Loren Bliss
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Communications or Media |
| Occupation | Editor/Writer/Photographer |
| Location | Tacoma, Washington, United States |
| Introduction | I've been a print journalist – editor, columnist, reporter and photographer – since my 16th year, 1956, when The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a stringer and copyboy. After an Army enlistment (active duty 1959-1962; 18 months service in Korea; honorable discharge 1965), I joined Ruling Class Media full-time but was soon drawn to the alternative press. My next three decades spanned both realms and won a dozen awards. I was the investigative reporter for The Jersey Journal; news editor of The Morris County Daily Record; editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine; a key United Press International stringer in Tennessee, New Jersey, New York City and Washington state; founding photographer of The Seattle Sun; the social-documentary photographer for Beth Israel Hospital's free clinics (NYC) and for my self-assigned book on the Counterculture, “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” But in 1983, just as “Dancer” seemed nearing publication, all my life's work was destroyed in a mysterious housefire. The odium of post-fire clinical depression effectively ended my career, though I continue writing and photographing – a would-be Phoenix even now. (Profile photo by Mary Plante) |
| Interests | Sociology and history (esp. class struggle), visual art, literature, music, science, spirituality, exceptional individuals, anomalous events, life in general. |
| Favorite movies | The Roots of Heaven, For Whom the Bell Tolls, On the Beach, The Innocents, Blowup, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Strawberry Statement, Ten Days That Shook the World, All the President's Men, Polanski's Macbeth, Silkwood, Reds, Matewan, Hoffa, Saving Private Ryan, Master and Commander, Zvezda (Star), Na Bezymyannoy Vyshsote (On a Nameless Height), Brestskaya Krepost' (Brest Fortress), City of Life and Death, Ghost Busters. |
| Favorite music | Traditional folk music, (Appalachian, African-American, British, Irish, Russian, Israeli), original rock, (esp. Tim Buckley, Bob Dylan), New Age, (esp. Loreena McKennitt, Dead Can Dance, Omnia, Faun), Classical, (esp. Bach, Borodin, Shostakovich), miscellaneous, (inc. Paul Robeson, Tom Waits, Patrick Sky, Ravi Shankar, Red Army Chorus). |
| Favorite books | The White Goddess, The Great Cosmic Mother, The Roots of Civilization, Tao Te Ching, The Way of Zen, The I Ching, The Communist Manifesto, A People's History of the United States, The Book of the Damned, Barry Fell's America BC series, JFK and the Unspeakable, The Odyssey, The Star Rover, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Men at War (anthology), The Wild Palms, The Subterraneans, The Dancer from Atlantis, The Orchard Keeper, Suttree, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Into the Forest, Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion, Myths and Texts, Earth House Hold, Mary Barnard's Sappho, books of photography by, Matthew Brady and assistants, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, Susan Meiselas, Diane Arbus, Jill Freedman, Gerda Taro. |