Welcome to the website of
Knox Bronson, accomplished roué & cat lover.
I’ll be famous when I’m dead.
Recent POSTS
{wild bubble} The Secret History of Frisco Podcast Update
Rachael By The Fire
This is Rachael Rivera. I can’t remember if we shot this picture before or after we did the “The Guitar Lesson” shoot. A very sweet young woman. I earlier reported that she was awaiting a heart operation. It turns out she has a new number and I was texting with someone named Cathy who has had Rachael’s old number for three weeks. After Cathy cleared up the mystery, I contacted Rachael through IG.
Rachael, I’m happy to say, is in Phoenix now, living with her fiancé, in perfect health.
Preview Episode of the “FRISCO—The Secret History” Podcast
Prepare For A Fight
From Political Orphans (run by a former Republican (pre-Trump) operative)
By Chris Ladd February 2, 2025
Last week, Donald Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to dump water from two critical reservoirs in South California into the ocean. He then posted a message that bragged of his “Victory” in freeing the water. He also claimed the move would have stopped the Los Angeles fires. Republican farmers in the Central Valley are going to need that water come fall. Let them drink dust.
America’s Dollar Store Nazis have launched their blitzkrieg against the federal government and it’s crazier than anything we imagined. Tariffs on Canada. Elon Musk personally and illegally seizing control of the OMB’s payment database. Firings of FBI bureau chiefs and a mass purge of agents. ICE raids everywhere and talk of sending innocent migrants to Guantanamo. There’s been much criticism of Democratic leaders for not doing enough, but to be fair, there’s no playbook for this. Democracy’s defenders are backpedaling as fast as possible trying to find our Dunkerque.
All the lessons we learned over the past seventy years or so about civic norms, responsible protest and nonviolence are now a tire around our necks. This isn’t a political conflict to be resolved by elections and laws. What remains of our legal system is about to harnessed for Fascist oppression. There are no better angels. There are no adults in the room. No one is coming to help. There is an enemy at the center of the republic. No peace is possible until that enemy is defeated. None of us will be safe, no matter where we hide, until this menace is destroyed.
Featured on a Polish Website szerokikadr.pl
I was contacted by a Polish photography magazine, Szeroki kadr (Wide Frame) out of the clear blue sky late last year. They wanted to know if I wanted to be featured in their “Inspiration” section of the site. Of course, yes! https://www.szerokikadr.pl/inspiracje/knox-bronson Below are the pictures I sent them. Underneath the gallery, you can read the bio I provided.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and I live in Oakland today. My website is http://knoxbronson.com. I also have run a website for iPhone photography since 2009, http://pixelsatanexhibition.com, which has over 30,000 images from around the world. Here is a link to my book, PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION : https://books.apple.com/us/book/pixels-at-an-exhibition/id6458878193
I have released four or five music albums. You can find them on iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc.
I have studied art my whole life. I’m not even sure I consider myself a photographer, since I use a phone! For me, the iPhone was the gateway to photography, a combination camera and canvas, paintbrush and palette I loved the limitations of the early iPhones along with the crazy weird apps! I think the iPhone camera has gotten too good now.
As far as artistic influences go, my favorite photographer is William Mortensen, whom Ansel Adams called the Anti-Christ. I love the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Man Ray. I have been influenced by painters and artists: Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and many more.
I have always told the artists on the PIXELS website to take their time on photos and to think like a painter. Ansel Adams said one great picture a month was “a good crop.” That is one thing I agree with him about.
{wild bubble} A To-Do List From Twenty Years Ago
PODCASTS
Riding the Wild Bubble
The Secret History of FRISCO
BOOKS—Masterpieces All
FLAPPING
Chervil Orbane, a youngish man living alone in the San Francisco Bay area, has awakened flapping. And knows it.
Two agencies–one extra-dimensional, one a super-secret government entity – know it also. And they want Chervil, for the furtherance of very different agendas.
An allegory, Flapping hews to classic epic form (the call, the journey, the dying, and the rebirth) in bite-size chapters, with diagrams, charts, and graphs to assist the reader in grasping essential concepts underlying Flapping — Chervil Orbane’s saga, his moment of clarity, the great epiphany, the big ideas, the good guys, the bad guys, the gratuitous sex, the refreshing absence of name brand pop-culture icons, a predictably cinematic happy ending, the ipso and the facto, as it were, of nuevo-millennial metaphysical thought.
FLAPPING comes with its own cd soundtrack – Flight of the Atom Bee. This wonderful CD has been remastered for maximum fidelity. Flight of the Atom Bee is a haunting, beautiful, and otherworldly suite charting the erotic, tensile fields that bridge harmony, melody, and undiluted electronic sound.
PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION
The emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, inspired by, shot with, and processed on the iPhone.
Pixels At An Exhibition documents the unexpected emergence of a new art form for the twenty-first century, one based on the technology of the iPhone, its limited camera and buggy apps, to create a new kind of magical realism. Combining camera and darkroom, canvas and paintbrush in one tiny device, the iPhone inspired the birth of a global art movement. Pixels At An Exhibition features the best of the pioneering artists and galleries culled from the 33,000 curated images on the Pixels website, many available nowhere else.
I finished, after three-and-a-half years of curation, writing, design, layout, and production, my history of the early years of iPhone photography and art, PIXELS AT AN EXHIBITION, 370 pp, 177 artists, 600+ images.
iBook for iPAD or Mac on the Apple Bookstore $14.95
Hardbound copy available at Lulu.com $99
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE HONEYBUN EMPIRE
Riding the Wild Bubble Berkeley To Frisco To Hollywood To Las Vegas & Back; Intimations Of Immortality On The Technicolor Lam, Sober.
