Making stories with and for the people.
Tom looks up in the margin! A tree & the sun w Dwarfs of East Agouza playing Museum of Stranglers Iii @wmbrfm #listenersview
War Machine #listenersview. Home commute in the margin w Lee Harvey Osmond covering Gordon Lightfoot. “Oh Linda” .@wmbrfm
Tom is in the margin. Hello! ❤️👁️👂🏻 #listenersview @wmbrfm The amazing Karl Berger & Edward Blackwell (1992) play “Skin & Wood Works.”
Dave is wandering again into the margin. Dwarfs of Agouza “Museum of Stranglers”. @wmbr #listenersview
Jake is typing in the margin. Miles Oliver sings “Save Me.” @wmbrfm #listenersview #typewriter
Golden Gate in the margin. @kitchencynics ❤️ “Can You Hear the Frog?” Yes! @wmbrfm And Alcatraz. I swam across there once. 🌀 #binocshot
Late afternoon w last bit of morning coffee heated up, a quarter cut of pear tart, one very large walnut. I squeeze it open between my two palms, pull the inside out. Looking out from this bench, I’m listening to Patti Smith talk about walking up (or down) a Paris street, describing “flashes of recognition.” 🙌🏼
Grieving bench, well positioned #listenersview @jillsees 🫧💭@wmbrfm a beauty.
No information accompanies this #listenersview Appears a spaceship has landed on Pleasant Street in Dorchester. Or Somerville. Or. 🌀@wmbrfm
Peter says “my margin”. “A stunner,” I respond. ❤️ #listenersview @wmbrfm
Dave transmits another #listenersview …Back in the #MightyNW with 90" held for you, Sue. Here are a pair of freshly-shot ITMOTO PHOTOS, taken 50 yards from each other. ✔️ @wmbrfm
Dave sez “it`s my second week listening from within Toronto`s Junction Triangle neighborhood.” #listenersview @wmbrfm
Out of Pandemnity into Movement in the Margin I sit with my coffee at a sidewalk cafe in Philadelphia, listening. Virginia Woolf’s voice mingles with the sound of geese nestling at dusk into the reeds along the Neponset River as I ride past. Movement can help carry us away from fear. Now comes the sound of Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart as the Ashmont-Milton trolly rolls by. Life. It’s wonders. I’m glad you are here. #listenersview
Making, assembling, shooting, sending into the Margin. @jillsees 🙏🏼 #listenersview @wmbrfm w the @yeahyeahyeahs “Runaway” ⚪️
Dave in the clouds in the margin. somewhere between Seattle & Toronto. 🫧 w the NY Phil, Bernstein playing Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. It’s 1960.
@lwjpnyc made these on her turntable. 🔥 Mandala in the Margin 🔥#listenersview🌀@wmbrfm Tom Verlaine RIP fronts Television w Marquis Moon ❤️ @pattismith
Chuck U as ever #listenersview w #nightshiftbrewing & Wagner’s English horn #tristan&isolde @wmbrfm❤️ 💪🏼
Dave #listenersview puzzling w #lemmymabaso “cornbread & black-eyed peas” #pennywhistle @wmbrfm
#listenersview all mine w #helengillett “skin” 🚴🏽💨 @wmbrfm
Todd’s looking up, sun sky , & listening. Noel Harrison is singing “Highway in the Wind.” #listenersview ❤️ @wmbrfm
December 16, 2022. A night walk in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Deb catches me passing across the edge of a light circle into darkness. A beautiful Masary Studio’s Solstice production leading us into these most mysterious days of winter.
This image brings me back to the early pandemic, riding across the city for hours on my bicycle. I spent a lot of time in cemeteries. In fact, I volunteered for a time as a Findagrave.com sleuth. Strangers would sent me a request to look for a long dead relative. I’d jump on my bike and be off with my maps of Forest Hills, Cedar Grove, or Mount Hope….send them pictures of what I found. If I found. lt can be quite difficult to find a grave.
I hesitated to tell anyone about these excursions. It seemed strange, and I couldn’t explain what compelled me. My time in cemeteries, in the midst of a pandemic, brought home the temporal nature of names and epitaphs carved into headstones, of memory, of whatever significance any of us may have in our lifetime. DNA is passed along, yet still, few are remembered by their grandchild’s children.
I ponder further in an essay, Toward a New Poetics of Journalism, commissioned by Nieman’s Journalism Lab.
In 125 years, when someone comes looking for us, what will they find? The hardscape — granite monuments, bridges, even mountains and rivers – eventually dissolve or give way to something unrecognizable, unverifiable. Journalists as anthropologists, social scientists, forensic experts — as with poets — leave a discoverable trace for those wanting to understand where they’ve come from. Let’s be generous with what we leave for them.
Find the full piece here.
Meantime, send me your musings, and join me In the Margin of the Other.
Support for Margin Media is provided by the Red Elm Tree Foundation, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, Inc., the Waterman II Fund of the Philadelphia Foundation, and the Wyncote Foundation