George Forss and I started Round Three of his new Kickstarter Project – “The Way We Were” –  this morning, the project is still under construction. We are working our way through a blizzard of security questions in anxious tech-centered America. There notifications, passwords, odd questions, financial information and spectacular software and loading issues relating to George’s historic home-made computing system.  I think he has the first version of Internet Explorer ever made, he goes through more steps to get his e-mail than I do in a week of blogging, his bank refused to even acknowledge  his computer’s existence.  I can’t quite even describe his very personal Internet access and communications system, I think he calls it Magic Jack.

George is heroic and I am willful, we will get this done.  It is important. In a sane world, someone like George would have an assistant handling it, people would be lining up to give him money to see his breathtaking photographs of another time and world. We have some more hoops to jump through. I’m still working on the bio – we are negotiating over how to handle the UFO Investigations – and we’ve completed all but one of the Kickstarter requirements. The Amazon payments system, the manner in which Kickstarter receives and disburses money, is holding things up for now. We got through the identity and security verification process, the tax information, most of the bank account information but because George’s computer frightened the bank, we need another method of verification, and of course, there are no humans to confer with.

George is a technical whiz far beyond me, but this new way of dealing with the world is hard for him, makes him anxious. Amazon has to deposit a few pennies in his account, and once he verifies the amounts, I think we are there. I’m hoping we can get George’s project – “The Way We Were” – up on Kickstarter next week. The project is about his desire to self-publish some of the photographs he took of the New York landscape before the destruction of the Twin Towers, which are featured prominently in his photography. The photos – I have seen many of them – capture the magical innocence of the time before that awful day, the grandeur and sense of our greatest city before it’s heart was broken and we entered a new world of fear and preoccupation with security.

This project with George has become important to me, an exercise, as a friend described it, in humility and genius. George is a genius, the first genius I have become close friends with, we talk at least once a day, and we have really come to understand one another, an act of faith on both sides. George has a great mind, he can do many things, but this process would have driven him mad, Kickstarter, like Amazon, is one of the new kinds of entities that works only through software, there are never any people to ask for help or to call or talk to. George told me a dozen times this morning that he would never have gotten this far without me sitting there.

I don’t actually believe that, George has overcome obstacles a lot more difficult than software programs in his life, but I feel this project is so important and so does he. America and the world are often cruel to their geniuses and George’s brilliant photographs of New York City, taken mostly before the awful tragedy of 911, need to be seen. George was one of the most acclaimed photographers in the world, I believe there is a huge and eager audience for his work. Round Four resumes tomorrow.