5.25.2006
a note to the reader: absence while still having presence?
this entry--though devoid of any digital archive related content--serves the purpose of an apology for a (s)lack of additions to this archive. its not that the archive is full, or abandoned, or forgotten. rather, it in itself as a project has been put to the side as i try to make money.alas, the truth: worthy efforts--perhaps things that are more important and significant--often lose out to those that some deem less worthy or significant or bound to have an impact on our daily life; making websites for small businesses and earning little money or promotional videos for non-profits earning even littler money.
but--do know this. although the project hasn't had an update in over two months, all is not lost. strange how the instantness and everydayness of the web makes us feel as if two months without an update is a sign of authorship abandonment, too much time away, and perphaps many other nuanced and subtle cognitive processes? for those readers and watchers that actually care (only a few i myself can name--mostly those that have bothered me about the sillyness of the last and what seemed final entry on tenacity) here is a brief look at some things to come, eventually:
1. complete overhaul of this site. my goal is to keep the site and its contents "unified." by this, i mean, no picture hosting on flickr.com. not that i don't like flickr, i just find it an amateur notion if this is really to be an "archive." taken literally, using flickr means that this really isn't a mcglone archive/database...flickr is the archive/database. so i will work slowly and carefully, trying to create my own web site that can itself host these artifacts and streamline the viewing of images.
2. to note, the site will more than likely be broader in scope. perhaps not a "mcglone" archive but an archive in general for other artifacts to be featured. the idea for the creation of this blog/database/archive literally came overnight, after my grandmother's death, its first post coming a week after she passed and a few days after the funeral. in almost a fetishitic manner, i guess, the mcglone archive became a way for me not to forget. it also was a way to kill time as i grew tiresome of the job hunt. but the two forged a path that i guess i always intended on following at some point in my life, my studies and my efforts to try my hand at this thing we call (some call) new media.
regardless of how the mcglone digital archives project pans out, this entry is nothing more than a long winded apology. perhaps a defence, but more so a response to a guilt brought on by myself and the strange disease that infects creativity that makes it difficult to finish (...is there a finish on the web?--for instance if you leave a comment, this entry in fact is added to and begins to take on a new narrative twist...) or at least commit to what i start. perhaps it is a symptom that stems from the photograph itself. in a bit of a correlation, surrealist manifesto (1924) author andre breton (pictured above with microscope) wrote this long ago on his own moviegoing habits:
When I as "at the cinema age" (it should be recognized that this age exists in life--and that it passes) I never began by consulting the amusement page to find out what film chance to be the best, nor did I find out the time the film was to begin. I agreed wholeheartedly with Jacques Vache in appreciating nothing so much as dropping into the cinema when whatever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and leaving at the first hint of boredom--of surfeit--to rush off to another cinema where we behaved in the same way...I have never known anything more magnetizing; it goes without saying that more often than not we left our seats without even knowing the title of the film, which was of no importance to us anyway. On a Sunday several hours sufficed to exhaust all that Nantes could offer us: the important thing is that one came out "charged" for a few days.
this fragmented and magnetic charge breton writes about in a rather blogesque prose, is what i feel quite often when creating; being present, yet somehow remaining absent.
