nineteen-eighty-eight



This is a picture I took in October 1988 at the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC. I walked randomly down the path and selected a point to take a photograph of the names on the wall. As the shutter came up, my eye was drawn to my own name (including the middle initial which on later investigation turned out to be for Allon where mine is Alan).

Robert Allon Brown

LCPL - E3 - Marine Corps - Regular
20 year old Single, Caucasian, Male
Born on Mar 05, 1949
From HOUSTON, TEXAS
His tour of duty began on Feb 25, 1969
Casualty was on Jul 06, 1969
in QUANG TRI, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE
Body was recovered
Religion
PROTESTANT

Panel 21W - - Line 68

I know of course that thousands of people visit that memorial every day, and that this sort of thing must happen to someone by virtue of sheer numbers and of course my name is more common than average (I can name you at least two famous Robert Browns and neither of them are me) but is doesn't stop it being spooky. Of course the picture above also gives you a clue as to what I actually look like though I think I may have altered slightly since then. I do not believe in synchronicity. Statistics are very often mistaken for synchronicity.

Soundtrack for today - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

The world is sort of 'correct' this morning; a sort of connectedness between the music on the radio coming in to work and the strangeness of the weather. A friend of mine used to describe this sort of day as having 'no weather', nothing out of the middle range of temperatures.

Another random picture for you :-



I got asked what the Bridgit Riley picture was supposed to be the other day!! I thought of making up some rubbish about 'representing the futility of the existence of an individual human in a post-modern Military-Industrial complex' but I suspect the questioner would have believed me. It's a picture. It looks sort of ok. And talking of random pictures, the final one for today :-



The Found Objects cupboard. I am not sure it actually looks like this any more as it is still in the garage with all the outside stuff packed on the inside. It is not very clear here but the white framed picture of what looks like dark tiles stuck inside the door of the cupboard is actually my first attempt at video art as the picture is a sample of a picture of a colleague which we got into the computer using a video camera attached to the input card of a very early digital camera. The sampling gave the picture a very raw quality which I liked like those throw-away video cameras which worked using standard audio cassette tape. I repeated the image and posterised it in an attempt to make it look like a Warhol repeat. Of course, the computer is not very good at doing this automatically and Mr Warhol had to do a lot a real work to get his images looking as plastic as they were. We printed the image out on a huge colour printer we had on evaluation which seemed to plaster the colour on to the paper to a depth of about a millimetre; I think a blind person might actually have been able to 'see' the picture just by running their fingers over it. Anyway, enough of this. I am bored now.

Clue for the Psycho - Reservoir Dogs link - what other films was Arbogast in?

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Brownian Motion