 14, 2009 | 2nd thoughts

Remembering

rememberthumbSeems like a good day to quote myself. Despite the bummer beginning, I think my prologue to this site ends with a bit of hope. I'd be kidding you if I said this was a direct response to the events of 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina (both of which deserve remembering right about now), but I'd be kidding myself if I denied that ... +more+

September 11, 2009 | 2nd thoughts