In 1999, I wrote a semi-naughty, mostly humorous article for Salon.com entitled “The Gentlemanly Art of Spanking” under the nom-de-plume Carson Fitzgerald. It became one of the fifty most-read stories of the year, generating a huge reader response.
A couple years later, I had the idea to make spanking kits and sell them online. It used to be that if one was first to the web with a product, one was guaranteed success. The HoneyBun Spanking Kit was the exception that proved the rule. Nonetheless, it was a cute product and, just as I was finishing the HoneyBun website, I was forced to leave Oakland under threat of death as a witness to some drunks firing their guns up the street from his apartment—no one was injured—so the book began as a road story.
I packed up a carton of spanking kits, his guitar and clothes, and headed south to LA and Hollywood. He then began writing email updates to all my friends in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
After a time, some friends encouraged me to turn the emails and the ongoing story into a book. This is the book. The book is a kaleidoscopic memoir—coming of age in Berkeley in the 60s, San Francisco in the 70s, a brief chapter about the 80s, and one about early sobriety in 90s. A fair amount of spirituality, commentary on materialism, the JFK assassination. Enjoy the ride!
Albums
Flight of the Atom Bee
My first cd, Flight of the Atom Bee, is a collection of instrumental pieces, strange and beautiful, featuring a lot of early analogue synthesizer technology along with an Emu SP-12 drum machine, a Jupiter 8x-P digital/analogue hybrid, and all sorts of outboard processors. To say I didn’t know what I was doing as I plunged back into modern music production is an understatement. But I heard sounds in my head I had to bring forth. It was an exhilarating time as I made my way by trial and lots of error.
Inspired by the weird fiction of Cordwainer Smith, Flight of the Atom Bee is a technicolor romp through the, bold, bright, and beautiful realms of analog synthesis.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Pop Down The Years
My first vocal cd, Pop Down The Years, garnered some good reviews. Eight original songs, one Donovan cover.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Flapping, The Official Soundtrack
Flapping—The Official Soundtrack, when it was first published as a paperback, came with a cd, my album, “Flight of the Atom Bee.” When I decided to publish it again as an e-Book on Apple Books, I thought I would release a new official soundtrack to go with it.
It’s really the greatest hits from Flight of the Atom Bee and Deus Sex Machina.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
One Man's Opinion of Moonlight
On Valentine’s Day, 2020, I released my second vocal cd. One Man’s Opinion Of Moonlight.
It’s an album of cover songs, ballads from the sixties and seventies, with one jazz standard, Autumn Leaves, and one original, Pop Down The Years, which is a love song to all the songs and music with which I grew up. The album title is one line from Young Girl Blues, written by Donovan, from his 1967 classic album, Mellow Yellow.
The album includes some of the songs that shaped my romantic ideals in my youth, a collection of songs from the era when “love almost conquered.”
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
the seasons | remixed/remastered
some distance, now, from the original composing of the seasons i must say that my understanding of the dire situation in which i found myself and the subsequent resolution and release through the act of creation abides, stronger than ever. i rightly intuited, as i neared its completion, that the arc of the seasons followed campbell’s archetypal hero’s journey in a most wonderful way. i would ascribe the elements of the story thusly:
summer of ‘68 ~ the call & crossing the threshold
autumnal sun ~ the road of trials, meeting with the goddess & diving into the abyss
winter blue ~ death, rebirth, transformation & atonement
the forever spring ~ the magic flight, the crossing of the return threshold & freedom to live
Buy it on Bandcamp! (It’s available for free download, leftover from the COVID lockdown era.)
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
Deus Sex Machina
Deus Sex Machina is another collection of electronic/orchestral works. I consider them to be mid-period works. I finally had a grasp on the technology and had gained a fair amount of confidence in my arranging abilities. A couple of these pieces—Ubi Mel Ibi Apes (where there is honey, there are bees) and 3 Seconds Before Maia Smiled—are in the permanent collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a part of a multi-media installation that ran for six months in 1999, Glenn McKay’s Altered States.
Also available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc.
The Pierce Street Community Garden
I hit Coalinga hard in early August, 2016, drummed out of Oakland by a jealous landlady and skyrocketing rents.
Years before, tweakers had trashed the little house into which I was to move. It had been empty since then and it showed. I slept on a foam pad on the floor as I worked to make the place livable. My only furniture was a lawn chair. I lived on roast chicken from SavMart, Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, and burritos from Tres Agaves, the all-night taqueria which serves the best food in town. The temperature hovered around a hundred and five degrees every day and the swamp cooler attached to the house was non-functional. Truth be told, I had never seen a swamp cooler before and I didn’t know what it was.
Read the whole story of one of my proudest accomplishments here.
Videos
There are tons of videos on this site. Here’s a link to the “Music Videos page“. Here’s a link to the “Art Videos” page. Here’s link to the “Weirder Videos” page.
My cover of Marty Balin’s Coming Back To Me was on my album, One Man’s Opinion of Moonlight, just me and guitar. However, a year or two later I returned to the song and listened to the piano part my friend Rachel Efron had played for it during our late night session. Producer Rick Baretta and I had decided not to use it on the album release. I thought I would see what I could come up with in terms of a minimal arrangement, cello, strings and oboe. And Rachel’s piano, of course. What Rachel does as we go into the bridge kills me every time.