I keep coming across this meme and now it has landed on me, basically I have been blog tagged by Luis Suarez, meaning I have to share 5 things about myself and then inturn blog tag 5 bloggers.
Luis points to a post from the initial blog tagger who pondered that we are part of blogosphere communities, and communicate to each other through comments and linking, and perhaps social networks, bookmark sharing, IM’ing, emailing, etc…we have this relationship based on common interest, and may frequently communicate with each other, but this is on a narrow scale.
Why not share something different about each other, it makes the relationship you have with the blogosphere more personal and holistic or humanistic.
eg. Luis is a km 2.0 blogger (we comment, link, IM and email), but I never knew he was a chef.
Anyway here is 5 things you may not know about me:
1. I’ve only been on the net for 5 years, I graduated as a librarian in 2005, and it is this study that threw me into the net, I didn’t see it coming…I thought libraries were about books.
Now I’ve been caught again in this second wave, the social net, and the good thing about being in the library field is that I fell into the social net early on as I was right into “current awareness”.
2. Before all things library I studied a diploma in film and took part in many short films, a few I shot went to film festivals in England and Greece, everything was paid for except the flight so I couldn’t go.
Film is an amazing art and science, I see film as a very difficult art in achieving close to what you are trying to express, as you are not always alone, it’s like you have 50 people on a film set, each with a paint brush, contributing their version and colour to your concept.
I really admire people who make films, as telling a story is not easy with pictures, try take 5 photos and make a story out of it, the hard part is making it profound, unique (not the usual), fresh (not mundane), evoke feelings, etc…
Anyway my favourite directors and films are: Federico Fellini (8 1/2, City of Women, Roma, Amarcord, Satyricon, And the Ship Sails on, Juliet of the Spirits), Ingmar Bergman, (The Seventh Seal, Hour of the Wolf, Face to Face , Persona), Luchino Visconti (Rocco and his brothers), Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura, Zabriski Point, Blow up), Paolo Pasolini (Gospel according to St Matthew, Oedipus Rex, The Decameron), Andre Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris, Mirror), Jean Luc Godard (weekend, 2 or three things I know about her, Masculin Feminin), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour) , Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, The killing, Lolita, 2001 a Space Odyssey), David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), Atom Egoyan (Erotica, The Sweet Hereafter), Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe)
Check out IMDB for reviews.
Nowadays I like taking slide photos on my old school SLR, maybe I’ll dig out the old super 8 movie camera, I bet I’d have trouble buying film for this.
3. Again before and during the library scene, I was in a post-rock band in Melbourne called Annie Mae…playing guitar and bass, and messing around with keyboard sounds.
This brings me to music, here are some of my favourites:
Donna Regina, Stereolab, Alpha, Mogwai, Hood, Lali Puna, Movietone, Art of Fighting, Mum, Out Hud, Tortoise, Brokeback, Pulse Programming, The Dirty Three, Architecture in Helsinki, Low, Mouse on Mars, Arab Strap, The Doors, Bonnie Prince Billy, Broadcast, Boards of Canada, Savath + Savalas, To Rococo Rot, Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, Herbet, Wechsel Garland, Rachels, God Speed You Black Emperor, The Pastels, International Airport, Tarwater, Sergio Mendes, Astrid Gilberto, Qua, Fruit Bats, The Sea and Cake…too many more to mention.
4. Whilst I was doing my library studies I landed my first library job at a counselling centre, my wife Abby (then girlfriend) was studing Holistic Counselling at a the Australian College of Natural Medicine, where I also worked in the library and started my first blog. I was for some reason immersed in the humanistic side of life, I ended up going along with Abby and doing a telephone counselling course, and I volunteered on the phones for a year.
Anyway this re-ignited me with research into life as I have always done with my younger brother, he really influenced me a lot, we use to have the Encylopedia Britannica in our bedroom and he’d always have his head in it, as I’d walk by he’d say “John I’m reading into European Mysticism, there’s guys out there who reckon you can live on plant drugs or in your dreams, there’s more to life than we think”…I think he was reading Aldous Huxley or something like that, pretty heavy for a 14 year old.
Then we’d see what we could cook up, we looked all around the garden, nutmeg, banana leaf, it was ridiculous, then my brother came across our datura tree (angel trumpet), my grandpa always warned us of this tree, I wasn’t game, but my brother tried it, and didn’t like the experience at all…actually a friend of mine also had it back then and he went blind for 1/2 an hour when he was on the bus, that’s scary.
My favourite books would have to be the Carlos Castaneda books, I think I read about 10 of them in a row. The first book has a lot about ingesting plant drugs, but when you get on to the 2nd or 3rd books these sorcerors no longer need to ingest plants, they have the power within…some say this stuff is fiction, if it is, it’s still awesome, the principles or discipline are so profound and common sense.
Some of my favourite books:
The cosmic Serpent: DNA and the origins of knowledge, Blackfoot Physics: A journey into the Native American Universe, Entering the circle: ancient secrets of Siberian wisdom discovered by a Russian psychiatrist, The Sirius Mystery, The Tao of physics, Secret Chamber: The quest for the hall of records, Urban Shaman, The Prophet, Atlantis: the antediluvian world, The politics of ecstacy, Care of the soul, The four agreements, The secret of the golden flower: A chinese book of life, The Lords The New Creatures, Hyperspace, The Republic, Illuminations, Jungle Medicine, Medicine Woman, The dancing wu li masters, Supernatural: Meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind, The grass is singing, A moveable feast, The Razors edge, On the road, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, The theater and its double, The outsider, The Trial, Rolling Thunder, Brave New World, The doors of perception, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Junkie, The Serpent and the Rainbow, From the ashes of angels, Gods of eden
5. I love my 2 cats, Grigo and Uggie, they are two of my best buddies. Abby and I recently got married in Fiji and the cats boarded in a cattery. When we picked them up a month later, the lady looking after them gifted us a CD full of photos of the cats getting up to stuff while we were away, I thought that was a nice gesture.
About 4 years ago we went on a holiday to Europe and China, and left the cats in the care of a friend, it turned out one of the cats ran away a couple of weeks after we left. When we got back a couple of months later we freaked out and put up posters describing “Uggie”, we didn’t have a photo (now we have lots and lots).
Anyway a month after that we got a call at 8am on a Sunday morning, it turns out Uggie took residence in a nursing home 1 km away, she was looking after the old folk, I think they liked her more than their resident cat, that we felt bad taking her back.
I think I got carried away with this, but it was fun going over some stuff.
That’s it, so who am I going to tag, let’s see:
EirePreneur (James Corbett)
Alex Barnett
Freshblog (John)
Pito Salas (BlogBridge)
Chris Saad (Touchstone)
Is anyone using Technorati Tags for this blog tag game, then the posts could be collected in the one spot, I’d like to follow a trail of this game.
And again.
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