My full name is John-Riley Harper, but I currently go by 'JR'. Straight introductions always seem weird, but I guess I'll give it a go. I don't take life for granted, and am amazed that so many people seem to think this experience as being 'normal' in any sense. This thought process CAN get a little annoying, as s/he sang in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, "...and the strangest things seem suddenly mundane." So school, for me, is a way to distract the mundane anomaly of life and see if anything happens in the meantime.

Sometimes there's a crescendo of disbelief in the global idea that humans seem to be question-answering machines. We know so little, and we struggle endlessly to combat the paradoxes of the universe. School seems to be a method to pretend to gain knowledge, but I think it is nothing more than a pretense. In short, we go and learn and try so we can pretend that understandings can be reached, but in reality, the only thing that can really be gained is the fake n' baked plasticized sadness that 'education is only job training.'

My current scholarly interests include image and literary analysis. I'm a frequent reader of contemporary rhetorical analysis sites such as the bagnewsnotes and http://rhetorica.net/. On one level, I'm trying to gain a greater understanding of, and ability to collaborate together, art mediums. Currently I'm a humble photographer, but I've been getting into audio, radio and lighting, and that may merge into video in the future. Anyway, I hope, in the end, that my life will not have been totally meaningless, but I'm afraid there's no escaping the tragic element of ultimate futility. Hooray!

Here is me yesterday: