Life-long resident of lovely North Carolina - I've lived around the state, and have visited (in some fashion) 90 of its' 100 counties.

I love a variety of creative activities: music, writing, photography to varying degrees. I've played various musical instruments for well over half my life at this point.

Some things obvious from viewing my photostream: I collect maps. I grow unusual tropical and subtropical fruit trees and keep them as houseplants. I am a recent cancer survivor. I am a musician.

Great loves include African-American and Asian history, arts and cultures, travel, the American South, hiking, wandering in big cities, hot weather, storms that most people find fearsome, the Appalachian Mountains, Latin-American and Russian lit, postwar Japanese film, French new wave cinema, music that other people find strange, science, botany, plants, modernism (especially architecture and 20th century classical music), everything.

I'm a novice-but-enthusiastic photographer; I am still working out themes and techniques - I would say that I have some attraction towards minimalism, odd angles and lean imagery. Photography has been intuitive and improvisational for me, so there will be great-to-awful, strange composition, banal subject matter, and some hopeful moments of Zen.

I have many, many creative and artistic heroes: Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, John Cage, John Coltrane, Jorge Luis Borges, Yasujiro Ozu, Vladimir Nabokov, Patti Smith, many, many others. With each, you find a creative vision and a greater worldview that are intimately entwined; their inspiration somehow hovers at the back of a lot of what I attempt creatively.