.::.Damian.::. profile picture

.::.Damian.::.

All of a sudden, I miss everyone.

About Me

I like finding poetry and beauty in common things and in unlikely places. Home is important to me - I keep looking for it everywhere. Although I don’t have any of my own, I like children and sometimes prefer them to adults. Generally, I like a balance of progressive views and traditional values – I place a great deal of importance on tolerance. I hope those who know me would say I’m kind, loyal, mindful and patient. I never get bored. I’ve had a variety of jobs: bookstore/coffeehouse manager, science teacher, independent movie theatre manager, translator/interpreter, municipal airport operator, cook, film festival tech (which I still do), record store guy, bartender. I work in event management - often challenging, never dull and provides the opportunity to be continually learning. I like learning. I pursue whatever has currently captivated my interest and learn as much about it as I can. Sometimes I feel like a stranger on earth. . .

My Interests

I have massive CD collection that's a never ending source of enjoyment and discovery for me. I love sharing music with friends. Hiking, traveling and the feeling of exploration are always exciting – I try to get out whenever I can. I rollerblade sometimes and love to see the landscape passing by. River-rafting and snowshoeing are both lots of fun. Dining out - I'm partial to ethnic and locally owned places (Indian, Thai, New Mexican, Vietnamese, etc.) ...and sushi. I go to cultural events sometimes and keep up with what's going on around town. Occasionally I'll go out to salsa or contra dance. I like coffee shops, some live music and film festivals. I also love playing guitar, writing, great films, great books, shibari, kinbaku, exercise, caffeine, shortwave radio, the feeling of connection that comes with good conversation, the sound of rainstorms, taking pictures, time with family, not dating, the feel of falling snow, vistas and landscapes that amaze, laying in parks in the cool grass with nothing to do, the sound of children playing, the changing of the seasons, wondering what it’s like to live somewhere else...

I'd like to meet:

I may not know till I meet you. . .

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Music:

~Max Roach~ 1924-2007 *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Some all-time faves: Bob Dylan * Siouxsie & The Banshees * Lou Reed * Miles Davis * Smog * Grateful Dead * Robert Earl Keen * Drive-By Truckers * Bill Monroe * Hüsker Dü * John Coltrane * New Order * Lucinda Williams * Lee Morgan * REM * Pernice Brothers * Loudon Wainwright * Ani DiFranco * Neil Young * T Rex * Josh Rouse * Fugazi * XTC * Beach Boys * Dave Brubeck * David Bowie * Manitas de Plata * Velvet Underground * Wille Nelson * Ornette Coleman * Tom Petty * Joni Mitchell * Duke Ellington * Jesus & Mary Chain * Emmylou Harris * The Byrds * The Clash * Chris Isaak * Johnny Cash * Jonathan Richman * Patti Smith * Wes Montgomenry * Lynyrd Skynyrd * Cocteau Twins * Lloyd Cole * Ramones * Love * Prince * Bobbie Gentry * Radiohead * Steve Wynn * Sun Ra * Jimi Hendrix * Billy Bragg * Carlos Gardel * Billy Joe Shaver * Joy Division * Tom Verlaine * Buddy Holly * Aimee Mann * Minutemen * Dolly Parton * Pere Ubu * Astor Piazzolla * Lydia Lunch * Thelonious Monk * Cranes * Steve Forbert * Charlie Parker * Bow Wow Wow * James Brown * Robyn Hitchcock * Joe Ely * Los Lobos * Björk * The Smiths * Flaming Lips * Van Morrison * Iggy Pop * Jackie McLean * My Bloody Valentine * Big Star * Meat Puppets * The Beatles * Stereolab * Matthew Sweet * Los Van Van * Kate Bush * Fountains Of Wayne * Radney Foster * The Marhsall Tucker Band * Tom Russell * Charles Mingus * Wilco * Bauhaus * Serge Gainsbourg * Paul Westerberg * The Band * Tori Amos * Doc Boggs * The Feelies * Sonic Youth * Bruce Springsteen * Nick Drake * Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers * Maria McKee * The Residnets * Townes Van Zandt * Massive Attack * John Lennon * George Harrison * They Might Be Giants * Merle Haggard * Eric Dolphy * Mink DeVille * Steve Earle * Tito Puente * Dar Williams * The Cure * My Morning Jacket * Bob Marley * Alejandro Escovedo * Led Zeppelin * Son Volt * Steve Reich * Lynn Miles * OMD * Jayhawks * Skid Row * Joni Mitchell * Cecil Taylor * Ride * Alison Kraus & Union Station * The Kinks * Daniel Johnston * The Jam * Neil Diamond * Metallica * Everything But The Girl * Freedy Johnston * X * Billie Holiday * Gram Parsons * Ennio Morricone * Caberet Voltaire * Rolling Stones * Caetano Veloso * Everly Brothers * Flat Duo Jets * Tom Waits * Frank Sinatra * Slint * Eagles * Camper Van Beethoven * Marianne Faithfull . . . and the list goes on . . . . . . Recent faves include Iron & Wine * Delays * Tift Merritt * Dogs Die In Hot Cars * Devandra Banhart * Cat Power * Stars * Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter * !!! * The Hold Steady * M.I.A. * The Go! Team * Richard Hawley * Bloc Party . . . . . . . . . *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Movies:

