Walk into splintered sunlight
Inch your way through dead dreams to another land
Maybe you’re tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken
And thoughts unclear
What do you want me to do
To do for you to see you through
A box of rain will ease the pain
And love will see you through
— “Box of Rain,” by Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter
My professional writing career restarted in the late 1980s/early 1990s when Bob LeVitus asked me to write a monthly column for MACazine. As I remember it, LeVitus wanted me to cover free, open source, and shareware Macintosh software in the first half, and anything I wanted in the second half of the column.
Who could turn that down? Certainly not me.
Thing was, I had to come up with a title for the column. I somehow managed to forget about it until the day before the issue was scheduled to go on press. I gave up and spit out “Box of Rain” — the music I was listening to at the time — and still listen to regularly.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
ARTS & FARCES began as a video production company, in 1982 1979, when I was still in graduate school. The name came to me after watching a British comedian on PBS talk about “artsy fartsy” people and events. I had been staring at a Georgia Humanities Council form for several hours. The state agency — I’m pretty sure it had a different name back then — wouldn’t deal with us as individuals; we had to be a business to get paid. So bingo — there — the business name fell right into our laps. Karen winced and went along with it.
We shot and edited a handful of documentaries and shorts. I needed a character generator (these were the analog days) and didn’t want to book studio time for a Chyron. I called up Apple and asked if this was something they were interested in or working on. And that got me into computers and then back into writing.
Karen edited everything I submitted formally and took on clients of her own.
We expanded out from editorial services to, well, just about anything legal anyone would pay us for. Technology and business consulting and user experience design and consulting mostly.
Things rolled on from there…
… And that run ended earlier today.
This morning, the ARTS & FARCES LLC partners agreed to dissolve the business partnership effective 12PM noon CST.
This website will be decommissioned in the near future.
The farces.com domain has been listed for sale at GoDaddy (the listing hasn’t yet gone live).
Changelog
- Saturday, 26 September 2020 9:46PM CDT:
- Clarified date of MACazine column start
- Corrected date of start of business partnership
Canonical source: A box of rain.
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