The D-Word's life is one of glamour and riches, as only a documentary filmmaker can live it

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If you wanna know why these entries have been so sporadic lately, all I can say is: Well, Well, Well... (but you gotta be a member).

Could also blame it on our brand-spanking new, partially donated Media 100xsnon-linear editing system which finally arrived the other day and is keeping us suitably occupied. More to come on how this exciting development came to be but, unlike a certain, ahem, unnamed competitor, Media 100 gets what Home Page and the D-Word is about.

Another Exciting development in the works, too...

One of the biggest benefits of doing this project is I’m getting to know some really great writers who are on the same wavelength. For instance, no one knows more or writes more eloquently about personal home pages than Pam O’Connell. Here’s yet another example.

And then there’s R.U. Sirius, who e-mailed last week asking if he can write a column about Yours Truly for his upcoming weekly Wired News column on Wired Digital. Guess he’d been reading the conversation thread in The Well. The addled D-Word’s official media policy (subject to change without notice, of course) is I won’t persue any press ‘til the damn film is finished, but if anyone finds me thru the Web, well, that’s different.

R.U. fired off a few questions, which I quickly answered that night at about 2am, being an increasingly busy and sleepless soul. 2am is a good time for me to write-- too tired to care about my place in posterity and all...

R.U. sent back the first paragraph of his article for me to further comment on. I’m posting it here ‘cause it’s downright insightful.

All Will Be Revealed

In following his nose, Doug Block has arrived at a really interesting place. What might have been just another documentation of persons engaging in a media project (in this case, web pages) promises to turn into a meditation into the changing nature of private and public lives in a media-saturated age. Broadcast media represented a relatively small increase in the likelihood of being publically revealed (or of intentionally self-revealing). Daytime talk, gossip columns, and other tabloid formats reveal a mutual hunger on the part of audience and subject for *exposure.* But what happens when everybody and their kid sister becomes a public broadcaster? What happens when a Justin Hall can come out of nowhere and do what only someone like Anais Nin could do several generations back--do it without approval or funding or an editor... and find a ready-and-waiting
audience? What does it mean to live in the age of the internet, the website, and the video camera? If information wants to be free, does that include the intimate secrets that you whisper to your lover in bed and the
phone number of your pot dealer? As aging rock star and technophile Roger McGuinn has noted, "We have met big brother and it is us." Is Justin Hall a liberator, bravely bringing personal truths out into the open or a harbinger of a total mutual surveillance culture that will limit our freedom by
limiting our privacy?

Good questions, R.U.

Anybody have some answers?

8 years ago today my daughter Lucy entered the world. Nothing I’ve done since or will do will ever be more important. Happy birthday, Sweetheart.

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