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: I love the big screen. I also love Netflix and it's giving me the chance to catch up with lots of great films. Recent favorites: Paprika * Army of Shadows * Black Book * The Queen * Venus * Volver * Babel * Children of Men * Stanger Than Fiction * Marie Antoinette * The New World * Junebug * Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind * Come Early Morning * On The Waterfront * Memento * Swimmers * The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) * Wings of Desire * The Searchers * The Thing (1982) * Finding Neverland * The Wild Bunch * Capote * The Grapes of Wrath * The Road Home * Casablanca * Festival Express * How Green Was My Valley * Nashville * Double Indemnity * Brokeback Mountain * The Story of the Ramones * American Splendor * Rock & Roll Heart * Citizen Kane * Metropolis * Sunset Boulevard * Badlands... and an awesome collection of Brothers Quay shorts I recently picked up (surreal, disturbing and beautiful). Favorite directors include: Alfred Hitchcock * Orson Wells * Akira Kurosawa * John Ford * Zhang Yimou * Pedro Almodóvar * Roman Polanski * Elia Kazan * Fritz Lang * Billy Wilder * Charles Chaplin * Ingmar Bergman * Luc Besson * Luis Buñuel * David Cronenberg * Robert Aldrich * Frank Capra * Stanley Kubrick * Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau * Sam Peckinpah * Terrence Malick * Andrei Tarkovsky * Federico Fellini * Francis Ford Coppola * Woody Allen * Vittorio DeSica * Yasujiro Ozu * Terry Gilliam * Wim Wenders * Jean Renoir * Nicolas Roeg * Rainer Werner Fassbinder * Bernardo Bertolucci * Martin Scorsese * Brian DePalma * Sergio Leone * Francois Truffaut * Jean-Luc Godard * Anthony Mann * Eric Rohmer * Mike Leigh * Josef von Sternberg * Howard Hawks * George Cukor * Buster Keaton * Michelangelo Antonioni . . .

Television:

.... .... Andy Warhol Documentary *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ~~~ Feasting on Asphalt ~~~ *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Best Week Ever, Man vs. Wild, Project Runway, Six Feet Under. . . I like VH1, National Geographic, History and Travel channels. I also love TMC. I still laugh at Seinfeld. I also enjoy documentaries (a lot), clips programs, countdown shows, small amounts of news, New Wave Theatre, bizarre public access programming...

