benefits of vectors

I'm not interested in money, but I love the challenge of connecting the dots between memes. The process is more akin to investigating flight patterns after a crash: where did an idea fly from, get refueled at, become airborne for the first time? I am just now trying to articulate growing up with my own father, who turned on the CIA in 1970 when we lived in Beirut and ended up fleeing in a station wagon with me and my two sisters to Syria and Turkey and then Europe to hide for three years while everyone looked for us. I was 10, my sisters younger, and we had a dog; my father was then 63. How he pulled it off beggars belief, still. So coaxing you into video and pixels in a very poetic and spare language, which you already speak so fluently, would be an exercise with vector-like benefits: no matter who such a project included or touched, the artwork would stretch to accommodate further interests and faraway curiosities, without ever losing its shape or original design. These sorts of efforts are rare, perhaps formulated in academic institutions as ideas but never really executed.

Have you seen the excellent film "Rivers & Tides" about Andy Goldsworthy? This is the visual poetry I would hope to emulate, even if the very modest video we could get in a single afternoon would be a fraction of that movie's efforts. Let me know if you're interested in creating something quickly and smartly like this; perhaps it is perfect timing for a new book, perhaps it's just another pain in the ass a new book births. I'd certainly be willing to put up some effort and organizational power. Good luck with the book, hope it sells like hotcakes or iPods, tell your agent to look into making a graphic version for the iPad which would be a certified money-loser but could very well create sales for the book that are not now imagined, never mind planned!

-- from correspondence with author James Brown, whose L.A. Diaries was terra firma in my frenzied flights over oceans of possibility and anxiety.