unidentified indignant radio host, london, february 1980:

tonite, as you fall into what always seems to be an endless sleep, please dream about the short silent movies of the 1920s. my dear friend and filmmaker, zachary david campbell was uproariously comic as a dapper man of the world who is a magnet for bad luck. after hearing his voice this cold afternoon in february (zachary called from his basement room filled with stenches of french gin and hash in the heart of grenoble) i remembered when doors slammed on his fingers, bees stung him on the neck, statues fell on his toes, but again and again he would shrug off his misfortunes and continue on his way. zachary's pranks, pratfalls and double takes, his signature gestures, are so vivid that any listener should begin to believe that he and his films of the 1920s really exist instead of being creations through these airwaves. zachary is the heart of a film we'll title "illusion," which happens to take place in two time zones. in the present there is myself, an anguished academic, who has appeared as a character in many of the early silents of the 20s. in one, my character, pulls himself out of his depression when he accidentally discovers zachary's films and writes about them in a newsletter widely distributed throughout the bile infested streets of industrial london. but its in "illusion" that zachary bubbled up from some dark, unconscious cavern. one day there was zachary, and then he disappeared. that disappearance is central to the mystery of the film, a flash flame followed by a void, and zachary becomes a footnote in hollywood history. nearly sixty years later, i learned that zachary was alive and had secretly made a series of highly personal films. a daunting task, to try and make a listener experience what they heard as a film, not as a description of a film. when i found zachary, he had taken an interest in his own films, but also delighted in watching movie pictures of chaplin and laurel and hardy-and buster keaton, who he discovered when he first began his career. in his next film to be released later this month, he at first thought he might include all his late films. but he decided to reduce it to one, "the inner life of jonathan mcglone," a metaphysical mystery, in which the title character destroys a manuscript to save the life of his muse.

in the changer: beth orton "daybreaker"
evening read: alfred lord tennyson "the lotus-eaters" & "ulysses"