Books:

Currently reading: *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Currently reading: *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: I wish I had more time to read! Favorite authors include: Willa Cather * Ford Madox Ford * Milos Kundera * Raymond Chandler * Pablo Neruda * Fyodor Dostoevsky * Jane Austen * Herman Melville * Nathaniel West * Henry Miller * Plato * Virginia Woolf * Ernest Hemingway * Garcia Lorca * Dylan Thomas * Eudora Welty * Søren Kierkegaard * William S Burroughs * Paul Horgan * Wendell Berry * Thomas Hardy * Jorge Luis Borges * Edgar Allan Poe * Jean-Paul Sartre * Arthur Rimbaud * Delmore Schwartz * Emily Bontë * Phillip K. Dick * Gabriel García Márquez * Langston Hughes * John Steinbeck * Jersey Kosinski * Kurt Vonnegut Jr. * Zane Grey * Friedrich Nietzsche * Edward Abbey * Anton Chekhov * D.H. Lawrence * Mark Twain * Albert Camus * Noam Chomsky * John Keats * Henry James * Nathaniel Hawthorn * Louis-Ferdinand Céline * Theodore Dreiser * Charles Dickens * Herman Hesse * Iris Murdoch * Jack Kerouac * Georges Perec * Simone de Beauvoir * Saul Bellow * Frank Norris * Howard Zinn * Miguel de Cervantes * José López-Gastón * Neal Cassady * Vladimir Nabokov George Orwell * William Shakespeare * J.D. Salinger * Jorge Amado * Rainer Maria Rilke * William Faulkner * Camilo José Cela * John Dos Passos. I am reading more non-fiction than ever before. For pictorial literature, I love Neil Gaiman and Los Hermanos Hernandez. I read the Weekly Alibi and some magazines: Paste, Magnet, Rolling Stone, National Geographic and I admit I have a weakness for EW (don't judge me). *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I like to take pictures. . .

Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My Blog

Urgh! A Music War

I just came back from The Guild Cinema where I saw what is supposed to be the only remaining 35mm print of "Urgh! A Music War" - a documentary from 1981 that features live perform...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:56:00 PST

Incident on Mission Ave.

While working on my computer last Wednesday night around 7:00pm, I suddenly heard a crash followed by a loud boom and immediately after, I lost all power at my house.  I looked out my ...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Sat, 14 Jul 2007 02:17:00 PST

Going to Dubai

  I recently accepted an offer to work the Dubai International Film Festival.  I am very excited about going to such an exotic destination, halfway around the world.  I have not be...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Sun, 05 Nov 2006 12:37:00 PST

Rock 'n' Roll Animal

  September 16 was perhaps the busiest day of my work year - over 70,000 people made it to the Fair on this day - it was a mass of humanity and there was so much going it was hard to ta...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Thu, 26 Oct 2006 06:22:00 PST

Fair Photo Blog, Part 2

Here's the second part of my picture blog from this years NM State Fair . . .Slam poetry at Ford Pavilion - the Albuquerque Slam Team took the nationals in 2005Tracy Lawrence at Tingley ColiseumAztec...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Wed, 18 Oct 2006 01:37:00 PST

Fair Photo Blog, Part 1

  I work as the director of events for the New Mexico State Fair.  It's a massive 17-day affair in the middle of September.  When I tell people what I do, I think it's hard to get ...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Fri, 13 Oct 2006 01:04:00 PST

Rain Frogs

  I remember from many years ago a girlfriend's apartment in a quiet, old part of town, with tight, narrow streets, just a short walk from the banks of the Rio Grande.  I recall brick floors...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:42:00 PST

Holes To Fill

  "We pursue that which retreats from us."   If The "Tao of Steve" (filmed in scenic northern New Mex) is to be believed, this is a principle set forth at some point by Heidegger.  Now...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Sun, 04 Jun 2006 10:38:00 PST

Film Festival Haikus

  Once a year, sometimes twice, I take a couple of weeks to work on a film festival tech crew - long hours, high pressure and some great films (amid not a few forgettable ones).  ...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Sun, 28 May 2006 10:38:00 PST

The Highway Kind

My days, they are the highway kindthey only come to leavebut the leavin' I don't mindit's the comin' that I crave.Pour the sun upon the groundstand to throw a shadowwatch it grow into a nightand fill ...
Posted by .::.Damian.::. on Fri, 19 May 2006 12:20:00 PST